The Rental

 

The modern ritual of borrowing a stranger’s life for a weekend. We scroll, we click … and suddenly we are entrusted with the curated intimacy of someone else’s kitchen and bath towels. It is commerce masquerading as hospitality; trust arranged by algorithm. And in The Rental, that fragile compact curdles.

Two brothers and their respective spouses. An oceanside palace of glass and timber that stands like a small cathedral. The house is bait, of course. Perched above the sea, isolated and wind-lashed, it carries a faint gothic pulse. These kind of home’s promise serenity … but whisper surveillance.

What makes everything hum is not its premise but its people. Alcohol flows. Molly dissolves restraint and jealousies bloom. The horror here is at first domestic, then technological. A slow, suffocating realization the most dangerous thing in the house might not be hidden in a smoke detector, but sitting across the dinner table.

Our Airbnb anxiety is almost a social muscle memory. Hidden fees, smiling hosts as gatekeepers. The uneasy choreography between guest and owner. Here, our host is brusque, racist … and vaguely hostile. When cameras are discovered, the film pivots into a guessing game of authorship. Who orchestrates the rot?

Only later did I learn the film was directed and co-written by Dave Franco. For a debut, it is slick and self-assured. And the presence of an A-lister like Jeremy Allen White elevates proceedings.  

Its ultimate defect (let’s face it, we all knew one was coming) lies in a third act. Human combustion is traded for a payoff with slasher vibes. If only the cast were granted a more intimate, character-driven reckoning and this could have brushed the high echelons of indie horror. 6.5/10.

 

Scream 7

When Scream 7 opens with a self-aware sequence built around fresh, disposable characters, the pacing feels hesitant. You may find yourself wondering whether the formula is finally beginning to strain. And yet … it’s worth remembering this franchise has remained remarkably sophisticated across its lifespan, never once collapsing into the kind of schlock that swallowed so many of its eighties slasher counterparts. Even in its most indulgent moments, it has prized intelligence over excess.

Historically, Scream films have thrived on the kinetic charge of adolescence: high school corridors and college campuses functioned as petri dishes for hysteria, hormones, and horror. Here, however, the energy has shifted. No.7 operates within the architecture of domesticity. Mother and daughter. Kitchen tables in lieu of lockers. The drama unfolds less like football game and more like a family reckoning. On paper, it feels like natural evolution. Characters age; franchises mature. Yet the early misgivings linger …

And then something interesting happens.

Artificial intelligence, the bogeyman of our waking lives, is threaded into the narrative bloodstream. In reality, AI provokes unease. On screen, however, it becomes a hall of mirrors. Motive fractures. The whodunit calculus grows unstable. For a series that built its reputation on unmasking formula, this technological infusion grants the writers a playground of near-limitless possibility. Every suspicion feels both justified and suspect.

What impresses most is the script’s willingness to drag its own legacy into the light. Every trope you can catalogue from the previous six instalments is addressed, dissected, and repurposed with meta nods. Expect red herrings that feel like inside jokes and revelations that land with both inevitability and surprise.

Performance-wise, the ensemble commits fully … even when the material teeters on the brink of excess. Emotional beats are sold with conviction, grounding the more labyrinthine plot turns. In interviews, Neve Campbell suggested the gore had been dialed back … I actually found the opposite. While not gratuitous for its own sake, several kills are staged with creativity. The choreography is sharp; the aftermath lingers.

By the midway mark, my apprehensions had largely dissolved. The domestic focus, initially suspect, deepens the stakes. When violence invades the home, it carries a different tune. The franchise’s progression feels, if not flawless, then at least logical. This is not reinvention for its own sake; nor is it a hollow retread. It is a continuation that acknowledges time’s passage.

Walking out, I felt something rare for a seventh entry: satisfaction. A sense of narrative symmetry. As though the circle that began in a suburban living room decades ago had tightened.

Somehow, against expectation, the mask still fits.

 

Relics by Shaun Hutson

 

There are certain writers who do not knock politely. They bash in hinges and grin through splinters. Since the 1980’s, Shaun Hutson has been doing precisely that – long before ‘extreme’ became a marketing badge and splatterpunk found its modern clergy. If horror has a gutter laureate, Hutson has long occupied the throne.

Relics opens up with a premise that is archetypal and academic: an archaeological dig which uncovers a subterranean chamber packed with the skulls of children. The bones seem ancient. They are not. This unsealing coincides with a series of ritualistic murders in which victims are disemboweled and their entrails contorted into letters of the alphabet. Language becomes viscera. Communication, carnage.  

The novel orbits two poles. On one side, a dig rich in Celtic ecofacts where archaeologist Kim deciphers tablets foretelling the rise of an ancient God named Dagda ... unless innocent blood is spilled. On the other, inspector Stephen Wallace is tasked with pursuing a killer who gouges out eyes and rearranges organs with a butcher’s finesse. Between it all lies a landscape of British hooligans, sadists, and opportunists … figures far removed from the incel loners who populate a universe like Richard Laymon’s. Hutson’s England is all boot boys and bile.  

The procedural threads, it must be said, strain credulity. Wallace will appear at crime scenes with uncanny punctuality, as if ushered by a narrative teleporter rather than real transport. The investigative mechanics feel perfunctory, even intrusive. Yet this has never been Hutson’s true arena.

His true arena lies in gore. When Hutson writes it, he does not suggest; he saturates the fucking page. Blood has temperature. Excrement and other bodily emissions are rendered without coyness. Animal cruelty, particularly in the depiction of dog fighting and other scenes of calculated brutality, will repel many. It probably should. However, the caveat is clear: this is pulp horror operating without anesthetic. To enter such territory expecting restraint is to misread the signpost.

Hutson’s excesses are not limited to gore. His action scenes tend to sprawl, sometimes running twice as long as they need to, and a firmer editorial hand could have sharpened several confrontations. The narrative momentum sags under the weight of its own enthusiasm.

What elevates Relics beyond adolescent provocation is craft. Beneath Hutson’s juvenile ferocity lies a writer who understands cadence, pacing, and the architecture of dread. The suggestion of curses, of ancient forces stirring beneath earth moving machinery, lends the narrative a mythic undertow. Bizarre accidents at the dig hint that something older than law enforcement has taken an interest.

For a novel born in the 1980s, Relics is unsubtle, frequently excessive, and occasionally clumsy in its scaffolding. Yet it possesses an energy that many contemporary horrors, polished to a lackluster sheen, lack.

Part archaeological nightmare, part occult procedural, Relics is wholly committed to its own depravity.

The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

 

Returning to early Dean Koontz feels oddly reassuring. Those mass-market paperbacks, spine-creased and yellowed, carry with them muscle memory. Before you begin, you know the rhythms. And yet, like revisiting an old neighborhood, the journey retains its power to unsettle.  

The Eyes of Darkness, originally published in 1982 under the Leigh Nichols pseudonym, occupies an interesting position in Koontz’s mythology. It’s a product of its time … but also a blueprint for everything that followed. A grieving mother; a child presumed dead. Shadow agencies operating beyond accountability. Beneath it all, there is the suggestion the horrors are not supernatural but bureaucratic, sanctioned, and carried out in fluorescent rooms by men who believe themselves necessary. 

The novel opens with a premise that Koontz would return to: a deceased child who refuses to stay silent. Tina Evans, one year on from the loss of her son Danny, is in survival mode when a message appears in his bedroom: NOT DEAD. From here, Koontz allows grief to do what it does best: erode certainty. Is this madness? Or something worse? Tina’s refusal to accept an easy answer becomes the novel’s emotional engine.

Koontz’s formative prose has a workmanlike quality that is often overlooked in discussions of his later, more philosophical work. Here, the language occasionally slips into something dreamlike, especially when Tina’s internal state fractures. The gaudiness of Las Vegas is rendered vividly in the opening act, all neon excess and artificial promise … before the narrative migrates toward harsher terrain. Desert gives way to mountain, heat to ice. The geography mirrors our protagonist’s descent into a truth that grows increasingly inhospitable.

Structurally, The Eyes of Darkness adheres closely to what would become a familiar Koontz pattern. Tina is joined by Elliot Stryker, a man of competence, integrity, and unwavering belief. Together they form the novel’s moral axis. This is both a strength and weakness. On one hand, the author excels at forging bonds under pressure. On the other, both characters are almost aggressively virtuous. Their moral clarity is so absolute it occasionally strains credibility. They feel less like ordinary people than idealized figures; the sort of good-looking, unblemished protagonists favored by Hollywood films. 

The antagonistic forces, by contrast, are more compelling. Koontz’s fascination with secret government programs and unethical experimentation is on full display, and he approaches the material with a restraint that latter novels lack. There is no overt political sermonizing here, no heavy-handed thesis. The menace arises instead from implication: the casual efficiency with which lives are erased, the institutional certainty that sacrifice is justified so long as it remains classified.

Our climax delivers what readers expect: psychic phenomena, megalomaniacal figures … and a conspiracy large enough to swallow individuals whole. There is also, in hindsight, an eerie prescience to some of the novel’s speculative elements – ideas that would take on an uncomfortable resonance during the recent pandemic. Whether coincidence or intuition, it adds a faint aftertaste of unease to an already charged finale.

The Eyes of Darkness is not without flaws, but I feel it’s an important artifact. It captures Koontz at a point where his imagination was ferocious but his voice unencumbered – where story took precedence over doctrine. Like other early works such as The Key to Midnight, Shadowfires, and The House of Thunder, it is a reminder of why his readership grew vast in the first place. Predictable, yes. But predictability, in the right hands, can feel less like limitation and more like ritual.

Dead on the Dolmen by Cameron Trost

 

There is something naturally comforting about mysteries that know exactly where they live. Dead on the Dolmen: An Oscar Tremont Mystery is rooted in a way that feels increasingly rare, and the soil it draws from is ancient, stony, and steeped in story. Brittany is not used as postcard scenery, but as lived-in geography. You can feel the damp in the air, the weight of centuries pressing beneath the grass; a sense that folklore hasn’t vanished so much as learned to wait.

At the heart of the novel is the Ankou, that skeletal ferryman of Breton legend, rattling through the night on horse and cart, his scythe in hand. Cameron is careful with this figure. He does not overexplain or modernize the myth into something slick. Instead, he allows it to retain its strangeness, its rural terror, and its ambiguity. The Dolmen itself becomes a locus of unease: a place where history, superstition, and violence overlap. Stones remember. This book understands that.

The narrative pairing of father and son, David and Rowan, serves as an emotional crux. Their relationship feels unforced, lived-in, and quietly affectionate. This is not a story that relies on melodrama to manufacture stakes. The fear grows organically, seeded in concern, curiosity, and the realization that something old may not be content to remain symbolic. When Oscar Tremont enters, he does so not as a disruptive force but as an extension of the novel’s temperament. An investigator of the strange and inexplicable, yes, but one who listens as much interrogates.

This was my first encounter with Oscar Tremont, and what struck me most was his restraint. In a genre sometimes populated by outsized personalities, Tremont feels refreshingly human. Competent without arrogance, curious without condescension. Trost resists any urge to turn him into a gimmick. Instead, our Investigator becomes a lens, someone through whom the uncanny can be examined without being diminished.

Stylistically, the prose is clean and unadorned. Sentences move easily, inviting immersion rather than demanding attention. There is a British coziness to the structure, recalling Midsomer Murders or Father Brown, yet filtered through a continental sensibility that gives the book its European verisimilitude. Dialogue is natural and unshowy … and the supporting cast of village characters feel lightly sketched but authentic.

Perhaps most telling is the sense that the author cares. Trost writes like someone invested not only in story, but in reader experience. There is an openness, a conversational quality that extends beyond the text itself. This is the kind of novel that encourages curiosity, not only about its mystery, but about the folklore it draws from. You may find yourself pausing to look things up, to wander down adjacent paths.

Dead on the Dolmen is not interested in reinventing the mystery genre. As an alternative, it polishes well-worn stone until it shimmers. Atmospheric, the novel reminds us that the most persistent horrors are rarely the ones that announce themselves … but those that have been quietly occupying the landscape all along.