A glorious bundle of horror stories that readers will find entertaining and unnerving.
Parent offers tales of terrifying and potentially deadly happenings, set around the October 31st holiday.
In the opening story, “Russian Dollhouse,” high school freshman Kit reluctantly takes her younger brother trick-or-treating. Her mood brightens when she runs into Jordan, a sophomore she has a crush on. She’ll happily go anywhere with him, even if it means venturing inside an abandoned house, where other kids reputedly went missing decades ago. Unexpectedly, that house has new decorations for the holiday—almost as if it’s trying to draw in unsuspecting youth. All 10 of this book’s tales unfold on or near Halloween; some include trick-or-treaters, although not all of them are harmless kids. For example, Carlos in “Keeping Up Appearances” runs an armed crew that goes door-to-door and demands much more than candy. However, when they knock on the door of one especially odd family, they get a very unwelcome surprise. These somber tales cover other October happenings, as well, including Mischief Night (traditionally the night before Halloween) and a haunted hayride. The cast, too, ranges from naïve children and a candy-swiping eighth-grade bully to a spouse who’s starting to regret his illicit affair. The longest story, “Dia De Los Muertos,” is also the best, featuring a U.S. Army gunner Russell Thompkins who’s AWOL in Mexico. As locals celebrate the Day of the Dead, his post-traumatic stress disorder dredges up memories of a Taliban assault during his second tour in Afghanistan. What happened to him back then, and what’s been affecting him ever since, is truly unspeakable.
Over the course of these tales, Parent hits on several reliable horror tropes: Creepy houses stir up anxiety, the telling of scary stories begets more frightening realities, and trick-or-treat bags and pillowcases hold hidden terrors. The collection features several unlikable characters who arguably deserve their grisly fates, but there are just as many that will elicit reader sympathy. Eleven-year-old Danielle, for one, has an understandable fear of alligators in “A Not-So-Scary Halloween,” and a holiday in Orlando, Florida, with her relatives puts her on high alert. Most of the stories trek into grim territory and contain violent, often grotesque imagery with lots of chunky bits, spurting blood, and biting teeth. There’s humor in these tales, as well, but it’s of a dark variety that complements the horrific goings-on, as in “Pulp,” which follows a film club’s Halloween party that—for one teenager, at least—becomes a real-life horror movie. Overall, the book is a fun read, and horror fans will appreciate its numerous nods to classic genre films (some of the players even share names with famous directors, actors, and cinematic characters). Parent also skillfully generates suspense with deft descriptive passages, as in the story “Rain”: “Lightning flashed through the house, casting Dad’s shadow long and thin up the wall and over the ceiling. Thunder followed quickly, crashing so violently that it rattled the picture frames hanging on the wall, knocking one askew.”
A glorious bundle of horror stories that readers will find entertaining and unnerving.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798336822137
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Corpus Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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