My childhood home had a double-barrel certified scary basement.
The wooden stairs leading down varied in size and smoothness, as they had all been replaced at different times over the century since the house was built. A large area of the concrete floor had been dug up as though something was buried down there. Two large kraken disguised as furnaces lurked in the darker nether regions. I would have to walk past them to get to the hidden chamber in the far corner, inside of which was the tunnel leading to an exit door I’m pretty sure I was the only person aware of. This cellar sat beneath a house occupied by a family (mine) that believed in spirits, poltergeists, and all of that. When WP Blatty’s “The Exorcist” came out, my mother obtained a copy and had all the family members read it so we would know what we were up against. That is when I learned that my cousin, at that time a Catholic Archbishop, had been trained as an Exorcist in the Vatican. The scary cellar, the buried chamber in the backyard, the concrete crypts in the woods near my house, the famous haunted cemetery a few blocks away (Graceland, home of Hattie the Hitchhiker, the ghost of a young woman who died on the corner by my house), all of it, created a world of built in horror for my very young self.
I’m sure that growing up in Scary Movie scarred me, but I grew out of it, and forgot about it, and never really thought about how a childhood spent in a world with some very dark corners could have an effect on an adult. Everything was fine. Then, I discovered Jess Lourey’s novels.
Now don’t’ get me wrong. Not all of Lourey’s novels are born in childhood horror of one kind or another, but several are. Her breakthrough novel Unspeakable Things resonates with me, since as an anthropologist with links to forensics and living in the same region, I have special memories of some of the things that shaped that book. The first novel of hers that I read was Bloodline, which is scary novel to Minnesota what a Coen Brothers’ film is also to Minnesota … is it fiction? Or is it documentary? Fiction? Or documentary? Hard to say.
Litani addresses that thing that happened several years ago that you may remember, documented to varying degrees in true-crime news shows ala 48-Hours, when large numbers of people were accused of abusing large numbers of children, but then it all turned out to be made up. Except it wasn’t actually made up, just gotten wrong by the authorities. It happens that the author’s childhood included this story not just because it was on the news, but because it was in her neighborhood, or at least, her extended lived experience as a kid. If I was an author like Jess Lourey, there would be a novel about my basement. Lourey’s novel (this one and others) is better than my basement.
I can judge how fun it is to read a particular book by how many times I highlight a phrase and note “steal this” (I’m a writer). My copy of Litani is full of those marginal notes. The characters are palpable, the story is intense and driving, and the pages demand turning. There be monsters in Litani. Pick this up and discover how central character, the very young Frankie Jubilee, hopes to slay them.
Litani is a free-standing novel, no need to read it in some order in relation to other novels by this author. But Lourey has some that are in order, and a new series coming out, the second one being available now for pre-order. Check out her work. The Quarry Girls, Unspeakable Things, Litani, the first in the new series, The Taken Ones, and the aforementioned Bloodline stand out. An entirely different lineage (only two books so far) concern young Salem and her best friend and various family members engaged in the modern phase of an ancient battle between forces of good and evil, and those two novels are page turners.
Funny thing about many, maybe most, of Lourey’s books: They may be classified as horror, but horror usually has stuff that isn’t real (like “The Exorcist” — yes, for the record I know that is made up!). Lourey’s novels, as far as I know, do not stray into unreality or science fiction. Somehow, they don’t have to, and somehow, that makes the horror more well done than a lot of other stuff that is out there. You can read these novels at night, but the experience might make you give people you meet during the day the side-eye.
