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Book Review: Lakewood: A Novel by Megan Giddings

cover art for Lakewood by Megan Giddings

( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com)

Lakewood  by Megan Giddings

Amistad, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0062913197

Available: Hardcover, audiobook, Kindle edition

 

After her grandmother dies, college student Lena discovers her disabled, neurologically impaired mother is unable to pay her bills or afford the medication she needs to manage her disability. So when she is recruited for a research study on memory for a substantial sum of money she pushes her reservations to the side, signs an NDA and paperwork stating her agreement to any procedure the study may require, drops out of school, and tells her mother and friends she has a new, well-paid job in the small town of Lakewood as an employee at a warehouse. Bizarre psychological testing, vaccines, pills, induced isolation, and hallucinations become normalized as different test subjects come and go. Realizing that something must be very wrong, Lena attempts to question observers and participants in the study and to find information online, but is blocked at every turn, until finally she discovers that unethical government experimentation on Black people has historical precedent. Despite her unsettling findings, Lena continues to participate in the study so her mother can keep her health insurance and pay the bills.

Obviously inspired by the Tuskegee experiment and other research studies that exploited Black people in the United States, as well as the Flint water crisis, Lakewood carries that legacy forward into the present, through generations of trauma. Ir is timely in its exploration of scientific racism, the drastic actions family members will take to help ill and disabled family members afford healthcare, and government gaslighting and neglect of the study participants and their own health.

Told from Lena’s point of view, this history metamorphoses into a personalized, hallucinatory, and terrifying situation that will appall, disturb, and shock the reader as the layers peel away. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: body horror, mutilation, murder, gore, violence, medical experimentation

 

Posted on January 23, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Final Girl by Wol-vriey

cover art for The Final Girl by Wol-vriey  (  Bookshop.com | Amazon.com )

The Final Girl by Wol-vriey

Burning Bulb Publishing, 2020

ISBN: 9781948278263

Available: paperback, Kindle

 

Wol-vriey’s prior novel, The Virgin, previously reviewed here, was a hit with his fans, and left them clamoring for a sequel.  Ask, and ye shall receive: The Final Girl was a game show alluded to in The Virgin.  Thankfully, the Nigerian splat-master listened to the fans, took the idea and turned it into its own book.  It’s chock-full of what his readers love and expect: a fast-paced story with creativity, gore, and twisted humor.  It has everything that made the prior novel such a good read, the main difference being this one will appeal to a broader audience, due to the non-existence of rape and graphic sex in the book.

 

Like its predecessor, The Final Girl revolves around a reality show broadcast on the dark web, and available for viewing to anyone willing to pony up the dough.  It stars eight women contestants placed in an underground mock-up town. A sum of 24 million dollars is hidden somewhere in the town.  All the ladies have to do is find it and avoid getting killed by the monsters that populate the town.  The catch?  There can be only one woman alive at the end, so the contestants have plenty of motivation to kill each other, as well as the monsters.  After the starting bell goes off to open the show, mayhem ensues.

 

As expected, The Final Girl is another runaway train of a novel, most readers will burn through its 190 pages in a sitting or two.    The creativity shown with the monsters in the book is one of the highlights.  They aren’t made up monsters per se, but instead, they are made from human corpses, stitched together and re-animated by a company that has mastered genetic engineering.  Example: the human centipede, made from a bunch of human torsos sewn together in sections, with arms for legs, and a human head on each end.  Kids aren’t spared here either; there are also children’s bodies with flippers added, turning them into homicidal fish-babies that populate the lake in the center of town.  These creatures are mean and scary enough to give the gun-toting contestants all they can handle.

 

As for the contestants, they are fleshed out better than the last story, well enough the reader will actually be cheering for some of them, and despising others.  The pious little Muslim girl, Fatima, is a genuine charmer who is almost impossible to dislike.  On the other end, you have the identical (and identically brain-dead) twins Cherry and Berry, who are easy to dislike and root against.  Their annoying habit of always finishing each other’s sentences contributes greatly to their aggravation factor.  A dysfunctional mother-stepdaughter team, a cop, a nurse, and a hooker round out the rest of the characters, but be prepared for some surprises, as not all the characters are what they seem.  The one uniting factor is these ladies are no wimps; they can dish it out as well as any Western gunslingers when survival is on the line, as long as they have enough ammunition.

 

Combine the above with the author’s usual fast-paced style of writing and splat, and you’ve got a winner of a story. The Final Girl does have broader appeal than his usual work.  A weak spot in Wol-vriey’s writing has always been the frequent, graphic sex, that never really seemed to contribute to the story.  This time, there isn’t ANY sex in the book, although there is a rape threat, which never materializes.  By removing this element, Wol-vriey trimmed the last bit of fat off his writing, leaving a pure, stripped-down thriller of a horror novel.  Fans of Jack Ketchum and Brian Keene should devour this book, and for people looking at reading splat writing for the first time, this is a great place to start.  It’s the closest the author has come to writing a book with mass market appeal, and it’s his best yet.  Highly recommended.

 

 

 

 

Contains: violence, extreme gore, profanity, drug use, body horror

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on January 14, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

 

A note from the editor:

We are getting near the end of November and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $45 we still need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now our review of The Grace Year by Kim Liggett.

 

 

cover art for The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett (   Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com  )

Wednesday Books, 2019

ISBN-13 : 978-1250145444

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

 

At first glance, The Grace Year seems like a YA take on The Handmaid’s Tale crossed with The Lord of the Flies. It takes place in an alternate society where women and girls are divided into groups by the colors of their hair ribbons: white for girls, black for wives, and red for grace year girls. Grace year girls are sent to an isolated camp as a group when they turn sixteen, after boys and men their age and older have an opportunity to choose one to marry from among them. Some girls are “veiled” and the rest know they will be assigned to manual labor tasks. The younger sisters of the girls who don’t return run the risk of being sent to the outskirts, where they will struggle to survive and are expected eventually to sexually service men no longer satisfied with their wives.

Protagonist Tierney is about to begin her grace year. She does not aspire to be veiled, but would rather labor outside when her grace year is done, as wives’ movements and speech are very restricted and she has always enjoyed spending time outdoors, learning useful skills from her father and spending her time alone and with her friend Michael, whose family is very high status. Rather than choosing Kiersten, the girl his family has picked out for him, though, Michael chooses Tierney to keep her safe, not realizing that he has actually made her a target during the grace year.

The supposed purpose of the grace year is for girls to come into their magic and work it out of themselves without risking the men, so the girls are “safe” to be around, but girls know that things too terrible to talk about must happen, because of each group of girls that leaves, fewer come back, and the ones who do are traumatized and refuse to speak about it. In addition to their isolation, the girls must stay within a fence, because they are being hunted by “poachers” who will skin them alive, dissect them, bottle the parts, and sell them back to the men in town as aphrodisiacs. There is the obligatory section of a YA speculative survival novel where a character whose job it is to exterminate a girl actually saves her and heals her and they fall in love, but it is particularly gruesome because there is no hiding the fact that he’s there to skin, dissect, and bottle her for consumption– he even has diagrams. The body horror is strong in this book, although most of the actual damage is done offscreen.

It is difficult to write about the characters and society in this book, both women and men, because from best to worst every one of them is so poisoned by patriarchy. The gaslighting of women and girls is so extensive and ingrained that it can’t really be separated out. Would Kiersten be so cruel if she hadn’t been trapped by society’s constraints since she was a child? Would so many of the girls have been so eager to believe in their magic if they hadn’t been powerless their entire lives? Even “good” men like Michael, with the best of intentions, can’t undo the damage. In 800+ pages (Amazon says there are 416, my Kindle says 815) there was not a single character in this book whose decisions could be trusted, including Tierney’s. The ending was absolutely crushing to me. I have to hope that YA readers who get all the way through to the end will develop a strong desire to examine their decisions and choices in light of the damage patriarchy does to all of them in the present, rather than waiting for the next generation. Whether they do or not, given the number of comparisons to The Hunger Games, I am sure many will find it a compelling read. Recommended.

 

 

Posted on November 21, 2020 by , Reply
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