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Tag Archives: horror

King Sorrow: A Review

Joe Hill’s new novel, King Sorrow, is his first full-length work in almost a decade, and I feel it was absolutely worth the wait.

King Sorrow is the story of Arthur Oakes and his friends, and the dragon to which they find themselves pact-bound. It’s New England in the early 90s, and Arthur is a young black man working in the campus library at Rackham College. His mother is serving a prison sentence at a nearby facility, and so he stays close by so that he can continue to visit her as her parole date approaches. Arthur has his eyes on a graduate program in England once he graduates, but his plans are disrupted when a blackmail scheme is launched against him. His mother has made some enemies on the inside, and the daughter of one threatens injury to Arthur’s mom unless he cooperates. So it is that Arthur begins to steal rare books from the college library’s collection for the blackmailers to sell.

Arthur’s friends eventually find out about what’s going on, of course, but they realize that one of the books that Arthur has been instructed to steal might contain the answers to their problem. The Crane journal, a grimoire bound in human skin, has been a part of the rare book collection for years, and inside it are the instructions to summon King Sorrow, a dragon who is willing to make pacts with humans. One night, in a weed and booze-fueled haze, the group gathers around a table and calls out to him. A bargain is struck. Arthur’s blackmailers will be dead by Easter, and he and his friends will be protected.

The problem with deals, though, is always in the details. Arthur and his friends soon learn that they must choose a new sacrificial offering once a year, or their own lives are forfeit. If the only way to summon King Sorrow is found in the grimoire, then the way to rid oneself of him must be contained in it as well, but the book itself made its way to the blackmailers and their buyer before the Easter deadline.

King Sorrow is a fantastic slow burn. I’ve missed Hill’s writing a great deal of late, but I was thrilled to get a chance to tackle this one early. It was released on 10/21, and so it’s been loose in the world for almost a week. My utmost thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for providing an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Spread Me: A Review

Sarah Gailey has been one of my favorite writers since I first encountered their work in River of Teeth. They have a tremendous knack for writing team dynamics and characters who survive against all odds. Their most recent book, Spread Me, is a spectacular example of both of these qualities with healthy doses of horror and horniness mixed in.

Kinsey is a researcher. She is the leader of an isolated team that is studying the cryptobiotic crust deep in the desert on a four-year mission. As is expected of humans under these sort of circumstances, the members of the team find themselves romantically (or at least sexually) entangled with one another, with the sole exception of Kinsey herself. While she’s not asexual, she’s not attracted to any of her fellow researchers (or fellow humans). Kinsey has a unique situation that she’s struggled to hide from the others at the station—she’s attracted to and aroused by viruses.

Under normal circumstances, Kinsey’s feelings aren’t an issue. She’s not distracted by the interactions of her coworkers, and feels like the isolation of their research station is conducive to her ability to focus on her work. Really, it’s an ideal setup for her. Until, of course, the specimen is unearthed.

Domino is the one to accidentally uncover it, but Kinsey is the one who saw it was breathing, the one to insist on breaking with protocols and bringing it inside the research station before an oncoming sandstorm can bury it again. Against the protests of Mads, the team medic, she brings the thing into the lab. To give a nod to Gailey’s earlier work, “this was a terrible plan.” Not long after contact with the specimen, the other team members begin to show signs of a viral infection, and Kinsey… Kinsey begins to fantasize about the implications of a previously unknown type of life—one that seems to know just what it is that she desires most, and is willing to do anything to give it to her.

Spread Me is an utterly brilliant erotic horror novella. Kinsey is simultaneously distant and sympathetic as she struggles with the differences between acknowledging and loving what she has and exploring her deepest, most secret desires. The novella alternates skillfully between chapters covering the present situation at the station and the recent past, wherein Kinsey and her subordinates meet, arrive at the station for the first time, and get to know each other. It’s a welcome diversion from the mounting tension (dramatic and otherwise) in the present, and gives you a chance to understand the relationships, and just why everyone at the station implicitly trusts Kinsey, even when that’s not the best course of action.

I absolutely loved Spread Me. It’s the fourth Gailey book I’ve read, and it’s an unrepentantly horny version of my all-time favorite horror movie, John Carpenter’s The Thing. My utmost thanks to NetGalley and Tor for providing me with an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Spread Me is available today. If you’re looking for sexy horror, this is it. Go get it.

Lucky Day: A Review

New Chuck Tingle horror means that it’s my lucky day. The mysterious man behind Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays is back, and he’s about to throw a curveball the likes of which you’ve never seen.

Vera Norrie is a statistician and University of Chicago professor who is about to celebrate the release of her first book, a takedown of Everett Vacation and Entertainment. On May 23rd, she and her fiancée, Annie, are going out for brunch with a group of their friends and Vera’s mother. The whole day has been meticulously planned by Vera as a way of coming out as bisexual to her mom and announcing their planned marriage. When things don’t go quite as hoped, Vera’s mother storms out of the diner with Vera close on her heels, and then all hell breaks loose.

May 23rd would become known as the Low-Probability Event, a disaster of nearly impossible (and statistically ridiculously unlikely) proportions. Nearly eight million people die that day, and Vera flees from the carnage, leaving everything and everyone else behind. I’m not going to say more about the event itself here, because there’s something to Tingle’s crafting of a series of Rube Goldberg-esque deaths that rival anything seen in the Final Destination films that just needs to be experienced for oneself.

Four years after the LPE, Vera’s depression and isolation are interrupted by the arrival of Jonah Layne, an agent for the Low-Probability Event Commission. He’s on a mission to expose Everett Vacation and Entertainment and their flagship Vegas hotel and casino, Great Britannica, as being somehow behind the disaster of May 23rd, and he’s come to get Vera’s help. She’s enlisted as a consultant to examine the reality behind the LPE, and decides to tag along with Agent Layne, mostly because he’s picked the same fight that she once had all those years ago. The big problem is that, while there was only ever one major low-probability event, there’s been a lot of little ones. For Vera and Agent Layne, things can only get weirder.

Lucky Day is an absolute blast to read. It may not appear as strictly horror on the outside, but Tingle’s writing will leave you questioning the odds of, well, everything you could ever fear. Vera is a painfully relatable protagonist, dealing with utter chaos and devastation by functionally shutting down and ignoring society because, after the LPE, nothing really matters. Agent Layne is a delightful foil, a hyper-competent federal agent reminiscent of Twin Peaks‘ own Dale Cooper or Tingle’s own Dark Encounters (the X-Files-esque TV series Tingle’s protagonist, Misha, was writing in Bury Your Gays). The book is out in the world as of Tuesday, August 12th. My utmost thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for granting me access to an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Black Flame: A Review

I love when Gretchen Felker-Martin releases a new book, and today is no exception. Black Flame is out in the world today, and that’s more than a little terrifying to think too much about.

It’s 1985, and Ellen Kramer is working as a film and negative restorer at a Staten Island archival firm. When a long lost German film, “Black Flame,” arrives at their building, Ellen and her coworkers are torn. It’s not a popular kind of movie, after all. It’s full of queer people in gender-bending roles, made on a low budget, and only recently recovered from the collection of a now-deceased Nazi officer. The film itself is in horrible shape, requiring lots of extra care and attention from the restoration team. The work, however, would pay enough to keep the firm afloat for most of the next year. Never mind the fact that it has the chance to fix the firm’s public image after their last big project’s connection to the KKK brought all the wrong kinds of attention to them. With that kind of money in the offering, Ellen’s boss leaps at the opportunity. He also decides that Ellen, being Jewish, should head up the effort to restore a lost work by a great Jewish director.

Ellen’s very uncomfortable with all of this. It makes her think of her ex, Freddie, and the time the two of them spent together. Time that she would much rather consider a phase after the two of them broke up. It doesn’t help that her parents are trying to set her up with a nice young man who might become mayor someday. They’re concerned that if she doesn’t get married and have children soon, it might be too late for her. The work strains her relationships with her coworkers too, to the point where all Ellen wants is to finish restoring the print so that she can be rid of the film forever.

That’s not how this is going to go. After accidentally cutting her hand on the film negative, things start to get progressively weirder. Ellen begins to question everything she knows about herself, her sexuality, her gender, her religion, her family history, and even reality itself. As the work stretches on, more and more of the past begins to bubble up to the surface. Some things, after all, will always refuse to remain hidden, and the costs of bringing “Black Flame” back into the present are far more severe than anyone could have anticipated.

Black Flame is a quick, almost frenetic short novel, clocking in at just over 200 pages. It’s far shorter than Felker-Martin’s earlier works, Manhunt and Cuckoo, but it’s no less gruesome and scary. Body horror remains one of her strongest suits, but the tension that she builds with Ellen in such a short period of time is absolutely incredible. I raced through this book out of sheer desire for the release of finishing and seeing how the end finally arrives.

My utmost thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Black Flame is on shelves today, August 5th. Go get yourself a nice, fast-reading spooky. It’s almost Hallowe’en, after all.

The Staircase in the Woods: A Review

“On Friday, June 5th, 1998, five teenagers went into the woods surrounding Highchair Rocks in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Only four of them came out.” – Chuck Wendig, The Staircase in the Woods

So begins Wendig’s latest novel. That summer night, Owen, Hamish, Nick, Matty, and Lauren went camping. The Covenant, as they called themselves, was bound by solemn promises to protect each other from bullies, to collaborate on homework so none of them fell behind, and so on. That night in the woods, high atop the cliffs, they find something impossible. A staircase, spiraling upward with no remnants of other structure around, no indications of how it had gotten there, or why. When no obvious answers could be found, most of the group decided to leave it be and go back to their campsite. Something about the staircase continues to eat at Matty, though, and so he invokes the Covenant (despite being told that’s not how it works) to get everyone else to go back with him and see what awaits them at the top.

Reluctantly, the other four teens trail along only to watch in shock and horror as, at the final stair, Matty vanishes. There’s no sign of him again.

The days and weeks after are chaos as the four survivors struggle to process what happened and to come up with a cohesive lie to tell to the police about what happened to their missing friend. They face relentless questioning about where they last saw him, who they talked to, and where he could have gone. The only problem is, none of them really know where Matty went, and the staircase is gone too, eliminating the possibility of anyone following after him.

Now, decades have passed, and the four surviving members of The Covenant have done their best to move on with their lives until an email arrives from Nick. He’s dying. Cancer. He wants to get the old gang together one last time before he’s gone, so he offers to fly all of them out to see him. He even invokes The Covenant to ensure that, despite all of the myriad issues they’ve developed as they’ve aged, they’ll come. And so they do.

Upon arrival, they quickly realize that Nick wasn’t being entirely honest with them. Instead of a nice get-together, he leads them off into the woods where, against all sense, they find the staircase again. It’s not the same place, but they know, somehow, that it’s the same staircase. He urges them to climb with him. A chance, he says, to do the right thing. To go find Matty.

To bring him back.

And, in the name of The Covenant, they follow.

The Staircase in the Woods is a brilliant, dark piece of horror from Wendig in the vein of Stephen King’s It (friends coming back together again as adults to face the evil they couldn’t defeat in their youth). The members of The Covenant have fallen away from each other, and they’re going to confront more than just the mysteries that lie at the top of the staircase if they’re going to have any chance of making it out of the woods again. I love Wendig’s horror (see my recent review of Black River Orchard) and I’m certain that most of you will too.

The Staircase in the Woods is out today from Del Rey books. My utmost thanks to them and to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Rose/House: A Review

It should be well known at this point that I love haunted house stories. Arkady Martine’s new novella, Rose/House is no exception to this.

In China Lake, California, legendary architect Basit Desiau built his masterpiece. Rose House is an advanced artificial intelligence that is fully integrated into the entire structure of a solitary house built out in the desert, some distance from the town proper. The locals refer to it as a haunt, as the AI within Rose House permeates through the whole building.

There is a dead man inside Rose House. That has been true for a year. Desiau arranged for the house to take the carbon that remained in his body after his death and compress it into a diamond, which the house then put on a plinth for display. In that respect as well, Rose House has always been haunted.

Now, though, there is another dead man inside Rose House. That shouldn’t be possible, as the only person in the world who was supposed to be able to access the labyrinthine house and its collection of Desiau’s archived work was on the other side of the world when he died. Dr. Selene Gisil, a former student of Desiau’s, is the only living person allowed inside Rose House. Her permissions, set by Desiau before his death, are to ensure that she remains the sole human caretaker of his notes and unpublished works. Despite having publicly distanced herself from Desiau before his death (and diamond-ification), Gisil is still the person he wanted to serve as seneschal.

Twenty-four hours have passed since this mysterious man died, and so Rose House has fulfilled its obligation by notifying the China Lake police precinct, in accordance with its programming guidelines. In order to get inside to examine the decedent, Detective Maritza Smith must track down Gisil and convince her to come back to the United States. There’s no one else that Rose House will allow inside, dead body or no. But who is the victim? How did he get inside Rose House to begin with? What is really happening out in the middle of the Mojave?

This is the first of Arkady Martine’s works that I’ve read, and I was very impressed with my first foray into her writing. Rose/House is a tight, tense narrative with little room for embellishment that you typically encounter in similar, albeit longer, works. All of our narrators get a little time to shine, and will leave you questioning what any of them really saw or did. I’ll definitely be looking into A Memory Called Empire in the near future if this book is at all indicative of Martine’s writing. My utmost thanks to Tor and to NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Rose/House is out in the world in hardcover tomorrow, 3/11/25. Go grab a copy, and let it grab you.

Don’t Let the Forest In: A Review

Spooky times call for spooky stories, and few times are spookier than the week of Hallowe’en. So it is with great pleasure that I present my review of Don’t Let the Forest In, a young adult novel from CG Drews. Don’t Let the Forest In is a psychological horror novel set in a prestigious boarding school, Wickwood Academy. It’s there that Australian-born twins, Andrew and Dove, first met Thomas. This is the trio’s senior year, but even on the first day back, everything seems to be going wrong.

Dove and Andrew have been fighting before they even arrive at the school, and all Andrew wants to do is find Thomas so that the three of them can resume their standard undefeatable crew behavior. Thomas is acting oddly, though, even for him. He seems more on edge than usual, there’s blood dried on his shirt, and he’s not talking to Dove. Previously, Andrew would write stories to vent his darker side. Thomas would illustrate them. Dove would serve as the boys’ connection to the real world, anchoring them and helping them through their academic struggles. Now, police are showing up to question Thomas about his parents’ whereabouts, and Andrew doesn’t know if he can even trust his twin. He doesn’t want to alienate Dove by discussing the way he feels about Thomas, he doesn’t want to risk losing Thomas by admitting that there may be more than just friendship between them, and he really doesn’t want to think about the possibility that Dove and Thomas are already engaging in a more serious relationship.

As the year grinds on and Thomas seems to be more exhausted, though, a secret comes out. He’s been sneaking out of the school into the woods at night to fight monsters, his own drawings come to life. The darkness within Andrew’s stories spilling from the pages of Thomas’s sketchbook now threatens everyone at Wickwood. While Andrew volunteers to go out in the dark to do battle alongside Thomas, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be enough. Even destroying the sketchbook doesn’t stop the horrors from tumbling out into reality. Andrew already knows he would kill to protect Thomas. If it comes to it, could he kill Thomas in order to save Dove and the rest of his schoolmates?

Don’t Let the Forest In is a fantastically dark adventure, and I’m ridiculously grateful to NetGalley and MacMillan for sending me an eARC in exchange for a fair review. It’s out in the world as of yesterday, October 29th, and is an absolutely perfect Hallowe’en read. Go get it.

I Was a Teenage Slasher: A Review

Hey, look! There’s a new Stephen Graham Jones book out!

I mean, naturally, I picked it up for review, so here we are.

I Was a Teenage Slasher is the story of Tolly Driver, a 17-year-old boy in the small town of Lamesa, Texas. While not a stunningly popular kid in his school, Tolly is largely unremarkable before everything goes wrong at his classmate Deek’s party. Before that night, he was known mostly for his deathly peanut allergy and for the tractor collision that killed his father. It’s the summer of 1989, and all hell is about to break loose.

See, another student who was trying to fit in with Deek’s gang died during a hazing ritual. In true slasher fashion, he rises from the dead and comes back for a roaring rampage of revenge, meting out justice to all of the other high schoolers who didn’t prevent his death in the first place. In the aftermath of that encounter, Tolly ends up getting some of the killer’s blood into an open cut on his own forehead. Now things are getting weird. Vehicles fail to start when he’s around. The kitchen knife makes an audibly sharp SHTING sound when pulled from the wood block, but only when he does it. Is Tolly Driver the new killer?

I Was a Teenage Slasher isn’t the first time Stephen Graham Jones has tackled horror from the killer’s perspective. This is his wheelhouse, after all. He plays with classic slasher movie tropes much as he did in his Angel of Indian Lake Trilogy. This time, though, we’re dealing with a delightfully reluctant killer who gradually becomes aware of what’s happening to him, but unable to stop himself. After all, he’s not the final girl. No matter what, he’s definitely going to be notable now.

My utmost thanks to Saga Press and NetGalley for an eARC of this one in exchange for a fair review. I Was a Teenage Slasher is out in the world as of yesterday, 7/16/24. Run out and get it. Just… watch your back.

Bury Your Gays: A Review

In which Chuck Tingle goes to Hollywood.

Misha Byrne is a screenwriter, and he’s just locked in his first Oscar nomination. He’s also gay, and executive meddling is on the cusp of forcing him to kill off the two queer leads of his latest TV series. Nearly four seasons of wildly successful X-Files-esque television, and he’s finding his work being subject to one of the oldest tropes in fiction: bury your gays. For Misha, this is particularly egregious, as his favorite childhood show fell victim to the same treatment years before. However, if he doesn’t go along with the studio’s plans, he’ll be in breach of contract and lose his job, and potentially any chance of working in Hollywood again.

Then, things start to get weird at the studio lot. Raymond Nelson, one of the oldest working animators at the studio, is crushed by a piano in an ironic echo of a cartoon death. Not long after, Misha spots a character from one of his horror films while walking out of a bar. This omen warns him that he has only five day to live, a timeline that coincides with the night of the Academy Awards ceremony. Soon, more of his horror characters begin intruding into his life, and he’s forced to face the very real traumas that shaped his career (and are threatening his boyfriend). Will Misha succumb to studio pressure by Oscar night, or will he fall to a twisted version of one of his own creations?

Chuck Tingle is absolutely killing it in the horror genre, y’all. Bury Your Gays is littered with little nods to actual Hollywood staples, all while carefully avoiding name-dropping any specific real world studio. Tingle builds phenomenal tension and intersperses some clever screenwriting aspects between segments of the story. This is a brilliant follow-up to last year’s Camp Damascus, and further solidifies Chuck as a horror writer of note. My utmost thanks to Tor Publishing Group and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Bury Your Gays is out as of yesterday, 7/9/24. Go get it.

Cuckoo: A Review

Gretchen Felker-Martin is back! It’s been two years since Manhunt dropped, and the world is still reeling from her spectacularly violent, grimy apocalypse novel. Now she’s written an arguably darker tale of queer fear in Cuckoo.

Like its predecessor, Cuckoo is undeniably a queer horror story. The novel introduces us to a group of teens, each of whom has been violently removed from their home and forcefully transported across the country. Their only crime? Being a queer teen in the 90s, for which their parents shipped them off to be changed. When they arrive at Camp Resolution, a desert-based conversion camp, they have nothing but each other, and no idea what they’re about to face. They don’t even know what state they’re in. Far from home and cut off from the outside world, they’ll have to band together to make it out unchanged.

Camp Resolution is, in a word, weird. The educational curriculum is pseudoscience, the physical activities consist of backbreaking labor or myriad household chores (depending on assigned sex), and the counselors are not just prone to violence but actively encourage it. The campers who have been there longer are brutal to the newcomers, and even Pastor Eddie, the leader of the camp, won’t hesitate to beat any of the teens who don’t bow to his whims.

Something darker still lurks in the shadows of Camp Resolution, though. The campers who have graduated from the program are… different. Not themselves anymore (and while some would argue that yes, that’s the point of a conversion camp, Resolution’s strategy relies a lot less on prayer and the Bible). Then, the dreams begin. The same dream. Each camper is digging a hole, and they find their own body buried deep in the earth. Something is reaching out to them, speaking to them… preparing them. Our ragged misfits know that they have to escape the camp, before they too are irrevocably changed.

Gretchen Felker-Martin absolutely nailed the building dread in Cuckoo. This book is just as filthy as Manhunt, and I mean that in the best way of describing her aesthetics and worldbuilding. I was thrilled to find out that her sophomore effort was an incredibly solid piece of horror. Cuckoo is out in the world today. Go get it. Read it. Get scared. Repeat.

My utmost thanks to Tor and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.