The Burning Class by Luisa Colón

 

In the midst of the rampant crime and corruption of early 1980s Brooklyn, Analie has built a life for herself as the adoring young wife of a New York City police officer and trusted nanny to a sweet little boy.

But Analie has a deadly past and a terrible secret that’s catching up to her—one that she’ll do anything to outrun, even if it means setting her world on fire and watching everyone and everything go up in flames.

Analie has been burning for a long time...

and you never forget your first crime.

The Burning Class is Luisa Colon's incendiary second novel, a gripping supernatural thriller that weaves a story of trauma, fury, and love against the backdrop of a city on fire.

When Analie was a child, she befriended Tenny, a poor, lonely, neglected girl. They were the best of friends for a time, until Tenny became more clingy and demanding. Analie tried to end the friendship but Tenny refused to let it go, becoming more and more intrusive and bothersome.

Now, as a grown woman, Analie is married to Corvi, a man she had a secret crush on when they were children. Corvi also came from an abusive, neglectful home.  He is everything she thinks she wants. A man who sees her for exactly what she is and wants her not despite it, but because of it. They seem to be a perfect match made in hell. Analie has unresolved trauma from her childhood, of which she never speaks. This fuels most of her actions and reactions throughout the book. She is always looking outward for validation from others that she is a good person or at least good enough.

This is the author's second novel, and the first thing I notice is how much she has honed her skill in both character development and pacing.

The Burning Class is part coming of age, part supernatural horror, and part domestic drama, all twisted together to form an explosive tale that blew me away. I couldn't put it down. The personal dynamic between the characters was masterfully crafted to propel the story forward to a skillful and satisfying conclusion. 

5 out of 5 stars

My thanks to the author for the gifted paperback.

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The World Turns Red by Tim Waggoner

Welcome to the meat room.

At first, it’s a whisper on the edge of your consciousness.

As it gets louder, you begin to make out words—dark, sharp, dangerous words… You clap your hands over your ears to shut them out, but you can’t escape what comes from inside you.

The voice tells you to do things to yourself. Bad things. Awful things…The longer you listen, the more they seem reasonable. Desirable.

Inevitable.

And as you reach for the nearest knife, gun, or rope, the voice speaks the last four words you’ll ever

All hail the Unhigh.

This novella is a quick and gruesome story that packs a lot of horror into eighty-something pages.

Lewis Cooper is in the midst of an ordinary day, grading essays on his laptop, when he happens to look out the window and see his neighbor fashioning a noose on his oak tree. What follows is a rash of suicides that spread like a plague, seeming to travel everywhere Lewis goes. 

Is Lewis immune, or is he somehow the catalyst? We learn the truth through flashbacks to his traumatic childhood and how these events shaped the man he is today. There were times I was not sure what was really happening and what was only inside his damaged mind.

This is a very dark, intense read with a surreal quality that pulled me in from page one and held me spellbound to the bitter end.

4 out of 5 stars

My thanks to Cemetery Dance Publications.

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One Dark Night by Hannah Richell

On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.

Rachel, the school guidance counselor, is trying to keep a handle on her increasingly distant teenage daughter, Ellie, while students and parents panic and mourn. Her ex-husband and detective Ben, dealing with a personal crisis of his own, has concerns about his daughter’s safety as he investigates the death of one of her classmates. Meanwhile, Ellie is keeping secrets from both her parents, including one about where she was that night.

Told from multiple perspectives and with Hannah Richell’s distinct “atmospheric and ever-twisting” (Emylia Hall, author of the Shell House Detective Mysteries) prose, One Dark Night is a white-knuckled and suspenseful thriller about urban legends, privilege, and how the past continues to haunt us.

 

When I read the description of this book, I thought the plot would have more to do with the ghost that haunts the road known as Sally in the Wood, so I expected something spookier. What I got is more of a combination of domestic drama and whodunnit.

A party in the woods ends in death for one teen in a murder mystery told from multiple points of view.

Ellie has been withdrawn ever since her parents split up, but after that party, she is keeping even more secrets. What really happened that night, and why is there blood on her clothes? Her father Ben, is a detective investigating the murder, and her mother Rachel, is the school guidance counselor who in trying to deal with so many students, is missing some signs from her troubled daughter.

A lack of communication between Rachel and her ex-husband Ben felt contrived rather than natural, in order to keep those characters in the dark for longer than necessary, before they finally learn what the reader already knows from the start, that their daughter Ellie was at the party on the night of the murder.

While I was not the target audience for this book, and I did not care much for any of the characters, it did succeed in pulling the wool over my eyes in every attempt to guess who the murderer was, which led to a satisfying reveal at the end.

My thanks to Atria Books for the invitation to read an e-ARC

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Cottonmouth By Kealan Patrick Burke

Available for the first time in paperback and digital.

A thrilling prequel to Kealan Patrick Burke's southern gothic horror novel Kin.

 Cottonmouth is set in the aftermath of the Great Depression in Tennessee, a time of religious fervor and charlatanism, of thieves, murderers, and moonshiners.

Here you'll meet Horseshoe Collins, a traveler on a vengeful search for the father who abandoned him; Billy Wray, a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher bringing the promise of salvation to rural communities paralyzed by fear of the Devil; and Jonah Merrill, a child grieving the loss of his beloved father and tormented by his mother's wrath.

With the threat of a second World War looming on the horizon, destiny will bring these three people together and set innocent young Jonah on the path to his eventual fate and a new name: Papa-In-Gray, the patriarch of the dreaded Merrill family whose horrific exploits were first introduced to the world in KIN.

 Cottonmouth is the prequel to Burke's horror masterpiece, Kin.

This can be read as a stand-alone, but if you have not read Kin, don't deprive yourself; read them both! Long before we meet Papa-in-Gray, the murderous religious zealot in Kin, he was just Jonah, an ordinary boy, growing up poor and neglected after his father passed away and his mother couldn't be bothered to care for him.

I'm not going to say much else about the plot except that it's a strong case for nurture vs nature in creating monsters because Jonah was not born evil. He was not a bad seed. Who knows what kind of man he would have grown up to be if he had not suffered so much abuse? I read Kin close to a decade ago, and I never thought I would feel sympathy for Papa-in-Gray, yet here I am wishing I could go back in time and offer the boy he used to be a shred of comfort. I can count on one hand the times I have gone back to reread a book, but Cottonmouth has made me crave a reread of Kin with an intensity that I can not ignore.

The writing is flawless, and the story is brutal and mesmerizing. 

5 out of 5 stars

available for pre-order

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