books – Page 2 – Darker Books

Song of the Sandman

I finally read the sequel to A God in the Shed. That first book by J-F Dubeau brought us a gruesome yet hypnotic unnamed god and a whole slew of secret societies trying to bend that god to their own purposes. The book ended in a confrontation that killed several people and didn’t resolve much.

The second book, Song of the Sandman, picks the story up not long after that, following several different survivors and delving deeply into the lives of the Sandmen, the society/cult that now (just barely) has the god contained.

Venus Mackenzie, the girl who actually kept the god in her shed in the first book, has been wandering Montreal looking for someone who can help her find it and try to kill it. As she does that, she has to contend with her guilt and pain over her part in this mess while knowing she’s still intimately connected to the god.

Daniel, whose father succumbed to the god’s lure in the first book, has gone to find his mother and brother. He’s really not sure how he feels about them, seeing as how they’re the backbone of the Sandmen and seem to think that if they just learn to control the god they can turn it into a benevolent deity who grants all their wishes. Meanwhile, they have the god locked up in the basement. They’ve trained a girl to sing such perfect lullabies that she can lull the god to sleep for days at a time. Of course, every time it wakes up it starts killing every cult member it can get its hands on, so it seems they’re a long way from their dream of transforming the god of death and hate into something less murdery.

Oh, and the girl who sings? She’s a prisoner herself, kidnapped years ago and also kept in the basement pretty much any time she’s not singing. The Society of Sandmen seems pretty mean for people dedicated to bringing about a peaceful utopia. They don’t seem to know they’re the bad guys, but I’m pretty sure they’re the bad guys.

There are other threads to the story, equally intriguing and complicated, but I’ve given you a good taste of what you’re in store for. The book switches back and forth between characters, whose paths sometimes cross in surprising ways, as the books weaves toward a grand confrontation between several characters, the Sandmen, and the god everyone wants a piece of. As the second book in a series that will clearly continue, we reach the end with many unanswered questions, but the end is dramatic and satisfying, with a couple big twists that make us excited for the next chapter in this saga.

In fact, this book’s grand finale felt more fully set up and more fully satisfying than the first book’s finale. In spite of its sprawling transitional vibe (the second book of a trilogy is always the trickiest) it was pretty enjoyable. I especially enjoyed reading about Alice, the girl with the power to sing the god to sleep. Her story arc and her psychology are especially interesting as she wrestles with understanding she’s merely a tool for the cult leader while also exploring her power over and kinship with this god, her fellow prisoner. This series seems to be getting better with each book and I’m excited to read the next one.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

White Horse

Today I present you White Horse by Erika T. Wurth. I got this at Op Cit in Santa Fe. Their website is sad and basic but in real life the store is a legit hoard of used books. Literal piles of books everywhere. I think I got this book in the crime section? Or mysteries? Their official horror section is tiny, as it is in most used book stores, so I browse other sections. This mystery promised “disturbing visions,” which sounded horror adjacent. The lady at the register said it was a great book. Then she paused and said “but it gets really dark. Are you okay with dark?” Yes, I’m okay with dark.

Kari James lives in Denver but she grew up in Idaho Springs, a tiny mountain town west of Denver. A bunch of her family still lives up there, including her cousin/best friend, Debby. Debby is pretty white but is fascinated by the native ancestry of her cousin’s side of the family, so when she finds an old bracelet with native symbols on it, she brings it to Kari. It belonged to Kari’s mother, you see . . .

Turns out the bracelet is cursed. Or blessed, maybe. It’s definitely connected to Kari’s ancestors and just having it around triggers powerful visions of Kari’s mother and sometimes other ancestors. Kari is not into this at all. Her mother disappeared when Kari was just two days old and Kari has always assumed she just couldn’t handle motherhood and ran off. After her mom ran off, her dad regularly drank himself into a stupor and eventually got into a car wreck that caused serious brain damage; Kari spent most of her young life helping nurse a father who could barely dress or feed himself and as far as Kari’s concerned, it’s all 100% her mom’s fault for bailing on them.

But these visions are showing something way more complicated than what Kari’s believed and whenever she goes to the real life locations her visions show, Kari finds another complicated piece of her mother’s history. While the visions are also terrifying, showing her mother bloody and screaming, being followed by a stinking monster with vicious claws, Kari makes time to follow them up, often with Debby at her side for moral support.

A lot of this book is about Kari’s personal growth, her coming to terms with her own past mistakes, her own emotional blocks and unresolved issues, her sometimes selfish and dependent relationship with Debby. Kari is an interesting character and an unreliable narrator. Sometimes we can see her problems way before she sees them in herself, and this is sometimes frustrating and sometimes fascinating, while allowing us to connect with Kari on a deep level as she wrestles her demons.

It also turns out to be a murder mystery. Pretty early on, Kari realizes her mom probably didn’t just run off to party or whatever, but it’s not clear what actually happened to her. It turns out Kari’s mom was heavily involved with the American Indian Movement, which means the FBI might have been out to get her. But the movement also had some dangerous people on the inside, so maybe one of them did something to her. Then, on top of these suspicions, Kari realizes her own grandfather was not such a good guy. Both Kari’s visions and her brief encounters with the man make him a suspect, too.

Both the visions and the real life mystery come together in dramatic fashion at the book’s climax. Kari’s final showdown is a blend of fantasy and reality as she faces both her mom’s killer and the demon of her visions at the same time. It might be a bit over the top with its technicolor dream sequences but it was also pretty gripping.

This was a pretty serious look at the way generational trauma and larger political issues can play out on the messy individual level, especially for indigenous women. I think it does a good job and represents a point of view that is really pushing to be heard right now. I’m not sure when I’ll be posting this review but it turns out I’m writing it on Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day.* Seems like an especially good day to be thinking about a book like this. Though it might not be technically horror this book is definitely dark, and it’s a good one to read if you’re looking for alternate perspectives and dark books by indigenous authors.

*Turns out it took me months to post this, as you can see. I write reviews as I read but I don’t post them in any particular order.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books.

Miss Pinkerton Review

According to Wikipedia, Mary Roberts Rinehart was the American Agatha Christie. She certainly didn’t achieve Christie’s heights of fame but then again, who has? Agatha Christie famously disappeared for a couple of weeks in 1926, adding immensely to her mystique as a mystery writer. Rinehart did nothing so dramatic, but she was almost shot and stabbed by her longtime chef in 1947 and that same year went public about her battle with breast cancer, which was a pretty bold move for the times. She was also a trained nurse and a war correspondent on the front lines of World War I. She seems worth remembering for all that, if not for the long list of books she wrote. Her life sounds terrifying and it seems like she was a badass.

Many of her books are available on Project Gutenberg but it doesn’t look like Miss Pinkerton is among them. It’s actually the second (maybe third?) in a series of four books following Hilda Adams, professional nurse and secret assistant to the police. I picked this up in a used bookstore and though Miss Adams keeps referring to former cases I wasn’t sure whether that was referring to actual previous books or just a plot device. Miss Pinkerton (also called The Double Alibi) works as a standalone book but it’s neat to know there are really more stories about her.

Anyhow, it’s 1932 and Hilda Adams is a home care nurse. The police, especially Inspector Patton, sometimes arrange for her to snoop around and find clues while she’s nursing at at a suspect’s home, and this is what brings her to the elderly Miss Juliet Mitchell’s stately home. Her good for nothing nephew has just accidentally killed himself while cleaning his pistol. Or maybe he killed himself. Or maybe he was murdered and it was made to look like an accident or a suicide. Nurse Adams is helping Patton figure out what happened while she nurses Miss Juliet.

What follows is a guessing game of motives and opportunity. The elderly servants are hiding something, but what? Miss Juliet is hiding something, too. So is Paula, the dead nephew’s girlfriend. She’s sniffing around awfully hard for information. And what about Miss Juliet’s doctor, hoping Miss Juliet will leave him money in her will? And the family lawyer in charge of that will? What really happened is anybody’s guess as our heroine sneaks around looking for clues and talking to suspects, all while actually nursing Miss Juliet and secretly meeting with Inspector Patton to report.

It’s pulpy and superficial but it’s a fun mystery and Nurse Adams is pretty plucky and independent for the 1930s. It’s also fun to read mysteries from earlier eras where so many people don’t have phones or cars. It’s a whole different feel, you know? Also, it was a little weird to realize that Nurse Adams’s medical kit has reusable glass vials of pills and a hypodermic needle she just washes and reuses forever. Of course she does, the 1930s weren’t full of single use gloves and disposable needles. But that’s what I love about reading old stuff–I always find little tidbits I’d never considered.

Anyway, Rinehart was cool and probably worth trying if you like old-timey stuff. I don’t see the Miss Pinkerton series for free but Project Gutenberg has other mysteries she wrote, plus some of her non-fiction writing. Or you could cruise used book stores for pulp novels that haven’t yet crumbled to dust. You might get lucky and find the sequel, The Haunted Lady. But I’m hoping to find it first.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack; embrace the darkness and read more books.

Red Rabbit Review

My kid picked this book out for me. I was browsing the horror shelves, one of my favorite pastimes, and she asked “if I pick a book will you read it?” Yes, of course. Pick anything and I will totally read it. So she handed me Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I do not regret saying yes to a random horror novel. Red Rabbit was a delightful book.

It reads very much like a fairy tale or folk tale, with lightly sketched characters guided by fate on an epic quest, but with a distinctly pioneer American flavor. We’re mostly following a posse of folk on a quest to kill a witch up in Kansas. There’s a pretty large reward for anyone who can take her out. Everyone in the posse has their own agenda, and only one old man, Tom Goggins, really cares about killing the witch. Because he is a self-taught witch hunter looking to make a name for himself. Best friends Moses Burke (Civil War army surgeon) and Ned Hemingway (well dressed cowboy) are just along for the ride, Rose Nettles has recently lost (killed?) her husband and can’t run their homestead alone, and Benito Cortez is running for his life after an ill-advised affair with a lawman’s wife. It seems fate has brought them together, along with the silent orphan they all just call Rabbit.

While this posse is traveling north into Kansas, having some weird and dangerous adventures along the way, the witch they’re hunting is tracking them along with everyone else trying to get at her. Sadie Grace is her name and she doesn’t seem particularly evil but she sure does have magic powers. She’s not worried too much about who’s coming to kill her, not even this posse seemingly thrown together by fate. She can handle whatever’s coming at her. She’s not too thrilled about the two so-called U.S. marshalls headed her way, though. One of them seems pure evil and pretty powerful. Him, well, she’ll have to be prepared for his arrival.

Despite its charming folk tale style, this book has a lot of dark and gory bits. That demonic U.S. “marshall” does some incredibly cruel and gruesome stuff, and our posse of heroes meets ghosts and cannibals and more on their journey. This book has an exciting blend of charm and horror, blending threads of American and Mexican folk magic with some old world European tropes my pioneer ancestors could have brought with them across the ocean. It was a fun read.

It also looks like Moses Burke gets his own separate novel after this quest is done. There’s a free snippet of Rose of Jericho at the end, featuring him. I’ll have to pick it up next time I go book shopping. If it’s anything like Red Rabbit it will be a great story.

As always, follow us here or on Substack; embrace the darkness and read more books.

Stubs: Part 1

Sometimes I read a book that inspires thoughts and feelings, but not enough thoughts and feelings to inspire a full review. (Often the book just isn’t dark in the way I was hoping it would be.) Even the way I write, with lots of asides about where I bought the book and what random thoughts I had while reading, there’s just not enough for a coherent thousand words or so. When this happens, I save them up and throw together some mini-reviews. Let’s talk about three of these books:

Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill by Phil Goodstein

This didn’t merit a whole review because it’s not really about ghosts. The spooky font and haunting line drawing on the cover promised me ghosts galore, so I was bitterly disappointed to find nearly six hundred pages and almost no ghosts at all. This is about 5% ghosts and lurid tales of Denver hijinks, 95% very detailed history of the Capitol Hill section of Denver focusing largely on architecture. I love history included with my ghosts stories, especially when that history involves colorful locals and either criminals or disasters. I like architecture and I’ve actually spent a few hours looking at cool buildings in the area this book is about, but this is way more detail than I ever wanted.

I did learn a handful of interesting things, though. I learned that Denver used radium tailings in some of their roadbeds, which made them radioactive enough to require cleanup efforts in the 1990s. I learned that 1920s Denver was kind of run by the Ku Klux Klan. I learned that during the Great Depression, movie theaters used to raffle off groceries. (That’s much more wholesome than the radium roads and the Klan thing.) There are a couple strange stories of murder and a couple of interesting ghost stories, but this book felt like a bait and switch. They lured me in with the promise of ghosts and then made me learn about city planning.

Reprisal by Arthur Gordon

Funny enough, I grabbed this book in Denver’s Capitol Hill area. I’m pretty sure I got it at Kilgore Books, a few blocks down from the fittingly named Capitol Hill books, where I got the ghost book with no ghosts in it. I was pressed for time on this book-finding trip so I grabbed several books based on hunches and cool titles, and this was one of them.

Turns out Reprisal is trying to show us the complexities of race in the Jim Crow south. It was written in 1950 by a rich white dude from Savannah, Georgia so . . . he nails it, obviously. Deep and rich understanding of the grievances and injustices that led to the Civil Rights movement soon to gain momentum and sweep through the south.

Just kidding. He doesn’t nail it at all. It’s awkward and unsatisfying to read. The center of the story is Nathan, whose wife was lynched along with three friends. Several of the men involved were eventually brought to trial only to be acquitted by a jury of their white small town peers. When Nathan hears of the acquittal, he returns to Georgia to take justice into his own hands. This part is interesting and Nathan is a sympathetic character. Unfortunately, our author spends most of the novel following various characters who aren’t Nathan, trying to present a wide range of views on the lynching in particular and race in general. (Of course, most of these characters are white.)

There are so many characters that none of them are particularly deeply drawn and following them all bogs down the story’s pace while not saying anything particularly enlightening about race or segregation. In the story’s first few pages, a reporter wants to cover the trial and its aftermath and his editor warns him that “if you’re going to tackle the race problem–which has been hammered almost to death lately–try to write about the negroes as people, will you? Not symbols of suffering humanity or shuffling clowns. If you can make ‘em people, with fairly coherent thoughts and reactions and emotions, you’ll have done something no other feature writer has done yet . . .” This feels like the author’s mission statement and honestly, I’m not sure he succeeded. Maybe by 1950 standards . . . .

To be fair, I don’t know what book from the pre-Civil Rights era south would meet a modern reader’s standards. It does seem like Gordon was trying to fight racism in some way with his book, which is more than most authors were doing. This book kinda sucked on both a technical and a moral level but I found the attempt weirdly interesting to think about.

The Broken Gun by Louis L’amour

I picked this up at a used book shop purely because I wanted to try out Louis L’amour. I was booked to stay at the historic Strater Hotel for a weekend and Louis L’amour apparently stayed and wrote there often, preferring room 222. There’s a little brass plaque on the door now commemorating him. I thought it would cool to read L’amour in the hotel where he stayed. For the record, it was cool and this is a good book. It’s not my usual dark vibe, though, so an entire post on this fun L’amour book I read for goofy reasons felt like too much.

This isn’t one of L’amour’s most famous books, it’s just the one I happened to find the day I went looking. This one is set in the 1960s (and also written in the 1960s), following a writer of Westerns, Dan Sheridan, as he researches an old mystery and ends up in deep trouble. He visits the remote ranch of Colin Wells for research and immediately starts to realize Wells means trouble. Stuck in the Arizona wilderness, miles from help, Sheridan looks for a way to escape while trying desperately to figure out why Wells would want him dead at all.

It’s a tight mystery with exciting action and interesting wilderness survival scenes. L’amour is more famous for writing what his character Sheridan writes, historical frontier fiction, but if all his books are as tense and tightly written as this I can understand his fame. Used bookshops here in the southwest are usually well stocked with L’amour so I’ll probably grab more eventually. Maybe he’ll show up in the next Stubs post I put up. Who knows?

As always, embrace the darkness here or on Substack. Read more (and darker) books! Happy New Year!

Cinderwich: a Review

I guess Cherie Priest is known for steampunk but I haven’t read any of those books. This is the second horror novel of hers I’ve read, though, and I enjoyed both of them quite a bit. (I’ve read Cinderwich and The Toll. I read The Toll before I started this blog but maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.) Priest is great at creating quirky and engaging characters and setting them in delightfully haunted spots in the swamps and hollers of the American south. Cinderwich is very gothic and also very southern gothic, which I like.

Cinderwich is a short one, almost a novella at around 160 pages, and the story it tells is pretty straightforward. Ellen Thrush is named after her aunt Ellen, who disappeared before she was even born. It’s kind of awkward being constantly compared (both favorably and not) to an aunt she never knew, so she usually goes by her middle name, Kate.

Aunt Ellen’s disappearance was quite the mystery and no one was affected more than Ellen’s girlfriend at the time, Dr. Judith Kane. Decades after the disappearance, when Kate ended up in grad school where Judith worked, they bonded for a while over Ellen’s life and possible death. Judith would share memories and Kate got to know a different side of her namesake. Eventually Kate left grad school and the two drifted apart, but Judith never entirely quit trying to solve the mystery of Ellen’s disappearance.

Years later, Judith invites Kate to visit Cinderwich, Tennessee, where for years someone has been writing “Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?” on walls and such. The name is right, the timing sort of fits, and Judith wants to follow this one last lead before giving up the search for good. Kate isn’t hoping for much but she agrees to meet in Cinderwich and help Judith investigate.

Ghostly things happen almost immediately, and they keep happening until the story’s dramatic ending. They meet probably most of the people left in this tiny ghost of a town, including three of the girls who originally found “Ellen” in the tree. The girls have since grown up into a kickass trio of very spooky, very gothy ladies who all seem to be kind of psychic. They and their house are awesome and Kate secretly wishes she could move in with them. So do I, frankly. They seem cool and they stock a wide variety of loose leaf tea at all times, it seems. It sounds lovely.

You might notice this story is chock full of women. It’s not a story about women exploring their womanhood, it’s not part of the town’s mystery or anything, but almost every single character is a woman of some kind. It’s just a cool ghost story centered around a bunch of women and their various lives and goals and perspectives. It gives the book a particular flavor I enjoyed.

This book isn’t gory at all, in spite of the dead body in the tree, and it’s not particularly frightening. It is, however, very spooky and magical and this town is haunted by mysterious (and sometimes malevolent) forces. I love a gothic tale with a really pervasive atmosphere and this delivers. The atmosphere is great and the mystery is satisfying, while Kate and Judith feel real and I’m rooting for them to solve Ellen’s mystery and get home safe. I highly recommend this as a quick cozy read. It’s a perfect ghost story for a long winter night.

As always, embrace the darkness with us here or on Substack.

I Read Some P. D. James Mysteries

I picked up this P D James omnibus at Brave Books in El Paso. I’m pretty sure. Or maybe I got it at Second Story Books in Durango. One of the two, for sure.

The omnibus is three novels: Unnatural Causes, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and The Black Tower. I read them all one right after the other and that was probably too much P. D. James at once. She seems to specialize in unpleasant characters and though I have a high tolerance for jerks and villains in literature, by the middle of the third book I was getting tired of how much everyone sucked. Most of the characters just suck in minor annoying ways like being kind of snobby or gossipy or referring to themselves as “one” all the time instead of “I” or “me”. Even the villains turn out to be kind of petty and annoying, which is probably pretty true to life but not that epic or interesting. They were exciting mysteries, though, and well written.

Also, by way of warning, James’s main detective, Adam Dalgleish, is weirdly ableist. Since I’ve only read these three books by James I don’t know how much this comes up in general but both Dalgleish books in this set have characters with disabilities or chronic illnesses and Dalgleish is very skeeved out by this. He’s very polite and keeps it to himself, and I understand these books were written in an earlier (and much meaner) time, but reading his insulting inner dialogue was kind of hard. If you’re sensitive about the topic these probably aren’t the mysteries for you.

Unnatural Causes was my least favorite, I think. In this one, our detective Adam Dalgleish is visiting his aunt Jane out in the tiny village of Monksmere, looking for some peace and quiet. Of course, he finds murder and mystery instead. When neighbor Maurice Seton’s body washes ashore with its hands missing, Dalgleish tries to stay out of the mess but the whole neighborhood is in an uproar. This one was my least favorite because most of the characters were purposely exaggerated for effect. Monksmere is an unofficial writer’s colony of sorts–all the neighbors involved are writers of varying degrees of success and they all seem to be cultivating various writerly personas. Sometimes this is funny and sometimes it’s kind of annoying and reminds us how farfetched and “writerly” the actual murder and surrounding mystery are. Honestly, James might be purposely parodying herself a bit with this one because the other two novels were more down to earth and realistic. If you’re interested in that kind of humor and playing with the genre you might like this one better than I did.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was next. This one actually stars Cordelia Gray instead of Adam Dalgleish. The novel begins with Cordelia inheriting her boss’s failing private detective agency under fairly tragic circumstances. We follow Cordelia as she takes her first case, investigating the apparent suicide of Mark Callender, a university student and son of a famous scientist. As she investigates, Cordelia immediately realizes this isn’t a simple case. Things get dangerous and though she’s in over her head, Cordelia is determined to succeed in her first solo case and keep her business alive. There are sharp twists and turns in this one and several tense moments and surprises. I enjoyed this story and I enjoyed Cordelia, who has a complicated backstory and an interesting personality. It’s a shame James only wrote a couple of books starring Cordelia because this character has a lot of potential.

The Black Tower once again stars Adam Dalgleish. This time he’s recovering from a near fatal illness and thinking of quitting detective work altogether. During his illness, an old priest from his childhood days writes requesting Dalgleish’s help with something, but by the time Dalgleish has recovered enough to make the trip it’s already too late. The old priest has died, apparently of heart failure. Dalgleish stays on to sort through the man’s effects and quickly realizes there’s something odd going on at the hospice next door. More mysterious deaths ensue and Dalgleish himself is in great danger as he tries to solve this mystery. This was an interesting book but as I mentioned at the beginning, Dalgleish is pretty skeeved out by all the sick people at the hospice. I mean, he wants to solve the mystery and prevent any further murders but he’d prefer to do it without touching or looking at the people in wheelchairs too much. It was awkward to read.

So. To sum up. P. D. James is famous and wrote a lot of books and a lot of those books were made into movies and tv series. My opinion of her work matters very little in the face of all that. I can see why these books were a great success, with their inventive murders and suspenseful plots and interesting characters. I probably won’t be diving deep into the career of Adam Dalgleish, though. He and his phobia of sick people are not for me. I might read the second Cordelia Gray novel, though. She was cool.

As always, embrace the darkness here or on Substack.

Odd Thomas: a Review

Let’s talk about Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. In almost every used bookstore I’ve been to, the horror section is one or two sad little shelves full of mostly Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Honestly, I didn’t even know Koontz wrote horror until I realized he’s always on the shelf next to King. I picked up Odd Thomas because I wanted to check out this second guy dominating the horror shelf and thirty seconds of googling suggested this was a popular title. Turns out this is the first in what became a whole series (and it’s mostly luck I grabbed book one instead of, like, book five). I’m not sure whether Koontz always had a series in mind or decided that after Odd Thomas blew up, but this reads just fine as a standalone novel.

Odd sees dead people. He’s a fry cook at the local cafe, he’s got a girlfriend named Stormy he wants to marry someday, and he sees dead people. He also sees shadow people and occasionally gets premonitions when something evil’s about to happen. He’s been having the same nightmare for ages, people lying dead and bloody, and it looks like his nightmare is about to come true.

This book is pretty good. Odd himself (and yes, Odd is his actual first name) is pretty likeable. He just wants to help people, checking on his landlady every morning, actively trying to hone his cooking craft, devoted to his girlfriend, and willing to drop everything for a ghost in need. He’s not a very deep or complex character but we can sympathize with the trouble his “gift” causes and we find out some tantalizing details about his childhood and his dysfunctional family as the story unfolds. The plot is the main thing here, though. It ramps up nicely as Odd gets just the worst vibe from a cafe customer and becomes convinced this guy is about to do something epically evil. He gets himself into various tense and scary situations as he tries to figure out what’s about to happen, where and when. His gift is hard to explain and even harder to prove, so he tries to keep a low profile as he investigates but in the end he has to jump right into the crisis.

It was a fairly exciting story and I’m about to give you a big spoiler, so skip this paragraph if you want to preserve the surprise. (This book is over twenty years old but I hadn’t read it until now so maybe you haven’t either.) Okay, spoiler time: there are actual Satanists involved and the book ends with a mass shooting. The Satanists felt like a silly ‘80’s throwback but the mass shooting felt both tragically relevant and oddly underwhelming in today’s world. He spends the whole book building up to a tragedy that will rock the world and I’m sure when this came out in 2003 this active shooter scenario packed a punch. Now it feels more depressing than shocking, and the villains doing it purely for the glory of Satan feels almost mockingly cute. Still, how could Koontz know what the future would become? I don’t hold this against him.

So the ending doesn’t hit now the same way it would back then, but I wonder if Odd’s childhood trauma hits even harder now that trauma is such a visible topic? Koontz doesn’t seem like a deeply psychological writer, but he does a bit of exploring of some deep trauma beneath Odd’s sunny exterior. I wonder if he explores that in the rest of the series. Someday I’ll have to pick the sequels off the sad secondhand horror shelf and find out.

As always, read more and darker books. And follow us here or on Substack.

The Angel of Indian Lake

The Angel of Indian Lake is the last book in an amazing trilogy. The trilogy begins with My Heart is a Chainsaw (read the review here) and continues with Don’t Fear the Reaper (read the review here) before wrapping up with this one.

What more can happen to Jade Daniels? What more can really be done in a town as small as Proofrock, Idaho? Apparently quite a bit as it turns out. Jade has fully stepped into the shoes of her beloved Mr.Holmes as the high school’s new history teacher. This is in spite of a severely checkered past and a record but that’s nothing Letha Mondragon’s money and influence couldn’t overcome. Letha and Jade go way back at this point and Jade is “Aunt Jade” to Letha’s daughter. On paper, things have really improved for Jade. Off paper, Jade is barely keeping herself together when things start to happen again.

Like in the earlier two books, it isn’t a singular murderer or supernatural force attacking Proofrock. This time though, it took me much longer to parse what all was going on and who was doing what. I mean that in the best possible way. The national forest gets set on fire AGAIN. There is a multi-bear rampage. I audibly gasped when that happened. There are zombies. We finally get to the bottom of why Rexall is the way he is (and get some satisfaction in that regard). There is so much more. Things move at a breakneck pace but the action is still punctuated by Jade’s thoughts and visits “to the video store.”

I am a big fan of a trilogy. Three is my goldilocks number of books in a series I think. Like any really solid trilogy, you need all three of these. Each book brings something new, something essential, and Jade is a new flavor of herself as time and the story wear on. I think the idea of picking a favorite book out of three that belong together is pointless but I will say that this third version of Jade is my favorite. I believe her. Something I have appreciated about Graham Jones’s writing throughout is the authenticity of his characters. How they react and change after all the violence and trauma makes sense for human beings. Jade is the best example of this. She’s pretty poorly adjusted but masking like a champion and trying her damnedest to just live some kind of life. Even when things kick off again, her continued vulnerability is what makes her worth reading about. She is not a Sarah Connor or Ripley. Who would be? She is damaged inside and out with fewer toes than she started all this with. She’s broken in ways that make sense while still trying to move forward and I find that really endearing.

This book is going to break your heart in more than one place. And yes, I know the second one did too. The first one also. But this one really did me in a couple of times. Trust me though, It’s worth it.

As always, follow us here or on Substack. Have a thrilling week and read more (darker) books!

Near the Bone

I was excited to read Near the Bone because years ago I read one of Christina Henry’s other books, one of her series inspired by Alice in Wonderland. I remembered liking it; the Disney version of Alice really freaked me out as a kid with its black backgrounds and creepy dream logic, so I was intrigued by Henry’s dark take on the tale. Near the Bone, however, didn’t impress me the same way.

As a voracious and dedicated reader of novels, I can’t believe I’m about to say this but Near the Bone should have just been a movie. As a book this kind of fell flat.

Mattie lives on the mountain with her husband, William. Her much older, extremely religious, horrendously abusive husband. They are utterly alone yet he still watches her like a hawk, dictating her every move and timing her to the minute. She has odd flashbacks and thoughts–snippets of songs she shouldn’t know, tiny memories of a sister and a mother–that William insists are dreams and nonsense.

And now, all of a sudden, there’s something new in the woods. Something hunting the animals and leaving their mutilated corpses in the trees. First the mysterious beast violates their carefully isolated territory, then a trio of cryptid hunters violate their territory as they look for the mysterious beast. William is not happy about any of this, and when he’s not happy Mattie is generally the one to suffer.

Great set-up, right? This would be a great movie. Mattie fighting between fear and hope as she finally connects with other humans and maybe, just maybe, a chance to escape her husband’s oppression. Everyone, hero and villain alike, stalked by the mysterious beast. It would be tight and terrifying in the right hands.

A book, on the other hand, usually lets you live with the characters over time and really get to know them. We can see deeper into their souls and follow their inner journeys as the plot unfolds. This is where movies based on novels usually fall short. With these people, though, their inner journeys just aren’t that interesting. We never see into the minds of William or the three cryptid hunters at all, really. We never know why they do what they’re doing in any real way. We follow Mattie’s inner journey quite closely as she begins to remember her life before William and gains courage in the process but honestly, it’s not that interesting a journey.

Spoiler alert: it’s super clear from the beginning that William must have kidnapped Mattie at a young age and brainwashed her into being his child-bride. We never know why except that he’s a fundamentalist nutcase and we never know how he managed to cozy up to Mattie’s mother without setting off all the alarm bells in the world. Mattie’s inner journey gives us zero insight and she just reads as kind of a mishmosh of stereotypes and tv tropes. Trying to follow Mattie’s inner journey actually detracted from the rest of the action, which was actually pretty exciting when we got to focus on it.

So yeah, it should have been a movie. Just show us Mattie and three cryptid hunters running around a mountain, trying to evade a mystery monster and a psycho kidnapper with a shotgun. Maybe a few brief flashbacks of Mattie’s previous life and how she’s suffered at William’s hands, so we can feel vindicated when he suffers and loses control of her. I can fill in her inner life for myself, and probably in a more interesting way than this novel did.