I recently read MONGRELS by Stephen Graham Jones, who in this Bram Stoker-nominated novel offered up a fresh take on werewolves. Buzzing from the encounter, I picked up another work by Jones, a novella titled THE ELVIS ROOM, a novella dealing with themes of the paranormal and scientific obsession. The premise grabbed me immediately.

In THE ELVIS ROOM, a scientist accidentally discovers evidence of ghosts while trying to disprove them. He goes public with his findings, which earns him ridicule. An outcast in the scientific community relegated to speaking at conferences specializing in the paranormal, he stubbornly searches for the truth. At the center of his thesis is exploring Elvis Rooms–rooms set aside as permanently empty at hotels in case a VIP shows up and needs a room. He finds that when all the rooms are occupied including the Elvis Room, somebody dies in the hotel.

Testing this hypothesis produces morbid results, and leads him deeper into the secret life of the dead.

The scientist is an anti-hero, somebody we root for while kind of hoping he gets his comeuppance for disturbing dead things and using the living as guinea pigs. He’s kind of like a Herbert West in his pursuit of proving the dead walk among us; his sociopathic obsession makes him strangely likeable, particularly since what he’s trying to prove is a groundbreaking discovery that would change the world. The novella’s horror element is similarly strong. The ghosts are chilling–not terrifying but creepy enough to provide an adversary that once cornered, has a big bite.

The result is a ghost story that is anything but your average fare. Titillating in its directions, intriguing in its scientific viewpoint, morbid in its aims, and chilling in its conclusion.

Dathan Auerbach’s PENPAL is a remarkable horror novel packing an emotional wallop. Originally developed as a series of short interconnected stories for an online horror forum, Auerbach revised and expanded it into this creepy novel.

In PENPAL, a man looks back on a series of strange events in his childhood in an effort to understand them. They started in kindergarten when his class wrote letters about themselves and attached them to balloons that were set free. For a time, many of the kids got pen pals, who wrote to the kids c/o the school. Only the boy didn’t get a letter. Instead, he received a blurry photo. Then more.

As the man looks back, these disturbing and increasingly tragic events take on a terrifying single narrative.

In my mind, PENPAL achieves two big accomplishments, the first in recreating the wonder of childhood in a realistic way without saccharine nostalgia, the second in subtly introducing unease, menace and darkness at the margins of this childhood until they permanently alter a boy’s life. In doing so, Auerbach managed to create something familiar but entirely new in the horror genre.

My only criticism is the story is somewhat disjointed, the product of it being a series of interconnected short stories that jump around in time. For example, the first story happens after the second, which I didn’t realize until much later. The result for me was I got confused about the timeline and what was happening at a few points. So if you pick up PENPAL, my advice is make sure you pay attention to the time the story is set in.

Recommended.

Werewolves have never been my thing, but Stephen Graham Jones’s MONGRELS reinvents the werewolf tale with a smart, raw, fresh, fun tale I thoroughly enjoyed.

MONGRELS is a coming-of-age story, focusing on a boy growing up in a family of werewolves, primarily his Uncle Darren and Aunt Libby. They raise him with an understanding of how werewolves can survive in the modern world, but as he grows older, the werewolf world eludes him, and he wonders if he’ll ever make the change and become one of them.

Otherwise, there isn’t much a plot, as this is an episodic tale, bouncing around in time as the boy grows up. The family is constantly poor and on the move due to their werewolf adventures stirring things up. They scrape to get by in the human world and thrive in their nocturnal world. Darren can’t help but go out and joyfully seek out trouble. Trouble seems to find the wiser Libby. And the boy, a keen student of the life he wants to live, navigates these upsets with smarts learned on the road.

I loved this story. Jones reinvents the werewolf trope with feeling and wit. Every incident the werewolves plow into is entertaining, and the insights about what it’s like to be a werewolf and how to survive is interesting and engaging. There’s little fat on the story, it’s all bone and muscle. The cathartic and satisfying ending has a lot of heart.

Check it out if you’re into werewolves or looking to be surprised with a satisfying reinvention.

Nick Cutter (Craig Davidson) roared onto the horror scene with his novel THE TROOP, quickly following up on that success with THE DEEP, THE ACOLYTE and most recently LITTLE HEAVEN.

His books hit me in a unique way, a completely mixed reaction. The writing is always terrific. The pages fly by. The dialogue is generally good. The monster element is the real star of the show. It’s fantastic, especially in THE TROOP. Those freaking worms. He packed so much skin-crawling horror out of one simple device that it’s clear the guy’s a genius at the horror game.

On the other hand, for some reason I never really connect with his characters, who strike me as stereotypes, and the books often feel kitchen sinked to me. THE DEEP starts off with a horrible pandemic that is largely tangential to the plot; the second half is basically one very well-written, horrifying but ultimately fatiguing set piece after another. About 80% into it, completely numbed, I was flipping pages past brilliant horror scenes just to get to the end. Otherwise, there are plenty of conventions popularized by Stephen King, resulting in books that read like King on crack.

LITTLE HEAVEN is his most ambitious work to date and probably his best. A big book with plenty of action, plenty of horror, an intriguing evil, and parallel timelines that come together nearly flawlessly to double the tension and final impact.

The novel begins with introduction of three major characters, Micah, Ebenezer and Minerva, outlaws who decide to join forces after a gunfight. As I said, their story is told in two timelines. In the past, they’re hired by a woman to travel deep into the wilderness to Little Heaven, a community built by a religious movement similar to a cult, and maybe rescue her nephew. They arrive to find the community under siege by an ancient evil that wants them all. In the present, they must return to the black rock overlooking the site to confront the evil one last time.

Again, I didn’t quite connect with the characters, whom I found unlikable. But Cutter does his magic, sweeping me, a horror snob, through his epic. Every night I returned to its pages to see what happened next, finding the narrative, story development, descriptions and the antagonist all executed brilliantly.

If you like mass market horror, Cutter’s a must read, and LITTLE HEAVEN is one of his best.