Horror writer David Nickle is a master of the creepy -- the reveal at the end of the horror story that lodges in your brain and revisits you in goosepimply moments of fear. I stole the idea of ambulatory thumbs in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town from one of his short stories ("The Unshackling of Thumbs"), because once I read that story, the image just wouldn't get out of my head.

But with his new novel, The 'Geisters, Nickle manages to capture another of horror's delicious thrills: spookiness. From the first page, The 'Geisters exudes a hindbrain-teasing sense of lurking menace, the haunted-house creak of an impending apparition. It's a spectacular feeling, and Nickle tightrope-walks it for 300 too-short pages, building to a climax that's spooky, creepy and scary besides -- and all the moreso because of that long journey on the verge of fear.

Geisters is the story of Ann LeSage, a girl who manifests a violent and elusive poltergeist she calls the Insect. We meet Ann as she is about to get married to a lawyer named Michael Voors, who bemusedly resolves the cognitive dissonance of salt-shakers that move on their own without resorting to supernatural explanations. Ann knows better. She knows that the Insect has escaped from the mental prison she built for it after it killed her parents and turned her brother into a quadriplegic. As she and Michael depart for a lavish Caribbean honeymoon -- paid for by Michael's mentor, a rich winery owner -- the Insect manifests more frequently and in ways that grow ever more violent, culminating with their return flight making a disastrous emergency landing that kills her husband. That death sets her on a journey across America, hunted by people who seem to know the true nature of the poltergeists -- and who have a darkly erotic relationship with them.

The story is a white-knuckler from page one, and Nickle is a master of luring you into thinking that the supernatural can be rationalized and systemized, only to reveal, time and again, that the orderly patterns we try to make of the irrational are figments of our imagination. I was off-balance and more than a little scared throughout.

Nickle has posted the first chapter to his blog.

The book's also got its own power-ballad:

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Kari Maaren wrote and performed this anthem for the book on her uke.

The 'Geisters

The Brazilian website "Arte do Medo" identifies this amazing eyeball face horror makeup as originating in Japan, though no other details are forthcoming.

ARTE DO MEDO #5 (via Super Punch)

I reviewed Lauren Beukes's time-travelling serial killer novel The Shining Girls back in May, and mentioned at the time that the US release was today. And here we are! Here's some of that review:

Shining Girls is the story of a serial killer named Harper Curtis, a savage psychopath who hunts the alleyways of a stinking Hooverville in Depression-era Chicago. Curtis is your basic remorseless nutcase who reels from one act of callous violence to another. Until he happens upon a boarded-up house where he seeks refuge from the people he's wronged and a chance to rest up and lick his wounds from an unsuccessful encounter. And that house isn't just a house, it's the House, an unexplained and inexplicable haunted place that slips through time back and forth between the Depression and the early 1990s. In this house is a room, filled with the trophies of murdered girls and their names, written on the wall in Curtis's own handwriting. Curtis learns that his destiny is to travel through the ages, killing the girls he's already killed, taking the trophies he's already taken.

One of Harper's victims is Kirby Mazrachi, but unlike the rest (and unbeknownst to Harper), Kirby survives his vicious attack. As Kirby matures, her obsession with the man who nearly killed her takes over her life, and she wrangles a job interning for the Chicago Sun-Times reporter who covered her attack all those years ago. She wheedles him into helping her pick up the details again, and slowly they begin to unravel the weird and awful truth.

Deftly told from many points of view and in many timezones, Shining Girls is a tremendous work of suspense fiction. What's more, it's a fabulous piece of both time-travel and serial killer fiction, using the intersection of those two themes to explore questions of free will, predestination, and causality in a mind-melting, heart-pounding mashup that delivers on its promise.

The Twelve-Fingered Boy is John Hornor Jacobs's debut young adult novel and it's amazing. It's a horror novel about Shreve, a kid from a tough background who is stuck in juvie and makes the most of it by running a black-market candy dealership; and his new roommate Jack, a quiet kid with twelve fingers and twelve toes. Jack is not the kind of kid who thrives in juvie, and Shreve takes him under his wing, trying to teach him how to get along on the inside -- but he's not very successful. Jack's extra fingers mark him out among the kids, and the worst of them smell blood when they see him and begin to circle.

But that's the least of Jack's problems. Far more worrisome is Mr Quincrux, a strange man from an unnamed government agency who seems to have the power to make the omnisuspicious guards and wardens go into a trancelike state. He's very, very interested in Jack, and particularly in how Jack landed in juvie -- an unexplained attack on his foster siblings that we quickly learn had something to do with telekinesis. Shreve quickly discovers that Mr Quincrux is an emissary for something much darker than any mere government agency, and as things escalate and Jack's powers come to the fore, it quickly becomes necessary for the pair to break out and hit the road.

Great horror novels demand likable characters -- people whose danger we can't help buy empathize with -- and Twelve-Fingered Boy has a pair of two of the most likable characters I can remember meeting. Shreve is fast-talking, tough-as-nails, thoughtful and honorable; Jack is quiet, gentle, scarred but indomitable. Their adventures hopping trains and sneaking across the country to unravel the mysteries of the plot are part Huck Finn, part X-Men. The scary stuff in this book -- and there's some really scary stuff here -- goes beyond the usual scares of kids' horror, and is truly the stuff of nightmares. This is a book that mesmerizes like a venomous snake, and while it comes to something of a conclusion at the end of 264 too-short pages, I was delighted to learn that it is only book one of a trilogy. I'll be on the watch for the next two volumes.

The Twelve-Fingered Boy

Miss Cakehead writes, "This set of Zombie Swimming Pool Rules was comissioned from graphic designer Pictographik to promote the Resident Evil Revelations blood swimming pool, and was based on an the iconic traditional British swimming pool rules. The pop up 'blood' filled swimming pool opens in London next week to mark the release of Resident Evil Revelations. In addition to its bloody appearance the swimming pool will offer floats in the form of human torsos, feature brains and intestines as lane markers, have Zombie lifeguards on duty and even offer a diving board in the form of a 'freshly killed human corpse'."

Zombie Pool Rules (Thanks, Miss Cakehead!)