Over the past decade and a half or so, Ronald Malfi has emerged as one of the most consistently engaging and terrifying voices in horror literature. His fiction has received nominations including making the final ballot of the horror genre’s most prestigious award, the Bram Stoker Award. Small Town Horror is his 2024 novel and hits on one of the most reliable of narrative starting points – friends reuniting after years apart. In this case, New York lawyer Andrew Larimer receives a call from his old friend Dale Walls urging him to return to their hometown of Kingsport, Maryland. Andrew is hesitant to leave his wife, Rebecca, who happens to be 8-months pregnant, but something in Dale’s voice convinces Andrew to drop everything and return to the town where he came of age. Going home is never easy, especially when the reasons for leaving have darkness and negativity surrounding them.
Five childhood friends are forced to confront their own dark past as well as the curse placed upon them in this horror masterpiece from the bestselling author of Come with Me.
Maybe this is a ghost story…
Andrew Larimer thought he left the past behind. But when he receives a late-night phone call from an old friend, he finds he has no choice but to return home, and to confront the memories—and the horror—of a night, years ago, that changed everything.
For Andrew and his friends, the past is not dead, and the curse that has befallen them now threatens to destroy all that they’ve become.
One dark secret…
One small-town horror…
When Andrew arrives and meets up with Dale, his old friend seems almost a shell of his former self. As it turns out, Dale’s wife has been missing and he thinks the events of their past – specifically on July 4, 2003 – is rearing its ugly. This event, not named early on in the novel involves Andrew, Dale, and their friends Antigone “Tig” Mayronne, Eric Kelly, and Matthew “Meach” Meacham. The event has something to do with the “town witch” Ruth Graves, who supposedly cursed these five friends. While some have gone one with their lives since that Incident, others have not…and have been haunted by it.
Like Andrew, his father was a lawyer, just as Eric followed his own father’s footsteps and became a police officer. Dale and Meach seem the most unhinged and concerned about what happened on that fateful day twenty years ago, Andrew doesn’t want to believe, Eric is pragmatic, and Tig is trying to keep it all together for her daughter.
When Andrew arrives in Kingsport, he heads to his deceased father’s home. A home which has been in the family for generations. He discovers somebody has been squatting, making a mess, and leaving an odor. He soon learns the squatter is his old friend Meach who is not doing well, he’s a known drunk and claims to be seeing ghosts.
Most of the novel is told from Andrew’s point-of-view as the first-person narrator so when he is less than truthful with his wife about where he’s going (claiming it to be a work-related trip) and to his old friends that he’s single, he immediately invokes the “unreliable narrator” trope – for good or for ill. When we first meet Andrew, he is suffering from nightmares and is very concerned for his pregnant wife and unborn child – he fears something very bad will happen to them. When his wife Rebecca asks him about it, he deflects. While somewhat dishonest, it is at least understandable – a husband doesn’t want to worry his pregnant wife any more than necessary or complicate the pregnancy in any fashion.
Several elements of Small Town Horror makes the novel such a page-turning addiction. There’s the familiarity of the story structure, Stephen King’s IT comes to mind (or even for this long time fantasy reader, Weis & Hickman’s DragonLance Chronicles) with the reuniting friends. There’s the specter of the past like King’s IT or even Straub’s Ghost Story. Malfi lulled me in with those elements.
The characters kept me there.
While Andrew was far from a truthful character, I found his voice as the narrator difficult to get out of my head. I kept hoping he would stop lying…in these horror novels, the characters are often not truthful with the people closest to them and that only leads to problems later on in the story. That is very, very much the case here in Small Town Horror. Everybody lies! Not just Andrew, but most of his friends aren’t exactly truthful, except the ones who are truthful aren’t believed. Having a character named Matthew Meacham going by the nickname of “Meach” felt very Stephen King to me, as well.
What helped to keep me going along with these characters was the central mystery, or rather what was not being revealed about the central mystery – just what exactly happened on that fateful July 4 in 2003. It was driving me a little crazy (in the best way because I kept me reading) that the characters weren’t really saying what happened that day for about the first half of the novel. That makes sense, from their perspective, I think. They all knew what happened and they wouldn’t want to restate what happened. But through Andrew’s recounting of the past, we do eventually learn what happened and how Malfi paces it out to provide the full revelation was effective.
What was even more effective – and one of the most effective plot twists/revelations I’ve ever read – happened roughly 4/5 through the novel. Not something I saw coming, but one of those logical plot twists that helps to make much of what preceded it make 100% sense.
Small Town Horror is only the third novel/book I’ve read by Ronald Malfi at the time I wrote this review (the other two were Black Mouth and Come with Me). It won’t be my last and will likely be near the top of my favorite reads of 2024.
Highly recommended.
© 2024 Rob H. Bedford
Titan Books | June 2024
Hardcover | 400 pages
Excerpt: https://crimereads.com/ronald-malfi-small-town-horror/
Author Web site: https://ronaldmalfi.com | Twitter: @RonaldMalfi
Review copy courtesy of the publisher