An assembly of refreshing horror tales that unnerve with panache.
This collection of Ohio-based stories, edited by Landry, revels in the macabre.
The collection’s 18 writers offer a wide range of creepiness—a growing boy’s fixation on snatching people’s teeth; a woman’s repeatedly dying in others’ bodies; and assorted monsters. Megan E. Hart opens this book with a punch. “In the Clearing” follows struggling addict Becka’s hopeful turn as a surrogate mother. The intended parents’ generosity, however, is quickly overshadowed by their unorthodox methods and increasingly grim behavior. Some of the other opening stories are scary but mere teasers for the true terror. War veteran Luis Gomez in Weston Kincade’s “Every Good Deed...,” for example, waits at a hospital for news on his sickly wife, but he stays calm by fidgeting with a grenade. Likewise, young Amanda of Gary A. Braunbeck’s “When Daddy Was All Fixed-Up and Everybody Was Happy” wants somehow to fix her well-known horror writer and psychologically disturbed father. The book’s real star, of course, is Ohio, the state of “fairly friendly” cities, ice cream shops, and wide-open countryside. These tales, however, show what may be hiding underneath, from ghosts at the Ohio State Reformatory to the unsettling figure a housekeeper spots in a cabin in Hocking Hills. Each author writes well, dropping believable characters into fearful or outright terrifying situations, and most readers will knock out (and relish) this book in an afternoon. The collection’s final entry, Lucy A. Snyder’s darkly humorous “Avocation,” takes a slight but welcome detour; a woman on a first date recounts the worst thing she’s ever done. Her buoyant narration (“No, I don’t do threesomes. May I finish my story? Thanks”) stays charming even as she gets closer to confessing her sin.
An assembly of refreshing horror tales that unnerve with panache.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2022
ISBN: 979-8218052232
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cracked Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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