HORROR BOOK REVIEW THE FOURTH HAUNTING BY F.G. COTTAM {BOOK REVIEW}

THE FOURTH HAUNTING BY F.G. COTTAM {BOOK REVIEW}

7/3/2023

HORROR BOOK REVIEW The Fourth Haunting by F.G. Cottam

it is the kind of novel that will richly reward multiple readings. Read this first for the supernatural chills and return to it for the richly realized web of relationships between the living. But leave the lights on when darkness falls.

The Fourth Haunting by F.G. Cottam

Publisher: Self-published for Kindle on February 18, 2023
Language: English
Length: 335 pages
Price: $3.57 to purchase; also available on Kindle Unlimited

Review by @KStreetMummy

You don’t read an FG Cottam novel for the gore. For unmatched chills and creeping dread, yes, but also for the complexity and richness of relationships. In Cottam’s best works, emotional restlessness serves as the engine for the plot, and The Fourth Haunting triumphantly continues this form. That’s even before the spectral nun without a face makes her appearance…

The Fourth Haunting introduces a new character in the Cottamverse, media personality and celebrity ghost hunter Tom Carter. Carter set upon his career path when as a young boy he was gifted an item once belonging to a reclusive child murderer, which triggered a thoroughly chilling encounter with the item’s original owner. Carter has a teenaged daughter living in a psychiatric residential facility and an ex-wife whose heart, along with their marriage, was broken by their child’s emotional and behavioral challenges even as Carter’s career flourished. There are few coincidences in Cottam’s novels, however, and as Carter’s professional and personal future unspools, he and his loved ones are pulled ever closer to the inferno of the Jericho Society, a sinister cult with power that extends beyond the mortal realm.

The pace is not as breakneck as in many of Cottam’s earlier works, and this may be his most ambitious use yet of multiple timelines and settings. The framing device is Carter’s work on a television series seeking to document proof of the paranormal and planned to culminate in the fourth haunted location of the title. The smorgasbord of locations thus introduced includes a haunted orphanage in the mountains of northern Italy, a former speakeasy and brothel on the South Side of Chicago, an old guerrilla hideout in western Ireland, a Scottish lighthouse, and a seemingly abandoned occult stronghold on the Isle of Wight. Although some readers may find the comparatively measured pace, array of locations, and divergent timelines throughout much of The Fourth Haunting to be superfluous in comparison to some of Cottam’s other work, it strengthens the creeping sense of dread that falls and rises–and does it ever rise–throughout the text.

Major set pieces include a tooth-tremblingly chilling encounter with a long-dead and pathetically young murder victim in an abandoned penthouse, the ghostly echo of a massacre at an orphanage in wartime Italy, and encounters in the same location with both an unthinking residual echo haunting and then with an evil consciousness exerting baleful influence from the afterlife. Cottam has always orchestrated some of the best mise-en-scène in literary horror, and his use of old-fashioned children’s toys in the initial moments of the visit to the Italian orphanage is not only eerie, but poignant and handled with sensitivity. Cottam writes notably movingly of the strain that can be placed on relationships when a cherished child is diagnosed with an overwhelming health issue. He also writes with great tenderness of the trust that we must by necessity place in the caretakers of the most vulnerable, and the potential for horror in human behavior when this trust is breached. Exploitation this is not.

While familiarity with his previous works is by no means required to relish The Fourth Haunting, longtime Cottam readers are also gifted Easter eggs in the return of both living and dead faces from previous novels, though not to the extent that they distract from Tom Carter’s quest. Their appearance is more like a quick greeting to an old acquaintance as you pass in opposite directions through a horrifically haunted airport.

There are certain roles that lend themselves well to advancing Cottam’s plots, some of which appear in The Fourth Haunting–the media star, the dogged journalist, the brilliant researcher–and it is a tribute to Cottam’s skill at characterization that they resonate anew on each outing (although I would not have missed the secondary romance between Carter and one of his documentary team, had it been excised). Cottam wields his sense of place as dexterously as he does characterization. The Fourth Haunting additionally reads as a love letter to the author’s hometown of Southport, UK. There is an affectingly elegiac tone to Cottam’s descriptions of working-class childhood and youthful casual jobs, first love, coming to terms with aging, and the compromises that we accept in return for a measure of stable happiness.

It is an indication of the extent of changes in the publishing industry, as if one were needed, that a writer of this caliber has self-published this work after traditionally publishing seventeen novels. In the hands of a less confident or experienced author, the variety of locations, characters, and timelines in The Fourth Haunting would risk losing the reader’s focus or overload with queasy sentimentality. Instead, it is the kind of novel that will richly reward multiple readings. Read this first for the supernatural chills and return to it for the richly realized web of relationships between the living. But leave the lights on when darkness falls.

THE FOURTH HAUNTING BY F.G. COTTAM

How a boy matured into England's most celebrated ghost hunter. And how what haunted him came back into his life bent only on a ghastly mission of vengeance.