Entertainment
3 New Horror Novels Full of Terrors That Are All Too Real
Our columnist reviews August’s horror releases.
Ask parents what scares them and you probably won’t get an answer like ghosts or vampires. Instead they’ll probably answer: They’re afraid of their kids suffering. That fear lies at the heart of Stuart Neville’s BLOOD LIKE MINE (Hell’s Hundred, 373 pp., $29.95), but in this novel, death is not the end, and that makes things infinitely worse.
Rebecca Carter and her daughter, Moonflower, are on the lam. They live in a van, crisscrossing the United States while carrying a dark secret. Broke, alone and without food or a place to go, they stay safe by trying to be as unmemorable as possible wherever they go. That’s easier said than done because whenever they interact with others, bad things happen.
Unbeknown to Rebecca and Moonflower, the F.B.I. is after them. Special Agent Marc Donner and his partner have been hunting a serial killer for two years, and Rebecca and Moonflower are their primary suspects. As life on the road gets harder and the F.B.I. gets closer, mother and daughter must hide while also dealing with a strange and dangerous change in Moonflower.
“Blood Like Mine” is a violent blend of crime and horror that plays with the definitions of predator and prey. However, the story’s real heart comes from its exploration of family and its consideration of what a mother will do for her child. Rebecca and Moonflower only have each other, and that is enough for a while. Then things change and Rebecca realizes that, in the state Moonflower is in, having her daughter is worse than losing her. That, ultimately, is the great horror that makes this twisty, relentlessly paced novel shine.
There is a passage a few chapters into Leslie J. Anderson’s THE UNMOTHERS (Quirk Books, 317 pp., paperback, $18.99) where the main character, a journalist named Carolyn Marshall, wonders if she’s wasting her time following a dead story. Up until that point, the novel has been so tame that readers might wonder the same thing. Fear not! Anderson’s novel is very much alive. The story explodes from there, steadily becoming stranger, bleaker and more exciting.
