Whisper House Press

Book: Small Town Horror

Author: Ronald Malfi

Publisher: Titan Books

Publication Date: June 4, 2024

Capone’s Rating: 4⭐ out of 5⭐

Two epigraphical quotes appear at the opening of Ronald Malfi’s Small Town Horror. The first, attributed usually to David Foster Wallace and by David Foster Wallace to Virginia Woolf (though it never shows up in Woolf’s writing), is “Every love story is a ghost story.” The second—more easily attributable to William Faulkner—is “The past is never past; it’s not even past.” Both of these ideas boil down to the same thematic notions: that it’s tough to overstate how strongly our past shapes our present, and that what we fell in love with is already dead. These are interesting places to begin a story, and they drive the heart of the narrative in Small Town Horror.

Curiously, the “Every love story is a ghost story” line appears—although modified to “Every story is a ghost story”—in another horror novel from 2024’s summer months, Gabino Iglesias’s House of Bone and Rain. In that story, the recent past forces a mostly willing protagonist down a violent and ever-darkening path. In Malfi’s new novel, on the other hand, the main character is trying with all possible diligence to avoid the darkening path on which his distant past has put him. Counter to Iglesias’s story, too, in which a group of friends tries to rectify the past through vengeance, Malfi’s story is about friends doing whatever they can to dodge vengeance and ignore their past, often as an explicit goal.

But the past doesn’t die. It’s not even past. What does that mean for Andrew Larimer of Small Town Horror? And his love story—with his wife, Rebecca—what does it mean that their love story is a ghost story? A part of me wants to start a horror book club just to provide a venue in which I might talk through the answers to these questions with my new, super cool, horror book club.

Small Town Horror, like other Malfi stories and most modern character-driven horror, relies on characters’ past wounds to drive the tension of the present-day misadventure depicted in the book. Malfi is getting much better at working the angles of his characters’ backstories and revealing just so much as is needed to propel the narrative without the story presenting as contrived for that purpose. Recently I listened to the audiobook of his 2010 Snow, and the difference between 2010 Malfi and 2024 Malfi is stark. I can only hope that I grow as much as a writer as this author has in the last fifteen years.

For fans of Catriona Ward’s twisty psychological horror and of Richard Chizmar’s neighborhood-pals-forced-to-return-to-birthplace stories, Ronald Malfi’s Small Town Horror hits the spot. Four stars.