Five Darkly Twisted Novels You May Want to Read Twice

by David Allen Voyles
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5 books
It’s not unusual for me to want to re-read a book I’ve enjoyed, but I’ll wait at least a year or two, usually longer, before going back to it. I mean, “so many books, so little time, right? But on rare occasions, I have finished a book only to want to dive right back into it again. Sometimes that’s because of the “Oh, now I get it,” moment, and I want to see how the author developed that idea, maybe find what I missed, while other times the prose was just so good, I wanted to experience it again. Here are five books that just would not allow me to put them away on the shelf until I’d read them again.
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The Pallbearers' Club

Paul Tremblay, 2022
Tremblay presents this story of “an unforgettable and unsettling friendship” in a unique format that really worked for me. His premise is that the narrator’s friend, Mercy, a character in the story who is as weird and awkward as Art Barbara, the narrator, found Art’s manuscript prior to its publication and took the liberty of making her own notes in red ink in the margins of every page. These notes offer another take on the “blood chilling twists” as presented by Art, causing the reader to constantly assess, and re-assess, which narrative is the right one. Add into the mix the New England legend Mercy was researching about a nineteenth century woman believed to be a vampire whose body was disinterred in order for her relatives to perform a ritual to put her to rest, and you’ve got the elements for a story that demanded I read it more than once.

Shadowdays

Polly Schattel, 2022
Once Schattel gets this story moving, which doesn’t take long, it’s a rollercoaster of violence and gut-wrenching suspense. As the blurb on Amazon states, “Melissa Sweet is a clinical nurse in a small southern town who, after a career-ending accident and the accusations of foul play that followed, is just now starting to put her life back together. Tormented by a harrowing act of violence, she makes an impulsive move that changes her life and the lives of those she loves forever. This unleashes a disorienting cycle of brutality and revelation as she reckons with the blood of her own past and the blood of those who transgressed against her.” Shattel doesn’t pull any punches with her hard-hitting prose that may leave you, as it did me, with the desire to go back and read the book again to find out what really happened.

Ghost Story

The Road Home
Jason Stokes, 2019
Justin, the protagonist of Stokes’ novel, is a spirit sensitive who has been seeing ghosts since he was six, but from the very first pages the reader knows this road trip story is going to be a wild ride. The encounters with ghosts are realistic yet much more frightening than any tales you might hear around the campfire. The cross-country trip Jason takes which serves also as a journey of self-discovery with his best friend Whitney involves an angle I don’t want to discuss since no one likes spoilers, but suffice it to say, this was another book that I wanted to re-read immediately.

Grind Your Bones To Dust

Nicholas Day, 2023
It’s unusual to comment on a horror writer’s gift of poetic language, but aside from its hard-hitting punches, Nicholas Day’s prose was what really made me want to go back for a second dip in the bloody pool. I found comments by critics, such as Shane Douglas Keene (“"... a symphony of violence rendered with a poet's eloquent finesse and a madman's ecstasy..."), Sadie Hartman ("The brilliance of it all is breathtaking ... I have never read its equal.") and Lilyn George ("I loved it, but damned if I didn't need a drink afterwards.") to be entirely accurate, not hyperbolic at all. The following summary taken from the blurb on Amazon gives you an idea of the plot, but it doesn’t fully prepare you for the barrage coming your way: “ A surveyor finds himself pursued by flesh-eating donkeys in the furthest reaches of Oregon's desert; a mass-murderer leaves the sanctity of his mountain home to pursue a long-lost love; his guide is an otherworldly raven possessed by a 19th-century American humorist; in nearby Klamath Falls, two estranged childhood friends set off to find a missing father with the help of two aging cowboys; and, a prisoner in her own home sees a vision of death and knows there is no escape.”

The Boatman's Daughter

A Novel
Andy Davidson, 2020
A Kirkkus reviewer says of Davidson’s Southern gothic novel, “Ample bloodshed is offset by beautiful prose,” and I couldn’t agree more. Davidson spins a terrific tale of Miranda Crabtree, the young protagonist who, left on her own at an early age by the death of her father in the gloomy bayous and marshlands of Arkansas, tries to survive while keeping a low profile, yet to survive she must interact with the most unsavory of characters. Davidson blends mythical surrealism with very real violence in this story of survival and endurance. His characters, including a witch, an evangelist, a corrupt sheriff, and a mystical sibling are all hyper-engaging and so rich, like the setting itself, that like me, you’ll likely want to re-read this book as soon as you finish it.