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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

Book Review: SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz

A note from the editor:

We are midway through October 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 $195 we 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 SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz.

cover art for SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire

SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz (   Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com )

Mocha Memoirs Press, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1735219554

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

The late L.A. Banks’ Vampire Huntress series, and her ability to transform common tropes of vampire fiction into stories that reflected the African-American experience, inspired many of the authors in SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire. Anthology editor Nicole Givens Kurtz continues that tradition here by showcasing Black writers and their imaginings of vampires, slayers, and hunters through their stories, giving Black readers the opportunity to be seen in vampire fiction that takes on the standard Eurocentric tropes and transforms them in a way that is uniquely relevant to Black people and also provides a window for other readers into what they have been missing because of the limited perspective of most vampire fiction. The stories come from all over the African diaspora, but the majority of them are by authors from the United States and Britain. Authors take various approaches to the concept of vampirism, inspired by Black culture, mythologies, history, and experiences, but there is nothing boring here. Interspersed between stories are beautifully calligraphed obituaries.

In the section of stories from the United States and Britain, strong stories include “Dessicant”, by Craig Laurance Gidney, takes place in a badly-kept up low-income apartment building that has red dust in the vents that is making its occupants sick and draining them of fluids. The negligent landlord can’t be reached and the protagonist, a Black trans woman ostracized by other residents, has to find a way to combat the dust, or whatever it is, on her own. “The Retiree”, by Steven Van Patten, is a funny, heartbreaking story that will give readers a new perspective on what goes on in a retirement home In “The Dance”,  by L. Marie Wood, the protagonist is surprised to learn there is more to her sexuality than she realized. In “A Clink of Crystal Glasses Heard”, by LH Moore, Neeka and her friends have a coming-of-age ceremony planned by their mothers that is not what they expected. “Diary of a Mad Black Vampire”,  by Dicey Grenor, puts the reader in the head of a bored, lonely and vicious Black vampire who finds herself intrigued by a fragile-seeming albino white girl. “The Last Vampire Huntress”, by Alicia McCalla, remixes the story of Kendra the Vampire Slayer, with Kendra the reluctant, prophesied, last vampire huntress who must accept her destiny and kill her vampire boyfriend after he attacks her friends. “Unfleamed”, by Penelope Flynn, tackles race and violence in the Victorian era with its take on the Dracula story. “Di Conjuring Nectar of di Blood” , by Kai Leakes, is a gorgeously written historical story of love and generational trauma. In “Snake Hill Blues”, set in 1927,  conjure woman Mamma Lucy eliminates a vampire who has been preying on dancing girls. I hope this author will bring her back in other stories!

The stories from African authors are also strong.  A few that stuck out to me included Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s “Attack on University of Lagos Law Faculty”, an entertaining story narrated by a pompous, egotistical law student who finds himself in the surprising position of vampire slayer, and “His Destroyer”, by Samantha Bryant, is a powerful rendering of the Passover story from the point of view of  the avatar of the Angel of Death. “Quadrille” is an engaging and occasionally darkly humorous story about friendship narrated by a vampire who has become a reporter in conflict zones in order to cover up his feeding habits, abetted by a djinn and a shapeshifter.

A last section contains stories about the future. These stories aren’t really horror, but they are compelling. In “Bloodline” scientists make a terrible mistake, enhancing a vampire’s powers.  “Message in a Vessel” is a science fiction story about the consequences of human enslavement to vampires, and “Blood Saviors” is a more fantasy-oriented tale in which an investigator for the vampires’ council discovers that a vampire has been enslaving and draining earth elementals to make a rejuvenating serum for humans, whose blood has become polluted, leading to vampires getting sick.

This is a great collection overall, with fresh takes on vampire lore that I really haven’t seen elsewhere, informed by Black experiences and perspectives. There’s enough here to love that it has taken me much longer than I expected to write this review. If you love vampire fiction or horror anthologies, and want to support Black authors, publishers, and readers of horror you should definitely pick this up. It’s a great way to discover some really talented Black writers, if you haven’t already. Highly recommended.

Contains: Animal killing, body horror, blood-drinking, torture, scientific experimentation, mutilation, murder, gore, violence, sexual situations, racism, sexual assault, rape, dehumanization, insects, genocide.

Posted on October 20, 2020 by , 1 comment
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