Kate Alice’s Marshall’s sophomore novel is the scariest book I have read in… I don’t know, maybe ever? It’s hard for me to say from my current vantage point of being huddled up under a warm blanket mumbling soft prayers for safety in a world so cold and bleak. Rules for Vanishing is fucking scary. Read it in the dark. Read it in the winter. Let it seep into your brittle bones and fuck you all the way up.

Sara’s sister Becca disappeared one year ago. Probably she ran off with a boy, but Sara doesn’t think so. Sara thinks that she ran off to follow a local legend, Lucy Gallows, on a mysterious road in the woods that only appears under very particular circumstances. And Sara is determined to follow the road herself, and get her sister back, no matter how ridiculous they may look if it’s fake or how dangerous it may be if it’s real. With a group of loyal and curious friends from her high school, she sets out on the road, with a book of rules to (maybe) guide her. The frame of the story is that Sara’s giving an interview to, like, an X-Files type guy, and her narrative of what happened is supplemented by other documents: Text messages, photographs, excerpts from books and interviews, cell phone videos, etc.

So, here’s a list of some things that are extremely my shit:

• sister stories
• folk horror
• things that are scary because they are pitiful, and wet, and doomed
• roads you mustn’t stray from through dark, spooky forests
• rules that you can’t break if you want to survive but come on, we’ve all read a fucking story before, we know you’re going to break the rules
• stories in documents

What I’m saying is that Rules for Vanishing was so, so good for me. I would have smoked a cigarette after I finished it, except that I was afraid lighting the flame would attract the attention of a many-clawed beast or a reaching, weeping undead woman with abysses where her eyes should be. When I first started reading, I questioned the found documents structure a little bit. The portion where Sara’s supposedly writing down her narrative were extremely typical YA narrative voice, down to the use of present tense, and I was all, “come come now madam, we all understand the limits of the epistolary form but you must, surely, play the game a little more than this.” And then there’s a reveal so utterly chilling and so intrinsically woven into Sara’s narrative to that point that I stopped questioning anything.

(I also screamed NO NO NO and threw the book away from me like it was a large and poisonous bug. The reveal was very fucking scary. THIS BOOK IS SCARY.)

Rules for Vanishing manages to maintain a high pitch of terror pretty much constantly. While there is a resolution — well, it’s ambiguous, but I felt good about it — there’s no point at which anything that’s happened to date starts making sense or feeling controllable. The characters walk down the road in the full knowledge that they’ll encounter seven gates and each one carries the risk of death. (And those aren’t false stakes: people die in this book. Hit me up in the comments if you want to know who.) No sooner have they gotten past one unknowable horror than they’re confronted with a new one. None of the problems that confront them are fully solvable; they’re only, possibly, with luck, survivable.

As scary as this book is — and I truly can’t overstate how many tiny, horrifying details Kate Alice Marshall has crammed into this standard-length book — it’s also exceptionally clever. As I mentioned, there’s something that Marshall’s doing with the early parts of Sara’s narration that you’ll have to go back and reread to fully appreciate. On a bigger scale, all of the interview scenes are building to a major reveal, and the set-up for that reveal is as exquisitely set up as just about anything I’ve read this year. I like it so much that I’m going to need to make a special spoilers section to talk about it, because it’s just that impressive.

Spoilers begin after this! Leave if you don’t want them!

Okay, so, you know that there’s something off with Sara when she’s conducting the interviews with Dr. Ashford and his assistant, Abby. (PS can we get a whole spin-off series about Abby? I loved her??) At first it seems like they’re just trying to get the story of what happened out of her, but then as the book goes on, it becomes clear that there’s specific information they’re looking for. Marshall makes it seem like they’re trying to find out about a member of the party, a girl named Miranda who has some connection to Abby. Then we learn what’s been hidden about Miranda, and you’re like — oh shit, there’s still a hundred pages left to go. So at that point you know that there’s something else. A woman on the road turns out not to be who she says she is, and you remember, suddenly, that way way way back in the beginning, one of the teenagers came through a gate and when they got to the other side, she was not herself. She looked like the girl they all knew. But she wasn’t. And Marshall lets you sit with the horror of the realization that as unreliable a narrator as Sara has been (for spoopy reasons), you can’t even trust that she’s who she says she is. And only at the very final moment is it revealed that actually, the one who came back wrong was Becca; and that sets up the final confrontation with the evil being from the road.

It’s! So! Good! It’s so good and satisfying. Every piece of the set-up is perfect, from the early clues about Miranda to the vanishing of Vanessa in the dark to the pacing of the reveals and the discovery of what’s key information and what’s peripheral.

Okay! Spoilers are now over! You can come back!

Even apart from the big reveals, Marshall just does an incredible job of maintaining the tension at a fever pitch. You can never relax. No matter what timeline you’re in, there’s always something lurking around the corner to jump out at you and make you scream. I loved this book to shreds, and I’m so glad I had a chance to read it. Many thanks to Caitlin Starling, author of The Luminous Dead, for talking it up so resoundingly on her Twitter timeline that I went to the library for it the very next day.

The post Review: Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall appeared first on Reading the End.

(Pray grade? Get it? Cause gods? No?)

Do not read if you don’t have a strong stomach. I have never read a book with so many viscera, including Gabriel Squailia’s book entitled Viscera. Not only is Rupert mixing with a wide range of violent people and gods, any of whom is likely at a moment’s notice to start wreaking bloody havoc, but his job also involves a pretty high number of sloshing intestines and globby detached organs.

If you can power through that, though, Khaw is a weird and wonderful voice in dark fantasy. She writes with equal facility about the gods of China and Greece, about the chill unfriendliness of London and the hot, noisy hubbub of Kuala Lumpur. I’ve now read two of her fantasy horror stories, and am eager to read more — as well as her queer alleged-romcom-though-having-read-her-other-work-I-have-my-doubts-about-that novella published with the Book Smugglers, Bearly a Lady.

(PS if you want to support the Book Smugglers in publishing cool, strange, diverse fiction, you can toss a few dollars at their Kickstarter, which is still going on!)

Food of the Gods was an excellent start to my RIP season! What spooky books have you been reading this fall?

The post RIP Read: Food of the Gods, Cassandra Khaw appeared first on Reading the End.

Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America’s great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it’s a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter’s troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation’s darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.

White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.

Doesn’t that summary sound like a light social satire in which a Music World Uproar causes privileged white boys to realize the folly of appropriation? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (that’s a reference to something terrifying that happens in the book). Don’t be fooled: “White Tears is a ghost story” should have gone up front, because holy shit, White Tears is a ghost story. White Tears is primarily a ghost story. When Seth and Carter send their faked song by imaginary Charlie Shaw out into the world, they set into motion a goddamn terrifying ghost story.

I am trying to strike a balance in this post between telling you enough information to get you to read this book and spoiling the reading experience. This book grabbed me by the throat and shook me like a Polaroid picture. It’s Southern gothic written by a Kashmiri British guy. It catches the reader up in Seth’s need to know how his life came to be in this shambles, even when you can clearly see that he’s walking straight into his own doom. It makes privileged white kids pay the bitter, vicious price of the country’s racial sins. It’s the rare ghost story that makes you root for the ghost.

If I had one gripe, it’s that the resolution of White Tears is perhaps a smidge too tidy. What you eventually find out about the ghost and its motivations, about Carter’s family and their history in the American racial landscape, is certainly effective to the story Kunzru’s telling. But in a way, I would have found it more satisfying if the ghost’s revenge on these people had been random and unfair, if Seth and Carter just happened to be the people on whom the ghost’s eye fell. If you’ve read the book, let me know if you agree! I will take arguments to the contrary.

Anyway, whatever, White Tears is still scary af. There’s this one scene, oh my God there is this one scene where Seth and Carter’s sister Leonie are down south talking to a black guy in a pick-up truck, and it will haunt my nightmares always. You’ll know the one when you get to it. Also, the B side of the Charlie Shaw record.

Please read this booooooooooook and then come back and talk to me about it! And also, if you have read other books by Hari Kunzru, what did you think of them? I would like to know more!

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