By James Keen
“This is worse than any nightmare he’s ever experienced.” – “Malice”.
The relocation of a family to a new town and into unfamiliar surroundings is a rich treasure trove of literary narrative possibilities that writers can explore. Displacement and the struggle to fit in with a new community provide interesting opportunities for storytelling and avenues for dramatic tension. Griffin Hayes takes this central story idea in his horror novel Malice, combines it with the recurring theme of the past constantly threatening to usurp the present in demonic and terrifying ways—secrets refusing to wither and fade away—fills it with some eerie and optimistic imagery, and provides a novel that, while interesting at first, becomes an increasingly predictable reading experience as the characters’ clichéd dialogue calls to mind bland exchanges in bland crime TV series.
Hayes begins the story uncomfortably in the first chapter, introducing our hero, Lysander Shore, a 17-year-old “goth” struggling to reduce his social alienation. Shore meets local insurance representative Peter Hume, who ominously tells the young man, “You were warned not to come here.” Shore’s new hometown of Millingham has its sinister forebodings, but also its decidedly more appealing aspects, most notably his new classmates Samantha and Summer, the former a self-proclaimed wizard and the latter a typical college goofball eye candy. As the weird events in Hayes’ novel begin to increase in terms of malice and gore, the author paints a rather bland, overly familiar picture of a young man torn between his affections for two very different girls, while slowly uncovering the origins of the supernatural happenings in the relatively peaceful town of Millingham.
Malice has many creative and interesting elements; there is an abandoned house with a violent history, a distinctly creepy sheriff, a subplot involving Samantha’s father (the local sheriff), and her mother’s suicide, but to quote the text itself, “something is not quite right.” Hayes moves the plot along at an energetic pace, but as the book progresses, its earnest intentions of scares and thrills are undermined by clichéd exchanges between characters, as the reliance on character archetypes and character development/motivation smacks of the author’s convenient contrivedness. The novel’s plot is tiringly obvious, hindering narrative tension until reading it becomes a page-turning exercise, and the reader feels little sympathy for the characters in the book. The text is filled with set pieces that seasoned horror fans encounter time and again, and Hayes’s narrative approach does not attempt to do something different with these ideas, but rather simply synthesizes horror tropes, perhaps to distract the reader from the obvious pretensions at work here.
It’s a shame, because Hayes’ writing is concise and descriptive. If he could find a less obviously derivative story and curb his penchant for cliché dialogue, this reviewer would certainly be interested in reading more from this author. As it stands, the book is neither terrible nor dramatically engaging enough to warrant more writing.
Order Malice here.
grade: 2.5/5
