Summary
Nevill’s stories are full of tight interiors, narrow minds, and entities that slip under a reader’S defenses. The Redemption of Morgan Bright suggests that our treatment of the vulnerable never changes. Or if it does, it’re only for the worse.
The title of Malfi’s latest novel sets expectations of Stephen King or Norman Rockwell’S Americana. Small Town Horror defies assumption.
“Family Annihilator” is the most memorable story in the collection, and even darker than its title suggests. A retrospective arc details the making of a cursed film in the nineties, while in the present day, the lone surviving member of the cast works toward a remake.
Lost Man’s Lane is the kind of horror novel “they’re used to write. Carson manages to tie off each strand in a neat and emotionally satisfying bow. The best of the stories benefit from a life well-lived, with a shared focus on grief and mortality.
Fans of Gothic fiction will feel immediately at home in Midnight Rooms. Imagine Jane Eyre or Rebecca as rewritten by Virginia Woolf. The disorienting flow of language makes Midnight Rooms one of the most remarkably written books of the year.
Only Stephen Graham Jones could get away with this. A first-person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of.age memoir about the making of a serial killer. It should be received with the same ire and disgust as American Psycho.
In Mystery Lights, the American Southwest is a stage for slippage between reality and the weird. The violence is harsh and unflinching but refreshing in its honesty.
Each entry in the Clown in a Cornfield trilogy has been bigger and stranger than the last. The Church of Frendo is the unpredictable climax to an inimitable trilogy.
The House of Last Resort is the perfect balance of the personal and the political with which to survey a genre that has always ricocheted between those two poles.
The House of Last Resort is horror that goes hard but never forgets to be fun. This Wretched Valley follows four intrepid fools into the deep Kentucky woods.
Among the Living is fast-paced, compulsive, and suitably horrifying. Kiste reins it in masterfully, never worrying too much about the mad logic of the situation.
The Haunting of Velkwood reads like a literary double negative, a brand-new thing emerging from the overlap of Twin Peaks’ suburban uncanny and the melancholy nostalgia of The Virgin Suicides. The novella is rapid and raw and unburdened by plot complexity, but there’s something so endearing about both the book and its innocent monster that you can’t help but cheer them on.
