I’ve become well-known at the local library branch. I am a member of the horror book club, my own titles are in the collection, and I’m involved in a horror event later this year. I’m the horror guy.
I went to the front desk to pick up my reserve of Richard Russo’s Under the Falls. The librarian went to the shelf, got the book and looked puzzled, as if there were some sort of mistake: “This isn’t horror.”
People love to pigeonhole everything. If you are from this generation, you behave that way. If you are of one particular political stance, you must agree with every point the majority makes. “You’re with us or against us!” “All or nothing!”
I was with a group of people recently and movie came up. I said I didn’t like it. “That’s because you like horror.” I replied that I like all kinds of movies. “Yeah, sure you do.”
One of the most popular influencers in the horror field openly boasts of reading nothing but horror. I don’t know whether to feel contempt or pity. A mixture of both, I suppose.
Generic horror writers are a relatively new concept. Most old writers, from Dickens to Hawthorne to Henry James, wrote all manner of fiction. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are best known for science fiction, or perhaps they were known as scientific romances in those days, but they wrote much more than SF.
Frankly, I think it’s absurd. What if I ran into someone at an Italian restaurant a bunch of times, then saw them at a Mexican place. “Hey, I thought you liked Italian food!”
Or, while I’m on a roll, people ask what kind of music you like. Some people will flap their arms and quickly answer with Metal! Country! Rap!
The barriers between the genres are not as thin as some seem to think they are. Horror is a universal feeling of dread and I see it in every genre.
You like terrifying books? Try Paul Theroux’s searing The Lower River. Or one of Philip K. Dick’s existential science fiction nightmares. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! is one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read.
Or, maybe you just want to read a book about people. Isn’t there enough horror, wonder, romance, and mystery in all our everyday lives?
I assured the librarian that, while I love conventional horror fiction, I read a lot of different types of books.
Simply put, I like great books. Sadly, what I see coming out in the established world of horror publishing isn’t exactly what I’d call great.
I recently received two books from mainstream publishers. I didn’t accept items for review for a long time, but I began to relent. Now I remember why I stopped.
One was an attempt at literary horror. I like the ambition, but it's not easy to write that kind of book. The prose was leaden, dreary, and no flow or meter. The sentences trudged along, with little to hold my interest or to inspire me to continue to read. Perhaps there's a good book hidden in there. A real editor would work with the writer to bring it out.
The other was written by an established television writer, so I assumed it would at least be professional. The book was intended for adults, but like so much pop fiction, it has the soul of a young adult book. There is a lot of smart YA fiction out there, but this one seemed like it was talking down to its young characters. Like baby-talking to your kids. Keep ‘em stupid and coming back for more.
What about independent publishing? I tried a book, a novella of course, by a popular favorite in the indie realm. This individual is constantly on social media, and like so many others appears to be selling themself rather than the work. The book was sloppy, simplistic, and by my standards, unreadable.
I’ll never stop reading horror, but we are currently in a glut of content being shoveled into troughs. It’s no different than the old days. The horror section at WaldenBooks was filled with cheap titles, with only a few worthwhile books for the discriminating reader.
I’d read a couple of Richard Russo books before. Not the big titles, like Empire Falls or Nobody’s Fool. I liked Chances Are and That Old Cape Magic, but they are ruminating books about old guys reflecting on their lives and the complexities in their families and home towns. Good books, well written, but I felt there were better ones by Russo.
Looking at the cover to Under the Falls made me think it’s a nostalgic look at the boys of summer in a small town. As I got into the novel, I realized it’s something far different than that. Even the cover began to look more like a boy falling, or having been pushed off a rock wall, rather than a fun back-flip dive.
Indeed, Under the Falls is more like a thriller than a mainstream novel. Don’t expect a formulaic, paint-by-numbers piece of fast food fiction like you’ll get from Jeneva Rose or Riley Sager. This book is smart, sad, reflective, and more about emotion and regret than crime and punishment.
Stone Mountain is a small town in upper New York, not far from the Canadian border. It hasn’t yet been touched by developers, even though there is a lot of beautiful waterfront property. It’s nearly a dead town, with an abandoned amusement park haunting the lives of people who are stuck there.
Stone Mountain is also the name of a successful music group. Tyler escaped the town when he was a young man and never looked back, even though it permeates his songwriting. Trying to get back to the swing of life after the Covid-19 pandemic, the group’s manager arranges the first live show to be at the band’s namesake town.
Tyler is filled with dread about going home. He returns to open wounds, hostility, and unanswered questions from his past. His fate is inexorably entwined with the town and its inhabitants. There are buried secrets, resentment, but also surprising loyalties.
The disastrous concert sparks a series of desperate events and opens a lot of unhealed wounds. The specter of Stone Mountain might claim Tyler’s soul, or perhaps it will save him from the emotional bonds that imprisoned him.
Under the Falls is written in multi-viewpoint chapters, which seems to bother a lot of readers. I always liked the approach to fiction. Russo portrays various members of his cast in vivid detail. We intimately learn about their hopes, fears, desperation, and the hopelessness that so many of us experienced following the pandemic.
It’s more than that. America is a haunted country, filled with anxiety, frustration, anger, resentment, and burgeoning violence. Covid merely gave us time to focus on it. Under the Falls gives a microscopic look into a small group of people trying to escape cages they’ve made for themselves.
This is a stunning book, by far my favorite of the three Richard Russo novels I’ve thus far read. I think my next one will be Empire Falls, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Written by Mark Sieber
I went to the front desk to pick up my reserve of Richard Russo’s Under the Falls. The librarian went to the shelf, got the book and looked puzzled, as if there were some sort of mistake: “This isn’t horror.”
People love to pigeonhole everything. If you are from this generation, you behave that way. If you are of one particular political stance, you must agree with every point the majority makes. “You’re with us or against us!” “All or nothing!”
I was with a group of people recently and movie came up. I said I didn’t like it. “That’s because you like horror.” I replied that I like all kinds of movies. “Yeah, sure you do.”
One of the most popular influencers in the horror field openly boasts of reading nothing but horror. I don’t know whether to feel contempt or pity. A mixture of both, I suppose.
Generic horror writers are a relatively new concept. Most old writers, from Dickens to Hawthorne to Henry James, wrote all manner of fiction. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are best known for science fiction, or perhaps they were known as scientific romances in those days, but they wrote much more than SF.
Frankly, I think it’s absurd. What if I ran into someone at an Italian restaurant a bunch of times, then saw them at a Mexican place. “Hey, I thought you liked Italian food!”
Or, while I’m on a roll, people ask what kind of music you like. Some people will flap their arms and quickly answer with Metal! Country! Rap!
The barriers between the genres are not as thin as some seem to think they are. Horror is a universal feeling of dread and I see it in every genre.
You like terrifying books? Try Paul Theroux’s searing The Lower River. Or one of Philip K. Dick’s existential science fiction nightmares. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! is one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read.
Or, maybe you just want to read a book about people. Isn’t there enough horror, wonder, romance, and mystery in all our everyday lives?
I assured the librarian that, while I love conventional horror fiction, I read a lot of different types of books.
Simply put, I like great books. Sadly, what I see coming out in the established world of horror publishing isn’t exactly what I’d call great.
I recently received two books from mainstream publishers. I didn’t accept items for review for a long time, but I began to relent. Now I remember why I stopped.
One was an attempt at literary horror. I like the ambition, but it's not easy to write that kind of book. The prose was leaden, dreary, and no flow or meter. The sentences trudged along, with little to hold my interest or to inspire me to continue to read. Perhaps there's a good book hidden in there. A real editor would work with the writer to bring it out.
The other was written by an established television writer, so I assumed it would at least be professional. The book was intended for adults, but like so much pop fiction, it has the soul of a young adult book. There is a lot of smart YA fiction out there, but this one seemed like it was talking down to its young characters. Like baby-talking to your kids. Keep ‘em stupid and coming back for more.
What about independent publishing? I tried a book, a novella of course, by a popular favorite in the indie realm. This individual is constantly on social media, and like so many others appears to be selling themself rather than the work. The book was sloppy, simplistic, and by my standards, unreadable.
I’ll never stop reading horror, but we are currently in a glut of content being shoveled into troughs. It’s no different than the old days. The horror section at WaldenBooks was filled with cheap titles, with only a few worthwhile books for the discriminating reader.
I’d read a couple of Richard Russo books before. Not the big titles, like Empire Falls or Nobody’s Fool. I liked Chances Are and That Old Cape Magic, but they are ruminating books about old guys reflecting on their lives and the complexities in their families and home towns. Good books, well written, but I felt there were better ones by Russo.
Looking at the cover to Under the Falls made me think it’s a nostalgic look at the boys of summer in a small town. As I got into the novel, I realized it’s something far different than that. Even the cover began to look more like a boy falling, or having been pushed off a rock wall, rather than a fun back-flip dive.
Indeed, Under the Falls is more like a thriller than a mainstream novel. Don’t expect a formulaic, paint-by-numbers piece of fast food fiction like you’ll get from Jeneva Rose or Riley Sager. This book is smart, sad, reflective, and more about emotion and regret than crime and punishment.
Stone Mountain is a small town in upper New York, not far from the Canadian border. It hasn’t yet been touched by developers, even though there is a lot of beautiful waterfront property. It’s nearly a dead town, with an abandoned amusement park haunting the lives of people who are stuck there.
Stone Mountain is also the name of a successful music group. Tyler escaped the town when he was a young man and never looked back, even though it permeates his songwriting. Trying to get back to the swing of life after the Covid-19 pandemic, the group’s manager arranges the first live show to be at the band’s namesake town.
Tyler is filled with dread about going home. He returns to open wounds, hostility, and unanswered questions from his past. His fate is inexorably entwined with the town and its inhabitants. There are buried secrets, resentment, but also surprising loyalties.
The disastrous concert sparks a series of desperate events and opens a lot of unhealed wounds. The specter of Stone Mountain might claim Tyler’s soul, or perhaps it will save him from the emotional bonds that imprisoned him.
Under the Falls is written in multi-viewpoint chapters, which seems to bother a lot of readers. I always liked the approach to fiction. Russo portrays various members of his cast in vivid detail. We intimately learn about their hopes, fears, desperation, and the hopelessness that so many of us experienced following the pandemic.
It’s more than that. America is a haunted country, filled with anxiety, frustration, anger, resentment, and burgeoning violence. Covid merely gave us time to focus on it. Under the Falls gives a microscopic look into a small group of people trying to escape cages they’ve made for themselves.
This is a stunning book, by far my favorite of the three Richard Russo novels I’ve thus far read. I think my next one will be Empire Falls, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Written by Mark Sieber
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