November and December Horror Round-Up

I decided to just combine these two months into one given how dense the end of the year has become, and because I'll shortly put out a number of "best of" lists to cover some great work from 2024. This was amongst the best couple months of new books this year, but the lack of absolute outstanding horror offerings (particularly in short fiction) has made for a sort of mid year in horror publishing.

Pay the Piper - George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus (Union Square & Co.)

This is the second of Romero’s books that novelist Daniel Kraus found when curating Romero’s archive, except this strayed far enough from the world of zombies that it stood out as a completely unique work that paralleled nothing else in Romero’s career. In what Kraus expertly finishes, we get an incredibly involved look at cajun life in the South Bajou of Louisiana, a crumbling of rural community as oil companies decimate the land, which itself is just an echo of its pirate past. What underskirts this is a cosmic horror story about monsters in the swamp, though this is only a background pretext for the haunting memories, mistakes, and failed relationships of those who inhabit the shanties in one of the poorest parts of the country. This is a brilliant portrait of daily life, compassionate and delicate while also containing some of the most ferocious characters I’ve encountered in modern horror. 

American Rapture - CJ Leede (Tor Nightfire)

CJ Leede is on a roll, and while the branding of her books lean into a pop sensibility, there is a quieter and more methodical storytelling under the surface. American Rapture follows a young woman raised in a repressive Catholic home arranged by a mother who blames herself for her victimization by sexual violence. This casts the entire experience of our characters, and by extension society at large, with a light of guilt training any and all sexual expression. A pandemic breaks out, one we are slowly introduced to in snippets, that leads to a zombie-like state amongst the afflicted that results in a state that sits somewhere somewhere between a rabid rapist and a cannibal. The book has more pathos and characterization than one might expect, though there is a certain triteness to the cultural indictment it makes of the caustic influence of the Christian right. We are nearly 25 years into the renewed relevance of Christian evangelicalism, almost fifty into the power of the Christian Right, so there is little transgressive in repeating the same observations of the toxic power of chaste Christian pseudo-moralities: frankly, we would need more than this to view it as a challenge to power. The world it constructs is actually well realized and there is an inherent complexity to the social mapping that Leede does to build a midwest region in crisis, but some cliche’d observations, dialogue, and liberal sexual commentary can make it feel a couple decades too late to offer the biting criticism the author seems to be offering. With all the detail provided to the structure of the emergency response and insurgent terrorism of the Christian right, some of the very basics of the disease itself and how this is playing out is left rather vague, to the point that it feels like Leede is unwilling to carry out the textual implications that sexual assault is the operative threat of the infected. More than that, the revolutionary cells themselves seem to hold much more potential to develop the political commentary, and since they only exist in the background we ultimately miss the indictment of the post-January 6th Right. Along with the fact that the book overstays its welcome at nearly 400 pages and that its marketing gives away the key plot points (the book is over a third of the way done when you actually realize a plague is happening) there are some missed opportunities. But it remains an overall satisfying read from an important new author in the genre, and is a good choice for those looking for a horror novel that manages to channel the very real fears we are living with in 2024.

The Queen - Nick Cutter (Gallery Books)

The Queen is amongst the most fun I’ve had all year, but also is a pitch perfect narrative thrill ride that balances an economy of words with an interesting series of narrative devices and an underlying metaphorical framework that, despite itself, carries readers perfectly well until the end. Think of a delightfully cynical teen mix of body horror, mad scientists, and near cosmic insectoid panic and you might catch up to the frenetic appeal of Cutter's prose. Cutter is simply the more popular pseudonym for Craig Davidson, and whose book The Troop is about to be on Netflix. This is one of the best horror books of the year since it so fluidly hits all genre marks while introducing us to relatable characters that tackles issues of class, gender, and alienation without passe manipulations or cliches. This is one book I look forward to seeing adapted for some skin crawling midnight film screening.

When You Leave I Disappear - David Nial Wilson (Shortwave Media)

Wilson’s novella does something that few modern horror works are really able to achieve, it makes its destination invisible until the final pages. Wilson’s story seems particularly personal given his biography: a fiction author finds success in writing commercially viable properties that she eventually finds less than satisfying. She looks for inspiration to try something new, finds an online writing prompt, and then heads into a near trance as some strangely prescient stories pour out of her. It only progresses form there, melding fact and fiction, character and creator, and all done in a way that maintains its rapid pace through its entire short length. Wilson is an archetype for working genre writers today, with a number of books for established gaming properties and what seems like the output for someone doing what it takes to make this career work. With When You Leave I Disappear the reader senses the question the author is posting about who they are with regards to their creative output, what they will leave behind that matters, and how they are going to separate themselves in an increasingly crowded field that does little to reward ingenuity. The prose is sparse, which holds it back at certain points, but mostly it keeps things simple as its spins a rather complicated and blinding story of intrigue where the terror lies in whether or not, at the end of the day, there is an actual self sitting under the narratives we tell.

Crypt of the Moon Spider - Nathan Ballingrud (Tor)

Nathan Ballingrud is known for essentially having two dramatically different styles. He has thoughtful, emotionally rich and wrenching horror stories set in a very familiar and contemporary setting, and he has fairy tales that are drenched in the language of morally resonate fables. It's the first of these I like, I have never been one for the folkloric invention set out of time, which is exactly what Crypt of the Moon Spider is. And yet, I enjoyed this book, perhaps the only example of this type of storytelling that I think kept me hooked despite my own preferences. It is set in an almost steampunk world where moon colonization is matched by a strange procedure built around injecting the brains of the melancholic with the webs of space spiders. Its prose is simple and haunting and works as an allegorical novella about the loneliness, and often petty tyranny, of experiencing mental illness. This is the first of a series with the sequel coming out early next year, and since it is such a quick read I’d recommend getting this one read so you can be ready to continue when Cathedral of the Drowned is released in August.

Cranberry Cove - Hailey Piper (Bad Hand Books)

Hailey Piper is one of the most popular of the New Queer Horror canon of the past few years, and Cranberry Cove will likely stand out as a haunted noir that centers its trans character in a fashion that refuses to be tokenizing and instead dives deeply into the lingering traumas of sexual violence. While that sounds heavy, and the book is, it reads quite easily as Piper drops us into a prose built around dialogue and familiar and hyperreal tropes of criminality, which is another way of saying it has a pulp appeal. The story is itself a little fragmented, easy to get lost in the details and doesn’t conclude in an incredibly satisfying way, but its uniqueness overcomes those structural limitations, and so does Piper’s approachable style.

Cold Snap - Lindy Ryan (Titan Books)

Cold Snap follows a familiar track of grief-horror books, this one set up for the first Christmas after the recent death of a family’s father. This volume is slim, but also not particularly novel, though it aptly handles the monologue of a mother who blames herself and is failing to connect with her son’s anger. The story’s lack of clear resolution is a point in its favor, though there is nothing distinct enough here to allow it to crowd out any competing book this winter.

Bound in Blood: Cursed Books, Damned Libraries and Unearthly Authors - Ed. Johnny Mains (Titan Books)

This is a solid effort from horror editor Johnny Mains that uses the theme of secret and powerful books as the binding concept, which leads us into some great Lovecraft-adjacent corners as well as some rather innovative uses of the biblio motif. Nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but we have great offerings from Charlie Higson, A.K. Benedict, Elizabeth Hand, and Eric LaRocca. I would say that, as with many similar anthologies, the stories that lean shorter tend to come up rather empty and there are a number of forgettable entries as well. 

W0Rldtr33 Vol. 2 - James Tynion IV and Fernando Blanco (Image Comics)

This is the second volume of a book that hit so well earlier in the year and, while continuing to be a comic worth reading, became slightly disjointed in its most recent arc. Like much of Tynion’s writing, it’s easy to get lost in overly complicated details and speculative fiction lore, which means that it’s best to read both volumes in direct sequence with little time between them. While the book has been an innovative addition to the world of information horror, it would be hard to read this month to month. Still, it is simply another example of why Tynion has been the most dynamic force in graphic horror of the decade and will likely set the tone for years to come.

Not a Speck of Light - Laird Barron (Bad Hand Books)

Laird Barron returns with another of his characteristically compelling cosmic horror collections with Not a Speck of Light, bringing together work from the past eight years. The book follows a similar model to his last collection, Swift to Chase, which roughly structures the stories to follow an interlocking, though non-linear, narrative. This allows each of the stories to be broken down into four larger sections, with each section reading like a possible novella. The plan for this type of book likely came years before the book’s completion given that each of these stories (except one) were published in magazines and anthology books without the overarching project in full view. This is a testament to the way that Barron works, creating his own mythos, common characters, and familiar landscapes ranging from upstate New York to Alaska to Olympia, Washington. There are not a tremendous number of surprises in Not a Speck of Light, other than to say that there are more good stories than bad and Barron’s tendency towards prolix character narration has been scaled back to a more manageable, and justifiable, format. Barron’s prose is easy to get lost in, with his narrators speaking in constant hyperbole and metaphor, stacking on slang that feels ill placed. But this book is well balanced, and even his more outlandish stories maintain a kind of relatable weirdness rather than becoming a self-parody. The best stories include the opener, “In a Cavern, In a Canyon” (avoid finding out where it was originally published, it’ll ruin the plot), “The Blood in My Mouth,” and “Tip Toe.” Barron seems to be the kind of writer who knows who he is and has kept a steady pace, just below the level of mainstream appeal and just controversial enough to remain a “writer’s writer” in the world of weird fiction.

Around Eldritch Corners - Christine Morgan (Word Horde)

Around Eldritch Corners is a difficult book in a lot of ways: it seems to revel in the fact of its pastiche, that it plays with the literary conventions of H.P. Lovecraft in a way that can feels intentionally arcane. What this means is that it is hard to imagine a large audience for a book that’s aping early 20th Century horror conventions, and whose creative ingenuity is confined to the sharp literary boundaries of those who came generation’s before. Morgan is herself the latest model of the professional horror writer, churning out a huge number of books, many of which are self-published, in a way that has become standard for anyone trying to actually live on what they make and who are not one of the one percent of published authors making it work through the Big Five. Morgan’s work is often incredibly niche, and numerous, with the greatest example being her last two books for Worde Horde, each collections of viking themed fantasy horror. There is a certain greatness in her career, someone making her career work precisely by being her whole self, and that also makes Around Eldritch Corners such a profound example of a “hit-and-miss” collection.

Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories - Various (Inhabit Media)

Arctic horror is a staple of the genre world, particularly cosmic horror, which often takes Lovecraft’s lead in locating something particularly haunting and understated about the North and South Poles. Because the theme is such a slam dunk it seems like an easy success, but Taaqtumi lacks the diversity and depth of storytelling that you need to sustain an audience. Taaqtumi has little in the way of shifting time periods, styles, characters, or lore, and so you end up with a series of familiar retreads that are hard to differentiate from one another.  With so many fantastic anthologies out this year, some of which are thematically similar, it’s best to leave this one out in the cold.