horror

How to Sell a Haunted House – Grady Hendrix

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Louise and Mark are estranged siblings who are forced to find a way to work together in an effort to clean out their parents’ house. That’s the starting point for Grady Hendrix’s novel How to Sell a Haunted House.

Louise and Mark squabble over everything, including how they should deal with the contents of the house: Mark calls it “junk”; Louise is more sentimental. It isn’t until things start to get, well, weird, that the siblings discover they have more in common than they realized.

When Louise arrives in Charleston, she discovers that Mark has already arranged for Agutter Clutter to come and cart away all the stuff their parents, Nancy and Eric, have accumulated over the years–and it’s a lot of stuff. Well, it’s a lot of puppets and dolls. That’s because Nancy was a puppeteer with “a Christian puppet ministry”. Neither of the siblings is really a fan and one puppet in particular makes “Louise’s skin crawl.”

Pupkin was a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling down from his front and two little nubbin arms. His chalk-white plastic face had a big smiling mouth and a little pug nose, and he looked out of the corners of his wide eyes like he was up to some kind of mischief. His moth and eyes were outlined in thick black lines and he wore a bloodred bodysuit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach […]he looked like he’d crawled straight out of a nightmare.

How to Sell a Haunted House is often funny, and also violent and creepy (and this will be especially true if dolls and puppets make you uneasy). And, then, like in the other Hendrix books I have read (My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), it also offers a deeper look at something more meaningful and real than just straight-up scares. (I didn’t find this book particularly scary, although it did, on occasion, make me squirm.)

This book tracks the emotions attached with grief (each section of the book is named after one of the five stages), the unresolved feelings you’re left with when you lose someone unexpectedly, and the notion that when your loved one is gone, all you have left –if you are lucky — are the people you have shared the journey with. If you are really lucky, that is a sibling.

Super enjoyable read.

Penpal – Dathan Auerbach

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Dathan Auerbach’s novel Penpal began life as a series of interconnected stories on an online horror forum, which probably accounts for some of the repetitiveness, wonky timeline issues, and disjointedness.

In the novel, a young boy starts to receive a series of blurry polaroid photos in the mail after his kindergarten class participates in a balloon activity. Each student writes a letter, ties it to a balloon and sets them free. The hope is that whoever finds the balloon will write back and include a photo of where they live. These photos will then be pinned to a map.

The unnamed narrator doesn’t think much of the first photo, but over the coming weeks he receives dozens more and upon closer inspection he discovers that he is in every single one of them. Creepy, right? Well, sure…if it had actually led somewhere.

In many ways, Penpal is a coming-of-age story. The narrator and his best friend Josh spend a lot of time in the woods, a place that is both magical and menacing. Once, the boy wakes up and finds him in the middle of the woods, lost. Once, he and Josh go looking for the narrator’s missing cat and that leads to a heart-pounding segment under a house. Then there’s the crazy denouement, which seems to come out of nowhere. And that was one of my issues with this book. It skips around and twists back on itself and although the narrator tells the reader that “the story I am about to tell you is the product of my own mental archaeology [and] like all great digs, how the artifacts fit together in a timeline is about as immediately clear as which things are important and which are not” I kept waiting for some sort of satisfying resolution.

I think Penpal had a lot of potential. There was a lot of hype surrounding this book – perhaps too much for a self-published debut. Lots of people put it in the extreme horror category. Can’t see that, really. Was I wowed by this book? No. Were there some bits that I enjoyed. Yes. Would I read something else by this author? Probably not.

Paperbacks from Hell – Grady Hendrix

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Grady Hendrix (The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, My Best Friend’s Exorcism) digs through the horror vault in Paperbacks from Hell. Subtitled The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, Hendrix, no slouch himself when it comes to things that go bump in the night, traces the history of mainstream horror fiction and his observations are both astute and often comical.

For anyone who grew up in the 1970s, lots of these authors will be familiar. Personally I was reading a lot of Stephen King back then, and there’s not really a lot about him in this book. Instead, Paperbacks from Hell (mostly) looks at the seedier side of horror, tracing the resurrection of the genre to Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tyron’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.

As Hendrix explains “All three spawned movies and, most importantly, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

Hendrix catalogues the specific sub-genres of horror, everything from satanic cults, haunted houses, explicit sex, creepy kids, possessed animals, zombies and vampires. The book is filled with lots of amusing turns of phrase and enough specifics to make a horror aficionado happy.

Then there’s the cover art. If you have any interest in pulp horror from this period – you should just go right ahead and order the book. It’s a whole lot of creepy fun.

This would make a great gift for any horror reader on your list. And while you’re at it – pick up one of Hendrix’s novels, too. He clearly loves the genre and he’s a great writer.

The Handyman Method – Nick Cutter & Andrew F. Sullivan

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I hadn’t heard anything about The Handman Method when I picked it up at the bookstore a couple weeks ago. I have an endless tbr list and so usually when I am buying books, I am choosing from that list. It’s very rare these days for me to buy books based on a cover or a blurb – unless I am familiar with the author. Nick Cutter (The Troop) aka Craig Davidson (Cascade, Cataract City, The Saturday Night Ghost Club) is a writer I really like, so when I saw this book, I bought it.

In this haunted house story, Trent and his wife, Rita, and their nine-year-old son, Milo, buy a new house in an unfinished subdivision. The house is spectacular but it “sat in moody isolation, a single unit in an otherwise uninhabited vista.” Still, it’s a dream house, the rooms “pristine, as if they had been finished with a jeweler’s attention to detail.”

It’s not perfect, though. Nick finds a crack in the master bedroom closet and it doesn’t take very long for things to start to get very weird.

Nick, a former lawyer (former because he’s on leave from his law firm after a strange incident), decides to tackle the crack on his own and that leads him to The Handyman Method, a YouTube channel where a man called Hank Trent offers his two subscribers advice on how to fix a crack in a wall and “Trent was immediately comfortable with Hank; the video was the equivalent of slipping into a comfy wool sweater.”

But Hank soon becomes an insidious force in Trent’s life and he’s not the only Internet personality who infiltrates the Saban household. Milo has his own YouTube obsession, Little Boy Blue, “a felt-limbed, Muppet-y creature [with a] toolbelt strung around its furry blue waist.”

The house starts to reveal its sinister underbelly, and I won’t spoil that for you. In many ways, it works as a haunted house story – and the backstory is …interesting. It’s hard to read a book with two authors and although Cutter explains in the notes the trajectory of the story, I’m still not quite sure how the whole thing went down.

I will say this, though: The Handyman Method didn’t really have the same emotional heft as Cutter’s other books (I am lumping all the books by Cutter/Davidson into this category.) I didn’t really care about this family as I probably should have and I am not sure if that is a flaw in the story or a flaw in me. There’s definitely some ick and some creepy moments, but I wasn’t blown away.

Brother – Ania Ahlborn

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Ania Ahlborn’s novel Brother is like getting throat punched. Well, I haven’t actually ever been throat punched, but I can imagine what it’s like.

Michael Morrow is nineteen and lives with his older brother Rebel, younger sister Misty Dawn, and their parents, Wade and Claudine in a remote part of Appalachia. Another sister, Lauralynn, no longer lives at home. It is clear from the book’s opening lines that life at the Morrow house is not normal.

Michael twisted in his bed, the threadbare blanket he’d used all his life tangled around his legs. A girl was screaming bloody murder outside….Those girls usually went quiet fast. They’d yell so hard they ended up making themselves hoarse. Them’s the perks of livin’ in the wilderness, Momma had once said. You scream and scream and ain’t nobody around to hear.

It’s hard to talk about this book without spoiling the dark and sinister things that happen in this house, but I think you’ll get the idea pretty quickly. And trust me when I say – this book goes there, all the way there. And even though Michael is a part of it all, he is also an incredibly sympathetic character. His life cracks open a little bit when he meets Alice, a girl about his age who works at a local record store.

She looked like Snow White from Lauralynn’s old book of fairy tales, except a hundred times more beautiful and wearing all black, looking about as modern as the music sounded.

Meeting Alice gives Michael a sense of hope. She reminds him that the world is big and full of possibility, if he can only find a way to escape his family. But that is easier said than done. The major problem is his brother Reb, a quick-tempered drunk who is impossibly cruel and cunning. Reb easily manipulates Michael and it isn’t until the novel’s unbelievable climax that you realize just how evil he truly is.

There are no moments of levity in Ahlborn’s book; it’s as black as pitch. And that makes it sort of odd to admit that I loved it, but I really did. Despite the atrocious acts committed by Michael, I just wanted him to find a way to escape. I watched him struggle to make sense of his life and if anyone was deserving of a redemptive ending, it was certainly him.

He was starting to see how he could separate himself from the responsibility of the things he’d done in his life. The fear. The manipulation. The sense of duty that had been beaten into him.

In the sections focused on Reb, we are provided with a glimpse into how his own experiences have shaped him. It doesn’t actually make him any more likeable, though. Claudine, the book’s most reprehensible character, has a horrifying backstory, too, but I really didn’t like her.

Brother is a pulse-pounding, emotionally resonate and horrifying novel and I highly recommend it…if you have a strong stomach and aren’t prone to nightmares.

The Taking of Jake Livingston – Ryan Douglass

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Jake Livingston, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Ryan Douglass’s debut novel The Taking of Jake Livingston, can see ghosts. Mostly ghosts are harmless, at least in Jake’s experience. They live inside death loops and can’t really interact with the world of the living.

There are several theories for why death loops happen. Mine is that the people who end up trapped just didn’t see it coming, so their minds got stuck in a glitch. As opposed to some people who did see it coming, because they brought it on themselves. Maybe ghosts who killed themselves get more autonomy when they cross over.

For Jake, an outsider and one of the only Black kids at St. Clair Prep, real life is more problematic than what’s going on in the afterlife. His only friend is Grady, who is nothing more than a “long lasting accident,” and his single-mother is a pilot who is often away for two weeks at a time, leaving Jake at home alone with his older brother, Benji.

Then there’s Chad, the school bully and “one of those rugby dudes who can’t mind his own business. Chews his gum extra loud and throws his voice in your face when he speaks. Just to be heard.”

When the boy who lives next door to Jake, Matteo Mooney, turns up dead, Jake’s life gets more problematic than it already is. That’s because Jake knows who is responsible for killing Matteo. It’s Sawyer Doon, a student who had gunned down several students at Heritage High. Doon is unlike any ghost Jake has ever encountered; he can make things happen in the living world.

Douglass wisely allows readers a glimpse into Sawyer’s life by way of diary entries and by doing so he becomes less a malevolent ghost and more of a troubled teenager who is bullied and traumatized until he can’t take it anymore. While little glimpses into his life in no way excuse the violence he commits, at least they offer some explanation.

I can’t say that I really loved The Taking of Jake Livingston as far as reading experiences go. That said, Jake was an interesting character and I was really rooting for him as he started to make some new friends, one a potential romantic interest. I do think the book has insightful things about friendship, bullying, school violence and as it’s a debut, I would certainly say Douglass is a young author to watch out for.

Harrow Lake – Kat Ellis

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Lola Nox is the daughter of acclaimed horror film director Nolan Nox. It’s just been the two of them since Lola’s mother, Lorelei, disappeared without a trace. Lola likes to think that nothing can spook her, but one night she comes home and discovers her father lying in a pool of blood. As he recovers, Lola is sent to Harrow Lake to stay with her maternal grandmother.

Harrow Lake is where her parents met and also the place where Nolan filmed his most famous movie, Nightjar. It’s a weird town which depends on its celebrity for revenue, hosting a week-long festival each summer to give fans of the film the opportunity to check out the locations. The man who picks Lola up at the airport tells her to “never go into Harrow Lake woods on a moonless night, or the trees might mistake you for one of their own.”

All sorts of weird things start happening to Lola in Harrow Lake. First her suitcase disappears and she has to go around town dressed in the costumes her mother wore in the movie. There’s no cell service or working landline. The townsfolk are strange, although she does meet Cora and Carter, a brother and sister whose mother was once friends with Lorelei. If things are off-kilter for Lola, they’re even more wackadoodle for readers.

Harrow Lake is haunted by Mister Jitters. Cora tells Lola that

Mister Jitters lived alone out in the woods with no family, no friends – kind of an outcast nobody wanted to know unless they were in the market to buy what he was selling, you know? He hid his moonshine in the underground tunnels that run all around the lake, but he got caught in a cave-in when the land shifted in twenty-eight.

Apparently Mister Jitters survived by eating human flesh “so he started hunting for people to drag back to his lair to eat.” This legend is legitimized by the fact that every so often, people go missing in Harrow Lake.

There’s a lot going on in Kat Ellis’ book. Family drama and secrets, repressed memories, and imaginary friends who may not be all that imaginary are just a few of the elements that ramp up the tension. It’s a lot, I have to admit, and some of the time I wasn’t even sure I knew exactly what was going on. Lola is a character to root for, though, and the book is definitely a fun read if you are a fan if things that literally go bump in the night.

The Weight of Blood – Tiffany D. Jackson

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The Weight of Blood is my third novel by Tiffany D. Jackson. (Allegedly, Monday’s Not Coming). It’s the story of Maddy Washington, a high school senior with a big secret: she’s biracial. Her father insists that she do everything possible to keep this a secret, but one day in gym class, an outdoor run catches her in the rain and soon everyone knows.

It’s not like Maddy had friends anyway; she’s odd. She wears poodle skirts and musty old sweaters, doesn’t have a cell phone and only watches old black & white movies. But when the secret that she’s been hiding her ethnicity from others gets out, the bullying ramps up. In a town that is already racially divided, the pot gets stirred even more.

Wendy decides that in order to calm things down two things should happen. 1. Instead of having a Black prom and a white prom, there should be one integrated prom and 2. her Black boyfriend, Kenny, the school’s star football player, should take Maddy to the prom. Her intentions seem sincere, but she doesn’t count on her best friend Jules’s plans for revenge after a video of her throwing pencils into Maddy’s hair goes viral and she gets into trouble.

Maddy is a sympathetic character who longs for the mother she believes died in child birth and who does her best to make her father happy, even though nothing she does seems to satisfy him. Kenny is counting the days until he can get away from his father’s relentless demands. Wendy is counting on Kenny to take her away from her impoverished life. What no one is counting on is for Kenny to develop feelings for Maddy.

If any of this sounds even remotely familiar it’s because The Weight of Blood is essentially Stephen King’s Carrie with a racism twist. I think if you aren’t familiar with Carrie you’d probably enjoy Jackson’s book, but I kept seeing Brian DePalma’s movie in my head.

Gallows Hill – Darcy Coates

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When Margot Hull’s parents, owners of Gallows Hill Winery, die suddenly, they leave their estate to their only daughter, Margot. She hasn’t been to Gallows Hill in over a decade, and has, in fact, not had any contact with her parents in many years. Raised by her maternal grandmother, Margot knows nothing about wine and very little about the property that has been in her family for generations. Now it’s hers and she has to decide whether or not she wants to keep it.

Her parents’ manager, Kant, takes her to Gallows Hill after the funeral and thus begins a very long, very slow story about the house and its bloody history. Gallows Hill “rose above her, broad and dark and heavy with shadows” and Margot feels nothing when she first sees it again. She has no memories of the place and there is nothing personal inside that connects her to its many rooms.

Darcy Coates’ Gallows Hill is what I would call an old-fashioned ghost story. It doesn’t take very long for things to start to go awry, but Kant doesn’t bother to tell her about the house’s menacing history that first night. He makes her a cup of coffee, tells her that he was the one who discovered her parents and that’s about it.

Margot’s first night in the house is marked by a few creepy discoveries: a strange life-sized effigy in the living room, a house with many halls and rooms, a lock on a window in what she assumes had once been her room, a mirror which reveals her face with

“skin [that] had shrunken and puckered. Swollen wrinkles spread over the cheeks and forehead. The eyelids had peeled back. Her eyes were swollen round orbs, barely fitting inside the sockets, bulging and bloated and swallowed in a sick gray tinge. Her lips were shrunken away from the teeth, exposing grimacing yellow bone and gray, pulpy gums.”

It takes a long time for Gallows Hill to reveal its secrets, and for patient readers who like a slow burn…good enough. But for me, the story wasn’t scary, the house wasn’t scary and Margot – a sort of mousey character to begin with – just wasn’t all that believable. Because the action doesn’t really ramp up until the last third, the first two thirds is a lot of Margot creeping around using her phone’s flashlight, being scared of just about every sound she hears.

It’s too long, but I think many readers would likely enjoy it.

Near the Bone – Christina Henry

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Mattie and William live in a remote cabin on a mountain. It is clear early on that Mattie is afraid of her husband; she can easily read his “ice-chip” eyes and anticipate when he’s going to hit her. There are rules to their existence on the mountain and Mattie knows not to break them. It is also clear, early on, that something is not quite right in their marriage. Mattie is having flashes of another life and she is staring to contemplate escape.

William is not the only threat in Christina Henry’s novel Near the Bone. One day, while out checking the snares, Mattie finds a dead fox. A closer investigation reveals strange tracks – bear, maybe – in the snow, almost “like the bear was walking on its hind legs like a person.”

William and Mattie set out to find and kill the bear, but it is clear that whatever is out in the woods is not any normal predator. It’s also when they come across a hiker in the woods, the first person besides William that Mattie has seen for as long as she can remember. Even more disconcerting, the man indicates that Mattie looks familiar to him.

Near the Bone is a straightforward story of one woman’s desperate attempt to escape the monster she lives with and the monster that lives on the mountain. We don’t ever really get to know enough about either of them for the story to feel high-stakes. The book is marketed as horror, but it isn’t scary. At all. And it’s not really a thriller, either.

It tells you something when all the praise included on the book jacket and inside pages is for other books by the same author. This is a story where the faceless monster is more sympathetic than the human monster.