September Horror Round-up

The Night Guest - Hildur Knútsdóttir, Translated by Mary Robinette Kowel (Tor Nightfire) * Pick of the Month*

The story of the Night Guest caught my eye as the perfect narrative allegory for the kind of exhausting chronic illnesses we are talking about more and more in the era of long COVID. A woman notices that when she wakes up in the morning she feels like she has spent the entire night out walking. The thing is, when she accidentally falls asleep with her pedometer on, she finds out she has been. This evolves into a story about familial trauma and the way it spins out onto everyone around us, especially those we try to love, in distinctly frightening ways. Short enough to read in an evening, The Night Guest is both a fabulous piece of new feminist horror and a good introduction to the small but mighty world of Icelandic genre fiction.

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories - Ed. Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines Press)

When looking at some of the recent anthologies attempting to diversify the horror world, you usually find they maintain a distinctly American style of storytelling. This seems like exactly what Sarah Coolidge’s anthology tries to break by translating fiction that not only had a different social, political, and geographic origin point, but feels completely alien from even the most cursory genre tropes. Instead, what you end up with is a collection of fantastic stories that do feel wholly different than what readers are used to, often employing a dreamlike tone or shifting in between genres signifiers. With one story we watch an alien that fills the hole in an aging mother’s life, while another is largely in the minds of two serial killer obsessed goths. These short stories (and they lean into the shorter side) maintain their subtlety, even holding a mythological quality, while always remaining grounded in relatable characters, which is truly a feat for abstract prose. This is a great introduction to a few new authors and I hope this will be one of the new volumes that helps to popularize translation in the horror world, which is still not as common as it should be.

Schrader's Chord - Scott Leeds (Tor Nightfire)

In any fast-paced, consumer focused horror novel you have two wolves fighting for the length of the text. Scott Leeds’ Scharder’s Chord is a good example of when the impulse to write a tight, punchy novel gets taken down by too many characters and extraneous plot points. The book follows a cursed record that ties a person, fatally, to the afterlife. The book’s central pitch is a fine one, and while it follows increasingly familiar plot beats throughout, Leed’s is not without talent so it is often a pleasant ride. But the length, well over 400 pages, is never justified, and a full third of the book reads as an overly written distraction. The marketing material gave away most of the book’s most substantial surprises in advance, and since the volume is missing almost any distinctive qualities it's hard to figure out why it would stand out against a really dense year of horror publishing. 

The Haunting of Alejandra - V. Castro (Del Ray)

V. Castro’s work does what horror literature is so perfect at, re-framing trauma and fear so that we can view these emotions with the mythic proportions they so often feel to hold. This is part of what was so wonderful about her possession-coming-of-age novella Goddess of Filth, which painted a supernatural vision of the very real capture we often feel as though our bodies and souls experience in early adulthood. The Haunting of Alejandra mobilizes La Larona in the service of a story about a stay-at-home mother stuck in a stifling marriage and a life losing its autonomy. We follow our protagonists as she reclaims not just her actual family lineage, but her ancestral memory as well, picking up on many stories of La Larona’s occupation as that of women desperately trying to become free. There is a therapeutic element to Casto’s writing and The Haunting of Alejandra seems written in a fashion that allows many readers to imprint their own experiences on that of Alejandra, and to see memory as holding the key to our healing. The book is not the most frightening of horror narratives, and sometimes leans heavily into what feels like self-help analogies, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. 

Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror - Ed. Ellen Datlow (Tachyon Publications)

As the most recent horror anthology by legendary editor Eleln Datlow, this seems like a no brainer. In reality, this anthology is a little more niche than it originally appears since it is made up entirely of reprints (no original stories) that focus on what she defines loosely as “psychological horror.” This means mostly that the horrific elements of each story does not necessarily depend on supernatural elements but instead what occurs internally in the minds each character. This provides apt room for a huge range of stories, from serial killers to hauntings, but often what you will find is that each story centers on a profound amount of unknowing. For example, one story set in the 1950s by Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” sets up a naive teenager girl into a conversation with a slick greaser and his friend that, from start to end, is unsettling and unclear. Something seems off about this character, his allure, his threat, and we see strange movement in his body, but we never know what exactly this is about. The story is not a bad offering, but will be hit and miss for those who want a certain amount of narrative structure in their fiction, and this particular style may have landed better in a different medium. Most critically, many of the stories remain somewhat confusing, best read slowly or in repetition, and some of the more recent entries will likely have been read elsewhere. Regardless, this is a smart collection with perhaps the best story being the emotionally devastating “Back Seat” by Bracken MacLeod and “One of These Nights” by Livia Llewellyn, while others, such as “21 Brooklands: Next to the Old Western, Opposite the Burn Out Red Lion” by Carole Johnstone I remain unsure of. Maybe that’s as it was meant to be.