Good faces off against evil in James Herbert’s The Dark
Herbert’s novel combines elements of a haunted house story, a zombie tale, and a meditation on the nature of evil.
Michael McDowell combines Southern Gothic and a haunted house tale in The Elementals
McDowell’s mashup of Southern Gothic and a traditional haunted house story provides a slow burn as opposed to the anarchic energy of his earlier novel.
Stephen Graham Jones’s self-aware metafictional slasher The Last Final Girl
The American novelist’s violent, cheeky 2012 book displays a true fan’s knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the cinematic subgenre.
Newfoundland’s Michael Crummey on history, story, and his latest novel, The Innocents
Michael Crummey talks fiction, Newfoundland, and landscape: “I had lived in Labrador for a while and I had the very real sense that this place could kill you.”
Till death do us part: the literary bait-and-switch of Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question
Jill Ciment‘s novel begins as a courtroom thriller, but transforms into a fraught examination of desire and culpability.
Hustle and flow: the Beat sensibility of John Rechy’s City of Night
John Rechy's 1963 debut novel is simultaneously a product of its time and somehow outside of time altogether.
A small derangement of consciousness: the challenging fiction of Jung Young Moon
Jung Young Moon’s novel eschews traditional notions of plot, character, and conflict in favour of a digressive dreamscape.
Busting borders: the gut-punch fiction of Don Winslow
The American crime writer Don Winslow opened the 2019 Toronto International Festival of authors with an insightful conversation about writing, genre, and the U.S. war on drugs.
Anatomy of melancholy: Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier
Kevin Barry’s third novel features two career criminals waiting at a seedy Spanish port for the arrival of the estranged daughter of one of them.