2022 Horror Must-Reads, Part 3: The Final Frightdown

This book, ya’ll. brain exploding noises I was so sure I had it all figured out and White just threw my theories into a puddle and stomped on them. Look, there’s no terrestrial setting creepier than an abandoned amusement park, as far as I’m concerned. So empty, so silent. So many clowns. *Sob*. But White takes that to a whole new level in Hide with a deeply suspicious high stakes game of hide and seek, featuring a cast of players as desperate as their playing field is desolate. This book never stops, not even for a moment. You hit the ground running when Mack is dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a bus, and it’s just a headlong rush towards a nail-biting finale. Mack survived a multi-murder as a child by hiding. Now hiding and surviving on her own are what Mack does best, so this game she’s signed on for should be a piece of cake. And the prize money will finally lift her out of poverty and let her start a new life. All she has to do is make it to the end, which gets harder to do when the bodies start dropping.

So first I have to confess: I have many literary weaknesses in this life, and polar horror is definitely on that list. Add to that the fact that All the White Spaces is queer, historical adventure/survival horror, and it was pretty much a guarantee that I was going to love this book. Jonathan Morgan stows away on an Antarctic-bound ship, escaping his family and the pretty box of a life they would trap him in if he let them. The captain of the ship is his hero, a giant among men who cut his teeth on adventure, and who Jonathan would follow anywhere. Even into disaster. When a fire strikes the ship, the crew has no choice but to flee across the ice to the Antarctic mainland in search of a secure place to overwinter. Only to find an abandoned expedition camp full of nightmares. Something in the long darkness of the Polar nights is stalking the crew, turning their own minds against them, and unless they can find a way off the frozen continent, Jonathan’s first real adventure may be his last.

Oh gosh, what do I even say. I mean, Bathory meets Dracula but its somehow even more Gothic and gay and beautiful than you would expect. House of Hunger is one of those Gothic books where the tension of “some bad thing is coming” is constantly building in the background, and when it finally goes wrong it goes wrong suddenly and in spectacular fashion. Just glorious, Gothic chaos everywhere you look. Depending on who you ask, being a bloodmaid is either a disreputable path to a shameful end, or a golden ticket to a new life of luxury and wealth. Marion decides to take her chances and hope for the latter, because the only thing waiting for her in her old life is abject poverty and murder. When she’s placed in the service of the House of Hunger, one of the richest and most notorious old houses of the North, Marion soon finds herself falling for the enchanting Countess Lisavet. And when Lisavet seems to return her affection, it seems like Marion can finally leave the shadows of her past behind her. Except the House of Hunger has shadows of its own, far darker than anything Marion has encountered before.

My last pick of 2022, and easily one of my favorite books of the whole year (she says, having said the same thing about probably a dozen books at this point, but I mean it every time!). This is another book that’s perfect for those of us currently in the dark, frigid throes of winter (or those of us who wish they were). Leech is a queer medical Gothic horror novel set in a fictional Northern town locked in the depths of a terrible winter that keeps the residents trapped in their homes out of fear of the deadly cold. In the estate that overlooks the town, the house doctor has died violently by his own hand, and it’s up to the newly arrived Doctor, a member of the Institute just like the deceased, to discover the cause. In fact, all of the bodies of the Interprovincial Medical Institute are doctors, because for centuries the Institute has been systematically replacing all the unreliable human doctors with it’s superior bodies, whose mind(s) can overcome any challenge or puzzle the Institute might encounter. Until they can’t. Because the parasitic creature that our Doctor discovers lurking in the cold, might finally be a problem beyond the Institute’s ability to solve.