No, I agree that Elk Head Woman was a straight up baddie. It’s an interesting idea to make her sympathetic, but I didn’t pick up on it in anything more than passing.
As promised, some other horror books I’ve read recently:
The Living Dead by George A Romero and Daniel Kraus
George A Romero essentially created the iconography of the modern zombie myth via his string of legendary movies. When he died in 2017, he left an incomplete novel, a story he wished to tell that he could never get the budget or funding for. This manuscript has been taken up and completed by Daniel Kraus. It’s hard to guess what’s Romero and what’s Kraus (although the fascinating Afterword goes some way towards this), but the most important thing is, it feels authentic. Just like the movies, there are lashings of gore, mixed with trenchant social commentary. The atmosphere is right and the settings feel faithful to the films without slavishly reproducing them. George’s trademark pessimism is there in spades as well. Fans are also going to dig the nods to other Romero films, and some other post apocalyptic scenarios (I’m sure there was a reference to The Last Of Us).
As a quibble, I’d like to have seen more of a global perspective, but maybe that’s a different book.
A Cosmology Of Monsters by Shaun Hammill
A multi decade story of a family haunted by hereditary monsters, real and metaphorical. A lot of the buzz around this one talks about HP Lovecraft, and to be honest, I think that’s a little misleading. While it shares that sense of reality not being what we think, the horror here is as much intimate as it is cosmic, and the book is far better written and interested in character than anything that Providence misanthrope ever managed. It’s certainly rooted in classic American horror, with nods to King, haunted house rides and Anne Rice as well as old Howard Phillips, but it sits aside from that world. It’s a quiet, odd, melancholy, book, with something of the off kilter fairy tale quality of Jonathan Carroll. It’s not a brutal gorefest, and you could have an argument about if there’s even a villain, but in the end, it’s a book that got under my skin, and I think it’ll linger there.
