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”). 

New Arrival: Eynhallow by Tim McGregor

 Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s famous (or infamous) tale of a reanimated monster, which is ironic since this is a story that seems to be “reanimated” on the regular. From retellings to reimaginings, Frankenstein’s monster, made from mismatched body parts and our own anxieties about death, has been stomping through popular culture and will no doubt keep going until humans stop fearing death (which is unlikely to end soon). But these stories aren’t just reanimated dead narratives, however; there are many that revisit the story while offering a new perspective on the source material, such as Tim McGregor’s Eynhallow.

Eynhallow’s main character is not the scientist or his monster, but one Agnes Tulloch, a mother of four who feels increasingly isolated thanks in part to her emotionally abusive husband and because the rocky, secluded island of Eynhallow is not the island paradise her husband promised. Then a mysterious stranger moves to the island to work in secret. Agnes works for and soon befriends the man, not knowing that he is Victor Frankenstein, animator of dead things, or that his monster is looking for Victor to fulfill his promise of a bride.

Many adaptations, like Victor Lavalle’s Destroyer and Frankenstein in Baghdad use more modern settings, complete with modern problems, to inject a dose of relevance into the source material. McGregor goes a different route and expands on a part of Mary Shelley’s original work that had great potential for drama, a drama that pulls main character Agnes into its orbit. McGregor gives Agnes the role of narrator, letting readers learn all about her hardscrabble life and her dreams of escaping it, so when the horror finally comes crashing down on her, readers’ hearts will break for her. Definitely one of the finer reimaginings of the Frankenstein story, Eynhallow demonstrates McGregor’s knack for creating fleshed-out (living flesh, that is) characters.

 

New Arrival: This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer

 

If there’s one thing working against the tourism board of any state park in America, or any place that has hiking trails to hike or rock walls to climb, it’s horror. Go out into the woods, according to most horror plots, and never come back. The woods are full of monsters, ghosts, and in some cases, the forest itself wants to eat you. However, I’d be remiss in saying the nature-is-dangerous trope belongs only to horror, since movies like Alive and 127 Hours show the dangers that exist away from paved roads and Internet signals. Nature is dangerous according to multiple genres, but author Jenny Kiefer manages to pull from all these different genres depicting the deadliness of the natural world in her stunning debut This Wretched Valley.

Four young people journey out into the forest near Livingston, Kentucky. There’s Dylan, a rock climber who’s looking to have her name immortalized, her steadfast boyfriend Luke, geology student Clay, who is also looking to find his own version of the brass ring, and Clay’s research assistant Sylvia. Clay just discovered a rock wall that could make Dylan’s name legendary if she climbs it and have climbers of all kinds pay Clay all kinds of money for their chance to climb it. This land represents a holy grail for Dylan and Clay, but there is also something haunting this land. Whatever lives within the ground has been killing ever since humans have set foot on its earth, and it looks to make the four its next victims.

Fans of wilderness horror will definitely get some Blair Witch vibes, particularly in its in medias res/true crime approach to storytelling, but much of this movie owes its structure to survival movies. Not only is something in the woods out to get these four, but injuries start piling up and food becomes scarce, creating a perfect storm in which these four will all make terrible and potentially fatal decisions. Fans of both supernatural horror and survival horror will love how Kiefer creates a satisfying stew of spooky shenanigans and frayed nerves. Overall, this debut is a spectacularly terrifying haunted house story that doesn’t even take place in a building.

 

New Arrival: Daughters of Block Island by Christa Carmen

 The gothic tradition might be just another subgenre of horror, but it might also be the subgenre that helped horror as a whole gain a foothold in the American zeitgeist. There are many horror fans who might remember the time they read Stephen King when they were “way too young,” but there are perhaps many others whose first entry into horror was Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. For those fans whose minds jump to gloomy castles and stormy nights when it comes to horror, Christa Carmen’s book The Daughters of Block Island is here to give gothic horror the Scream treatment.

One of the first things this book does is remind you of its roots. The story begins with Blake Bronson, a gothic book lover and recovering addict searching for her birth mother on the mysterious Block Island. Unfortunately, she doesn’t survive the experience and she’s found murdered in a clawfoot tub. Receiving a mysterious letter in the mail from Blake, a sister she didn’t know she had, Thalia Mills also returns to Block Island to find out if Blake really was her sister and who may have murdered Blake to hide some deeply buried secrets.

For those who feel like this plot is somewhat familiar, then congratulations! You are the intended audience. This book, from the tone to the metafictional asides, is designed to tickle the pleasure centers of those who love gothic novels and love finding Easter eggs about graphic novels. Just like how the movie Scream and its many sequels dissected the horror genre, Block Island dissects the gothic tale and its many conventions, creating a gothic (naturally) tale that is more fun than frightening. It’s ultimately a lighter read for gothic fans who might enjoy the Gothic trappings in a story but maybe not the more archaic language that can be as dense and impenetrable as the fog around the island.

New Arrival: The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro

 

Hauntings are as much a part of horror as chocolate is to ice cream. Chocolate isn’t necessarily a requirement, but it’s hard to imagine ice cream existing without chocolate, just as it’s hard to imagine a horror story without its protagonist being haunted in some way. That said, just like there’s Rocky Road, Death by Chocolate, and all the subtle variations of chocolate, there are many variations of hauntings, some of them might be done by ghosts but nearly all of these hauntings are helped along by the protagonist. Married mother of three Alejandra, for example, is a woman haunted by many things in V. Castro’s The Haunting of Alejandra.

Alejandra is nearing a breaking point. Her husband treats her more as hired help than a life partner, and she spends most of her life living for her children, who drain her emotionally. On top of all of that is La Llorna, the murderous mother of Mexican legend who wishes to pull the women of Alejandra’s family into a pit of despair and death. Alejandra discovers her roots, a therapist who doesn’t scoff at her visions of La Llorna, and a mother she never knew, but will it be enough to save her and her family?

(Might be spoilers ahead, but read this book if you like woman protagonists getting stronger)

The book could have easily been called “The Transformation of Alejandra” as its real focus is on Alejandra’s personal and spiritual journey. Rather than explosive phenomena of blood pouring from the walls and furniture flung every which way, this story is more about how Alejandra arms herself for battle from La Llorna and what she represents; the despair of a life lived in quiet, soul-crushing desperation. She takes steps to help her and her family, gathering knowledge about her past and about herself, deciding who she really wants to be. The real vanquishing of the story isn’t so much sending La Llorna back to Hell or wherever she resides; it’s Alejandra vanquishing those elements of her life and personality that are holding back her growth as a person. It might be a different flavor of haunting than some are used to, but the metamorphosis Alejandra undergoes gives a more than satisfying ending.

New Arrival: Ghost Eaters by Clay Mcleod Chapman

 Ghosts have haunted everywhere from spooky, gothic houses to IKEA-like stores and fast food restaurants, but where these restless spirits ultimately reside is in the human mind. The people who encounter these insubstantial spirits also bring along their own substantial baggage, whether it be fears, skepticism, or one of the most powerful and painful aspects of the human condition: grief. Fewer still are the people who actively expose themselves to the potential physical and mental trauma of a haunting, but that’s exactly what the people in Clay Mcleod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters do in their quest to “get haunted.”

Erin chooses to get haunted because she just lost her on-again, off-again boyfriend and would do anything to get answers. She discovers those answers in Ghost, a drug that allows its users to see ghosts. Soon, this drug is spreading beyond the borders of their home city of Williamsburg, but Erin has her own problems. As she becomes more and more addicted to Ghost, eager to finally make contact with her boyfriend, Erin soon finds herself in a spiritual hole from which she might be unable to free herself.

While there are many stories that tackle the attachment ghosts have to the living from the spirit’s perspective, a sort of magic bullet that sends the ghost “into the light,” it is rare that a story looks at how the living attract ghosts. The fact that this drug not only lets people see ghosts but draws ghosts toward them is perhaps the greatest metaphor for how one’s inability to move on from a loved one’s death is keeping them haunted. As Erin goes deeper and deeper into her use of Ghost, isolating herself more and more from the living, Chapman reveals a more surreal universe than what is hinted at during the beginning of the story. More than just a run-of-the-mill ghost story, Ghost Eaters is a meditation on grief and how it can pull us away from the living if we’re not careful, that we should “get haunted” at our own risk.

New Arrival: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes

 People expect horror stories to be set in Gothic castles, rickety houses, and abandoned amusement parks, but one of the scariest settings for a horror story may be right above our heads. Space is the perfect setting for a horror story; it’s cold, it’s dark, and as the tagline for the movie Alien says, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Perhaps it is science fiction’s use of space as a place of limitless boundaries and optimism, there seems to be a dearth of horror stories set in the final frontier. S. A. Barnes’s newest book Dead Silence creates a different kind of horror story by setting the classic ghost story in outer space.

Claire Kovalik’s uneventful career leading a beacon repair crew is coming to an end. She’s staring down the barrel of forced retirement and her prospects are as dim as the endless cosmos outside her window. Then her crew comes across the luxury spaceliner Aurora, which was declared lost more than twenty years ago. She and her crew see this as a golden opportunity to make some quick money but exploring the ship reveals something bad is waiting for them in the Aurora. Claire and the rest of her crewmates are hearing strange whispers and seeing words scrawled in blood. The crew and passengers of the Aurora all suffered in their final voyage and Claire and her crew may be next.

The book’s tagline calls it Titanic meets The Shining, but there are a lot of such combinations that can be made like Ghost Ship in space, or Alien meets The Haunting of Hill House. Barnes takes advantage of the Aurora’’s emptiness, employing description and background that give an idea of what the ship was, which makes what it now is all the more terrifying. And Barnes shows it to be a terrifying place, her descriptions serving to establish a claustrophobic, tension-wrought atmosphere. Like any good ghost story, she also has a protagonist with the right kind of psychic baggage that the ship can use against her. Add in some potentially expendable members of her crew and you have a by-the-numbers ghost story that shows space, the final frontier, can absolutely be the final frontier of fear.