The Beginning of Truth at the End of Civilization

Ronald Malfi, Bone White

A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape where his brother disappeared. So he catches the next plane to Alaska.

I have conflicted feelings about Ronald Malfi’s thriller of isolation, atmosphere, and paranoia. On one hand, Malfi subjects his characters to innovative tortures on the perimeters of civilization, tortures which explore the characters’ depths and the extremes they’ll reach to survive. On the other hand, Malfi relies upon the Blair Witch horror model, the city-dweller’s terror at wilderness, amplified by the characters’ lack of Cub Scout-level survival skills.

Investigator Jill Ryerson of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation as seen remarkable crimes on America’s “Last Frontier.” For her, human rationality comes to the tundra to die. But even she’s shocked by the violence and rot she finds in Joseph Mallory’s isolated cabin outside Dread’s Hand, Alaska. (Yes, “Dread’s Hand.” Malfi’s symbolism isn’t light-handed.) But for all his candor, Mallory refuses to explain his motivation, leaving Ryerson even more confused.

Paul Gallo absolutely knows his twin brother is among Mallory’s victims. Danny’s last text came from Dread’s Hand, after all. Paul and Danny were Corsican twins growing up, but as adults, they’ve felt disconnected, and wandered through life seeking purpose. So Paul heads for Alaska, hoping not only for answers, but also to reconnect with the missing half of his soul. Imagine his shock when Ryerson’s investigation turns up…

Nothing.

Malfi’s story heats up in Act II, when Paul, disgusted with Ryerson’s lack of procedural headway, undertakes his own investigation. The East Coast city boy rents an SUV and heads into Alaska’s mountainous interior, and if this sounds ominous, it is. Malfi’s high-handed atmospherics really gain steam here, as Paul questions a community that’s kept secrets aggressively for generations. As often in horror fiction, local yokels are the scariest phantoms.

Ronald Malfi

Simultaneously, however, Malfi relaxes into genre stereotypes. His dead-eyed provincials shouting “Y’all just git!” are pinched straight from better-known literature; James Dickey’s Deliverance, and its better-known movie adaptation, spring to mind. Malfi has described this book in interviews as his most autobiographical (I don’t know his CV, so can’t confirm). But one starts suspecting Malfi has lived much of his life through books and movies.

His worldbuilding supports this doubt. He makes fleeting mistakes about both Fairbanks and Annapolis which reveal, to those with local knowledge, that he mostly researched these locations online. So many Dread’s Hand locals warn Paul that he’s risking getting stranded all winter that, when it doesn’t happen, we’re astounded. I’m not sure whether I appreciate or loathe this subversion of Chekhov’s Gun. Maybe a hybrid.

Wilderness, for Paul (and Malfi), is metaphorical, not physical. When Paul abandons the signposts of comfortable suburban life to seek truth in the hinterlands, he abandons the comfortable presumptions which his White American upbringing bequeathed him. An AmLit professor, he’s spent his life teaching students to find truth in others’ texts. But he reaches a point where his only truth exists in places where no paths or pre-built infrastructure exist.

Which, when presented in LitCrit analysis, sounds pretty cool. But Malfi’s actual storytelling relies on mass-media depictions of country life, including crude nature demigods, crudely drawn animals, and fear of countrified superstition. One gets the feeling, reading Paul’s journey, that Malfi never took an orienteering course or camped overnight in the woods. His depictions are crude, sweeping, and stereotyped, yet somehow, Paul finds ways of surviving.

I can’t help wondering if Malfi read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about another college-educated city boy who abandoned the map in Alaska’s wilderness, and learned the wrong lessons. Malfi seemingly believes that the physical, non-metaphorical wilderness is a place where people go to learn themselves, push their limits, and emerge transformed. Which it can be, if they take the time to prepare. But that’s not what Paul does.

The contrast is ironic. Malfi writes about a man who escapes the comfortable but stultifying confines of White modernity to discover the harsh but liberating truth. But he writes it using familiar, market-tested storytelling tropes, assembled like Lego bricks. There’s a lot I like about Malfi’s book, particularly his ambitious themes and deeper questions. But the tools he uses to address those themes and questions are just too comfy.

Last Star, Straight Onto Mourning

Catriona Ward, Nowhere Burning

Poor adolescent Riley needs to escape her abusive foster home, and the impossible girl outside her second-floor window offers the sanctuary she needs. All Riley has to do is run away across the Colorado Rockies and learn to fly. As unlikely as that sounds, it’s better than staying put. But when she reaches Nowhere, the strange ruin of mid-century grandeur overlooking Boulder, she finds a compound of frightened fugitives like her, all somehow permanently children.

It wouldn’t be accurate to describe Catriona Ward’s latest book as a retelling of Peter Pan. More like a self-conscious homage. Ward, whose previous works have relied upon sudden reveals and last-minute surprises, offers three converging narratives building toward a secret she’s previously kept. But this time, the reveals don’t feel earned, not like natural extensions of the ongoing story. It feels like she’s deliberately lied in order to blindside us at the last minute.

In the first narrative, Riley escapes her abusive home situation, dragging along her brother Oliver, too young to understand what’s going on. They hike to Nowhere, the remains of a palatial mansion that burned years ago. There, a commune of adolescents has established a stable society without adults. Riley feels both drawn to and repulsed by their self-reliance, backed by simple, useful roles and their leader’s home-brew religion. They worship something that needs constantly appeased.

The second narrative follows Adam. An architect and builder, Adam contracts with prestigious actor Leaf Winham to build improvements on his Colorado mansion, called Nowhere. Leaf is charming and acclaimed, but distrusts fame, and prefers to keep his secrets. Adam feels drawn to Leaf, to the point where he abandons his life, including his pregnant girlfriend. Only when Leaf controls Adam, and he has nothing to return to, does Adam begin uncovering Leaf’s dark secrets.

Finally, documentarian Marc and his camera operator, Kimble, have decided to investigate the urban legends surrounding Nowhere and its cult of children. They want to become the first adults to approach the ruined mansion in several decades, and capture its secrets on camera. But the closer they approach the building, the more friction starts emerging from Marc’s deeply buried past, and it becomes increasingly clear that he’ll hurt his closest friends to keep his secrets.

Catriona Ward

It’s obvious, early on, that these narratives unfold out of sequence. Since Adam’s story unfolds in a Nowhere untouched by fire, it clearly precedes the other two. We read in expectation of how the building’s secrets, clearly known in the other threads, will come out in Adam’s past. Also, how exactly do the other two narratives relate? Marc clearly knows more than he tells Kimble, despite call her the sister he wished he’d always had.

The problem arises here. I’ve read two previous Catriona Ward novels, where plot points revolve around information the characters have, but don’t share. In Little Eve, the narrator is self-consciously telling the story and playing with narrative conventions, in the Agatha Christie style. In The Last House on Needless Street, the secrets are buried under facts the characters take for granted, and therefore haven’t thought about in years. We feel surprised without ever feeling deceived.

Here, the characters clearly know, and often think about, the secrets motivating their choices. They just don’t tell us. The revelations come as raw info dumps, sometimes several paragraphs long. Once the characters reveal the secrets they’ve nurtured, we don’t feel surprised or illuminated, as we have in previous Ward novels; we feel lied to. We can forgive that once, because people lie. But as lie after lie gets revealed, we feel manipulated, not enlightened.

This hurts because Ward’s set-up is so good. Besides Peter Pan, previous critics have compared Ward’s premise to The Shining and Lord of the Flies. Ward isn’t merely imitative, though; she uses these time-honored influences to question how good people with honorable intentions make, and constantly re-make, civilization. Leaf Winham, the charming narcissist, and the children’s religious rituals, are just two forms of community building that work well for adherents, until the moment they don’t.

Reading, I felt like Ward had devised characters, situations, and a nonlinear form that served her psychological writing style well. But she hadn’t figured how to tie the multiple threads together, so she pulled a Hail Mary and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed, if her previous books hadn’t been so good that they set my expectations so high. Sadly, the product feels like a good premise, finished with a cheap rug-pull.

The Deep, Dark Mines of the Uncanny Valley

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep

Shellshocked veteran Lt. Alex Easton’s sole qualification to investigate unexplained phenomena, is that they’ve seen it before without flinching. But where they previously fought ineffable monsters in their native Gallacia, a mysterious Eastern European land of dismal swamps and forests primeval, this time, they’ve been invited to America. But then, if there’s a place as old and as hostile to humankind as Gallacia, it must surely be Southern Appalachia.

T. Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” novellas, starring Alex Easton, whose unique gender identity doesn’t translate into English, each delve into different horror subgenres. The first retold a Poe classic, highlighting a theme Poe introduced, but didn’t explore. The second followed the conventions of folk horror. This third unpack a theme popular in recent movies: the legend of mysterious humanoids dwelling in the caverns and mines permeating America’s eastern mountains.

Dr. James Denton, a supporting character from Easton’s first story, has telegrammed Easton for their help. He admits Easton isn’t particularly qualified, except that they’ve faced similar conflicts before, and he needs a partner who won’t ask stupid questions. So Easton crosses the ocean, rides America’s rails, and walks into West Virginia’s dark, forested mountains, a terrain from which more intrepid explorers have frequently failed to return.

Many American folk myths speculate that something dark and mysterious dwells underground, a horrible monster which we’ll uncover by mining for hydrocarbons or even just spelunking. This monster is usually whispered to be older than humankind, and eager for small provocations to resurge and take America from us. Of course, this is coded language. We “Americans” know who we stole this land from, and why they deserve to reclaim it.

Kingfisher salts these themes with a Lovecraftian influence which she acknowledges in her afterword, but which she doesn’t hammer needlessly. Rather, she describes two war-torn old souls, walking wounded, who investigate a land older than human conception. There, they discover a cavern that cannot possibly exist, guarded by a force so close to human, that its very existence personifies the uncanny valley. But that force is holding something worse back.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Reading this novella, I’m reminded of Stanisław Lem’s signal classic, Solaris. Both stories feature humans encountering an intelligence so different from themselves that they cannot truly communicate. Though Easton and Denton have more success than Kelvin in making peace, they struggle with some of the same problems. What does it mean to “communicate” with an intelligence that isn’t human? Or to speak individually with a collective intelligence?

But our protagonists bring something to the story that neither Lovecraft nor Lem considered: capitalists’ willingness to burn everything that doesn’t turn a profit. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and Lem’s ocean planet encounter humans primarily through scientists and explorers. Kingfisher’s primordial intelligence comes to light because humans dynamited the mountains and uncorked Earth’s mantle in search of power and money. Therefore, “first contact” means not curiosity, but pain.

I’ve become a particular Kingfisher fan because she reverses widespread cultural expectations. In this case, besides Easton’s blunt defiance of the Anglophonic gender binary, Easton also sees America as exotic and foreign, reading America back to Kingfisher’s audience. Burned out on conflict, Easton sees American glorification of the Spanish-American war as bizarre and uncivilized. America’s much-bandied national youth seems ridiculous amid Appalachia’s uncountable antiquity.

One could continue unpacking Kingfisher’s themes. Cartesian dualism versus the Freudian psyche, perhaps, or the failures of technological triumphalism in the face of Earth’s unimaginable age. Kingfisher plays with these thematic contrasts and reversals like Lego bricks, creating a whole that readers recognize from previous books, but which is entirely her own. Her ability to use common strategies to tell an uncommon story is why I’ve become a Kingfisher fan.

Although this story remains short, it’s the longest yet of Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier novellas, over 170 pages plus back matter. This gives Easton space not only to investigate their themes, but also to confront the monster. But this story also has perhaps the largest company of characters yet, and Kingfisher doesn’t give everyone full development. Easton’s loyal batman Angus, in particular, gradually disappears from the story, which is disappointing.

That said, this story largely maintains the momentum of the previous “Sworn Soldier” novellas. Though I might wish the story was about fifty pages longer, to give every character the space they deserve, that would’ve changed the novella-reading experience. Kingfisher’s distinct voice and nonconformist attitude remain visible and keep the narrative popping. It reads like a slice of popular literature, just seen through a lens like you’ve never read before.

Secrets Buried in the World’s Darkest Corners

T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

A wandering soldier returns to the ancestral hunting lodge deep within the Balkan mountains, finding it fallen into disrepair. Alex Easton, a haunted veteran who sacrificed ancestry, home, and even gender to fight for their country, has lost everything except their name and this house. But with no caretaker keeping the house’s dark spirits at bay, something stirs deep within the walls. A shameful past is now walking abroad.

This second novella in Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” series is definitely a bridge volume. The first novella focused on Easton’s struggle to understand what happened at the Usher estate—if you missed it, Volume One retold Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” This one, which doesn’t appear to be based on existing literature, is more driven by character, and by Easton’s inability to grapple with their wartime past.

The village of Wolf’s Ear, at the base of the mountain which Easton’s lodge bestrides, wants to traffic with Easton or the lodge, but nobody will say why. The superstitious, but largely anonymous, population, resembles the massed villagers in Young Frankenstein, terrified of an ancestral curse they can’t actually describe anymore. Easton struggles for explanations, even as a terrifying woman begins stalking the old soldier’s waking dreams.

Though Kingfisher mentioned Easton’s wartime history in the previous volume, she didn’t much go into it. This time, Easton, our first-person narrator, describes more of their autobiography, which mixes trauma and boredom in equal measure. The war left Easton with persistent nightmares and a lingering paranoia, but Easton’s batman, Angus, repeatedly reminds Easton that it isn’t paranoia if monsters really are chasing you.

Kingfisher also delves more into the history and culture of her fictional nation of Gallacia. She depicts a country which has been slowly, persistently sapped of joy, not only by its ancestral enemies, but by its own loaded history. Easton, with their ungendered name, has chosen a life of sexless gallantry, but found themself sucked into old grudges and ancient wounds. Those old metaphors become literal in the events of this story.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

We witness a marked tonal shift from the first volume. In that book, the monster Easton confronts has physical mass, and can be defeated through strength and intellect. This story leaves the scientific elements in favor of folk horror and the supernatural. Easton, Angus, and their supporting cast have to confront the lingering shadows of a medieval past that their ancestors already killed, but which can never die.

This results in a looser, more introspective story than the previous one. Where Easton found themself carried along by Poe’s plot before, this time, Easton must dig into their own trauma and their people’s collective guilt. This means much longer passages of autobiographical rumination than before, passages that feel slow early on because they’re setting readers up for a more substantive reveal later on.

Perhaps most notably, this second volume isn’t freestanding. In contemporary genre fiction, many authors use one of two patterns in series fiction. Either the story is actually a single narrative broken into separate volumes, or each story is independent and individually articulated, letting readers jump into the story already in progress. Kingfisher doesn’t do that. Instead, this is a separate story, but relies upon exposition she provided in the previous volume.

Readers might notice that I’ve said little about the story’s plot, or the monster Easton confronts. Indeed, Kingfisher herself withholds the monster fairly late too (comparatively speaking: the story runs under 150 loosely-spaced pages). In essence, this isn’t a story about a definable monster, like the previous volume was; it’s about Easton’s inability to confront their own demons, and those of their country, until forced into a corner.

Maybe this sounds like damning with feint praise. I’ll acknowledge, readers shouldn’t dive into this one cold; Easton’s introspective ruminations will probably feel long, maudlin, and rootless to anyone who didn’t see their previous accomplishments. But for those who have, this novella will provide the backstory and culture that Kingfisher elided in the prior, plot-centric volume. This is a book for readers who enjoyed Volume One, not intended for newcomers.

Again, this is clearly a bridge narrative, building into another story—Volume Three dropped while I was reading this one. Kingfisher presumably intends to establish Easton’s character for another, perhaps more substantial, confrontation in a pending story. Because I read and enjoyed Volume One, I also found plenty to love here, but only because I’m already invested in Kingfisher’s character and setting. This is a book for fans, not beginners.

A Child’s-Eye View of the End of the World

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 55
Guillermo Del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone

Carlos, newly orphaned and unprepared for violence, is dropped off at an orphanage in the last year of the Spanish Civil War. There he encounters one of the least subtle symbols in cinematic history: an unexploded Nationalist bomb in the front courtyard. Inside, he finds the boys playing out the events of the war outside, without really understanding their roles. He also encounters the ghost of another boy who died under murky circumstances.

This, Guillermo Del Toro’s first feature film, captures several themes which recur throughout his body of work. A society caught in rapid change, and people unprepared for the consequences of that change. A world where life and afterlife are separated by mere moments. The tedium of life, punctuated by flashes of sudden violence.

Carlos struggles to acclimate himself to the orphanage’s internal politics. The concept of “politics” turns unusually literal here: administrators Casares and Carmen support the Loyalist cause, with its rhetoric of democracy and freedom. But that rhetoric sounds hollow when Jaime, the school bully, rules the residents with an iron fist. As often happens with children, the bully appears dominant and charismatic; but like Franco’s Nationalists, he rules erratically and inconsistently.

Looming over the orphanage is the story of Santi, a child who vanished the day the unexploded bomb fell. The timing is suspicious, but nobody ever found Santi’s body. Sneaking around after curfew, Carlos encounters a spectral boy with an open head wound, but the apparition won’t communicate. Instead, it wordlessly indicates something untoward is happening with Jacinto, the orphanage janitor, whose loyalties are strictly to himself.

Del Toro’s storytelling is slow, cerebral, and moody. Despite the wartime setting, his characters spend the most time simply waiting. Jaime and Jacinto, the child and adult bullies respectively, occasionally try to make events happen, to offset their existential boredom; but when their forced actions don’t go according to plan, they feign gape-jawed surprise. Bad people claim to be helpless when bad acts produce bad consequences.

Most importantly, though, Del Toro doesn’t tiptoe around the supernatural themes. Ghost story filmmakers often attempt to skirt their ghosts’ reality, keeping their gossamer spirits in the corner of the shot, where characters can explain them away. Not here. As in other Del Toro movies, the ghost here is real, solid, and centrally framed. When Carlos runs from the ghost, he isn’t fleeing a shimmery haint; Santi’s ghost is palpable, and his blood is still hot.

Carlos confronts the ghost of Santi in The Devil’s Backbone

Jacinto believes the administrators are hiding a treasure that he could steal, in order to ingratiate himself with the Nationalists. Like the ghost, Casares and Carmen’s treasure is real, but nevertheless immaterial. The treasure matters less than the way the treasure makes people act. Greed makes Jacinto reckless, which makes Casares defensive. Eventually the administrators chase Jacinto, the Nationalist bully, out of the building. But that only makes him more aggressive.

The children’s loyalty unfortunately fluctuates. With Casares seemingly ascendant, Jaime declares his support for Casares and the Loyalists. But that reveals to Carlos how cowardly and inconsistent the bully actually is. He takes it on himself to investigate the building, and its resident ghost, willing to shoulder the cost. But when Jacinto returns, now backed with Nationalist support and the ability to actually hurt the children, Carlos realizes he’s now completely alone.

Well, alone except for the ghost.

That brings up one remaining recurrent theme in Del Toro’s work. Yes, in his world, ghosts are real, not something the living can rationally explain away. But they aren’t monsters. Del Toro’s ghosts linger because they need something: an unfinished task, undelivered message, or unresolved injustice. We, the living, can absolve the dead and set their spirits free, but only by paying attention, only by listening without words. For ghosts, this world is purgatory, and the living hold the key.

World events like the Spanish Civil War attract Del Toro, not because they're violent, but because they test human loyalties. (Del Toro would return to the Spanish Civil War for Pan’s Labyrinth.) People have to choose sides in wartime; those who claim neutrality get clobbered by those who care enough to fight. Carlos cares deeply, but without ideological commitment, so he initially gets swayed by superficial charm. He learns, however, to take sides for solid, palpable reasons.

Like with most of Del Toro’s ghost stories, the message here is far from spectral. Ghosts linger because the past isn't really the past, and the living bear a responsibility to those who can no longer speak for themselves.

History, Horror Movies, and Literary Critique

Michael B. Jordan (center) and ensemble prepare to face the monsters, in Sinners

In late spring 2025, two movies dropped close enough together to be essentially simultaneous, and therefore comparable. Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), hit cinemas on April 18^th and became an immediate success. The fourth Fear Street movie, Prom Queen, shipped on Netflix on May 23^rd, and landed with a thud. These movies share significant overlap, so why did one succeed, and the other splat?

Both movies are historical reconstructions. Sinners recreates a pre-Hays Code gangster film, but with a primarily Black cast, adding the burdens of Jim Crow onto Prohibition-era themes. Around the halfway mark, it shifts from a musical gangster drama into a horror film, painted in shades of Quentin Tarantino. But throughout, it retains its core of Black Americans struggling to assert their identity in an era of overt, legalized bigotry.

Prom Queen, set in 1988, attempts to capture the experience of a 1980s “dead teenager” slasher flick. That’s all it does. Unlike Sinners, which unpacks multiple layers of Black experience and the economic dislocation of the post-WWI world, Prom Queen tries to return viewers to the era when audiences got giddy, giggly, and possibly horny while watching masked evildoers hack their way through hordes of pretty, sexually precocious youth.

Both movies are freestanding. Though Prom Queen joins an existing franchise, viewers needn’t watch prior Fear Street movies to understand most of this one. I had definite quibbles with the original trilogy, but overall liked it. But without the connection to the existing movies, this one feels adrift. The original trilogy existed in conversation with prior generations of horror film canon; without that, this one appears merely lurid.

Sinners shows two Black men who share one goal: to build a distinctly Black space in segregated Mississippi. Their Club Juke aspirations, where Black musicians sing Black songs to Black audiences, bespeak a desire to simply exist, without the need to propitiate White gatekeepers. But a trio of local Whites demands entry anyway. Yes, the trio are supernatural monsters, but that’s ancillary. At root, Whiteness defines them, and their demands.

White Americans have a history of expecting admittance to Black spaces: blues clubs, Juneteenth parades, the entire disco subculture. But when White people arrive, they begin making exorbitant demands, expecting the existing Black infrastructure to assuage their White fears. I say this as a White man who frequently attends Black church; I know Whiteness makes aggressive, high-handed demands on Black identity. We eventually drive Black people from their own spaces.

Set aside everything else that happens in Sinners. Pause the time-shifting griot magic on the dance floor, the Smokestack Twins’ need for cash in a cash-strapped community, or the bloodthirsty monsters that eventually besiege the club. Those are trappings, but the movie is really about Black people building Black spaces, and White people demanding admittance. Viewers needn’t ruminate upon these themes, but these themes drive the movie.

The killer prepares to dispatch another interchangeable teenager in Fear Street: Prom Queen

Similarly, the original Fear Street trilogy uses the trappings of past cinema: 1990s horror comedies, 1970s slasher flicks, and 2010s psychological horrors. But again, these are set dressing. The movies are about inherited guilt and the degrees to which the living bear responsibility for their ancestors’ sins. The movies don’t foreground those themes or demand answers from the audience, but they exist behind the garish surfaces.

The best horror narratives have a definable spine that says something about us, the audience. The Call of Cthulhu asks what might happen if God were ultimately hostile to human needs. Cujo depicts a mother reduced to helplessness and the inability to keep her children safe. Night of the Living Dead, made during the Cold War, asks what happens when buried secrets rise up and demand admission.

Again, audiences don’t need to spend time mulling over these themes. But we also need them there, to give their narratives meaning. Jason Voorhiees and Fredde Kruger say something about class divisions and suburban anomie, and when studios remove these themes from sequels to focus on gross-outs and bloodbaths, the resulting movies just don’t work. Horror succeeds or fails based on what it says, or doesn’t say, about us.

By contrast, Prom Queen uses the original trilogy’s trappings, but forgets the driving themes. Like countless Freddy sequels, it dresses up pretty, and spills copious blood, but it doesn’t feel larger than that. Some themes exist, but only laterally, and without connection to the original trilogy’s message. Like too many sequels, it’s all style, no substance. But without substance, it’s easy to forget, and audiences probably will.

Man You Should’ve Seen Them Kicking Edgar Allan Poe

T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

Lieutenant Alex Easton (ret.) has come to call upon a fellow veteran, Roderick Usher, and his ailing sister, Madeline. No, seriously. Easton finds a rural manor house plagued with decay and verging on collapse, and a childhood friend reduced to a wisp straddling death’s door. Far worse, though, is what Easton discovers when he finds Madeline sleepwalking the labyrinthine halls: another voice speaks a malign message from Madeline’s lips.

T. Kingfisher is somewhat circumscribed by her source material, a retelling of one of Poe’s most famous stories. Either Kingfisher’s story plays to an inevitable end, or it abandons its source material, a perilous dilemma. And unfortunately, Christina Mrozik’s cover art spoils the climactic reveal. Rather than the resolution, we read Kingfisher’s novella for the suspense and exposition along the way, which Kingfisher has in abundance.

Besides Roderick and Madeline Usher, the named characters of Poe’s original short story, and Easton, Poe’s originally nameless narrator, we have two other characters: James Denton and Eugenia Potter. (All characters, except the Ushers, go by surnames, as befits the 19^th-Century setting.) In Poe’s original, the Usher siblings represent proto-Jungian archetypes of a fractured soul. In Kingfisher’s telling, characters become representatives of post-Napoleonic malaise.

First, Easton. A veteran of an army with an excessive range of pronouns, Easton’s androgynous name matters: one’s only gender is “sworn soldier.” Placed against the intensely gendered Usher siblings, Easton remains neither fish nor fowl, a permanent outsider cursed to watch humanity’s struggles without benefiting. Gender, and its attendant social baggage, looms large herein, driving people together but preventing characters from ever truly understanding one another.

Potter is a scholar and scientist, denied credentials in her native England because of her sex. Denton, a combat surgeon, survived the American Civil War, but suffers combat trauma, which in that time is regarded as emasculating cowardice. Both characters have conventional binary gender, but in their own ways defy mandatory gender expectations. When the crisis comes, however, their nonconformity defines their heroic qualities in the story.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve identified themes here, but Kingfisher doesn’t simply propound a message. Rather, these characters’ unique manifestations empower them to fight a threat growing beneath the unspoken tensions of the Long Nineteenth Century. What appears to be decay permeating the Ushers’ manor house, is actually a symbiotic growth that threatens the tenuous social structure of the Belle Epoque and the last days of aristocracy.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Poe is one among several writers whose stories expanded the realm of possibility in American literature. But, like Lovecraft, Poe’s writing reflects his time, and its prejudices. In recent years, authors like Victor LaValle and Kij Johnson have updated Lovecraft, rewriting his stories without the limiting biases. Though I know other authors have done likewise with Poe, I haven’t seen them the same way; Kingfisher closes that gap.

(Yes, Mike Flanagan released a House of Usher adaptation almost simultaneously with this novella. But I’m old-fashioned enough to distinguish between literature and streaming TV.)

Kingfisher’s story runs short—under 160 pages plus back matter—but never feels rushed. She nurtures the kind of character development and interpersonal relationships that Poe largely skimmed. Poe’s original, published in 1839, was groundbreaking, but its terse style feels underwritten by contemporary standards. Kingfisher injects the kind of depth and development that cause contemporary readers to feel suspense, and to care about the outcomes.

I especially respect that Kingfisher avoids that tedious contrivance of contemporary horror, the twist ending. For a quarter century, writers and filmmakers have insisted on finishing with a melodramatic rug-pull which undermines everything we thought we knew. This was fun for a while. But nobody’s likely to create a better twist than Catriona Ward, at least anytime soon. Kingfisher builds suspense on character and action, not by stacking the deck.

Rather than abrupt reversals, Kingfisher drives her story with questions that the characters must answer. Where, she asks, do monsters come from in an era which no longer believes in the supernatural? How can we fight monsters when they go beyond the limits of science and natural philosophy? And what does it mean to defeat an evil being that can get up and walk after you’ve already killed it?

Admittedly, Kingfisher is circumscribed because we know where her story is headed. We remember 11^th-grade AmLit. But she beats this limitation by interspersing a range of character development that would’ve frightened Edgar Allan Poe. Classic literature never just reflects itself, it asks important questions about us, the readers, and Kingfisher definitely achieves that goal.

The Shadows and Glaciers of Northern Norway

C.J. Cooke, The Nesting: a Novel

Sophie Hallerton has just secured a coveted job nannying for an esteemed British widower raising his children in Norway’s remote northern forest. One problem: she isn’t Sophie Hallerton. She’s Lexi Ellis, a chronic screw-up who stole Sophie Hallerton’s credentials to escape looming homelessness, or worse. When Lexi arrives in Norway, though, she finds that Tom Faraday’s house conceals secrets that make her lies seem small.

I really liked C.J. Cooke’s most recent novel, The Book of Witching, which combined family drama, mystery, and historical saga with a distinct voice. So I grabbed Cooke’s 2020 book expecting something similar. Indeed, she mixes liberally again from multiple genres with broad audience appeal. Somehow, though, the ingredients come together without much urgency, and I’m left feeling disappointed as I close the final cover.

Architect Tom Faraday needs a nanny to nurture and homeschool his daughters, because their mother committed suicide in a Norwegian fjord. Anyway, everyone believes Aurelia committed suicide. We dedicated readers know that, the more confidently the characters believe something in Act One, the more certainly they’ll see their beliefs shattered by Act Three. This is just one place where Cooke invites readers to see themselves as in on the joke.

Lexi secures the nanny position with her filched credentials and some improv skills, only to discover she’s pretty effective. But once ensconced in Tom’s rural compound, she finds the entire family up to their eyeballs in deceit and secrets. Tom’s build, in honor of his late wife’s earth-friendly principles, is badly overdrawn and short-handed. The housekeeper hovers like Frau Blucher. And Tom’s married business partners are fairly shady, too.

Supernatural elements intrude on Lexi’s rural life. Animal tracks appear inside the house, then vanish without leading anywhere. Tom’s older daughter, just six, draws pictures of the Sad Lady, a half-human spectre that lingers over her memories of Aurelia. The Sad Lady maybe escaped from Aurelia’s hand-translated compendium of Norwegian folklore. A mysterious diary appears in Lexi’s locked bedroom, chock-a-block with implications that Tom might’ve killed his wife.

C.J. Cooke

If this sounds familiar, you aren’t wrong. Cooke introduces her stylistic borrowings in an unusually forthright manner. Lexi reads “Nordic Noir” novels in her spare time, signposting the sepulchral midwinter setting, and Lexi describes her ward’s artwork as “Gothic,” the correct term for this novel’s many locked-room puzzles. This boldly announces Cooke’s two most prominent influences, Henning Mankell and Henry James, whose influence lingers throughout the story.

Unfortunately for contemporary English-language readers, Cooke also writes with those authors’ somber pace. Her story introduces even more narrative threads than I’ve mentioned, and more than the characters themselves know, because her shifting viewpoint means we have information the characters lack. We know how intricate their scaffold of lies has become, and sadly, we know that if that scaffold collapsed, most characters would be more relieved than traumatized.

Cooke unrolls her threads slowly and deliberatively. The narration sometimes includes time jumps of weeks, even months. Probably even longer, because Tom’s ambitious experimental earth-house would take considerably longer to build than something conventional and timber-framed; one suspects Cooke doesn’t realize the logistics that go into construction. Characters have mind-shattering revelations about each other, sometimes false, then sit on them for months.

Indeed, despite the unarguable presence of a carnivorous Norwegian monster inside the house, it’s possible to forget, because it disappears for weeks. Cooke’s real interest, and the novel’s real motivation when it has one, is the human drama. We watch the tensions and duplicity inside the Faraday house amplify, a tendency increased by geographic isolation. Indeed, we see every lie the character tell, except one: what really happened to Aurelia.

This novel would’ve arguably been improved by removing the folk horror subplot, focusing on the human characters. But that would require restructuring the storytelling. The characters linger at a low simmer for chapter after chapter, then someone does something to change the tenor, and for a moment, we reach a boil. Cook’s Nordic atmospherics, and glacial pace, put the best moments—and there are several good moments—too far apart.

Then, paradoxically, the denouement happens too quickly. After 300 pages of slow, ambient exposition, Cooke abruptly ends the narrative in a manner that leaves many threads unresolved. Despite Cooke’s pacing errors, I found myself invested in Lexi’s journey of discovery, only to find it ends hastily, in a manner scarcely prompted by prior events. Cooke’s narrative doesn’t conclude, it just ends.

I’ll probably read Cooke again. But after this one, I’ll approach her with more caution.

One Dark Night in an African Dreamland

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories

A recently deceased wife must choose whether to move onto the next life, or become an ancestral avenging spirit in this life. A civil engineer tasked with building a dam must first defeat the carnivorous spirits controlling the river. When houses begin vanishing from an impoverished slum, one gifted girl discovers the disappearances follow a logarithmic pattern. Refugees seeking asylum discover the immigration people aren’t bureaucrats, they’re a priesthood.

Zimbabwean author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu writes from a hybrid perspective: one foot in her homeland, one in the West. Ndlovu herself studied at Cornell and Amherst, and many of her mostly female protagonists are graduates of American (or Americanized) universities. Yet Zimbzbwe’s history, both its ancient past and its recent struggles for independence, remain near the surface. For Ndlovu, Western modernism is usually a thin and transparent veneer.

Many of Ndlovu’s stories fall broadly into the categories of “fantasy” or “horror,” but that’s a marketing contrivance. Though many of her stories involve a monster—a primordial horror dwelling under conflict diamond fields, for instance, or carnivorous ants raised to make boner pills—almost never does the monster drive the story. Usually, Ndlovu’s monsters point her protagonists toward a deeper, more disquieting truth underneath the protagonists’ lives.

Instead of outright horror, these stories mostly turn on the friction between expectation and experience. Our protagonists usually start the story believing something rational, or expecting something reasonable. Recurrent themes include meaningful work and graduating from high school, two of the most common aspirations. But life in post-colonial Zimbabwe, with ancient traditions, modern tools of repression, and widespread poverty, always intrudes on those hopes.

In one story, a Zimbabwean student receives a fluke gift from the ancestral gods: she keeps stumbling accidentally into money. But the more money she fumbles into, the more her family expects from her. Soon the escape she sought becomes the burden she resents—until the gods demand an eternal choice.

When a student suffers blackouts, Western medicine cannot help. She consults an oracle, who finds the cure hidden in the past. To escape her condition, the student must time-travel to early colonialism and recover a military queen whom the British historians erased from living memory.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Ndlovu structures some stories more like fables than Western fiction: an island king discovers immortality, but slowly stops being human. A healer erases the burdens of grief, but secretly serves a master whom her patients never see. A handful of newspaper clippings hide the secret pattern governing city women’s lives.

Not every story is “horror” or “fantasy.” In one story, an American college student discovers a common tool of Zimbabwean folk practice, and finds a way to monetize it, at the people’s expense. In another, poverty forces a talented student to leave school and find work; she pays her bills, but watches opportunities flit past.

Concerns of faith and religion recur. Though many of Ndlovu’s characters are Christian, and quote the Bible generously, they do so in a nation where ancient gods might occupy neighborhood houses. She reads the rituals and habits of government as religious rites, which isn’t a stretch. Issues of daily life contain spiritual depth in a nation where nature, death, and hunger always linger on modern life’s margins.

Ndlovu’s stories range from three to sixteen pages. This means they all make for complete reading in one session, with time left over to contemplate her themes. And those themes do require some deeper thought, because she asks important questions about what it means to be modern in traditional communities, or to be poor in a world with more than enough money. She doesn’t let readers off easily.

Perhaps I can give Ndlovu no greater praise than saying her short stories are genuinely short. Too many short story writers today apparently had an idea for a novel, jotted some notes, and thought they had a story. Not so here. Out of fourteen stories, one feels truncated; the other thirteen read as self-contained and thematically complete. That isn’t feint praise, either. I appreciate that Ndlovu crafts fully realized experiences we can savvy in one sitting.

The title story, which is also the last, asks us whether it’s always bad to go unnoticed. The question comes with piercing directness. Characters find themselves disappearing from a society that doesn’t want to see them. But maybe, for those taken away, it’s a Biblical experience. We can’t know, Ndlovu tells us in the rousing final sentences, but maybe that uncertainty is what makes her characters’ lives worth living.

Horror, Romance, and the Wrong Kind of Love

H.D. Carlton, Haunting Adeline: Cat & Mouse Duet, Book 1

Adeline Reilly has just inherited her grandmother's old house, a Victorian-style manor knockoff overlooking the Washington coast. The house might be cursed; Addie certainly thinks it resembles a horror movie set, but that doesn’t discourage her from moving in and updating the interior. But somebody else has noticed Addie’s arrival. A nameless hacker, vigilante, and apparent superhuman begins stalking her, entering her house silently and with apparent impunity.

I became interested in this novel because author H.D. Carlton became a runaway bestseller without backing from a Big-Five publisher. Maybe, I thought, she tapped some unrecognized reservoir of readership the algorithm-driven mainstreamers ignored. Having read this one, I suspect that her magic must be her willingness to air Freudian linen, because I don’t recall a more bog-standard psychological tapestry recently outside an undergraduate psych textbook.

Like Carlton, Addie is an independent novelist, and therefore has remarkable time liberty. She apparently has freedom to supervise the professional restoration of Parsons Manor, while also having lunch dates with her best friend, and live author appearances. Despite her freedom, though, she has no ability to supervise her house, so her stalker has an unimpeded ability to enter, leave flowers and letters, raid her liquor cabinet, and escape unseen.

And what a stalker. He has time enough to haunt Addie’s romantic life, including torturing and humiliating her dates. But he moonlights as a vigilante, hunting a national human trafficking network. This secondary plot is tonally inconsistent with the Gothic main plot, resembling an unsold Hollywood treatment. He’s also able to follow Addie from the city to her isolated country house, commit crimes, and destroy the evidence, remaining constantly invisible.

Adeline’s support network apparently consists of two people: her mother and her best friend. Daya, her best friend, has one role: try to get Addie laid. That’s her response to everything. Excessively ambitious house restoration project? Let’s get drunk and laid. Stalker somehow entering Addie’s locked house and leaving tokens? Let’s get drunk and laid. Describing Daya as Adeline’s Freudian id is, frankly, generous.

Her mother, therefore, is her Freudian superego. She exists to warn Addie against anything risky, chaotic, or fun. She appears when necessary to provide dire, sepulchral exposition, and to urge Addie to assume more socially acceptable adult responsibilities. At one key juncture, she drives an hour to give Addie a warning she could’ve conveyed in a text message, because fundamentally, she isn’t a rounded person, she’s a narrative device.

H.D. Carlton

If we understand Addie’s supporting cast in Freudian terms, then her nameless stalker represents both Eros and Thanos. He selects Addie entirely because she’s beautiful, which he expounds in lush detail. But, without speaking to her (or reading her prose) he declares himself “addicted” to her. Then he proclaims: “All I want is to break her. Shatter her into pieces. And then arrange those pieces to fit against my own.”

Yikes.

Carlton manipulates the story to ensure that Addie’s stalker remains, for narrative purposes, blameless. Sure, he’s a violent torturer, but it’s okay, because the people he hurts are QAnon-style human traffickers. Sure, he captures and murders any man Addie attempts to hook up with, but it’s okay, because she brings home abusers and criminals who deserve being hurt. Violence winds up being protective, nurturing, even benevolent. Brutality as romantic desire.

Okay, this character is an unrefined fantasy of male domination. Some women find violence the ultimate expression of masculinity; I’m reminded of the women who sent Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, love letters during his decades of incarceration. I can only imagine the women who entertain these fantasies haven’t survived an abusive relationship, because this character isn’t sexy, nor even particularly frightening; he’s just disgusting.

Yet Addie romanticizes him, finding parallels with her great-grandmother’s juicy personal diaries. Like Addie, Genevieve Parsons had an enigmatic admirer who haunted the margins of her forested Gothic gingerbread house. We await how these two stories will converge. But until they do, Addie increasingly sees her violent stalker as a dangerous boyfriend like her great-nana’s dangerous, shadowy love. She sees both as frightening and titillating.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

This glorification of violence, as an expression of love, frightens me. Not in the good frightening way that draws audiences back to horror literature and novels, I understand that. Rather, this novel elevates violence as romantic desire, repeating the myth that, if he loves you, he’ll hurt any rivals and dominate your time. I suppose this might seem erotic and exciting, if you haven’t been through it.

Teenage Torture and Softcore Self-Indulgence

Harleigh Beck, Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: an Erotic Horror Story

It’s been nearly a year since Skyler and Evelyn killed their high school’s star quarterback, Nate, in a totally avoidable hit-and-run accident. They’ve kept their culpability secret for an entire year, despite the rumor-mongering common in small towns. But as the anniversary approaches, Skyler begins seeing Nate everywhere. She fears his spirit hungers for revenge, until he astounds her by showing up, alive and unmarked, in the high school hallway.

To review this novel, I must first acknowledge: I’m not Harleigh Beck’s intended audience. Before page one, Beck dedicates this novel “For all of my erotic horror girlies.” Not women, girlies. Beck has selected a mostly young, primarily female audience, presumably one whose ability to appreciate literature is uncluttered by excessive prior reading. Perhaps that’s why Beck pinches liberally from Tobe Hooper, Ambrose Bierce, Kevin Williamson, and more.

The seemingly resurrected Nate wants revenge on Skyler specifically. And the revenge he wants is specifically sexual in nature. Though Skyler, who narrates most of this novel in first person, repeatedly emphasizes her plainness and lack of desirability, she has constant attention from several boys—a staple of young adult fiction. But while Dustin and Max want to date Skyler, Nate wants to humiliate, degrade, and dominate her.

And Skyler loves it.

Although these characters are high school students, and several important scenes happen inside their school, Skyler and Nate occupy a world substantially devoid of adults, surnames, and other indicators. Only in the epilogue do any adults (besides Skyler’s mostly absent, milquetoast dad) appear, or any characters receive surnames. Group dynamics mimic teen movies from the 1990s and 2000s. Characters, individually or together, are beholden to Hollywood boilerplates.

Only in Nate’s tortures of Skyler do events vary from cinematic standards. By day, Nate finds ways to isolate and gaslight Skyler. By night, he seeks increasingly embarrassing ways to sexually torment her, promising to eventually deflower and assassinate her. His conflation of sex and death would trigger Sigmund Freud’s alarm bells, not only for his dominant power trip, but also the increasing gratification Skyler feels at her forced submission.

Beck divides the novel into two parts. (Three actually, but the third is a brief codicil.) Part One mimics conventional teen horror. Nate tortures Skyler in broad daylight, blackmailing her into complicity by threatening to reveal what happened that fateful night. Nate’s malevolent predations exist amid a context of teenage ennui: high school, where everybody fits pre-written social roles, and Skyler’s home life, where Dad has become a phantom.

Harleigh Beck

Part Two occurs in a single frenetic night. Teenagers gather at an abandoned vacation cabin for a Halloween party, where Nate decides to finally enact his revenge. Somehow, while Nate cleaves a body count, Agatha Christie style, through the amassed teens, nobody pauses the party. The atmosphere of adolescent banality that permeates Part One becomes oppressive in Part Two, as Skyler increasingly realizes why she’s trapped inside with her tormentor.

Previous reviewers have raved about Beck’s “twist ending,” which has become an obligatory component of genre fiction today. This further demonstrates that Beck writes for an audience unclouded by excessive genre familiarity, because without spoilers, she signposts the twist from around page 20. Besides, it’ll take serious gumption to write twists exceeding Catriona Ward, so maybe authors should pause that boilerplate for now.

And the erotic component? Beck highlights that component in her promotional material, and considers herself so transgressive that she requires a full-page trigger warning in the front matter. So does the content stir my loins? No, but I’m not seventeen, like these characters. They seemingly find eros in describing body parts and saying dirty words. They’re clearly finding their sexuality, and as students, reduce the experience to limbs and anatomy.

I find myself neither frightened, nor aroused, nor invested in character development, as characters develop according to their designated Hollywood roles. But again, I’m not Beck’s preferred audience: I’m a middle-aged male who’s watched horror movies for thirty years. Beck writes for a more naive audience unjaded by either sex or death. Perhaps it matters that Skyler repeatedly protests her Laurie Strode-like innocence.

Perhaps Beck would rather write big-ticket film treatments. Perhaps this story might make stirring, acceptably dangerous late-night Netflix viewing. But just reading it, where I set my own pace, I’m too conscious of Beck’s cinematic sources and shopworn cliches. Beck has an earnest, skillful voice and handles English well, so I finished the novel easily. But without either eros or thanos, I close the book and think: “Meh.”

East Coast Jazz-Age Gothic Extravaganza

Riley Sager, The Only One Left: a Novel

The mansion known as Hope’s End has enough terrible stories to make Disney’s Haunted Mansion look sedate and staid. Amid the waning Jazz Era, a shocking triple homicide left an entire family of Back East elite dead and mutilated. Now Lenora Hope, the only survivor, paraplegic and mute, has decided to tell her story. Working through an outdated manual typewriter, she begins unloading on a poor nurse unprepared for everything.

This is Riley Sager’s seventh thriller under this byline, and eleventh overall, in only fourteen years—a veritable assembly line of paperback chills. Working at such a pace, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Sager uses genre stereotypes. Diving into this novel, I quickly recognized allusions, some more overt than others, to Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne du Maurier, and D.H. Lawrence. And that turned out to be just for starters.

In 1983, Kit McDeere knows the Hope’s End murders as merely a lingering urban legend. Pursued by her own demons, Kit accepts a caregiver job for Lenora Hope, mostly because she can’t find anything else. When Lenora proves to be, not a daffy patient just winding down, but a crafty schemer ready to divulge secrets she’s kept hidden since 1929, Kit simply isn’t prepared for the mass of horrors dumped in her lap.

Once lavishly appointed and luxurious, Hope’s End has become a time capsule of Gatsby-era nostalgia. Lenora’s dwindling household staff preserves the house, but also basically keeps her prisoner inside an upper-story suite overlooking the Atlantic. Kit gets drawn into the building’s faded grandeur, but also into Lenora’s story, which she types painstakingly with only her left hand. The secrets, and the decaying house, take on labyrinthine proportions in Kit’s mind.

Sager emphasizes the contradiction between the house’s aspiration, and its condition. It’s beautiful, but also literally falling apart. This proves to be a metaphor for the agreed-upon fictions that keep everyone behaving politely toward one another. The staff’s autocratic matron, Mrs. Baker, works hard to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed since 1929. This illusion becomes harder and harder to maintain.

Everything exists on multiple levels. Just as the house is a metaphor for the gentlemen’s agreements binding polite society together, the dirty secrets Lenora wants to divulge are metaphors for the traumas people need to express, but can’t. Kit reads Lenora’s long-buried secrets and becomes a crusader for justice denied for over fifty years, but that’s a metaphor for the doubts and self-blame she can’t address within herself.

Riley Sager

Within these interlocking symbols, one rule of mass-market fiction is: the more assiduously characters believe something on Page One, the more thoroughly they’ll find their expectations inverted on the closing page. We readers have become accustomed to twist endings and big reveals. Therefore, authors will wedge multiple twists into the narrative, because they know we’re keeping suspect lists and testing them against accumulating evidence.

Yes, Sager does that too. I mentioned three novelists above whose work Sager channels. As the story accelerates, though, it becomes increasingly clear Sager expects his readers to know story boilerplates mostly from Hollywood, and his narrative assumes a three-act structure familiar from Syd Field screenwriting manuals. I started noticing narrative conventions pinched from filmmakers like Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Robert Aldritch.

I don’t say this to disparage Sager’s storytelling… except when I do. In later chapters, Sager’s chapter breaks start occurring on big plot reveals or cliffhangers, sometimes so pointed that readers can practically hear the soundtrack orchestra playing a dramatic flourish. Seasoned readers start observing what film critic Roger Ebert called his Law of Conservation of Characters: every named character serves a purpose, and if we don’t know it, we just don’t know it yet.

Individual readers will decide whether this bothers them. The novel’s filmic qualities give it a galloping pace that keeps readers curious, wanting to have our unresolved questions answered. We find ourselves genuinely caring about these characters, and hurting when they’re disappointed. But as cantilevered revelations start accumulating, they start straining readers’ credulity. We start wondering, sometimes out loud: could they really keep such secrets for fifty-four years?

Probably not.

Readers’ ability to enjoy this novel will match the degree to which they’re able to remind themselves it’s a novel, not reality. If readers can enjoy the allusions to classic Gothic romanticists of yore, and the movies they may still have gathering dust in their VHS collection, they’ll probably lose themselves in Sager’s contrivances. The minute we start asking questions about plausibility, we’ll yank ourselves abruptly out of the book.

Low-Budget Monsters and High-Price Consequences

Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie: a Novel

Thirty years ago, when longshot indie movies became a realistic media presence, four New England kids decided to make a horror film. Decades later, the unfinished movie’s moldering remains have become a viral internet sensation, and the last surviving cast member is involved in helping the production “go Hollywood.” Between the two stories of cinematic hubris, one survivor recounts his tale of deep immersion, and the stains that don’t wash off.

Stoker Award-winning novelist Paul Tremblay’s books are often deemed “postmodern” because they comment on storytelling and the creative process. In this one, the nameless narrator recounts the two productions of his horror movie, entitled Horror Movie. Tremblay divides the novel into three braided strands: “Then,” “Now,” and the screenplay from the unfinished movie. Each, in various ways, criticizes the Hollywood process, while praising the human relationships which make Hollywood possible.

In the “Then” section, set mostly in 1993, a trio of starry-eyed artistes dragoons our narrator into their movie, mostly because a key prop fits his face. The movie, featuring adults playing teenagers in the 1990s style, addresses adolescent themes that seem simultaneously dated, and completely timeless. We know, because the narrator warns us, that this production ends in tragedy; we wait tentatively to discover what happens.

The “Now” section, set in 2023, describes how our narrator collaborates with a major studio to remake the unfinished movie. The original director used the internet to create buzz around a movie nobody saw, and the broken lives left in the movie’s wake, before she died—a death revealed only slowly. Our narrator gives the “E! True Hollywood Story” version, but only through his own, distinctly traumatized viewpoint.

Finally, the screenplay is… well… unfilmable. It represents the grandiosity that infected would-be auteurs after Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater made guerilla filmmaking look easy. Three teenagers turn the pain and ennui of suburban life into tortures they inflict on their anonymous friend, naively yearning to live inside their favorite horror films. They want, but don’t want, to create a monster. The script includes long, discursive passages which voice the screenwriter’s private misery.

Paul Tremblay

The word “metafiction” has been tossed around so heedlessly in recent years, that it’s become a parody of itself. We know the boilerplates: characters leaning on the fourth wall, aware they’re fictional constructs, commenting directly on the art-making process or the relationship with the audience. Sometimes it’s cute. But, like any movement that becomes sufficiently popular, it’s become cheapened by imitators who prefer the trappings to the substance.

Therefore, how readers receive Tremblay’s story will depend on what they bring into the experience. Fans of horror films from the peak slasher era will certainly recognize themselves. Tremblay’s characters, like their movie, and presumably like his intended audience, have been well-off and comfortable for long enough to become numb. His characters want to feel something, anything. However, their bid to create feeling, only spreads misery around.

Our narrator has confabs with Hollywood producers, attends fan conventions, collaborates with the countless hard-working technicians who make movies possible—all without telling us his name. He’s a complete cypher, an anonymous everyman moving through life propelled by others’ demands. Even before the unfinished movie made him legendary, it’s clear the aspiring auteurs cast him because he was someone they could control, and he never completely escapes them.

The overall result is thus less frightening than knowing. Tremblay doesn’t just signpost the looming moments, the tropes where horror cinema spills into its characters’ lives; he actively warns us what’s coming. When something gory finally happens, we already know the broad strokes; we only await Tremblay describing the finer details. Reading, we feel anxiety and anticipation, but never really fear.

This isn’t entirely a criticism. Tremblay presents a literary novel about horror, without necessarily being horror. Throughout the novel, Tremblay brings out themes of characters desperate to feel something, anything. The feelings they achieve, however, prove transitory and meaningless. Even the denouement, where the narrator finally shows some gumption, ends with him admitting: I don’t know what happens next. You, the fans, need to tell me.

Perhaps this reflects Tremblay’s own disappointment. Hollywood optioned his 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, handed it to M. Night Shyamalan, and it did okay without making any waves. One can read this novel as a statement of both disillusionment and powerlessness. It teems with knowing winks to Tremblay’s intended audience, who watch these movies regularly. And it reminds them that, sometimes, it’s okay to feel nothing.

The Island of Faith and Lies

Catriona Ward, Little Eve

On a tiny Scottish island forgotten in the backwash of World War I, a strange prophecy has come to fruition. Five people and a horse lie dead, and a 5000-year-old megalith has fallen over. This was the final act needed to purge the world and bring The Adder into the world, purging corrupt humanity. So what exactly happened here? How did one teenage girl cause so much death and destruction? And where, exactly, is The Adder?

This, Catriona Ward’s second novel, debuted in Britain in 2018, but didn’t receive an American release for years. Only after some of Ward’s latter novels, particularly The Last House on Needless Street, garnered American acclaim did anyone think readers across the pond would appreciate this novel. Having read it, I understand why publishers would’ve assumed a limited Yankee Doodle audience: it’s almost aggressively British. Yet I think that only increases this book’s American appeal.

The laird of Altnaharra, one John Bearings—identified throughout almost exclusively as “Uncle”—believes himself a messiah. He receives visions from his snake, Hercules. He has formed a doomsday redoubt inside his ancestral castle, comprised of two common-law wives and four foundling children. He forces everyone else to live austere vegetarian lives (while he indulges in beef and gravy), and performs periodic tests to determine which of his children will become the harbinger of his snake cult.

If this sounds like a frenetic mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Wicker Man, I won’t disagree. Ward channels a specific kind of apocalyptic fear, not of the world ending, but of unhinged people awaiting that end. The castle teems with caverns, hidden rooms, and labyrinthine hallways, the lifeblood of gothic horror. As in the best gothics, supernatural occurrences have become seemingly common, but we must wonder how supernatural they really are.

Trapped inside the Altnaharra castle, Uncle enforces capricious discipline, while his children adapt themselves to appease his moods. The war-ravaged outside world is too busy to interfere, so Uncle’s religion becomes ingrown, consuming the children. Teenaged Evelyn particularly struggles with Uncle. She wants his approval, and campaigns to be named his successor; but she also can’t help seeing how manifestly corrupt Uncle has become. Her attempts to escape only make her situation worse.

Catriona Ward

Ward starts her narrative at its conclusion, as the rural villagers living in Altnaharra’s shadow discover the bloodbath. What actually happened unfolds only in flashback, as the massacre’s only survivor dribbles out information sparingly. While the villagers seek pat answers and want to close the coroner’s inquest quickly, the few facts we receive only make things muddier. This is only made worse when it becomes clear that Evelyn has buried key facts, and Dinah, the only survivor, is lying.

It probably comes as no surprise to readers of horror literature that, the more thoroughly we believe something on Page One, the more surely we’ll see that belief shattered. Ward’s other novels have shown her ability to cantilever multiple twists. We attempt to predict what surprises Ward will throw our way, because horror literature since the late 1990s has trained us to watch for rug-pulls in Act III. Ward knows this, and her twists are truly surprising to today’s jaded audiences.

What, Ward asks us, makes a family? Uncle chose his two wives and four children because he needs adulation. He maintains their loyalty, not through love and devotion, but through caprice and Crowleyist woo-woo. Uncle’s wives have differing reactions to his ministrations, and their responses reflect traditions of Jungian psychology. But Uncle’s children choose not to escape, even when opportunities arise, because Uncle’s violent whimsy is all they know. They have no survival skills without him.

This novel also uses themes of religion as a shared activity. Uncle leads his apocalyptic cult unilaterally; he alone receives revelations from The Adder, and dispenses justice that might be god-given, or might be arbitrary. Religion holds Uncle’s ramshackle family together, but it also creates divisions, as cult members try to determine who’s blessed or damned. Capital-T Truth comes from Uncle alone, and his motivations are hardly beyond question.

Ward cultivates fear, not through monsters and blood—despite kicking off the story with a crime scene, Ward uses violence so sparingly that, when it does happen, it’s even more shocking—but through misdirection and claustrophobia. Our narrators lie because lying is the only language they know. The outside world of objective truth and information only confuses them. We see the world through their eyes, and what we see is truly terrifying.

The Devil Walks on Rural Roads

Ania Ahlborn, The Devil Crept In: A Novel

Young Stevie Clark has watched enough cop dramas to know a lackluster investigation when he sees one. Police in Deer Valley, Oregon, aren’t taking Jude Brighton’s disappearance seriously. As Jude’s cousin and best friend, Stevie decides to pursue the case himself. Retracing Jude’s steps, he finds a monster lurking on Deer Valley’s periphery. But poor, tongue-tied, neurodivergent Stevie can’t make anyone take his warnings seriously.

This is my second Ania Ahlborn novel, and I wonder whether it’s too early to identify a pattern. Ahlborn takes familiar horror boilerplates, and revisits them from another angle. This time, Ahlborn spotlights a joyless small town, a dysfunctional family, and a community that doesn’t need to bury its secrets, because it hasn’t accepted that it even has any. If this sounds familiar, these are the Lego blocks Stephen King regularly builds with.

Initially, Stevie’s investigation more resembles mystery than horror. Disgusted with Deer Valley’s shrugging, nonchalant investigation, Stevie seeks answers himself. Notwithstanding his sighting a monster, Stevie’s story has more personal drama than out-and-out terror. As we follow Stevie’s parallel investigation, though, we discover facts about his relationship with Jude. The two pre-adolescents seem less friends, more trauma-bond survivors.

Stevie resembles King’s frequent child protagonists: preternaturally bright, but surrounded by authority figures too entrenched to heed his warnings. He’s also, despite his intelligence, an unreliable narrator, plagued with echolalia and visual delusions. That enables Stevie’s abusive stepfather and willfully blinkered mother (two other King standards) to discount Stevie’s warnings, even when the mystery starts penetrating their house and family.

Behind this front-story, another narrative unfolds. Rosie Alexander believes herself unloved and unlovable, especially when she miscarries immediately before her husband’s fatal accident. She retreats inside her rural cottage, just her and the secret she cannot let anyone else discover. Rosie shares her house with a slavering creature of appetite, a carnivorous hungry ghost she cannot kill, because in her twisted way, she loves it.

Deer Valley binds Stevie’s and Rosie’s stories together (though they unfold asynchronously). It’s a melancholy community, a graveyard of hope where nothing happens and everyone is doomed to disappointment, despite apparently being fairly populous and having a picturesque downtown full of people. Nobody in Deer Valley keeps pets, despite the numerous feral cats. Nobody talks about the future, because apparently there isn’t one.

Ania Ahlborn

Years earlier, something happened to Max Larsen, a Deer Valley child who didn’t heed his parents. Max’s story is every parent’s nightmare, but it’s also the phantom adults use to scare children into complacency. Stevie has heard Max’s story, and considering that his mind frequently manifests his fears, he walks a tightrope between giving into Deer Valley’s mindless blandness, and pursuing the truth he knows exists, out there, somewhere.

Ahlborn’s two protagonists, Stevie and Rosie, who never meet, and the sepia-toned community they share, seem almost comforting in their bleakness. Their story seems remarkably familiar. That’s because Ahlborn pinches them wholesale from King’s Castle Rock novels, in theme if not actual words. Both communities teem with people merely going through the motions because they’ve forgotten that anything else exists.

In comparing Ahlborn to King, I don’t mean this disparagingly. Ahlborn writes an homage to King’s style and themes, but places her spin on them. King’s child protagonists, like Danny Torrance or the Losers’ Club, regularly struggle with surrounding adults, yet we know, with the clear-eyed conviction of youth, that they’re telling the truth. With Stevie, whose senses regularly deceive him, we have no such assurance.

Stephen King is, essentially, the Beatles of mass-market horror: a commercial force so monolithic, other artists only achieve success by passing through him. But he’s also an industrial product. As I’ve written recently, King’s oeuvre is consistent enough that other writers can effectively create new Stephen King material without his actual involvement. Like the Beatles, other artists could mimic King and sign their paychecks.

By contrast, Ahlborn both embraces and resists this propensity. By writing her own Stephen King novel, revisited from her unique viewpoint, Ahlborn demonstrates that King’s technique is still artistry, provided authors have their own voice. There’s nothing wrong with giving audiences what they want; bakers make the bread people will eat, not what expresses their inner turmoil. But every baker perfects a technique totally their own.

Ultimately, Ahlborn squeezes terror from a subject readers will find excruciatingly familiar: a large soul in a small, constricting world. Stevie can’t accept Deer Valley’s pervasive lies, so Deer Valley must make him fit. We only wonder what tortures Deer Valley will inflict to preserve its myths of comforting blandness.