Gertrude Stein once wrote that “Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.”
I think if Stein read these horror novels, she’d change her mind.
‘The Reformatory’
Ryan Murphy, take note. Tananarive Due has written the “American horror story.” Set in Jim Crow Florida of the 1950s, “The Reformatory” is a mesmerizing novel full of haunting twists and heartbreaking horrors. The story is about a Black family fighting (real) monsters with all the power they can manifest.
Gloria has always scoffed at her brother Robert’s claims he sees ghosts, “haints.” She even represses her own ability to see a person’s future unraveling like “a ribbon” in her mind. After all, “there’s worse things to worry about.” On their way home from school one day, a white teenager tries to force himself on Gloria. Robert retaliates. He’s sentenced to six months in the Gracetown Boys Reformatory.
At first glance, the reformatory looks bucolic. But “ugly is just beneath the surface.” While Gloria does all she can to advocate for her brother’s release, Robert slowly realizes his supernatural ability to conjure ghosts may be the only way to survive.
When a “corruption is big enough,” says Miz Lottie, the siblings’ guardian and one of the novel’s most compelling characters, “it can be a ‘haint’ too” that, like a mirror, “shines yo’ ugly back at you.”
‘The September House’
If you prefer your horror off-kilter, shockingly funny and bloody good, step inside the September House, where one month a year the walls bleed, the basement bursts with bad things and everything screams and moans in the night. Carissa Orlando has tucked a clever story about the horrors of domestic violence inside an ingeniously constructed haunted house novel.
The September House is a dream for artist Margaret, writer Hal and their daughter Katherine — or at least the illusion of one. Margaret tolerates the house’s September shenanigans. She even gets used to Fredricka, the spirited housekeeper with a gash on her forehead who constantly rearranges the furniture. Margaret avoids the ghost who bites and ignores the other grotesque “pranksters” roaming the rooms. That is, until Hal goes missing, Katherine returns home and the horror in the basement can’t be restrained any longer.
‘Black Sheep’
Rachel Harrison’s novel is a dread-filled, phantastic read. It’s pretty funny, too. Vesper Wright struggles to make ends meet schlepping fast food at Shortee’s Restaurant. She’s mostly in control of the “staggering rage” beneath her snarky 20-something demeanor, but when she’s pushed too far by a table of “bros,” she causes a “nacho cheese incident” that gets her fired (I laughed and ewwed at the same time).
When an invitation to the wedding of her best friend Rose and her ex-boyfriend arrives, Vesper decides to return to the isolated town of Virgil, where she was raised in a “self-sustaining,” secret cult. Yup. Satan has taken their wheel. Vesper buys a “revenge dress” in red satin, determined that the wedding is hers “to destroy.” Vesper’s plan forces a reunion with her mother, a horror movie “scream queen,” her absentee dad, and a faceoff against the rest of the devilishly “devout religious community.” Things go the way of the proverbial handbasket quickly.
