Soul Taker: Book Four in the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. ScareStreet, 2021

Cambridge professor and paranormal investigation Marcus Mortlake can’t get a break. It’s his 50^th birthday and he has a new girlfriend, but his best friend is recently dead, and now an enemy from his childhood has come back to haunt him. Something is taking children in the village he grew up in, and it’s the same creature that tried to take him when he was young. This means going back to his old hometown, something he doesn’t relish. His relationship with his father is not good; his father seems to hold him responsible for the long ago death of his mother. On top of all this, the entity may be connected to Crowe, Mortlake’s nemesis.

It was interesting (and sad) to read about Mortlake’s childhood and how he first encountered the paranormal, and I liked the use of a mythological being. His friends all showed up to help, with a rather unique way of dealing with the entity. The Halloween atmosphere of course added to the eerieness. The strands of story that follow from book to book are getting more complicated with each volume, as Crowe tries to gain power in the Game, where he is stuck. I can’t wait to see where this is all going! Five stars.

 

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.