A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Malerman

Published in the UK (small press) in 2016; published by Del Rey on January 19, 2021

The title encapsulates the plot. Two 17-year-old virgins go canoeing on a date. They paddle from one lake to a second lake, where they find a tunnel that leads to a third, swampier lake. There they find a perfectly preserved house at the bottom of the lake. Its roof is visible from the lake’s surface but the house is apparently a secret. They decide that the underwater house would be a great place to lose their virginity.

James and Amelia feel drawn to the house, as if by a supernatural force. They eventually get some scuba gear so they can spend time exploring the house and each other. They even build a raft so they can sleep on the lake. They don’t want to know how or why the house exists, how or why its furniture and teacups remain perfectly in place rather than floating away, how or why rugs stay flat on the floor and show no sign of damage, how and why dresses are moving through the water as if worn by an invisible woman.  Apparently, they are worried that rational thought would destroy the magic. Eventually the magic is destroyed by the onset of creepiness. There’s a monster or a presence or a something in the house because how could there not be?

The House at the Bottom of a Lake isn’t marketed as YA fiction but I would only recommend it to young adults. The plot is unsophisticated. The young lovers are the only characters of any importance and almost the only characters to appear. The sex is far from graphic. Josh Malerman’s prose is simple (almost juvenile). All of which is fine if you’re fifteen and wondering what it would be like to lose your cherry underwater, although the absence of pain and blood won’t give kids a realistic view of virginity’s loss.

Is The House a horror novel? Probably, but it’s too dull to be frightening. Is The House a love story? Too much of it is — and a sappy love story, at that — but the idea of seventeen-year-olds bonding over a house at the bottom of a lake is so unconvincing that I was unmoved by their puppy love. The ending attempts to make a dramatic statement about the ephemeral nature of young love but the story is so lacking in drama that adult readers are likely to shrug their shoulders and hope that the next book they read will be better.

The novel’s first climax suggests what the house is made from but doesn’t explain its existence because no explanation is possible. The novel’s final climax is silly and anticlimactic. The story is too simplistic to hold the interest of most adult readers.

Horror novels are based on fear, not rationality, although the best horror novels are based on rational fears. I don’t necessarily expect a horror novel to make sense (apart from the internal logic that the author constructs) but I do expect a horror novel to be frightening. This one isn’t. We’re often told that James is “more scared than he’s ever been” but we don’t feel the fear. Nor did I ever get the sense that James and Amelia were particularly imperiled. Maybe a YA audience would react differently, but since the book isn’t marketed as YA fiction, I can’t recommend it.

NOT RECOMMENDED

In the Shadows of Men by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Subterranean on August 31, 2020

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror all tend to be shelved together in bookstores, although they are distinct genres. Robert Bennett Jackson is one of the best at blending the genres together. His recent novels have been fantasies with elements of science fiction, but In the Shadows of Men is best categorized as a horror novella.

The story is of two brothers, one of whom becomes obsessed and perhaps possessed by evil. Narrating the tale is the younger Pugh brother. He calls his older brother Bear. If the narrator’s first name is revealed, I missed it.

Bear and his brother had an abusive father. Bear took the larger share of the abuse. The narrator was living in Houston when Bear asked him to come to Coahora, a dried-up Texas town that is seeing a new life due to fracking. The narrator’s wife left him, he feels trapped, so Coahora seems as good as any other place in which to disappear.

Bear bought a motel from a cousin who inherited it from Corbin Pugh, an uncle of Bear’s father. Bear thinks he can fix up the motel and cash in on transient workers until the fracking moves elsewhere. The narrator agrees to help because he has nothing else to do. Before much time passes, the sheriff pays a visit and tells them that Corbin operated the motel as a house of ill repute, importing Mexican girls to serve the local men.

In the tradition of horror novels, spooky things begin to happen. They find a hatch in one of the motel rooms but they can’t unlock it. They hear voices and an old Merle Haggard song. The narrator sees apparitions and hears girls crying. Bear begins to behave irresponsibly and then gets a bit whacky. The narrator is eventually drawn into the good-versus-evil conflict that is so often central to Bennett’s work. The story’s suspense comes from the fear that evil will overtake the narrator before he can save an innocent victim and — perhaps — save his brother.

Since these are all standard horror elements, I can’t say that there is anything surprising about the story, although it delivers some chilling moments. Bennett’s strength is his characterization. While there aren’t many characters, he does a sufficiently deep dive into the narrator’s psyche that it’s easy to feel sympathetic when the brother-against-brother theme reaches its denouement.

At this point, Subterranean has made In the Shadows of Men available as a fairly pricey deluxe edition hardcover. I don’t take price into account when I make recommendations, but buyers might want to take it into account when deciding how much they want to pay for a novella. The price point is appropriate for collectors and affluent Bennett fans. Other readers might hope that it eventually becomes available in a more affordable format. In any event, the story is one that horror fans and Bennett fans will likely appreciate, even if it lacks the substance of Bennett’s longer work.

RECOMMENDED

The Boatman's Daughter by Andy Davidson

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on February 11, 2020

The Boatman’s Daughter is marketed as a supernatural thriller. While supernatural forces contribute to the thrills, horror novels like this one remind us that humans at their worst are more horrific than the imagined entities that haunt human lives. The supernatural entity who lurks in The Boatman’s Daughter might be less evil than a couple of the human characters.

The boatman is Hiram Crabtree. His daughter is Miranda. The novel opens with the boatman’s disappearance in the bayou when Miranda is eleven. Accompanied by a witch, Hiram embarks on a mission after telling Miranda to wait in the boat. In the horror story tradition, Miranda ignores sensible advice and plunges into the darkness when she hears disturbing sounds. Instead of finding her father that night, she finds a baby, or perhaps an abomination, that she calls Littlefish. She raises Littlefish as an orphaned younger brother.

The witch is an old woman named Iskra who was once scolded by the leshii for having a loveless heart. She is too selfish, the leshii told her, to have children of her own. The leshii, according to various wikis, is a mischievous deity that inhabits forests in Slavic mythology. Apparently one of them made it to Arkansas.

Most of the novel’s action occurs a few years after Miranda finds Littlefish. Miranda has been bedeviled by a one-eyed constable named Charlie Riddle who paid a price for trying to have his way with her. At Riddle’s direction, Miranda uses her boat to deliver drugs through the bayou. A “mad, lost preacher” named Billy Cotton, widower of a woman named Lena who had a gift for perceiving the supernatural, is also involved in the distribution scheme. Cotton was present at Littlefish’s birth, a seriously warped scene that the novel revisits more than once, each time imparting new revelations that tie the past to the present.

Miranda eventually learns the truth about her father’s disappearance and the mysterious origin of Littlefish. The other key character who contributes to the story is the dwarf John Avery, a dissatisfied employee in Riddle’s drug dealing enterprise. And then there’s the girl in the forest who haunts Cotton’s dreams, much as Littlefish does and for a similar reason.

The Boatman’s Daughter tells a creepy story that delivers a regular dose of chills. That’s what horror novels should do, so I rate this one as a success. The supernatural elements are a bit muddled. As they deliver murder and gory mayhem, Riddle and Cotton are sufficiently evil to supply a full quotient of horror, even in the absence of the leshii and mysterious monsters lurking in the depths of the earth. Littlefish and the girl in the forest nevertheless add to the story’s eerie atmosphere.

Andy Davidson’s vivid prose gives the story a cinematic quality. His explanation of characters’ motivations, good or evil, makes it possible to believe in their existence. Miranda’s ability to cope and to redefine herself at the novel’s end is appealing. The novel does not depend on gore, despite the occasional severed head, to instill fear. The story might not persuade the reader to believe in the supernatural, but it will reinforce the belief that horror is a force personified in the lives of horrible people, and that darkness is never so dark that it cannot be overcome by light.

RECOMMENDED

Ghoster by Jason Arnopp

Published by Orbit on October 22, 2019

Ghoster is a clever variation on a ghost story. It suggests a supernatural basis for the supernatural hold that smartphones have over their users. Are we the masters of our gadgets or, by wiring ourselves to the digital world, have we become lost souls?

Kate Collins thought her luck had finally changed. After dating a string of losers, she met Scott with an assist from Tinder. Convinced that he would be the one to save her from a life of loneliness, she agreed to move in with him. He has a nice apartment with a sea view but it is in a different city, so she gives up her lease and quits her job as a paramedic and readies herself for a new life.

A few days before the scheduled move, Scott goes silent. Texts receive no response. Voicemails go unanswered. When the movers arrive, she has them load up her property and races to Scott’s place ahead of them. Convinced that Scott is not answering the door because he is seriously injured, she breaks in and finds that the place is empty, all the furniture gone, with no clue as to Scott’s whereabouts. Was he abducted and killed? Kate assumes the worst until her best friend tells her that Scott is still posting on social media. The realization that she has been played by Scott is even worse than her fear that Scott was dead.

Having nowhere else to go, Kate squats in the apartment. She finds Scott’s apparently discarded iPhone, figures out his password, and becomes obsessed with the phone’s content. Apart from the usual treasury of porn and a record of Scott’s Tinder contacts, she finds videos of sleeping people and Scott's online diary. None of that is quite as disturbing as the sudden appearance of Scott’s less charming twin brother, the fresh scratch marks at the door, and the occasional appearance of a blue spectral figure.

Ghoster creates the suspense that readers of horror stories demand. For much of the novel, ambiguity drives the plot. Is Scott dead or is he playing a nasty trick on Kate? Is Scott’s brother simply self-centered or is he malicious? Is Scott’s apartment haunted or is there a logical explanation for the phenomena that bewilder Kate? The story works because the reader is never quite sure where it will go.

Kate’s chatty first-person narration also contributes to the novel’s success. Jason Arnopp’s lively prose and his sympathetic portrayal of Kate make the novel an easy and fun read. The story’s message — we should all think about our enslavement to smartphones — is all the more resonant because it never gets in the way of an engaging plot.

RECOMMENDED

Tinfoil Butterfly by Rachel Eve Moulton

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept. 10, 2019

Tinfoil Butterfly is a disturbing novel about a young woman and a child, damaged in different ways, who share a harrowing experience. The story is simple — only four characters play a significant role — but simplicity amplifies the novel’s power.

Emma Powers flees from a hospital and gets a ride with a creep who doesn’t want to let her out of his van. Emma’s goal is to get to the Badlands. The creep has seen newspaper stories about Emma and Raymond, her stepbrother. The creep eventually regrets meeting her.

Emma is messed up. She narrates the story in the first person, eventually explaining why she is messed up and why she and Raymond made it into the newspaper.

Emma meets a kid named Earl after taking the creep’s van and running out of gas at an abandoned diner. Earl is also creepy, an imaginative child who has an unhealthy obsession with death. At the same time, Earl’s talent for creating creatures from tinfoil and seemingly bringing them to life suggests that life and death are struggling for dominance in Earl’s persona. Like Emma, Earl has secrets that the reader eventually discovers, one of which alters the reader’s fundamental understanding of the character.

Earl lives with an older fellow named George, a man whose health appears to be failing. George might be the creepiest of all the characters who enter Emma’s life.

Earl and George live in a deserted house in a ghost town. It’s the kind of house where no sensible person would want to visit the cellar. So, of course, Emma explores the cellar. She doesn’t like what she finds. Events in her life roll downhill from there.

Despite the visit to the cellar, Tinfoil Butterfly isn’t a traditional horror novel, although it is marketed in that genre. The novel’s true horror is not the fear of crazed killers in remote areas (although that fear is part of the story), but the horror of living a tragic life — a broken home, an abusive parent, drug addiction, unhealthy relationships. Ordinary horrors can lead to extraordinary evil, the novel seems to say.

Yet the story is not without hope. Emma is messed up, but she does not have an evil heart. The opportunity to bring some good into another person’s life might be her path to redemption. Rachel Eve Moulton conveys the immediacy of Emma’s conflicting emotions, creating empathy for a broken woman who deserves a second chance.

The story moves quickly and creates genuine anxiety, although the ending is one a reader might predict. Conflicts essential to the plot are resolved, but what will become of Emma after the story ends is unclear. Happy endings, Moulton implies, are too much to expect. The opportunity for a new beginning might be the best anyone with a difficult life can hope to find. What the novel’s surviving characters will make of that opportunity is a story waiting to be told.

RECOMMENDED