BOOK REVIEW: HAG BY JOHN GOODRICH
2/10/2018
 Hypothetically, if you were battling cancer, what would be one of the last things you’d want to deal with? Would it be the vengeful spirit of a slave that is pissed and doesn’t care you are dying? If you were living in a Boston apartment building in John Goodrich’s Hag you might want to move it up on your list. Hag is one of the most satisfying stories I’ve read this year, keeping me engaged and invested to the bitter end. We are introduced to David, a professor that moved to Boston after being diagnosed with cancer. It might not be the smartest idea, considering he has no friends or family there, but he is part of an experimental treatment and needs to be close to the hospital. His friend Sam visits as often as she can, and he does befriend a tenant of the building, yet for most of the week he is alone. That is until a ghost decides he needs her vicious company to help him forget the side effects of the chemo. Apparently, the building David moved into is haunted. The tenants and landlord know about the ghost, in fact at one point the owner says this is why the rent is so cheap. It’s a little unclear at first why the spirit singles David out, though near the end we get a bit of an idea. I’m not sure if we need a reason for the attacks, but the reasoning we do get doesn’t justify the ghost picking on a guy with cancer. I do like this setup for a ghost story. David’s weekly chemo treatments puts him out of commission for a couple of days, which is the perfect time for something terrible to happen. Goodrich threads in the tension by having the spirit randomly show up, with no clues as to when she’ll appear. Whenever David is too weak to get out of bed or is busy dry-heaving you’ll find yourself praying this isn’t one of the times she decides to show up to make everything worse. When David found out about the cancer he decided to forgo the sad looks and comments from his friends and coworkers, so he didn’t tell them, except for Sam. His reasoning being he couldn’t stand the thought of how others would react. It feels a bit convenient for the story, how can anyone help him if they don’t see the ghost? I do understand why he’d act this way, I don’t always share the bad things in my life. Yet, for the story, it does stick out a bit, like someone’s cell phone not working or the car not starting while being chased by a maniac. David is not completely without friends, he has Sam and the upstairs neighbor Valya. The friendship between the three of them is what makes this so much more than a ghost story. Sam is tough, she is fun, and she does something for David that I’m not sure a lot of friends would do. Valya is an elderly Russian widow that quickly takes David under her wing. I would love to read a story just about her life, she was a World War II pilot, walked across wartorn Germany, and now lives in Boston with her ghost of a husband. Yes, he is also a ghost, though all he really does is hang out in Valya’s apartment. Goodrich takes these two side characters and fleshes them out to the point that you are just as interested in their lives as you are of David’s. They are not there just to help build up David’s story. Sam and her wife are trying to have a baby, Valya has children that are too busy to visit her. I enjoyed reading both of their story arcs and appreciated that Goodrich decided to make them more than window dressing. As the attacks intensify, and the chemo continues to wreck David, I found myself wondering why he stayed in the apartment. It’s the one major hang up I have with the book. Like so many other ghost stories, the plot hinges on the fact that the person being haunted stays where the ghost is. If they leave, then there isn’t really a story. But, after the second attack, it became a bit frustrating watching David continue to stay there. Sam is there for some of the attacks and becomes the voice of the reader, asking David why he doesn’t move. His response is that he isn’t going to be bullied, then later, he decides he wants to help her. It sort of works as an excuse to keep him in the apartment. Though, I’d have to believe a more rational person would pack up and go. I applaud Goodrich for writing a beautiful story about a cancer patient trying to survive. There is enough horror in here to keep horror fans happy, but I believe it’ll be the story of David, Valya, and Sam that keeps you reading. Hag is a deep, heartfelt, cancer patient story masquerading as a ghost story that focuses more on surviving and friendship than it does on the actual haunting.
 In Shadows of the Wicked is a deliciously creepy story that follows two young men who cannot sever their ties to wicked ghosts that brutally murdered their mother and father, try as they might. Jeremy and Reggie’s parents were killed in front of their eyes by an evil ghost family of three. The Family includes the father, Prester, who orchestrates the family’s movement from their current spiritual world toward an ultimate Other World; Daphne, his wife and helper; and Angeline, their daughter, who has a special affinity toward inflicting pain and fear on her victims. After the murders Jeremy and Reggie move from a town in Virginia to Austin, TX to be near their Aunt Becky. Eventually the boys begin seeing The Family again. No matter how hard they try to get rid of The Family, they always come back. The Family recruits the help of a troubled man named Floyd to help entice the boys into dangerous situations that bring them closer to The Family so they can finish what they’ve started. Can Jeremy and Reggie rid themselves of The Family and Floyd for good before it’s too late for them and their closest friends? I love ghosts and ghost stories, so this book was right up my alley. Ghosts are especially scary to me when they can so brutally possess or straight up murder people, which Michael gets into early on. It’s bad enough when ghosts just haunt the hell out of you until you feel you’ll go insane - it’s another when you’ve seen them kill your parents and wonder when they’ll kill you. The story overall was super creative and pretty gory. Especially toward the end of the book when they’re in a town called Bliss - at least the town as how The Family fabricates it to the delight of Floyd and to the horror of the others - there are some pretty demented things that go on there. I also like Michael’s overall depiction of ghosts - how they’re seen, how they behave, how they touch people. I thought the ghosts were unique and creepy. The plot was the right amount of complexity to where it kept you guessing, but it still had an overall arc so you weren’t left frustrated at the end of the book. There were just a few things that could detract from the story. I felt the characters could have been a bit more developed, maybe needing more depth or complexity. The characters were thankfully consistent throughout the book, but for some reason many of them felt very two-dimensional to me. More (or different?) description about their thoughts, feelings and looks may have helped. The pace of the book starts off very fast and action-packed to set the tone of terror, but then it just seemed like a long while until you got to the action-packed ending. So if you can get over a period of lag, then you’ll be fine because the ending was pretty good and unpredictable. The last thing that bugged me was an issue of editing or proofing. There was a higher incidence of grammatical errors (i.e. a question needed a ?, but a statement didn’t need that ?) or misspelled words than what I’m used to. It wasn’t horrible by any means, but for someone who is picky about that kind of thing, it can be distracting when you find more than one or two in a single book. Overall I think this is a great book if you’re into ghost stories, and I plan on reading more by this author.
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