Horror – Page 2 – Marked for Plot

But Not Too Bold

Novellas have become one of my go-to library checkouts. With my limited budget, dropping $15 on a book that will take me a single evening to consume is a tough choice to make. However, I love the length and format, and I find that authors tend to be much more focused on what makes their work special in novellas. But Not Too Bold is an excellent example of that trend, and it put Cabaret in Flames (Hache Pueyo’s upcoming release) on my radar.

The Premise:
Dália’s promotion to Keeper of the Keys is only a small surprise. Nobody expected her mentor to be eaten, but when you work in a house owned and inhabited by Anatema, a fabulously rich pseudo-eldritch spider creature, you know that getting eaten is one of the hazards of the job. Thankfully, Dália is not a Bride, and thus her risk of being eaten is much lower than those who seek to marry into the wealth of the household. Unfortunately, Dália is quite beautiful, and Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman. Dália must step carefully, but she finds herself at home with the strange encounters her new position throws at her.

Read if you Like: translated books, fast-paced horror, creepy spider monsters, tidy endings, descriptions of opulent mansions

Avoid if You Dislike: human/monster love stories, depictions of spiders, characters without self-preservation instincts, fairy tale ‘retellings’ far from the source material

Several People are Typing

Put simply, this book is a shot of adrenaline. I want to give a big shout out to u/diazeugma for recommending one of my new favorites during the r/fantasy pride month event in June. It took me a while to pull the trigger on this workplace comedy/horror book about a man stuck in the Slack chat of his workplace, a PR firm. When I did, I consumed the book in around 4 hours. At 250 pages, this reads a lot more like a novella because of how sparse the pages are. It’s not a book without flaws, but this book contains a level of joy few authors are able to capture.

The Premise:
Gerald is an underperforming grunt at a PR form who works for (mostly) horrible clients. His brain gets sucked firm’s Slack chat, unable even to check his emails, and Gerald finds himself with only unbelieving coworkers and an annoying help-bot for company. Be a fly on the wall for secret workplace affairs, existential crises prompted by sunsets, THE HOWLING, and a bidding war for Gerald’s now empty desk.

Read if You Like: The Office meets Twilight Zone, comedy from the absurd, the distillation of existential dread, captivating characters, train wrecks in slow motion

Avoid if You Dislike: not getting physical descriptions of characters, mysteries that never get explained, strong romance plotlines

Hungerstone

Queerness and vampirism go hand in hand throughout literature. While I’m not well versed in the classics, The Book Eaters and Heart of Stone both showcased how vampire stories can be gripping in both romantic and horror spheres. Hungerstone is essentially a take on Carmilla (which I haven’t read), with a special focus on the main character’s relationship with her own agency. I think fans of gothic horror will love it, and is a good option as a starter to the genre if you like stories with a more internal focus (whereas something like Mexican Gothic or A Botanical Daughter would be better starting points for more plot focused stories). However, its much less vampire-forward than I would have expected.

The Premise
Lenore is trapped in a listless life and a loveless marriage. An orphaned noble with no money to her name, she married Henry (a corrupt steel magnate) to find a life of security. Now she finds herself without any clear anchors in her life, struggling to figure out how she can salvage some happiness. As they move to the countryside, they pick up Carmilla on the road, a mysterious stranger who seems in desperate need of care. As Carmilla starts to open up Lenore’s eyes to just how dire her situation is, Lenore finds he growing attraction to their new guests matched only by the horror rising in her as she comes to terms with the reality of her life.

Read if You Like: melancholy, living in a character’s head, depictions of abusive relationships and the effects of patriarchal structures

Avoid if Looking For: plot focused stories, lead characters who drive the story, a heavy focus on classic elements of vampire stories

Mister B. Gone

I’ve known the name of Clive Barker for a while now. Hellraiser is influential enough that even someone who absolutely despises horror movies knows its basic imagery. He’s an author lauded as a pioneering queer writer and an author I had no intention of touching with a 10 foot pole. Mister B. Gone was recommended to me by a friend who swore it was their favorite book of all time though, and so I took the plunge into this dark comedy. It wasn’t a perfect book, but the writing was engrossing enough that I’m curious to try some of his books that are more widely lauded.

The Premise:
Jakabob Botch is a demon. A rather incompetent and pathetic demon really, who can’t even work magic properly. And he’s trapped inside a book, the book you’re reading incidentally. Throughout his recounting of his life’s story on Earth, he besseeches you to burn the book in your hands, to end his pitiful existence trapped in ink and paper. But fine, why not, he’ll tell you a little bit more, but only if you promise that you really will destroy the book by the end of it all.

Read if You Like: Fourth-wall breaking, morally bankrupt (but likeable) protagonists, humorous asides, demons and angels

Avoid if You Dislike: books without a strong A-Plot, engrossing climaxes, straightforwardly gay characters

The Black Hunger

As part of pride month, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and discussing about how avoiding problematic tropes can lead to more problematic tropes. Bury Your Gays (other than being a Chunk Tingle novel I very much want to read) is a classic example of authors, playwrights, and screenwriters killing off queer characters as a way of saying this person was bad and immoral sort of like how literally every Disney Villain dies due to their own character flaws. That trend is bad and problematic, but its backlash led to such predictable happy endings that I didn’t get the same beautiful tragedy and sadness in queer speculative fiction that I could find in cis/het works. Thankfully, I think this is being seen and rectified, mostly by queer authors themselves. I’m all for tragic gays making a comeback.

The Black Hunger is a great example of how bad endings for queer characters isn’t problematic on its own. It’s only bad when used as a way to demonize queer folks. And while I had some issues with the book, I had a great time with it as part of my continued exposure therapy to the horror genre after being traumatized by watching The Mummy when I was five (I still don’t like beetles to this day). Unfortunately, this book struggled in other areas, mostly related to depictions of Buddhism, which will rightly be a dealbreaker for many.

The Premise:
John Sackeville is dying from a mysterious curse eating away at him. His partner is dead, and something horrible has happened to the world. He’s being interrogated for key information about a strange cult (partially of a dark sect of cannibalistic Buddhists, mostly Russian), but he starts at the beginning and takes his time getting to the juicy bits, spending a good among of time on his childhood, his years at Oxford, and his time in the British service in India. Part of his story also involves diary entries of a Jewish psychologist visiting the home of his ex-love to diagnose her with madness, and a letter said ex-love’s dead husband wrote to her about his experiences as a prisoner in Russia to a particularly Spooky count and his family.

Read if Looking For: older gay male representation, evil cultists (and Russians), far too many teeth, slow burn gothic horror

Avoid if You Dislike: multiple narrators, Epistolary novels that don’t read like letters, authors taking liberties with real-world religions without getting it quite right

Don’t Let the Forest In

Despite being a middle/high school English teacher, I don’t actually read much Middle Grade or Young Adult works these days. Sometimes I’ll preview a book for class, but rarely for personal pleasure. Oddly, the vast majority of YA that I read is horror, despite it not really being my favorite genre (it’s growing on me, I promise!). I picked up Don’t Let the Forest In in as some first steps to introduce more aro/ace representation into my reading diet. Overall, I thought this was a good book, and one that I’m glad I read. While I think some elements will frustrate readers who primarily pursue adult books, I think it’s got enough good things going on to be worth recommending to a broad variety of people.

The Premise
Andrew and his twin sister Dove attend a prestigious and remote boarding school, courtesy of a rich (and largely absent) father. Dove is a straight-A student, but Andrew is listless, reserved, and anxious. The only thing keeping him afloat (other than Dove making sure he doesn’t fail any classes) is his best friend/roommate/crush Thomas. Thomas is wild and abrasive, the visual artist to Andrew’s creative writing. But Thomas’s parents are missing, presumed dead, and Thomas is a prime culprit. Things between them aren’t the same as they used to be, and that’s before Andrew realizes that creatures from the forest are trying to attack the school every night.

Read if You Like: unreliable narrators, endings that stick the landing, impactful twists, creepy forest monsters

Avoid if You Dislike: archetypical side characters/set dressing, romantic tension derived lack of effective communication, slow pacing

Small Gods of Calamity

This seems to be the week of book club reviews for me. I’m very happy to be a regular participant in r/fantasy’s Beyond Binaries Book Club, which focuses on queer speculative fiction. This month brings us to a supernatural police procedural story. It wasn’t quite as dynamic a story as I would have liked, but I really enjoyed the lead character, setting, and magic. If you want to check out the mid-way discussion of book club, check it out here!

The Premise
Kim Han-Gil is a police detective, one wildly unpopular with his own department. He’s aloof, a bit strange, and trouble follows him. He’s also part of the spiritualist community, helping keep ghosts and spirits from causing trouble. Currently, he’s hunting down spiritual worms causing a spate of suicides and murders in the city. These worms also took his mother when he was a child. Combine that with a new partner (who knows how long this one will last), and memories Kim Han-Gil’s past, and he’s in for a rough week. Doesn’t help that he hasn’t refilled his anxiety meds for the past four months either.

Read if You Like: loner cops, creepy possession spirits, immersive magic

Avoid if Looking For: thrills and chills, resolutions to all loose threads, critiques of criminal justice systems

Dudes Rock: A Celebration of Queer Masculinity in Speculative Fiction

I try to read a few anthologies each year, but it had been a while since I read one that wasn’t the collected works of a single author. Dudes Rock seemed promising, and I think the short story format has plenty of space to explore masculinity in bite sized chunks. I’d say that this was a pretty mixed bag in terms of anthologies. Some real bangers, but also a decent amount that I had little to no response to. But the stories that hit got me very interested in those authors’ other works.

I’ll review each story in a bite sized chunk below (in publication order), but I want to flag my standout favorites of this collection were Rosa Cocdesin by Aubrey Shaw (gothic), The Depths of Friendship by Candy Tan (cheeky and fun) and Cigarette Smoke from the Fires of Hell by Jay Kang Romanus (intense characterization). In general, I thought the middle portion was stronger than the start or end of the collection.

Read if Looking For: short story collection featuring magic dildos, himbo cults, haunted houses, fairytale princes, and stories in the form of badly written job application essays

Avoid if Looking For: consistency in depths of theme and experimentation across stories

Compound Fracture

Andrew Joseph White is an author who has done a great job of pushing the YA space in the last few years. Hell Follows With Us was good, but The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is a real masterpiece of a historical fiction horror. He has a habit of breaking away from the typical prose stylings and plot progression that has begun to feel very repetitive in modern YA Fantasy, feeling more akin to something we’d have seen in the early 2000s content wise, but with a lot more representation and modern sensibilities.

Compound Fracture is much more realistic than White’s other works (barely any speculative elements at all) and is heavily inspired by his own life and family. You’ll find most of his trademark elements (body horror, trans & autistic lead, religious queerphobia), and generally speaking if you like his other books you’ll enjoy Compound Fracture. In the end, I found this the weakest of White’s novels so far, but still very much enjoyed it.

The Premise
The Abernathys have a long and violent history with the Davis family. Going all the way back to union vs mining company wars, their history is a bloody one. Miles Abernathy has just come out to his parents as trans when he gets nearly killed via beating by sheriff’s son after showing a friend evidence of the Sheriff Davis’ corruption. Miles needs to navigate healing, his family’s poverty, and a desire for justice with the threat of more violence looming over his, and his family’s head. And all the while the ghost of his ancestor, Saint Abernathy, is haunting Miles, railroad spike piercing his mouth in death as it did at the end of his life.

Read if Looking For: gruesome descriptions of wounds, Appalachian culture, realistic queerphobia descriptions

Avoid if Looking For: lots of fantasy/supernatural elements, nuanced villains

The Witchstone

Good Omens is a book that casts a very long shadow. Even when books aren’t explicitly setting out to be humorous, it’s tough to avoid comparisons when your lead characters are angels and demons. In this case, we’re only working on the demon half of the equation, but with humor as a core part of the story’s pitch, it immediately had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, I found The Witchstone to mostly be a disappointment, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call the book a bad one.

The Premise
Laszlo (800) is a demon, a nepo-baby, and about the laziest curse keeper you could possibly imagine. He ignores his job of cultivating misery in his assigned family and instead messes around finding ways to swindle enough money to buy the newest Gucci shoes. Unfortunately, a new manager gives him an ultimatum: shape up within a week, or get turned into primordial ooze. The Drakeford family meanwhile, is cursed to turn into monsters, slowly becoming more and more violent and deformed until they need to be put down by their own children. Maggie (19) and Lump (11) get dragged into Laszlo’s orbit when he arrives on their doorstep, claiming he has the keys to solving their family’s problems.

Read if You’re Looking For: plucky humans, sassy demons, some casual tentacle horror

Avoid if You’re Looking For: humor that’s insightful and cutting, tonally consistent books, the next Good Omens