Christopher Buehlman’s Those Across The River was one of my favorite books of 2018.

Failed academic Frank and his wife, Eudora, move down to Georgia, where Frank plans to write the history of his family and their plantation, and the terrible things that happened there. He inherits the land, or something like that. The townspeople are nice enough and the quaint rural ways all seem nice and harmless, but there a certain dread that plagues the townspeople. A certain presence. That presence demands sacrifice.

Buehlman does a terrific job of building atmosphere here. We spend a ton of time getting to know Frank and Eudora, and their neighbors. The setting, hot, depression era, rural Georgia where the air is humid and suffocating, plays an intricate part of the story in the sense that as Frank slowly feels oppressed by his circumstances, the reader does too.

It became increasingly clear to me what was haunting to the town, although the clues were quite subtle, I thought. I won’t spoil it here. I will say that I wish more horror stories were done this way; the subtle heightening of tension is brilliantly done and by the last hundred pages or so, you aren’t putting the book down.

There is one thing I did not enjoy about this book, and it’s the way Buehlman wrote Frank’s physical descriptions of Eudora. Jesus, guys, is it really so hard to write about women without comparing their bodies to fruit? Or flowers? We get it, Eudora’s got big boobs. Enough already, stop focusing on them. Additionally, if Frank called Eudora a sphinx one more time, I was going to set the book on fire out of sheer annoyance. These awful depictions of the sex didn’t ruin the book, there wasn’t enough of it in the book for it to ruin it, but good lord, just leave it out next time. Sometimes I think sex is something you do in private because it’s so ugly when you aren’t directly involved.

I do recommend this book. In spite of the cringe-worthy descriptions of sex between Frank and Eudora, I thought the rest of the book phenomenal. Just, maybe, don’t read it at night.

Tagged: authors: christopher buehlman, books: those across the river, genre: horror, genre: supernatural