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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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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