Review: A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill

A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 17, 2019



For all its Lovecraftian references, A Cosmology of Monsters is a deeply human story: of monsters both literal and figurative, of the petty pains and beautiful heartbreaks of the horror-haunted Turner family and the monsters they meet, embody, and unleash. The scourges of mental illness, the soul-sucking micro-pains of a life lived at the ragged edge of the middle class, and the daily suffocations that family---the people that you can never truly escape---require . . . these things combine with rather more tangible horrors, some very literal monsters in the dark, to create a story that manages depth without sacrificing its fantastical elements for the sake of its metaphors. (As I began reading this, part of me was afraid the monsters would be figurative. Rest assured, this is literal horror. The monsters that stalk the Turner family are very real, though much of the book is devoted to the more mundane monstrosities we ordinary folk experience: poverty, sickness, conflicts within the family, etc.).

Overall, I enjoyed this quite a lot. I won't speak too much about the plot, as the mystery of what's actually going on is part of the fun. Suffice to say, we follow here the lives of an ordinary American family whose lives are drenched in horror. From a father's love of horror fiction and haunted houses, passed down to his children and eventually serving as a family business (in the creation of a haunted house called The Wandering Dark), to the more more mundane horrors of poverty, sickness, and familial clashes, to literal horrors in the dark that haunt each generation of Turners, this is a horror novel quite literally about horror.

It takes a lot of skill to mesh the mundane with the fantastical in a way that that diminishes neither, and this depiction of American life is almost as unsettling as the eldritch City that haunts and hunts our characters. The marriage that 'should' have every element needed for success and fortune, smashed against the rocks of small dreams, smaller incomes, and the lack of fulfillment so endemic to so many lives. The running of a small business, the closest thing to a religion that America has, treated like the daily grind of precariousness that it oh-so-often is. The institution of the family, that most sacred thing, twisted and rotted into an inescapable prison.

I see this is being categorized under cosmic horror, but that's not an entirely accurate description. This story's bones lie in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, not in what I'll refer to as the Innsmouth/Cthulhu 'shelf' of cosmic horror. In other words: this isn't really about the horror of the unknowable, the madness of glimpsing what man is not meant to know---it's about the riders on the night winds, monsters both seen and touched, and an eldritch, inescapable land which we must, and must never, visit.

I did have some quibbles. A group of characters appear that I found rather plot device-y, and the ending, which I found (overall) to be very appropriate and satisfying, did have a couple of illogical elements and some things I thought should have been fleshed out a bit more. But overall, this was a well-told story with an interesting plot, something horror fans and non-horror fans should definitely both enjoy.

Review: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 1, 2019


Upon the death of her grandmother, a freelance editor grabs her glorious dog Bongo and heads off to to clean out her grandmother's rural North Carolina house. Said grandmother was quite a bitch, which isn't really relevant to the plot (except in one somewhat hilarious way that I kept expecting to be expounded upon or subverted, but never actually was). Said grandmother was also a hoarder, which definitely is relevant to the plot, as it turns a quick clean-up into a much longer affair. And as the days pass and the shadows lengthen, our oh-so-unlucky narrator discovers certain eldritch truths lurking in the forest surrounding the house. And then she discovers that certain of those has decided to follow her back to the house. (She also discovers that Bongo is both the best and worst of dogs. You'll see what I mean there.)

The first three-quarters of The Twisted Ones is one of the best horror novels I've read in a long, long while, the sort of book I kept reading late at night and then yelling at myself for reading late at night, because every wind gust and house creak was suddenly causing me to freeze in place while trying not to glance in shadowed corners.

However and most unfortunately, as we reach the home stretch, that carefully-built sense of dread just up and dissipates, like fog hit with a fan, until I suddenly felt like I was reading a far more generic slasher-esque chase story than what had come before. I knocked off a star for that, where I'd have cheerfully given this five stars and beyond had the promise of the earlier sections been maintained through to the end.

There is a tie here to a . . . I wanted to say a horror classic, but I'm not sure the book in question qualifies as that. (Certainly not in the sense of being a 'shorthand' novel among horror fans, one of those books whose quotes, plot, and references any good horror reader would immediately recognize.) Rather, this is tied to a lesser-known book by the same author as a clear cosmic horror classic, so it'll be familiar to some readers but definitely not all. In any case, I myself hadn't read the book in question, and didn't even realize what was being tied into the plot while reading the book, and I certainly had no trouble following the plot.

If you're any kind of horror fan, definitely pick this up. Just be forewarned: the ending might disappoint you.

Review: The Nobody People by Bob Proehl

The Nobody People by Bob Proehl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 3, 2019

This book is not about the X-Men, but you might be forgiven for forgetting that fact as you crack open this 400+ page . . . not doorstopper, because I don't think it quite qualified there, but it's definitely a book of great girth. (Whatever the proper term for that would be.) The Nobody People calls its superpowered humans Resonants instead of mutants, but there are so many parallels that it's impossible to really talk about this book without mentioning its clear inspiration. (Primarily, but not just the X-Men; the author clearly had a lot of fun peppering this book with a plethora of tiny SFF references, from Doctor Who to The Magicians to what I could swear was a dash of The Highlander. But those are easter eggs at best; the X-Men clearly lie at the bones of this story.)

The problem with that, though, is that I didn't feel the author really did anything new with its inspiration(s). It's not an interrogation of the X-Men, or an expansion of the ideas behind that series, though it definitely explores similar (in places, identical) themes of prejudice and power. It's a book that's about many of the same things, and I don't know that lampshading the similarities did anything to elevate this into something more original.

There were things I enjoyed here--there's an almost Stephen King-ish quality to the writing, not in the 'horror' sense but in the episodic attention to characterization--but I also felt the pacing dragged. This is a decently long book, and it often felt even longer, to the point where there were times I had to force myself to keep reading (and not to skim).

Overall, I'd say this is one of those books that I could see others enjoying a lot, but just wasn't entirely my cup of tea.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.