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A review by xterminal
Husk by James Roy Daley, Matt Hults
4.0
Matt Hults, Husk (Books of the Dead, 2011)
“A sharp pain manifested within her wound...”
Given how much I adored Forrest Armstrong's The Deadheart Shelters last year (it made my 25 Best Reads of the year list), I figured I'd start checking those same avenues for more buzz books. Didn't take long for another to crop up: Husk, the first novel from Matt Hults. And to an extent, the buzz is warranted; Hults has turned in a solid supernatural-slasher thriller that doesn't do all that much to break the conventions of the genre, but works within them quite well. Were we still in the golden age of the mass-market pulp-paperback horror novel (mid-seventies to late eighties), I can absolutely see this book getting Hults a contract with one of my much-beloved cheaper publishers of genre horror, someone like Playboy, PaperJacks, or Pinnacle. Husk is, easily, on a quality level with the books published by those presses thirty or forty years ago in terms of plotting, pacing, characterization, etc.
“Becky, gagged, felt her stomach seizure.”
The other really good thing about such an arrangement is that it would have hooked Matt Hults up with an editor/proofreader who could have done something about the times this book's writing goes as horribly off the rails as it does. Granted, it's only the odd sentence that does, but those sentences are truly odd indeed. The two most obvious are already here (the other two that really jumped out at me will follow, though I'll be qualifying both of them, and one will only be an excerpt, as quoting the entire sentence would be a major spoiler). If you don't have a problem with them, or if you can get around them given that we're talking about four sentences in a 338-page novel, then I can recommend this one pretty enthusiastically for fans of genre horror. On the other hand, if you took Latin in high school (do high schools even offer Latin any more? I'm too old for my own good...) or college, you might come across “Further emphasizing the pure wickedness the hecatomb reeked of, he found a wide pool of blood the killer had gathered in a shallow pit at the center of the room.” Now, I'm going to admit right up front that one's probably not Matt Hults' fault, at least not entirely (there was an AD&D monster, I think in the Fiend Folio called a Hecatomb), but I do not think, in the words of Inigo Montoya, it means what you think it means. (A hecatomb is a sacrifice of one hundred cattle.) Similarly, Hults talks about “extirpated remains” in one sentence later on. Which I will admit, totally sounds cool (and gross). Until you look up “extirpated” and find out it means “local extinction” (as in a species dying off within a specific area), as opposed to anything having to do with, say, liquefied, rotting body parts.
So, yeah, the writing could use some touching up. (We'll not even mention the dangling preposition in the hecatomb sentence.) But for good, solid action and a hefty side of gore, Matt Hults brings it. *** ½
“A sharp pain manifested within her wound...”
Given how much I adored Forrest Armstrong's The Deadheart Shelters last year (it made my 25 Best Reads of the year list), I figured I'd start checking those same avenues for more buzz books. Didn't take long for another to crop up: Husk, the first novel from Matt Hults. And to an extent, the buzz is warranted; Hults has turned in a solid supernatural-slasher thriller that doesn't do all that much to break the conventions of the genre, but works within them quite well. Were we still in the golden age of the mass-market pulp-paperback horror novel (mid-seventies to late eighties), I can absolutely see this book getting Hults a contract with one of my much-beloved cheaper publishers of genre horror, someone like Playboy, PaperJacks, or Pinnacle. Husk is, easily, on a quality level with the books published by those presses thirty or forty years ago in terms of plotting, pacing, characterization, etc.
“Becky, gagged, felt her stomach seizure.”
The other really good thing about such an arrangement is that it would have hooked Matt Hults up with an editor/proofreader who could have done something about the times this book's writing goes as horribly off the rails as it does. Granted, it's only the odd sentence that does, but those sentences are truly odd indeed. The two most obvious are already here (the other two that really jumped out at me will follow, though I'll be qualifying both of them, and one will only be an excerpt, as quoting the entire sentence would be a major spoiler). If you don't have a problem with them, or if you can get around them given that we're talking about four sentences in a 338-page novel, then I can recommend this one pretty enthusiastically for fans of genre horror. On the other hand, if you took Latin in high school (do high schools even offer Latin any more? I'm too old for my own good...) or college, you might come across “Further emphasizing the pure wickedness the hecatomb reeked of, he found a wide pool of blood the killer had gathered in a shallow pit at the center of the room.” Now, I'm going to admit right up front that one's probably not Matt Hults' fault, at least not entirely (there was an AD&D monster, I think in the Fiend Folio called a Hecatomb), but I do not think, in the words of Inigo Montoya, it means what you think it means. (A hecatomb is a sacrifice of one hundred cattle.) Similarly, Hults talks about “extirpated remains” in one sentence later on. Which I will admit, totally sounds cool (and gross). Until you look up “extirpated” and find out it means “local extinction” (as in a species dying off within a specific area), as opposed to anything having to do with, say, liquefied, rotting body parts.
So, yeah, the writing could use some touching up. (We'll not even mention the dangling preposition in the hecatomb sentence.) But for good, solid action and a hefty side of gore, Matt Hults brings it. *** ½