Tag: horror

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.

Recent Reads

Around this time of year, I start looking for spooky reads. This is always a little weird for me, because I’m both fascinated by horror novels and easily put off by them. Plus they sit outside my usual ranking system, because for me, a book has to be re-readable to get a four star or above–and I rarely want to reread horror novels. I’m just happy to survive them. So their ratings tend to be one of three. DNF–not for me! 3 stars–a good read that I will never revisit. Or the rare 5 stars, where I will never reread it myself, but I will tell everyone I know who likes horror that they have to read this book.

But I keep trying, even as I DNF the majority of them. I have such a narrow range of “horror that I enjoy” instead of “horror that annoys me” or “horror that horrifies me”. For the long weekend, I dove into two and they were both successes.

Malice House by Megan Shepherd has the kind of premise I just love. A character inheriting an isolated artist’s estate–along with its Terrible Secrets (TM). This book upped the ante by involving monsters. Plus it brought in the always evocative idea of art (writing or illustration) birthing its own reality. That said, this was a reasonably pleasant read, but not much more. There was a sudden jump to “The Marburys are cursed!” that sort of came out of nowhere for me. The ending was very full of all the monsters, when the rest of the book was only sort of looking at them sidelong. Plus Haven Marbury, the heroine, takes a midpoint action that feels also out of the blue. Overall, I liked the book, but it felt like Shepherd was putting in as many elements as she could to make sure her book felt distinct from others, and it just ended up a little rushed and muddled. The core tension between Haven Marbury and the local “Ink Drinkers” book club was wonderful, and went to great, creepy places. I also really loved Haven and Kylie’s friendship. An enjoyable read. It is apparently book one in a series, and I’ll probably read the next.

Burn the Negative by Josh Winning. Another familiar sort of premise that always attracts me: A cursed film, a child actor who’s made a new life for herself yet gets dragged back to the traumatic events of her past when the cursed film gets a remake. I liked this one a lot. It’s also sort of familiar, but it also has an interesting take on the “final girl”. A few twists that hold up well with the characterization and the information that has come before–which is not always the case! This one I recommend.

I’ll take suggestions for other horror reads. I like horror-adventure really. I don’t like horror where absolutely everyone dies miserably. I don’t like weirdly contrived stories. I like ghost stories. I love mad science. I love discovery stories. In movie terms, I like Crimson Peak, The Others, or The Relic. I don’t like Saw, Human Centipede, Hostel, or Seven.

Horror novels that have really worked for me? Gemma Files’ Experimental Film. Robert Jackson Bennett’s America Elsewhere. Kate Alice Marshall’s Rules for Vanishing. Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw. T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall.