Book Review: How Not to Renovate a Haunted House

Title: How (Not) to Renovate a Haunted House

Author: Jenny L. Howe

Date: July 21, 2026

Publisher: Delacorte

ISBN: 978-0-593-80912-9

Quote: "[M]y favorite parts of really old places are the absurd ghost stories."

Amity's divorced parents, who had a really big house in California, decide to sell the house so that Amity's mother can (drag Amity along with her and) move into a colonial-era house in Massachusetts. If Amity wants to go to college "for free," she has to attend the college where her mother teaches. Amity's spent her high school years preparing for college in California; at the last minute she finds out that she has to go to college in Massachusetts instead. But at least the house comes with an absurd ghost story, which is being promoted on the Internet by a boy Amity and her best high school friend find attractive. 

Oh, for more young adult novels where (realistically) a mere boy's merely attractive face doesn't matter to the protagonist; where, if she must pair off, she pairs off with a boy after she's actually got to know a few different ones. Or (shudder, quake) at seventeen she thinks it might be a good idea not to try to be half of a couple until she's had some practice living on her own, the way I did at seventeen, and this does not mean that she's saying no to romance or marriage or motherhood; it means that she's saying yes to life while she waits for boys her age to start to show some indication of the kind of men they're going to become. Or, if she likes the boy's face on the Internet, she learns that that doesn't mean she'll like him in real life; in real life another boy might be more interesting. Or she has her adventure on her own, and likes a boy, and might have a romance with him later, but the girl's adventure is a story in its own right, independent of any romance she may also have, that year or ten years later. In real life, sharing an adventure is a good way to get acquainted with another person, but in real life every adventure every young person has does not fit by a precise, prearranged formula into a romance. 

But this is a sweet romance. The ghost is, in the reality of the story, real. The girl and the boy are mutually attracted. The girl doesn't seem interested in any of the classes she's taking or the jobs for which they might prepare her; like the protagonists of Teen Romances of 1950, she really just wants to reproduce. The kissing is choreographed to fit in with the laying of the ghost. For me the progress of Teen Romance might be plausible by itself (a few college boys are as nice as Theo, who has a tattoo just to offset what a devoted son and sensitive boyfriend he is) and suspension of disbelief in the ghost story might be possible, but the synchronization of the two plots is too much suspension of disbelief at once. For some readers that's not a problem. It's a cute, clever, slow burn romance in which a long-ago ghost story is brought to light and the ghost is laid to rest...or at least one of them is. There could easily be a sequel. 

The ghost story is mild, like the romance. There are ghosts, plural, and one of them is righteously indignant, but their motivation is to tell their story rather than to hurt anyone. 

As entertainment, this more-rom-com-than-horror story should get a high school student through a few study periods, without provoking any embarrassing emotional reactions. I miss the days when Delacorte was publishing the sort of novels Nat Hentoff and Barbara Danziger were (then) writing, but even readers who want to be activists don't always want to be spurred on. There's something to be said for novels that help us relax, too, especially during high school study periods. 

Book Review: It Came from the Lunchbpx

Title: It Came from the Lunchbox

Author: Eric M. Hamilton

Date: 2016

Publisher: Brief Conceits

Quote: "I pieced together what I was. Some discarded lunch, forgotten in the corner of a third grade classroom."

When Kamal is left alone in the classroom, the long-discarded lunch, which has grown a brain and learned English over the years, starts talking to him.  At first it seems friendly. But it is trash. By the end of this short e-book Lunch is threatening to eat Kamal. 

This story may aim over the heads of third grade readers with its 1980s jokes (Lunch learned English in the Eighties, and as a monster Lunch has things in common with the Eighties monsters in Gremlins) but it has series potential. Adults should love it. Lunch is alarming, but not beyond Kamal's ability to outwit. 

Will something finally eat Lunch? Will something make a Sensitive New Age Monster of him? According to ericmhamilton.substack.com, the answers to those questions have yet to be written.

Book Review: The Night Singers

Title: The Night Singers

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2024

ISBN: 979-8224802265

Quote: "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. - Nikola Tesla"

When bad writers have come to the end of their idea, and their readers want another story, they turn to ChatGPT. When good writers are in that situation, they do some research.

London Clarke did some research about a beautiful, tourist-friendly island. Islands led to the islands in the Odyssey. The islands in the Odyssey included Aeaea, Wailing Island, and the Sirens, for fear of whom Odysseus put wax in his men's ears and made them tie him to his ship's mast. The Sirens' magical song led to sound vibrations and a machine that some people think may stop the progress of cancer, at least for a while, with sound vibrations...Add the basics of a gothic horror/romance tale--the young woman who's immature and maybe a bit masochistic, too, enough to do exactly what she's been warned not to do, and the young man who seems not merely "grumpy" but unapproachable because of a terrible secret in his past--and you have the main plot elements in this book, tied together as only London Clarke can tie. 

It's not a retelling. Riff (short for Robert Isaac Franklin) is not Odysseus, the clever Greek who was able to reclaim his men and walk away from Circe. He is almost as young as Callisto (not Calypso), who takes upon herself to rescue him from a diabolical recording contract enforced by demonic creatures with punk hair and tattoos...

The details of their premarital sex act aren't spelled out in detail but there's no room for doubt that premarital sex takes place. There's also some explicit violence, though in the reality of the story, the characters who get stabbed, bashed with oars, and so on aren't human and deserve worse than they get. 

If you're looking for a Southern Gothic horror romance with movie potential, this book is for you.

Book Review: Claws Clues and a Deadly Detour

Title: Claws Clues and a Deadly Detour

Author: Pandora Gale

Date: 2026

Quote: "[B]est stay in your room tonight. Inn gets...restless."

When her car broke down, Crowe thought she heard a psychic voice calling her to go to the inn in town and help someone. When she lay down in her room in the inn, she dreamed about a big fluffy Maine Coon cat being locked up because people were calling him "the Phantom Cat" and associating him with human trouble. So she uncages the cat and immediately there's a murder for them to solve. 

The cat is in the lead. He has psychic powers. In his past he was worshipped by humans who called him Lucifer. He doesn't like most humans or wish them well. He likes scaring the guilty into confessing. I think this book was written with more comedic than satanic intentions, but it's the kind of book that used to trigger "satanic panic." 

If you read Lucifer as an animal who' s been abused by Satanists rather than an old school witch burner's notion of a familiar demon in animal form, you might want to read the rest of a series about Lucifer and Crowe. I wouldn't spend money. The cute, whimsical, funny part of this series is going to be a phobia trigger for someone you know. There are better cozy mysteries.

New Book Review: The Lingering Dead

Title: The Lingering Dead (formerly Souls of the South)

Author: Philippa Wozniak (formerly Louise Philips)

Date: 2026

Quote: "Sometimes...a house chooses its owner."

Although it's a reissue, what I received was an advance reader's copy of a shiny new edition of this book. 

This is a ghost story. The humans who are alive in the 1930s, when the story takes place, are being moved around by the humans who died during or after the Civil War. If that kind of stories completely destroy your suspension of disbelief, read something else. That's what's not to like about this book

Otherwise it's a classic Southern Gothic story with a sweet, sassy heroine who's in danger of various kinds, sometimes rescuing herself, sometimes being rescued by a handsome hero, and a present-time Miss Louisa who is benign and a ghost Miss Louisa who the present-time Miss Louisa insists is up to no good, and a tangled line of inheritance. Is Ted a Yankee with more money than good sense, who might buy the cotton mill but won't be able to run it, or is he the long-lost rightful heir? The living characters don't know. The ghosts do. And what about the woman who may or may not have been killed before she was placed on the bed beside Ted in the hotel room? 

You'll laugh at the cliches. You'll like Savannah and, as it becomes clear that she's not who she seems to be, enjoy her quest to find out who she really is. You might even manage to like Ted, who seems less conceited than many heroes of romance. If you're not put off by the active ghosts, you'll probably enjoy this book.

New Book Review: I'll Watch Your Baby

Title: I'll Watch Your Baby

Author: Neena Viel

Date: May 2026

Publisher: St Martins

ISBN: 978– 1– 250– 28916– 2

Quote: "Selling children is the natural order."

In the mid-twentieth century a woman whose original name was Martha Louise White became infamous under one of twenty-some names she used, "Linda Taylor," as the "Welfare Queen." Her many hustles, which included various victimless crimes as well as welfare cheating and allegedly included fraud, theft, child trafficking, and possibly murder, may or may not have made her a millionnaire. Nobody was ever sure. Nobody ever proved most of the charges against her; all that was known for sure was that, in the early 1970s, she was taking welfare money under a few different names, claiming more children than were actually found living with her, covered in furs and jewelry and owning three expensive new cars. Welfare payments were supposed to be for women abandoned by men, but "Linda Taylor" had several beaux on her string. For a woman who lived mostly in the North she was quite the Southern Belle. She claimed to be Black, White, or other things as suited her purposes; usually White when she was claiming to be married to a White man. She might have been a sociopath. Ronald Reagan's speeches about welfare reform often referred to the one crime that was proved against her, the welfare fraud, and often suggested that others were doing the same thing. There has never been any shortage of welfare cheats but neither has there ever been a confirmed case of welfare-cheating on anything comparable to the scale on which "Linda Taylor" did it. She was unique.

In order to be the supreme scam artist of her time Martha Louise White had, as Neena Viel brings out in this horror story base on her, to be intelligent (though she had no education to speak of) and charismatic; some of her identities were spiritualists and at least one claimed the title "Reverend." Photo evidence shows that she was pretty, a femme fatale. She could as easily have been a heroine as she chose to be a criminal. She was truly a legend in her own time.

This web site's first Black History Month book pick (tomorrow we'll look at a Valentines Day romance) is based on the legend that was "Linda Taylor." Viel's antiheroine, Lottie Turner, seems made of equal parts of Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind with a sprinkling of Marie Laveau. Her most significant long-term relationship is with another classic motif in the American literary tradition: the haunted site where bad things done in the past have attracted a malevolent spirit. This is a horror story, though for most of its beginning it deals with natural, if very unpleasant, events in the lives of living, if unadmirable, people, and seems like a gross-out story. The ghost isn't named as a ghost until the last quarter of the book. The gross-outs seem attributable to human nastiness, drinking and drugs. The ghost may remind you of the more malevolent ghost in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, as the vivid (and nasty) sensory details may remind you of Stephen King's horror stories generally. One of Lottie's admirers may remind you of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, too. Those are strong characters that tap into enduring archetypes. The effect of mixing those archetypes in one novel is intense.

Lottie is obsessed, and the younger people who gather around her in her old age become obsessed, with red-eyed white flies. Lottie thinks she remembers them from her childhood in Tennessee, sees them everywhere she goes, and seems to be projecting them into the minds of the young people. Houseflies have red eyes, but there are no red-eyed white flies in Tennessee; what gardeners call whiteflies are something different. Those unnatural white flies and their white larvae appear wherever Lottie goes throughout the book. There's a red nightgown that keeps popping up in spooky ways, too, and a photo of a woman with a baby and anywhere from one to ten other children.

The story starts when Lottie, fleeing the scene where she's been convicted of welfare fraud, becomes the friend of Phyllis, "Filly," a woman for whom she works as a baby-sitter. In the 1970s tuberculosis was treatable, but Filly apparently does not benefit from the treatment; lots of TB gross-outs lie ahead. "Linda Taylor" may or may not have murdered a family for whom she worked and burned down their house. Lottie at first remembers being poor, lonely, and aggrieved when she was young in Tennessee, and occasionally thinks she hears an inner voice warning her not to have "another friend." Then Filly's husband confronts her with the fact that she's the Welfare Queen, escaped from justice. Lottie thinks  of killing him, thinks of fleeing, but hasn't done either when her dying friend "turns into a werewolf." Lottie recognizes that although she didn't want to kidnap and sell Filly's children, for the sake of friendship, and didn't need the money, something wanted her to sell the children; Filly says she's arranged for Lottie to "get the children and the house," but something makes sure that can't happen. 

Later some younger people go to a big house in Tennessee where an old woman who calls herself Mrs. Gibson is dying of tuberculosis. The two young men and two young women are friends, almost siblings, not couples. They are, of course, children Lottie trafficked. One of them wants to do to Mrs. Gibson all that she believes Lottie did to her family. Others just want to cheat the old woman out of money. But things get weird. The young people think some of them have drugged, changed the clothes of, damaged the property of, others of them. They are wrong. They're being led to meet the ghost of a slave who was especially badly treated. Her name has been lost. She's the Queen of Flies.

Exactly what's going on isn't always clear. Lottie has a vivid imagination and often speaks metaphorically. Some major events and some details are hallucinations, dreams, or drug trips, and some are metaphors, and some are part of fictive reality. When a character describes something bizarre you have to wait and see whether other characters saw it too, or whether the character describing it expected that they would.

In an afterword Viel identifies Martha Louise White with her mother--whether she's confessing any literal physical relationship, or only saying that her mother took welfare and may have taken more than she was entitled to, she refuses to say. Thus Lottie can't be the cheerful sociopath many like to imagine that "Linda Taylor" was. For Viel the welfare-cheating is trivial, and it's important to Viel to establish that Lottie hated the child trafficking she did, didn't actually commit the murders people thought she did, and didn't particularly relish the sex offenses she perceives as being done to her. 

If you want a real Tale of Blood and the Supernatural, I'll Watch Your Baby is one that will be hard to forget. If you have a sensitive heart and/or a sensitive stomach, read something else.

(How can I be reviewing a book that's supposed to be published in May when it's only February? As regular readers know, publishers sometimes send advance copies of a manuscript they're going to publish to reviewers in order to generate publicity before the book is available in stores. This review is based on an advance copy.)

Book Review: Anansi Boys

Some people don't want to sell or promote anything by Neil Gaiman because, although his sexual misconduct wasn't rape, it did harm the marriage he betrayed and the "other woman" he disappointed. This is a valid concern. However, because today is Halloween and because we're all connecting with our Inner Caribbean Islanders this week, I'm reposting this post from the past anyway. Anansi Boys, which became American Gods, was a brilliant feat of folklore/horror/humor. 

Book Review: Anansi Boys

Author: Neil Gaiman

Date: 2005

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 978-0-06-051519-5

Length: 384 pages plus a preview chapter from Fragile Things

Quote: “As a general rule, the only things properly terrified by the approach of penguins tend to be small fish, but when the numbers get large enough...”

British-American Neil Gaiman begins this novel by acknowledging his debts to “the ghosts of Zora Neale Hurston, Thorne Smith, P.G. Wodehouse, and Frederick ‘Tex’ Avery.” If you try to imagine a novel that this unlikely quartet, or someone who’d tried to learn from each of them, might have written, there is a very slight possibility that you’ll have some idea what to expect from Anansi Boys.

It helps if you know that Anansi is a trickster character in folklore and that “Anansi Stories” is a West Indian name for anything from comic nonsense to outright lies. Anansi Boys is mostly comic nonsense, but it does contain at least one outright lie.

It’s not exactly a horror story, but it does have a few characters who ought by rights to be dead. Mr. Nancy, senior, is a supernatural creature who has chosen to seem dead, temporarily, in order to lend his immortality to his son, Charlie Nancy. Charlie once ignorantly arranged for a witch to transfer his magical qualities into a separate life form, a “long-lost twin” who Charlie decides wasn’t lost enough when he finds his grown-up brother Spider during the course of this novel. As each brother uses what powers he has to save the other, each matures into a complete young man. But there’s also a murder victim whose husband would prefer that she join him in the afterlife, but she insists on staying active as a ghost long enough to punish the murderer.

It’s meant to be nonsense, not religion, but since all “Anansi Stories” are based in a Pagan belief system that conflicts with Christian doctrines, fundamentalists are entitled to barn Anansi Boys from their home.

Banning it may make children more interested in sneaking peeks at it., They will probably “get” enough of the jokes to want to read the whole thing.

I would encourage children not to read this book. You’ll miss too many of the best bits if you’ve not read all the older books that went into Gaiman’s mind to produce this one, and it’s unlikely that you’d have time to read all of them before age 25. Why spoil the suspense by reading the story before you can understand the jokes? Read Coraline, or any of the Discworld books, and save Anansi Boys for later.

There’s less sex and violence in this book than there is in most horror stories, but there’s enough of both to offend some readers. Women who respect their life-giving potential will particularly dislike the character of Rosie, who has always been able to abstain from premature baby-making with Charlie, whom she thinks she loves, but flops into bed the first time she meets Spider and decides that this means she loves him more. (To be fair, at that point in the novel the brothers look identical; Rosie thinks she’s finally giving in to Charlie.) Gaiman spares us the disgusting details and slips this plot element into the story deftly enough, wrapping it up in enough British West Indian slang, that a child reader might miss it...but it’s there. If she’s really in love, guys, she won’t even think clearly enough to bother about birth control! That’s the outright lie. If she really loves you, she’ll protect you from premature fatherhood, just as, if you really love her, you’ll spare her from even having to think about premature motherhood.

On the other hand readers are entitled to appreciate the West Indian-ness of the characters. Their culture, like their genes, is a mixture of Native Caribbean, African, Indian, British, and European influences. Nobody takes much time to analyze what came from where except when, as occasionally happens, someone defies the genetic odds by looking completely “White.” Being financially well off, the characters travel freely among the islands, London, and Florida. Free to be their individual selves, they hold no prejudices (only an occasional individual grudge) and feel some empathy for the less well-to-do West Indians who can’t afford to travel off their native island.

Readers who live in places where they don’t meet people like this in real life will probably want to. I enjoyed being married to one; I enjoyed the memories Gaiman’s characters called back.

There’s also the chuckle factor...Gaiman is the student, former co-author, and novelistic heir of Terry Pratchett, and his comedic style is fully worthy of his teacher and should appeal to all Pratchett fans. Fans of Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, Sue Townsend, P.G. Wodehouse, and/or Charles Williams may also enjoy this book.

Then there’s the sheer novelty of finding a story in English that sides with the spiders against the birds. You may still prefer birds, but you could still benefit from the mental stretch of identifying with the spiders. 

Book Review: Fan Fatale

Title: Fan Fatale

Author: Jinx James

Date: 2023

Quote: "Robyn...soon completely covered the wall of her bedroom with hundreds of photos of Amber."

Which is more the stuff of nightmares: a deranged, over-the-top fan, or a  pretty starlet with no talent, a weak character, and a lot of bad habits? Robyn is the first; Amber is the second. This story, extracted from a collection of short stories, is a horror comic all the way. 

More of us are more likely to have to deal with deranged fans (or even no-talent starlets) than with assassins so why do I read this story as whimsical and amusing, while yesterday's story was concerning? I think the treatment of the topic matters. While some people might be tempted to become deranged fans (or no-talent starlets), this story emphasizes that those are bad things to be and shows how Robyn and Amber could have stopped their own descents from tedious to obnoxious to horrible. They're not being paid to make careers out of being tacky. Nobody is really being hurt...up to the end.

Book Review: Grief Hollow

Title: Sour Roots

Author: Shawn Burgess

Date: 2022

Quote: "With each step they took, the forest grew darker."

In an unspecified deep, dark, creepy part of the Appalachian Mountains, worse things than mold and rot haunt a place soon to be known as Grief Hollow.

One of them is a nameless "fallen woman" who, over years of living alone with grief, shame, and revenge, has transformed into a nightmare creature in the general category of what mountain people used to call Boogers. (The word is probably of Celtic origin, but during some war or other it was deliberately confused with "Bulgarian" and words for what were supposed to be that country's bad habits.) Traditional Boogers were emissaries of the Devil who came to lead sinners to their judgment. They didn't need to look worse than ugly, sooty humans. The only description of them usually given is that they were black (from spending time in the Eternal Fire) and ugly. They led or carried people away to a gruesome fate.

This one, however, seems a bit more like the "Dogmen" of more recent urban legends from further west. The look of a "Dogman" has been explained as based on a view of a bear with a disease that can cause bears' fur to fall out Bears occasionally stand and walk on their hind feet. A bald bear on its hind feet looks a bit like a naked human with a dog's head, only bigger than either human or dog. It might be willing and able to eat a human alive. It would have leathery skin, black if it were the Appalachian Mountains' black bear, and lots of teeth and claws. If it made a sound, the sound would probably be a growl or snarl. That's how Westerners describe Dogmen. It's also how Shawn Burgess describes the resident of Grief Hollow in the 1920s.

In addition to the "honey" whose humanity died in Grief Hollow long ago, whose sole purpose for existing is to get revenge on him, the man who abandoned her has a brain-damaged son, a ladylike but minimally competent wife who's doomed to spend her life keeping her son out of sight, and two little daughters whose idea of rebellion is playing in the forest. Where, in the first chapter, first the children hear a malevolent whisper that they've "come home," then they find themselves running--feeling that they're being chased--toward a crumbling house, and then something with black leathery skin and a lot of teeth and claws eats them.

Meanwhile a turned-out sharecropper (in the Deep South they were usually Black, but in the mountains they were more often White) wanders past Grief Hollow. There a grieving father insists that he be hanged for the murder of the little girls of whom only bloodstained scraps have been found. After all, he's clearly not intelligent and he doesn't know the names of the places he's wandered through. The father wants to vent his feelings on somebody. It's not as if the sharecropper will be missed.

Drawing energy from the children, the monster from Grief Hollow shows herself to their mother and brother. Just describing what she's seen gets the mother declared insane. The brother, who's never been given credit for intelligence,  blathers about "the lady from the mist" being his friend...

The grief will grow from these sour roots for another hundred years, and three volumes, if you want to read them. If you like horror fiction, you probably will. The story is told vividly but tastefully, by the special standards applied to horror fiction, and points to Burgess for leaving the usual moonshiners and outhouses out of this story.

Book Review: Time for Death

Title: Time for Death

Author: Christie Silvers

Date: 2021

Quote: "We always have fun when we go out to Fosters Cemetery."

Canonical vampire stories are about amoral people, but show them bound by a strict moral code, even if they ignore it. Rick, the boyfriend who says the line quoted above to Liz, the protagonist, is pretty much a lawful good character. It's only Liz's chaotic allure that inspires him to take her to the cemetery to have sex on strangers' graves. 

That's where they meet the vampire who seduces Liz and injures Rick, after building his strength by killing a couple of their friends.

Liz is, to stay within this web site's contract, a piece of work and a half. The B word will probably come to readers' minds. It's not just that she describes, in detail, doing what would make babies if she were fully human with three different men in this story. It's the way she cheerfully lets Rick and also Chad, and would let Susan if it came to that, be hurt so that she can fully enjoy Marcus the vampire. The enjoyment of a canonical vampire, as distinct from a tamed Twilight-type vampire, includes killing him--if you can. 

For those who want to read more about that kind of character, yes, there's a series. Liz will roll on, hurting more people, in more books. Vampires will be reduced to sludge after humans are slaughtered in each story. The sacred act of bringing a new life into the world will be profaned. Repeatedly. And Liz will "love" and kill additional men, besides Rick and Chad.

It's the sort of fantasy Freud liked, because he understood it: For readers who feel that they have no power, it may be gratifying to imagine having exaggerated,  unnatural kinds and amounts of power, and using it in ways they know are wrong, thereby justifying their powerlessness in real life.

Book Review: Nocturne House

Title: Nocturne House

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2020

ISBN: 978-1393140283 

Quote: "If the woman in the hospital is Laura, you will find her very changed."

Laura Massabrook does a lot of changing in this novel. More, I suspect, than a real human could survive. 

She's been labelled bipolar, a mental illness that's hard to define and often used as a way to discredit normal young people...as it might be by abusers, or exploitative institutions. Laura may actually have a physically based mood disorder. In the hospital she's predictably unhappy about having her symptoms mis-medicated with drugs that produce unpleasant physical effects. But then she meets a wonderful new doctor who wants to help her reframe her moods as the "empowerment" and "beautiful sorrow" of a brilliant mind. Laura has given no evidence of a brilliant mind, of any talent for leadership or entrepreneurship or "creativity," but trying to become something she probably is not has to be preferable to being legally doped to death...right?

Er, um...the alternative being presented to Laura is the vampire cult that ran Whickering Place and employs Pearse. (The series is a trilogy with a prequel; I've not reviewed them in order because I've not received them in order. Nocturne House is volume three.) 

The vampires in this novel are mostly the kind we sometimes find in real life: human beings who are excited by the idea of drinking other people's blood. They're not "undead," but they think they'd like to be. They consume large amounts of blood: some pilfered from hospitals, some drained from more or less consensual victims at their parties, some exchanged with one another. They also prostitute women and children. Their cult is dominated by abusive men, but promotes a few women to "leadership positions" where they help the men torture and kill other women. Nocturne House also seems to be occupied by ghosts and demons; Laura sees them, but then Laura is coming off a lot of drugs.

The squick level is high. There's a lot of blood and violence, suicide and murder, with quite a few moldering corpses as evidence that can help Laura,, her husband, Pearse, his wife, and law enforcement personnel deal with most of the cult's leaders by legal means. The mood in this novel alternates between terror and gross-outs with no contrasting wholesome scenes for the reader's relief; it's not an emotional roller coaster but an emotional deep-sea dive.

What I didn't like, although I can imagine it being what some readers will like, is the moral ambiguity of Laura's character. She doesn't like being drugged. She doesn't trust her mother or her husband, who lovingly send her back to hospitals to be drugged. So in the vampire cult, while still going to "classes" that seem to be standard business school blah-blah, she gets into an adulterous relationship with one of the cult leaders who seems to be nicer than the others. Of course he's not nice and, in order to break off the adulterous relationship, Laura will have to do things to him that aren't nice either. This is a story where the protagonist does things that certainly aren't virtuous throughout, and her climactic choice is between loyalty to a man who represents absolute evil and loyalty to one who represents self-harm, if not complete self-destruction. So...meh. I like stories where at least one of the alternatives at least some of the characters choose is good, or decent, or natural. 

In the real world there are people who feel that their mental disorders are more unbearable than the effects of drugs intended to damage their brains. Others feel that the drugs and their side effects are more unbearable than the mood swings, "depression," even hallucinations or tremors. There is an industry that wants it to be believed that the first type of mental patients are always closer to sanity than the second type are. Mainly because that industry's motives are so obvious, I'm skeptical about this. I would have felt that the nastiness in this story was justified if it had concluded with some evidence that Laura's mood swings had stabilized, as those of young people often do, and Laura could safely stay off drugs and practice her way to responsible adulthood. 

The writer known as London Clarke says that this kind of "weird, gothy stuff" is reaching some audiences as a good influence. I'll take her word. I don't know whether anyone who feels trapped in situations where all the choices available seem bad reads this web site. If you do, this novel is for you. 

Book Review: Whickering Place

Title: Whickering Place

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2019

Publisher: Carfax Abbey

ISBN: 978-1393470373

Quote: "Agoraphobia is hard enough to overcome on its own, but you've made some great strides this past year."

Avery's therapist is encouraging her to move to the house where her father died, Whickering Place. Her father behaved somewhat strangely after moving there; he's thought to have committed suicide. So, maybe Dr. Murphy believes in the flooding technique for overcoming irrational fears? Whatever. Within a few days, Avery won't know whether she's more afraid of leaving her new home or of staying in it.

The place really does, in its fictive reality, whicker. There are thumping and slithering sounds as if a succubus, a massive snake with a woman's head and arms, lives in the attic. There are bats, too. There is an oldfashioned phone that rings and replays creepy voices. There are mysterious toy coins that turn up in the house and around town, frequently before or after a murder. There are evil spirits who take over the narrative at times, who whisper people's names at night just to scare them.

The town is a fictional world's version of Asheville, where, London Clarke assures us, there is no history of a vampire cult in the real world. 

A few trigger warnings are in order. Teenagers can probably handle the squick level in this book, but adults probably won't want to recommend it to them, or seem to recommend it by letting them catch us reading it. (Hello, younger Nephews? You did not see your Auntie Pris reading this book. You can't be sure someone else is not writing this review.) Avery has a gun--before hospitalization for post-traumatic stress, she was training to be a police officer--and, before the story's over, she will shoot homicidal maniacs to save lives. Avery was a virgin, still getting to know her very first boyfriend when they were shot and he didn't survive, and she's not felt like dating anyone else until she meets the two attractive brothers who are renting rooms in Whickering Place. In the course of the book she will marry one of them and enjoy a proper honeymoon. Before the final page she'll be living alone with the other one, not really as a wife but letting people think she is, waiting to find out whether the one she's married is dead, alive, or maybe undead. The dominant visual image throughout this book is blood, some of it shed consensually in vampire cult meetings, much of it spilled during homicides, some of which are committed by sympathetic characters.

If you enjoy that kind of story, you'll love Whickering Place. Please understand that many people who are brave in real life, including doctors (like one of the brothers) who've worked in emergency rooms and seen this kind of gore on a daily basis, just don't enjoy reading a full-length book about it. 

Bonus for some readers: This novel is part of a series that began with Pearse, previously reviewed here, and describes just how the cult are continuing to use and abuse Pearse Gallagher. Avery will taste Pearse's blood in this story. 

Book Review: Dark Roots

Title: Dark Roots

Author: Lucius Valiant

Date: 2023

Publisher: Thornhill

Quote: "The rumor was that he already had a little vampire in his blood to begin with, and that a hunting accident had caused it to soar past the strict 30% threshold."

So Ramsay is no longer allowed to hunt, and he resents having heard Harlan, the narrator, described as the Van Helsing Society's "most promising hunter." His goal is to ensure that Harlan will be forbidden to hunt, just as he is.  

Will Harlan gain status by hunting down the Highgate vampires...after discovering that they're what's left of his blood relatives? Or will this be the rare novel in which the narrator's antagonist is the one who achieves his goal? I'm not telling.

Vampire stories aren't my favorite genre but, if they're yours, you will probably like this one. It's told by Victorian rules; if the vampires get up to any incestuous orgies, we're not told about it. All we see them do is bite. Though one biting scene goes into lurid details Bram Stoker tastefully withheld.

Book Review: The Quest for Captain Sammy's Treasure

Title: The Quest for Captain Sammy's Treasure

Author: C.L. Hart

Date: 2023

Publisher: Naughty Netherworld

Quote: "Darkness and ominous silence dominated the Jungle of Kled."

This short but complete story is another piece of fanfiction, with some places and characters taken directly from the works of H.P. Lovecraft and others from the works of other Naughty Netherworld authors. It seems more an introduction to a horror novel than a horror story; a character describes various sinister "goddesses" as her aunts, before invoking a rather pretty and nice one who helps the characters find the treasure rather easily. Here are gross-outs rather than horrors, told with that selfconscious delight in a self-parodic style of writing that adds comic relief to Lovecraftian horror fiction. One of Captain Sammy's companions is a humanoid with snakelike features, and one is an alien monster, but they're clearly not bad sorts. They are acquainted with Ketil and Yitzy. 

Most of humankind may find no use whatsoever for this story. Others take an understandable delight in it--Cthulhu fanfiction being a genre that unites lovers of wacky gross-out horror fiction of all ages and nations--and should rush right out and buy it. The printed version is in an anthology called Pirate's Gold. The e-book contains links readers should be able to use to buy or download that book.

If you're not sure whether you'd ever get into the Cthulhu Mythos, this story might be an easy introduction; the horrors aren't very horrible and the gross-outs aren't very gross. The fictional universe of this story gets much nastier than the Jungle of Kled. 

Book Review: The Neighbor

Title: The Neighbor

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2021

Publisher: Carfax Abbey

ISBN: 978-13939-17694

Length: 419 pages

Quote: "I'm the only one now who can protect my children while they're inside the house."

And Claire does a terrible job of it. But that's normal. This is horror fiction. Main characters make terrible mistakes. Usually they can correct their mistakes by the end of the book. First-person narrative is usually a hopeful sign...

Let's admit it: I like this book a lot more than I usually like horror fiction. I read it, I give people some indication of the level of horror they have to face if they want to buy something with just the right chill factor, but horror stories I've read twice are just about limited to Dracula, Frankenstein, Stephen King, Charles Williams, and things I forgot reading the first time. After reading this novel I did not immediately want to delete it off the Kindle; that says a lot for The Neighbor.

Maybe it's because I'm living in my own bad-neighbor story. Why has it not ended decisively by now, as real-life stories of bad neighbors usually do? Because my bad neighbor inherited the same kinds of intelligence from the same ancestors I did. Because I don't have much money to spend on the kind of technology local law enforcement want to see used and don't want to supply. I've seen some of that "Are you sure you're not just obsessed with this man?" kind of thing the characters in the novel encounter (and yes, they are obsessed with the evil man). I'm not. I'm interested in solving a real-world crime, but if I ever feel attracted to another man, it won't be one of my cousins. As long as they keep their health they are good-looking men, but to me they're relatives. It's mutual. Sometimes bad-neighbor situations really are entirely about the real estate. Maybe some part of me was craving a story about a fictional bad-neighbor situation that was about sex and sin and repentance and salvation.

I want to say this on behalf of women who are single, widowed, divorced (like Claire), estranged, temporarily separated, or just working different shifts from their husbands, and are having to deal with creepy male neighbors. There is a tendency, promoted by very bad fiction, to think that any conflict between people of different genders are "really" about sexual attraction to each other and will be resolved by indulging that attraction. Even when they feel such an attraction, sleeping around doesn't solve any problems, except to the extent that it distracts people from their original problems by creating worse ones. We all need to admit that after about grade six, nowadays when people feel free to admit and act on their attractions, conflicts between a male and a female are likely to be really about whatever they're about, on the surface: sales, promotions, top grades, scholarships...real estate...

Anyway, whether or not there is an attraction to be acted on, conflicts between a male and a female have to be resolved in the same way conflicts between people of the same sex and/or family have to be resolved. The Neighbor acknowledges this. Claire's husband has just dumped her for another woman; the bachelor who moved in next door, Steel, is attractive; the attraction is mutual. Given a pretext to speak to each other, they flop into bed. Then a stuffed toy cat Steel gave Claire's youngest child starts haunting the whole family, and her eldest child starts sleepwalking, and the computer starts showing random creepy images that seem to stir up the deepest fears of the person looking at it...and then the really scary events of the story begin. 

Gunnar thinks a drink is a drunk; for some people it is. When he leaves, Claire feels free to "enjoy the taste of wine." Gunnar seems all too ready to ascribe all the bad things that happen to his ex-wife and children to the Demon Alcohol. In the reality of the story I was hoping he'd have to face the different kind of demon Claire and the children are dealing with. He doesn't, but it's a series. There could be a sequel where he does. 

The story takes place in the Hump of Virginia, where Claire soon realizes that along with her demon "lover" she's also dealing with the Demon Development. A more distant neighbor's property is under construction, but the job never gets done because a bottomless sinkhole can't seem to be filled. Claire's Korean immigrant friend tells her that this is because there are "too many holes" in the neighborhood, not physical holes but portals to the underworld through which evil spirits are getting in. The sinkhole is the physical manifestation of the spiritual holes in everyone else's lives, not only Claire's. After talking to Steel another couple will be violently attacked, a new baby will be born dead, and other bad things will happen. Claire can only protect herself and her children.

And she's only a social worker. Claire became a social worker because she wanted to believe that her father developed a mental illness after tormenting mental patients with exorcisms of demons that didn't eist; she didn't want to believe either in demons or in God. She wants to believe she can help people by observing their unhappiness with detachment, never raising a finger, only ever handing out psychological cliches. Before the story's over Claire will be forced to confess sins and ask people for prayers and even pray, herself. 

No, that doesn't make this a Sunday book. The classic cliche of horror fiction is that religious faith, usually embodied in Catholic forms but generally understood as just faith in some sort of higher power of goodness, is always what saves the survivors. The focus of horror fiction is not on the faith but on the feeling of horror, though. The effect on readers' souls may be cathartic but is not inspirational, rhough it's an interesting psychological question why people don't report feeling inspired to pray and do good works after exposure to horror stories. Traditional morality is usually a solid motif in horror stories--Claire's horrors begin with a reckless sex act, in other stories it's a theft or an outburst of unrighteous anger or a show of disrespect toward a parent--yet somehow the emotional effect doesn't seem to be to motivate readers to be chaste or honest or patient or loyal. Unless, of course, they consciously think about it 

Anyway every one of those 419 pages is well written, reinforcing traditional morality if you consciously look for it. Claire's life starts to behave like a computer infested with Windows 10 during one of Microsoft's "update" fits, only, unlike Windows 10, the chaos has an explanation that can be brought under control. Claire has to do the kind of "emotional work" she has presumably guided patients through but hasn't done for herself, facing the trauma that motivates what has seemed like a foolish but harmless quirk: she likes to sneak around town at night pretending to be someone, anyone, other than herself. 

She does not, in the story, have to confess and repent of her sins, but Clarke is a good enough writer to suggest that she's doing that somewhere offstage where denominational bickering about the process of confession won't spoil the story for readers. Some things are best left to readers' imagination and it takes a skilled writer to activate readers' imagination, rather than spelling out every detail.

And, local readers? Local writer. 

Book Review: Ketil and Yitzy's Adventure in the House of Lost Dreams

Title: Ketil and Yitzy's Adventure in the House of Lost Dreams

Author: Team Netherworld Creations

Publisher: Naughty Netherworld Press

Quote: [Yitzy] "had a conical body with a three-eyed head on a stalk."

About a hundred years ago the writer known as H.P. Lovecraft published the very "pulpy" horror stories that made up the Cthulhu Mythos: Horror-fiction monsters, inspired by but not really based on the deep sea creatures oceanographers were beginning to describe and the not-quite-human creatures of folklore and fiction, are the future of humankind. People discover this through adventures narrated floridly, not particularly well, but with a positive delight in long or obscure words and a certain morbid glee.

Literary critics agreed that it was dreadful. Most readers never got into Cthulhu but Lovecraft's work attracted a following of people who read his work as a guilty or rebellious pleasure. Here was nothing educational, enlightening, or inspiring; just delight in gross-outs. For some Lovecraft's sesquipedalian words are part of his charm. 

And so, unto this day, when publishers invite manuscripts of speculative fiction, they still find it necessary to state whether they are or are not willing to read any more fan contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. 

This "novelette" is typical. It's set on a world that died before Earth was born, but its characters use recent Earth slang and references. Ketil is a Swedish ghost; Yitzy is an alien who lets itself be called "he" just to fit in, though its species don't have genders. They will soon be joined by a pair of English ghouls who call themselves Robin Hood and Little John, and seldom miss a chance to talk about their taste for decomposing human flesh. 

Most people don't get into the Cthulhu Mythos. I don't; I don't like the practice of sending out "sample chapters" instead of complete novels, but in this case the e-book breaking off just where the characters drank the gruesome-sounding potion and divded into the murky liquid came as a relief. I say this in a friendly and supportive way. A Cthulhu story is not an ideal gift to a person you don't know well. For those who do like Cthulhu stories, however, this one seems the sort of mix of gross-out, comedy, and adventure they'll enjoy. Publishers who are willing to consider Cthulhu stories should take a long look at this one. Cthulhu fans? Run don't walk.

Book Review: Girlgoyle

Title: Girlgoyle

Author: Evan Ramspott

Date: 2015

Publisher: Storyteller

Quote: "Tffany didn't believe in ghosts...But they were always watching her."

You might, as I did, think that a "Girlgoyle" would be part of a "Better Heroes" collection because she overcame her obsession with her really strange-looking face and did something heroic to help someone else. You would be disappointed, as I was. This full-length novel is coherent and well written in its way but it's not what you expected, and may not be anything you'll enjoy. 

In the reality of this fictive world, gargoyles are alive. They are something humans may become in the afterlife, though no rule is given for determining who becomes a gargoyle. They live in a bare stone tower on a bare stone mountain, their skins are stone-colored, their emotions become a bit stony too, but they have big batlike wings, quite a nuisance for them t learn to drag about, on which they can fly. Their purpose in life is to subdue rebellious ghosts. They live in barracks, not unlike boot camp, and practice until they're good enough at flight and fight to go out and beat ghosts into submission.

Tiffany was a near-normal little girl, not all that strange-looking, just a bit like an anime character. (For some strange reason, although it's not a graphic novel, the book is generously illustrated with anime-style drawings.) Body hardly big enough to support a head that's not oversized, maybe taking a break from the hard work of growing up, maybe not growing up because it's not healthy. Tiffany was subject to anxieties and nightmares, and was never very strong, until one night she felt herself being crushed to death and woke up a pretty-faced, scrawny gargoyle with wings. After a little training in the use of her wings and the magical light energy ghosts and gargoyles wield, she finds the ghost who pushed her into the afterlife and leads her friends, even her teachers, out to destroy him. 

There is internal logic to this book. I totally did not get into it, but you might. The author has skills, and there's been a series of sequels that apparently appealed to people who are less turned off by the gargoyle world premises than I am.  

Book Review: With a Blighted Touch

Title: With a Blighted Touch

Author: J. Todd Kingrea

Date: October 2023

Publisher: BHC Press

ISBN: 978-1-64397-363-0 

Quote: "I've been to doctors ever since the...blackouts started...They can't find any cause for them."

But when Kit's blackouts occur, at the same time, someone who has touched him dies. Kit's still a young man, a failed musician, an addict, and two of every five people in his high school class are dead. Kit grew up in the fictional town of Black Rock, below Blackpoint Mountain, where kids love to repeat the legends about the charred black stones and the sour-smelling whitish fungus that grows in the area, "the blight," being part of some primordial curse associated with a spirit of death trapped in the scorched rocks. 

Kit's always half joked about being cursed. When he lets his memories reopen, he remembers that the evil spirit of Blackpoint Mountain chose him, when he was a child. Black Rock is one of those little towns where all the families are old, all the old families have some sort of sick secret, and then there's that family who are really nasty. Kit had been getting the worst of a fight with some of them after school when the spirit told him that he'll never know when, or which one, but for all his life, he'll be subject to blackouts during which someone who's touched him will die.

Before he remembered this Kit touched a nice, friendly old school friend, the divorced mother of two daughters. So he has to confront his old enemies, find the ancient book, and face the embodiment of death in the cave, to protect these friends.

All the archetypes best loved by horror fiction fans come out and dance in the Great Smoky Mountains, in the summer of 2011. Including the innocent person who naively sets the stage for some sort of return, or recurrence, in the 2020s.

I read it with a chortle, as I read the main plot of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, at the effects continually scrubbing mold off things can have on the imagination...but if you want something to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, this horrid tale, with its funguslike zombie children and its school bullies who grow up to worship demons, is for you. 

There are things like that. They are found wherever humans are found; they are humans' archetypes. The forms they take in your city neighborhood are familiar. What forms might they take in the scenic hills where you vacation? J. Todd Kingrea knows. Stephen King (who's not noticeably related to me) ought to appreciate his mix of terror, horror, and gross-out.

Book Review: Beneath the Flesh

Title: Beneath the Flesh 

Author: Claire Ladds

Publisher: Claire Ladds

Quote: "The voices carried on, Mr. Cavannagh trying to fend off his wife's nasty, cruel sniping, but with little success."

Here's the solid "fact" in this piece of fiction: Miriam, Mrs. Cavannagh, is a horrorcow. Long ago her ancestors made some money renting out rooms in their big, cold house, somewhere in an unspecified place where the characters seem British and the weather is cold enough for Canada. Now--which feels like the 1940s, but then characters whip out mobile phones--Mr. Cavannagh drinks, and Mrs. Cavannagh walks in her sleep. They have no paying lodgers left. They have an orphan Mr. Cavannagh invited to live with them in a burst of drunken bonhomie, and Mrs. Cavannagh trained to work in the shop that is now the Cavannaghs' source of income. It's an unusually cold winter, when snow hangs on all winter long, and the house is always cold> Mrs. Cavannagh tries to ignore "Final Reminders" and limits everyone's food. 

If asked, Mrs. Cavannagh could say that they've treated Ella as if she were their own daughter. This is likely to be true. Mr. Cavannagh would probaby be just as weak, and Mrs. Cavannagh just as spiteful, if they'd had a child of their own. Ella is now twenty-three years old but "kids had more pocket money" than she's allowed to keep out of her duly documented wages for work int he shop. She's working for room and board. The room is cold, with a loose window that lets in the snow. The food is cold, scant, and nasty. Mrs. Cavannagh hits her husband and beats Ella when she's not feeling good about herself. And does she feel bad about herself merely because she's likely to lose her ancestral home, or has she done worse things?

One morning Mr. Cavannagh disappears. Did he go out into the falling snow to smoke his pipe, or did Mrs. Cavannagh kill him at last? He's talked of taking Ella and leaving his wife, but he's too drunk, and she's too badly intimidated, to have much chance of surviving on their own, and both of them know it.

In any case, Ella's luck is about to turn. A rent-paying lodger turns up, a young woman who says she works in the film industry. She's older, and has changed her name and hair color since Ella last saw her, but she's an old foster sister from the abusive home where Ella lived before she met the Cavannaghs. Is she really just an A.A. with an entry-level job that pays well...or is she an undercover police officer? 

And why did a knife with blood on it turn up in Mrs. Cavannagh's hand as she woke up one morning? What about the other things going missing?  And what's in the private freezer, locked with a padlock to which Mrs. Cavannagh is sure she holds the only key? Would Mrs. Cavannagh really have killed her husband, chopped him into pieces, and stowed him in the freezer?

If you're looking for a gothic tale full of cold, hunger, and hostility to help you appreciate warmth, food, and family, Beneath the Flesh is for you. The bitter chill never leaves the fictional atmosphere; the end of the book reminds us that hardships do not make people nice. Ella and her foster sister are not idealistic introverts like Sara Crewe. The foster sister even takes the name Maya, reminding us of the Hindu philosophy of karma as an endless cycle of revenge spanning beyond generations and spawning fresh abuses. This is the darksome land, wild wolf-cliffs and windy wilderness, where extroverts seem doomed to spend their lives. 

Be kind to orphans, Gentle Readers.

New Book Review: Pearse

Title: Pearse 

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2024

Publisher: London Clarke

Quote: ""What did you get me?" She blinked. "Absinthe.""

Men do well to beware of a woman who asks a man for a date, much less one who pays for his drink, but even for a gal who does the asking and the paying, Lacey is more than Pearse bargained for. 

Pearse is a "sanguinarian." A professional phlebotomist at a hospital, he's become a bit kinky about drinking human blood. There are real people like that. Like other people with peculiar sexual kinks, they form social clubs. And, just as it's easy for people with more sinister intentions to take advantage of more popular kinks, it's easy for people with really evil intentions to exploit a club of people who want to act out "Dracula" fantasies.

This book is a "prequel" leading into a series. It has an ending, but Pearse knows the ending is only temporary. His troubles will resume.

Content warnings: This is a novel about people trying to emulate Dracula in real life. Violence, enough detail to make it clear that extramarital sex is going on, and the kind of language you'd expect today's young people to use when that sort of thing is happening, are to be expected. This is the sort of book parents and teenagers will probably hide from each other--each knowing that the others are aware that that sort of books exist, but neither wanting to know that their parents or their children actually read it.