Right now, I find reading horror cathartic. No matter how bad things get, at least my house isn’t haunted, an ancient entity hasn’t possessed my husband (as far as I know) and the penguins I’ve seen recently at the Minnesota Zoo didn’t peck out my eyes.
In his introduction to Ira Levin’s horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby,” Chuck Palahniuk wrote that until Levin’s novel, “the real horrors were not at home.” Home became dangerous because we refused to acknowledge what was growing inside us until it was too late.
Kit Burgoyne’s ingenious “The Captive” (Soho Press, 376 pages) is set in the “too late.” An extraordinarily wealthy British family, the Woolsaws, control everything. Rosa, Cam, and Luke are anti-capitalist revolutionaries, but their organization is broken. They kidnap the Woolsaws’ daughter, Adeline, realizing too late that she has birthed the spawn of a dark entity. Unfortunately, Adeline refuses to be ransomed and the baby turns out to be “Chernobyl in nappies.”
“The Captive” is a thrilling, gory tale with comic details (“next to her daughter, everything else in the universe is just hair-clippings and pencil shavings”) and a cosmic worldview (“large concentrations of wealth are like deformations in space-time: they warp reality around them”).
Rachel Harrison’s terrific, psychological “Play Nice” (Berkley, 336 pages) is about the childhood trauma of three sisters, Leda, Daphne, and Clio, and how that trauma has festered in their adulthood. Clio, as her name in Greek mythology suggests, wants to unpack the truth about the family’s history.
The official story is their mom was an alcohol-addicted narcissist who believed a demon possessed their childhood house. After her death, the sisters vow never to return to the house. Clio defies them. Let me just say that what ensues is her gradual unraveling. Harrison’s characteristically clever plotting that centers the female experience, a snarky main character and don’t-look-over-your-shoulder horror are in cracking form here.
The Macabre (Harper Voyager)
Kosoko Jackson’s “The Macabre” (Harper Voyager, 400 pages) is a dazzlingly bold cosmic horror/fantasy akin to Matt Ruff’s “Lovecraft Country” or N.K. Jemisin’s “The City We Became.”
Artist Lewis Dixon discovers something is wrong in the British Museum when he brings one of his paintings to contribute to an exhibit. In a secret museum room, he meets Evangeline, “a Black woman in a high-powered magical position” as the head of the Royal Arcane Intelligence Agency, a global organization tasked with limiting casualties caused by “cursed antiquities.”
