As the summer goes on raining, I hope my short reviews help you finding good books to read, enjoy!
The Gaia Chime by Johnny Worthen
During the shooting of a documentary film about budding tennis star Bobby Weller, Charlotte and cameraman Seth witness and film the athlete brutally killing his parents. They decide to slightly change the project to keep on filming, and realize that lately there’s an awful lot of rich, like seriously filthy rich people dying or being killed after a chime is issued by some kind of force.
I feel like this is one of those books that are not written for me. I see the necessity of a younger generation to rebel, and every preceding generation has had advantages, and younger generations don't like that. I'm just sick of hearing about it 24/7 which American fiction I'm consuming is doing right now, and it got old. This book is about that, the younger generations literally killing older ones because Earth is on their side, bla bla bla. In this book specifically, there is also a disconcerting lack of women over the age of 25, what's that about?
This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer
A story that opens with the discovery of three brutalized dead bodies in the wilderness, we already go into this book knowing how it will end, and it was a good way to start a story. A group of young people see their chance to leave a mark as social media rock climbing legends sets off to an untouched cliff in Kentucky. What exactly happened here?
As I said above, the start was great, and showed the promise of an outstanding horror debut. Even though there were unsettling and even scary bits, the overall story failed to keep that initial tension though, and this turned pretty quickly into an ordinary, run of the mill survivor horror. It didn't help that the characters weren't all that relatable.
The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery: A Novel by Clarence A. Haynes
Gwendolyn Montgomery lives the life - she's New York’s most powerful publicist and has a perfect new boyfriend, what else could she ask for? When something weird and horrifying happens at an event she's hosting, she's shook, and soon realizes that this incident and other occurrences are addressed to her. Meanwhile Bronx psychic and spiritual guide Fonsi is having other problems, he's stuck in his head with his ex-lover who did nothing to show appreciation or love for him: So Fonsi takes a ghost lover to alleviate his loneliness! There is an old connection between Gwendolyn and Fonsi and they will need to meet again and face the demons of her past together as a barrier between the two dimensions of both ghosts and humans is weakening.
Clarence's characters are generally extremely likable, relatable and fun to read about, but with The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery he ups that game, as especially Fonsi is sooo awesome all around! I love the notion of having a ghost lover, since everyone alive is shit anyway, love the aspects of spirituality and ancestral powers, and their incorporation into modern New York life, the community life and connections... I'm a big fan of Clarence's writing, and it was inspiring to see his passage from Young Adult to New Adult/Adult is so well accomplished and smooth, congratulations on this wonderful work!
Finally, I definitely need to praise the audiobook narrators and the overall audio production, it was so well done I think I already want to re-listen. I was given an ALC from Libro FM via the Otherland Bookshop for review purposes, plus Clarence is a real life friend of mine, but none of this affected my rating because this book is great anyway!
The Stand by Stephen King
Does The Stand really need another review? Maybe, or maybe not. The go-to work when talking about post apocalyptic dystopia, King's most massive work is a very detailed, sometimes maybe a little tedious, character study and borders hard on soft science fiction (King himself stated an influence was George R. Stewart's Earth Abides). Revolving around a group of characters who break into two after a devastating pandemic of a virus called Captain Trips, everything in this book moves toward the titular final stand of these two camps, assembling behind Mother Abagail Freemantle for the good, and Randall Flagg, aka The Dark Man for the evil.
I have read The Stand before, when I was maybe 14 years old and an entirely different person with much more intense reactions. Reading it today in preparation for the upcoming horror anthology set in the The Stand universe, The End of the World As We Know It, I reacted differently to the characters. While I took good vs. evil much more literally when I was young, I realized that now I have much more compassion, or even feel closer to some characters on the dark side, like I couldn't stand Frannie and even Stu, but quite liked Lloyd and Nadine, for instance. There's voices that say that there's actually no good or evil in this book, just characters who fulfill what they are meant to be and I may agree with that view. I did enjoy reading it again, but I think I wouldn't go for a third time. I'd be interested what the film or TV adaptations made of it, there are enough of them around.
Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud
Six stories of terror, all of them more or less tightly connected to the concept of "hell", and none could have written them better than Nathan Ballingrud.
From an actual map of hell, to found footage horror on a lost phone, an imp from hell summoned to replace a deceased loved one, to more complex narration structures that require universe-building such as The Maw or the dark fantasy tale Skullpocket in which children interact with actual demon-creatures - Ballingrud's imagination as well as writing expertise know no bound.
My highlights were The Diabolist which is told from the mouth of a creature of hell connecting to the daughter of the magician who summoned her, as well as The Maw, in which an unlikely couple, an older guy and a young survivor of a hellish world in which creatures roam houses to butcher people, go searching something very precious.
Atmosphere, chills, tension, it's all here, and yet each story is so different, Ballingrud's range so wide that it's in itself eerie how well and versatile he can write. I can't believe I've let this sit on my shelf for years (but finally picked it up now for my Mount TBR reading challenge).
Hellions: Stories by Julia Elliott
Another short story collection that I only accidentally discovered when it was the book of the month at the Literary Horror reading group, and possibly wouldn't have had discovered on my own.
Elliot's collection comprises eleven short stories and has a really wide range; horror adjacent, southern Gothic, folkloric and even fairy tale meet in this book under the wider umbrella of the surreal, the feminist, the humorous.
My favorite is probably Erl-King, in which a college student, sexually lured by her much older college professor, discovers that he is in fact a shape shifter, and she teaches herself the ability to take that kind of power from him.
It was a weird and interesting reading experience in that the many repeated elements, notably a group of neighborhood/school class children, an outsider longing for/involved with the supernatural, are repeated in three or four stories and in hindsight aren't distinct enough not to amalgamate. Maybe I just missed the differences in tone, but the stories who dealt with everything else were great to read.
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