An assortment of jolts, abominations, and shaken nerves that readers won’t soon forget.
The suburbs are a breeding ground for malevolent entities and hideous sights in this debut collection of horror short stories.
In “Green Eyes,” the first of 13 tales, an outcast at school lives alone with her mother. The two have an unusual remedy when one of them is sick, which only turns scarier as the story continues. Throughout this collection, the seemingly harmless either precedes something sinister or proves to be the source of horror. For example, Phil works at Darryl’s comic-book store in “Origin Story.” It’s hardly surprising when their conversations entail hypothetical superpowers, until it leads to a frightening reality. In the same vein, the tales’ settings are familiar, typically welcome places, such as a retail store, a nighttime beach, and a kids’ birthday party. Hawkins grounds so many of these stories by integrating relevant concerns, from low-income housing to body-image issues. Bullying, too, plays a part in some of the characters’ lives, including the blue-collar narrator of “Carpenter’s Thumb.” After he crushes his thumb with a hammer swing, his co-worker Carl laughs mercilessly, just one sign of the two men’s increasingly destructive relationship. Narratives will draw readers into characters’ mindsets; even when they’re nameless or they fear something intangible, it’s easy to tremble right alongside the players. That’s certainly true for Carol when her young daughter becomes obsessed with a cult children’s show in “The Stumblybum Imperative” (“The screen was awash with bright colors as the characters huddled in their costumes…Oversized heads made of felt and foam pressed together, barely fitting inside the frame”). Although Carol finds herself mesmerized as well, it’s still unsettling when one of the bubbly, plushy-costumed Stumblybums turns inexplicably erratic right there onscreen. The author’s pithy writing churns out chilling scenes that feed on suspense and don’t linger on the gory bits for long. Regardless, the book’s highlight is the potent, cringe-inducing “Storms of the Present.” In it, one person goes to terrifying lengths to lose weight—and that’s merely the beginning of a dark descent.
An assortment of jolts, abominations, and shaken nerves that readers won’t soon forget.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781937346126
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Coronis Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.
A doughboy makes a curious discovery at the front in this inventive metaphysical horror tale.
This novel by Kraus centers on Private Cyril Bagger, a U.S. soldier during World War I and the son of a bishop who died on the Lusitania; he’s taken his father’s Bible with him into the Army as a remembrance. He’s also a confidence man and shirker relegated to burial duty in the French countryside, which is fine with him: The work is grotesque (Kraus depicts wartime deaths in visceral detail) but keeps him from becoming a corpse himself. Alas, his commander has hand-picked him and four other “disreputable” soldiers for a suicide mission to rescue what sounds like an incessantly shrieking soldier. Cyril finds the source of the shrieking, which turns out to be—well, that’s tricky. Cyril sees her as a vaguely familiar woman, clothed in red and blue, bathed in bright light, and capable of magically rescuing him from the worst of German gunfire; members of his cohort see a mother, a former lover, and other women. So for the purposes of Kraus’ novel, the shrieker is a metaphor for the ways war stands in contrast to our deepest needs for care and safety. It’s a sweet sentiment, albeit one that Kraus coats in a lot of ugliness, particularly the seemingly endless human carnage. Kraus structures the novel as an extended run-on sentence (with paragraph breaks), giving the story a relentless and intense rhythm. As a veteran horror writer, he’s gifted at depictions of blood and guts and knows how to keep a story moving, but in its latter stages the novel is a philosophical one as well, concerned with humanity’s seemingly inborn need to wage war and what might counter it. The identity of the woman Cyril calls an angel is vague, but Kraus has a clear grasp on our worst impulses.
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068458
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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