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Book Review: House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig

cover art for House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig

House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig

Delacorte, 2019

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984831927

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

House of Salt and Sorrows is the strangest version of the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” I have come across to date.

 

The Duke of Salten had twelve daughters. His wife died in childbirth with the last, and the girls have, one by one, died terrible deaths, until only eight of them are left: Camille, Annaleigh, Rosalie, Ligeia, Lenore, Honor, Mercy, and Verity (yes, there are some very Edgar Allan Poe-influenced names). I’ve seen some complaints about the lack of character development in the girls, but the original tale doesn’t make most of them more than placeholders.

 

Inheritance in Salten goes to the eldest child, regardless of sex. With the death of her sister Eulalie, whose funeral starts the book, Annaleigh, the narrator, is sixteen and now second in line to inherit, after Camille. Annaleigh’s father has recently remarried a much younger woman, Morella, who is now pregnant with twin boys and decides that after years of mourning, another year set aside to mourn Eulalie is a year too long, and it’s time to put the black away.  She orders them special dancing slippers, and plans a party to invite eligible suitors. Annaleigh isn’t ready to set her grief aside, but she isn’t given a choice.

 

Annaleigh believes Eulalie was murdered, and investigates with Cassius, a young man visiting Salten, who is soon entangled in the family’s intrigues (he is also the required love interest for the main character in a YA novel). She also discovers her sister Verity has been drawing disturbing portraits of their dead sisters, insisting that she is seeing their ghosts. A rumor has spread that the girls are cursed, and though invitations to Morella’s party are accepted, no one wants to speak or dance with them. Frustrated with their situation, the girls look for a magical door, find it, and go through it to discover it is an elegant ball where they can dance all night.

 

Or is that really what’s going on? I can’t say more without spoiling the story except to say that Annaleigh is an unreliable narrator and this book is really dark, disturbing, and disorienting. I’m still unclear on how much of the ending was real. The grief in the book felt authentic and the author’s world building was incredible. Salten is on an island in the ocean, and the People of the Salt have their own customs and religious traditions. “Aesthetic” is a popular concept on social media right now, and the aesthetic for this book is what I’d call island gothic. The ocean and the tall cliffs of the island permeate everything. This is a very dark tale, and while it doesn’t get violent or disgusting often, when it does, the imagery is vivid, so it isn’t for everyone, but it may be a treat for those who like their fantasy drenched in darkness.  Recommended.

 

Contains: Images of and references to suicide, murder, body horror, childbirth, stillborn children,  sexual situations, violence, gore, sexual situations, blood, decay.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

 

Posted on June 26, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

cover art for To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

Turner Publishing, 2021 (release date June 21)

ISBN: 9781684426348

Availability: Paperback, Kindle ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

If you only have the budget to purchase one book for the entire year, this is the one to buy.  To Dust You Shall Return is superior to everything else out there, might as well just hand the author the Stoker award for best horror novel of 2021 and skip the drawn-out nomination process.  It’s that good: other authors will be hard pressed to equal it.

 

Most of the story is set in Harlow, one of those Children of the Corn-type Midwestern towns you could drive through and not know if anyone actually lives there.  Curtis Quinn, an aging ex-Mafia hitman with a price on his head, is led there while on the trail of whoever butchered his beloved wife into pieces.  He suspects it’s a revenge hit to get to him, but what he finds in Harlow is much more sinister and terrifying than anything the Mafia could have dished out.  Harlow residents live in fear of the Mayor, a sadistic madman (or is he?) with inhuman powers.  The residents’ only hope is the legend of the Griffin, an outsider who may one day come to deliver the townspeople from the Mayor’s grasp.  Could Curtis, a cold-blooded killer, be that man, and is it somehow connected to his wife’s murder?

 

The story scores unbelievably high on every possible level, but the excitement and originality are the two best points.  After a brief prologue, the story shifts into high gear right away, and, in 352 pages, doesn’t let up.  There’s never a hint of a slowdown: this is the type of book you will keep reading well into the night, until exhaustion sets in.  For originality, Harlow itself is one of the most intriguing fictional towns ever invented; it’s an unusual cross between a communist community and Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines.  Residents are provided for and given jobs, but the cost is never being able to leave the town, exceept for a forays lasting a brief hour or two.  The town is surrounded with razor wire and various traps to keep the people in.  If they do escape, rangers track them down and return them to Harlow, where they are ritually slaughtered in front of the townspeople in extremely painful and bloody ways.  This causes the book’s gore factor to run high at times, but it is always in service to the story, never gratuitous for the shock factor.  That said, some of the killings are as hardcore as anything Jack Ketchum ever wrote and will make readers cower in fear, praying to forget what they just read.

 

The characters and plot also sell themselves by their unpredictability: the story does not go where you would expect.  Numerous characters double-cross each other, and the book becomes a guessing game,  keeping the story engrossing.  The legend of the Griffin also helps drive the story’s unexpected twists and turns, as most stories with a creepy little town rarely use the “savior” angle.  It’s just another example of what sets this story apart from all the competition.  Bottom line: just buy this one, and prepare to be blown away.  You won’t be disappointed.  This is beyond highly recommended.

 

Contains: blood, gore, profanity, cannibalism, ritualistic torture.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on May 13, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

cover art for The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

(  Bookshop.org )

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

Sourcebooks, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1728206028

Available: Hardcover, paperback

 

Stuart Turton probably wouldn’t describe his books as horror, but they are compelling, original, and dread-inducing. In a departure from the surreal Agatha Christie-like The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, in The Devil and the Dark Sea, this story takes place in 1634, on a ship leaving from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the center of the Dutch East Indian Trading Company, for Amsterdam, home of the company’s headquarters, a journey of about eight months during which many ships were lost as sea. Readers expecting accurate historical fiction will not find it here: in a note, Turton essentially says he did the research, but threw it out the window if he found it wouldn’t work with his story. By changing as much as he did, he’s basically written an alternate history, which would be fine except that he never identifies it as such, which is unfair to readers unfamiliar with the setting, who will think it’s solidly grounded in the historical period (I guess once someone calls your work genre-bending it’s hard to commit).

 

Passengers on the Saardam include Jan Haan, the ambitious governor general of Batavia; his wife, Sara Wessell; and their inventive daughter, Lia; his mistress, Creesjie Jens, and her sons; his chamberlain, Cornelius Vos; and guard captain Jacobi Drecht.  Also traveling on the ship is Sammy Pipps, a Sherlock-type detective and alchemist of unknown origin who has been accused of spying, and his bodyguard/case recorder, former Lieutenant Arent Hayes. Before the ship leaves, a leper warns the passengers not to leave, warning that the devil “Old Tom” will be their downfall, but the governor general is insistent on leaving for Amsterdam immediately. Complicating things by bringing religion into the mix on a ship where passengers and crew are already uneasy and superstitious, a predikant, or preacher, and his acolyte Isabel, stow away on the ship as well.

 

Just as the ship sets off, the sail is unfurled to show a symbol that Creesje, the predikant, Arent, and one of the sailors individually recognize and associate with Old Tom. Is the devil really on the ship with the passengers and sailors, are they imagining things, or is someone playing with the characters’ fears in hopes of personal gain? The predikant, a former witch hunter, claims they’ll know for sure once three unholy miracles have occurred. As the ship gets further out onto the open ocean, the unholy miracles are identified, and the weather worsens, the onboard situation gets more violent and treacherous, and it becomes clear that, real or not, Old Tom has followers among the crew. As the histories of the characters and plot twists are unraveled, and the deaths stack up, the situation becomes even more unnerving. Is the ship haunted by Old Tom, or is something else going on?

 

Turton does a fantastic job of creating a sense of mystery and dread. There is no escape from the ship out on the ocean, just people, most of whom don’t like or trust each other, adrift after a storm. Turton admits he took liberties with history for the purpose of the story, so I don’t know if sailors truly lived continually in such brutal, violent environments, but he paints a vivid picture of the dynamics. Characters who could have been one-dimensional were fully developed: Arent turns out to be the governor general’s nephew, and while Haan might have been terrible to his wife and underlings,  he clearly cherishes his relationship with Arent. Haan’s wife Sara could have been set up in opposition to his mistress, but they turn out to be close friends. Sammy and Arent, for all their similarities to Holmes and Watson, are completely different in body type, personality, background, and overarching motivation. I found the very ending unneccessarily brutal, unrealistic and extremely disappointing, and felt it marred the story in a big way,  but I felt the atmosphere, character development, and descriptive language still made this worth reading.

 

The Devil in the Dark Water reveals some very dark aspects of overseas trade and the participants in it during the 1600s. No one comes away untainted. Despite the faulty ending, it’s a tale I won’t soon forget, and I would certainly give Turton another chance.

Contains: violence, gore, murder, implied rape, brutal killing of animals, body horror, mass murder

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on February 24, 2021 by , Reply
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