For 2023, I decided I needed to read more horror.  I’ve always liked to claim that I love the horror genre, but it seems like I have only read Stephen King, so I need to broaden my horror author horizons.  So, I did what I always do, I scoured the internet, asked my book friends (most of whom are not horror fans, so that was a bust), and went back through my book logs to see which horror authors I have previously enjoyed so I can seek out additional works.  I started looking through the January 2022 books, and didn’t have far to go before I stumbled on a stellar 5-Star called Such a Pretty Smile.  The storyline was brilliant, and DeMeester was genuinely able to frighten me a tad (it takes a lot, I used to teach middle school).  DeMeester happens to have more than one published book, so I dug into her backlist.  This particular book was the only other one available from my library’s elibrary, so I grabbed it and eagerly got started.

            Imagine if Stephen King’s Children of the Corn and the massive creatures in Frank Herbert’s Dune got together with Charles Mansion and decided to have a strange child.  That offspring would be this book.  Couple that with two mentally unstable but strangely determined main characters, and you’ve got one of the more bizarre stories I’ve ever read (until I read Woom).  There is a super religious community, a mom that could give Carrie’s mom a run for her money, a bunch of snakes, and a book that shouldn’t have ever been written.  It’s the perfect recipe for a great horror novel.

            It is a tad weird that I ended up reading DeMeester in January two years in a row, maybe she has written some sort of subliminal message into her books that makes the reader want to start each year with one of her strange tales.  If that’s the case, she’s a horror queen.