Graphic Content: Dark Ride Vol. 2 and 3 by Joshua Williamson, Andrei Bresses, and Adriano Lucas

One of the many ways I procrastinate when I should be writing is I watch roller coaster videos on Youtube. I have resorted to living vicariously through these videos because it takes a while to travel to the locations of these roller coasters and I don’t want to pay $20 for a corn dog. Luckily, writer Joshua Williamson and artists Andrei Bressen and Adriano Lucas have pooled their talents to create the graphic novel series Dark Ride, which combines two of my favorite things: amusement parks and horror. I reviewed Volume 1 of this series for the website No Flying, No Tights, and Volumes 2 and 3 offer a fitting end to this tale of Faustian bargains and trying/failing to live up to your parents’ expectations. 

Volume 1 of this story introduces readers to Devil Land, the Scariest Place on Earth, a horror-themed theme park designed by eccentric genius Arthur Dante. As heirs to his legacy, Arthur’s children Samhein (Sam), the dutiful son, and Halloween, the goth girl influencer, constantly try to show their father they are worthy to run the park, but they soon discover that there is something truly terrifying that helped Arthur build Devil Land. It turns out the streets of Devil Land are paved with human souls, and Sam and Halloween’s souls may be up for grabs. 

The series is enjoyable with Bressen and Lucas’s artwork helping writer Williamson fully realize the look for this park, especially the diabolical mascot that performs its own brand of vile mischief. Williamson, though, develops his characters to tell a compelling story, allowing Sam, an absentee father, becoming the book’s moral center as Halloween, often seen as shallow by her family, becoming a wild card that could save the day or send them all to Hell. For those horror fans that love the visual aesthetic as much as the spooky storytelling, all three volumes of Dark Ride are worth the price of admission, especially if you check it out at your local library. 

 

Graphic Content: Killadelphia Deluxe Edition Book 2 by Rodney Barnes and Jason Shawn Alexander

There are some that say horror shouldn’t deal with anything political. My initial response to such a statement is to ask the person making said statement how much actual horror they’ve seen in the last 50 or so years. Horror, indeed a great deal of speculative fiction, hits not only the universal truths of human existence but provides a mirror, no matter how cracked, into our currently broken times. Some may pejoratively call such horror “woke,” but such stories also bring a bright light to some very dark and harmful social issues. Rodney Barnes’s book Killadelphia is an excellent example of this, using the idea of vampires as the Founding Fathers as an example of our current broken system. I had already reviewed the first deluxe edition of this series, but Killadelphia Deluxe Edition Book 2, like any good sequel, raises the stakes for all the characters involved. 

The book opens with Philadephia as a fallen city. Abigail Adams, wife of former president John Adams, and her vampires are not roaming the streets at night to slaughter any innocent humans in their way while humans fighting for survival are turning on each other in the bright light of day. Undead detective James Sangster, Sr., along with his son, find help in the form of the enigmatic vampire Seesaw, a pack of werewolves who know a thing or two about war, and a trickster god, but the vampire army have boosted their numbers with the addition of founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. 

With the stellar depictions of vampiric carnage rendered by artist Jason Shawn Alexander, the meat of the story is filled in by writer Barnes. Barnes does quite a bit of narrative lifting in this volume, having to handle so many new characters, from werewolves to new vampires. In the hands of an inexperienced writer, all the new characters could have flitted past the readers without leaving any impression, but Barnes balances them all, letting them all develop organically and contribute to the overall story in their own ways. Along with character development, Barnes uses the vampire metaphor to shine a light on the dark underbelly of America and the promises it has left unfulfilled with monologues by a man who helped build it. 

Have You Read This? The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

There are works of horror that have violence and works of horror that are violent. They are violent with their depictions of a human body’s surgical deconstruction, violent with their brazen exploration of taboo subjects, and violent with their wanton disregard to the fairy tales that remain sacrosanct for many people. This is, of course, a good thing, even necessary, since horror is a genre that often pushes and even destroys boundaries. Cassandra Khaw’s retelling of The Little Mermaid story, The Salt Grows Heavy, is a novella that rejoices in its violence. 

It starts with the tale that everyone is familiar with, that of a mermaid princess who falls in love with a prince whose kingdom is on land and her sacrifices to be with him. What those books don’t mention is how the prince mistreated the mermaid once she was his or how the mermaid’s daughters went on to eat the kingdom. Disney execs would likely be horrified to learn that this mermaid then goes on the run with a nonbinary plague doctor who discovers a village full of murderous children ruled by “saints” who really love performing surgery. 

As a novella, this is a quick read. As a story, it’s a fever dream/acid trip of a fairy tale retelling. This is mostly due to Khaw’s writing. Not content to simply describe events as they happen, she paints a gloriously visceral picture with her words, blurring the boundaries between what is beautiful and what is horrifying. In this retelling, the mermaid who is not named Ariel is no longer a victim; instead she is a force of nature that will tear through anything to get what she wants. 

Graphic Content: The Devil That Wears My Face written by David Pepose and illustrated by Alex Cormack

 

God bless Mad Cave Studios! I say this as a horror fan and a fan of horror graphic novels. They might not have the same name recognition as Image Comics or Boom Studios! However, this means that they’re able to establish themselves as the scrappy underdogs of horror comics, and scrap they do. They don’t post inflammatory posts about the major comic companies or challenge editors to street fights, but they garner attention by coming up with the most unusual subjects for their stories, often throwing away traditional genre conventions. Their latest horror series, The Devil That Wears My Face, written by David Pepose and illustrated by Alex Cormack, calls itself “‘Face/Off’ meets ‘The Exorcist’,” and no other elevator-pitch-style tagline sums up a series better. 

In 1740, conflicted priest Father Vieri was summoned to Spain to perform an exorcism. The demon known as Legion has killed lesser priests who have tried to force him out of the Spanish nobleman in which he resides. When Vierti tries to remove the demon, Legion turns the tables on him and ends up switching bodies with Vieri. Now Legion is loose in the Vatican, spreading violence and chaos wherever he goes, and Father Vieri, whose captors believe he is the possessed Spanish nobleman, must stop Legion in his body before he burns the Vatican down. 

This book and Cormack’s gruesomely gory artwork, featuring people not just murdered but exploded, plants it firmly in the adult horror category, along with its use of demonic possession, but Pepose’s story owes a lot to Face/Off, the face-switching action film from the ‘90s, not only in its plot similarities but in its overall tone. This book zooms at an action movie pace as the stalwart heroes try to apprehend Legion and stop the demon’s carnage. And the delightfully evil Legion himself hams it up in a way that would make Castor Troy, Face/Off’s main villain, proud. Movie fans who gravitate between Jerry Bruckenheimer action and James Wan splatter might enjoy this horrific trip to 1700s Italy.

Graphic Content: Dark Spaces: The Hollywood Special written by Jeremy Lambert and illustrated by Claire Roe

 

Anthology series are some of my favorite kinds of horror graphic novels. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in the ‘80s where movies like Creepshow and shows like Tales from the Darkside reigned supreme. It might also have to do with my love of short stories, after all, I’ve always admired the way an author can tell a self-contained story. Dark Spaces, an anthology series created by Scott Snyder, is continuing this horror anthology tradition, even though their stories take place over multiple issues. However, the stories include multiple authors and artists and all tell their own unique stories while falling under the Dark Spaces umbrella. Writer Jeremy Lambert has created a story that somehow combines Old Hollywood with the setting of a Pennsylvania mining town in Dark Spaces: The Hollywood Special. 

The Hollywood Special is a luxury train traveling the country in support of the war effort, carrying fading star  and functional alcoholic Vivian Drake, who is there to boost morale even as her own career and family life falls apart. The train makes a stop in Minersville, Pennsylvania, a mining town that is reeling from a mine collapse. And locals know that the Mishmash Man, a creature that feeds on human misery, will feast on such a tragedy and Vivian discovers that she has plenty of misery to whet the Mishmash Man’s appetite. 

Lambert’s story blends a lot of setting elements that seem an odd fit within the narrative (Old Hollywood and Appalachian folk horror don’t go together like chocolate and peanut butter). However, the pairing works with the glue between them being the theme of dreams like Vivian’s career as a movie star and Minersville resident’s visions of prosperity left to rot in the darkness. Drake is also an intriguing character whose layers slowly unfurl to show why she chooses to hide inside a bottle. What really sells this story, however, is Claire Roe’s artwork, providing some bizarre dreamlike imagery as the narrative shifts from past to present, from real to imaginary. What her art does for the Mishmash Man makes this a book a must for body horror fans, but those who love a creepy atmospheric story will want to ride the Hollywood Special. 

Graphic Content: Dark Spaces: Dungeon by Scott Snyder and Hayden Sherman

 

Horror once focused on the moment where a protagonist or a character met the monster or faced their fear, a single moment of terror that was like an adrenaline shot to the reader’s heart. However, horror has recently looked not just at terrors attacking characters in the past but traumas from the past that have buried deep underneath the characters’ skin, festering throughout their lives. One such person is the investigator at the center of Dark Spaces: Dungeon. Written by Scott Snyder and illustrated by Hayden Sherman, this entry into the Dark Spaces anthology series looks at how many people live in dungeons of their own making. 

The story begins with tech entrepreneur Tyler Letts who’s left the fast-paced lifestyle of New York for a quieter life in the country. And while the view outside his window is scenic, it’s the dungeon that’s under his basement that has him calling the FBI (this despite the message painted on the wall that says “Tell No One”). Enter Special Agent Madok, who knows that this is the kind of chamber used by the Keep, an individual whose MO is to keep his prisoners in boxes designed to break bones and wills. Madok is all too aware of the Keeper’s methods, and when Tyler’s son goes missing, Tyler must match wits with the demented dungeon keeper while the clock ticks. 

Snyder’s story reads at first like a straightforward procedural, but as mentioned before, the Keep doesn’t just kill his victims. Sherman’s artwork renders in gruesome detail the Keep’s victims after they’ve spent time in his dungeon. People might be tempted to call this a Saw rip-off, especially considering the elaborate designs of these dungeons, but Snyder’s work is more psychological, delving deep into the trauma is both a help and a hindrance to agent Madok, and the secrets held by both him and the Keep drive the conflict of this work to a shocking twist that just may trap the reader.  

New Arrival: I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Stephen Graham Jones may be entering his Stephen King phase. Not only is his name becoming synonymous with horror, thanks to novels like Mongrels and the Jade Daniels series, but he’s also demonstrating just how prolific he can be. He seems to be writing at a blistering pace where the novels just seem to fall out of his head as fully formed as Athena, but he’s also been branching out into other mediums, like comics. His current novel is a return to one of his tried-and-true favorite horror subgenre: the slasher. However, I Was a Teenage Slasher is far from a rehash of his previous work in the Jade Danies series; rather, it’s a tragic tale of a future slasher who’s agency was stolen from him. 

Lamesa, Texas circa 1989 is far from a bustling town. Their main exports are oil, cotton, and death. Death comes in the form of Tolly Driver, a rudderless seventeen-year-old who hangs out with his best friend Amber while trying to process the death of his father. One fateful night, Tolly becomes something worse than a disaffected teen; he becomes a slasher, an unstoppable killing machine that attacks the teens of Lamesa, taking full advantage of the Slasher rules that govern his abilities and drive him to murder everyone who wronged him. 

Made for fans of slashers but with more emotional heft than most slasher films, the story of Tolly discovering his abilities has more in common with superhero stories than slasher films. Much like superheroes (or villains, in Tolly’s case), his story involves struggling to accept what he’s become. Like the Jade Daniels series, this book is a loving homage to the slasher genre, but Jones flips the script by putting readers in the mind of the killer. That killer, it turns out, does not necessarily want to be a murder machine; rather, he is merely fulfilling the role this universe has given him. To put it another way, one could compare the moral of Tolly’s story to Uncle Ben’s advice to his nephew, the Amazing Spider-Man: With great power comes great responsibility (for Tolly, it should probably be “With great power comes a substantial body count”). 

Have You Read This? Rabbit Hunt by Wrath James White

 

Though I consider myself a scary librarian (meaning one who loves all things horror, and not an actual scary librarian), I must admit that my knowledge has been lacking in one particular area: extreme horror. If more mainstream horror is a hamburger that might have mustard on it, then extreme horror is a burger covered in Carolina Reaper Scorpion Devil’s Spit Sauce (if such a sauce exists). Why I am just dipping my toe into this genre is likely due to a lack of understanding of the genre. Detractors of extreme horror might say that it favors gore over story necessities like plot and character development, but I wanted to see for myself, which is why I checked out Rabbit Hunt by Wrath James Wright. 

The story follows former fraternity brothers Big Mike, Mooky, Rashad, and Steve are excited about a hunting trip and leaving behind their adult responsibilities like their jobs and their wives. Six college kids are also looking forward to getting back to nature by dropping acid and getting drunk. When these two groups meet in the woods, far away from civilization, readers will see a hunt where bodily fluids flow freely and respect for human life flies completely out the window. 

This book definitely lives up to its “extreme” reputation, going above and beyond not just in its original methods of desecrating and destroying a human body but the visceral detail in which these acts are described. However, while such books also have a transgressive quality to them, its level of violence will be readily familiar to fans of such movies as Terrifier. And like Terrifier, the characters might not be considered likable, or even well-developed, but these serve the purpose of the story: to either tear apart human flesh or be torn apart. Slashers like Friday the 13th are filled with these kinds of shallowly drawn characters who are simply fed to the meat grinder in a hockey mask. However, describing Rabbit Hunt as a slasher clone does ignore White’s attempts to ground it into the current and volatile political climate. Many of White’s characters, despite their political leanings, seem quite capable of violence; all they need is the opportunity, which White repeatedly gives them. If White’s tale does have a message, it’s that anybody, anywhere is capable of violence that would shock the sensibilities of civilized (or uncivilized) society. 

Graphic Content: Dark Spaces: Good Deeds by Che Grayson and Kelsey Ramsey

 

Fans of horror and comics, or horror comics, might know the name Scott Snyder. Superhero fans might have heard of him because of his seminal work on Batman series like “Death of the Family” and “Dark Nights: Metal.” Horror fans might remember him from such original works as American Vampire and Wytches. He’s managed to parlay that name recognition into an anthology series called Dark Spaces, published by IDW comics. Though he has contributed his own writing to this series, Dark Spaces: Good Deeds is a collaboration from two female creators, with writing done by Che Grayson and illustrations done by Kelsey Ramsey. 

This particular story in the series is a female-centric one with two female protagonists. The first is teenager Cheyenne Rite, who is trying to adjust to her new home in small-town St. Augustine, Florida. The other is Jean McKnight, who is looking to put her journalism career back on track with a piece about St. Augustine’s 450th anniversary celebration. Both women join forces to try and uncover an evil act that goes back centuries that could destroy the town and everyone in it. 

The premise could have had dueling protagonists, with each of them fighting for recognition in their own story, but Grayson keeps them balanced enough so that neither feels like a shallow character (the third act twist also helps keep each protagonist distinct). Ramsey contributes with artwork that doesn’t skimp on the horror, with images that could be pulled straight from a Creepshow comic, which is a complement. Grayson and Ramsey’s collaboration has created a spooky story that looks ready to topple with all the elements going on but still delivers a solid supernatural tale of karma come due. 

Have You Read This? Kill Creek by Scott Thomas

 

While some might have a TBR pile, I have a TBR tower. As a librarian, I am surrounded by so much great stuff to read, I feel like a kid locked in a Toys R Us. Sadly, it takes me longer to read books than it does to play with toys, so my TBR tower can become either an architectural marvel or a disaster waiting to happen. To prevent such a collapse, I decided to finally read a book that I have wanted to read for a long time: Scott Thomas’s Kill Creek. While the cover seems to promise a by-the-numbers haunted house story, Thomas adds enough dramatic flair and compelling characters to help it stand out from the other haunted houses on the block. 

Somewhere in the Kansas countryside, situated by the titular Kill Creek is the Finch House, an abandoned home with its share of ghosts. It is here where four of the most famous writers of horror have agreed to be interviewed. There’s introspective Sam McGarver, reeling from a recent split from his wife; Daniel Slaughter, a writer of Fear Street-like books who is a devout Christian; Sebastian Cole, the esteemed elder statesman of horror, and T.C. Moore, an acerbic female Splatterpunk author. All are intrigued by the Finch House and the house is more than happy to let them in. In fact, a little bit of what haunts the Finch House might follow each of these authors home. 

Moving past the standard groans and rattling chains, Thomas takes his time building up the discomfort, which steadily grows into dread. What really sells the book is the ensemble cast, who all have their own approaches to horror but all bring assorted traumas that the house will gleefully exploit. As with all the great haunted house stories, it’s the mix of those haunted with the things that are haunting that create the book’s combustible elements, showing them that any horror these writers can devise pales in comparison to what Finch House shows them. 

One book down, several more books to go. 

Have You Read This? Your Body Is Not Your Body edited by Alex Woodroe and Matt Blairstone

 

As a genre relying on generating a particular emotion within its audience, horror can be both universal and very personal. Horror can often touch on universal fears, such as the fear of death, but it can also be used to discuss the personal fears of the author, including fears of being attacked simply for being who they are. Often, these kinds of stories aren’t so much a whimper of submission as they are a cry of rage. Such stories are included in Your Body is Not Your Body, an anthology of weird fiction featuring authors from the Trans/Gender Nonconforming community. 

Editors Alex Woodroe and Matt Blairstone have compiled stories that definitely put the weird in weird fiction. Take, for example, a medieval monk whose body is transformed by a different kind of possession. And if such a tale is too tame, there are stories featuring living weapons, transcendental massages, haunted telephones, and a story from rising star like Hailey Piper about women exploding. Many of the stories in this collection focus on all the ways that a human body can become twisted into something unimaginable, both beautiful and horrifying. The weird in this fiction anthology is definitely the gloriously great kind of weird. 

Anthologies such as this serve not only as an introduction to the various authors who are presented in this book, but books like this one also introduce readers to weird fiction. There are no gothic castles or classic monsters here; the horrors presented in this book are from not only one’s body becoming unrecognizable, but the world they live in becoming hostile, which is what many transgender and gender-nonconforming people are experiencing with the rash of anti-LGBTQ laws being ratified by various states. Horror is supposed to create a fear response, but horror, of all kinds and especially the stories in this book, rely on creating feelings of empathy for the protagonists in these stories. 

Graphic Content: Shook: A Black Horror Anthology by Bradley Golden, John Jennings, and Marcus Roberts

 

When people think of graphic novels, they tend to think of them as . . . well, novels, or at least one overall story. But there are other creators who are using the comic book format to tell smaller stories. Not only does this demonstrate experimentation with the form but it also introduces readers to comic creators they might never have discovered otherwise. There are many different creators that aren’t as famous as, for example, Jim Lee or Geoff Johns who are telling their own stories, including black creators utilizing the monsters within the horror genre to reveal their own unique perspectives on what is scary. The book Shook: A Black Horror Anthology features a collection of graphic novel horror stories from today’s most-well known black comic artists and authors.  

The stories in this anthology reflect many different tropes and subgenres residing under horror’s umbrella, and readers who want to explore black stories, and the subsequent hardships within them, will savor these sinister tales. Fans of dystopian fiction will like Tasty! Itchy! by Bradley Golden (“Mississippi Zombies”), but they might want to stay away if they are terrified of bugs. Writer John Jennings (“Box of Bones”) gives readers“The Breaks,” a 90’s spin that could have been part of “Tales from the Hood.” Rodney Barnes, creator of “Killadelphia,” offers up a ghostly serving of Southern Gothic justice in his story “The Last March.” 

The artwork presented within this anthology is as varied as its stories. For “The Breaks,” artist Charlie Goubile evokes the most talented graffiti artist in how he draws the characters. Allesio Nocerino, the artist for “Evil Lives,” gives the story the feel of an EC comic book with his choices of color and composition. Artist Roberto Castro goes black and white but fills his artwork full of superhero-looking action sequences in “Ezra the Hunter.” Even if readers find some stories in this anthology lacking, there are others that could put a delicious shiver of fear in their spine. 

Graphic Content: Haunt You to the End by Ryan Cady and Andrea Mutti

 

When people say that the world is on fire, they might mean that figuratively or literally. Just checking the news is enough to fuel a truckload of anxieties, but in particular the climate is worrisome; the news is filled with temperature records being broken and violent storms leaving devastation in their wake. Horror stories are often at their best when they’re addressing these kinds of anxieties. Writer Ryan Cady incorporates climate catastrophe with the classic ghost story in the book Haunt You to the End.

The story is set in the near future (but it still seems like a pretty close future). As the climate spirals out of control, where even the air can be toxic. An unemployed journalist, a compassionate doctor, a TV demonologist, join an eccentric billionaire and his small contingent of military contractors on an expedition to Isla Lodo, supposedly “the most haunted place on Earth,” all to prove the existence of life after death and to give people hope that there is something beyond this life (whether that’s actual hope is debatable). As a superstorm threatening to wipe Isla Lodo off the map approaches, this team discovers that there is something more dangerous than the air and the storm that’s coming. It’s something that wants their very souls.

The horrors that Cady explores seem quite relevant to today, even as the book it set nearly a century into the future, and the characters he populates this world with are the ones you’d expect to find in a by-the-numbers ghost story, from the billionaire who has relatively good but misguided intentions to the disillusioned cynic who is forced to become a believer. There’s even a corporate big bad that not only is keeping what’s happening on Isla Lodo quiet, but they are also responsible for the way the world is. To keep this story grounded, Artist Andrea Mutti doesn’t draw things like flying cars and hoverboards, keeping the technology very much down-to-earth, perhaps to show just how close this environmentally-ravaged world is to ours. However, readers should expect the typical ghastly ghostly images of bodies in various states of injury and reanimation. As for the story itself, it doesn’t break new ground, but its environmental message does evoke some very real-world terrors.

Have You Read This? And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

 

We trust reality. Or at least we hope reality will always be reliable, that the same rules that governed it yesterday will govern it today and so on. It can be quite upsetting when the little daily bargain you make with reality is suddenly broken. Honestly, if you can’t trust reality, who or what can you trust? That question is what drives this zombie-adjacent novella And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin.

This story is about monsters and about survivors. After a plague that turns ordinary people into monsters strikes, bands of survivors roam the countryside, stealing what they can and taking out any monsters they come across. These monsters might have been friends, neighbors, lovers, or family, but they are no longer human. Spence learned all these hard lessons as a survivor and he’s killed many monsters, but the plague might be something different and he might also have a different kind of body count on his hands.

Devlin’s book is a quick read, but it’s not necessarily an easy one. This is largely because of how it consistently erodes the trustworthiness of its narrator Spence. Spence’s story might not be what he thinks it is, meaning the reader will start to question what exactly is real in Devlin’s book. About the only answer Devlin gives is that reality is ultimately subjective, but this realization is of little comfort to poor Spence. Fans of shorter works like Sara Tantlinger’s To Be Devoured and Joe Koch’s The Wingspan of Severed Hands should like this particular break from reality.

Graphic Content: Harrower by Justin Jordan and Brahm Revel

Slashers are back in a big way, and killers wielding life-ending weapons are in. Whether it’s Stephen Graham Jones reinventing the genre in his Indian Lake trilogy or streaming service Shudder pumping out contemporary slasher along with their library of slasher classics geared for gorehounds, maniacs are making a bloody splash. Nowhere and no one is safe, not even graphic novels. One of the latest to capitalize on the slasher renaissance, and seemingly the closest to a traditional slasher, is Harrower, a book of small town savagery written by Justin Jordan and drawn by Brahm Revel.

The small town that is to be the center of carnage is Barlowe, New York. Jessa Brink, along with her friends, are ready to cut loose this Halloween night despite warnings from their parents and the local legend about the Harrower. The Harrower is Barlowe’s resident boogeyman. For generations, the Harrower has stalked the shadowy streets of Barlowe, looking for young men and women who stray from the path of puritanical purity. Unfortunately, Jessa and her friends find themselves in the Harrower’s bloody, destructive path.

Fans of slasher movies will find a lot that’s familiar in this book, from the secondary characters who are only there to add to the body count to the killer and his distinct weapon (in this case, a medieval battle axe swung with deadly precision). Jordan’s story doesn’t necessarily break new ground, but there is also comfort in the familiar. Fans might even feel nostalgic watching the Harrower use brutal methods to enforce a moral code, remembering how Jason Voorhees killed teens who have sex and/or do drugs on his campground. The twist at the end even references how slashers are often portrayed as purity enforcers. Along with Revel’s depictions of carnage, Harrower is a feel-good kind of slasher for fans who long ago wore out their VHS copies of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, along with those lucky enough to have just discovered the slasher genre.

Have You Read This? What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

 

Horror fans are, of course, familiar with Edgar Allan Poe, whether it’s through his dark and dolorous monologues over birds perching on statues, or detailing the exploits of a razor-wielding orangutan. Poe has lived a brief but tumultuous life, but his fingerprints on the horror genre are everywhere. His influence is such that many modern authors are revisiting his classic tales, not necessarily to rewrite these stories but to tell different ones that happen to take place in the same universe. An example of this play-in-Poe’s-sandbox approach is What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher’s novella that revisits “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Alex Easton, a retired soldier, has made their way to the infamous House of Usher because their friend Madeline Usher is dying. Not only is brother Roderick a nervous wreck, but there is a strange fungus growing on the grounds and the lake is glowing. With the help of a charming mycologist and a skeptical doctor, Alex will delve into the mystery of what grows beneath the House of Usher, hopefully before it devours them.

T. Kingfisher, author of The Twisted Ones, is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors for delivering folk horror but she also has a particular knack for including humor into her horror. Many have trouble maintaining that balance, the tone constantly oscillating between too funny and too terrifying while ultimately becoming confusing for readers. Kingfisher lets the humor shine through in the dialogue between Alex, a great example of LGBTQ+ representation, interacting with characters like the eccentric mycologist as well as the dialogue between Alex the mentee and Alex’s gruff mentor and friend. Those that have read Poe’s story can guess that the horror ratchets up near the end, and Kingfisher delivers with some body horror that might trigger a fear of mold. Narrator Avi Roque’s portrayal of Alex, through snappy banter and stomach-turning horror, and the relatively short run-time, makes this book a frightfully fun exploration of Poe’s universe.