Off The Reservation by Stephen Graham Jones

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Off The Reservation is a follow-up to The Only Good Indians, a roadtrip horror novel about four Blackfeet on a mission to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Five years after the events of The Only Good Indians, Nate Yellow Tail finds himself in new trouble, with his best friend Sebby on the brink of death. He’s offered a chance to try and restore balance and save Sebby by joining others on a quest in a run-down RV: head to a residential school to save the bones of a murdered boy. The thing is, once they get there, it turns out something else is there too.

Ahead of reading this one, I reread The Only Good Indians, which isn’t actually necessary (Off The Reservation is more of a companion than a sequel that requires knowledge of its predecessor), and I found I had a greater appreciation for that novel on a second reading. Stephen Graham Jones has a distinctive writing style that sometimes leaves me disoriented, but once I’ve got into the style, it works, and I think for my first read of The Only Good Indians, I never got into it. For Off The Reservation, it was more that the pacing is slow for the first part, leading us deep into the characters setting off on their journey, so there wasn’t the momentum to slip into his writing style, but once I got a bit further in, I got into it a lot more. There’s also a whole bunch of different character perspectives throughout the narrative, some of which are easier to get into than others.

Like how The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a take (an incredible take) on the vampire novel, Off The Reservation is a fresh take on a possession story, complete with misleading Christian iconography. It tackles some dark stuff, but also plays with a lot of pop culture inspiration (which the acknowledgements detail in great depth). I think if you’re a fan of Stephen Graham Jones’ style, this one will be up your street, with a great cast of fucked up characters and lingering message about the consequences of desperate choices. It wasn’t quite up there with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter for me, but it was a great read nevertheless.

You’re No Better by Andrew Joseph White

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You’re No Better is a dark YA thriller about an autistic trans boy trying to deal with living in the shadow of his serial killer father. Morgan Slaughter is seventeen and when he was ten, he put his serial killer dad behind bars. His mother, now an influencer cashing in on being an autism mom, has agreed that they’ll take part in a true crime documentary, but Morgan has another focus: finding the identity of his dad’s last victim. He finds himself teaming up with his new classmate Felicity who knows more about him than he’d like, but if Morgan is going to face the past, there’s a lot he’s going to have to deal with.

Having read Andrew Joseph White’s previous novels, both the YA ones and his recent adult novel, I was expecting the incredibly dark subject matter and portrayal of different kinds of trans autistic experience. What makes this one a bit different is how it is more of a real life thriller than his other books, with Morgan’s dad being a regular serial killer and the threats in the book coming from regular flawed human characters. The story is told from Morgan’s perspective, meaning that you really see his thought processes and experience other characters through him.

The characters are the most notable part of the book, with a lot of vivid personalities and messed up people. In particular, Morgan is given space to be not always a nice person, whilst the book still explores how that is different to his dad’s actions. I do wish that there was a bit more at the ending of the book that delved deeper into the character growth (or lack of), particularly around Morgan’s relationships with and thoughts about other people. I appreciated that the book does set up the future for the characters, but I wanted just a bit more of the consequences given how dramatic the book is.

This is a dark, sometimes uncomfortable book and I think it would be great for older teenagers—it would have definitely been a good stepping stone for teenage me from tame teen books to reading things like Lolita. I liked how it is in conversation with the concept of true crime, whilst not letting that distract from the character side of things.

Mothersucker by Kim Bohyun

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Mothersucker is a Korean novel about revenge, as a detective tries to track down a killer, but the killer is a mother avenging her daughter who has transformed into something else. Jin-seon is a detective investigating a series of violent murders of men whose only connection is that they all did terrible things to women. But she doesn’t know that she’s on the hunt for Geum-hong, a woman whose daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, and who woke up with a thirst for blood and a need for revenge.

This book wasn’t what I was expecting it to be, with the narrative told through a huge range of perspectives and it partly feeling like a police procedural rather than a vampire story, but that made it a very distinctive read. I found the many perspectives engrossing and it is a book that you can speed through thanks to its fast pace. The ending suddenly changes tack a bit, with a couple of short sections after the main bulk of the novel. I liked the first of these, but I found the second quite different to the rest of the book so it didn’t quite work for me.

Overall, this is an engrossing novel with an interesting structure that won’t be for everyone—there could be disorientation as you move between a lot of different characters—but which works well to explore a huge range of perspectives. It explores violence against women in South Korea and how injustice can lead to people becoming monsters, with the horror side very much tied up in the horrors of real life violence.

The Cracks by T.H. Huddleston

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The Cracks is a gothic horror novel about an English stately home with its own secrets, working to uphold tradition in the modern day. Sandra’s a recently widowed ex-punk without a job and about to lose her home when her old university friend Gerry offers her a sanctuary in the form of staying with them in his wife’s family manor in the countryside. At first, Sandra thinks she can use this as a chance to rebuild her life, but the longer she spends there, the more strange things happen, sinister accidents and figures in mirrors, and it seems that Hautmond Hall has its own ideas about what Sandra should do.

This book is a classic ‘haunted building makes people act in certain roles’ story, using gothic horror to explore the British class system (as gothic horror often does). Like the fictional punk song at its centre, this is not a subtle book. The history of the house and its family is cartoonishly evil, hitting all the expected horrible landed gentry notes, and Sandra’s friendship with Gerry is a take on the Brideshead-esque class difference between university friends.

The narrative starts as a slow burn, with the gothic trope of Sandra thinking she’s going mad with some of the things happening, and then builds to a bloody conclusion. I like the attempt to combine old manor house gothic horror with punk rock, though the story does end up very predictable, and the punk ethos perhaps didn’t quite get enough space to shine or make the book feel very different to other horror stories with old houses wanting to keep people acting in certain ways.

The Cracks is a fun take on punk gothic horror that is perhaps most for people who are like Sandra and her late husband: those whose punk ideals (or former punk ideals) sometimes brush up against being friends with people with other backgrounds and political views. I didn’t find it as funny as it was marketed as being (it isn’t quite as quirky and high concept as Grady Hendrix and Rachel Harrison, whose work this was compared to), but I appreciate the use of gothic tropes alongside punk ideas.

Quaint Folk by Bitter Karella

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Quaint Folk is a horror novel about an American family who move to a British island where the inhabitants take their strange traditions very seriously. Jessica is trying to appear like the perfect wife and mother, whilst also feeling inadequate and scarred from her upbringing. When her husband Greg’s job has him, Jessica, and their non-binary child Sandy move to a town on a British island to complete a deal, Jessica sees this as a fresh start. Once they’re there, both Jessica and Sandy find themselves battling the town’s expectations and the traditions for the upcoming holiday.

Having read Karella’s previous novel Moonflow, I was expecting something queer and weird, and Quaint Folk is certainly those things too, but sometimes in a different way to Moonflow. Immediately as you begin reading, the narrative tone gets across the satirical side of the novel, from the parody of an idealised American family with a father working for a generic tech company to the utter ridiculousness of the quaint British town they go to, complete with nonsense elements and very real ones. 

You need to read the book with this tone in mind, as the actual narrative combines this nonsense side with a very dark side, in which the characters are threatened for not conforming and treated with contempt, but the combination of the two elements gets across how Karella is exploring folk horror through a queer lens. For queer characters, folk horror isn’t just weird townspeople feeling a bit off; it is being actively misgendered or told you’re not the right kind of person, or being actually in danger. It’s more of an unsettling folk horror than something with scares, but that makes the nastiness more insidious.

There’s a lot of really interesting setup in the book, delving into Jessica and Sandy’s characters and building up the unsettling question of where the power in the town actually lies. The conclusion feels quite sudden after that, leaving a lot of questions unanswered and not quite exploring all of the implications, and I’m not entirely sure what I think of it. I think the ending might work better if it was a film, but as a book, I wanted slightly more from it.

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm

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Our Cut of Salt is a haunted house novel about a Palestinian family separated from their family home. Nuhad was forced to leave her childhood home in Haifa in 1948 and never got to return. After her death, her granddaughter Marina, who has grown up in the US, wants to visit her grandmother’s home and find out more about her family, whilst Marina’s mother Haifa fears that her daughter shouldn’t visit the city Haifa was named for. When Marina gets there, she learns that her family’s old house is haunted, with its residents disappearing, and that her grandmother was hiding secrets of what happened in Haifa.

There’s so much to say about the haunted house genre and what it can be used to communicate, and Our Cut of Salt offers a timely, horrifying take on the haunted house by asking what if the trauma of a family’s history is embodied in their home? It is a powerful way to tell the story of Palestine and of a family that had the concept of home taken from them. These messages in the book aren’t subtle—the house is even a voice within the book—but I found that was what made it particularly visceral. 

Despite being a haunted house book, the horror comes from the horrors of what has happened and what continues to happen in Palestine, making this a book that works for horror fans interested in the haunted house genre and also anyone wanting to read about legacies of trauma in Palestinian families even without an interest in haunted houses. 

Carrying by Samantha Josephs

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Carrying is a body horror novel about a stealth trans woman who becomes pregnant and finds herself with a mysterious illness that requires experimental treatments. Martha has it all: the house, the husband, a lovely stepdaughter. Nobody in her life now–except one old friend–knows she is trans. She finds herself faking pregnancy, trying to appease her husband’s desire for another child, when suddenly she starts feeling unwell, and then discovers she is actually pregnant. As her baby develops, her strange illness leads her to even stranger treatment, and she has to build lie upon lie to get her dream of motherhood.

This book is a take on trans body horror that I’ve never seen before. I love how it goes down the route of a lot of recent body horror films like The Substance and Love Lies Bleeding in not feeling the need to actually explain the ins and outs of the weird physical stuff going on, but instead is more focused on its characters and what it is saying about the body. Whilst there’s some disgusting body horror, there’s also some emotional moments, particularly as Martha finds herself getting something she never thought she would, but everything still not going smoothly. It is also purposefully ridiculous, never quite asking you to take it seriously or believe that someone like Martha doing these things would actually exist.

I love how this book subverts some of the expectations you might have about trans body horror and find new ways to play with those ideas, whilst also creating some quite tender moments about a woman finding different forms of motherhood and trying to survive them.

Newbourne Park by Jennifer Thorne

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Newbourne Park is a horror novel about a woman whose weekend getaway changes her life in a completely unexpected way. Martha is stuck, unable to move on with her life after the death of her mother, but when her brother invites her to a weekend at the country house his friend works at, she takes him up as a chance to do something. Their weekend starts well, but when the owner returns along with a whole load of other people, it turns out that the house has secrets, and Martha is about to be drawn into them.

Like Thorne’s Diavola, this is a horror novel that explores class and privilege, but Newbourne Park is also a werewolf novel in a similar way to Rachel Harrison’s Such Sharp Teeth. That means that instead of scares and creepy stuff, the focus is much more on the horrors of being a werewolf and the power dynamics between the characters. The first part of the book is a tense unfolding of Martha and the others spending an illicit weekend at the house, and then from there is becomes more about Martha dealing with the consequences in a slower, more drawn out way.

There’s some great ridiculous moments—like having to be approved to join the werewolf pack via a Whatsapp vote—and generally this fits into the fun horror genre that I’d categorise Rachel Harrison’s books as, in which there’s some gore and a supernatural concept, but nothing scary. I liked all the commentary on the British class system and how that was interlinked with werewolfism. This isn’t a subtle book, but it’s a fun ride.

Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould

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Until the Last Light Goes Out is a horror novel about a mysterious Florida resort where almost an entire high school class was massacred. It is twenty five years since most of the Ripley Memorial High School senior class were killed at the Kaleidoscope. Paige’s mother was one of the survivors, but Paige has tried to put that behind her, even as her best friend KJ obsessed over the place. However, when Paige returns for the anniversary of the massacre, she discovers KJ is missing, and it is time for the survivors’ children to face the Kaleidoscope and what happened there.

This is a very atmospheric horror novel that creates a very vivid Backrooms-esque resort that feels like the images of the poolrooms you see online. I loved that sense of the Kaleidoscope as something unknowable, whilst its labyrinthine structure allows for questions about the price you pay to get out. The character relationships were also good, with the two generations offering space for parallels and building good structural tension as it cut between then and now. I also liked the romantic tension between Paige and KJ and how that compared to the treatment of another character from the parents’ generation.

I was really picturing the events and the resort as I was reading this book and I think it would be great adapted into a film. It was described as YA on Netgalley, but I honestly think this book is good for any age if you like its style of horror, which is more existential and survival-based rather than anything scary. If you’re a fan of cursed vibes in horror and the idea of something bad lingering across generations, Until the Last Light Goes Out is one to try.

This Movie Doesn’t End The Way We Want by Hailey Piper

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This Movie Doesn’t End The Way We Want is a horror novel about a woman whose sister and best friend disappeared at a movie theater as children. Val is estranged from her parents who blame her for her sister and lives haunted by the strange film she watched all those years ago. After Val stumbles across someone dead, she finds herself facing the memories of the past as she tries to work out how the film works, helped by a former classmate who hunts down lost media as a job.

This book is a fun take on the cursed media genre, quite self-aware of how that genre is centred around online video these days and the fact that there’s actually a lot of work (and people) that go into making a film. There’s also a lot around character, particularly Val’s relationships with other people and how her parents let her down after the disappearance of her sister. There were some elements that could have maybe done with a bit more detail, particularly during the climax of the plot, but I liked how the story ended up hazy and surreal in places (a style which ironically often works better in horror films than books).