A fun, imaginative story collection with solid horror and writing.
A collection of spooky short stories centered on classic Halloween themes.
In Bills’ newest book of short fiction, the prolific author and expert on all things Texas returns with 13 tales that frighten and entertain. The subjects range from the ghosts of Vietnam vets killed in action to half-nude fortune cookie prognosticators and murderous, insane former judges. In the title story, an otherwise normal suburban father, Bryan Nichols, finds himself despondent at his neighborhood’s lack of enthusiasm for Halloween, especially considering his neighbor—who also happens to be the father of his childhood best friend who was killed in Operation Desert Storm—used to be well-known for his life-size (and lifelike) spooky lawn figures. Soon, Bryan discovers these statues are actually the ghosts of former townspeople. The reader wonders if Bryan will soon join them in the afterlife. Next, Bills switches gears to the tale of a woman with a second sight who dispenses prescient wisdom through fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant. When a reporter comes knocking, the two fall into a brief love affair spurred by her insistence that the world will end any moment. The stories shine most brightly in their shorter form, such as “The Judge,” a well-crafted tale in which a young police officer begins interrogating a man who murdered his own wife, only to quickly realize that he has seen this man before, and he holds a dark secret from the officer’s childhood.
Paths cross and recross over time in this collection, and Bills does well to amplify the inherent friction between competing lives in a small (or even large) town. While certain pieces verge on the saccharine—a common pitfall in any work dealing with love and loss, as horror fiction often does—the general sense while reading is that Bills is a confident, competent storyteller with tales to spin and the requisite command of language to keep readers turning pages. The author does well, too, to capture the essence and nostalgia of Halloween from the outset: “As I walked, I felt like a kid again, fourteen, ten—eight. I smiled and laughed. Halloween had always been our night.” While some pieces drag a bit and could have used a lighter hand (“Nature Calls” slows the pace, for example) readers will garner enough thrills and chills to keep moving through the entirety of Bills’ collection. The blurbs at the beginning of each story are an odd touch that probably could have been eschewed, but otherwise, Bills displays an innate sense for the reader’s experience, in particular by dropping in just enough backstory for each cast member to give the necessary context for the emotional freight to be delivered without bogging down plot with extraneous personal history. Readers looking for a spooky Halloween ride without gore overflowing from its pages will find a lot to enjoy here.
A fun, imaginative story collection with solid horror and writing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781957529431
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Fawkes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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