New Horror Fiction - The New York Times

In Sara Gran's occult thriller, "The Book of the Most Precious Substance," a rare-book dealer falls under the spell of a powerful 17th-century manuscript.

In Sara Gran's sensational occult thriller, THE BOOK OF THE MOST PRECIOUS SUBSTANCE (Dreamland Books, 319 pp., paper, $18.95), the rare-book dealer Lily Albrecht is swept into a hunt for a copy of "the most precise and most effective grimoire of sex magic ever written."

Created by an alchemist in the 17th century, and once enacted by the dark magician Aleister Crowley — "the world's leading authority on sex magic" who "learned everything he knew about sex" from it — "The Book of the Most Precious Substance" is a dangerous, powerful treasure. With the help of Lucas, a sexy librarian, Lily tracks down some of the rich and powerful people rumored to have used the book to fulfill their dreams: rock stars and witches, an admiral scheming for the White House, a dominatrix duchess in southern France and a seedy businessman. Along the way, Lily and Lucas discover fragments of the book, just enough to begin dabbling in the rituals, and soon fall under its spell.

Gran's writing, like the grimoire, is palpably seductive. The search for pleasure and magic is an aphrodisiac, one that pulses on the page. Gran's plotting is hairpin in its curvature, her descriptions of desire sexy and subtle. Like Lily Albrecht, readers have little choice but to follow the book to its sinister conclusion.

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Christopher Golden's ROAD OF BONES (St. Martin's, 228 pp., $27.99) opens with the documentary TV producer Felix Teigland, known as Teig, and his cameraman, Prentiss, speeding down an inhospitable and brutally cold stretch of Russia's Kolyma Highway to capture proof-of-concept footage for a Hollywood pitch meeting. They're drawn by the infamous history of the Stalin-era highway. Countless men and women, all sentenced to gulag camps, died while building it. "They were driving across potholed, rutty, icy graves — had been since they'd begun the trip — and there were hundreds of miles to go." If a landscape can absorb trauma, this place is saturated.

Teig and Prentiss expect frostbite and treacherous terrain. They'd like to find proof "that the supernatural existed alongside the tangible world." But that's before their local guide brings them to the village of Akhust, where they plan to spend the night. The place is inexplicably abandoned, its houses left open to the elements; only a young girl, Una, remains. Vicious, wolflike creatures soon appear from the forest. When their guide is killed, they flee with Una, and Teig's focus shifts from saving his career to saving her life.

Golden, an economical writer, creates a mother lode of terror in just over 200 pages. There is little lingering as he pushes his characters deeper and deeper into the Road of Bones. Despite a somewhat clichéd back story that explains Teig's connection to Una, his need to protect her creates a warm emotional center to this cold world. Shamans and spirits, the undead and the feral, the creatures of the Kolyma Highway and the unimaginable horrors of its history make for riveting reading.

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The strange and wonderful define Kim Fu's story collection, LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (Tin House, 214 pp., paper, $16.95), where the line between fantasy and reality fades in and out, elusive and beckoning as shadows flitting on a screen. In "Liddy, First to Fly," a mysterious growth appears on a pubescent girl's ankles: "bubbles of clear fluid, about the diameter of a quarter, the skin almost completely transparent," that reveal themselves, when lanced, to be wings. Liddy's friends are fascinated, horrified, even jealous of her transformation. She "had become what she was meant to be," one friend notes. "And maybe we all would."

The question of becoming, however painful that process, is also at the heart of "June Bugs," a novella that follows a woman who has fled an abusive relationship, only to rent a house infested with "a seething sea of beetles — their color of dried blood, the sheen of their glassy wings like cresting waves."

The toxicity that had permeated her life in her previous home — shared with a lover who sapped her vitality with the persistence of a vampire — begins to seep into her new life. The bugs are ever-present, small and seemingly harmless, and yet they take over every space she inhabits, "the living mixed with the dead … moving radially toward the light fixture, a concave flower-shaped chandelier, as though mesmerized." While extermination would be the best solution, she finds herself stuck, waiting for the chill of winter to free her.

Danielle Trussoni is the Book Review's horror columnist and the author of five books. Her latest novel is "The Ancestor."