Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey

“Eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England, I, Once Was Willem rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham. The words enclosed herein are true.”

When Willem dies, too soon, too young, his parents can’t stand the thought of having lost him. They find a sorcerer, quite by accident, and the sorcerer brings Willem back to life (for a fee). But what comes back to life is not really the same old Willem, rather it’s a somewhat confused and confusing assembly of his dead bones and flesh infused with a jumble of his old memories. His parents flee from him in grief and horror and his community rejects him. Eventually, he makes the best of things and makes a new life for himself in the wild. He also takes a new name, Once Was Willem.

Meanwhile, the sorcerer who brought Willem back to life, ends up in cahoots with a local bandit who has taken over a local castle and its fief. While the bandit turned lord covets worldly power and riches, the sorcerer covets the mysterious magical power he can sense beneath the castle. The sorcerer will stop at nothing to tap into this power source, and the new lord will stop at nothing to keep his ill-gotten wealth and power. Their machinations are bad news for the villagers of Cosham, and Once Was Willem, who get caught up and dragged into some terrible shenanigans.

There is a lot of blood and gore, violence and death in this book, yet it also has an oddly wholesome charm that mainly comes from Once Was Willem’s found family of monstrous misfits, a family bound together by friendship rather than blood. Freaks and monsters, as it turns out, make for better company than Willem’s ever had. Once Was Willem is a riot to read. There’s mysterious magic, ghosts, and monsters, and our hero must fight intolerance, fear, and greed as well as evil. Carey’s strength, in this book as in many of his other works, is that he has empathy for (almost) all his characters, capturing their vulnerabilities, and strengths. There’s a beautifully detailed complexity to the relationships between these characters in Once Was Willem, as the humanity of monsters, and the monstrousness of humans, are revealed.

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The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett by David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark

“London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically, and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett—Sweeney Todd’s accomplice…”

Death, often gruesome and gory, stalks the pages of this book which is only right and proper in a story about Mrs. Lovett, the penny-dreadful-famous pie-maker who helped Sweeney Todd conceal his victims in pie dough. Demchuk and Clark grab this story by the guts and turn it into a suspenseful, visceral, and macabre mix of historical fiction, gothic horror, and psychological crime thriller.

The book is set in the early years of Victorian London, and the descriptions of the city, its streets and alleys, its guts and organs, its scents and stench, and of its inhabitants—the wealthy in their silks and perfumes, and the poor in their rags and grime—shape and permeate the tale as it shapes and permeates the main character.

As for her, the woman who reveals her life story, bit by bit, in letters addressed to the inquisitive journalist Miss Gibson, she obfuscates her true identity at first, but it’s not great spoiler to reveal that she is, or was, Mrs. Lovett.

By giving the story completely to Mrs. Lovett herself to tell (we never read Miss Gibson’s letters to her, and only ever see one side of the epistolary conversation with brief interjections from police documents), we are drawn into the story the same way Miss Gibson clearly was. What we find in the letters is a woman who has been stalked by death throughout her life, from her childhood in the bloody butcher shop where she learned how animals are turned to meat, through a nightmarish stint in a rich surgeon’s home, to her days in the pie shop. As disturbing as her story is, it feels like an honest and truthful account of her past. However, as any storyteller or reader should know, telling the truth can be just another way to obfuscate what really happened because even if you tell nothing but the truth, you rarely tell the whole of it. And what is left unsaid is as important as anything else Mrs. Lovett chooses to reveal.

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

“A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits.”

Like The Butcher’s Daughter, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is an epistolary novel, told in letters and journal entries, weaving together historical and fictional horrors in a tale that is a fierce and transformative take on vampire lore, a blistering revenge story, and a piercing, ferocious take on the brutal, genocidal violence against native Americans that helped birth the United States. Specifically, Jones’s story is based in part on the 1870 Marias massacre where U.S. troops attacked a camp of nearly 200 Piegan, or Blackfeet, people in what is now Bear Creek, Montana.

Good Stab the man, such as he was with all his hopes and strengths and failings, died in an encounter with soldiers who were transporting a very strange man, or creature, in a cage. He died but comes back, and when he comes back, he is changed. Jones puts his own spin on vampires here, and one of his most interesting twists is that vampires slowly change into whatever creatures they feed on, whether human or animal (or fish, as it turns out).

We see most of Good Stab’s story through the eyes of a Lutheran pastor who lives in a small town where a series of terrible deaths occur, deaths that creep ever closer to the pastor’s own life, and past. Church, crosses, prayers, faith…none of those things protect you from vampires in this tale, especially not from Good Stab who is a vampire with a singular purpose: to exact revenge on those who murdered his people.

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

There are a lot of gut-wrenching, harrowing, gory deaths in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but what haunted me throughout the book, and what clearly haunts Good Stab, is that day when his old life ends and his new life begins. That memory, of the everyday life in the community he left, the people he lost, and of a world that will never be again, moves like an ocean of grief and loss and profound sadness beneath the horrors and Blood Stab’s intricately crafted revenge.

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Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins

“Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy.”

Reading this book actually felt somewhat unsettling at first because when I started reading, I couldn’t see the pattern yet, only the first carefully crafted clippings that make up the beginning of the collage. Soon, though, the bits of lives and deaths, people and places, described and mourned in obits, connect and touch in ways that make the pattern, the story, emerge.

This is one book where I went looking for an interview with the author after reading, and what I found was Robins writing about her book at Scalzi’s The Big Idea, where she describes it as “a nonlinear, fragmentary novel about a nonhuman character,” and as “a story told exclusively through linked (fake!) obituaries, etymologies, and ‘found’ news clippings, told out of order, mixing genres with gleeful abandon, spanning over 300 years and two planets, and having no semblance of typical narrative conventions.”

I love books that play with structure, and Remember You Will Die is a creatively crafted literary experiment that gains emotional weight and heft with every obituary.

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Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

“The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere….wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost.”

Theodoridou takes on the bloody tale of Bluebeard in this book, dissecting the tale and rearranging its parts into a new, more complicated pattern. The tale does begin with Agnes who arrives at the great manor house after the death of her baby. Caring for the lord’s young son becomes her life and calling. What she doesn’t know when she first arrives, but soon understands, is that there is a darkness, both alluring and devouring, that marks the family she serves. The local lord, and his son, have a power over others, and the world, that seems inescapable. Those drawn into the orbit of these men become trapped:

“If you leave you die. But if you die, you stay.”

Sour Cherry is told as a story within a story. The storyteller, the narrator who flits in and out of view, is telling us the story from a place in the present, but the roots of her story reach into the past, into folklore and myth. Theodoridou’s prose is beautiful, but this is also a dark, tough read because it delves so deep into the reasons (beyond fear and threats) that make some women stay with men who are no good for them or anyone else. Because things die around the men at the heart of Sour Cherry: women die, men die, animals die, crops fail, death permeates the houses they live in and the relationships they have in ways that are both just like a fairytale and like real life. There is a chorus of dead women and girls around these men, a chorus of ghosts, their names mostly forgotten, haunting the women who stay, whispering to them of nightmares and dreams.

Sour Cherry is a complex, conflicted, and sometimes painful read where past and present, fairytale and reality, are woven together so tightly that the weave is impossible to pick apart.

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Two deathly bonus picks to look forward to:

It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest—coming in July, 2025

“Silent film star Venita Rost’s malevolent spirit lurks spider-like in her cliffside mansion, a once-beautiful home that’s claimed countless unlucky souls. And she’s not alone. Snared in her terrible web, Inspector Bartholomew Sloan—her eternal nemesis—watches her wreak havoc in helpless horror, shackled by his own guilt and Venita’s unrelenting wrath.”

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Katabasis by R.F. Kuang—coming in August, 2025

“Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.”

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Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m in the middle of Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas a book that grabbed me by the throat in the best possible way right in the prologue, titled “The Boy in the Black Serape.”

“A voice in Oliver’s head told him, Turn back! But with each step deeper into La Casa, a darkness pulsed through him that left his head fuzzy, as wild and exciting as the desert wind.”

If you don’t like prologues, a) you’re wrong, and b) this particular prologue is exquisite and filled with a sense of oncoming, inescapable darkness and dread. It sets the stage perfectly for what’s to come as we follow (clairvoyant) Liz Remolina and her (mouthy) sister Mary as they head back to the town of San Ojuela after the death of their aunt. Described as a “gothic spaghetti western” set in a place where “monsters and ancient gods stalk the night,” Olivas’s book weaves together childhood tragedy, supernatural dangers, and menacing, bloodthirsty creatures, into a viscerally unsettling and thoroughly gripping story. For a short fic taste of Olivas’s prose, you can read her story “The Other Side of Mictlān” in Uncanny Magazine.

Another recent horror fave of mine is The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. This novel won the 2024 Bram Stoker Award and the 2024 World Fantasy Award, and it’s a masterful blend of horror and historical fiction. The story is set in a small Florida town in 1950 (the Jim Crow era) and follows the fate of a twelve-year-old black boy named Robbie Stephens Jr. and his sister, Gloria. After an altercation with the son of a wealthy and powerful local white man who is harassing Gloria, Robbie is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory with a forbidding history. The storyline is split between Robbie’s harrowing tenure in the Reformatory where he must fight to survive the brutal institution, and Gloria’s desperate fight to get her brother out of there.

Robbie can see haints, the lingering spirits of the dead, and there are a lot of them haunting the Reformatory, but while there are supernatural horrors aplenty in the book, and while the ghosts Robbie encounters are not exactly kindly and benign, it’s the living, breathing people who bring on the worst horrors. Due makes you feel the massive, oppressive weight and strangling grip of the ever-present racism in Gloria and Robbie’s lives, the way it curtails their choices and punishes them without mercy whenever they try to get justice or stand up for themselves. I also highly recommend Due’s novelette “A Stranger Knocks,” a story that riffs on the well-known maxim that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I love horror stories where the narrator is unreliable, falling apart, or, maybe, changing into something other than you (or they) thought they were at the beginning of the tale. A great example of this is The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir. The book is set in Reykjavik and the story is firmly anchored in the seemingly mundane, everyday life of Iðunn. Iðunn has trouble sleeping and is feeling out of sorts, and no remedies, doctor’s visits, or blood tests seem to help or explain her condition. Her anxiety increases when she wakes up with injuries she cannot explain, and when her brand-new step-counting watch shows that she walked over 40,000 steps in one night, she knows something is wrong. As Iðunn tries to solve the mystery of her night-time exploits, the story twists and turns into darker and more terrifying territory where the past (and a whole lot of poor little cats) play a prominent role.

Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is another great example of a horror novel where the narrator undergoes a fundamental, and in this case profoundly unsettling, transformation. This is one of my favorite books from 2024, and it’s an intimate, painful, masterfully executed tale of psychological horror and revenge. Kim takes you deep inside the everyday trials and tribulations of a Korean-American immigrant family, and then documents its unraveling. More specifically, she documents the unraveling (and eventual transformation) of the oldest daughter, Ji-won. Ji-won is a typical firstborn daughter: sharp, intelligent, competent, responsible, but after the family’s finances take a turn for the worse, cracks begin to show, and after her parents’ divorce, those cracks multiply and deepen. Ji-won and her younger sister stay with their mother who is increasingly depressed and distraught after the divorce, and who eventually strikes up a new relationship with George, a white man who, as it turns out, is not a very good man at all.

Kim captures the internal and external pressures on Ji-won with visceral precision. Her family is falling apart. Her mother is a mess. The family’s financial situation limits all Ji-won’s options, and the pressures of college are crushing her. On top of all that, Ji-won carries the generational trauma from her immigrant parents, their haunting memories of poverty and starvation, and then there’s the world outside her home, with all its racist and misogynistic micro- and macro-aggressions. As her life cracks and crumbles, Ji-won’s anger grows, and her dreams of succulent eyeballs intensify.

There’s a deep and dark sense of humor layered into the horror of this book and that sense of humor comes out most hilariously in Ji-won’s friend/not-boyfriend at college. The depiction of a certain kind of young man who uses the lingo and catchphrases of feminism and anti-racism to create a certain kind of persona, is only too familiar from current news and events.

If it’s ghost stories you crave, Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunting of Velkwood fits the bill, though this is most definitely a ghost story with a difference. The book follows Talitha who has lived the last twenty years of her life in the wake and shadow of a supernatural tragedy. She was a teenager when her neighborhood suddenly and inexplicably disappeared behind a mysterious, impenetrable veil, turning it into a literal ghost town and claiming the lives of her sister and mother and untold others in the process. Only three people got out: Talitha and her friends Brett and Grace. As it turns out, they are not just the only people who escaped, they are also the only people who are able to go back inside the area, through the veil. A young researcher (who might have been a bit obsessive in his Velkwood studies) asks Talitha to go back and enter the area for science and for herself. She initially refuses but finally agrees to go back with a secret mission of her own.

Kiste’s story deals with two interconnected puzzles: what happened to Talitha’s neighborhood that caused it to become stranded outside reality? And what happened to Talitha and her friends back then, what tore them apart and what still binds them together? This is horror wrapped around a layered story about adolescence, love and friendship, about living your life haunted by the specters of your childhood, and how to maybe find a way to set your ghosts, and yourself, free.

Friendship in all its fractured, difficult glory is also at the heart of The Drowning House, a chilling and suspenseful novel by Cherie Priest. After a violent storm, an old house that disappeared into the sea years ago, reappears on the beach of a small, isolated island in the Pacific Northwest. An old woman in a house near the beach dies the same night and her grandson, Simon, disappears. Two of Simon’s childhood friends, Melissa and Leo, return to the island in the aftermath of this tragedy. Together, they try to find their way past their old gripes and grudges as they look for Simon and also try to figure out what the hell is going on with the strange house that washed up on the beach.

As a resident of the Canadian part of the Pacific Northwest, I love to read stories set in our neck of the woods, and I also love how Priest weaves together past and present as the lives of the three friends are tied together with the mysteries of the old house, old magic, and wicked, terrible deeds.

Dark fantasy twines together perfectly with horror and, oh yes, vampires, in The Crimson Road by A.G. Slatter. I’m a huge fan of Slatter’s writing, whether it’s razor-sharp horror like her short story “Home and Hearth”) or dark, lush, fantasy like “Bearskin” (one of my all-time favorite short stories.)

The Crimson Road is set in Slatter’s Sourdough universe, a world full of magic and mystery, and women with sharp claws and sharper minds. In this book our narrator and heroine is the young Violet Zennor, assassin-in-training and recently bereaved after the death of her (insufferable) father. Violet is a wonderfully bold and brassy protagonist with a penchant for sharp knives and hand to hand combat, and she’s been trained her entire life to undertake a dangerous mission that involves the mysterious and terrifying Leech Lords. After her father’s death, Violet tries to ignore the path he forced her to take, but when several deaths occur in her hometown, she soon realizes the danger is greater, and hits closer to home, than she imagined. She sets out to face down the Leech Lords, and the darkest most terrible secret from her family’s past.

One of the many things I loved about this book is the way it connects several of Slatter’s recent novels, including All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, and The Briar Book of The Dead. I also love how it puts a decidedly Slatter-esque twist on vampire lore.

Finally, if you want to read an utterly devastating and crushingly bleak horror novel, I recommend Where I End by Sophie White. Where I End won the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award, it’s described as “modern Irish gothic”, and after I read it, I felt like I needed to wrap myself in a cozy blanket and watch nothing but kind and colorful cartoons to restore my equilibrium. Yes, this book is bleak, harsh, and dark in a way that makes it feel as if reading taints your soul.

The narrator is Aoileann, a young Irish woman who lives in a tiny community on a craggy isle off the coast of Ireland. Everyone on the island seem to shun, fear, and even hate Aoileann and her family. She has grown up friendless, without even going to school, and no one seems to have ever truly loved or cared for her. Aoileann shares a house with her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother is harsh and domineering, and her mother, whom Aoileann calls “the bed-thing”, is bedridden and might also, somehow, be the cause of whatever curse has befallen the family.

Aoileann’s mother has to be fed and changed and cared for like a baby, and Aoileann hates every minute of it, just like she hates her monotonous, isolated existence. Things seem to change when a young woman, an artist, comes to the island with her newborn baby. Aoileann becomes absolutely smitten with her and what follows once these two women meet is a dark and sharply twisted story of desire, want, and nameless, pitiless darkness. It’s an unflinching story that is sharp as flint.

Three bonus picks for Women in Horror Month:

Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda – a brilliant collection of unsettling, surreal, beautifully crafted horror stories. You can read her story “Things Boys Do” in Nightmare.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken – a litfic zombie novel that won the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. Read Will McMahon’s review right here at Psychopomp.

From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos – I know Psychopomp published this novella so obviously we’re all biased here, but a book about “immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons” has to be included on this Women in Horror reading list.

I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”

Monsters have been part of human storytelling from the very beginning. Mythology, religion, and folklore from all over the world; ancient epics like Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Nibelungenlied, and The Odyssey; old stories like those gathered in One Thousand and One Nights; all of them are teeming with monsters are terrifying, thrilling, powerful, bestial, magical, and alluring—often, all those things at once.

It says something about our love for monsters that even the oldest monster tales still hold our interest. Beowulf, for example, is a thrill to read, and while I first experienced the full text in Seamus Heaney’s translation, I highly recommend Maria Dahvana Hedley’s 2020 translation for its bold-as-brass take on the text:

I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.

The late 19^th and early 20^th century brought us monsters that keep turning up in new incarnations in fiction, movies, and video games. The vampires of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla, the werewolves of Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf and Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris; the monster cobbled together from body parts, electricity, and hubris in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the invading alien monsters of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds; and man, turning himself monstrous through science, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

While it was published in 1979, decades later than the previously mentioned books, I think Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber should be added to this list of Gothic monster classics. The stories in the collection are all based on fairytales and folktales, including the title story which is a masterful retelling of Bluebeard. Carter also delves deep into all sorts of monstrously wolfish delights in her reworkings of Little Red Riding Hood, “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “Wolf-Alice.” Carter’s monsters are usually both bestial and alluring, and the same is certainly true for many other monsters, including the vampires in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (now adapted into a hot hot hot new TV-series). It’s no secret that monsters can be sexy. Check out A.V. Greene’s short story “The Monster Fucker Club” in Apex for one recent, terrific take on that subject.

“I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.”

~Victor LaValle

Beyond the monster classics, there are plenty of new monster stories to go around as well. Some of my favorites from recent years include the epic, intricately woven fantasy series Monstress by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda, The Changeling by Victor LaValle (which puts some truly old-school monsters right in the middle of New York City), the compelling horrors of What Feasts at Night and What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, and Cadwell Turnbull’s politically charged, monster-driven, multiverse epic No Gods, No Monsters and its sequel, We Are the Crisis. If you’re into werewolves (I am, if you haven’t noticed), I recommend the one-two punch of Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones and The Devourers by Indrapramit Das. Two deeply engaging and very different takes on werewolves and werewolf lore, one set in present-day United States, the other a sprawling tale of love and transformation that spans centuries and continents.

If you’re hungry for some brand-new monster books, there’s already a lot of 2024 fiction to dig into, including these six titles:

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

What do you do when you meet an alien in Central Park?
It coils up in the sunlight, fanged and beautiful, eating the turtles who live on the rocks. It tears them in half and plucks the meat from their shells with white-glove hands. There are red stains on its fingertips. It has eight heads and eight necks like adders. Anna stares at it in delight.

Exordia is the story of Ssrin, a multi-headed, snake-like alien so evil that most people can’t even deal with being in her presence. Ssrin comes to Earth, fleeing her own kind, and hooks up with Anna, a Kurdish woman who survived enough trauma and war to fuel a universe of nightmares. It starts out something like Venom, with Anna and Ssrin living cheek-by-jowls in Anna’s apartment in New York City, and it ends in Kurdistan, with what is perhaps the most all-out, balls-to-the wall, over-the-top fight for Earth I’ve ever seen on the page, but it’s truly the relationship between Ssrin and Anna that is the heart and (evil?) soul of the story.

The Last Phi Hunter, by Salinee Goldenberg

Most other hunters only cared what the phi did in their current state. It was hard to pity a monster when a mother recounted the loss of her child or a demon whose belly bulged with human bones. But the pret, Ex could feel bad for them.

Goldenberg’s fantasy novel is filled with monstrous spirits rooted in Thai culture and folklore (like the krasue and the pret). It’s also infused with a strong Buddhist perspective on monsters and ghosts, reincarnation, karma, punishment, and the afterlife. We follow Ex, a young phi hunter, trained by the Phi Hunters Order to hunt down and kill the phi, AKA the hungry ghosts, AKA the reincarnated souls of humans whose past sins have caused them to come back in cursed, monstrous forms. Like in Exordia, the connection between human and monster is one of the strongest parts of the book as Ex’s growing empathy and connection with the monsters he has been trained to hunt changes his perspective.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell

If Shesheshen ever went near those flocks, droves of human guards would descend on her. Meanwhile townsfolk wore the wool while eating those very animals.
And somehow Shesheshen was the monster.
Had she ever worn a human while she ate them?

If you’re looking for a different kind of monster story, Wiswell has you covered. Like The Last Phi Hunter, this book deals with monsters and monster hunters, but this fantasy romance is told from the perspective of Shesheshen, a monster who falls in love with one of those hunters. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter and usually lives happily as an amorphous lump in her nest, but when she is attacked in her home, she builds herself a body from various leftover limbs and items from past meals. Once she’s out in the world, she has to contend with the monstrosity of humans and even—shudder—in-laws.

The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček

The Beast could look like anything when it came; the one who fought it had to be equally adaptable.

This phantasmagorical wonder of a book is full of monsters, shapeshifting and magic, and the entire tale, from its start in the Grey Tower, through a strange journey and quest in an even stranger realm, to the fateful confrontation at the end, is haunted by the specter of a monster known as the Beast. The Beast always rises; and the Guardian of the West Passage must always fight it. Pechaček writes a world that is full of monsters and monstrous beings, none of them more frightening perhaps than the mysterious, and seriously powerful, giant ladies who rule the towers of the realm.

The Garden of Delights, by Amal Singh

“What if I want to defeat monsters?” asks the girl confidently. Once again, her eyes blaze, and command respect. — The Caretaker can tell she will defeat a monster someday. And it will be easy for her.

Singh’s lush fantasy novel is set in the city of Sirvassa, “where petals are currency and flowers are magic” and where the Caretaker of the Garden of Delights creates magical potions, “delights,” from flowers. Not very monstrous, you might think, but this is also very much a story of monsters, beginning with the mysterious winged creature that tries to attack the city from above. There is also another monster at the heart of this tale, and Singh captures the origins of that particular beast with subtly nuanced insight, describing both the thrill and the dread of becoming a monster, capable of terrible things, but also capable of wielding teeth and claws against your enemies.

The Eyes are the Best Part, by Monika Kim

“I stare at my reflection in the graffitied mirror, expecting to see a monster, a demon, a killer, but it’s me. Just me.”

There are no supernatural or extraterrestrial monsters in this psychological horror novel. Instead, we follow the profoundly unsettling, but also rather glorious, transformation of Ji-won from frustrated, stressed out Korean-American college student, into a predator with a craving for eyeballs. While this is a completely different kind of story than The Garden of Delights, the books share some similarities in their depiction of how a person might choose to embrace the monstrous in order to fight back in an unjust world. With razor sharp precision, Kim captures the way Ji-won’s psyche fractures under the increasingly unbearable pressures of everyday indignities—failing grades, poverty, her parent’s divorce, the stifling presence of her mom’s loathsome new boyfriend, fetishization, misogyny, racism. Even when Ji-won goes off the rails in quite spectacular fashion, I understood her choice to become monstrous.

I think Grendel’s mother, another monstrous woman, “ferocious, tenacious, rapacious” (in Hedley’s Beowulf translation)would have understood her too.

That’s why I embrace monsters, because monsters are ultimately the patron saints of otherness—everything people say should not be.

~ Guillermo del Toro

1) A complex multiverse where travel between universes is possible.

2) An (initially) unidentified and seemingly omniscient narrator whose true identity is only revealed later in the story.

And,

3) A harrowing, edge-of-your-seat, cartoonishly zany and fierce chase scene involving an enhanced cyber soldier in a battle suit, and a humanoid rabbit girl with the impossibly improbable name Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, a rabbit of the Pandominion, from the city of Canoplex-Under-Heaven in Ut.

Bonus point: there is also a cute yet surprisingly powerful robot-buddy (or two.)

Fictional multiverses come in all sorts of shapes and guises, and Carey’s multiverse has its own defining features. One of these features is that every world we visit is a different iteration of Earth.

“All these places were the same place after all, under different guises and bearing different names. Earth. Jaarde. Eruth. Ut. Tellus. Gea. Taram. Terra. Jorden. Maa. Zeme. Bhumi. Dikiu. Lok.”

The reason for this Earth-centered focus is that while travel between universes is possible, the available technology only allows travel between the same location in different universes. Meaning: whatever spot you travel from in your universe, you will end up in that same exact spot in the universe you travel to. This restriction brings with it some interesting complications throughout the books, and I kind of like the idea that though the characters move far and wide through the multiverse, they are (almost) always interacting with essentially the same geographical place.

Every Earth in this multiverse has evolved along in its own path. Some of them are quite like our own Earth. In many others, evolution took a different course early on and Earth ended up ruled by the descendants of canids, felines, sloths, or even rabbits. And some Earths are entirely barren, victims of an unknown multiverse apocalypse called “the Scour.”

Another distinguishing feature of Carey’s multiverse is that a multitude of the worlds are ruled by an empire called the Pandominion, described as a “colossal assemblage of worlds wavering forever between performative democracy and naked tyranny.” And yes, Carey’s critique of colonialism, and his disdain for the delusions of superiority that all colonial power inherently requires, are a major part of the how this story unfolds.

There’s an interesting interview with Carey in Grimdark Magazine where he talks about the duology, and about how his views of Britain’s colonial past shaped the books. He also comments on his choice to use Lagos, Nigeria as the location for much of the story, saying “Infinity Gate is partly a story about empire, so it made sense to me to choose a setting that gives the lie to that nostalgic imperial myth.”

For a very long time, the Pandominion has been happily chugging along as an imperial juggernaut, using the almost limitless resources from millions of worlds to fuel its factories and feed its citizens; training and indoctrinating its cybernetically enhanced soldiers to maintain the rule of the empire, secure in the belief that they are the most powerful entity in the multiverse. And then they run into another empire: the machine hegemony, AKA the Ansurrection, an empire made up of machine beings united by a sort of hive-mind/artificial intelligence.

“The Ansurrection worlds, just like the Pandominion ones, were all of them variants of this one world, separated from each other only by the gossamer veils of the stochastic manifold, sometimes called the multiverse.”

This encounter leads to a devastating war that threatens the entire multiverse. It also leads to the formation of a resistance, as a small group of disparate, desperate selves try to stop the war and ensure the multiverse’s survival. (“Selves” is the term used in the books for sentient beings of any kind, whether they are biological, mechanical, or otherwise.)

While most of the duology takes place on Earths other than our own, Carey kicks off the story in a near-future version of our own Earth where a Nigerian physicist named Hadiz Tambuwal not only discovers the existence of the multiverse, but also invents a device that makes it possible to travel between universes. This might seem like world-altering tech that would make her next in line for a Nobel Prize, but unfortunately for Tambuwal, she is living and working on an Earth that has been ravaged by climate disasters and conflict. In short, her Earth is dying, the university in Lagos where she works is wholly abandoned, and there is no one around to celebrate her achievement. Her only companion is Rupshe, an artificial intelligence residing within the university’s computer system.

Tambuwal’s experiments attract the unfortunate attention of the Pandominion’s military and bureaucracy, setting off a chain of events that crash-bang-smashes through the two books, derailing all sorts of Pandominion plans and profoundly affecting the multiverse all the way to the grand finale in Echo of Worlds.

Carey’s duology has a grand and ambitious scope and delivers thought-provoking perspectives on, and explorations of, big themes like the way colonialism shapes and disfigures societies and citizens, how difficult it can be for one intelligent species to recognize the intelligence of another, radically different, intelligent species; and what happens when two empires who thought themselves masters of all universes clash head on.

In addition, the Pandominion duology contains some heavy-duty scientific content that, at times, verges on info-dumping. While I felt the weight of these lengthy scientific explanations, especially at the beginning of Infinity Gate, Carey makes the science pay off later in the narrative. And besides, if you can’t put a bunch of heavy-duty science into a science fiction epic, then where the heck can you put it?

What makes the books really pop for me, though, is the motley crew of characters that get caught up in this clash of empires, eventually forming a that mini-resistance working to stop the war between the Ansurrection and the Pandominion. In addition to Tambuwal (who is blunt and unsentimental in a way I thoroughly appreciated) and the artificial intelligence Rupshe who both originate on our own Earth, that motley crew includes:

– Essien Nkanika, a young Nigerian man from a universe almost identical to our own who, early on, tries to scam Tambuwal and ends up paying a hefty price for that error

– Moon, a terrifically brutal and sweary cat-woman-warrior

– Dulcie, a cute robot with a complicated past

and

– Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, AKA my darling rabbit-girl Paz, who can be naïve and vulnerable and also (literally) kick ass (you do not want a human-sized rabbit kicking you in the solar plexus…)

Together, this crew banter and argue like all good found families, they carry out some spectacular multiverse heists, and go looking for the enigmatic third power in the multiverse, a sentient moss (?) called the Mother Mass.

Another member of this mini-resistance group, though he doesn’t exactly join willingly, is a Pandominion administrator, duty watchmaster Orso Vemmet (“his closest pre-sentient ancestors were hedgehogs and moonrats”), who ends up playing a big part in the endgame.

(By the way, the fact that so many of the characters in this multiverse are animal-based gives the entire story a pretty trippy vibe. Sloths and dogs running an empire? I’m into it.)

Through Vemmet, Carey gives us a peek inside the day-to-day operations of the Pandominion’s vast bureaucracy, where the work is often guided not by ideology or even some grand evil schemes, but by petty rivalries, careerism, and corruption. This part of the story reminded me forcefully of the excellent 2022 Star Wars TV-series Andor, as it reveals both the awful weaknesses and terrifying strengths built into the imperial system. A system where quite ordinary, even mediocre, individuals are both willing and able to cause terrible suffering, death, and injustice, all in a day’s work.

All these characters go through significant changes over the course of the story—physically, mentally, and emotionally—both because of what they do, and because of what is done to them, but it’s the transformation of Paz and Essien that stuck with me the most. Paz is the moral center of the story, and she is instantly likeable, from the moment we first meet her as a young student on Ut, through all the trauma and tragedy that befall her, until the bitter end. Her changes, while profound, are an extreme version of growing up, as she essentially becomes a stronger and more experienced version of herself while her spirit remains mostly unchanged. Essien, who grows up dirt poor on the streets of a parallel Lagos and later becomes a cybernetically enhanced Pandominion soldier, is very much her opposite when we first meet him. He is much harder to like, especially since he betrays Tambuwal for his own petty greed almost right off the bat, but boy oh boy does he ever pay for his mistakes, and in Echo of Worlds, a guilt-ridden Essien becomes the other emotional center of the story in addition to Paz. He changes in ways that are more fractured and complex than Paz, and there is a scene late in the books where he brushes up against his own painful past that had me sobbing as I read it.

Carey’s multiverse might be vast and complex, but the sprawling story feels surprisingly lean and trim in the telling, and it’s brought to a hard-won but satisfying conclusion that finally reveals the identity of that mysterious, omniscient narrator who gives us this description of themselves in the first chapter of Infinity Gate:

“I meant no harm to anyone. I would even argue that what I did was for the best. Nobody had ever attempted before to perform surgery on entire universes. For such a task, you need a knife of immense, all but incalculable size.

Me. I am that knife.”

Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds are available now from Orbit Books.

The One Who Waits

I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know?

Any list I make of Bradbury short stories will likely start off with “The One Who Waits” because, to me, it’s the quintessential Bradbury story, and also one of my favorite short stories, ever. Like so many Bradbury stories, it’s set on Mars where a group of explorers land, but it’s not told from their point of view. It’s told by a ghostly entity that haunts an old, abandoned well. This story has everything I love about Bradbury: achingly beautiful prose, gruesome and mysterious deaths, and a profound sadness running through it like a dark undercurrent.

• First published in The Arkham Sampler (1949)
• Included in The Machineries of Joy (1964)

The Veldt

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.

This is probably one of the most well-known of Bradbury’s short stories and it’s easy to see why it’s made such an impression (and why it still hits so damn hard). There’s VR-technology used for murderous purposes, there’s child’s play turned sinister, and there’s the dark twist of children turning on their parents. “The Veldt” has been adapted for TV several times (by NPR, and Canadian television for example) and has been turned into a movie. I also feel its influence in several of Star Trek TNG’s holodeck episodes.

• First published in The Saturday Evening Post (1950)
• Included in The Illustrated Man (1951)

The Small Assassin

I am dying and I can’t tell them now. They’d laugh and call me one in delirium. They’ll see the murderer and hold him and never think him responsible for my death. But here I am, in front of God and man, dying, no one to believe my story, everyone to doubt me, comfort me with lies, bury me in ignorance, mourn me and salvage my destroyer.

One of Bradbury’s strong suits is taking something we tend to assume is innocent and good and turning it into something unsettling and disturbing. And what is more innocent than a baby? In this short story, a pregnant woman suspects that the child she is carrying is evil. A completely ridiculous idea, of course. Unless she’s right.

• First published in Dime Mystery (1946)
• Included in The October Country (1955)

Skeleton

Mr. Harris stood. His SKELETON held him up! This thing inside, this invader, this horror, was supporting his arms, legs, and head! It was like feeling someone just behind you who shouldn’t be there. With every step, he realized how dependent he was on this other Thing.

This is one of the creepiest and wildest ideas in all of Bradbury’s short stories (and that’s saying something). In “Skeleton” a man becomes obsessed with the idea that his own bones are a malicious and alien presence in his body. As his condition progresses, as he gets more and more paranoid, his mental and physical health deteriorates. Looking for a cure, he consults a “bone specialist,” but the treatment is of a highly unusual nature.

• First published in Weird Tales (1945)
• Included in The October Country (1955)

“Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”

“What if Roger was right this morning? Mrs. Goodbody, what if she’s right, too? Something terrible is happening. Like—well—” he nodded at the sky and the million stars —“Earth being invaded by things from other worlds, maybe.”

Alien invasions rarely happen with all ray-guns blazing in Bradbury’s stories. Instead, he often imagines something more insidious and devious and bone-chilling. For example, what if those mushrooms everyone is suddenly growing in their cellar’s aren’t just mushrooms? Bradbury’s bent for twisting darkness into the everyday is on full display here as we start to wonder what is really happening in all those basements.

• First published in Galaxy Magazine (1962)
• Included in The Machineries of Joy (1964)

Zero Hour

Mink went to the door. “We’re having trouble with guys like Pete Britz and Dale Jerrick. They’re growing up. They make fun. They’re worse than parents. They just won’t believe in Drill. They’re so snooty, cause they’re growing up. You’d think they’d know better. They were little only a coupla years ago. I hate them worst. We’ll kill them first.”

This is another alien invasion story where the invasion is hiding in plain sight and where children and a children’s game become a menacing and powerful force. Like so many of Bradbury’s darkest stories, “Zero Hour” finds the deepest and most disturbing kind of terror in a nightmarish subversion of children and childhood.

• First published in Planet Stories (1947)
• Included in The Illustrated Man (1951)

The Third Expedition

It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

Bradbury had a real knack for story-openings, and this story is a prime example (part of the story’s opening is quoted above). “The Third Expedition” was first published in 1948 and was later incorporated into The Martian Chronicles which strings together several Bradbury stories into a tale about what happens when humans try to colonize Mars (which, btw, turns out to be a really, really haunted planet). In the story, an expedition from Earth to Mars finds a town that seems comfortingly (and eerily) familiar to them. It’s also populated by their long-dead relatives and family. It was originally published with the title “Mars Is Heaven!” and of course, it does not have a happy ending.

• First published in Planet Stories (1948)
• Included in The Martian Chronicles (1950)

The Martian

The cold wind blew and the thin rain fell upon the soil and the figure stood looking at them with distant eyes.

“The Martian” is also part of The Martian Chronicles and it explores a similar idea to “The Third Expedition”—but here, the perspective, and the outcome, are twisted in a new direction. An elderly couple from Earth have moved to Mars and one night, they find their long-dead son at the door. Or at least, someone who looks exactly like their dead son. He’s not, of course, and once the rest of the settlers finds out who, what, the old folks are harboring, things go real bad, real quick. What I love most about this story is how Bradbury infuses it with such a deep sense of sadness and foreboding, and how it uses the desperate darkness of grief.

• First published in Super Science Stories (1949)
• Included in The Martian Chronicles (1950)

Marionettes, Inc.

“I’ve had him for a month. I keep him in the cellar in a toolbox. My wife never goes downstairs, and I have the only lock and key to that box. Tonight I said I wished to take a walk to buy a cigar. I went down cellar and took Braling Two out of his box and sent him back up to sit with my wife while I came on out to see you, Smith.”

There are a lot of science fiction stories about the dangers of making humanoid robots, and in “Marionettes, Inc.” Bradbury puts his own spin on this idea. Here, a man buys a robot look-alike so that he can spend more time away from his wife without her noticing. Sharing your life and your wife with a robot? Yeah, definitely creepy. Two things stand out for me about this story.  First, it involves a robot husband which in my experience is a lot less common than a robot wife. And secondly, while sci-fi is full of robots gone bad (and while this robot might not be following the famed laws of robotics), I feel like Bradbury’s sympathies are with the robot. (That sentiment comes through even more strongly in his 1969 story “I Sing the Body Electric.”)

• First published in Startling Stories (1949)
• Included in The Illustrated Man (1951)

The Crowd

How swiftly a crowd comes… like the iris of an eye closing in out of nowhere.

This one, like so much of Bradbury’s work and so many of the stories I’ve listed here, is a masterclass in taking something everyday and familiar, in this case the way crowds gather at the site of an accident, and turning it into disturbing and menacing horror:

“Is he dead?”
“No, he’s not dead.”
“He won’t die. He’s not going to die.”

• First published in Weird Tales (1943)
• Included in The October Country (1955)

The Fog Horn

“Sounds like an animal, don’t it?” McDunn nodded to himself. “A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten million years calling out to the deeps. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do.”

OK, so this one might not be super creepy, per se, but it’s an inspired monster story. “The Fog Horn” shines with Bradbury’s trademark gorgeous prose and it’s pervaded by a sense of profound loneliness and longing. It’s my favorite kind of monster story, one that empathizes with the monster. According to Bradbury, the story was inspired by the ruins of a demolished roller coaster on Los Angeles beach that made him think of a dinosaur skeleton.

• First published in The Saturday Evening Post (1951)
• Included in The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

There Will Come Soft Rains

The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The threat of nuclear annihilation haunts a lot of science fiction written during the Cold War, and this story focuses on that particular apocalyptic nightmare. But rather than describing the brutal destruction and suffering of war, Bradbury describes an automated house that has survived humanity. It’s a story haunted by the emptiness, by the void left behind by those who died. In an interview in 1980 (published in The Christian Science Monitor), Bradbury himself picked this as the story “that represents the essence of Ray Bradbury.”

• First published in Collier’s (1950)
• Included in The Martian Chronicles (1950)

The Long Rain

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

Once again, Bradbury shows off his gift for story-openings. The way the rain is turned into a powerful and sinister force in those first lines absolutely sets the tone for the rest of the tale. “The Long Rain” takes place on Venus where a rocket has crashed. Four survivors are now on a harrowing trek through the planet’s perpetual rains, trying to find the safety of a Sun Dome, while in perpetual danger from the hostile Venusians. All four seem to be losing their grip on reality and one by one, they perish, until only one of them is left.

• First published in Planet Stories (1950)
• Included in The Illustrated Man (1951)

Several books I’ve read lately feature haunted towns. In The Briar Book of the Dead by Angela Slatter (which I reviewed for Psychopomp earlier this year), the witch-governed village of Silverton is largely unaware of being haunted until the town-steward, Ellie Briar, gains the ability to see and speak to the dead. And in Christopher Barzak’s novella A Voice Calling (published by Psychopomp) a chorus of voices from the town where the (definitely haunted) Button House is located, tells the story of the terrible house in their midst and how the shadow cast by that house has tainted and twisted the fate of their community through the years.

Adding to my list of haunted literary locales, I present to you three books I’ve read recently that feature three very different haunted towns.

Cinderwich, by Cherie Priest

“That dead woman—she wore a groove in this town. Everyone who visits here, everyone who just passes through…they all fall into her story. Some of ’em stay here, trapped. Even the folks who get to leave, they always take some part of her with ’em.”

In Priest’s novella, Kate Thrush and her former college professor, Dr. Judith Kane, travel to the tiny, barely-there town of Cinderwich, Tennessee, hoping to finally solve the mystery of what happened to Kate’s aunt Ellen who vanished without a trace decades ago, before Kate was even born. Ellen wasn’t just Kate’s aunt. She was also, once upon a time, Judith’s lover and her unexplained disappearance has haunted Judith into her old age. Now, Judith has found a newspaper article which mentions that the desiccated corpse of a young woman was found wedged in a treetop in the town of Cinderwich around the time of Ellen’s disappearance. Kate and Judith (both of them deliciously salty investigators, by the way), meet up in Cinderwich, and soon realize that there are deep and dark mysteries lurking in both the town’s past and its present.

Priest infuses the tale with a chilling, creeping, ever-growing sense of dread, and the story, like the town of Cinderwich, is full of great characters, including the various ghosts that haunt the town, the woods (and the motel); and the women (*cough* witches*cough*) that seem to both try to help and hinder, Judith and Kate’s investigation. In true haunted town fashion, there are ghostly currents pulling at the fabric of reality in Cinderwich, and the town’s grip on the two outsiders tightens like a vice the deeper they dig into the mystery of the dead woman in the tree.

Withered, by A.G.A. Wilmot

“I said you’re trapped,” Amara repeated. “This town isn’t suffocating; it’s cursed. I’m cursed, you’re cursed, we’re all cursed.”

In Wilmot’s Withered, the link between a haunted house and the haunted town that surrounds it is at the very heart of the tale. After some very rough times, 18-year-old Ellis and their mom move to the small town of Black Stone, hoping for a fresh start and a place for Ellis to recover. While Ellis does their best to get their life back on track and find a new job and maybe even make new friends, they soon realize that the house they’ve moved into is haunted (just like the locals have been implying from the get-go). Worse, when Ellis, and their new friend Quinn, dig into the house’s mysterious past, they discover that the whole town of Black Stone is not just haunted, but might be the epicenter of an otherworldly battle, a duel, of sorts, that affects and threatens everyone in the community.

Wilmot deftly weaves together the stories of the ghosts and the living, the past and the present, the house and the town, as Ellis and Quinn get closer to the truth about Black Stone. There’s a wicked-sharp sense of humor running through this story, but there’s also a sincere and gentle thoughtfulness to the way the mystery plays out. Ellis’s experience with anorexia, grief, and depression subtly mirrors the supernatural struggles of the story, deepening the emotional impact of revelations to come. This is horror with empathy and purpose beyond gore and jump scares.

The Bad Ones, by Melissa Albert

“Palmetto is a strange town. More than you’d think for a place that has two Chili’s.”

“People die. Sometimes badly, sometimes young. There are tragedies every day, everywhere. But there’s a death in our town’s history that for some reason became legendary.”

In Albert’s supernatural horror novel, The Bad Ones, four people in the town of Palmetto disappear without a trace in a single night. One of those people is a high school girl named Becca, and when Becca’s estranged best friend Nora tries to figure out what’s happened to her, she finds deep cracks and dark shadows in her own and Becca’s life. She also finds what seems like a series of clues left behind by Becca, and these clues lead her deep into the town’s past where sinister secrets and powerful forces lurk, sometimes hidden in plain sight.

The Bad Ones is a story with many layers. It’s about the joy and pain of intense friendship (toxic, semi-toxic, and otherwise). It’s about the everyday horrors of high school, it’s about grief and loss and trauma, and it’s about the transformative, liminal magic of imaginative play and storytelling. It’s also about the town of Palmetto, a place haunted by the bad things that have happened (and keep happening) there; a place where buried secrets have caused a great darkness to take root, spread, and fester. Part of that darkness involves a local legend of a goddess who played a pivotal role in one of Nora’s and Becca’s childhood games. The way Albert captures the sometimes-confining nature of small town life, and the way she puts the weight of the tale on the intense and complicated friendship between two girls, made this story hit me right in the solar plexus.

Bonus short story picks if you want a quick trip to a haunted town:

• “The Third Expedition” by Ray Bradbury (part of The Martian Chronicles, and originally published under the title “Mars Is Heaven!” in Planet Stories in 1948)
• “Black Fanged Thing” by Sam Rebelein, published in Shimmer
• “Small-Town Spirit” by Frances Rowat in Fireside Fiction