Synopsis
In The Door in the Field, a construction worker’s bad day becomes a far worse night when drinks at an off-the-books bar send him down an unforeseeably bloody path.
In The Boy in the Woods, something evil has infected the counselors at a summer camp, and a young boy will have to do anything he can to survive the night.
In One Half of a Child’s Face, a woman spying on her daughter and ex-husband notices an odd painting hanging in an empty apartment . . . one that seems to call to the building’s children.
In Wear Your Secret Like a Stone, a big-box clerk discovers that her book pick for a Halloween display echoes a dark secret hidden beneath the idyllic facade of her hometown.
With this collection, Scott Thomas digs his hands into the soil of the American heartland and establishes himself as a master of Midwestern Gothic.
Review
A huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC!
The Gothic often evokes mental images of remote homes succumbing to an unknown decay, the origins of their sickness shrouded in mystery. But what about the rest of the world? Those sprawling fields of crops, the land with blood spilled upon its soil long ago, what of those ghosts? Scott Thomas directly confronts this notion with Midwestern Gothic, a collection of four novellas that explore the darker side of the Midwest. Now if you’re familiar with Thomas’s previous novel, Kill Creek, you’ll recognize some familiar names floating within these stories, ones that have inextricably become a part of the intricate fabric of lore Thomas sews.
Midwestern Gothic is a unique read for multiple reasons but most glaringly for its formatting. Each of the four novellas comes with its own cover and title, a venture into different facets of the uncanny nature of the American Midwest. These small details work a long way in creating seemingly succinct, yet united stories. Thomas spins his own intricate web of macabre, grotesque, and undeniably dark lore within the realm of each novella, exploring ideas of an earth that keeps the score, a vengeful spirit, the origin story of an urban legend, and a Rear Window-esqe haunting.
Thomas showcases vivid imagery to paint a clear picture of his version of Kansas which is his personal horror playground. In many ways, the style of his writing in which he pays such close attention to the finer details of the setting (a main character in and of itself) brings to mind the kind of prose we often see from Stephen King. Aside from style, Thomas writes with a large degree of expertly executed suspense, namely in the first novella, “The Door in the Field.” There is no better way to describe this story than anxious, a tale that builds upon degrees of tension to conclude with a resounding bang that’s felt across generations. Some of these sentiments can be said about “Wear Your Secret Like a Stone,” as Thomas explores the haunting of people as much as places. “One Half a Child’s Face” relies on, well, unreliability and the sense of upheaval to deliver one whopping dose of unsettling horror.
Deserving a paragraph all on its own, “The Boy in the Woods” feels inherently like Thomas’s strongest entry in this collection. A slasher-eque story with a devastating twist-ending, I can’t help but feel like “The Boy in the Woods” and Stephen Graham Jones’s I Was A Teenage Slasher share some dominant, gory, heart-breaking DNA. This is a story that is compelling for its action, a compounding sense of urgency that takes flight as the pages fly by. Yet equally captivating is the emotional component to Eddie’s story, a child who yearns to fit in at summer camp on a normal day, a child who wishes to survive on this horrendous night.
From blood-thirsty plains to haunted apartment complexes, Scott Thomas delivers a tour de force with his examination of the Gothic in his collection, Midwestern Gothic. Each of the four novellas contained within this collection shines for different reasons, but their thread of commonality exists thanks to Thomas’s unique, grounded setting of the uncanny Midwest. Kansas feels like Scott Thomas’s Castle Rock, hopefully a place eager to spawn more of the weird, more of the dark, more of the haunting.
Midwestern Gothic by Scott Thomas is on shelves now from InkShares!
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