Interview: Christa Carmen

Today for Writer Wednesday, I chat with author Christa Carmen.

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and two-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, and How to Fake a Haunting, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australiasian Shadow Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

Hi Christa! Thanks for taking some time to chat.

Thank you so much for having me, Anthony!

How To Fake A Haunting, which released on October 7th, is your third book in three years. That’s consistent output! Tell us a bit about the plot.

Lainey Taylor is being pushed to the brink by her alcoholic husband, Callum. However, without any DUIs or missed work days for a judge to point to, Lainey knows she won’t win against Callum–and his influential family–in divorce proceedings or an attempt to gain full custody of their daughter, Beatrix. She’s trapped, angry, and completely helpless. 

Her best friend Adelaide has a wild solution. They’ll stage a haunting so convincing it will drive Callum out of Lainey’s life for good. They start small, with strange smells, noises in the walls, and flies unleashed along the windowsills (I had to insert at least a little Amityville-esque influence!). But with each stage of their plan (and a little help from Callum’s alcohol-induced night terrors), Lainey is closer to seeing the haunting through to its bitter, freeing end.

Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that there’s far too much rage, resentment, and fear for Lainey and Adelaide’s plan not to go horribly wrong. As their fake haunting spirals into something no one can control, Lainey discovers that the only way out is to join forces with Callum, or die trying.

What inspired or influenced How To Fake A Haunting?

There was a very specific moment of inception for this book. My husband and I have been married for nine years this October, and like all married couples (or maybe just like all people once they reach a certain age), we tend to occasionally (ahem, often) spend so much time choosing a movie to watch, that by the time we turn it on, one or both of us falls asleep. On this particular evening, my husband swore he wasn’t tired; we chose a movie, and not five minutes later, I heard heaving breathing coming from the couch. 

Annoyed, I decided to head in and get ready for bed. But before I could, an idea–BAM–hit me like a horror movie jump scare. I grabbed his cell phone, and took a picture of him sleeping on the couch. I think maybe I was planning to show him the picture in the morning, like, “I told you you’d be the one to fall asleep!” Instead, I texted the picture to myself, walked into the kitchen, and then stormed back into the living room loud enough to wake him. “Why did you just text me a picture of yourself sleeping?” I asked. Disoriented, he replied, “What? Why would I text you a picture of myself sleeping?” But I doubled down, narrowed my eyes, and said, really cryptically, “You mean, you didn’t just text me this picture of you sleeping from your phone?” Needless to say, he was suitably freaked out, and eventually, I caved and admitted to the prank. When the time came to get working on a new novel, I thought of the playfulness of scaring your spouse, and how the idea of faking a haunting could be really fun, which morphed into questions of why someone would want to commit to a fake haunting, and then things just took off from there!

It seems like you did quite a bit of research into the paranormal investigation field, and particularly in regards to faking a haunting. Can you tell us a bit about that research?

I think the research for this book might have been some of the most bonkers research I’ve ever conducted. Around two-thirds of the way through the book, in chapter 32, Lainey and Adelaide have returned to Lainey’s house under cover of darkness to orchestrate the mother of all fake hauntings, a terrifying spectacle that will finally send Callum packing for good. In order to pull off what is essentially an elaborate theatrical production, the women dig deep into their arsenal, acquired through extensive horror movie research and a meeting with a husband-wife team of paranormal investigators. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that, in order to write the scene, I had to rely on my own knowledge of horror films, titles like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, Carrie, The Changeling, and Malevolent, as well as deep dives into smart speaker and television programming capabilities, magnetized candles, recordable teddy bears, and how much pig’s blood might be required to recreate an abattoir inside a bathroom.

Having read and loved all three of your novels, I feel like it’s safe to say you have slowly increased the supernatural quotient in each book. Daughters of Block Island was more classically Gothic, with mostly eerie vibes; Beneath the Poet’s House had some moments that could have been supernatural or could have had mundane explanations but were left up to the reader to decide, and now, without spoilers, it appears the fake haunting turns real. Has this slow increase in the supernatural been a conscious decision on your part?

So, short answer… yes? But one that was met with a fair amount of reluctance on my part and lots of encouragement from writer friends and beta readers.

I recently took part in a wonderful event an An Unlikely Story in Plainville, MA with fantastic thriller writers Vanessa Lillie and Tracy Sierra, and Tracy said that she thinks one of the most difficult things in writing horror is coming up with a ‘system’ of the supernatural—or monsters, or killers, or whatever frightening thing the author is working with—that is unique but also makes sense in the world of the story, and she stated that she felt I’d done a good job with it in How to Fake a Haunting (for which I’m eternally grateful). She then asked if I had any advice on how to invent a ‘horror world’ that is also logical, and my answer was that I start by getting something onto the page that serves the story, but that ultimately, I don’t want the supernatural in my work to be, as the kids say, “cringe.” 

I think I shied away from the supernatural on the page in the past because I was worried I would do it in a way that would be hokey or take readers out of the story. I should have trusted myself more, however, because I was happy with how the final third of How to Fake a Haunting played out.

I’m always interested to know what an author’s creative process is like. Are you a plotter, a pantser, somewhere in between? Has your process changed over the years you’ve been writing?

I am neither, I suppose. I’m a writer who tends to know where she wants a story to begin, where she wants it to end, and the major beats in between. The details, though, how I get from beginning to beat one, beat one to beat two, etc., those are apt to surprise me. I do tend to—if I stumble on an idea I want to include somewhere in a manuscript—get nervous that I’ll forget it, so I text myself little “breadcrumbs,” as I call them, so I can go back over the text thread at the end of each draft and make sure I’ve incorporated everything I wanted to include. So…I’m a ‘Hansel-and-Greteler?’

I love that term! Let’s make it a thing. You also write short stories and have edited some anthologies of local Rhode Island writers’ work. What do you look for as an editor?

First and foremost, adherence to submission guidelines! It may sound nitpicky, but this shows an editor that you respect their process and their time, and helps you put the right foot forward from first glance. As for content, I look for work that keeps me guessing, keeps me uneasy, has me questioning everything I thought I knew in the world of the story. I love a well-done ambiguous ending, a jump-scare-on-paper, and both quiet and cinematic horror, as long as it’s well done. Most importantly, I want to be thinking about the story long after I read it, turning over lines and plot points in my mind. I’m currently editing an unannounced project right now, and it’s been a delight to discover some new voices and be told some amazing, get-under-your-skin stories from writer’s I’ve come to admire.

I’m already eagerly anticipating your next book, as you probably have guessed. Can you tease us at all about your next project and when we might expect it?

Well, thank you! That’s so nice to hear. I’m indeed hard at work finishing up my fourth novel, as well as putting a second short story collection together. The novel will NOT be set in Rhode Island, which is pretty wild for me, but in London, Geneva, and Rome, and is a sort of body horror/sci-fi/artifact chase mashup. I’m having lots of fun with it and am looking forward to getting back to work on the project post-release of How to Fake a Haunting.

 In the meantime, my short story, “The Clearing,” is part of Lindy Ryan and Stephanie M. Wytovich’s HOWL: An Anthology of Werewolves from Women-in-Horror, out November 4th. I also have a story, “Comeback Kid,” in The Rack II: More Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Tom Deady, that came out October 14th, and several other stories in anthologies, as well as an editing project, that I can’t announce just yet.  

Anyone interested in updates can find me online, at Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christaqua/), Instagram (@christaqua), and Bluesky (‪@christaqua.bsky.social), as well as on my website, www.christacarmen.com.

And my traditional final question: What is your all-time favorite book?

I’m going to be such a downer on this question, because my favorite book is A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara. I’ve never read something beyond this book in which the characters felt realer to me than some of the real people I know. Yanigahara’s ability to immerse you in the story, in the world she’s created, is unparalleled. Jude’s plight also helped me understand more about how trauma can follow and shape a person than some of my experiences working at an actual inpatient psychiatric hospital ward; I worked to get into patients’ heads, to help them, but one can never quite reach through someone’s barriers the way you can into a well-rendered character’s head, and this was Jude St. Francis all the way.

Thanks, Christa!

Thank you, Anthony! This was a blast!

You can find my review of Christa’s second novel, Beneath the Poet’s House HERE.

Book Review: THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER

MY RATING: Recommended*

REVIEW: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a moody, often fever-dream-like, occasionally brutal vampire novel set against some of the bloodiest moments of Montana history. It is part vampire memoir, part family drama, and part mystery, takes a number of surreal turns, and plays with modern expectations of vampire lore – all of which adds up to a thrilling, engrossing, and thought-provoking novel.

The set-up: Etsy Beaucairne is informed of the discovery of a journal written by her great-grandfather Arthur, a Lutheran priest in Miles City Montana in the early 1900s. The journal is not only a link to lost family history, it may also provide Etsy with a way to move her stalled life forward. What she discovers in the journal is the confession of a Blackfeet Indian named Good Stab, who professes to be a vampire. Good Stab also appears to be behind a string of deaths and disappearances in both San Francisco and Miles City. The book alternates between Etsy’s 2020’s present, Arthur’s journal entries in the 1910s as he's taking the confession, and Good Stab’s recounting of his existence through the 1800s.

Good Stab’s memoir is the most surreal, fever-dream like part of the book (at least until near the end), especially in his early days as a vampire coming to understand what he has become, what he can do, and the limitations he is faced with. It is here that Jones plays most with genre expectations of a vampire’s existence and abilities, as the blood Good Stab consumes affects not only his physical appearance but his cognitive abilities. (If there are other vampire novels that touch on this the way Jones does, I haven’t come across them yet.) Good Stab is not the sparkly teen or brooding aristocrat of so much modern vampire fiction, but he has more character depth than the vampires of fiction from the Gothic era. There is also no romance in his story – but there are moments of unexpected beauty in his connection to the natural world and to his people.

There is also a lot of mystery connected to the telling of Good Stab’s story. Why has he chosen Arthur to tell his story to, and why now? What is Good Stab’s connection – if any – to the spate of dead bodies showing up on the outskirts of Miles City? Arthur’s personal history has some mystery as well, alluded to and hinted at in his self-observations throughout the journal: how did he come to be a pastor in this frontier town? How did he get the injury that affects his ability to walk? I would describe this mystery element of the book as “fair play:” in that the answers to all of these questions are embedded, some subtly, in the narrative and after the reveals the reader can go back and string those hints together.

The mystery also ties into the family drama, as Etsy tries to understand her great-grandfather’s journal in the context of what her family knew and didn’t know about his life and disappearance. Etsy and Arthur both encounter crossroads at which revealed knowledge forces a decision that will change the course of their lives.

Throughout the book Jones deals straightforwardly with how colonialism and American westward expansion affected the native population, and how steeped in blood the history of Montana (and by extension, all of the American West) is – a history many of us did not learn about in school, a history we should know about and learn from.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is not an easy read, but it is an engrossing and thought-provoking one. I recommend it.

*I have moved 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’ll be including this note in all of my reviews for the next several weeks.

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. I finished the book well before the release date but fell behind posting reviews. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is available now wherever books are sold.

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: The Shivers

TITLE: The Shivers

AUTHORS: various

194 pages, Amazon Originals, (e-book and audiobook)

MY RATING: 4 stars out of 5

REVIEW: The five short stories in Amazon’s The Shivers collection all capably fulfill the promise of the collection’s title: they all made me shiver at least once, and most more than that. While they all have some supernatural element (some slowly revealed, some blatant from the start, and mostly all in the form of ghostly presences of some kind), they are mostly absent of jump scares and gore. They are more on the suspenseful side of horror, an interesting blend of the psychological and the supernatural. All of the stories have a grounding in the everyday that is slowly (or, as slowly as one can in a short story) infused with dread and then outright horror.

In Joe Hill’s “Jackknife,” a disgraced college professor at loose ends slowly realizes there is something not right about the tree from which he recently removed a rusted old jackknife. In Stephen Graham Jones’ “The Indigo Room,” a dramatic office presentation turns dark, eerie, and prophetic. Grady Hendrix’s “The Blanks” takes place in an almost too idyllic island summer community whose secrets are hinted at before being revealed, while Catriona Ward’s “Day and Night in Misery” tweaks the haunted hotel room trope in a most moving way. The collection concludes with “Letter Slot” by Owen King, focused on a teen boy living in poverty on the same road as an abandoned McMansion to which he is inexorably drawn.

While I’ve read stories or novels by Joe Hill, Owen King, Stephen Graham Jones, and Grady Hendrix (but only one short story in Hendrix’s case), this was my first exposure to Catriona Ward’s work, and her story (like the others) definitely made me want to read more (readers, feel free to recommend what Ward book I should read next!). All five authors understood the assignment here and delivered on it. Hill’s story is probably the most outright horror/least suspenseful. Jones’s is absolutely the most surreal and otherworldly. Hendrix’s is the creepiest. Ward’s and King’s tie for the title of “most tugged at my heart.” I enjoyed all five stories and can’t stress enough how much each creeped me out.

For four of these stories, the sense of dread works so well because the authors make you care about the main characters through personal moments or traits or reminiscences that resonate. Suspense is more suspenseful, horror is more horrific, when you care about the characters who are in danger. I found the main character of the Hill story to be thoroughly unlikeable and thus less sympathetic but found the other protagonists to be relatable. Interestingly, three of those main characters are mothers of young children who are in some sort of danger, while the fourth is a teenage boy with a sick mother (a natural reversal of the caregiver/cared-for roles).

Fair warning for those who might need it: both the Ward and Hendrix stories involve child death. Both happen “off screen” but are recounted in enough detail that it may upset some people.

I received an advance electronic reading copy of this book for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The Shivers is available now in e-book and audiobook format only from Amazon, and can be purchased as individual titles or as a bundle.

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.

Book Review: OUR SHARE OF NIGHT

TITLE: Our Share of Night

AUTHOR: Mariana Enriquez   TRANSLATOR: Megan McDowell

588 pages, Hogarth Books, ISBN 9780451495150 (paperback; also hardcover, e-book, audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, translated into English by Megan McDowell, is not an easy book to read. It is close to 600 pages of dense emotive language, shifts in point-of-view, jumps in time, forays into multiple horror sub-genres, history lessons, and a pervading sense of doomed inevitability. But it is a book worth reading and contemplating. I might not have read the book, or at least not now, if it hadn’t been chosen as the January selection for Stanza Books’ Horror Book Club. Weeks after finishing it, scenes are still popping unbidden into my head and the urge to research the 1980s history of Argentina in more detail keeps growing.

Our Share of Night is primarily the story of Juan Peterson and his son Gaspar, who one morning in January 1981 set out on a road trip that will eventually take them to the remote family estate of Juan’s recently deceased wife, Rosario. Rosario’s family is part of a worldwide cult called The Order, and Juan is the Order’s unwilling medium, keeping them in contact with the Darkness they worship and which they believe has promised them immortality of a sort. Juan will do anything to protect his son from being used by the Order – even if it means putting himself, his brother Lius, his best friend Stephen, and his wife’s half-sister Tali in danger. The aftereffects of that initial road trip play out years later, as Juan’s health continues to fail and Gaspar ages into adulthood.

 I say ‘primarily’ because in addition to the large sections of the book told in close third-person from Juan’s and then Gaspar’s POV (with occasional forays into close third from the POVs of various friends and loved ones), there are shorter sections told from other people’s POV: a stream-of-consciousness section from the POV of Juan’s adoptive “father” Doctor Bradford; a short first-person section narrated by a journalist; and a long flashback narrated by the late Rosario. The Doctor Bradford section was the toughest part of the book for me, as stream-of-consciousness is not a form I enjoy, and also one of the more horrific passages as well.

Enriquez smoothly intermixes supernatural/cosmic horror (the scenes with the unknowable Darkness and the way it manifests through Juan),cult horror (The history and machinations of The Order), body horror (very much not easy to read are the passages describing what one of the Order members has done to deform young children), slasher horror (people in a house with a deranged killer), houses that are haunted or connected to supernatural realms (several), medical horror (the AIDS Crisis), generational trauma, and the very real horrors of living under a dictatorship that caused the disappearance of thousands of citizens. I’m hard pressed to think of a sub-genre of horror that isn’t represented in one form or another. There’s even a bit of erotic horror.

The true core of the book is the characters. I can’t say that I particularly like Juan, but I believed, and even admired, his need to protect his son from the horrors that have been inflicted on him. I believed in his need to somehow revenge himself on those who have abused him. I felt for Gaspar even as I yelled at him (yes, I yelled – I didn’t throw the book across the room, but I yelled) for falling into some of the same negative behaviors his exhibited. Enriquez’s handling of this generational inheritance of anger and propensity for physical violence is nuanced and oh so very realistic, as is Gaspar’s awareness that he needs to break the cycle and his struggle to do so. Rosario is equally complex in her love for Juan and her drive to take over (and theoretically change) the Order but at what cost? What, if anything, does she consider unacceptable?

Enriquez also has a lot to say about the perseverance of organizations and orders. She never directly references the legend of the Hydra (cut off one head, and two more grow back) but like that creature, despite generational bulldozing (for lack of a better term), the Order keeps coming back – much like the dictatorships of Argentina (the faces may change; the methodologies of control don’t). And so the horror continues even as the book ends.

As stated earlier, this is not an easy book to read for many reasons. But what it has to say about the history of Argentina, of colonialism, of fanaticism, is too important not to make the effort. It’s not a polemic; it’s not a lecture. It is a fantastic, character driven novel that also holds a mirror up to systems of control (organizational and interpersonal) while also touching on pretty much every type of horror story you can think of.

I’ve had Enriquez’s 2021 short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, on my To Be Read bookcase pretty much since it was published, and bought her 2024 collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, as soon as it came out – both at the recommendation of Mark at Stanza Books in Beacon NY. This novel has convinced me to move both collections up closer to the top of my To Be Read stacks.

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.

Sunday Shorts: Three from Autumn Cthulhu

Editor Mike Davis takes a line from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Polaris” (“And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon…”) and uses it as the core principal of the anthology Autumn Cthulhu (Lovecraft ezine Press, 2016). Here are my thoughts on a few of the stories contained therein:

cover image by andreiuc88

“In the Spaces Where You Once Lived” by Damien Angelica Walters

Helena and Jack, a couple in their retirement years, live in a house that backs up onto a beautiful forest. Jack is falling victim to dementia/Alzheimer’s and Helen is struggling to accept the slow loss of her husband and to cope with the changes in his personality. Jack is convinced this house is not his home, that his home is elsewhere: perhaps somewhere in the woods. Walters’ story balances a very real fear (Jack’s health and eventual full loss of memory and cognitive function) with a slow-growing dread that something is very wrong in the woods. Of course, something is, or this wouldn’t be a Lovecraftian story. The relationship between Helena and Jack is drawn so indelibly by Walters, it is easy to see the love that underpins the strangeness and discomfort; scenes with their child and grandchild add to both the poignancy of Jack’s situation and the tension of the mystery of the woods. Helena does eventually learn what’s lurking just out of sight and why it is affecting Jack – but thankfully the author does not use it as an explanation for Jack’s declining mental acuity. That would have been a bit too precious for an otherwise realistic look at the horror of Alzheimer’s and similar diseases.

“The Black Azalea” by Wendy N. Wagner

The protagonist of Wagner’s story is Candace, a recent widow whose marriage to Graham was not a happy one especially in the later years. Before he passed, Graham had planted an azalea bush in the shadow of an elm tree that succumbed to Dutch elm disease, leaving room for sunlight to kill the azalea. The dead azalea blocks Candace’s view of her garden, so she decides on the last nice day of autumn to dig the bush out. Which is when she discovers strange rot at the bush’s core … strange rot that seems to be incredibly contagious to all the other plant life on Candace’s property. And eventually to more than just the plants. Wagner is an expert at moving a story from subtle unease to full out horror, and “The Black Azalea” is yet another example of that skill. The story also does not skimp on characterization in favor of horror; Candace’s life as a widow, and her life before becoming a widow, are just as central to the story as the rot is (and, in fact, I began to consider that this (supernatural? extraterrestrial?) rot is something of a metaphor for the course of Candace and Graham’s marriage.

“A Shadow Passing” by Daniel Mills

“A Shadow Passing” is one of the most fever dream-like short stories I have read in recent memory. A young boy’s mother leaves their house each day, dressed in widow’s black, to track down “them” – winged batlike shadows that speak to her, taunt her, are leading her to something. Something the boy seems tied to, with his strange fevers. Something the boy’s aunts and grandfather don’t seem to want him to be a part of, seeking medical assistance for him while his mother is away. Mills’ prose is perfect for the story’s overall sense of disconnection from logical reality, of a sick child’s inability to understand why the adults in his life seem to be at odds, of the way fevers especially steal time from us and cause us to hallucinate. I might have been reading too much into the story, but it also feels like an investigation of how adults who get caught up in cults will sacrifice everything, potentially even their own children, for the sake of their new beliefs – and how difficult it is for family members outside the cult to save the ones who have been sucked in.

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.

Book Review: WILD SPACES

TITLE: Wild Spaces

AUTHOR: S.L. Coney

121 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250866837 (paperback, also e-book and audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Puberty is strange and confusing for everyone no matter how much your parents may tell you about what to expect. It’s especially so for the twelve-year-old boy at the center of S.L. Coney’s novella Wild Spaces, who comes to learn that all the things he doesn’t know about his mother’s family are connected to the changes he’s beginning to experience. Generational/hereditary trauma is hard enough when it’s purely emotional; what happens when it’s genetic, and those genes aren’t human?

Wild Spaces takes genres that perhaps shouldn’t work together (Southern Gothic, Eldritch Horror, and Coming of Age) and melds them so seamlessly that not only do they work together, they become something that feels fresh and new (Southern Eldritch Boys Adventure, perhaps?).

The story opens with a classic “boy meets stray dog” scene straight out of a Tommy Kirk/Kevin Corcoran Disney movie that melds a high level of wholesome adorableness (waiting to see if anyone will come to claim the dog before deciding on its new name (which ends up being the boy’s favorite pirate, Teach)) with a fair warning that this is about as light-and-fuzzy as the story gets, and that a monster is on its way. I loved this opening salvo of nostalgia tinged with danger. But from there, the story takes darker and darker turns beginning with the arrival of the boy’s maternal grandfather, who has clearly been estranged from his daughter for a long time. It’s the first time the boy and his father are meeting the grandfather, and the scene is wrought with awkward introductions that more than hint the grandfather is not a good man. Even Teach doesn’t like him. Exactly how the grandfather is not a good man is doled out slowly at first, until his true nature is revealed. These early scenes take place in a two-story house on the Carolina coast during a sweltering summer that builds to a massive storm (a storm that is both a physical danger and a metaphor for the havoc the grandfather is wreaking on their previously calm lives). If “remote house during a hot and stormy summer during which family tensions spill over and secrets are revealed” doesn’t make this book a Southern Gothic, I’m not sure what would. The reveal of the grandfather’s true nature alongside the physical changes the boy is experiencing eventually tip the story into very clearly Eldritch Horror. I don’t want to reveal too much about that aspect of the book. It took me by surprise and a few scenes actually scared me.

Even when I wasn’t outright scared, I was still uncomfortable (in all the right ways), and it took me some time to pinpoint why: the author’s narratorial voice leaves all the characters excepting Teach nameless, and that set me at a remove from them and their situation. They are the Boy, His Father, His Mother, His Grandfather. The physical details given make them real, while the use of titles (for lack of a better term) in place of names makes them a little surreal. I kept thinking “I should know these people at least well enough to know their names … why don’t I know their names?” It’s a really, to me, effective way of keeping the reader slightly off-kilter – which is exactly what the boy is feeling as he learns how much he doesn’t know about his mother, her family, and thus himself.

I highly recommend Wild Spaces. It’s a fast moving, discomfiting novella that will make you consider how family secrets affect a child’s development, and how unconditional love can help a child overcome trauma.

(Side-note: It occurs to me that Wild Spaces and Will Ludwigsen’s A Scout Is Brave make excellent companion pieces, and even though the authors did not intend it they do seem to be in conversation with each other. Both meld coming of age boys adventure and a gothic-style seaside setting with eldritch horror but with vastly different stylistic tones and narratorial voices. I’ve read both books twice now, and I suspect both will be on my “occasional rereads” shelf going forward.)

Book Review: TIDAL CREATURES

TITLE: Tidal Creatures (Alchemical Journeys #3)

AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire

453 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250333551 (hardcover; also e-book and audiobook)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

Tidal Creatures continues to build out the world Seanan McGuire introduced us to in Middlegame and deepened in Seasonal Fears. Like Seasonal Fears, it starts off by introducing us to a new batch of characters that personify/anthropomorphize a new set of universal concepts. In this case, embodiments of the Moon in all the forms such embodiments have taken throughout all the world’s mythologies. Unlike the main characters of Middlegame (who are forced to become the embodiment of the Doctrine of Ethos by their Maker) and Seasonal Fears (who become embodiments only after winning a competition), the human embodiments of the Moon are chosen by the Moon gods/goddesses themselves and the situation is less “embodiment” and more “time-share.” The human avatars of the Moon are able to go about their lives as essentially human, except when the Moon needs to shine through them and the resident Moon god/dess must take full control. I loved this idea that in a universe where almost every natural concept/constant is embodied, the ways the embodiments function can be so varied.

Where Seasonal Fears was a road-trip novel, Tidal Creatures is a murder-mystery. (It’s been long enough since I’ve read Middlegame that I’m not sure what classic genre I’d place it in (I really need to do a re-read), but at this point I’m almost positive part of McGuire’s plan for this series is to use the trappings of a different classic genre for each entry.) Someone is killing the moon gods of the San Francisco area. Which is a problem because part of the job of the Moon gods is to cross the sky above the Impossible City (the heart of all creation, thanks to the alchemy of an author named A. Deborah Baker). The moon gods who notice what’s happening must figure out who is doing it before they can wrest control of the Impossible City (and thus, the universe) for themselves. This is a very “fair play” mystery – meaning all the clues are there for the reader to figure out the who, why, and how (because how the murder that start the book was even possible, given the victim was the living embodiment of the moon and fully empowered when it happened, is part of the mystery). Readers who enjoy having a juicy mystery in the middle of their fantasy/horror hybrid novel will not be disappointed and will probably enjoy the challenge of figuring it all out before the characters do.

Several of the main characters of the novel are the local embodiments of three moon goddesses and a moon god: Judy (Chang’e), Anna (Artemis), Professor Williams (Diana), and David (Máni). They are more like co-workers than friends, and even though they are all embodiments of the Moon, they are embodiments of different Moon deities, with different mindsets and histories, so they are not automatically best friends and comrades. I really appreciated that while two of these moon deities are familiar to just about anyone who experienced a public-school education in the United States, McGuire went out of her way to make the other two deities from non-Eastern-European traditions, and to give us a deep sense of what those deities were like in those traditions. She made me want to learn more about Chang’e and her peaches of immortality, Máni, and others who are mentioned but play less significant roles in the way the story plays out (Losna, Aske).

The moon deities are not the only main characters. There’s also Kelpie, a woman who thought her current unusual body type (mostly human, but with orange skin and legs that end in hooves and a few more subtle differences) was the result of a horrible lab accident that also wiped her memory. She learns what she really is and goes on the run from her employers, the Alchemical Congress of the United States, after her friend and mentor is killed for seemingly failing in a project designed to get the Congress access to the Impossible City before it is claimed by its rightful rulers. She encounters a boy name Luis and his mother, Isabella, who is an hechicera (a type of sorceress), who join her in her quest to find someone who can help her understand herself and help stop the man pursuing her.

In Kelpie, we have one of the most stunning portrayals of a person escaping and overcoming the trauma of gaslighting that I think I’ve ever read – a woman whose whole sense of self and purpose gets uprooted and who still finds ways to stay strong, move forward, and come to terms with what she really is. In Isabella, we get a stark indictment of the ways in which European colonization practically (and in some cases, totally) eradicated other belief systems (by absorption or by destruction).

I found aspects of each of the main characters relatable, and I came to care for all of them as much as I did the main characters of Middlegame and Seasonal Fears. And for those wondering, I can say without spoilers that while the MCs of Seasonal Fears only get a few passing mentions, the MCs of Middlegame enter the story much earlier, and play a much bigger role, than they did in Season Fears.

Fans of Seanan McGuire, fans of mystery-fantasy-horror hybrids, fans of tales of moon deities: you’ll find something to love about this book. BUT – you should probably at least read Middlegame if not Seasonal Fears before Tidal Creatures, to understand the alchemical underpinnings of the world and the history of the Alchemical Congress.

I received an advance reading pdf of this book for free via NetGalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I received and read the ARC well before publication date but dropped the ball on posting the review until now. Tidal Creatures is currently available wherever books are sold.

You can read my review of book two in the series, Seasonal Fears, HERE. Somehow, I never posted a review of Middlegame. I’ll have to reread it and fix that one of these days.

Book Review: SILVER NITRATE

TITLE: Silver Nitrate

AUTHOR: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

368 pages, Del Ray, ISBN 9780593355381 (paperback, also hardcover, e-book and audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: Sometimes, horror slams into your life blatantly and unavoidably, and sometimes it slowly insinuates its way into your life, growing incrementally with plenty of easy-to-miss warning signs. Thus it is in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate – a subtle sense of unease at the start grows into full-blown supernatural horror by the end, a journey that, like the characters, you won’t be able to stop once you start no matter how many signs there are warning you away.

In 1990s Mexico City, Monserrat (a movie sound editor), her childhood best friend Tristán (a struggling actor), and Abel (a retired director) uncover the secrets of a “lost film” from the 1960s, a film Monserrat and Tristán have been obsessed with since high school and which Abel actually directed but left incomplete, leading to the realization that magic is real and to a cult that wants to bring their dead leader back to life. Along the way there are magical changes of fortune, ghosts, and dark presences.

I’ve become quite a fan of “lost film” and “forgotten television series” stories over the past few years (see: Will Ludwigsen’s Acres of Perhaps, for instance), and I was already a big fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia (I haven’t read everything she’s ever written, but I’m working on it), so of course the combination of author and concept would catch my eye. Silver Nitrate, in case you haven’t already figured it out, did not disappoint.

Moreno-Garcia’s characters are always nuanced and complex. Montserrat, Tristán, and Abel are no exceptions. Montserrat juggles frustrations with family and a misogynistic boss with her self-admittedly unrequited love for Tristán. She could do better on both the employment and romantic fronts if she could just let go of these things/people she loves, but she can’t bring herself to break from either. Tristán had it all as a devilishly handsome soap opera star in a tempestuous relationship with his co-star girlfriend until a car accident took both away from him. He too cannot let go: of the love, of the guilt, of wanting to regain his career. And Abel – well, Abel starts the story at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from Montserrat and Tristán, having given up career and love and become an alcoholic recluse … until they come along to rekindle his interest in his lost project. They are not quite “three points on a triangle,” but they are on an emotional continuum. Moreno-Garcia illustrates the push and pull they exert on one another in small moments and large confrontations that keep the book’s emotional stakes high.

That emotional push and pull also makes it easy for each of them to ignore the warning signs that things are getting dangerous, and that what seemed like a light bit of magic at first is pulling them into something darker and potentially fatal. I don’t want to say too much about the reveals in the last quarter of the book, but I will say Moreno-Garcia is great at blending the literary equivalent of a “jump scare” with the kind of psychological horror that typically eschews jump scares. And she kept me guessing right up to the denouement as to how things were going to play out.

Fans of psychological and supernatural horror, fans of “lost film” stories, and fans of period pieces (yes, as much as it pains me to say it, stories set in the 1990s are now “period pieces”) will all find Silver Nitrate a worthy read. Check it out.

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. I received and read the ARC before the book was published but dropped the ball on posting the review. The paperback edition was released on May 21st, 2024, and is available in all the usual places. Also, Moreno-Garcia’s newest novel is The Seventh Veil of Salome, which also has to do with a classic period of filmmaking. I’m hoping to read that soon.