An acquired taste that’s much like the rest of the author’s body of work: bloody, terrifying, triumphant.
A one-two punch of grindhouse horror from one of the craft’s most inventive practitioners.
Jones is riding high on his much-lauded vampire Western (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, 2025) but this isn’t a step back by any means, just a palate cleanser, two novels joined back-to-back. These twinned tales of Final Girls under threat from paranormal entities swings less literary, but fans of the author’s Jade Daniels trilogy, not to mention slasher flicks in general, should be delighted with the gruesome results. Killer on the Road finds moody 16-year-old Harper hitting the road after a fight with Mom and hooking up with her best friends, Kissy and Jam, not to mention ex-boyfriend Dillion and tag-along little sister Meg. Before they get very far, they’re attacked by a malevolent truck driver with murder on his mind. This nasty business lifts from all sorts of genre touchstones to make its case—the cat-and-mouse game in Spielberg’s Duel is just one that includes serial killers, physical transformation, and good old American road violence. After the vociferous gore in Killer on the Road, readers might expect a respite from The Babysitter Lives, but no such luck. Harper would probably be friends with high school senior Charlotte, not least due to their shared Native American heritage and ferocious spirit. In Charlotte’s case, what’s a babysitter to do on the night before Halloween except babysit two creepy twins for their secretive, mistrustful parents? Except that, as her girlfriend, Murphy, reminds her, the scariest local legend is about a mother who drowned her children on that very night, years ago. What resembles a modern gothic quickly turns into something else, as Jones visits all sorts of horrors upon his creation, from insanity-inducing portals to somewhere down under, to murderous doppelgängers and other visitations.
An acquired taste that’s much like the rest of the author’s body of work: bloody, terrifying, triumphant.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781982167677
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
