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.

 

Have You Read This? I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House by Ben Farthing

 

One of my favorite things about horror is how, no matter how far out there the premise is, one is still able to tell an emotionally resonant story. Add vampires, add vampire musicians, or add vampire hunting musicians hunting vampire musicians; readers of horror can afford to have their suspension of disbelief stretched to its limit if they feel the emotions being portrayed are authentic. One such example of this is the writings of Ben Farthing. My wife had recently purchased two of his books for me as a Christmas present. While I liked the nutty nostalgia-laced horror in I Found Puppets Living in My Apartment Walls, my mind comes back more often to his more emotionally relevant I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House.

The book is a quick read but it packs quite the emotional punch, despite its seemingly light premise. Proud dad Dave is hiking in the woods behind his house with his four-year-old son Jacob when both father and son make a fascinating discovery: somehow, a circus tent has appeared on Dave’s property. Dave at first doesn’t know what to do about such an oddity near his home and Jacob seemingly doesn’t want anything to do with the house, but all it takes for the two to become prisoners of the tent is to approach it. What began as a mere curiosity for Dave becomes a fight to escape a tent that seems to swell beyond the size of most tents, as though it somehow exists outside the boundaries of time and space.

Once father and son are trapped inside the tent, all sorts of seemingly impossible occurrences and monstrosities try to keep them from leaving. Dave is not only struggling to find a way out but he is trying to keep Jacob relatively calm and not have him break down in a way that would impede their escape. Much of the emotional weight of this story is in Dave questioning his own fitness as a parent and the end of the book provides a surprising knife in the gut for both Dave and the readers who, like Dave, wonder if they are really a good parent. How the book ends won’t give readers a sense of relief as it gives them a chance to say, “At least I’m not Dave.”

Graphic Content: Whisper of the Woods by Ennun Ana Iurov

 

There is a movie titled Don’t Go Into the Woods, which is also sound advice. In fact, many horror movies and stories are built around the premise of a character going somewhere they weren’t supposed to go, seemingly as an object lesson to not stray from the proper, well-lit path. Not going into the woods is, in fact, a time-honored tradition dating all the way back to Hansel and Gretel (though one could argue whether the children had any choice in the matter). Continuing that tradition of staying very far away from the woods by telling a very basic story is the short graphic novel Whisper of the Woods by Ennun Ana Iurov. 

Adam’s friend Vlad has disappeared. He went to Romania and no one has seen or heard from him, so Adam tries to track him down, venturing not only to a foreign land but to Romania’s most haunted forest, the Hoia Baciu. It is in this forest that the iele roam this forest looking for victims. Vlad might have been a victim of the iele, and Adam, who ventures into the woods, might be next.

Iurov, as both author and illustrator, has created a dark, little fairy tale that follows the basic premise of staying away from haunted places (an idea which frankly would have ended a lot of horror movies before they could get a body count) while also playing on the trope of the visitor to a foreign land or village that ignores the multiple warnings, from the townsfolk to the supernatural seeming omens, to leave. The story is rather basic, and would be rather uninspired if written out in text form, but it does allow Iurov to showcase gorgeous artwork that looks almost like hundred-year-old woodcuts. The barebones story and the artistic choices, like showing the differences of night and day by having vibrant colors during the day and stark black and white scenes at night make the book feel like a beautifully rendered children’s book. It’s a children’s book that’s not necessarily for children (for example, the nudity) but it might scratch a nostalgic itch for readers who long ago discovered they liked being scared all the way back in elementary school.

 

Have You Read This? Silent Key by Laurel Hightower

 

When it comes to combining genres, horror, like chocolate, goes with everything (if you are allergic to chocolate or simply don’t like chocolate, please insert your favorite food into this analogy). Like chocolate, when horror is drizzled onto a story, it becomes something delicious. Drizzle some horror on a western, and you get something like Alex Grecian’s Red Rabbit, drizzle it on comedy, and you get just about any work from Grady Hendrix. There are plenty of examples of genre mashups involving horror, but one that isn’t as prevalent is the action/adventure thriller (think if Stephen King wrote a story with James Patterson or C. J. Box). Laurel Hightower, however, has given readers a near-perfect blend of action/adventure and horror with her pulpy delicious tale Silent Key.

This tale features former Detective Cam Ambrose, who recently lost her husband Tony and discovered he was having an affair. Fearing those responsible may be coming after her and her family, including her young daughter Sammie and her brother/protector Dimi, she heads to Texas to her Uncle Bert’s place. What was an escape from New York turns out to be even more dangerous as there’s something haunting Bert’s place, something Sammie can see, but something that Cam will barely see coming. To save herself and her family, Cam must find out what is haunting them and what secrets her husband was keeping from her.

It might be an oversimplification to say one simply drizzles horror into another genre when sometimes it requires a balance. Too much of one genre creates a constant shifting in tone and atmosphere that dilutes the final product. Hightower, however, has found the proper balance: a suspense-driven thriller that also utilizes haunted house tropes that will genuinely frighten readers. These kinds of thrillers tend to be full of plot elements and characters that propel the narrative at the risk of losing readers, but Hightower maintains the story’s focus throughout, even creating a potential story universe that can be explored in later books. This is why horror is drizzled into these stories and not poured. Like any good chef, Hightower shows the importance of just the right blend of ingredients.

Have You Read This? Rin Chupeco's The Sacrifice

 

YA horror has always seemed rather nebulous. What exactly is YA horror? It can be defined as “horror that specifically targets young adults ages 11-18” (and that’s my definition that I’m using to make a point, so bear with me here), but that then leads to the question of how exactly does fiction target a young adult market? Does it use teenagers? Does it reference Pokemon? Being that I am old enough to have grandchildren, when I talk about YA horror, I feel like the Steve Buscemi meme where he’s wearing skater garb and asking “How do you do, fellow kids?” Before I’m called a curmudgeon or advised to go play stickball in the street, I’m reminding people of my age only to illustrate how I need to broaden my own horizons. Thus, I’ve decided to give Rin Chupeco’s The Sacrifice a try, and it offers a narrative that borders on both folk horror and even a smattering of metacommentary.

There is no found footage necessarily in this story, but it does involve a Hollywood film crew that visits the remote island of Kipsmata located near the Philippines. The locals know that the island is under the sway of a dreaming god, but that’s exactly why a film crew has decided to film their latest reality show there. They hire a local teen, Aton, who is familiar with the island and its curse, to be their guide, but he also might have to be the crew’s savior when someone attempts to wake this god and claim its power.

The story collects a lot of different folklore and tropes to create its funhouse of an island, from ghosts that torment the living with guilt and regret to folk horror where the trees are said to grow around corpses. Chupeco’s use of East Asian mythology also gives this story a setting way different from the Gothic house with creaking doors. There’s a mishmash of characters who fill out the crew but the real linchpin in the story is Aton, the main POV character who offers an outsider perspective to a film crew blithely wandering into a trap. He also serves as the voice of reason that, of course, no one listens to, all while pursuing a relationship with teen Chase, a boy who is recovering from a nasty breakup through social media. Its focus on the teen protagonist puts this tale squarely in the YA category and its scares are fairly conventional but the setting does keep them interesting. Another YA horror novel, Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield, has more moments of sheer terror, but The Sacrifice does offer a spooky action-adventure in an exotic locale.