Skip to main content

Richo Reviews: Agony's Lodestone by Laura Keating (Tenebrous Press, 2023)

 Twenty years ago, 18-year-old Joanne Neilson, local celebrity for her feats on the swim team, left the house to take the family dog on a walk through the woods. The dog came home; Joanne did not. Now, the remaining Neilson siblings - loner Aggie, family man Alex, and Bailey - estranged from the others due to his plans for a true crime docuseries about the disappearance - are led back to those same woods by a videotape showing an impossible recording of the day their family was broken apart.

Keating imbues this novella with a fantastic sense of place. This is a region Keating knows well, and she blends that knowledge with a clear love of nature and an inventive streak. The weird woods of Cannon Park - so named for the regular booming of the tide in the caverns beneath - are realised with enough grounding and clarity that the emergence of clearly unnatural phenomena becomes truly unsettling. Mixing in real-world strange landmarks, like magnetic hills, is inspired, blurring the distinction between what is natural and what is, distinctly, unnatural.

More than the landscape, though, the core of this story is the family dynamic, explored between their contemporary interactions and a series of flashbacks to when the siblings were children. They seem at first like loose sketches - the dedicated father who tries to be there for his sister too, the shut-in who tolerates her brother checking in on her for his sake as much as for hers, the tearaway screwup. But through the way they act and speak with one another, the memories they share and the old arguments they rehash, they emerge as well-realised portraits of people in tension between their past pain and their present struggles, their love for one another and all the distance that has built between them.

Keating's prose is effective, and at points truly brilliant. I think through these reviews I'm learning that I enjoy a more stylised mode of writing than is on display here, but I can't deny the beauty of some of the powerful turns of phrase Keating employs to evoke grief, turmoil, intense emotion and inner revelation. Combined with the skillful portrayal of family relationships, her writing creates a strong emotional anchor that makes the weirdness much weightier, and drives the reader towards a climax that fits perfectly.

Agony's Lodestone is a strong piece of emotionally powerful and very creepy horror writing, and I'll certainly look forwards to Keating's future work.

I can't let you go, though, without mentioning that the novella is dotted with illustrations by Trevor Henderson, which are true to form - that is, eerie, unsettling, and imaginative. But I probably didn't need to tell you that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Richo Reviews: Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin (Titan Books, 2024)

Camp Resolution is a brutal and degrading conversion camp for parents to turn their LGBTQ teens into the cishet kids they want them to be. But in the summer of 1996, a group of teens at the camp begin to suspect that it hides something even darker. This is the latest by Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of the excellent Manhunt, and much like that book it is a harrowing, frenzied masterpiece. I'll just tell you at the top: this book is exceptional, and you should read it. But if you want more convincing than just 'I said so', here we go: The first thing that truly stands out is Felker-Martin's skill at character, at psychology. We saw this in Manhunt , and once again Felker-Martin demonstrates an incredible talent for getting inside the heads of her characters. Even the character we follow for the prologue, a mother suppressing her concerns about sending her daughter to Camp Resolution, is a fully-fleshed person, a scathing and disturbing portrait of a woman simult...

Richo Reviews: Split Scream Volume 3 by Patrick Barb and J.A.W. McCarthy (Dread Stone Press, 2023)

Split Scream Volume 3 is here and Dread Stone are going from strength to strength with these double-feature, bite-size horror tales. This time, we have Patrick Barb's So Quiet, So White , and Imago Expulsio (The Red Animal of Our Blood)  by J.A.W. McCarthy. In Barb's story, following family relations in the aftermath of a terrible event, he truly puts the lie to the old saw that good prose should be unnoticeable. His writing is thick, writhing in the reader's hands. On occasion it can trip over itself, choke on itself, but at its best it is reminiscent of Laird Barron, stylised and punchy and surly. Some writing flows, but this oozes , slick and ominous. Who wants a pane of glass when you can have this glorious dark vista? Atmosphere and tone are Barb's weapons of choice, but he still manages to work in a vicious twist - more analogous to a twist of a knife in the gut than a twist in the tale. McCarthy's piece is a darkly romantic story of passion, trauma, and the t...

Richo Reviews: Your Body Is Not Your Body, Various Authors (Tenebrous Press, 2022)

 One thing I love is a themed horror collection. An array of different takes on the same theme, commonalities spiraling off into individual and idiosyncratic concepts. Make that theme something as deeply personal as a trans perspective on body horror, and you have the makings of something not only exciting and inventive, but insightful, painful, powerful. The variety on display here is dazzling and every story offers something unique; even some that explore similar territory on the surface do so through deeply personal lenses. Some are acutely, painfully in the present moment; others draw us to the distant past, imagined futures or other worlds. There are stories that invoke mundanity, the gothic, schlock, religious horror, science fiction, all spun around the anchor of the human body and its transformations. Speaking as someone who rarely feels grounded in his own body, these stories made me deathly aware of my chest tightening, my stomach churning, my skin crawling. None of these...