number 59 - Daphne - Josh Malerman

 

A new book by Josh Malerman will always go as close to the top of my TBR pile as possible. This one was no exception. 

In this book, he gives us a very Malerman take on the slasher genre. 

Daphne is a seven-foot-tall denim clad ghost in KISS makeup who kills basketball players in the town of Samhattan. 

If you think that sounds far-fetched, the most famous slashers out there are a school caretaker who was burned to death and invades teenagers; dreams, a super strong guy who wears a captain kirk mask and gets up every time you kill him, and a nine-year-old boy who drowned and somehow came back as a hulking killer in a hockey mask.  Daphne is almost normal by comparison.

Being a Josh Malerman book, there's more going on here than just a bunch of shreddies getting shredded (or in this case crushed). He uses the traditional tropes of the slasher to look into the causes of fear and anxiety.  Daphne is not just an unstoppable ghost; she is a personification of fear itself.

The book manages to be a tense and scary horror story with plenty of teens dying horribly, and a close look at anxiety and its effects. 

As usual with Josh Malerman, I raced through this in a couple of days.  His distinctive style is remarkably easy and fast to read. His characters are all well drawn and relatable. His shreddies are given just the right amount of background before Daphne folds them into shapes they were never supposed to inhabit. 

There's surprisingly no gore in any of the killings but they're still wince inducing as the mental pictures given to us don't need the addition of buckets of literary blood. Daphne is a scary villain, and the story has a few surprises up its sleeve.

Malerman is one of those writers, who, despite an instantly recognisable style, seems to be able to write vastly different novels in different styles of horror equally well. This is no exception. Highly enjoyable, slightly silly in a good way, but thought provoking when it wants to be.  Another excellent read from Mr Malerman.

Number 29 - A Spider on My Tongue - TM Wright

 If you were to ask me for a list of the best horror novels ever written, A Manhattan Ghost Story by TM Wright would be close to the top every time. It was followed a couple of years later by a sequel, The Waiting Room.  And many years later by this slim volume.

Abner Cray, lead character in the first book, and object of the search by his best friend Sam Feary in the second, is now living, or maybe not, in a house in the woods with a legion of unwanted guests.

His reality has fragmented almost completely.  This book takes the form of a journal detailing his current existence and flashbacks to what led him here, with musings on life and death and the differences between the two states.

It's a weirdly compulsive, totally fractured and not 100% sane narrative. It bounces from subject to subject, flashback to present to nightmare fuel at the drop of a hat.

It has a very similar feel to the TM Wright I reviewed a couple of months back.  It seems like his later books became quite samey, with a lot of repetition of the same verbal tics and narrative trickery, and legible story coming in in second place behind the style. 

The style is very readable and very creepy when it works.  It insinuates itself into your brain without you noticing. The horror comes in quietly at an existential level rather than being immediately frightening.  I still prefer his books that had more conventional narratives along with the existential terror.

This is one for Wright completists like me I think. It's difficult to find online for a reasonable price.  For the casual fan, read Strange Seed, Manhattan Ghost Story, The Woman next Door, The School, the Playground or any of his books from that sort of era. They're more satisfying reads than this one as good as this one is.

Number 27 - Nothing But Blackened Teeth - Cassandra Khaw

 

I picked this up because of that gorgeous cover, and word of mouth on social media.  That plus quotes on the back from several of the brightest stars in modern horror which claim it to be the absolute cat's whiskers and best new thing since Hill House...

I went in therefore with expectations set at very high...

That might have been a mistake. Although I can see the quality of the writing and it did move me in the final chapters, I was a little underwhelmed.  I don't think it completely lives up to hype. 

It tells the story of a group of friends who pitch up at a haunted mansion in the depths of rural China for the marriage of a pair of them.  The bride has always wanted to get married in a haunted house (as you do) and this place certainly fits the bill.

A lot of time is spent detailing the past love lives and interactions between the friends. The bride is so opposed to the narrator, it's hard to believe that she would have agreed to allow her to come along since there are so few in the group.  A wedding party of 20 or 30, maybe, but only 6? It's not like she's a plus one to a fully welcome guest. In fact, for a close knit bunch of friends willing to travel to a remote (500 miles from the nearest hospital we're told at one point) part of China for a wedding, there seem to be a lot of underlying resentments. That might be the ghosts dragging their worst feelings out though. 

The atmosphere is built nicely. the legend of the house is suitably nasty and the style of writing is mostly very good. Despite the short length of the book (a shade over 100 pages) this is a slow burn until the terror kicks in.

There's some meta style commentary going on too.  "This is the part of the story where this happens" sort of dialogue.  That was a weak point in the writing for me I will admit. If it was meant as comic relief, it wasn't.  It it was meant to heighten tension, it lessened it.  IMHO.

I think I probably need to set aside a couple of hours uninterrupted reading to properly appreciate this.  Over the last few days I've only managed to catch a few pages here and there, which isn't ideal for this style of horror.

Overall, it's mostly fairly well written and atmospheric, but I wasn't 100% won over, and I'm not sure why. There are some stylistic tricks she overuses which become very noticeable and dragged me out of the story. That's one reason. But it wasn't so much that it's unforgivable. 

One for a reread... This is the sort of book I usually love.  I'm disappointed I didn't like it more.

Number 89 - the Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

 Neil Gaiman does an imaginative variation on Kipling's Jungle Book.  Instead of Mowgli living in a jungle and befriending the wildlife, we have Nobody Owens, a child who finds himself orphaned and living in a large cemetery being raised by ghosts (and a vampire).

Considering that this is a children's book, the opening chapter is very dark indeed with The Man Jack  proving to be a really quite scary villain as he creeps through the house and viciously murders Bod's entire family.  

Luckily for Bod, he's chosen that day to toddle unseen from the house and up the road to the deserted (by humans) graveyard. After a confrontation and a plea on his behalf, the decision is taken by the ghosts to grant young Bod the freedom of the graveyard and raise him to adulthood.

Like the Jungle Book, this book takes the form of a series of interlinked short stories.  The longest story joins them together and uses plot elements from all the preceding tales to give a more than satisfying conclusion to one of the overarching plots.  I found the final chapter to be really quite moving.  

As usual for Neil Gaiman, the prose is excellent.  He achieves a fairy tale feeling which is deceptively charming, given the darkness of the subject matter.  Bod is a brilliant creation and watching him grow and mature is a lovely experience. The supporting cast are all uniformly engaging, some mysterious, some funny, some scary.   The illustrations are rather good as well.

I was going to power through this book but found myself slowing down to savour it instead.  As children's books go this has plenty to engage the more mature reader too. 

Buy it for your kids if you must, but don't feel ashamed of reading it for yourself too.  You won't regret it.