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I finished out the work week with a venti cold brew and A History of Fear by Luke Dumas. It was the perfect book to get lost in after a long day. The novel takes the form of a manuscript within a manuscript (within the actual manuscript of Dumas's book). A journalist covers the murder of a Scottish university student by an American graduate student studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh--a story that gains widespread coverage after the accused claims to have committed the murder under the influence of the Devil. The book we are reading is the journalist's book, though the majority of the text is a separate manuscript written by the accused murderer and found in his prison cell, with the addition of interviews and other primary sources.
Mixed media horror novels are always fun, and it is easy to get pulled into Grayson's recounting of his experiences after arriving in Scotland to follow the footsteps of his recently deceased father. What I found most impressive about A History of Fear was that rather than getting caught up in its gimmick, it contains a layered and nuanced exploration of religion, belief, family, and sexuality, all swathed in the dark magnetism of your own personal devil. Anyone with religious doubt or trauma from childhood will find a lot to relate to in Grayson's story, especially in the particular headspace of an atheist who was raised deeply religious, and the remnants of those early teaching that stick in our heads and hearts like barbs. It shows that belief is never simple.
After finishing A History of Fear, I picked up The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson, one of my picks for the Fates & Favorites readathon. I am so glad that Riley included this on her list because I have been meaning to read it for years. What I especially loved about this as a sci-fi story is that it didn't belabor the world building or the science. It put the reader right into the action and provided background information as it came up naturally in the story. It was very short, but impactful, and the reveals at the end made me excited to pick up the subsequent books in the series. I think that The Murders of Molly Southborne would make a great introductory novella for readers wanting to get more into science fiction. It's an opportunity to get into a fascinating and complex sci-fi world without having to take on a 600-page space epic.
I finished Molly Southbourne on Saturday morning, and then I headed to my mom's house to hang out with my family's pets and get some more reading in. I read a bit more of Clown in a Cornfield 2 by Adam Cesare. This is a highly anticipated sequel for me, since the first book was such a pleasant surprise of a YA slasher. The character work in these books is so impressive, and it makes the themes that Cesare explores through his stories of killers in clown masks take on much more weight than you might expect. Because the character work is so good, though, I've had to put down the sequel multiple times just to take a break from the intensity. I've come to care about these characters, and they just keep going from danger to danger. Cesare does an amazing job of ratcheting up the tension and never letting the characters, or the reader, feel truly safe. I highly recommend the Clown in a Cornfield books to anyone who is looking to get into slasher books, or who wants to see what the current YA horror scene has to offer.
When I needed to take a break from CiaC2, I picked up A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson. This is another book from my Fates & Favorites TBR, and another read that is a long time coming for me. It's hard to talk about a book that has so much hype in my particular online reading community, but I was very impressed with A Dowry of Blood and how much Gibson was able to do in such a short book.
There's been a lot of talk recently of the vampire renaissance in fiction, and I think that in that way, A Dowry of Blood was ahead of its time. This is vampire horror at its best, showing the horror of the condition as well as the deep emotional implications of bestowing and receiving immortality. The way that the narrative emphasized agency in the face of a force with seemingly insurmountable power and control, and the focus on the found family between Constanza, Magdalena, and Alexi, brought a beautiful tenderness to an otherwise brutal story. Gibson did a fantastic job handling the passage of so much time through a short novel, illustrating the way that it must have felt for Constanza, for the centuries to melt past like fleeting moments, while simultaneously feeling interminable under the thumb of a manipulator. It's clear that A Dowry of Blood explores what it is like to be in an abusive relationship, and it also does a fantastic job of teasing out the nuances of depression--the way that time can dilate and contract, the way that color can fade and senses can dull, the way that everything is tolerated because nothing feels tolerable. Constanza's story sends a powerful message for so short a book, and I'm excited to read more of S.T. Gibson's work.
The final book that I started during my 24 hour readathon was Where Darkness Blooms by Andrea Hannah. This YA horror novel joins a growing subgenre of books about rural small town life and the sinister undercurrents that can hide within a seemingly mundane place. I want to write more at length about the themes and development of that subgenre, but so far I am enjoying Where Darkness Blooms. It tells the story of four teenage girls whose mothers--three women who were best friends and lived together in large old house at the end of a road in their small town of Bishop, Kansas--go missing, the latest in a series of disappearances and deaths of women in Bishop reaching back to the founding of the town.
The vibes in this book are just what you want from a small-town horror. The girls are seemingly trapped in Bishop by vicious windstorms that grow in ferocity as the novel progresses, and they are embroiled in a complicated series of social relationships with the town's other citizens, namely the Harding family, who may hold the key to the curse that seems to loom over their town. Books with so many points-of-view to follow can sometimes be too much, or suffer from one of the POVs being less interesting than the others, but I think that Hannah does a fantastic job of distinguishing each of the girls' individual storylines while always showing the ways they are entwined.
Overall, this was a very successful and satisfying 24 hour readathon for me, and I'm glad I got to enjoy so many discussions and reading sprints throughout. I am always on the fence on how I feel about "binge reading" because I don't want to pressure myself, or burn myself out on a hobby that I do for relaxation, but every once in a while there's nothing better than just committing a whole day to getting cozy and reading some books.
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