I read Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods in 2020 and I bought it because it was described as a horrifying psychological thriller and…I guess that’s true? I wasn’t horrified. It was a psychological thriller. I’m going to go ahead and say spoilers because the book only came out in 2018, but…eh.
I had a lot of problems with this book. First of all, it was extremely confusing. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I’m pretty bright. I was never a kid who had any trouble with “book learning” and if I’m really focused on something I’m interested in, I pick it up pretty quickly. I had to reread passages in this book over and over and over again to make sure I understood them correctly. I’ve read confusing books before, but this one was just loaded with stuff that left me scratching my head upon first reading.
It was even difficult to determine the setting at first, although that was one of the easier parts to figure out. The story is set in colonial New England, and basically, a woman goes berry picking in the woods and gets lost. She finds herself in the company of three other women – Captain Jane, Granny Someone, and Eliza, to whose cottage she keeps returning.
It also becomes clear throughout the book that the narrator, who is called Goody by the women she meets, is being beaten by her husband and her son is emotionally distant from her. It also becomes clear that she is trapped in a cycle of abuse that never ends. All the characters are. Fairy-folk are stand ins for Native Americans. Hope – personified by a golden blonde girl – comes and goes. The characters are trapped in some kind of surrealist game where they willingly abuse other people by someone who controls them.
The whole thing is imagery of fairy tales and folklore and even the Bible, but to me the book fell flat. Strangeness can be fun, but after awhile it gets tiring. If I have to work that hard just to figure out what’s going on, I can’t enjoy the story. And I don’t love the whole ‘abuse’ thing as an allegory or a metaphor or whatever it was. People seem really split on this book, with lots of people singing its praises and lots of others more in line with my way of thinking.
I’m sure In the House in the Dark of the Woods is a book for someone, but it’s not a book for me.
Category Archives: horror
In the House in the Dark of the Woods
The Outsider
I was always going to read/listen to The Outsider. It was released in 2018, and I listened to it in 2020 during Covid, of course, but I had been on the waiting list at the library for much longer – I think three or four months. Anyway, I was always going to read The Outsider because Stephen King wrote the novel around Holly Gibney, probably my favorite of his female characters to date, and maybe favorite overall.
Holly is hired when what seems to be an open and shut case begins to get out of control. The raped and mutilated body of Frankie Peterson is found, and all signs point to Terry Maitland, a teacher and local Little League coach. Maitland claims innocence, as he was at a conference with other teachers at the time of the murder, but they find his fingerprints and DNA at the crime scene – however, they also find video of him and his fingerprints at the site of the conference, with the other teachers confirming his nearly constant presence.
Maitland is eventually murdered by Ollie Peterson, Frankie’s brother, who blames Maitland for his brother’s death and his mother’s resulting fatal heart attack. Ollie is shot and killed by police. Ralph Anderson, who ordered the public arrest of Maitland and blamed for the ensuing publicity circus, is put on leave. With his dying breaths, Maitland continues to insist he’s innocent.
Holly, who has become a private investigator since we last saw her in End of Watch, takes the case when she’s approached by the investigator hired by Maitland’s attorney. Things proceed from there, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes quote driving the story: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. The premise of the story is that a guy was in two places at once, and Holly knows that cannot be the case.
I enjoyed this book a lot although I saw some mixed reviews of it when I googled it briefly to refresh myself of some of the character names (I couldn’t remember Terry’s last name to save my life three years later). Once again, Stephen King sucked me into a story *so* fast. It took one chapter or less. His gift for this, at least in my case, is something I can only dream of.
I love that Holly has opened a detective agency. I love Holly. She is just as adorably quirky in this book and I found her just as endearing.
Of note: HBO made this novel into a show and I hated it because they ruined Holly. I remember seeing a lot of criticism at the time that people who disliked the TV version of Holly was because she was black and eyeroll. It wasn’t that she was black. It was that they took away all her charming quirks and just left her as someone who was socially awkward. I love that she’s a movie buff and that she bites her nails obsessively and that she’s very sweet and loyal once you get to know her. None of what made her wonderful came through in the adaptation. I was super glad when HBO decided not to pick up season 02.
Better Holly news! Stephen King is publishing another novel focused around Holly later this year, and I’m so excited that I’m tempted to preorder it.
Christopher Buehlman
After reading Those Across The River in 2018, I decided to finish up Christopher Buehlman’s published novels in 2019. Or at least the ones available to listen to in my library. I listened to these while fixing up my home before moving in, so they were great for passing time.
Those books were (in the order that I read them):
The Lesser Dead
The Suicide Motor Club
The Necromancer’s House
But let’s do this backwards, because I didn’t finish The Necromancer’s House and was less impressed with The Suicide Motor Club. The Necromancer’s House was a snoozefest. The premise was super promising – a guy can speak to the dead through film and ends up being chased by a monster out of Russain folklore – but I just couldn’t get through it. Maybe I’ll try again, maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but it just didn’t grab me.
The Suicide Motor Club was a revenge story. It takes place in the 1960s and involves a group of nomadic vampires driving around highways in muscle cars, taking victims from car wrecks (that they cause). They accidentally leave a live witness after wiping out her entire family, and she joins a convent in the hopes of finding peace. Years later, she’s approached by a group of vampire hunters, with a goal of wiping out all the vampires, especially the ones in the fast cars. She’s the only one who can recognize them. This one was pretty good but it dragged a bit in the middle, and it wasn’t as good as the The Lesser Dead, which it was tied to through a character named Clayton.
The Lesser Dead was definitely the best of these three books and the scariest fiction book I read in 2019. If you want to feel discomfited through an entire book and especially at the end of a book, this is the story for you. The book follows Joey, a vampire living in the New York underground in 1978. Joey was turned by Margaret in the 1930s, as revenge for getting her fired from her job as a cook.
Anyway, in spite of this antagonistic relationship, Joey is now part of Margaret’s nest of vampires, along with some others. Vampires are corpses that are all in varying states of decay, and have to use their glamor magic to project the image of health to humans and other vampires, and this is how Joey in particular sustains himself: he goes to night clubs and parties, picks up women, and drains them.
The nest of vampires encounters a bunch of child vampires, who are constantly hungry, and not very discreet, which goes against the group rules. The children are so constantly hungry that Joey thinks they might be another species of vampire entirely, but this is eventually found not to be the case. Still, the vampires find themselves feeling sorry for the children, who they think were turned for pedophilic purposes, and feed them their own blood.
Obviously things are not quite what they seem, and the reader learns this as Joey does too.
I will say it’s a little slow to start, but it’s clearly building to something, and overall I loved The Lesser Dead. It was thoroughly creepy and unsettling. I will probably revisit it and it’s the strongest reason for revisiting The Necromancer’s House. I really can’t emphasize how good this book was. I listened to the audiobook, which Buehlman actually narrates and it’s outstanding. It was a fantastic experience and I can’t recommend it enough.
The Dark Half
The Dark Half is a horror novel by Stephen King, I think maybe writing as Richard Bachmann at the time. Bachmann was a penname of King’s during the 1970s and 1980s. It’s one of two books by him I read in 2019 (the other being Pet Sematary).
The story opens with Thad, an author and recovering alcoholic, living somewhere in Maine. Ludlow, I want to say. Thad’s books aren’t very successful, they’re a dense literary fiction, fairly cerebral, and he finds success under the penname George Stark, writing crime novels about a psychotic killer.
When it becomes known that George Stark is actually Thad, Thad and his wife stage a phony funeral at the local cemetery that attracts a bunch of attention, including from People magazine. I can’t remember exactly why they decided to get rid of Stark. I think it was because Thad became kind of a shitty person while writing as George (drinking heavily and chain smoking and being a general nasty piece of work) and with people discovering Thad was George, he didn’t need George so much anymore.
Well, as things usually go in horror stories, George did not stay dead. He emerges from the graveyard with a physical body and equipped with the “personality” Thad gave him while he was writing as George. George goes on a killing spree (like the psychopath Thad wrote about in his crime books), killing everyone associated with his death, including the author of the People magazine article, Thad’s editor, etc… George is not a very nice guy. The murders are investigated by Alan Pangborn, the sheriff of Castle Rock (and one of King’s recurring characters). Thad has alibis, and doesn’t much want to answer questions, but his fingerprints and recordings of his voice are found at the scene, and Pangborn believes Thad is guilty of the murders, he just isn’t sure how.
Anyway, after Thad realizes he and Stark have a mental bond and realizes his twin children also have mental bond, he and Pangborn figure out that Thad had a twin reabsorbed in utero, and that this parasitic twin was removed from Thad’s brain as a child. (Gross, y’all). So the question becomes if Stark is a malevolent spirit separate of Thad, or Thad manifesting an alternate personality? And who would win?
I love pseudo-psychology/scientific stories like this. They’re fun and ridiculous, and this was no exception. In addition to being a horror book, it was also something of a whodunit, which are one of my favorite types of stories, and it kept me very interested as I pulled up carpeting and painted my new home (before moving in). As with many of King’s books, I was left feeling rather creeped out and thankful I didn’t have a twin (at least none that I know of). *shudders*
The Grip of It
Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It was a psychological thriller/horror book that was favorably compared to the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and that’s mostly why I picked it. It wasn’t a bad book, exactly, it just…wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, I guess.
Julie and James are a young married couple who move into a house “between the forest and the ocean” because they need to get away from the city where they lived. James is basically a gambling addict and unable to control himself, so they leave to “start over” in the country with no money. As someone raised on the east coast of the United States for my whole life, I LOL’d at this. Where did you get a house by the ocean you can afford with no money, exactly? Please let me know, I’d like to move there.
Anyway, after they move in, the weirdness cranks up. The cute (if old and in need of some cosmetic work) house they bought seems to start rotting from the inside out, with strange stains appearing on the walls and the water inexplicably contaminated with filth. I will say that Jemc does a good job of building atmosphere here. The language is good and the house is claustrophobic and undeniably creepy. There are rooms within rooms (hello, House of Leaves) and the feeling that the house is haunted pervades throughout the novel, with hauntings happening to everyone but very much centered on the main characters. In desperately searching for the source of the house’s unexplained decay and their increasing psychological and physical torment, we end up following the couple as they get to know their weird neighbors and search for information on the house’s mysterious previous owners.
There are two places Jemc falls short here, though, and they’re fairly major flaws: the couple themselves, Julie and James, are flat, boring, and what personality they do have is rather unlikeable. This is a pretty major flaw if you’re trying to get a reader to sympathize with them. The second place this novel fails is with the resolution, in that there is none. There’s an element in many psychological horror books that leaves a lot up to the reader, but this book has literally no resolution to anything. The couple just picks up and moves out of the house. I don’t know how they managed this with no money either, but when one of the narrator’s mysterious bruising matches the weird wall stains and you never get a clue as to why, common place mysteries like “how are you buying and selling homes with no money?” take a backseat.
I’d give this book 2.5 of 5 stars, if I was using a star rating. The atmosphere and language I enjoyed, but the characters and plot fell really flat.
The Fisherman
I picked up John Langan’s The Fisherman when I was living in Nyack, New York because it was in the “local interest” section of the Barnes & Noble in the Palisades Mall.
There aren’t a ton of horror novels that take place in upstate New York, but I found one.
It was pretty good.
The novel takes place over a course of three parts and is presented as a memoir of our narrator, Abe. In Part 1, ‘Men Without Women,’ Abe marries Marie who dies, about a year and a half after their marriage, of breast cancer. Abe is naturally devastated, but eventually pulls himself out of his depression and burgeoning alcoholism when he wakes up one day with a strong desire to go fishing. Fishing is how he eventually processes Marie’s death and is able to go back to work in a functioning manner.
As the years pass, one of Abe’s co-workers, Dan, also loses his wife and children. His wife and twin toddlers are killed instantly when they’re hit by an 18 wheeler that runs a stop sign. Abe strikes up a friendship of sorts with Dan, and they go fishing most weekends, sharing a bond of grief they don’t really speak about.
Eventually, Dan suggests they try a new fishing spot – Dutchman’s Creek in the Catskill mountains. On the way up, they get caught in a torrential rain and stop at a diner, where a short-order cook (a thinly disguised version of HP Lovecraft) hears their destination and advises them against going. Part 2 of the book – ‘Der Fischer’ – tells the history of Dutchman’s Creek. This is where the story gets really bizarre, in the way most horror stories are bizarre. Using the technique of a story within a story, we go from the present day to the early 20th century, where we are presented with a tale that includes zombies, an immortal sorcerer, water nymphs, a cursed grimoire, disgraced academics, a heroic fellowship of men, and last but certainly not least, an ancient primordial monster lurking below the waves of a vast, black ocean (leviathan).
Part 2 of the story takes up the most space but to me it was the most interesting part.
So, Abe and Dan decide to continue on to Dutchman’s Creek, in spite of the warnings of the short-order cook. This is a horror story, afterall. Part 3, ‘On the Shores of the Black Ocean,’ is where these two narratives converge and goes on to address the consequences afterwards. I won’t ruin it for you, as this is a pretty decent payoff and the book isn’t that old.
This is the sort of book that is about one thing but is really about something else. This book is a book about grief, and how people deal with it and go on to use it to continue their lives after a devastating loss. Abe uses his grief as a force to transform his life. Dan stews in his with a horrific result. It reminded me, in this sense, of the movie ‘The Babadook.’
I enjoyed this book, but I can see why not everyone would. It’s a character study as much as a horror novel, and it does have a rather slow build up and is very psychological in many ways. That said, I really enjoyed it, especially as I knew the local geography. I recommend it highly, if you like this kind of story. It was interesting, well done, and very suspenseful.
Pet Sematary
I didn’t do a lot of Stephen King in 2019, I suppose because I did so much of him in 2018. Pet Sematary is considered one of King’s “classics,” one of the novels everyone points to when no0bs ask where they should start with King.
I am pretty glad I didn’t start with Pet Sematary. This is where it gets a little strange with me. I thought Pet Sematary was really good, but I can’t exactly say that I liked it. I know, I know.
Let’s start with the most obvious thing I had trouble with in this novel: I’m not a big fan of animal deaths, no matter the type, even if it wasn’t horrible torture porn or anything like that. I’m that person who only cares if the dog dies. So there was an animal death in this book, which I didn’t love, but on the other hand the book is so old I knew the general plot and knew it was coming.
Then, there is the main character, Louis. Sigh. It’s not that he’s a bad character, or even particularly dislikeable but I personally tend to dislike characters/people who live in denial and lie to themselves. (No, I don’t have many friends in real life, how did you know?) Honestly, I have a lot of character flaws, but believing my own bullshit is not one of them. How many times do you have to do the same thing before you realize it’s not a good idea? Louis is one of those. How many times do you have to bury things in the ancient Indian burial ground before you figure out the outcome is not going to be better? At least one more, apparently.
There’s also the whole trope of the ancient Indian burial ground. The book came out in 1983 so things weren’t quite as enlightened then but I still probably wouldn’t use that trope today. That said, in this case it was a really effective use of the trope. I also think King may have played fast and loose with the geography of the Mi’kmaq people because while I think they are a tribe of the Northeastern Woodlands, I think most of their territory is in Canada, not as much in Maine. I looked this up when I read the book but it’s been a while. This is one of those things I’m willing to overlook while acknowledging it might be considered culturally insensitive. I also remember reading the Mi’kmaq had really interesting spiritual practices (nothing about cursed burial grounds), but that’s not really relevant.
Anyway, like I said, I enjoyed Pet Sematary but I can’t quite say that I liked it. It is definitely one of King’s best novels, and an excellent place to start with his books. Highly recommended.
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
Necronomicon is a selection of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories. For those who don’t know, ‘Necronomicon’ is a fictional ‘Book of the Dead’ by a ‘mad Arab’ that appears in Lovecraft’s work, which contains stories of the ‘Old Ones’ (old gods) and how to summon them.
I know Lovecraft is a problematic author in many ways but I still really love his work. Lovecraft’s legacy is a complex one, as he was both racist and classist, but he did moderate as he got older. His social attitudes were common for his time, especially in New England where he grew up, and he still wrote some great horror stories.
I’m familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos (not an expert, but familiar) but was not much familiar with Lovecraft’s work and I thought this would be a good place to start.
This collection had almost 40 short stories in it, and I had some definite favorites:
‘The Rats in the Walls’ – a story about a man who returns to ancestral roots and discovers some family secrets are better left undiscovered. This story also features a black cat that reminds me very much of my own black cat. In later editions the cat was named ‘Black Tom’ but in earlier editions and as originally published, the cat was named ‘N*ggerMan.’ Yes, quite problematic. In the edition I listened to, they used the original name, which was so completely distracting that it often took me out of the story. I know the context, but it was still distracting. I won’t say I am prejudice free, but to my credit, and to the credit of my entire family on both sides, we don’t use the ‘n’ word and never have. I find it quite repulsive. I know some people use it, but as a 30 something white female of European decent, I don’t out of respect and it’s not mine to use. I read the story again later, with the cat’s new name, and it was much better. It’s a good story, all in all, and I really liked it. It was probably my favorite in the entire book. If you do read it, try to read a later edition with the cat named ‘Black Tom.’ Full disclosure, my black cat’s name is Tybalt, Prince of Cats.
‘Herbert West, Reanimator’ – this story is about a man who reanimates the dead, hence the title. Needless to say, the reanimation of the dead doesn’t go well. Supposedly this was to be a parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a book I hated, by the way – 300ish pages dedicated to the whining of a deadbeat dad). This is considered to be one of Lovecraft’s weaker works and I can see why that is, but I still really liked it. The narrator made it rather enjoyable, and the ending felt good. Very creepy.
‘The Thing on The Doorstep’ – in which the protagonist explains he’s just killed his best friend but isn’t a murderer. It’s as weird as it sounds, but very good.
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ – this is the first story in the the Cthulhu Mythos, published in 1928. The narrator slowly but surely discovers the cult of Cthulhu, and meets Cthulhu up close. The atmosphere is great in this story. You know what’s coming, and it builds slowly. I enjoyed it tremendously.
‘The Dunwich Horror’ – another tale that is considered to be a part of the core of the Cthulhu Mythos. A very unattractive woman has a very unattractive son with an unknown father. That father is revealed/or heavily implied to be the Lovecraftian deity Yog-Sothoth. It goes pretty poorly for the village of Dunwich after that. I enjoyed this one, but not quite as much as ‘The Call of Cthulhu.’
There were a couple of other Cthulhu Mythos stories in there but ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Dunwich Horror’ were my two definite favorites.
I really enjoyed these stories. I went out and bought a hardcover of Lovecraft’s complete works afterwards. It’s still in my TBR pile but that’s where I went back and reread ‘The Rats in the Walls.’
Lovecraft is a huge influence on horror writing, and I don’t regret reading his stuff, even though some of it has issues. His stories are imaginative, creepy, and sometimes even quite funny. Personally, I’d skip Necronomicon and just buy a complete collection, so you can read the whole thing. I don’t usually enjoy highlights being chosen for me, although I’d say this was the exception. Now I’m going to read all the stories anyway, so I probably should have just done this from the start. To each his own. But I did enjoy this immensely. No regrets.
Escape From Asylum
Madeleine Roux’s Escape From Asylum was described as a “terrifying prequel to her Asylum series.”
I did not find it terrifying. It was disturbing, though. It was another YA novel but I overlooked it, considering it was supposed to be very scary. Again, disturbing yes, scary no. (The only YA novel I’ve found scary thus far was The Monstrumologist.)
Psychiatric hospitals have a special place in the American psyche (no pun intended). People were sent there for all kinds of reasons, even those who didn’t belong there and were frequently subjected to brutal, cruel experiments under the guise of “treatment,” which is sort of what happens here.
In this story, it seems pretty obvious that Ricky didn’t belong in an asylum. He was a kid who got into some trouble, not an honest to God sick person or a criminal or whoever else they committed there. His stepfather, who clearly dislikes him, has him committed with the complicity of his mother who, Ricky thinks, would let him come home if he could just talk to her. He isn’t like the other patients – there’s a man who thinks he can fly (sick) and a woman who killed her husband (criminally insane).
Unfortunately, Ricky’s time seems short when the (psychopathic) warden decides to enroll Ricky in his program that will not just “cure” him but will “perfect” him. Ricky decides he needs to escape immediately, and with the help of sympathetic nurse and a fellow patient, he sets his plans into motion.
I don’t really remember much about what happened at the end of this story, except that Ricky turns out to be gay, and I can’t exactly remember if that’s why he was sent to the asylum, or if he did something where I said, “Wow, he’s not really innocent.” I seem to recall the latter.
What I do recall is the feeling of horror when I realized the warden was experimenting on his guests, for lack of a better term. I should have honestly seen that coming, what else could be happening at an asylum like this? Much like the revulsion we feel when we watch what doctors used to do to asylum patients in documentaries, I felt that with this book. The claustrophobia, the feeling of helplessness and inevitability. The atmosphere was good.
But the story didn’t make me want to read more of the ‘Asylum’ series, and so I probably won’t. It wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t good enough to make me want to read more.
Those Across The River
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.
words in scarlet ink 