A review of Kasey Kubica’s book Woebegone.

Woebegone opens with a heart-wrenching scene of great tragedy. Be aware there there are no emotional punches pulled.

On the narrative level, the story drives toward solving the mystery of that tragedy, as well as many other tragic and horrifying events, all connected.

But when I fully digest Woebegone, it becomes something deeply sobering. It becomes a cautionary tale, and an eyes-open reckoning of the destructive effects of tragedy on people and on community.

The events of the opening tragedy never leave the characters. It leaves an open wound in each character, and they all try different ways to close that wound, to heal it. Even the community around them tries to cope. And yet, the wounds remain raw — not only those wounds wrought by the opening tragedy, but older wounds hidden in their past. Points of view shift and swivel, and even when characters fully dissociate, they crash back into their realities.

Unaddressed grief, pain, and tragedy produce a setting and story where we’re brought to the edge of what’s unfaceable, and then pushed over that edge, learning the cost of refusal.

Kasey Kubica’s novel shares a trait with many classic novels — a seemingly simple read with a steel core of unflinching humanity within.

A review of K. L. Young’s book The Secret Language of Spiders.

The Secret Language of Spiders is a title so fantastic, I had to pinch dozens of people to be sure it was real. It is quite real, as my alleged parole officer keeps insisting.

In a small, dark, dying, and twisted town, horrible things scuttle about in the darkness, and horrible voices whisper insistently from beneath cold soul-sucking water. Faith and love are tested in unforeseen ways, and we learn that isolation and despair lead to the heart’s darkest horrors.

The engine in this novel starts right away, and revs up continuously throughout, until its mind-destroying, multi-legged climax. It’s terrific page-turning terror, lovingly hidden beneath a haunting cover!

Young’s setting is every little town left behind by the mad rush of society and poisoned in the center, and his characters are every real and hurting person abandoned in that same rush. Some still crave relevance and some have accepted their baffling fates in a shell of a town whose core has finally started a collapse into itself. And, as with the dark parts of life, there’s even a touch of humor here and there.

Watch for more work by K. L. Young, and brace your mind for when it hits!