With a Vengeance
by Riley Sager
Sager’s WITH A VENGEANCE (Dutton, 382 pp., $30) is many things at once: a fast-paced thriller, a locked-room mystery and a violent tale of revenge.
Back in 1942, during World War II, Anna Matheson’s brother died when a train transporting American troops preparing to ship abroad exploded. It wasn’t an accident. The train’s engine was intentionally constructed with shoddy materials to turn it into a deadly bomb. Anna’s beloved father, a train mogul, was blamed for the incident, convicted and later murdered in prison. The events devastated Anna’s family, especially because Anna is certain her father was framed.
Twelve years later, Anna has gathered the six people she believes are responsible for destroying her family, using personal notes with targeted messages to get them to join her for a 13-hour nonstop luxury train ride from Philadelphia to Chicago. She wants to watch them squirm and make them confess to their crimes, and then, at the end of the trip, the F.B.I. will be waiting to arrest them. But someone else on the train has a different plan, and it involves killing everyone before they reach Chicago.
“With a Vengeance” doesn’t tread new ground — it is very clearly inspired by Agatha Christie — but it dances around this known territory with grace and aplomb, in large part because of Sager’s impeccable pacing and signature twists. Some characters are thin and there’s a love triangle that occupies too much space, but Sager holds it all together with interesting deaths, buckets of tension, a few surprises and plenty of speed.
Strange Houses
by Uketsu; translated by Jim Rion
Uketsu’s STRANGE HOUSES (HarperVia, 203 pp., paperback, $17.99) follows a writer who starts investigating a peculiar home for sale in Tokyo. A friend, an architect named Kurihara, helps him scrutinize the building’s floor plans. As the men probe, they discover bizarre details and architectural incongruities, which convince them they’re looking at a house designed for murdering people — a “hired killer workshop,” as they call it.
When a young woman reaches out to the writer with information about a second mysterious house, the writer and Kurihara pore over a new batch of floor plans, and conduct a series of interviews with the young woman, to figure out what this curious second building actually is and what happened there as well.
“Strange Houses” shares a lot of DNA with Uketsu’s previous book, “Strange Pictures,” including: half a title, a central conceit of a mystery that must be solved by studying images, an aesthetic and atmosphere, and even a cover design. Given the many glaring parallels, it’s impossible not to compare the two books.
Unfortunately, “Strange Houses” doesn’t reach the same heights as “Strange Pictures.” The difference lies in the way each book uses its key components. “Strange Pictures” employed multiple cryptic images as puzzle pieces to slowly shape a larger story that ultimately made sense. It was a unique narrative approach that made the novel feel fresh. In “Strange Houses,” though, the approach is more haphazard. First, the book’s images — in this case, floor plans — appear so often the book starts to feel repetitive. (They appear on 17 of the first 50 pages, for instance.) Meanwhile, the overall narrative never coalesces into anything enjoyable.
“I can see how it all fits together,” the writer says to his friend at one point, “but … isn’t it all a little far-fetched?”
Awakened
by Laura Elliott
Postapocalyptic narratives usually deal with large-scale events, but their success hinges on their ability to make the grandiose feel immediate and intimate. Elliott’s AWAKENED (Angry Robot, 431 pp., paperback, $18.99) does that very well.
The story is set in a world where scientists have come up with a way for people to stay awake for longer and longer. Sleep is necessary, of course, but capitalism demands small sacrifices. This sleep “innovation” has brought about the end of civilization: Without rest, humans have transformed into violent zombielike monsters called “the Sleepless.”
Thea is part of a group of scientists who, haunted by guilt, are desperately looking for a cure. So far, all their efforts have been in vain, but when two survivors — one of them not entirely human — show up one day, they bring a new wave of hope.
The thing that stands out in “Awakened” isn’t the end of the world, but rather, Elliott’s deeper meditation on life. Thea and one of the newly arrived survivors, a man who can’t remember his true name so he just asks people to call him Vladimir, constantly engage in philosophical conversations about everything from the power of identity to the definition of humanity.
Empathy. Ethics and science. What it means to be “divergent” or “different.” “Awakened” grapples with these topics valiantly and lyrically. This is an impressive debut worth losing sleep over.
The post Revenge, Murder and Zombies in 3 New Horror Novels appeared first on New York Times.
