adult | Diversity in Horror Fiction

Pour One for the Devil by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Formats: Print, digital

Genre: Gothic

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Author is Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indian, main character is American Indian (unknown tribe), Gullah side characters

Takes Place in: South Carolina Sea Islands

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Forced Captivity, Incest, Racism

Blurb

When Dr. Van Vierlans receives an invitation from Mrs. Elizabeth Van der Horst to give a lecture at her island mansion off the coast of South Carolina, he doesn’t think twice. There’s a generous honorarium, and he relishes the chance to revisit the Sea Islands, where he once studied the Gullah language.

The lavish house he arrives at is strangely out of time. No other historians appear, nor does an audience, as he passes the time chatting in Gullah with the household servants. Just when his suspicions become difficult to ignore, Mrs. Van der Horst plies him with a sumptuous feast that distracts him from her true motives–which may prove more sinister than anything he’s prepared to imagine.

I first read Van Alst’s work in the Indigenous dark fiction anthology, Never Whistle at Night. His story, The Longest Street in the World stood out to me because it was the first time I’d read an Indigenous story about an “Urban Indian.” The story took place in Chicago, home to the first Urban Indian center in the country, and author Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Van Alst’s main character in Pour One for the Devil, Dr. Van Vierlans, is also an urban Indian and an Ivy League trained junior professor of anthropology. Already I love this because we not only get to see an American Indian man with a PhD, but he’s also an anthropologist to boot. So often anthropologists are portrayed in media as white people studying “primitive” Indigenous people in remote areas, and the field itself is the product of colonialism, so it was refreshing to see an Indigenous anthropologist.

This Southern Gothic story begins with Dr. Van Vierlans being lured to the estate of the wealthy, white Elizabeth Morgenstern, with the promise of a generous honorarium for a lecture about the Coosaw shell rings. I was already getting vibes before the professor arrived, but then Auntie Delilah, a Gullah domestic worker at Morgenstern’s home, attempts to warn the doctor that both Elizabeth and the house are dangerous. Either due to ignorance (has he never seen a horror movie?!) or greed, Dr. Van Vierlans decides to ignore the warnings and stays anyway.

While taking a nap in one of the guest rooms Dr. Van Vierlans has a dream that the Devil is sitting on his chest. The Devil asks for a story about himself, and the doctor agrees to give him one, but in exchange Lucifer must leave him alone until Van Vierlans dies. The devil warns him that his death will be sooner than he expects, but even this isn’t enough to scare him away from Elizabeth’s House. It’s interesting that the devil appears to him at all,since Van Vierlans supports the traditional ways, unlike his father who insists on practicing Christianity.

At dinner the professor and his host engage in verbal combat. Dr. Van Vierlans finds Elizabeth Morgenstern, or Miss Lizzy, as she prefers to be called, fascinating. As a man from Chicago, he finds her rural Southern ways to be quaint. And because he’s an anthropologist, and familiar with the etiquette of different cultures, he’s able to impress Miss Lizzie with his impeccable manners. Elizabeth tells him about the automatons built by her late husband, Peter, which Delilah believes are powered by spirits.

I like how the American Indian man is portrayed as the cosmopolitan city mouse, while the country mouse is the wealthy white woman. He has studied her culture enough that he can easily blend in and impress the old white lady. Dr. Van Vierlans also becomes friendly with Auntie Delilah as he studied the Gullah as part of his work as an anthropologist and speaks Gullah creole (though Delilah points out he speaks it “like a little boy”).

I also really appreciated how Gullah is translated into a more formal style of English; a sociolect associated with the wealth and intelligence. Mitford popularized the idea of U (upper class) and non-U (non-upper class) English in the 1950s, which she claimed could determine what social class one belonged to. A person’s accent is also strongly associated with class. Because class is often erroneously tied to intelligence people will infer how smart someone is by what kind of English they speak. For example, standardized grammar often aligns with high IQ scores, and IQ tests have been show to favor people who are white and privileged. And no, it’s not because they’re smarter, IQ tests just aren’t accurate measures of intelligence. Gullah used to be (and sometimes still is) erroneously considered a mark of ignorance. By translating Gullah into “upper class English” (which Delilah and her sisters also speak fluently) Van Alst demonstrates that not only does the creole language have its own grammar and syntax rules, but that Gullah speakers are just as intelligent as those who speak a more formal English. The Gullah people are also described as “West Africa’s best and brightest farmers” who were enslaved and “forced to use their agricultural genius to grow rice crops on stolen land.” Again, Van Alst directly contradicts the racist stereotype that enslaved Black people were ignorant.

Auntie Delilah (whose true name is Nenge) was my favorite character. She is ethnically Mende (one of the largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone), and her father and grandfather were Kamajor, respected hunters/warriors. She describes her childhood teachers as foolish white folks from up North who saw her and her people as souls to be saved. She learned about the bible and took her name from there as a middle finger to white Christians and the patriarchy. Delilah is happily unmarried and childfree, but is far from being a mammy stereotype. Instead, she’s chosen to remain single and without children because she enjoys her independence and doesn’t have the patience for a husband and child. I also always enjoy seeing happily childfree women in fiction.

I think some of the strongest aspect of Van Alst’s writing are his descriptions of nature and Elizabeth’s house. You could practically feel the humidity and smell the lush vegetation. I also enjoyed the humor, which balanced out the horror well. The ending was weird, not in a bad way, but it did leave me yearning for more of an explanation. It felt to me like the book ended abruptly before the story had finished, but I’m also not someone who enjoys vague endings.

Tags: Adult, American Indian, BIPOC, Book Review, Chippewa, Gothic, Ottawa, Own Voices

On Sunday She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Saga Press

Genre: Gothic, Historic Horror, Werebeast

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Black characters and author, Queer main character and author

Takes Place in: Georgia, USA

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Body Shaming, Cannibalism, Child Death, Childbirth, Death, Gore, Homophobia, Incest, Miscarriage, Physical Abuse, Racism, Rape/Sexual Assault, Self-Harm, Sexual Abuse, Slurs, Slut-Shaming, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence, Vomit

Blurb

When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.

Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.

But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.

Haunting and thought-provoking, On Sunday She Picked Flowers explores retribution, family trauma, and the power of building oneself back up after breaking down.

I received this product for free in return for providing an honest and unbiased review. I received no other compensation. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Jude (short for Judith) does what I’m sure many women have dreamed of doing. After killing her abuser she runs away from her terrible life to live alone in a haunted house in the forest where she becomes a wisewoman/healer and takes a mysterious lover who may or not be a beast. On Sunday She Picked Flowers reads like a Southern Gothic fairytale, if “Once Upon a Time” were 1965 and “a land far away” was Georgia. This is not a pretty story with a pure, fair maiden who is rescued from her miserable life. Instead, our heroine, 41-year-old Jude, is described as “too fat, too Black, too tall, and too damn ugly” (at least by her teachers and classmates) and is forced to save herself from her wicked mother and the curse of transgenerational trauma.

Jude has lived with her abusive, religious mother for her entire life. She doesn’t understand why her mother, whom she calls Ma’am, hates her so much, only that she does. Ma’am will beat her daughter for the smallest offense then turn around and act like nothing happened (this is known as the cycle of abuse). Her two aunts, Phyillis and Vivian, tell Jude it’s her own fault she’s abused for being “difficult” and she should be grateful for all her mother has sacrificed for her.

Jude keeps a packed bag and a tin of money hidden under her bed so she can leave one day. She’s tried to run away before but people in the town always bring her back. Eventually Jude realizes the only way she’ll ever be free is to kill her mother. One night Jude is making dinner when Ma’am announces she found the packed bag under Jude’s bed. Ma’am tried to guilt trip Jude before telling her daughter that she’ll never let her leave. Something snaps in Jude and she starts hitting her mother and the two end up on the floor. Ma’am tries to strangle her but Jude grabs a meat cleaver on the floor and buries it in her mother’s face. She attempts to call her aunt Phyllis for help and to confess what she’s done, the only one of Ma’am’s two sisters who might show her compassion, but is rebuffed. Realizing she can’t stay in that house Jude runs away and ends up in an abandoned haunted house in the middle of the woods that she names Candle.

In many ways transgenerational trauma can feel like a family curse that passes from parent to child. The controversial field of epigenetics claims that trauma can change your DNA to the point that it’s passed down genetically to your offspring, with descendants of Holocaust survivors, Residential School Survivors, and enslaved Africans continuing to experience the symptoms of trauma (depression, anxiety, substance misuse, etc.). Dr. Joy DeGruy, who holds advanced degrees in both clinical psychology and social work research, came up with the term “post traumatic slave syndrome” to describe the transgenerational trauma experienced by African Americans as a result of the Atlantic slave trade, in addition continued discrimination in the present day. While the American Psychological Association (APA) awarded Dr. DeGruy a Presidential Citation in 2023 her theory is not without its critics. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, a historian and anti-racism scholar, argues that the idea of post traumatic slave syndrome is itself racist as it implies that Black people are inherently dysfunctional as a group.

Some studies have shown that when someone experiences abuse as a child and is unable to learn healthy coping methods, they are more likely to abuse their own children, with one study stating that abuse and neglect victims are three times more likely to be abusive themselves. Rates of domestic violence are higher in the Black community, with Black women at the greatest risk, most likely due to a combination of racism and poverty. Black parents also have a complex relationship with the corporal punishment of children, especially in the South. When my siblings and I were little my Black grandmother thought it was very amusing that my white mother didn’t believe in spanking, and joked about how the beatings she gave my aunt and father would get her sent to prison now.

But she did what she did to protect them from something worse. She knew white people would use any excuse to hurt, arrest, or even kill a Black person, even if they were a child so Black children had to always be obedient if they wanted to survive. They did not have the same opportunities as white children to make youthful mistakes. Child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton, who is herself a child abuse survivor, explained in an interview with Ebony that “People think that hitting a child is a form of teaching. We think it will protect them.” In another interview with the Touré Show podcast Dr. Patton stated “There was this idea that ‘Well if I beat you, you’re gonna be alive at the end of the day, whereas if the Klan gets their hands on you, you’re dead’… And so we fast forward to this century, and you have Black people saying, ‘If I don’t beat my child, then the police will kill them.’” Of course, the belief that all Black parents are inherently abusive or “bad” parents is rooted in racism.

Ma’am was horribly abused by her own father, and ended up taking her pain out on her daughter. Jude’s beatings were treated as acceptable “punishments” by her aunts who had been beaten similarly as children. But this does NOT mean that an abused child is guaranteed to be abusive themselves. Jude is able to break free and learns to love herself and that she’s more than what was done to her, just as many Black parents today are moving away from “tough love” and embracing gentle parenting. In fact, corporal punishment is quickly falling out of favor in the Black community.

Scholfield’s prose is gorgeous, one my favorite lines in the book is, “Jude entered the verdant maw of the woods, past its bark teeth and down its mossy throat, down into its humid green bowels.” What a great description, both foreboding and beautiful. It’s also a perfect example of the book’s reoccurring theme of transformation as Jude leaves civilization behind and enters the enchanted world of the forest (appropriate, as the forest has long been a metaphor for transformation in both fairytales and folklore). Ma’am prefers nature small and tamable because she had too much of it as a child working on a plantation (one of the reasons my grandmother left Tennessee and moved to Chicago) and four generations of Ma’am’s family slaved away on a plantation, even after emancipation. But Jude loves the beauty of nature and its wildness, and is willing to work the land if she’s working it for herself and not another. For in the forest, she is truly free.

Judediscovers safety and strength in her solitude, that is until she meets Nemoira, a strange and beautiful woman who enters Candle and immediately makes herself at home. Jude falls hard and fast for the mysterious Nemoira, who may or may not be the beast that’s been leaving meat on her doorstep. Their relationship reminds me of classic stories like Bluebeard, Tsuru no Ongaeshi (Crane’s Return of a Favor), and Beauty and the Beast. I loved that this book was about an older woman rather than a 20-something. Of course there’s nothing wrong with younger heroines, but it can get repetitive always reading about women half my age in books supposedly aimed at adults. It’s easy to find older men in media, but creators seem afraid to make their women older than 30 or so. Jude, on the other hand, starts the story out at 41 and is in her sixties by the end of it. She’s also able to change and develop as a character despite being older. It’s wonderful to watch Jude go from terrified and helpless to fearless and self-sufficient over the course of the story. Best of all, she gets to have a romance and hot sex! Media makes it seem like women stop having sex the minute they hit 40, but while age can change how you have sex, older adults are still sexually active. So it’s nice to see that represented here and not treated as a punchline or something gross.

This was an achingly beautiful and haunting story. Despite its supernatural and fairy tale-like elements, the book’s depictions of abuse are still realistic. I appreciated how Scholfield humanizes Ma’am without excusing her abuse of Judith. Ma’am’s treatment of her daughter is inexcusable, even though Judith is not a “perfect victim” (a harmful myth that often prevents abuse survivors from getting help). Judith’s relationship with Nemoira is similarly complex, with Judith trying to love a monster without herself becoming monstrous and learning to stand up for herself. Scholfield’s descriptions are lush: you can practically see, smell, and hear the forest. On Sunday She Picked Flowers feels like in takes place in a liminal space between fantasy and cold reality, the “real” world, and the world of the forest. While reading it, I always felt like I was just on the edge of a dream.

Tags: Adult, African American, BIPOC, Black, Gothic, Historic Horror, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Own Voices, Werebeast

The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Genre: Gothic, Myth and Folklore

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Filipino author and characters, Gay author and character, non-binary side character

Takes Place in: The Philippines

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Child Abuse, Classism, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Gore, Homophobia, Illness, Incest, Miscarriage, Mental Illness, Racism, Rape/Sexual Assault, Sexism, Slurs, Transphobia, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Victim Blaming, Violence, Vomit

Blurb

Some legacies are best left buried…

Villa Sepulveda is a storied relic of the Philippines’ past: a Spanish colonial manor, its moldering stonework filled with centuries-old heirlooms, nestled in a remote coconut plantation. When their patriarch dies mysteriously, his far-flung family returns to their ancestral home. Filipino-American student Adrian Sepulveda invites his college girlfriend, Sophie, a transracial adoptee who knows little about her own Filipino heritage, to the funeral of a man who was entwined with the history of the country itself.

Sophie soon learns that there is more to the Sepulvedas than a grand tradition of political and entrepreneurial success. Adrian’s relatives clash viciously amid grief, confusion, and questions about the family curse that their matriarch refuses to answer. When a landslide traps them all in the villa, secrets begin to emerge, revealing sins both intimately personal and unthinkably public.

Sifting through fact, folklore, and fiction, Sophie finds herself at the center of a reckoning. Did a mythical demon really kill Adrian’s grandfather? How complicit are the Sepulvedas in the country’s oppressive history? As a series of ill omens befall the villa, Sophie must decide whom to trust—and whom to flee—before the family’s true legacy comes to take its revenge . . .

The Villa, Once Beloved is a modern gothic horror story set in the Philippines about the terrible crimes people will commit to obtain and maintain wealth and power. The story is tied to its setting, with the history of colonialism and political corruption in the Philippines playing an integral role in the plot.

Don Raul Sepulveda, the wealthy patriarch of the Sepulveda family, has decided his deceased family members need to be moved to a grand mausoleum. He attempts to build the mausoleum himself, despite his advanced age, after firing all the builders because they kept telling him his vision was impossible. Raul believes his family’s grand tomb must be finished quickly because death is coming for him, and is proven correct when he dies that night after seeing a terrifying specter in the jungle: a pale, faceless woman. His wife, Doña Olympia finds Raul’s crushed body in his bed the next day, his hands covered in dirt.

A few days later, a college student named Sophie is flying to the Philippines in a luxurious private jet with her boyfriend, Adrian, to visit his family. It’s her first time on an airplane and her first time out of the country. They’re flying to the Philippines for the funeral of Don Raul, Adrian’s grandfather. Sophie may be Filipino but she was raised by a white, working-class couple on a farm in Nebraska, making her feel like an outsider. While Sophie is worried that she may be intruding on the Sepulveda’s family’s private grief, she’s happy she can support Adrian in his time of need.

Sophie loves her boyfriend because of his “boundless and innocent optimism” and his ability to talk about his feelings and have tough conversations. He lavishes her with praise, unlike her adoptive parents, who don’t give her a lot of positive affirmation. Adrian cares deeply about his family and country, and has been educating Sophie about the Philippines: its history, culture, and what it means to be Filipino. Maybe I just distrust straight cis men, but Adrian seemed too good to be true. There weren’t exactly any red flags, but something about him felt off. Yellow flags, if you will. He never brings Sophie to his family’s home, despite it being only an hour from campus, and I got the sense a lot of his activism was performative. And the way he educates Sophie about the Philippines felt condescending. Sophie loves it;she describes it as “very My Fair Lady. Sophie was clay ready to be molded, a Filipina Eliza Doolittle who somehow needed to be more Filipina, and Adrian was happy to be Henry Higgins.” But if you remember the film (or the George Bernard Shaw play it was based on) Henry Higgins was a misogynistic jerk to Eliza Doolittle.

Adrian is planning to make a documentary about his family and their ties to the Marcos, a major political family in the Philippines. The Sepulvedas are related to the Marcos through Imelda Romualdez Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines. She was the wife of former president Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, Sr., and mother of the current president of the Philippines, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos, Jr. Ferdinand was a kleptocrat who ruled as a dictator from 1965-1986, committed numerous human rights violations, and kept the Philippines under martial law in the ‘70s. Adrian hates the Marcos with a passion, even going so far as to organize a protest at Standford University when Bongbong visited the Bay Area. When his grandmother Olympia announces that the current president and his mother will likely be guests at Raul’s funeral, Adrian is horrified.

Adrian’s family has been in the Philippines since before the diocese, and own a large coconut plantation. Their villa was built nearly 200 years ago by Señor Bartolome Sepúlveda as a summer retreat for his reclusive wife Dorotea to hide her from the attention of other men (or to hide her from society after she went mad from homesickness). They were Spanish aristocrats who had fallen on hard times and moved to the Spanish East Indies attracting by Manila’s growing wealth after the Spanish crown took control and turned it into a major trading port. Their son Oscar saved the Sepulveda fortune, by starting the coconut plantation. He married Mercedes, an indio (which his father didn’t approve of). They had seven sons and one daughter, Soledad, who was married off to a member of the Marcos family.

Claudio, the oldest son of Oscar and Mercedes, is Divina and Raul’s father. He was born in 1929, after the Philippines had been sold to America. Claudio, as a US national, served in the US army and fought in WWII during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur. Claudio became a general himself, and a war hero, and chose to marry Elisea Jimenez because she was an heiress. He cheated on her multiple times, and may or may not have fathered children with other women. Elisea was the power behind the throne. She prevented Claudio’s siblings from ousting him from the company and it was her idea to expand into the international coconut trade in the sixties, selling lumber, coconut wine, and coconut oil. The coconut oil was especially popular with their US partners, and is still used in major cosmetics brands.

But then the Sepulveda family’s fortunes turned. In 1985 there was a worker’s strike at the Sepulveda’s plantation due to Marcos’ Coco Levy Fund Scam. A few days after that typhoon Saling (aka Typhoon Dot) struck, resulting in landslides that destroyed the countryside. Then malaria struck the town. There were crocodile attacks after that, then swarms of beetles that destroyed crops. Finally, a warehouse collapsed, killing several workers including Raul’s brother-in-law. When Raul’s father died suddenly of an aneurysm, Raul decided to flee to the states with his wife and young sons (Kai was not yet born), hoping to escape the curse. He left behind his newly widowed sister Divina to care for the villa and the coconut plantation.

Joining Adrian and Sophie at the villa are his parents Eric and Margot, his uncle Javier, his grandmother Olympia, his great aunt Divina, and some servants including the caretaker Remidios. Adrian’s auncle (a gender-neutral term for a parent’s sibling) Kai joins them later, barely making it to the villa because of the typhoon that strikes the Philippines. If you’re as bad at remembering names as I am, I would definitely recommend keeping a list of the characters because there are A LOT. Keeping track of the living family was one thing, but throw in all the ancestors on top of that and I started having trouble keeping track of who was who.

The book is told in third person limited tense, with Sophie acting as the main protagonist and audience surrogate who, while Filipino, is also an outsider and new to the culture and history. We also learn more about the family’s history through Adrian’s interviews with Divina for his documentary. Javier and Remidios serve as the deuteragonist and tritagonist of the story, giving the reader more of an insider’s view of the Sepulveda family. Javier and Remidios are both more cynical than the naïve Sophie who is just happy to be included. Javier is disappointed to discover his old home is not as grand as he remembered, instead finding it cramped and ill preserved whereas Sophie is in awe of the villa, highlighting their very different upbringings. Remidios has a less than charitable opinion of Sophie in the beginning (though she does warm up to her) and it’s interesting to see the protagonist, who is so often praised by Adrian, looked down upon by another character. Sophie is also the character who is most disturbed by what’s happening and becomes increasingly distraught as the story continues, growing paranoid and isolating herself from the rest of the family.

This is a slow burn horror book, which admittedly, I’m not usually a fan of. Things don’t start to getexciting until halfway through, when one of the family’s biggest secrets is finally revealed. The first half of the story is mostly getting to know the characters and their history, and I feel like it could have used more horror and foreboding. But of course, that’s just my personal preference.People with more patience than me will have a completely different reading experience. I did really enjoy learning about Filippino history and I liked how Manibo used real events and tied them into the story, like Typhoon Dot and the Coco Levy Fund Scam. I also liked how it isn’t revealed whether supernatural factors are at play until the very end. The reader is left to wonder if Raul was really killed by a batibat (a sort of Filipino sleep paralysis demon that can cause sudden, unexplained deaths) during a bangungot as Remidios claims, or whether the monster he saw was merely an apparition brought on by his madness. And is the string of disasters surrounding the family the work of a curse or merely bad luck?

Despite the villa’s size there’s a feeling of claustrophobia due to its isolation. The typhoon knocks out the internet, phone services, and roads making it impossible to reach anyone outside the villa. Because the villa is in a secluded area, it’s unlikely anyone will come to the aid of those trapped there by the landslides, despite Olympia’s insistence that everyone will come for her late husband’s funeral. Manibo is excellent at creating a gothic atmosphere, and, despite so many characters, each has their own unique perspective and personality, making them stand out. A must read if you’re a fan of the gothic.

Tags: Adult, Asian, BIPOC, Book Review, Filipino, Gay, Gothic, LGBTQIA, Myths and Folklore, Non-binary, Own Voices

The Scald Crow by Grace Daly

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Creature Publishing

Genre: Myth and Folklore

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Bisexual main character with chronic pain, author with chronic pain, Black Lesbian side character

Takes Place in: Illinois

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Ableism, Child Abuse, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Illness, Medical Procedures, Mental Illness, Racism, Slut-Shaming, Stalking, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Victim Blaming, Violence

Blurb

Shot through with gallows humor and speaking in the voice of a trusted best friend, this self-deprecating horror novel explores medical trauma through Irish folklore, asking “Can a sick woman ever be trusted?”

Brigid—that’s the Irish Breej, not “Bridge-id,” though it’s not like she’d correct you—has had a rough go of it. Her mother abused her when she was little, her best friend (and secret crush) is too busy chasing some blonde to answer Brigid’s calls, and she lost her job thanks to chronic pelvic pain with no identifiable cause. As a self-doubting, disabled adult, she’s certain that everything that has happened to her is her fault.

When her mother goes missing and Brigid’s only option is to move back into her childhood home in the idyllic Midwestern town of St. Charles, Illinois, the uncanny begins: A particular crow that once harassed her reappears, following her everywhere. A painting of Jesus keeps coming back, no matter how many times she throws it away. Frozen body parts show up in places rubber band balls and door stoppers ought to be. Every night she dreams that her real mother is dead and decaying in the closet, and the identical mother who raised her is not her mother. But it’s all in Brigid’s head. It’s all her fault. It must be. What other explanation could there be?

To survive, she’ll need to ignore what her mother and her chronic-pain doctors have always told her: that her perception of reality can’t be trusted.

Brigid (who uses the Irish pronunciation “Breej” rather than Anglicized “Bridge-id”) struggles with chronic pelvic pain coupled with IBS that makes it incredibly difficult for her to perform everyday tasks. Due to her chronic pain, Brigid can no longer work, and her disability payments are barely covering the cost of living. She’s on the verge of losing her apartment and becoming homeless (of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who experience homelessness roughly half of them have some form of disability). So, when her abusive mother mysteriously disappears and leaves Brigid her childhood home, she thinks her luck might finally be turning around. Unfortunately, returning to the house not only brings up bad memories for Brigid, but it begins to make her question her sanity as well. Things seem to move around the apartment. Objects she thought she threw out reappear making Brigid question her memory. She finds mysterious meat in the fridge and what, from her description, appears to be a phalange in the garbage disposal.

One day she wakes up to discover garbage spread across the floor and the mysterious piece of meat hanging from the ceiling. Brigid tries to tell the police about the apparent vandalism, but they’re unsurprisingly useless. Strangest of all, a scald crow appears to be following Brigid and spying on her. Scald crows, more commonly known as hooded crows, are found in the UK, so what one is doing in Illinois is anyone’s guess. In Irish folklore the hooded crow, or Badb in Irish, represents the Morrígan, a terrifying goddess of war, sovereignty, and fate. Like the Greek goddess Hecate, the Morrigan is often depicted as a tripartite goddess, three sisters named Badb, Macha, and Nemain. The hooded crow also appears at the death of the demigod Cú Chulainn. Brigid is fascinated by Irish mythology; she remembers reading it with her father before he disappeared, it still brings her comfort on her bad pain days, and she begins to wonder if the crow is more than just a crow. Of course, no one believes her.

Brigid is used to being gaslit, both by her abusive mother and medical providers who question her mysterious pelvic pain. So, when things start getting weird at the house, Bridgid believes it’s all in her head. She also thinks her pain is “all in her head,” even though any decent healthcare provider would tell her that psychosomatic pain doesn’t mean the pain is made up or fake. Unfortunately, as anyone with a chronic condition will tell you, there are a LOT of terrible healthcare providers who treat chronic pain as imaginary. It’s not like on medical TV shows where doctors fight to find a diagnosis and treat the patient no matter what. In the real would, if providers can’t easily diagnose you, they decide you’re no longer their problem or you’re making it up.

My father, a gastroenterologist, often sees patients who have spent years trying to find a diagnosis for their digestive issues before they end up in his office. Most of these patients have seen multiple other specialists who simply gave up on them after discovering they weren’t easy to diagnose. A patient of his told me she spent 10 years looking for a cause of her digestive issues before my dad diagnosed her as having a zoonotic disease from working with swine, something no one else had bothered to test for. Judging by this Reddit thread this is not an uncommon experience for people with chronic illnesses. Brigid has already had one exploratory surgery that came up with nothing, and has pretty much given up any hope of finding a cure for her chronic pain.

Keep in mind people with disabilities are not a monolith, and every individual has a different relationship with their disability. Not every person with a disability wants a cure and assuming all disabilities should be “cured” (i.e. assuming a disability is a defect that keeps someone from being “normal”) is ableist. For example, most autistic people don’t want a cure as autism is not a disease. Many Deaf people feel the same way. Accommodations and addressing ableism are what they want, not a cure. But again, everyone feels differently. Some people may want certain aspects or comorbidities of their disability to go away, but not others. For example, an Autistic friend of mine is perfectly fine with his autism, but hates his anxiety disorder and takes medication to mitigate it. He would be thrilled if his anxiety was cured. But some people with disabilities DO want a cure, and that’s also okay. Brigid’s disability causes her to physically suffer a great deal, and accommodations can’t really mitigate her pain, so she doesn’t like it and wants it gone.

Like many folks with a chronic illness and/or pain, Brigid has a limited amount of energy to get things done and must plan her whole life around her pain flares. She is often too tired by the end of the day to cook anything healthy for dinner and usually just gets a microwave pizza or burrito because that’s all she can handle when her pain gets bad. She must plan her days carefully around her pain, which makes unpacking and cleaning her mother’s house difficult. Spoon theory is a metaphor created by Christine Miserandino to describe the amount of energy a person with a chronic illness has for every day tasks. Each activity costs a certain amount of “spoons.” Simple things like brushing your teeth or watching TV “cost” less spoons while more complex tasks like going to school or work, cleaning the house, or exercising require more spoons. The number of spoons someone has on any given day can vary, so activities need to be planned around the number of spoons available. People with chronic illnesses, pain, depression, etc. have less spoons that someone who is able-bodied and neurotypical,so they need to be especially careful about how they plan their days. They may only have a few spoons on especially bad days, so they need to get as much done as possible on good days. When Brigid’s pain is less severe, she tries to get as much cleaning and unpacking done as possible, even though it will make her pain worse later.

Brigid doesn’t just have physical symptoms to contend with. She also struggles with trauma from the emotional abuse she endured from her mother for years. Brigid thinks she’s unlovable and deserves the abuse from Mammy because she was a “difficult” child. This has left her with a lot of shame and self-hatred. Her friend, Emma, points out that, in truth, Brigid is too agreeable and will go along with anything, even if it hurts her. Brigid’s people pleasing along with her lack of self-compassion are both common in abuse survivors. Brigid doesn’t recognize what happened to her as abuse, however, since it was never physical.

Brigid often dreams that an evil mother came and killed her “real” mother, who used to be kind and loving. There’s a Freudian theory that a child can’t comprehend her previously loving and kind mother becoming cruel and abusive, so she thinks her mother has been replaced somehow. In Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales the author argues that children separate their mother into their “good” mother (when she’s kind and nurturing) and “bad” mother (when she punishes them or doesn’t give them what they want). This is represented in Grimm’s Fairy Tales by the usually deceased good mother, and the wicked stepmother, who provides a transference object for the child’s hate.

Brigid’s mother being replaced by a bad version also brings to mind the story of changelings. In European folklore, a changeling is supernatural substitute that was left by fairies, demons, elves, or trolls in place of a human, usually a child. In Ireland, the belief in changelings continued to endure at least as late as 1895, when Bridget Cleary, who worked as a dressmaker, was murdered by her husband, Michael Cleary. At his trial Michael claimed that his wife had been replaced by a fairy and he had to burn the changeling alive to get his wife back. If you’re a fan of Aaron Mahnke, episode 11 of his podcast, Lore, tells the story of Bridget Cleary (I highly recommend it).

There’s a modern theory proposed by such scholars as D. L. Ashliman, Lorna Wing, and Davids Potter that the changeling myth arose as a way to explain neurodivergence or other disabilities in children. Unfortunately, this could lead to abuse and even infanticide as parents believed the child was not their own. In 1826, again in Ireland, Ann Roche drowned her four-year-old grandson, Michael Leahy, believing him to be a changeling because he could neither speak or stand. Roche believed that holding him under water would cast out the fairy which would allow her grandson to act like a “normal” child. Sadly, even today, children with disabilities are at least three times more likely to be victims of abuse or neglect than children without disabilities (and the number may actually be higher due to many children with disabilities being unable to directly report). When children with disabilities are murdered by their caregivers people will often excuse the murder and paint the murderers as victims because their child was a burden. Moral philosopher and terrible human being Peter Singer argued in his book Practical Ethics (1979), that it is morally justified to kill babies with disabilities. He also claims that it’s totally okay to kill a baby with a disability if the parents replace them with a non-disabled baby.

“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second.”

Gross. Sadly, Brigid has internalized the belief that her disability makes her “a burden,” despite what her therapist and best friend tell her.

I liked that Brigid’s Black best friend and crush, Emma, was not relegated to the role of “just there to support the white girl with no needs of her own.” When Brigid was relying too much on her for emotional support Emma was quick to set a boundary and tell her BFF (not unkindly) that this was probably something better discussed with her therapist, Carol. Emma makes time for Brigid, but isn’t always available when she calls, as Emma is busy with her own life which includes romantic turmoil, pottery class, dealing with the rich white parents she nannies for, and her beloved cats. She will even call Brigid for support when she’s struggling with her love life, so the friendship doesn’t feel one-sided (even if Brigid, in her insecurity, worries that it is).

I also appreciated that although Emma works as a nanny for rich white people, she does so without falling into the harmful Black mammy (not to be confused with what Brigid calls her mother) trope. She does the work because she’s paid well (very well) by wealthy parents, but still recognizes the inherent racism in liberal white parents hiring a Black nanny so their kids will respect other races while also expecting her to do the work they consider below them. Emma is a curvy woman, but not desexualized at all. In fact, Brigid often remarks on how stylish and sexy she is. Again, Daly could have made Emma little more than a trope, this time the Jezebel, but manages to avoid it by making Emma a well-rounded character. She is more likely to speak her mind than Brigid, but isn’t “loud and sassy,” and struggles with her own insecurities. Although Emma doesn’t appear often in the book, she still gets her own romantic storyline, and even some character development when she recognizes she’s being biphobic by refusing to date women who have only dated men before. I’m also happy to report that “Black” was always capitalized when talking about race.

I loved Daly’s dark sense of humor because sometimes all you can do is laugh about it when things are terrible, as Brigid often does to deflect. I also loved Brigid’s character, felt strongly for her, and wanted so badly for her to have a happy ending, even though I know those are rare in real life. The pacing is a little slow in the beginning compared to the end, but that’s really the only criticism I have. This story is not for the squeamish, as Brigid suffers from both gastrointestinal distress and difficult periods and both are described in painful detail. Honestly, I appreciated that Daly did not shy away from talking about poop and menstrual blood as it let the reader see the full extent of what Brigid goes through on a daily basis. As someone with my own pelvic and digestive problems (that are thankfully nowhere near as severe or painful as Brigid’s) it was refreshing to see symptoms I’ve experienced myself described without shame. Scald Crow was one of those books that managed to made me laugh out loud, choke back tears, and shiver with apprehension. Definitely a fun and spooky read.

Tags: Adult, Bisexual, Book Review, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Disability, LGBTQIA, Myths and Folklore, Own Voices

Fever Dreams of a Parasite by Pedro Íñiguez

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press

Genre: Body Horror, Eco Horror, Eldritch Horror, Folk Horror, Ghosts/Haunting, Historic Horror, Killer/Slasher, Monster, Sci-Fi Horror, Zombie

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Mexican American author and characters, Mexican characters

Takes Place in: Mainly Mexico and California

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Ableism, Alcohol Abuse, Amputation, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Body Shaming, Cannibalism, Child Death, Child Endangerment, Childbirth, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Gore, Kidnapping, Miscarriage, Mental Illness, Physical Abuse, Racism, Rape/Sexual Assault, Sexism, Stalking, Suicide, Torture, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence, Xenophobia

Blurb

Íñiguez weaves haunting tales that traverse worlds both familiar and alien in Fever Dreams of a Parasite. Paying homage to Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Langan, these cosmic horror, weird fiction, and folk-inspired stories explore tales of outsiders, killers, and tormented souls as they struggle to survive the lurking terrors of a cold and cruel universe. With symbolism and metaphor pulled from his Latino roots, Iniguez cuts deep into the political undercurrent to expose an America rarely presented in fiction. Whether it’s the desperation of poverty, the fear of deportation or the countless daily slights endured by immigrants, every story is precisely rendered, often with a twist that allows us to see the mundane with fresh eyes.

Most of the stories in this anthology fall in the cosmic horror genre, but each story is entirely unique. There are, however, a few repeated themes; families, poverty and classism, people down on their luck, and those who take advantage of them. Monsters are a staple throughout the book, though most of the stories don’t really explain what the monster is. Are the dog-creatures werewolves? Is the blood sucking child a vampire? What in the world are those maggot monsters in Midnight Frequencies? What the hell is the old man with the fangs? Who knows! I can guess, but sometimes it’s scarier not to know. Even with all the different strange creatures, there’s often a human enabling it, once again proving that humans are the worst monsters of all. The anthology explores various themes and contemporary issues like the California wildfires, environmental destruction, addiction, the damage done by both the cartel and the US in the poverty-stricken areas of Mexico, how desperate immigrants are exploited, predatory landlords, and even increasingly adversarial political TV commentators.

The first story, titled Nightmare of a Million Faces, is about Anastasia Mendez, an unemployed porn star who just left an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend/manager/fellow porn star, Robert. Even without the monster appearing at the end the story is already disturbing as it focuses on how women’s bodies are often controlled. In Anastasia’s case, Robert decides(as her manager) who she has sex with and what roles she takes, and as her boyfriend, he coerces her into having an abortion she doesn’t want when he gets her pregnant. Even though the story is short, much of it focuses on fleshing out Anastasia’s character so you feel invested in her survival by the end of it.

I liked that Nightmare of a Million Faces focused on the flaws in the mainstream porn industry without condemning sex work itself. And while Robert was controlling, Anastasia chose to work in porn before she met him, and even after they broke up, sex work wasn’t something she was forced to do. It’s also very pro-choice, despite focusing on an abortion Anastasia didn’t want. People with uteruses shouldn’t be forced to abort any more than they should be forced to give birth. Women of color like Anastasia are at especially high risk of reproductive coercion.

Birthday Boy is one of my favorite stories in the collection. It’s about a child whose fantasies shield him from the horrors around him and the atrocities committed about his father. The story is quite short, but effective, and the ending feels like a gut punch. Many of the characters are either parents or about to become parents, and there’s a certain horror in knowing they must protect their children from the monsters. Some are men whose wives have left them and taken their children, like in Midnight Shoeshine. Others, like the father in Postcards from Saguaroland, have left on their own to try and secure a better life for their families. Then, there’s Frank from Roots in Kon Tum, who abandoned the woman he impregnated in Vietnam and started a new family in the US. Effigies of Monstrous Things is about a single father trying to raise his daughters after his wife’s disappearance. Shantytown and Caravan are both stories about single mothers living in poverty struggling to take care of their only child, and The Body Booth is about an expectant mother who has chosen to raise her child alone. The House of Laments is one of the few stories with a happily married couple in which Rodrigo and Julia are expecting a baby after suffering multiple miscarriages. Some of the stories are focused on other types of familial relationships, like the grieving siblings in The Cellar and the seal hunting uncle and nephew in Skins.

The story from which the anthology gets its title is written like a magazine profile on an elderly fashion designer named Alberto Madrigal, whose designs are based on traditional Mexican fashion. When he first immigrated to the United States, before he became famous, other designers called him a “parasite” and accused him of stealing jobs. But now he’s hired by famous celebrities, like heavy metal star Kane Krieger, who has just had his directorial debut. His horror film, called Fever Dreams of a Parasite, is about a man tormented by dreams that may come from another world and slowly drive him to madness. The critics have panned Krieger’s film at advanced screenings, and he wants to wear something to the premiere that will be a big “fuck you” to the critics. Madrigal struggles to create a suit until he’s inspired by a nightmare and the fleas on his dog’s back. I liked the unique epistolary style of this story. Postcards from Saguaroland is another notable example of Íñiguez deviating from his typical story structure, with a non-linear story that starts with the reveal of the monster.

There was one story I had a few issues with, The Savage Night. When I first started reading it I thought it was about an unnamed Indigenous tribe, because the main character was referred to as the tribe’s medicine man, in which case many of the tropes used in the story and the title would have been problematic. Fortunately, it turned out to be about Paleolithic humans in which case a writer has a lot more creative freedom. Still, I would have used a different term for the tribes’ spiritual healer as “medicine man” seems to be specific to American Indians.

The Last Train out of Calico is much better in terms of representation. Although Lakota train robber Warren Blackhawk has hints of “the stoic Indian” it’s nice to see a morally gray American Indian character. American Indians are usually painted as either the “noble savage” or someone on horseback whooping and killing cowboys. So, it’s nice to see a sympathetic character who’s just a guy who robs trains with his friends.

Other things I liked: Black was capitalized when referring to race and the Spanish wasn’t italicized. A woman with substance use disorder was portrayed sympathetically as a struggling mom who loves her child but is also battling a disease, rather than a weak and immoral person.

The anthology felt like Lovecraft meets the Twilight Zone, which I loved. It’s full of fun, bite-size horror stories full of tragic characters struggling against an uncaring world, whose desperation and hopelessness you can really feel. Íñiguez’s collection is bleak with a strange, dream-like quality to it, full of the weird and grotesque.

Tags: Adult, Anthology, BIPOC, Body Horror, Book Review, Eco Horror, Eldritch, Hispanic/Latinx, Historic Horror, Mexican, Mexican American, Monster, Own Voices, Sci-Fi, Vampires

Draw You In Vol.1 – Collector’s Item by Jasper Bark

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing

Genre: Blood & Guts, Mystery, Occult

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Gay author, two main characters with mental illness

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Ableism, Amputation, Body Shaming, Child Abuse, Death, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Gore, Homophobia, Mental Illness, Pedophilia, Police Harassment, Racism, Rape/Sexual Assault, Slurs, Transphobia, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence, Xenophobia

Blurb

Can you disappear so completely that only one person remembers you existed?

That’s what comics creator Linda Corrigan asks, when her editor, disappears without a trace. Drawn into an FBI investigation by Agent McPherson, Linda and comics historian Richard Ford unearth a chilling link to the forgotten comic artist R. L. Carver, whose work might just hold the key to a series of mysterious disappearances.

As they explore Carver’s life, they uncover the secret history of horror comics, the misfits, madcaps and macabre masters who forged an industry, frightened a generation and felt the heat of the Federal Government. They also stumble on the shadow history of the United States on a road trip that veers into the nation’s dark underbelly, where forbidden knowledge and forgotten lore await them.

Described as “Kavalier and Clay meets Clive Barker,” Draw You In Vol.1 – Collector’s Item is the first in a mind-bending trilogy of novels. It contains stories within stories that explore horror in all its subgenres, from quiet to psychological horror, from hardcore to cosmic horror.

Experience the epic conspiracy thriller that redefines the genre for a new generation.

I should start by saying this is the first book in a trilogy, it ends on a cliffhanger, and you’ll be left with more questions than answers. You need to read the full series to get the whole picture, but you won’t have to wait for the next volume to come out because all three books have been published. I’ve only read the first book for this review, so I can’t say what the rest of the series is like, but I enjoyed the first novel. Readers should also be aware the story centers around an FBI investigation with the main character acting as a civilian consultant. While I personally enjoy detective investigation stories like Psych, Lucifer, and Hannibal, I know copaganda is a big turn off for many. Finally, there’s a secret government organization, which may be another turn off for readers, as the whole idea of a wealthy cabal that secretly controls the government has roots in antisemitism (look up “The Elders of Zion” for an example). However, Bark’s secret organization seems to be controlled by wealthy WASPs instead, and one of the people trying to prove its existence is a Jewish man. I personally felt like the secret organization was more of a criticism of how the government often hurts those with marginalized identities than playing into an antisemitic conspiracy theory, but I’m also not Jewish so it may hit different for someone who is.

The story starts with a formerly famous comic book artist named Linda Corrigan who is now struggling to get by. It’s been my personal experience that male authors don’t usually write women well, but I love the way Bark writes Linda. For one thing, I appreciate that she’s middle-aged and heavier set instead of hot, young, and skinny. She acknowledges that her appearance is a double-edged sword; while she no longer gets sexually harassed, misogynist editors now ignore Linda completely. Her complicated relationship with being an artist, especially now that she’s no longer popular, also felt relatable and realistic. Linda loves being an artist, but the industry does not love her back, and it’s a difficult job, full of heartbreak and financial strain. She doesn’t just miss the money, but the attention she used to get as a famous artist.

She’s struggling to market and sell her independent graphic novel, Doom Divine (the title comes from the Algernon Swinburne poem The Death of Richard Wagner) and it’s destroying her morale. Linda misses the old days when she was on panels and invited as a guest artist. As someone who used to do artist alleys at anime cons 10+ years ago, I can relate to Linda’s fond memories of the past. I remember when it was easy to get into an artist alley back in 2009 and Boston Comic Con was a one-day event in a basement room that cost about $20 to get in (you got a discount if you wore a costume). It was mostly indie comic creators and comic shops selling back issues back then. Of course, Linda also admits that comic cons have become much safer for women than they used to be earlier in her career, when she was one of the few female comic artists and was used to sexual harassment. She’s happy to see both more women attendees and women working in the industry.

Linda is getting little traffic at her booth and debates packing it up early when she runs into one of her old editors at Fox Comics (I love that Bark uses a real comic book publisher from the past), Paul Kleinman. The two begin joking around and Paul shows her an old sketchbook of horror art. Linda recognizes the work as being by a little-known comic artist named R.L. Carver. Paul lets her use Carver’s old pen and sketchbook, and she draws a quick portrait of the editor. He ends up inviting her to an exclusive party with a bunch of other editors that could really help Linda’s career. Linda puts on her Vampirella dress (another fun comic book nod), and heads to the party, but when she arrives, no one has heard of Paul and she’s not on the list. To add insult to injury her old assistant editor Stephanie tells her that her dress isn’t age appropriate and too revealing. Hurt and humiliated Linda heads home wondering how Paul could play such a cruel trick on her.

At the con the next day, no one seems to remember who Paul is. His mysterious disappearance triggers one of Linda’s panic attacks. She reports Paul missing after about a week, but the police imply Linda is ether crazy or lying for filing a missing persons report for a man who seemingly doesn’t exist. She’s beginning to believe maybe she really is losing her mind when Agent McPherson of the FBI tracks her down. He tells Linda that Paul isn’t the only mysterious disappearance connected to R.L. Carver’s sketchbook, and he offers her a position as a special advisor to the FBI. Joined by a comic historian named Richard Ford, the three set out to learn the history of the enigmatic Carver. Linda finds herself relating to Carver because he’s also a comic artist ahead of his time who’s dismissed by the industry. As she learns more about his story, she begins to wonder if pursuing a career as an artist is truly worth it. As the mystery at the root of the story unfolds, we also learn more about the comic industry and its history.

The cover for Tales from the Crypt #29 shows a hunch backed ogre nailing a man into a coffin. The cover for Black Cat #50 depicts a man's face and hands melting down to the bone from a tube of uranium. Weird Mysteries #5 shows the purple gloved hands of a man removing the brain of an ape's head. The cover of Eerie #2 has a skeleton holding a lantern and staff of bone leading a woman in chains through a sewer. The woman wears a torn yellow dress.

Tales from the Crypt #29, Black Cat #50, Weird Mysteries #5, Eerie #2

Carver is revealed to be a Black comic artist (although I notice the editor didn’t capitalize Black) like Matt Baker, Elmer C. Stoner, and Jackie Ormes, who starts out drawing horror comics, similar to Alvin C. Hollingsworth (To learn more about Black comic artists check out Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books). We also learn later in the book that he’s asexual (yay for ace rep). Carver draws stories for the pre-Comics Code horror comics of the early 1950s, like Voodoo, Eerie, Suspense Comics, Black Cat, and Tales from the Crypt. Carver even has his own “horror hosts,” similar to the Crypt Keeper and Uncle Creepy, called the Saints of the Damned. Unfortunately, Carver’s work becomes too realistic and horrific and he’s eventually fired. Struggling to find work, Carver does a brief stint drawing fetish comics. This is similar to Joe Shuster, one of the original creators of Superman, who did BDSM comics under the pseudonym of Clancy when he was desperate for money (which you can learn more about in Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster). Of course, the creation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 would have made Carver’s graphic illustrations impossible to print.

Blue Beetle #31 depicts a man clad in a blue scaly costume with a blue domino mask, red gloves, and a red belt. He is fighting Japanese soldiers in a WWII battle. There's a tank behind him with American soldiers. The City of the Living Dead cover shows a blond, white woman adventurer holding a whip. She stands in a cave full of human bones in front of a white-faced corpse that's been tied up by the wrists. The cover of Phantom Lady shows a dark haired white woman in a skimpy blue costume with a red belt and red cape. She is standing in front of a giant page with writing that is being read by an emaciated yellow hand with long finger nails.

Blue Beetle #31 drawn by E C Stoner, City of the Living Dead drawn by A.C.Hollingsworth, Phantom Lady #13 drawn by Matt Baker

A psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham was largely responsible for the Code. His book, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, blamed comic books that depicted sex, crime, and drug use for contributing to juvenile delinquency by encouraging these acts in young people. Not even the relatively tame superhero comics were safe, with Wertham claiming that Batman and Robin encouraged homosexuality and Superman was un-American and fascist (which I’m sure his two Jewish creators must have appreciated). Seduction of the Innocent was extremely popular, even winning a Book of the Year award, and this popularity stirred up a moral panic across the country. This eventually lead the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to hold the comic book hearings in 1954. By September of that year the Comics Magazine Association of America came together to create the now defunct Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring body to regulate the content of comic books. Rukes included “No comic magazine shall use the words “horror” or “terror” in its title” and “All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.” This censorship hit horror comics, particularly publisher EC, especially hard.

Finally, Carver settled on making Underground comix. Comix emerged in the 1960s partially in response to the draconian restrictions enforced by the Comics Code Authority. These comics were either self-published or published by a small press and were sold in head shops. They often depicted drug use, free love, and political commentary. The golden age of underground comix lasted from 1968 to 1972, starting when Robert Crumb published Zap Comix. Underground horror comix rose in popularity during this time, many of them inspired by the EC Comics of the 1950s. Titles including Skull (Rip Off Press), Insect Fear (Print Mint), Death Rattle (Kitchen Sink), and Bogeyman (San Francisco Comic Book Company) were published in the early 1970s.

Boogeyman shows a monster in a graveyard with green skin and a white face with giant black eyes and a salivating mouth full of sharp teeth. In it's fist it holds a small demon with moth wings. Skull shows what appears to be an Aztec cult. There is a disfigured face in the foreground in a black cloak with a symbol on the forehead. A light skinned woman in a skimpy outfit walks a fierce dog on a leash. Insect Fear depicts a giant, neon green mosquito in a laboratory.

Bogeyman #3, Skull #5, Insect Fear #1

The amount of research that went into creating Draw You In Collector’s Item is impressive. Bark makes several references to real world artists like John Severin and Jack Cole, writers like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, publishers like Fox Comics (creator of Blue Beetle) and EC (creator of Tales from the Crypt and Mad Magazine), series like Terry and the Pirates, and even individual comics like DC’s House of Secrets #92 which features the first appearance of Swamp Thing. Bark also references other historical elements like the Cartoonist and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) created by Burne Hogarth for returning GIs and the Kefauver Hearings. Even the Louisiana Voodoo (which has differences from Haitian Vodou) was well researched, something that’s rare in the horror genre and routinely reduces a religion down to zombies and curses. I studied Vodou in college as part of an anthropology course (there was a lot of arguing with my white professor that yes, it was in fact a “real” religion) and found that Bark uses proper terminology when referring to the spiritual leaders (oungan and manbo), spirits (lwa), symbols (veves) and takes care to not make Voodoo seem like a “primitive” belief system. Bark even includes the manbo and ougan, Cécile Fatiman and Dutty Boukman, who conducted a Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman, which is credited with being the catalyst that started 1791 slave rebellion of the enslaved Haitians against the French slaveholders.

The numerous mysteries at the center of the story (many of which I haven’t revealed to avoid spoilers) grabbed my attention and managed to hold it for the entirety of the book: no small feat considering I have ADD and can’t focus on one thing for long. The characters are all intriguing and I enjoyed the diversity of opinions and personalities. For example, Richard struggles with the stigma of having a mental illness while also having to be reminded by Linda to be more aware of his white male privilege, which always ruffles his feathers. Sometimes she feels sympathy for him, other times she appreciates how he admires her work or is impressed by his research skills, and on still other occasions she finds him incredibly frustrating and ignorant. I appreciate Bark’s honest representations of mental health for both Linda and Richard as well as accurate exploration of the harassment women face in the comic book industry. Overall, this is a fun, captivating read and I can see why it’s called Draw You In because that’s exactly what this book does.

Tags: Adult, African American, Asexual, Black, Blood & Guts, Book Review, Gay, LGBTQIA, Mental Illness, Mystery, Occult

I’m Sorry if I Scared You by Mae Murray

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Medusa Publishing Haus

Genre: Body Horror, Sci-Fi Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Bisexual main character, Lesbian major character; queer author of Indigenous descent with a chronic illness/physical disability

Takes Place in: Arkansas

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Antisemitism, Childbirth, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Gore, Homophobia, Physical Abuse, Police Harassment, Rape/Sexual Assault, Slurs, Slut-Shaming

Blurb

Thanksgiving 2010.
The world prepares for the first lunar eclipse to take place on the winter solstice since the year 1638. Crop circles, strange animals, disappearances, and UFOs permeate the empty countryside of the American South.

Odette “Odie” Tucker is a first-generation college student, returning home from Boston to rural Arkansas for the holidays. On the drive home, she endures a pill-induced abortion in a gas station bathroom, the product of a recent rape she has told no one about. On a whim, she ‘rescues’ the clump of expelled cells in a plastic water bottle.

At home, Odie faces the suppressed feelings of abandonment from her family and lifelong best friend Dale, an out butch lesbian Odie is too afraid to admit she’s in love with. When Odie’s abortion becomes sentient and possesses her, she begins to live vicariously through its complete embrace of life, love, sex, violence, and vengeance.

I started I’m Sorry if I Scared You while recovering from a salpingectomy. One of my biggest phobias is getting pregnant and giving birth, and with Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022 and the current administration’s war on birth control, I wasn’t taking any chances. And post-sterilization seemed like a good time to read a Southern rape revenge story about a sentient fetus and the occasional space alien.

Most of the story takes place in rural Arkansas, from where Murray originally hails. I’m Sorry if I Scared You is a love letter to that area and the low-income families that do their best to survive there. Poverty is a serious issue in Arkansas. Its poverty rate of 17.2% is the seventh highest in the nation, above the national official poverty measure of 11.1%. It’s one of the worst states for child well-being, has a higher suicide by gun rate than the rest of the US, has an incarceration rate of 912 per 100,000 people (making it the third highest in the Nation), is one of the least educated states, the most homophobic/transphobic, and is ranked one of the worst states to live in due to the economy. In contrast, Massachusetts, the state where Murray currently lives and her main character, Odie (short for Odette), goes to school, is one of the richest states, the first to legalize same-sex marriage in the country, and the most educated state in the US. We were also voted the snobbiest state (and apparently we’re proud of it), but more on that later. Odie is the first in her family to get into college (implied to be Harvard) and she views school and moving to Mass as her ticket to a better life. That is, until she’s raped by another student and discovers things can be shitty pretty much anywhere.

Disillusioned and depressed now that she knows college in Massachusetts can be just as shitty as the things that happen at home, Odie takes Plan B and drives back to Arkansas for Thanksgiving break to find comfort among her friends and family. She drives while bleeding through her pants and passes the clump of cells in a gas station bathroom. For reasons unknown to her, Odie decides to save the embryo in a plastic water bottle and bring it home with her. We learn that Odie has very mixed feelings about home. She’s ashamed of the insect infested trailer and the poverty in which her family lives, but at the same time, she loves her family and her two best friends, Dale (short for Dhalia) and Dwayne, and wants to be with them after such a traumatic event. Both her father and stepmother struggle with substance use disorder, alcohol for her dad and pills for her stepmom, and her teenage brother, Bubba, has already been to rehab for meth.

Substance use disorder (SUD)* does not discriminate when it comes to socioeconomic status, but poverty, lack of formal education, and unemployment are all risk factors for fatal overdoses and make it more difficult to recover from SUD. At my current job working with patients with SUD, I see how much more our low-income and unhoused patients struggle with their recovery than our patients with more financial stability. There are fewer detoxes that accept Medicaid and MassHealth (I live and work in Massachusetts, and MassHealth is our public state insurance), and those that do are often not as nice as the ones that only accept private insurance. Poverty and being unhoused can have disastrous effects on mental health by increasing stress and feelings of hopelessness, which in turn increases the risk of substance abuse. It’s also extremely hard to try and focus on getting better when all your energy goes toward trying to survive. There’s also the shame that comes with both, as poverty and addiction are often viewed by our society as a moral failing, as if poverty and substance use were choices.

Odie struggles with the complexities of loving someone with substance use disorder. Her father is kind and loving one moment, then flies into a violent rage the next. He drinks while he drives, terrifying Odie and Dale. But Odie seems to have accepted his alcoholism as a fact of life, which makes it even sadder. Murray does an excellent job capturing the feelings of despair felt not just by Odie after her assault, but of her friends and family who didn’t “escape” rural Arkansas. Shortly after her return, Odie and Dale head to Club Trinity (probably based on the Triniti Nightclub in Little Rock), the only gay club in the state. Even with Arkansas passing anti-LGBTQIA+ bills left and right, there are still safe havens for the queer community in Arkansas, like Eureka Springs, “the gayest small town in America.” Odie remarks that “The Southern queers did not have the same air of self-importance as the queers in Massachusetts” which, as a Massachusetts queer, I really wanted to be offended by, but it is kind of true. Having lived in Mass my whole life, there’s definitely a lot of classism here, and people will often ask where you went to college so they can judge how well educated you are, especially if you’re in the Boston area or one of the college towns. I’ve read posts by white Massachusetts liberals who will joke about Southern states “getting what they deserve” under Trump, as if there aren’t leftists in red states, and painting Southerners as lesser because they view them as poor and uneducated (and apparently think being low-income and lacking a formal education somehow makes you inferior). They don’t even realize how racist this is since the South has a large Black population.

My grandmother was from Tennessee and also left her depressed hometown of Iron City (the subject of the documentary Iron City Blues) during the great migration to move to Chicago and get her degree. Her family expected her to return home to be a teacher when she graduated, but she knew if she returned, she’d never escape the Jim Crow South and instead stayed in Chicago where there were more opportunities for an educated Black woman. Unlike Odie, my grandmother had nothing but negative things to say about the town she grew up in, and the South was full of bad memories for her. Odie knows her town isn’t a good or safe place to live, but there’s still love there. It’s why she goes back to Arkansas to seek comfort.

This was a weird ass book, and I mean that in the best way possible. I wish I could give more away, but since it’s short, I don’t want to spoil anything. Two of the book’s major themes are police violence and sexual assault (which feels especially poignant in today’s political environment) and it’s gratifying to read about Odie getting her revenge on both the cops and her rapist. A satisfying and sick fantasy since we so rarely get justice in the real world. I liked that there was polyamorous representation and we get to see what it’s like to be queer in a red state. It’s also refreshing to see Murray subvert “hixploitation” horror (examples include films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Motel Hell, and Wrong Turn). Here it’s not the “hillbillies” who are the source of horror, but the rich college kid and corrupt cops.

*If you or someone you know struggles with substance use disorder check out SMART Recovery, a secular and research based peer support group.

Tags: Adult, American Indian, BIPOC, Bisexual, Body Horror, Book Review, Chronic Illness, Disability, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Own Voices, Physical Disability, Queer, Sci-Fi

This Thing is Starving Isobel Aislin

This Thing is Starving by Isobel Aislin. Highly Recommended. Read if you like Linghun, The Road to Hell by Terry Benton-Walker

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Independently Published

Genre: Ghosts/Haunting, Historic Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Asexual main character, trans man character, lesbian character

Takes Place in: Pennsylvania

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Child Abuse, Child Death, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Homophobia, Medical Procedure, Mental Illness, Pedophilia, Rape/Sexual Assault, Self-Harm, Sexism, Slurs, Slut-Shaming, Suicide, Transphobia, Victim Blaming, Violence

Blurb

It’s just a house, right? Houses can’t hurt. Houses can’t bleed.

But this house wants you to.

When the Waite family moves into their new home, they don’t bargain on being unwanted guests. But this house has deep-rooted, blood soaked history, and it’s angry. This Thing is Starving is an unflinchingly feminist love letter to the abused, bursting with feminine rage and told from the perspective of a haunted house.

Warning, this review discusses abuse, rape, and the sexual abuse of minors.

The house on 4377 N. Oscar St is haunted. But this is not your typical haunted house story. This story is told from the house’s point of view as it witnesses the tragedies that befall its owners throughout the year. The house is haunted by four women and one trans boy. The first, and oldest, is Lillian. She lived in the house with her husband in the 1920s and is the most unstable of the five ghosts. Jason was a teenaged, closeted trans boy from the 1950s. Lila was a lesbian from 1975 who hated her queerness. In 2002 the house was owned by a woman named Karissa, a child abuse survivor who struggles with low self-esteem. The final ghost is Kay, a teenaged girl who died in the house after it was abandoned by Karissa in the early 2000s. All the ghosts are victims of abuse, sexual assault, or other forms of violence at the hands of men, and they all met with tragic ends either by their own hand or at the hands of others.

Veronica Waite and her family are the house’s most recent inhabitants. Her mother, Louise, moved them there after escaping an abusive partner and is doing her best to start over. The house immediately takes a disliking to the family, with its wild and grubby children and Louise who it immediately labels a “bad mother” due to her love of wine, parentification of Veronica, and inability to keep track of all her children. The only exception to the house’s ire is Veronica, whom the house feels strangely drawn to. It views her as “a splotch of brightness amongst the gloom” and tries its best to communicate with the eldest Waite child. Veronica certainly seems happy in the beginning. She finds a new friend quickly, makes the cheerleading team, and even lands a hot, football playing boyfriend. She creates beautiful art to hang in her attic room. But then things start to unravel for the family, and the house can do little to stop it. As Veronica struggles with her asexuality and trying to take care of her siblings, she slowly learns how cruel the world can be to women and girls.

Most of the men in this story are horrible, even an old man whose obituary Louise is editing. I’m sure the “not all men” crowd will object to the fact that almost all the cisgender men (and boys) in the story are awful human beings (admittedly sometimes to the point of feeling like caricatures), but I believe this is intentional. The story is being told from the point of view of the house, and the house hates men. Because the house can only witness what happens within its walls, or the lives of the unhappy ghosts who haunt it, the house rarely gets to see the good parts of humanity. Statistically, the majority or murders and rapes are committed by men, so of course the ghosts are more likely to be victims of male violence, leading to the house believing that all men are inherently bad. Toward the end of the book, a character named Owen shows up who is devoid of the toxic traits shown by most of the other male characters. While he clearly has a crush on his female coworker, he respects her boundaries, supports her decisions, and keeps his desire to protect her in check. But of course, the house can’t recognize that he’s a good man like the audience can, and immediately hates Owen.

Ironically, the house is reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes because it doesn’t understand the complexities and nuances of abuse. It can only see people as innocent victims (women, girls, and AFAB people) or evil perpetrators (cisgender men and boys). But characterizing men as inherently evil gives them permission to behave horribly, as it rejects the notion that they have control over their actions. Essentially, it’s a more insidious form of “boys will be boys.” But men can, and need to, do better. The house also conveniently ignores the fact that women can not only support the harmful actions of men, but can be perpetrators themselves, and that men can be victims, but Aislin does not. Lillian is abused by her serial killer husband, but when she finally snaps and kills him, she doesn’t free the women he has chained in the basement. Instead, she replaces her husband as the predator in the house and kills them. She even slut shames her husband’s victims, justifying their rapes and murders to herself. Veronica’s younger twin brothers, Charlie and Sawyer, are also revealed to be victims of their father’s abuse (especially Sawyer). Sadly, like Lillian, Sawyer becomes an abuser himself, acting out what he experienced at the hands of his father on his little sister Leslie. The house makes an exception for Jason, a trans man, another victim of male violence, but not for the twins. I suspect that’s because the house is mildly transphobic, and sees Jason as a woman, even though he’s clearly a man and his ghost has a male-presenting form.

While the house feels a fierce protectiveness of Veronica and her baby sister, it shows a cold indifference to their brothers. Interestingly, Louise was also abused by her husband, yet the house doesn’t group her in with other victims. Instead, it views her with scorn for “failing” to protect her girls (but not the boys). This is another sign that the house is not entirely free from its own sexist bias and doesn’t fully understand how abuse works. The house’s hatred of Louise is understandable, with its strong desire to protect, it cannot comprehend a mother “failing” to do so. The problem is that the house expects her to be perfect just because she’s a mom, even though Louise is a victim herself and doing the best she can under the circumstances. She loves her children, and tries her best to protect them, even when the police fail to.

Sadly, judging mothers who are being abused is not an uncommon occurrence. In an interview with NPR, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels explains “It’s basically sexism. Most of the legal experts that I talked with said that it comes down to a cultural expectation that women are responsible for what happens in the home. There’s an expectation that they should be the moral center of the family, that they should reign in the man’s worst impulses, and that they should do whatever they can to protect their child, even if it means, you know, sacrificing themselves.” Mothers can have their children taken from them, and are even sent to prison due to Draconian “failure to protect” laws. Kerry King is one such mother, who is serving a 30-year sentence in prison for not protecting her daughter from their abuser, John Purdy, who is only serving 18 years for abusing King and her daughter. On October 26, 2004 in the case of Nicholson v. Williams the New York Court of Appeals ruled that children who witnessed abuse were wrongfully removed from their mother’s care, and that their non-abusive mothers had not been “neglectful” simply because they were unable to protect their children from witnessing domestic abuse.

This Thing is Starving starts with statistics about the rape, exploitation, and abuse of women and girls. Aislin states that the story is dedicated to the women who never get justice and whose stories are never heard. The book reminds me of rape revenge films without the sensationalism/exploitation common for the genre, similar to Promising Young Woman and Revenge (both films notably have female directors). Except, in this story, most of the victims don’t get revenge. Revenge against an abuser may be satisfying in fiction, but it rarely happens in real life where men often get away with hurting women. This makes the book feel more realistic. And when the house, full of pain and rage, lashes out and tries to hurt abusers and rapists, it usually hurts the innocent as well.

For example, when the house violently kills the teen boys who attempt to rape Kay, she also gets caught in the crossfire and is killed. Hate and anger rarely hurt just the intended target, but others as well. As Maddie Oatman so eloquently puts in her rape revenge article for Mother Jones “These stories offer a retributive vision of justice, the violence of the man mirrored back onto him. Traditional gender roles are flipped—the woman is the predator, and the man is the prey—but the basic shape of the conventional revenge story is unchanged. Witnessing women take revenge in film and fiction may offer a cathartic thrill, but the trope can also function as a trap; vengeance replicates the same power structure the avenger wishes to hold accountable.” She further goes on to explain “But justice can and should mean something other than the balancing of harms, as prison and police abolitionists and other activists have argued. In resisting the carceral approach to punishment, they advocate a politics of structural change, of experimentation and openness to new social forms. These ideas demand a radical artistic approach to match, a breaking free of the traps of the revenge plot. A couple of recent works give us a sense of this. Call it the reparative mode.”

Aislin shows us that there are other, healthier ways to heal from trauma than hunting down and killing your rapist (something victims are sadly arrested for in real life). And honestly, I really appreciate that Aislin presents more realistic ways that survivors can heal from trauma, like leaning on others they trust for support and opening up about what happened. Instead of perpetuating the cycle of violence like the house does, the survivors heal by breaking free of it. This Thing is Starving is certainly a difficult and heart-wrenching read that contains abortion, rape, revenge porn, conversion therapy, drug addiction, suicidal thoughts, an infant’s death, pedophilia, trauma, a minor doing sex work, and transphobia. But Aislin doesan amazing job handling the difficult topics of abuse, sexual assault, and trauma without making the story feel like trauma porn.

Tags: Adult, Asexual, Book Review, Ghosts/Haunting, Highly Recommended, Historic Horror, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Queer, Trans

Feeding Lucy by Mo Medusa

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Crooked Foot Press

Genre: Occult

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Lesbian main character, queer, non-binary author

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Cannibalism, Death, Gore, Gaslighting, Gore, Sexism Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence, Vomit

Blurb

Frankie left home ten years ago, abandoning the tall mountains of her small hometown for the tall buildings of the big city. Desperate for a new life, she was happy to escape her overly-critical mother and the Polish-American customs of her past.

But after a strange caller informs her of her mother’s sudden death, she’s reluctantly drawn back to the mountains for the first time in a decade.

Arriving days before the Scandinavian tradition of Sankta Lucia, the town is aglow with holiday lights and cheer—and the townspeople can’t stop talking about the annual Feast of St. Lucy.

When an unexpected blizzard rolls through, revealing the true nature of the feast—and the evil that resides in the mountains—the darkness of her mother’s past is brought to light once again.

Caught between tradition and terror, Frankie quickly learns that her mother’s overbearing influence won’t be stopped by her death alone.

Taking elements from The Night of the Witches in Polish folklore, and the real tradition of Sankta Lucia, Feeding Lucy is a story of grief, tradition, and the darkness that lives inside of us all.

Frankie, or Franciska, as her mother calls her, is suffering through an awkward holiday party at her job when she gets the call that her mother has died. Frankie had a complex relationship with her volatile mother, Lucja. The two lived together in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere along with Lucja’s ancient, cranky cat, Zula. Growing up, Frankie felt like her mother loved that old cat more than her. She doesn’t expect affection from her mother because it is so rarely given, and eventually stops expecting everything at all. Lucja is both overbearing and withholding as a mother, obsessing over everything her daughter does one moment, then punishing her with the silent treatment the next. Frankie fears disappointing her mother above all else, yet always seems to do so. Lucja judges everything her daughter does, what she wears, and even what she displays in her room. She grows to hate Lucja, and gets away from her the first chance she gets. Frankie moves to the city, gets a job at a magazine, and joins the local queer scene. She goes no contact with her mother and forgets all about her until she gets the call. Frankie has no interest in her mother’s body, or returning to their small town, but the coroner promises her that Lucja left her a “pretty penny” and she’ll need to come back to her hometown if she wants to collect the insurance money.

Franciska is from Kolbe, a town built by immigrants all from the same small village in Poland, whose descendants are determined to keep their traditions alive. To Franciska, it seems more like they can’t let go of the past. One of their most important traditions is Sankta Lucia (Saint Lucy’s Day) a Catholic feast day commemorating the Sicilian saint who was martyred during the Diocletianic Persecution by the Roman Empire. Saint Lucy’s Day is held on December 13^th and is viewed as a precursor of Christmas Day. Because the name Lucia is derived from the Latin “lux,” meaning “light,” and her feast day is celebrated during the darkest time of year, Saint Lucy’s Day is considered a “festival of light” meant to drive away the darkness, similar to Diwali or Hannukah. Young girls dress up as Saint Lucy, in a white robe with a red sash and a wreath of candles on their heads. Songs are sung and saffron buns eaten.

A drawing of a girl with long blond hair and brown eyes wearing a white dress with a red sash. Oh her head is crown of green leaves, red berries, and six white candles. She is holding a seventh candle and it's casting shadows on her face. The picture has a dark blue background with a gold border and holly leaves surrounding the image.

An example of what girls wear for Saint Lucia

Interestingly, Lucia shares her holiday with another Lucy, the Scandinavian Lussi. Lussinatta, or Lussi’s Night is similar to the legend of the Wild Hunt, where Lussi and her band of trolls, witches, and undead spirits would spend the darkest night of the year searching for unsuspecting humans who had stayed out too late or not finished their chores. Those who had not finished spinning yarn or threshing could expect to have their chimneys smashed. Those who were especially unfortunate would be whisked away by Lussi, never to be seen again.

And wouldn’t you know it, Frankie has arrived in Kolbe just in time for the annual Saint Lucy’s feast her mother always organized and the town’s people are very invested in making sure Lucja’s estranged daughter attends the feast (red flag number one). But Frankie just wants to get her inheritance and go back to the city. That is, until she runs into her long-lost love, Stella, working at the coroner’s office. Frankie is so smitten with her former girlfriend that she immediately agrees to stay for Sankta Lucia despite her initial hesitation, and gives Stella a pass for her strange, mercurial behavior (red flag number two). She only briefly wonders how it’s possible that Zula, who was already an old cat when Frankie was a child, is still alive (red flag number three). Even the disturbing visions Frankie starts having during the day, and the horrible nightmares when she sleeps, don’t clue her in to the fact that something is deeply wrong in Kolbe.

I appreciated the depiction of Lucja and Frankie’s dysfunctional relationship. The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that Lucja is emotionally abusive to her daughter, but as is often the case when there’s no physical component, the abuse is not immediately obvious. Lucja uses guilt to manipulate and control her daughter, alternating between coldness and gentle affection. Her love is conditional and young Frankie feels like she has to earn it.

An estranged adult child returning to their small town only to discover the town’s dark secret is one of my favorite horror tropes (seen in such films as Salem’s Lot and Dead Silence), so this was right up my alley. The story has a witchy vibe and a dark, moody atmosphere that makes reading it feel like the calm before the storm (or blizzard in this case). This slow burn horror is perfect for a dark winter’s night.

Tags: Adult, Book Review, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Non-binary, Occult, Queer

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Genre: Psychological Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Korean-American author, main character, and side characters, Black side character

Takes Place in: LA, California

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Cannibalism, Death, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Gore, Medical Procedures, Mental Illness, Racism, Sexism, Slurs, Slut-Shaming, Violence, Vomit, Xenophobia

Blurb

Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying… yet enticing.

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.

Out of all the types of trauma and injuries the human body can suffer, eye trauma makes me the most squeamish. They’re so soft and vulnerable; whenever I know an eye injury is about to happen in a horror movie, I watch the scene through my fingers. The infamous eye scene in Zombi 2 still makes me squirm. So, I knew a story that centered around ripping out eyes and consuming them would be especially horrific. Interestingly, the book isn’t especially violent. There are only two scenes with any significant amount of blood, though ironically the stabbing and bludgeoning is less disturbing than the scenes of eye trauma and cannibalism (which have comparatively little gore).

After Ji-won Lim’s Appa (Korean for dad) abandons his wife and two daughters their Umma (the Korean word for mom) is completely inconsolable. Despite being a faithful and devoted wife, he still leaves her for another woman. She haunts the entrance to their apartment, hoping he will come back and saying she wants to die without him. It’s at that moment Ji-won realizes their roles are reversed. She has become the mother and Umma the daughter; it’s now Ji-won’s responsibility to take care of her little family.

When Umma was little, her parents left their children to search for work. Her other siblings decided to follow, afraid they would starve to death before their parents returned. But Umma refused to leave their home and instead waited for her parents to return, living off bark and snow throughout the harsh winter. When her family finally returned the following summer, they found her skeletal and delirious. Her older brother mistook her for a ghost.

To Ji-won, her mother’s decision to remain behind seems foolish and naive. She feels frustrated by what she sees as Umma’s stupidity and thinks she’s pathetic for spending her life making herself small and inconspicuous to men. But she also pities how every part of Umma’s life is characterized by suffering and relates to the fact that her mother is always alone. Ji-won is feeling abandoned, not just by her Appa but also her high school friends who all got into Berkeley when she didn’t. Their loneliness makes both women particularly vulnerable to predatory men. Umma begins dating George, a white man with striking blue eyes. He says he speaks Korean, but is terrible at it and his pronunciation is awful. He clearly fetishizes Asian women as is clear when he leers at a Chinese waitress and later at Ji-won’s chest, makes gross sexual comments to Ji-won and her younger, underage sister Ji-hyun, and goes on trips to Thailand to sleep with the women there.

He also gets mad when they have a white waitress at a Chinese restaurant because he wants to experience “culture,” even though the restaurant is anything but authentic (it’s called Wok and Roll for crying out loud). George has a truck with a bumper sticker that says “I’m a Republican because we can’t all be on welfare,” complains loudly about how kids these days are “too soft” and “easily offended,” and reminiscences about “the good old days.” Essentially, he’s a loud, mediocre, abrasive white man who is thoroughly convinced of his own superiority. Understandably, the sisters can’t stand George, and they both resent Umma for bringing him into their lives, but the conflict averse Ji-won refuses to say anything about it.

Meanwhile, Ji-won befriends a boy in her class who seems like George’s polar opposite. Geoffrey presents himself as an ally. He takes women’s studies, wears “Nevertheless she Persisted” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg t-shirts, reads Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All be Feminists, and is horrified when a group of frat bros at their school say disgusting things about Asian women in front of Ji-won. Ji-won immediately likes Geoffrey and really wants to be his friend. She’s impressed by his intellect and his knowledge of the world. She believes they “get” each other and she doesn’t need her old friends anymore because she has Geoffrey now. But slowly red flags start to pop up. Geoffrey gets extremely jealous when Ji-won spends any time with her new friend (and possible crush) Alexis. At first Ji-won excuses this, thinking he’s just insecure and possessive of his friends like she is. Even when he snatches her phone out of her pocket to get her phone number, acts clingy, or pushes her to do things even after she’s said no, Ji-won continues to ignore his toxic behavior. She doesn’t realize Geoffrey is arrogant, loud, self-absorbed, and rude, just like George. His quips about feminism are just showing off, trying to make himself seem better than other men. He claims he’s an ally because he’s read about oppression, yet still gives Ji-won a thoughtless, racist gift for Christmas. George and Geoffrey are merely two sides of the same coin.

After Appa’s abandonment, the frat boys at her school saying disgusting about Asian women, George invading their life and being horrible, and Geoffrey’s face heel turn, Ji-won is boiling over with barely suppressed rage. Things come to a head when George wakes her from a nightmare and she quickly turns her anger on him and starts cussing him out. She apologizes for Umma’s sake, but the outburst has awoken something in Ji-won. Up until this point Ji-hyun has been begging her Unni (Korean for older sister, an honorific used by younger women to refer to older women) to do something about George and is frustrated by her inaction. Now Ji-hyun notices something is off about Ji-won and starts to worry about her, despite her sister’s insistence that she’s fine. Ji-won is a well-crafted, sympathetic anti-villain who focuses her anger on the toxic men who have wronged her. She cares deeply for her little sister, Ji-hyun, and her Umma, while still finding them frustrating (something I’m sure many daughters will relate to).

She’s also incredibly manipulative, cowardly, jealous, and unable to deal with her emotions in a healthy and mature way. Feeling betrayed that her friends are all going to Berkley, Ji-won hides an heirloom ring then blames one of her friends for stealing it. She continues to try and sabotage their relationships by sending texts pretending to be her other friends or their crushes because she’s upset that they’re “abandoning” her. When her friends finally figure out what she’s doing and try to have a calm conversation about how she hurt them, Ji-won shuts them down and leaves abruptly because she feels like she can’t face what she did. She doesn’t interact with them again for the rest of the story.

Later, Ji-won fucks with George the same way she did with her friends. Because he’s so convinced of his own self-importance and superiority, he’s easily manipulated by a “Oriental girl” he sees as beneath him. She starts by stealing money from his wallet, hiding his keys, and putting his driver’s license down the garbage disposal. Her “pranks” escalate and she destroys his most prized possession, the expensive Rolex his father gave him, and even gets him fired from his job, all why playing innocent. I love that she’s imperfect and gets to do bad things. I’ve mentioned it before, but imperfect, morally gray, sometimes villainous characters are my favorite! There’s too much of a push for protagonists to be perfect and heroic, but too often it leads to dull characters, in my humble opinion, at least. As horrified as I am at some of Ji-won’s behavior, I still love her as a character, and it thrills me that she gets to live out her (and I imagine many other Asian women’s) revenge fantasy.

I’ve touched before on how white men tend to fetishize Asian women and how harmful it is. As Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and author of “Reel Inequality” told USA Today “The idea that Asian women are desirable and exotic and passive isn’t just an innocent stereotype or a desirable trait to envy. The shadowed side of that is they then become targets of hate, sexual violence and physical violence when they aren’t perceived as fully human and deserving of rights to be safe.” Media representation unfortunately only reenforces harmful hypersexualization of Asian women.

Top: Cio-Cio-San from a 2019 production of Madama Butterfly at the San Carlo Theater in Naples. Second row: (left) Gigi from the musical Miss Saigon (right), Fook Mi and Fook Yu from Austin Powers. Third row: (left) a Vietnamese sex worker propositioning Joker and Rafterman from the film Full Metal Jacket (right), Trang Pak hooking up with Coach Carr from film Mean Girls. Fourth Row: a series of sexy costumes loosely inspired by Chinese and Japanese clothing modeled by white women in “yellow face.”

One of the editors for this book, and my personal friend, Diana Pho, wrote this piece about being fetishized and harassed as a Vietnamese-American woman during an interview at New York Comic Con back in 2013. Diana was there to host a panel on representation in comics and had donned one of her Asian inspired steampunk outfits and was carrying a parasol. She was approached by a group of white men asking her to do an interview for a “TV show”. Though hesitant, Diana agreed. The interviewer (who she would later learn was Mike Babchik from the now defunct Man Banter) immediately started making sexist and racist comments (you can read a full account of the incident here).

Mike Babchik: So, if I were walking in the rain, could I pay you to walk next to me with your umbrella?

Diana Pho: Pay me?

Mike: If I paid you?

Diana: Then, buy your own umbrella.

Mike: No, I want to buy an umbrella with an Asian girl.

Diana: Then no.

It got even grosser from there.

Mike: Well in my experience, girls who stand next to me longer than 20 seconds get a cream pie.

Diana: I would give you a slap in the face.

Mike: (backing away) Really? Would you?

He then scurried off. As white men tend to do, Man Banter had completely underestimated Diana. They were expecting a weak, submissive, Asian girl who would giggle at their crude remarks, but what they got was a fight from a woman who wasn’t about to put up with their racism and sexual harassment. She told her story, and it wasn’t long before outlets like The Daily Dot, 18 Million Rising, and The Mary Sue all picked up the story. A petition was started to have Mike Babchik’s employer hold him responsible for the harassment. One of the employees from Man Banter sent Diana an apology on Tumblr, and promised to delete the so-called interview and agreed not to return to NYCC (though it sounds like the con was planning to ban them after Diana reported the incident to them). Diana mentioned that while she was angry that this happened to her, she was even more upset that this could be potentially happening to young women and underage girls who didn’t have the same resources, support, or confidence to call them out (I know I certainly wouldn’t have felt comfortable standing up to an adult when I was a teenager). For every Diana there are thousands of other Asian women who don’t get to tell their story. Women whose valid concerns are dismissed as “overreacting,” are shamed into believing it’s their fault, and that they should keep quiet about their experiences.

Diana Pho at New York Comic Con in 2013

The Eyes Are the Best Part is a slow-burn psychological horror story. I was half way through the book and wondering if perhaps I had picked up a thriller by mistake, when things started to get bloody and wild. It’s a suspenseful read, made even more tense by Ji-won’s deteriorating mental state and fraught relationships. The atmosphere is oppressive and claustrophobic, with the tiny, cramped apartment the family shares emphasizing Ji-won’s feeling of being trapped. Kim’s writing is as precise as a surgeon’s blade, gradually becoming more chaotic as Ji-won’s mind begins to unravel. There isn’t a page or paragraph wasted on filler or pointless details. Every line of the book carries meaning and weight.

Tags: Adult, African American, Asian American, BIPOC, Black, Book Review, Highly Recommended, Korean, Psychological Horror

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Pour One for the Devil by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Lanternfish Press

Genre: Gothic

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Author is Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indian, main character is American Indian (unknown tribe), Gullah side characters

Takes Place in: South Carolina Sea Islands

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Forced Captivity, Incest, Racism

Blurb

Tags: Adult, American Indian, BIPOC, Book Review, Chippewa, Gothic, Ottawa, Own Voices

On Sunday She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Saga Press

Genre: Gothic, Historic Horror, Werebeast

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Black characters and author, Queer main character and author

Takes Place in: Georgia, USA

Blurb

Haunting and thought-provoking, On Sunday She Picked Flowers explores retribution, family trauma, and the power of building oneself back up after breaking down.

Tags: Adult, African American, BIPOC, Black, Gothic, Historic Horror, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Own Voices, Werebeast

The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Genre: Gothic, Myth and Folklore

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Filipino author and characters, Gay author and character, non-binary side character

Takes Place in: The Philippines

Blurb

Some legacies are best left buried…

Tags: Adult, Asian, BIPOC, Book Review, Filipino, Gay, Gothic, LGBTQIA, Myths and Folklore, Non-binary, Own Voices

The Scald Crow by Grace Daly

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Creature Publishing

Genre: Myth and Folklore

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Bisexual main character with chronic pain, author with chronic pain, Black Lesbian side character

Takes Place in: Illinois

Blurb

To survive, she’ll need to ignore what her mother and her chronic-pain doctors have always told her: that her perception of reality can’t be trusted.

Gross. Sadly, Brigid has internalized the belief that her disability makes her “a burden,” despite what her therapist and best friend tell her.

Tags: Adult, Bisexual, Book Review, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Disability, LGBTQIA, Myths and Folklore, Own Voices

Fever Dreams of a Parasite by Pedro Íñiguez

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press

Genre: Body Horror, Eco Horror, Eldritch Horror, Folk Horror, Ghosts/Haunting, Historic Horror, Killer/Slasher, Monster, Sci-Fi Horror, Zombie

Audience: Adult

Diversity: Mexican American author and characters, Mexican characters

Takes Place in: Mainly Mexico and California

Blurb

Tags: Adult, Anthology, BIPOC, Body Horror, Book Review, Eco Horror, Eldritch, Hispanic/Latinx, Historic Horror, Mexican, Mexican American, Monster, Own Voices, Sci-Fi, Vampires

Draw You In Vol.1 – Collector’s Item by Jasper Bark

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing

Genre: Blood & Guts, Mystery, Occult

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Gay author, two main characters with mental illness

Blurb

Can you disappear so completely that only one person remembers you existed?

Experience the epic conspiracy thriller that redefines the genre for a new generation.

Tales from the Crypt #29, Black Cat #50, Weird Mysteries #5, Eerie #2

Blue Beetle #31 drawn by E C Stoner, City of the Living Dead drawn by A.C.Hollingsworth, Phantom Lady #13 drawn by Matt Baker

Bogeyman #3, Skull #5, Insect Fear #1

Tags: Adult, African American, Asexual, Black, Blood & Guts, Book Review, Gay, LGBTQIA, Mental Illness, Mystery, Occult

I’m Sorry if I Scared You by Mae Murray

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Medusa Publishing Haus

Genre: Body Horror, Sci-Fi Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Bisexual main character, Lesbian major character; queer author of Indigenous descent with a chronic illness/physical disability

Takes Place in: Arkansas

Blurb

*If you or someone you know struggles with substance use disorder check out SMART Recovery, a secular and research based peer support group.

Tags: Adult, American Indian, BIPOC, Bisexual, Body Horror, Book Review, Chronic Illness, Disability, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Own Voices, Physical Disability, Queer, Sci-Fi

This Thing is Starving Isobel Aislin

This Thing is Starving by Isobel Aislin. Highly Recommended. Read if you like Linghun, The Road to Hell by Terry Benton-Walker

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Independently Published

Genre: Ghosts/Haunting, Historic Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Asexual main character, trans man character, lesbian character

Takes Place in: Pennsylvania

Blurb

It’s just a house, right? Houses can’t hurt. Houses can’t bleed.

But this house wants you to.

Warning, this review discusses abuse, rape, and the sexual abuse of minors.

Tags: Adult, Asexual, Book Review, Ghosts/Haunting, Highly Recommended, Historic Horror, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Queer, Trans

Feeding Lucy by Mo Medusa

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Crooked Foot Press

Genre: Occult

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Lesbian main character, queer, non-binary author

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Cannibalism, Death, Gore, Gaslighting, Gore, Sexism Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence, Vomit

Blurb

Caught between tradition and terror, Frankie quickly learns that her mother’s overbearing influence won’t be stopped by her death alone.

Taking elements from The Night of the Witches in Polish folklore, and the real tradition of Sankta Lucia, Feeding Lucy is a story of grief, tradition, and the darkness that lives inside of us all.

An example of what girls wear for Saint Lucia

Tags: Adult, Book Review, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Non-binary, Occult, Queer

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Genre: Psychological Horror

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Korean-American author, main character, and side characters, Black side character

Takes Place in: LA, California

Blurb

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.