LITTLE EVE, US edition of the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award-winner for Best Novel & BLOOD MOON PROPHECY, debut YA fantasy

LITTLE EVE
CATRIONA WARD
Tor Nightfire
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street, comes the Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel Little Eve, a heart-pounding tale of faith and family, with a devastating twist

STARRED reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist! A LibraryReads Hall of Fame Pick! Winner of the (2018) Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel!

“A great day is upon us. He is coming. The world will be washed away.”

On the wind-battered isle of Altnaharra, off the wildest coast of Scotland, a clan prepares to bring about the end of the world and its imminent rebirth.

The Adder is coming and one of their number will inherit its powers. They all want the honor, but young Eve is willing to do anything for the distinction.

A reckoning beyond Eve’s imagination begins when Chief Inspector Black arrives to investigate a brutal murder and their sacred ceremony goes terribly wrong.

And soon all the secrets of Altnaharra will be uncovered.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The #Spooktober reading this year has made me feel quite gruntled. That said, however, I'm glad I read Sundial first among Author Catriona's work...the domestic-horror vibe, added to the all human all the time cast of horror-bringers, made me feel comfortable with her voice. I had no additional hill to climb to get past the cosmic-horror tropes I wouldn't necessarily choose to read.

But psych the cosmic-horror tropes I was expecting, given that this is a story about a cult whose organizing principle is the end of the world, "cleansed" by sea-serpent, were absent. Instead this was an historical fiction with seriously gothic overtones, set at the end of World War One and containing the usual gothic elements. It wasn't a *bad* surprise. It was, however, definitely a surprise.

Author Catriona received the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in 2018 for this story. I think that's one helluva great accolade to get for one's second published novel. That we in the US are getting it only now suggests someone fell asleep at the switch back in 2018. I can't say I felt this was a perfect novel, it relied a wee bit too heavily on ghastly punishments for its unsettling-bordering-on-scary stuff and its cult aspects felt worn out pretty quickly. What I found to enjoy was Author Catriona's word-sorcery:

My heart is a dark passage, lined with ranks of gleaming jars. In each one something floats. The past, preserved as if in spirit. Here is the scent of grass and the sea, here the creak of wheels on a rough path, here a bright yellow gull’s beak. The sensation of blood drying on my cheek in the wind. Abel crying for his mother, Uncle’s hand on me. Silver on a white collarbone. The knowledge of loss, which comes like a blow to the heart or the stomach. It does not reach your mind until later.

The opening of the book...we know the Dark Sorceress Catriona has rattled her bone-bag of words and will be casting irresistible spells soon. And she does.

Just not the ones I expected.

The manner of unfolding the story was intriguing. The setting was wonderfully gothic. The characters weren't as fully realized as the ones in Sundial were, but that is entirely understandable and was not unexpected...a second book isn't going to have the same polish as a fourth one does. At least, if the writer is developing authorial chops, it won't; and she most definitely is a writer developing fast and well. What that meant to me, as I read along, was that I could see details that were not the ones I think Author Catriona would emphasize now (eg, some of Delilah's behaviors, and Uncle's almost mustachio-twirling one-note-ness). I will say that this is why I landed on the four-star key instead of a fraction higher. The four stars are, however, fully merited based solely on the plot's cohesiveness and its appropriately increasing pace. A headlong rush would not have served this story the way it did Rob's story in Sundial.

While the ending is, I've tried to think of a different word but no other one fits, condign, it isn't necessarily the one you-the-horror-reader are thinking it will be. That, above all things, was the reason I recommend this story to my horror-reading friends: It's good not to know.

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BLOOD MOON PROPHECY
DILANI KAHAWALA (Legend of the Nyx #1)
Cedar Street Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Eleven years ago, Tilly Nyx did something she wasn’t supposed to. As a result, her mother was killed. Her village was destroyed. Her sister disappeared. And an ancient horror sent her into hiding.

Now sixteen years old, Tilly is determined to go home, even though she doesn’t know where home is or how to get there. All she has is the map that her mother made her swear to protect with her life.

Tilly soon finds herself plunged into the world where it all began—a world of oceans, sailing ships, and feuds between ancient magical families. She joins a fleet in search of the secret that her map holds, the secret that has been guarded by her family for thousands of years.

As Tilly learns how to cast sprites and make potions, she and her three friends must follow the trail of murky clues left by her ancestors before time runs out. But the closer they get to their destination, the more Tilly learns about her true identity–and everything is not as it seems.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Young-adult fantasy with cosmic horror overtones isn't my go-to genre reading. This debut novel got in under my radar because I liked the cover and the storytelling voice lulled my concerns about the subject matter.

Because most of the story is told in short chapters heavy on description, I wasn't asked to "listen" to a chosen-one teenaged girl. That was a huge plus to me. I still came away from the read wanting to swat this bratty child for being so completely and unwarrantedly willing to be guided only by her own thoughts and feelings. She never consulted anyone with more information than she possessed, she never changed her mind until her stubborn skull got thumped and hard...she is, in short, a typical smart teen. That made me nutso!

The reason I finished the read was that I liked the found-family aspect, I found the author's descriptions and world-building were very well done, and the cover art. Oh my heck. I am such a fool for a gorgeous cover. This one really fits the story being told...you'll see why. So much of the story's action is sea-borne that I mention it as a possible deal-maker or -breaker, depending on whom the read is destined for; the ships aren't, for once, the relation- type but the wooden type. The author's grasp of sailing is probably superficial but, as mine is too, I found nothing eye-rolling in her depiction of life aboard them. The sailing themes served as handy reasons to bring characters together but only briefly...as that is a deeply rooted feature of chosen-one quests, that worked very well.

Mei, James, and Nav, Tilly's scooby-group, are all standard characters. The vibe one gets from the read is very much Harry Potter and those Mortal Instruments books; the side characters, though very much side characters, are more than furnishings for the heroine's story. That dubious honor goes to the immense cast of secondary characters, seemingly dozens of them, all serving one and only one purpose. These are features of YA fantasy stories, I hasten to add, not bugs. The author is quite clear about her purpose for each one of the secondary characters. When the occasional one pops back up in a later chapter I felt quite surprised.

If you're looking for something to please your classical-magic loving tween/early-teen niece/cousin/grandchild, this introductory volume in what I expect to be a successful series will earn you early-adopter points. This is an author to watch...her journey, beginning here, can go to much greater heights.

THE CAMILLA STEN PAGE: THE LOST VILLAGE, a folk-horror Swedish thriller in translation & THE RESTING PLACE, atmospheric domestic thriller

THE LOST VILLAGE
CAMILLA STEN (tr. Alexandra Fleming)
Minotaur Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar in this brilliantly disturbing thriller from Camilla Sten, an electrifying new voice in suspense.

Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.

But there will be no turning back.

Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice:

They are not alone.

They’re looking for the truth...
But what if it finds them first?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Sten is a Force. Her storytelling chops, in this her debut novel!, are truly impressive. Usually split timelines, here denoted by labeling chapters "Now" and "Then", give me pause. It so seldom adds impetus to the natural pace of the story. In Author Sten's case she overcame this. By itself that merits praise...but to use it, as here, in setting a perceptual "trap" for her readers, is extraordinarily tough to pull off.

The framing device that threatened, at first, to derail my enjoyment of the story was also the biggest surprise to me: A long stretch of "Now" spent reading letters discovered in the Lost Village. While that by itself isn't bad, so very often it is a deus ex machina and so feels like a cheat to me. I re-read parts of the section to see if I could find the seams but I couldn't...I kept running across images I lingered over (eg doubts creeping up on a character like "stinging little devils") and action I wanted to follow right now. That's good horror writing...good writing, period.

Much of the seemingly inevitable comparison-to-known-things marketing has borne down hard on Midsommar, a stunningly beautiful folk-horror film whose story is stretched to the point of snapping in order to make its beautiful scenes...seriously, go look at it, the stills should be sold as art!...work. Also harked back to is The Blair Witch Project, whose shakycam found-footage horror story was, to put it mildly, a farrago but whose fascinating editing (predictable and pedestrian aren't necessarily ineffective in horror storytelling) has deeply influenced the entire field of visual horror storytelling. This comparison is, to me, fair and reasonable; the Midsommar one is a stretch and honestly a disservice to the story here told.

This is folk horror as only a Swede setting her story in Sweden would, possibly could, produce. But it's much, much more unnerving to me, more frightening, than Midsommar because this story is about the intersection of mental illness and religious fanaticism that is its own form of mental illness...but grounded in a solid, meaningful, and thoughtful take-down of capitalism and patriarchy.

We perceive women suffering from mental illness with a sort of paradoxical double-sidedness; both victims and monsters, simultaneously infantilized and feared. A certain level of dysfunction is accepted—after all, women who are suffering mild depression and starving themselves aren’t going to leave their husbands or start revolutions, which is very practical indeed.
–and–
We view a depressed upper-class woman from a stable family background dealing with depression as “having the blues,” while the homeless woman on the street corner battling auditory hallucinations is a thing to be feared, a threatening monster. Not a person in need of help. Not someone with thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs of their own. Not a fully formed human being with agency and identity, suffering from an illness and doing their best to function as well as they can.

Author Sten is singin' my song; Translator Fleming is wrapping it in stylish English.

Several friends of mine who read and reviewed the book, all of them women, weren't impressed with the author's feminist take as presented, and to a woman they were dismissive of the "folk horror" trappings the US publisher wrapped around the story. In that latter I hesitantly join them, but as a man I felt the feminist, or more accurately anti-patriarchal, views the author quite clearly espouses by way of contrast to the "Then" action and more clearly espouses in the "Now" if via a dark means, rang me like a bell.

Permaybehaps I'm settling, in the sense that it might not be as clear to the women because it's not enough of a feminist standpoint. I can't say; I can say that, to me, this read bound together creepy, scary real-life threats and challenges with a social and political slant I am in sympathy with. You should give Author Camilla Sten a shot, see what you think.

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THE RESTING PLACE
CAMILLA STEN (tr. Alexandra Fleming)
Minotaur Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A spine-chilling, propulsive psychological suspense from international sensation Camilla Sten.

The medical term is prosopagnosia. The average person calls it face blindness—the inability to recognize a familiar person’s face, even the faces of those closest to you.

When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, her anxiety mounts. The dark feelings of having brushed by a killer, yet not know who could do this—or if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality.

Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a dark past for over fifty years.

Eleanor. Her steadfast boyfriend, Sebastian. Her reckless aunt, Veronika. The lawyer. All will go to this house of secrets, looking for answers. But as they get closer to bringing the truth to light, they’ll wish they had never come to disturb what rests there.

A heart-thumping, relentless thriller that will shake you to your core, The Resting Place is an unforgettable novel of horror and suspense.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've known someone with prosopagnosia well, and for a lot longer than I have known the word or the condition existed. It's one of the reasons I was really eager to get this book's DRC and devour it. I was so happy to see this under-represented and misunderstood disability represented at all. I hoped, of course, to see it represented well.

It was. The condition of "face-blindness" was truly well established, in a complex and multivalent way; it was also chillingly effectively woven into a deeply unsettling, even unnerving, plot.

Prosopagnosia, face blindness. It means my brain doesn’t process human faces the same way others’ do. I can’t recognize faces, so have to memorize distinguishing features instead.

What happens, as you've seen in the book description, is a scene of brutal violence that simply can't be forgotten by anyone who's experienced anything remotely close to it. But, in Eleanor's case, it's a scene that lacks a very important resonance. She's seen a murder, and a murderer, and she can't forget it but can't process it, can't help assign guilt to the guilty because she is biomechanically incapable of the necessary function. And then what happens? She inherits the house her grandmother failed to tell her that she owned. Way to lard the stress into the liver of the story...another set of unknown people, faces ever unknown to her and markers to somehow fasten onto their identities.

From that point on, I was so very sold on this read. I could not WAIT to see how this awful psychological double bind would resolve.

The things I liked were, like the things I liked in The Lost Village, the ones that brought the character to life:

...it’s the body that panics first, the brain that follows. If I can just keep my breaths slow and force myself to relax then I can trick my mind into calm.
–and–
“Your fear is valid, but that doesn’t make it real. The fear may be true, but it doesn’t have to be your truth.”

They're present, they're satisfyingly numerous, but in the end the thing that will make or break the read is one's response to the ending. The entire book is a set-up to the set-piece in the last, say, thirtyish pages. It's a big ask from a sophmore novelist. I was rewarded by it because its resolution was so very timely and so personal to me. I can't say more because the Spoiler Stasi will descend on me with malice and fury. This post will clue you in to the direction we're heading if you care to be enlightened.

I thought the use of a big, old, dark manor house in the country was going to be a silly distraction, a gewgaw meant to distract me from something...it wasn't, and it was; the big winter storm, another gothic-storytelling staple, was similarly used. These weren't my favorite moments in the book. I will say they didn't "ruin" my experience of the story as can happen with such inessentials. The nature of the story is so basically well-crafted that Author Sten could've chosen any one of an array of settings and accomplished her task.

I confess that, as I read along and Eleanor kept doing her Eleanor thing, I was half-dreading the need to slap an "ableism" content warning on the review. I was so relieved that I did not feel Author Sten had crossed my own mental threshhold for use of a disability shading into the old, dark "crippled" territory I've still been hit with in the twenty-first century.

I'm going to leave the last words to Eleanor, via Author Sten. I think they say more about what I derived from this read than I can.

She says that wounds can leave scars on our souls just like on our bodies, and that we have to learn to live with them rather than try to rid ourselves of them completely.

MANHATTAN CULT STORY: Abuse, Crime, Sex, and My Life inside a Secret Organization, delivers true-life #Spooktober chills

MANHATTAN CULT STORY: Abuse, Crime, Sex, and My Life inside a Secret Organization
SPENCER SCHNEIDER
Arcade Publishing
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “We were invisible. We had to be. We took an oath of absolute secrecy. We never even told our immediate families who we were. We went about our lives in New York City. Just like you. We were your accountants, money managers, lawyers, executive recruiters, doctors. We owned your child’s private school and sold you your brownstone. But you’d never guess our secret lives, how we lived in a kind of silent terror and fervor. There were hundreds of us.”

Right under the noses of neighbors, clients, spouses, children, and friends, a secret society, simply called School—a cult of snared Manhattan professionals—has been led by the charismatic, sociopathic and dangerous leader Sharon Gans for decades. Spencer Schneider was recruited in the eighties and he stayed for more than twenty-three years as his life disintegrated, his self-esteem eroded, and he lined the pockets of Gans and her cult.

Cult members met twice weekly, though they never acknowledged one another outside of meetings or gatherings. In the name of inner development, they endured the horrors of mental, sexual, and physical abuse, forced labor, arranged marriages, swindled inheritances and savings, and systematic terrorizing. Some of them broke the law. All for Gans.

“During those years,” Schneider writes, “my world was School. That’s what it’s like when you’re in a cult, even one that preys on and caters to New York’s educated elite. This is my story of how I got entangled in School and how I got out.”

At its core, Manhattan Cult Story is a cautionary tale of how hundreds of well-educated, savvy, and prosperous New Yorkers became fervent followers of a brilliant but demented cult leader who posed as a teacher of ancient knowledge. It’s about double-lives, the power of group psychology, and how easy it is to be radicalized—all too relevant in today's atmosphere of conspiracy and ideologue worship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm going to reproduce the author's "Nine Tell-Tale Signs You're in a Cult":

1. You give an inordinate amount of time and money to the group.



2. The group's ideology is strict, exacting, and unforgiving.



3. Your life is highly regulated by the group.



4. You cannot challenge the leaders or the ideology—their word is final.



5. The leaders will punish you for breaking the rules of the group.



6. Former members are ostracized and denigrated.



7. The group isolates you from your friends and family.



8. The group discourages you from thinking for yourself.



9. You are afraid to leave the group.

I was tense and uneasy as I read this book...I know lots of people like the author from my years living in Manhattan. It could easily be any one of them, any one!, who tells this awful, painful story. I don't think I know the author, though honestly it doesn't matter, the poor guy's been through so much and in service of so little.

His cult experience reminded me of my mentally ill mother's tactics and techniques for controlling others. I don't see that as a nurturing thing, though I suppose I can see why someone who felt...unmoored...would see it as such. It's a cruel world out there, and to be told...convinced...that the cruelty you're experiencing is actually lovingkindness replicated religious nuts' favorite tactic of "love, it's all done from love"...just not for you, vile sinner, but for the little animatronic cultist they are trying to free you to become! (I think they actually have the balls to call it "your best self.")

So his decades of serving the whims and needs of capricious, demanding, judgmental Others are a bitter recapitulation of the way my experience of christian and jewish religious nuts tried to grab hold of me in my youth. It was a chilling, dreadful reminder of how easy it is for others who have Othered you to convince you to give up the real, authentic you and submit to them and their warped, perverted will.

That said, the author's clearly got something to say about how he feels vis-a-vis gay people. No mention ever comes without his vigorous denial that he's gay. Okay, so...why bring it up? It kinda-sorta goes along with my main dissatisfaction with the read as a read. It feels scattershot. It takes time to explain a life, and I think that time was laser focused on the axe he quite genuinely and necessarily grinds against Sharon Gans and her vile School. It left me feeling like I was looking at the hole where that guy had been, not the guy who'd climbed out of said hole.

It's #Spooktober. Read something factual...and still truly, inescapably, chilling and horrifying.

RED RIGHT HAND, Lovecraftian urban-fantasy violence by one pissed-off woman & TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE, Alexander + Hephaestion in the Underworld

TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE
WILLIAM L.J. GALAINI (The Patron Saints of Hell #1)
Evolved Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: While the First World War rages on Earth's surface, Hephaestion discovers the ideal opportunity to rescue his general, king, and soulmate Alexander the Great from the lowest ring of Hell. The problem? No one’s ever dared such a feat before, and only a madman would try.

As Hephaestion descends into the pit of eternal torment, he discovers unlikely accomplices willing to assist his impossible plan…but complications and subterfuge leave Hephaestion and his allies scrambling for footholds in a world governed by demons, devils, and opportunists. Soon the fires of Hades are the least of his worries as he must outrun, outgun, and outmaneuver beasts and monsters hell-bent on his destruction.

With a cast of unexpected characters from civilizations long buried and historical figures you only thought you knew, Hephaestion must answer the true question of his quest: What does it mean to be known, to be remembered...and perhaps, to be human?

Loyalty, commitment, and love ignore the bounds of death and time in an adventure that explores culture, history, and obsession through the lens of a man who defies reason.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Spooktober starts with a crashing, steam-billowing bittersweet battle-heavy CRASH. Hell, where Alexander of Macedon, genocidal psychopathic horndog, has been spending his afterlife, is gonna have to give him up...Hephaestion, Alexander's earthly lover, best friend, confidant, and now rescuer, has had entirely enough of hanging around in Purgatory waiting for Alexander's sins to be expiated and for him to join up with the patient, still-loving man whose death precipitated Alexander's own.

But you, O Reader, already know...be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be "Yes."

Hephaestion's decision, now that the whole planet's gone mental and tossed itself a mechanized slaughter in the form of the Great War (as WWI was known then...really, it's obvious that our name for it is a retronym if one gives it even a minute's actual thought), is worthy of some demented I Love Lucy-in-Hell weirdness...dead bodies as disguises, inevitable exposure, meeting a new, improved Scooby-group. But it takes us quite a while to get to this point...we're in Hell, not Purgatory, but nowhere near finding Alexander.

The action is, while magisterially slow, quite well-thought-out, and Hephaestion's motives for his quest elicit a lot of push-back from many sources both helping and hindering him. (All the Jesuits in History ending up in Hell was one of my happiest reading-life moments. I love, love, love the little easter-egg moments Author Galaini chucks into this stew!) One character in particular, Yitz the Jew, was perilously close to a stereotype. I got the impression, fortunately, that the author was actually aiming for archetype and, being in Purgatory, then Hell, wasn't saying this is how Jews are but this is how Jews are seen as part of the horribleness of Hell.

The truly delightful conception of the Afterlife as a place where there are all periods of History and all levels of technology intermingling, to be like Doctor Who's episode where Winston Churchill is Caesar and Morris Minors fly through the air under giant balloons was designed: Wrongness, but playfully presented, is still wrongness and still evokes unease. As the struggle to reach his belovèd Alexander continues, Hephaestion remains obsessed with achieving his millennia-held goal of reuniting with him. All around him are people warning, hinting, offering other views. Blinders on, Hephaestion pursues his goal.

And achieves it.

This is not The Song of Achilles. There is no beautiful ending for anyone in Hell. And, as Hephaestion finally achieves his reunion, the full and terrible truth of the answer to a prayer being "Yes" is, at last, borne in upon him.

That is why I gave the story four stars in spite of its too-slow-for-me pace, in spite of its occasionally unpleasant characterizations, in spite of its flaws whatever they might be to you or me. The love one bears for the heart's own darling is not always the feeling the heart's own darling deserves.

A bitter dreg to drink. A truly powerfully importantly real, urgent Truth. Falling in love is not always, or even all that often, the happy end.

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RED RIGHT HAND
LEVI BLACK (Mythos War #1)
Tor Books
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Charlie Tristan Moore isn’t a hero. She’s a survivor. Already wrestling with the demons of her past, she finds herself tested as never before when she arrives home one night to find herself under attack by three monstrous skinhounds straight out of a nightmare. Just as hope seems lost, she is saved by a sinister Man in Black, dressed in a long, dark coat that seems to possess a life of its own and wielding a black-bladed sword in his grisly red right hand.

But her rescue comes at a cost. The Man in Black, a diabolical Elder God, demands she become his Acolyte and embrace a dark magick she never knew she possessed. To ensure her obedience, he takes her friend and possible love, Daniel, in thrall as a hostage. Now she must join The Man in Black in his crusade to track down and destroy his fellow Elder Gods, supposedly to save humanity from being devoured for all eternity.

But is The Man in Black truly the lesser of two evils–or a menace far more treacherous than the eldritch horrors she’s battling in his name?
Red Right Hand is the first book in the fantastically creepy Mythos War series by Levi Black.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nyarlathotep! The Crawling Chaos!! I am so so sold on this read. People using ol' H.P.'s stuff in ways that'd probably make him scowl and whine? Bonus points! And Charlie Tristan Moore is someone who would make ol' H.P.'s hackles rise. A woman, a mutt, a person without a pedigree? *gasp* Bring it, say I, and fling it on his grave.

So in this trilogy-starting story, Charlie (our narrator) meets with some really scary, very weird...dog-things...inside her front door as she stumbles in drunk from a binge trying to drink a boy she liked off her mind. The action, in other words, is reported in first person and starts from the get-go, never slacks, and keeps getting higher and higher stakes riveted to it.

What works best about this is that Charlie (Charlotte, really) Tristan Moore's learning what the ruddy hell's going on at the same time we are. She's not narrating from either the Afterlife or a cozy chair in front of a fire, a brandy balloon a-swirl in her hands, relating her youthful wild adventures.

What slightly less impressed me was Charlie Tristan Moore's gradually revealed psych history...it was all a bit too pat, and too obviously engineered to make her the proper tool for Nyarlathotep. It led to the feeling that she was a created tool instead of what I understood her to be, a fortuitously shaped stick that Nyarlathotep found here in ordinary reality and co-opted for his use. If the former is the case, then what the heck would an entity that could exert its will so powerfully *need* with a hench-rat?

Well, no matter, what kept me happily reading was the pace of events once the Man in Black gets his hooks into her and sets her her tasks. I was in the mood for horror, it's Spooktober, we've got truly awful people trying to screw up reality even more than they've managed to do in the past six years...gimme the fake kind, with excitement but no danger, please. This first-of-three violent, gory supernatural-horror-defeating stories filled the bill admirably, used the Lovecraft Universe very creditably while still ringing changes on the themes so they didn't feel leaden and overburdened with MEANING. This is never easy. Author Levi did it well. I know I've slammed those dragon-tattoo books for their repugnant sexual violence against women before. It's not a subject I invite into my entertainment these days.

What made me respond differently to this story is that the violence of Charlie Tristan Moore's past is not presented pruriently, is not downplayed in its effects on her and her life as I felt was the case in those Swedish stories. As she puts herself into terrible situations to serve a man and his needs in this story, Charlie's furiously ragingly hating him, and expressly making herself remember why what happened to her is making Nyarlathotep's abuse of her worse.

It felt, then, for once like her pain was her enemy not her secret power.

And she still succeeds, she still lives, she still has Love to save. It worked for me. If Spooktober's going to mean something to you, try slotting this read into it.

FOUR STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES NOVELLAS, New York Times bestselling novelist delivers scares galore