An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.
Supernatural menaces, body thieves, and ferocious killers pervade Allen’s grim collection of stories and poems.
John Starkey, in the tale “Strange Wisdoms of the Dead,” sails a rotting ship out to sea carrying victims of the Plague. Far away from the surviving villagers of Bliss, he can set the vessel afire and burn the corpses. Along the way, however, something else takes the helm, turning Starkey into a passenger with no idea of the ship’s new destination. These assembled short stories feature such spooky conventions as ghosts, a witch, and someone trying to bring a creature to life, but the prevailing theme of this book is body horror—grotesque depictions of torn or modified flesh and impossibly contorted bodies. That’s just where the title story leads, with Aaron Friedrich and his online publication for Owlswick County; he’s always looking for material for his website, and Aaron’s own town of Grandy Springs, Virginia, has an especially bizarre history. Locals like Aaron bear scars on each side of their faces but have no recollection whatsoever as to what caused them. As Aaron inches closer to a terrifying hidden truth, he may prefer to forget all over again. Characters from “Slow Burn” also pop up in the equally gruesome and novella-length “The Comforter,” which takes place in another Virginia town. The story focuses on 13-year-old foster kid Maddy, who’s receiving cryptic notes (“my mom stole your mom’s skin”) stuck to her school desk. Even with someone looking out for her, Maddy may be unable to elude the terrors awaiting her.
It won’t surprise readers familiar with Allen’s work (Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories, 2020) that he doesn’t shy away from violent bits. Descriptions include viscera, teeth (not just in mouths), and tortured limbs of all shapes and lengths. Many passages are outright disconcerting even out of context: “She fills his mouth and plugs his throat, his tongue slapping uselessly against a column that tastes of blood and raw river silt.” The author’s gleefully vibrant prose animates these stories; this also holds true for the collection’s free-verse poetry. The poem “The Windows Breathe” gives life to an old house with “hungry shuddering groans” and a hall that’s “rounded, glistening, so much like a gullet”; “The Sacrifices” makes an abstraction tangible, as “shriveled souls brushed our skin, / like dried leaves.” As in many works in this genre, the monster or brooding presence often reveals itself only at the end or opts to remain ambiguous. This narrative approach injects these stories with nerve-racking anticipation and dread over what may happen to characters like friends Andi and Celine in “Machine Learning,” in which an early-morning casting call leads to a mysterious detour. Owen’s black-and-white digital illustrations accompany each of the stories and poems, though there are only five unique pieces with multiple repeats throughout. These stark images (a monster peeking over a horizon; tendrils emerging from a skeletal chest) nevertheless enrich the dark tales herein.
An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781956522037
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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