Ghostwritten

Starred review from August 29, 2022
The four horror novellas of this wonderfully meta collection from Malfi (Come with Me) all turn on a vibrantly imagined theme that fans of macabre fiction will easily relate to: books as agents of horror. The centerpiece of “The Skin of Her Teeth” is a novel whose story adamantly refuses to let its telling be altered for extra-literary adaptations—with inevitably fatal results. In “The Dark Brothers’ Last Ride,” a pair of penny-ante hoods couriering a forbidden book to a buyer discover that it’s the key to horrifyingly altered realities. The collection’s most ambitious story, “This Book Belongs to Olo,” introduces a pop-up book whose creator uses the shifting facades of its interiors to trap victims in the architecture of his house. Though each story stands alone, the author subtly links the quartet through shared characters and small references so that the final tale, “The Story”—about a death-inducing e-book—reads like a well-orchestrated crescendo to all that came before. Malfi makes reading about the perils of reading a terrifying delight.

September 15, 2022
Is "book horror" a thing? It just might be, after readers get their hands on this collection of four never-before-published horror novellas from the author of The Night Parade (2016) and Black Mouth (2022), among many others. Each of the four stories involves a book, in one way or another: a novel absolutely refuses to let itself be adapted into a film; a couple of mobbed-up delivery guys wonder why a book is so important; a pop-up book and a precocious child make a very bad combination; and a "choose your own adventure" story is a bit too real for comfort. Malfi makes horror feel viscerally real by showing it to us through the eyes of his vividly described characters--if they are frightened, apprehensive, or just confused, so are we. Fans of the author's previous books will welcome the opportunity to see how he handles the shorter novella form: if anything, because these stories are smaller and tighter, they just might be even scarier than some of his full-length novels.

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