Powerful. Brutal. Bursting at the seams with cosmic horror, ennui, violence and self-annihilation. There are many ways to describe Laird Barron’s latest collection, NOT A SPECK OF LIGHT: Stories (Bad Hand Books, 370 pp., paperback, $19.99), but superb works just fine.
A murderer recounts his most memorable kills and how his victims have haunted him in “The Glorification of Custer Poe.” In “Joren Falls,” a retired couple learn to live with the hungry abomination that dwells in their attic. “The Blood in My Mouth” follows a man whose partner will do anything to see her dog again, even if it means delving deep into the supernatural.
Recurring elements across the 16 tales in this collection — space as a threatening place full of monsters; Alaska as the cold, unforgiving backdrop where death lurks at all times; violence as the answer to most questions — give it a pleasing sense of cohesion. Barron’s work is where eldritch horrors and unflinching brutality collide with poetry. “Not a Speck of Light” proves Barron belongs on the Mount Rushmore of dark speculative fiction.
Hildur Knutsdottir gives readers a lot in her new novella, THE NIGHT GUEST (Tor Nightfire, 208 pp., $19.99), but she doesn’t give any answers, and that’s a good thing.
Idunn is always tired. She’s tried everything to fix her fatigue, but nothing works. Her friends suggest that exercising more might improve her rest, so she buys a watch with a pedometer to take up walking. One evening she forgets to remove the device before bed and, much to her surprise, it reveals that she unconsciously takes lengthy hikes at night while she’s asleep, always to a harbor in a district that is “an industrial blight.”
Idunn’s exhaustion during the day continues, and as a result, her life begins to collapse — all while her night jaunts leave her bruised and bloodied, with a black eye and missing some fingernails. She needs to go to the harbor and find out what’s happening before things get worse, but Idunn knows enough to be too scared to go.
“The Night Guest,” which is translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal, is Knutsdottir’s first book to be published in English. Her sharp prose, short chapters (which are sometimes no more than a sentence) and tense mysteries make this book a truly gripping read you can devour in one sitting.
Sidestepping norms of decorum and taste is risky, but Richard Thomas pulls it off beautifully in INCARNATE (Podium Publishing, 254 pp., paperback, $19.99), a novel full of bizarre creatures, gore and suffering that explores grief, forgiveness and the eternal battle between good and evil.
“Incarnate” is split into three intertwining story lines. The first follows Sebastian, a sin-eater who helps the deceased cross over to the afterlife through a haunting ritual. The second is narrated by a female monster whose existence is concentrated on fighting for survival and looking for love while birthing monsters with different partners. She wants to protect the world from terrors coming in through an otherworldly portal, which is also one of Sebastian’s concerns. The third story line belongs to Kallik, a boy who befriends Sebastian and begins his training to become a sin-eater.
The Sebastian and Kallik sections are great. They delve into ideas about human cruelty while also examining love and care. The monster’s section in the middle is even better, but squeamish readers may bristle at the amount of weirdness and viscera in that narrative. Still, Thomas’s passion for language is evidenced by his lush descriptions of the frozen tundra where the story takes place and the creatures that inhabit it, and he tempers the most foul scenes in time to keep the novel from becoming off-putting. This is a must-read for fans of strange, surreal horror.
SINOPHAGIA: A Celebration of Chinese Horror (Solaris, 485 pp., paperback, $16.99), translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni, is an enlightening, if somewhat slow, anthology that showcases what China’s horror scene has to offer.
Ni’s introduction — which is filled with information about China’s rich tradition of zhiguai, or tales of the strange, and about the ways horror has become stigmatized in the country — is alone worth the price of admission. The 14 stories that follow — each written by a contemporary Chinese horror writer — are just as riveting. Hong Niangzi’s “The Girl in the Rain” is an atmospheric tale about a love triangle that mixes with a local legend, with deadly results. She Cong Ge’s “Those Who Walk at Night, Walk With Ghosts” follows a group of people who must take a sick man across a mountain full of phantoms. Yimei Tangguo’s “The Ghost Wedding” uses the Chinese “Ghost Marriage” legend to tell a story of lost love and spirits. The stories are of varying quality, but they all engage with aspects of Chinese culture on a national and regional level, and that pulls the collection together.
Touching on everything from myths to poetry, and exploring Chinese history and the way the country is still processing its past, “Sinophagia” is an enriching anthology that educates while it entertains.
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