CHILDREN OF THE FOG

San Francisco’s fog conceals madness, murder, and demonic intrigue in this lurid horror novel.

Lizzy Gardner has the perfect San Francisco life, complete with a high-paying job as a wealth manager, a swanky downtown apartment, and a devoted boyfriend named Tom. It all unravels when she has a horrific nightmare about a young woman being disemboweled, only to see news reports the next day about an identical girl who has been found dismembered in Golden Gate Park. Lizzy intuits that the dream and the murder are somehow connected to her brother Dylan, a drifter, dream interpreter, and occasional psych-ward inmate. The runaway junkies whom Dylan hangs out with have been having unsettling visions of a Dark Lady, her ghoulish, corpselike minions, and a giant cat; the apparitions have prompted a rash of overdoses and suicides. A fresh encounter with the Lady’s hypnotic minion sends Lizzy into a nervous breakdown; she starts wandering the streets and has a psychotic episode at work. Dylan takes Lizzy to a prophetess, who clarifies their predicament: Lizzy must allow the Dark Lady to take possession of her body—or Tom will be killed. Anderson’s yarn is a tense, psychological horror story in which the lines between dreams, delusions, and reality blur and otherworldly villainy feeds on characters’ very human sinfulness and guilt. It’s also an eerie portrait of San Francisco, from the sterile Financial District skyscrapers to the seedy Tenderloin. Anderson’s richly atmospheric prose is punctuated by gory violence and horribly vivid evocations of the macabre: “The grin…was so revolting, so smeared-looking. As if her grandmother had been munching on flies, their black bodies caught in her teeth behind her pursed and bloodless lips. There was a cunning hunger in that grin, quivering, vulgar—a hunger for her.” Yikes.

A haunting supernatural thriller blending splattery carnage with creepy derangements of the soul.