Book Review : Ronald Malfi - Small Town Horror (2024)
There are two main pleasures one can derive from reading a novel: the please of having your expectations met and the pleasure of having your expectations subverted. One is not better than the other, depending one what the reader is looking for and how the storytelling is executed. Ronald Malfi's Small Town Horror is of the former kind and it’s quite self-aware about it. Titling your small town horror novel Small Town Horror might seem like a terrible idea (and it is), but its also honest as fuck.
Small Town Horror tells the story of Andrew Larimer, a young New York lawyer living the American Dream and expecting his first born along with his wife Rebecca until the day he receives a phone call from an old friend urging him to come back to his hometown of Kingsport, Maryland. Something terrible happened twenty years and and it's come back to haunt Andrew, Dale, Eric, Tig and Meach. One fateful 4th of July, five normal kids did something they shouldn't have done and that they will never outlive or outrun.
What Haunts Us All
As you've might imagined from my introduction, there aren’t many surprises in Small Town Horror. There is one fun and worthwhile twist, it mostly hits all the classic supernatural slasher tropes in the vein of I Know What You Did Last Summer. But Small Town Horror hits them hard and dynamically. It also swiftly surfs a narrow line between guilt and haunting, which is another classic, but super important variable of good horror and Malfi's masterful ambiguous point of view on it is Small Town Horror's best asset.
Everything feels extremely familiar at the start of Small Town Horror up to a point after 50 pages where I told myself: oh fuck, what am I even reading? This feels like an Are You Afraid of The Dark story. But the absence of overt supernatural occurrence and most important, the absence of bodies starts shifting the point of view a little bit. Conventional horror signifiers like a haunted house start gaining an ambiguous meaning like. You start asking yourself questions like: is it haunted or just dilapidated?
Ronald Malfi uses your perception and your horror culture against you in Small Town Horror. Even if I hate this title with passion and I believe it will hurt the sales of a good book, it awkwardly fits the concept. You’re supposed to head into Small Town Horror thinking you’re going to comfortable navigate all the classic tropes and you do navigate them, but there's a lot of fun bumps along the way. It’s by no means a revolution in horror writing, but Ronald Malfi has a masterful understanding of what makes it scary.
The Byzantine Protagonist
The protagonist Andrew Larimer is another interesting variable in Small Town Horror even though I had an ambiguous relationship to him. He’s quite the chatty Cathy. Because most of the chapters are delivered from his first person point of view, he delivers a whole lot of information about Kingsport and other characters and some of it could’ve been left unsaid. His volubile nature serves a purpose, but sometimes it kills the charm and the mystery of certain settings. Especially at the start.
That said, what’s awesome about Andrew is that he’s not quite honest with us either. He's not an outright liar, but certain decisions he's not living well with certain decisions he’s taken over his life (that have nothing to do with the 4th of July fiasco) and he’s doing a lot of cognitive reframing. All of us do that, but when his reframing is challenged by the outside perspective of other characters (which I feel happens a little late in the novel), it’s where Andrew becomes fully human and relatable in all his byzantine flaws.
*
I liked Small Town Horror. It was too much on the conventional side for me to love it, but I had fun with its shifty point of view and its emotionally dishonest protagonist. It was predictable, but dynamic and honest. Conventional, but playful and sneaky deep. Not every novel needs to revolutionize the way you read fiction. I consider Small Town Horror to be an A+ type of beach read that'll keep your turning pages until it's dark outside. Don't overthink this one. Some books are just meant to be fun.
