Tag Archives: book review

An Exercise in Degradation

Beleth Station

by Hope Madden

I imagine a lot of people have thought about getting out of a bad marriage and wondered, What’s the worst that could happen?

Those people should talk to Samantha Kolesnik and Bryan Smith. Or maybe they shouldn’t. The duo’s unusual A-side/B-side horror tale Beleth Station is like a premise wrapped in a dare that really digs into What’s the worst that could happen?

Both writers take the same set of characters, same basic idea of being trapped in a dying town off the Pennsylvania highway, and then each sees how bad it can get.

Kolesnik’s take, A Night to Remember, comes first, following Krista and Nick as they flee Krista’s stultifying marriage. They find themselves in need of roadside assistance in an isolated stretch – a common enough beat in horror, but one that Kolesnik takes in depraved and alarming directions. What follows is an experiment in degradation.

There is a deep hopelessness in this story, a kind of grim poetry that’s so beautifully written you commit to the long, bleak, terrifying haul. You will want to look away, but Kolesnik’s prose compels you.

Both stories explore the primal terror of helplessness, each wallowing in the evil that men do, each almost mocking the naivete of faith in the human condition. Still, they are vastly different tales. Smith’s The Gauntlet feels more cinematic, like Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs meets Stephen King’s The Running Man.

Conspiracy, brutality, revolution all fuel a tale that drops you in the middle of the action and never lets up. Two desperate pairs – young townies dying for escape, new lovers lured in from the outside – commit increasingly horrendous acts to garner freedom.

For Smith, the question isn’t how bad can it get as much as how far will you go, and what will you be when it’s over? He has a flair for both imagery and pace that makes The Gauntlet all but impossible to stop reading.

Life Less Ordinary

Waif

by Hope Madden

Just two years ago, writer Samantha Kolesnik crafted the hypnotic road trip horror True Crime and introduced us to a frightening, insightful and bold central figure.

Much has changed in Kolesnik’s approach to her latest novella, Waif. And yet, a master of complex characters, Kolesnik delivers another fascinating point of view vehicle in Angie, whose thoughts and rationalizations defy clean moral categorization. Waif travels an unusual path along with Angie, an abused wife whose husband concocts a bizarre plan to recapture her sexual interest. The undertaking draws her into a wild world full of new dangers, and it awakens something.

The novella probes this damaged psyche without apology or judgment, Kolesnik’s writing here frank and often frankly sexual. Where her previous novella delivered dreamlike stream of conscious horror, Waif’s punch is direct.

The plot itself is never less than fascinating, allowing Kolesnik to explore sexual politics, loss, and an almost endless set of ideas concerning abuse. Through Angie, a less-than-reliable reliable narrator, Kolesnik asks provocative questions, and the answers she offers are often disturbing.

She complicates the ideas of innocence, agency and complicity, and once again her choice of narrator allows for a morally fluid point of view, which gives the author opportunity to look at every topic from a wide and wild range of perspectives. The story role-reverses again and again, giving nearly every character the chance to try on the robes of victim and perpetrator, often willingly.

Waif wastes not a sentence on sermonizing. Instead, it explores dangerous possibilities in the name of reclaiming something you thought you’d lost.

Book Review: True Crime

by Hope Madden

“Every girl in the world was taught not to trust her gut. Every girl in the world knew she was the fool in the play.”

Samantha Kolesnik’s insightful first novel, True Crime, hypnotizes as it repels. Like a string of memories playing across the narrator’s mind during a long and loose car ride, the novella delivers a Southern gothic tale that calls to mind Flannery O’Connor or Shirley Jackson. The grim poetry of Kolesnik’s writing style, however, is uniquely hers.

As Suzy meanders through some of the more eventful times in her young life, you realize this is a narrator with the potential to  be unreliable if she valued anyone’s opinion enough to lie. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Her story is mainly being articulated for her own benefit, a way to measure her culpability, evaluate her options, reflect on root causes and wrestle with the monster within.

True Crime is hardly an exercise in existential angst, though, and that’s mainly because Suzy is such an enigmatic and yet utterly straightforward character. Kolesnik’s prose is empathetic but not forgiving, which creates a fascinating atmosphere.

The approach of depicting events as memories allows Kolesnik the poetic license to focus just on the moments Suzy finds most compelling—the truth behind the details, the cause and effect, the timeline and technical details are rendered irrelevant. In their place Kolesnik offers a dead eyed but dreamlike depiction of the ugliest side of life.

What sets the piece apart from others of the same subgenre is the insight Kolesnik offers through the eyes of this young woman. She is both victim and beast in degrees that frustrate and inform, her narrative containing moments of genuine clarity concerning victimhood and the female form that rarely emerge in horror fiction.

Kolesnik’s style, her ability to create something that’s simultaneously aimless and meticulous, entrances as it delivers a quick, effective punch. In its own way an indictment of true crime culture that has overtaken the nation, the writing feels quietly but deeply fascinated by the compulsion to wade into a grisly reality.

Like the contents of the magazines Suzy so loves, Kolesnik’s tale contains a horrible beauty you can’t seem to look away from.

True Crime is available January 15, 2020 from Grindhouse Press.

You can also preorder on Amazon.