9/4/26
A new round of Guests of Honor for Scares That Care’s AuthorCon VII have been announced. You can view them here. More to come in the days and weeks ahead.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 118
Trinity by Kristin Dearborn
Hardcover - Trade Paperback
Fresh out of jail and hopeful his troubles are behind him, Valentine Slade returns to his hometown of Lott, New Mexico. But for Val, his troubles are just beginning. His girlfriend’s State Trooper brother comes after him with a shotgun, his mother Caroline has been diagnosed with a mysterious form of terminal cancer, and a mutilated corpse is found on the road outside his house.And there’s something more…something…unnatural out in the desert…something that is not human watches and waits, luring Val deeper and deeper into a terrifying mystery that may very well be tied to otherworldly intelligence…and tied to Val himself. To find the truth Val must delve into nightmares he’d rather forget, horrors he’d rather not know, and into places where there is nowhere to hide.We are not alone. There is no escape from the truth. No escape from...TRINITY.
A debut novel for Kristin, she had the misfortune of seeing it released near the end of the Delirium Books/Dark Fuse era, so despite getting some good early reviews and praise, the book never really found its legs. Which is a shame, because it’s a solid debut and a great read, with a fun plot, great action sequences, and imagery that absolutely flows off the page.
Avowed UFO “nut” that I am, it might surprise you to learn that I generally don’t care for aliens in my horror fiction. I’m not talking about bizarre monster tyope aliens like in Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (which you probably know as John Carpenter’s The Thing) or William W. Johnstone’s ridiculously bad but so over the top it’s great novel, Them (which involves disembodied telepathic alien brains from space). No, I’m averse to traditional Gray aliens and their spacecraft appearing in Horror, with rare exception — The X-Files, for example, which does it right, at least for the first few seasons, by leaning hard into the HORROR of such a situation. Trinity is another example of aliens in horror done right. Indeed, as the mystery unfolds and the dread builds and the body count rises, Kristin delivers what could have very well been a lost episode of The X-Files, complete with a Whitley Streiber-esque investigative work wound through the narrative. But there are no federal agent coming to save the day for our protagonists, and Val’s psychological unraveling is written masterfully and is heartbreakingly effective.
Highly recommended. While the book is out of print, I see signed hardcovers pop up on the secondary market fairly often, ranging from $60 to $125. Curiously, I never see trade paperbacks pop up, which means the folks who own them are holding on to them — the mark of a good book.
