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Book Review

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Posted on November 10, 2022

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) by Eric LaRocca

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First published last year in the US by Weirdpunk Books, Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) has made its way to the UK and found a home with Titan Books. Somewhere along its journey across the pond, it picked up a new cover and two more short stories – ‘The Enchantment’ and ‘You’ll Find it’s Like That All Over’ – transforming the book from a novella into a short story collection.

The collection still retains an echo of its original form as most of its pages are taken up by the titular story ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke’- a post-internet take on the epistolary form which comprises emails and instant messenger transcripts between Agnes Petrella and Zoe Cross. Read more

Posted on April 3, 2021

Stephen King’s LATER: A Review

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I started absorbing Stephen King before I was born. When she was pregnant with me, my mom distracted herself with two equally consuming tasks: stitching future-me a small quilt (despite very little knowledge or skill related to sewing) and reading the serial installments of The Green Mile, published between March and August of 1996. She spun my future with fabric squares—painstakingly arranged for comfort—and whatever textures might be taken from the echoes of chants and shaking chains on a fictional death row. Manufactured, destroyable dread was the invisible thread connecting the balloon to the toy block to the yellow background.

Now, it’s 2021 and I’m an adult who does my own grocery shopping and I see a new paperback on a display at Costco and I throw it into my cart before any food. King’s latest (aptly titled Later) is a compelling, genre-mash and in many ways, one of King’s most honest stories. Read more

Posted on March 27, 2021

Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons (Book Review)

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Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons

Author: Steve A. Wiggins

Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021

Popular culture continues to provide evidence of its fascination with the demonic and possession. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the number of horror films that have been produced over the years on the topic. Given the influence of Christianity as the dominant religion in American culture, and the centrality of the Bible within that tradition, it might be assumed that as the Bible informs cinema’s demons that this influence is straightforward, simple, and one-way: from the text to the screen. But this is not the case. The reality is far more complex, multifaceted, and synergistic.

Steve Wiggins explores and unpacks this topic in his new volume, Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons. As with his previous volume on religion and horror, Holy Horror: The Bible and Fear in Movies, Wiggins brings together his academic background in biblical studies, along with a fan’s and scholar’s interest in horror. The result is an informative exploration of both the Bible and the demonic in horror that has as much appeal for those involved in either area of research specialization, and even more so for those who appreciate when these areas overlap. Read more

Posted on October 6, 2020

Deconstructive Nostalgia in Clown in a Cornfield

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Adam Cesare’s first YA horror novel Clown in a Cornfield delivers exactly what it promises from the title. High school senior Quinn Maybrook, a city girl from Philadelphia, moves with her father to the rural town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, after a family tragedy. They’re looking to move on from this trauma, and so it’s ironic that they settle in Kettle Springs, a town rooted in the past. Quinn quickly assimilates into the surprisingly vibrant youth culture in the town, but she soon learns that not everyone is so fond of the town’s teens. The majority of the novel takes place over the course of one night, as a group of killer clowns attack Quinn and her new friends.

So, why killer clowns? As Brandon Cornett’s article on creepy clowns claims, clowns are terrifying because of their inherent unknowability. Their true emotions are hidden through the use of a painted-on facial expression that’s often overly exaggerated. Clowns fit well within the realm of the uncanny valley: they look one way, but, in the case of horror films, commit acts of violence that don’t always add up with their outward appearance – cheerful and animated. Read more

Posted on April 23, 2020

We Know How It Ends…and Yet: Alma Katsu’s The Deep

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I read Alma Katsu’s last novel, The Hunger, because it was about the Donner Party’s fate. I knew going in things were going to be bad for the Donners and the families that followed them out west; slow starvation, ill-planning, and death buried in the snow-covered mountains. What I was not expecting was the horror Katsu created in such a constricted narrative. She was magically able to thread superstitious doubt, panic, and fear in a way that made reading the ill-fated journey less of an exercise in schadenfreude and more nail-biting. I am still scared when I think of passages in that book, so my anticipation for her latest novel, The Deep concerning the fates of the RMS Titanic and her sister ship the HMHS Britannic was palpable to say the least.

Both ships go down within four years of each other, and both sank due to the hubris of men enthralled by capitalism and war. While I may not know the history here as well as I did with The Hunger, I know Katsu is up against the challenge of reader expectations. The Deep is a strong novel and though tackling a historical tragedy so profoundly embedded in our cultural memory, it manages to build tension about exactly how the tragedy will unfold. As with The Hunger doubt, terror, and superstition haunt the characters and equalize them across the economic divisions that the Titanic made so clear. In The Deep, Katsu delivers another novel with a refreshing take on a story well-told. Read more

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