Book Review: GIRL IN THE CREEK

TITLE: Girl in the Creek

AUTHOR: Wendy N. Wagner

262 pages, Tor Nightfire, ISBN 9781250908643 (hardcover, e-book, audiobook)

MY RATING: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*

REVIEW: Girl in the Creek, Wendy N. Wagner’s new ecohorror novel from Tor Nightfire, manages to be claustrophobic and expansive at the same time, masterfully using beautiful descriptions of the Mount Hood region of the Pacific Northwest to make the reader feel trapped with the main character as things spiral out of control.

Travel reporter Erin comes to the small former mining town of Faraday with four friends (podcaster Hari, tech-savvy Matt, shelter for endangered women runner Kaylee, and Kaylee’s sister Madison) ostensibly to write an article about Faraday’s charm and eco-tourist-friendly attitude. She is really there to investigate a spate of missing persons cases, both for a possible book and episode of Hari’s podcast and to find emotional closure for the disappearance of her brother Bryan, which has been ruled by local police as a suicide with no body found. Erin and her gang immediately encounter locals both nice (hiking enthusiast Jared, river tour guide Dahlia), not nice (the Steadman brothers) and indeterminate (landlord Olivia Vanderpoel, deputy sheriff Duvall, local mushroom expert Ray). In the hands of some writers, juggling this many characters would be unwieldy at best, or they would mostly be played at stereotype level, filling their narrative roles without much depth. But Wagner has a wonderful knack for imbuing characters with depth in just a handful of sentences, forcing the reader to see beyond the “types” and come to care about them, which I happen to thin is a key component of effective horror fiction. I love slasher films as much as the next horror aficionado, but I never feel emotionally connected to most of the victims in such a film. Wagner made me care, so almost every death (and there are deaths, oh boy are there deaths) has emotional impact, even the ones that occur chronologically before the events of the book.

Wagner is also adept at establishing and maintaining mood. Despite being set largely outdoors, there is a pervading sense of claustrophobia that anyone who has ever been lost in the woods or crawling through a cave or stumbled through a dark house will recognize. Hours after finishing the book I still can’t quite shake the feeling. There is an undercurrent of looming danger that permeates every page and grows more distinct and precise as the threat becomes more apparent to the characters.

I have a love/hate relationship with mushrooms. Seen out in the wild, I find their variety of shapes and colors fascinating (sometimes morbidly so) and often can’t look away from them. But I also have a strict “no fungus” rule when it comes to what I eat (don’t bother trying to convince me otherwise. It’s been attempted. It won’t work). Wagner perfectly captured everything that fascinates me about wild fungi while also increasing my commitment to never eating any … thus perhaps proving why I would be one of the first victims if I existed in this book (or in any other fungi-based horror or SF story). I shall be looking even more askance at mushrooms, mycelium, mold, and mildew going forward.

I have not yet read any of the other recently released entries in what seems to be a trend of fungi-based horror, but I can highly recommend Girl in the Creek, Wendy N. Wagner’s entry into the genre.

I have previously reviewed some of Wendy N. Wagner’s short stories here and here, and plan to post reviews of her other novels soon.

*Starting now, I’ve decided to move away from a star-based rating system here on the blog (I can’t avoid using stars on Goodreads, NetGalley, and the various bookseller sites). Instead I am switching to ranking books as “highly recommended,” “recommended,” “satisfactory” and “not right for me.” I may add other levels as I refine this concept.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Sunday Shorts: SLOW BURN

TITLE: Slow Burn

AUTHOR: Mike Allen

278 pages, Mythic Delirium Books, ISBN 9781956522037 (paperback; also e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Slow Burn, Mike Allen’s latest short story collection, is another tour-de-force mix of body horror, existential dread, and yes, I’ll say it again as I did for his previous collection, mind-fuckery (in the best possible sense of the word). Allen’s stories, even the dark fantasy entries, are grounded in a gritty reality that then veers into increasingly disturbing imagery. Even when his stories start with a sense of dread or an unsettling moment, Allen’s talent for grounding the reader before pulling the rug out from under is on full display.

Allen’s stories are character driven, wherein lies another of his talents: revealing the interiority of a character with sometimes just a sentence or two. Whether the story is set in the small town here-and-now of southwestern Virginia or a fantasy world, the horror is heightened because the characters, or their wants/needs, are recognizable and relatable. The main characters also tend to be common people – middle class or lower – rather than rich or famous, dealing with horrors that encroach on their ability to get a job, keep a job, or get home to a loved one.

In “Falling Is What It Loves,” a daughter tries to come to peace with the complicated relationship she had with her father after his death from cancer with the aid of a supernatural (or possibly alien?) creature called a “roommate.” Is the roommate somehow the main character’s conscience or internal monologue personified? Does every person on Earth have a “roommate”? The story opens up, but does not easily answer, questions about guilt and communication and generational trauma. Generational trauma is also at the core of “The Feather Stitch,” in which a grandmother’s search for her missing grandson leads her to a craft shop with a demonic connection – but generational understanding and familial magic also play their role in a dark story with a (hopefully) hopeful ending.

My two favorite stories in the collection share a theme: how secrets revealed can cause a life, and a person’s sense of self, to fall apart. In “The Butcher, The Baker,” Trukos’ life is simple: kill whoever Auntie Mayya tells him to, in defense of her baking empire. Until the day when Trukos kills someone he wasn’t ordered to and the magic driving him begins to unravel. (Is it spoilery to say this is the darkest take on both the titular fairy tale and “the gingerbread man” that I’ve ever read? Possibly. Sorry.). In “Gherem,” (co-authored with Charles M. Saplak), the titular character, injured in battle, is tasked with carrying an angry witch back to their homeland with the prize that had been battled for before enemy forces catch up to them – but neither Gherem, nor the witch, nor the reason for the battle, are what they at first seem.

The collection also includes horror, or horror-tinged, poems. I feel in no way qualified to review poetry, so all I’ll say is that like the short stories, the poems range from the subtly eerie to full-bore horror.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Review of AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT: STORIES

TITLE: Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories

AUTHOR: Mike Allen

235 pages, Mythic Delirium Books, ISBN 9781732644021 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): A Korean War veteran must rely on wits, improvised weapons, and words from the dread Necronomicon to escape the lair of a deranged cult. A ghost cannot communicate how she died, no matter how desperately she tries, while an unconventional ghost hunter incurs the venomous wrath of the Queen of Night. Murderous conspiracies reveal themselves in online video clips, a saint blasphemes as a serial killer prays for mercy, and corrupt families in ancient kingdoms trade blood and souls for leverage over foes. Enduring nightmares for a living can lead to a fate worse than burnout. A gruesome invasion from outside space and time tests courage – and corporate loyalty – past all rational limits. In these twenty-three stories and poems, two-time World Fantasy Award nominee Mike Allen spins twisted narratives, some wound through the fabric of our world, some set in imagined pasts or futures, all plumbing the depths of human darkness.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Mike Allen’s fiction is in your face, no holds barred. Allen will do whatever it takes – linguistic gymnastics, horrific physical details, telling a story from the point of view of a parasite or a micorganism – to get under your skin, to make you squirm, and quite possibly to make you throw the book across the room as you fight back nausea. If I may steal a term from my own review of Allen’s most recent novella (in the anthology A Sinister Quartet): Mike Allen’s work is one masterful mind-fuck after another.

If you’re the kind of person who wonders whether a spider might lay eggs in their ears while you sleep and then gleefully describes what it would be like when those eggs hatch, does Mike Allen have some stories for you. Not that that there’s a spider-lays-eggs-in-main-character’s-ear-canal story in this volume – but it’s the kind of thing that would be right at home here, and if anyone could make it scary instead of trope-y, it’s Allen. The stories that are cutting-edge body horror are not for the squeamish. The protagonist of “The Sun Saw” stumbles upon a creature fused together from the living bodies of multiple humans; “Puppet Show” reveals the back-stage workings that turn humans into blood-soaked automatons for a massive rock stage show by the band Bloodbath Jubilee. In these stories, Allen spares no details. He refuses to let us look away from the damage people will do to each other in the name of religion (the cult in “The Sun Saw”) or entertainment (“Puppet Show”) or science (“Aftermath of an Industrial Accident,” which features some graphic death scenes and another forced melding of disparate bodies into one).

Not every story is a full gross-out, of course. The body horror of “With Shining Gifts That Took All Eyes” and “Tardigrade” is subtler stuff, in the former case more inferred than seen. Even the comical-but-disturbing “Tick Flick” is not quite as in-your-face – but all three stories leave an afterimage burned on the mind’s eye that returns days after you’ve last consciously thought of the story at all. And sometimes, that’s worse than the more concrete images Allen gives us.

Body horror is not the only sub-genre represented. There’s a linked pair of fantasy horror tales, “Longsleeves” and “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade,” that take place in the land of Calcharra and explicate the lengths men will go to to gain and retain power (usually over or through the women they’re supposed to care for). There are Lovecraftian themes and overtones in a number of stories: the unseen Owner of the creature in “The Sun Saw” and the unseen Mother in the disturbing  monologue “Drift from the Windrows” being the most obvious. There are cursed books (“Binding,” which is also an excellent example of the “club story” genre) and cursed phrases (“Nolens Volens”).

The Calcharra stories aren’t the only linked stories in the collection. Fans of Allen’s Korean War veteran turned hunter-of-the-weird John Hairston will be happy to see him in two of the tales herein, “The Sun Saw” and “Nolens Volens” (and isn’t it about time Cemetery Dance or Subterranean Press issued a nice hardcover collection of all of Allen’s extant Hairston adventures?). The stories “The Cruelest Team Will Win” and “Follow The Wounded One” don’t share characters or a setting but they seem to take place in the same world, one in which certain people are born with animal spirits that allow them to co-exist in the dreamworld/spiritual realm connected to our own. The female narrator of “The Cruelest Team” turns into a bird to chase away, or sometimes eat, the ghosts haunting friends’ houses, while the male narrator of “Wounded One” turns into a giant cat in the other world and meets a young woman who also turns into a bird. (I didn’t see anything that implies Leeanne in “Team” and Kori in “Wounded” are the same character or even turn into the same type of bird – but perhaps I wasn’t reading closely enough.) Both protagonists take on apex predators in the spirit realm who are equally dangerous in the mundane world.

There are a couple of more standard ghost stories as well: the protagonists of “A Deaf Policeman Heard the Noise” and “Burn the Kool Kidz at the Stake” each deal with ghosts haunting their psyches and their homes. “Kool Kidz” also has a lot to say about toxic fan culture and is perhaps even more topical now than it was when it originally saw print in 2017 (which seems so much longer ago than it really is).

Three of the stories in the collection have never been published before: “A Deaf Policeman Heard the Noise,” “Puppet Show,” and “Blue Evolution.” “Blue Evolution” is a neat bit of classic pulp-fantasy-adventure, in which the crew of a dimension-hopping aircraft/submersible encounter both spider-pirates and giant evolving native organisms. It’s also a great example of the author hitting the main characters with two equally bad problems and forcing them to use one to solve the other (although not necessarily in the way one might expect).

The collection also includes a number of Allen’s poems, of which I would be remiss not to mention “Toujours Il Coûte Trop Cher,” co-written with C.S.E. Cooney and imagining a spiritual/ghostly encounter between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. If this one hasn’t been recorded as a two-person audio play yet, it should be.

There really is something for every type of horror fan in Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories. Well worth seeking out in print or e-book.

NOTE: I received an ARC of this title from the publisher but didn’t get the review written in time for it’s July release.