> HORROR: JAMES GRAINGER
ALL THE FABULOUS BEASTS BY PRIYA SHARMA UNDERTOW PUBLICATIONS, 290 PAGES, $25
U.K. author Priya Sharma has been quietly publishing her ornate but ultimately unclassifiable stories in online journals and hard-to-find print anthologies for over a decade. Luckily for those readers who don’t haunt specialty bookstores and the outer reaches of the internet, Sharma’s stories have been collected into a single volume by Toronto’s own Undertow Publications.
The stories in All the Fabulous Beasts draw heavily on the gothic, folk horror and fairy tale traditions without ever feeling derivative.
The lines between the living and the dead, animal and human, even lover and family member are blurred and artfully reconfigured into grotesque shapes by Sharma’s prodigious imagination and sparse but lyrical style.
Amajor new voice in dark fantasy and horror. tails of the infamous Donner Party expedition: In pioneer times, a wagon train of American settlers set out for California; when early snowfall stranded the wagons in the mountains for the winter, the desperate migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive.
Rest assured that Alma Katsu knows more about the expedition than you ever will, and in The Hunger, she plays fast and loose with the known facts of the Donner Party’s doomed journey.
In Katsu’s version of events, the cannibalism and murder begin long before the wagon train gets bogged down in the Sierra Nevada. A child is found horribly mutilated near the wagon train. A breakout of fever leads to savage violence.
The pious pioneers begin to suspect the dark workings of a witch.
Though occasionally slowed by extended flashbacks, The Hunger is a gruesome and strangely moving reimagining of a grim chapter of American folk history.
UNBURY CAROL BY JOSH MALERMAN DEL REY BOOKS, 370 PAGES, $36
Josh Malerman’s high-concept novels have been winning over readers and critics since the publication in 2014 of his debut, Bird Box, a riveting take on the post-apocalyptic zombie saga.
In Unbury Carol, Malerman reworks a classic fairy tale — Sleeping Beauty — filling out his tale with the larger-than-life archetypes of the Old West. Carol is a frontier woman who periodically falls into a deathlike coma, during which she visits an alternate world called Howltown.
After the death of her best friend, one of the only people who knows of her condition, her conniving husband Dwight hatches a plot to bury her alive the next time the coma strikes. Only Moxie, an infamous gunslinger who carries a torch for Carol, can save her from Dwight’s machinations. Oddly paced and overly wordy in places, Unbury Carol is still an intriguing read with plenty of genuinely macabre and surreal moments, especially whenever the bounty hunter/arsonist Smoke makes an appearance.
WIDOW’S POINT BY RICHARD CHIZMAR AND BILLY CHIZMAR CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS, 160 PAGES, $32
This short novel by father-son writing team Richard and Billy Chizmar is proof that in horror fiction, the oldest stories are often the best stories.
The Chizmars take one of the genre’s most familiar plot lines — an overnight stay in a haunted house — and with disarming confidence breathe chilling new life into the stock narrative tropes. The Widow’s Point of the title is an abandoned and reputedly cursed lighthouse in a small coastal community in Nova Scotia.
Several gruesome on-site deaths have forced the current owner to padlock the lighthouse, but a bestselling author, hoping to gather material for his next book, bribes his way into a weekend stay.
The novel is structured as a transcription of the audio recordings made by the author, a limitation that forces the reader to fill in their own visual details as the weekend of horrors progresses.