Mary: an Awakening of Terror

Let’s talk about Mary: an Awakening of Terror, by Nat Cassidy. This book, about a middle-aged woman going through perimenopause, is written by a man. A straight cisgender man, even. Nat is aware this might be weird, and he talks about it before we even start the story (and again at the end). I can’t say that as a man he perfectly captures the experience of middle-aged women. He only partially captures the weirdness of menopause and the female midlife crisis (both of which I have some experience with). But it’s a good effort and I enjoyed this book a lot. Unless you love romance, you’re not gonna see middle-aged women featured much in books and movies. They’ll get supporting roles but the stories are rarely about them. This story, and I give it a lot of credit for this, is definitely about Mary and a slew of other women her age. It’s wholly centered and focused on their feelings and experiences and it works to represent them in real and individual ways.

So anyway, on to Mary’s story. In a weird twist of fate, I am almost exactly Mary’s age as I write this. I’m a few months younger (we’re both a few months shy of 50) but way farther than her in the menopause journey. Mary has just begun to feel the joy of hot flashes, poor sleep, brain fog, irregular periods, and irritability that herald the menopause years. All of this really sucks but it’s also very “normal” and Mary’s doctor is zero help. She’s afraid to tell him about her more unusual symptoms–vivid nightmares, fits of blind rage, and really specific hallucinations. Every time she looks at a woman too close to her age, she sees terrifying images of damage and decay. It happens when she looks in the mirror, too, so that’s fun. 

This is her daily background noise–lonely apartment, dead-end job, no friends, intense and frequent hot flashes, terrifying hallucinations. Still, it’s her life and she’s doing her best to live it on her own terms. Until her boss lets her go, which means she’ll probably lose her apartment. As Mary is trying to figure out how to get a new job and stay housed, her Aunt Nadine calls from Arizona, begging Mary to come take care of her. Nadine says she’s dying but she’s probably just lonely. Nadine kinda sucks to live with (she sucks a lot to live with) but . . . she’s family, and it’s not like Mary’s got anything else going on just now. 

So Mary goes home to Arizona to take care of Aunt Nadine for a while and maybe figure herself out. And the horror begins almost immediately. I’m about to give away one key plot point so spoilers ahead! You’ve been warned! Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know! Okay, here’s the spoiler: one of the main things Mary figures out is that in addition to being herself, a quiet bookish woman, she’s also inhabited by the soul of a local serial killer who used to target middle-aged women. This explains a lot about those face-melting hallucinations, as well as a few other things that started happening when she got back to town.

Okay, spoilers over. Without giving anything else away, it turns out Mary’s hometown has a dark history and is super haunted by terrifying ghosts with bloody clawlike fingers and bloodsoaked pillowcases over their heads. Crazy stuff starts to happen and Mary herself might be responsible for some of it. It’s all horrific and violent and confusing but it also does push Mary to find her own courage and power. Will she once again let life knock her down, surrender to the invisibility that takes so many aging women, or will she rise up and force the world to see her? 

This book is full of women struggling to be seen and valued. Some of them try to rebel, some try to be useful to those in power, some try to smile through it all and lean on other women, some are fiercely bitter and independent to the last. The story is relentless in this way; it’s entirely about women and it’s entirely about the ways the world totally fails to recognize and value them no matter what they do. This is a kind of depressing but vital aspect of the book because it makes you empathize with and root for pretty much every single female character even though some of them are actually pretty villainous. 

In spite of the dark themes of misogyny, this book is full of dark humor and exciting bloody horror scenes. Mary is personable and funny. Aunt Nadine is awful but also funny (and smart). A lot of the action is brutal and creative and satisfying in the way of classic ‘80’s slasher films. (Just for a taste of the humor, at one point Mary is literally saved from death by a hot flash.) I love it when horror stories can use a sense of campy fun to help us deal with dark and depressing issues, and this book does it well. It’s a fun book that horror fans will really enjoy even if you know zip zero about menopause and care not at all about middle-aged folks and their struggles. It will entertain you while giving you a bit of a new perspective. And if you know menopause intimately and know the struggles of middle-age, you’ll know exactly how Mary feels. 

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This Wretched Valley

This is a Trex book review for This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer.

I genuinely don’t remember where I saw this book first. I think it was in the free magazine from my public library. Anyway, it was on my to-read list for a while since I have a fondness for books where nature is trying to kill everyone. Fiction or non-fiction, I love a book where man’s hubris is checked utterly by nature. The book opens with the remains of four bodies and an abandoned Jeep being found on the side of the highway in rural Kentucky. From there we go back to who those four people used to be and how they ended up as a confusing set of remains.

Clay is a graduate student in geology at the University of Kentucky completing his dissertation using LIDAR technology to map rock formations. He finds what he believes to be an uncharted rock wall in Kentucky. With hopes to finish his dissertation and also turn this discovery into a career mapping climbing locations professionally, he plans a field excursion out to the wall. He brings in a fellow graduate student in his program, Sylvia, to help him research the location. Her research is in the relationship between native plants and geology. Clay also recruits his rock-climbing friend, Dylan, who recently received a sponsorship and is excited to be the first person to set climbing routes on this virgin rock wall. Dylan’s boyfriend, Luke, and his dog, Slade, come to belay for Dylan. On their way to the site, they stop at a diner for a last meal of sorts. The waitress tell them that the patch of forest they’re headed for is dangerous. People who go in don’t come out the same if at all. Obviously, they go anyway. From the get-go, things start to go wrong. Slade is scared and acting oddly, every plant Sylvia sees is poisonous, there is no sign of the huge rock formation they’re heading for, and the gps is misbehaving. Obviously, they push forward. 

Eventually, they reach the lip of a valley and see the giant rock. It’s everything Clay and Dylan hoped for. Slade has to be dragged into the valley. The rock has a magnetism to it, especially for Dylan. Drawn by the rock, Dylan wakes up before everyone else the next morning and starts to free climb. In her haste, she leaves the tent unzipped and Slade escapes. When Luke wakes, he’s beside himself. It’s unlike Slade to stray but he’s nowhere to be found. After an hour of looking, Dylan convinces Luke to quit. Now Luke is filled with resentment at her seemingly callous attitude toward their dog, ingratitude at the sacrifices he made to be there, and general disregard of his emotional state. Dylan is a woman possessed by this rock and her dreams of making it big as a climbing celebrity. Clay is somewhat inexplicably bumbling and brooding. Sylvia, at this point, seems to be the only person who is acting pretty normal and is doing responsible research and documentation. Slade remains missing. Dylan is mapping yet another climbing route and is high on the wall when disaster strikes. She falls and multiple of her clips fail. Dylan’s weight pulls Luke off the ground and the rope swings her like a pendulum into his body. Luke’s head smashes against the wall. She cuts them both down and it’s immediately apparent that Luke needs medical attention at a hospital. He is concussed and has seriously injured both an ankle and a wrist. This is when things really start to spiral for the group. 

From here, the book takes a slightly different course than I expected. From the first pages, it’s clear to the reader that the physical location is wrong or evil or…something. What was surprising was that in addition to the supernaturally evil locale, there are evil ghosts. So this is a place possessed. The ghost character and backgrounds for them are really interesting additions to the story. The interactions between our main characters and these ghosts are creepy and mind-bending. I wondered though if there were too many different eras of ghost. Clearly the idea is that the place is evil and hungry, corrupting and capturing the souls of those who dare enter. There is ultimately no explanation for why. I get it, it’s supposed to be like an eldritch evil that defies explanations of men but I still wanted more. Similarly, some ghosts were more evil and in charge than others but didn’t really have much more background. Why did the oldest ghost seem to date back to the civil war? That doesn’t seem long enough unless the civil war itself was a catalyst somehow. Another thing that bothered me some was how the ghosts and the land seemed to be sharing the corpses. It was an interesting idea that they were both feeding off the fear and death but the different mechanisms left something to be desired. Like why did Sylvia get turned into a skeleton but Clay was left largely intact? I appreciated the variety but felt there was just a tiny bit more explanation or exploration needed. Anyway, this is mostly me poking holes in an otherwise perfectly good and satisfying horror novel. There is plenty of gore, suspense, disgust, betrayal, and visceral sensory detail here to give you at least mild nightmares. 

What Stalks the Deep

What Stalks the Deep is the third in T. Kingfisher’s “sworn soldier” series featuring Alex Easton. I highly recommend all three and they do relate to each other, but each of Alex’s adventures is complete in itself, so you don’t absolutely have to read the first two to enjoy this one. All you need to know going in is that Alex has been invited to America to help a friend, Doctor Denton, who was instrumental in defeating the mysterious evil Alex encountered in the first book. The way the invitation is worded, Alex is pretty sure Denton has encountered some new mysterious evil and Alex is not one to abandon a friend or shy away from battle. So off to America it is!

If you haven’t read any of these, “sworn soldier” is pretty much its own gender identity in Alex’s home country of Gallacia. Alex was born female but took on this new identity and pronouns (ka and kan) when ka became a career soldier. In Europe, this is generally accepted as “one of those quirky Gallacian things” and people are curious but not alarmed about it. Fellow soldiers tend to recognize one of their own breed in Alex. Americans, of course, know jack-all about this tiny European country so mostly Alex just poses as a man instead of trying to explain Gallacian language and culture. None of this is vital to any of the stories, I just find the whole thing (and Alex’s wry comments on Gallacia) interesting and amusing. I also think it’s a cool way to present the unique life experience and bond soldiers often have. Gender aside, it is its own thing, you know?

The real meat of this story is that Denton’s cousin has disappeared while exploring an abandoned mine his family owns, and there’s reason to think strange things are afoot. Finding out requires exploring the mine itself, and in the process Alex has to constantly remind themself (kanself? Kaself? I don’t speak Gallacian) that ka is a badass soldier who is absolutely not claustrophobic or scared of being deep underground. Nope. Nosiree, Alex isn’t scared one little bit and ka’ll die before ka’ll say otherwise. I love Alex. 

As they explore the mine and nearby town, the friends do indeed find something mysterious and maybe evil. I don’t want to give anything away, but the “sworn soldier” series (and a lot of Kingfisher’s weird tales) generally lives in that muddy area between natural and supernatural and this book definitely lives in that area. Kingfisher takes a lot of inspiration from classic authors of weird tales, like Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen, and this particular one draws inspiration from Lovecraft and his stories of ancient gods and buried mysteries. I enjoyed, as I usually do, the updated and creative spin she put on the classic theme. 

I haven’t reviewed a Kingfisher book for you yet so you couldn’t possibly know this, but I love her work. I can always count on her for engaging characters and solid storytelling, and though she leans more toward haunting and fairytales than gore, she’s great at creating a spooky atmosphere and has a real knack for creative and disturbing imagery. I haven’t read a book of hers yet that I didn’t enjoy, and I find Alex Easton’s adventures especially delightful. Plus the cover art is awesome. I listened to the first two books on audio* but someday I’ll have to go buy physical copies because the artwork is just that good. 

*I don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks but I recommend these if you’re into that sort of thing. All the books are written in first person as if Alex is telling us the story, and Avi Roque does a great job conveying Alex’s sense of humor and soldierly stoicism while preserving ka’s unique identity. 

Until next time . . . as always, embrace the darkness and read more books.

Blindness: a Review

A couple years ago I had this idea to read a whole bunch of books by Nobel Prize for Literature winners. I chose a couple from each decade the prize has been awarded and I actually got through the first three or four authors on my list before my life exploded a bit for entirely unrelated reasons. By the time everything calmed down enough for me to focus on hobbies and projects again, I’d cooled on the Nobel project and eventually I started this one instead. 

Still, I haven’t entirely forgotten the Nobel thing and when I noticed Jose Saramago’s Blindness on the horror shelves at Antigone Books, I decided to put it on my pile. It seemed like a nice intersection between my old project and my new one. 

It was a nice thought. Too bad I didn’t enjoy this book at all. It is dark, though, so I’m determined to review it. 

I should mention the writing style first. Saramago has a very distinctive style of run-on sentences and walls of text. He doesn’t separate speakers so when he writes conversation it can take a second to figure out who’s saying what. He also barely uses any punctuation to show speakers’ inflection, so an extreme cry of pain would read the same way as a sigh of love or directions to the bathroom. I didn’t have trouble understanding the story but it faded quickly into a drab monotone that I hated quite a lot. People swear up and down that the run-on sentences sound great in Portuguese and I even read that it’s not an uncommon style choice in Portuguese and Brazilian writing. I can actually buy this. Some style choices just don’t translate well, so I can buy that the flat monotone of the English text is actually melodious and flowing in the original. Even though it didn’t work for me, it’s definitely unique.

Okay, moving on. The book’s plot is essentially that everyone in the city is going blind, one after the other, for no discernable reason. We, as readers, are following several of the first to be afflicted as they’re shunted off to quarantine (along with one blind man’s wife who pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband). None of the characters have names because, and this is stated early on, now that they’re blind they have no use for names. They’re all called things like “the first blind man” and “the woman with dark glasses” and “the doctor’s wife.” This is both kind of annoying and probably deeply thematic.

Anyway, this blindness is both mysterious and extremely contagious so no one wants to actually enter the quarantine building to clean or deliver food or help these newly blind people learn to get around, so they mostly stumble around in confusion and shit on the floor. A lot. Both these aspects are described at length throughout the book. Symbolism!  The sighted wife is very worried about what will happen if she’s found out (Will she be taken away from her husband? Will she become a slave to the needs of her blind bunkmates?) so most of the time she doesn’t try to help make any of this better for anyone. Some of this is thematic and some of this is, I think, Saramago being very old and sexist. (We’ll get back to this in a minute.)

As the quarantine building becomes overcrowded and order breaks down both in the building and the surrounding city, a faction of criminals hijacks the food supply and demands everyone’s valuables in exchange for food. When the valuables run out, they demand sex from the women of each unit in return. The non-criminal men kind of protest but let the women bravely volunteer to be raped for the good of everyone. The night before their rape appointment with the criminal faction (the criminals pick a different dorm room each night to send them women), the women generously have sex with a bunch of their male bunkmates. The sighted wife totally watches her husband have sex with another woman and is . . . super compassionate and pleased that he’s happy. 

Then Saramago describes pretty explicitly the gang rape of a couple of different sets of women, the subsequent murder of the criminal faction’s leader, and the burning down of the quarantine building. At this point, the quarantined prisoners realize all the guards have either fled or become blind and they’re free to leave. Our main characters wander the city looking for food and checking on their former homes, being cared for by the sighted wife. Various symbolic things happen, including more shit everywhere and a lot of beautiful cleansing rain. Some of the symbolism feels a bit ham-handed, if you ask me. Then, at the very end, people begin to spontaneously regain their sight. Their recovery is exactly as sudden and mysterious as their blindness. The end.

But back to Saramago’s sexism, partly because it feels like a lot and partly because it’s a symptom of the larger way the book failed for me. Saramago was born in 1922 and even though he didn’t write Blindness until 1995 (and he was famously very communist and atheist and enlightened and whatnot) he writes with a creepy old-timey view of women. The sighted wife is unfailingly selfless and not interested in leading these people in any overt way. So is the “girl with the dark glasses” who, in spite of being blind, every man there can tell is the hot one. Saramago also never lets us forget “girl with the dark glasses” was also very slutty before she went blind. It doesn’t seem to matter, he just wants us to know. Later in the book, her sluttiness is redeemed (I guess) because in addition to taking a motherless boy under her wing, she falls in love with an old man who feels like he might be a creepy stand-in for an aging Saramago himself. Women are used heavily as symbols of hope and redemption and compassion in this book, but none of them feel like real human people. For me, it deeply undermined Saramago’s themes. How can I agree “sometimes people act this way” and feel moved by Saramago’s message when some of his pivotal moments feel like Saramago’s weird fantasy? Also, of course the women are redeemed by pure motherly selflessness. I guess even atheist communists have trouble leaving the Madonna/Whore binary behind.

The whole allegory seems to be about how fragile society is and how easily it breaks down into violence and selfishness. I don’t really disagree with this point but if I did this book would totally fail to convince me, mostly because I didn’t feel any complexity here. Only a couple weeks after reading Blindness I read a book about the New Mexico State Prison riot, and I couldn’t help but see deep parallels with what Saramago was trying to represent. In some ways, the prison riot is exactly the kind of sudden madness and breakdown of morality Saramago is writing about. But the actual prison riot was full of the kind of complex behavior even the worst human disasters are always full of–people murdering fellow inmates, police standing by and letting it happen, inmates trying to help friends, people trying to escape, inmates sneaking a friendly guard out the front door. Saramago’s story was simplified, of course, but to me it felt so simple the characters didn’t feel real or human anymore and I couldn’t identify with anything. 

If I were very young and new to stories exposing the “evil within us,” as I always think of it, I might have been more moved and impressed with this book. I was assigned a dozen similar books over my years at school, though, and have read many since then. If I had to rate them all, this would be pretty low on my list. 

Embrace the darkness. Read more books.

Silent Girls

Eric Rickstad’s The Silent Girls is the first in a trilogy, apparently. If I hadn’t figured that out already, the major cliffhanger at the end would have tipped me off. Thing is, by the time the cliffhanger happened I was a wee bit tired of this book so I’m not sure when or if I’ll find out the end of that new mystery.

This is one of those super gritty mysteries that keeps you guessing because everyone in it is definitely awful enough to murder someone. Even our hero, honestly. His defining features are his tragic backstory and the fact that he drives drunk a lot. Enough that I expected it to become a plot point somehow, with him swerving all over the snowy winter roads while fully loaded, but it turns out that drunk as Frank is in this book, it doesn’t affect much of anything.

But anyway, back to the tragic backstory. Once upon a time Frank was on the police force of his small Vermont town, probably with a good career ahead of him. Then his sister and her husband were brutally murdered, leaving a miraculously unhurt (but now orphaned) baby daughter. Frank quit the force and became a private detective, partly so he could focus on raising his niece and partly because of his guilt over the whole situation. When the killer arrived, Frank’s sister was at the house waiting for him to show up; he was late for the millionth time because he was busy having meaningless casual sex with some gal. To be clear, no one was expecting this killer to show up. Frank wasn’t neglecting his duty or intending to put anyone in danger, he was just being normal amounts of douchy and self-involved. Still, he feels incredibly guilty about it and now that his niece is off at college and the horrible killer is about to be paroled, it’s been on Frank’s mind more than usual. 

None of that is the mystery. It’s very much going on in the background and it’s very important to Frank but the actual mystery is mostly unrelated–a local teen has gone missing and the cops are starting to worry that the disappearance is related to a handful of others over the last few years. This is a mystery novel so of course they’re connected, but the missing girls are from widely different areas and seem to have nothing in common. Frank and the town’s two detectives, Harland Grout and Sonja Test, have a devil of a time connecting the girls and figuring out who might want them dead. 

I don’t want to give too much away but I will say this mystery deals heavily with teen pregnancy and the abortion debate. It doesn’t try to take a definitive stand, which I appreciate, it just touches on various sides of the issue as the mystery is unraveled. I enjoyed the complexity there and the mystery was kind of farfetched (as most mysteries are) but it was interesting and had some dramatic moments and exciting twists. It was exciting to watch these detectives connect the dots, and the mystery was unraveled slowly in a way I enjoyed.

None of the characters quite held together for me, though. Rickstad was quite descriptive and gave us plenty of hooks into their psyches but none of it felt quite coherent. Sometimes it felt like jumping from scene to scene without quite enough to connect them. Each scene might be dramatic and emotionally fraught, but they don’t quite build up into the compelling whole I was hoping for. This is especially true of Grout and Test–we’re given all these tantalizing little peeks into their personal lives but none of it really goes anywhere. Sonja Test, for example, has become a fanatical distance runner and it’s heavily implied there’s a backstory to this new compulsion. I was intrigued by this and hoping we’d find out what’s going on with her but we never do. These dropped threads were disappointing.

Sometimes I browse through reviews after I finish a book and I noticed someone complaining about editing. They were pointing out small annoyances like a person with makeup running down her face in one paragraph and then further down the page described as not wearing any makeup. I’d noticed some little things like that, too, and it got me thinking that lack of editing could explain most of my issues with this book. Take the same characters and mystery but tighten up a few places, expand others, have the detectives interact with each other more (they often seem to run on parallel tracks even though they’re on the same case) and the whole book might have felt more real and compelling. 

It does seem like this was Rickstad’s first novel so it’s possible these rough edges are smoothed out in the sequels. And that cliffhanger is quite a doozy, relating heavily to that tragic backstory I talked about, so I might have to give the second book a shot sometime. Eventually.

Embrace the darkness. Read more books.

Ring Shout Review

This is a Trex review for Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout.

Although nonfiction about the Klan is full of horror enough, this book takes the existence of the real Klan and layers on the supernatural. What if some klansmen were literal monsters? Inhuman creatures with supernatural strength disguised as humans? Ring Shout tells the story of Maryse Boudreaux and her two deadly compatriots as they hunt and grapple with white-hooded monsters in 1915 Macon. They are watched over and aided by Nana Jean whose magic called them to her to fight evil. She brews magical water by channeling the energy of spiritual “shouts” through herself. Maryse wields an otherworldly sword that was forged by slaver chiefs who channeled their regret and anguish into its’ smoky blade. She is the champion chosen by three spirit “aunties” who Nana Jean doesn’t trust and calls “haints.” There is a new and powerful entity in Macon who has pushed into Maryse’s dreams – Butcher Clyde. His plan is to use the film “The Birth of a Nation” to create a portal for an even more powerful and destructive entity than himself to enter the world. There are a lot of supernatural and frankly freaky as hell things in this book. The author does some truly terrifying things with mouths and teeth. The pacing and action feel more fantasy but the body-horror and supernatural entities make this a decidedly creepy (in the best possible way) book. 

As compelling and surprising as the supernatural elements are, just as rewarding were the historical and cultural details. Nana Jean is a Gullah woman and speaks in Gullah on the page. The history and significance of shouts is explained and revered as one of the key factors of the magic in the book. One of Maryse’s friends, Chef, was a Harlem Hellfighter in the war. Disguised as a man, she fought. Now she kills monsters with homemade bombs charged with Nana Jean’s blessed water. One setting of the book is a jook joint owned by Maryse’s love interest. It’s hard not to imagine a more formalized version of the jook from Sinners and this one also gets beset by monsters so I feel fine drawing that comparison and using the movie set in my imagination. On her journey to defeat Butcher Clyde and what hell he is trying to bring forth, Maryse seeks out The Night Doctors. They are terrifying beings based on the historical atrocities committed against enslaved peoples in the name of medicine. It’s not every day that a book teaches me so many things and does so while weaving it all together seamlessly.

Ring Shout is a skillfully written book. It’s entertaining and thought provoking at the same time. While transporting you to a different historical time and place, it also imagines a world where the oppressed have magical tools at their disposal to combat injustice. Not everyone, but some. But so does the enemy. In fact, one of the inciting incidents for everything going on in the book is the release of The Birth of a Nation. In actual history, that movie triggered a resurgence of the Klan. This is also so in the book but some of those human Klansmen also become monsters because of the racist, hateful power of the film. At the climax, Maryse must decide whether she wants to take that power for herself and avenge her people or reject Butcher Clyde’s proposal. Would the end justify the means? Would vengeance make anything better?

Ring Shout got national acclaim and it was well deserved. If you haven’t read it yet, change that. It’s short, action packed, compelling, and even though there were some spoilers in this review, the journey is more important than the destination with this one. Just because you know where it’s going doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy how it gets there. 

Song of the Sandman

I finally read the sequel to A God in the Shed. That first book by J-F Dubeau brought us a gruesome yet hypnotic unnamed god and a whole slew of secret societies trying to bend that god to their own purposes. The book ended in a confrontation that killed several people and didn’t resolve much. 

The second book, Song of the Sandman, picks the story up not long after that, following several different survivors and delving deeply into the lives of the Sandmen, the society/cult that now (just barely) has the god contained. 

Venus Mackenzie, the girl who actually kept the god in her shed in the first book, has been wandering Montreal looking for someone who can help her find it and try to kill it. As she does that, she has to contend with her guilt and pain over her part in this mess while knowing she’s still intimately connected to the god.

Daniel, whose father succumbed to the god’s lure in the first book, has gone to find his mother and brother. He’s really not sure how he feels about them, seeing as how they’re the backbone of the Sandmen and seem to think that if they just learn to control the god they can turn it into a benevolent deity who grants all their wishes. Meanwhile, they have the god locked up in the basement. They’ve trained a girl to sing such perfect lullabies that she can lull the god to sleep for days at a time. Of course, every time it wakes up it starts killing every cult member it can get its hands on, so it seems they’re a long way from their dream of transforming the god of death and hate into something less murdery. 

Oh, and the girl who sings? She’s a prisoner herself, kidnapped years ago and also kept in the basement pretty much any time she’s not singing. The Society of Sandmen seems pretty mean for people dedicated to bringing about a peaceful utopia. They don’t seem to know they’re the bad guys, but I’m pretty sure they’re the bad guys.

There are other threads to the story, equally intriguing and complicated, but I’ve given you a good taste of what you’re in store for. The book switches back and forth between characters, whose paths sometimes cross in surprising ways, as the books weaves toward a grand confrontation between several characters, the Sandmen, and the god everyone wants a piece of. As the second book in a series that will clearly continue, we reach the end with many unanswered questions, but the end is dramatic and satisfying, with a couple big twists that make us excited for the next chapter in this saga. 

In fact, this book’s grand finale felt more fully set up and more fully satisfying than the first book’s finale. In spite of its sprawling transitional vibe (the second book of a trilogy is always the trickiest) it was pretty enjoyable. I especially enjoyed reading about Alice, the girl with the power to sing the god to sleep. Her story arc and her psychology are especially interesting as she wrestles with understanding she’s merely a tool for the cult leader while also exploring her power over and kinship with this god, her fellow prisoner. This series seems to be getting better with each book and I’m excited to read the next one.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

White Horse

Today I present you White Horse by Erika T. Wurth. I got this at Op Cit in Santa Fe. Their website is sad and basic but in real life the store is a legit hoard of used books. Literal piles of books everywhere. I think I got this book in the crime section? Or mysteries? Their official horror section is tiny, as it is in most used book stores, so I browse other sections. This mystery promised “disturbing visions,” which sounded horror adjacent. The lady at the register said it was a great book. Then she paused and said “but it gets really dark. Are you okay with dark?” Yes, I’m okay with dark. 

Kari James lives in Denver but she grew up in Idaho Springs, a tiny mountain town west of Denver. A bunch of her family still lives up there, including her cousin/best friend, Debby. Debby is pretty white but is fascinated by the native ancestry of her cousin’s side of the family, so when she finds an old bracelet with native symbols on it, she brings it to Kari. It belonged to Kari’s mother, you see . . . 

Turns out the bracelet is cursed. Or blessed, maybe. It’s definitely connected to Kari’s ancestors and just having it around triggers powerful visions of Kari’s mother and sometimes other ancestors. Kari is not into this at all. Her mother disappeared when Kari was just two days old and Kari has always assumed she just couldn’t handle motherhood and ran off. After her mom ran off, her dad regularly drank himself into a stupor and eventually got into a car wreck that caused serious brain damage; Kari spent most of her young life helping nurse a father who could barely dress or feed himself and as far as Kari’s concerned, it’s all 100% her mom’s fault for bailing on them.

But these visions are showing something way more complicated than what Kari’s believed and whenever she goes to the real life locations her visions show, Kari finds another complicated piece of her mother’s history. While the visions are also terrifying, showing her mother bloody and screaming, being followed by a stinking monster with vicious claws, Kari makes time to follow them up, often with Debby at her side for moral support. 

A lot of this book is about Kari’s personal growth, her coming to terms with her own past mistakes, her own emotional blocks and unresolved issues, her sometimes selfish and dependent relationship with Debby. Kari is an interesting character and an unreliable narrator. Sometimes we can see her problems way before she sees them in herself, and this is sometimes frustrating and sometimes fascinating, while allowing us to connect with Kari on a deep level as she wrestles her demons.

It also turns out to be a murder mystery. Pretty early on, Kari realizes her mom probably didn’t just run off to party or whatever, but it’s not clear what actually happened to her. It turns out Kari’s mom was heavily involved with the American Indian Movement, which means the FBI might have been out to get her. But the movement also had some dangerous people on the inside, so maybe one of them did something to her. Then, on top of these suspicions, Kari realizes her own grandfather was not such a good guy. Both Kari’s visions and her brief encounters with the man make him a suspect, too. 

Both the visions and the real life mystery come together in dramatic fashion at the book’s climax. Kari’s final showdown is a blend of fantasy and reality as she faces both her mom’s killer and the demon of her visions at the same time. It might be a bit over the top with its technicolor dream sequences but it was also pretty gripping. 

This was a pretty serious look at the way generational trauma and larger political issues can play out on the messy individual level, especially for indigenous women. I think it does a good job and represents a point of view that is really pushing to be heard right now. I’m not sure when I’ll be posting this review but it turns out I’m writing it on Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day.* Seems like an especially good day to be thinking about a book like this. Though it might not be technically horror this book is definitely dark, and it’s a good one to read if you’re looking for alternate perspectives and dark books by indigenous authors. 

*Turns out it took me months to post this, as you can see. I write reviews as I read but I don’t post them in any particular order.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books.

Miss Pinkerton Review

According to Wikipedia, Mary Roberts Rinehart was the American Agatha Christie. She certainly didn’t achieve Christie’s heights of fame but then again, who has? Agatha Christie famously disappeared for a couple of weeks in 1926, adding immensely to her mystique as a mystery writer. Rinehart did nothing so dramatic, but she was almost shot and stabbed by her longtime chef in 1947 and that same year went public about her battle with breast cancer, which was a pretty bold move for the times. She was also a trained nurse and a war correspondent on the front lines of World War I. She seems worth remembering for all that, if not for the long list of books she wrote. Her life sounds terrifying and it seems like she was a badass.

Many of her books are available on Project Gutenberg but it doesn’t look like Miss Pinkerton is among them. It’s actually the second (maybe third?) in a series of four books following Hilda Adams, professional nurse and secret assistant to the police. I picked this up in a used bookstore and though Miss Adams keeps referring to former cases I wasn’t sure whether that was referring to actual previous books or just a plot device. Miss Pinkerton (also called The Double Alibi) works as a standalone book but it’s neat to know there are really more stories about her.

Anyhow, it’s 1932 and Hilda Adams is a home care nurse. The police, especially Inspector Patton, sometimes arrange for her to snoop around and find clues while she’s nursing at at a suspect’s home, and this is what brings her to the elderly Miss Juliet Mitchell’s stately home. Her good for nothing nephew has just accidentally killed himself while cleaning his pistol. Or maybe he killed himself. Or maybe he was murdered and it was made to look like an accident or a suicide. Nurse Adams is helping Patton figure out what happened while she nurses Miss Juliet.

What follows is a guessing game of motives and opportunity. The elderly servants are hiding something, but what? Miss Juliet is hiding something, too. So is Paula, the dead nephew’s girlfriend. She’s sniffing around awfully hard for information. And what about Miss Juliet’s doctor, hoping Miss Juliet will leave him money in her will? And the family lawyer in charge of that will? What really happened is anybody’s guess as our heroine sneaks around looking for clues and talking to suspects, all while actually nursing Miss Juliet and secretly meeting with Inspector Patton to report. 

It’s pulpy and superficial but it’s a fun mystery and Nurse Adams is pretty plucky and independent for the 1930s. It’s also fun to read mysteries from earlier eras where so many people don’t have phones or cars. It’s a whole different feel, you know? Also, it was a little weird to realize that Nurse Adams’s medical kit has reusable glass vials of pills and a hypodermic needle she just washes and reuses forever. Of course she does, the 1930s weren’t full of single use gloves and disposable needles. But that’s what I love about reading old stuff–I always find little tidbits I’d never considered. 

Anyway, Rinehart was cool and probably worth trying if you like old-timey stuff. I don’t see the Miss Pinkerton series for free but Project Gutenberg has other mysteries she wrote, plus some of her non-fiction writing. Or you could cruise used book stores for pulp novels that haven’t yet crumbled to dust. You might get lucky and find the sequel, The Haunted Lady. But I’m hoping to find it first.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack; embrace the darkness and read more books.

Red Rabbit Review

My kid picked this book out for me. I was browsing the horror shelves, one of my favorite pastimes, and she asked “if I pick a book will you read it?” Yes, of course. Pick anything and I will totally read it. So she handed me Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I do not regret saying yes to a random horror novel. Red Rabbit was a delightful book. 

It reads very much like a fairy tale or folk tale, with lightly sketched characters guided by fate on an epic quest, but with a distinctly pioneer American flavor. We’re mostly following a posse of folk on a quest to kill a witch up in Kansas. There’s a pretty large reward for anyone who can take her out. Everyone in the posse has their own agenda, and only one old man, Tom Goggins, really cares about killing the witch. Because he is a self-taught witch hunter looking to make a name for himself. Best friends Moses Burke (Civil War army surgeon) and Ned Hemingway (well dressed cowboy) are just along for the ride, Rose Nettles has recently lost (killed?) her husband and can’t run their homestead alone, and Benito Cortez is running for his life after an ill-advised affair with a lawman’s wife. It seems fate has brought them together, along with the silent orphan they all just call Rabbit. 

While this posse is traveling north into Kansas, having some weird and dangerous adventures along the way, the witch they’re hunting is tracking them along with everyone else trying to get at her. Sadie Grace is her name and she doesn’t seem particularly evil but she sure does have magic powers. She’s not worried too much about who’s coming to kill her, not even this posse seemingly thrown together by fate. She can handle whatever’s coming at her. She’s not too thrilled about the two so-called U.S. marshalls headed her way, though. One of them seems pure evil and pretty powerful. Him, well, she’ll have to be prepared for his arrival. 

Despite its charming folk tale style, this book has a lot of dark and gory bits. That demonic U.S. “marshall” does some incredibly cruel and gruesome stuff, and our posse of heroes meets ghosts and cannibals and more on their journey. This book has an exciting blend of charm and horror, blending threads of American and Mexican folk magic with some old world European tropes my pioneer ancestors could have brought with them across the ocean. It was a fun read. 

It also looks like Moses Burke gets his own separate novel after this quest is done. There’s a free snippet of Rose of Jericho at the end, featuring him. I’ll have to pick it up next time I go book shopping. If it’s anything like Red Rabbit it will be a great story. 

As always, follow us here or on Substack; embrace the darkness and read more books.