Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
Of the three Hendrix novels I’ve read, this one feels like the weakest to me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the concept, as I stated in my “Current” review last month. I haven’t changed my mind about it, especially after learning what the source of the haunting is. It’s not your typical graveyard. It’s something far more sinister that feels uniquely American, in the worst possible way.
Where this novel fell a little short for me was its explication of its villain and his backstory. I don’t want to spoil too much, but at around two hundred and forty pages, I feel like the story could have benefited from about thirty pages or so of additional exposition about the cause of the haunting.
I will say that the epilogue to the story was an absolute banger though. I’ve always wanted to write a whole story about what happens after a horror story and I think Hendrix nailed it with Amy’s epilogue.
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Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling
When I took Gothic Literature as my senior seminar for my undergrad, my entire family laughed and said I couldn’t have picked a more perfect class. I do love me some Gothic literature.
A thoroughly modern story, Last to Leave the Room nonetheless draws strongly on the Gothic tropes of forbidden science leading to existential crisis and the doppelgänger. At one point, Tamsin even researches these Gothic stories as a way to try to understand what’s happening to her.
Even though it’s written in the third person, the story sticks to the main character like glue. This continues to be a trend I’m seeing in current novels, either through this kind of third person narration or being written in first person. Considering that the stakes of the story are supposed to be about the whole city of San Siroco, I feel that this unnecessary limitation of perspective meant that I had a hard time feeling like the stakes were actually at stake. The story starts and ends strong, but bogs down in the middle. I thought it was good, but maybe not great.
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Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
When I first picked up the book, I assumed the story would be about werewolves. The back of the book summary quickly corrected me that it’s about a cursed, unifinished film, whose script was written by a Nazi occultist. It sounded so original that I was stoked to pick it up.
The narration is trading off between focusing on Montserrat, a sound engineer and horror aficionado, and Tristán, her childhood friend and an actor. I’m connecting with and enjoying both characters, Montserrat because she’s a sound engineer (which is what my day job used to be) and Tristán because of his vacillations between exuberance and melancholy.
The story is engaging and well-paced. I find myself staying up later than I’d intended to read a little more.
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What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman
For what felt like a long time, I wasn’t connecting with stories and writers in the way that I had for most of my life. But I feel like in the last two years, I’ve read several writers who make me look for their names while I’ve browsing bookstore shelves. Clay McLeod Chapman is one of those writers.
Reading the inside flap of the book reminded me of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s The Harbor, which is a book I’ve read multiple times and still enjoy. It’s described as “[c]ombining supernatural horror with domestic suspense into a visceral exploration of parental grief.” Which sounds exactly like the kind of story I want to write. So I’m in.
The Chimerical Dark 