My Aardvark book box subscription scores again; the books from this service have consistently surprised me with their quality, especially the horror novels, which have produced some of my favorite books of the year– books that I’d never have come across were it not for the club.
I need to get something out of the way first, though. This is a haunted house book. It’s a pretty damn effective haunted house book. You can really stop reading here if you want! You probably already know if you like good haunted house books, and if you are that guy, go grab this.
That said: the verb that keeps getting used throughout this book about what the house does to people is eats. The house eats people. The main character is Jessie Campanelli, fourteen years old at the start of the book (and living in a neighborhood near where I lived in Chicago, and in high school in 1994, which was the year I graduated, so this book hits home in a few places) and sick at home in bed, when she dares her annoying little brother to get a couple of his friends and go spend half an hour in the creepy old house down the road.
One of his friends loses an arm. Paulie is never seen again. The house ate him. And it’s immensely creepy and atmospheric in the book, but God help me, every time I saw a reference to the house eating someone, I was reminded of this:
(Forgive me, please, Christina Henry; your book is way way better than Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, which Oswalt gets the name of wrong every time he mentions it, but I couldn’t get past the eating.)
Jessie, who is an adult with an elementary-aged child by the end of the book, spends her life living in the house she grew up in, and Paulie’s death reverberates throughout the book, leaving scars that eventually rob her of her entire family and bring her one of her own. The book does a great job of capturing the kind of working-class, multi-generational families that Chicago’s neighborhoods are known for, and the relationships, bad or good, between Jessie and the rest of the characters in the book are a definite highlight. Jessie herself is kind of a mess, but she’s earned it, and her determination to better herself and keep her son safe is kind of inspiring.
I read this book in about four hours, a hundred pages before bed and the rest this morning before I was able to do anything else. It’s hard to put down, and the pacing is masterful. It’s creepy as hell throughout, and if anything I could have gone for another fifty pages or so to beef up the ending a bit. The book doesn’t quite fumble the finish, but the ending does feel a little bit rushed, which is my only real complaint.
I missed spooky season with this one– I should have read it in October– but you should check it out anyway.
(Okay, one thing: to be completely clear, there are gonna be some dying and/or threatened children in this book? Paulie isn’t the only one. If that’s not your bag, avoid. Consider this your trigger warning.)
I feel like I haven’t treated Tananarive Due with enough respect.
The Reformatory is the third of her books that I’ve read. I did not know that until just now! I remember reading her book My Soul To Keep way back in 2016, and at the time I really liked it, but for some reason every time I think of it now I feel like it wasn’t something I enjoyed. And I just discovered that I read her debut novel, The Between, in 2020.
When I tell you that I don’t remember anything about that book, I need you to understand that not only do I not remember any details about the story, I did not even remember the book existed. That cover looks unfamiliar. I cannot picture where my copy of it is in my house, and I surely read a print copy. I don’t know what the spine looks like. If you had asked me ten minutes ago what the name of Tananarive Due’s debut novel was, I would not have been able to tell you. My recall of books from years ago is not always great, I admit that, mostly because I read 100+ books a year. But forgetting a book existed or that I ever read it at all is not a thing that I do.
And that after my weird about-face on My Soul to Keep? I have no explanation for this phenomenon.
Anyway, The Reformatory is really good, and if six months from now I find that I’ve turned on it too, I’m gonna need someone to come get me.
The Reformatory is the story of Robert Stephens Jr., a 12-year-old boy who is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for a supposed six-month sentence after kicking the son of a wealthy white man in the knee. The book is set in 1950 in Florida, thick in the middle of Jim Crow, and the Gracetown “school” is a segregated, haunted nightmare, run by a grotesque abomination of a man. It is widely understood that Robert won’t be getting out in six months, as the warden is renowned for finding excuses to hold on to any boy sent to him until their 21st birthday regardless of their original sentence. Beatings and torture are commonplace and the inmatesprisoners “students” are encouraged to turn on each other at any opportunity.
The book bounces back and forth between Robert’s story and his sister, who Robert was defending when he kicked the other boy. She is trying her best to get him released, which is easier said than done in any number of ways. Their father has fled to Chicago after his attempts at unionization upset the Klan, and it’s fairly clear that part of the reason Robert is being treated as poorly as he is is because the authorities can’t get at his father.
The book would be scary enough without the haints, is what I’m saying, and the presence of a large number of ghosts at Gracetown becomes almost a distraction from all of the more grounded evil taking place there. Of course, a number of them are ghosts of children who were murdered or otherwise died while incarcerated there, and, well, a whole bunch of them bear quite a serious grudge against the warden.
I won’t go into much more detail, because (as usual for books I enjoyed) you deserve to experience the twists and turns on your own, but this really is a hell of a book, and I’ve not heard a lot of people talking about it. Give it a read.
I called this “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up” in my Goodreads review, and … really, isn’t that enough?
I am tempted to say it is, because it has been a long day, and I am tired, and I don’t have a ton of stamina at how the hell is it almost 8:00 already to write a complete review, so I’ll just say this: Monika Kim’s debut about a college-aged Korean-American girl named Ji-Won is equal parts horrifying and rage-inducing, which is an interesting combination. Ji-Won’s father leaves her mother at the very beginning of the book after an extramarital affair, leaving Ji-Won’s mother an emotional wreck and upending their family entirely. Ji-Won has to take on trying to keep her family stable while negotiating her first semester at college, and when her mom takes up with a white guy who is pretty clearly a narcissistic, womanizing scam artist and she catches the attention of a second white guy who is horrible for a whole different set of reasons, keeping her family stable starts to take a backseat to keeping herself stable.
Because she’s growing obsessed with eyes– eating them, specifically– and the more her mother’s beau pulls the wool over her eyes, the easier simply murdering him to get him out of their lives becomes to consider. And we’re off to the races, as Ji-Won both grows (descends?) into becoming a budding serial killer and definitely descends into some pretty interesting types of what I think is technically referred to as The Crazy. She has bad dreams and occasional hallucinations and for a minute at the end there you think the book is going to take the easy way out and then it doesn’t, and … yeah, I’m sticking with “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up,” here. Not for everybody, either, in case that’s not perfectly obvious, but I loved it.
A quick word on the white guys, as I feel like I just opened the book up to a certain set of accusations: the book is not anti-white so much as it is anti-a couple of specific kinds of white guys, and in particular it takes aim at Asian fetishization, which, at least as far as I’m familiar with it, pretty much is a white guy thing. The college guy is unbearable in a few other kinda white-specific ways too, but at least at first he pales(*) in comparison to the mother’s new boyfriend, who is immediately and clearly awful to everyone except her. Anyway, if you’re the type to get het up when you think white people are being criticized you’ve probably bailed on my blog years ago, so I doubt this will be a real problem for anyone who might take my recommendation seriously anyway. If not? We can take it, I promise.
One way or another, there’s a great build-up here, a brief moment where you might be worried that the end is about to get away from the author, and then she nails the landing anyway. I really liked this one, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for future work from Monika Kim in the future. (I also picked up a second copy from Illumicrate, because … my god, that cover!)
(*) I swear I didn’t do that on purpose, and I’m sorry, but not sorry enough to remove it.
It’s entirely possible that you’re going to get a flurry of posts today; I have at least three in the hopper right now and that’s only not five because I’m planning on packing three book reviews into a single post here. One of them is a super late entry into my best books of the year post, which right now is coming tomorrow, I think. We’ll see. Anyway, off we go:
Standard disclaimers, I suppose, for whenever I review an author who I “know” online; Kara and I have been mutuals long enough that I couldn’t tell you where we met or how long ago it was, and we tend to find each other near-immediately any time a new site pops up. That said, I’m a big fan of their Reanimator Mysteries series, the third book of which came out in October and I read a couple of days ago. Kara’s books tend to be(*) queer Victorian paranormal romances, and this one concerns Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, an investigator for New York’s Paranormal Society who is, uh, dead. And resurrected by Oliver. And they’re lovers now. And they can’t get more than half a mile apart.
It’s kind of a delightful series, believe it or not. The first sentence of the third book mentions “freshly rinsed organs.” It’s that kind of book.
Anyway, this one dives into both Felipe and Oliver’s pasts, and the main mystery of the book concerns the nearby town of Aldorhaven and a sudden infestation of the risen dead. Aldorhaven is a “murder town,” a decidedly unofficial designation for a place where the number of unexplained deaths and weird paranormal happenings is way above the norm. The town, and the forest surrounding it, become characters of a sort in this book, which has more than a little of The Shadow over Innsmouth‘s DNA in it. It’s wonderfully creepy in a whole lot of ways and you should probably grab the whole series, which starts with The Reanimator’s Heart and The Reanimator’s Soul. Book IV comes out next year.
(*) Tend to be? Possibly “always are”? This is Kara’s 10th book and I haven’t read them all.
I’ve been putting off picking up Marcus Kliewer’s We Used To Live Here until it came out on paperback, but Barnes & Noble’s still-ongoing end-of-year hardback sale and a couple of Christmas gift cards pushed me over the edge. The premise of this one is that a young couple has bought an old crumbling house high up on a mountain, planning on renovating and possibly flipping it, and one night a family of five shows up on their doorstep while Eve, one of the homeowners, is at home alone. The father claims that he used to live in the house, and asks if he can have fifteen minutes to show his family around. Eve reluctantly agrees, and … well, it doesn’t go well. This is psychological horror and not the murder-and-torturefest that “it doesn’t go well” implies there, but Eve basically spends the rest of the book going slowly crazy. It’s intense.
This, I think, is the most your-mileage-may-vary of the three books, because how much you enjoy this book is going to depend on how willing you are to 1) scour the text for clues that may or may not be in there and 2) live with ambiguity about what exactly is going on. Eve ends up unable to trust her own perceptions and her own memories about literally anything, and this is the kind of book that has little interstitials throughout, clips from interviews or TV shows or message board posts that initially won’t make sense but will tie together eventually, and all of them end with Morse code. I deciphered one and got the word “and” and decided that I didn’t need to decipher the rest. Maybe you will! Maybe that whole idea kind of annoys you. I have no idea if the Morse code is important or not. I know I didn’t bother to check.
Anyway, for me, this book started off as a great slow-burn mindfuck but sort of collapsed under its own weight by the end. I four-starred it on Goodreads, but you’ll need some tolerance for gaslighting and unexplained events and a wildly unintentionally unreliable narrator. By the end of the book if Eve so much as mentioned the color of something I was flipping back to see if that thing was the same color the last time she mentioned it. I don’t mind some ambiguity in this kind of book but it went a little beyond my comfort zone. You will doubt everything by the time the book ends, but the atmosphere and the oppressive quality of Kliewer’s writing meant I more or less finished this book cover-to-cover in a single sitting. You decide if that sounds like your type of thing.
I meant to hold off until paperback on the Kliewer book and ended up grabbing a hardback; I have this one in paperback and I regret not buying it sooner. Alexis Henderson’s debut, The Year of the Witching, was an Honorable Mention for my best books of 2020 list, and House of Hunger is better than Witching. It’s a vampire book in all but name; there is, in fact, no explicit magic or supernatural powers mentioned anywhere(*) in the book, but Marion, the main character, flees a life as a scullery maid to take a position as a Bloodmaiden in the ambiguously defined “north.” Her job is to provide her blood when her obscenely wealthy patroness, the Countess Lisavet, requests it. In return for seven years of indentured service, she will receive a huge pension for the rest of her life upon her retirement.
And, yeah, Lisavet isn’t a vampire, and neither are any of the other rich people in the book– blood is extracted through needles or occasionally through bites, and even when Marion is bitten it’s made clear that Lisavet is wearing prosthetic sharp fangs in order to puncture her skin. But there’s a whole lot of blood-drinking going on, and the closest the book gets to actual magic is mentions of things like “blood lamps,” which might just be regular lamps inside a hollow globe so that the light is red but might also be powered by blood somehow? It’s unclear. One way or another, Lisavet in particular is a fascinating character, and her relationship with Marion is really well-written and interesting, and when things inevitably go to hell at the end the horror is real. This book isn’t related to The Year of the Witching, and Henderson’s third book just came out and is also a standalone, but I’d love to see more about this world. I’m genuinely not sure if this is actually going to show up on the list tomorrow, but it’s definitely in the running. Check it out.
(*) Heavily implied, maybe, but not until late in the book.
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