​I read a lot of horror over the 2010-2019 decade. Here are some works that I strongly recommend. In no particular order:

Slade House, David Mitchell: A haunted house that mysteriously “appears” within a labyrinth of back alleys once every nine years. The forays of different characters into the house are riveting, and I found the narratives deliciously spooky. The impact is frequently creepy and often startling.

The Institute, Stephen King: Best Stephen King book in years. The story was gripping, the characters were fascinating (and well developed) and the narrative had no false steps. The plot was creepy as hell.

Hex, Thomas Olde Heuvelt: Crafty, unnerving, and extraordinary. A 21st century tale of witchcraft.

Behold the Void, Philip Fracassi: Unusual and chilling stories. The last one is terrifying.

The Ritual, Adam Neville: Artic hauntings, disturbing Scandinavian folklore, and gut-wrenching horror. This was a riveting and unsettling read.

The Bone Weaver’s Orchard, Sarah Read: A deceptively complex ghost story with atmosphere and chills. I loved it.

The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley: Suspenseful, original, and more than a little unnerving. But, be aware, it is not a traditional horror story. But it is eerie, strange, and atmospheric.

The Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay: A disappearance of a teenager. Eerie, unsettling, and devastating.

Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay: Updated take on demonic possession. Wonderfully conceived and executed.

Odd Adventures with Your Other Father, Norman Prentiss: This is a genre-bending, no holds barred novel combining horror, comedy, love, and coming of age drama.
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A Cold Season, Alison Littlewood: This is quiet horror at its best. The tension is subtle but chilling. The kid portrayed in the book is a poster child for the ‘creepy-kid’ horror genre. The entire book is reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby to some degree.

​I had the opportunity to read The Waiting, one of Joe Hart’s earlier novels. This supernatural tale involves a young widower and his disabled son residing on an island in one of the countless lakes of northern Minnesota. There are ghosts aplenty, scary incidents, a creepy backstory and a haunted grandfather clock to propel the story. The early setup is nicely done. Our protagonist, Evan Tormer, is nicely drawn and the geographical setting is an interesting character in its own right. The second quarter of the book meanders a bit with a couple of torpid scare scenes. The action picks up the pace and the storyline gels at around the half-way point. The puzzle pieces start falling into place and momentum builds. There were two or three genuine freaky passages that chilled me and I honestly didn’t see where the plot was going. The ending was nicely handled, too, although the subplot involving a potential love interest didn’t quite achieve the author’s intentions – at least for me. On the other hand, I found the subplot of a single dad raising a disabled child to be a unique addition. The child is portrayed with dignity, so kudos to Mr. Hart on that score.

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I’ve read a number of Gary Fry’s works and I think this is one of the best, if not the best, narratives he’s written. A number of reviewers draw comparisons to Lovecraft. I can’t comment on the accuracy of this. I’ve read only one Lovecraft tale and didn’t like it at all. Siren of Depravity, though, is one mind-blowing read and I was hooked from the beginning. The tale is a slow burn, no doubt about it. But, this slow burn is insidious. There’s an icy chill just below the surface, and I found myself being propelled forward with the occasional nuggets of sheer creepiness that would appear in the story. Clues about the past of the characters are disclosed in a well-paced manner and the story-arc is unsettling and gruesome. The finale is pulse-pounding with a couple of jolts that I didn’t see coming. The characters are fully realized, even the secondary ones, which really enhances this well-told tale. A solid horror novel.

​This is a chilling coming of age story that works primarily because of the believable characters. The main protagonist is a teenage boy struggling with raising his little sister with no help from their drug addicted mother. Will is a gifted baseball player who happens to be from a poor and broken family. He is best friends with kids from a much higher SES than his, and madly in love with a girl just out of his reach. This teenage drama within the context of a rich vs. poor small town world is well drawn. Janz is a horror writer, though, and two parallel stories involving hideous creatures in the woods and a serial killer who eats his child victims are soon introduced. The author ramps up the scares and the excitement involving his adolescent characters, and the reader is caught in the onslaught. The last 20-25% of the book is non-stop action and the story falters a little as the mayhem becomes redundant. A heavy editing hand might’ve helped here. Still, Children of the Dark is a blast and I loved it.

I never considered that ghost stories and strange local folklore might have regional and cultural significance. I just loved to read ghost stories and that was good enough for me. As a kid, I had cousins (all siblings) who relished telling their own personal encounters with the uncanny. There was a transparent “thing” which would float in your peripheral vision but disappear when you looked straight in its direction (I never saw it).  There was the little pale man who was spotted in the principal’s office at my one cousin’s school when no one should have been there. He was the only kid who saw it. My aunt just shrugged.
I was secretly thrilled with the tales, but was naturally a skeptic. I still am, and others find it unusual that a guy who likes and writes horror stories does not believe in the supernatural. I don’t find it odd at all. Maybe it’s because I’m drawn to the psychological and cultural significance of the tales. That’s an occupational hazard I think—as a psychologist and university professor I look for the natural, the observable, and the empirically based.
My wife and I have been visitors to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for over 20 years. A location like this is loaded with history, much of it sinister. The settlement of Roanoke Island in 1585 founded by Sir Walter Raleigh disappeared without a trace a few years later. Blackbeard, the notorious pirate, hid among the barrier islands and was later killed at Ocracoke. Scores of shipwrecks off the coast of the Outer Banks resulted in the area being referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. From these historical counts came tales of specters, ghosts, strange lights, ghost ships, and the Gray Man who warns visitors to evacuate the coast when hurricanes approach.
While I loved the stories and the mythos of the area—which I tried to incorporate into my latest novel The Disembodied—I realized that these are more than just “stories”. These accounts explain the Outer Banks. The settlers and early residents made use of these accounts to make sense of a setting which, while beautiful, could be inhospitable. Brutal storms could but your life at risk if you did not take precautions. Want proof? Take a look at any of the stories. The individuals who did not take these warnings into account were foolhardy. And, those that did showed great judgment. They were survivors.
Ghost stories and folklore in this day and age reinforce the accounts of stamina and the struggles of the early residents. Tales of ghosts go along well with the Graveyard of the Atlantic, don’t you think? There is a sense of identity, a collective ancestry, that the area shares. This can be reduced to a smaller geographical area as well. The haunted house in a neighborhood—everyone has a story about it. Some bring the story-tellers back to their childhood.
The sense of lore can also be passed down within families and provide anchors for family history. My cousins still tell tales.

I found the image above from Ghetty Images (O. Donmaz).

.It's been almost a month since I've posted. End of the semester grading and Christmas preparation got the better of me. I am pleased, though, to pass along a recent interview I gave on Creativity @ Work. Enjoy

romehow I’ve never managed to read any work by Adam Nevill. So, when he offered a free trilogy of short novellas on Kindle, self-published under the title of Before You Sleep, I jumped at the chance. All three were fantastic, although I have my personal ranking of the stories. Overall, each was riveting and eerie with predominantly subtle passages of horror. The first, “Where Angels Come In”, was my favorite. A boy recounts his experience while recovering from traumatic injuries obtained while he and a friend explored an off-limits haunted house (the big, white house in the woods). The friend didn’t make it out, while the nature of narrator’s injuries are beyond imagining. I mentioned that the horror was subtle across the three stories (and for the most part it is), but the escape attempt from the haunted house doesn’t exactly qualify as “subtle” – and is gripping.
The second piece, “The Ancestors”, involves a little Japanese girl who has moved to a new house with her parents. She’s lonely at first, but then befriends the ghost of another little girl and the toys left behind when other children have “left” the house. This one was my least favorite, although it was by no means a dud. The narration is creepy and unnerving, and you never quite get a sense of what the heck is going on.
The last story is “Florrie” and it recounts the behavior of a young man who recently purchased a townhouse from an elderly woman – whose furniture and belongings remain mysteriously within the house.  I found this story surprising in both the tone and the plot line and was sucked into the story.
Overall, these are not gore fests and the endings are rather ambiguous, so those of you who need closure might be disappointed. However, I found the prevailing sense on uncertainty quite satisfying. 

​Cold as Hell by David Searls is a relatively short novella that contains an emotionally chilling wallop. Peter Craig is Christmas shopping with his wife, elderly uncle and two kids at one of those “lifestyle” malls – which means it is outdoors. The weather is brutally cold, but he kids still want to ride an electric kiddie train that runs around the mall. The parents relent and allow the kids to go, despite the uncle’s warnings that things don’t seem quite right. The mom takes the opportunity to complete some last minute shopping while Peter and the uncle hang out for the train to return. After Peter ducks into a bar to warm up, he returns to find the uncle missing and no sign of the kids or the kiddie train.
The nightmare begins.
The rest of the story involves Peter frantically trying to find the kids. No one has ever heard of (or seen) the kiddie train. The subsequent events become increasingly bizarre and terrifying. For a short piece like this, the characters are nicely drawn. Peter’s frenzied inner dialogue is spot-on, and anyone who has ever misplaced a child for a brief period of time will recognize the distraught sensations of the character. I was able to gulp down this story in one sitting, not only because of its short length, but also because of the intense nature of the plot. Unnerving and scary, Cold as Hell has a distinct Twilight Zone feel to it.  

​I just reread a novel I last read over 40 years ago. The Queen of America by Russell H. Greenan was published in 1972 and was marketed as a horror story at the time. When I read it back then, I enjoyed the novel for its edgy plot and memorable characters. The fact that I recalled it fondly says a lot about the story line and characters within. The protagonist is fourteen-year-old Ignacio (Ig) Never who lives with his father in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dad is a famous Spanish historian who is becoming increasingly anxious and paranoid—which has prompted him to seclude himself in his bedroom. He only communicates to his son by intercom and hand-written notes. Which no adult supervision, Ig roams Harvard Square and surrounding coffee shops and student hangouts with his dog Ripper. He befriends an assorted mix of adolescents and young adults (a 15-year-old mathematics genius attending MIT, an 18-year-old movie porn director, a 19-year-old drug dealer, and a 19-year-old furniture maker). Into this mix appears 16-year-old Betsy, who walks into the coffee house frequented by the characters after riding through a snowstorm on a motorcycle. She’s beautiful with blonde hair and a delightful personality. She’s also a serial killer who loves slashing to death anyone who insults her, regardless of how minor the insult was.
I won’t go any further in my discussion of the plot. By any stretch of the imagination, The Queen of America would not cut it as a horror story in today’s market. There’s no unique twist to the murders or to the killer. Nonetheless, the story was as enjoyable as I remembered it. The characters are great and pretty unique. I cared about them and wondered what the heck was going to happen to them (and the outcomes for many of them are unexpected). Boston circa 1970 is described in a way that is now almost nostalgic—and which probably wasn’t intentional at the time. The technology and dialog are almost quaint which add to the book’s charm. The scenes of horror, while few and far between, are jolting and gory and were probably brutal at the time of publication. They still had the effect for me, most likely due to the rich cast of characters for whom I cared a great deal.