THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7IF ART IMITATES LIFE,horror fic-
tion is a great mimic, predicting
and exploring the frightening and
surreal realities of the contempo-
rary world. Exhibit A: Zoje
Stage’s mind-bending, trippy
second novel, WONDERLAND (Mul-
holland, 358 pp., $28).It begins with
the most realistic of desires: more
living space. Orla, a retired ballet
dancer, and Shaw, an artist, leave
New York City for a house up-
state, their two young children in
tow. Shaw has his own studio; the
kids won’t have to share a room.
While the house is everything
they hoped for, and the landscape
is breathtaking, Orla begins to
understand that they have
stepped into a threatening envi-
ronment, one that is “responding
to their thoughts, desires, fears.”
Shaw taps into this energy, and
his paintings become disturbing.
“Maybe we... asked for this.
Somehow. By mistake,” Orla says,
and indeed, the question of re-
sponsibility for the nightmare
lingers, as does the line between
reality and imagination. As the
family fights this “powerful and
desperate entity,” one begins to
feel, like Orla, the predatory
power of nature, its ability to take
what it needs to survive.
THE SURREALis also at the heart
of MEXICAN GOTHIC (Del Rey, 301 pp.,
$27),Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s
stylish and edgy new horror
novel. While the book draws
inspiration from Gothic classics
like “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre” —
there is a spunky female protago-
nist and an ancient house filled
with disturbing secrets — its
archly intelligent tone and in-
sightful writing make “Mexican
Gothic” an original escape to an
eerie world.
In 1950s Mexico, Noemí
Taboada, the daughter of a
wealthy industrialist, is sent by
her father to help her cousin,
Catalina Doyle, whose impetuous
marriage has landed her in High
Place, a moldering mansion
perched in the “steep and abrupt
landscape” of El Triunfo.
Noemí, who prefers parties and
fashionable dresses to the staid
Anglophile Doyle family, finds her
cousin much changed. While the
family doctor claims Catalina
suffers from tuberculosis, she
doesn’t have any of the usual
symptoms. Indeed, she claims
that the walls tell her secrets, a
dreamy delusion Noemí soon
comes to experience firsthand. In
her attempts to help Catalina,
Noemí is pulled into a frightening
ancestral legacy that has ripped
the Doyle family apart.KATHLEEN JENNINGS’S FLYAWAY
(Tor.com, 175 pp., $19.99),reads like
a fairy tale, one in which every-
thing is slightly off-kilter. Bettina
Scott, who lives with her odd,
controlling mother, is at the cen-
ter of a number of family myster-
ies in her village of Runagate, aplace where you’ll find “roses
planted in wire-fenced gardens on
the buried corpses of roadside
kangaroos.” Jennings’s sentences
are startling, requiring one to look
close, then step away; just as a
Gaudí construction — the Sagra-
da Família, for example — de-
mands one take in a small accre-
tion of details to best appreciate
the vast complexity. It can feel
claustrophobic at times, but en-
tering this world is worth the
discomfort: Jennings has written
an unforgettable tale, as beautiful
as it is thorny.DON’T LOOK NOW, but the sequel to
“Bird Box” — the 2014 novel by
Josh Malerman that was adapted
into a film starring Sandra Bull-
ock — is here. Malorie and her
children survived their first en-
counter with the creatures —
amorphous beings who cause
madness to all who see them —
by taking refuge in a school for
the blind.
In MALORIE (Del Rey, 300 pp., $28),
12 years have passed and now the
rules have changed: The crea-
tures can harm by touch so that
even the blind are undone. In this
fast-paced, frightening narrative,
Malorie discovers information
about fellow survivors, and hits
the road with her children,
searching for something of “the
old world” to hold onto.GEORGE A. ROMERO, whose film
“Night of the Living Dead” de-
fined the modern zombie, left his
novel THE LIVING DEAD (Tor Books,
654 pp., $27.99) unfinished when
he died in 2017. Daniel Kraus, the
co-author of “The Shape of Wa-
ter,” stepped in and completed the
book, giving Romero fans a final
experience of his particular vision
of a zombie apocalypse. And what
an apocalypse it is! Panoramic
and sweeping, “The Living Dead”
is a smorgasbord of the undead, a
book that will give even the most
ardent zombie lovers their fix.
The story begins with one
infection, and expands to show
characters as they struggle
through the contagion. Compar-
isons can be made to the current
pandemic, but that is no surprise:
Like so many horror writers,
Romero saw it coming. 0Where Evil Lurks
DANIELLE TRUSSONIis the Book Re-
view’s horror columnist and the
author of five books. Her latest novel
is “The Ancestor.”
DARK MATTERS/HORROR/BY DANIELLE TRUSSONI
KATE DEHLER‘Maybe we... asked for
this. Somehow. By mistake.’The joys.
The tribulations.
The twists.
Read, watch and listen to the stories.
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