Ushers by Joe Hill

Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2024

“Ushers” is a short story that Amazon is marketing to Kindle users. Non-Kindle readers might find it in an anthology at some point. With its supernatural focus, the story might fit broadly into the horror genre, although by that standard, the same might be said of the Bible. Unlike horror fiction of the slasher/monster variety, the story sends a message about life rather than encouraging readers to be frightened of death.

Martin Lorenson doesn’t see dead people, but his parents ran a hospice so he has seen many people die. Just before they die, he sees something else. The clue to what he sees is in the story’s title.

Marin has been fortunate to avoid his own death. In high school, he was home with diarrhea when a school shooter killed his classmates. At least, that’s the story he tells.

As the story begins, two police detectives want to know why Martin purchased a ticket for a passenger train that he didn’t board. The train derailed and killed a bunch of people. The detectives (Duvall and Oates, not to be confused with the 1970s singing duo who gained fame by performing insipid music) think Martin’s avoidance of death is suspicious, so they interview him.

Although the story is too short to permit much character development, Duvall is more interesting than your average fictional police detective. He has an adult daughter who, in the age of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, feels conflicted about being a Black woman whose father works in law enforcement. Duvall’s position is that cops can’t all be white or the nation would descend into apartheid. God knows there are Americans who would welcome that outcome.

Anyway, how is Martin so lucky that he twice avoided catastrophe? Joe Hill channels the creepy gene that he must have inherited from his father to provide an explanation that will appeal to fans of the supernatural.

The story’s ending has an unexpected twist, although its message — appreciate being alive while you still can — is far from original. As a short story (and this one is shorter than most of those in the Amazon Original Stories series), the story’s focus is tight, but Hill balances its focus on death with moments of humor and a message suggesting that something better awaits us on the other side. Religious readers (or those who believe in an afterlife for nonreligious reasons) might find the story comforting. I found it entertaining.

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The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on April 1, 2024

Edgar Allen Poe is credited with creating the first fictional detective. Some years ago, Joe Lansdale contributed to a collection of new stories about Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Lansdale brings Dupin back in the novella-length The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor.

A young man named Julien has been investigating the catacombs in Paris. A series of gruesome murders has coincided with his investigation. Pieces of one victim’s body were scattered in the catacombs. A disemboweled victim was found on the doorstep of Julien’s sister Aline. Fortunately for Aline, Julien has paid a tavern owner to lock her inside her room at night. Unfortunately for Aline, Julien has disappeared. She visits Dupin in the hope that the famous solver of mysteries can find her brother.

The story takes on an air of the macabre when the tavern owner explains how he was chased by a demonic entity on his last visit to lock Aline’s door. Julien has a collection of books that describe portals to supernatural dimensions. He seems to have made a particular study of the Lord of the Razor (who happens to be an early Lansdale creation). If one of the Razor’s sharp instruments causes someone to bleed, the Lord of the Razor enters that person’s soul.

Dupin and his assistant (the story’s nameless narrator) embark on a search for Julien that takes them on a couple of trips to the catacombs. Bones and skulls and rats provide an appropriate setting for a confrontation with a demon.

Lansdale is a versatile writer. He dabbles in crime, humor, science fiction, and westerns, often mixing genres in original ways, but he is also one of the better horror storytellers in the business. The Bottoms is one of the most frightening books I’ve read. This novella is a bit too conventional to be truly scary, but the Lord of the Razor is sufficiently creepy to inspire a few chills.

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The Militia House by John Milas

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 11, 2023

The Militia House combines the story of a Marine deployed to Afghanistan with a horror story. War is horror even without a supernatural element, which might be the story’s point.

The novel begins as a conventional story of a soldier in Afghanistan. It has the uncertain feel of many debut war novels told by veterans who want to write about their military experience but aren’t sure what they want to say.

Alex Loyette is a corporal who leads three other Marines in the routine tasks associated with establishing landing zones for helicopters. Alex joined the Marines because he was failing in college. He wanted to make people think he was doing something important, but he didn’t care about military service. His brother was the war hero, someone who died after stepping on an IED, whose sacrifice meant more to others than to Alex. Alex knows he will never be a hero, will never be perceived in the same light as his brother.

Alex has given up on everything. He doesn’t want to try to live up to a potential that he can’t recognize. He doesn’t want to do good things or be a good person or please people who cared about him. He just wants to be left alone. He comes to realize that by joining the Marines, he ran away from one lost cause to join another.

The novel’s hook is a building just outside the wire called the Militia House. British soldiers claim that the Militia House is haunted. It was at one point occupied as barracks by Soviet soldiers who fought their last battle against the Taliban in its confines. Bullet holes riddle the interior walls.

Creepy events occur before Alex visits the Militia House. He sees a dog with porcupine quills stuck in its nose. Quills eventually turn up at other locations. Drawings pinned to the walls seem to change, as if they are being redrawn. A notebook in which Alex scribbles his thoughts reappears every time he burns it. One of Alex’s men talks in his sleep and appears to be sleepwalking.

The creepiest events occur in the Militia House, where time is distorted and a stairway to a basement appears and disappears. Alex should know better than to return to a haunted house, but when one of his team disappears, he leads the rest on a rescue mission. It doesn’t end well.

The novel captures the frustration of miliary life. John Milas establishes Alex’s backstory and insecurities effectively. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to the novel. Perhaps Alex is under the influence of the supernatural. Perhaps he’s gone off his nut. Whether the supernatural threats are meant to be taken seriously or are the product of Alex’s disturbed mind is never clear, although the reader sees little to suggest that Alex has any reason to be haunted by war. For that reason, the story feels insubstantial, even a bit pointless, despite some vivid images.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Insatiable Volt Sisters by Rachel Eve Moulton

Published by MCD x FSG Originals on April 4, 2023

The Insatiable Volt Sisters is a literary horror story. Unless the author is Mary Shelley, I’m not sure that “literary” and “horror” belong in the same sentence. Stephen King (to whom Rachel Eve Moulton seems to pay homage by naming a character Carrie) once argued that writers either create genre fiction or literature but not both. In later years, after sharpening his writing talent, King backed away from that position, but there is some truth to the suggestion that plot-focused genre fiction isn’t easily blended with literary fiction’s focus on character and setting and deep themes. Some writers perform that trick, but Moulton sacrifices the storytelling that horror fiction demands by focusing on her literary aspirations. In the end, Moulton uses the trappings of horror fiction to dress up a domestic drama that explores feminist themes. She never manages to create the buildup of dread that is essential to a good horror story.

The plot cycles between 2000 and 1989, although the reader learns much (maybe too much) about the early history of Fowler Island in Lake Erie. We are told at least twice that Eileen and Elizabeth Fowler, sisters who developed the power to communicate with each other without speaking, built the island’s downtown and roads, as well as the Island Museum. Elizabeth married Seth Volt, who dug a quarry and built a Victorian house that islanders call Quarry Hollow. Legend has it that Seth imprisoned Elizabeth in the house, separating her from her sister. They learned to communicate by telepathy to overcome their separation.

The half-sisters Henrietta (Henri) and Beatrice (B.B.) are descendants of Seth Volt. They were born two years apart to different mothers but were often mistaken for twins, perhaps because their mothers looked so much alike. Their father James, a reclusive poet who somehow made a living, apparently had a type. After Olivia Rose vanished, James knocked up Carrie and brought her to the island as his new wife. The sisters grew up in Quarry Hollow and know it to be haunted, perhaps by Oliva Rose, but not by her alone.

Fowler Island is where depressed women go to die. “The island feasts on female sadness. It licks it up like ice cream.” Women visit the island and disappear, perhaps by jumping (voluntarily or otherwise) into the quarry, which is now filled with water. The quarry is known to the Volt sisters as the Killing Pond. Nobody seems to care about the missing women. Their bodies are never recovered so they are quickly forgotten. Moulton seems to be making a heavy-handed argument that society in general doesn’t care about women, although in most places, when someone comes across a female foot that has been detached from its body, the police at least investigate. Not on Fowler Island.

The island devil, a “great big and dripping thing with leathery fins,” lives in the Killing Pond. Perhaps bodies never surface because they are consumed by the monster, apart from the stray foot. When, on occasion, “the essential part” of the monster walks on land, it can change its shape to suit its whims. The monster’s true identity is a barely concealed secret until Moulton decides to state the obvious.

The other key character is Sonia, the curator of the island museum who helps mop up the blood and feet when women disappear. Sonia helped James raise B.B. after Olivia Rose disappeared.

For reasons that are revealed near the novel’s end, Carrie separated from James without warning, leaving the girls to fear that she had disappeared like Olivia Rose. After she returned, the girls sensed that Carrie would leave James and made drama because they feared she would only take her biological daughter with her. Their scheme to remain inseparable ends with a transformative experience for Henri. The island is indifferent to the scheme because it has plans for the Volt sisters.

Early in the novel, in a chapter that takes place in 2000, B.B. finds her father’s body, minus a part he seems to have shed. B.B. calls Henri to deliver the news. When Henri tells her mother that she will return for the funeral because B.B. needs her, Carrie reminds Henri that the island is “a magnet for trouble” and a “lighthouse for disaster.” Carrie eventually agrees to join Henri although she vows not to enter Quarry Hollow. Really, she should have known better. In any event, the Volt sisters are together once more.

The plot is all over the place. It combines a haunted house story with one of demonic possession while exploring sisterly relationships under extreme circumstances, failed marriages under extreme circumstances, and the disappearances of women who fled extreme circumstances. Themes of female despair and empowerment drive the novel. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to note that the ghosts who haunt the house are the residue of the women who died on the island. In death as in life, they are enslaved by toxic masculinity. Exactly why that is true is never addressed. It seems to be assumed that male demons feed on women because that's what men do.

The eventual show of strength displayed by the Volt sisters is a stretch, if only because their acquisition of girl power is unconvincing, even in a horror novel that demands suspension of disbelief. A late scene in which Carrie and Sonia overcome adversity by battling a devil while they’re underwater is just silly. So is the thought that ghosts of dead women urge a living woman who allies with them to “be strong” and “not to quit” until they transform the woman into “a lightning bolt of a girl.” You go, sisters! This is the kind of plot I might expect from a comic book. I just couldn’t take it seriously.

Because the novel is literary, Moulton devotes great attention to character development. Carrie and Sonia are collateral characters but they relate their thoughts in detail — Carrie’s thoughts of how it feels to be a disappearing mother, her changing feelings about James and the plan she made to escape from the island, her fear of the house and of James’ potential responsibility for the vanishing women; Sonia’s thoughts of being a maternal stand-in and the custodian of island lore. The detail slows the pace, inhibiting the fear that the novel never conjures.

Descriptions of the island monster crawling out of the goop are a bit chilling, until we realize that it’s a standard lizard monster with changeling powers. Moulton’s failure to enliven a horror story with original ideas leaves a shell that she fills with striking sentences and an ode to sisterhood that, while well-intentioned, falls short of being compelling.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez

First published in Spain in 2019; published in translation by Random House/Hogarth on February 7, 2023

Our Share of Night is a literary horror novel, a domestic drama with a supernatural twist. A father hopes that his son did not inherit his connection to the Darkness. When it becomes apparent that his son shares his ability to summon the Darkness, he wants to shield his son from his wife’s family, who expect the Darkness to reveal the secret of immortality. The son loves and hates his father. He will eventually need to confront his family, just as his father did.

The Order regards Juan Peterson as a medium, an essential bridge to the Darkness and its secrets. The Order has deep roots in England, but a branch of the family moved to Argentina, where it is ruled by the matriarch Mercedes. Juan and Rosario, the daughter of Mercedes, had a son named Gaspar. Rosario died three months before the novel begins, but Juan should still be able to speak with her. He cannot find her because she has been hidden from him. Who did the hiding?

Juan was born with a defective heart. He’s had multiple surgeries, but he knows his condition will lead to a premature death. Before he dies, Juan is desperate to find a way to keep the Order from taking control of Gaspar. The Order wants to compel Juan to allow his essence to enter Gaspar at the moment of death. The transmigration of consciousness is the secret of immortality that the Order craves. Juan wants his son to live his own life, not as a continuation of Juan and not a life of servitude to the Order.

Juan is convinced that Rosario was murdered because she wanted to protect Gaspar from the clutches of her family. When the story opens, Gaspar is only six. The Order does not know whether Gaspar has inherited the ability to become a medium. Juan learns the distressing truth when Gaspar begins to see dead people. Juan keeps that knowledge a secret from family members as he teaches Gaspar to make the dead go away.

The story spans generations as it traces the history of the Order. Mercedes is the “priestess of a god who ignores her.” She is always looking for new mediums but Juan is the best she has found. Mariana Enríquez details the rituals the Order follows to satisfy the hunger of the Darkness. Initiates willingly, even ecstatically, lose limbs when they touch the Darkness after it is summoned by a medium. It’s rare for horror novels to make the supernatural seem real rather than silly, but Enríquez has created a shadow world that seems just as real and even more frightening than the world we inhabit.

The novel’s first half focuses on Juan and his relationships with other family members who belong to the Order, including Rosario’s half-sister, with whom Juan has a complicated and intimate history. Much about Juan is complicated, from his bisexual relationships with family members to his parenting of Gaspar. Is Juan an abusive father or is he doing what must be done to protect his son?

Gaspar comes into his own when he enters an abandoned house with his friends. One of those friends is Adela, a distant relative who lost her arm to the Darkness. The door to the house is locked but Gaspar has the ability to enter locked doors. They discover that the house is larger on the inside than its outside dimensions. Adela enters a room in the house and closes the door behind her, challenging Gaspar with the only door he cannot open. Adela is never seen again (at least not in the corporeal world). Her disappearance will trouble Gaspar in the years to come. Gaspar will also be troubled by memories, or the absence of memories that would explain gaps in his life. Those memories will eventually return and illuminate Gaspar’s history with his father, but only after his father’s death.

Like many good horror novels, the story contrasts supernatural terror with the horror that is part of life in the seen world. Chapters in the second half follow several characters, often embodying a different aspect of life in Argentina at different times in the nation’s turbulent history. Pablo is one of Gaspar’s friends who entered the house with Adela. Pablo is secretly in love with Gaspar, but Gaspar is straight. As he grows older, Pablo struggles to balance his fear of AIDS — a disease that eventually claims most of his friends — with the thrill of anonymous sex. Pablo is shunned by moralistic Argentina. He still feels the hand that grasped his shoulder when he was lost in the house where Adela disappeared. Perhaps the supernatural forces that haunt him are symbolic of the other fears that torment gay men in Argentina.

Vicky was also in the house with Gaspar and Pablo. Ten years later, she’s a talented medical student, with an almost supernatural ability to diagnose hidden diseases. She wants Gaspar to believe that his occasional encounters with (the ghost of?) Adela are hallucinations brought on by epilepsy. The reader, like Gaspar, will doubt that medicine can explain the experiences that Gaspar, Pablo, and Vicky have. The novel asks whether disease and mental illness might be an outsider's explanation of perceptions they do not share or understand.

A late chapter follows a journalist who tries to investigate the story of Adela. She learns how difficult it is to find Gaspar, even when she knows exactly where he lives. Another chapter follows Gaspar as he is haunted by the ghosts of his father and Adela. Psychiatric care does no good in a country where disappearances are common and everyone feels haunted. Argentina’s military dictatorship is a version of the Darkness; its believers control the nation in the way that the Order controls Gaspar’s family.

The novel covers an impressive amount of ground without ever causing confusion. Enríquez’s crystalline prose build a supernatural world that no less sharply focused than the Argentina in which her carefully crafted characters live. Themes of family drama (a well-meaning father whose parenting is cruel because he knows no other way; a mother who shields her child from the child's controlling grandmother) will resonate with families that are troubled by violence and strife that has no supernatural origin. A strong ending resolves Gaspar’s immediate problem while recognizing that the pain of lost souls and the risk of new horrors are always a part of life. Our Share of Night sets a new bar for literary horror novels.

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