This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on July 4, 2023.

Boys in the Valley

By Philip Fracassi – Tor Nightfire – July 11, 2023

Review by Robin Marx

Boys in the Valley immerses the reader in the harsh, prison-like environs of St. Vincent’s Orphanage, deep in the hills of rural Pennsylvania, 1905. Here Peter Barlow and 31 other boys spend monotonous days working the fields and participating in church services under the watchful gaze of a handful of Catholic priests. Any perceived infraction or impiety is met with withheld meals, corporal punishment, or a trip to the dreaded “hole”: a subterranean cell dug into the grounds outside the dormitory. The boys’ already grueling situation goes from bad to worse with the midnight arrival of the local sheriff and his deputies with a grievously wounded suspect in tow. The injured man is combative and raving, with the sheriff evasive about the circumstances of his arrest. Former military medic Father Poole attempts to provide treatment, but what begins as first aid soon devolves into a harrowing exorcism that the wounded man does not survive. After the man’s death and interment in the orphanage grounds Peter notices an unsettling change come over a number of his fellows, beginning with one just returning from an overnight stay in the hole. Formerly cheerful boys have become inexplicably malicious and conspiratorial. They huddle together, darkly plotting and recruiting others, while the priests refuse to acknowledge that anything unusual is occurring. Violence seems imminent, and as the oldest boy with a strong sense of responsibility it’s up to Peter to protect his comrades. Assuming, that is, he can distinguish friend from demonic foe.

Like Fracassi’s previous novel, Gothic, Boys in the Valley involves devil-worship and demonic possession. The publisher’s pithy tagline describes Boys in the Valley as “The Exorcist meets Lord of the Flies, by way of Midnight Mass.” Similarities to The Exorcist are obvious, and both the absence of effective adult supervision and the pervasive child-on-child brutality certainly bring to mind Lord of the Flies. But despite being—at its heart—a religious horror novel, I would also recommend it to fans of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Isolated and snow-bound, the orphanage may as well be as remote as an Antarctic research station, and its immediately clear that no outside help is forthcoming. Unlike many horror stories, where a singular devil flits from one host to the next in serial fashion, possession is treated here almost like an infection. Some demonic hosts are more insidiously subtle than others, engendering a heavy atmosphere of paranoia as alliances shift and former friends become lethal enemies.

Despite the claustrophobic setting of Boys in the Valley, Fracassi effectively manages a large cast of characters. The various boys are all named and given evocative quirks. The lion’s share of characterization is given to the oldest two boys, the noble aspiring priest Peter and his cynical counterpart David, but through brief passages and conversations Fracassi manages to communicate each boy’s essential nature with surprising economy of words. With the end goal, of course, of making the reader really feel the blow whenever a particular boy meets a savage end at the hands of his fellows.

The pacing is another highlight of Boys in the Valley. Many authors would be tempted to prolong the first third of the novel, after the first boys start to change. Those authors would drip-feed the reader a series of unsettling events over several more chapters before the first murder takes place. Fracassi’s demons are impatient and ready to get to the carnage, however, with the whole sequence of events escalating very quickly. I appreciated the apparent confidence Fracassi had in the strength of his basic premise and his scene-setting ability. Rather than dragging things out unnecessarily, all hell breaks loose within the orphanage soon after Peter uncovers the demonic threat.

Previously published in 2001 as a 500 copy limited edition by Earthling Publications, Boys in the Valley is now being released by Tor Nightfire. Hopefully this mass market edition from a major publisher will introduce Fracassi to a wider audience of readers. After reading both Gothic and Boys in the Valley I am firmly convinced that Philip Fracassi is a name worthy of being included alongside other contemporary horror greats like Paul Tremblay, Nick Cutter, and Stephen Graham Jones. Boys in the Valley is a tense page-turner, absolutely gripping.

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on February 1, 2023.

Gothic

By Philip Fracassi – Cemetery Dance Publications – February 3, 2023

Review by Robin Marx

Philip Fracassi’s new horror novel Gothic opens with its protagonist Tyson Parks trapped in an untenable situation. Twenty years ago he was a New York Times bestselling horror author, hailed as Stephen King’s heir apparent. But times have changed and his more recent books have been commercial and critical failures. His smug Manhattan agent—lounging in the posh corner office Tyson’s labor and talent financed—berates him like a child for falling out of step with the fickle tastes of the fiction market. Tyson’s latest manuscript is both late and diverges significantly from the book he pitched to his anxious publisher. The creative well is running dry and his business partners are growing impatient while his debts mercilessly compound.

Tyson’s fortunes change, however, when his supportive partner Sarah buys him an ornate Victorian Gothic writing desk as a present for his 59th birthday. A smoothly polished stone slab supported by decadently engraved rosewood, the monumental antique is intended to reignite Tyson’s creative spark. And it works, beyond Sarah’s wildest hopes. From the moment Tyson sets fingertips to keyboard, he is drawn into a fugue state in which the words flow easily and the hours slip by, leaving him pages of disturbingly compelling tales of witchcraft and human sacrifice. Publishable pages. But while his writing career makes a dramatic recovery, his personal life takes a drastic turn for the worse. After receiving the desk, loyal family man Tyson finds himself growing distant and dismissive towards his friends and loved ones, even gradually becoming paranoid and outright violent. A new, malignant Muse is his constant companion. If that wasn’t enough, in addition to the desk’s dark influence, Tyson finds himself targeted by Diana, the mysterious and ruthless last scion of the aristocrat who originally owned the artifact. For the desk is, in reality, a repurposed altar dedicated to blasphemous occult rituals.

The clever conceit at the heart of Gothic is that it is an unabashedly old school horror novel about an old school horror novelist. It’s a book that the reader can easily envision Tyson Parks writing himself at the height of his popularity. Tyson may be struggling because he’s behind the times, but Gothic celebrates the era when writers like him were most successful, when names like Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, and Peter Straub adorned every drugstore paperback spinner rack. Fracassi wisely avoids directly aping King’s voice and tics, but King in particular is referenced multiple times in the book. The writer’s descent into madness immediately brings to mind The Shining, and the seductive, haunted artifact that gives with one hand while exacting a terrible price with the other reminds the reader of a certain cursed possessed car. In fact, this parallel is amusingly lampshaded by Tyson’s best friend, Billy: “Can you believe it Tyson? It’s like Christine…but wood!”

While Gothic is clever and occasionally referential, it doesn’t go overboard on postmodernism or irony. It takes a somewhat silly premise—haunted furniture—and combines it with familiar (some might even say played-out) gothic horror elements like warlocks, moonlit ritual sacrifice, and devil worship, and then proceeds to deliver a serious, straight-faced horror story. Fracassi uses these well worn tropes not to mock them from the smirking perspective of an “evolved” 21st century horror writer, but because they are still COOL.

Gothic, as they say, goes hard. The book limits itself to an intimate cast of characters and imbues them with a great degree of interiority, making their insecurities, fears, and struggles relatable to the reader. Fracassi then tightens the screws, subjecting each of them to an inexorably escalating sequence of horrors. Moments of outright violence are infrequent, but are graphically and squirm- inducingly described. While it is handled with what I felt to be appropriate gravity, there is one scene of sexual assault that may be too intense for some readers. Gothic is a novel that draws the reader in and makes them care about the characters before absolutely devastating them. As demonstrated in the shocking climax, no one who comes into contact with the demonic desk survives completely unscathed. Gothic concludes with an extended denouement that hints at even grimmer implications for the world at large.

While plot and characterization are generally quite strong, the character of Diana was the weakest aspect of the book. Her ancestry and its entanglement with the desk’s origins are important to the narrative, but despite the cold-hearted tenacity she displays throughout most of the book, she appears uncharacteristically careless at a crucial moment. Gothic has an uncommonly strong cast of characters, however, and this one false note does little to tarnish the book as a whole.

The horror genre is currently blessed with an abundance of talented authors all pushing in different directions, innovating and deconstructing and elevating, but it’s gratifying to see one newer writer recognize that the classic tropes became classic for a reason. Sometimes an old-fashioned spooky story about possession and devil worship just hits the spot. Gothic is an immensely satisfying love- letter to the golden age of paperback horror.

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