Tag: horror

The Suffering: A Novel by MJ Mars

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The Suffering: A Novel by MJ Mars

Absolutely chilling and brilliantly written. This book made me stay up all night for all the right reasons. It also made me afraid of my own house – and for a horror novel, that’s killing it!

I won a paperback copy from a Facebook Group giveaway, and was thrilled because I am so ready for the spooky October season. (It’s my first spooky October read!) It arrived via Amazon; and a little later, some goodies also arrived from the author (a bookmark and cards depicting the scary characters from the novel).

The Suffering is a new adult horror revolving around the haunting of a group of housemates. Kyle, Pete, Lance, Tad, and Cass are the university students and friends who reside at Brackenby House, a Victorian mansion where the rent is cheap — and where a century ago a famed psychic and a group of would-be occultists performed a séance. That demonic summoning resulted in a terrible bloodbath; all the occupants of the house at the time, save one, perished in inexplicable ways. The gory history of the house was never more than a joke to the young friends, until one Halloween, they decided to perform their own séance.

I will leave the reader to discover the awful consequences.

The haunted house story is not the novel’s only appeal, classic as it is. Mars’ writing and nuanced character development are what makes The Suffering truly shine. The pacing of the book is swift; the story unravels like a horror film. Often, with only a short sentence, Mars sent shivers across my skin. The economy of her words works well to build suspense and dread. She forces the reader to fill in the unsaid darkness with the most evil things.

The characters are also well-crafted. They are unique and yet recognizable, wholly likable, and realistic. The genre so often (sadly) produces puppet-like characters, stereotypes who feel (to this reader) more like ghosts than human. But Mars successfully avoids this; these young friends react as you or I might in the same situations — and in their effort to survive their hauntings — connect with the reader as much as they do to each other, through compassion, friendship, honesty, and fear. Very quickly, this reader found herself bonded to the unfortunate residents of the house.

Readers should also know that the book is spicy in some parts. The romantic aspects of the novel add to the storyline. The language also is suited to an adult audience; this is not a juvenile horror novel, though there is nothing in the novel that would warrant an R rating.

MJ Mars has earned a fan in this reader. I look forward to their other stories and novels!

The Cannibal Gardener: A Novel by Joe Pawlowski

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The Cannibal Gardener: A Novel by Joe Pawlowski

I am kicking myself for letting The Cannibal Gardener sit on my (ridiculously, 4-digit long) TBR List (To Be Read) for as long as I did. This novel delivered on all the horror and squeamish discomfort it promised. For readers who enjoy paranormal and historical elements, delight in having their own sense of security in the Righteous Ways of the World shaken, and well-delivered gore, this exploration into cannibalism and flesh-lust is a must-read.

That said, readers should be aware that gore here is not for the faint of heart. The subject matter, cannibalism, is already one which pings our most primal fears. The idea of consuming human flesh twigs an evolutionary nerve in our psyche the wrong way; we are social beings, needing the survival of others to secure our own. Even in a case of hyper-evolution of the competitive drive as individuals seek to enhance evolutionary fitness, human culture has developed an universal anathema to indulge in killing and eating a member of our own species. An odd quirk of humanity, as one character in the novel, Denise, notes.

This nauseating subject is also what makes this novel such a good horror read. And it is indeed, all about cannibalism. The novel is an entanglement of its characters’ diverse stories, each one eventually weaving together with another until all come together at the end. Their disparate lives are connected by this ugly, bloody practice in some way. Edmund, Denise, Milo, and George are the primary protagonists of the novel. Each of them engages in the profane act in some sense and this draws them into an ancient goddess’ cruel net.

Aside from the lurid story itself, Pawlowski’s fast-paced prose, adeptness at storytelling, and nuanced character development is an major appeal. The novel flows at a pace which fuels the urgency of events and, yet also linger on the characters’ voices and inner dialogue. The resultant surge and lull allows the reader to feel the thrill of a mystery and immerse themselves in the interior world of the characters. This is in part achieved by allotting each chapter to a different narrator.

The prose is mature, as is Pawlowski’s authorial voice. It is consistent, succinct, expressive. It is also clear Pawlowski’s journalistic experience enhances his craft. Not only have his observations of human behavior led him to create fleshy characters (forgive the pun!), his decisions of what to reveal and when reflect a deep understanding of his audience. I also much appreciated his vocabulary; the novel’s language borders on the intellectual. I mean this as a compliment. Its precision delivers a sharp image of events to the reader, leaving well-placed gaps that each one may organically fill in with their own imagination.

I look forward to Pawlowski’s other horror fiction…

Cadaverous: A Novel by Jay Bower

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Cadaverous: A Novel by Jay Bower

I came across this novel in a Facebook group I’m in, and — I’ll be honest — the cover caught my eye. I know, I know, we aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but dang, it is appealing. The book itself did not disappoint either! For readers looking for some Halloween horror (it is that season again), Cadaverous will deliver.

For readers who enjoy the tongue in cheek style of Grady Hendrix (and their novel, We Sold Our Souls), paranormal and demonic elements, or novels about heavy metal, rock, or music in general, Cadaverous will appeal. Music is a central theme. Bower’s novel is also, like Hendrix’s, an intellectual horror, the sort premised on what is said and unsaid, leaving the reader to organically grasp the creepiness of the story. It is horror of the outlandish and yet-could-be-totally-believable type, with a decent dose of gore and paranormal spookiness.

The novel begins in epistolary style, as the remnants of a research project gone awry. The novel is delivered mostly in this format, as a blog belonging to its main character, Gaige Penrod, a musician in a band. The story revolves around Gaige and his desire to achieve fame, fortune, and prestige through his music, and his interactions with a groupie named Lisa. The reader is never quite sure what happens to Gaige, or how trustworthy Lisa is — until we reach the end. Cadaverous is a mystery as well, up to the very end, and it leaves the reader with a tantalizing and creepy “what if….”

The novel’s characters are young; this is a young adult fiction, best suited for and written with the young person in mind. It’s an appropriate horror for a young audience, though there are mentions and references to sex, romance, and similar themes. The characters are well developed, though readers should know this is not a character-centric novel; plot propels the story.

Bower’s prose fits a YA audience and the story is straightforward and simple, though with a good share of twists befitting a horror/mystery. The language is accessible, easy to follow; and overall, the novel is well-written with a flowing pace.

All in all, a very satisfying horror read.

Beyond the Trees: A Novel by Christopher Renna

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Beyond the Trees: A Novel
by Christopher Renna

Not my usual cup of tea, but this Young Adult bildungsroman/fantasy/horror did keep me on the edge of my reading chair! Beyond the Trees is novel about a pair of brothers, the younger is our protagonist and narrator, around whom the novel revolves.

The novel opens with Caden and Ansel Murphy, young men surviving high school and all the angst that time and space engenders. Caden struggles to belong; Ansel does not. Living in a small town rife with prejudices of all kinds, but especially against queerness, the younger brother wrestles with identity as a gay man. Renna successfully weaves in social commentary and lessons about inclusion into the story; what is means to be a man, what manhood looks like, “should” or “could” look like, expectations and realities. Ansel embodies the idealized version of manhood, finding it easier to settle into this cultural environment. But the events of the novel reverse the brothers’ roles, and in doing so, challenge the norms of manhood.

One night, Ansel goes missing. The cause is unclear. There are rumors of paranormal phenomena. In the course of recovering Ansel, Caden finds himself in a strange place, one that seems like it could not exist, a fantasy land. As grounded in reality as the novel is, much of it takes place in this fantasy location, the narrative arc of this part of the story mimicking the classic Hero’s Journey. This is the land beyond the trees.

The story is simple, but the undercurrent of social and cultural commentary complicates it in a very appealing way. Additionally, Renna’s smooth prose, swift propulsion of the story, and fleshed-out characters renders a well-crafted novel.

The Unforgiven Dead: A Novel by Fulton Ross

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The Unforgiven Dead: A Novel by Fulton Ross

This Tartan Horror/Mystery had me creeped out in the middle of the night! And yet, I couldn’t put it down, spine shivers be damned!

The novel revolves around a murder of a young girl and the mystery of her gruesome death, as seen through the eyes of the local constable who is investigating it, Angus. But this policeman is extraordinarily gifted with paranormal (in)sight, a legacy of his own haunted past. What results is a deeply engrossing whodunit woven through with Gaelic history and culture. For readers who enjoy hints of the demonic, pagan, and ancient evils, The Unforgiven Dead will have you prancing a ritual dance. For readers who love a twisted murder mystery, one in which the murderer is hidden in plain sight alá Agatha Christie, The Unforgiven Dead will absolutely make you squeal once the culprit is exposed.

But the story alone is not the novel’s only draw. The characters of this novel are deftly crafted, their dialogue mimics life, their motivations are raw and human and utterly flawed. For readers of literary fiction, the trials of Angus, Nadia, Gills, and Ashleigh will rent your heart. Their lives mimic reality and their hurts are ones we are likely to relate to, if we don’t know them well already.

The Unforgiven Dead leaves me pining for a moody, grey Scotland more than I could have imagined.

Burn The Negative: A Novel by Josh Winning

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Burn The Negative: A Novel by Josh Winning

It’s such a cliché to say “I couldn’t put it down!” but with Burn The Negative it was so true! Thrillers set in contemporary digs are rarely my chosen genre, but every once in awhile a little thrill appeals to me and relieves me from the setting and character-driven interiority of historical or literary fiction. Burn The Negative had everything I wanted in a thriller: compelling characters with flawed, awful motives; a fast-paced plot that left me thinking “Oh no, what the WHAT?” as things go from horrendous to abysmal; mysterious hints that led me to announce “Aha!” far too early; and, the cherry on top: a twisted ending.

The novel opens with a fabulous line, immediately a portent of fuckery on a grand scale. A young women is headed somewhere she’d rather not be. It’s for work, but it isn’t really, and she’s having a bit of a nervous breakdown over it. The woman is the novel’s protagonist, Laura, who is a former child actor, now tasked with rehashing her Hollywood trauma as a journalist writing an article about the remake of the horror film that killed her career and ended her normal psychological development as a teenager. This is a novel that revolves around the drama of Hollywood on multiple levels, leaving the reader feeling very much like they are watching a Netflix Original horror film unfold in text.

As the remake of the film progresses, things go unbelievably wrong. But is this marketing? Is this the curse of the original horror film? Is it Laura herself? Both the remake and Laura’s memories of her Hollywood nightmare disintegrate into a surreal soup, leaving the reader wondering if there is something paranormal at foot or not.

The story alone is not the only draw of the novel. Winning’s prose is witty and the book includes fun elements — flashbacks, articles, ephemera, movie lore — which flesh out the story arc, provide context, and make the novel feel deliciously kitschy. This book is fun.

Fans of horror films, horror film lore, haunted media, and fast-paced mysteries can fully expect to enjoy Burn The Negative.

How to Sell a Haunted House: A Novel by Grady Hendrix

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How to Sell a Haunted House: A Novel by Grady Hendrix

Yes, Grady Hendrix’s books are kitschy. Yes, they are gimmicky. Yes, they are never what they seem — and isn’t that a great thing for a horror novel? Yes! This novel is nothing like what the title might seem. The horrors run far deeper than the house itself; like most of Hendrix’s horror stories, it is the past, relationships and families gone awfully awry that are the real terror.

The novel begins with a woman who dreads facing the task of cleaning up her childhood home with her estranged brother. The brother who is an utter assH*le. As they delve through their inheritance it becomes clear that there is an entity between them, something old and ancient, and malicious. This novel is not what it seems, but there really a haunted house in it!

What makes How to Sell a Haunted House so compelling though is not only the story arc, which is fairly straightforward, but the characters Hendrix creates. The characters are flawed in ways that are intimately familiar (everyone knows someone like the assH*le brother); I felt a real tension between wanting to slam the book shut on some of these people and desperately wanting to read on to find out if they got their comeuppance. That tension is Hendrix’s brilliance as an author; Hendrix creates people you love to hate or hate to hate… and who eventually, you hate to love. The heroes are villains in as much as they as are the neighbor next door, your sister in law, your mother, your teacher.

The novel is one of transformation; dare I say it? It is the story of an exorcism. But while there is a kind of fluff about the novel, it is also dark and its subject matter is deeply disturbing. This is the kind of horror that is so real, so plausible, that it seeps under your skin and make you wonder how things that can happen every day can morph into a tangible darkness. Readers, be prepared to feel creeped out, heartbroken, angry, and disgusted all at the same time.

How to Sell a Haunted House was Hendrix at their best (and I couldn’t imagine how they’d top My Best Friend’s Exorcism or The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (my two favorite Hendrix novels), but they did!)

Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror Edited by Angela Yuriko Smith & Lee Murray

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Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror
Edited by Angela Yuriko Smith & Lee Murray

I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this collection: Modern horror? Literary criticism? Traditional tales of terror? It intrigued me regardless.

What Unquiet Spirits delivers is a combination of all of the above. It is memoir, criticism, history, and ethnography in balanced fusion. Each chapter is written by an Asian female author and in it she discusses both her own writing, the cultural and historical inspiration for her characters, the origins of some feminine demon, ghost, or creepy — a unquiet spirit — which haunts her and the pages she has produced. In some chapters the author draws on a deeper well of literature of the past and ponders the future of the female spirit archetype that is the focus of their chapter.

The books is divided by and devotes its pages equally to feminine spirits across the Asian continent, from East to Southeast to South Asia. I was pleasantly surprised to see such attention given to Southeast Asian spirits and archetypes (my favorite was always the pontianak, the evil spirit of a woman who lurks in the dark under the protection of a banana tree. In my recollection, she can be “pinned” to the tree with a needle or a pin and made to do the pin-holder’s bidding. But, beware to that horrid individual if the offending metal is ever removed!)

While the collection examines different demons and feminine archetypes from across a swath of very diverse cultures, it ultimately makes a singular, united appeal to the reader. Their call to action is unmistakable: Asian women, as a whole, alive or dead, demonic or angelic, monstrous or victimized, are powerful beings. Asian women have been too long overlooked in the literary world and deserve more than the whispered, submissive voice they have been too long assigned by Orientalists; hear them shout, scream, screech!

For that reason alone, Unquiet Spirits is worth reading. But there is more.

The authors reveal facets of the Asian feminine that have rarely been visible, that is to Western audiences. To Asian women, we have always known they were there, even when our patriarchal societies told us to ignore them, to castigate them, to revile these demonic women as ill-influences on ourselves and our communities, yet still, Unquiet Spirits is sure to deliver novelties and new knowledge to Asian/Asian American readers.

Sign Here: A Novel by Claudia Lux

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Sign Here: A Novel by Claudia Lux

A departure from the more serious novels I’ve been reading lately, and perfect — if a little late — for the Spooky season. Still, if you are a horror fan, any time is a good time for a paranormal mystery, which is exactly what Sign Here is, with a generous injection of humor.

Sign Here is a combination of the television show, “The Good Place” and one of Simone St. James’s paranormal mysteries, the kind which unravels to reveal a multi-generational history. It’s laugh-out-loud funny and also deadly serious at the same time. I couldn’t have asked for a better post-Halloween read than this. It gripped me to very end.

The novel is set in two dimensions: Hell and Earth. The former is a bureaucrat’s heaven, a place where the radio station is constantly on commercial break and the music is every genre you can’t abide. There’s fun to be had in Hell, but no peace, utterly no reprieve from annoyance. Ever. One of the main protagonists of the novel is a demon who long lost his humanity and now deceives or manipulates souls in order to collect them for his hellish quota. His goal is to complete a “full set” of a family, one soul from each generation. And to find some measure of peace in the afterlife. The two objectives are not exclusive.

The family he has targeted is a wealthy and dysfunctional one, a collection of questionable traits has passed down from one generation to the next. They have a long history with this demon, a transactional history of quid pro quo. There is also trauma, murder, abuse, and just downright immorality in the family’s past; one might say, the stuff that Hell is made of. But they are lovable too. Their flawed histories and personalities make them all the more human, all the more recognizable, for all their privilege and wealth. The reader will get the impression there is something not quite right about them though, and as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that several of them have something to hide — even from the demon himself.

The novel is set at the start of the annual family vacation, a dreaded and welcome event. There’s a newcomer to the lake house with them: the new best friend of the daughter. She’s bright and curious — and may just force the family’s dark secrets into the light.

The two storylines intertwine: Will our demon be able to exploit the family to meet his quota? Will he ever escape his Hell? Will the family be able to keep their horrors safely hidden in the past? Someone’s soul is at stake. Will it be the father? The mother? One of the kids?

Sign Here ends explosively and satisfyingly. Everyone gets what they deserve.

A History of Fear: A Novel by Luke Dumas

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A History of Fear: A Novel
by Luke Dumas

By page three, I was hooked. The ending comes to a perfect, organic conclusion — but I readily admit that if Dumas writes a sequel, I’m all in.

A History of Fear unfolds like Stoker’s Dracula, adopting an epistolary approach, delivering the story via journal entries, letters, official reports from doctors, prison officials, and newspaper articles. The novel dives deep into the most disturbing parts of human psychosis reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It delivers gothic horror too, in the manner of Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the end, the reader can’t be entirely sure of who is the monster, if demons are real, if evil is more human than we comfortable with. A History of Fear is a horror fan’s feast: gore and psychological terror stride side-by-side, the paranormal and the divine and the mundane intertwine to create a world the reader is never entirely sure is real. Illusion may very well be reality… or worse.

But the story is not fantasy; there is a real history embedded in this novel — and a commentary on a history of monstrous bodies, sexuality, religion, and intergenerational trauma. There is a reality underlying the one Dumas weaves for us. This is what makes the novel so appealing; there is a real horror here, one that we can recognize. This history is one that might be so common as to be truly terrifying because it might actually exist within ourselves. Or someone we know.

A History of Fear follows the main character’s slow descent into madness — or his ascent into clarity, depending on your interpretation. There is a true mystery here and this drives the story forward. The reader needs to discover what the main character also seeks: some sense of closure and parental acceptance. The main character is driven by a need to know themselves and their past. This is a genealogy of a family and the homophobic culture of the West. Dumas focuses on the psychological damage inflicted on those who deviated from the dominant norm and those who dared to question their place in it. The novel travels between the past and the present, each part of the jigsaw puzzle adds to the image of the whole of time, allowing the reader to witness the unraveling of the man’s mind and the suffering caused by intergenerational trauma.

The novel opens with the main character’s eventual, inevitable fate; this is the mystery. We know what happens to him. The mystery is why and how. The horror is the long arm of intergenerational trauma.

A wonderful book to have read in October, the Halloween month, but really, a fantastic gothic horror for any time of the year.