House of Whispers: Book Two of the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. ScareStreet 2021

In this volume of the Mortlake series, we are given a ghost story. This is my favorite type of horror story, but there is more to it than just spirits who lived and died in the house.

Tara’s best friend has gone to visit her brother and sister-in-law’s new place, Haslam House, up north. They are house flippers, and, with their young daughter, have moved into a really old place not much south of Hadrian’s Wall. The daughter draws and speaks of a woman that no one else sees. Anita immediately asks Tara to come up and look into the spirit. When Tara arrives, she finds that what started with whispers at night and some drawings is turning into something more serious. While the first spirit is a spiritualist from the Victorian age and not harmful, not all are so nice. When a séance Tara conducts go bad, she in turn asks Mortlake to come up and see what he thinks can be done. It’s one of those times when nothing seems to go right…

I loved this book! It had all sorts of supernatural goings on in the house, and it brings in a larger story arc than merely what goes on a Haslam House- and that’s complex enough on its own. We get to know Mortlake’s crew better. We get to see that there are different types of spirits, and learn more about how the supernatural universe works in this series. I loved that a large part of the story is standalone, but that the larger story advances. Five stars.

 

Wolfsbane: Book One of the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. Scare Street, 2021

The first in the Mortlake series (of which I read the 3^rd one first…doh), this book, while interesting and suitably creepy, has some of the faults that all ‘origin issues’ do. The characters are new, undeveloped, and their abilities have to be explained, we’re being introduced to how the magic of this world works, and it’s shorter than the following books. But I felt Mortlake was well done, as was Tara- we get an extremely intense introduction to her.

We meet Tara as she is on a hike with her boyfriend. Lost, hungry, and wet with rain, when they come to a fence they decide to climb it as they feel it’ll be a shortcut. They are attacked, though, by creatures that Tara cannot recognize. Her boyfriend falls to the creatures, but Tara gets away, with no memory of how. In the ado surrounding her hospital stay and police questioning, someone slips her a business card with “Mortlake” on it. An internet search shows he’s a professor of myth and legend at Cambridge, with a side line in investigation of paranormal evenets. As an astrophysicist, Tara doesn’t put much faith in the paranormal. But between some things that happened when she was a teen, and the fact that the ‘wolves’ that killed her boyfriend didn’t look like normal wolves, she gives Mortlake a call.

Mortlake accepts her plea for help willingly- he’s already been looking into it. He swiftly pulls his helpers together and I’ll not give anymore or the whole thing will be spoiled. Suffice it to say that their skills, paranormal and physical, mesh into a unit that can face most things. I like that no one person- not even Mortlake- knows or does everything. It takes a village, I guess, to fight the paranormal.

Pretty good for number one in a series; I’ll give it four stars.

 

The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher. Saga Press 2020

I’m not sure whether to call this book a horror story, science fiction, or fantasy. Whatever it is, I loved it.

Freshly divorced and still gob-smacked by this fact Kara goes to live with her aging and eccentric uncle Earl. Earl’s not just your average eccentric; his home is also a museum of weird things: the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy. It’s a tourist spot; people come to see the Fiji Mermaids, Jackalopes, human skulls, posters about Big Foot and aliens, and dioramas of stuffed mice reenacting the end of The Empire Strikes Back. The deal is she will help with the museum in exchange for rent. She’s good at it; she helped out there as a teenager and is used to the bones and stuffed elk head that her grandfather puts over her bed because he knows it was her friend when she was a kid.

When grandpa has to go get knee surgery, Kara is sure she can handle the musuem on her own. Right up until she notices that someone has knocked a hole in the sheetrock in one room. She enlists the aid of the barista next door, Simon, a gay thrift-store, Mad Hatter, goth- to fix the hole. And pretty much as soon as he starts he discovers a very large problem- there is a hallway behind the hole. Which would be fine, except… there is not really anything behind that room. It’s a place that cannot be there.

Of course they enlarge the hole so they can investigate. The more they see, the weirder things get, until they know they are in another world. A world of water, small islands of sand, metal bunkers on the islands, and willows. Lots and lots of willows. Think Algernon Blackwood amount of willows.

This book is seriously creepy. The can’t be there world looks innocent at first, until they start to explore. This is Twilight Zone extended to movie length territory, the biggest fear (to me) being ‘what if they can’t get back”. But there is more to fear than just that; there are things that are just wrong. The book is also seriously funny; Kara and Simon make a great, practical team dealing with the horrors but they also react to fear with humor, which I can relate to. I loved the characters, I loved that there was no love interest thrown in the mix, and I really love that, even though it’s a stand alone as far as I can tell, it could easily be made into a series. I mean, Kara does live in a museum of the weird, and people send them new stuff all the time…. Five stars.

 

 Bloodlust, by David Longhorn; Mortlake Series Book 3. ScareStreet, 2021

I seem to be reading this series all out of order. No wonder I get confused!

In this installment of the adventures of Marcus Mortlake, the professor at St. Ananias College, Cambridge, finds himself meeting a woman from his past: Cassandra. He was a young man when they met; she was way out of his league and seemed to go out of her way to connect with him. When she took him to meet the leader of the cult she’d joined, Nathanial Crowe, things go terribly wrong, and Cassandra and Crowe are presumed dead.

Mortlake, as well as his mentor, Monty Carrington, posseses supernatural powers. They are far from alone in this; the local police force knows about and uses them when cases show signs of supernatural activity. So Marcus is called in when people start being found exsanguinated, little thinking he’s meeting his old nemisis – who didn’t used to be a blood sucker.

The first part of the story moved slowly, moving between past and present. There is an assortment of supernatural talents and beings in this series and several are presented here, on both sides of the confrontation. I found the last part of the book more interesting than the first, although it went by rather quickly. I would have liked a bit more of a give and take, but I could see how it had to be presented as Marcus having only one chance.

I really like Mortlake, Monty, and the policemen they work with. I found Crowe more annoying than terrifying, but really loathed Cassandra. All as the author meant! Four and a half stars; one half star off because of the tedium of the flashback.

 

Tavern of Terror: Short Horror Stories Anthology. Volume One. Scare Street, 2022

A collection of a dozen tales of horror, which all have in common Hannigan’s bar and it’s bartender, Harry. Half of the stories are by Ian Fortey, with a couple by Sara Clancy, a couple by Simon Cluett, and one each by David Longhorn and Kevin Saito.

While the stories are all good, some are more sci-fi than horror. I don’t have a problem with that- I read both- but some folks might be disappointed by that. What did disappoint me was that only the first couple of stories really involved Hannigan’s; in the rest of the stories, it barely rated a mention. And I swear I’ve read a lot of these stories before. Still, like I said, the stories are all well written and have great ideas in them! Four stars; I had to take a star off for not using Hannigan’s well.

 1920s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook, by Charlotte Fiell. Welbeck, 2021

This book presents almost 500 pages of 1920s fashion. It is almost all pictures, though, so calling it a sourcebook is a bit of a misnomer. A visual sourcebook, yes. But with less than a dozen pages of text you don’t learn much about how fashion was changing and how it fit into the changes in life itself during the time. But all the images are either photos or drawn pages of advertisement from the era, so it is a huge resource for modern artists, designers, costumers, and social historians. Many of the images show the clothing from the rear as well as the front shot, which makes them invaluable for costumers. Four and a half stars, because I would have liked to have seen more text.

 A Haunting in Hartley – Haunting Clarisse Book 2, by Janice Tremayne. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2020. 

In the 1930s, in a small town in the Australian bush, Father Grimaldi is sent to the basement of the church to retrieve an old cross. While down there, he encounters a malevolent spirit who offers him a deal with the devil- literally. Decades later, Harry and Clarisse are sent to the ghost town so Harry can do some research. Upon arrival, they find that the town subsists mainly upon weddings taking place in the old church, and tours by Paranormal Jack, a ghost hunter.

Intrigued by- but skeptical of- the ghost tour, Harry signs up for an extra tour after the main one. This one involves spending the night in the cemetery. Clarisse refuses- she’s had one run in with the paranormal (in the previous book, The Girl in the Scarlet Chair) and doesn’t want another. The next day, Paranormal Jack is killed and his belongings- including many boxes of the papers he’s collected in his ghost hunting- are stored in the church basement- the basement where Harry has been assigned a room as his office. This gives Clarisse a reason to enter the basement- and puts her in range of the spirit.

The plot thickens at this point, flashing back to the 30s and back again to present day. A lot of crimes from the past emerge. What starts out as a regular ghost story turns into something more. In the end, it reminded me of a fairy tale- a deal with a devil, three tests to be faced. It has a decent structure, although some things could have used more explanation- to say which things would be spoilers. Auto-correct seems to have had its way with alarming frequency. Four stars.