Category: Books

Book
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman

Series
Book 4 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
A heroin smuggling ring drops off a valuable shipment in a shop owned by one of the old friends of the Thursday Murder Club. The plan is to have a handler pick it up the next day, and he’ll be able to make a tidy profit just by keeping quiet about it. But a few days later, he’s found murdered in his car, and the box of heroin has gone missing. The club resolves to find out who murdered their friend, and the case will end up involving every one of their increasingly growing group of colleagues and acquaintances, as well as getting them involved with drug smugglers, art forgers, online scam artists, shady government organizations, and murderers with multiple levels of experience.

Notes
This series started out aggressively cozy, just on the verge of being insufferable, but managed to win out on charm. The stories have gotten better with each installment, finding a good balance between a cozy charming mystery story where you’re hanging out with a bunch of familiar characters, and making them all feel like real people with real concerns instead of just a bunch of stereotypes about the elderly.

The Last Devil to Die is unquestionably the best in the series, both for keeping up with a twisting plot and also giving the reader time with each member of a cast of characters that’s grown to unwieldy proportions. But most of all, it deals with the death of a main character across several chapters that are extraordinarily well written. It’s sentimental without being maudlin, respectful without being cold, and all handled in a way that feels honest and not manipulative. It’s an extended series of emotional gut punches that feel earned in a series that’s always shown affection and respect for its characters.

This feels like the last book in the series, but Osman quickly assures readers in the afterword that it’s not. He’s just wrapping up the first four-book run of the story and taking a break to concentrate on a different series of mysteries. I think it’s a good call, and it’s definitely going into a hiatus on a high note, reminding us why we’ve gotten to feel like these characters are friends, instead of growing tired of over-exposure.

Synopsis
An excellent wrap-up to the first four books of this series, balancing the obligations of a twisty murder mystery with readers’ desire to spend more time with characters they’ve gradually gotten attached to.

Book
William by Mason Coile

Synopsis
Henry is a robotics expert living in a refurbished Victorian house with his pregnant wife Lily, a genius programmer and tech company CEO. Their marriage has become strained, mostly because of Henry’s crippling agoraphobia that keeps him trapped inside the house. Out of loneliness, he’s been going into the attic to work on a secret project: a highly-advanced, self-aware robot named William. But he suspects that something has gone horribly wrong with his creation, as William is cruel and manipulative, as if he’s been possessed by some dark, nihilistic force of destruction. When Lily brings some of her work colleagues to meet Henry, the four soon find themselves trapped inside the high-tech house with the evil robot and whatever dark entity wants all of them dead.

Notes
This is a very quick and easy read with short, propulsive chapters; I sped through the first several chapters one night and finished it on a short plane flight the next day.

Unfortunately, the dialogue is clunky and amateurish, the characters are extremely shallow, most of the conversations are frustratingly circular since the author doesn’t want to give too much away, and the events are still almost completely predictable. After less than 50 pages, I’d already predicted everything that was going to happen, and I was about 95% correct.

There are a couple of good horror story moments, and I was compelled to reach the ending without ever being tempted to abandon it. On the whole, it feels like the novelization of an episode of a Syfy Channel horror anthology series that almost certainly never existed.

Verdict
A quick but disappointing read, with just enough forward momentum, and just enough of an interesting concept at the end, to keep it from feeling like a waste of time. It’s too bad that so many of the concepts are so familiar that it becomes completely predictable. People have been doing smart-house-out-of-control stories since at least 1999, and of course evil robot stories for far longer, but the idea of combining them with ghosts and demons is a premise that might’ve worked if the execution had been stronger.

Book
Unruly by David Mitchell

Synopsis
The comedian goes through the history of the British monarchy, from the beginnings of post-Roman rule through the reign of Elizabeth I, devoting a chapter to each monarch and a brief description of their rise and rule.

Notes
How much you enjoy this book depends on how much you like David Mitchell. In case that seems obvious: I’d been expecting this to be structured like a history book, covering a subject I knew (or remembered?) very little about, but given a lighter touch to keep it from being so dry. Instead, it’s a bit more like having Mitchell go off on tangents, personal anecdotes, peevish observations about modern life in the UK, and his opinions on the concept of monarchy, while hovering generally around the topic of the monarch in question.

Which isn’t necessarily bad, because he does manage to deliver exactly what’s promised by the book’s premise and cover. And to Mitchell’s credit, while he doesn’t go into much depth about the monarchs — or more accurately, he’s inconsistent in how deep or shallow he goes within each chapter — it’s highly unlikely that I would’ve remembered the details if he had. I’ve already forgotten the names of most of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, and I still can’t remember the difference between the various Henrys, Edwards, and Richards.

I’m not sure who exactly is the target audience, though, besides fans of David Mitchell. Everything seems to be written for audiences in Great Britain, since there are frequent mentions of areas of England, or personalities, politicians, or stores, with the assumption that they don’t need to be given any more context. It also seems to assume that some parts of English history or some monarchs are universally known, to the degree that I wonder whether he’s expecting too much of non-English readers, or if I simply wasn’t paying attention in European history classes. I felt dumb for not knowing that William the Conqueror was the first Norman king of England, and I’m still not sure whether I should feel dumb or just feel American.

However, it did finally give me a high-level understanding of the differences between Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Plantagenets, and Tudors; as well as an extremely high-level understanding of the overall timeline and where events like the Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, and the War of the Roses fit in.

Verdict
Does exactly what it says on the cover, and if you’re a fan of David Mitchell, you’ll probably enjoy it a lot. For me, it was slow reading (but excellent for helping me fall asleep!) and even without being bogged down with too many dates or location names, still managed to have a lot of info that I’m sure I won’t retain. What I will retain, probably, is the equivalent of what British children learn in their first couple years of history classes.

Book
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Synopsis
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House to begin her employment as governess for the wealthy Pounds family. She finds herself not terribly impressed by her employers or their children. But she continues on, learning more about the house, the family history, and the servants, while tolerating the misanthropic or sullen behavior of the children, the jealous cruelty of Mrs Pounds, and the lecherous intrusiveness of Mr Pounds. Her account culminates in the surprises she has planned for the family and their high-society guests during an extended Christmas celebration.

Notes
I don’t want to say too much about this one (but of course, will anyway), not because it’s unremarkable, or because it has significant surprises beyond what’s promised in the title and the premise, but simply because it so confidently and completely speaks for itself.

Knowing that it was so popular, and that it’s appeared on so many lists of recommended books, I went in unsure of which route it was going to take. Was it going to be a mass market black comedy, aimed at a very specific type of reader who grins as if they’re being naughty and describes it as “deliciously wicked?” Was it going to take the Lemony Snicket approach, with an understated account of the horrors and cruelties of those wacky Victorians, along with fun facts like “can you believe they used arsenic in their make-up?!” Or was it going to be a more lurid horror novel, excusing its scenes of explicit graphic violence with the reassurance that it’s okay because you see, it’s all satire?

As it turns out, there’s aspects of all of those, but it’s too insightful and confident in tone to settle into any one of them. I could immediately tell that I should stop making assumptions and just let it do its thing, when I read its excellent opening chapter, with its perfectly evocative first sentences:

Ensor House sits on a stretch of moorland, all raised brows and double chin, like a clasp-handed banker about to deliver terrible news.

I meet its mullioned eyes from the open phaeton, rolling across the moor to my destiny, my breasts jiggling in my corset.

It adopts the format of Victorian fiction, and it makes frequent explicit references to Dickens, but it never comes across as a simple parody. Instead, Feito uses the narrator’s mindset of psychopathy to make her a dispassionate observer of a society that is deeply cruel and built on a foundation of gross injustice, hidden under a performance of sophisticated manners and upstanding morality.

The subject isn’t entirely new, but the voice is. Notty isn’t presented as an anti-hero or a villain, but as someone who was created by this society and also stands outside of it. As a result, the misogyny, racism, classism, repression, and backwards science — which here, isn’t allowed to be cast as simple ignorance, but as a tool to perpetuate all the existing systems of misogyny, colonialism, and classism — isn’t allowed to be safely compartmentalized away as a product of its time. They’re universal.

Meanwhile, Notty is prone to hallucinations or delusions, and curious obsessions, but she also seems to be the only person capable of seeing what’s actually going on.

As I was reading, knowing that the book had become popular, I kept thinking, “I hope they’re not trying to turn this into a movie, because everything that makes it special is what makes it unfilmable.” But of course, they are. However, it sounds like it’s on exactly the right track, both by having Feito herself write the script, and by the perfect casting of Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty. If it is even possible to adapt what makes the book work, these are exactly the people to do it.

Verdict
A confident take on a premise that could’ve easily gone too far in any predictable direction, but manages to be both insightful and entertaining. Creates a character that refuses to be sympathetic or relatable, in a story that satirizes misogyny but never settles into a simple you go, girl! tone, and still somehow leaves the reader with the feeling that she “won.”

Book
Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

Series
Book 5 in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series

Synopsis
When one of the residents of a small, gated, community in London is murdered, the neighbors are all the most obvious suspects. It became one of Daniel Hawthorne’s first cases collaborating with Scotland Yard since he left the police, and it seems like straightforward material for Anthony Horowitz’s fifth book about the brilliant detective. But Hawthorne is reluctant to give Horowitz much information about the resolution of the case, or about his partner at the time. As Horowitz wonders if he’s even got enough material for a book, he starts to learn that there are a lot of people who don’t want him digging up the past.

Notes
I’ve already been getting increasingly annoyed by this series, but keep getting them because any Anthony Horowitz book is almost always an engaging, fun read. I think this might be the point where the gimmick has finally run out of steam. The book was fine overall; it’s a decent murder mystery, even if the “locked room” component was a little bit of a cheat for most readers, and the resolution was a bit implausible. But while I really appreciated the attempt to change things up a bit with this one, while still keeping the “meta-murder mystery” feel to it, the changes left it without enough of a hook to make it interesting.

The concept behind the series is really clever. Horowitz casts himself as the Dr Watson to a brilliant fictional detective, but describes the case as if everything really happened. So there’s often a neat ambiguity between what’s real and what’s fictional, and he’s describing the process of writing the book and solving the mystery while the story is still in progress.

My main complaint with the series is that Hawthorne is such an abrasive character, without enough eccentricities to make him as appealing a character as Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. That’s not as much of a problem here, but only because Hawthorne is more or less a cipher. There’s barely any characterization at all. And his previous partner is, somehow, even less interesting. Meanwhile, Horowitz has greatly dialed back on setting himself up to be a hapless punching bag, as he throughout the other books, but ends up just mentioning his Alex Rider books over and over again.

Verdict
Still a reasonably solid murder mystery, and I do like the attempt to present the story as a work in progress, taking place at the time of the case and also in the present day. But there are very few interesting characters, and not much of a hook.

Book
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume One by Emil Ferris

Synopsis
This is the spiral-bound notebook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old living in a basement apartment in Chicago with her mother and older brother. She loves monster movies and horror comics, and she wishes that she’ll be bitten by an undead creature to transform her into the werewolf girl that she knows she truly is. When her troubled upstairs neighbor is killed by a gunshot, she puts on her brother’s trenchcoat and hat and becomes a noir detective on a mission to solve the case.

Notes
For years I’ve been hearing this book described as “astonishing,” “dazzling,” “beautiful,” and “profound.” All the superlatives are accurate. It’s absolutely stunning in how it combines images and words in ways that can only exist in a graphic novel, to the degree that neither seems to be a complement for the other; they inextricably linked with each other.

It also tackles some of the heaviest of heavy topics — the Holocaust, racism, homophobia, cruelty, isolation, poverty, murder, grief, guilt — in a way that doesn’t rob them of their weight and impact, but also aren’t too heavy that you want to look away or become overwhelmed. It’s all processed through the mind of a girl who’s extremely intelligent, but has a specific frame of reference (or lack thereof) for everything, so there’s a sense of fascination to it all.

And the art is stunning throughout. Karen copies the covers of her favorite horror comics (they form the chapter breaks), and she loves going to the Art Institute with her older brother and copying some of her favorite paintings. She has synesthesia, and many of the paintings have smells that trigger strong memories for her. Her drawings are mostly done in pencil with cross-hatched shading, often with colored pencil, and sometimes in ink when she’s recounting particularly traumatic events.

Volume One ends on something of a cliffhanger, and Volume Two was just released last year after a seven year delay. I’m eager to see how the story ends, but I think it’ll be a while before I tackle it. As amazing as My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is, it’s felt like a dark cloud of sadness hanging over everything.

Verdict
Undeniably a masterpiece, a look at the dark cruelty of the world and the bright moments of kindness, all interpreted by an unusually imaginative child.

Book
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

Synopsis
Melissa, nicknamed “Mouse,” has been asked by her father to help clean out the home of her recently-deceased grandmother. She travels alone with her dog to the house, deep in the woods of North Carolina, and discovers that in addition to being cruel and abusive, the woman had been a hoarder. As she’s sorting through years’ worth of collected trash, she discovers a hidden diary written by her grandmother’s second husband. It contains an unsettling description of a Green Book that has been hidden somewhere in the house, his encounters with strange creatures in the woods, and a repeated litany that includes the line I twisted myself like the twisted ones. She starts searching for the Green Book that might help explain the man’s descent into madness, and she begins to realize that there is something outside the house at night, trying to get inside.

Notes
This is the first book I’ve read by T. Kingfisher, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. I definitely enjoyed it, but it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

In particular, the tone was so lighthearted that it often felt like it was somehow a parody of itself. Mouse is frequently making wisecracks and half-serious observations about the things that are going on, while the things that are going on are all straight out of a folk horror story. And a genuinely creepy one at that.

It almost seems like it’d be easier to process if it had been so flippant that it was no longer scary. But there are descriptions of being alone in the house at night, with rooms left unexplored, and with strange things outside, that are extremely effective. Especially if you’re reading it in bed in the dark.

At the same time, there’s a cast of other characters who join Mouse to help her out, going past the role of comic relief and joining in the wisecracks. It almost feels like a self-imposed writing challenge, to put as many elements into the story as possible to completely deflate any sense of tension and isolation, but still somehow make it scary.

The afterword for the book explains that it was inspired by a letter by HP Lovecraft, which was commenting on a real 19th-century horror story called The White People. Some of the character names, plus the format of a partially-remembered account of a lost book, are taken from that story. The Twisted Ones is a really interesting, contemporary take on that format so common to turn-of-the-20th-century horror, where horrific events are described second- or third-hand from letters or journals, stories within stories within stories.

Verdict
It seems like the book simply shouldn’t work as well as it does. Using the tone of something like a Douglas Adams novel to tell a folk horror story feels like it should be a disaster, too flippant to be genuinely scary, and yet I found myself sufficiently creeped out at all the right moments.

Book
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Synopsis
Jason Dessen is a quantum physicist living in Chicago, teaching at a university, and happily married with a teenage son. A contentious encounter with an old friend and roommate leaves Jason wondering about how his life would’ve gone differently had he pursued his research instead of settling down with a family. That night, he’s kidnapped by a stranger, injected with a disorienting drug, and left for dead inside an abandoned warehouse. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a familiar but alien version of his own world, where he’d not only continued his research into quantum entanglement, but taken it to an extreme that he never would’ve thought possible.

Notes
Usually, I can appreciate an author’s talent at making a book propulsive and engaging, even if I’m not entirely won over by its depth. Getting the pacing right for a thriller is really difficult, and it should be respected! And I’m also warming up to the idea of authors taking big swings stylistically, choosing to forgo straightforward, naturalistic writing in favor of making the prose itself interesting. But Dark Matter didn’t entirely work for me.

A big part of it is the writing style, and since I haven’t read anything else by Crouch, I still don’t know whether it’s his style, or if it’s a specific affectation he uses in this book. But there’s a drastically overused tendency to write in sentence fragments.

A few words.

A period.

An adjective.

Another adjective.

And so on.

Separated by lengthy, exposition-heavy dialogue in which characters that all have mostly the same voice will give a layman’s explanation of quantum theory or the layout of Chicago. It is undeniably good for pacing, and I often found myself barreling through it, but it also never stops being distracting.

I can’t really fault the book for its content feeling overfamiliar, since it was written during the initial wave of similar projects, and I’m only reading it now after the ideas have been overused in popular culture.

Multiverses.

Alternate realities.

Sliding Doors.

Everything.

Everywhere.

All at Once.

I feel like I can fault it for taking too long to get to the point, however. The first two thirds of the book are going to feel familiar to anyone who’s ever read or seen a story about multiverses, and it seems to treat the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment as if it were still an idea unexplored in popular fiction.

But the last third has a twist/plot development that I genuinely hadn’t seen coming, and it’s by far the most interesting idea in the book. Unsettling in its implications, took the story in a whole new direction, turned the story from suspense thriller into horror, since I had no idea how the protagonist could possibly get out of the situation.

And that ties into my other main criticism of the book, which is that it’s so completely solipsistic, something it mentions in passing but still doesn’t seem to be aware of how off-putting it is. The protagonist is the most important character in the multiverse, and everyone else is an afterthought. I noticed this the most in its handling of its two women characters, who are both described with respect, but are put into roles where they have no real agency apart from supporting or driving the main character. One of them even mentions that she’s being treated as a prize to be won, which doesn’t patch over the problem but merely draws attention to it.

But in its defense, she (Daniela, Jason’s wife) is also the character who explains why their solution for the book’s unsolvable final conflict is a satisfying one, calling out the very specific choices that do make us unique in an infinite multiverse. I was just disappointed that so much of the book is about her, without actually giving her a more significant role to play.

Verdict
I wouldn’t be as critical of a book that I didn’t enjoy reading at all, and Dark Matter is compelling and engaging, with the last third exploring an idea that I hadn’t expected and I hadn’t seen before. If you read it as an entertaining suspense thriller, the kind designed to hit the New York Times bestseller list and written with the movie rights already in mind, it’s solid. But (at the risk of being too corny) if you look at it too closely, it all starts to collapse.

Book
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Synopsis
A collection of short stories that includes “The Black Phone,” possibly his best-known story because of its movie adaptation.

Notes
Until now, the only piece of Joe Hill’s work that I’d read was his excellent Locke & Key comics with Gabriel Rodriguez. Or I should say, the only piece that I could remember reading, because several of the stories in 20th Century Ghosts seemed undeniably familiar, as if I’d read this collection or, more likely, the stories collected elsewhere.

As the introduction states, the title of the collection is more of a metaphor than a packing list: only two of the stories could really be called ghost stories (“20th Century Ghost” and “The Black Phone”), and many of them aren’t even horror. Instead, there’s a common theme of echoes from the 20th century and its pop culture, presumably many of the things that interest Hill personally: horror in all its various formats, baseball, movies, science fiction, super-heroes and -villains, and, frequently, dysfunctional families.

Locke & Key was brilliant, but it also weighed heavily on me. It always seemed to be straddling my line of comfort and propriety, spending most of its time on the side of fascinating fantasy horror, then unexpectedly hopping over into what seemed like unnecessary cruelty or delighting in its characters’ misery. Hill spends a lot of 20th Century Ghosts jumping back and forth over that line, with stories that are original, imaginative, and masterfully written; that sometimes feel cruel in their lurid descriptions of poverty, learning disabilities, or complete over-the-top contempt for fat people. It’s just odd to be reading a story that seems to be touching on universal ideas, and then suddenly encounter something so needlessly exclusionary.

So it was a brilliant choice to start the collection with “Best New Horror,” which I think is an outstanding (fictional) encapsulation of horror fiction not just as a genre but a fandom. I’d call it a “defense” of horror, but it’s written with the sense of confident assertion that it doesn’t need to be defended. He describes two lurid, boundary-pushing horror stories, but with a sense of detachment, so that it doesn’t give the sense of wallowing in the gruesome details, but giving just enough to leave a disturbing image in the reader’s mind. Then he acknowledges the ways that horror fans are seen as “off” or troubled by people who don’t share their love of the genre, and the ways that the fandom attracts so many tiresome and unimaginative people who do just want to wallow in the gruesome details, with no real sense of artistry. And then he ends with a description of why he loves the genre, why he’s eager to find the boundaries of taste and propriety, and why pushing, pulling, and dancing over them gives the exhilarating feeling of being alive.

Another standout story is “Pop Art,” one of the sweetest and most imaginative in the collection, suggesting a ton of metaphors but never allowing itself to be reduced to just one simple idea. I also liked “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead,” a lost-loves story set during the filming of Dawn of the Dead; “Last Breath,” a good old-fashioned creepy story that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a Ray Bradbury collection; and “The Cape,” which I like mostly for consistently refusing to do what I expected it to do next. One of the best concepts is “You Will Hear the Locust Sing,” a 50s sci-fi-inspired homage to Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but I thought it failed in the execution, giving in too much to pointless contempt for its white trash characters.

Verdict
This collection is incontrovertible proof of Joe Hill’s considerable talent. Far from being “just” a horror writer, he confidently and masterfully switches between tone, setting, voice, time period, and genre; even in the stories that I don’t like very much, the writing is excellent. He has a particular gift for knowing exactly how to end a story: rarely allowing it to settle on just one idea, but stopping at just the right moment, to let you feel the full weight of what’s going to happen next.

Book
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson

Synopsis
After a betrayal and break-up, Ro moves back to her home state of Georgia to start her dream job as an assistant professor of literature in Athens. One day while at a farmer’s market wishing for something magical to happen in her life, she meets the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, selling cupcakes and hand-made soaps and candles from a stall. The two hit it off immediately, and Ro quickly becomes intrigued with the idea of finding everything that’s been missing from her relationships with men, and completely infatuated with someone who seems to be naturally good at everything.

Notes
At the risk of stating the obvious, lesbian romances don’t typically give me anything to work with. So I was surprised as anyone to find myself almost squealing in the first chapters of this book, as Dawson somehow perfectly captures the thrilling feeling of falling hard for someone.

It’s that electrified sense of being simultaneously hyper-self-aware and wary of going too far, but also emboldened by new opportunity. We hear every one of Ro’s thoughts as she goes through all of the stages of a new romance, looking for signs that the attraction is mutual, tamping down sparks of unwarranted jealousy, making sure she’s not falling into patterns of obsessive behavior but then again who’s to say what’s obsessive and what’s perfectly healthy?

I especially love how Ro’s inner monologue hones in on specific phrases and facial expressions in her short exchanges with Ash. It reminded me of when I’ve been crushing hard on someone, and I could leave the briefest, most mundane conversations fully convinced that we’d just engaged in the most sparkling banter.

And because there’s no attempt to hide the premise that this is a horror story, it reads simultaneously like charming romance and suspense thriller. The writing itself gives no hints and definitely no winks to the reader; it is thoroughly the story of a smart, modern woman trying to navigate her way through feelings she’s never felt before. We’re listening to Ro making perfectly understandable and even intelligent choices at the same time we’re looking for all the warning signs and red flags that she’s blissfully blind to. Everything she describes as quaint or charming seems like it could be turned into something ominous and terrifying. The feeling of excitement and danger that comes from first kisses and first sexual experiences is something the reader feels viscerally, because we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop and things to turn horribly dark.

The book is short, but it’s not slight so much as mercifully succinct. It’s also surprisingly funny in places, and it’s enjoyable to read a character in a horror story actually being smart, even when she doesn’t always have her wits about her. And even though we spend the entirety of the novella inside Ro’s mind, the worst moments still maintain the distance of fiction, reminding the reader that this is intended to be a fun horror story.

For other squeamish readers: the gruesome stuff is implied more than fully described, and it never felt as torturous as the other books I’ve seen it compared to. Still, I advise sensitive readers to check for content warnings available online. I don’t want to give anything away here, because a lot of the excitement for me came from having no specific idea how dark the story was going to get.

Verdict
I loved it. It’s the horror-story premise of “don’t go into that door!” played out as a story of romantic infatuation that’s clever, smart, genuinely charming, and embarrassingly (but also delightfully) familiar.

Book
The Watchers by AM Shine

Synopsis
Artist Mina is driving through a desolate part of Connemara when her car breaks down, right on the edge of a dense, dark forest. She goes into the woods looking for help. After dark falls, she hears bloodcurdling shrieks from all around, and she finds a stranger urgently rushing her into the only safe place after dark: a plain concrete bunker with a huge glass wall, and a bright light that shines all night to let the unseen creatures of the forest watch the human residents.

Notes
This was another book that was a recommended read in folk horror. I’d say it does qualify as a modern take on folk horror, but I’m wary of saying too much more about it, for fear of ruining whatever it is that makes it work.

And I say “whatever it is” because I’m still not exactly sure how it works. I started the book and was immediately concerned that I was going to have to abandon it, because it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten. It was full of these almost-florid descriptions of things that somehow completely failed to evoke a solid image of anything. It felt as if it were mimicking the action-description-tangential memory rhythm of novels just because that’s what novels are supposed to do. But I thought that’s just the prologue, I’ll see what happens once it gets started.

Then I thought that I was only into chapter 2, but I already disliked the protagonist. The book establishes her as the type of person who takes out a sketchpad in public and stares intently at strangers while she draws them without their permission, and those people are just the worst. And then a few chapters later, I was thinking that the premise seemed kind of implausible, and there had to be a more straightforward way to get a solitary woman alone in a forest. And then I thought that I’m several chapters in, and I still can’t picture the main setting for the bulk of the book from its descriptions, and the only reason I’ve got a mental picture of it at all is from the trailer for the movie adaptation from last year. And then I thought I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, and I can already see the ending coming from a mile away. And then I thought that I was barely halfway through the book, and it seemed way too obvious so there must be something else going on. And then I realized that I’d read three quarters of the book and it was way past my bedtime and I should go to sleep. (And immediately picked it up again and finished it the second I got home).

It’s got this propulsive energy that doesn’t so much make up for my criticisms as it renders them completely irrelevant. I still can’t say I feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters in the slightest, and yet I was desperate to know what happened to them. Does it even make sense for me to complain about clunky passages when I was this compelled to keep reading?

Verdict
One of the damndest experiences I’ve ever had reading a book. My blurb would be “a folk horror suspense thriller in the post-Lost age.” I don’t even know if I’d recommend it, but my experience wasn’t so much reading it as consuming it whole, gristle and all.