Round-up: Four new horror books start 2023 with a shiver

Fellstones

By Ramsey Campbell

Flame Tree Press, 250 pages, $21.95

Reading a Ramsey Campbell novel is a little like being trapped in a pleasantly furnished but slowly shrinking room. As the walls and ceiling inch closer, you are so lulled by the beautiful wallpaper and ornaments that you ignore the avenues of escape as they are closed off one by one. “Fellstones,” the Liverpool author’s latest novel, executes this Campbellian sleight of hand by first immersing the reader into a mildly unhappy relationship between two bookstore employees, Paul and Caren. Paul is emotionally distance, finding more solace in the Classical music he loves than in any human relationship. When he is summoned back home by his adoptive family to attend a communal village ritual, Paul begins to suspect that the familiar villagers may actually be initiates of a cosmic occult conspiracy that depends on his participation. An elegantly written gem from a genre master.

Bad Cree

By Jessica Johns

HarperCollins, 280 pages, $23.99

Debut novelist Jessica Johns blends First Nations cosmology, dream imagery, and stark contemporary realism in “Bad Cree,” the tale of a Cree family plagued by nightmares with a prophetic and even supernatural dimension. Mackenzie is living in downtown Vancouver, having fled her home in northern Alberta after the death of her sister Sabrina, a tragedy that replays itself in Mackenzie’s nightly dreams. Mackenzie can handle the bad dreams — it’s the physical objects she carries with her from the dream world that make her question her sanity. With nowhere left to turn, Mackenzie returns to her family, where she confronts the sinister spiritual entity that haunted her late sister. Laconic pacing slows the opening scenes, but the novel finds its feet once Mackenzie returns home, making for a visionary journey into the liminal zones of consciousness and reality itself.

The Vessel

By Adam Nevill

Ritual Limited, 160 pages, $14.99

In the UK they’re called “carers,” underpaid and mostly female workers who assist the ill, the elderly, and the disabled in daily household tasks. In “The Vessel,” Adam Nevill’s 11th novel, Jess is an exhausted soldier in this invisible army. Lacking proper child care and housing for her daughter Izzy, Jess leaps at the offer to care for Flo, an elderly dementia sufferer living alone in a dilapidated mansion. Flo is a nasty piece of business — she verbally and physically assaults Jess — but the money is good and Jess can bring Izzy to work. Soon, Izzy forms an unexpected bond with Flo, one that seems to awaken Flo’s sinisterly protective side. Nevill’s depiction of the country’s fraying social safety net and the horrors of bodily and mental disintegration is unrelenting, but the bleakness sets up the reader for a blistering and strangely uplifting climax. Genuinely creepy and thought-provoking, and the narrative momentum will probably carry you to the end in one sitting.

Breakable Things

By Cassandra Khaw

Undertow Publications, 240 pages, $21.99

Myth, folklore, pop horror tropes and identity politics collide and cross-pollinate in these 23 stories by Canadian-Malaysian writer Cassandra Khaw. Throughout the stories, Khaw’s voice is both lyrical and deadpan, streetwise and cerebral. In “Don’t Turn on the Lights,” an urban legend is retold and turned on its head, with each new version revealing meanings only hinted at in previous tellings, while “The Ghost Stories We Tell Around Photon Fires” blends deep-space science fiction with the classic ghost story. This requires a taste for experimental narrative forms and genre conventions performed with postmodern self-consciousness, but the perceptive reader will find much to enjoy here.

SHARE: