Have You Read This? It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

 

The popularity of shows like Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and its sequel The Haunting of Bly Manor show that the public still has an appetite for spooky ghost stories. When bringing up these and other haunted house tales, it should be noted that there is more to these ghosts than just how they look in a flowing white sheet. Ghost stories are all about memories and hurts buried deep until they come screaming to the surface. This idea is especially evident in Jo Kaplan’s haunted mansion and haunted people novel It Will Just Be Us.

The book follows the story of the Wakefield family, namely protagonist Sam Wakefield. She has just moved back with her mother into the family’s haunted mansion, but what haunts this mansion doesn’t wear a sheet or rattle chains. Wakefield Manor is where different moments in the house’s history constantly replays for its tenants, showing Sam the lives of her ancestors as well as traumas she’d rather forget about. When Sam’s pregnant sister Elizabeth moves in following a fight with her husband, a new specter appears, a faceless boy who wants to play with Sam in the worst possible way.

Kaplan inserts a lot of different horror tropes and plot points like a plate spinner constantly adding one more plate to keep spinning, always with the threat of the whole thing crashing down. While some of those threads seem to dangle, Kaplan’s story crosses the finish line with a complete, even heartbreaking, ending. She also demonstrates a deep understanding of how fully-realized characters, not moaning and creaking doors, draw readers into these stories. She creates very believable relationships and motivations, like the sisters’ love/hate relationship and the mother’s alcoholism, which everyone is forced to watch and relive over and over again. Like any good ghost story, It Will Just Be Us is a character study of people who cannot escape the gravitational pull of events that have them repeat or compound mistakes that could lead to their downfall. Like many haunted house stories, Wakefield Mansion can represent the minds of these women, both familiar home as well as prison where each hallway and stairwell only lead to locked doors. If ever a show deserves to be in the streaming pantheon of haunted house shows, hopefully this book will join them. Until then, people should just read and enjoy the book.

Screen to Scream: Crimson Peak and Mexican Gothic

There are so many haunted house stories out there, I wonder if, in these horror universes, there isn’t a subdivision of real estate that deals specifically with haunted homes (The realtor, smiling, says, “this house is located next to some great schools, the mall, and there’s a convenient Hellmouth in the basement”). That said, there are still people getting more mileage out of this trope, even doubling down into the trappings of Gothic storytelling: large, imposing mansion; odd, secretive characters that may or may not be antagonists, and bad weather (fog, rain, etc.). Guillermo Del Toro’s film Crimson Peak, for example, leans heavily into its Gothic roots, complete with that Del Toro aesthetic, but there are also books like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’sMexican Gothic that are willing to take the Gothic haunted house tale in new and exciting directions.

Crimson Peak is a visually breathtaking film, a literal Gothic tale come to life that can be genuinely scary. The story of Edith Cushing, a young woman who falls for an marries young eccentric Sir Thomas Sharp, is one familiar to many fans of the genre. All the basics are there, from an obtrusive, menacing sister who resents Edith’s presence to a notable physical location, the eponymous Crimson Peak, a mountain stained by its red clay (symbolism). Add a decrepit mansion with a hole in its center (MORE SYMBOLISM!) and you have all the ingredients there, but focused through the lens of Del Toro’s vision, such as his depictions of the ghosts that haunt this place, the movie becomes a sprawling, gorgeously odd movie.

Mexican Gothic is a different kind of story. Yes, there are the basic elements: slightly naïve but plucky heroine, sprawling family mansion that’s mostly isolated, creepy and off-putting family. However, Moreno-Garcia doesn’t rely on a visual aesthetic to draw readers in, instead using well-developed characters and descriptions to captivate readers. Noemi Taboada is more than just a heroine who finds herself suddenly over her head in a mansion far from her social circles. Noemi is a young woman with her own motivations and fears, one who realizes that her status as a woman and a socialite often has many of those she encounters pigeonholing her, even as she slowly discovers who she is and what she is truly capable of by delving into the mystery of High Place. High Place itself becomes more than just a house as Moreno-Garcia’s descriptions go beyond making High Place a metaphorical antagonistic setting and actually cast it as a living, even malevolent, organism. Both movie and book are familiar with the Gothic tradition, but they both find their emotional power by upending these traditions.

Have You Read This? Boneset & Feathers by Gwendolyn Kiste

 

Many readers are familiar with the “coming-of-age” narrative, but there is a different narrative that is typically prevalent in the superhero genre. I like to call it “coming into power.” That power can be the ability to move objects with your mind or cause them to spontaneously combust, but it is also a realization of one’s identity, one’s agency in their own fate, and one’s responsibility to others. A modern superhero example is Spider-Man, who went from pro wrestler to superhero after his inaction helped cause the death of his beloved Uncle Ben. A similar plotline moves through Gwendolyn Kiste’s latest book of witches and self-discovery Boneset & Feathers.

Just to clarify, the story has nothing to do with superheroes. The main character Odette is a witch, but she’s not the kind that flies to places on brooms or casts fireballs at her enemies. In truth, Odette seems very afraid of her magic, not just because of what it can do but what it can attract. Odette’s world if full of Witchfinders, men who make those involved in the Salem Witch Trials seem like choir boys, and Odette escaped them last time only because she did not burn. The rest of her village wasn’t so lucky. The village she used to call home now fears her and the magic she refuses to use is demanding to be used, and this coincides with the Witchfinders returning to Odette’s village to finish what they started.

It’s tempting to call this book a historical fantasy novel, but it almost takes place in another world, one where witchcraft and forest spirits are more prevalent and sometimes malevolent. However, the main theme of this novel is familiar for those fans of books like X-Men, where the protagonists discover the powers they have are not necessarily curses but can be channeled into positive pursuits, including helping others. Other appeal terms that this novel brings up are “female empowerment” and “self-actualization.” One of the big appeals of this book is watching the young witch Odette learning about the power that lives within her and coming to terms with it. Many readers, I think, will want to observe Odette make this journey of “coming into power” as well.

Have You Read This? The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

 

The vampire has been used so many times in fiction that it probably deserves its own section in Barnes and Noble (at the very least, it deserves a few displays). What began with Varney and Dracula has now expanded to the vampire infecting different genres from action to westerns to romance. Heck, there's probably an Amish vampire novel out there somewhere. So to take the vampire as your story's main villain and make that story stand out is an accomplishment, one that Grady Hendrix has done in his latest The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires. 

Patricia Campbell is a housewife who has devoted herself to her family and her household, but she had found fulfillment in those to be lacking. With her ungrateful kids and distant husband, the only comfort in Patricia's life is a bookclub focusing on true crime. So when a stranger enters their neighborhood, and strange things start happening in her neighborhood, Patricia begins to suspect this stranger, charismatic James Harris, is cut from the same cloth as Bundy or Dahmer, but the truth is much more sinister and his grip on the community is much more difficult to pry loose. 

I can imagine the elevator pitch for this book being, "Okay, it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but replace the Scooby Gang with the cast from Steel Magnolias." However, Grady Hendrix has shown time and again that he can create a truly resonant story out of a pretty wacky premise. Yes, this book has some gory moments, some funny moments, and even some comedic gory moments, but Hendrix never forgets the emotional core of this story, the friendship that unites these women. And James Harris is more than just the slavering monster; Hendrix makes him not only evil but also magnetic. It doesn't take him long to burrow into the community and make himself at home, even as the deaths pile up in a low-income area that borders the book club's. The book manages to discuss disparity between classes, suburban banality, and dreams deferred thanks to adult obligations, all in a story about Dracula invading a Southern suburb. 

Have You Read This? Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

There are some works of fiction that defy mere summary. These kinds of works are so outlandish that

summarizing them for the benefit of someone unfamiliar with the author’s work is liable to raise some eyebrows. It is also one of the great things about speculative fiction. A story can have completely unreal elements as long as its grounded in some reality. Joe Lansdale demonstrated his understanding of this when he wrote "Bubba Ho-Tep," making his mummy-fighting, rest-home-dwelling Elvis a deeply nuanced protagonist. Stephen Graham Jones also understands the grounding within reality, as demonstrated by his novella Night of the Mannequins.

I am hesitant to go into details about the actual plot of this tale because half the fun of reading this is trying to wrap your mind around the sheer lunacy of the plot. I can go into some detail about what this book includes: mannequins (a given), slasher films, sacrifices, kaiju-sized monsters, coming of age. The story focuses on a group of friends whose relatively innocent prank involving a mannequin goes way out of control, leading to death, destruction, and the collapse of friendships.

The book is narrated by Sawyer, a very entertaining but unreliable narrator, who tells the tale from introducing his friends, to the prank that was the first domino, to the aforementioned death and destruction. Reading this made me wonder what talking to Stephen Graham Jones is like. Not so much when he narrates his fiction, but when he just tells a story, sitting in a bar, recalling what happened to a cousin’s cousin or a great aunt’s friend. He displays a definite gift for description in an almost stream-of-conscience way that creates a truly unique literary voice. This tale owes a lot to slashers and Godzilla but you don’t need to be an overwhelming fan of both genres to appreciate the craft Jones brings to this story.

Have You Read This? Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill, Leomacs, and Dave Stewart

 Looking once more at the offerings by Hill House Comics, it's high time I got to Joe Hill's main contribution to these titles, largely because it was the one that peaked my interest in Joe Hill's return to the graphic novel format. The cover of Basketful of Heads features a figure wearing a yellow rain slicker, face obscured in shadow. One arm holds a wicker basket with an America flag draped over it (one can assume it is the aforementioned basketful of heads). The other hand holds an archaic looking battleaxe (one can assumed it was used to sever the heads residing in the basket). Just by looking at the cover, you know what the story is about and what the major appeal of the book is. 

There is a story to the basketful of heads. It takes place on the island of Brody Island (if you watched Jaws, you'll either love the constant references to the movie or roll your eyes at them). It also features two young lovers June and Liam, who are trying to decide what to do with the rest of their lives as summer winds down on the island and all the tourists leave for the summer. She and Liam are then tangled up in a plot involving murder, corruption, and escaped convicts. Liam is captured and June, in fighting off a man in a prison jumpsuit, discovers an axe that has a strange enchantment: whenever you cut off someone's head with it, the head remains alive. June tries to track down Liam using the enchanted axe and her collection of severed heads that reveal more and more of the story. 

Yes, there is a mystery here, but it's not one that leaves a great many jaw-on-the-floor surprise twists. The only real mystery is how someone in the scene is going to lose their head and be added to the basket. However, the story isn't really the point. Joe Hill did the right thing calling this story Basketful of Heads because the title is basically the point. Sure, Hill shows his flair for dialogue and interesting characters that helped fuel the success of his seminal work Locke & Key, but this story is all about the hijinks one can get up to with a severed head. There's no Agatha Christie level of mystery here, or even a Flannery O'Connor deep dive into the human soul. This book is for fans of movies like Re-Animator and Evil
Dead that explores some really fun body horror humor. Even the art by Leomacs and Stewart harkens back to DC's Vertigo titles, which showed many adult situations in ink and paint. This book has a particular audience, but Joe Hill seems to know exactly what that audience wants. 

New Arrival: The Dollhouse Family

 If many horror stories are to be believed, childhood things should not only be put away when one gets older, but maybe even burned to ash, followed by a salting of the earth it was burned on. The closet in your bedroom? There's a monster in it. Your favorite toy? There's something evil looking at you from that toy's glass eyes. Childhood is often looked at through the rose-colored lens of nostalgia, so horror just loves coming in and flipping that love of childhood and its memories on its head. If your home currently has a dollhouse in it and you read M. R. Carey's The Dollhouse Family from Hill House Comics, you'll probably consider selling it on Ebay. Or burning it. 

The Dollhouse Family is a generation-spanning tale featuring a antique dollhouse, an ageless family that lives inside it, and a girl whose life is fundamentally altered by it. Young Alice receives the dollhouse as a six-year-old and it becomes an oasis from her turbulent home life. By speaking some magic words, she is able to enter the dollhouse and spend time with her loving surrogate family. But such magical things often has very large price tags, and what lives beyond the Black Door will eventually try to collect. An adult Alice soon finds that what lives in the Dollhouse seeks entry into our world. 

Less like an actual dollhouse and more like a grandfather clock, this story has a lot of moving parts, from Alice's ancestor, to the family that occupies the Dollhouse, to Alice's struggles as a single mother. These plot points all vie for attention, but adult Alice's struggles as a mother from a broken home resonate the most as she finds herself doing the best for her daughter, even as she must come to terms with what the Dollhouse actually is. M. R. Carey, much in the same way he wrote about zombies in The Girl With All The Gifts, doesn't go for the low-hanging fruit of haunted dollhouse. This tale involves demon hunting, domestic terrorism, as well as whether it's preferable to live in a safe fantasy versus a painful reality. Add the art from Peter Gross and Vince Locke that introduces an Adult Coraline vibe, and you have a very twisting and twisted fairy tale for adults. The ending may be too out there for some, but the journey of Alice's family shows strong bonds and abiding love that no demonic children's toy can kill.
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