YOU LIKE IT DARKER: Stories (Scribner, 502 pp., $30) is an outstanding collection from Stephen King, the master of horror, that features 12 eerie tales full of darkness, loss, danger, resilience and even aliens.
There are no throwaways here, but some stories merit individual attention. The first story,“Two Talented Bastids,” opens the book brilliantly. It’s a tale about an aging author and an old friend who was a famous painter that begins normally enough and then delves into the dark secret of how both creatives got their skills. Its gradual slide into terror perfectly sets the tone for the entire collection. “The Fifth Step,” about a man who opens up to a stranger in a park, is a literary shanking — it’s fast and violent in equal measure. “On Slide Inn Road,” about a family that encounters two murderers while stuck on a country road, is a master class in tension and is full of King’s dark humor. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” the crown jewel of the collection, is a 150-page crime novella about a man dealing with the aftermath of a strange dream and the obsessed detective with arithmomania hellbent on pinning a crime on him.
This book will please any horror reader, but loyal King fans will find these stories particularly rewarding, especially because of the callbacks to his previous works.
“You like it darker? Fine. So do I,” King states in his afterword. He knows what we like, and he delivers. This collection proves King is still king.
Layla Martínez’s debut novel, WOODWORM (Two Lines Press, 149 pp., $21.95), is a wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy novel about women trapped in a haunted house where shadows devour people.
The story, which is translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, follows an unnamed woman and her grandmother. They live in a house built by the family’s patriarch, a criminal who trapped women in a stable and exploited them. “This house is a curse, a curse my father put on us when he condemned us to live out the rest of our years between its walls,” the woman thinks.
The father’s body is still in the house. The women pray to saints for protection and see angels, but the house is full of dangerous shadows and ghostly voices. The women are scorned by their neighbors, who think they’re strange, so when a boy goes missing, they become suspects in the disappearance. Together, they join forces with the spirits to try to prove their innocence and get something akin to justice.
This is an exceptionally gloomy tale of anger and isolation, filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of evil. Intergenerational trauma and monsters share the spotlight in this terrific debut.
While Martínez makes hauntings dreadful, Christina Henry’s THE HOUSE THAT HORROR BUILT (Berkley, 315 pp., paperback, $18) makes them fun.
Harry Adams, a struggling single mother, is a horror movie aficionado, and she is a fan of the director Javier Castillo’s work, a fact she strategically does not mention when she takes a job cleaning at his Chicago mansion, Bright Horses. Harry knows that Castillo treasures his privacy; he had moved to Chicago to escape media scrutiny after a family tragedy.
The job turns out to be easy, which is good because Harry needs the gig, especially after the new owner of the building where she lives with her son tells her that he is selling the place and that they need to move. But maintaining the job grows to be difficult when, first, Harry keeps hearing strange noises while cleaning and then a possessed costume attacks her.
This book is a celebration of horror films, but what will stick with readers is the relationship between Harry and her son, Daniel. A lumbering costume is fun to read about, but Harry’s past and her precarious finances are the real monsters here. Henry’s spooky tale has a scary face, but it has a heart of gold.
’Pemi Aguda’s GHOSTROOTS: Stories (Norton, 208 pp., $26.99) is a collection of 12 unsettling tales that explore both the depths of humanity and the mores of Nigerian society.
The story “Manifest” follows a young woman who appears to be morphing into her dead grandmother. After moments of panic and a few violent outbursts, the imagined transition becomes reality. This story uses second-person narration for maximum effect: “In the mirror, you do not recognize yourself. And it’s because there is no you there.” Another standout is “Breastmilk,” the story of a woman struggling to breastfeed while also trying to keep her relationship afloat after her husband cheats on her. In “The Hollow,” an architect works on a vengeful house with a dark past that can’t be measured or understood.
These tales, set in an alternate version of Lagos, Nigeria, in which supernatural phenomena make the impossible commonplace, unflinchingly explore complicated human emotions. Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision, these stories herald the arrival of a major voice in speculative fiction.
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