Stephen King’s new collection of short stories is titled “You Like It Darker,” and he comments in the very fascinating afterword that he got the title from the Leonard Cohen song “You Want It Darker.” These twelve stories range from nine pages to ninety pages, and each one introduces us, unsurprisingly, to people who are visiting a dark place.
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Author Douglas Preston’s latest novel, “Extinction,” fits comfortably into several genre spaces. It’s definitely a murder mystery, certainly a science fiction piece, and, eventually, absolutely a horror story which, incidentally, could quite easily be adapted as movie material.
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In some ways, “Midnight is the Darkest Hour” by Ashley Winstead seems at first to hit many cliches that we might find in a murder mystery set in a tiny town in the southernmost point of Louisiana: a fundamentalist Baptist Church with hypocritical parishioners and an even more hypocritical preacher, a steamy, alligator-filled atmospheric swamp, a “bad boy” best friend, a naive main character. But Winstead takes all that and turns things upside down as we come to realize that in spite of her apparent naiveté, Ruth Cornier, the preacher’s daughter, doesn’t fit neatly into any of the slots in which the others in town have placed her.
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“Hemlock Island” is the eponymous setting for Kelley Armstrong’s new stand alone horror novel, and just the name of the island is a clue that it could be a dangerous place to visit. Laney, a divorced teacher who just published her first book, owns a beautiful house on the island. It was a gift from her ex-husband Kit when he walked away from their marriage. Laney must visit it because the current renters left in a huff after complaining about a blood-stained closet door, and that, in combination with other strange happenings, causes her to investigate what’s going on there.
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How much does our brain do to protect us? What repressed memories might surface one day with the right stimuli? In “Behind the Red Door,” author Megan Collins explores how childhood events can be suppressed, altered, misremembered, and deleted. Main character Fern Douglas is happily married to a fabulous pediatrician and she enjoys her job as a school social worker. She knows how to talk to kids, how to get them to admit to abusive living situations and how to help them understand it’s not their fault that they have abusive parents.
“Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic” is a set of twenty excellent short stories dealing with the terrible effects of pandemics and lockdowns on both normal and abnormal human beings — and on normal people who become abnormal as the result of attempting to cope with viral plagues. The editors, Nick Kolakowski and Steve Waddle, have done a fine job of collecting and presenting the material; the stories range in intensity from quite intense to horrifyingly compelling.
The series began with “The Darkdeep,” a horror story by Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs, and now the stories of the monsters and the mystery behind the appearance of “The Beast” might just be solved. In the first book, we learn about the quiet town of Timber in the Pacific Northwest, and about several of its teenage residents.
Nico is the son of an environmentalist, and with his friends Opal, Emma, and Tyler, and another teen, Logan, the son of the richest businessman in town, all happen upon a houseboat in the middle of an unnamed island. Strange things happen both in the houseboat and in the waters around it, but in this second book, they learn that the fate of the world may be on their teenage shoulders.
Danish novelist Soren Sveistrup’s “The Chestnut Man” offers us two fascinating protagonists, several gruesome murders, a few puzzling clues, and zero investigative results — through many hours and days — despite a long, grueling search for the perpetrator. Here is an electric police procedural/murder mystery and a harrowing miasma of gritty suspense that builds to a brutal, ugly, and entirely appropriate climax. “The Chestnut Man” is downright perfectly nerve-wracking. Just as it’s supposed to be.
Get ready for a set of new superheroes. And super bad guys. “Villain” by Michael Grant has them all.
Both Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs are seasoned writers, and that shows in their newest release, “The Darkdeep.” The story is Stephen King for kids, and the horror is all too imaginable, thanks to the well-written descriptions by both authors of the horrors that main character Nico and his friends face in a haunted cove in the Pacific northwest.
With “Sawkill Girls,” author Claire Legrand creates a positively Stephen King-ish horror story that takes place on an exclusive island for the extremely wealthy where girls have mysteriously disappeared for decades. In addition to the three female main characters, the island, with its woods and cliffs and mysterious hidden areas, becomes almost another character.