Black Flame is a short horror novel about a closeted Jewish woman who works on restoring a film seemingly destroyed by the Nazis. In 1980s New York City, Ellen works restoring old film and dodging her mother’s desire for her to settle down and marry a nice man. As she starts working on a film brought in by a group of German academics full of queer debauchery and strange occurrences, not only is Ellen’s repression pushed to breaking point, but she starts to realise that the film is bleeding into real life.
Having read Manhunt and Cuckoo, I was always going to read Gretchen Felker-Martin’s next offering. This one is quite different, a shorter book that focuses on a smaller story centred around one protagonist. It explores queer repression, Jewishness, and the concept of things from film stock coming into the real world, and has a level of gore and sex that you’d expect from Felker-Martin. It starts off fairly gently as we’re introduced to Ellen, but it gets nastier as the book goes on, with some memorable moments near the end. The horror is more around the horrors of repression and violence rather than actually being scary, but it’s still more of a book for extreme horror fans like Felker-Martin’s other books.
Fiendfully Reading 
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