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Don’t Fear the Reaper

This review was first published on our Substack in September 2025. My sister Trex wrote it.

***This review contains spoilers for “My Heart is a Chainsaw” and its sequel “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Stephen Graham Jones proceed with caution***

Jennifer Daniels is back in town. It’s been four years since the summer of book one and Jennifer is coming home reluctantly. This book explores what the aftermath of a slasher could look like for survivors in the real world. How would the legal system respond to a person who had to kill or be killed? How would lawyers and prosecutors deal with a huge body count and a suspicious lack of hard evidence pointing at the identity of the killer? In the time between books, Jennifer Daniels is charged with and prosecuted for a number of crimes. Her heroism in opening the dam to stop the forest fire is reduced to destruction of government property. Surviving the massacre and then being shuffled through the judicial system leaves Jennifer disconnected from the version of herself that was Jade. She wants to be Jennifer now but being on parole means moving home to the house she inherited from her dead father.

Letha Mondragon has severe facial disfigurement from her run-in with Stacy Graves and has endured multiple reconstructive surgeries to try and reattach her jaw. She’s in constant pain and her jaw is wired shut. She has married Banner Tompkins and has a baby. She processes the trauma of everything that happened in book one by making herself as much an expert on slashers as Jade ever was.

Jennifer and Letha are just two examples among many in the book that believably portray characters surviving a huge collective trauma. Nobody miraculously bounced back or conveniently moved on. Everyone in town lives with their hackles permanently up. This plus a record breaking blizzard set the stage for a new outbreak of killings. Proofrock is cut off from the outside world with a notorious serial killer on the loose. Jade, Letha, and probationary deputy Banner Tompkins are trying to keep history from repeating itself while fighting to stay alive themselves.

This book is every bit as good as the first. It just is. In fact, I think I liked it a bit better. Jennifer’s reluctant journey back to Jade is heartbreaking and thrilling at the same time. We get to see a more mature and sober version of her leading a group of fellow Proofrockers who actually grasp the stakes this time around. Jones delivered a new set of slasher tropes interwoven with stunning surprises. His characters remained nuanced and interesting. Old characters got new layers and new characters were just as developed. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is a fantastic book and honestly the best thing you can do is to just go read it.

The Possession of Alba Diaz

What’s the book? The Possession of Alba Diaz by Isabel Cañas

How dark is it? Medium dark, like a mine entrance.

How good is it? 4/10 dark spirits

Mexico, 1765. Alba Diaz is rich and of marrying age. This is good, yes? No. This is more of a “marriage as business deal” time and place and Alba is terrified of ending up with some creepy old dude with a booming silver mine. So she makes a deal with her friend Carlos; he’s around her age, attractive, and has as little interest in marrying as Alba does. They agree to marry, forging their own business alliance before a much less pleasant one can be forced on either of them. So far, so good.

Then, two things happen. First, Alba meets Carlos’s magnetically sexy cousin Elias. Second, a plague hits. (The Matlazahuatl they describe was a real plague that swept through colonial Mexico several times in this era. It sounds terrifying.)

And here I must digress for a moment, because part of this story is told from Elias’s point of view. Elias grew up in Spain while his father worked here in Mexico at the family silver mine. While his father remarried a local and had another kid here in Mexico, Elias and his mother did not have a great time back in Spain. He’s pretty bitter about it. He has a checkered past, including a stint doing forced labor in a Spanish mine and some time in Constantinople studying alchemy and the occult. His alchemist buddies gave him a bunch of money and sent him to Spain to buy mercury for their experiments, and he does just that. But he also finds out his estranged father has died and Elias is more or less expected to take that mercury to Mexico and use his mad mercury skills to pay of his father’s debts. (They don’t explain it much, but mercury was key to refining the silver out of the ore they were mining.) He’s pretty pissed about the whole thing; the only silver lining (hah!) is the amazing gal he meets at a party cousin Carlos drags him to. The amazing gal is, of course, Alba.

Okay, back to the plague. Alba convinces her parents to move up to Carlos’s family silver mine until the plague burns itself out; they can ride out the plague safely up in the mountains while also finalizing the details of Alba’s impending marriage. The big downside is that sexy tempting Elias is coming, too, since he came to Mexico to work in that exact mine. Since he’s part of Carlos’s family, she can’t entirely avoid him. She also has to hang out with Carlos’s best friend, Bartolome, a soldier-turned-priest who wants to win Mexico for the Inquisition or something. Alba thinks he’s creepy but she’s also very religious so she feels guilty for thinking he’s creepy.

It’s here, up at the silver mine, that Alba becomes very clearly possessed by an evil entity. As her symptoms worsen, she doesn’t know who to turn to. Bartolome represents God and the church, so he’s an obvious choice, but Alba doesn’t quite trust him. Elias has some experience with the occult and Alba does trust him (turns out Elias is a pretty nice guy) but the book he’s using to help is, as far as they both can tell, evil. It’s a puzzle.

Things get worse and worse as Bartolome and Elias approach the problem from opposite angles. Eventually Bartolome involves the Inquisition and blames the whole possession on Elias’s sorcery. Things are not looking good for either Alba or Elias.

Alba is a sympathetic character, Elias is interesting, Bartolome makes a good villain, and the possessing entity itself is quite intriguing. I was excited to be along for the ride as the book got more violent and mysterious.

It chugged along and kept me interested right to thend, which is both bloody and dramatic. It’s also kind of a happy ending for Alba and Elias.

This is where the book lost me. Without giving away too many details, it felt like too much of a hand-wavey ‘deus ex machina’ situation to me. I love a good happy ending but this book set us up for a heartwrenching tragedy and just reversed it in the last few pages in a way that felt cheap. But right up until then, this was a fairly satisfying read.

La Llorona

This post first appeared on our Substack in September 2025.

Let’s talk about La Llorona, a collection of short stories by Chris Rodarte.

I picked this one up in a gift shop. We’d first moved to Santa Fe and were still doing tourist stuff. Gift shops are a surprisingly good place to find offerings by local historians and folklorists. My copy seems to be signed by the author, who grew up in Albuquerque, but I didn’t notice that at the time. In fact, at the time I laid it on a table and promptly got distracted by other books. I remember squashing a large bug with it and though I thoroughly wiped it off the cover still feels a bit psychically tainted with bug guts. I think this is why it took me two or three years to actually start reading La Llorona. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, that’s a dumb reason to put off reading this.

Chris Rodarte’s author page says he’s a teacher, which explains his writing style. It feels a lot like a “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” collection. Dark and spooky tales told in a simple easy style that’s accessible to just about anyone. A great collection for young readers looking for a scare, with the same potential to either scar a kid for life or ignite a lifelong fascination with the darker side of literature. It’s a quick read with a nice variety of Llorona tales, ranging from uncanny to terrifying to tragic.

Some of the stories are inspired by real events and stories told to the author personally, but they’re not raw ghost experiences. The raw stories are recreated and blended into tight little tales fitting into various common categories–hitchhiking ghost, graveyard haunting, spirit warning, cautionary tale–and all with La Llorona as a central figure.

To be honest, I’m not convinced all the specters are actually La Llorona; some of the connections seem pretty tenuous. I’m not even sure if I believe in ghosts, but La Llorona has a pretty specific backstory and connection to drowning so if she does exist, some of these stories fall pretty far outside her usual bailiwick. Still, even if these experiences aren’t all La Llorona’s doing, they’re chilling nonetheless.

One of my favorites is “The Stick Lady”, based on a friend’s experience. As kids, the woman and her friends were caught in an arroyo when a storm hit in the distance. They began to hear loud cracks, like branches breaking, and saw a terrifying old lady walking toward them ahead of the storm. They fled from the ditch just in time to escape the stick lady and a flash flood coming their way. This was a quick and believable story, made more eerie by being unsure whether the Stick Lady was warning them of the flood or bringing it to them.

Another great story is “Two Minutes to Midnight”, a made up story set in a real building in Santa Fe. The Public Employees Retirement Administration (PERA) building was put up in the 1960s, partially over the site of a historical graveyard. It seems the builders just paved over a lot of bodies, which means every time they try to add or renovate they find old bones. I’m not surprised that ghost sightings began pretty much from the moment the building opened. (Fun fact: this building is not that far from my house. Luckily we’ve never been haunted by its ghosts.)

In this story, two friends are allowed to ghost hunt by an uncle who cleans the building at night. The building is so haunted they have a hard time keeping night workers, so the building is deserted as the uncle leads them way down into the sub-basement and leaves them there. The kids’ annoyance at this prank turns to terror as La Llorona and an army of rats chase them through the building. The PERA building’s history makes this story more intense but it’s spooky and suspenseful even without knowing about the building.

Like most local ghost story collections, this isn’t high literature or destined for the best seller lists. It’s charming, though, an easy read, and an exciting perspective on New Mexican folklore and history. If you like little hints of truth and experience in your spooky tales or have a youngster looking for a good scare, this is a fun little book to pick up.

The Staircase in the Woods: a Review

What’s the book? The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

How dark is it? Not too gory but kind of existentially dark

How good is it? I give it 6/10 decaying fish

This book was pretty surreal. I saw it on a display and thought, “yeah, I remember pictures of woodland staircases going around the internet a while back. Makes sense they would inspire a horror story.” This book was, indeed, inspired by those pictures.

Mostly, this book is devoted to the kind of otherworldly house those stairs might lead to.

Way back in high school, Owen and his friends hiked out to a local camping spot to get wrecked in peace and anjoy the wonders of nature. On the way they discovered this random staircase that had never been there before. Just a staircase, all by itself, with no sign of a house around it. That was weird and terrifying, so they ignored the hell out of it and hiked on. But they were high schoolers so eventually drama happened and one of them decided to climb it. Matty, the most popular and well-adjusted of the friends, wanted everyone to climb the staircase with him but no one else was into it. They were all fighting with each other or too high to understand the request or dealing with their own shit. When everyone refused to join him, Matty climbed the ladder by himself and when he got to the top he just . . . vanished.

All his friends had to go home and just live with that confusion, as well as the suspicion of the whole town because there was no trace of Matty and no convincing explanation of his disappearance. Because the staircase vanished, too. The remaining friends, Owen, Lore (known as Lauren back in high school), Nick, and Hamish try to move on with their lives and . . . it doesn’t go that well. Owen and Nick are largely consumed by various mental health issues and Lore and Hamish, while outwardly successful, are emotionally far from okay. They spend decades like this, ignoring each other and nursing their various wounds, until Nick finds another staircase and convinces everyone to climb it. For Matty. This time they all vanish.

At the top of the stairs is a nightmare realm, literally. They’re trapped in a house where room after room is the scene of decay and tragedy; some rooms are the scenes of murders or suicides, some are the scenes of low points in the friends’ own lives. This dreamworld isn’t out to kill them, exactly, but it’s definitely trying to beat them down until they maybe kill themselves or each other in despair. It’s definitely trying to catch each one alone and vulnerable.

Most of the book takes place in this nightmare series of rooms, which makes it kind of a surreal book that runs on dream logic. While there’s plenty of gore and tragedy to be seen in the rooms, we’re really here for the emotional journey each character is taking as they attempt to rescue themselves and each other. We learn about each of the friends and the various pains they carry, both secret and not so secret. They’re all interesting and relatable enough that I was invested in their journey and whether they (and their friendships) survived this ordeal. It felt a little “after school special” in parts, trying too hard to teach me emotional lessons, but I do have a sappy side so I still enjoyed the book overall.

When I was little I was really weirded out by stories that ran on dream logic; Alice in Wonderland freaked me right out more than anything actually meant to scare me. I’m way more tough and grown up now but dream logic still sucks me in pretty well, disorienting me in a way that makes the horror scenes much more effective. The book starts to lose me near the end as the dream logic devolves into a backstory that doesn’t make a lot of sense but by then I really did care about the characters and whether they’d make it out alive (and of sound mind). I don’t know that I’m itching to read Wendig’s entire oeuvre but I didn’t hate this.

Who Killed Aunt Maggie

This review first appeared on our Substack in September of 2025.

Let’s talk about Who Killed Aunt Maggie by Medora Field. This is one of a handful of pulp novels I picked up in El Paso. I basically scanned the pulp table looking for female author names and murdery titles. I knew nothing about Medora Field and I didn’t know how hard this book is to find these days. Like a lot of pulp paperbacks, my copy started falling apart the second I opened it up, so I’m not surprised they’re becoming rare.

This book is casually racist. It was published in 1939 by a well off white lady from Georgia, so it’s no surprise. The only black characters in this mystery are servants, and they’re all portrayed as kind of dumb and childlike (and extremely devoted to the rich white family who employs them). Late in the book there’s a short speech about the moral inferiority of black people. Medora Field (married name Medora Field Perkerson) was an advice columnist and historian who wrote a book about Georgia’s historical buildings and was friends with Margaret “Gone with the Wind” Mitchell, who was also racist.

Honestly, it’s the unthinking casualness of the racist bits that gets to me. I read a lot of older novels so I’ve run across a lot of racist and sexist and colonialist content. As a modern white American lady, I have the luxury of taking a detached view of most of it. A surprising number of old novels actually examine and push back against the views of their time in ways that are interesting and hopeful, even when they fall far short of modern standards. Sometimes, though, there’s just zero thought and zero pushback and the old timey awfulness just sits there stinking up an otherwise decent story. (I suppose that’s sometimes true in contemporary fiction, too.)

It’s a shame because this is an otherwise decent story. Not great, but decent. The mystery takes place in a grand old plantation house Sally Ambler has inherited from her family. She’s offered to host an impromptu engagement party for her friends Claire and Bob. Bob’s old fling, Eve, is crashing the party and Sally’s Aunt Maggie has also been staying at the house to look through the library and do some family research. Maggie has also been nosily looking at all the recent renovations and making one last search for the secret room their ancestor was rumored to have built back before the Civil War.

As soon as she arrives to get the party ready, Sally feels something isn’t right. Who was that man she saw dashing away through the backyard? Where have the servants got off to, when they were supposed to be here dusting bedrooms and preparing dinner? She’s a bit spooked, but soon all the guests arrive and those thoughts are pushed out of her head. Until bedtime, that is, when she walks out of the kitchen to find Aunt Maggie crumpled at the bottom of the back stairs. At first Sally assumes Aunt Maggie fainted or somehow tripped down the stairs but it soon becomes clear that something far more sinister is afoot . . .

We spend a lot of time watching characters bumble about the house while learning about their various tense relationships and wondering who might have motive for such a crime. Sally and her husband try to call the police but the phone line has been cut. They try to get Andrew, the butler, to drive to the nearest town for help but all the cars’ tires have been punctured. A fierce storm comes up and the electricity goes out, which leads to a night of various suspects roaming about the house with candles, finding clues and having spooky moments. This isn’t the tightest of mysteries but there are fun and intriguing moments as the night progresses.

The next day they finally get the police and coroner out to investigate but at first this only leads to more confusion and questions. The coroner, by the way, is a blind lawyer. In these forensics-heavy days of medical examiners and crime scene investigators, it’s easy to forget that coroners with no medical expertise did and still do exist. This coroner’s expertise is in ferreting out motives and secrets by listening intently to the way people talk. He’s an interesting character, but he’s also the one who gives the racist speech, so that ruins things a bit.

After a lot of worrying and conjecture and confusion, Sally literally stumbles onto the mystery’s solution, which is a lot more tense and suspenseful than it sounds. The book’s finale was pretty exciting. Not sure it was worth the racism, but it was a good ending.

And there we have it. Who Killed Aunt Maggie was an interesting experience but I’m not itching to find Field’s second novel. It might interest you to know both of her books inspired movies in the 1940s; I haven’t seen either movie and the synopsis for the Who Killed Aunt Maggie film sounds not much like the book, but if you’re into old movies you might look them up. Tell me if they’re any good. Tell me if they’re also casually racist.

Stubs: Part 2

It’s the Friday before Independence Day here in the USA, which means we’re all too busy loving/hating America to read full reviews. It’s also the day after my birthday and I’m probably getting a tattoo as this goes live. Yes, we all lead very full lives and today I’m just leaving some quick mini-reviews here of a few books that didn’t quite fit the normal profile for one reason or another. Enjoy.

Most Delicious Poison

Written by Noah Whiteman, the title Most Delicious Poison: the Story of Nature’s Toxins from Spices to Vices pretty much sums it up. I dip into history and popular science on occasion, and this one delivers some pretty interesting info about how plants protect themselves and how humans have learned to use those defensive chemicals as flavorings, medicines, and recreational drugs. The book is inspired by Whiteman’s struggle to understand his father’s debilitating problems with alcohol, so along with exciting stories about medicine and interesting facts about flavorings, we get vulnerable discussion of the more dangerous uses of plants. It’s not exactly our usual Darker Books fare but I found it fascinating and quite moving in parts.

Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge

Last October we stayed at the McCoy Hotel in Tucson, which had a cute red desk with a pile of paperbacks on it for our reading pleasure. This was in the pile. It’s a mystery for youngsters written by Barbee Oliver Carleton; the internet has precious little about her but she apparently wrote a lot of stuff for youngsters. This book is kind of quaint and cute, with detailed and interesting descriptions of the Massachusetts wetlands where it’s set. It’s not particularly spooky or exciting but it’s fun in a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys way.

The Devil’s Butcher Shop

Last Halloween I wrote a bit about the New Mexico State Penitentiary, which is probably haunted because of the deadly prison riot of 1980. Back then, I said I’d bought a book about the riot but I hadn’t read it yet. This is that book. The main reason I’m making this a stub instead of a full review is that, even for a hardened true crime enthusiast like myself, this is a hard book to get through. It’s not for everyone. Still, I was riveted by Roger Morris’s book, which details not only the riot but the appalling mismanagement leading up to it and the shocking lack of consequences afterward (both for the murders committed by rioters and for the negligent and corrupt managers of the prison). It was thorough and moving, and I appreciated the way Morris built sympathy for the prisoners while making it clear that the actions of many prisoners during the riot were also inexcusably awful. This one will stick with me a long time and I’m glad I read it, but it’s definitely one of the darkest books I’ve ever read.

Curioddity

This one, by Paul Jenkins, is the opposite of dark. I bought it at an occult book shop in Tucson and it’s got a mysterious cover so I thought it would be at least a little dark. Instead I got a rollicking absurdist adventure with a lot of goofy humor. The book is not set anywhere in particular but Jenkins is a British comic book writer, which explains why the book felt so much like a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett project. It also explains the main character, Wil Morgan, who is exceedingly straitlaced and depressed about life; he’s constantly baffled and disconcerted by the zaniness suddenly springing up around him even though it’s making his life better by leaps and bounds. This type of straight man seems common in British comedy. Anyway, the book is fairly funny and if you like British goofiness you should read it. But it isn’t dark. Not even a little bit.

The Black Hunger: a Review

This review first appeared on our Substack in 2025. This is a repost.

Let’s talk about The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen. This is a new title, published last year, with a quote on the cover calling it a “gothic masterpiece.” The quote is from Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters, which I read sometime last year. Honestly, I should not have taken this as a ringing endorsement.

I liked The Book Eaters okay, it had a cool premise and decent action, but the flat characters left me cold. How did I expect this new book, recommended by the author of flatness, to have anything but flat characters that also left me cold? These two books are very different but they have the exact same positives and negatives. Great concepts and interesting world building but characters so flat they felt like afterthoughts.

The Black Hunger is set in the British empire of the early 1900s, following John Sackville and his faithful manservant/lover Garret Benson from the hallowed halls of Oxford all the way to India and then into Tibet and Mongolia as they try to foil the plot of an evil Buddhist cult. This alternate mythology, where the future of the world hinges on the various sects of Tibetan Buddhism fighting the unholy Dhaumri Karoti, is great. It’s interesting and original and exciting. This feels like the dream Pullen just had to put into words–he’s clearly put a lot of thought into creating a rich world surrounding this alternate Buddhist history. Whenever the book centers on this–when we see the cultists’ dark rituals, when we follow John and Garrett to meet the Dalai Lama, when we read flashback sections of previous encounters with this cult–the book comes alive. It all feels real and electric. Really, I can’t say enough good about these parts.

When we’re not directly following the cult’s action, though, the story falls flat. All the characters feel fairly wooden, heroes and villains alike, and nothing is told with the same vibrancy and detail as the culty bits. I didn’t find John or Garrett very interesting and their great love affair felt a bit like a convenience. They grew up together and remained unfailingly loyal to each other to the end of the story. If they’d been more deeply written, this would have been a great love affair tinged with the sadness of having to hide themselves from a prejudiced world. It’s clear that’s what their love was supposed to be, but I was unconvinced. They just didn’t feel very real or deeply motivated by anything; maybe this is true love or maybe it’s just too hard to meet other gay men in that cultural climate. John and Garret felt more like a step on the way to the cult action than anything else.

The villains are even more flatly written. Flat villains aren’t always a problem but the deep world building around the Dhaumri Karoti suffered a bit from the cartoonish villainry of the bad guys. The cult is based around the idea that one way to end suffering is to follow the traditional Buddhist teachings of detachment and right action, and another way is to just kill everyone. There can be no suffering if there are no beings alive to suffer. This is an interestingly scary alternative with great potential but it also makes us wonder what would lead someone to choose the dark second option. What despair would make that seem the right choice? That’s what I wonder, anyway. Apparently no one in the book wonders this at all–the Dhaumri Karoti all seem to do this purely for evil and bloodlust. Officially, they’re trying to end all suffering but they take pure delight in causing as much death and suffering as they can along the way. They don’t even try to justify it. It sometimes feels implied that they’re like this because they’re colonizers or because they’re serf-holding Russian lords, and that’s just how those guys roll. Even this could be interesting but the lack of character development just left a lot of thematic implications totally unexplored. I found that really unsatisfying.

Still, that whole Buddhist apocalypse cult thing was a really exciting idea. I’m fascinated by cults and apocalypses and the Dhaumri Karoti delivered on both counts. This is Pullen’s first novel, I’m pretty sure, so he has room to grow. If he can get as excited about his characters as he is about his alternate religious history, we could see great things from him in the future.

The Bog Wife: a Review

review written by Trex

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister is part Gothic horror and part Magical Realism. The Haddesley family has always lived in their crumbling West Virginia mansion, on the edge of their cranberry bog. The bog gives them everything they need. It even provides a wife for each generation’s patriarch: a woman made from the bog is magically provided for the new patriarch when the old patriarch’s body has been returned to the bog. It’s a covenant kept for generations.

The book opens with Wenna Haddesley returning home to help with the ritual of their father dying. Wenna has been estranged from her father and siblings for years and plans on leaving West Virginia again as soon as possible. Plans change as she sees the sorry state her family has been living in and as old family drama and dynamics suck her back in like the peat bog itself.

This book reminded me of a lot of other stories but felt original nonetheless. There are certainly elements of “The Fall of the House of Usher” with part-mad siblings rattling around decrepit rooms. The isolation of the Haddesleys and their sense of being chained to a legacy they never chose made me think of 100 Years of Solitude. The Haddesleys live in the disgraced present circumstances of their glorious family who previously enjoyed wealth and abundance. Or at least, this is what they were always told. The magical realism of the story is all in the bog – how they interact with it and vice versa is more an expression of how the siblings evolve as characters and less about the magic itself.

The Bog Wife was less horrifying or scary and more quietly disturbing. Whereas I thought I’d feel the most connected to Wenna, Charlie ultimately became the character I found myself hoping for. The creeping decay and macabre events ultimately tell a really poignant story about siblings living in the ruins of their own lives. Witnessing the choices they make with the sorry tools life provided them is what kept me reading.

Still Life with Bones: a Review

What’s the book? Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty

How dark is it? It’s about real atrocities so . . . it’s pretty depressing

How good is it? 6/10

This was the Morbidly Curious Book Club‘s latest selection so I didn’t come into this book with any particular expectations. I read it because they sent it to me. Turns out it’s mostly about the author’s experience exhuming mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina as part of her anthropology studies. It’s a little bit about bones and the stories they tell, a little bit about exhumation and the various ways it’s viewed, and a lot about the atrocities perpetrated in both countries during certain periods of time.

The last part was the most interesting and informative to me. I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, vaguely aware that shit was going down in South America and President Reagan was somehow very involved, but I was way too young to understand any of the details. I remember U2 mentioning El Salvador in their songs and stuff but I didn’t really know what they were talking about. In fact, somewhere in the middle of this book, reading about the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, I realized they’re who that song “Mothers of the Disappeared” was about. I feel a little dumb now because I always thought that song was a metaphor. (To be fair, I was in middle school when that song came out.)

In parts of this book, Hagerty explains La Violencia in Guatamala and the Argentinian junta that kidnapped thousands of supposed dissidents, tortured them extensively, and dumped their bodies when they were done. These chapters were sad and horrifying and enlightening. They made me want to know more about the history and politics behind it all. These chapters were also the hardest chapters to read, by a long stretch, because they detail some of the horrific crimes behind the mass graves being investigated now. The discussion of Argentinian torture especially got to me, mostly because it was so perversely creative in its cruelty. It feels important to witness and condemn such things but it’s also hard to read over breakfast.

The rest of the book was more personal and poetic, more centered on Hagerty’s own experience and musings. In many ways, she becomes a stand in for the reader, giving us a single human perspective to guage these enormous events by. Her focus on her own emotions and thoughts gives us suggestions on how to shape our own emotions and thoughts about the subject. Sometimes this filtering makes the whole subject easier to handle but it also puts us a step farther from the action that makes it a little too easy at times. Instead of relating to these survivors and witnesses directly, we’re relating to Hagerty as she relates to them. At times, she becomes the subject in a way that feels a bit self-involved. Once in a while I got a whiff of that pampered American ‘their tragedy is so sad for me‘ rot.

But it was only the occasional whiff; for the most part I appreciated this book and the attempt it made to condense a huge and difficult topic into a relatable story for a mass audience. As such, it was a good introduction that made me want to do some more serious research some day.

Within these Walls: a Review

What’s the book? Within These Walls by Ania Ahlborn

How dark is it? Medium grey, like a drab prison wall.

How good is it? 4/10 ghosts

Lucas Graham is a true crime writer who really needs a good story. Good thing one drops right in his lap; mysterious cult leader Jeffrey Halcomb is finally ready to talk about his crimes and he wants none other than Lucas Graham to write his story. The catch is that Halcomb will only tell all if Graham comes out to interview him right now. And if he agrees to rent Halcomb’s old house. The one where Halcomb killed all those people . . .

Thus begins Within these Walls, a haunted house story with some cult killings thrown in for extra spice. The spooky weirdness starts pretty much the moment Lucas and his 12-year-old daughter arrive at the house. His daughter knows Lucas is here to interview some murderer in prison for his next novel, but he definitely did not tell her the history of their current abode. Which is dumb, because this is the twenty-first century and she knows how to Google. This is eventually pointed out in the novel. Lucas really didn’t think that one through.

We follow Lucas’s investigation into Halcomb and his cult, interspersed with flashback chapters detailing the months leading up to the famous murders. I would tell you more about both, but it’s all explained in excruciating detail in the book. We’ll read a chapter from the point of view of Audra Snow, the cult member who originally lived in the house. Then we’ll read about Lucas finding clues about the same event in the present. Then we’ll read a short police report or news article from the past detailing the same info. If Ahlborn wants us to know what it’s like to be a writer struggling to make a story out of nothing, she does a great job. If she’s trying to build suspense or connect us to the characters, this over-explaining thing isn’t helping.

That’s too bad, because the actual haunting bits are pretty exciting. Lucas’s daughter quickly becomes obsessed with Halcomb and the cult, convinced that she can find a way to contact them and free the spirits haunting her new home. She sees spirits, experiences time slips, she feels terrifyingly drawn toward this cult leader she’s only seen on the internet. Lucas is also having some weird experiences but he mostly deals with them by burying himself deeper in his work.

It all builds up to a nicely creepy ending, but even with all the tedious exposition there are parts that aren’t explained nearly enough. We never get to know what Halcomb’s deal is, where his power comes from or why people are so attracted to him. In the flashback chapters, Audra Snow pretty much goes from “who are these people?” to “I will literally do anything for Halcomb, including sex with his entire cult” in a week or two. In the present, Lucas’s daughter sees Halcomb’s picture on the internet, and in spite of knowing his history (and in spite of being only 12), immediately becomes obsessed with how great he is. I need to know how this works and it is never explained. I’m irritated.

So . . . my feelings are mixed. I love a good haunting and those scenes are well done. I love a dark ending and this book definitely has one. But the good parts make the repetitiveness and unanswered questions all the more annoying, like Ahlborn was dwelling on all the wrong things between jump scares. The book was flawed to the point that I couldn’t really immerse myself in the suspense. Too bad, too. With a proper buildup the ending would have really gotten to me.