Synopsis
Calliope Street is a psychedelic horror novel reminiscent of Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco, T. Kingfisher’s A House with Good Bones, and Dario Argento’s surreal horror film Suspiria.
Jack and Avery’s new home on Calliope Street is a fixer-upper’s dream. The lurid collage of pornographic clippings on the basement wall seems like a quirky (and campy) feature. But once the house awakens, what seemed harmless becomes as horrifying as the blood seeping from the carpet. The house is alive. It is intelligent. And it demands homage.
Inspired by the surreal and graphic films of the Italian maestros as well as a meditation on obsession and the relationship between tragedy and art, Calliope Street evokes the myth of Orpheus and Euridice, mixing art, love, and death into a modern take on the haunted house.
NOTE: Released in the UK as The House on Blood Street.
Review
Happy Pub Day to both Josh Hanson and Black Crow Books on the release of THE HOUSE ON BLOOD STREET! Black Crow were kind enough to send me an eArc!
The House On Blood Street (or Calliope Street as it is titled in the US) follows couple Jack and Avery as they move into a fixer upper that they buy at a steal. But, as they begin renovations, they discover strange things around the house, including but not limited to a collage of pornographic images of women covering a basement wall, and a blood-stained pentagram under the carpet. Soon, they discover the bloody history of this house and the murders and cultish rituals that took place here.
Inspired by classic Italian horror (of which I am woefully unacquainted with, other than the 2012 indie flick Berberian Sound Studio), Blood Street starts off immediately strange and unsettling, and never really lets up from there. In fact, it starts off feeling like a coherent, conscious narrative, before descending into the dreamlike, the nightmarish, the weird and the ambiguous. It’s a real love letter to surrealism, and it feels like something David Lynch would have created.
Atmosphere is one of Hanson’s strong points and it’s something I always appreciate in a horror story. For me, atmosphere is all about the flavour of the book, the tension in your chest, and the anxiety you feel for the characters. Luckily, Jack and Avery both feel good to follow, and seeing this descent into the utter strangeness of it all, as a deep sense of wrongness grows thicker with each page, was wholly satisfying. This is also a book with so much – what feels to me – allegory to chew on. Reading other reviews, I see there are allusions to Greek Myth (alongside, of course, the Italian horror cinema that so inspired this novel), however I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t all pass me by. Totally my own fault though, I’m just a bit stupid!
The House On Blood Street is a fascinating creepy psychological horror that goes beyond its initial haunted house set up. Truly bizarre & experimental, this is one that I think will become a cult classic, much like the cinema that birthed it!
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