In Paddy Chayefsky’s ALTERED STATES, a brilliant young scientist obsessed with exploring the relationship between consciousness and matter undergoes a series of experiments with horrifying results. This is the novel that inspired the 1980 movie directed by Ken Russell. It’s even more fun to read this story than rewatch the classic movie.

Chayefsky is one of my favorite screen writers, giving us some of my favorite movies of the ’60s and ’70s: NETWORK, THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, HOSPITAL, and then of course 1980’s ALTERED STATES. I loved the ideas in the movie so much that when I found out Chayefsky based it on a novel he’d written, I had to have it. The problem was the only copies available were used, and I have a massive allergy to mildew. Whereas I could spend hours in a used bookstore in my younger days and come out with armfuls of cheap gems, these days I can’t stand being in one for longer than 10 minutes. I obtained a few copies but couldn’t get through even a few pages, even after using every trick in the book to dry them out.

Fast forward to a week or so ago, and I learn they finally adapted the book to a Kindle version. What this means: Basically, the publisher scanned the paperback and created a Kindle file, resulting in some weird formatting issues. What it also meant: I finally got to read it.

In the novel, Eddie Jessup is a brilliant scientist obsessed with using various ancient drugs and sensory deprivation to cultivate hallucinations that he believes are actually primal memories, allowing him to regress farther and farther back to the original self, the first thought, the creation of the universe. What he ends up finding terrifies him. Emily, his wife, is far more practical, believing there is no ultimate truth and humans live with pain, and the way they truly live well is by loving others. These viewpoints clash frequently in the novel.

It’s a smart book by an obviously smart writer, packed with interesting ideas. Chayefsky was a far more gifted screenwriter than he was a novelist, resulting in long-winded expositions and monologues loaded with exclamation points. But the ideas are fantastic, smart, interesting–I look at ALTERED STATES the same way I did THREE-BODY PROBLEM, which honestly in my view was not well written as a dramatic narrative yet completely fascinating as a novel of ideas.

So, I’d recommend this one if you’re looking for something different and weird that punches you in the brain.

In WE USED TO LIVE HERE by Marcus Kliewer, a young woman welcomes a family into her home, as the man says he grew up in the house. The result is a nightmare of shifting reality. Creepy and crisply paced, this new horror novel was a lot of fun.

Eve and Charlie live in a big old house they recently purchased and intend to flip. Eve is an anxious people pleaser, Charlie tougher and more practical. When a family arrives one day asking to have a look around the house, as the man once lived there, Eve lets them in. Only, events cascade that prevent them leaving, and the longer they stay, the more reality itself seems to shift. Intermittent epistolary chapters establish a spooky lore around the house, giving us the impression that it is not just a house.

Apparently, the novel started as a series on Reddit back around 2014, and it was so popular it was eventually fleshed out as a novel. My short review is I loved the read, though the last act wasn’t as strong as I would have liked as it doesn’t quite pay off on all the strong elements.

What I liked: Eve and Charlie are very likeable characters, the lore around the house provokes a sense of wonder and by the end makes sense, the writing has a page-turning pace, and there are plenty of little creepy moments that never feel kitchen-sinked. The mystery really propels the story, reminding me of novels like 14 by Peter Clines and HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Danielewski. What I didn’t: The last act is solid but rolls out as fairly conventional, not quite paying off the numerous questions raised earlier in the story. Which would be fine if the lore and those questions were in the background, only the story really leans into it.

All told, this jaded horror reader closed the covers a very happy camper. WE USED TO LIVE HERE is a super impressive debut and a distinctive addition to horror.

Alex Grecian’s RED RABBIT turned out to be one of my favorite horror reads during an explosive year for quality horror.

The publisher synopsis promises a tale of a posse hunting a woman wanted for practicing witchcraft in the Old West. I love horror and I love Westerns, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I ended up reading a story that was far richer and more imaginative than the simple tale I expected.

The novel mostly focuses on a widowed schoolteacher who connects with two cowboys and a witch hunter named Old Tom, who is en route to a small town to collect the bounty for killing a local witch. Together with a mute child named Rabbit, they all set out for the town, only to run into numerous obstacles in what is a somewhat meandering and quite episodic plot; the Old West, it seems, is a dangerous place and very haunted.

I loved the imaginative integration of so many horror elements into the Western genre. Demons, witches, ghosts, cannibals, and other horror elements are expertly woven by Grecian into the story as a kind of haunted Americana, and very convincingly too, providing an alternate history of sorts where monsters are real and just another hazard in the American landscape. Part of the charm is each is given an interesting back story or folkore-ish element. The demon in particular is very well done, as is the “hunter.” The horror elements really shine. They’re super well done, and they make the story surprising and feel driven by its own odd logic.

On the downside, there are a lot of characters, and we never really get too deep into any one of them, making it difficult to really empathize all that much. That may bother some readers. As each character was otherwise very well drawn and interesting, I personally didn’t mind it; I found them all quite memorable, and the emotional distance I wound up feeling from them didn’t bother me, as there was so much other stuff going on that kept me turning pages.

Overall, RED RABBIT is a solid Western and a terrific horror novel. Recommended for fans of both looking for something different.

Stephen Markley’s THE DELUGE is not only the best fiction read of 2023 but one of the most important novels I’ve ever read. In this extraordinary and ambitious novel, Markley lays out a scenario for a climate change future, and it’s even more horrifying than you imagined, leading Stephen King to call it “terrifying.”

The novel had been recommended to me, but at first I found it a little daunting. At 900 pages, it’s a door stopper of a read. I don’t mind long reads, but they don’t always earn the length and can be self-indulgent (Ayn Rand, I’m looking at you). I figured, well, I can at least give it a shot. I’m glad I did.

Told through a large cast of characters, we see the horror of climate change. Heat waves, massive storms, gradual sea level rise swamping coasts, collapse of ecosystems, a weakening food chain, and the terrifying threat of massive pockets of methane in ocean and permafrost releasing to essentially end human civilization and ultimately humanity itself as a species. Remarkably and deeply researched, this is climate change without platitudes (like how technology and specifically tech billionaires will save us), hyperbole, or political agenda, just the best available science.

On the human side, we see the even scarier reaction to the world slowly fraying. Massive refugee flows, skyrocketing food inflation, entire towns and cities being gutted by flood and fire, overdeveloped coastal areas washed away. The rich donate to causes while continuing to profit off the problem, asking for government bailouts while undermining any effective legislation. Then we have the usual portion of the population that reacts to fear by trying to make any problem worse by fabricating an entirely different reality of denial and obfuscation, ripe for the usual grifters. Lefties aren’t spared either, criticized for ideological purity tests, infighting, and tying every single social justice aim to addressing climate change. Beholden to big money, both parties prove worthless and impotent to address the crisis.

In short, there are three major reactions to what happens. Those who see the problem and the solution scream like Cassandras, only to be attacked and thwarted at every turn. Those who are profiting from the problem will do anything to maintain business as usual. And those suffering from the problem will either rise up or just as likely be distracted and wind up punching down. If you’ve been paying attention to American politics over the least 10+ years, you’ll likely find yourself saying, yeah, this is exactly how it’s going to go down.

Part of the problem here is we can’t address climate change while maintaining capitalism and the political system in its present form, and that brings out the usual tiring hysteria about the New World Order and Marxist gulags. It’s always weird to me how people get their ass kicked by capitalism, a system designed to break every four to eight years, and then blame the government, whose minimal safety net and regulation is the only thing separating them from outright robber baron dystopia–alternately holding the government accountable for every problem but then screaming “Socialism!” at any effort to solve the problem. (I just saw an example of that this year–in my province, oil production is 7% of GDP but you’d think it was 95%, based on our premier’s policies and rhetoric, and even though half the province was literally choking on another year of rampant forest fires, and even though the premier cut budget for wildfire fighting services in half, she was re-elected with a solid majority, which simply boggles the mind.) To address climate change, we have to stop the legalized bribery, hold both parties accountable to the problem, stop thinking corporations will solve it for us, and hold big business–particularly the fossil fuel industry, which has known about climate change for many years but even now actively suppresses science and government action–accountable for their pollution, the cost of which they largely pass on to the rest of us.

We see these perspectives portrayed through a wide range of characters, eco-terrorists and scientists and policymakers and others, spanning two decades of steady environmental collapse. The characters themselves are interesting, often have a distinctive personality and voice to distinguish them from the rest, and are deeply drawn. Nonetheless, the author made the decision to make it not easy to tell whose point of view we’re getting when each new chapter starts. This results in a mental effort with each new chapter that becomes annoying. With so many characters, it’s not easy to keep track of everyone even without this confusing approach. But kudos to the author for managing all these characters and intertwining storylines in a tale that is packed with science and economics but is also very human and packs a big punch with horrific sequences that steadily ramp up the story into becoming an outright thriller. In this, THE DELUGE compares favorably to Kim Stanley Robinson’s THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, another door stopper I loved that reads more like nonfiction than fiction and whose characters often feel like mouthpieces for different views than real people.

Anyway, that was ultimately a minor criticism compared to how much I absolutely loved this book for telling hard truths. My only major criticism is the same as I had for THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, which is how much hope there is we can act in time. When America finally starts to do the right thing, it does every right thing, and I have my doubts we can pull it off. In my opinion, America is essentially run by billionaires profiting from today’s capitalism, choosing politicians and policy, getting bailed out by the taxpayer when they make bad investments, and believing if the world ends, they’ll be insulated from it–as if any seat on a burning plane is the one you’ll survive in and that all that wealth they can’t get enough of will be worth anything in the end. Still, I appreciated the novel’s recipe for victory in the war against climate change and the hope it represents.

Overall, I encourage everyone to read THE DELUGE. In my view, it’s the most important work of fiction of the year if not the decade.

In THE HANDYMAN METHOD by Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan, a man moves into a new home with his family, only to become obsessed with fixing its many deficiencies and by extension, his own manhood. I picked this one up after reading Sullivan’s THE MARIGOLD, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and after noting it was co-authored by Nick Cutter. I liked this one a lot.

In this story, Trent moves into a new house in an unfinished development with his successful wife Rita and son Milo. Soon after moving in, he notices a crack and turns to Handyman Hank, a YouTube DIY expert and all-around manly guy ready to offer home improvement advice along with his own aw-shucks wisdom about being a real man. As more things go wrong with the house, Trent finds himself immersing in Hank’s increasingly monstrous worldview, producing a horror story reminiscent of THE SHINING, if Jack Torrance were seduced by the toxic form of masculinity in order to solve his insecurities. He discovers he is a pawn, both in an ancient pact and of the house itself.

Some readers wanted more clarity in the narrative and a tidier landing, and I’m not sure I can argue with that, but I didn’t mind. I found the book a perfect blend of the authors’ strengths–Cutter’s fine skill at writing the horror set piece and Sullivan’s deep and provocative ideas that included his take on one of my favorite elements, the idea of a house within a house. Overall, I had a great time with this story. As with THE MARIGOLD, I appreciated Sullivan showing me something I hadn’t seen before along with his writing that again showed solid skill.

Check it out if you’re looking for something new from a haunted house story.