The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 4, 2018

The Mansion is a horror novel that faintly echoes The Shining, in that the action takes place in an older multiple-room building occupied in its winter months by a husband and wife that, come spring, will be placed in the service of guests. The story is also similar in that the protagonist struggles with his sanity — perhaps he was a bit unhinged before beginning his stay; perhaps his perceptions are altered by the environment in which he dwells. In most respects, however, The Mansion and The Shining are quite different.

Billy Stafford and Shawn Eagle developed a new kind of smartphone operating system by working intensely in a cabin near a dilapidated mansion in the woods for 23 months. A third fellow who joined them, Takata, they try not to think about. Billy didn’t think about much of anything except drugs and booze after Shawn stole the company from him. Billy won Emily, the woman they both wanted, but Shawn became one of the richest men in the world, leaving Billy with a small amount of stock that he sold to support his addictions.

Years earlier, Shawn’s parents died in a fire on the property where the mansion sat. It has always had a reputation for being haunted. Shawn is rennovating to create a retreat for the ultra-wealthy, but construction accidents have only added to the legend of the haunted mansion.

Shawn has equipped the mansion with a program called Nellie that he and Billy imagined but never made a reality. Billy wrote most of the code; Shawn’s engineers tried to plug the gaps. Nellie is not quite an Artificial Intelligence, but it is meant to anticipate needs and to take action, without being prompted, to make its users happy. Shawn wants Nellie to run the mansion but there’s a ghost in the machine and Shawn needs Billy to perform an exorcism. Nellie, it seems, has a temper.

The final plot element involves Emily’s sister Beth, her husband Rothko, and their spooky twin daughters. That’s the only plot element that didn’t work for me. At some point, enough is enough and more is too much. The twins play a significant role in the story but they don’t fit snugly into the concept and their presence is just too convenient. Eziekiel Boone could have told the story without them and their omission would have improved the novel’s focus. The science fiction rule that it's fine to imagine one, but only one, impossible thing should also bind horror writers.

Despite my sense that The Mansion is an inspired amalgamation of two or three Stephen King plots, it stands comfortably on its own merits. Horror succeeds when it’s convincing. Apart from the bewitched twins, Boone does a masterful job of placing real people in real danger. Even if the danger is combination of supernatural forces and a computer gone mad, Boone does what good horror writers do — he makes the reader forget how divorced from reality the story’s premise might be so that the reader can worry about Billy and Emily and experience vicarious fear. The novel has a good pace, develops sympathetic characters in a reasonable amount of detail, and works its way to a satisfying climax.

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Halcyon by Rio Youers

Published by St. Martin's Press on July 10, 2018

Martin and Laura Lovegrove have two daughters, Shirley (15) and Edith (10). Edith used to suffer from night terrors, but a therapist helped her put that in her past. Until now, when she has a vision — a premonition — that she somehow projects to her sister, of an explosion that kills hundreds of people. Three days later, a young man who has apparently been brainwashed drives a homemade bomb into a nightclub, causing the scene that Edith saw. A woman who suffers from the same affliction, psychic signals crossing over into the realm of perception, teaches Edith to cope.

Martin is recruited to join Halcyon, which Nolan, the recruiter, defines as a better and safer America, a self-sustaining community with no crime, no poverty, no discrimination, no tech, and no clocks. Its founder, Mother Moon, is its spiritual leader, but Nolan denies that the community is a religious group, a cult, or a hippy commune (although it sounds like a combination of all those). Halcyon is on an island and, for reasons I won’t reveal, what happens in Halcyon stays in Halcyon. It’s like Hotel California: you can check out, but you can never leave. Except for Mother Moon, who apparently spends some of her time at a mysterious place called Glam Moon, which may or may not be an imaginary world.

Mother Moon is Valerie Kemp, who sold her body for drugs in Manhattan until she found the Society of Pain. The Society teaches that pain is the path to enlightenment, although its members prefer to witness the pain of others than to experience their own.

Eventually this all ties together but I cannot say that the connections are seamless. The novel feels like it was compiled from three related stories, each of which are more interesting than the story they create when assembled. That’s partly because it just takes too long for Halcyon to get where it’s going. Halcyon’s The novel’s pace too often lags. Perhaps a less ambitious story would have been tighter and more compelling.

Halcyon benefits from moments of strong writing, particularly when Edith discovers that she can’t suppress or hide from a nightmare premonition. The story has supernatural elements, or at least psychic themes and the suggestion of a hellacious afterlife, but it isn’t sufficiently frightening to be classified as a horror novel. It’s just a little too strange to be scary, unless readers are frightened by malicious roosters.

Nor is Halcyon sufficiently thrilling to be classified as a thriller, although it does feature elements of crime and mystery. The story addresses terrorism in an abstract way that divorces terrorism from its political roots, which divorces the story from the realm of terrorism-based thrillers. I’m not so anal that I need to classify every novel — some of my favorite books defy classification — but it is difficult to know just what to make of Halcyon.

Notwithstanding its faults, Halcyon introduces the reader to sympathetic characters and occasionally builds tension by placing those characters at risk. School shootings and other acts of mass violence are an early theme of Halcyon, but they are not sensationalized. The story is not pro-gun or anti-gun; it is pro-empathy for families touched by violence. While Halcyon might be predominantly a horror story, the novel recognizes that there is plenty of horror in the earthbound world, and that horror must be balanced with compassion. The story struggles to follow a consistent theme as it moves from cults to sadists to mass killings to domestic drama to interdimensional portals, but it has something worthwhile to say about how victims can become monsters. That earns Halcyon a guarded recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Hush by John Hart

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 27, 2018

The Hush is a sequel to The Last Child, which I haven’t read. As I understand it, The Last Child is a straightforward suspense novel that deals with Johnny Merrimon’s search for his missing twin sister. The Hush returns Johnny as a central character, but the novel blends suspense with horror and the supernatural. It’s kind of a haunted woods story, although the woods are swampy which makes them even more foreboding. The supernatural slant will upset readers who think a sequel should be just like the novel it follows. I admire John Hart for changing up his game (there’s not much point in writing a sequel if you’re just going to rewrite the last book), but readers who can’t abide horror novels will likely be disappointed. In any event, the novel stands alone, and I don’t have the sense that I missed anything in The Hush by not reading The Last Child first.

Johnny lives alone in Hush Arbor, with no electricity or phone or running water, and no desire to leave. He inherited six thousand acres in North Carolina and is fighting to keep it. Sometimes he finds himself in the swamp in the middle of the night and has no recollection of walking there. The swamp was once thought to be haunted by slaves who were hung from its trees, as we learn in a flashback involving a young boy who made the mistake of hunting there in 1931.

Johnny drives to town once a month but prefers his own company. His father is dead. He avoids his mother and her new husband, a police detective named Clyde Hunt who apparently played a significant role in The Last Child. Johnny is trying to forget the past, but he knows he is forgetting how to live a normal life.

Johnny’s best friend, Jack Cross, is a new lawyer, having overcome a difficult childhood. Jack seems to be the only person who notices that Johnny is changing in ways that cannot be explained by isolation alone. His senses are abnormally heightened. His wounds heal with impossible speed. He is acutely aware of everything that happens in the woods and water, whether it involves animals, fish, humans, or trees. As the only person who visits Johnny, Jack senses the presence of something evil in the swamp and worries that it is affecting Johnny.

Johnny needs an appellate lawyer to save his land, but can’t afford one. Jack introduces him to an appellate lawyer in his firm who might represent him pro bono, for reasons that only she understands. Some of those reasons have to do with the arousal she feels when she thinks about Johnny, a sensation that multiplies when she meets him in person.

A grizzly death in the woods leads to a murder accusation, but the murder clearly couldn’t have been committed by one individual — a fact that doesn’t deter the sheriff from accusing Johnny. The murder provides the reader’s first inkling that The Hush is a horror novel. More deaths follow, as do a series of gruesome events with supernatural origins that are closely connected to the Hush, the Merrimon family, and North Carolina’s evil history as a slave state.

All of the secondary characters are created with an abundance of detail, including a rich hunter named Boyd who wants to buy Johnny’s land, a young woman named Cree who dreams (as Johnny does) about bloody events from the past, Cree’s mother who is trying to take Johnny’s land, a fellow named Leon who operates a ramshackle tavern/restaurant at the outskirts of the Hush, and the seemingly crazy old woman who raised Leon and who is the only person capable of understanding the dreams that trouble Johnny and Cree.

I don’t read many horror novels, but I enjoy them when the author creates an environment that is truly creepy. Hart does that in The Hush. As a place, the Hush is such a carefully rendered world that I set aside my skepticism about the supernatural and became absorbed in the story’s convincing detail. But The Hush is also the story of Johnny’s internal struggle — an eternal struggle between good and evil, when good and evil are not easily distinguished — and of his loyal friendship with Jack. Hart’s believable characters and settings, combined with a plot that is chilling and suspenseful, makes The Hush one of the best horror novels I’ve read in recent years.

RECOMMENDED

The Only Child by Andrew Pyper

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 23, 2017

The Only Child is a horror novel, but it’s not the horror novel I expected. Is it a vampire novel? Not really, because the vampire genre has devolved into a branch of romance fiction thanks to Twilight and its trashy imposters. There’s only a bit of romantic blood lust in The Only Child, although the protagonist, a fellow named Michael, once wooed Mary Shelley.

Michael is a monster, a blend of Dracula and Frankenstein and Mr. Hyde, who has a taste for blood and nineteenth century horror writers. Give Andrew Pyper credit for drawing on the classics for inspiration.

Michael says he was created to be the prototype of a perfect soldier. Those plans never turn out quite as the mad scientist expects. But whether Michael is telling the truth about his origins is not entirely clear.

What is clear, perhaps, is that Lily Dominick is his daughter. And that Lily’s mother was torn apart by a bear when Lily was six. Except it might not have been a bear. And while Lily’s memories of that day might not be entirely reliable (did she really ride away from the crime scene on a white horse?), it doesn’t take much to convince her that she is a monster’s daughter.

Lily is now a forensic psychiatrist who assesses the mental health of individuals who, more often than not, have committed horrible crimes. The story begins with a man who tore the ears off a stranger so that he would be evaluated by Lily. At least, that’s what he tells her. The man is Michael, who claims to be over two hundred years old.

Michael manipulates Lily in ways that lead her to Eastern Europe and a variety of threatening encounters. Lily wants to learn the truth about the man, about her mother, and perhaps about herself, but separating truth from deception is difficult. The eventual question for Lily is whether she should make an alliance with Michael or with the people who are trying to kill him. It’s a tough question.

Pyper is an excellent storyteller and The Only Child is a truly creepy work of fiction. The plot moves in unexpected directions and the characters are so enigmatic that it’s impossible to decide who to like or dislike until the very end. In fact, the ending redefines the reader’s view of key characters. The Only Child is a well-crafted, surprising novel that plays with the traditions of horror fiction and manages to add something new.

RECOMMENDED

Full Wolf Moon by Lincoln Child

Published by Doubleday on May 16, 2017

Fiction like the Jeremy Logan series demands (as do many horror stories) a willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of being creeped out. Still, Lincoln Child never pushes the boundaries so much that an open-minded reader will become unwilling to accept the scenarios he creates. Child always makes events seem as if they could happen, even if they couldn’t.

Historian and paranormal investigator (“enigmalogist”) Jeremy Logan is asked to investigate the deaths of two hikers in the Adirondacks, where Logan happens to be staying. The unfortunate hikers were “savagely mauled to death” under a full moon at different times in roughly the same location. A killer who lives in the area after his release from a mental health commitment becomes a convenient suspect as new killings occur, but the reader knows that ordinary killers can’t tear people apart.

After a bit of investigation, Logan learns that the community considers the Blakeney clan, an inbred family of backwoods lunatics, to be a more likely culprit than a rogue bear. But are the Blakeneys just garden variety crazy, or are they werewolves? Rumors abound.

Of course, werewolves come out when there’s a full moon, and a scientist in Full Wolf Moon who happens to be studying the effect of the moon on small critters posits a reasonable theory as to why that could be true. At least it’s reasonable in the context of thrillers and horror fiction, which means it might be malarkey, but it sounds plausible. That’s really all the reader can ask in a story about a possible werewolf.

Child evokes some genuine emotion during the course of the story. Secondary characters have enough depth that the reader will care when they encounter misfortune. The book isn’t particularly frightening, but it creates a nice atmosphere of "things that go bump in the woods."

The story moves quickly and it’s entertaining, although the resolution is less surprising than Child must have intended. Full Wolf Moon is certainly better than most of the vampire stories, and nearly all of the zombie stories, that have flooded the market in recent years, making this werewolf story a good choice for horror readers who want to expand the range of monsters that keep them awake at night.

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