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.  

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. 

Have You Read This? The Ghost That Ate Us by Daniel Kraus

 There could be a few of them insinuating themselves into your Netflix queue. Maybe they are podcasts that slither through your earbuds into your ear while cleaning. You might even be reading one right now. I am speaking, of course, of the true crime genre. Not only is it horror-adjacent, but within the genre, there are all sorts of different crimes out there to tickle one’s bloodlust, from straight-up murder to bizarre forays into the criminal lifestyle. The genre has become so well-known that author Daniel Kraus has decided to use it as a framework in his haunted-fast-food-franchise story The Ghost That Ate Us.

This book chronicles the haunting of a Burger City just outside of Jonny, Iowa. Novelist and first-time true crime writer Daniel Kraus investigates just what happened to the workers who witnessed these strange hauntings and the event that left many of them dead. Going back through digital evidence and interviewing the survivors, Daniel might be the only one able to discover what led to the tragedy that will forever stain Jonny, Iowa and one fast food franchise. More importantly, he might be the only one to stop history from repeating.

Kraus’s story benefits greatly from the true crime format: it allows him to dig into the story in a seemingly clinical manner while that clinical detachment gets chiseled down throughout the course of the story. Add with that his spellbinding interactions with the survivors who are still bearing the physical and emotional scars from the poltergeist and both author and reader are slowly and inevitably pulled in. Much like the Blair Witch back in the ‘90s, its pull comes from its flirtation with being a “true” story. Part of true crime’s appeal is that there is often more than a few kernels of truth in these stories, which makes it a little harder to forget once the book is closed or you’ve closed your Netflix app. Those won’t stop the evil if there’s the possibility it’s somewhere outside your house.

Stream to Scream: Malignant and Such a Pretty Smile

 

This shouldn’t have to be said, but I will state it just in case there are people reading this who still haven’t gotten the message: horror can be about more than just scaring or disgusting the readers. Yes, there are plenty of movies and books that are more like endurance tests than enjoyable fiction, there are people that enjoy them, and I’m not here to pass judgment on them. But horror stories can show a creator’s understanding of storytelling devices, especially themes. The James Wan film Malignant and Kristi DeMeester’s novel Such a Pretty Smile have their shocking moments, but they also have the underpinnings of a very popular theme in fiction: family.

People who haven’t watched Malignant might have heard of it, whether by it being a work by Saw and Conjuring director James Wan or by having its completely bonkers premise spoiled for them. I will do my best to avoid that here. All readers really need to know about the premise is that a woman named Madison who witnesses a series of murders because she is somehow seeing the killer’s memories. Knowing so much about these murders and her connection to the victims naturally have her high on the suspect list even as she, and the audience, tries to discover whether or not she’s going mad. There’s the standard James Wan moments of shadowy corners and faces in the dark, but it goes wonderfully off the rails by the third act. Despite this, Wan does understand what ultimately helps this woman stand up against this ultimate evil. It is the family that she may not have been born into but loves her all the same. Leave it to Wan to hide some sentimentality into his gonzo, out-there horror movie.

Such a Pretty Smile isn’t as out there as Malignant, but it understands how the family dynamic gives its heroines strength. The story stars in 2004 when a serial killer called the Cur, known for the rather doglike way he savages the bodies, starts up yet another murder spree involving young girls in New Orleans. Caroline, a young artist dealing with the deteriorating health of her father, is having bad dreams and may even be sleepwalking. She also hears strange howling in the night. In the present, Caroline’s daughter Lila is trying to cope with typical teen issues like crushes and parents not understanding, but she also hears the howling and she’s also getting strange urges. Such a Pretty Smile doesn’t need to dial up the crazy because DeMeester understands the emotional underpinnings of its dual narratives, which switches back and forth between mother and daughter and sets up the parallel between the two and allows both drawing on the strength and love from the other. Both tales have men who act as villains and do some truly heinous things, but they also feature women who become stronger through coming together and finding other strong women to lean on.

Have You Read This? August's Eyes by Glenn Rolfe

 Ghosts can haunt us, but so do memories. These ghosts of memory haunt us with the joys we can never again know as well as the regrets that make us second-guess ourselves. Sometimes, these memories can be patient. They can wait a long time, emerging years later, clawing their way out of our psyches where we buried them. Such is the fate of the protagonist in Glenn Rolfe’s supernatural thriller August’s Eyes.

When John Colby was a boy, he saw something he shouldn’t have. He saw a young friend get kidnapped by a killer the press called the Ghoul of Wisconsin. John buried this event deep in his mind until years later, when an adult John, now married and a social worker, is tormented by dreams where he is a boy and trapped in a place called Graveyard Land, and there is a Ghoul in that graveyard that he doesn’t want to find him. John thought that it was just a dream but that dream is intruding on the waking world, terrorizing his family and friends. The Ghoul is also very real, and he wants little Johnny to come with him to Graveyard Land and stay there forever.

Rolfe’s work is very reminiscent of Stephen King with its developed characters, slow-building tension, and epic, otherworldly confrontations. However, there’s a little bit of Jack Ketchum creeping in, or at least an extreme sensibility that shows Rolfe doesn’t mind exploring the subject of child abduction and assault. The book does indeed get dark, but it never feels exploitative. Rolfe does this by populating his book with characters that are more than one-dimensional hostages, characters that the reader can get to know, love, and cheer for as they fight their way through the story’s darkness. From wife Sarah, who is supportive of her husband while having her own interests, to Patrick, a hard-working teenager who gets a chance to put his true crime knowledge to use. Finally, there’s John Colby himself, who has his flaws, but he is still a likable protagonist and ultimately demonstrates the strength of character needed to fight back against the Ghoul and his minions. The book left a few gaps in the overall mythology, placing the main villain too deeply into the shadows at times, while the plot also moved too quickly, zipping quickly between chapters and storylines, but August’s Eyes  is still a great read for people who wish Stephen King would really cut loose. The book was still an enjoyable stroll through Graveyard Land even with some serious darkness always nipping at my heels.