An offbeat and gory, but ultimately unsatisfying, tale of terror.
In Carro’s horror novel, scientists developing a fear-inducing drug start human trials, using themselves as subjects.
Los Angeles resident Mitch Trager’s life is upended when his wife, Wendy, is killed during an armed robbery, just moments after they celebrated her birthday. Five years later, he seems to have moved forward, at least in his professional career. He’s the head of his own pharmaceutical company, Trager Chemicals, where he and a team of scientific researchers are developing a new kind of drug: one that induces fear. But just after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to start human trials, the project’s investors pull their funding and order them to clear the lab, which is housed in a refurbished former psychiatric hospital on an island off the Seattle coast. Determined to continue their work, the researchers decide to spend the weekend in the lab before the electricity gets turned off, and they start the trials on themselves. The same day, newspaperreporter Gillian McCann shows up unannounced to interview Trager for a follow-up to an article about Wendy’s murder. The researchers, who have all shared their deepest, darkest fears and traumas with Trager, try the drug and temporarily experience terrifying hallucinations. As they continue their research, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to tell what’s real and what’s not. Meanwhile, Gillian starts to realize that there’s a hidden motive behind Trager’s project. Carro combines an intriguing premise with classic horror story elements, including a creepy, isolated setting, a ragtag group of deeply traumatized people, an intrepid journalist, and sinister science. The book doesn’t quite come together in a satisfying way, however. Although the characters are mildly entertaining, none are particularly compelling. Occasionally stilted dialogue makes the pacing drag, and readers may find the narrative’s constantly shifting perspectives and timelines to be difficult to track. But the horror sequences are delightfully grotesque: “The wall came to life with movement. Arachnid legs popped into view all over the mass, like spiders escaping a wall of tar. There were hundreds.”
An offbeat and gory, but ultimately unsatisfying, tale of terror.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781735070179
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Tether Falls Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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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