Revelator by Daryl Gregory

Published by Knopf on August 31, 2021

As horror novels go, Revelator is creepy rather than frightening. The horror does not manifest as a vampire or demon or any other destructive entity that seeks to enslave or destroy the human race, although the possibility that such an entity might reveal itself underlies the story. For most of the novel, the entity that places Revelator into the genre of horror fiction doesn’t threaten anyone except the series of children who serve it, and it probably doesn’t intend to hurt them. Only at the novel’s end do we learn the true nature of those children and of their relationship to the entity they serve.

Alternating chapters focus on the life of Stella Birch in 1938 and 1948. Stella’s family has long resided in a mountainous area of Tennessee that is about to become part of a national park. Inside the mountain lives an entity Stella calls Ghostdaddy. Others in her family call it the God of the Mountain.

A long line of Birch women, all born to absent fathers, have communed with the Ghostdaddy. They enter the mountain and receive the word of Ghostdaddy. Since they are apparently recipients of the mountain god’s revelations, a religion has grown from the communions. The religion was not founded by the women who actually commune with Ghostdaddy, but by a man who purported to have a better understanding of the revelations than the women who receive them. For each new generation of women, the word of the God of the Mountain has been transcribed in a series of books, accompanied by commentary furnished by a male family member who believes he better understands the god’s true meaning.

Stella is a child in 1938. She wants to read all the books of the women who came before her, but her Uncle Hendrick won’t allow it. Hendrick has appointed himself the current interpreter of the God of the Mountain’s words, as spoken through the Birch women. Hendrick would like Stella to produce as many revelations as possible, but her mother Motty doesn’t think Stella is ready. Hendrick defers to Motty as the oldest surviving Birch woman. Stella has her own mind about things and discovers truths about Ghostdaddy before Motty is ready to reveal them.

In 1948, Stella returns to the mountain because Motty has died. Sunny becomes the next Birch girl to commune with Ghostdaddy. Stella wants to shield Sunny from that experience while Hendrick wants to keep Sunny to himself. He’s moving the family religion to a broader audience and needs new revelations to cement his position. Struggles eventually ensue between Stella and Hendrick, between Stella and Sunny, and between Stella and Ghostdaddy.

Daryl Gregory adds color to the story by giving Stella a role in the family moonshine business with her Uncle Abby. She also has a quasi-romantic relationship with a preacher’s son. Something strange happens when Motty slaughters pigs, but you’ll have to read the book to understand it. All of that background helps Gregory portray Stella as an interesting and sympathetic member of a strange backwoods family.

The backwoods tendency to invent bizarre religions and to sucker others into believing them is a key component of the story. It might also be a thinly disguised commentary on the negative impact that backwoods religions have on their adherents. The backwoods church that most of the characters attend before they learn about the God of the Mountain doesn’t allow women to speak. On the other hand, the God of the Mountains is a real entity that demands a form of worship, even if it isn’t much of a god. Unsurprisingly, all of Hendricks’ interpretations of the god’s “revelations” prove to be completely wrong. Such is the nature of fringe preachers.

Stella views herself as a monster. If people knew what she is capable of doing, others might see her that way too. The reader will more likely view Stella as someone who had to play the hand she was dealt, and who played it with courage and compassion.

If Revelator isn’t particularly scary, the story’s creepiness — the ending, in particular — offsets the absence of chills. The atmosphere is appropriate to a horror novel, the story has a good pace, and the depiction of backwoods religion adds to the story’s interest.

RECOMMENDED

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.

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