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juushikaTitle: The Black Lord
Author: Colin Hinckley
Published: Tenebrous Press, 2023
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 125
Total Page Count: 526,550
Text Number: 1926
Read Because: reading the publisher, ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: The disappearance of an infant presages the return of an entity that has haunted his family for three generations. This opens strong with its horror, no slow build from mundane to speculative, and I admire that; and then the narrative loops back, an unusual, risky structure, introducing new PoVs to explore the backstory of folk horror meeting cosmic horror. Hinckley leans into kinesthetic descriptions, into precise unsettling moments, which I find refreshingly effective (as an aphantasic reader who bounces off of most horror monsters as a result). But the titular Black Lord is too late introduced to a narrative otherwise so exhaustive in developing its lore, and while parts of the family dynamic feel true, family history isn't an anxiety that speaks to me; this most me a little as it went on.
Included is a short story: another spooky tree, another remarkably evocative moment, interestingly oblique Noodle Incident treatment of the inciting events, another climax that doesn't quite sell me. Hinckley is doing cool things with narrative structure and has an eye for horror, but his meeting of themes to horror is a little staid for me.
Author: Colin Hinckley
Published: Tenebrous Press, 2023
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 125
Total Page Count: 526,550
Text Number: 1926
Read Because: reading the publisher, ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: The disappearance of an infant presages the return of an entity that has haunted his family for three generations. This opens strong with its horror, no slow build from mundane to speculative, and I admire that; and then the narrative loops back, an unusual, risky structure, introducing new PoVs to explore the backstory of folk horror meeting cosmic horror. Hinckley leans into kinesthetic descriptions, into precise unsettling moments, which I find refreshingly effective (as an aphantasic reader who bounces off of most horror monsters as a result). But the titular Black Lord is too late introduced to a narrative otherwise so exhaustive in developing its lore, and while parts of the family dynamic feel true, family history isn't an anxiety that speaks to me; this most me a little as it went on.
Included is a short story: another spooky tree, another remarkably evocative moment, interestingly oblique Noodle Incident treatment of the inciting events, another climax that doesn't quite sell me. Hinckley is doing cool things with narrative structure and has an eye for horror, but his meeting of themes to horror is a little staid for me.
