August Horror Round-up

Knock, Knock, Open Wide - Neil Sharpson (Tor) *Pick of the Month*

While Neil Sharpson’s new novel (the first since he shifted to writing full time) seems to have arrived late last year with little fanfare, the recent release of the paperback edition will hopefully receive the commendations it deserves. Knock, Knock, Open Wide is one of the most gripping and narratively engaging adaptations of Celtic myth I’ve ever read. Such source material often lend themselves to a more surreal, fairy tale kind of prose rather than a character-driven story set in a modern and urban Ireland. To even get into the details of the plot would reveal some of the key secrets of the book (at least to folklore enthusiasts), but it remains a pitch-perfect example of how modern fiction can draw out the elements of traditional folk tales that remain perennial to human relationships. It is also a landmark title in the development of new queer Irish horror, and the multiple generations and shifting backgrounds only help to ground it in the real world of these complicated characters. For those who prefer their horror told through clear storytelling rather than abstract myth-making, Sharpson’s book should be near top of the list for both this year and last year. Try to read it while it remains free as part of Kindle Unlimited. 

The Unmothers - Leslie J. Anderson (Quirk Books)

This debut novel by Leslie J. Anderson is a tour de force, and since she comes with a long pre-novel bibliography our expectations were already high. A journalist, grieving over the loss of her husband, heads to a rural Ohio town known for breeding prize horses. The problem is that one of the mare’s just gave birth to a human baby, allegedly. The story is itself a parable about the cruel prison that motherhood can offer in patriarchal society, as well as the stifling reality of small-town life featuring vanishing economies, opportunities, and community cohesion. Anderson does well to keep these various levels balanced on each page of the book, with the last thirty or so becoming so conflicted that you realize the only narrator to trust in this text may be the horses themselves. Like Sharpson’s book, Anderson balances the folk horror with precision, a genre that, while exquisite when done well, often devolves into hackneyed cliches and pastiche. Hopefully we are heading into a new folk horror renaissance.

Silver Nitrate - Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Ray)

One of last year’s best and now heading into paperback, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate acts as her horror follow-up to the much hyped Mexican Gothic. She far exceeds that earlier effort, at least when it comes to horror genre fans as she takes a complex gothic tapestry and uses it to paint over the pacing of a paperback thriller. We meet old friends, one a nearly out of work film editor and the other an actor equally struggling through a paused career as they track down a legendary film caked in racist, occultic magic. The story digs deep into the mythology of earlier generations of cinema, when mystery still inhabited the film stock laced in silver nitrate, and “movie magic” seemed rather literal. The book handles the element of Nazi esotericism with care and accuracy, drawing out the racial dynamics of colonialism that continue to define not just Mexican film culture, but the continent as a whole. More than anything this was a joy to read, as with all of Moreno-Garcia’s books, and this will end up as a defining novel in the subgenre of film horror. 

Houses of the Unholy - Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image Comics)

Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips comics are a genre of their own, but always branded in the pulp world of crime fiction. Their new graphic novel Houses of the Unholy instead leans into the horror aesthetics of the Satanic Panic, the period in the 1980s and 1990s where society collectively believed Satanic cults were murdering our children and courts began to take revenge on unsuspecting teachers and parents. While the book walks the line between genres, it largely follows the beats of their earlier horror-inflected crime books like Fatale: a group of kids manufactured charges of Satanic ritual abuse and now, decades later, someone is killing those who made up the lies. The only issue with Houses of the Unholy is that it ends rather quickly, and it would have been interesting to see them spread this out across at least a six-issue miniseries. But, in the end, it is hard to be disappointed with anything they have put out the past few years, and Houses of the Unholy leans into the author and artist’s obsession with secret cults, arcane rituals, and the idea that something cosmic could be sitting underneath everyday criminality.