You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

Posted on March 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Plot twists and a weirdly relatable serial killer offer readers a wild ride in this darkly comic thriller of grief and murder.

Joanna Wallace’s first novel, You’d Look Better as a Ghost, combines black humor and a realistic portrayal of grief with a serial killer, with whom readers are surprisingly inclined to empathize. This oddball story is both grim and unexpectedly entertaining.

When readers first meet narrator Claire, she is standing awkwardly at her father’s funeral, wondering at the strange behavior of the “serious-looking men in serious black suits… standing seriously too close and staring at me. Are they waiting for me to talk?” She assesses their comments, taking everything literally, contemplating human idiosyncrasies. She’s not all that good with people, and she’s also deeply grieving.

It’s not just grief. Claire has always struggled with the habits of those she calls “ordinary people,” a group she does not identify with. “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” She lives alone outside of London, painting, running on her treadmill, and now wrestling with the loss of her father following a painful battle with early-onset dementia, psych wards, and abusive care homes. Her late father seems to be the one person she’s ever felt close to; flashbacks to childhood sketch a chilly if not disturbing portrait of her mother. Plagued by migraines, Claire gets a doctor’s referral to a bereavement counseling group. “I may not have cried, drunk to excess or wrung my hands in disbelief since Dad died but I’ve definitely become more reckless with my kills.”

Oh, yes: Claire is also a serial killer. She struggles with “ordinary people” to the extent that she often feels the need to end their lives, a process for which she enjoys taking her time. Her new bereavement group offers her potential outlets for her creativity, as well as new challenges.

In Claire’s witty, deadpan voice, You’d Look Better as a Ghost revels in dark humor. A new acquaintance “asks whether I want anything to eat. A slice of chocolate cake. That’s what I really want. But I’m mindful of the fact that I killed this woman’s sister fairly recently and the cake is ridiculously overpriced. So, I order a shortbread biscuit instead. Feels like the decent thing to do.” Claire has some very firm ideas of propriety; for example, pairing wellies with a kilt bothers her considerably more than dismemberment does. But the novel also deals seriously with the protracted grief of losing a loved one to dementia, and the potentially redemptive power of true friendship. Amid much irreverence, its themes are genuinely heartfelt and even sweet. This debut is fresh and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the January 29, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 mugs of soup.

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Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on December 15, 2023 by pagesofjulia

It took me a while to get to this one, but I am very pleased to be back in the Stephen King universe. Salem’s Lot is classic horror. King doesn’t get everything right (and this was published in 1975), but there’s not much question that he’s a supremely great writer. His stories are very easy to take in and get lost in. I enjoyed this very much, and I’ll keep working my way through his extensive catalog.

I won’t spend too much time on plot; you can find that elsewhere. My audio version opens with a short foreword or introduction which King reads himself, and it made me feel so good about what I was headed into. In his own voice, I heard the style and easy sentences of a master, and heard him discussing reading and writing as lifetime loves. He describes reading Dracula as a young boy, and then a bunch of secondhand E.C. Comics, and reimagining the vampire story for a contemporary U.S. of A. He confesses that Salem’s Lot, only his second novel, is dated, but he still counts it among his favorites. “Carrie, the book which came before it, seems almost fey by comparison. There is more confidence here, more willingness to be funny.” It only made me more excited about the story to come. Ron McLarty reads the novel itself, and very well I think: I have no comment on his reading either way, which is a good sign.

In Salem’s Lot, the moderately successful novelist Ben Mears returns to the Maine town where he spent just a few years as a boy, but where he had an indelibly frightening experience in a moody old mansion where a famous recluse had hung himself. He meets a nice girl, and settles in to a room in a boarding house to work on a spooky fourth novel. To a mild, idyllic backdrop, Ben courts the girl, Susan Norton, and makes new friends. But the town of Jerusalem’s Lot (or Salem’s Lot, or simply The Lot) isn’t done with mysterious, creepy figures. Ben’s not the only newcomer in town. A beloved dog is found impaled on a cemetery fence. Two young brothers disappear in the night, and one death follows another. A small but tough motley crew forms up: Ben, the writer; Susan, the young woman; Matt, an aging high school English teacher; Mark, a middle-school boy new to town; Father Callahan, the town’s Catholic priest, who will figure in the Dark Tower series; and Dr. Jimmy Cody. Together they will fight an ancient evil. The novel’s prologue serves as a teaser, with an unnamed man and boy on a cross-country trip. This action actually falls chronologically at the end of the book, just before its epilogue–sending me immediately back to the beginning when I finished listening to it.

King absolutely excels at realism, exquisite detail, and a combination of quaint small-town living (as sordid as sweet, but very true to life) with horror. He’s got a social conscience perhaps ahead of his time. His characters feel accurate, and everything flows very naturally; his sentences are that very special kind of smooth and easy that appears effortless but is actually extremely rare and difficult to achieve. It’s masterful and I’m a little bit in awe. On the other hand, there was one element that got under my skin. To protect plot spoilers, I’ll discuss it here briefly in white text (highlight to read): I really liked Susan Norton’s character, and was invested in her development not only as character but as strong young woman coming into control of her own destiny. She was the first of our powerful little team to fall to the big bad vampire, and I quite resented how that worked; after I’d come to see her as a proper strong woman and major player, it felt like she got thrown away like the cheap girl character in a pulpy horror story. Jimmy Cody later falls, too, but I was left with the sense that Susan didn’t get the treatment she deserved. I was left with the taste of misogyny in my mouth and felt sad about it. I respect Stephen King’s efforts, and find him better (in the lyrics of the Drive-By Truckers, who were talking about somebody entirely different) “at worst, no worse than most white men of his generation, north or south”… but it still made me sad. I’ll also recall again that in his introduction he acknowledged that this novel is dated. I hope this is part of what he meant, and that we’re still getting better now.

This issue, for me, was worth noting but did not fatally poison the experience. It’s an outstanding horror novel, and it’s sticking with me, and King is a marvel. I sort of want to go back and read the entire Dark Tower series over again (ha), but there’s so much more King out there, too. I do recommend. There’s not much perfect in this world.

Rating: 8 ice cream sodas.

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Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

Posted on August 7, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this darkly comedic yet philosophical horror novel, an unhappy 20-something returns home to the insular community and church she’d left behind only to find frights worse than she’d remembered.

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison (Such Sharp Teeth; Cackle; The Return) moves inexorably from the darkly absurd into terrifying horror. Readers follow apathetic, antisocial Vesper Wright as she returns home to her estranged family and learns that what she knew of her unorthodox upbringing was just the beginning.

Vesper is 23 years old, working as a server at a chain restaurant “in an unglamorous part of Westchester County, sporting a polo and serving plates of baby back ribs I was fairly certain were generated in a lab.” She’s unhappy but relieved to be free from the family, community, and church in which she was raised–until she receives an invitation to attend the wedding of her former best friend and her first boyfriend. Magnetically drawn to the place she misses, dreads, and still thinks of as home, Vesper reencounters not only the unusual church but her powerful mother, a horror movie megastar who never proved very maternal: “I’d only ever seen her emote on screen, her vulnerability behind glass. She was more human to me when she was pretending to be someone other than herself.” What she finds at home will blow Vesper’s world, and perhaps literally the entire world, wide open. She reconsiders her memories and “that our past is not the truth. It’s warped by time and emotion, inevitably muddied by love and resentment, joy and shame, hope and regret.” Eventually Vesper will have to rethink everything she thought she understood about her family, her church, and her past–and reexamine her loss of faith.

Early on, Black Sheep exhibits black humor and an accessible 20-something nihilistic angst. Details of Vesper’s former church are darkly comic. As the stakes rise, however, Harrison’s imaginative plot turns gruesomely to true horror. Fans of the genre will find pleasure in both the playful and the ghastly aspects. Aside from the terror, Vesper’s story ruminates on themes that include nature vs. nurture, the legacy of family trauma, and the repercussions of organized religion in its various forms. “Nothing terrified me more than this. The notion that without a choice we inherit parts of us that we cannot change. Cannot cut out.” This subject matter elevates a horror novel to a study in philosophy, even as the bloodletting ramps up.

Black Sheep is can’t-look-away riveting in its best and most disturbing moments, gripping readers on both conceptual and visceral levels. Vesper’s discontent and wrestling with her own worst self, her former family’s creepy cultlike demeanor, and the final crescendo of action add up to an unforgettable adventure.

This review originally ran in the July 14, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 glasses of wine.

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The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz

Posted on February 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this shape-shifting tale, aspiring novelists come together at a possibly haunted estate with a famously reclusive writer–for what turns out to be as much horror as inspiration.

Alex, the glum protagonist of Julia Bartz’s The Writing Retreat, has recently crossed into her 30s. Stuck in long-term writer’s block, her dreams of making it as a novelist are just about dead; she holds a thankless and “bleakly underpaid” position in publishing; her sex life is equally bleak; and she still mourns her traumatic friend-breakup with the more successful Wren a year ago. So it feels like a shocking and undeserved honor to be accepted to a fantastically exclusive writing retreat hosted by Roza Vallo, the wildly successful novelist Alex has idolized since she was 12 years old. The catch is that Wren has been accepted, too.

Roza’s Blackbriar Estate in the Adirondacks in New York is grand, dramatic and supposedly haunted. Roza herself is famous, rather controversial and private: the five young women attending the retreat must sign NDAs. Alex’s adoration of her enigmatic hero is enormous, and she senses this is her big shot at turning her life around: “If I lived in a pocket of Roza Vallo’s brain, however small, I sensed it would bolster my own existence.” She is also nearly crippled by anxiety about being near Wren–but that concern is quickly overshadowed by the terms of Roza’s intensely competitive program for the retreat. The five writers in attendance must each complete a whole novel in just 28 days, and the best of their works will win a million-dollar advance on a publishing deal. Even as the high-speed writing race ramps up and the drama with Wren continues to smolder, it emerges that something still more sinister is going on behind the scenes at Blackbriar Estate. Inexorably, The Writing Retreat evolves into a locked-room mystery, as eight women–five young writers, two staff and Roza–find themselves snowed in at Blackbriar and beset by potentially fatal threats that may be supernatural or simply human evil.

Bartz imbues her writing with a shape-shifting momentum: the plot’s focus moves from the small, painful dramas of competition and jealousies in friendship into horror and psychological suspense. Blackbriar Estate is both magnetic, in its haunting history and narrative possibilities, and stifling. The world of writing and publishing can be, at turns, solitary, socially supportive, triumphant and backbiting, and The Writing Retreat encompasses all these possibilities and more, as it explores friendship and family traumas, artistic crises and human nature. Bartz’s debut subverts genre in the interest of entertainment, satire and chilling thrills.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 words.

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Lakewood by Megan Giddings

Posted on January 23, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This was a striking, chilling novel, which I’ve chosen to tag as horror although it is of the disquieting sort and relies less on jump-scares and gore (although the gore is not entirely absent). It contains very apt, detailed descriptions of contemporary young people and family dramas; characterization and specificity are strengths of Giddings’ writing no matter what she does. But it quickly moves beyond writerly deftness into seriously troubling subject matter, to make this a novel both thought-provoking and book-club-worthy, and riveting.

We meet Lena when she is a college student burying her beloved grandmother, Miss Toni. Her mother (Miss Toni’s daughter) Deziree is present, and can be a good friend to the younger woman; but Deziree is frequently ill, and it was Miss Toni who Lena thinks of as Mom. Now she is faced with a stack of bills: medical bills for Deziree and for Miss Toni, bills for the funeral, the house, general costs of living. She must maintain a high GPA to keep her scholarship. Her college roommate Tanya is a great friend but from a walk of life that makes her unable to empathize with financial strain. A letter arrives. “An invitation to participate in a series of research studies about mind, memory, personality, and perception. The Lakewood Project. It offered Lena and her family health insurance if she was selected to be a participant. Also housing and a weekly stipend… It was addressed specifically to her.” The money is so good – and more importantly, the medical care for Deziree – that Lena leaves college. If she can last a year in Lakewood, it could be life-changing.

Lena is a young Black woman in an unnamed Michigan city with a college and a sizable Black population. Lakewood is a small Michigan town in which she is almost the only Black face. Place is not one of the biggest elements of this story (and maybe I overemphasize it because you know it is always an important one for me), but the city/small town divide definitely accounts for part of Lena’s estrangement; she notices the differences in noise and quiet, and the anonymity of the one versus the sense of being watched in the other, which is of course very much about race as well as population density. Lena is very aware of race. With a single exception, the participants in the Lakewood Project are Black, Latinx or Native American. The staff, doctors and observers are all white. She is conscious about performing a “safe” version of herself in the town of Lakewood. The study itself involves acting, but so does her larger life.

I’ll stop here, because I hope to encourage you to read this book and be surprised by its turns as I was. But you can safely see from here that Lakewood is about the sinister side of medical research studies and race and racism in this country, both throughout history and in the present. Giddings is a rising writer of note, and this novel is quietly terrifying.

Rating: 8 teeth.

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Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

Posted on August 5, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Mothers and motherhood haunt this alarming, dark, weirdly funny novel of family ties and the power of just the right recipe to heal all wounds.

Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing is a grim, disturbing novel of family drama and mental illness, yet a bizarrely funny glimpse into one woman’s mind. In its opening pages, Abby, who narrates, and Ralph have recently moved in with Ralph’s mother, Laura, hoping to nurse her through her depression. But instead, Laura takes her life, Abby purloins Laura’s coveted opal ring and Ralph falls into despair. “Because even though he’d been strong when we’d moved in, strong enough to move in–equipped with resources he’d downloaded from a website called the Borderline Parent, and a swear-on-your-life promise from me that I could handle this temporary uprooting–being near her stirred rotten dangerous things inside him.”

Abby, very much in the throes of dealing with her own mother’s shortcomings and abuse, has identified Ralph as part mother, part god, the “Perfect Good” in her life and “the most genuinely good person in the entire world.” “Ralph would make eggs too, not specially because I was there, but because a person has eggs for breakfast. And soon, I remember thinking, clutching fistfuls of duvet to steady my overwhelming joy, I would be a person too.” In flashbacks to her childhood, she recalls a beloved couch she calls Couchy Motherthing, and constantly circles and ponders the ideal mother figure; she relies on a cookbook “for the mothers of good, happy, wholesome families, with lots of mouths to feed. And that’s the kind of mother I am too, even if I’m not yet”–because Abby desperately wants to have a child of her own, to embody the kind of mother that neither she nor Ralph got to have. She works at a nursing home where she considers her favorite resident her “baby” and, simultaneously, the perfect mother she never had. This fantasy is disrupted by the appearance of the woman’s real daughter, which might just push Abby over the edge. Because paired with her nurturing impulse, Abby secretly harbors intense rage, “murder so much more manageable right now than creating a whole entire family.” Her love verges on violence.

Hogarth (The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated)) rocks readers via Abby’s turmoil, her swings from devotion to fury, self-loathing to self-aggrandizement. Motherthing keeps readers as unstable as its narrator, struggling to manage the traumas and the waves of emotion. Abby copes with a focus on a few objects that she imbues with special significance: Laura’s ring (symbol of rejection, as Laura judged her daughter-in-law “more of a Kay Jewelers type than a vintage-family-heirloom type”), Abby’s cookbook and the recipes she hopes will save Ralph (an obsessed-over jellied salmon and an unusual iteration of Chicken à la King). The result of these roiling thoughts and images is a darkly comic, kaleidoscopic novel of unhealthy fixations, love, murder, the gifts and wounds that family can inflict and one woman’s fight to save herself.

This review originally ran in the August 4, 2022 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 little dogs next door.

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Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror ed. by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

Posted on June 10, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Forty-something short-short horror stories collected here, and as one might imagine, they vary in how memorable and loveable I found them. I think I will choose “Katy Bars the Door” by Richie Narvaez and “Human Milk for Human Babies” by Lindsay King-Miller as my favorites; and I read one that still makes me angry, but I think I will not name it here, out of spite. Short-short stories are delightful, and I do love a themed collection like this; I would do such a thing again. I appreciate as well the wide range of what constitutes ‘horror’ to different writers: the grisly, the ghostly, the suggestively disturbing, the creepy in different senses. Your mileage as always will vary – you will love the ones I forgot as soon as I finished them, and vice versa. Ah well. Happy horrors, friends.

Rating: 6 beads.

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Friend of the Devil by Stephen Lloyd

Posted on April 4, 2022 by pagesofjulia

This singular novel of teenaged hijinks, a mysterious missing book, potentially profound evil and PTSD is wry, shockingly violent, philosophical and laugh-out-loud funny.

Stephen Lloyd’s Friend of the Devil offers a captivating blend of madcap mischief, terrifying and gory malevolence and thoughtful ruminations on humanity. Gruesome, deadly serious and frequently hilarious, this novel is an unusual cocktail.

Sam Gregory works as an inspector for an insurance company, responsible for rooting out fraud or solving cases like this one: a valuable antique book gone missing from the library of Danforth Putnam, a snooty boarding school on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. A war veteran, Sam pops pills to clear his mind of the traumatic memories and bad dreams that haunt him. He feels only a jaded weariness at the privileged antics of the students (and for that matter, the staff), but dutifully searches for the missing volume, sure there’s nothing here but another case of a drug-addled teen or disgruntled employee.

Sam is so wrong. But on his way to shocking, elemental horrors, he (and readers) will meet magnetic characters like the indomitable Harriet (D&D dungeon master, student journalist, extreme nerd and loyal friend) and bitter, acerbic Dale (a charity case at Danforth, which no one will ever let him forget). Despite his initial impressions of the school, Sam will take away unexpected lessons from these and other inhabitants of the island. What haunts Danforth and its very special missing book will turn out to be seriously sinister, and by the time Sam approaches its true nature–supernatural, or simple human evil?–the stakes will be ultimate.

Sam’s sardonic wit and tough-guy demeanor impart a flavor of classic noir. Harriet, who moves swiftly and unstoppably from bullying victim to plucky heroine, is a pure pleasure. Lloyd, who is also a TV writer and producer (Modern Family; How I Met Your Mother), showcases a talent for description and rich sensory detail from the first pages, when readers meet the rarified denizens of Danforth, “a diverse group… in every way but one. They were all filthy rich.” His characters are colorful, lovable or repellant, and the almost casual facility with which he kills them off is impressive.

Lightning-paced and undeniably weird, this is not a tale for everyone, as it bounces around between witch hunting and mythical evils, teenaged betrayals, PTSD, petty crime, bloody violence and delightful dry humor. But for the right reader, Friend of the Devil‘s unusual brand of gore and laughs is wildly, wickedly entertaining and positively unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the March 4, 2022 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Junior Mints.

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Sundial by Catriona Ward

Posted on February 7, 2022 by pagesofjulia

This unnerving novel of family history and impossible choices is part ghost story, part terrifying reality.

Catriona Ward (The Last House on Needless Street) places mundane, everyday frustrations alongside profound chills in a novel of family, tough choices, secrets and terror. “It’s the chicken pox that makes me sure–my husband is having another affair.” At the beginning of Sundial, readers wonder what feels just a little off about the suburban household where Rob and her husband, Irving, bicker and feud and raise their two daughters, Callie and Annie. Irving has a nasty temper; Rob is bitterly frustrated: “These days I don’t understand why anyone bothers to watch soap operas or go to movies. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.” Annie is a sweet, docile child; Callie has a discomfiting fascination with murder and death. When the bones of small mammals begin to show up in Callie’s room, Rob feels that things have gone far enough, and takes her elder daughter away for a spell–to Sundial, Rob’s family home in California’s Mojave desert, an abandoned hippie commune and site of terrible unnamed wrongs.

Through flashback-style stories Rob tells Callie, readers learn of Rob’s past: she had a twin sister named Jack, and the sisters shared an unusual upbringing, surrounded by half-wild dogs, scientific experiments, wayward graduate students and shadowy, evil acts. Something dark lived or lives in Rob, or Jack, or Callie, or possibly all of them, and it gradually dawns on readers that Rob is mulling the unthinkable choice to save one daughter or the other. Her secrets come out only slowly and in fits and starts, and it’s often unclear what is imagined, what is paranormal and what is plain human malice. “It’s possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?” The novel’s perspective shifts between Rob then, Rob now and Callie, so a character may appear innocent in one chapter and dangerous in the next. At least one of these narrators is surely unreliable, but it takes until the final pages to piece together the unsettling enigma of Rob’s family history and the possible futures for her girls.

With the special horror of creepy children and the very real torture of abusive adults, Sundial serves up a deeply, deliciously disturbing family mystery, populated by ghost dogs and misguided scientists as well as apparently nonthreatening neighbors. A slow burn leads into a quick ratcheting up as this psychological horror deals its final blows.

This review originally ran in the January 6, 2022 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cinnamon candies.

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The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers: And Other Gruesome Tales by Jen Campbell, illus. by Adam de Souza

Posted on January 28, 2022 by pagesofjulia

This delightful book, I’m pretty sure, came from another Shelf review. Jen Campbell teases her reader, in a brief foreword, with a playfully sinister tone; she notes that “brilliant, horrible tales” once “known far and wide” have somehow been replaced with “‘happily ever afters’ where nothing really awful happened and, well, a lot of them became boring.” She wants to restore the gruesome; thus this book, which offers fourteen tales from around the world (each presented with its country of origin), adapted and tweaked by Campbell. They are indeed deliciously gruesome, and complemented by Adam de Souza’s illustrations, which nod to each story’s cultural origin. I really liked this intersection of fairy tales, traditional storytelling, modern twists, and horror. Campbell’s afterword neatly bookends the collection with a cozier tone, now that we’ve gotten to know each other and all.

The title story is Korean, and straight horrifying. “The House That Was Filled With Ghosts” (Japan) I enjoyed for its victorious ending (bit of a ‘happily ever after’ here, Campbell!). “The Adults Who Lost Their Organs” (Germany) reminds me of a story I knew as a child but cannot name now… “The Man Who Hunted Children” (South Africa) is I think the “Hansel and Gretel” reference. “The Wife Who Could Remove Her Head” (El Salvador) had a refreshing outcome for the rebellious wife; likewise a bit of justice in India’s “The Son of Seven Mothers.” But my absolute favorite was definitely the final story, from Spain: “The Woman and the Glass Mountain.” There are book lovers, adventures, a wedding in a library, triumphant women, and queer love. I am smitten with this story and this whole book, and will put it in the growing pile of fairy tales & folktales that are somewhat simultaneously creepy and weirdly comforting. What a treat. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys tracking storytelling in human history and across cultures, or fairy tales and their origins, or spookiness in general. Good times.

Rating: 8 fingers.

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