Striking characters drive this worthwhile batch of unnerving stories.
Everyday people become entangled with unavoidable terrors in Kane’s collection of creepy tales.
The book begins with “Past Is Prologue,” in which Marcus vows to marry Rufina, a slave he’s completely fallen for. But their love blossoms in Herculaneum, the ancient Roman town that readers know Mt. Vesuvius will doom. Many of the 12 stories that follow are plays on familiar figures or horror scenarios. “The Last Bride” takes place in early 17th-century Hungary, where a certain Elizabet Bàthory makes a connection with a mercenary who goes by the name of Dracul. The titular “Suzanne” finds a potential romantic interest in police officer Jericho as the two bond while holed up in a local police station during a zombie apocalypse. The author offers a few selections that stray from more common genre tropes; “Dokkaebi” features a 1400-year-old shapeshifting goblin from Korean mythology. The author builds solid foundations for these tales, from the mood-setting environments (“Before Iraq, he never noticed the various shades of green sported by the aspens, oaks, walnuts, and other leafy trees of West Virginia. Soon the green would change to a blaze of yellows, oranges, and reds”) to the well-drawn casts. The characters include couples in unstable marriages; a ginseng hunter and his estranged surrogate father; and a popular doctor of theology alongside his president-elect son. Kane’s unadorned prose rarely lingers on the violent bits; his straightforward approach occasionally results in tales that, even with monsters in the mix, aren’t so scary. Still, he delivers shocking turns, whether in the form of a surprise ending or a character’s unexpected revelation. Galal’s black-and-white artwork accompanies each story, illustrating such haunting moments as grieving in the falling rain and recalling images from a fuzzy memory.
Striking characters drive this worthwhile batch of unnerving stories.Pub Date: May 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781087963365
Page Count: 280
Publisher: C2 Visionary Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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