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sharpteethreviews · 7 months ago

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The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 (4.5/5)

“When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . . .

When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury. But with her husband dead just weeks after their marriage, her new servants resentful, and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie has only her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. Inside her new home lies a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure —a silent companion —-that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself. The residents of The Bridge are terrified of the figure, but Elsie tries to shrug this off as simple superstition--that is, until she notices the figure's eyes following her.

A Victorian ghost story that evokes a most unsettling kind of fear, this is a tale that creeps its way through the consciousness in ways you least expect--much like the silent companions themselves.”

When I first checked out The Silent Companions from the library, it only had 3-stars on Goodreads. Looking at it now, I’m pleased to see that it’s gone up to nearly 4-stars- of course, because I’m biased but that’s kind of the point of this whole review blog. I will never claim non-bias, I think book reviews mean slightly more when there’s a bias in there. But that’s my opinion, this whole thing is my opinion.

I’m a self-proclaimed lover of the psychological aspect of horror- what can I say? There’s something about watching someone being faced with horrors and seeing exactly how it is they cope, or fail to. Purcell has a particularly fascinating exploration into this with The Silent Companions. Gaslighting in horror is one of my particular favourite tropes within that psychological umbrella- to be experiencing fear and to be doubted. And then to combine it further with the isolation of grief!

To quote the book itself, “She had an urge to confess everything. . . But to speak of such things made them a farce. You could not explain fear; you could only feel it, roaring through the silence and striking your heart still.”

Purcell’s voice in her writing captures perfectly the rolling tumble from a woman with her head held high to desperate defeat. And that’s something I can’t understate, Purcell really does excel in this book with her tones- from the blue tones of grief to the grey of misery. There is something so enrapturing about how she writes horror, that you act as voyeur in Elsie’s story. Her recounting of her doom. The atmosphere is created with a natural ease, there’s no theatrical backdrop here- any context needed for period terminology is given through natural story flow instead of a whole aside being needed, or an immersion breaking explanation. It’s difficult to successfully explain whole cultural items through context clues, but I do think that Purcell should be given the credit of having done it very well.

Additionally, something I think I have to mention; the sort of ‘creatures’ in this book, the things actually committing the horror bit, are fascinating. They’re not something that you’d normally think to be afraid of, creeped out by maybe, but overall harmless. Nobody is really eyeing their life-sized cardboard cutout of a random celebrity like it’s going to murder them. But Purcell makes them absolutely creepy with just the idea of it. They don’t even do much- it’s implied- and somehow it’s all the worse for it. There’s one passage in the book that I can’t quote here in full without spoilers, but I can quote even just this tiny fragment for a fraction of the effect. “Splinters. . . Something trying to get in.”

Haunted dolls step aside, the cardboard cutout of Danny Devito in the back of your bedroom closet is making his move.

Now, something I’m not usually a personal fan of in really any book is multiple timelines being told within, separated by chapters. There’s something about it that breaks immersion for me, something about being distracted by the cliffhanger of one storyline during the next installment of the other story- only for that one to pause just as you were getting back into it. Rinse and repeat. The Silent Companions unfortunately isn’t an exception to this. I feel the pacing between the three timelines taking place can be an awkward shift instead of the natural flow the story itself has. Maybe that natural flow is what makes it so awkward- it doesn’t feel like what’s happening should pause, so the disruption is harder to recover from. The stories being told are still great, and well written- I’m just not a huge fan of the breaks in flow.

The end of the book is also a bit of a disappointment in that regard. I won’t spoil it here, I don’t want this to be a spoiler blog for some reason. But the end of the story here feels more stuttered and haphazard, some ideas feel unfinished or unfleshed out. Like it was something Purcell might’ve explored more but didn’t, for either a lack of time or space, or that she couldn’t make a longer delve into it work. I would’ve really liked for the ending to feel more like a solid landing for all the greatness that preceded it- but instead it sort of feels like an ‘Oh? Okay I guess.’

Overall, Purcell did an amazing job with The Silent Companions. It’s a book I would heavily recommend for anyone looking for a nice shorter length-without-being-too-short story. It’s involving, the pacing of the ‘main’ storyline is incredibly well done, the horror is a beautifully crafted sense of dread and confusion. Its ambiance is lovingly crafted with a healthy amount of period knowledge without becoming an essay. I don’t know, I just really enjoyed what Purcell did here and the next book on my to-read list is The House of Whispers by her, so I have decently high hopes.

I can add a warning that there are some elements of this book that might affect certain audiences- if you’re squeamish about things happening to babies or pregnancy, or if you’re sensitive to topics of mental illness in a ‘Victorian-Asylum’ kind of way, then at the very least be advised and don’t say I didn’t warn you. Or do, really, I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet.

Cheers, friends!

#book blog #book review #books #sharpteethreview #bibliophile #horror #horror books #literature #The Silent Companions #laura purcell #horror book review #hello

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kjudgemental · 8 months ago

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The Southern Book Club's Guide To Slaying Vampires - Horror Novel Review

Author: Grady Hendrix Publisher: Quirk Books Country: USA Year: 2020 The last novel of Hendrix before his move to Titan Books for his next release (which would be The Final Girl Support Group) is, as he states in the introduction, a kind of companion piece for My Best Friend’s Exorcism, taking a look at the adventure of parenthood as opposed to the troubles of the teenage years. Here our…

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esonetwork · 2 years ago

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'Reliquary' Book Review By Ron Fortier

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/reliquary-book-review-by-ron-fortier/

'Reliquary' Book Review By Ron Fortier

RELIQUARY By Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child Forge Fiction 264 Pgs

Way back in 2002 a good friend sent us a copy of the book, “The Cabinet of Curiosities” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It was in this book that we first encountered FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. We didn’t know at the time that it was the character’s third appearance in a book by these two writers. Later we would learn he had first appeared in “Relic,” (1995) a horror thriller that was later adapted into a feature film. Now we hadn’t read “Relic” but we had seen and enjoyed the movie. Sadly, while bringing the story to the screen, the screenwriters opted to trim the large cast of characters and Pendergast was one of the casualties of those cuts.

Buoyed by the success of that first collaboration, Preston and Child wrote a sequel, “Reliquary” (1997), and once again brought back Pendergast as part of the original cast of characters from the previous thriller. Again, at the time, we were totally oblivious to any of this. Or the fact that Pendergast role slowly growing even though he was still part of an ensemble of players. With the arrival of “The Cabinet of Curiosities” he took center stage and quickly gathered a huge fandom. Soon the series became the Pendergast books and each continued to expand his popularity. It remains our personal favorite.

Recently we found a new paperback edition of “Reliquary” and immediately picked it up. We were amused at the sub-title indicating it was “The Second Novel in the Pendergast Series.” How things had changed. Being familiar with the movie version of “Relic” we had no trouble digging into this story and realized quickly that it is most assuredly a follow-up. In fact, one might rightly call it Part Two of the same tale. In “Relic” a scientist returns from a trip to the Amazon infected by an exotic plant. Upon his return to New York City and the Natural History Museum, it transforms him physically into a monstrous beast that then terrorizes and murders lots of people before being vanquished.

In “Reliquary” several of his museum colleagues have discovered the truth behind the monster and begin experimenting with what remains of the alien plant. This secret experiment leads to the creation of as yet another mental and physical altering drug and they begin testing it on the homeless “moles” that live beneath the streets of the city. Soon these poor souls are turned into horrible creatures and begin killing people at random. When a rich young debutant becomes one of their victims and her headless corpse is discovered in the river, the police begin to investigate, and eventually, Lt. Vincent D’Agosta and Dr. Nora Kelly, a museum curator, are once again teaming up to solve the grisly murders. It is no surprise when, a quarter into the book, Agent Pendergast appears we readers are once again enjoying another fast-paced, fantastic thriller like no other.

Being Pendergast fans, we’re happy to have had this chance to read one of his earliest appearances and as ever cannot wait for his newest book.

#Aloysius Pendergast #book review #Cabinet of Curiosities #Douglas Preston #ESO #ESO Book Review #ESO Network #Forge Fiction #Horror Book Review #Lincoln Child #reliquary #Ron Fortier

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liber---monstrorum · 2 years ago

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2 ⭐ - sorry if the review sounds mean, I got infected with the nightmare vegan evil disease

SUMMARY

Grace isn’t exactly thrilled when her newly widowed mother, Jackie, asks to move in with her. They’ve never had a great relationship, and Grace likes her space—especially now that she’s stuck at home during a pandemic. Then again, she needs help with the mortgage after losing her job. And maybe it’ll be a chance for them to bond—or at least give each other a hand. But living with Mother isn’t for everyone. Good intentions turn bad soon after Jackie moves in. Old wounds fester; new ones open. Grace starts having nightmares about her disabled twin sister, who died when they were kids. And Jackie discovers that Grace secretly catfishes people online—a hobby Jackie thinks is unforgivable. When Jackie makes an earth-shattering accusation against her, Grace sees it as an act of revenge, and it sends her spiraling into a sleep-deprived madness. As the walls close in, the ghosts of Grace’s past collide with a new but familiar threat: Mom. (Source)

Review below the cut. Warning, this review will contain spoilers.

REVIEW

I'm going to be honest: there's not a lot in Mothered that I particularly enjoyed. The pacing, story, prose, and characters were not at all what I want from a horror book. There were exactly two characters I liked seeing on the page (which is stretching it, since one of them is a cat) and one horror moment that I found to be memorably creepy. While it was a fast read, if I hadn't gotten this book through Netgalley I almost certainly would have DNF'd it pretty quickly (and that is if I had picked it up at all, since it would have failed the page 99 test).

STRUCTURE AND PROSE

As it opens and ends the story, I may as well discuss the prologue and epilogue. These two follow a therapist named Silas, who claims he is excited to work with an unnamed patient due to the brutality of the murder she committed. It's obfuscated which of the two women, Jackie or Grace, committed homicide. (Keep a pin in this as we'll be returning to it.) As the prologue concludes, we are told that “[Silas’s] job, as it often was, would be to filter the drop of truth from a waterfall of magical thinking” (13). This setup, with Silas being directly indicated to be a character who would engage with the narrative about to be told, indicates that the main bulk of the narrative would be in a narrative frame. Grace would speak to Silas to confess her life story and convince him of her point of view (a la Frankenstein, the reason why I love a good frame narrative). This is not the case. Rather than being nested, the narrative is delivered by a close third person narrator, with Grace’s story bookended by Silas’s. The prologue and epilogue might as well have not been there; they add little to nothing to the narrative. All that was achieved was disappointment. The completely normal third person narration was. A Choice. Look, I’m a fan of close third person. It works fine, but it was a disappointing choice, espcecially after that prologue setup. Grace as a character does have interesting elements to her that I feel would have been far more interesting to me as a reader had we navigated the narrative directly through her eyes. Speaking of characters, wasted potential is the name of the game in Mothered. Characters have features and traits, but aren’t well-rounded. Part of that issue is with the dialogue; it is middling at best, and stilted, awkward, or shallow at worst. Additionally, there's not as much of it as one would think for a story about a toxic mother-daughter relationship stuck in close quarters.

The standout issue with the characters for me is that they are their role in the story before they are a character. Silas is not a character who is a therapist, he is the therapist character (and, upon a re-read of the prologue, is I think supposed to be some sort of reader stand-in? Which I also am not a fan of). Miguel isn’t a character who is the main character’s best friend; he is the best friend character (worse, he falls into the gay best friend trope). Jackie isn’t a character who is Grace’s mother; she is the mother character. Grace, by virtue of being the protagonist, somewhat escapes this issue, but still is not well-rounded or developed by any means. She’s supposed to be an unreliable narrator, something I normally love, but in her found to be unengaging.

Grace as a protagonist could have been interesting; she has a lot of childhood trauma, but does genuinely try to help those around her. She’s kind towards her friend Miguel and drops everything to help him when he gets sick. While has the bizarre hobby of catfishing women (which she calls damsels) online, she describes it as intentionally trying to help build these women’s self esteem and help them improve their lives. The interesting elements of her, however, aren't really fleshed out enough. The damsels plotline especially had a lot of very interesting potential that’s completely unfulfilled. It really only exists so that Grace has something to feel guilty about and hide from her mother. The pacing. God, the pacing. The pacing was strange, due to the fact that a bulk of the narrative is dream sequences. The narrative jumps forward in time rather suddenly in order to dump the reader into a dream without indication. Not only does this make the pacing feel jerky and inconcistant, it also means that the dream segments are also far less effective. While suddenly jumping from reality to a dream can be a valuable strategy because it puts both the reader and the character into a state of uncertain reality, most of the time it did not work in Mothered. The only time I did find it effective and memorable was the first; after that, since I knew what the author was trying to pull, the strategy was ineffective because I knew it was a dream, even if Grace did not.

The pacing during the non-dream segments was jerky as well. It often felt like the narrative was just trying to hurry to the next dream sequence. For example, chapter fourteen ends with Grace texting her best friend Miguel; chapter fifteen jumps to her having been hired by her old boss and visiting the new salon space. From that first paragraph, it's obvious that it's a dream. As a result, the non-horror section of the dream dragged on for far too long (since the conversation the characters was having was not only not real but also completely banal) while the horror section of it was not horrifying (as the physical danger, social rejection, and reality break Grace was experiencing was obviously just a dream). During most dream sections, especially during the second half of the book, I was bored. For a mystery/thriller novel, Mothered is not very mysterious or thrilling. While there is certainly a hidden past tragedy that is eventually revealed, the actual reveal is... kind of boring. The narrative takes, in my opinion, the most uninteresting route. In the prologue, Silas muses that the case is “a good puzzle… one that look[s] on the surface like the gory movies he still so loved” (13). But this isn’t a puzzle. All the answers are spoonfed to the reader, and if the narrative makes an attempt to hide it, it does a terrible job.

One example of a very unmysterious mystery is the intentional obfuscation of who killed who in the prologue. My thought process during the first half of the novel was this:

A) Because the narrative follows Grace in close third person and

B) never follows Jackie,

that would normally indicate to me that

C) Grace, as the POV character, will be the surviving party.

However, because the identity of the patient in the first chapter is intentionally and carefully obfuscated from the reader, then

A + B might not equal C, but instead equal either

D) an upset of expectations (for example, Jackie killing Grace)

E) a third act twist revealing a previously unknown actor or plot element that reveals that the killer, the victim, Grace, and Jackie are in a more complicated configuration than first presented.

As I continued reading, it became clear to me that the narrative was not going to pull anything that interested. Despite this, I held out hope that the final chapters would have some kind of twist. That hope was futile. That setup of not knowing who dies is never cashed out. It just follows the most basic, obvious route: Grace is the protagonist, and because she is a protagonist, she can’t die so she has to be the murderer. Why bother to intentionally hide who kills who and then just not do something interesting? Especially when that problem is directly presented as being a puzzle!

Speaking of basic, the prose in general was boring. It’s all very direct and blunt, which can sometimes be a fantastic way to write a horror/thriller, but it just didn’t work for me here. The prose relies so heavily on telling over showing I felt as though the narrative was spoonfeeding me. Look, I don’t always need purple-literary-Romantic-big-words-long-sentences prose to enjoy a novel, but I do need something to chew on. If I’m not finding that in the structure, characters, horror elements, or central mystery, then by god at least give me some chewy prose.

THE DREAMS

I love dreams in horror. Exploring unreality, watching the line between waking and dreaming blur, having one encroach into the other. I love it all. Therefore, believe me when I say that the premise of incorporating horrible nightmares into a horror story isn't the issue. The issue with Mothered’s dreams was the execution. First off: the horror elements were almost completely restricted to dreams. Although there were one or two moments of horror that I found genuinely intriguing, memorable, or creepy (for example, the "Mona needs a calfskin bag" dream), most of the rest of them were tropey, predictable, or overdone. While I bought that these dreams were upsetting for the character, they were not particularly upsetting to me. At some point it just got old. The use of dream horror is, to me, something that has to be done subtly, carefully, and sparingly, especially when we have a protagonist presented as unreliable. It's none of those things in Mothered. The few horrifying elements outside of dreams are hallucinations. Grace dismisses them as such pretty quickly, and the hallucinations themselves fail to be credible from the get-go because they aren’t believably slotted into Grace’s reality. Horror-wise they aren't even good ones; they're even more tropey than the dreams. Even the horror of Grace and Jackie’s toxic relationship and the childhood trauma was restricted to these dreams as well; while there were some good moments of toxicity, gaslighting, or emotional manipulation in the waking world (such as Jackie letting Coco outside), almost all the detail and nuance we get about their history is dreamed.

Even the dreamed details about their past that do carry over into the real world aren’t fully fleshed. For example, during a dream, we are introduced to the paper dolls that Hope and her sister Grace used to play with. Later, while rummaging through her mother’s things, Grace finds her sister’s doll but not her own. While the doll imagery comes back in later dreams, that doll as a symbol of her mother’s favoritism and her relationship with Grace never beomes a point of conflict between the two. There isn’t ever a conflict about it, even when those dolls get brought up in conversation. I wanted a blow-out fight about those dolls; I wanted those dolls as an element of gaslighting; I wanted those dolls to be something that lead to a direct conflict that further develops Grace and Jackie’s current day relationship. But they don’t, and neither does much else.

The book’s summary claims that moving in together makes “old wounds fester” and “new ones open.” Sure, old wounds get re-opened, but calling what happens “festering” is a bit of a stretch. Grace is reasonably stressed about her mother being a bad roommate at times and Jackie occasionally apologizes for being a bad mother to her (though those conversations are rather surface level and nowhere near as toxic as they could have been). The only “new wounds” that open are are the ones that kill Jackie, with nary a new psychological wound in sight. As a result, the level of intensity between the two never quite reaches the fever pitch needed to make that final snap believable, narratively satisfying, and sharp.

One final complaint about the dreams I couldn’t shoehorn in elsewhere, so I’m shoehorning it in here. Sometimes (typically during dreams where Grace is reliving a childhood memory), Grace calls Jackie “Mommy.” I get why—as a child, she certainly did not call her mother by her first name—but it really did not work for me. Grace was a child forced to grow up too soon; I could buy her calling Jackie mom, maybe, but mommy? I certainly can’t see an overworked, exhausted Jackie referring to herself as “mommy” to her children. It was just weird and off-putting and out of place because it was so infantile, and, to be honest, came off as funny and unserious.

All that said, the dream scenes were far better written than the scenes that took place in reality. If they'd had better connective tissue and were more subtly handled, they could have been very effective. As it is, they're disappointing.

REALITY

From the premise, title, and setup of Mothered, I expected a book about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. I expected the narrative to explore that relationship in-depth and push the tension of it to its very limits. I wanted to watch them try to navigate an enclosed space. I wanted overtures of forgiveness turning nasty. I wanted conversations about Grace's childhood! I wanted them to have small disagreements that balloon out of control! I wanted a slow build of tension and complex hatred! I wanted gaslighting, damn it! There were a few times—for example, the dinner party with Miguel—where there was subtle friction between actions and intention between Grace and her mother. Grace questions who her mother is now and how she relates to the woman who raised her. Jackie is the traditional boomer parent and brings up grandchildren. Miguel and Grace share the occasional bemused glance. It was a good early scene, which I thought would lead into later, complex, more dramatic scenes. For the most part, though, Grace and Jackie’s interactions were not all that complex, did not have subtextual implications, and were so direct and unnuanced it just was never all that interesting. While Grace certainly had reasons to doubt the reality around her, as a reader, I did not have any reason to believe what she was being told by her mother was untrue.

As mentioned earlier, most elements of the novel’s central mystery—what happened to Grace’s twin sister—were introduced in dreams, then (maybe) introdced into the waking world. The only piece evidence that emerged from a direct confrontation between Jackie and Grace was the box. While what it revealed wasn’t particularly funny, I couldn’t take the contents seriously because it just gave me Assassin’s Creed 2 flashbacks.

Anyway. On all accounts, even down to the title, Mothered is supposed to be about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. It's also about:

The pandemic (which didn't really work for me. If it had been a book set during the pandemic, it might have worked. The difference between the two is a bit difficult to explain, but it's something that made a huge difference)

Her career as a hairdresser

Growing up being the primary caretaker to a disabled sibling

A weird disease that causes nightmares and turns you vegan

An ace woman’s relationship with her sexuality and desire to be a mother herself (complete with guilt over telling a teenager to have an abortion so her life wasn’t ruined!)

The close friendship between two queer people

That same woman’s hobby catfishing other women, pretending to be a man so that she can help them improve their self-confidence

The book just tries to juggle too much in the 300-ish pages it has. While a novel of that length certainly can incorporate that many or even more plot points, Mothered just doesn’t pull off weaving them together as cleanly as it could have. As a result, the narrative becomes muddled and shallow, with the titular mother-daughter crowded out by the rest. Before I close out, I just want to complain about the whole mystery illness plot point. It's another unnecessary, underdeveloped plot element that muddies the narrative waters even further. The final hook it provides in the epilogue (the therapist is like "oh no I'm having nightmares... just like Grace did!!!") was so cheesy I actually laughed out loud. It became doubly funny when I realized one of the symptoms of the disease is becoming a vegan. I'm sorry, but I genuinely cannot take the narrative seriously enough to be thrilled or frightened.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In writing this review, I had the opportunity to sit with the novel’s themes and really consider: what are they saying? What do they mean? It’s interesting to me that initially I read this book as (at least attempting to be) feminist. Yet after ruminating on how the book handles themes such as abortion and birth, motherhood, disability, and childhood trauma, it surprised me how shallow and at times contradictory it all ended up being.

While I can see why other folks enjoyed this novel, it's absolutely not to my taste when it comes to horror, thriller, or adult fiction. Further, in my opinion, I think it's ineffective in its exploration of mother-daughter toxcicity and childhood trauma. I requested Mothered because I always heard such great things about Baby Teeth; unfortunately, I think this has indicated she's not an author for me. Thank you again to Thomas & Mercer for providing a digital advance review copy through Netgalley. If you're interested in reading Mothered, it releases March 1, 2023. Find more information about the book here.

#liber monstrorum reviews #mothered #mothered by zoje stage #horror book review #horror book #thriller book #thriller book review #book review #bookblr #netgalley #netgalley review

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thetransfemininereview · 27 days ago

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As the clock strikes midnight at the dawn of Halloween, I come bearing spooky books! Check out these cool recs for horror and paranormal novels by transfeminine authors that'll make your day a little darker 🖤

#halloween #spooky season #trans horror #horror #horror recs #book review #book rec #queer book recs #trans book recs #trans fiction #trans literature #transfem #booklr #literature #books

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thechaoticreader · 1 month ago

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Horror books that genuinely scared me (from a lifelong horror reader that’s so so rare):

1) The Outsider by Stephen King - made me paranoid as fuck at night, had to hide the dust jacket

2) Straight by @drchucktingle - I had fucked up nightmares about this book, I couldn’t look my cis straight roommates in the eyes for days

3) Everything the Darkness Eats by Eric LaRocca - I’m a queer with religious trauma, I had a full existential crisis after reading this

Did these books affect me psychologically? Yeah probably. Are they also in my top fav of all time? Yup😊. Would I recommend them to everyone? Fuck yeah I would! Go read these and prove love is real (that is a threat💕)!

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velichorus-k · 1 month ago

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I hope me just constantly posting stickers isn't getting annoying but I have SO many ideas and I am an avid sticker enjoyer I'm having so much fun coming up with these lol

Ford and Fiddleford batch! I've got two more batches of 5(?) sticker designs each and then I'm gonna focus on the Bill animatic for realzies :)

#fiddleford mcgucket #stanford pines #fiddauthor #gravity falls #society of the blind eye #backupsmore #the book of bill #(for the snowman snowglobe. I think that one's my fave :))#My little shop of horrors sticker got taken down for review tho :(#gravity falls stickers #gf fanart #fanart #art #I can never remember which is my main tag

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lakecountylibrary · 10 months ago

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If you liked Camp Damascus, try Hell Followed With Us

and vice versa!

There's a lot to love in both Camp Damascus by @drchucktingle and Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. As horror novels about queer youth with, shall we say, complicated relationships with religion, they have a lot in common - if you liked one you very well may like the other. Let's take a closer look.

Characters:

Both books feature queer, autistic youth fighting back. The characters are trying to survive in a world created for them by abusive adults and religious institutions that hold power over them.

In Camp Damascus we follow Rose (autistic, lesbian). In Hell Followed With Us we follow Benji (neurodivergent, trans) and Nick (autistic, gay).

Genre:

Both books are horror, but with two distinct flavors. Camp Damascus has more of a creepy factor, while Hell Followed With Us leans more toward gore. In Camp there is some mystery to the evil, but in Hell the evil has a name, a face, an address - and a to-do list.

Both books deal with Christian cults and the horrors of indoctrination. They deal with the characters' complicated relationships to Christianity as an institution and God as a concept. They also both quote Christian scripture heavily.

Vibes:

While both books are horror, they do feel very different, largely because the primary emotion that drives each story is different. In Camp Damascus, it's love. In Hell Followed With Us, it's rage. You'll certainly find both emotions in certain quantities in either novel, but what they primarily put forward distinctly changes the vibe of both books.

So there you have it! Two fantastic reads in close thematic conversation with each other - but still quite distinct. If either sounds good to you, do yourself a favor and check out both today!

See more of Robin's recs

#camp damascus #hell followed with us #andrew joseph white #chuck tingle #lgbtq books #lgbtq reads #lgbtq authors #lgbtq characters #horror #horror novel #queer horror #book review #book recommendations #books and reading #booklr #book recs #LCPL recs #robin's recs

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horrorhodgepodge · 24 days ago

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The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward [Book Review]

Hey fellow horror fans! 👻 I just finished reading The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward, and when I say that I devoured this book, I am not joking. I read it over two sittings in two days because it was so engrossing. This is a book about a serial killer, a missing child, justice, revenge, and a sad house on a sad street. It’s also much more. What I loved 😍 I thought I knew what…

#book review #catriona ward #dark horror #horror #horror book #horror book review #horror lit #horror review #psychological horror #review #serial killer horror #the last house on needless street

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gbhbl · 1 month ago

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Horror Book Review: Grisly Deeds (Tommy Ellis/Margot Ellis)

Written by the husband-and-wife team of Tommy and Margot Ellis, Grisly Deeds is a collection of horror shorts not for the faint of heart. A collection that pays homage to the classic horror anthologies of the 1960s and 70s. Filled with tales of cold war experiments gone wrong, medical terrors, Victorian and Edwardian gothic, this is a collection to read with all the lights on. That shadow,…

#Book #Book Review #Grisly Deeds #horror #Horror Book #Horror Book Review #Margot Ellis #Tommy Ellis

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effemar · 7 months ago

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MY BLOOD WAS FULL OF GAGS AND OTHER PEOPLE'S DISEASES. MY MONSTROUS LITTLE MEMORY HAD SWALLOWED ME WHOLE. IT WAS THE YEAR I OFFICIALLY BECAME THE BRIDE OF JESUS.

#trc #my art #my review of the raven king 2018: 10/10 loved the body horror. and the gay rep. the combination body horror and gay rep.#trc spoilers #< for anna my friend anna who hasn't finished the books yet 😭#adam parrish #ronan lynch #mmmm i think i will tag it as pynch #pynch

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month ago

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Ian McDonald's "The Wilding"

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Ian McDonald is one of those absurdly brilliant novelists that just leave me wondering the actual fuck he manages it. How does he cover so much ground, think up so many compelling characters, find so many gracenotes, conjure up so many complicated emotions?

McDonald burst on the scene in the late 1980s, with the 1988 novel Desolation Road and then his 1989 Out On Blue Six, a slick, stylized cyberpunk-meets-Orwell tale that overflowed with beautiful prose, technomysticism, and sly jokes that hid sneaky truths that hid even more sly jokes:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/20/out-on-blue-six-ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-novel-is-back/

By my count, McDonald has now published twenty books – mostly novels, but a couple short story collections (and the most amazingly demented, Tom-Waits-inflected teddybear murder comic imaginable, 1994's Kling Klang Klatch):

https://irishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Kling_Klang_Klatch

McDonald's work is truly globespanning. While he's made his mark on the Martian soil, and overtaken the moon with the Luna trilogy (his definitive rebuttal to Heinlein's Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) he is widely adored and much-awarded for the glittering, futuristic versions of Brazil (Brasyl), Tanzania (the Chaga series), and India (River of Gods).

Indeed, McDonald's imagination has roamed so far over the Earth and the solar system that it's possible to overlook his fantastic reimaginings of Ireland, the land where he was raised. There's his Philip K Dick Award-winning 1991 novel King of Morning, Queen of Day, a swirling, mythopoeic novel of Celtic mysticism:

https://www.baen.com/king-of-morning-queen-of-day.html

And then there's 1992's Hearts, Hands and Voices, which is lowkey one of the best novels I have ever, ever read – a scorching science fictional allegory for The Troubles, but with the gnarliest biotech weirdness you can possibly imagine:

https://archive.org/details/heartshandsvoice0000ianm/mode/2up

McDonald's books cover so much goddamned ground, but one feature they all share is a prose styling wherein every sentence is at least 20% poetry, a fraction that somehow, impossibly, rises to as much as 150% in certain especially shiny passages.

Like this passage, which opens The Wilding, McDonald's new horror novel that marks his first return to Ireland since 1992:

Autumn lay on the great bog in silvers and tans, late purples and duns.

The sun rose above the tall ash saplings and feral sycamore. It called the birds into full voice. Stabbing shrills, tumbles of notes, the flutes of dove-call, frantic ticking hisses, song upon song. In hedgerows and copses, among the pale foliage of the birches, in the weave of deep willow and the bramble fastnesses, each bird called and was heard. In this season the peatland held the day's warmth through the night and on the bright, clear mornings rivers of mist formed, filling the subtle hollow places in the exposed cuttings, the bogs and fields. High sun would dispel it but at this hour half of Lough Carrow lay mist-bound. Each blade of grass hung heavy with dew, the clumps of sedges were already browning, the bracken curling and crisping.

A pair of horns lifted above the willow scrub and out-grown ash hedges of the Wilding. Polished tips caught the low sun and kindled as bright and keen as spears.

https://www.gollancz.co.uk/titles/ian-mcdonald/the-wilding/9781399611503/

Oof.

I would drop everything to read Ian McDonald's grocery lists but after that opening, I wasn't going to put this one down, and I didn't, reading the whole thing on yesterday's flight home from my gigs in Atlanta this week.

The Wilding is (I'm pretty sure?) McDonald's first horror novel, and it's fucking terrifying. It's set in a rural Irish peat bog that has been acquired by a conservation authority that is rewilding it after a century of industrial peat mining that stripped it back nearly to the bedrock. This rewilding process has been greatly accelerated by the covid lockdowns, which reduced the human footprint in the conservation area to nearly zero.

The story's protagonist is Lisa, a hard-case Dubliner who came to the bog to do community service after a career as a crime syndicate driver for hire, a woman who never met a car she couldn't boost and pilot in or out of any tight situation. After years in the bog, she's ready to start a new life, studying Yeats at university, indulging a late-discovered love of poetry that has as much to do with her redemption as her years in the wild.

Lisa's last duty before she leaves the bog and goes home to Dublin is leading a school group on a wild campout in one of the bog's deep clearings. It's a routine assignment, and while it's not her favorite duty, it's also not a serious hardship.

But as the group hikes out to the campsite, one of her fellow guides is killed, without warning, by a mysterious beast that moves so quickly they can barely make out its monstrous form. Thus begins a tense, mysterious, spooky as hell story of survival in a haunted woods, written in the kind of poesy that has defined McDonald's career, and which – when deployed in service of terror – has the power to raise literal goosebumps.

There's a lot of fantasy that deals with Celtic mythology, including McDonald's own King of Morning, Queen of Day, but the vibe of that stuff tends to the heroic and romantic – sure, there's the odd banshee, but in the main, it's mischievous wee people, pookas, and leprechauns. More fey than fear.

But Irish mythology in its raw form is terrifying. The monsters of Irish storytelling are grotesque, mean, remorseless, and come in every shape and size. Some authors have done well by going back to the bestiary for the deep cuts. When I was a kid, I must have read John Coyne's Hobgoblin fifty times (mostly because it was about D&D, which I was obsessed with). I haven't read this one since I was about 12, and I have no idea if it'd hold up today, but it left me with a deep appreciation of the spooky multifariousness of monsters who dwell in Ireland's bogs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobgoblin_(novel)

The Wilding is a suspense novel, which means there's no way to really sum up the plot without spoiling a lot of the affect, but suffice to say that McDonald brings large swathes of deep Irish lore to the surface, and it had me reading as fast as I could and wanting to put the book down and hide.

What a writer McDonald is! The fact that this is the same guy who wrote last year's stunning secret-history/solarpunk/uncategorizable wonder that was Hopeland beggars belief:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace

Read you some Ian McDonald novels, is what I'm trying to say. This one is only available in the UK, if that's not where you are, consider mail-ordering it. Looks like they've got stock at Forbidden Planet for £19 plus £18 shipping to the US. Worth every penny:

https://forbiddenplanet.com/424306-the-wilding-hardcover/

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh

#pluralistic #books #horror #science fiction #ireland #fantasy #gift guide #reviews #climate #rewilding

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