Title: Crypt of the Moon Spider (Lunar Gothic Trilogy #1)

Author: Nathan Ballingrud

Release date: August 27th, 2024

*Huge thanks to Netgalley & Tor Nightfire for the digital ARC!*

Having previously read Nathan’s stellar short story collections ‘North American Lake Monsters’ and ‘Wounds: Six Stories From the Borders of Hell,’ I was beyond excited when this novella was announced. Nathan also has a novel out, ‘The Strange,’ but I’ve yet to get to it, my TBR as deep as the Mariana’s Trench at this point.

But when Netgalley approved me for this one, I knew I’d be diving in quick, and after reading Michael Patrick Hicks’ review, I couldn’t wait to see what I was in for.

What I liked: ‘Crypt of the Moon Spider’ takes place in an alternative reality, where humans have colonized the moon to a degree. Many years ago, a cave was found deep under the forests on the moon, a cave where an immense spider lived. Now, the moon is home to those deemed ‘unfit’ on earth, people with depression, melancholy and immoral thoughts.

Taking place in 1923, we follow Veronica, as she arrives at an institution on the surface of the moon, where Dr. Cull has developed a cure for melancholy. She wants to get better, wants to return to earth and her husband, but doesn’t believe she can be fixed.

Ballingrud does a wonderful job of setting the stage and frankly, while this is considered ‘science fiction’ it merges the line between sci-fi and horror so very well. This novella is unnerving. You know something lurks, something’s just below the surface – not only of the moon, but also of the story.

Once Dr. Cull’s methods are revealed and Veronica’s childhood stories are unlocked, the story rampages towards a shocking mid-story climax. It was frankly unexpected, seeing how Ballingrud was telling this story, but it worked perfectly to set up the second and third acts.

The ending brought some closure but also created significantly more questions. These questions will be front and center when book two arrives and Ballingrud deftly makes it so that the reader wants to know the answers to those questions.

What I didn’t like: Within the story, we are introduced to the character known as ‘Grub.’ I personally thought the section that details his backstory and arrival was unwarranted. While it did work to show us Dr. Cull’s depravity and methods, it slowed the pacing. Saying that, there’s the potential this was necessary for the trilogy aspect.

Why you should buy this: Ballingrud has a way with prose that instantly transports you to whatever wonderful place he’s created. It’s one of those things that the masters of writing have and the rest of us chase. The story within is magical but grounded, while also being dark and sinister. The first book in this trilogy effortlessly has the reader in the palm of its hand, making us long to learn what comes next.

4/5

Title: That Which Stands Outside

Author: Mark Morris

Release date: July 16th, 2024

*Huge thanks to Flame Tree Press & Netgalley for the digital ARC!*

Back in 1989, Mark Morris’ debut novel, ‘Toady,’ was released heralding the arrival of a new and exciting voice. Now, some thirty-five years later, Mark is still releasing thrilling, can’t-put-down books. Recently, he’s been working more in the Dr. Who realm, but has been putting out some critically acclaimed anthologies through Flame Tree Press. When this, his debut with Flame Tree, was announced, I was very excited. I haven’t read ‘Toady,’ though it is buried somewhere on my Kindle currently, but this one sounded right up my alley and I was excited to dive in.

What I liked: The novel starts out with a bang, Todd, a down-on-his-luck actor, comes across a woman being attacked one night after leaving his job as a bartender. He intervenes, and while he saves her from worse injury, he himself gets his ass kicked, putting him in the hospital. Waking, he finds the woman there, and that she’s been coming to make sure he’s ok daily. Her name is Yrsa and quickly the two of them fall in love.

Morris sets the stage nicely with that moment bringing them together, but Todd’s feelings for her are solidified after she gets word her mother has died and she’ll need to return to a small Nordic island off the coast where she’s from. She hates the place, hates her hometown, but Todd volunteers to come and the story takes off.

Once there, it becomes apparent immediately that the townsfolk have no love towards Yrsa, no sympathy that her mother’s died and after a short time there, Todd finds out why. When Yrsa was a child, she fell into a cave on the outskirts and was missing. Almost a week later, she was found, but none of the towns people believe that the child they pulled from that hole was Yrsa.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not widely read on the 80’s and 90’s UK authors. I’ve read some Ramsay Campbell and more recently a lot of Adam Nevill. I’ve read Tim Lebbon’s work, and many of the ‘new’ breed of UK authors – Kevin J. Kennedy, Gemma Amor, V. Castro, David Sodergren, Phil Sloman, Dave Jeffery, David Watkins, Joseph Sale etc. etc. – and ignoring them (not maliciously) I’ve found that the UK writers coming from that time period have a very pragmatic approach to developing their story. They take their time giving us lush descriptions (read detailed not purple prose) but also have this uncanny ability to leave a drip or two of dread within every paragraph. Such is the case here. Morris sets up the bowling pins well – Yrsa tells Todd about the caves, they go there, and she shares that she saw something when she crawled through as a child. Todd then gets his brother, who has a drilling company, to come and drill through, to see what she saw – and even in that statement alone, there’s a desire to know what it is, that the reader is intrigued.

Morris continues the trend of giving us plum location and character descriptions, while teasing out this change in Yrsa. The rain comes and she dances naked outside. Strange things happen around the town and she seems to be energized. Small little figures are seen and she smirks at the notion. It all leads to the final quarter of the novel being full on bonkers. The drilling breaks through, the terror is realized and characters begin to fall like confetti.

For me, it was a tale of two parts. The first half worked wonderfully to set the stage. I felt like I was walking the streets with Todd, meeting the people and enjoying the remoteness, even if the people were not outwardly friendly to Todd. The second half was the classic horror novel. We get carnage, bloodshed and tangible chills. Morris takes this time to knock down those bowling pins he set up, hundreds of pages ago, and boy does he knock them down.

The ending was remarkable in that it gave us closure. That’s a rare thing these days in the world of expected sequels and readers want more and more. I personally, was very happy with how it was wrapped up.

What I didn’t like: While I personally loved it, in the novella age of fast releases and faster reads, I’m hopeful that the readers who love these dark, burning, quality stories find it and it explodes, because everything is fully developed. I can see this one being set aside by those readers who think a three hundred page book is too long, as this one really begins to pick up steam right around that mark.

Why you should buy this: I’m actually shocked I’m not seeing this novel all over my social media pages as it was fantastic. Morris gives us amazing characters, a phenomenal back drop and some truly wonderful lore. Todd is a character every single reader will root for, even when he seems to be completely oblivious to the dark omen he’s in a relationship with, and the action is here is masterful.

An absolutely face-smacking good time, this one had me hooked from page one and never let go. Now, I really should give ‘Toady’ a read.

5/5

Title: Static Screams

Author: Nico Bell

Release date: March 6th, 2024

*Normally, this is where I’d thank Netgalley and the author for sending me a digital ARC of this book, and while I did grab it off of Netgalley, I had also purchased this on release day! Recently, I saw it on Netgalley and grabbed it, wanting to help Nico boost the profile of the book, but it was also a subtle way for me to bump it way up my TBR, because I try my best to keep a 100% review ratio on Netgalley!*

Over the years, I’ve become a big fan of Nico Bell’s fiction. From ‘Food Fright’ to ‘Beyond the Creek’ to her anthology (that I did have a story in, full disclosure!) ‘Shiver,’ she has a keen eye on what makes the reader unsettled. I still have to read her book ‘Open House,’ which is on my Kindle, and seeing as ‘Static Screams’ was such a wild ride, I’m going to bump that one way up the pile as well.

I loved the new artwork that A.A. Medina from Fabled Beast has created for this edition and the synopsis had me hooked. Any time I get to read a story from a steady writer like Nico, (one who perfectly crafts the tale in wonderfully dark ways) that involves our MC dealing with hallucinations, I know I’m in for a fantastic time.

What I liked: The first quarter of this novella very well could’ve been the entirety of the story and I’d have loved it. We open with a young woman, Carmen, who is dealing with significant PTSD. After her mother took her own life, Carmen struggles with seeing ‘dots,’ these weird, undulating things that float and converge around her in the sky. Her meds control it, but the story picks up with the pharmacy denying her new prescribed medication because of the dosage and without her meds, the dots come at her with a hurricane-level fury.

This could’ve easily been the story. Bell could’ve focused on the appearance of these visions, how Carmen and her aunt have a solid bond and work together to get Carmen the help she desperately wants, and the reader would’ve been richly rewarded for going on that journey with Carmen. Instead, Bell catapults us a million miles further down the deranged train, by introducing Barbara. Barbara is a doctor who is working on a mysterious experiment, one that is so far out of the ethical world of medicine, that she does it on her own, hidden, private property. Once she meets Carmen, she knows she’s the one, and from there the story really ramps up.

Bell does a great job of giving us the ups and downs of Carmen’s struggles. How she desperately wants to reunite with her mom, but also how she knows what Barbara’s doing is wrong and with the introduction of the doctor’s assistant, Neema, we get another layer of potential betrayal.

The final quarter of this one is a frantic sprint, where Barbara’s deception is revealed and choices about what is right and wrong need to be made. We see Carmen harness this ‘power’ she has, something I won’t stray too far into to keep things spoiler-free, but it works really well for the narrative and Bell doesn’t overuse it and turn this into a parody of itself.

What I didn’t like: I don’t know if I fully buy Neema’s role and involvement. It works well for the deceptive aspects and for the battle between right and wrong, but every time she started to defend herself, it felt a bit lite and not effective. That could just be me though finding that!

Why you should buy this: I’m a huge fan of seeing a strong, female lead battle back and not take shit from anyone. Carmen is fierce, powerful and it was great seeing her realize and then utilize her full potential. Bell does a great job of walking us through the opening struggles of Carmen’s mind frame, but also effectively changing that ‘weakness’ into a strength in the latter half and showcasing why Carmen wasn’t weak, but could overcome anything, which metaphorically adds another layer.

Another really great story from Bell! This was awesome.

5/5

Title: False Bodies

Author: J.R. McConvey

Release date: October 1st, 2024

*Huge thanks to Breakwater Books for sending me a digital ARC!*

Do you know the writer J.R. McConvey?

I feel like this is a name that not enough people know about, but that within a few short months that is going to really change.

First, let’s get something out of the way. I know J.R. McConvey. Cocky eh? Well, no, what I mean is, I actually know the guy, consider him to be a wonderful friend and at one point, we were even working on a screenplay for one of my novella’s together. J.R. is not only a fantastic human, but outside of the writing world, he’s a Gemini and Genie award-winning producer. In the writing world, his debut collection, ‘Different Beasts’ which was released in 2019 won the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize in Speculative Fiction award. And that was where we connected. Well, not through that – but because of that win – his collection was sent over to Kendall Reviews for reviewing and I jumped on it for three reasons. One – it was titled ‘Different Beasts’ so I was stoked to read some Canadian beastly tales. Two – because he was Canadian. I’m always game to read new to me Canuck stuff. Three – not surprising, but Andrew Pyper had judged those awards and there was a blurb from what Andrew had noted about the book, and that really sold me. It was very similar in tone to Andrew’s blurb of Ian Rogers ‘Every House is Haunted’ collection and that collection is SO GOOD, so I was on board. And guess what? ‘Different Beasts’ was magical.

Not long after, J.R. and I began chatting and since then we’ve become solid buds. But don’t take that for nothing, if this book sucked, I’d tell you, because I know his beard could handle the truth.

Sometime in the last two or three years, McConvey asked me if I knew of any place he should send this novel for submission. I suggested a few spots, but nothing stuck (unintentional pun), but when he said it had been picked up, I was so excited.

Why?

Have you read the blurb.

Here’s a quick sentence to get you excited. ‘A cryptozoologist goes to Newfoundland to investigate a report of a Kraken attack.’ I mean COME ON. If you read that and your eye brows went up and your heart rate quickened, then not only are you and I now friends, but you can best bet you’re zipping to the bottom to hit the preorder link.

If you read that and were like ‘meh,’ I suggest you stop reading and question why you hate awesome fiction. You can marinate on that.

So, now, we arrive at McConvey’s debut. ‘False Bodies.’ Stunning cover art in tow, I bumped this way up my TBR, wondering just what craziness McConvey’s delivered and boy, does he deliver.

What I liked: The story follows Eddie Gesner, a cryptozoologist, who is trying to live his life with a few things hanging over his head. The first is that he’s seven-feet tall. Which makes him standout no matter where he goes. I’m not sure if this character was modeled after James “Bobo” Fay from Finding Bigfoot, but that’s kind of who I pictured while reading this. The second is that many people consider him a murderer. Why? After marrying the woman of his dreams, they went on a trip in Tibet. While there, his wife disappeared, never to be found. She was super rich. So, many presumed he killed her. While Eddie insists that a Yeti took her. This has now given him the moniker Eddie ‘The Yeti’ Gesner, which he detests.

The story picks up while he’s at a cryptozoology conference. His friend contacts him and tells him of a strange occurrence off the Newfoundland coast. Where a drilling rig was seemingly attacked by a Kraken. How do they know this? A tentacle was left behind.

Up until this point, McConvey delivers a very straight forward creature-feature. He’s setting the stage and you’d be forgiven if you believed that the rest of the story would go like this – Eddie goes there, investigates, discovers that a massive squid exists, battles it to avenge the deaths of those workers and the death of his wife, and once he successfully kills the creature, lives out the rest of his life.

Wrong.

No, what McConvey does from that point on is simply extraordinary. This novel is richly layered and as we move from chapter to chapter – and it’s very subtle at first – J.R. ramps up the tension and the pacing so that the final quarter feels like a full on sprint.

Once on the ground, he teams up with a local detective who wants to get to the bottom of what happened. We get more details. The crew change was scheduled to happen. The new crew arrived, only to find nobody onboard the drilling rig. Then they all mysteriously returned – dead – but with markings on their foreheads.

We then get a mysterious diary – from the 1800’s and a distant relative of the detective – that goes over a previous incident of a giant squid arriving at the shores, and soon Eddie understands someone is following him.

The introduction of the squid-cult was a fascinating plot point. I won’t go too far into that aspect as I’m now at the stage where I gotta walk the spoiler-free line carefully, but it not only opened up some supernatural elements I wasn’t expecting, but made for some cinematic scenes.

Throughout, the reader is pulled along by one simple aspect – is there really a giant squid. Once we get our answer, McConvey ramps things up and this is when we get the ‘corporate greed’ aspect that we are tipped off about in the synopsis. Yet another element that honestly wasn’t on my Bingo card for this novel, it added more depth, but also worked well when we consider the current Canadian environment and the ongoing boycott of Loblaws. My only gripe is that the head of the corporation wasn’t described more like slime ball Galen Weston.

McConvey wraps this up perfectly. The final fifty pages or so are pristine and harken back to the depth of storytelling he offered in ‘Different Beasts.’ This is a Canadian story at its heart and that really shines through this final quarter. Throughout we get that aspect well, the ‘everyone knows everyone’-ness of the location, the ‘everyone is friendly’ aspects, but McConvey injects the Canadian horror story element ten-fold to wrap this up and it really showcases how phenomenal of a writer he is.

What I didn’t like: Honestly only one main issue with this one and that involves somebody key to the cult. I can’t specifically say – spoilers and such – but Eddie invites them to meet up as he has questions but somebody kills them before he can meet them. The way it was laid out, I felt like I’d missed something, as I’d kind of assumed they had special powers, so when it was said they died, I wasn’t fully on board with the delivery. Minor, but was an odd choice at that particular juncture of the story.

Why you should buy this: Look, if you read my one-liner up top and pumped your first in the air and instantly smelled saltwater, then smash the preorder button and celebrate being awesome.

But, if you read all of this and you’re still on the fence, you should buy this because this novel takes the basic outline of a horror novel and wraps it within a 70’s detective novel. This is what a ‘James Bond Meets The Kraken’ movie would look like if filmed by the guys who made ‘Se7en.’ This novel delivers in spades with great set pieces, tons of action and a deeply flawed main character that you want to root for, even as the evidence stacks up against him, time and time again.

McConvey has delivered an immaculate debut novel and I can’t wait to see this one breach the surface and shred readers when it gets released.

5/5

Title: Moon of the Crusted Snow

Author: Waubgeshig Rice

Release date: October 2nd, 2018

If you’ve been following any of my reviews for the last seven or so years, you’ll know (and have read me typing these things before!) that I love Canadian wilderness fiction, dystopian fiction, and just unnerving wilderness fiction. A few of my own books are essentially those concepts all throw into a blender and mixed up for consumption, but very rarely do we get Indigenous Canadian Dystopian Wilderness Fiction and somehow, Waubgeshig Rice’s 2018 release, ‘Moon of the Crusted Snow,’ was completely missed by this reader. How? I really don’t know. Outside of this book, the only other examples of ICDWF (yeah, I’m being a bit too lazy to type that all out again, though me typing this out to explain to you why I didn’t type that out is far longer than if I’d typed that out… anyways) is 2019’s ‘Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories’ which was PPPPPHHHHHHenomenal. Yes, emphasize the PPPPPHHHHHHH when reading that please and thanks.

So, when I read the synopsis of this one, I was really excited, and it wasn’t long after I bought this that the sequel, ‘Moon of the Turning Leaves’ was nominated for an Aurora Award for Best Novel. With that in mind, I bumped ‘Moon of the Crusted Snow’ way up my TBR and dove in, wondering what heartache Rice had in store for me.

What I liked: The story takes place in a small northern Anishinaabe community. Life is simple for the people who live there, though things have improved since they were connected to the larger hydro lines and internet access. Winter is coming, so those who hunt are out getting the last few animals to fill their freezers until Spring and those who have young ones are getting prepared to keep them occupied when it gets too cold to spend much time outside.

Things are going well until one day the power turns off and all communication with the outside world ceases. At first, this is nothing, they’re used to it and it was a frequent occurrence prior to them joining the larger grid. But as the days accumulate and turn into weeks, tensions rise and the community gets a plan together.

Before I go a bit further here, I want to discuss a few things. Rice effortlessly creates these characters and weaves the opening portion of the story with ease. Evan and Nicole feel like old friends, and the few characters we see introduced with depth – Walter etc. – all come across as friendly, caring people who know that the duty of the Tribe council is to look after the whole not the individual. Seeing that this release came out prior to Covid, and having read it now, it’s interesting that this book foreshadowed a lot of the relationship breakdowns and Freedom rallying we saw sprout up when the pandemic hit.

Growing up, a show I watched weekly as a kid was ‘North of 60,’ which felt like a very early prequel to this book. I loved seeing the interactions between the people, the way that the elders wanted some of the young ones to remain their and keep their way of life going and how the outside, wider world continued to creep in and disrupt life. Rice’s depiction of this small town was very similar and it was within those ‘casual’ moments that this one really shines. I say ‘casual’ because we get almost throw away paragraphs that really highlight the struggles this group has dealt with. One such example is an early 20’s man who we find out was being highly recruited to try out for a hockey team, only for his flight out to be cancelled due to a blizzard and he never got a second chance. Or when the kids sit down and we get a wonderful story told to them from the grandparents. For some readers these moments may come off as ‘filler’ or ‘not necessary’ but when we look at the totality of the story in itself, it works perfectly with the flow of the book and with the nature of the community.

Now, the true ramping up of this story occurs not long after two community members return from down south. They were at university and arrive via snowmobiles. Once back they describe the chaos that has taken over the wider world with power outages and connectivity essentially down around the world. Soon after, a strange, towering white man arrives, one who demands they shelter him as he has limited food and promises to help out.

Rice does a great job of showcasing the unsteady relationship between the Indigenous group and Caucasian who has arrived. It ripples with historical implications as well as the constant battle between wanting to help while wondering what they’re really up to.

Evan is a powerful main character. A family man first, with a heart of gold, but one who is distrusting of this new arrival and the threat of others following. And soon enough a few more do. This is compounded by members of the community dying and food supplies dwindling.

Listed at 220 pages in print length, Rice packs this with so much tension, you’ll feel like you’re reading a George R.R. Martin door-stopper. As each chapter concludes and we move closer and closer to the ending, Rice keeps somethings unanswered and suggests – subtly – about other, nefarious things at work.

The ending is a powerful whiplash of anger, frustration and confrontation. It was expected and all roads led to it, but the straightforward way Rice tells this part was fantastic. Just devoid of excessive description, we get action from A to B to C and damn if it wasn’t spot on and emotional.

We get a wonderful epilogue, that shows the reader where things were going and honestly, if a sequel was never written, I’d be perfectly fine with how it ended, wrapping up most loose ends, but leaving others up to the imagination of the reader.

What I didn’t like: I’m actually A-OK without knowing the ‘why’ of the world going dark, as I suspect some readers would want that spoon-fed. And I’m A-OK with the secondary characters remaining fairly under developed. They weren’t central to the narrative but they played their roles when called upon. The only thing that I can see, that might annoy some readers that also irked me, was the lack of the environment playing any role in the sequestered nature of the community. Yes (and small potential spoiler) we do get two characters that freeze to death, but when winter hits and the temperatures plummet, I thought for sure we’d get more of the people battling against winter as well as each other, but for the most part that’s an alluded concept with fuel running lower and the constant fight to make sure everyone had enough firewood.

Why you should buy this: Rice has crafted such a pristine story here. The characters are wonderfully complex, battered, flawed, but human. The community is great and reminded me of where I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and the realistic actions that take place once the lights go dark was more unnerving than most of the most terrifying horror novels I typically read. What Rice did here was sublime and already it’s found a place as a revered book, but that will only grow as the years go by.

Now, onto the sequel.

5/5