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.

Graphic Content: Dead Kingdom, Vol. 1 by Etienne Deprentigny

 

A little-known fact about me (at least, I’m still assuming it’s little known) is that I love to play Dungeons & Dragons. Particularly, I love exploring a dark dungeon, gathering up treasure and killing scores of enemies. Also, I love to read stories about said dungeons, treasure, and monsters, not necessarily in that order. As a lover of horror, I am particularly overjoyed when fantasy and horror overlap, where the swords sever lots of limbs and the sorcery is typically used to raise and/or control the dead. This is basically the setup of Etienne Derepentigny’s Dead Kingdom, Vol. 1, which takes the Walking Dead formula and sets it during medieval times.

The story is set in a land that has been torn apart by war. Kain is a peacekeeper and former soldier who has grown tired of battle, but he must once again take up his sword as the land faces a plague of the dead rising and attacking the living. As the bodies fall only to rise again, Kain must make his way across the land, reunite with his wife, and hopefully not die and become part of the undead army.

This world drawn by Derepentigny is not a shimmering fantasy world of shimmering castles and flying dragons that could easily end the zombie scourge with a few fiery blasts. Derepentigny’s world is dingy, full of drab stone walls and muddied, bloody soldiers. When the dead are dispatched, after figuring out that the head is indeed vulnerable, the kills with ax and arrow become a highlight of his book, especially for fans of the Walking Dead. Those fans will definitely see a Rick Grimes template in Kain. Derepentigny, who also writes the book, establishes Kain as a soldier reluctant to fight but is, despite his best efforts, quite good at it. Add in a quest for his wife and this story becomes ideal for fans of both Walking Dead and Dungeons and Dragons, those who wouldn’t mind roving the apocalyptic wastelands while wielding a sword. 

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.