Tag: darcy coates

April reads

Apparently April is the month where I catch up on horror. It’s such a weird genre for me. I am fascinated by horror but also easily annoyed by it. I dislike people being cruel to each other for no reason. I dislike people suffering for no reason. And I really dislike nihilistic downer endings. It’s one of the things that turned me off of Supernatural—Sam and Dean had made everywhere hostile to them, so much so that even death wouldn’t be a rest (Yes, I know the series resolved well. I just gave up for a long time around season 10.)

But I also love people struggling against forces that they don’t understand. I love people trying to survive long odds—not undamaged, but coming out alive. I love man vs. monsters. I also really love the style. A lot of horror writing is extremely visceral (no pun intended) and powerful. It’s a genre of senses. The creeping cold around your ankles, that scratching of claws against your window, the scent of something subtly wrong, and on and on and on. Love that. It’s probably the most sense-driven genre.

So this month I read:

What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher

In this novella, a soldier decides to take a sojourn at their cabin in the woods, mostly to facilitate their batman’s affair with a mycologist. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Easton arrives to find the caretaker dead and something lurking in the woods. I really adored What Moves the Dead, the first novella in this (hopefully long-running) Sworn Soldier series. I adored it, even though it used the Fall of the House of Usher as its springboard. I have contradictory opinions about books based on other fiction—suffice it to say that I approach all books of that ilk with suspicion.

What Feasts at Night was not quite as good as the first novella but was still an excellent read and a keeper. Kingfisher is really wonderful with setting and characterization. I always feel like I am immersed in her world, and I would love to hang out with her characters. I’m adding this series to my shelf with Sarah Monette’s Grave Key.

What Grows in the Dark – Jaq Evans

This is a tricky book. It has a heroine who is not particularly likeable, being repressed, and a con artist of sorts. She claims to be a psychic so that she and Ian, a college friend (who doesn’t really know her that well) can travel around making a little bit of money making youtube videos. She gets called back to her small town by her dead sister’s girlfriend who says something is taking other kids. The way it took her sister. Usually, I dislike characters who aren’t forthcoming with their friends and allow situations to go from bad to worse, but here, it works. This book never really gets terrifying, but it is definitely slow burn creepy.

A Cosmology of Monsters – Shaun Hamill

Strange, strange book. I loved it. It’s a literary sort of horror, about a family over decades, primarily the youngest son. And of course, it’s about the monsters that are haunting them. I really liked the monsters and their relationship to humans.

Where He Can’t Find You – Darcy Coates

A YA horror novel.

This one might be my favorite read of the month, not just of the horror books I read. I adored this book from page 1 to the end. It’s got a fairly standard premise: there’s a killer in a small town, and if you’re not careful, it’ll get you! But what really made this stand out is that everyone knows what’s up from page 1. The Stitcher is the town bogeyman; the teens think they know who he is, and the police agree, but! There’s no evidence. There’s none of that slow “we must convince people we’re right!” They start off believing two things at once: that the creepy man who smiles is the Stitcher, and that the Stitcher’s kills come on a crest of inexplicable events—technology failing, animals being born deformed, etc. I’m not a huge Darcy Coates fan; her books are hit or miss for me, but this one is a definite hit.

The Grip of It – Jac Jemc

This piece is as hard to follow in some ways as a fever dream, and that’s really what this book is like. Nightmarish. But you’re in it, and you’re accepting it, and then you wake up. The premise is a straight-forward as these stories go: a married couple with some problems buy a haunted house. Things get worse. This is definitely a book where the style is what sells it. If you want your hauntings wrapped up with a bow, though, this is not the book for you.

I also watched The Dead Boy Detectives, which I mostly liked.

All of these books were good reads.

The Haunting of Ashburn House

I just finished Darcy Coates’ The Haunting of Ashburn House and I have thoughts. This is the first book of hers that I have actually read. I have sampled several and each time sort of said, eh, not for me. I am picky.

This one sounded up my alley–sudden inheritance at a perfect time, deep, dark family secrets–and the protagonist Adrienne is sympathetic. I expected to love this book like crazy. In the end, though, not so much.

I loved so many elements here: her great-aunt Edith’s creepy messages to herself carved into the walls, the tables, even her bedframe. I loved that the locals were actually kind! Coates didn’t go for the easy “isolate the heroine by making everyone dislike or distrust her”. I think that worked really well, because it makes the horror feel more powerful if there are allies and they can’t actually help. Coates did a good job of explaining away the usual accoutrements of modern life: no car for Addy, no cell phone–she’s too broke to own them. And not just the usual novel-excuse broke: actual broke. $3.47 in her bank account and a $20 bill in her purse. She’s homeless except for Ashburn House.

My absolute favorite element kicked in early when as twilight descends, the entire forest around her house (because of course Ashburn House is isolated in a forest) goes eerily silent. What’s worse than a forest falling silent all around you? When it erupts with terror–all the wild animals shrieking, her house cat Wolfgang shrieking, her own panic rising. I loved it.

I think this wonderful element, which plays out over three nights, is actually the strongest, most creepy, aspect, and that’s why I didn’t love the rest. Sounds contradictory, but all this amazing terror and the natural world shrieking in panic and outrage, and then…. everything that comes after is just less for me. Oh, it’s an evil ghost/zombie thing. I’ve seen you before.

And once the evil revenant makes the scene, matters narrow down from this enormous world-shaking event to the usual story line of “will the heroine survive?”. At that point, all the carved words that Addy has been ignoring start to feel like an exercise in is this heroine too stupid to live?

A carved message in the kitchen table that says IS IT FRIDAY LIGHT THE CANDLE is understandably ignored when the ominous factor is some unseeable force in the woods. It’s a lot less so when there is an actual evil intruder trying to get inside. Have some common sense, Addy! But no.

There are a couple of issues that really sort of splatted the ending for me. First, that the haunting starts to get more scattershot. The forest erupting in panic is wonderful. The revenant is… horror movie creepy. But then we start getting bleeding paintings and ghosts in the mirrors and it all just sort of becomes horror movie 101. I kept sort of mentally comparing Coates to Kingfisher. I find T. Kingfisher’s horror novels more effective because she really keeps her focus on a specific horror and the way it affects her heroine/the world. There are no distractions from the main thrust of the horror.

The second issue that weakens the ending for me is that Addy–just after the climactic moment–finds the letter her great-aunt left her explaining every single thing in detail. The fact that she didn’t find the letter until late in the game makes sense, but it was just too much explaining all at once: history of the family, the revenant’s identity, the source of its powers, its weaknesses, and so forth. It’s like an entire short story of its own and I really would have loved to see more of it slipped in throughout the book. Coates has Addy research the house and her family, but hit nothing but dead ends. She survives through sheer grit and dumb luck.

So, while I enjoyed reading it; my interest started out stronger than it ended. I turned the pages more eagerly in the beginning than at the climax. Would I read another of her books? Yes. I have my eye on From Below.