This is my third Josh Malerman book, after 'Unbury Carol' and 'Inspection', and it's the least of them for me, though it also features by far the best character in any of them, an unusual one because it's the town of the title rather than any individual person who happens to live there. There are a lot of such individual people, as this claims to be "a novel in six novellas". I don't really buy that, because I never got any real sense of an overarching story, just a host of smaller ones set in a consistent place. Malerman could easily write another half dozen novellas set in Goblin and tack them onto the end of this book, without affecting the narrative flow in the slightest.

Given that it really doesn't function as a novel, there are a couple of ways to see this book that I see as valid. One is to look at each of the individual novellas and judge them either on their own merits. The other is to look at how well they work together as a themed collection. What's really odd about the book is that I don't believe the individual novellas work that well in isolation but, put together, the town in which they're all set grows in legendary fashion. I adored Goblin the town if not 'Goblin' the book, while realising that Goblin the town only exists in 'Goblin' the book.

Just like any horror anthology film, there's also a framing story inserted as a prologue and epilogue but it leaves its payoff until the latter, which leaves us rather on the hop. I liked what the former did but felt a little let down when it ended without any payoff and the first novella showed up instead. I presumed that the payoff would arrive at some point, though I did expect it to do so gradually within each novella as a linking device rather than just wait for the end of the book.

Maybe because I felt it was going to happen, I looked for connections between the stories and didn't find many at all, other than the town itself. What there was mostly revolved around a key to the city, which was clearly an item of importance from its first appearance even if we don't have a clue what it meant until much later on and then not really.

My favourite of the novellas is probably the first one because I didn't see the twist coming. It's there to be seen, neatly telegraphed, and it's reasonably obvious in hindsight but I saw something else and was taking it in a different direction. It's called 'A Man in Slices' and it's an appropriately unsettling piece to introduce us to an unsettling town. It's told by a Goblinite named Richard but it's about one of his friends, Charles, whom he first met as a boy and remained a sort of friend to ever since. I say "a sort of friend" because Charles isn't like the rest of us. There's clearly something wrong with him, an aberration that Richard feels increasingly guilty about, to the degree that this novella kicks off with him wondering if he should turn Charles into the Goblin cops. Why, we're about to find out.

Even here, it's clear that the novella isn't just about Richard and Charles but about Goblin, the kind of place where things happen and people like Charles happen too. It rains all the time, statistically a lot more than any other town around it (or presumably anywhere on the planet). The locals are used to it. Goblin has a bloody history, which we continually learn more about as the novellas run on, but a sort of collective atmosphere has grown up around it that nobody can explain. Maybe it's cursed or there's something in all that water, but things are wrong in Goblin.

It feels like a legend rather than an actual town, the sort of place where campfire horror stories are set but which nobody has actually visited. That's why it's somehow appropriate for Malerman to tell us about all sorts of wild and wonderful details about the town without ever explaining them. That's also really annoying for the reader, because we want answers to all the questions that he throws out there like confetti. Why does it rain so much? What are the creepy slow cops wearing faces that are clearly not their own? Why are all the people of Goblin buried standing up? Who knows. I don't and I read this book.

I liked all the other novellas too but, in every instance, I only liked them until I was underwhelmed by their endings. They all played out like the prologue, in that I was hooked in by Malerman's clean and effortless prose and neatly creeped out by the details, whether by a magician and his supernatural assistant (whose powers are never explained) in 'Presto', by the odd obsession of a local historian in 'Kamp' or by how horribly wrong working on autopilot can become in 'A Mix Up at the Zoo'. However, all of them end without satisfaction. Some end too quickly, some too obviously, some without a real ending at all.

And, throughout it all, as much as I wanted to know more about some of the characters, not only the leads in these novellas but especially some of the supporting cast, I wanted to know more about the town of Goblin. Even with whole pararaphs or even whole pages of history consistently expanding our knowledge and understanding of the town, in each and every one of these half dozen novellas, I left the book wanting more. I wanted a guidebook. I wanted a potted history. I wanted maps, stats and a whole Wikipedia page.

And, as initially enthralled and ultimately disappointed as I was with each of the slices of Goblin we find ourselves treated to here, I wanted more of them. Never mind half a dozen, give me a dozen or a baker's dozen or a score. Hell, give me a gross! It doesn't matter if they're in prose form in 'Goblin II' by Josh Malerman or in episodic form in a 'Goblin' TV show like 'Eerie, Indiana' or 'Friday the 13th: The Series', where we learn more and more about the setting as we go through individual episodes set there. I don't care. Just get me tickets to Goblin. I miss the rain. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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