THE CHILDREN, YA fantasy monadnock looks at the storytelling tapestry from the other side

THE CHILDREN
MELISSA ALBERT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?

Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn't seem so scary a moment ago. It's a story for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.

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My Review: Does George RR Martin have kids? Maybe one called "Dayana" or something? He's on track to die before agreeing to finish his astoundingly beloved fantasy series, like Edith...and to many of us not-fans it feels as though there's some kinda dark bargain involved in its globe-spanning popularity.

In the age of severely overprivileged fandoms for what is revoltingly, but accurately, called "IP," this story could not cut closer to the bone. There's a certain inevitability in Edith's appalling betrayal of her children, using them as close models for her fantasy characters. "Write what you know" taken to a dark extreme by a parent who gave little but took much. A bargain her children had no say over. It supports them to this good day. In a sense that's fair enough since it took their developmental years out of their own control.

Guin is the kid who bought in, albeit resentfully, to the hype and has become an apologist for Edith and her invasive behavior. Perhaps she's just making hay while the sun shines, perhaps she's getting her own back for the neglect and emotional absence of her self-centered parents...failed actor father, family-supporting writer mother. She's created a hollow kind of fame out of monetizing her childhood marked by the celebrity lifestyle her parents cultivated in place of actually being parents. Guin's project is to keep the spondulix rolling in. Brother Ennis has chosen a more rigorous path, though still cashing in on his beginnings, by becoming An Artist. Fame has followed, but he's chosen to cut Guin out of his life. Throughout this story we're in Guin's PoV so we're only told what she knows about why.


"Guinevere" is a terrible name to hang on a kid. It practically slams the door on an ordinary childhood because the teasing would be brutal. It's really of a piece with Edith's fantasy life-turned-hugely successful fantasy world: Guin's fated to be an unhappy princess who's become a queen in a realm not her own, and not of her choosing. "Nomen est omen" test case number skatey-eight skabillion. It feels as we're reading along as though Author Albert, author of multiple popular children's books, started wondering about how this creation thing works as a force outside your authorial control. It's clear Guin is traumatized. By what? Her parents are the first in line for blame. But she and Ennis are orphans. The fire that consumed their childhood home and killed their not-good parents was not caused by the parents themselves. What did cause it? How does...does...that unsolved mystery explain Edith's massive cultural juggernaut "The Ninth City?" It's eaten their lives, not knowing but knowing too much, not understanding but seeing more than they should. Ennis isn't working with Guin on solving what she sees as a strange mystery. It is as always up to Guin to do the work, shoulder the burden.

Author Albert uses the psychological reality of Guin's parentification to explore women's roles in our capitalist culture. It's also clear that there are...oddnesses...in this family system that clearly come from the psychological stress of bearing all the load on the females, woman and girl, in the system. When one looks at it out of the corner of one's eye there are ununsual things that cause unease in we-the-reader. They're not remarked on or attended to in the narrative. They are there and quite uneasy-making though...the woods, how cliche, have eyes and are watching you.

The fire destroys as fires do. No more parents, no more books to keep the mmoney comingin, no more brother because he buggers off leaving it to Guin to pick up such pieces as she can to make what she—she alone—will from the wreckage. The number of abandonments Guin suffers would warp anyone in her shoes. Her response...to take it all on, put it to the best use she can...is what fuels this novel of reckoning with her ghosts.

Literal ghosts? Probably, at least of a sort. Edith might not have been as inventive as her adoring and demanding fan base thinks.

It's here the missing fifth star is explained. The tinges of horror, of fantastical things not seen just beyond our line of sight, all crystallize in the last approximately ten percent of the story. I saw why, and saw the point, but I'm less interested in the fantastical than in the truly chilling psychological novel that precedes the ending. That is not to criticize the ending as a natural result of the preceding story. It absolutely fits, it's quite clearly signposted early on. It's definitely one of several possible results of the story as told.

Just not the one I would've preferred.

IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET: Queer Reflections on Horror, a genre the community embraces...hard

IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET: Queer Reflections on Horror
JOE VALLESE (Editor)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$25.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.

It Came from the Closet features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on "Jennifer’s Body", Jude Ellison S. Doyle on "In My Skin", Addie Tsai on "Dead Ringers", and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

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My Review: I'll put it this way: It seemed to me, when I began reading, that queer people are really barkin' up the wrong tree to look to horror, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic medium it is, for representation. Anti-models, maybe...but representation carries (to me, anyone else?) positive or at the minimum neutral connotations for the represented.

I do not see this in horror stories, where the evil queer has survived long past its rejection in most mainstream media.

"All of us together are smarter than any one of us" has never been more amply and aptly demonstrated than in this collection of essays. It is true that some are hits and others misses; it's in the nature of collections for this to be the case. My miss could easily be your hit. It's the reason that essays are so very valuable collected together, to maximize the reader's exposure to new, different ideas that might resonate...or clang dissonantly. Both, and all the shades of experience between, are valuable for pointing out and pointing up one's blind spots.

I'd never once, when watching Jaws in 1975, considered the homoerotic subtext in the film. (I've never read the novel.) I only watched it the once because, fifty years later, I still won't go into the ocean above my ankles because I'm *still* scared by that buoy scene. (IYKYK) Jen Corrigan saw it. I didn't think she was right at first; then I kept thinking about the points being raised and came to think she was correct. Fifty years later, I'm thinking about a film I saw once, and can't forget for bad reasons, reassessing it in light of a stranger's thoughts and appreciating it more positively for doing that.

Recontextualizing an object of fear, fifty years later, actually reduces the terror I've always felt due to Spielberg's genius-level indirect threat building, not making it grimly obvious therefore dismissable, reducible to whether we think the effect was "good enough" or not. What strikes unseen is always more frightening, look at Alien, look at ICEstapo's masked raids, look at the fear of the unknown everywhere in our culture.

So essays by queer people about the films that scare all of use make the scares, even the ones at our expense like Tucker Lieberman's essay on childhood trauma and A Nightmare on Elm Street, are the best use of our mental energy around these cultural products designed to elicit fear in the viewer. When we, the queers of the world, are targets of evil everywhere in our quotidian lives it pays to forearm yourself with context to battle the inner demons "They" want to feed, to convince you are REAL and YOUR FAULT...which they aren't.

A book to be savored in sips, not down-in-one belted into your eyeholes. Well worth gifting to your horror-obsessed friend of any sexuality, or your queer media-studies nibling/grand, or just some guy who was traumatized by Jaws as a teen.

You never know where healing will come from.

THE SALVAGE, sapphic Gothic Scottish fun

THE SALVAGE
ANBARA SALAM
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A twisting, gothic literary thriller sure to delight fans of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, The Wonder by Emma Donaghue, and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist, has been called to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, dragged from arctic waters, holds the remains of a celebrated explorer and the treasures of his final expedition. But on her first dive down to the ship, Marta becomes convinced she has seen a dark figure lurking amid the wreckage.

When the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deep chill of a record-breaking winter keeps Marta stranded on Cairnroch, she forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working in the island’s only hotel. When the ship's artefacts inexplicably disappear, Marta and Elsie have to brave the freezing conditions to search for the missing objects before anyone else catches on. As something eerie seems to follow her at every step, Marta must confront if the haunting is a figment of her imagination, the repercussions from a terrible mistake from her past, or if something more sinister is at play that will trap her and everyone on the island—and their secrets—in an icy wilderness.

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My Review: Sapphic gothic ghost story set in the icy winter waters of the North Sea off Scotland? Meat and drink! Get in my eyeholes!

Marta, a woman in the dangerous business of commercial salvage diving in 1962, is a rarity. It's her husband who runs things, and maybe it's just me but seems to me he's not averse to taking on jobs that put Marta in very significant danger. As the story unfolds, there are secrets in this marriage that, well, that cast doubts....

She's evidently, however, still down with this. Not only does her narrative voice convey very significant pleasure in the underwater world, she's at her sharpest while observing the wreck off Cairnroch. The eerie shadow? That's not an object, that's a being and no being not suited up like her belongs down there. Anyone would get the hell away as fast as possible!

Returning to the surface, badly shaken but with her inventory of the salvage to be collected, there occur things to prevent her from going down to begin salvage right away. On the return trip, she discovers there are very significant items missing...she inventoried them, now they're not there. (Listing them would be spoilery, so no on that.) What's happened? It's not like deep salvage diving is something just anyone can do, nor is it obvious how the heck the stuff was removed, or where it could've gone.

It makes the cold reception of the (quite Calvinist) Cairnroch people more pronounced...the treasure belonged to a very revered local hero, whose family has commissioned the recovery of material to fill a museum on the island. The extreme cold of that winter, the greatly heated up Cold War (this was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and the weird behavior of the islanders towards her make Marta...uneasy...plus, after the artifacts she was to salvage got disappeared, things got no better. Worse, in fact as now she can't shake the sense of being followed...since the Presence on the wreck gave her a scare.

With all the troubles piling up, Marta needs backup. Her husband isn't there, wouldn't be likely to help if he was...he's still angry over some stuff...though he is still her boss. Anyway a local will be more help because things are weird in this place she's isolated inside by weather, world events, and the job she still needs to pull off in order to get paid.

Enter Elsie. She's so local she works at Cairnroch's only hotel. She and Marta are...eyeing each other up...so maybe she will act as Marta's go-between to see what the hell's happening here. And on this super religious rock, Elsie's probably never had a better opportunity for a hook-up. And I do not think anyone on the island's at all fooled by their sneakin' ways. It's another layer of Other in a world obsessed, in that terrible, cruel Calvinist way, with Us-v-Them. I was pretty unconvinced by the way the "special friendship" developed considering Marta's dramatically obvious Otherness and Elsie's being One of Us to the islanders.

The resolution to the different situations arrives as one would hope it would, arising from the events Author Salam's created; but honestly it was waaay later than it would ideally have been. Marta and Elsie aren't any closer at the end than is decorous. It felt to me that, for three-quarters of the book, I was hoping Marta's husband would show up and stir the pot, or something equally dramatic.

This is not a dramatic book. It's all vibes. Really, really good vibes...I put my cardigan on half a dozen times despite it being seventy degrees in here...but short on the stuff of drama. Fights? Not even verbal ones. Hauntings? Self-inflicted ones galore. All very interesting to me. Not terribly exciting.

As someone who appreciates a narrator who isn't seeing what's really happening but instead what her shadows let her see, I was fine with this. Marta, Syrian/Scot like the author is, is a woman out of every place she's ever been put. Check. Marta's really sure she Knows the Score, despite not seeing the hoop half the time. Check. Marta's never let her defenses down, not for anyone; too risky. Check. The list goes on.

Reading diary entries is a very gothic way to build suspense. I myownself don't think it works in favor of low-conflict, high vibes stories so that seems like a miss to me. It would be a five-star read as an only-vibes novella; it only gets to four stars as a heavy-vibes gothic eerie haunted-house novel, with too little (and too incredibly uncritically unexamined) sapphic stuff to really get past the gate into the churchyard.

So I can't recommend it unreservedly but can definitely say there's a pleasurable red here for a vibes reader seeking wintertime chills; anyone who likes underwater scenes is going to purr happily, as they're some of the most effective writing in the story; and those in love with a ghost story for Yule.

THE GRACEVIEW PATIENT, spooky #Deathtober scarefest (for rational reasons)

THE GRACEVIEW PATIENT
CAITLIN STARLING
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Misery meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers in this genre-bending, claustrophobic hospital gothic from the bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.

Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial.

The conditions are simple, if grueling; she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital.

Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls.

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My Review: I've had gout for decades, starting in my earliest twenties. My family has gout throughout it. I'm convinced, and medical orthodoxy agrees, there is a genetic component to the condition. If someone had told me in the 1980s "we have a truly horrifyingly painful way to rid you forever of your gout" I'd've had my bags packed for the trip to Graceview Hospital before I stopped smelling the garlic the utterer had eaten for lunch.

So this story was a "sign me up!" from giddy-up to whoa. As I got to know Margaret, to be in her familiar-but-dreadful world of "how much is there for me to do, versus how much is there available for me to do it with?" calculus of living, worry with her as she tries to balance practical necessities, dealing with a narcissistic parent, and leap with joy at the sudden promise of the lifeline she's flung, I wanted so badly for things to go well for her.

Bait-and-switch much, Author Starling? It's a spooky place, Graceview, and Margaret's a very vulnerable lassie. Bad stuff's gonna happen! It's part of the read!

As Margaret gets deeper and deeper into the meddical hell she was warned awaited her, odd things occur. One of her nurses becomes a patient. The weird offness of Graceview Hospital intensifies, though of course the medication and the extreme nature of the treatment combine to present mental-health challenges to the participants. As you'd expect! Still, having experienced medication-induced psychosis first hand, I can tell you Margaret's utter horror at the psychotic break's symptoms is spot-on.

So that's the secret to my four-star rating of this weird, creepy, deeply unsettling story: I never for an instant believed this was anything other than a perfect;y reasonable side-effect of a perfectly horrible medication that was meant to cure something previously incurable. Spooky stuff seldom gets even this far up in my literary estimation because I'm so deeply materialist in my worldview.

Author Starling writes her socks off creating this setting, making it a very real place, imbuing it with eerieness and thus setting Margaret up for her nightmarish experiences. That she would've had them no matter what is what kept me from feeling this was more or less a prurient exercise in psychological torment as entertainment. It is real and honest in its presentation of what a psychotic break feels like. The terror of being unmoored from reality while undergoing very physically challenging treatment to improve your quality of life is the central fact we're dealing with here.

And that is the reason I enjoyed this story as a horror read for #Deathtober. It's got gothic rags draped over its granny-panties, so I can trust it to deal with the scary stuff as *feelings* not Reality, which they manifestly are not. Mostly, anyway.

The lack of even a fraction of a fifth star is down to a more serious problem I had: the ending is as ambiguous as possible, leaving every concerning thing well and truly unresolved. I'm as unhappy as the next reader when authors spoon-feed me a little-bow-wrapped ending; but there exists a middle ground between "the end" and this book's stopping place.

I'd say more but y'all're really, really spoiled and complain about spoilers with the verve of the wronged adolescent denied the car keys.

BLOOD ON HER TONGUE, modestly successful Carmilla revamp

BLOOD ON HER TONGUE
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: "I'm in your blood, and you are in mine…"

The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.

Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry… and hungry.

Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.

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My Review: Messy take on Carmilla, only with twin sisters.

It's at its strongest in conveying the overpowering terror of losing one's mind, of feeling the moorings of consensus reality slipping out of one's grasp. The very introduction to the story's reality is a letter...hi, Bram!...that unquestionably gives us a taste of how that unmooring will play out in the rest of the tale. Lucy worries mightily about Sarah as she learns more about the damage done to Sarah's sense of reality. When she comes to look over the damage to repair what she can, the situation somehow gets worse for her.

Evidence aplenty greets her that Sarah is in the midst of supernatural crisis, vampiric deaths, and quite a lot of relationship toxicity. Sarah's world is full of people dying in creative ways. But the main issue I think most will have is how far Author van Veen (My Darling Dreadful Thing) is willing to push the body horror. No ordinary, sane person, ie Lucy/the reader, is going to see this kind of violence and not skedaddle. At top speed. Lucy is there for her twin so of course she will stay longer than you or I might, but there's an eye-gouging scene that...no matter if one witnesses the event or the aftermath...would cause a celeritous evacuation of self and digestive tract.

I wasn't convinced by the characters. To me, they felt insubstantial, tags placed on dialogue, because they reacted yet never interacted. Lucy, for example, has no reason to get entwined with Michael that I could see; it was a plot contrivance. It's not like this is shocking in the context of a horror novel, but I hoped for more, given my first experience with the author. That, more than any other factor, stalled my rating at four stars. I was really ready to go higher.

If you come to this read expecting body horror and a page-turning, propulsive gorefest, you will like the book. If you're wanting an updated Carmilla with its sapphic overtones and its more interpersonal horror slant, it won't be the most satisfying of reads.

On a personal resonance,the story's twins have the same names as my sapphist grandmas, Sara and Lucy...the very first QUILTBAG people I knew in this life.

So on balance a read aimed at others, not at me.

VANTAGE POINT, good times don't get better than watching rich people dally and fall

VANTAGE POINT
SARA SLIGAR
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Succession meets Megan Abbott in this seductive Gothic suspense novel about the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most affluent families.

The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents’ tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when intimate videos of Clara are leaked online. The most frightening part is that she doesn't remember filming any of them. Are the videos real? Or are they deepfakes? Is someone trying to take down the Wielands once and for all?

Everyone thinks Clara is losing her grip on reality, but she knows the videos are only the beginning. Years ago the curse destroyed her parents. Now it’s coming for her. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point reveals a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the blurred lines between public and private personas and the nature of truth in the digital age.

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My Review: Do I hope this is what happens to the richest .01% of families? Yes. Would I sit by and watch with huge schadenfreude while amplifying the most embarrassing, hurtful moments on social media despite the pain it might cause the family in question? Oh my goddesses YES! Extra speedy sharing if they issue statements deploring the hurtful invasion of privacy, and I'll find a way to automate the 24-hour-a-day posting process if they're tech scum!

This book and me? Destined to be besties.

Sounds like a five-star rave is incoming, doesn't it?

Nope. When the shock-twist ending is the same ending you've been telegraphing all along, you don't get five stars. It could be some meta thing, playing on my expectations for a twist in a thriller by not giving me one; I don't tend to read thrillers for that sort of playfulness (which is usually disappointing and annoying anyway). Why it bothered me was that the author was flagging the ending in what felt like every chapter, most unsubtly; then that's what happened; so why'd I read all this intermediate red-herring-ing?

Because this gothic, soapy, OTT strange-fest was fun. I liked reading it. It wasn't groundbreaking, or paradigm-shifting; no one promised me it would be. I was told I'd have a good time eagerly watching the twisted ending of a hypercapitalist family.

Check.

Would I have liked it more, if...fill in personal crotchet here? Sure, I can play that game all day and most of the night with almost anything. But this book delivers what it promises, and you'll have a good time getting there.

IF I STOPPED HAUNTING YOU by COLBY WILKENS

IF I STOPPED HAUNTING YOU
COLBY WILKENS
St. Martin's Griffin Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An enemies to lovers romance with a spooky twist where two feuding writers end up on a writers retreat together at a haunted castle in Scotland

It's been months since horror author Penelope Skinner threw a book at Neil Storm. But he was so infuriating, with his sparkling green eyes and his bestselling horror novels that claimed to break Native stereotypes. And now she’s a publishing pariah and hasn’t been able to write a word since. So when her friend invites her on a too-good-to-be-true writers retreat in a supposedly haunted Scottish castle, she seizes the opportunity. Of course, some things really are too good to be true.

Neil wants nothing less than to be trapped in a castle with the frustratingly adorable woman who threw a book at him. She drew blood! Worse still, she unleashed a serious case of self-doubt! Neil is terrified to write another bestselling “book without a soul,” as Pen called it. All Neil wants is to find inspiration, while completely avoiding her.

But as the retreat begins, Pen and Neil are stunned to find themselves trapped in a real-life ghost story. Even more horrifying, they’re stuck together and a truly shocking (extremely hot) almost-kiss has left them rethinking their feelings, and… maybe they shouldn’t have been enemies at all? But if they can’t stop the ghosts pursuing them, they may never have the chance to find out.

Full of spooky chills and even more sexy thrills, If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens is the funny, fast-paced romp romance readers have been waiting for!

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My Review: Spooky castle...enemies forced into proximity...sparks flying left and right...bingo! #Deathtober read card filled.

One star off for heterosexualizing a perfectly good plot.

Author Wilkens does a fine job of entertaining her readers with a ghost story inside Gothic-novel trappings. Her domestic-violence opening...the woman throws a book at the man hard enough for the injury to bleed, and to leave a scar, and it's...somehow okay...? Like, a woman injuring a man isn't a problem but if he'd done the same to her the howling banshees would be all over it!


I was not thrilled by this.

I just barely got to a three-star rating because Author Wilkens made me chuckle many times *in*spite*of* my existing irritation. That is some serious talent! Causing an irked old curmudgeon to chuckle is a feat!

I really don't know what to tell you about the violence. You know your own tolerance for the abuse passed off as humor trope.

THE BOOK OF WITCHING, the kind of horror that keeps me awake

THE BOOK OF WITCHING
C.J. COOKE
Berkley Books
$19.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.

Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

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My Review: The dual-timeline haters are duly warned: this novel uses that technique in an absolutely inescapable way. It's not a gimmick to improve pacing...it's integral to the story, and deployed in a way you invest in right away, or really dislike instantly. It does not change for the entire book so be advised of that if you do not like it on contact.

The initial horror set-up, a mother hearing that her daughter who was off on an adventure holiday is now in the hospital, scared me enough. "It can't get worse than this," thought innocent little me. Your kid's in a burn unit far away. You have to get there, worried out of your mind. Your beloved only child is, when you can finally speak to her, someone else...or so she says. "It can not get worse than this," I shuddered.

Had I but known....

I don't go in for supernatural stories, witches and devils and suchlike silliness. If something supernatural like that existed, I'd've seen it for myself in these past *cough*ty-*mumble* years. Ain't happened. Weird shit, yes; devils and gods and miracles, nope. None of that kind of horror is here, either. It's all the slimy rottenness of Humanity. It's all the horrible stench of misogyny. It's all greed and control at their ugliest and most personal.

Just in somehow linked points in past and present.

That's as far as suspension of disbelief will take me, so I'm glad that's as far as we went. There's nothing but a truly unnervingly described...talisman? power focus?...wisely left ambiguous. If one wants a supernatural explanation for these weirdly entwined events so distant from each other in time, there's a way to see that; there's also nothing that requires it to have that explanation, and the horror in the story told is of human origin.

That made it just right for me to read this #Deathtober, and is why I gave it four stars. I found Clem's anguish and confusion horrifying because they're totally relatable. Her child, a new mother herself, is wounded terribly in body and quite possibly irretrievably in psyche. That could not possibly be worse, except evil Author Cooke made it scarier by introducing elements that are outside normal parameters.

Parents of teens strongly cautioned.

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING, sapphic Dutch Gothic horror...my first such...please not last, though

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press
$17.99 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a world where the dead can wake and walk among us, what is truly real?

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the only good thing in Roos’ life, which is filled with sordid backroom séances organized by her mother. That is, until wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop attends one of these séances and asks Roos to come live with her at the crumbling estate she inherited upon the death of her husband. The manor is unsettling, but the attraction between Roos and Agnes is palpable. So how does someone end up dead?

Roos is caught red-handed, but she claims a spirit is the culprit. Doctor Montague, a psychologist tasked with finding out whether Roos can be considered mentally fit to stand trial, suspects she’s created an elaborate fantasy to protect her from what really happened. But Roos knows spirits are real; she's loved one of them. She'll have to prove her innocence and her sanity, or lose everything.

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

My Review: Satisfying sapphic romantic story of a woman who uses legit psychic powers in service of a horrible, harridanly charlatan. Or the story of an impressionable mentally ill young woman in thrall to a horrible, harridanly charlatan who grabs hold of sapphic love to effect her escape from abuse.

Either one fits. Both take us down the very dark, quite chilling paths that Author Johanna ushers the reader down. Roos, our PoV, has never experienced a normal life. It's the second culturally Dutch novel I've read this month that paints a very bleak picture of Dutch life after WWII, though I suppose that isn't exactly a shock is it. What does surprise me is the deeply homophopbic atmosphere Author Johanna portrays...I suppose the patriarchal horror of the world she's limned before our utterly appalled eyes is a big part of that, as the homophobia in question is directed at sapphic lovers.

If I'm to offer you one inducement to exceed all the others to get this book into y'all's hands, I'm going with: Dutch Author Johanna wrote this book in English, about lesbian survivors of a horrifying war in the Netherlands, because she's Dutch, because she's lesbian, and because she's clearly not quite right. How many people can accrete so many out-of-mainstream identities, write a story directly centered in them all, and get it published in the insular US market? And then, topping the high-calorie literary sundae with its obligatory gorgeously red cherry, create the undead/zombie character that twangs your readerly heartstrings with her fullness and pathos? Sweet, dead Ruth...my favorite zombie!

There are no others, just this one.

You can read, and there's a synopsis above this, so you know what's going on. I'm here to tell you if I think Author Johanna did the job of convincing me to invest in her world: Yes. Did she make me think long and hard about how the transactional world cheapens, while defining, human relationships: Better than the Southern Gothics. Roos is a classic Tennessee Williams character, a Blanche Dubois plus agency, with the psychic fragility and serious Love problems; Ruth puts me in mind of a gender-flipped Darl Bundren, articulate, doomed. Did her writing cause me to sit quiet for long moments, committing parts to memory: once, which is once more than most books I read. (It's a spoiler, so I daren't share; the Spoiler Stasi are ever vigilant and quick with their truncheons.)

The unique quality I literally never expect from horror, especially Gothic horror, novels is, here, the pervasive Dutchness of the story. It could not be reset in the US, or England, without losing the special something that kept luring me past my usual guardrails against con-artist faux psychics and fantastical stories of spirit lovers. These are usually the tropes I use as reminders that I have compararively few eyeblinks left and don't want to waste them. Author Johanna, in using postwar, post-Occupation Netherlandish settings, convinced me not to pre-judge these characters. Their long national trauma, their dark personal traumas, their battles faught against real cultural horrors, all formed a gestalt of world and people that convinced me to set my usual intolerance for these ideas aside and consider them as real...to the characters, thus opening the door to my belief as well.

That's a huge achievement for an author I'm unfamiliar with. I'm really pleased to say that I felt the ending was indeed a payoff commensurate with my investment of care and attention.

Brava, Johanna van Veen. Clearly your genesis as the odd-triplet-out was predictive of your sui generis selfhood. I'm eager for more from you.