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Book Review: In The Woods by Tana French

cover art for In The Woods by Tana French

In The Woods(Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French

Viking, 2007

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670038602

Available: Used hardcover, Kindle edition, paperback, mass market paperback, audiobook.

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In one of the sessions at StokerCon this year panelists brought up the Suburban Gothic. Does it exist? The suburbs probably don’t seem like a source of dark family secrets and horrific events to you,  but I live in the suburbs, and there’s a lot more hidden beneath the surface than most people might expect.

 

What better place to start exploring Suburban Gothic than with In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French? Taking place in 2004 Ireland, this is a messed up story from the beginning. Twenty years ago, three twelve-year-old kids disappeared into the wooded area behind their subdivision, and only one of them was found, with his clothes covered in blood, unable to remember anything. The survivor, Adam Ryan, moved across the country, started going by another name, and eventually worked his way up though police bureaucracy to the elite Dublin Murder Squad. Now a new murder has been committed in the same place… is it possible it is the same person responsible for his friends’ disappearance? Rob’s partner Cassie is doubtful that he can be objective, but she keeps his secret as the two of them investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl found on a sacrificial altar at an archaeological site near the woods.

 

Rob, the narrator, is an unreliable narrator who disintegrates in front of the reader’s eyes as his memories start to unravel and the personality he’s constructed for himself since his friends’ disappearance begins to peel away. It’s unclear even how much of what he’s telling us is actually happening and how much his mind is playing tricks on him as he and Cassie track down leads on their current case, thinking that perhaps it will also lead to the solution of Rob’s friends’ disappearance. In the midst of it all the workers at the dig are up against a deadline as developers plan to dig up the site to start construction on a motorway, and (speaking from experience here) there’s nothing like corrupt developers with money on the line and government officials in their pocket to liven up surburbanites against new construction.

 

French does a great job with build ups, but I felt her follow through on plot points and building relationships was sometimes a let down, or confusing. Character development is confusing, possibly because we are seeing everything through Rob’s eyes and his perceptions are unreliable. Rob himself is not an especially likable character–and from the beginning pages we know he can’t be trusted– but I loved the friendship between Rob and Cassie and was not happy with how French handled it at the end. French’s language can be evocative and lyrical: the woods of the title appear a magical, haunted place, even as close to the rather prosaic subdivision Rob, and the victim he is investigating, grew up in.

 

Compelling and disturbing until the last few pages (there is one major, essential piece of the story that is never explained, leaving it with a bothersome hole at the endcover art for In The Woods by Tana French) Tana French has successfully evoked Suburban Gothic, the darkness that lies under the pleasant-looking surface of suburbia.

Posted on June 11, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall

cover art for The Taxidermist's Lover by Polly Hall

The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall

Camcat Publishing, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0744303810

Available: Hardcover, large print paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook (Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com)

 

There are books that just spin into something unique, something that could either crash and burn or catch fire and pull the reader into the pages from the opening chapter. The Taxidermist’s Lover claims to be a modern gothic horror novel, yet it is a bit more than that. Its brave form and writing elevates it from your typical horror yarn.

 

Polly Hall has penned a different sort of novel, with a second person point of view that, while not typical, works well for the story of Scarlett in her love with husband, Henry. Henry has the odd profession of a taxidermist, which obviously seeps into the relationship that undoubtedly turns twisted.

 

The readers follow the strange couple, along with twin sister Rhett and rival Felix, as true love has consequences.

 

Henry has a predilection for creating “special” animals for Scarlett, often mashups of beasts both beautiful and grotesque. She comes to develop a fondness for them, despite their nightmarishness.

 

As Scarlett’s psyche begins to fracture, the story spirals into a hypnotic ellipse that in lesser hands, would fall apart.

 

Hall has created a thing of beauty, with poetic prose that entrances as the sparse story and dialogue swell into a fever dream.

 

Recommended for all gothic horror fans, especially those who enjoy literary fiction.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

Editor’s note: The Taxidermist’s Lover is a nominee on the final ballot of this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

Posted on May 17, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey, 2020

ISBN: 9780525620785

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook, Kindle

 

In 1950’s Mexico, Noemi, a flirtatious, intelligent fashionista, decides her cousin Catalina has been out of touch for too long.  When Noemi receives a disturbing letter from Catalina suggesting that she might want to escape from her new marriage, Noemi packs her gorgeous wardrobe and heads to isolated High Place, the ancestral home of the English Doyles, to investigate.

Ever the realist, skeptical of her cousin’s fairytale princess notions about marriage, Noemi immediately distrusts her suave brother-in-law. She soon realizes that he is evil, and so is his menacing house that has wallpaper “slippery, like a strained muscle” and walls like “sickly organs” with “veins and arteries clogged with secret excesses.” Something is not right at High Place, and Noemi starts to feel its curse invading her mind and body, slowly but surely, just as it has infected her cousin.

What begins as a poetic, gothic fairytale, becomes a wild blend of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The Doyle men and women have preserved their family line by choosing between “fit and unfit people.” The men wield their power by practicing eugenics through a weird and totally terrifying combination of sexual abuse, drugs, intimidation, and psychological control. The house has an actual heartbeat that is pulsing with mold, fungus and rot, and the creepy family patriarch, an ugly man full of secrets and disgusting tumors, sores, and black bile, is directing and insuring the family’s future from his deathbed. Murders have occurred at High Place, and strange epidemics have killed droves of workers in the family’s silver mine. Once Noemi has the facts, she knows she must fight and use her wits  to survive and save the people she cares about before the evil overcomes them and traps them in a living hell forever.

Although the book seems set in a period later than the 50’s in terms Noemi’s language and sensibility, it still is, in more than one sense, a horror story that reflects the historically violent subjugation of women used as breeders in families and cultures obsessed with lineage and legacy. Religion, status, and seclusion frequently became barriers to freedom for these women by preventing them from making choices about the direction of their own lives. The women of Mexican Gothic cope with horrible suffering and mirror the superhuman strength it took for real women to endure, and sometimes find rare opportunities to escape, the nightmarish situations forced on their gender. Highly Recommended.

Contains: gore, sexual situations, profanity, incest, body horror

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: Mexican Gothic is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. 

 

Posted on March 1, 2021 by , Reply
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