As I point out every time I read a Josh Malerman book, it's completely different to the last one, a deliberate choice on his part that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Last time it didn't for me because I wasn't impressed at all by 'Incidents Around the House', a neatly creepy central idea aside. I'm absolutely impressed by this one, which is the best from him I've read since my favourite thus far, 'Unbury Carol', published in 2018. He's up to thirteen novels and I've read six of them, so I should knock out 'Spin a Black Yarn' soon and get back above halfway.

The setup is nightmarish. After a drunken night out, Emily Moore wakes up in bed, in gloves and a party dress, being painted by an artist who isn't using a canvas. Last night was great, enjoying the sights in Wainscott, Michigan, nestled on Lake Michigan, with her boyfriend, Jack Whitney. She's celebrating in a way because she thinks she's pregnant, though she hasn't taken a test yet. Where is Jack? Ah, he's in a room up the hall and, if she moves, something bad will happen to him. They'll hurt him. I love everything about this. It's contrast and unvalidated threat and surreal weirdness. It feels like we're in 'Misery' territory but with Annie Wilkes being a mad performance artist.

From here, we alternate for eleven chapters between Emily now and Emily then, though then is a relatively recent then. She's only been with Jack for six months, after all. The then chapters are a collection of vivid, vibrant moments. Emily and Jack are full of life, busy and quirky. They're often outdoors too. The now chapters are such a contrast that it's jarring. The location is unknown but clearly inside. It may be a room in a building or just a space penned off to pass as a room, the feel being that everything within this room is staged. It's all minimal, with an agenda that's unclear, a play in which Emily finds herself suddenly centre stage without a script.

The artist is painting her without love, though we have no idea why. And, while it's just the two of them, the artist has control, even beyond the threat of something bad to Jack. She can just blow her silent flute and Emily will collapse and passes out again. She tests that process, because she's not going to go along with any of this nonsense without proving she is indeed stuck first. And she is. We learn a little in these alternating chapters, not least that Emily and Jack saw this artist on the beach with a frame but no canvas. She's creating what she calls living canvases.

Eventually we learn that Jack isn't in a room up the hall, not that we ever expected him to be, and he's searching for Emily. From his perspective, she just vanished without explanation, leaving her phone behind, suggesting that she merely popped out for something and, for some reason, never came back. He doesn't believe she got cold feet and went home, but in a neat touch, he can't ring her parents, because he hasn't officially met them yet and he doesn't want their first interaction to be a confession that he's lost their daughter. So now we alternate between now and now, but a pair of different points of view, Emily's and Jack's.

And that's all I'm going to say about the story because this grows well from that initial setup and I don't want to spoil anything. I'm not even going to spoil the name of the artist, which seems like a pun but isn't a stretch from reality, so there's no way I'm going to spoil the impeccable visual with which everything wraps up. Or the twist after it. There's a lot here, much of it spun around a core theme of art and how we translate that into our daily lives. However, there are other things that I'm far safer in talking about, so I'll go there instead.

For one, there are two jump scares here that work incredibly well, even though the first wouldn't translate into visuals. It would take a seriously talented cinematographer to stage this naturally without it seeming like it's setting us up for something. Jump scares only work when we don't see them coming. This one comes out of absolute nowhere in prose and I thoroughly appreciated that because it's rare. Jump scares are also inherently visual and so are very hard to manage without visuals. This one worked even for an aphantasiac like me.

For another, there are other towns mentioned in passing and they seem to have meaning within Malerman's oeuvre. I don't know if anyone's connected all the dots and drawn a map of Michigan in his fiction, but they should get around to it. Clearly he's trying to do to Michigan what Stephen King did to Maine. Emily and Jack met on a blind date in Chaps, which I believe is where 'Incidents Around the House' is set, even though I neglected to mention that in my review. 'Samhattan' is a common location for the novellas in 'Spin a Black Yarn'. Chowder is where 'On This, the Day of the Pig', later republished as 'Pearl', is set. And Goblin, of course, is the setting for 'Goblin'. Now we'll be able to add Wainscott to that map.

Partway through, I noted that this is a quick read but a thoughtful one and Malerman absolutely needs to nail the landing. The good news is that he does, making this a sparkling success. I always feel happy in picking up a Malerman, because, unlike so many horror authors, I don't know what I will get from it. Sometimes he falls short, like last time, and sometimes he hits it out of the park, like here. Crucially, he's interesting either way. I really should dive into 'Spin a Black Yarn' as soon as I have a chance, as it's sat on my shelf for too long, and I should seek out the others I don't have, not least his award winning debut, 'Bird Box'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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