Recently Read: Threshold

Threshold by CaitlÌn R. Kiernan

The most important thing in a good horror novel is not, as monster movies might have you believe, the monster. That's secondary. You don't even have to know what, exactly, the monster is. Or whether there is even a monster anywhere at all within the pages. Now, in the good stuff, you may think you know who or what the monster is, and you may think it is safely several pages away from you, but when you get there, maybe there's just a strange odor, or some other sign that something was - might have been - there.

Good horror is a setting and characters. You kind of grow to like them. Some of them may up and die on you. Others - the lucky ones - might wind up in an asylum somewhere. The rest, unfortunately, are just waiting. And, if it's really good, they're not exactly sure that what they think might happen to them has any bearing in reality.

Good horror leaves you unsettled. Good horror keeps you out of cellars. Or, at least, has you constantly watching your back.

This is better than very good horror. And, if I ever happen to get down south again - specifically, anywhere in Birmingham - I will be looking around every corner and into every shadow. Most likely, I'll avoid that city in particular. This is, after all, great horror.

In some senses, this could qualify for the label "science fiction" in the sense that it is fiction and the science contained within is important to the overall story, and, essentially is what one of the primary characters is about. I've heard some complain about the characters in here - that they're pitiful, not exceptionally possessed of all the things any good Mary Sue author would want themselves their characters to have. These characters have all the flaws you can find in real live people, and these flaws can rip open like fault lines, just like they can in real people. I've known some of these folks - I've seen them in the graduate departments at a major university; I've seen them cowering in the sticky, thick sludge leaking from the dumpster in the alley behind a coffee shop; I've played in bands with them, and seen them up on stage. They don't always have things go their way. When they do, they are surprised. Usually, the find out later that it would have been better for them if things didn't go their way, maybe.

This is not the type of novel for those who think most things on the best sellers on the horror shelf are fine, upstanding examples of literature. Mostly, that's because this is a fine, upstanding example of literature that just happens to also be a deeply unsettling work of horror fiction, with a serious bent on paleontology and geology.