The White Devil by Justin Evans (HarperCollins) takes a little while to get past what seems to be a typical “coming of age” story, as a badly behaved American teen is exiled to the prestigious British Harrow School for a year. But the book quickly turns into an adventurous and horrifying modern ghost story delving into a fascinating hundred year old mystery for its vicious, deadly haunting.
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (Alfred A. Knopf) is, believe it or not, a fresh take on the werewolf novel. The titular last werewolf, Jacob Marlow, is smart, has a literary bent (he quotes from Nabokov’s Lolita), and is ready to die. His nemesis is a werewolf hunter who can hardly wait until the next full moon to finish off Marlow. But vampires who for their own reasons don’t want him dead complicate matters interestingly.
Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Quercus) is a long, complex novel by the author of Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead that begins with the inexplicable disappearance of a child from an isolated Swedish island community. Two years later the parents have broken up and the father, native to the island but who moved away to marry, returns — because he’s got nowhere else to go. There is no real protagonist and that, plus the fact that the story rambles a bit, mar what could have been brilliant. But with patience, the eerie happenings (returning dead), hints of monsters, and unholy deals will keep readers reading.
The Devil all the Time by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday) is horrific at times but would be difficult to classify as horror — which shouldn’t put off those who enjoy a good dark mainstream novel about rural southern Ohio and West Virginia and the people who live there. The story has the rawness and unpredictability of the movie Winter’s Bone (I haven’t yet read the Daniel Woodrell novel). Among the characters are a man who believes that only by making more and more elaborate animal sacrifices can he save his dying wife, a murderous couple who pick up and torture young men, and a pair of scam artists posing as a preacher and his acolyte. Highly recommended.
Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson (HarperCollins) is about a woman who wakes up one day, doesn’t know where she is, who she is, or who the man in bed with her is. This is the kind of book that at the three-quarter point, this reader worried that the writer wouldn’t be able to pull off the delicate balancing act of ending the story properly. Although there are a few loose ends, Watson does so brilliantly.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk Books) is a fine first novel marketed to young adults about a suburban teenager who’s been raised on his grandfather’s fanciful tales of an island off England where he and other child refugees from Nazi Germany were given asylum in an orphanage. The boy doesn’t really believe the stories until his grandfather is brutally attacked and with his dying words directs his grandson to clues proving the existence of both the home and its unusual inhabitants. The book is charming and magical but also horrifying. It’s liberally illustrated with photographs of “peculiar” children and adults resulting in a nice looking and totally readable package.
Regicide by Nicholas Royle (Solaris Books) is an unsettling novel about a disaffected young man who enters a Kafkaesque parallel world inspired by the Robbe-Grillet novel he’s reading titled Regicide.
Feast Day of Fools by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster) — although I enjoy the Dave Robicheaux novels a lot, I — like his creator, sometimes need a break from them. So Burke’s newest novel, featuring Sheriff Hackberry Holland, a man haunted by his experiences as a POW in the Korean War, is welcome. Holland has been central to two of Burke’s previous novels, including the early Lay Down My Sword and Shield with Holland having recently returned from the war. Feast Day of Fools is not supernatural but it’s a dark, complex riveting story about evil doings and good deeds taking place along the Texan-Mexico border. An alcoholic ex-boxer witnesses the torture and death of a man in the desert and reports it to the Sheriff, setting in motion events that spotlight some of the flashpoints of contemporary U.S. society: illegal immigration, drug running, the exploitation of children, psycho killers, corrupt politicians, and religious extremists.
The Edinburgh Dead by Brian Ruckley (Orbit) is an atmospheric police procedural (kind of) about a nineteenth-century mad scientist and the body snatchers who enable his experimentation in raising the dead. Ruckley deftly blends historical figures and events into the plot (Burke & Hare and their murderous ways of supplying anatomical schools with bodies).
