This Appalachian cosmic horror novel tells the story of a gay man who must return to his ancestral home in the mountains of Western North Carolina after his mother’s death to clean it out and sell it off. Navigating feelings of grief and anger, he finds her house is haunted and her nosy neighbors always watching him-and one of those neighbors happens to be his favorite adult performer. While he develops a new romance and oversees his mother’s funeral, tension builds as the characters’ circumstances go from ominously creepy to terrifying.
Dark bleatings, my solitary tribe! I’ve been having such a great reading streak recently. Almost everything I’ve picked up over the last couple of months has been awesome, and that wonderful new pattern continues with this novel from Michael G. Williams. This is an author I hadn’t heard of before, but will definitely look forward to reading more from!
It reminded me of a few things, a few great things, like The Shining, House (the movie from 1985 – that one was only a mild reminder when the weirdest parts of the story started crawling out), and Phil Sloman’s Les Vacances. When I say “reminded”, I mean that this story most definitely does its own thing, but there were moments that brought me back to how I felt absorbing these other great stories and it made me smile a lot.
Reginald is a brilliant character that burst with personality from the first page, and thanks to my own very dark sense of humour, I liked him immediately. He awakens one night to see an apparition of his mother in her final moments, and his only real response is to crack a joke about where she’s heading. This set up alone does such a wonderful job of painting quite a bit of the much larger picture of his personality and humour, their less than great relationship, and how he’ll respond to news of his mother’s death, which doesn’t arrive until a few hours after the incident.
The author’s excellent character work only consistently continues as we meet more people. Reginald returns to his mother’s house, with his inheritance in mind, only to discover that she’s sold off quite a lot of the property she owns, and that people are living in houses on it. We learn a lot about Reginald’s brother and sister in law before meeting them (from Reg’s perspective, of course), a neighbourly but determined lady called Kate, and Lewis, the attractive neighbour that Reginald is already well aware of, because he’s subscribed to Lewis’s….er…sexy online profile.
I know I’m going on about character a lot but it’s the thing I care most about and I enjoyed it so much here. The last thing I’d like to compliment the author on is how realistically but inoffensively he managed to portray people in different age brackets. There’s a tendency to stereotype, particularly for humour purposes, but rather than that approach, the characters just felt so real here. One line that absolutely cracked me up was from a guy called Vince, and I got which generation he was from when he uttered the words, “Bro, do you consent to a hug?” You’ll have to read the book to understand why that was as funny as it was, but that whole character tickled me in a weirdly wholesome way.
Besides loving all of the characters and interactions (by the way, the author truly excelled himself with the amount of personality coming through the dialogue), I am also delighted to report that there were moments in this book that genuinely frightened me, a rarity when I read. There is a chilling scene that involves a silhouette in a window near the beginning and I literally put the book down and applauded it, such was my terrified delight at being so spooked.
You might be thinking, “Yeah but this is just a classic haunted house story, right?” Oh nay, nay my lovely tribe. I thought that too, and to be honest, I was fine with it because if this was a ghost story, it was effective. However, there is much MUCH more going on, and Reginald’s discovery about who his mum really was and what she was involved with unfolds seamlessly and scarily. Is scarily a word? Who cares.
I’d absolutely recommend this to horror fans. I’ve got very stingy this year with my star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads, and I gave this one of my lesser-spotted 5/5 ratings. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links for you below:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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