Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Published digitally by Open Road Media on July 14, 2015

Wylding Hall is sort of a gentle horror story, if that’s possible. What kind of horror? Demons? Ghosts? Witches? Monsters? All I will say is that this is neither a zombie novel nor a “space aliens who look like lizards” novel. Which is fine because the world has too many of those already.

Wylding Hall combines a supernatural/horror novel with a band story. The band (Windhollow Faire) became famous after their Wylding Hall album but it was once a bunch of kids playing folk songs in London pubs for fun. We learn early on from Lesley, the American singer who joined the band as Arianna’s replacement, that Arianna, after being replaced, fell to her death from guitar player Julian’s window. The producer decided the band should recover from her death by spending the summer in the country recording their second album at Wylding Hall, an old Tudor full of strange rooms, surrounded by spooky woods. In retrospect, it is one of the most influential albums in the history of progressive folk, or so the producer claims.

The novel is told in the form of a documentary. Band members, the producer, and occasional outsiders talk to a documentarian about the summer that the Wylding Hall album was made (and, to a lesser extent, about the backgrounds of the band members).

During the first half of Wylding Hall, characters mention, without actually describing, an event that occurred during the band’s stay. They also make references to dead birds, the disembodied voice of a child singing, an occasional apparition, warnings from a local farmer to stay out of the woods, and other foreshadowing of a horror to come. But most of the time, the characters are talking about themselves, their relationships, and the process of making music. It is in the second half that something unexpected and unexplained occurs.

I called this a gentle horror novel because no people are torn to shreds, or turned inside out, or have their blood sucked out. If violence is what you want, Wylding Hall will probably bore you. If you’re looking for a good band story, the kind of story that allows relationships to develop among people who are forced by circumstances to spend a lot of time together, you’ll probably like Wylding Hall. I don’t know that the supernatural element adds much -- it isn’t particularly frightening -- but it does provide the glue that holds the story together.

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Slade House by David Mitchell

Published by Random House on October 27, 2015

Too many horror novels are horribly dull. Moreover, horror fiction that isn’t well written (e.g., most vampire novels) can be excruciatingly awful. Slade House suffers from none of those faults. It is engaging, surprising, smart, and by the end, quite creepy.

Strange things happen in Slade Alley. A mansion, hidden on the other side of a small doorway in the middle of the alley, is difficult to find, perhaps because most of the time it isn’t there. The mansion is Slade House.

In the first of the novel’s five segments, Nathan Bishop’s mother takes him to Slade House. There he meets Norah Grayer and plays games with a kid who turns into a vicious dog -- unless Nathan imagined the whole thing. In the second segment, DI Gordon Edmonds (a lazy, racist representative of the Thames Valley Police), meets the mansion’s owner, Chloe Chetwynd, after traveling to Slade Alley to investigate a tip concerning the Bishops’ disappearance nine years earlier. Chloe denies any knowledge of Norah, leading the reader to wonder whether she is being deceitful, whether multiple mansions are hidden in Slade Alley, or whether there is some other answer to the mystery.

We learn something of what’s going on at the end of the second segment, before we move forward another nine years. This time a group of college kids decide to investigate the mysterious disappearances that seem to occur in Slade Alley every nine years. The segment is narrated by Sally Timms, whose sister, a journalist, turns up in the fourth segment.

The book’s structure makes the first four segments come across as linked short stories, each with its own cast of characters. Tying all the segments together is Fred Pink, who knows something about Slade House but, since he appears to be a raving lunatic, cannot get anyone to listen. The final segment again features a new character, but that segment twists the story in the direction of a satisfying conclusion.

Horror is a traditional vehicle for exploring themes of good versus evil. Slade House defines evil as the belief that it is fine to improve or extend one’s own life by taking the lives of others, a belief that is expressed in slogans like “might makes right,” uttered by “those who voluntarily amputate their consciences.” There is evil aplenty for the reader to enjoy in Slade House. The imaginative story, told in praiseworthy prose, is more often fun than frightening, but its best moments are at least mildly chilling.

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Night Music by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on October 6, 2015

Night Music is the second volume of Nocturnes, collecting John Connolly’s short horror fiction. In fact, it collects every short story Connolly has written since the first volume was published in 2004.

Two of my favorite stories concern a peculiar library. A man who is eased into retirement after the death of his mother sees a woman throw herself in front of a train, but since no body or blood can be found, the police suspect that isolation and loneliness may have had an impact on his mental health. The man is inclined to question his own sanity after he realizes that the woman in the scene was imagined, although she is not the product of his own imagination. “The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository” taps into the secret fear of all avid readers that the line between reality and fiction might be uncomfortably thin. Fans of fantasy, serious literature, and libraries should all enjoy the story.

The Claxton library is also the setting of “Holmes on the Range”, this time hosting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who have made a premature appearance at the library after Holmes’ death (later rescinded) in “The Final Solution.” This is a fun story, maybe my favorite in the volume. Apart from its fun factor, it reminders readers why they read: for the opportunity to become lost in a great story, to occupy -- if only momentarily -- a different, more intriguing world.

Books also play a key role in most of the five tales collected under the title “The Fractured Atlas — Five Fragments.” The first tale takes place in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and involves a number of people in different locations who experience misfortune when a book comes into their hands. The book contains worlds, but those who dare to touch it wish they had not. The second tale features a disagreeable bookseller in nineteenth century London who seeks the help of an occultist to learn the true nature of a book that attacks other books. The third and fourth installments take place in the World War I era. The relatively brief third tale, concerning the mud in which fallen soldiers dwell, sets up the fourth, which is more of a detective story involving a missing person who had been attempting to track down a rumored book of the occult that was known by many names, including The Fractured Atlas. The fifth is basically an epilog to the fourth. In the end, the five tales can be read as a story about how books change the world, although not always for the better.

“Blood of the Lamb” is a short, surprising, aptly named, and remarkably creepy story about a girl who has a miraculous power that, to her parents’ dismay, is both revered and feared. The need to feed the woods-dwelling Razorshins with bootleg whiskey during prohibition is the subject of “Razorshins.”

With the help of a … something … the rape victim in “The Lamia” gets revenge. Only a page long, “A Dream of Winter” is as chilling as its title implies.

“The Hollow King” goes off to fight an annual battle with the forces of evil, but each time he returns, the single tear shed by his Queen renews him … but how many tears will the Queen shed when she learns the truth about her King? “Lazarus” arises from the dead and is a disappointment to all, including himself.

Two men who rob the houses and bodies of the dead in a time of war realizes they’re looting the wrong house when they meet “The Children of Dr. Lyall.” An old man checks into a hotel room in “A Haunting,” finding it occupied by a younger version of his dead wife.

The story behind a gruesome painting that might not exist is told in “On The Anatomization of an Unknown Man (1637) by Frans Mier.” It is the least successful entry in the collection.

The collection ends with an engaging essay in which Connolly traces his history as a reader, viewer, and writer of horror. I often skim or skip nonfiction essays in a collection of fiction, but this one -- like the collection as a whole -- is both insightful and entertaining.

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Andersonville by Edward M. Erdelac

Published by Random House/Hydra on August 18, 2015

The first quarter of Andersonville is extraordinary. After that, the novel drifts into the conventions of horror fiction. Although the novel as a whole does not live up to the promise of its beginning, it remains a well-told tale.

A black man named Barclay Lourdes sneaks onto a train and assumes the identity of a captured Union soldier. Confederate soldiers take Barclay and their other prisoners to Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. It is a brutal place. Edward M. Erdelac describes the stench, disease, starvation, and cruelty that pervade the prison camp in vivid language. It is a place more suited to lice, maggots, and vermin than the prisoners who inhabit it.

The premise of Erdelac’s novel is that Andersonville (an actual prison camp during the Civil War) was intentionally made into a place of depravity so that demons would have an earthly environment in which they could thrive. Barclay, a practitioner of hoodoo and voudon, has been asked to investigate the camp by Quitman Day, whose western magic (the kind that involves pentangles) is ineffective inside the camp. The fact that Barclay and Day support opposites of the war provides a source of tension despite their childhood friendship. The fact that Barclay blames Day for his sister’s death creates more than tension.

Like many novels that rely upon magic and the supernatural to fuel the plot, I think Andersonville might have been a better book without the magic. The dramatic setting and Barclay’s multifaceted personality lend themselves to a more serious work of fiction. Still, the story is fun. It goes the way a horror fan would expect it to go. That might disappoint readers who are looking for surprises, but strong characters and fast action overcome the story’s weaknesses.

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The Deep by Nick Cutter

Published by Gallery Books on January 13, 2015

If this is the apocalypse, Luke Nelson thinks, at least it is orderly. People get the Spots, then they get the `Gets, then they wander away with blank minds. Luke's brother Clay, eight miles deep in the ocean near Guam, might have the answer to the phenomenon.

The Deep falls into the "strange entity discovered at the bottom of the ocean" subgenre of horror novels. The entity, nicknamed "ambrosia," has properties unlike any substance known to science. Ambrosia appears to have the curative powers that humanity needs in a time of crisis. Of course, this is a horror novel so the reader knows better, thanks in part to clues that Nick Cutter plants about its true nature. One of those clues is delivered in mysterious messages written in a submarine that returns from Clay's base in the Mariana Trench.

Cutter does a reasonable amount of character building although he sometimes slows the story's pace with flashbacks to Luke's past. Luke carries the scars of a difficult childhood and the guilt of allowing his son to go missing under his care, events that make him wish he would become afflicted with `Gets and forget everything that haunts him. I understand the technique of prolonging tension by cutting away from the present to talk about the past, but Cutter's frequent resort to that device is sometimes frustrating. For the most part, however, Cutter steadily builds a sense of dread, conjuring primal fears and encouraging the reader to share them with Luke.

A few too many scenes tell us about the characters' dreams. That often strikes me as something writers toss into a book to fill pages when they can't think of a creative way to advance the plot. The dreams are relevant here because they are presumably influenced by sinister forces at the bottom of the ocean, but horror-filled dreams seem like a cheap way to fill the pages of a horror novel. The characters' waking fantasies ("did I see/feel/hear that or am I hallucinating?") do a better job of provoking shivers.

But what about the bottom line? Parts of the book (particularly a diary written by one of the scientists on the ocean floor) are decidedly creepy. Parts of the book are at least borderline scary. The plot threads connect in a way that might be difficult to accept, but horror novels demand that disbelief be suspended before opening the book so that did not bother me. The nemesis that threatens Luke and the rest of humankind is formulaic -- in fact, it echoes the nemesis in Cutter's last novel, The Troop -- but Cutter wields the formula deftly.

A passage that describes Luke's work with stray dogs is quite moving. Other parts of the book that attempt to explain characters and their motivations are founded on clichés. But still, the ending -- the explanation for all the horror -- is clever. I like the way it plays with the meaning of evil. This isn't a deep book but, as horror novels go, it is at least slightly better than average.

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