Tag:

Horror

Review

The Bachelorette Party

by Willy Williams

Agatha Christie’s 1939 And There Were None set the template for the island mystery with its protagonists trapped on a remote isle and stalked by an unknown killer. The arrival of cell phone technology has forced writers to up their thriller game. As with the guests in Sean Doolittle’s Device Free Weekend, the five girlfriends who arrive at Baltic Vinyasa on Isle Blind off the Swedish coast for a four-day yoga-themed bachelorette party must give up their cell phones and other digital devices to the proprietor, Irene. “I wish I wasn’t so addicted to my devices,” confesses Lena. Her sister Tessa, the bride-to-be’s best friend, has another, more secret, motive for joining the party. A true-crime podcaster whose latest episode crashed and burned in the wake of a scandal, she hopes to redeem her career by solving the mystery of the Nacka Four. A decade earlier, four young women, who had traveled to the archipelago for their annual reunion, disappeared, presumed by police to have drowned when their boat was found floating. Tessa suspects they may have been murdered on Isle Blind and is determined to find evidence. But from the moment she steps on the island, her sense of dread grows. While elements of this twisty mystery require a suspension of disbelief (the luxurious hotel is built on a rocky island too barren to support crops yet has plenty of water for hot showers), Sten (The Resting Place) excels at building the creepy horror and chilling tension. Readers who like their thrillers bloody and gory will enjoy this dark Nordic take.

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Review

Departure 37

by Jeff Ayers

In the middle of the night, an airline pilot receives a frantic call from his mother, begging him not to fly in the morning. He is not the only one to receive a call from their mom, all with the same request. In some cases, their mother has been dead for some time. In a tiny town in Maine, a high-school girl named Charlie follows an odd-looking weather balloon to the remains of a military crash from the 1960s, and the pilot was her great-grandfather. The landing of a mysterious aircraft at an abandoned military base ties into a top-secret project of a scientist named Marty, who discovers a unique way to hide planes from radar. Add in the escalation of a mission to drop a nuclear bomb on Cuba at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. All of these random factors convene in this engaging and baffling thriller. The storyline alternates between Marty’s scientific research during the Kennedy administration and the present, when Charlie and another student search for answers. Carson, a pseudonym for Michael Koryta, delivers a terrific blend of horror and espionage that could be frighteningly real.

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Review

Exiles

by Jeff Ayers

Coile, who also writes as Andrew Pyper, passed away in early January, and this tense and terrific novel is sadly his last. A crew of three—two men and one woman—is sent to Mars to coordinate the eventual habitation of the red planet. Machines were sent earlier to create the base where they will live out the remainder of their lives, but the crew arrives at Mars to find no response to their signal. A bumpy ride to the surface and changed lock codes reveal a strange scenario. The robots built the habitat but were attacked by a being with stealth abilities and super strength, and the description sounds like an insect if it had one giant claw and could walk on two legs. As the crew listens to the machines tell their story, it appears that not all is as it seems, and the robots might be homesick for Earth, which would be entirely against their programming. This mix of horror, isolation, and psychological suspense demands to be read in one sitting and forces the reader to ask provocative questions with answers that have profound implications, such as, “What constitutes sentience?” and “What is the price humanity is willing to pay to reach the stars?” Exiles would make a fantastic movie, and fans of Alien or Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow should consider going on this journey.

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Review

The Memory Ward

by Jeff Ayers

Mailman Hank Davies lives in the small town of Bethlam, Nevada, and delivers to the same people every day. It’s predictable and consistent. One morning, he accidentally trips over a tree branch, and one of the envelopes opens, and he can see the letter inside. The page is blank. He secretly opens a couple more letters, which are also blank. When he talks to his wife, Iris, about the mystery, she shrugs it off and reminds him he needs to take better care of himself and not stress over trivial things. After Hank’s accident, his doctor warns him to take things easy. As Hank begins questioning his life and memories, a neighbor comes by in the middle of the night and says, “You can’t trust them. They mean you harm.” This cryptic message sends Hank on a perilous journey, questioning everything and everyone in his life. But if he learns the truth, it won’t set him free: It will destroy him. Bassoff weaves a tale that mixes Ira Levin with the best horror films, where you want to yell at the screen to warn a character of what is about to happen. This novel is an atypical chain, in which the more the story twists, the tighter the chain becomes instead of unwinding. Readers will not be able to put this book down until they learn the mystery behind the façade.

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Review

Nether Station

by Jeff Ayers

Space exploration and the curious pursuit of knowledge might sometimes be the wrong decisions. A wormhole has been discovered in the vast end of our solar system, and after numerous probes only add to the questions, a team of astronauts heads to the region. They take turns monitoring the systems for six months while the others slumber in cryogenic sleep. The wormhole appears stable, and when a probe starts transmitting a signal over four years later from our nearest star system, the hope is to make this a way station for travel between the two galaxies. The six-year journey to the portal is tense and chaotic for the group, but the problems are merely beginning once they arrive, and what they discover will change everything they understand. For Dr. Cammie Skoura, a scientific genius who lacks an understanding of social norms, this mission must succeed, no matter the cost. Anderson has created a compelling story with a great cast of characters. The tension builds as the truth emerges, and as the team tries to cope with the ramifications of its discovery, things become more terrifying. Both thriller and SF fans will want to go on this journey.

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Review

Listen to Your Sister

by Henrietta Thornton

Calla, 25, has carried her family forever—they’re a “collectively forked tongue, sharp and dangerous”—and their endless needs drag her from the better life she was building. She’s now a fretful, parenting-advice-reading mom to her lovable but wayward younger brother Jamie, 16. Their father is dead; their mean, drunken mother took off; and middle child, Dre, is no help, despite swearing that if Calla became Jamie’s guardian, he’d be there for them. “Redneck Amish Mormons would be better guardians than you,” says Jamie, in one of the book’s many grimly funny moments, and the pinnacle of his unthinking rejection is driving to a Black Lives Matter protest with a group of friends—when he promised Calla he’d stay home—to give the protesters some illicit help. Jamie has been experiencing bizarre moments, such as when his hand dissolves into a girl’s face and he can feel her insides; more of the same happens at the protest, but no excuses can help Jamie with the law when he’s Black and the protest gets violent. Things are simultaneously going monumentally wrong for Dre, who now must also dodge the police; Calla is once again on the hook to save her brothers from themselves. This is where fear and body horror meet hope and love, the siblings’ lengthy battle for one another stretching their emotional and physical limits and revealing their true selves in all their fury and strength. Debut author Viel really brings the horror here, it’s not for the squeamish at all, but those who can brave this epic fight will be rewarded with a story to remember.

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Review

Deadly Animals

by Willy Williams

Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney has a curiosity about dead things. She keeps a secret roadkill body farm in an abandoned garden near the local motorway and likes to sneak out of her flat in the dead of night to note the decomposition rates of her finds. But on this particular evening in May 1981, she discovers the putrefying body of her classmate Mickey Grant, who disappeared from a local disco two weeks ago. “Ava knew him as an unpleasant boy, a bully you couldn’t walk past without him saying something spiteful. When he went missing, Ava hadn’t cared.” But she telephones the police and, not wanting to reveal her unusual hobby, disguises her voice as Mrs. Poshy-Snob, a woman with a low voice and flawless diction. When he interviews Ava during his inquiries, Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye is impressed by the teen’s intelligence and self-possession. Signs point to a monstrous serial killer at work after Ava and her best friend John find another mutilated corpse, that of a six-year-old boy. In alternating chapters, Tierney’s compelling narrative follows Ava’s and Delahaye’s separate investigations until the two threads braid into a chilling climax. Ava’s precocity may remind readers of Alan Bradley’s 11-year-old amateur sleuth, Flavia de Luce, but Ava uses her morbid studies to escape an unhappy home life, and her territory is not a cozy English village but the gritty, impoverished suburb of Rudery, South Birmingham. Selected as a finalist in the Daily Mail First Novel competition, this astonishing, beautifully written debut is creepy, gruesome, and heartbreaking. One of the best thrillers of the year.

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Review

Graveyard Shift

by Henrietta Thornton

Some books end with a recipe for a cake or cookie that was mentioned in the story along with nice characters in pleasant surroundings. Then there’s Graveyard Shift. No nice characters, definitely no twee surroundings, and the back matter has two lists: one of songs including “Nightmare” by the Rats and “Bury Me with It” by Modest Mouse (you’ll note the vermin theme) and recipes for cocktails including Corpse Reviver #1. The novella drops readers right into the horror, which brings together the kind of eclectic bunch gathered by a smoking habit. These insomniacs and late-shift workers meet nightly for a smoke in the graveyard of a college town’s dilapidated church, where they witness the dumping of something very unexpected and even more horrible than they would have imagined. Edie, the relentless journalist in the group, seeks answers, aided by bartender Theo, who’s witnessed one of the other weird goings on in the town. Called “Hostile Incidents,” these are instigated by so-called Belligerents, the several “weary, mild-mannered” people who have gone “suddenly berserk.” Readers will want to get their shaky hands on Rio’s previous work, If We Were Villains, after this deliciously bizarre, creepy tale.

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Review

Fever House

by Henrietta Thornton

In his acknowledgements, Rosson calls this “a wild fever dream of a novel,” and he nailed it. Where to start with this feral read? Since it’s a horror/suspense novel, the first gory moment seems apt: when a crime boss’s enforcers threaten a man with a drug addiction who owes a payment and the man asks, “What’re you gonna do? Knock my teeth out?” He then goes on to do the job himself, with his own filthy fingers. The enforcers find a severed hand during their work, one that causes those nearby to feel the need to do tremendous violence, the urge “[slithering] in. It floats on a dark wave.” The gore gets more sophisticated—“make me a necklace from the heads of your children…make me a red veil from their latticed veins”—only adding to the supernatural head-spinning. At the same time, we follow the life…if he or it is alive…of a being called Saint Michael, a secret captive of the U.S. government. Saint Michael can sometimes see visions of future events, especially when periodically “encouraged” by the agonizing process of government agents trimming his wings. In counterpoint to the government actions we meet a musician, Katherine Moriarty, who was very successful in her day but now is agoraphobic, her closed-in life perhaps related to the bizarre goings-on elsewhere in the novel. All converge in a terrifying episode in Portland, Oregon, that will surely be a highlight of the movie that is already being made of this terrific novel. Every word here is crafted to impart just the right level of revulsion, fear, and, at times, wonder. Get ready for awards nods for this work as well as comparisons to the works of Cormac McCarthy and Justin Cronin.

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Review

Vampires of El Norte

by Brian Kenney

It’s clear that Isabel Cañas wants all the genres—speculative, historical, horror, romance, mystery—and why not? She does such a magical job of blending them together, as this follow-up to the Gothic The Hacienda makes clear. Set during the Mexican-American War, known in Mexico as intervención estadounidense en México (United States intervention in Mexico), at its core this is a Romance. Nena, daughter of a Texas rancher, and Néstor, son of vaqueros, are young teens who’ve grown up together. During a late-night excursion on the ranch—in search of lost treasure—Nena is attacked by a beast that drains her of her blood. Feeling no pulse and assuming she’s dead, Néstor flees. But Nena survives, and years later, amid the war, they meet again. He’s a member of the calvary, she a curandera, or healer. Their reunion shocks them both, with Nena unleashing her anger at Néstor for abandoning her. But soon there are bigger issues at hand, including attacks from the Yanquis and bloodthirsty creatures lurking in the dark. Compelling, steamy, and with a wonderful perspective on the War, this unique tale is not to be missed.

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