Hey, I have a Substack don’t I? Been a while, friends!
In the interest of not simply filling my newsletter with entirely too detailed discussions about the practical and social implications of AI (followed by literally months of silence), I thought I could spend some time working on building up the “Of Books” section of the title of this publication. To that end, here’s my review of “The Black Lord” by Colin Hinckley, published by
.First, a disclaimer: I received this book for free as an advance review copy. Do with that information what you will, but I will also note that I don’t spend time reviewing works that I don’t enjoy. Though this is the first review I’ve shared on Substack, I used to intermittently review stuff on my Twitter before, y’know… everything that’s happened over there recently. I only review things I like because I think a negative review of a book has a disproportionately negative effect on the author, due to the way sites like Goodreads and Amazon are set up. So if all my book reviews are good, now you know why.
Also, this review discusses family trauma and child loss. Please feel free to not read if either of those things are likely to cause you distress.
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Alright I think that’s my moral obligations out of the way.
The Black Lord is a novella by Colin Hinckley and it’s available here and you should buy it because it Fucking Rules.
First of all it was so immediately unsettling that I had to stop reading and start again in the morning because I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep otherwise. It reaches its long, slender fingers around your heart and begins to squeeze less than two pages in. Admittedly, I’m a relative newcomer to the horror scene, but I found it immensely disquieting and it filled me with an overwhelming dread at several points.
Part of this is because it's talking about children. I'm not sure how you quantify it, but the loss of a child is probably the most terrifying and upsetting thing a human can go through. This story starts with one child having disappeared, and is being told through the eyes of a second child, sickly and haunted by the creature that is tapping at his window in the night. The sense of imminent threat is palpable, and Hinckley doesn’t take his foot off the gas all the way through.
As the story switches through its points of view, which overlap temporally, the fallout of the loss of the child becomes clearer. The second kid is ill and withdrawn, the father is drinking, and the mother is completely lost. And then there's the thing, calling to the family. I won’t spoil, but there’s a connection there, and the immediacy of that connection draws a direct line between the everyday horror of the family’s dissolution, and the more overt cosmic horror of the creature and the world it inhabits.
And what a world. I understand that the point of horror is the way it perverts the expectation of the reader or viewer, and that the most unsettling thing is often just how normal things feel, but The Black Lord’s particular breed of perversion is fascinating to me. Things look, at first, to be normal. The image of a river, a recurring theme in the book, seems only too normal, until you gaze into it and thalassaphobia strikes you as you realise that it has near infinite, unknowable depths. Every mention of the environment the protagonists end up in has this level of clean facade with a twisted, horrid change when the characters are up close. All that which should be a comfort, or at worst, a neutral experience, has a foulness to it. This reflects, again, what the family is going through. At first blush, they seem normal and well functioning, but generational trauma and secrets hide just out of reach, scraping at the window and yearning to get inside.
This discussion of family is one of the central themes of the book and I think it’s this that made me enjoy it so much. It doesn’t shy away from how a family unit can be broken from the inside. One of the characters laments the loss of the family they expected to have. This discussion of expectations of experience becomes a pivot point in the book, after which the characters plunge into a world where all expectations of experience are subverted.
This really hit home for me because there are these a priori ideas of what a family should be. What ought to happen, and how things are when you dream about them. But in reality the world is complicated. Betrayal, loss, pain, and unknowable external forces mean that a family doesn’t have this one-size-fits-all shape to it despite what your best intentions. Everyone faces it, and strength comes through adaptability, understanding, and accepting the flaws to attempt to build something whole out of what’s been broken.
The Black Lord weaves the twisted environs and unknowability of its cosmic horror with its down-to-earth everyday horror so skilfully that you might miss the seam between the two. It’s going to stick with me for a long time, because although its short, it has depths that only appear when you stare closely.
Thanks for reading.
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