Douglas Clegg’s NEVERLAND is a terrific coming-of-age (but written for adults) horror story told with heart, humor, and Southern Gothic twists, all of it deeply familiar yet combining to create something original.

Ten-year-old Beau is off to Gull Island with his parents, older twin sisters, and baby brother. Along with his uncle, aunt, and odd cousin Sumter, they converge on The Retreat, Grandma Rowena’s ancestral home. The summer promises heat, boredom, bugs, and plenty of bickering among the grownups. When Sumter tells Beau about the god he’s keeping in an old shed, which opens the way to Neverland, Beau can’t resist. What the children do in the shed feels thrilling but quickly turns nasty. It’s all make-believe, though, right? When it becomes real, Beau must choose between the delicious horrors of Neverland and the unsatisfying but positive normalcy of his family.

This is my first work by Clegg, and I loved it. His writing has been compared to Stephen King’s, and I couldn’t disagree more, which is a great thing for me as a reader. I think Stephen King should be Stephen King, and the rest of us horror writers should have our own voice. Clegg’s storytelling resurrects all the nostalgia of summer family vacations, tedium and snarling family dynamics and small moments of supreme adventure. The characters are especially vividly drawn. The horror elements are well done, emerge organically one little bite at a time, and blend perfectly with a growing Southern Gothic element as the family’s dark secret is revealed. The story drags a little at the end as the author seemed to fight to corral all the cats he’d let loose, but overall, it’s a great story. I’m now curious what else Clegg has up his sleeve, and I may check out another of his books.

THE RECKONING is another terrific horror/thriller novel by Jeff Long, the author of my one of my favorite horror works, THE DESCENT. I recently reread it (it was originally published in 2004) and liked it even better the second time around.

Like THE DESCENT, THE RECKONING reads like Michael Crichton decided to do a horror novel, though Long is far superior to Crichton in my opinion in building strong characters. I don’t know if I’d classify it as thriller fiction with horror elements or the other way around, but who cares because either way, it works for me.

Molly, a photojournalist, travels to Cambodia to document the recovery of bones belonging to dead and missing American servicemen fighting during the Vietnam War. After a dig goes bust, she and two searchers meet a mysterious stranger, who tells them where they can find an entire lost platoon. They jump at the chance–Molly to get her story, her companions to recover the dead–and lead a team into what they discover is a lost city in the jungle. There, the ruins brood and sleep, haunted by ghosts, and Molly learns that here, the war never really ended…

Long’s is one of my favorite writers. He’s a master of producing wonder, ticking time bombs, likeable and capable heroes dealing with an escalating catastrophe, and a sort of visceral and moody horror that keeps you reading. If you haven’t checked out his work yet, I highly recommend it.

Celebrated speculative fiction author Kathy Koja’s THE CIPHER has a terrific premise: after a party, Nicholas and Nakota, a dysfunctional couple, end up in the storage room of his crummy apartment building and discover a strange and utterly mysterious black hole in the floor. He’s obsessed with her, and she’s obsessed with it, while it appears to be obsessed with him, setting up a creepy and bizarre love triangle of sorts. It’s kind of like the horror version of Jonathan Lethem’s AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE.

I’d never read Koja before, and she can really turn a phrase. Large parts of the book read like the stream of consciousness of a mad genius. The central conflict of the love triangle is engaging, the obsessions interesting, the core mystery of what the hell the “Funhole” is and what’s in it hooking me from the start, particularly the early crazy experiments they conduct to study it. There’s a theme somewhat teased of people filling empty lives by projecting and searching for meaning. And the horror element packs a ton of satisfying creep.

Two things didn’t work for me as a reader, however. First, only two of the characters out of what grows into a large cast are remotely likeable, and our narrator, Nicholas himself, is so negative about everything the story goes from a heroin chic to a serious downer vibe. As for Nicholas, he has no real agency despite constant attempts to gain control–mostly floundering and waffling–and none of the characters changes or grows to offer a character arc. Secondly, the second half of the book is majorly repetitive, leading to an ending that is inconclusive and lacking all the answers, which is fine, but offering no real resolution, which I found disappointing.

So all in all, I had a strange mixed reaction to this one. I loved the first half and didn’t want it to end and then grew impatient wanting the second half to be over. As a whole, it’s heavy, it’s dark, it’s creepy, and it’s periodically titillating and even beautiful, but it missed some vital elements for me that would have made it a perfect horror read. So THE CIPHER might be a love or hate read for some, though regardless of whether you love or hate it, you have to admire the singular identity Koja creates for it and the skill and craftsmanship that went into it.