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Tag Archives: horror

A House With Good Bones: A Review

Some family secrets are supposed to stay buried.

Sam’s having a rough time. Her post-graduate fieldwork in archaeological entomology is on hold, and so she makes the long trans-Texas drive from Arizona back to North Carolina to live with her mother until the work has funding again. Sam’s mother is living in her own mother’s old house now that Gran Mae is dead, and is happy to have Sam come back home for however long it will last.

The problem is that the house no longer feels like home for Sam. With blandly-painted walls (ugh, ecru), and familiar knickknacks out of sight, the house itself seems to be telling her that something is wrong. Never mind her mom’s behavioral regressions to the days of Gran Mae’s life, or the vultures that are hanging out in the neighborhood. There’s also Gran Mae’s rose garden, which, while stunningly beautiful as ever, is suspiciously devoid of insect life (trust Sam on this one, she’s an entomologist, after all).

Before long, Sam begins to have dreams of her grandmother, and remembers things she said. “The roses say to say your prayers,” and “the underground children will get you…” and not-so-startling fatphobia linger in her memory. But how much of that was real? All is clearly not well on Lammergeier Lane, and Sam is determined to find the answers. Negotiating Southern hospitality and prejudices and overcoming her own fears will be critical.

A House With Good Bones is a quick, fun horror read, y’all. T. Kingfisher has put together one fantastic ride. I loved following Sam on her journey through her family’s past as she strove to save her mom and herself from a disturbing legacy. Not to mention that I will never look at ladybugs (Coccinellidae) the same way again.

My utmost thanks to NetGalley and to the folks at MacMillan/Tor for an eARC of A House With Good Bones in exchange for a fair review. You can snag a copy for yourself starting on March 28th.

The Crane Husband: A Review

I am utterly broken by this book.

Maybe it’s because I was the farm kid who left that life behind. Maybe it’s because I’m a parent, and I can’t help thinking that I’m not doing enough for my children. Maybe it’s because Kelly Barnhill just has a way with words that makes me want to weep.

The Crane Husband is a fairy tale set in the near future of the midwestern US. The protagonist, a young girl of fifteen, is doing her best to help manage what’s left of the family farm, raise her nine-year-old brother, Michael, and promote and sell her mother’s art. She misses her father, who died several years before, and wonders about the life she might’ve had if he hadn’t succumbed to illness.

Everything about her life changes drastically when her mother brings home a crane dressed in a hat and glasses and her dad’s shoes, telling her and Michael that they can call the crane “Father.” Soon, their mother’s life is upended by the arrival. Their mother has taken lovers in the past, but none of them stayed long. The crane is different, and not just because he’s a bird. She withdraws from her time with her children, leaving her daughter to cope and take care of Michael. She stops helping around the farm, and neglects her own health, all to please the crane’s whims. Our protagonist must learn the hardest lessons about what she’s willing to tolerate and what sacrifices can or should be made for family.

This novella is beautiful, and haunting in the best way. It’s a powerful retelling of the story of the crane wife, but it transcends the bounds of the original story and encompasses a new view of heartache, labor, gender expectations, and love.

The Crane Husband will be in stores on February 28th. You’ll want to read this one, but brace yourself. Nothing is what it seems. My thanks to both NetGalley and Tordotcom for an advance copy in exchange for a fair review.

Don’t Fear the Reaper: A Review

It’s spooky season!

Yes, I know it’s February, but the joy that is Halloween cannot possibly be contained in a single day, let alone a single month. Especially not when there’s a new Stephen Graham Jones book to be had.

I’ve read a lot of SGJ’s work over the last few years. From Mapping the Interior to The Only Good Indians to My Heart is a Chainsaw to Night of the Mannequins. He has rapidly become my favorite modern horror writer, and Don’t Fear the Reaper only serves as further evidence of his brilliance.

When I first picked up My Heart is a Chainsaw back in 2021, it started a string of slasher movie viewings as, like Jade, I immersed myself in things like Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Candyman, Scream, and Children of the Corn. Unlike Jade, I wasn’t trying to hide from my trauma within the slasher genre. But at the end of that novel, Jade had faced her demons, triumphed over the threat to her home. She had faced the killer and survived. She was the final girl.

But as any slasher fan knows, there’s nothing more common in the films than a sequel…

Now, four years have passed since the Independence Day Massacre shattered the town of Proofrock, Idaho. Four years since Jade opened the dam above Indian Lake, saving the town from a rapidly spreading wildfire. Four years since she was accused of murdering her abusive father that night on the water. Going by her birth name of Jennifer again, our final girl has come back home to a town that has tried to move on, but is still obviously traumatized. Jennifer herself has tried to move on as well. She abandoned her collection of movies, finished her associate’s degree (it looked good for the courts, after all), and strives to connect with people and events in real life. She wants to find a home again, to reconnect with Letha and Sheriff Hardy, and even her mom.

It’s December 12th, 2019 in Proofrock, and the snow has complicated things for the citizens. Not only has it disrupted the usual Thursday by blocking most of the traffic through town, but it also interrupted the prisoner transfer of one Dark Mill South, a hook-handed serial killer. Given where his convoy was when an avalanche wiped out the escort, Dark Mill South should be dead too. No one thinks to look for him in town until after the first high schoolers start turning up dead. And tomorrow is Friday the thirteenth…

“The way I see it, someone’s out to make a sequel. You know, cash in on all the movie murder hoopla. So, it’s our job to observe the rules of the sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate. Carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.” – Randy Meeks, Scream 2

Caught in between the desire the move beyond her past and the need to protect her friends and family, Jennifer is forced to confront a killer again, but this one knows the rules just as well as she does. After four years away from the movies that she used to wield as weapons, there may be some new tricks she hasn’t learned. Don’t Fear the Reaper is a pitch-perfect follow-up to Chainsaw, and a solid second entry in a planned trilogy, leaving readers eager to learn what’s next for Jade and the people of Proofrock. It’s out in stores today.

My utmost thanks to Gallery Books and NetGalley for providing an eARC of Don’t Fear the Reaper in exchange for an honest review. This one was an absolute treat.

And yes, I started reading this one in the middle of a power outage, by kerosene lamp light, as is only proper for good horror.

The Book Eaters: A Review

How far would you go to protect your children?

For Devon and her son, Cai, there doesn’t seem to be a limit. She’s prepared to leave every other member of her extended family behind, betraying everything she’s ever known to ensure that her son will be able to live. She’s even willing to bring strangers home for Cai to feast on when he’s hungry. See, Devon and her son aren’t quite human, despite their appearance. They’re members of a species known as Book Eaters. They are sustained not by food and drink, but by paper and ink. Devour a book and immediately know all of the contents of it. Memorize a document in seconds by digesting it. And Cai? Cai’s not a standard ‘eater. Unlike most members of his species, he craves memories and personalities eaten directly from a victim’s brain.

The Book Eaters are endangered, though, with girls being rare. Women in the Six Families of Book Eaters are married out of their manors into arranged weddings in order to provide genetically viable heirs. Two births per mother, then they can live a comfortable existence in one of the family manors. That’s the way it has to be. But Devon’s separation from her first child left her traumatized, and she was unwilling to go through that pain again.

When Cai is born, it’s expected that he’ll be drafted into the family’s enforcement division as a “dragon” after his limited time with his mother passes. Instead, Devon takes her young son and flees the other Book Eaters, hoping to find a source of a drug that will allow Cai to subsist on books as she does. How long can she make it when a team of dragons is chasing her? How will she cope knowing that her own brother is leading them? You’ll have to read Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters to find out.

The Book Eaters is out in stores as of yesterday. My utmost thanks to NetGalley and Tor/Forge for an advance copy in exchange for a fair review.

Nightmare Fuel: A Review

A while back, Tor Nightfire reached out to me after I reviewed one of their horror titles. They asked if I was interested in an upcoming non-fiction book about horror, and why people like it. I, naturally, said yes. So I was sent a copy of Nina Nesseth’s Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films, and reader, I loved it.

Nightmare Fuel digs deep into the reasons that people like me enjoy horror movies. A breakdown of the techniques used in horror, like jump scares and repetition, sheds light on the false assumption that horror movies are “switch your brain off” entertainment. Nesseth covers the definitions of fear, horror, terror, and various other terms that tie in to the film watching experience. The book examines the physiological structures in the human brain that respond to particular aspects of horror movies, explaining why our bodies respond the way they do (and consequently, how we create a barrier in our minds to help us understand the difference between a real threat situation and one that’s being shown to us in film).

As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a non-fiction reader under normal circumstances. However, Nina Nesseth has knocked this one out of the park. Nightmare Fuel is a must-read for horror movie fans, combining the science of fear with the history of the genre into a beautiful, quick read. It’s out in the world as of yesterday, so go check it out.

My utmost gratitude to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an eARC of the book in exchange for a fair review.

Manhunt: A Review

Wow.

I mean.

Where do you start a review for a book like Manhunt? I’m going to have to say it starts like this, because I’ve literally never read a book like Manhunt before.

The world has ended, at least for cis men. A virulent plague has torn through humanity, attacking people with higher levels of testosterone and turning them into violent, feral monsters. The survivors do what they can to get by, rebuilding where they can. Beth and Fran navigate through the New England wilderness, tracking and killing the men and harvesting their testicles and kidneys to bring back to their friend Indi. She processes hormones for the two trans women so that they can prevent the disease from transforming them into mindless beasts as well. Together, they might be able to hold on.

However, the wild men aren’t the only threat to Beth and Fran in this remade world. Militant TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are sweeping the eastern seaboard, killing anyone who isn’t a cis woman. Their leader, Teach, is out to leave her own mark, and she’ll destroy anything or anyone who might even consider helping trans folks.

Gretchen Felker-Martin has crafted a horrifying, violent apocalypse that skillfully wraps its way around gender and sexuality. She blends beautifully erotic scenes with the grotesque, and leaves you terrified, but somehow still wanting more. Manhunt showcases the power of found family, even in the face of utter destruction. “Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone.”

This book is definitely not for the faint of heart or the delicate of stomach, but it was an absolute blast. It’s out now. My thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an eARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth: A Review

It’s October, and the month that I spend in celebration of Hallowe’en is one of my favorite times of the year. Nearly five weeks of spooky stories, movies, games, all building up to a night spent in costume asking strangers and friends alike for candy? I’m 100% in.

This year, one of the best scary stories that I had the pleasure of reading was Cassandra Khaw’s new novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth. I’m a big fan of horror novellas, as I love seeing how an author can build suspense over shorter texts, and Khaw absolutely shines here. They skillfully blend Japanese myths and history with a modern setting, leaving me wanting so much more.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is the story of a group of friends, horror fans all, who have overcome their intertwining pasts to gather at an ancient Heian-era mansion so that two of them can get married. Why not have a destination wedding in a haunted house? After learning about one of the spirits that is said to occupy the grounds, the friends soon find that their planned night of drinking and telling ghost stories may have gone a step too far. An ohaguro-bettari, the ghost of a bride-to-be, has claimed one of them as a replacement for the man who died before he could become her husband a thousand years ago.

Khaw presents us with a group of protagonists who are clearly genre-savvy, but their own interpersonal connections have grown strained, and may prove to be their undoing. “This is the problem with horror movies: Everyone knows what’s coming next but actions have momentum, every decision an equal and justified reaction. Just because you know you should, doesn’t mean you can, stop.”

I loved Nothing But Blackened Teeth, and devoured the novella in a couple of hours. It’s available for you to buy today!

My sincere thanks to NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

The Only Good Indians: A Review

Stephen Graham Jones wrote one of the creepiest novellas I’ve ever read, Mapping the Interior. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity to grab an eARC of his new novel, The Only Good Indians. I’m glad I did, too.

Ten years ago, four young Blackfeet men went on their last hunt together. One last chance to get an elk before winter. Ricky, Lewis, Gabe, and Cass. It was supposed to be their shot to prove that they weren’t the screw-ups that so many folks on the reservation thought they were. One opportunity to prove that they were good Indians. Only it all went wrong, didn’t it? They weren’t supposed to be hunting in that part of the reservation. They would pay the price.

Ricky died the next year. “INDIAN MAN KILLED IN DISPUTE OUTSIDE BAR,” the headline had read. But he’d run from home. Left the reservation after his little brother overdosed, looking for work. He never made it to Minneapolis like he’d planned. But what if the headline didn’t get it quite right? What if there was more to it than a handful of roughnecks getting drunk and angry in a parking lot? More than a lone elk wandering into the lot, trashing the men’s pickups, leaving them to believe that Ricky had been causing the damage?

Now the tenth anniversary of their hunt is coming up, and Lewis is trying to find the courage to tell his wife the truth of what the four men did that day in the snow. The truth about the elk they killed, and the fate that they sealed for themselves with each rifle round. Lewis left the reservation too, though he never went as far as Ricky tried. But lately, Lewis hasn’t been feeling quite right. He’s been seeing things, impossible things. A cow elk dead in his and Peta’s living room. Dead? Or was her eye following him as he climbed the ladder? And it couldn’t be the same cow. Lewis killed her that day. Distributed her meat to the reservation elders. Still has her skin balled up in his freezer. Was it an elk that he saw? Or was it a woman with an elk’s head?

Meanwhile, Gabe and Cass are still at home on the rez, preparing a sweat lodge for a friend’s kid who needs to get put back on a proper path. A classmate of Gabe’s daughter, Denorah. The sweat will be a chance for Gabe and Cass to embrace their heritage, and pay respect to Ricky’s memory. Teach the kid, Nathan, a little too. Maybe a little bit of atonement for their elk hunt, now a decade back. At the very least, the kid’s dad will throw Gabe some extra cash that he can use to buy something for Denorah. But then, Lewis is in the headlines too…

Something survived that day, ten years ago. Something vengeful. Something patient. Something with horns.

Elk, the Blackfeet elders say, have a long memory.

The Only Good Indians is a fabulous novel. Stephen Graham Jones did not disappoint with this heartbreaking work. Part contemporary commentary on Native American lives, part slow-burning horror, it’s everything I could’ve wanted.

Happy publication day at long last, Mr. Jones.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

 

Something is Killing the Children: A Review

I like comics, and I like horror stories, and I absolutely love when they come together well. James Tynion IV’s latest project nails that blend. Something is Killing the Children first hit comic shops in single issues starting in the fall of last year, and my attention was immediately drawn to the series. I first discovered Tynion’s writing on Detective Comics back at the beginning of the Rebirth arcs, and quickly shifted to his and Rian Sygh’s Backstagers series. Tynion’s a versatile writer (with series published under BOOM!, BOOM!Box, and DC), with a real skill for subtle, underlying horror themes. Something is Killing the Children is a much more overt horror, and it shines because of that. And unlike Backstagers, Something is Killing the Children is definitely not for the younger readers out there.

Our first chapter opens with a group of four young boys playing truth or dare at a sleepover, and a story about a monster living in a nearby ravine quickly draws scorn. They set out to investigate, just in case. We soon learn that three of those boys are now dead, and the 4th, James, is under suspicion for the deaths. Almost a dozen kids in town have died recently, with another dozen or so missing over the course of the two previous months. James is struggling to understand what happened, because what he saw that night in the ravine should’ve been impossible.

It’s only when Erica Slaughter arrives in town that James finds someone who believes his story. Erica knows that there’s a monster somewhere nearby, and she’s here at the behest of her mysterious boss to kill it before any more kids go missing. As the only known survivor of any encounters with the creature, James is going to be able to provide Erica with some much-needed intel before she sets out after it with a chainsaw.

Erica Slaughter

Meet Erica

Who is Erica, and where did she come from? Why does she carry around a stuffed octopus? Why can none of the adults seem to see the monster when it’s right in front of them? Something is Killing the Children is a dark, gory blend of Locke & Key (some bizarre things happening that adults seem weirdly oblivious about) and Stranger Things (monsters chasing teens), and I am 100% here for it. Werther Dell’Edera’s art is beautifully disconcerting, a perfect match for Tynion’s brilliantly paced writing. I’m compelled to track down more of his work now, because he’s crafted images that are going to linger in my head for days after reading this book.

The print version of volume one of Something is Killing the Children is due in stores on May 26th. The book contains the first five chapters of one of the best new horror comics I’ve picked up in years. It’s really no surprise that I loved this first volume, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. If you’re a horror fan, do yourself a favor and give it a read.

 

Thanks to NetGalley for an eARC of this book in exchange for a fair review.

A Door

Chuck Wendig’s latest writing challenge asked for us to share a real-life spooky experience. I decided to write a bit about something that happened about this time last year.

I’ve written a lot about doors. Secret passages, locked doors that contain various secrets, portals to other places… It’s definitely a recurring theme in my work. So imagine my surprise at finding something that wouldn’t be out of place in my work showing up in my apartment.

My girlfriend and I were moving in together for the first time, and we’d finally found an affordable place with enough space in the right neighborhood. We leased the apartment without looking at it, so we didn’t notice it when we first moved in. Not even when we were doing our walkthrough with the checklist the office had given us. Looking for chipped paint, broken blinds, etc. Maybe it was just the shift in lighting after we got the bedside lamp set up. Eventually, though, we spotted a small seam in the wall. There it was. A vertical line, a slight indentation too deep to just be in the paint.

“That’s weird.”

“Oh, damn. Yeah, it is. It’s like they patched the wall over here, and didn’t care that you’d be able to see a gap in the drywall. Weird.”

We didn’t think about it for a while after that. Occasionally, we’d smell smoke, though, like the next door neighbor was enjoying being in Colorado (despite lease clauses). Then, there was a revelation.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Uhh… It’s not just a seam.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a door.”

“What the fuck?”

Sure enough, there was a second line running parallel to the first, about two feet over. Then we followed them up.

“Yeah. It’s a door. There’s frame here too, and look. There’s the lintel.”

“What the actual fuck?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was a leftover from when the construction guys were building the apartment. A way between this one and the one next door without having to go back into the hall.”

“Then why would they frame it and then fill it in?”

My girlfriend even asked the leasing office about it. The agent who came to look at it had no clue it had ever been there. We pulled the bed away from the wall, and the lines ran all the way to the floor. It was unmistakably a door. Filled with drywall and painted, yes. But a door.

That was when we looked up at the ceiling and noticed the scratches in the popcorn ceiling. Gouges several inches long, spaced closely together, about a foot from the filled-in door. Another group of them a few feet away, nearer to the entrance to the bedroom. Almost like something had crawled across the ceiling from the door to the not-quite-door… Or been pulled…

 

 

 

Happy October, everyone!