The Books of Horror Go To List continues to be the gift that keeps on giving, as this is another gem of a novel to rank up there with the best of them. It appears to be Ronald Malfi's best-known and best-regarded novel, but 'Bone White' is nipping at its heels and showed up just as often when the members of the Books of Horror Facebook group were putting this list together. Clearly, I need to read that one too, likely followed by everything else Malfi has written. This is mature horror with clear potential to be filmed, either as a feature or as a television mini-series. I wouldn't want any of it to be cut for length.

What we read is effectively written by Aaron Decker to his wife Allison. He translates novels from the Japanese. She was a journalist. "Come with me," she told him one December morning, but he didn't and she was shot in the head at the Harbor Plaza strip mall by a young man with grievances against his parents and ex-girlfriend. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Six dead, plus the killer. We see it on the news every day and it's ceased to have meaning until it connects in a personal way. Aaron is devastated.

Then, three months later, a package shows up on his doorstep from her work, and eventually he's able to open it, at which point he's confused by a receipt. It's for a motel in North Carolina, a long way from home, paid in cash on a date when he wasn't home. He was in New York City, visiting one of his editors. It seems wrong, as does the name of the place, the Valentine Motel. Of course, he's wondering if she cheated and isn't sure if he even wants to know, but Other-Aaron, the half of him who thinks in Japanese, can disassociate and look into it. He goes to the motel, which turns out to not be a romantic place at all, mostly a place for fisherman to stay for cheap.

At this point, this is a mystery novel but we don't even know what the mystery is. Allison knew but she's dead. Aaron doesn't have the faintest idea. Then we get a mild supernatural element, with a closet light that flashes inconsistently, highlighting the Deckers's mystic pedestal, a place where, in family logic, things always turn up when they're lost. It gives him a key and Other-Aaron uses it to open Allison's locked hope chest. There's a gun in there, a dead doll and a file folder detailing a history of the dead: six teenage girls, all of a particular type, all murdered, but in different states and going back to before Aaron and Allison married. There are case histories, personal interviews and a repeated note, "Gas Head will make you dead."

Of course, Aaron decides to solve this mystery, or we wouldn't have a novel. It wasn't official work at the Herald; this was something Allison did on her own time for her own reasons, which Aaron is blissfully unaware of, but he loved his wife and this mystery is a part of her that he never knew. It feels like time to get to know that Allison too. So he visits the scenes and talks to the cops and the families and the journalists and gets precisely nowhere. In fact, one of the murders is solved, her killer a convicted paedophile who's already dead. Holly Renfrew's sweater was found in his house.

But he perseveres, learning more in the process about both his wife and the apparent serial killer she was hunting and, because each step reveals a little bit more about both, it would be very easy indeed to spoil this. What I will say is that this plays in a number of genres. At heart, it's about one man coming to terms with the death of his wife. It's about grief and loss and an inability to handle either because the man who did it is inconveniently not there to accuse. It's obvious who to blame, but it's hard to do that when they're dead too. Meanwhile, he's on his own.

What keeps Aaron close to Allison in this trying time is the mystery she was trying to solve, which has now become a mystery he's trying to solve, even though it's for completely different reasons. This is a serial killer story and much of this plays out more like a crime novel than a horror novel, a lot more James Patterson, say, than Thomas Harris. However, we don't see the killer going about his dubious business at any point. There's no attempt at suspense, the clock never ticking down to another death that might have been stopped if only the mystery was solved in time.

That's because this is about Allison far more than it's about the killer. It's about who she was and why she never shared that part of herself with her husband. It's about why she was dedicated to a case that she was never paid to work. It's about her personal connection to these crimes and the need to find closure, two details which now transfer over to Aaron. It takes a while to realise that he has a personal connection to these crimes through Allison and he needs to find closure too, for her own death and through this mystery. It's never about the killer. He's just the end of the story.

Well, mostly, as there are things that bring this back from crime to horror. The mild supernatural angle is one. It sets up a couple of things, including a well-handled ending, and it serves as a good way to keep Allison in mind, even though she died before the book began. Aaron has the constant feeling that she hasn't moved on yet, that she's still there watching him. Malfi has a concept that he calls "headlight ghosts", where you sit in a car with the lights off, think of someone for a count of ten, then switch the lights on. More than once, Aaron does that and there she is, albeit briefly, kept alive for a moment by a quirk of brain chemistry.

So this is a serial killer crime story in a topical general fiction setting but with a side of ghosts. As we run on, we eventually bump into another side of urban legend (as you probably expected with that "Gas Head" quote), and eventually a tinge of eco-horror that adds flavour. Throughout, that title continues to resonate, almost like a chorus after each couple of verses. Each time it arrives, it's in a slightly different context, all the way to a song by the Del-Vikings. Each iteration works as a reminder that there will be another and, if you're paying attention, you'll have figured out the last one already, but there are plenty on the way and they underline why it's such a great title.

I adored this book, which will now rank very highly amongst the other choices on this Go To List, a consistent collection of excellent books. It's hard to compare to anything, but there's maybe some of the grief of 'This Thing Between Us' in here, some of the mystery of 'The Sun Down Motel' and some of the layered revelations of 'Penpal'. Those are three very different novels and this counts as a fourth, but that just highlights how deep and diverse this Go To List is. I stayed away from the new faces of the genre for too long. I've seriously missed out, but I'm seriously catching up. Malfi has nineteen novels out. I've now read one. I guess that's a start. ~~ Hal C F Astell