House of Monstrous Women is a gothic horror novel set in the Philippines in 1986, in which a young woman finds herself in a nightmare of a house, playing a game alongside her brother and childhood best friend. Josephine lives in Carigara alone in the family home, running out of money since her parents were killed and her brother moved to Manila. When her childhood friend Hiraya offers Josephine a chance to come to her family’s old mansion to play a simple game that could give Josephine whatever she desires, it seems like a chance to escape. However, the house seems to not want to help, and the more Josephine learns, the worse her chances seem to be.
The book starts off slowly, building up Josephine’s family history and how tied their tragedies are to the political situation, whilst showing her exploring Hiraya’s house. Once the game begins, the book becomes much more fast paced, with a gripping run to the end. It also features some great horror moments like crawling through impossibly tight tunnels for your life and discovering the truth about the food served in the house. There’s plenty of the gothic side too in terms of social commentary, not just in the political situation but also the position of women in society and how Josephine is looking set to be forced to marry an older man, and the children’s game turned into a deadly fight fits in well with this.
Whilst the book was mostly a quite slow burn gothic novel for the first half, I liked how it then became more tense and also more creepy as it went on, especially with all the insects. If you like gothic horror, this book delivers a tense story that explores the complicated bonds between family and friends and a fight against oppression.
We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is a new horror novel from Eric LaRocca, centred around a cursed town, Burnt Sparrow, and what happens when three faceless creatures massacre a number of residents. Seventeen-year-old Rupert Cromwell is drawn into events by his father, and soon finds himself far too close to the dark cruelties that follow. It’s hard to say much more without giving too much away.
Having read most of LaRocca’s previous stories (liking some more than others as to be expected) and having a lukewarm reaction to his previous novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, especially as it is the start of a trilogy. However, I feel like this novel better showcases LaRocca’s skills in telling transgressive queer horror stories that explore human cruelty and trauma, whilst building up a sense of lore around Burnt Sparrow that I’m assuming will be continued in the later books in the series. The narrative is told from two characters’ perspectives, including a few horror stories told by those characters, plus some separate articles about Burnt Sparrow, and the narrative itself is episodic despite the overarching ‘plot’ of the three faceless murderers. By doing this, the book is able to delve deeper into some characters than you can in a shorter story, whilst still giving LaRocca space to weave shorter extreme horror stories and moments into the novel.
I’ll be fascinated to see what comes next in the series, as this one did feel like you were missing just that bit more about Burnt Sparrow, and the ending is quite sudden, with a lot of wider things left unanswered. The more extreme horror or splatterpunk moments in the book are quite brief, so whilst people should always take heed of trigger warnings at the start, I’d say that it isn’t as unrelenting as some other books I’ve read, and a lot of the horror comes from LaRocca’s trademark exploration of people’s choices and cruelty and the thresholds they are willing to cross. For me, this was one of my favourite LaRocca books, combining unnerving supernatural elements with the horrors of humans themselves, and using the novel length to weave in related stories.
Basilisk is a horror novel about an online game that leads two ethical hackers down a road towards a mysterious cyber weapon for targeting people, not technology. Alexandra Webster worked for a cybersecurity firm, and now we’re reading her story, written down to document what happened when her and her colleague Jay found the start of an online game created by ‘The Helmsman’ that rewarded participants with further “chapters” about a mysterious weapon. Jay disappeared, and Alex was still searching for what happened to him, and who the Helmsman was, whilst evading the strange smiling people trying to stop her.
This is a very distinctively-told horror novel, most easily summarised by saying it is like if you tried to do House of Leaves about a tech-focused ARG rather than a house. The actual writing is partly a narrative written by the ostensible protagonist, Alex, with added comments by someone else investigating the manuscript, and also the texts of the Helmsman’s chapters. On top of that, there’s links to articles, videos, and playlists, and a general expectation that you get drawn into the mystery enough to want to know what is going on. In that way, it makes you a player too, even if a passive one, and that is perhaps how it is most like an ARG as well as being about one: the meta- and intertextuality make it a horror novel with a ‘this is true document we found’ framing that actually has that creepy sense that could be true. Alex as a character isn’t particularly transparent—in her narrative she barely reveals anything about herself that isn’t part of what happened—but this works to allow the reader into the position of Alex, or to project their own things onto her. In a way, this is a book that is more about avatars than actual people.
Despite not being a hacker or a cybersecurity person, I’m otherwise perhaps the target audience for this novel: I love horror and internet horror, I find the concept of ARGs fascinating, I work close enough to tech-y stuff that I can recognise some of the tech terminology and don’t find the rest of it intimidating if I don’t understand it (and, I love mentioning ‘The Game’ as an example of a game). Like House of Leaves, there is a lot contained within this novel (or linked from it), including the hacker stuff, but also Old English, The Matrix, cryptic crosswords, philosophy, creepypastas, and other things that all feel part of a certain milieu. However, if you’re not really engaged with those as potential ideas that might fit together in some kind of weird way, this book might feel off-putting, rather than a fun sort of rabbit hole. For me, it was the latter, a story packed with references to things I knew a bit about and an atmospheric sense of dread as it slowly unfolds through Alex’s narrative.
There’s something about modern day fears captured in Basilisk even though it might appear to be a fairly silly horror concept, from the idea that there’s some kind of cyber weapon that could actually cause people to go insane as in the book, to other technological thought experiments and conspiracy theories that can cause people to extreme actions. The book itself has sections in The Helmsman’s chapters that discuss some of these things, such as Roko’s Basilisk and Slender Man, and being aware of some of the very real possible consequences of online ideas makes Basilisk even scarier in some ways. Again, this does require some knowledge of these things already (for example, I think the Zizian cult stuff around Roko’s Basilisk is too recent to even be mentioned in the discussion of Roko’s Basilisk in this novel), but even just knowing that ideas on the internet can become something more primes you. In this way, the book is also similar to something like Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms, another horror novel that takes the internet seriously.
From seeing some early reviews before I started reading, I expected Basilisk to be difficult to read and impenetrable (ironic given that Alex and Jay are penetration testers), but it turned out to be a readable, slow burn descent into what is apparently a purposeful madness. Maybe I’m just really the right person for this book, but I had a great time with it, and if you have any interest in the intersection between horror and technology, especially in terms of the transmission of the horror ‘threat’, then Basilisk is fun, dark, and has a satisfying enough ending despite feeling like a book that could perhaps never end in a way that really brings it all together.
North American Lake Monsters is a short story collection exploring different kinds of monsters, human and otherwise, and the messy realities of these. There’s a real range of stories in the collection and you’re always guessing what kind of horror, whether creature or psychological or something else, is going to appear in each one. There’s a lot about class in America and the impacts of desperation in relation to class, wealth, and worth, and I particularly like how this plays out in the titular story, which explores how we see different kinds of monsters and the importance of viewpoint. I also like how often any supernatural or otherworldly elements feel almost secondary in relevance to the working class lives in the book, with other people having a more important role in their stories and the horror within. If you like literary-tinged horror that shines a light on working class America, then this collection will be ideal.
Model Home is a novel about three siblings and what happened in their seemingly ideal gated home. Ezri grew up in Texas with their two sisters, Eve and Emmanuel, in a McMansion their parents were proud to own, even in such a White community. When their parents are found dead in the house, Ezri and their sisters must face the haunted childhoods they spent there, and their blame on the house and their parents for keeping them there, because sometimes the what haunts us isn’t always what we think.
I was excited to read a new book by Rivers Solomon and this one didn’t disappoint, combining a complex family relationship and a classic haunted house premise with ideas of memory, justice, and recovery. The chapters are mostly told from Ezri’s perspective, with some from others’ points of view, and it works well to make it hard to work out exactly what people know and what memories might mean. The plot is quite like a horror story, and is split between the past and the present to explore what it was like for the siblings to live in the house as well as the present events, but the book also plays with these ideas of haunting, and what kinds of harms might be out there.
The characters are rich and well-realised, even shown through mostly Ezri’s perspective, and I like how details about them are slowly revealed rather than told to us straightaway. There’s also a lot of character detail that feels very real, like diabetic characters taking insulin and checking their blood sugar, and characters are allowed to be messy, complicated people without it needing to have a plot reason. I liked the relationship between Ezri and their daughter, and the complexity of not always being able to be the parent a child might need, and also how various parent-child relationships in the book showed how these can change over generations and there can be new models of parenting. Model Home is very much about family relationships and the ways that these can haunt, as well as how choices made by family impact each other.
There’s plenty more packed into the book as well, as it plays with expectations about what kind of story it is, and it defies easy categorisation, but is just a book that explores memory, haunting, family, race, and belonging whilst having a gripping plot about a house that reminds the siblings of a terrible past.
At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a new short novel from LaRocca about a hopeless man who has invented an unusual ritual for people who want to die, but also want to live a better life. Ashley Lutin has lost his wife and his son has disappeared, he struggles with the knowledge of his queerness and the queerness he saw in his son, and he’s positioned himself as an outsider who can be contacted by strangers for a strange ritual that, unbeknownst to them, involves being buried alive. However, one of these strangers tested Ashley’s carefully planned ritual and his ideas of salvation.
I’ve read a lot of Eric LaRocca’s books, and I tend to find his stories either work for me or they don’t. This one is in the former category, with a good mix of some LaRocca trademarks (weird online forums, depraved actions, grim violence) and a self-aggrandising protagonist who believes he can really change people’s lives. The writing style and layers to this book, with constant repetition of the title phrase and some stories-within-stories as internet posts, are likely to divide people, but I enjoyed how the book was almost self-obsessed with its own rituals and motifs, reflecting Ashley’s ideas and how he uses these as a way to deal with his grief and regret. Ashley’s own belief in his edginess and outsider reputation (particularly through his claiming that having face piercings makes him really weird) is also an interesting aspect and again reflects the title of the book and the certainty of the protagonist that he is loathsome.
As a fan of Dennis Cooper and books like Exquisite Corpse and Brainwyrms, I didn’t find the content particularly shocking, and it all centres around our ideas of death and life so thematically makes sense. I did think that, though I liked the almost novella length (and think LaRocca writes that kind of length well), a few of the plot elements could’ve had more depth to them, particularly the backstory of Ashley’s child, Bailey, and their relationship. Ashley’s own queerness and his reaction to Bailey’s felt like something that needed more space to really make the queer horror element of this book work. However, this is one of my favourite Eric LaRocca stories I’ve read, combining a good concept with a narrative written through a distinctive perspective, and I was glad to enjoy it after not being a big fan of Everything The Darkness Eats.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a horror novel about an apocalypse brought about by right-wing news and social media in the USA. Noah’s parents have been parroting far-right views for a while now, but when his mother leaves a cryptic message and then can’t be contacted, he drives from Brooklyn to Virginia to check on them, but what he finds is his parents in a weird state, trying to attack him. Then it turns out they aren’t the only ones, and Noah’s brother and his family have fallen victim too, and then Noah and his nephew must try and make it back to Brooklyn, through the radicalised hordes.
I’ve been hearing about this novel for a while, and even though I didn’t really enjoy the only other Clay McLeod Chapman book I’ve read, I wanted to give this one a go, and I’m glad I did. The satire in this is very explicit—there’s Fax News, there’s influencer juice cleanses, there’s Baby Ghost to the tune of Baby Shark—and the horror is too, with memorable moments of gore and sex. This isn’t for the faint-hearted, and a good recent comparison is Alison Rumfitt’s work: if you enjoy that, you’ll be able to handle the stuff in this, with Tell Me I’m Worthless cited at the end in a list of influences and useful works for writing the book. I enjoyed that it was more extreme, not shying away from ideas of possession and what horrible things that makes people do to their bodies.
The structure is more experimental than most apocalypse stories, focusing mostly on the initial moment in the first part, then the build up in the second, and then just after that initial moment in the final section, which is intercut with lots of found footage moments to give a sense of the scale of devastation. This format doesn’t give much space for connection with the central figure, Noah, but you delve further into the minds of his brother Asher and Asher’s family, and it’s not the sort of horror where you need a deep connection as it is more about the shock of what is happening more generally than specifically what is happening to Noah. The ending doesn’t give much closure or explanation, and perhaps lacks a really memorable closing moment, but it also plays on a ‘liberal’ idea that such an apocalypse could be easily recovered from, suggesting that far-right threats aren’t just something to ignore.
I really like horror that blends together modern fears with classic horror elements like possession, and Wake Up and Open Your Eyes feels like an American version of Alison Rumfitt’s work, exploring the visceral horror of media radicalisation and far-right views. The middle section, about how one family got to that point, was perhaps the strongest part for me, especially in light of this theme, but overall this is a great horror novel that doesn’t shy away from being in your face, and you just can’t shut your eyes.
All the Hearts You Eat is a horror novel about life and death and the bonds that tie people together, as dead trans girl Cabrina appears to loner Ivory and to her best friends in life Xi and Rex. Cabrina Brite washes up dead in Cape Morning, and Ivory finds her death poem lying nearby. Ivory didn’t know the girl, but she seems to be haunted by her now. Meanwhile Cabrina’s best friends are also dealing with the realisation that Cabrina’s presence is still around, in this small town that held no space for her.
I didn’t know anything about this book going in, so it was a very welcome surprise to discover that it is, if you really want to boil it down, a trans vampire book. All of the main characters are trans and the book explores who you can choose to be and who you can’t, using the gothic horror of a town haunted by vampiric creatures and a mysterious island. One of the great things about this book is the complexity and messiness of the main characters, especially the complex relationships between the three teenage characters who are just reaching adulthood. The ending really highlights how this isn’t a simple ‘trans characters versus the world’ book, but a horror novel with the space to explore different ideas about who someone is and how they might act when treated badly.
I found the book took me a while to get into, with the writing style quite obtuse at first so I couldn’t quite work out what was going on. Once I settled into the book it became much more enjoyable, though still occasionally a bit confusing. As everything else about this book was so up my street, it was a shame that I found it so hard to get into at first. However, this didn’t stop me really appreciating this book, from its depiction of the messiness of feelings between trans teenagers to its exploration of what it means to feel like a outsider and how that might cause you to react to promises from supernatural creatures. Piper uses horror to tackle a lot of interesting things about growing up trans in a small town, but doesn’t forget to include gory and dramatic moments along the way.
[I was asked to blurb this book by the lovely Haunt Publishing, so this is a mini review I wrote for that.]
In Benothinged, Alvar Theo asks what if the real monster of queer horror is isolation, mental illness, grief, poverty, and all of the other things that people face in modern day Britain, and if so, how might we defeat that monster? The result is a book that is haunting, bittersweet, and yet also full of tiny joys, as the trans protagonists learn to work together to build a world free of this monster.
Coup de Grâce is a horror novella about a man trapped in an impossible subway station. Vicken is on the subway, planning a one way trip to the Saint Lawrence River, but when he gets off, he’s in a huge, Brutalist station. A station with no exit and no return line. A station that changes as he explores. And suddenly things aren’t as certain as they seemed when he stepped onto the train.
This novella combines some fantastic horror elements: liminal spaces, fourth wall breaking, body horror, and the kind of terrifying impossibility of space you get in House of Leaves. It is also a dark look at depression, suicide, and self-harm, and the warning at the start is important to note because it does make up a lot of the book. What you end up with is something visceral and weird, almost absurdly funny in the way it paints hopelessness and lack of control by its ending, and a book that never quite offers a reprieve. The ending might be a bit divisive, leaving a lot up to the reader, but it is exciting to see this kind of horror, that isn’t afraid to be unrelenting, and I loved the creepypasta and liminal space elements (the book itself feels like it could be a creepypasta even as it refers to them).
Fiendfully Reading 
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