by TJ Price, curator of HOWLS Book Club nominees for December 2023’s “Childhood’s Hideous Echo” category
Because it’s easy to gloss over the memory of an encounter with something slightly uncanny as a child’s fantasy, something that can’t possibly be true… but what if it was? What if, in fact, it still is?
A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans
Thirty-year-old George Davies can’t bring himself to hold his newborn son. After months of accepting his lame excuses and strange behavior, his wife demands that he see a therapist, and George, desperate to save his unraveling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, reluctantly agrees.
As he delves into his childhood memories, he begins to recall things he hasn’t thought of in twenty years. The odd, rambling letters his father sent home before he died. The jovial mother who started dating too soon after his father’s death. A boy who appeared one night when George was lonely, then told him secrets he didn’t want to know. How no one believed this new friend was real and that he was responsible for the bad things that were happening.
Terrified by all that he has forgotten, George struggles to remember what really happened in the months following his father’s death. And when a mysterious murder is revealed, remembering the past becomes the only way George can protect himself–and his young family. (StoryGraph)
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I am constantly talking about this novel. I found it in a used bookstore once, and have read it multiple times since acquiring it. I am stunned that it’s not better-known. Even if this is not the book that is chosen from this list, I highly recommend seeking it out on your own. It is fantastic, thrilling, and I dare you not to feel repeatedly chilled by both its insinuations and its darkness.
Bookshop* | StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
The Wise Friend by Ramsey Campbell
Patrick Torrington’s aunt Thelma was a successful artist whose late work turned towards the occult. While staying with her in his teens he found evidence that she used to visit magical sites. As an adult he discovers her journal of her explorations, and his teenage son Roy becomes fascinated too. His experiences at the sites scare Patrick away from them, but Roy carries on the search, together with his new girlfriend. Can Patrick convince his son that his increasingly terrible suspicions are real, or will what they’ve helped to rouse take a new hold on the world? (StoryGraph)
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Campbell has a knack for using prose to both camouflage and accentuate terror in his stories, and nowhere else is that more true than in The Wise Friend. Shifting leaves, the murmurs in a forest glen, the Dopplering sounds of cars rushing by…these are only some of the descriptions that haunt not only the protagonist of this novel, but also the reader, and draws one fully into Campbell’s twitchy, occult-ridden world.
Bookshop* | StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer
Rock yawned. “Gotta get moving,” Rock said. A couple of hundred million years went by. A rock is always slow to take action. A rock watches an oak grow from a sapling to a towering tree, and it’s a flash and a dazzle in the mind of a rock. What was that? Rock thinks. Or maybe, Huh?
That’s how Zod Wallop starts. Harry Gainesborough wrote and drew the story three years ago, before his daughter drowned. Now he writes nothing. Raymond Story read Zod Wallop while he was a patient at Harwood Psychiatric. Now the book means everything to him – so much so that he’d like to meet its author and live out its events. In fact, Zod Wallop means so much to Raymond that he has taken great pains to escape the institution and is now journeying to Harry Gainesborough’s house with his young wife, Emily, in tow.
These odd doings alone would be enough to unsettle Harry, but they’re compounded by other coincidences. Bizarre coincidences. Occurrences that lead Harry to believe that Zod Wallop is actually happening. (StoryGraph)
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I think this novel is typically classified as YA, and for sure, there are some aspects of this that read in that fashion, but the content is brutal, and much of the emotions that are evoked are of a staggeringly adult nature. I read it first as a teenager—another one of those bizarre used-bookstore finds—and the paperback copy on my shelf has never left me since.
StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
Sacrament by Clive Barker
A famous photographer lying in a coma holds the key to the salvation of the world. But first he must travel back into the traumatic events of his childhood.
Will Rabjohns has everything. He’s handsome, he’s rich, and he’s revered as the world’s greatest wildlife photographer. He’s also a haunted man, driven to risk his life for his art – to capture the raw tragedy of the wild, the beauty of nature’s violence.
After a near fatal encounter with a polar bear, he lies in a coma. There he must relive a central childhood memory: a meeting with ancient and terrible forces which revealed to him the mystery at the heart of nature. And he realizes that if he awakes, he must confront the darkness of his past and wage a war, not only for his own soul, but for the soul of the planet and every animal that breathes upon it. (StoryGraph)
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This was one of the first books I read by Barker, again, as a teenager, and it was also one of the first books I ever read to not only feature a gay man as protagonist, but that really examined what that means, in all of its implications for society and for life and love. It remains my favorite Barker book to this day, though it definitely is a bit of an outlier amongst his novels—savage, terrifying, heart-rending, and ultimately beautiful.
StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
Seed by Ania Ahlborn
With nothing but the clothes on his back — and something horrific snapping at his heels — Jack Winter fled his rural Georgia home when he was still just a boy. Watching the world he knew vanish in a trucker’s rearview mirror, he thought he was leaving an unspeakable nightmare behind forever. But years later, the bright new future he’s built suddenly turns pitch black, as something fiendishly familiar looms dead ahead. When Jack, his wife Aimee, and their two small children survive a violent car crash, it seems like a miracle. But Jack knows what he saw on the road that night, and it wasn’t divine intervention. The profound evil from his past won’t let them die…at least not quickly.
Country comfort is no match for spine-tingling Southern gothic suspense in Ania Ahlborn’s tale of an ordinary man with a demon on his back. Seed plants its page-turning terror deep in your soul, and lets it grow wild. (StoryGraph)
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When I first encountered Ahlborn, it was via her novel The Devil Crept In. I finished it in one sitting, and was instantly hungry for more. This was her first, and best-known novel, for quite some time. I love it—it’s lurid, but taut, and it drips with menace from the opening page to the final chapter. Ahlborn is generally a great writer, and I’ve enjoyed most of her novels, but this one is the one that has the most staying power, for me.
StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
And The Winner Is…
Out of these five books, HOWLers voted to read Seed by Ania Ahlborn. Discussion starts on December 25, and you can join in by joining the Discord!
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