Head Like a Hole

I can't remember how this one appeared in my Amazon suggestions, but they were dead on. 

The cover is striking and the Nine Inch Nails title was obviously appealing. 

Then I read the blurb and a horror novel set partially in the 90s with pop culture references? Yeah, I'll give it a shot. 

I'm not sure I can give it a higher recommendation than it was delivered yesterday evening and I stayed up until 3:15am finishing it. 

So once you open the cover, the first thing you see is an illustration that was definitely inspired by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Another point in this book's favor. 

Then it's divided up into sections and each is named after a 90s song. More points. 

The book begins with a true crime podcast guy doing a sneak interview attack on a 46-year-old woman who lives in a tract housing development. She begrudgingly begins to tell her story and thus come the flashbacks to 1996. She and her friends graduated in 1994, so this is set two years after. 

Main character Megan is an artist who failed out of a Philly art school. She works in a bar with her booty call dude, who wants to have an actual relationship but she's hesitant. Megan is a rich girl or at least semi-rich. Her parents send her off to a boarding high school that's mostly for the wealthy. That's where she meets our flashback cast. There's her boyfriend Adam, who basically ghosted her after graduation. There are Tom and Desi, the stoner journalist and the semi-gothy New Agey girl. And there's Chunhee, the Chinese girl who was bullied by the rich white kids, because of course she was. There's also Oksana, Megan's Ukrainian dancer roommate, who none of them can seem to remember. 

The flashbacks aren't exactly Megan telling the podcast guy her story, because they're written from the PoVs of multiple characters. They begin with a fisherman making a very grisly discovery. When he pulls up one of his crab traps, along comes the head of a woman with a little tiny set of lungs and a heart dangling beneath her. When she opens her eye and begins trying to speak, he freaks out, but she soon is able to control him. 

There is body horror in this, mostly having to do with Oksana there trying to regrow herself. She needs blood and flesh to begin the process, but eventually is able to reconstruct herself using parts from people the fisherman has killed for her. 

So the fisherman is being controlled by her. She's able to get into people's heads. His taking the neighbor's dog leads to the introduction of Detective Nolan, the uncle of the podcast guy in the present. He mailed his investigation notebook to a family member before the big finale and podcast guy eventually finds it. 

Then we begin to follow the fisherman and Oksana on their little killing spree, while Megan is alerted to problems by the reappearance of Adam. She's still mad at him, but she is having the weird dreams he mentioned, so she begins by going to her old high school. She eventually realizes someone is after the five of them. She calls Chunhee and heads there but arrives too late. She and Nolan are always a couple steps behind Oksana. 

I'm going to stop there because I want people to read this book. There's the mystery of what happened to Megan in the past. Her parents died in a fire and she drove off a cliff and was in a coma for two weeks. It's clear something also happened to Oksana in the past, which feels delightfully like some Point Horror stuff. It's also fun to discover the extent of Oksana's abilities and learn the story of how they developed. The ending is just a series of big reveals while the final battle versus Oksana is happening. 

Then we get back to the present and the podcast guy...well, you need to read to find out what happens to him. I had a suspicion thanks to one character's name. 

If you're not squeamish about what I'd call minor body horror, then definitely give this one a read. The 90s references are really fun if you lived during that time. The characters are two years older than me, so I knew every song and trend mentioned. 

My only criticism is that the author needs to be careful if he's going to do a book mostly set in flashbacks. He used versions of the phrase "catch feelings" not once but twice and we most definitely did not say that in the mid-90s. It's a more modern (and somehow childish-sounding) phrase that doesn't belong in the past chapters. According to Urban Dictionary, it originated in 90s hip hop, but I never heard it until much, much later. There's no way a bunch of mostly white boarding school kids would use that phrase in the 90s. Urban Dictionary says it became popular in the 2010s. So yeah, reading that early on took me right out of the book and made me cringe momentarily. But a very minor criticism. The majority of the book was excellent.