By Richard Chizmar & Billy Chizmar

Cemetery Dance, out February

There are many tales about the Widow’s Point lighthouse at Harper’s Cove. But surely it can’t be as bad as has been made out – and Thomas Livingston is determined to prove that’s the case.

If you like your horror to gradually enfold you in its chilling embrace, then don’t miss this novella from father and son Richard and Billy Chizmar. Even reading it in a fully lit train carriage, I could feel it exerting a grip similar to that I’ve found in the best Stephen King tales, that compulsion to turn the pages even though you are sure that things are about to go irretrievably wrong…

In a sense it’s an update of the old epistolary novel, in that the vast majority of the story is told via transcripts of the contents of a dictation machine that supernatural investigator Livingston takes in with him during his self-imposed vigil in the lighthouse. Conveniently for us readers, that allows him to narrate the past history of the place – and also provides “objective” evidence of other forces and events, as well as letting him occasionally be an unreliable narrator, to his own detriment.

It would be unfair to go deeper into the plotline: certain elements play out exactly as you’d expect, others don’t, and there are a couple of occasions when you almost want to shout at Livingston in the same way that you’d shout at the idiot teenagers heading into the darkened room where you just know the monster is lurking. The Chizmars provide a credible account of a man falling apart – a man who claims to want to know the truth, but actually needs the exact opposite – set against a background that you come to know quickly. All 268 steps of it. Glenn Chadbourne’s black and white art complements the mounting terror, the choice of image sometimes very telling.

The King influence is clearly present – the story is dedicated to their long term friend, there’s the repetition of a rhyme from one of the books, and there are obvious parallels with 1408 – but the Chizmars give it a different voice and emphasis so the novella never feels like a pastiche or homage. Widow’s Point taps into those same fears and anxieties that King has done for the last five decades in its own way. And I hope that there’s plenty more to come.

Verdict: Chilling and haunting – a well-told piece of horror. 9/10

Paul Simpson