I recently finished three horror novellas and thought I would write up something about them here since I didn't review them for Library Journal.
Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman (Bad Hand Books) is up first.
The summary from the publisher is:
The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later.
Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade—or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.
Rule number Write what you know—so Glenn decides to share his son’s story. The class offers him a chance to make sense of a senseless crime and find the fictional closure life never provided. But as Glenn’s story takes on a life of its own, someone from the past is compelled to come out of hiding before he reaches…
It is a perfect example of grief horror - the tight, suffocating, deeply personal nature of grief when a loved one dies. There is a terror when it overcomes you and it can transform you as much as any supernatural transformation. Glenn Partridge is changed by the death of his son into someone he would not have recognized. The devastation of grief has made him a man obsessed with finding what happened to his son and he learns what happens when the story wasn't meant to be completed. No one writes about grief better than Clay. This book will break your heart as it fills you with dread.
Candy Cain Kills Again by Brian McAuley is a sequel to his previous work for Shortwave Publishing's Killer VHS series. From the publisher:
After surviving the horrors of Christmas Eve at the Thornton house, Austin, Mateo and Fiona head to the Church of Nodland to get some confessions from Pastor Wendell and his congregation. Little do they know that Candy Cain is coming to town to wish one and all a very merry axe-mas!
It's a horror romp that will delight those who miss the experience of going into a video store with friends and pulling slashers off the shelf. In this fun, violent ride, the kills come quickly and are wildly creative. This is the kind of book that can smash a reading slump. The characters' relationships are complicated as they deal with the repercussions of the first book. The emotional fallout is handled with care and a deft sense of character development.
We will end with Coup de Grace by Sofia Ajram. From the publisher:
Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.
Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.
The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.
A terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.
The book has the best sense of depression of any book I have read recently. Readers have the sense of Vicken's dark hopelessness and the endless, gray trap of his existence. Within this novella, Ajram is able to explore the movement between hope and despair within the claustrophobic, confined space of the subway system. The reader is brought along as Vicken wanders in the surreal labyrinth in which he's been trapped. This book is well deserving of the praise which has been heaped upon it. Settle in for an evening and lose yourself within the text. Hopefully, you will make it out.
