A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024) by Mariana Enriquez

 Audiobook Review

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)

by Mariana  Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

  I straight up loved Our Share of Night, the multi-generational novel about a group of Satanists operating in the UK and Argentina.  I'm by no means a fan of the horror genre, but Enriquez really nailed the cruelty of a fictional satanic cult and I still think about some of the scenes on a regular basis as an example of what good writing means to me- and just to think that this is a writer who has her words translated into English from Spanish.  I've more or less decided that for books within the close Indo-European sphere: English, Spanish, French, German the idea of losing meaning/beauty in the translation from one closely related language to another is overblown except on a poetic level. 

  Going in I knew that this volume of short stories wouldn't match her novel, but I still enjoyed this collection.  The title story, in particular, combines the elements of her style:  A spooky, LA-based story about an Argentinian journalist who convinces her editor to let her travel to  Los Angeles to do a story on the cultish group that has sprung up around the memory of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who died under extremely mysterious circumstances inside the Water Tower of the Cecil Hotel.  While in Los Angeles, she is forced to confront the memory of her dead lover who lost himself to schizophrenia and heroin and reconnecting with a lesbian couple who live in the Hollywood hill.   Most of the other stories are set either in Argentina or in an Argentina-like place and have similar but different combinations of spooks and personal issues.   Mostly, though, this collection was just a reminder for me about how much I loved Our Share of Night. 

   

William (2024) by Mason Coile

 Audiobook Review

William (2024)

by Mason Coile

    William is an AI centered horror novel and I checked out the Audiobook after the New York Times gave it a great review last month.  The mere fact that the Times gave that many column inches to a work of genre fiction that was published under a pseudonym, no less (Mason Coile is the "open pseudonym" of award-winning Canadian author Andrew Pyper.)  The set up is that a pregnant tech billionaire and her agoraphobic husband are living in their state of the art "smart home" in the Seattle area.  Henry, the protagonist, is an engineer who spends his days working on "William" a spooky ai powered android that has no legs and a fearsome hatred of Henry and all of humanity.  The reader knows things are not going to go well and indeed they do not, with events starting to pile up after Lily, his wife, invites to work friends over for a rare dinner. 

  Although William clocked in at under four hours, Coile manages to intersperse the gory horror scenes with philosophical musings and a very big twist at the end.  It's worth a listen for the Halloween season!

Father of Lies (1998) by Brian Evenson

 Book Review

Father of Lies (1998)

by Brian Evenson

   The first Brian Evenson book I read was Immobility, his 2013 novel about a human-less post-apocalyptic scenario.   That was back in 2021.  Since then I've kept track of him- he's one of the few horror/sci-fi genre writers who commonly attracts attention from the literary fiction mainstream, which is enough for me.  Recently(2016 anyway), many books from his backlist were put back into print by Coffee House press, and Father of Lies (along with everything else he ever published) popped up on the Libby library app.  

  Father of Lies is an early work, a relatively straight-forward work of religio-horror about a psychopathic leader of a Mormon-like church (Evenson is from Utah and was raised Mormon).  In 2024, it sounds like a particularly sadistic retelling of the Catholic Priests vs. Young Boys saga of the past decades.  Unlike the Catholic Church, Mormons are still in full on refuse to acknowledge/cover-up mode, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the church which is depicted is only Mormon-like. 

  The horror is nothing you wouldn't read about in a newspaper story about Catholic priests abusing young boys- although he does murder one young parishioner after she confesses to being pregnant by her older brother.   This murder triggers a cascade of events which include a physical manifestation of Satan and lots of back and forth between him and his ever-supportive Church elders.  Events spiral when the mothers of three young church-members all come forward claiming that their young male children are victims of the protagonists vile abuse, and much of the horror comes from the support he continues to claim from the Church hierarchy who really stand by him all the way through the book.