This was another ARC from Tenebrous Press, which is doing lots of cool things with horror in the weird mode. Many of the books they put out fall outside my personal taste zone, but I always appreciate the creativity and drive behind them. But this one fell well within that zone.
I am going to struggle to summarize this one because it is… Nebulous. I think it qualifies as a collection of short stories, but all of the stories fit together to create a much bigger story, which is probably why Tenebrous lists it as a novel on the website. The stories are, or the novel is, all set in and talk about the town of Olyoke, built on a swamp in Tennessee, but the Tennessee is arguably not the one we know. Because things happen in Olyoke that do not happen in our world, and no one really seems to question that.
The swamp is full of gray-eyed worms and gray-eyed people who have lived there since long before. Ghosts of people who never died haunt the religious/music theme park. The men who drained swampland to build the town vanished in the night or went mad because they drank the water flowing from a mysterious girl trapped in a tree. And people in the town dream of other worlds where they have other faces, and an approaching cataclysm that is either a cleansing flame or an unstoppable titan was foretold by one of several prophets who founded cults in the town.
It is all capital-w Weird.
And it is not just the subject matter that dodges easy grasp. The way Endwell approaches the writing is squirmy, too. Things are simply left unexplained, such as who the hell “Holly” is, the subject of the theme park that dominates the town’s center. Or why the town is overrun by red-frogs, which also seem to carry a plague?
Then there is the language use. Endwell approaches language in a not-too-unusual manner, except for the (very “now”) flexibility of pronoun use, which comes across at first as quite gender-aware until you meet someone who goes by “it” who might, actually, not be a someone?
Now, I will say that things come together. There are lots of unanswered questions but they are of the sort that really don’t need answers. And the ending, as such, does not leave the reader dissatisfied so much as… In a state of wonder. Dazed, even. Because this collection, or novel, or whatever it is seems to be swirling somewhere above mere storytelling, much as the figure on the cover swirls above the world.
This was a fascinating book. An eminently readable book. And, dare I say, an enjoyable one, if a bit outre. For those who look for stories that avoid pat explanations and neatly tied-up ends, this is definitely one worth pre-ordering.
I connected with Leodora Darlington a few months back through my translation work, and she recently asked me for a comment on her upcoming debut novel, The Exes.
I was surprised and honored by the request, my first ever such. I was also a little nervous, because I’ll be honest: I’m kind of an opinionated old guy and I have increasingly little patience for books that don’t grab me. I was a bit worried I’d have to diplomatically dodge the comment.
It turns out that I had no need to worry. This book was a blast.
The Exes is the story of Natalie—Nat—a young woman who has had a very troubled history with men: namely, all her exes end up dead under slightly shady circumstances.
Now, she’s met a new man with whom she really wants things to work out, despite her promise to herself and her estranged sister to never let her heart go again. As you might expect, things take some rather unhappy turns.
So, right off the bat, you think you see where this one is going, but really: you don’t. This book had more twists than a Chubby Checker album. More turns than a rally race. More surprises than a… You get it.
Yes, it’s a thriller, so you know people die and you will look for suspects and try to suss out what’s a red herring and what’s not, but this one kept the guessing fresh to the end. I think I remember at least three “Holy shit, really?” moments. The turns do tread a little close to the excessive at times, but everything is just so well structured that it keeps well within the “just go with it” safe zone.
There were two things about the writing that really stood out to me: the depth and reality of the main character Nat, and the way Darlington handled current social issues and trends (modern sexual politics, toxic masculinity, trauma as a driving force in fiction, etc) in a natural and smooth way.
Nat is a mess, but she’s trying, and the way she handles herself and the crazy shit that happens to her just works. She’s aware of her issues and how they exacerbate things. She works to deal with her weaknesses, and falters like all of us, but doesn’t give up or beat herself up when she does. She fights on through the self disappointment and fear and most importantly does not let her mistakes and her trauma define her future. It’s a refreshing way to handle the increasingly heavy reliance on protagonist psychology that is so common in literature today.
Similarly, Darlington deftly weaves in timely social observations in a way that keeps them from dominating the plot and also avoids any hyperspecificity that could date the story in the future.
For example, one of Nat’s exes was a red-pilled manosphere type. Rather than referencing easy identifiers like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, who will one day surely die and fade into obscurity, Darlington just mentions, “[Nat] should have paid more attention to the podcasts he listened to.” A perfectly light touch to offer context without too much restriction.
I have to admit, it’s really hard to believe that this is a *debut novel.* The writing is so tight and smooth, the characters so alive, that it feels like an old hand was at the pen.
In the end, all I can say is that it was a great ride. Clever, fun, and yes, hard in places. There is grief and suffering and cruelty here, too, but also satisfaction. Loved it.
It releases next February, and I really think thriller fans are in for a treat.
I pre-ordered Neil McRobert‘s Good Boy from Wild Hunt Books and apparently they take the “pre” part very seriously, because I got it quite a while before it was officially published.
The cover to Good Boy by Neil McRobert.
I’ve been a fan of McRobert’s horror-focused podcast, Talking Scared, for a while now and one of the biggest reasons is the host’s sincere passion for his subject. He matches it with insight and damned good questions to create simply one of the best interview shows around.
So, when he announced he was finally taking the plunge into authorship, I was there for it.
I am pleased to say that it was the right choice.
Good Boy is a novella/short novel about a man and his dog who team up to keep a small northern English village safe from an ancient evil that feeds on local children. There are obvious touches of classic Stephen King, especially It but also a touch of non-horror work like The Body, but the voice is pure McRobert and above all, it is so obviously rooted in love.
I cannot overstate what a relief that is. Horror as a genre is going through what they call a “moment,” with a flood of lauded authors and works getting big all over the place. But a major element of that is a glut of stories centered around trauma and grief. Not simply in the the obvious way—horror has always been about people experiencing traumatic events—but in ways that center traumatized people experiencing horrific events that seem to grow from that trauma. This is a perfectly fine trope, but as it becomes dominant I find myself wondering, what about people who are live their lives without being haunted by the gaping spiritual holes of lost children/horrific accidents/guilt over terrible mistakes etc.? Don’t they get horror stories anymore? Isn’t there some other emotion we can ground our stories in besides grief?
Of course there is, as McRobert shows us. Love is also a fundamental part of the human condition, and it can also serve as a foundation for horror stories. This is a story about love saving people, despite the frustrations and stresses and doubts that assail all our choices, even when made out of love and the desire to do good. And it feels so genuine. Anyone who listens to Talking Scared knows how much McRobert loves his dog, Ted, and the honesty of that emotion comes through crystal clear in the work.
And the horror is still real. The antagonist in Good Boy is a nasty thing indeed, and well worth Jim, the protagonist, making the difficult choices he does.
I read Good Boy in a single sitting and enjoyed every last page of it. Thanks for bringing the love back to horror, Neil.
I’m not sure I’d exactly call this a review, but I read Ono Fuyumi’s Zan’e—the movie version is The Inerasable in English but I’d call it “Tainted” if anyone ever asked me—and I have thoughts.
The Japanese cover to Zan’e.
Here’s a bit of a summary, since I’m sure not that many English speakers have read it.
The story is told in the first person by an unnamed “I” who is ostensibly Ono herself. The narrator is a Kyoto-based horror writer and collector of jitsubanashi kaidan, so-called “true ghost stories.” She puts out calls for readers of her work to send her their stories, and one day she gets a letter from a young woman named Kubo who seems to live in a haunted apartment.
Her story reminds Ono of another she’s heard before. She finds another letter in her records with the same story, essentially, sent in by another reader who lived in the same apartment building as Kubo.
And so begins a long investigation. Kubo and Ono interview other residents of the building and of the neighborhood, going back further and further in history to track the haunting. They slowly unravel a story of a diffuse, metamorphic haunting that covers the block where Kubo lives, but also seems to spread and change. They find terrible mass murders, suicides, and arson linked to it, and realize they themselves might be “infected” because the odd things follow them even when they move to new houses.
Eventually, nearly seven years after Kubo’s first letter, they track the origin of the haunting to a terrible accident at a coal mine almost a hundred years ago, on the other side of Japan.
And that’s it. The great conceit of Zan’e, and one of the reasons it has become so influential in Japanese horror is that from start to finish, it maintains the aura of real people investigating a real “strange story.” There are no great climaxes, no battles with evil, no conclusion, really. They encounter something odd, wonder where it came from, and find out.
And this book has left its fingerprints all over Japanese horror since its 2012 publication. It’s on every “Best of” or “Must Read” horror list I’ve ever seen, and authors and filmmakers alike cite it as an influence.
After reading it, I can see the influence they mean. The figure of the “kaidan collector” has become a standard trope now, with examples to be found in Kamijo Kazuki’s Shinen no Terepasu/The Bright Room, Niina Satoshi’ｓ Sorazakana/Fish Story, and many more. The concept of “haunting as infection” is not original to Zan’e, but the evolution of that haunting from a lingering form of resentment or anger a la Sadako in Ring into essentially a mindless natural phenomenon reached its zenith here.
And then there is semi-documentary approach, without any reliance on fiction elements like plot, arc, denouement, etc. It’s just a flat record of events, some of which are really creepy or disturbing but are mostly just… Stuff happening. That has been enormously influential in the “fake documentary” style of horror that is so popular right now. Sesuji, of Kinkichiho no Are Basho ni Tsuite fame, has cited it as an influence for that reason.
For fans, it has earned a reputation as one of the most frightening horror books in the Japanese language. And I get it! At its core, what Zan’e presents is a cosmology that truly is terrifying.
The basic idea is based in the Japanese spiritual concept of kegare. Kegare is a taint, a metaphysical stain that gets on people who come into contact with things considered unclean: death, blood, rot, filth, and (in the dreadfully misogynistic ways of olden days) things involved with being a woman like menstruation and childbirth.
Zan’e takes up kegare based on the very traditional idea that a place where people die is stained by that death. Usually that stain fades naturally, but in her book Ono speculates that perhaps, if more death happens there before it fades, the stain is intensified, and so a cycle can begin. Couple that with the idea that people who simply go that tainted place—simply be present—then become carriers of the kegare, and you begin to see the danger.
Then, she postulates that the very intense kegare may carry echoes of the death, or the deceased’s state of mind at the time. Their misery, or anger, or pain. The stain whispers, it weeps, the sound of a suicide’s belt dragging over the floor lives on in the stain. What if some people are more susceptible to the influence of the kegare than others? The sounds and visions of shadowy figures truly disturb them, the voices whispering in their ears successfully convince them to kill others and themselves… Won’t that create a new, stronger stain? And on and on, ad infinitum…
This is the terrifying heart of Zan’e that made one award judge say “I don’t even want to put this book on my shelf.”
But. With all that said, I don’t know that I would recommend this book to anyone except horror completist nerds (like me). Because this book is dull. Deadly, painfully dull. Which could well be the intention, given the dedication to the realistic style. Anyone who has ever interviewed members of the public knows that most people just aren’t good at telling stories. They meander, they repeat themselves, they get confused. And given that much of this book is a documentary-style record of just such interviews, you get all of that.
There is, for example, a twenty page chapter that is just one elderly neighbor of Kubo’s talking about all the many people who have moved in and moved out, the buildings that have gone up and come down, the changes over the years… You know, old people stuff. Within that twenty pages are roughly two paragraphs that actually pertain to events of interest. The rest is simply there to add weight to the idea that some houses in this neighborhood just don’t get lived in long. Which isn’t all that interesting a point.
I would say that basically nothing interesting as such happens for over half of the book. It’s all just talking, with hints of the taint scattered through to keep the monologues relevant to the story. So. Dull.
I had to force myself to finish Zan’e. I only did it because I want to better understand modern Japanese horror, and it’s such an influential book that I felt it necessary. But God, it took me forever.
The Fisherman made me a fan of John Langan. There is something in the combination he weaves of cosmic horror and emotional grounding, with a hefty dose of simple erudition, that hits with me.
When I learned he had a new collection coming out I was eager.
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions by John Langan. From Word Horde Press
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions is a collection of short stories and one… Essay-fiction? from the last few years. This is one of the rare collections that does not have any misses, in my opinion, but that may just be because I like Langan already.
The title story, “Lost in the Dark,” was perhaps the fiction highlight for me. It uses the sort of “found footage” style conceit, as a film professor interviews a former student about a horror film she made that might actually have been a documentary. The layered structure and truly creepy atmosphere of the student’s cave story—rather effectively hinted at in the cover art, honestly—work really well.
There are two fun interpretations/extrapolations of classic stories. “Haak” is the one that takes the biggest swing, and took the longest for me to “get” what was going on, while “Alice’s Rebellion” felt a bit too grounded in the state of the world today for comfort.
I also really enjoyed “Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs,” a story about death and family and childish resentment. It felt closest to the writing and worldview of The Fisherman.
But I have to put the essay/fiction of “Snakebit, or Why I (Continue to) Love Horror” is a previously unpublished work that approaches the title idea, why Langan continues to love horror, by embedding a story that begins as a version of “literary fiction” that he then works into the horror mode, while explaining how different approaches translate into effects on the reader.
It’s not only a fascinating insight into horror writing, it’s a fun read. And, I would argue, it’s a crystallization of valuable writing advice for people wanting to play in the horror genre. Honestly, this is the one that has kept me thinking the longest after I finished the book.
I think the book is more than worth the price of entry for “Snakebit” alone, but taken as a whole the collection is just pure winner. And Word Horde sells books themselves, so no need for Amazon!
Jim Rion - Translator & Writer 