Cold on the Mountain by Daniel Powell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a solid little horror novel that feels more like an expanded short story. There are no side plots or other distractions here, just a Point A to Point B story about a family that takes a shortcut in the Sierra Nevada mountains that leads them into the small town of Adrienne, a place where evil gathers (literally, all the bad people of the world end up here after they die).

As part of the contingent of “normals” that blunder into Adrienne, Phil and Wendy Benson are forced to work for the “dark ones” to earn a chance for a once-a-year lottery that sees a bunch of people, both good and bad, released back into the world via magic portal. Adrienne is host to demons, serial killers, Joseph Goebbels (“Call me Joseph”) and the teenage Columbine killers who are never mentioned by name and are weirdly depicted as cartoonish villains.

There is some nice tension as the family struggles to both follow the rules and sometimes defy them, knowing the dire consequences of being caught, but the story is almost too efficient as it speeds along to the endgame, the various pieces all falling in place so quickly there is little time to allow events to sink in. The reader learns about Adrienne but it only ever feels like the surface is examined.

Phil, the protagonist of the story, comes across as a decent but ultimately bland kind of everyman. Bo, his brother on the other side, leads a search to find him and his family, and at one point he and his girlfriend come to believe it’s essential to get the local sheriff on-board to make their kooky plan to free the normals of Adrienne work, though it’s never stated exactly why he’s needed. The sheriff is nice enough as a character, but he becomes increasingly non-essential as the story progresses, to the point where I almost felt his alleged need was a deliberate red herring.

The conclusion will likely leave a lot of readers with a “What happened next?” feeling but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Overall, Cold on the Mountain has a comfortable old school horror feel to it. The journey is brisk–perhaps too much so–but the action certainly keeps rolling along.

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Haven by Tom Deady
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When I pick up a book by an author I’m not familiar with, I do it because the story interests me, or I heard something positive about it, or it was on sale.

What I don’t do is familiarize myself with the author before reading, and so it was that I found out afterward that Haven is Tom Deady’s first novel. It is also the 2017 Bram Stoker Award winner for First Novel.

There are things I enjoyed about the story, an old-fashioned horror novel about a monster lurking in the lake of a small town–and the perhaps more menacing human monsters that work and live around the lake–but I found the story dragged on too long and the melodramatic writing was distracting at best and eye-rolling at worst. I read through to the end but didn’t feel much reward for having done so.

Given the reviews and awards, it may be that I’m just not getting the tone Deady was going for. He renders the characters well for the most part, though some of the supporting characters are typical small town stereotypes, and all of them tend to be overly explicit in their thoughts and actions. Subtlety is not merely tossed out the window here, it is packaged up and shipped over to the other side of the world.

In Haven the sheriff is a cartoonishly evil man with an equally cartoonishly evil son. They serve as the primary antagonists while the monster–the design of which brings to mind the car devised by Homer in The Simpsons in how it’s a conglomeration of mismatched parts intended to be the ultimate representation of its form–occasionally devours, but more often just weirdly mutilates and kills people who get a bit too close to the lake.

The mystery is slowly revealed over the length of the novel, mostly by having characters remember key details from the past piece-by-piece as their minds struggle with the wicked effects of alcohol, mental trauma or both. Conveniently, everyone remembers everything before the story ends.

The whole thing is hokey and kind of silly and I’m actually okay with that, but the writing ranges from a plain meat-and-potatoes quality to stuff that would have benefited from a more discerning editor. Observe:

“Shut the hell up. Who the hell do you think you’re talkin’ to, your freak friend, huh, Father?” The last word he literally spit out, spraying the priest with drops of saliva.

Eddie’s body was literally in pieces.

It hadn’t rained all summer, literally.

He was literally doubling over he was laughing so hard.

Women had never been a problem anyway, but after nailing Greymore, they literally threw themselves at him.

Next he stole a glance at his partner in crime—literally.

What if his little sermon had worked, and Jake had gone off half-cocked (literally) to the lake to find the thing himself?

And my personal favorite:

The ground was literally shaking under their feet as rocks rained down.

Not figuratively shaking, no sir. This ground was literally shaking. It was the real deal, shaking-wise.

The point of these examples (and there are many others) is that any good editor would have stroked out that one word without hesitation and made every sentence better as a result. That this was not done does Tom Deady no favors as a writer.

But I will say this–while I found the ending ultimately unsatisfying and the story overly long, I kept plugging away at it, anyway, so Deady obviously managed to capture enough of that old-fashioned monster horror novel thing to keep me engaged. If he continues to write and gets better help with editing and revision, his workman-like prose can only improve. He can tell a story so I see promise here.

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