If you want to read a novel that feels like a puzzle, look no further than Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s ORACLE (Tor Nightfire, 376 pp., $29.99). The novel, which is translated from the Dutch by Moshe Gilula, opens with two friends, Luca and Emma, who one morning spot a hulking shape in the middle of a flower field. The object is the Oracle, a sailing ship from the 18th century. Curious, Emma goes down the ship’s hatch and vanishes in the darkness beyond. She never comes out. Soon, others — including Luca’s father — and a handful of police officers suffer the same fate.
Eventually, a government agency sweeps in, spins lies about the boat and the missing people, then transports the vessel to a secure location for research, recruiting Robert Grim, a retired paranormal expert with a drinking problem (who also made an appearance in Olde Heuvelt’s previous novel “Hex”), to study the ship. Meanwhile, Luca is accosted by dark visions; people refuse to stay quiet about their missing loved ones; foreign forces try to acquire the ship; and nobody seems to see the menace the Oracle is bringing their way.
In “Oracle,” Olde Heuvelt deftly juggles many characters while delivering chapters full of supernatural mayhem. This is a novel that toys with the end of humanity, but the threshold to the apocalypse has seldom been so fun. This is Olde Heuvelt’s sharpest, most compelling work to date.
Vampires are back, and C.J. Tudor’s THE GATHERING (Ballantine, 336 pp., $29) comes to join the fun.
Detective Barbara Atkins works for the Forensic Vampyr Anthropology Department. When a boy is murdered in Deadhart, Alaska, Atkins is sent to investigate. The town’s citizens are pinning the killing on a nearby vampyr group called “the Colony,” and they say they have video proof, but as Atkins does her job, she discovers that the evidence has been staged and things are more complicated than they seem. To crack the case, she teams up with Deadhart’s previous sheriff, and together, they must find the culprit before residents do something they’ll regret.
The novel’s blend of police procedural and horror works well. The story’s fast pace and numerous twists keep you hooked, and Tudor’s witty dialogue beautifully punctuates the narrative’s constant action. However, Tudor’s efforts to turn the narrative into an allegory about bigotry feel underdeveloped. There are a few heavy-handed analogies (at one point someone says an anti-vampyr tattoo is “akin to a swastika”), but otherwise the novel doesn’t delve into racism, homophobia or antisemitism, which would be rampant in a small town that hates those who are different from them. Despite those flaws, Atkins is a great character and there is enough action, tension and gore here to satisfy most horror readers.
Relentlessly creepy and fantastically atmospheric, S.A. Barnes’s GHOST STATION (Tor Nightfire, 377 pp., $27.99) shows that no matter where humans go, our brains can be our worst enemy.
Dr. Ophelia Bray is a psychologist who studies the treatment and prevention of “Eckhart-Reiser syndrome,” a mental illness that afflicts those who spend too much time in space and turns them homicidal and suicidal. In one case, an E.R.S.-fueled episode left 29 people dead. Ophelia is working to make sure events like that won’t happen again.
For her research, Ophelia is assigned to a small exploration crew on a dead planet, but the crew’s standoffish demeanor and cruel pranks make two things clear: They don’t want Ophelia there, and they’re hiding things. When their pilot is murdered, Ophelia and the crew must work together to solve the crime, but cooperating with people she doesn’t trust proves extremely difficult, especially because she’s haunted by her past and because the planet has secrets of its own.
“Ghost Station” is space horror at its best. Barnes explores internal terrors, like psyches spiraling from trauma, guilt and grief, and extraterrestrial ones, like frozen mysteries hidden in towering alien ruins. But no matter what she’s showing, Barnes makes the reader feel as if doom is just around the corner, and that constant tension makes it hard to put this book down.
Some anthologies are more than the sum of their parts. THE BLACK GIRL SURVIVES IN THIS ONE: Horror Stories (Flatiron, 354 pp., $19.99), edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell, is one of them. A wonderful young adult collection of uncanny tales, this anthology makes a statement: Black women belong in horror.
The stories featured in the collection are diverse in theme and approach, but they all center Black female leads and their experiences. Standouts include L.L. McKinney’s “Harvesters,” a story that brings eerie doppelgängers to another level; Evans’s “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou,” which follows a young Black woman haunted by a family curse; and Monica Brashears’s “The Skittering Thing,” which perfectly captures the feeling of being hunted by something in the dark.
“The Black women in this anthology are asserting that we matter,” the horror legend Tananarive Due states in her foreword. And they do. Projects like this — brave, necessary — celebrate Black women, and will hopefully inspire the future of the genre.
