Have You Read This? Wasps in the Ice Cream by Tim McGregor

 

Many people who study horror as a literary genre will often ask what makes a particular work of fiction a horror book? As told by Wikipedia, literary historian J. A. Cudon says that horror is a genre that “shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing.” In other words, horror is more than scares that gets the heart racing. Sometimes, horror is quiet, as slow-acting as a poison, not shocking the heart, but leaving it sick. Such is the case with Tim McGregor’s novella Wasps in the Ice Cream.

It’s Summer 1987, and young Mark Prewitt plans on spending the summer goofing off with his friends. Unfortunately, he and his friends harass the Farrow girls, whose family are the town’s pariahs. Feeling guilty, Mark strikes up a friendship with Farrow sister Georgia, one that threatens to become something more. Mark soon leads a double life, hiding his relationship with Georgia from the town while getting pulled deeper into the Farrow’s world of witchcraft and speaking with the dead. The summer will end with Mark forced to choose between his friends and the fascinating Farrows, as well as how dark the human heart can get.

An elevator pitch for this book would be “Shirley Jackson writes a pitch for The Wonder Years but set in the decade of Stranger Things,” but such a pitch might be reductive for what McGregor has really done with this coming-of-age story. Even the book’s title, referencing Mark’s job, can be symbolic of something dangerous hidden in something sweet, and such symbolism could describe Mark’s relationship with Georgia, Mark’s relationship with his friends, or just Mark’s idealism crashing headlong into reality. Even the book’s supernatural elements take a backseat to McGregor’s stellar character development, particularly with Mark and Georgia, the two characters McGregor pushes the farthest from tropes that have been explored in other books. Georgia is more than just a witch trope, and Mark is a likable enough protagonist but has a graveyard full of secrets.

The story focuses on Mark, but both he and Georgia have an air of tragedy about them. Theirs is a relationship that readers will want to see succeed despite the multitude of hurdles placed before them. Instead of syrupy, afterschool-special sweetness, McGregor opts for something more bittersweet, which many would argue is closer to an authentic portrayal of adolescent love. 

 

Graphic Content: Killadelphia written by Rodney Barnes and illustrated by Jason Shawn Alexander

 

Vampires are monsters. This is a fact, but what makes a monster? Is it simply the teeth and claws? Most animals have those, and even if they use them on other beasts, we don’t necessarily think they are monsters. Maybe it is intent, the willingness to do evil. That could make something a monster, but what if that intent to do evil is born in what some might call noble intentions. This quandary is explored in rather bloody ways in the vampire graphic novel Killadelphia, Deluxe Edition, Book One, written by Rodney Barnes and illustrated by Jason Shawn Alexander.

Philadelphia is a town rich in history, but that history is a bloody one that decides to rise again. Vampires walk the streets in the city of brotherly love. James Sanger, Jr., along with his recently resurrected father, must stop the machinations of President John Adams and his crew who want to start a very bloody revolution.

Barnes’s story has a surprising number of layers. Besides the main conflict of living vs. dead, there’s the frayed relationship between father and son detectives James Sanger, Jr. and Sr. The father is a legendary homicide cop and Junior feels he could never hope to fill those shoes. Senior also does little to boost his son’s confidence, spending most of the book putting down his son and his abilities to the point that readers can see it's not just the bloodlust talking. That rather toxic dynamic is actually detrimental to the horrors they are facing, namely the Adams and their army of vampires, all pulled from lower socioeconomic classes and all looking to rise up for something other than blood.

However, this book has plenty of blood, thanks to Alexander’s artwork. I would say it’s spilled but there are plenty of vampires in these pages ready to lap it up, and the action can get frenetic enough to lose track of what’s going on. Alexander doesn’t lose track of the fact these vampires are truly monstrous to behold, sprouting serpentine fangs and grasping talons that help the reader perceive them as not quite human, not while in the throes of bloodlust. Yet there’s also more subdued moments that Alexander shows his talents at rendering people not sprouting fangs, creating realistic faces that emote when necessary.

The real strength of this book, and of the included werewolf story Elysium Gardens, is Barnes’s characters. The cast of characters permeating Killadephia don’t feel like filler or like stereotypes; they all have distinct motivations, both monsters and humans alike. These characters, at multiple points in the unspoken social hierarchy, all speak to its many levels and just how precarious that structure is.

Graphic Content: Empty Eyes, written by Diego Agrimbau and illustrated by Juan Manuel Tumburús

 Childhood is expected to be a time of innocence, but horror has a great way of subverting expectations. In some stories, there are “childhood things” that we are told we need to put away to become adults. These include toys and imaginary friends are ultimately holding us back from being mature and capable adults. In some horror stories, these childhood things (for example, killer dolls) prevent us from growing up by simply ending us, but some childhood things can also protect us from what awaits us in the very cruel, very real adult world. Such is the case of the graphic novel Empty Eyes, written by Diego Agrimbau and illustrated by Juan Manuel Tumburús.

The story takes place during WWI at the border between Russia and Poland. Near the border is the Nurk Orphanage, which now houses only three living children: young Otto, his older sister Ophelia, and Maurice, who has a psychological hold over the siblings, ordering them to bring back fresh meat to feed Maurice’s cannibalistic tendencies. Otto wants his sister’s protection, especially after all the other children died, but they might still be close to Otto, perhaps looking out at him through the dolls that fill the place.

It is easy to think of Guillermo Del Toro’s work as this story shows the contrast between the fantasy world and a real world ravaged by war, but Agrumbau’s story is less fantasy and more horror, as it deals with child death and cannibalism. Tumburus’s artwork even plays with this dichotomy of childlike wonder and horror in his artwork. The children are wide-eyed (when they have eyes) and cherubic and seem to reference the artwork of many popular children’s books. What this ultimately means for young Otto is that the world that exists outside his is not one of bright, safe fantasy. There is no respite, either in this world or the next, for the ravages of war and the horrors born of the human condition. Readers who are fans of Del Toro’s movies will love this particular graphic novel, as well as readers who know childhood always has a dark side.

 

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.