I've been on a horror kick lately
Jonathan Maberry's first novel, the first in the Pine Deep trilogy. Pine Deep is his Derry or Castle Rock - lots of weird stuff happens there and most residents simply choose to live with it. In Pine Deep, they lean into it
hard, to the point that the Halloween season is their Christmas and they bill themselves as The Most Haunted Town In America. Thousands show up for the various festivities, culminating on Halloween. This year, though, things are different and much, much worse. Thirty years ago there was a terrible series of killings that ended in them lynching The Bone Man, a wandering blues musician. Now the real killer is about to rise again, and he's been working on building up agents of his in the town for decades.
Very pleased with this, even if the first book is mostly intro and set-up. We get introduced to all the major players, backstory on the events of long ago. and the general plan of things we're going to be seeing in the next two books.
This is a series of short stories set in Pine Deep; some of them are flashbacks to the past of some characters but most of them many years after the tragedy in the first series. I read this book first, and the difference between major characters in this and Ghost Road Blues is stark and sometimes disturbing as you realize just how much they've been through.
There are a couple of Joe Ledger tie-in stories here, both vastly amusing because normally unflappable Joe really does lose his cool when confronted with in-your-face supernatural stuff.
The final book in the Kagan the Damned series. All the plot threads a-brewing come to a head, here. The ultimate finale is IMO kind of rushed, and some of the revelations are less than I think they could have been. But it's still a good homage to classic Sword-And-Sorcery adventure mixed with some Mythos horror.
I'm not a fan of ghost stories. I'm not a fan of haunted house stories. I loved this book.
I'm not a fan because so, so often we get a long sloggy build-up of 'is it or isn't it?' that I'd just as soon not go through again. and then Stuff Happens only in the last few chapters. That doesn't happen here. First line of the book: "The walls of the house were bleeding again."
Now, there is a bit that occurs just before the home stretch where I almost closed the book and gave it to Goodwill because, well, I've been burned before and it tweaks my second most hated genre convention, but... trust the author. She brings it home in a great conclusion.
Great little start to some frothy and neat British urban fantasy. The 'right hand' are the scholars and researchers while the 'left hand' are the boots on the ground door-to-door people; both protect the mundanes and maintain the ancient bargains that separated the human world from the spirit world. Sometimes, some critters get frisky or think their time has come again, and then there is trouble.
