JAMES GRAINGER
With “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the second in the Indian Lake Trilogy, Stephen Graham Jones establishes himself as the undisputed master of the literary slasher novel. Jade Daniels, the sardonic final girl of “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” returns to Proofrock, Idaho, four years after surviving the Independence Day Massacre. Her arrival, one day before Friday the 13th, coincides with a nearby avalanche that waylays a police convoy carrying a notorious serial killer, “Dark Mill South.” When he escapes and makes his way to Proofrock, Jade, still a suspect in the first massacre, is forced to rescue the townies again while facing down a lifetime of trauma.
Eleven years after teenage Henrietta Volt and her mother fled their family home on Fowler Island on Lake Erie, Henrietta receives a call from her estranged half-sister Beatrice informing her that their father has died. The news comes with a desperate request: for Henrietta to return to Fowler. When Henrietta reluctantly agrees, she is drawn back into the curse that has afflicted generations of Volt women on the island. The shifting timelines and multiple narrators can be confusing at first, but the reader should get acclimatized pretty quickly to this complex updating of many beloved Gothic tropes.
Nathan Ballingrud has gifted us with two of the finest collections of short horror fiction in the last 10 years, so expectations are high for “The Strange,” his first novel. Set in an alternate historical timeline in which Mars was colonized in the late 19th century, “The Strange” transports readers to a Martian settlement in 1931 that had contact with Earth several years earlier. There, 14-year-old Anabelle Crisp embarks on a dangerous journey to retrieve a voice recording of her mother, who left Mars on the last transport ship to Earth. The eerie Martian setting and its feral frontier communities play to all of Ballingrud’s strengths and will evoke feelings of awe and terror. Anabelle is less satisfying as a protagonist; her lack of experience, cockiness and bad decisions inexplicably inspire loyalty from the far more interesting secondary cast of desperate frontier men and women.
Eunice Houghton is an elderly heiress so terrified of a family curse that she offers a six-figure salary to anyone who can prove that a house on her property is haunted. What Eunice plans to do with that evidence is irrelevant to Eric Ross, a father of two girls on the run from a recent family tragedy who agrees to move into the spite house. The mysterious residence soon obliges Eric with all the evidence of the supernatural he needs; it also works its malevolent power on his youngest daughter. A satisfying haunted house story that, like so much good American horror fiction, probes the country’s deep historical wounds.