Recent Reads: July 26
Two horror novels that made me cry (and also a mystery novel)
And no, you don’t have to give up when you’re too wrapped up in a fence to escape. What you do is writhe and snap when that big hand comes to collect you. What you do is tear with your sharp teeth at the webbing between that thumb and forefinger, and then bring your hind claws around to peel out on the wrist, because this might be too much to live through, sure, that’s life, that’s death, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take anyone with you.
—The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones
Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson
Set at a remote Australian mountain ski resort, this one features a family reunion that was bound to be uncomfortable and awkward at best—two of the attendees are brothers who haven’t seen one another since one of them testified against the other in a case that resulted in his three-year prison sentence—and that’s before the murders start.
It’s the precursor to Everyone on this Train is a Suspect, and stars the same narrator, a man who knows the mystery genre—and mystery readers—so well that he can accurately predict how we think, which clues we’ll pick up on, what red herrings we’ll discard. The mysteries themselves are totally fun, but it’s the narration that makes these books truly special—he has to walk the narrow line of being both Poirot and Hastings, both Holmes and Watson, and he absolutely pulls it off. I can’t remember reading anything quite like them.
A few examples showing why these are such a blast:
Our narrator is self-deprecating, but in a way that’s warm and funny, not annoying:
My name would be useful, I suppose. I’m Ernest Cunningham. It’s a bit old- fashioned, so people call me Ern or Ernie. I should have started with that, but I promised to be reliable, not competent.
He knows his stuff (this one especially got me because 2/3s of the time I can identify the bad guy from the opening credits in any of those old-people procedurals (I mean c’mon, if Isabella Rossellini is going to appear on The Blacklist OBVIOUSLY she’s going to be the villain):
In a mystery like this one, there are clues in every word—hell, in every piece of punctuation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think about the device in your hands. If a killer is ever revealed and your “percentage read” isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read. This works to spoil films too: the highest-profile actor with the fewest lines is always the villain, and a sudden wide-shot of a character crossing a road means they are about to be hit by a car.
Because he knows how we think, he knows exactly what we’ll roll our eyes about, and often preemptively responds:
We weren’t really trapped by the storm, as happens so frequently in these types of novels. We weren’t trapped at all. But we were chained by our own egos, our regrets, our shame, and our stubbornness. It was time to swallow that. This is about the right time for an exodus anyway, I figure, being six chapters from the end.
If I hadn’t read them out of order, I’m sure I’d be absolutely over-the-moon raving about this first one. It really only pales in comparison because the second one felt like it was literally written with my specific tippy-top favorite tropes in mind—this one was also hugely enjoyable and I’m really looking forward to pressing into lots and lots and lots of library patrons’ hands.
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix
Way back when, I read Horrorstör.
Years later, I picked up Paperbacks from Hell.
This year, something happened, and I just started barrelling my way through the rest of Grady Hendrix’s books—as far as I’m concerned, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires proved that when it comes to male authors writing about women and patriarchal bullshit, he’s on par with Ira Levin; I read The Final Girls Support Group as a much-deserved ode to Linnea Quigley; and in addition to featuring an absolutely terrifying puppet, How to Sell a Haunted House is a killer story about siblings. Basically, on a personal level, one of the more positive things to come out of 2024 so far is the knowledge that if Grady Hendrix writes it, I should read it.
So I went into this one with high expectations, and it delivered well beyond those expectations. Scary, funny, smart, thoughtful, an empathetic and realistic depiction of teenage girl best friendship, and GODDAMN, IT MADE ME CRY.
It opens a lot like Stand By Me, with an adult thinking back on a golden-hazed-but-not-without-bite-and-darkness childhood. It’s chockablock full of era-specific references, which are an absolute hoot, but it’s the characterization and depiction of girl friendships that make it sing:
After they snuck into Flashdance, Abby and Gretchen would slip off their shoes at the dinner table and grab each other’s crotches with sock-covered feet. Abby would wait until Gretchen was lifting a forkful of peas, then stick her foot in Gretchen’s crotch, making her fling food everywhere and sending her dad into a tirade.
“Wasting food is no joke!” he’d shout. “That’s how Karen Carpenter died!”
I would have read a whole book purely about these kids, but before long, it fast-forwards to high school, and eventually, to Gretchen’s possession. And things get… extremely tough for our girls.
Things I loved:
That we don’t witness Gretchen’s possession
That it easily, especially at first, can be read as a metaphor for sexual assault (and Abby actually raises the possibility as an explanation for Gretchen’s sudden shift in personality and behavior) [relatedly, Shaun David Hutchinson’s Howl is a great YA horror novel that uses genre tropes to explore the aftermath of sexual assault, as well as the culture of silence and shame that protects the perpetrators—I found it incredibly, viscerally powerful, impossible to put down, and I generally have a really hard time reading stories about SA]
The absolutely dead-on descriptions of what TCBYs felt and smelled like
How the adults in their lives fail these kids again and again due to being more concerned with image and social capital and what they deem “appropriate” than in, say, their kids’ actual health and well-being—which is depressing AF but also pretty accurate, and DEFINITELY accurate in re: how teens tend to view most adults
Uhhhh… everything about this book? I loved it, full stop. I didn’t think I could love a Hendrix book as much as The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, but here we are with an official tie?
The depiction of the connection forged between kids who spend hours and hours and hours in the car, driving around and bellowing lyrics to songs on cassettes played over and over and over; of sneaking cigarettes while lying in the grass in a sunny backyard and talking about everything and nothing and everything and nothing; of the blistering protective rage that bubbles up when someone or something threatens that person; of the intense love you feel for them and understanding that you share, even as you age and grow and lose touch. This book nails it.
It’s really something special—I’ve read so many books about friendship, and so many books about girl friendship, and going in, I did not expect this book to be in the top 1% of titles that really, truly gets it, in all of its sometimes gruesome glory.
But it is.
Last week
Recent Reads: July 19
Apparently I’m all about the mayhem this summer? I guess we all have a different definition of escapism. Scroll down to read about four mystery-thrillers, one absolutely fantastic and three that… well, they kept my interest? Which is actually a heavy lift sometimes, so while it sounds like I’m damning them with faint praise, I’m not.
Recommended by y’all last week & added to my TBR
The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore
It’s Elementary, by Elise Bryant
“Do as I say!” Laurie told the children she was watching, and you can’t see me in John Carpenter’s angle on that dark living room of her babysitting gig, but I’m standing right over there behind the curtains where Tommy Doyle was hiding before, and, Laurie, I do, I do as you say, I do like you taught us. I fight and I fight and I refuse to die no matter what, and it ends me up in places like this over and over, but that’s better than being stuffed open eyed in a cabinet or posed on a bed with a headstone.
—The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones
The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones
I finished this one a couple of days ago, and I have still not been able to talk about it without crying—which is definitely not the norm when I’m talking about horror novels. But this series—The Angel of Indian Lake is the third in a trilogy—and in particular, its heroine, have irrevocably lodged themselves into my heart. Jade Daniels is one of those rare characters who has become so absolutely real to me that I am genuinely finding it difficult to accept that she is a fictional creation, genuinely finding it difficult to imagine that she is not out there in the real world. Somehow, even typing that out has me crying again? Obviously, I will absolutely be buying copies of the entire series for myself to read and reread, and Stephen Graham Jones has a new fan for life.
In a nutshell, the series is about Jade Daniels, who lives and breathes horror movies—particularly slashers—and then, basically, her life becomes one. She witnesses and survives massacre after massacre, using genre rules to understand, unravel, and, again, survive these situations. She doesn’t think of herself as the heroine, as the final girl, because she thinks of final girls as being these ultra-rare shining stars—but we in the audience know from the beginning that she is up there with the best of the best of them, we believe in her from page one and we’ll keep believing in her even after she walks off the last page.
I started the series loving her for her movie references and encyclopedic recall of horror trivia, as well as her insistence on looking at these movies—movies that so many people dismiss as trash or lowbrow or without any sort of merit—through an intellectual and more importantly, an emotional lens. Horror is her armor, yes, but she sees elements of the real world in it, too, and vice-versa. Because this series takes place over a number of years, we see Jade grow into adulthood, and we see her have to interrogate and explore and process the trauma of having survived what amounts to multiple horror movies—not unlike Ellen Ripley or Laurie Strode or Nancy Thompson or Sidney Prescott.
She contends with and survives killer after killer, monster after monster, betrayal after betrayal. She lives with survivor’s guilt, through prison, heals from injuries only to be bloodied—body and soul—all over again. She is a Native American girl, then woman, living in the United States of America. She knows the history of her town, the history of this country, and she knows how the world works—both the regular world and this horrorshow of a town she lives in—and even though everything tells her that there’s no point in fighting, she does. She keeps fighting to survive, despite all odds and despite her exhaustion, and that refusal to stop means that underneath it all, under that cloud of cigarette smoke and all that eyeliner, protected by that emotional armor, there’s still a kernel of hope in there.
And oh good, I’m crying again.
While I’m already crying, I’ll say this: Ultimately, Jade comes around on the idea of final girls. She realizes that they’re not nearly as rare as her teen self thought, and in that realization, Stephen Graham Jones is giving power to his characters, and I’d argue, to his readers.
There’s final girls everywhere, aren’t there? I used to think they were the rarest breed, the finest vintage. But everyone who’s got something to fight for, they’ll fight for it, never mind if it’s a fight they should win. Should doesn’t always matter. What does is that you run screaming into this thing, and don’t stop until it’s over.
—The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones
As a whole, this series is a powerful piece about survival and rage, about justice and revenge, about how violence can provide catharsis—but also that it ultimately begets more violence. It turns into a juggernaut, and once you give yourself over to it, once you flip that switch, it can’t always be flipped back. It’s written with an incredible amount of compassion and empathy—it is literally dedicated to the child who would become hockey mask-wearing boogeyman Jason Voorhees, a child who drowned because people weren’t watching out for him.
I don’t want to go so far as to call those camp counselors adults, because they were jackass teens and also children, but knowing Jade’s history, it’s understandable why she’d empathize with Jason before he became the unstoppable, indiscriminate killing machine that he became. Let alone her feelings about Jason’s mother—of course teenage Jade, given her childhood, would feel for and be drawn to Pamela Voorhees, who exhibits the most extreme version of Mama Bear tendencies in Friday the 13th. (I know I’m talking around a lot of this and this would probably all be better off in my private physical journal, but I’m in too deep now, LOL.)
That dedication—and the rest of the book—is a constant reminder that so many slasher stories are rooted in tragedy and pain and injustice, that sometimes the monsters (like Jason) were actual people before they were monsters. Late in the book, Stephen Graham Jones acknowledges the Freddy problem—Fred Krueger was a monster even before he was a literal monster, but he comes back because the parents of Elm Street chose to commit a monstrous act themselves in an attempt to protect their children.
Stephen Graham Jones makes horror and violence beautiful without losing sight of the suffering involved. He shows that it comes from one of two places: people who are hurt, who lash out and then A) can’t stop or B) do stop, but then have to contend with what they’ve done and their own regret; and people who want power and control, who see themselves and their desires as more important than anything else, who take pride in their willingness to cause pain. In some ways, given the state of the world and the American political landscape, this was the perfect book at the perfect time. But in other ways, in my heart, it will always be the perfect book at the perfect time.
SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB'S GUIDE is a freaking masterpiece.
I’m definitely going to look for the Stevenson books (and not just because we share a last name 😂)