Two Sides to Every Murder
Released in June of this year, Two Sides to Every Murder is the latest novel by Danielle Valentine. She is the author of two other novels, Delicate Condition and How To Survive Your Murder. And I’m happy to say that this new title lived up to its predecessors.
The Story
Two Sides To Every Murder is the story of two girls, Olivia and Reagan. Olivia’s older sister is re-opening a local summer camp named Camp Lost Lake, seventeen years after a series of brutal murders took place. It also happens to be seventeen years after Olivia was born, as she was born in the camp on the night of the killing spree.
Meanwhile, Reagan is the daughter of the woman accused of committing said murder spree. She is known as the Witch of Lost Lake, and the two of them have been hiding most of Reagan’s life. But she is sure that her mother is innocent. She sneaks into Camp Lost Lake, hoping to find evidence to exonerate her mom. What she finds instead is Olivia, who looks exactly like her. And together, they discover that the Witch of Lost Lake is still very much alive. But they might not be for much longer.
What worked
This was a fast-paced book. It was also a gory, bloody book. Reading it felt like watching a horror flick. Specifically, it felt like watching a summer slasher like Scream or Friday the 13th.
Even more specifically, it feels like a book written someone who’s favorite two films are Friday the 13th and The Parent Trap. Someone who understands both of these distinct tropes very well and uses both to their fullest potential.
I’ve mentioned this before with Valentine, but it bears repeating. Her work makes it clear that she is a huge slasher fan. She understands the genre, the tropes, and the expectations inside and out. Because of that, she knows when to give you exactly what you expect, and when to subvert the hell out of that expectation.
Because of this, I understood quickly that the two main characters were going to be sisters. But I did not predict the killer. At least, I didn’t predict all the killers.
And yet, when we realized who the killer was, it made sense. It didn’t feel like it came out of left field. It felt like I should have seen it coming all along. This is the sort of thing that keeps people flipping pages. The constant need to know the mystery. To know, in the most basic form, who done it.
What didn’t work
All that being said, this book wasn’t a total slam dunk for me. And not just because I realized I was the same age as some of the parents in this book.
Let’s start with the dialog. While most of it was fine, some of the back and forth felt very juvenile. And yes, this is a young adult book. But lots of young adult books don’t feel like I’m sitting in the back of a school bus.
I think we can be immersed in the world of a teenager without the clunky phrasing and overly modern slang. Maybe this is just because I read a lot of young adult fantasy, which sidesteps the slang issue altogether. But I feel like it could have been done better.
I was also disappointed that Two Sides to Every Murder was not as deep as the other books from Valentine. And because of that, I wasn’t as invested in it.
How to Survive Your Murder asked an important question. How far would you go to bring back someone you lost? Delicate Condition explored some dark parts of motherhood and the body horrors of pregnancy. By comparison, Two Sides to Every Murder was a kill fest. Yes, there were some family ties. But it just didn’t hit the same. It was still fun, it just wasn’t as deep.
That being said, this was a fantastic Summer read. It’s fun, fast, funny, and bloody. And it left me hoping that this isn’t the last we see from this author.
(4.5 / 5)
Book Reviews
The Twisted Ones
‘Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones…’
‘Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones…’
Published in October 2019, The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher is a modern folkloric, occult horror. Better known for her fairytale retellings, The Twisted Ones is a retelling of Arthur Machen’s 1904 pulp horror classic, ‘The White People’. T. Kingfisher uses her creative license to delve into the myth of the twisted ones, who exist in a specific part of the woods in rural North Carolina. Everyone living near these woods knows something about the white people. Many have seen them, or one of their creations, but all know to stay away.
The Story.
When Mouse is asked by her father to clean out her deceased grandmother’s house, she packs her lovable coonhound Bongo into her truck and heads to the house she has not visited since childhood. Entering the house though, she discovers the job may not be as easy as she thought. Grandma appears to have become a hoarder before she was placed in a care home. There is an entire room of dolls and the stairs are completely blocked by boxes of who knows what. Mouse decides she is up for the task and so begins filling garbage bags. She needs money from the house sale after all.
While emptying her step-grandfather Cotgrave’s bedroom, Mouse uncovers his journal and decides to give it a read. Mouse is a freelance editor and cannot help herself. The journal discusses the existence of the twisted ones, the white people, earworms, and a strange green book that Cotgrave once possessed. There are direct quotes from this book, as he remembers them, and his ideas about interpreting it. Mouse puts the journal aside, writing it off as the ramblings of a man suffering from dementia with racist leanings.
After finding what she calls an effigy hanging in the woods, and then stumbling upon a bald hill that shouldn’t exist, Mouse is drawn back to the journal. Further reading however does not help her. The eerie lines from the journal begin to repeat themselves in her head and unnatural-looking things start to tap at the windows late at night.
Highlights.
Bongo. Enough said. Named after the antelope, not the drum. Mouse’s loveable, sometimes brainless but very charismatic coonhound won my heart. T. Kingfisher has done such a wonderful job characterizing this animal and setting up the bond between Mouse and Bongo, this adds to the overall tense feeling of the story as they both enter risky situations. It is not a spoiler that the dog survives. Mouse makes sure to tell us that all ends well for both of them in the first chapter.
Another highlight are T. Kingfisher’s effigies, descriptions of which are both horrifying and beautiful. The idea of being able to tie, nail, or string together organic and inorganic parts and have a moving creature is bone-chilling (pun intended). But it is the way she describes their movement, the staggering and swaying. There is a strange sadness about them, whilst they still come across as sinister and threatening.
Drawbacks.
It is hard to fault this story, perhaps the slow build of the beginning half of the book is the only thing worth noting. T. Kingfisher takes her sweet time discussing the state of Mouse’s grandmother’s house and Mouse dwells on the fact that she has to clean the place up. There is a lot of complaining and the trips to the truck and the dump become repetitive. That being said, this slow build adds to the overall sense of foreboding in the story and should be expected by readers familiar with folkloric horror.
The Final Take.
This book left me feeling unsettled and getting to the ending was the only way I could resolve that feeling. I couldn’t put the book down simply because I needed closure so the sense of dread would resolve itself. I will never hear the children’s rhyme, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones’ again without chills.
(5 / 5)
If you have been searching high and low for a book in which a devil named Rick, who is the spitting-image of Billy Zane, impregnates a male porn star so that his spawn can finally get into heaven for once, then I’ve found the book for you. From the opening pages, The Devil’s Gunt, by Gerald Dean Rice, launches action sequences, body parts, blood, guts, cum, and vomit at the reader faster than they can dodge, and Dean’s constant clever innuendos (“temptation reared its mushroom-shaped head”) had me laughing out loud at multiple points throughout the book.
What Exactly is The Devil’s Gunt it About?
The Devil’s Gunt follows Median, a current-day porn star, after he finds out he was impregnated with the devil’s spawn. With the help of his roommate Joe, his estranged wife Mary, and a disembodied head in a box, they investigate out how and why the pregnancy occurred while dodging Rick and his demons at every turn. Interspersed throughout this story, we follow Alfred and Milo, from their origins as two supernaturally-gifted boys enslaved on a plantation, to their mysterious involvement in the current day devil-baby debacle.
This horror-comedy-sex-thriller explores almost every subcategory of horror: body, supernatural, family trauma, historical, medical, action, and more. For example, when we first meet Rick the devil (there’s many devils in hell, apparently), he’s impersonating a pony-tail-wearing abortion doctor with a cache of menacing medical tools. Or, after this initial run-in, the trio must flee from demon-shadows that atomize any person they come in contact with. There’s even an interlude in which Alfred and Milo disguise a violent encounter within a mob stampede after the 1929 stock crash.
The only place where The Devil’s Gunt seems to hold back is in the details of the cursed pregnancy itself. How, exactly, is there a baby in there? Where does it come out? How did it get there in the first place? Perhaps in the vein of Frankenstein, Rice leaves the most scientifically confounding, humanly gruesome aspects of the situation up to our imagination.
The Devil’s Gunt is chock-full of subversions of ideas about angels, devils, possession, heaven, and hell. So if you are curious about concepts such as robot-devils or “Scooby-doo Court”, you’ll have to read it for yourself.
(4 / 5)
“It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.
‘The Werewolf.’
Published way back in 1979, Angela Carter’s short story anthology The Bloody Chamber is now considered a classic by many people. It is also thought of as one of Carter’s more, if not most, controversial fictional works. It is common knowledge that fairy and folk tales of old are a lot darker than the cartoon versions we are familiar with. Carter takes this darkness to a new level. These stories contain common themes of sexual desire, violence and love. Many of these stories depict explicit sexual descriptions. If you are a person who takes note of trigger warnings be aware. These stories contain scenes that discuss and depict abuse, bestiality, rape, incest and paedophilia.
The Stories.
Each of Carter’s ten stories in The Bloody Chamber collection are based on fairy or folk tales. In several of these stories this is obvious. For example, the collections eponymous story, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, is undoubtedly based on the tale of Bluebeard and Carter’s Puss-in-Boots keeps its original name. We see Beauty and the Beast represented obviously in both ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’.
There are other stories here that only pull at the loose threads of existing fairy or folk tales; taking a single thought or idea and running with it in another direction completely. There are actually several that seem to mashup a combination of stories in one. For example, in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, the plot as a whole feels like a take on Sleeping Beauty, but there is an obvious reference to Jack and the Beanstalk. The Countess reciting the ‘fee, fi, fo, fum’ rhyme of that story to her victim.
Highlights.
I am a sucker for both fairy and folk tales and as such the highlight here for me was seeing characters and parts of plots that are somewhat familiar in a different light. This sort of ‘re-telling’ (for want of a better word) invites the reader to ask ‘what if’ and I think that that is a very powerful thing to do.
There was a certain dark, wintery aesthetic to all of the stories in this collection that was also big highlight for me. The rain, the wind, the snow, I could feel the chill rising off the pages. The repeated images of birds and birdcages, mirrors and roses created ominous feel and really ticked all of the gothic horror boxes.
Drawbacks.
There were two issues that I had with reading this anthology that really made me struggle to get through to the final pages.
The first was the style of Carter’s writing. Yes, I understand that these are adult fairy tales and there is a level of flowery, descriptive writing that is expected to encounter as a result. But I just felt like I was drowning in dense description in several of these stories. So much so that my brain zoned out several times and I had to stop and rewind, turning back to reread several pages at a time.
My second issue was that it often felt like the violence was skimmed over due to the length of some of the stories, one being only two pages long. The reader barely has time to process what has happened before the story had ended and a new one begun. It often felt like getting punched in the face. For some this point might land in the highlights section, but for me it was a big drawback.
Final Take.
The stories in The Bloody Chamber anthology are divisive. Some love every single one of them, others have a strong aversion. For me, I liked a few. My attention was held by ‘The Erl-King’ and the story of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ itself was an enjoyable read.
Overall though, I think this one missed the mark for me. It might only be because the prose was so heavy with description that I had trouble concentrating on the stories themselves. Despite this, The Bloody Chamber is one of those books that everyone should read at least once in their life.
(2.5 / 5)
