Book Review : Max Booth III - Touch the Night (2020)
Pre-order Touch the Night here
Nothing gets on my nerves like childhood nostalgia. My formative years were full of shitty drunken adults, miserable redneck kids and scrambled porn on television, so fuck you if Nintendo or the Ninja Turtles make you feel any good. Childhood is where you inherit the bullshit that will follow you around all your life. Never in a million years did I expect someone else to understand that. But Max Booth III’s upcoming horror novel Touch the Night is an awesome middle finger aimed at cheap nostalgia and a purveyor of terror wrapped in one. Rarely had I felt so vindicated by a book.
Touch the Night tells the story of Alonzo and Josh, rebellious prepubescent boys who get in trouble after fighting a convenience store clerk. Alonzo’s mother Ottessa watches them get picked up by the popo, but decides not to intervene because 1) she’s afraid of cops and 2) it might teach these brats a lesson. But later, local sheriff claims they’re not at the station. Even worse, he suspects Ottessa’s been harboring them from the law. Along with Josh’s mom Mary, she decides to take the law in her own hands. Because it definitely wasn’t cops who took the boys.
This novel is more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than it is Stephen King’s It, but it’s driven by the same idea than the iconic clown story. That a corruption has taken over a small town. It is embodied metaphorically by the lazy sheriff who refuses to properly investigate a freakin’ child disappearance and literally by the weirdo cult who kidnapped Alonzo and Josh. There might not be a clown that makes you hallucinate your worst fears in Touch the Night, but there are two realities seemingly unaware of each other and that is almost more terrifying to me.
That brings me to something more nuanced that Touch the Night does. Because it’s a pretty straightforward novel about an underground cult. What makes it work so well is the Ottessa/Mary chapter, which explore the feelings of false security in their small town. The two women feel isolated in their ordeal because nobody else is taking it seriously. Percy is a small place, everybody knows each other, can’t run away very far, etc. The horror themes ofTouch the Night are anchored in a very real dread. Small towns are horrible places to live through a personal tragedy.
Touch the Night is a wildly different novel from Max Booth III’s prior release Carnivorous Lunar Activities. The writing is more dense and rich with details. It’s a very demanding book to read, but it rewards your appropriately with a killer sense of place that was never really part of Booth’s toolbox, except maybe for The Nightly Disease. I’ve been reading Booth for several years now and he’s one of the only authors I follow who got noticeably better at his craft. I’ve very much a privilege to witness such growth with each new novel. Makes my job exciting.
There you have it. Growing up in a small town is a claustrophobic, existential nightmare. It doesn’t matter if you played Super Mario 3 while it happened, it doesn’t change the fact you probably dodged perverts and beatdowns from psychotic kids until you either left or become a shitty adult yourself. Touch the Night'‘s brutal honesty and multifaceted exploration of corruption themes really struck a chord with me. It’s not JUST an underground cult horror novel. It’s a novel about growing up all crooked, cut off from the rest of the world.
8.4/10
