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Detective Vicky Paterson has seen more than her fair share of murders in the town of Fort Halcott, New York. But this one is the strangest yet, an unnerving ritualistic killing of a woman with hoarding disorder discovered amid the already horrific backdrop of her home. Meanwhile, hot on the trail of a missing girl, professional fixers Will and Alicia stumble on another disturbing ritual in an abandoned factory that seems to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Vicky is ready to blame her case on a potential serial killer; Will and Alicia are willing to call the ritual nothing more than the work of a deranged sex cult. But both investigations stumble to a halt when the world erupts in a cicada emergence of biblical proportions. Far from the harmless, droning creatures one would expect, these cicadas are driven to attack, forcing themselves down humans’ throats and taking residence there. As people everywhere fight to survive, Vicky, Will and Alicia begin to wonder: How is this infestation related to their cases? And how can they ever hope to stop a swarm so immense?
Even if they lack the drive to infest and kill, a cicada emergence can feel like an invasion. The Swarm, Andy Marino’s latest horror novel, pulls on this thread and amplifies it. Marino turns cicadas’ already otherworldly drone into a malevolent force, their haphazard way of flying into a learning algorithm bent on human destruction. While that premise might seem hokey to anyone who has spent time around harmless, bumbling cicadas, in execution, it is anything but. Marino’s insects are horrifying, alien creatures with unshakable drives and unknowable goals. And they don’t just come in ones and twos. In the tradition of Hitchcock’s seminal classic The Birds, the cicadas of The Swarm are inescapable, blotting out the sky in great streams of wings and writhing masses of bodies. Marino balances this ecological horror with a sympathetic look at a cast of characters whose lives were already on the brink far before the cicada emergence. Sometimes gruesome and always creepy, The Swarm rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation.
With his breakthrough 2014 novel, The Troop, which was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of the last decade, Nick Cutter established himself as a writer of propulsive, muscular, unrelenting journeys into terror. His latest book, The Queen, reaffirms his place as one of the genre’s most entertaining storytellers, delivering a creature feature and the story of a doomed friendship in one unputdownable package.
Told over the course of a single day, the novel follows Margaret Carpenter, a young woman still reeling from the disappearance of her best friend, Charity Atwater. Margaret wakes up to find that an iPhone has been mysteriously delivered to her doorstep, and it begins pinging with messages from someone claiming to be her vanished friend. The Queen soon descends into something even darker, as Margaret embarks on a journey to find Charity and get to the bottom of an increasingly violent mystery that’s gripping their small town.
Cutter wastes no time in throwing Margaret into the deep end, and the book moves like a freight train even when he’s pulling off some surprisingly tender moments between characters. Margaret’s narration is crisp, relatable and full of the kind of urgency that you’d expect from a someone in such an extreme situation, but Cutter’s great gift is his ability to go beyond that, to build a world even as he’s building a character. There are no trade-offs in his prose, no sense that we’re slowing down to lay the groundwork for something that’ll come next. It’s all multipurpose, expertly designed to keep you turning the pages as the book’s horrors grow deeper.
As for those frights, many of which involve a fascination with insects and how they interact with the natural world, Cutter is once again in top form. If you loved the body horror of The Troop, you’re going to get that in spades, along with an element of Promethean, sci-fi terror that’s almost cosmic in its levels of dread—and, of course, buckets of gore.
Because of these ingredients, and so many more, The Queen is a must-read for horror fans, for Nick Cutter fans and for anyone hoping to stay up late with a good scary yarn.
Ezri Maxwell and their sisters fled the house they grew up in—a malevolent McMansion in a gated community where the Maxwells were the only Black residents—as soon as they were old enough. Their parents stayed, and now they’re dead, seemingly in a murder-suicide. To finally face the traumas of the past, Ezri and their sisters will have to return to the nest.
Model Home is a striking take on a haunted house novel, and in its pages you make it clear that you know the trope’s lineage well. What are some of your favorite haunted houses, and what drew you to the house-as-monster motif?
Having a favorite haunted house feels a little like having a favorite serial killer—it’s hard to hold something in any kind of esteem when what gives it its cultural hold is its degree of terror. I came first to the haunted house genre, if it can be called a genre in its own right, via film. Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) upset all my ideas about how we define a haunting in the first place, and for that reason was extremely formative for me when dreaming up Model Home.
I also can’t talk about Model Home without discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved. They don’t have much in common at first glance besides families surviving in, to use Morrison’s word, spiteful homes, but both books also deal with the United States itself as a kind of specter, an entity that possesses. There’s so much that cannot be exorcized, no matter how much we will it.
“When writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?”
Model Home is a very internal novel. Can you talk a little about what it was like getting inside Ezri’s head?
Ezri has an extremely fractured, poorly realized identity. At many points in the novel, it’s evident they don’t see themself as a person or self at all. Still, they’re extraordinarily observant and self-examining. Getting into Ezri’s head was a little like writing about a subject the way a scientist might, with a very keen, cold, objective eye. I wrote Ezri the way I’d write someone filling out a lab report about themselves, trying desperately to understand something they never could.
One of the more unique features of the prose in Model Home is the lack of dialogue punctuation when Ezri is remembering a conversation, rather than actively taking part in it in the present. Why did you choose to use quotation marks for conversations in the present but not in the past?
Everything that happens in the past is happening in Ezri’s memory, which necessarily has a dreamlike quality to it. When writing, I aim as much as possible to use the tools of language and prose to mirror various feelings and phenomena. The lack of quotations in the memories calls to attention the haze and murkiness inherent in the act of remembering.
A narrative featuring a heavily racist community could have (obviously) been set in a lot of places. Why did you decide to set Model Home in the suburbs of Dallas?
I spent a lot of time as a kid in the North Dallas suburbs, and it will always have a really intense hold on my imagination. Texas, in general, actually. It’s a strange place with strange people (though, of course, that can be said of anywhere). My mother and I used to visit houses for sale in fancy gated communities just like the one in Model Home, fantasizing about what life there would be like. There was a short-lived TV series set in Dallas called Good Christian Bitches, based on a memoir of the same name. I’ve never seen the show or read the book, but I remember when I heard that name and learned it was about Dallas, I was like, oh, yes, absolutely, correct.
Over the years, I’ve loved seeing the breadth of places where your mind has taken readers—and how strongly you’re able to invoke those places. How do you go about instilling that sense of place within your work?
I was always that kid who could get lost in a fantasy, and I haven’t outgrown that. I live in the worlds I create in my head, fall asleep thinking about them. It’s genuinely a pleasure. The realm of the imaginary, even when what I’m imagining is something awful, is a refuge for me. It’s like real life but more. Or sometimes less. But in just the right ways I need at a specific time. I like to think that by spending a lot of time in these fantasy worlds, I can pull out the details that give a place its uniqueness. I moved around a lot growing up. I am always longing for places I’ve been before. So when writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?
I love the environmental contrasts that come up constantly in Model Home—from the heat of Dallas versus the cool of the interiors to the difference between Texas and the U.K. Why did you highlight the extreme contrasts of these environments?
Contrast makes things easier to see. The fake sterility of a new-build development appears sharper against a crumbling old Victorian. But also, I love place. It’s strange how every city, and every pocket within a city, has a flavor and a history and a strangeness. It feels right and correct to write about it and draw out that uniqueness.
Emmanuelle, Ezri, Elijah, Eden, Eve—why the “E” names?
There’s nothing special about the letter “E” in particular—They used to have all “F” names in a previous draft!—but I thought Eudora might be the sort of parent who would give all of her children names with a similar theme or sonic motif. Since she and her husband shared “E” names by coincidence, she decided on the letter E for her offspring: Ezri, Emmanuelle and Eve. I think the fact that Eve and Ezri kept up the tradition shows the hold their mother still has on them.
We mainly see the siblings’ father through Ezri’s eyes: a distant man who, while not particularly harmful to their upbringing, certainly has his own shortcomings. Do you think that Emmanuelle and Eve would have the same things to say about him?
I think for all the siblings, their mother was such a massive force in their life that no matter what kind of father their dad was, he would’ve been overshadowed.
Your work spans several media. Has working with different forms—and video in particular—affected how you approach your writing?
I absolutely think through a multimedia lens when I write. Through playwriting, I’ve learned specifically how to think about bodies in space, how they move, how they interact with the objects in a scene. And I always think about each scene as if it were in a film. What is being communicated through the actions of the characters? What does the space look like? What’s the geography of the room they’re in?
Photo of Rivers Solomon by Wasi Daniju.
Read if your Halloween plans are: A horror movie marathon, specifically A24 horror movies
Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was haunted and determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). A disturbing tale that explores self-doubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
—Laura Hubbard
Read if your Halloween plans are: Exploring potentially haunted places—abandoned strip malls, creaky old houses, creepy caves … you get the idea.
If you’re in the mood for some spine-tingling stories, cozy up to Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World, a fictitious (or is it?) compendium that is both fascinating and creepy, and made all the more so by Pulitzer Prize-winner Fahmida Azim’s striking illustrations. Seema Yasmin, a journalist, professor and physician, has created a fictional narrator named Dr. N, a taxonomist and ontologist who has traveled the world to investigate the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent djinn. Djinn, Dr. N writes, have been “haunting humanity since pre-Islamic times.” He submits the fruits of his research to his academic committee to explain his long and unexplained absence from class, in this volume of stories from around the world that capture the long history and great variety of djinn. Many of these stories are related to human events, such as one concerning a ghostlike horseman who allegedly appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Another terrifying tale of more dubious origins takes place in London, when a woman delivering her husband’s specimen to an IVF clinic spots what she thinks is an abandoned baby in the middle of the road. She stops, of course, but things do not go as she expects. Djinnology is beautifully designed, with maps, English and Arabic inscriptions and more, gamely selling a high-octane, between-two-worlds vibe. Most of all, Azim’s haunting illustrations in smoky colors perfectly portray this menagerie of spirits. Readers will find themselves looking over their shoulders.
—Alice Cary
Read if your Halloween plans are: A bar crawl in a tiny costume, weather be damned
Quite often in fiction, the figure of the vampire has represented loneliness, but we’ve arguably never seen that sense of yearning quite the way Rachel Koller Croft portrays it in her new novel, We Love the Nightlife. Croft’s protagonist, Amber, is frozen in her party girl prime, turned in the waning days of the 1970s by her maker, the beautiful and manipulative Nicola. Decades later, Amber begins to imagine what life might be like without Nicola, and considers an escape plan. But Nicola’s influence is powerful, her ambitions are vast and her appetite for control deeper than Amber ever imagined. Despite her vampiric nature, Amber feels like one of us. This is mainly due to Croft’s skill; her conversational, warm and relatable prose depicts Amber not as a lonely monster, but as a person longing for freedom in a savage world covered in glitter and awash with pulsing music. We also get to see Nicola’s side of the story and her own brand of yearning, giving the book an antagonist who’s not just remarkably well-developed, but human in her own twisted way. These dueling perspectives, coupled with memorable side characters and a beautifully paced plot, make We Love the Nightlife an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted breakup story that’s perfect for vampire fiction lovers and fans of relationship drama alike.
—Matthew Jackson
Read if your Halloween plans are: Watching a brainy horror documentary, or peeking at spooky clips on YouTube
Any horror writer doing their job knows how to tap into the fears that plague us most. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond provides a robust account of how art has reflected American dread for centuries. As it turns out, our history is rife with foundational fear, making it prime territory for some scary storytelling. Dauber starts his “tour of American fear” with our country’s bloody beginnings and proclivity for blaming the devil for everything from bad weather to miscarriage (hello, Salem!). He then passes through slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and beyond to more contemporary paranoias reflected in film: murderous technology (The Terminator), individual indifference (the Final Destination series) and surveillance (Paranormal Activity), to name a few. Dauber’s attention to the details of myriad cultural touchstones, both famous and obscure, will entice those who care to tiptoe deeper into the darkest of the dark. American Scary’s greatest success is making readers consider what art may be born of our late-night anxieties. Spooky stuff, huh?
—Amanda Haggard
Read if your Halloween plans are: Curling up in a chair at home, reading a lightly spooky book or one of the more gothic Agatha Christies
Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle resides in a quiet hamlet in upstate New York. The only out of the ordinary detail about Ms. Pinkwhistle is that she loves to solve a good murder mystery—not only those in the books she protects and enjoys at work, but also the real-life, grisly deaths in the otherwise sleepy little town of Winesap. But when a string of local murders hits a little too close to home, Sherry realizes that she can no longer remain an unattached bystander. A demon, or several, might be at the heart of these ever-increasing deaths, and Sherry will need the help of her skeptical friends and her possibly-possessed cat to root out the evil in Winesap. C.M. Waggoner’s The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a stunning blend of genres, a dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery—and by the time readers realize this, they, like Sherry, are too deeply entrenched in the case to let it go. Waggoner infuses the pages with darkly humorous scenes and snappy dialogue, as well as unexpected magical touches that hearken back to the author’s previous fantasy novels, a combination that’s perfect for fans of horror tropes as well as lovers of mystery. Sherry Pinkwhistle is a sleuth to be reckoned with, and beneath her frumpy and soft exterior lies a pleasant surprise: a clever, determined heroine who will stop at nothing to protect the place she calls home and the people who live there.
—Stephanie Cohen-Perez
Read if your Halloween plans are: Circling up with friends and family for a night of scary stories
Eerie Legends: An Illustrated Exploration of Creepy Creatures, the Paranormal, and Folklore From Around the World arrives like Halloween candy, just in time for the spookiest season of the year. Austin, Texas-based artist Ricardo Diseño’s bold, offbeat illustrations don’t simply complement these spine-tingling stories, they lead the way. Each chapter blends elements of fiction and nonfiction, and includes a corresponding full-page illustration that stands on its own as a fully realized piece of art. The horror elements here are plenty scary, but skew toward the creature-feature end of the spectrum—think Universal Studio monsters, or even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. The chapter on Krampus details the yuletide terror’s appearance with frightening specificity: “Part man, part goat, and part devil. . . . His tongue is red, forked, creepy, and always whipping around.” Diseño’s hoofed monster, straight out of the Blumhouse cinematic universe, is shown in the midst of abducting a child. Each chapter ends with a campfire-style tale about the designated monster, written with Lovecraftian zeal by Steve Mockus. As an added incentive, the cover glows in the dark—a feature I hadn’t noticed until after I fell asleep with it on my bedside table. Talk about eerie.
—Laura Hutson Hunter
Read if your Halloween plans are: A hike contemplating the macabre beauty of seasonal decay—be sure to leave the woods before dark!
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, opens in 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Tokarczuk is known for her penchant for the mythical and her deft, dark satirical wit, and as the subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” would lead readers to hope, the forests above the village whisper and echo with eerie sounds. The narration seems to come from ghostly entities who at times “vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles—and then gaze from afar, from above.” A cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. It is September, and the clock is ticking. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Empusium is about the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe, and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age—like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, from which it draws inspiration. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczyslaw responds to the mysteries around him with curiosity and seeks his own way forward. Tokarczuk also favors a new path and, as usual, casts her enthralling spell.
—Alden Mudge
Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was haunted: determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly-white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. In the aftermath of the apparent murder-suicide, the remaining Maxwells must reckon with not only their parents’ deaths, but also their relationships with one another and their past experiences. All the while, they must wrestle with a singular question: Were their parents’ deaths as they seemed, or did they die at the hands of the spirit the three siblings all tacitly agree haunted their childhood from the moment they moved in?
How Rivers Solomon built their terrifying new take on the haunted house.
To call Model Home a haunted house novel is like saying that It is about a clown. Yes, you would technically be correct, but you’d be missing the point. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s latest novel is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). That emotional clutter often makes Ezri an unconventional narrator, and occasionally it makes them an unreliable one. It also explores how Ezri’s struggles to learn to be a parent mirror their mother’s obvious reluctance to move from academic to full-time mother. Add that to the long-reaching malice of the house itself, and Model Home makes the point that the past doesn’t just inform the present: It haunts it. A disturbing tale that explores self-doubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
If you had told T. Kingfisher a few decades ago that she would write a novel inspired in part by her love of Regency romance novels, she probably wouldn’t have believed you. After all, the author is best known for her work in horror and dark fantasy, two genres not exactly known for their similarity to frothy series like Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton or Evie Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women.
Indeed, years ago when she discussed romance with a friend (who just so happens to be acclaimed Regency romance writer Sabrina Jeffries), Kingfisher was largely dismissive. “I had the unenlightened, snarky view of romance as just ‘girly stuff.’ ” Her friend pushed back. “She, very patiently, was like ‘Have you ever read one?’ ” Kingfisher hadn’t, so she gave one of Jeffries’ books a try. To her surprise, she liked it. More than liked it, in fact, despite the fact that “nothing actually happens; there are no explosions, no one is getting kidnapped.” So she read more, and she realized that Regency romances are set “just far enough away in history that it feels fantastical.” The subgenre also gave her a look into what she describes as a sort of shared universe: “A good Regency takes you to a world you know and that you’ve read lots of books in, so it’s fun comfort reading.” And because Kingfisher doesn’t read in-genre while she’s writing, Regencies eventually became what she’d read while she was drafting. “Since I write a fair amount of horror these days, I read quite a lot of [romance].”
“There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”
Years later, Kingfisher decided that she wanted to dip her toes into the familiar “extended universe” of Regency romance and write one herself. “It sort of grows on you, and you think ‘I could do this,’ ” she muses. But it wasn’t so simple to switch genres. As a setting, Regency requires a lot of research, something that Kingfisher admits is something that she can do, but that she isn’t particularly meticulous about. “There are a lot of things that it never really occurs to me to even question,” she says, referencing tiny details like the invention of modern canning practices or the use of specific types of lamps.
Which is a problem if you want to write a Regency romance, she says. The genre has ardent fans, particularly costumers, who care very much about the historical accuracy of the work. “There are people who know exactly what kind of buttons are on things, what sort of boning is in the corsets and what year it came into fashion, and they’re all very nice people. The emails they send are not in anger but in sorrow.” By her own admission, she doesn’t really care about researching clothes, so Kingfisher decided not to write a Regency romance exactly, but “something that’s more fantasy-universe Regency, and it turned into A Sorceress Comes to Call.”
Kingfisher’s horror novel, a crafty reimagining of the classic Grimm fairy tale “The Goose Girl” set in a Regency-esque world, centers on two unlikely heroines. The first is Cordelia, a young teen whose abusive sorceress mother, Evangeline, is determined to ensnare a wealthy and well-placed husband. Usingher cunning, Evangeline lands an invitation to the home of her potential match, Samuel, a squire with a sizable fortune and a love of pretty women. Cordelia is timid and naive, a poor combination for a horror heroine. She initially flounders in her new environment, jumping to help servants with their work and struggling to do more than stutter in front of their hosts. Although she knows what her mother is doing is wrong, she doesn’t feel like she can tell the squire or his family that Evangeline is a murderess with the power to physically control people like puppets (a practice referred to as “making them obedient”). When asked about Cordelia’s nature, Kingfisher grins. “She was too timid. If she would have been the only protagonist, I would have just been yelling, ‘Grow a spine for the love of god and stab someone.’ ”
But, as Kingfisher points out, not every Final Girl is going to be a spunky master of martial arts who is ready to take on evil. “There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”
Luckily for both the plot and Kingfisher’s patience, the novel has that second heroine: Hester, the squire’s 51-year-old sister. Where Cordelia is unsure, Hester is confident. Where the young girl is guileless, her counterpart has wisdom. The only problem is that Hester is also reluctant to act, understanding that her brother will make his own mistakes and that she cannot force him to make good decisions.
“She would not be a hero unless she was pushed out of her comfortable existence. She is perfectly fine where she is at the beginning of the story,” Kingfisher says of the middle-aged heroine. That is, of course, until the consequences of not acting are great enough to spur Hester into action, something that Kingfisher says is like the story of the world in microcosm. “A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”
That isn’t to say that Hester is perfect. She can be described charitably as curmudgeonly, and more realistically as resistant to anything that will make her happy. She is a spinster by choice, having turned down a marriage proposal from Lord Richard Evermore, a man that she very much loved. Hester was convinced that Richard would be marrying beneath him, both because of her lack of title and her bum knee. But when Hester calls on her former paramour for help to get rid of Evangeline, she gets a second chance at love. Although, as Kingfisher points out, she does “fight off that second chance very hard. There are people who are just determined not to do something that will make them happy. It’s frustrating, but we’ve all known them.”
Read our starred review of ‘A Sorceress Comes to Call’ by T. Kingfisher.
Even if A Sorceress Comes to Call didn’t quite end up being a traditional Regency romance, elements from the era still sparkle within the dark firmament of Kingfisher’s fantastical horror. One of these is Cordelia’s obsession with etiquette. She quotes heavily from a real-life tome called The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, consulting it for everything from how to make conversation with her hosts to the proper way to interact with her childhood friend. Cordelia’s constant check-ins aren’t just for her benefit, though. They’re for the reader’s—and for Kingfisher’s. Young ladies of the time had to follow Byzantine rules of etiquette, and as Cordelia struggled with the expectations of her new home, Kingfisher did too. “I didn’t know the etiquette of things either,” she says. And so Kingfisher mined The Ladies’ Book to assist them both. While many of the social mores outlined in the text struck Kingfisher as silly, she also recognized that “the author cared enormously about her readers and really wanted them to not be embarrassed.”
As she creates a rich tapestry of magic and alchemy, Kingfisher also weaves in a poignant depiction of abuse. Evangline’s power is manipulation, from taking control over another’s body to making them see things that aren’t there. As in many horror novels, there is no established, detailed magic system as there might be in a pure fantasy work: Evangeline’s magic is, instead, more like an elemental manifestation of her own penchant for abuse. “It’s inherently powerful and uncontrolled,” Kingfisher says.
But despite all that magic affords someone like Evangeline, it’s also precarious to try to practice it. The people of Kingfisher’s alternate Regency believe that magic is real, which makes it difficult for a sorceress to operate without being attacked by either non-magical citizens seeking to protect themselves or by their fellow magic users. “If a sorcerer were smart,” Kingfisher says, “they would never ever display any sign of magic whatsoever, and they would tell their children to never show any sign of it either.” One of her characters echoes this sentiment, saying that magic is likely “more trouble than it’s worth,” a statement that makes the author wonder if that character has magic in her own family. (She isn’t sure, wondering aloud during the interview if it’s possible to “have headcanon about your own book.”)
“A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”
To fight Evangeline’s power, Cordelia, Hester and their allies use a sort of alchemy rooted in the power of water, salt and wine. “I’m not sure where that came from,” Kingfisher says of the alchemical system, other than a question of “What feels vaguely elemental here?” As with Evangeline’s magic, the rules of alchemy are largely obscured, hidden in half-truths and metaphors within dusty tomes. Kingfisher points to the traditions of folk Catholicism as a possible influence. “My grandmother was a very devout Catholic,” she says, but was more of the “putting saint cards in the frame of the mirror type, not the going to church regularly type.” No matter its inspirations, the alchemy in A Sorceress Comes to Call is viewed with the same feelings of distrust and suspicion that Catholic practices would have been in Regency England (which was, by the time the 1800s came around, almost exclusively Protestant).
Despite A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark subject matter, Kingfisher never abandons her signature dry sense of humor, something that she says is essential to the delicate balance of telling an effective horror story. While she admits that it’s an unavoidable part of her authorial voice, she also contends that the ability to know when to break the tension is an integral part of the genre. “I think it works in horror. It’s the same reason that the music builds, it’s very tense and then it’s the cat. It’s a cliche now, but you can only tighten the screw for so long before it just can’t ratchet any higher. You have to deflate some of it. People can’t just stay at the maximum level of paranoia the whole time.”
And indeed, without the occasional bit of situational humor—Hester and the household servants have a pointed tendency to interrupt Evangeline’s interludes with the squire at the most delightfully awkward moments, much to the sorceress’s frustration—A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark ambiance would become stifling. As Kingfisher points out, deep horror and humor go hand in hand. “Did you ever watch M*A*S*H?” she asks, and she laughs as she says it. “People under stress crack a lot of jokes.”
Photo of T. Kingfisher by Henry Soderlund.
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Ghost stories rely on a few basic tenets: ghosts exist, they can influence the corporeal world and they have an interest in doing so. In Johanna van Veen’s beautifully written and deeply depressing My Darling Dreadful Thing, a murder trial’s outcome hinges on whether the characters can accept these tenets. Roos Beckman, a young woman in post-World War II Netherlands, has been accused of killing Agnes Knoop. Her psychiatrist, Doctor Montague, is trying to establish an insanity defense for his young patient, whereas Roos is trying to prove that Ruth, her spectral companion, both exists and is the true culprit. But van Veen’s focus is on what happened before the murder, how Roos discovered who she was outside the constraints of the abusive home where she conducted fraudulent seances with her mother.
The domineering stage mother, unwilling child performer and floral names (roos is Dutch for “rose”) are all reminiscent of the musical Gypsy. However, unlike Gypsy’s Mama Rose, who is often interpreted as a tragic figure rather than a villain, Roos’ Mama is wholly unsympathetic. For all its ensanguined spectacle, My Darling Dreadful Thing’s most disturbing sequences may be Roos’ descriptions of her life with Mama, which are rivaled only by Agnes’ stories of her own past or the distressingly casual racism several of the antagonists display towards her for her Indonesian heritage. This is a ghost story, but its supernatural horrors are constrained compared to the concentrated hostility the real world directs at its most marginalized. And van Veen is not so naive as to expect her characters’ resilience to be infinite. They are strong but brittle; they break, despite everything spirit companions (real or hallucinated) do to help.
Roos’ trial is never more than a frame, and is dispensed with in a bewilderingly short sequence near the novel’s end. Van Veen’s focus never wavers from Roos, and the result is an unremittingly bleak but well-crafted story, where even joyful moments are limned with Roos’ desperation and our sense, as readers, that none of this will end well for anyone.
Jennifer Thorne’s Diavola is an exercise in delicious twists and masterful suspense, told in the smart, snarky voice of Anna Pace, a jaded Manhattanite on a vacation quite literally from hell.
Anna’s swanky upcoming family trip certainly doesn’t seem monstrous on the outside. A marketing artist by trade and a painter by passion, she’s thrilled at the prospect of renting a Tuscan villa in the picturesque Italian countryside. The problem is her family. Thorne immediately places readers in Anna’s anxious thoughts, and her dread at having to see her parents and siblings, let alone take an entire trip with them, seeps into your bones before any of the other characters even arrive on the page. From a never-ending cycle of guilt trips to spiteful gaslighting, the tension between the Pace siblings and their alternatively aloof and agitated parents is so palpable that you wonder why they torture themselves every year. It’s soon clear that their stay at Villa Taccola might be the last straw.
As ugly stories and past grudges are revealed and Italian wine flows freely, the vengeful spirits of the villa decide it’s time to feast, and events quickly spiral out of control. Thorne pays homage to a cornucopia of mythology, sprinkling in some art and architecture history for good measure, as the Paces struggle to make it through each night. Diavola is a ferocious, maximalist horror ride, an impressive display of Thorne’s skill at crafting unsettling and disorienting scenes. There’s a rottenness lurking within the Pace family—Anna included—but it’s hard not to sympathize with them as they battle night terrors, horrifying visions and spirit possession. After all, whose family is perfect?
In S.A. Barnes’ slow-simmering creepfest Ghost Station, the stress of deep space travel can do things to a person. If longtime spacers develop the condition called ERS, they’ll start to see things that aren’t there, hear voices that no one else hears. They sometimes turn irritable, even violent.
The story begins with Dr. Ophelia Bray, who is very out of her element. A psychologist by trade, she’s been assigned to a small exploration team investigating an ancient, lifeless planet. The crew is mourning the death of a teammate, and none of the surviving members have any interest in Ophelia’s therapy sessions or letting their guard down. They also don’t seem to care if their work increases their chances of ERS. But as the explorers investigate the planet, stranger and stranger things begin to happen. It seems they aren’t alone on this world after all. Ophelia and the crew are going to have to trust one another to figure out what’s happening to them if they hope to escape alive.
Barnes is no stranger to sci-fi horror; her excellent Dead Silence stood out for its atmosphere and sheer scariness, and fans of that novel will be more than happy with this follow-up. Like any great horror story, Ghost Station takes its time, but is sure to ensnare anyone craving intergalactic horror. Barnes patiently increases the sense of unease, building suspense with small moments that are odd on their own and increasingly strange taken together: an empty spacesuit in an abandoned station, a shape running through a snowstorm seen through a window, a rash on the skin. Things pick up steam in the later acts, especially after a couple of shocking moments right after the halfway mark.
In this golden era of sci-fi horror, Barnes leads the charge with her thoughtfully crafted characters, top-notch pacing and an ever-present sense of dread.
It’s impossible to read The Parliament without thinking of Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds,” a 1952 short story that was famously adapted on film by Alfred Hitchcock. The Parliament is similar on its surface, if considerably more visceral in its avian brutality. But it is far from a simple retread of old territory.
Author Aimee Pokwatka concocts a cast of law students and nonbinary theater kids, regimented librarians and apple-juggling cosmetic chemists, all trapped in the historic Elmswood Public Library, where Madigan “Mad” Purdy is teaching a class on how to make bath bombs to a group of preteens. Unfortunately for all of them, a horde of tiny owls have inexplicably determined that everyone in or near the library is food.
However, The Parliament truly separates itself from its forerunner in the “horror with beak” tradition by two things: the depth, detail and intelligence of its characterization; and Pokwatka’s choice to wrap bloody, terrifying scenes (such as a woman being skeletonized by hundreds of thousands of owls like a wounded capybara in piranha-infested waters) around a fairy tale. A fictional book titled The Silent Queen lies at the heart of The Parliament, a story that brings to mind Patricia McKillip’s oeuvre or a Guillermo del Toro reimagining of a Disney fairy tale. In it, all 8-year-old girls are brought to the Mountain every year, where the Monster lives. The Monster takes something from each of them in payment for an Enrichment, anything from a beautiful singing voice to the ability to heal any wound. Queen Alala rules her domain from the top of a vast tower, her voice the price she paid the Monster for her own peculiar boon. Mad reads Alala’s journey to her students to hold them together, while each of them struggle with their own demons and wonder if any of them will survive the night.
Pokwatka manages to tell two remarkably compelling, detailed stories. Both are in completely different genres, and both could easily stand on their own, but Pokwatka renders them inseparable. Queen Alala might as well be in that library herself, or Mad could be out questing to find her voice. This master class of intelligent and beautiful writing transforms The Parliament from simply a tale of murderous animals into the kind of captivating novel that comes along all too rarely.
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