So back in 2016 I happened across a copy of Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism in my local book store and after reading it was delighted to find a new voice in the horror genre that felt like a bridge between YA horror and the adult stuff.
A few months later I tried his first book Horrorstor and although I didn't like it as much, I loved the layout and design of the book and there were some really great bits in it that I saw coming more together with My Best Friend's Exorcism.
Finally, last year I read his non-fiction work Paperbacks from Hell and I have to say it ranks quite high in my favourite non-fiction about the horror genre.
So last weekend when a copy of his latest, We Sold Our Souls came into my local library I was thrilled to dig right in. And three days and 330 pages later - I absolutely loved it.
The book follows a has-been heavy metal guitarist named Kris who begins the book in a dead-end job in a small town, and on a quick side-note, I was thrilled the lead of this story was a woman in her mid-forties, rather than a nineteen year old kid - I'm always happy to read coming of age stories, but shake it up a little people!
The story moves from small town nightmare to the truly epic and does it with a great love of the music it glorifies. It bounces from humour to terror to gross-out horror and back again, and honestly, I simply couldn't put it down.
While browsing through a bookstore a year and a half ago I had the delight of discovering author Grady Hendrix, who's book My Best Friend's Exorcism was both a delightful look at high school in the eighties and a really effective horror novel focusing on demonic possession. Last year I read his earlier work Horrorstör which, although not quite as good as exorcism was still a fun read and had some really great moments of tension as his characters worked their way through a haunted IKEA-style store. In some ways it reminded me of China Mieville's 2005 short story "The Ball Room", both in subject matter and high tension.
Then last year I found Hendrix's nonfiction work Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction and was simply blown away. The book covers the boom of Horror paperbacks that started in the late sixties with Rosemary's Baby and ended in 1988 with Silence of the Lambs (which re branded Horror as Thriller).
The book includes everything from monsters and Satan through to V.C. Andrews and apocalypses, and although Stephen King and Anne Rice (who dominate the Horror section in any bookstore), the book is a treasure trove of the crazy stories that were published over these two decades and as a long-time horror fan I wasn't sure if I was more delighted when Hendrix examined books I loved or introduced me to titles (and series) I had never heard of before.
A really fascinating read and the cover art of these stories is well displayed and makes for a great book to dig into or just browse through.
So every couple of weeks I swing through my local bookstore and add titles to my ever-increasing to-read list, and then about once a month I see how many of these books I can get at my local library. Sometimes, the newest books happen to be available without the 300-person hold queue in front and I get to try out an new author in one of my favourite genres.
Which brings me to the horror novel, My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix (author of 2014s Horrorstör - which is still sitting on my to-read list), a delightfully horrifying story of the demonic possession of a high school girl in the late eighties, and her best friends attempts to help.
Now, as a horror fan who was ages 4-14 during that decade, I'm clearly a little biased, but to be fair, too much nostalgia can be a little overwhelming and I thought this book did an incredibly excellent job of telling the story of two best friends from ages ten to sixteen and made for a really interesting look at their relationships with each other and their parents.
Yes the book is a horror novel, so there are sequences that will upset some readers, but honestly, I found the characters engaging, the story believable, and I was rooting for their success the whole way through.
An excellent read, and one that will lead me to other works by this author.
A lot of fun.
