Book Review : Max Booth III - The Last Haunt (2023)
Everyone loves Halloween. but some people love it a little too much. You know the people I'm talking about: they make pumpkin-themed Facebook posts on September 1st, they nurture a two months long mystery over their overelaborated costume, etc. The most extreme Halloween lovers turn the celebration of spookiness into a living, like the protagonist of Max Booth III's new, unexpected novella The Last Haunt and you know, sometimes loving something too much becomes more dangerous than hating it.
The Last Haunt is a oral history of the McKinley Manor Massacre (liberally inspired by you know what), an extreme haunted house located in Texas. Told from the point of view of neighbours, local cops, former employees and whatnot, it contextualizes the circumstances that lead to the death of extreme haunted house artist and all-around deranged man Gus McKinley. Unfortunately, it was not the first death that happened inside his attraction and definitely not the only one that happened the same night.
How to Talk About the Unspeakable
Here’s where lies the genius of Max Booth: haunted house stories are a dime a dozen, but your generic haunted house is lost in the middle of the woods or in an urban wasteland of some sort. Not in a functioning neighbourhood and it isn't inhabited by seemingly normal people who work at the local Wal Mart outside their business hour. McKinley Manor isn't properly haunted to speak of. It is a construction meant to exploit the fear and vulnerabilities of unsuspecting thrill seekers and Halloween lovers.
No one testifying in The Last Haunt is actually scared of McKinley Manor. It's just an undeniable part of their day-to-day lives. Gus McKinley's neighbour Christine Addams (who opens the book) is perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about. She's not a haunted house story protagonist. She just lives next to one and it makes he life miserable. The intimidating majesty conventionally associated with haunted house story language is replaced by the existential dread of social life as an adult.
The haunted house doesn’t matter all that much in The Last Haunt. We spend very little time actually in it. It’s the deconstruction of the "haunting" experience that makes this novella so much fun. Because the characters ARE haunted by the murders that happened, but not in the way Gus McKinley intended. Everyone is completely oblivious to what McKinley was trying to do, which is what makes it so funny. You can haunt people in 2023. You just can’t make them believe some place in haunted. It’s a small, but important detail.
Best way to talk about unspeakable murders is through people who don’t really care about them.
The Art of Ending a Story
I really liked The Last Haunt, but it didn’t enrapture me like Maggots Screaming! of The Nightly Disease did. I believe it has to do with how the novella ended. Because you get to experience the actual McKinley Manor Massacre. But you get to experience the characters' reality in such mundane terms (and I mean that in the best possible way), the leap to such dire and dramatic circumstances it a little too intense to make. It's like you’e starting a whole other story two thirds into one you already enjoy.
Don't get me wrong, there’s brilliant foreshadowing through all that lengthy chapter. Max Booth knows what he's doing and it was brought up properly, but such a shift in tone should’ve maybe been foreshadowed from the very start? The events of the final chapter aren't even alluded to until the second part of The Last Haunt, which made it a hart sell. At least to me. Ending a story is difficult. Ending a killer story like The Last Haunt in a satisfying manner is even more difficult. That ending was fine, but it was too far fetched to be great.
*
The Last Haunt is a lot of fun and, most important, it's very, very short. It's a great pickup for October or even for a single sitting reading on Halloween night. It's smart and witty and funny as shit. It might’ve not wrapped things up in the way I hoped, but the deconstruction of the haunted house experience and the actual existential haunting featured in the novella were so much fun. You don’t need to be a Max Booth III completist to pick it up. It's actually a great gateway into Booth's great sense of humour and storytelling.
