I’ve been in a mood for reading horror lately, and a fair number of interesting stories in that field have been crossing my path, so I’m combining reviews here of two debuts from this week. Although they’re both pretty brisk reads that include LGBTQ+ protagonists and diverse casts, they’re quite different in focus and tone.
What Grows in the Dark is a debut novel by Jaq Evans, released on March 5. The viewpoint characters are Brigit and Ian, a phony spiritualist and her cameraman who’ve been hoping to make it big with their “paranormal investigations” videos. But it gets all too real for both of them when they’re drawn to a missing-persons case in the hometown that she had fled years ago, after her troubled sister’s apparent suicide. Not only is Brigit forced to confront her traumatic memories, and the role she played in past events, but she, Ian, and several other people come to realize that much more than psychological horror is happening in the woods outside this small town, and reaching inside it to affect generations.
There are flashbacks, a plethora of secrets, unspoken romantic entanglements, and struggles with grief and guilt, yet somehow Evans weaves everything together smoothly and keeps it all moving swiftly. I’m a bit frustrated by some of the choices that characters take, and it seems apparent that even darker consequences may lie ahead in the future, but I can at least understand why those decisions were made. Overall, it’s an eerily intense book, and I’ll be interested to see what comes in the future from Evans.
Terror at Tierra de Cobre takes a very different tack. Going on sale March 7, this Weird West novella by Michael Merriam leans nearly as close to action-adventure as to horror. Here, copper miners in New Mexico Territory have disturbed the bindings on an ancient evil spirit, and she has taken them for her own. The townswomen hire female mercenaries to get their husbands back from the siren/shapeshifter, or at least to defeat the monster.
The publisher rightly compares this book to a gender-swapped version of “The Magnificent Seven”, but it also reminds me of Barbara Hambly’s The Ladies of Mandrigyn, in which the women of a city hire a mercenary to rescue their husbands from an evil wizard who enslaved them, but end up having to learn how to do the fighting for themselves.I breezed through this fast-paced thriller; however, although the short length feels right for this plot, the large cast of characters means that the reader doesn’t get to know many of them well. The villager Maria Garcia gets some growth and development, but others, from the Apache woman Kira to the head gunslinger, the nun, and the reporter, are mostly shallow sketches who get put through their paces to serve the plot. But I definitely enjoyed this book enough to want to look up some of Merriam’s novels and see what he can do with more complex characters and plots in stories with more room to breathe.
In both What Grows in the Dark and Terror at Tierra de Cobre, supernatural evil powers simply seize whatever they want from some people, but tempt others with dark bargains. For some people, the consequences of compromising with evil are swift, obvious, and severe; for others, whether they’re trying to save themselves or others (or just telling themselves that’s what they’re doing), it may take longer for the insidious effects to become apparent, and meanwhile those people can tell themselves they chose the lesser evils. It’s interesting to watch those choices and consequences unfold, and What Grows in the Dark offers the most of that; however, if at the end of the day you just want to see some people simply stand up against evil and win, even with heavy losses, you can consider giving Terror at Tierra de Cobre a try.
Combined content warnings for WGitD and TaTdC: Violent deaths, betrayals, harm to children (off-camera and memories), self-harm, body horror, prejudices, psychological horror, supernatural horror.
Disclaimer: E-ARCs of both works were provided for review purposes.
