I was absolutely thrilled to discover that Mexican filmmaker extraordinaire Guillermo del Doro was reuniting with Chuck Hogan for a new series of books, which kicks off with The Hollow Ones. Between 2009-2011 (was it so long ago?) the pair co-authored the outstanding vampire trilogy The Strain, which was later turned into a TV series. If you like fast paced vampire action, which begins with a single infection and, which over three books lead to an incredibly apocalyptic vision, it is very hard to beat. If you have never tried The Strain, the three books can be virtually read as a single novel and is an intense experience.
 
Hogan seems to have been relatively quiet since The Strain, whilst Guillermo del Toro has co-authored other works with two distinguished YA writers Daniel Kraus (Trollhunters) and Cornelia Funke for an unnecessary novelisation of his most famous film Pan’s Labyrinth (The Labyrinth of the Faun). Was any need for a YA(ish) version of Pan’s Labyrinth fifteen years after the film? Probably not. However, it probably reads better to those who have never heard of the original flick, as if you have seen the film the book is rather redundant.
 
The Hollow Ones is an interesting collaboration and a distinct change of direction from The Strain, in that it lacks the pace, action, and apocalypse of the earlier work. However, it is very nice to see the pair produce something fresh which does not retreat to familiar ground. Although I enjoyed the novel, I could not help thinking of a moderately successful 1987 science fiction film which aspects of the plot are strikingly similar to, simply switch the science fiction element for the supernatural and you have the same thing. It is surely a coincidence as nobody has a monopoly on such plotlines but revealing the name of the film would be a major spoiler!
 
The action begins in present day New Jersey with two FBI agents, Odessa and Leppo, who are called to a violent incident in a house which in the aftermath of, the veteran detective inexplicitly goes berserk and the much younger Odessa has to shoot and kill him. There is absolutely no reason for this moment of madness and in the fallout  Odessa is confined to a desk, with an air of suspicion hanging over her, and her career in the FBI both in taggers and hanging by a thread. However, another element of the tragedy makes her very uncomfortable which she keeps to herself; she believes she saw a shadowy smoky presence leave her partner’s body the moment she fired the fatal shot.
 
Odessa is then given a dead-end assignment, clearing out the belongings of a long since retired agent who seems to have had an office cupboard that the agency has forgot existed. At this point I could not held feeling a serious Mulder and Scully vibe, with the X-Files similarly being dumped into an office as far off the beaten track as possible. Odessa tracks down the former agent, Earl Solomon, who although he is very elderly and bedbound in a hospital, she warms to.
 
Solomon becomes an important part of the plot as the action flashes back to 1962, the Mississippi Delta region, to when he was a rookie agent. The fact that Solomon is black is crucial to the story, there were relatively few black agents in the FBI during that period, and even fewer in the Deep South of America, where segregation and racial tensions are convincingly portrayed. There is also a code of silence; whatever you do, do not talk to the police and the threat of violence is always in the air.
 
I am not going to enter into the specifics of the mystery which connects Odessa and Solomon, except that the retired agent tells Odessa to contact a man called John Blackwood by dropping a letter in a non-descript letterbox and, surprise, surprise, when she gets home this guy (as if by magic) is sitting in her house waiting for her. I found this sequence akin to something you might find in a Harry Potter or other kid’s fantasy story and rather twee for an adult horror novel. However, Blackwood was obviously a guy from a different time and place, and he bounced off Odessa well, they never quite became a ‘buddy’ partnership, but their clash of styles and mannerisms was entertaining.
 
There are various other flashbacks to London in 1582, which fill in the back stories around Blackwood, this takes in real historical character John Dee, who was very influential in the court of Queen Elizabeth I and experimented with alchemy and other dodgy types of magic and mysticism. The crux of the story revolves around events which happened in 1582 and vibrate through time until 2020 sucking in both FBI agents in 1962 and 2020. It is great how some of it pieces together, with stylish writing and entertaining set pieces which clash and contrast the supernatural with the modern world of 2020.
 
Although The Hollow Ones had three well developed story strands, ultimately the individual parts were more interesting than what they morph into, which was slightly old hat and many readers are sure to feel they have been here before. The press material implies this is the start of a series and if it is to be successful I would suggest Odessa and Blackwood are given stronger ‘cases’ to investigate so that they do not come across as a poor man’s Mulder and Scully or Charlie Parker. It will be interested to see whether the authors follow the John Connolly (Charlie Parker) route in which supernatural themes are subtlety merged into their detective novels. From the way The Hollow Ones is presented, this is probably a certainly, but Connolly sets the bar exceptionally high and del Toro and Hogan will need to pick up momentum in the follow-up. It will be interesting to see which direction the series takes (and whether the hyper-busy del Toro has time for it in his busy schedule). However, in long running series, Connolly included, it takes time to develop characters with the reader growing into them, which hopefully will be the case with The Hollow Ones as events move on. A convincing opening entry, but I suspect there is better still to come.   
 
Review by Tony Jones

A horrific crime that defies ordinary explanation.

A rookie FBI agent in dangerous, uncharted territory.

An extraordinary hero for the ages.

Odessa's life is derailed when she's forced to turn her gun on her partner, who turns suddenly, inexplicably violent while apprehending a rampaging murderer. The shooting, justified by self-defence, shakes Odessa to her core and she is placed on desk leave pending a full investigation.

But what most troubles her isn’t the tragedy itself – it’s the shadowy presence she thought she saw fleeing the deceased agent’s body after his death.
​
Questioning her future with the FBI and her sanity, Odessa accepts a low-level assignment to clear out the belongings of a retired agent in the New York office. What she finds there will put her on the trail of a mysterious figure named John Blackwood, a man of enormous means who claims to have been alive for centuries. What he tells her could mean he’s an unhinged lunatic. That, or he’s humanity’s best and only defence against an unspeakable evil that could corrupt even the best of us . . .

There's a kind of unwritten understanding in the UK where, if someone asks you if you're fine, you say “not too bad” or something similar, even if the weevils of despair are burrowing into deep your soul, or you dropped your yoghurt on the bus.
 
So when you see a title like The Perfectly Fine House, you immediately think “yeah, it's not though, is it?” The answer is a definite no. There's another clue in that simple, effective cover by Don Noble too, with a set of grasping hands reaching towards a house on fire. And if you've read anything by Stephen Kozeniewski or Wile E Young before, you'll be expecting richly-realised world-building along with nerve-worrying chills. This is a book that delivers on both counts, and it's chock full of imagination, humour, romance...so much more than the cover and title suggest.
 
The most interesting aspect is how the paranormal is brought into the everyday, bringing to mind The Frighteners, Ghostbusters, or even the bureaucratic afterlife of Beetlejuice. In this world, exorcists are more akin to plumbers than troubled, pea-soup splattered priests. Ghosts in this world enjoy vices like sage and sex, and some humans take advantage of this by visiting ghostly hook-up agencies. It's through one such purveyor of erotic ectoplasmic encounters that we meet the main characters of Donna and her dead twin Kyle, who promises his overworked sister a stress-free vacation in the titular house.
 
Naturally, a non-haunted house in a world where you can pet dead dogs and hold hands (or more) with a spectre is a cause for concern. As the twins struggle to understand the place and its effect on both dead & living souls, relationships are threatened along with all of ghostkind.
 
Perhaps the book's greatest strength is how well realised its world is, with some fantastic attention to detail. It's a place where you learn about ghosts in school and just accept them, a kind of parallel Earth that's adapted to allow spectres to exist alongside regular folk. Disgruntled humans chase away pesky entities with windchimes, or threaten to toss them into salt jail; exorcists treat ley lines like blocked pipes, and instead of being bound to a single place, ghosts travel by popping in and out of existence, teleporting themselves wherever they like. Because it's all handled so matter-of-factly, it's easy to get on board with the idea early on without the concept having to be over-explained. Everything just fits.
 
Another strength is how becoming a ghost is taken for granted, a safety net of sorts for the living. Because the spirits here are somewhat tangible, if a little squishy, and visible to basically anybody, nobody seems to feel a true sense of loss, or concern about heart attacks and the like. Until the perfectly fine house starts claiming victims, that is. When the dead start to experience true death, it packs a heavy emotional and psychological punch, especially as each ghost is infused with personality instead of just being a cartoonish floating wad of sheets. It's easy to share the ghosts' panic and unease once the threat of eternal non-existence looms, and it's a credit to both authors that a story packed with dead things retains such a strong human core.
 
For my money, any book that can have you feeling existential dread on one page and love of life on the next is definitely worth a purchase.

​In an alternate reality where ghosts are as commonplace as the weather, the most terrifying thing imaginable is a house not being haunted.

Donna Fitzpatrick runs a surrogacy agency, where ghosts can briefly possess volunteers in order to enjoy carnal pleasures. She's also working herself into an early grave. But that's no big deal because death is no worse than puberty. That's particularly evident in Donna's twin, Kyle, a self-absorbed roustabout who spends most of his time high on sage. Kyle's been in arrested development since his motorcycle accident fifteen years ago.

When Donna has a panic attack, Kyle insists she take a vacation at an abandoned mansion. There's just one small problem: there isn't a single ghost in Jackson Manor. And while an unhaunted house seems no worse than an oddity at first, soon ghosts go missing, natural disasters consume entire cities, and every afterlife on earth is threatened by the terrible secret behind . . .

THE PERFECTLY FINE HOUSE.

In 2019 I stumbled upon Leo Darke’s Lucifer Sam which became one of my favourite novels of the year and I was delighted to give it a rare 5/5 gingernuts. It was a very quirky horror comedy built around how a failed heavy metal band saves the world, it was so crazy even the legendary Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious comes back from the dead, taking the stage for a gig near the end. It was stupid, very funny and I would recommend it very highly. Sadly, it picked up very little press from the horror community and I regard it as a lost gem. Here is the review should you fancy ‘rediscovering’ this filthy little treat:
 
 https://gingernutsofhorror.com/fiction-reviews/lucifer-sam-by-leo-darke-book-review
 
When I heard from Grinning Skull Press that Darke had a new novel in the pipeline I got VERY excited and I hoped he would replicate the magic formulae which made Lucifer Sam such a unique experience; with a similarly clever blend of comedy, horror, sheer ridiculousness and a dollop of gore. Although Pandemonium is comparable in style to Lucifer Sam and was very enjoyable, it failed to reach the great heights of its predecessor, but still had its fair share of high points. It is also billed as ‘Book One in the 101 Ways to Hell’ series and I would question whether there is enough scope to merit a sequel.
 
Initially I though the novel was going to have amusing musical references, harking back to Lucifer Sam, and the opening chapter title, the rather knowingly, ‘I Hate Pink Floyd t-Shirt’ certainly backed that up, but the musical references sadly petered out. The story opens with main character Billy listening to a stolen CD of Pink Floyd cover songs when there is an aggressive knock at the door. After answering, he is promptly violently assaulted by a man who tells him to cease contacting a woman called Aura, whom we realise was Billy’s (sort of) girlfriend. Billy, in his late thirties, was a likable loser, not dissimilar to the failed rocker from Lucifer Sam.
 
A large part of Pandemonium takes place in a bookshop in Bristol and the amusing dynamics involving the various loser characters who work there, few of which truly enjoy their jobs and clock watch until closing time. I enjoyed these interactions, as this was a very quirky (and rather British) setting for a horror novel. After Billy takes his kicking the story flicks back to the moment when he meets Aura, a beautiful young woman he notices in the bookshop, idly flicking through guidebooks about walks across the British Isles. He does his best to chat her up, much to the amusements of his colleagues, whilst doing so he sees her thumbing through a very old looking book of walks. After she exits the shop, totally besotted by her, Billy hunts down the book she was browsing hoping it might provide a clue on how he can locate her for a date.
 
To say this woman has sexual magnetism would be an understatement and Billy becomes totally obsessed with her. However, we quickly realise that the book ‘The Olde Britishe Guide to 101 Walkes Through Hell’ is equally magnetic, but in very different and rather ways. If you have ever seen the Japanese horror film Dark Water there is a ball which scarily reappears after being thrown away, this book does something similar and holds whoever reads it in a dark obsessive funk, drawing them to a particular walk.
 
If you have ever been a casual rambler in the south of England Pandemonium may well put you off as much of the book revolves around a certain route: ‘Walk No 21 Deepest, Darkest Somerset’ which several brave souls embark upon only to face a sticky end! Some of these scenes were very entertaining, such as when perennial shoplifter Cyril Peck (who hates the countryside) nicks the book and finds himself in the middle of nowhere attempting ‘Walk No 21’ when you just know something horrible is around the corner (or over the next sty) or the local rambling group who meet a violent and bloody end after stopping for their packed lunches.
 
Other highlights included flashbacks to Roman Briton (364 AD) where the story originates and the entertaining back-and-forth between Billy and Julie Everly. Whilst Billy is obsessed with Aura, Julie is equally obsessed with Billy and will do anything to bed him. The blend of mundane book-stacking, getting warned by their anal manager, selling the odd book, whilst side-batting Julie’s obvious advances was a good laugh and distraction from the supernatural story. You will not take any of this very seriously.    
 
The balance between horror and comedy is difficult to get right and although it failed to hit the sweet spots of Lucifer Sam, it still jogged along nicely and was a speedy and easy read. Although Pandemonium lacked scares, but that’s the price you pay for comedy and a light writing style, however, it did have some unsettling moments surrounding the freaky whistling Billy hears when he has been close to the dodgy book or when Billy stumbles upon the pub from Hell.  Make sure you hang around for the poor saps looking around for the paintball centre which does not exist. They should have all gone to the pub instead (but in Bristol, not the one from Hell!) 
 
Review by Tony Jones
 

From the moment their eyes met across the crowded sales floor, Billy knew he had met his soulmate, the woman he was meant to be with. While on a date, the appearance of three hooded figures in a field spooks Aura, and she tells Billy he needs to put her from his mind, forget she ever existed. Then she was gone.

But how do you forget the one you are destined to be with?

The only clue to his girlfriend's disappearance is an old and very strange guide to country walks that Aura had shown great interest in-particularly Walk No. 21, which would take the traveler through "deepest, darkest Somerset."

What is it about Walk No. 21 that had Aura so fascinated?

And why has it become an obsession, not only of Billy's, but of anyone who has come in contact with the book?

In my recent review of Gary McMahon’s novella Glorious Beasts I mentioned his long and enviable track record as a short fiction writer. Now Journalstone/Trepidatio have published a new collection of his stories from the last six years. The title, Some Bruising May Occur, is of manifest excellence, but do the stories live up to it?

They’ve certainly chosen a cracking one-two punch to start things off. ‘My Boy Builds Coffins’ has featured both in Black Static magazine and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8, and you can see why. McMahon is able to mine the simple premise described in the title – a small and otherwise crashingly normal boy unnerves his parents by taking up the building of mysterious miniature caskets – to unearth a fine crop of terrors such as parental guilt and inadequacy, bereavement, and the loss of childhood innocence. The latter is in fact a recurring preoccupation of the writer, although in many of the stories in this collection the innocence is not so much lost as wantonly smashed with the hammer of abuse by a procession of unfit parents and authority figures. The second story ‘Some Pictures in an Album’ is for my money the best of these, partly because it uses a technique I love – telling a very dark story through snapshots described by a traumatized narrator – and also because it avoids feeding the reader too much information, leaving a nice little garden of nightmares to flourish in the interstices of the plot.

Some of these child-centric stories, such as ‘Unicorn Meat’, were too unremittingly black for my taste (though you can’t say the title doesn’t warn you), but others contained an appealing thread of hope gleaming redly in the dingy tapestry of despair, poverty and cruelty. For instance ‘Little Boxes’ – which also boasts such a great basic premise that I’m amazed no-one seems to have thought of it before – is a very enjoyable look at the form a supernaturally-enhanced uprising of disaffected youth might take, though if you’re the sort of person who lies awake at night worrying about just how pissed off Generation Z are going to be when they grow up, then you might want to skip this one. ‘Hard Knocks’, which deals with a school shooting, also has a satisfying ending which contains a substantial component of revenge but without being too black-and-white.

McMahon’s adults, meanwhile, are not always evil, and many of the characters here are just ordinary people struggling to keep their heads above the black waters of modern life, with depression, dysfunctional relationships and addiction being recurring themes. Often the weird elements in a story will emerge seamlessly from the awful environments they occur in, and when you think back on the stories it’s often hard to remember at exactly what point the supernatural intrudes. And yet these incursions of strangeness, dark as they are, often add a note of liberation, however fleeting, to the hopeless, predictable and often marginal lives of the heroes and heroines. This is the case in ‘Tethered Dogs’, which features a prostitute granted an occult power (but at a very heavy price), and ‘What We Mean When We Talk About The Dead’. This examination of the afterlife is almost upbeat by comparison with the other tales in this collection, and together with ‘Tethered Dogs’ it is the most reminiscent of McMahon’s Thomas Usher novels.

Not all the stories are so focussed on social justice, however, and in fact some of the best are more overtly fantastical. ‘Kaiju’ pulls off the trick of making you seriously entertain the possibility of a Godzilla-type entity appearing without warning to clobber us all; it is, of course, seen through the lens of a survivor, but it has a more original plot than a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. ‘Cinder Images’ is a headfuck of the Nicholas Royle variety about a cursed film with the power to warp reality, and ‘The Night Just Got Darker’ is that rare thing, a story about the nature of writing that you can actually finish and enjoy. So whatever type of horror fiction floats your boat, you should find something that tickles your fancy here, as long as you like your horror lean, unsentimental and committed to depicting the modern world without airbrushing.

Review by Daisy Lyle 

There has been considerable buzz for The Only Good Indians amongst reviewers and bloggers, the first novel in four years from Stephen Graham Jones. The excellent Mongrels of 2016 is a tricky act to follow and although this latest work shows the versatility of a very experienced author, ultimately it falls short of the earlier read. Neither is it likely to have the wider appeal of the quirky and engaging Mongrels which featured a slightly different type of ‘outsider’ to that of The Only Good Indians.
 
At its heart one of the major themes of The Only Good Indian is that of the ‘outsider’, providing social commentary and observations about the lives of modern Native Americans or Indians. The prologue opens with a newspaper headline; “Indian Man Killed in Dispute Outside Bar” and throughout the story this idea is revisited; the downtrodden plight of the modern American Indian. There is nothing wrong with social commentary in horror novels, but the balance with the supernatural must gel. In The Only Good Indians it lurked so far in the background the reader might easily forget they were reading a tale of the uncanny. The many cultural observations of the American Indian, the prejudices which still exist, the differences in living on or off the reservations or clashes between tribes all played a part in the background story and were perhaps more interesting that the supernatural angle. 
 
The main story revolves around an event which happened ten years before the action begins; Gabe, Cassidy, Richy and Lewis were out hunting on the last day of the season and shot a herd of elk. These killings were unnecessarily as they gunned many more animals that they required for food and through some sort of weird karma, a spirit connected to the dead animals is seemingly hunting them for revenge ten years later. In the prologue, Ricky is killed first, it looks like a bar fight which went too far, but the others think there might be something sinister and contact with each other for the first time in years. Set over a two-week period, there is a countdown to the exact ten-year anniversary to the killings of the elks whilst the entity draws closer.  But this countdown was a real plod and I struggled to remain invested in the slow-moving proceedings. 
 
The spirit, the entity seeking revenge, lacks page time and for the most part remains very abstract. I just did not have the patience for the crawling pace of the novel and once the men were being hunted, they just seemed to accept that this was their lot in life, their price to pay for their earlier discretion. It lacked tension and any sense of urgency with the Indians running short of ideas very quickly. Ultimately the supernatural angle of the novel was weak, and I struggled to balance the elk entity story with the lives of these downtrodden Indians who lived on the fringes of society. I was looking to be entertained and I kept putting this book down and reading other stuff and it was tough to finish. Amazon shoots itself in the foot by name checking it with Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, this novel has nothing in way of comparison to the terrifying remote Swedish forests where the Nevill masterpiece is set. 
 
At a certain point the novel does make a change of direction and the action picks up slightly after the introduction of Denorah, the daughter of one of the four, Gabe. I found her much easier to spend time with as she has not been ground down by the same circumstances which impacted her father and his friends. Denorah, who has her own problems, is also a basketball prodigy but is often at odds with the school coaches due to her flamboyant, seen as showing-off, style. Again, nothing to do with horror, but I found these sections concerning basketball and the American Indian from the teenage perspective to be one of the strongest of the book. Eventually the Demorah basketball story intertwines with that of her father and the elk entity which was an odd but entertaining sequence. Although I did come close to abandoning this novel, I was ultimately pleased I finished it, mainly as I wanted to know how everything played out for this spiky, but very likable, teenager.
 
Entities associated with Native American mythology often pop up in modern horror fiction and although The Only Good Indians does occupy the literary end of the genre it lacked the necessary ingredients to make me want to take some of the ideas explored in the book further. For example, did the killing of the elk have some special significance to the Blackfeet Tribe, to which the men were members? Did the four break a tribal unwritten law by killing more than they could eat? Was the elk ever seen as a supernatural force by the Blackfeet in any wider context? These are all good questions, but I just did not care enough about the men involved to follow any of it up. I recently also read J.H. Moncrieff’s Those Who Came Before, which concerns a supernatural happening on an ancient Indian reservation. That novel might not have been as thoughtful or literary as The Only Good Indians, but it was a great page-turner and along the way also made observations about the life of modern American Indian without sacrificing readability. 
 
Ultimately, I struggled with the writing style of The Only Good Indians and found it heavy going, slow and all the characters were too similar until Denorah is introduced to the story and there are a few sparks. I am sure this novel will have its fans and many readers will be delighted to see Jones return to the Native American themes he last visited in the strong novella Mapping the Interior, but it lacked the freshness of Mongrels .

Tony Jones

Adam Nevill's The Ritual meets Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies in this atmospheric gothic literary horror.

Ricky, Gabe, Lewis and Cassidy are men bound to their heritage, bound by society, and trapped in the endless expanses of the landscape. Now, ten years after a fateful elk hunt, which remains a closely guarded secret between them, these men and their children must face a ferocious spirit that is coming for them, one at a time. A spirit which wears the faces of the ones they love, tearing a path into their homes, their families and their most sacred moments of faith.
​
The Only Good Indians, charts Nature's revenge on a lost generation that maybe never had a chance. Cleaved to their heritage, these parents, husbands, sons and Indians, these men must fight their demons on the fringes of a society that has no place for them.