Greetings from the Macabre Republic…

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…Home of the red, black, and blue; where there’s a darkness not just on the edge of town, but all along Main Street; and where the heartland lies deep within October Country.

This site is an outgrowth of the blog Macabre Republic (constituted in 2010), which was devoted to the celebration and appreciation of the Gothic in American literature and culture. My goal here is not merely to construct a platform for my own written work, but to build a community of fellow aficionados–all those who feel right at home on the nightside.

Think you might fit in nicely? Here’s a quick citizenship test:

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Matter of Death and Life

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The Life of Chuck is one of Stephen King’s most unusual works, so perhaps it’s appropriate that I have a strangely mixed reaction to its 2025 film adaptation (currently streaming on Hulu). The narrative–both literary and cinematic–features an experimental structure (three acts presented in reverse chronological order, covering separate periods of the title character’s life) and a curious juxtaposition of tones/genre elements. We move from the grim mystery of the opening (an inexplicable apocalypse plagues civilization) through the light-hearted middle (centered on a joyful dance sequence) to the quiet horror (the dark secrets of Chuck’s childhood home, with its haunted cupola) of the concluding section.

To no surprise, Mike Flanagan displays his directorial expertise in this quite faithful adaptation. Each of King’s three acts receive scrupulous attention, and brim with striking details. The blueish televisual images of Chuck Krantz projected onto the windows of a blacked-out neighborhood was an effectively eerie touch, and the choreography of the dance scene in the outdoor mall is exquisite. Flanagan arguably surpasses King’s novella in terms of interconnecting the different sections. The viewer can’t help but appreciate the various visual echoes and dialogue callbacks that retroactively explain and enrich the opening section.

Aside from flashing some very impressive dance moves, Tom Hiddleston (playing Chuck as a 39-year-old accountant) doesn’t distinguish himself here. But that’s not a knock on his acting, but a reflection of the limitations of the adult role. Granted more screen time, Benjamin Pajak is more compelling as an eleven-year-old Chuck; his interactions with his grandparents and his grammar-school crush are equally endearing. Familiar Flanagan players such as Kate Siegel and Samantha Sloyan pop up here, shining in their brief appearances, and Mark Hamill gives a terrific performance as Chuck’s loving but grief-stricken grandfather Albie.

The film is not devoid of missteps, such as its employment of an omniscient narrator (Nick Offerman). I found such random splashes of voiceover commentary intrusive, confusing (as I wondered what, if any, connection the narrator had with the characters) and facile (a lazy device for conveying exposition). The haunted-cupola plotline also disappoints, but again, this seems to be mainly a flaw inscribed in the source material. King doesn’t elaborate on this paranormal element as much as he likely would in a full-fledged novel. There is little explanation as to how/why the cupola does what it does to visitors; it is a rough maguffin imported to facilitate story development.

My biggest gripe, though, is that film failed to be as emotionally moving as I had expected. Chuck’s struggle is sad but not tearjerking, and the carpe diem theme sounded by the conclusion falls flat. The film lacks the coming-of-age bittersweetness of Stand By Me, or the exhilarating release of Andy Dufresne in the rain after escaping Shawshank prison. Make no mistake: The Life of Chuck is a well-crafted and highly watchable film, but one that is not destined to achieve classic status. Ultimately, it proves less than the sum of its disparate parts. Flanagan did his best with the offbeat source material, but the director’s considerable King-adapting skills can be better focused on other, more canonical works of the author.

 

Horror Highlights

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2025 was an amazing year…in the world of horror fiction, film, and television. Here are ten year-end reviews of the best the genre had to offer:

 

The Lineup: “Mother Horror’s Top 50 Horror Books in 2025”

Fangoria: “The 25 Best Horror Movies of 2025”

The Hollywood Reporter: “The Best Horror Movies of 2025”

RogerEbert.com: “It’s Stephen King’s World: How the Writer Became the King of Hollywood Again in 2025”

Crime Reads: “The Best Books of 2025: Gothic Fiction”

Screen Rant: “The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2025”

Book Riot: “The Best Horror Books of 2025 for When You Really Want a Good Scare”

Bloody Disgusting: “10 Best Horror Television Series of 2025”

Bloody Disgusting: “The Best Horror Books of 2025” 

Bloody Disgusting: “Best of 2025: 10 Hidden Horror Gems You Might’ve Missed” 

 

Happy New Year to All the Horror Lovers in the Macabre Republic!

Countdown–Flannery O’Connor’s Top Ten American Gothic Stories: #8

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At loooong last, this countdown resumes…

[For #9 on the countdown, click here.]

 

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1953)

Typical of O’Connor’s fiction, this brief yet resonant story is peopled with grotesques. Old lady Crater is toothless, her feminine frame likened to “a cedar fence post.” Her daughter Lucynell is chubby, “completely deaf,” and mentally challenged (“afflicted,” in the parlance of the narrative). Then there’s the tramp Tom T. Shiftlet (the echo of “shiftless” in his surname underscores an aimless lifestyle) who shows up one evening at the “desolate spot” of the Crater homestead: “His left coat sleeve was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it [he soon explains that he lost the limb fighting in the “Arm Service”] and his gaunt figure listed slightly to the side as if the breeze were pushing him.” When he lifts his arms up, “his figure formed a crooked cross,” a striking image for this offbeat preacher-type (Shiftlet numbers “gospel singer” amongst his many past professions) given to dire proclamations such as “The world is almost rotten.” O’Connor’s story is marked not just by physical disability and intellectual limitation, but also spiritual sterility.

In true American Gothic fashion, appearances deceive in this piece. “Ravenous for a son-in-law,” the old woman works to pawn off her daughter (whom she claims is only fifteen or sixteen, but in reality “[t]he girl was nearly thirty”). The mother seems less interested in securing someone to love and look after her special-needs daughter than in having a handyman around to fix up the decrepit domicile. But the duplicitous Shiftlet is running his own con game, and matrimony is just a ruse to satisfy his material interests. The hero-villain invokes an appropriately Gothic context when told he’ll have to sleep in the Crater car: “with a grin of delight” masking his visage, he asserts that “the monks of old slept in their coffins!” A poor approximation of Christ (after getting the old car running again, he “had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead”), Shiftlet proves a quite Satanic figure. When the old woman throws in a new paint job for the car as part of the marriage agreement, “Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.” After getting the mother to finance a weekend-getaway honeymoon, Shiftlet drives off with Lucynell, stopping en route at a roadside eatery whose name points toward the infernal: “The Hot Spot.” Shiftlet commits a stunning, shameful act of selfishness and irresponsibility by abandoning his sleeping bride there and stealing off with the coveted car.

Driving on alone toward Mobile, Shiftlet experiences feelings of depression and perhaps pangs of guilt. He sights a billboard with a warning message to “Drive safely. The life you save may be your own” (at this point of his sinful life, it’s more than just Shiftlet’s physical well-being that is at risk). Back at the Hot Spot, the guy working the counter had observed that the snoring but innocent Lucynell looked “like an angel of Gawd,” to which Shiftlet curtly replied: “Hitchhiker.” Not long thereafter, Shiftlet picks up a runaway boy and starts carrying on that “My mother was an angel of Gawd.” The kid isn’t interested in listening to any sermonizing, though, and tells Shiftlet to “go to the devil!” before jumping out of the moving vehicle. Meanwhile, a storm gathers blackly overhead, leading Shiftlet to feel “that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.” “Oh Lord!” Shiftlet shouts out. “Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” Hardly driving safely (speeding towards a doubtful salvation), the slimy Shiftlet floors the pedal and “race[s] the galloping shower into Mobile” in the story’s final line.

American Gothic takes to the open road in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and travels to a dark place.

 

Crowning Achievement (Book Review of King Sorrow)

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The dark-academia fiction of Donna Tartt meets the epic fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien in this big, bold novel by Joe Hill. Blackmailed by a sleazy pair of drug dealers into stealing rare books from the university library, college student Arthur Oakes turns to his friends for assistance. The group half-jokingly uses an occult tome to summon a demonic dragon (from a shadow world called the Long Dark) to do their bidding. They should have read the fine print on this Faustian bargain, though, because they are then forced to select someone as an annual sacrifice to King Sorrow’s fiery maw or suffer such deadly consequence themselves.

As interesting a premise as this is, it could have been developed quite blandly: the do-gooding sextet of protagonists (when interviewed, Hill has likened his book to a bonus season of Friends reimagined as horror) making the world a better place by singling out the worst actors for a barbecuing comeuppance. To his credit, Hill never settles for the simplistic; he delves deep into the moral conundrum resulting from wielding a fantastic assassin. The toll of associating with King Sorrow is steep, affecting the group members both personally and in their relationships with one another.

For all its otherworldly elements, the novel succeeds because it follows the proven model of Hill’s father, Stephen King, by rooting the extraordinary in the everyday and building believable, relatable characters. The narrative features figures adorable and deplorable. Sometimes the same character will elicit such divergent responses at different points in the novel, as the complexity of Hill’s craftsmanship traces various redemption arcs and falls from grace. Arthur, Gwen, Donna, Van, Allie, and Colin: these six friends are destined to become as storied as the members of the Losers’ Club. In further testament to Hill’s peopling skill, even the minor characters here are unforgettable (including perhaps the most off-color troll in the history of fantasy).

Any discussion of characterization must not neglect the titular antagonist. King Sorrow conveys all the malefic grandeur of Tolkien’s Smaug. Undeniably sly, he also possesses a fiendish wit (never has a dragon been given better dialogue to chew on). Similar to Pennywise the Dancing Clown, King Sorrow likes to play with his food: he torments his designated victims before savagely dispatching them. This terrible denizen of the Long Dark lurks in the background for much of the book, but his appearances (sometimes unexpected) are always frightful, and sublimely scene-stealing.

Epic in its ambitions, Hill’s novel spans–and melds–genres such as horror, romance, fantasy, and techno-thriller. Its expansive plot contains some stunning, emotionally grueling twists. Weighing in at nearly 900 pages, the book is the definition of hefty, but never bogs down amidst its many shifts in genre and jumps in time (like King’s It, King Sorrow tracks the protagonists’ conflict with an eldritch entity over a period of decades). The world evoked by Hill’s words is so well-imagined, so immersive, that explorers will tread delightedly–and be reluctant to leave it behind. Akin to the ouroboros referenced within, engrossed readers might be enticed to circle right back to the book’s opening upon completion.

Joe Hill has already scaled amazing heights in his writing career, but King Sorrow forms his once and future magnus opus. To loft the praise even higher: this book ranks right alongside the best publications of any member of the illustrious King family.

And that (said the dragon to the scorched earthling) is not just a bunch of hot air.

 

A.G. Exemplary? “Midwestern Gothic” By Scott Thomas (Part 4 of 4)

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Part 4 of a series of posts exploring the American Gothic qualities of the novellas in Scott Thomas’s Midwestern Gothic.

For Part 3, click here.

 

One Half of a Child’s Face

Rear Window meets Oculus in this story of voyeurism and the evil workings of a strange object. Sienna Roh is in a bad place: drinking too much, neglecting her work, obsessing over the neighboring apartment building (where her ex-husband lives, and where their daughter is presently spending the weekend). Using her daughter’s telescope, Sienna spies not just on her ex’s residence, but all the apartments facing her own home. Each peeped window is like a television screen, and Sienna christens the various scenes with sarcastic sitcom titles–“The Shouties,” “The Godlies,” “Mr. Loneliness”–that capture the volatility, the mania, and quiet desperation transpiring behind people’s closed doors. Matters turn even darker when Sienna glimpses the delivery (by workers curiously sporting “blue medical gloves” and “large black headphones”) of an abstract and perhaps abnormal artwork suggesting the titular image. Hung up in a seemingly empty eighth floor apartment, the painting proceeds to prey (assuming that Sienna isn’t just having a psychotic break) on deep-seated guilt and resentment. It insidiously drives the building’s adults crazy while luring their children towards its gaping maw.

The Gothicism of the piece grows even more overt based on Sienna’s work-from-home job. Tasked with copyediting a nonfiction book called Scars and Stripes: Thoughts on American Horror, she is currently working on the essay by renowned horror author Sam McGarver (the protagonist of Thomas’s fantastic debut novel, Kill Creek). Paragraphs-long extracts from that essay are interpolated throughout the narrative, with McGarver’s genre insights furnishing thematic commentary on Sienna’s encounter with the “primonatural” (i.e. evincing “powers before [vs. supernaturally beyond] our understanding”) painting. One passage from McGarver’s essay serves an almost epigraphic function at the start of the novella:

So what is the source of Midwestern Gothic? Where did the evil originally root itself? Not in the [haunted] structure but in the very land upon which the structure was built. The land was the prize. And it was won by inflicting misery and death on the native people who found it first. Europeans saw the land, and they had to own it at any cost. So when those proud farm folk stood in the doorways of humble houses built with their own hands, staring out at acres of waving wheat and corn that they planted, the land stared back. A pact had been made. An endless exchange. Misery for misery. Blood for blood. The bounty they enjoyed left a void, and one day that void would demand to be filled.

“The land stared back” at the posing farm couple: this evocative passage practically frames the perspective onto Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic.

A gripping and horripilating tale, One Half of a Child’s Face arguably leaves its mysteries (e.g., the specific origins of the child-hungry artifact, and the human conspiracy that has deposited it at the apartment building) too unresolved to be completely satisfying. But in its meditation on the unnerving features of Midwestern (vs. English or even New England and Southern) Gothic, the novella supplies a perfect conclusion to Thomas’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection.

 

Tripping the Dark Fantastic: Ten Standout Stories in The End of the World As We Know It

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This anthology tribute to Stephen King’s postapocalyptic epic The Stand definitely goes big: 779 pages, and thirty-four tales ranging across time and space. “Stories from around the world, and beyond it,” co-editor Christopher Golden writes in the foreword. “Tales that expanded our understanding of the few weeks surrounding the devastating spread of the ‘Captain Trips’ superflu, examined the influence of Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg, and postulated about the landscape that remained after readers turned the final page of Stephen King’s masterpiece.” The table of contents is stocked with notable names (including that of King, who supplies a short but informative introduction), from both within and outside the horror genre. The authors all bring their A-game, but here are the ten stories that stood out the most to me:

 

“The Tripps” By Wrath James White

Despite Mother Abagail forming such a central figure in The Stand, King’s novel is arguably lacking in African-American perspective. White’s tale, though, fills in any gap, by dramatizing how the early days of the superflu pandemic play out in the inner city. An unflinching look at the horrors occurring in the streets–and behind closed doors.

 

“Bright Light City” By Meg Gardiner

Another terrific examination of the beginning of the end, appropriately set in the ever-so-sinful city of Las Vegas. “Bright Light City” goes to some dark places, and features a psychopathic girl gone wilding who makes The Stand’s awful Julie Lawry seem like a goody two-shoes by comparison.

 

“Lockdown” By Bev Vincent

A longtime King follower/scholar, Vincent puts his expertise to work here by featuring a familiar King locale: a tiny island of the coast of Maine. The story gives off a wonderful Storm of the Century vibe, as it tracks the cost of coming together to defy deadly intrusion.

 

“Grace” By Tim Lebbon

Normally, the transporting of a horror icon (e.g., Jason, Pinhead, Leprechaun) to outer space represents a shark-jumping direction for a franchise. Lebbon bucks such trend in this harrowing narrative of a space shuttle caught in decaying orbit and haunted by the malign influence of Randall Flagg. “Grace” is amazing, and my pick for the top story in the anthology.

 

“Till Human Voices Wake Us, and We Drown” By Poppy Z. Brite

A return to the horror genre under the Brite byline is a momentous occasion, and the story published here proves quite memorable. Offbeat in its invocation of Japanese mythology, and oddly (but undeniably) erotic, “Till Human Voices” imaginatively engages with the anthology’s parameters.

 

“Keep the Devil Down” By Rio Youers

The longest selection in the book, yet also the fastest moving. A high speed chase through the Arizona desert, with the Walking Dude behind the wheel of a marauding muscle car? Yes, that gets my motor revving. For all the franticness, though, Youers also manages to script a strong character study.

 

“The Story I Tell Is the Story of Some of Us” By Paul Tremblay

Approaching the world of The Stand via one of your own novels (The Pallbearers Club) at first might seem a tad self-serving. But Tremblay can be forgiven, since he furnishes a clever and seductive narrative, finely framed as a dramatic monologue.

 

“He’s a Righteous Man” By Ronald Malfi

Malfi runs a masterclass in misdirection, in this tale concerning a first-time novelist whose book (published at the time of the Captain Trips outbreak) eerily predicts the apocalypse. Now the author tours the country as an exalted prophet, but a shocking twist is in store.

 

“Came the Last Night of Sadness” By Catherynne M. Valente

A slow boil of a story that gradually reveals its secrets but builds to a very satisfying climax. Kudos to Valente for strategically diverging from a key plot point in The Stand and extrapolating from there: What if Flagg had  _____? [spoiler redacted]

 

“The Unfortunate Convalescence of the Superlawyer” By Nat Cassidy

Cassidy takes the biggest leap in the anthology, and absolutely nails the landing. He not only tackles the world(s) of The Stand, but the entire King multiverse. This trippy, Easter-egg-rich tale is a real treat for Constant Readers (amongst whom Cassidy clearly numbers).

 

 

 

The Ketchum Canon: Weed Species

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[For the Previous Ketchum Canon post, click here.]

In Jack Ketchum’s horror fiction, the line between exasperation and exploitation can appear blurry. Case in point: his 2006 novella Weed Species. The book opens with the main character (not to be mistaken for a protagonist) Sherry allowing her fiancé to videotape her molesting her drugged, comatose kid sister Talia, and then to rape the thirteen-year-old himself: “Talia’s virginity was [Sherry’s] Christmas gift to Owen–her virginity and the camcorder.” The couple’s sordid deeds are presented in graphic detail, and the scene only grows more disturbing when Talia (reacting badly to the halothane that she has been dosed with) starts choking on her own vomit. A few chapters later (after Owen and Sherry’s previous acts of rape and murder are chillingly catalogued), the reader learns that Talia in fact died that unholy Christmas night. Yet the depravity extends even from here, as Sherry indulges in some reprehensible role playing. She “dress[es] up in her little sister’s clothing” and lets Owen act out a sexual-initiation fantasy, a deflowering of innocence: “there was even bleeding because she’d bought some fake blood in a novelty store and inserted it with a tampon.”

At first, such luridness can seem of questionable literary value. But Ketchum subtly signals his alignment with Gothic tradition: the passing mention that Sherry’s wedding reception is booked at a place called “Monk’s Inn” invokes M.G. Lewis’s classic 18th-Century shocker The Monk. Also, the scopophilic kink that Ketchum gives to Sherry and Owen (who record their crimes for later home-entertainment viewing) in turn serves as a challenge to readers, forcing them to confront their own potential prurience. What sort of response is triggered by such depiction of transgression–distaste, or base titillation?

No doubt, this is one of Ketchum’s grimmest and most pessimistic narratives. Yes, Owen is soon arrested (and executed) for his crimes, but when Sherry returns to society following her own plea-shortened prison stint, she is hardly rehabilitated: she prompts her new boyfriend Arliss into criminality by telling him she wants to see him rape somebody. There is nary an exemplarily behaving character to be found here, either in foreground or background. At one point, Sherry watches a Nature Channel program about “man-made extinctions,” specifically, the “extermination of the dodo on the island of Mauritius” by “sailors who killed the [birds] just for fun.” Writing to a prison pen pal, Sherry references a Wisconsin family of “church-going baptists” [sic] who “kept their seventeen-year-old daughter locked up in the basement for three years without anybody knowing….They shocked her with this dog-collar, burned her with an electric iron, shot her with a BB-gun, knocked out her teeth with a hammer.” While still incarcerated, Sherry watched (in the day room) a CNN report about the genocide of poison-gassed Kurds in Iraq. This news “is followed by a story about a cat who had gone repeatedly back into a burning apartment building to save her three newborn kittens.” The point Ketchum (an admitted ailurophile) makes with this juxtaposition: felines act more nobly than human beings do towards their fellows.

The piling up of atrocities in the novella is deliberate, an aggregation in the name of outrage. Ketchum’s censorious approach to his subject matter is highlighted by his chosen title, which is nicely explicated by the book’s dust jacket copy:

WEED SPECIES: In ecology. An invasive species, also called an invasive exotic, is an organism that is intentionally or accidentally introduced to an area where it is not native, and where it successfully invades and disturbs natural ecosystems, displacing native species. The term is most often applied to, but not limited to, plants. See also kudzu, water hyacinth, zebra mussel, Burmese python, eco-tourism, sociopath.

The propagation of impropriety is demonstrated via the character of Janine Edmundson, another Christmastime subject of Owen’s bad cheer. The rape victim reappears late in the narrative, now married with children but still tormented by her teenage experience. A drunkard, she hits her kids (“They made her crazy. They were both so goddamn innocent. The world, she knew, was not.”) and physically/verbally abuses her mild-mannered spouse, who also just happens to be named Owen: “Swinging on him with all her might, her mouth spewing the vilest things she could imagine saying, as though he were the other Owen, the first Owen–as though she could turn back the clock and do now what she was incapable of doing then. Tearing at him. Hurting him.” The embodiment of the adage that hurt people hurt people, Janine is last seen hurling a tumbler at her husband, hitting him square in the back and possibly paralyzing him.

The next chapter in the novella introduces the Deuteronomy-reading holy roller Lemuel Samm. Glancing up from his Bible study, Lemuel sees a rerun of American Justice playing (the same Owen-and-Sherry-revisiting episode of the tabloid news show that enrages Janine) and recognizes his next-door neighbor on the TV screen. Lemuel then breaks into Sherry and Arliss’s house with gun blazing, catching them in the flagrant act of raping a captive girl. The hypocritical couple, who attend church religiously, has returned home from Sunday night mass to engage in sinful tryst. Carnality gives way to carnage, but the sense of comeuppance is complicated as the puritanical vigilante notes (in the chapter’s concluding line) how strangely aroused he has grown from the violent attack on the sex offenders. It seems that deviance hasn’t been weeded out by this bloody climax.

Any appreciation of Weed Species should not fail to mention its visuals: the wonderful cover art by Alan M. Clark, and interior black-and-white illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne (each featuring the creeping advance of invasive plants). At the same time, the packaging of a glorified short story as a pricey ($35 in 2006) hardcover novella feels like a cash-grab by Cemetery Dance, a leveraging of Ketchum’s popularity in the horror genre.

With its rough subject matter and lack of a protagonist to identify with and root for, Weed Species makes for a tough (if quick) read. The book is far from Ketchum’s best work, but represents his unflinching commitment to exploring the worst of which humanity is sadly capable.

 

Horror Noir à la Coen

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From the live burial in Blood Simple to the repurposed woodchipper in Fargo, the neo-noir oeuvre of the Coen Brothers has been marked by macabre crime and pitch-black humor. While nowhere near the caliber of the aforementioned classics, Honey Don’t (directed by Ethan Coen, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke) certainly fits the mold, as it aims a dark lens at the sunbaked sprawl of Bakersfield, California.

The film stars Margaret Qualley as Honey O’ Donohue, a gumshoe in high heels. Bending genre/gender conventions, Honey looks like a femme fatale but operates as a private detective. She is also openly lesbian in orientation. Besides some steamy sex scenes (Honey’s investigation involves a free-love-espousing church cult), Honey Don’t is distinguished by its moments of gonzo violence. Run over and dragged by a drug dealer, a would-be buyer gets “all gunked up in his tire treads.” There’s a throat-slashed abuela, a fork-stabbing under the chin, a bludgeoning with a clothes iron, multiple brandings with a hot teakettle.

A perfect combination of the sultry and snarky, Honey is a captivating character who warrants further onscreen cases. This film disappoints somewhat in its climax as it succumbs to Suddenly Psycho Syndrome (which has come to plague the Scream franchise), but overall Honey Don’t is much more entertaining than suggested by the mostly lukewarm reviews it received. The dark comedy offers a fine way to spend ninety minutes on a Black Friday night in late Noirvember.

 

A.G. Exemplary? “Midwestern Gothic” By Scott Thomas (Part 3 of 4)

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Part 3 of a series of posts exploring the American Gothic qualities of the novellas in Scott Thomas’s Midwestern Gothic.

For Part 2, click here.

 

The Boy in the Woods

Thomas veers into classic slasher territory in this tale set at a remote, lakeside summer camp and stocked with transgressive teenage counselors. Also on hand is the eponymous/viewpoint character, ten-year-old Eddie Reicher,” whose parents have failed to pick him up on the last day of camp. Eddie is more popularly–and cruelly–known as “Reek the Freak” or “The Dog-Faced Boy,” thanks to a prior incident of canine mauling that has left him disfigured (“a face like a mangled hunk of ham”).

The camp is steeped in dark atmosphere. Its man-made lake is described as “a wound carved into the Kansas countryside”; “dead trees sprouting from the water” suggest an Usher-esque environment. The main section of the campground has been worn down by usage: “Now it was starting to show bare patches, exposing the Kansas soil like the blackened flesh of a decaying wound.” Indeed, Camp Cottonwood warrants the macabre nickname “Camp Rottenwood” even before a bloody massacre makes its infamous.

After the putrid corpse of a cryptid-like creature is discovered with a cloud of mosquitoes bizarrely “sucking on the carcass like it was Thanksgivin’,” the resident maintenance man (dubbed “Crazy Ralph”) forebodingly proclaims that the camp builders “Shoulda just let this land be.” Horror haunts the landscape, but Thomas doesn’t just furnish a narrative riff on Friday the 13th. Deviating in unexpected direction, the novella also recalls the film Cabin Fever.

The Boy in the Woods makes for a speedy read, not just because it is the shortest of the quartet of novellas in Midwestern Gothic. Featuring unity of time and place, the narrative quickly kicks into overdrive, tracking a fateful night of mayhem as a mysterious outbreak renders the counselors insanely violent. Thomas offers up some wild scenes of body horror (the infection is spread in most grotesque manner). In this chilling twist on summertime Americana, youthful fun in the sun gives way to a harrowing nightmare.

At tale’s end, circumstances threaten to transform the unfortunate Eddie into the stuff of  “campfire stories” (Thomas sounds the Gothic theme of the demonization of the perceived Other). Still, this circling back toward slasher formula doesn’t trample the novella’s cursed-heartland themes. In an ominous interpretation of the iconic 1930 painting “American Gothic,” critic Donald B. Kuspit once wrote that Grant Wood’s depiction hints at a Midwest “fertile with more than neat rows of wheat and corn.” This same sentiment can be carried over from Wood’s Iowa to Thomas’s Kansas, a region rife with the sinister and uncanny.

 

Sleepy Hollow Follow-Up

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A string of bizarre deaths occur in the Western Woods in Return to Sleepy Hollow, the new IDW Dark comic series set fifteen years after the events of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. Katrina Van Tassel–last seen arriving in New York City at the end of the film–has since returned to her home village, where she now operates a funeral home, with some assistance from her daughter Lotte (who can communicate with the spirit world). After the latest murder, Ichabod Crane (estranged from Katrina, and unaware that he has a daughter) is summoned back to Sleepy Hollow to aid in the investigation. Denying the wild events that he, Katrina and young (now “quite grown”) Masbeth witnessed in the film’s climax as a “product of mass hysteria,” Ichabod has reverted to professional-skeptic mode; he makes his career out of debunking claims of the paranormal. So when Katrina suggests an “otherworldly malignant force” is at work in the Hollow, Ichabod naturally insists that there is a rational explanation for the seemingly ritualistic murders. But there’s little doubt that the stubborn man of science is destined to be disillusioned once more.

Sleepy Hollow is one of my all-time favorite films (as my posts here at Dispatches from the Macabre Republic must have made quite evident over the years). I have lost count of how many times I have watched Tim Burton’s masterpiece. So, admittedly, it was jarring at first to see the motion picture transformed into the stasis and silence of comic book panels. But artist Savanna Mayer quickly establishes an autumnal vibe (creepy, leafless trees are an ominous presence from page one) and writer Casey Gilly exhibits a knack for scripting a good sequel (revisiting the original, yet also offering a twist on familiar elements). The inaugural issue of the series is a bit exposition-heavy, as it reintroduces the characters and reveals the backstory of their past fifteen years, but I am intrigued as to where Return to Sleepy Hollow will take readers. And wondering if Ichabod is headed for another thrilling encounter with a revenant Hessian of local legend.