Book Reviews

In some ways, Jimmy Hawthorn is a lot like many other high school kids. He’s quiet. Kinda shy around girls. Gets pretty good grades. Likes to play video games. For a while there he had to deal with a bit of bullying until he hit a growth spurt and started lifting weights. He’s never found himself in any real trouble to speak of. No run-ins with the law. Gets along well with his parents and his brother. Yeah, just an average young man from an average family living in an average American town. There is one thing, though, that might not be considered quite so average about Jimmy Hawthorn.

I described Eyes to See—the first book of Joseph Nassise’s “Jeremiah Hunt Chronicles”—as a travelogue of the macabre. In that story, the Bram Stoker-nominated author set his protagonist’s horrifying encounter with a shape-shifting specter in the city of Boston. In doing so, he created a map of terrifying encounters set in some of Boston’s most famous areas. In Nassise’s follow-up, King of the Dead, he takes his readers down south to sweltering New Orleans.

Nerves is accomplished short story writer John Palisano’s first novel, and it’s fair to say at the outset that it defies easy classification. Is it horror? Arguably. Is it a fable? Arguably. Is it a thriller? At times, arguably. Nerves also gives a sense that it may belong partly in the Bizarro sub-genre, but again it’s “arguable” and can’t quite be limited to that niche. While one doesn’t want to use the term “unique” too loosely, it is unusual and different from just about everything I’ve read in the last year.

With her duology of Anna Dressed in Blood and Girl of Nightmares, Kendare Blake has created an intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive portrayal of how, and why, the dead maintain their hold on the living, literally and figuratively. It doesn’t hurt that Blake has crafted a deeply appealing YA love story in the process.