Bailey Hagen has trouble sleeping. Because of the nightmares. Nightmares about the boy with the cold eyes. Nightmares about her cursed town. Nightmares about death.
The lines between Bailey’s dreams and reality blur when she starts school that fall to find that one of the new arrivals looks exactly like the boy from her nightmares. And if he’s real, she realizes with horror, then the rest of her ominous night visions could also come to pass….
I’ll admit to being a little worried going into Cameron Chaney’s Fresh Hell. I’ve enjoyed a lot of his writing, but all he had done so far had been short stories. A novel is an entirely different beast, one with which short-form writers tend to struggle. But this turned out to be needless apprehension, I’m glad to say, because Chaney absolutely rocked his long-form debut.⠀
Chaney is a writer who very much wears his influences on blood-soaked sleeves, but with the first entry of the proposed Autumncrow High series he manages to deliver something that reads like a modern, refined version of the tawdry teen horror books of the eighties and early nineties to which he pays tribute. ⠀⠀
A tribute he pays in rusted, blood-stained spades. The convoluted plots and overwrought melodrama that defined those trashy paperbacks are still prevalent here, but again, presented in a more focused way. There are some hiccups along the way, of course. The final part in particular gets a lot of new elements thrown at it. No doubt seeds for further plot points as the series goes on, but their introduction is so sudden and slightly out of left field that they threaten to push the main narrative into egregious territory. It never goes beyond captivating chaos, though, again, thanks to the story’s carefully calculated construction.⠀
Curiously, that polished writing comes directly from the author’s unwavering dedication to authenticity: Fresh Hell was written for these types of book’s original adolescent audience, who are now all obviously adults, and as such Chaney can afford to deliver a more mature story, both in terms of its bloodshed (this is decidedly more explicit than any Fear Street offering), ingenuity (something occurred halfway through the book that legitimately blew me away), and, particularly, in its emotional honesty. Because despite all the terror and trashiness within, this is a story with a lot of heart.⠀
And ultimately that’s what draws me to Chaney’s writing. The stories that flow out of him may be full of horrors, but they come from a melancholy vein. There’s sadness and sorrow behind it, but also a bottomless, beating empathy. And that’s why I’ll keep coming back to Autumncrow High.
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