Have You Read This? A Light Most Hateful by Hailey Piper

 

The drive-in is a vanishing part of the cultural landscape, which is rather sad considering the myriad and delightful horrors that once graced their screens. Many people have fond memories of the drive-in, even those who haven’t watched horror movies, but for horror fans, the drive-in conjures thoughts of monsters from the stars like the ones from Joe Lansdale’s magnum opus The Drive-In. It’s fitting, then, that Hailey Piper begins her latest book A Light Most Hateful at a drive-in on the night of a reality-rending storm, but Piper also takes the concept to some original and terrifying places.

This journey into the frightfully fantastic begins in the small town of Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania where Olivia lives after running away from home. She has managed to eke out a life while she deals with small-town boredom and an unrequited crush on her best friend Sunflower. Then a summer storm shows up, bringing more than just thunder and lightning. This storm brings with it the power to bend the will of the people of Chapel Hill to an otherworldly intelligence, even as it transforms the landscape. Olivia now tries to survive the night and rescue Sunflower before the storm and the being it serves wipes Chapel Hill off the map.

This tale’s beginning in the drive-in and what happens to people after the storm approaches makes it feel like a by-the-book but still enjoyable monster movie that would entertain the late night drive-in crowd, but Piper has always excelled at taking her fiction in new and exciting directions that subvert her audience’s expectations. Rather than a simple tale of running and more running from a mob of brainwashed humanity, Piper has crafted a tale that explores the power and limits of friendship, exploring both the bonds that strengthen us and those that hold us back. Without revealing too much of the twist that brilliantly transforms the book as much as an unnatural storm, Piper also explores concepts of identity and the connective threads that are so tenuous yet somehow manage to hold us together. Come for the pseudo-zombies, but stay for the high-concept, mind-bending story.

Graphic Content: Playthings by Jon Clark and Travis Williamson

 

Many of us grew up with toys. Toys of all shapes and sizes, from games to dolls, have provided a great deal of our childhood memories. But like clowns and restaurants featuring animatronic mascots, toys that were created with the singular intent of providing joy to children become twisted when portrayed within the horror genre. Imagine Toy Story and Joe Hill’s N0S4A2 had a horrifying baby that lived in the tunnels beneath Fantasyland in Walt Disney World and you might come up with the elevator pitch for Playthings, a comic series created by writer and colorist Jon Clark and illustrator Travis Williamson.

The story begins with Alison Hart waking up in a brightly colored room surrounded by toys that seem to be moving on their own. She’s also tied to a chair and appears to have plastic hands, but that’s not even the worst thing that’s happening to her. Her daughter is missing, taken into this warped wonderland by one of these toys and she will do anything to get her daughter back, even things that she once thought were unthinkable.

Clark’s story might bring up thoughts of Child’s Play and its killer doll Chucky, especially how one doll in particular loves to attack its victims legs, but it differentiates itself through its setting and its protagonist. Alison is not initially portrayed as a good mother, or at least it seems she’s an indifferent one. It isn’t until her daughter is taken that her protective nature emerges. Then she begins her descent into a demented playhouse that is more terrifying than anything Alice ever encountered in Wonderland.

This psychedelic trip that would give Liam Neeson second thoughts is gloriously rendered thanks to Williamson’s illustrations, along with Clark’s choice of colors. Williamson has made the interesting decision of leaving a more cartoonish aspect to his character design (something akin to Image’s The Maxx series for those comic fans with long memories). The people populating this universe don’t look too different from the toys that are supposed to shock when they start coming to life. This aesthetic choice makes the book look less like a bad touch of Christmas magic and more a questioning of reality, leaving the reader constantly guessing as to what’s going on.

Playthings is currently on Hoopla but I hope it gets its own trade paperback very soon.

Have You Read This?: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

 

Family can be a source of comfort, but family can also be a source of anxiety, even trauma. When those who are supposed to protect us do the complete opposite, it can be uniquely terrifying. Jack Torrance running through the halls of the Overlook with a mallet is scary, but it’s particularly terrifying to Danny Torrance (and the readers when they are seeing Jack through his son’s eyes). The betrayal of grandparents might not have the sting of a parent emotionally harming a child, but those wounds can still run deep, especially when it forces someone to confront that grandparent’s influence on them.  T. Kingfisher’s A House with Good Bones features a less-than-kind grandmother who has already sowed the seeds of trauma within the minds of her family. 

Sam Montgomery heads to North Carolina to spend some time with her mother in the family home, the one inherited from Gran Mae. Sam loves dearly, but she notices that something is off with her. The changes range from her nervous energy and weight loss to the more obvious redecorating of the house in a style more similar to Gran Mae’s. Gran Mae was a spiteful and controlling old woman whose influence has somehow lasted even after her death. Sam tries to figure out what is happening to her mother and hopefully save her.

Kingfisher seems to excel in creating narrators who are human as well as humorous. Sam has a wry sense of humor that she manages to maintain even as she catalogs all the strangeness around her. There’re a few spooky phenomena in this book, but the unease comes more from Mom’s odd behavior. The terror doesn’t really kick in until late in the book where the supernatural elements decide to stop hiding. It’s a tonal shift, but readers will be rewarded with an off-the-wall yet heartfelt ending, if they stick with the book. The book being a novella, and the likability of Sam, makes finishing this book as easy as a trip through a not-haunted garden.

Graphic Content: Family Tree, Vol. 1: Sapling by Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester

 

The title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” isn’t hyperbole or symbolism (that comes later in the story). The subject of the story is an old man with wings sprouting from his back. He crashlands in a couple’s yard and with his arrival flock the pious and the curious, those who see the old man as either a celestial being or an oddity to be put in captivity for our amusement. If the story has a moral, it’s that  when humanity discovers something truly awe-inspiring, we’d probably find some way to ruin it. The “humanity ruins everything” trope has been explored throughout literature, both fantastical and mundane, but there are times where it goes beyond simply that people are intrinsically terrible. Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester, for example, created a story where they combine the fantastic and mundane to  explore familial bonds in the aptly titled Family Tree, Vol. 1: Sapling.

The story centers on single mom Loretta, her angsty teenage son Josh, and her young daughter Megan, who seems to be turning into a tree. What begins as a rash on her skin soon becomes bark complete with branches and leaves. Adding to the drama is the return of the kids’ grandfather/Loretta’s father-in-law Judd, an old man who’s handy with a shotgun. Soon the reunited family goes on the run from a mysterious group called the Arborists that wants Meg for their own ends. As the family flees and tensions between them rise, more is revealed about what the Arborists want and what Megan’s skin-to-bark affliction actually is.

The images of Megan’s skin becoming bark, plus some other spoiler-laden images of what this affliction does, puts it in the realm of body horror, but there’s also a fantastical undercurrent, particularly when Lemire’s story explores what is happening to Megan and many others around the world. Beneath the bark of this body horror fantasy are layers (or rings) of familial relationships that seem to give the title of this book a deeper meaning beyond the obvious pun. These layers include Loretta and grandfather/father-in-law Judd sniping at each other over what happened to the kid’s father or Meg learning more about her father thanks to what’s happening to her. Yes, there’s some graphic skin-to-bark depictions, but Hester shows real skill in depicting the pain in each family members’ expressions from annoyance to anger to terror. This story incorporates body horror, but those expecting a bloodbath with monster trees might be disappointed. This Family Tree is more about the lives of individual branches trying to discover their roots (yes, the tree puns are done). Just like Marquez used a pseudoangel to explore human weakness and a desire for meaning, Family Tree, Vol. 1: Sapling  uses an apocalyptic tree disease to explore how family makes us who we are, for better or worse.