Tag: horror

The House That Eats the Dead by Max Doty

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The House That Eats the Dead is a horror novel about a family who move into a dream home, only to find it has a special hunger. Claire feels like her family have made it when they move into a big house in the suburbs. Her two children love it, and and her lawyer husband Tom feels like it is the chance for him to move up the career ladder. As they unpack, they notice that things start to disappear. The house is hungry, and it can be fed. Can Claire, and anyone else who suspects the house’s secret, resist the temptation to make use of its powers?

This is the kind of straightforward horror book that does what it says in the title. Some haunted house books have more twists when it comes to the house itself, but this one doesn’t: the house eats the dead. It isn’t a scary book, but any horror elements come more from people and what they would do with that concept than the house itself, which never feels malevolent, just doing what it does. The twists and turns of characters’ plots are fairly predictable too, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t work for a fun read that hits the expected plot moments. I can imagine this book working well adapted into a film, and the house’s “eating” would probably be more horrifying onscreen than it can be when reading it.

The main frustration with this book is that, other than Claire (and her sister) to some extent, there isn’t much backstory for anyone, including the house. It feels like a bit like a horror story for people who don’t like the amount of backstory that characters get from writers like Stephen King, if you find that there’s too much information and not enough plot. The blurb I read compared this book to Grady Hendrix, but I think that in Hendrix’s best works (including How to Sell a Haunted House), there is both emotional depth to the characters and more to the concept than the title. The concept at the heart of this book, and the realities that Claire faces, are dark and interesting (especially the idea that all of the serial killers and creeps want the house), but it could’ve gone deeper, even without making it a darker kind of horror.

I feel like this book is probably ideal for people taking their first steps into the horror genre or who don’t like things that are too scary or disgusting. I think it does feel similar to Rachel Harrison’s books, so it fits into that kind of fun horror with a supernatural concept and looking at what regular people do with that. However, for people who read a lot of horror, it can feel a bit one note, not really delving enough into the house itself.

The Sea Hides Its Dead by Megan Bontrager

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The Sea Hides Its Dead is a horror novel about a academic expedition to try and find an underwater cult of Leviathan. Caroline is a grad student who is the only person who believes in Edward Beck, an academic obsessed with a strange quasi-religious cult there’s little proof of. When Beck, who is also her lover, says he needs her to come along on an expedition into the sea caves where the cult may have dwelt, it seems like the chance she needs. However, once the group gets to the caves, they become trapped there, forced to undertake trials relating to their greatest sins.

I was drawn to this book thanks to the title and the sea horror idea, and whilst it isn’t really a sea horror book like I was expecting, I did find it a fun horror adventure. The plot is very much as you’d expect, with the group descending and then facing various dramatic things happening. There’s a big focus on Caroline realising that Beck doesn’t really care about her, and her focusing on her friendship with Mallory, a relationship she previously undervalued. At times it feels like Caroline gets all this emotional depth at the expense of the other characters, who are mostly just stand-ins for certain concepts or tropes. I also found the morality at times a bit black and white, with the ‘good’ characters always having ‘sins’ that are completely justified in the narrative. The ending reinforces this, with a sudden happy ending that didn’t quite carry the weight of its negative aspects.

To me, it felt like a cross between a ‘stuck in a cave’ horror like The Descent and the academia/power/belief side of Katabasis. The horror of the Leviathan wasn’t really there for most of it, so it felt less about that side, and more about the human side of things. Personally, I think that the title perhaps isn’t the best for the book, as the book really didn’t feel much about the sea at all, which I was expecting. If you go into this expecting horror about power and trying to find a cult whilst trapped in a changing cave system, I think you’ll have a decent time.

Splasher by Billie Host

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Splasher is a horror book set within a university swim team, as people start dying in and out of the pool. Spencer is back at the university where a fellow member of the swim team died ten years ago, now the assistant swim coach for the team. When two students are found dead in the pool on his first day, the whole team are thrown off, but it doesn’t stop there.

I loved the concept of this book, combining a slasher with such a specific setting as a university swim team. My sister is into competitive swimming so I appreciated all of the detail behind the swim team, rather than it being a cursory theming, though I can see that some people might find there is a lot of swimming content in the book. The narrative itself is pretty simple, and the reveals are barely reveals, but I still found it pretty fun to come along for the ride. The narrative perspective swaps between a few characters, which doesn’t always work—I think it would have been better without one of the perspectives who was antagonistic, as it felt like revealed too much— but I liked how it meant you got some depth to more of the characters through their perspectives.

The book was marketed I believe as adult horror, but I think it is most similar to Point Horror books and fits more into that kind of genre (or at least into Point Horror nostalgia for adults). It reminds me a lot of why I used to love the Nightmare Hall books as a teenager: taking a specific element of university life and doing horror around that. However, despite being set in 2006 (mostly, and for occasional flashbacks in 1996), it is updated from Point Horror as there’s actual queer characters, which I appreciated. It’s not a particularly tense or scary slasher and it has quite a slow pace, so it is best for something fun and a bit silly with Friday the 13th vibes.

Slasher Summer by E.L. Chen

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Slasher Summer is a horror novel about a group who were once friends in high school, now reunited in the remote cabin where their cult favourite slasher film movie was filmed. Patrick has invited his old group of friends, all of whom came together to watch horror films, back together to stay in the cabin in their hometown where the film Slasher was made. Things between them haven’t been the same since high school, but this is their chance to come back together. However, when they spot the slasher from the film in the woods, suddenly their reunion is more than just a chance to remember the horror films they used to watch.

This book is one of the many love letters to slasher stories that have been released in recent years, featuring many references to classic slasher films and characters. The book doesn’t get too bogged down in the references though, and it really builds up the characterisation of the group as the focus rather than just ticking off tropes. I loved the way that it plays with some of the more dated elements of slasher tropes, particularly around race and sexuality, and questions who is allowed to play which role in the genre. At the same time, the narrative has a slow build up and then a gory second half, so it doesn’t lack the kind of excitement you’d expect from the genre. I worked out the twist partway through, but it was still a satisfying ending that felt decently set up.

If you’re a fan of fun slasher stories, but also want a version that takes characters who are slightly older than the usual teens and has them wonder if they really want to stay who they were in high school, then Slasher Summer is one to look out for. There’s definitely a few characters whose deaths make you feel like you wished they could’ve had longer, which I think is a testament to the characterisation as in many slashers you can often struggle to tell the initial deaths apart.

Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin

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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.

The Decadence by Leon Craig

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The Decadence is a gothic horror story that offers a new take on the country house novel, as a group of friends flee to an old country house during lockdown. Jan and her friends are floundering, and now lockdown has made things even worse as they can’t even party to escape their lives. But there is one option: a couple of weeks at the old country house Theo inherited from his great uncle. Fuelled by as many drugs as they could bring, things start falling apart almost immediately, as their interpersonal dramas surface, but quickly it seems to Jan that there’s something else going on, and maybe the house isn’t the safe retreat they imagined.

This is a book that takes a lot of other works and reinvents them into something new, as Leon Craig discusses in her note at the end of the book. The narrative perspective (entirely from Jan’s point of view, a woman trying to fit in despite being a queer Jewish woman in a upper class English environment) and characters are from the country house novel, even pushing as far as (again, as Craig states) The Secret History as a kind of country house novel without the house, but with the in-group rarified from others. The haunted house side of things easily calls to mind Shirley Jackson, House of Leaves, and Tell Me I’m Worthless, and the latter in particular feels like a good comparison for this book, with The Decadence having less of the horror but a similar connection between the evils of Britain and the haunting of its seats of power.

The story itself is pretty simple, with messy characters and drama between them building to a climax alongside the weird things happening in the house, and being forced together in a claustrophobic setting adding to all that. It starts in a slow burn gothic style, mostly focused on the characters, before things ramp up as they all take an experimental drug. Sometimes this kind of book can lack a dramatic ending, but The Decadence builds to something that feels in-keeping with the atmosphere it has created (though I think having read Tell Me I’m Worthless primed me to expect something like what happens). Due to being from Jan’s perspective, you never quite know what was going on with the other characters, which again, suits the genre, and also the overarching theme of belonging and what is knowable.

I thought from hearing about it that The Decadence would be my sort of book, with its combination of haunted house horror, the Brideshead-style novel, and a queer protagonist, and I’m happy that I wasn’t disappointed. Craig uses the range of books that influenced her to create a new version of a gothic country house that fits into the claustrophobia of lockdown (which I’ve not mentioned otherwise in the review, but I liked how it came into the novel, and how it didn’t) and explores the messiness of belonging (or not) in terms of identity, money, and power in modern Britain.

Acquired Taste by Clay McLeod Chapman

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Acquired Taste is a collection of short stories by horror author Clay McLeod Chapman, with a huge range of premises across 25 stories. The stories in the collection are mostly pretty short, never outstaying their welcome, and I liked how much they could differ, meaning that the stories don’t end up getting too repetitive. There’s also a mix of horror styles, from darker, more extreme horror to more bittersweet moments and satirical stories.

There were a lot of fun concepts in the stories (there’s one that involves plushies similar to Labubus which is a great romp) and creepy moments (like someone hearing a crying baby in the cinema, only to realise they’re alone). The only stories I found less engaging were one about civil war psychic sisters (as I’m not really a historical fiction person) and another that was presumably the precursor to CMC’s recent novel Wake Up and Open Your Eyes as it felt like a slightly watered down version of part of that book, and as I’ve read that novel, it wasn’t very exciting to read that.

The collection is great if you like punchy horror short stories, and would work as a good introduction to Clay McLeod Chapman as well. Short stories aren’t always my favourite format, but this kind of well-paced, varied, doesn’t-shy-away-from-being-nasty collection is what I do like.

You Weren’t Meant To Be Human by Andrew Joseph White

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You Weren’t Meant To Be Human is an adult horror novel from YA author Andrew Joseph White, in which an autistic trans man who lives in service to a hive of worms and flies becomes pregnant against his will. Crane found solace in the hive, who have him permission to transition and to not speak, after growing up feeling like everything was wrong about him. He met Levi, an ex-Marine and fellow member of the hive, who treats Crane how he thinks he ought to be treated. But when Levi gets Crane pregnant, the hive insists that Crane must give birth, even though Crane will do anything to not have to.

Having read some of White’s previous young adult novels, I was interested to see what his adult horror would be like, and You Weren’t Meant To Be Human is suitably dark and horrifying for someone like me who much prefers adult books to YA books. The book is basically trans pregnancy horror mixed with Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms, so very visceral not only in worm stuff and body horror, but also abuse, trauma, and the absolute terror of having to be pregnant when that is one of your greatest fears. That does make it quite tricky to review if you are someone who falls into that latter category, as I really don’t know how other people would find it, but if you’re a trans person who could get pregnant, this is quite a book.

I like how a lot of the background in the book isn’t really explained, because the story isn’t about worldbuilding but about Crane’s experiences and thoughts. Even the side characters mostly don’t get a huge amount of backstory, particularly those in the hive, but again, we are viewing things through Crane’s perspective. The visceral descriptions are really what make this book, with the body horror less gory and more horrifying in context. The ending has a dark twist that makes sense, and a lighter twist that I’m not sure how I feel about, though it does offer a kind of hope that might be needed in such a brutal novel.

This is trans horror that uses the horror devastatingly to explore an element of trans experience (Torrey Peters’ story ‘The Masker’ is another example I can immediately think of), resulting in a book that I think is going to feel horribly real for some people and open others’ eyes to something they hadn’t really thought about. Whilst I’ve enjoyed White’s young adult novels, I think that You Weren’t Meant To Be Human is even more my sort of book, and though it won’t be for everyone (as with any extreme horror, you should definitely take heed of the content warnings before reading), it is a tense, cutting horror novel that puts a fresh spin on some horror concepts.

Moonflow by Bitter Karella

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Moonflow is a horror novel about a mushroom-growing trans woman who ends up being lured to a female cult in the woods by a mysterious entity. Sarah needs money and her best bet is to find the mushroom that her friend wants, the powerful King’s Breakfast. It only grows in the Pamogo forest, so Sarah heads off with the help of Andy, who works at the visitor centre and doesn’t approve of her plan to sell the mushroom. Once in the forest, they find themselves being lured deeper, but once there, they find a weird cult of gender essentialist women.

Before starting this book, I didn’t actually realise it was so much like something I’d usually read, as the blurb I read didn’t really emphasise the trans splatterpunk nature of it, but Moonflow is like if you crossed Alison Rumfitt’s books with the mushroom-y vibes of Mexican Gothic, with a heavy dash of Gretchen Felker-Martin as well. It’s the sort of horror that manages to become satirical and darkly funny, whilst also being cuttingly real about certain elements (the cult’s obsession with saying ‘phallic alec’, for example). It starts off slow, with a great glitched phone element and the fear of forgetting something, but quickly becomes much weirder with a cult focused on lesbian sex and psychedelic substances. The ending is satisfyingly disgusting, with a cosmic horror style lack of real resolution about what happened.

If you like trans horror, Moonflow is a fun botanical take on the genre that combines the horror of eldritch beings and mysterious fungi with the horror of a feminine-obsessed cult to explore different ideas of what happens once you learn something you can’t turn away from.

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle

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Lucky Day is a cosmic horror novel about a statistics expert who survives a global disaster only to try and work out why it happened and give meaning back to her life. Vera’s life was torn apart by the Low Probability Event that struck globally, causing death and destruction, so she hides away in her house, not wanting to care about anything. But when a mysterious agent turns up at her house asking for her help investigating a Vegas casino that seems to be linked to the event, Vera is drawn into the mission.

Having read both Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, I was interested to see what Tingle would do with this premise. Unfortunately, I found that the book didn’t work for me, and I found myself frustrated with it at various points. To start off with, the narrative is told by Vera in first person present tense and there were turns of phrase in the narration that felt jarring, like slang that didn’t quite flow in the narrative voice. 

The overall tone of the book, despite being pitched as cosmic horror, is as comic as Bury Your Gays‘ satirical tone, and that matches the tone of the ridiculously gruesome violence that happens at a couple of points in the book (think Final Destination vibes), but not the fact that these events are meant to be genuinely horrifying to the narrator. For me, this made the novel, like Bury Your Gays, feel just a bit too ridiculous to feel serious, and that undercut the balance of the comic existential side (deaths so unlikely you’re meat to laugh) with the actual horror of contemplating the meaninglessness of that. Maybe the tone could’ve worked if it came together at the end to say something interesting about the concept of the absurd, but the end is a bit flat, feeling too neat and not really giving any of the characters a proper conclusion.

On that note, the characters also didn’t work for me. Vera was a series of stereotypes which move from ‘incredibly organised statistics professor’ to ‘depressed nihilist’ and then, by the end, never really resolves how she might rebuild something more like the former again, or how any of her former life and personality might be changed by her huge existential crisis. Her bisexuality feels like it is a plot device (which admittedly is a major plot device at the start and then that has a throwback later on which felt really randomly included) and Vera might’ve felt more interesting as a character if we learnt anything more about her experiences, either in terms of her sexuality and her relationship we see at the start of the book, or even just any interests she had before (other than presumably an X-Files-esque TV show that gets a lot of references in the book, without any further detail or point). Saying too much about Agent Layne would give away spoilers about the book, but again he was more larger-than-life stereotypes, and there aren’t really many other characters that appear more than momentarily, so the book really has to lean on these two.

I think that there will be plenty of fans of this book who like the fact that it is more of a campy sci-fi story with a few gruesome horror moments  (especially as Tingle has a lot of fans who like that campy vibe to his writing), as long as you don’t want greater meaning from the existential side other than ‘maybe things do have meaning actually’. As with Bury Your Gays, it felt like there were moments in the narrative where you were really being hit over the head with an idea, even when it wasn’t fully considered, and in fact the entire book felt like it was trying to take the concept of people saying bisexuals don’t exist and make it into an existential joke, but it never really does that in a satisfying way.

And on a personal note, I’m really interested in fiction about Vegas and it felt like this book could’ve done so much more with the setting and atmosphere given that it was almost entirely set in Vegas. There could’ve been so much more about the fact it is a casino that is at the heart of events, or about gambling, or even Vegas and queerness. But if you’re looking for queer horror set in Las Vegas, I’d suggest reading Torrey Peters’ novella ‘The Masker’ from Stag Dance, which says a lot more about queerness itself.

I’ve ended up writing a lot about this book because it frustrated me how I wanted it to be more interesting and engaging than it was, and how much it felt like a bunch of stereotypes and trope jokes put together without saying anything about them. However, as I said, I think if you’re looking for something silly in the vein of Tingle’s other recent horror books, you might have more fun with it than I did.