#BookReview ‘Black Mouth’ by Ronald Malfi

About the book…

Perfect for fans of Stephen King’s IT, a group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerizing odyssey of terror.

For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He’s haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother’s life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.

Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago – the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.

I am so very grateful to Sarah and Eleanor at Titan Books for my gifted review copy of one of this year’s most anticipated titles (HUGE Ronald Malfi fan here!) ‘Black Mouth’ is out in July in paperback and e-book!

And…I was absolutely not disappointed, Black Mouth has shot into my Top 10 of books of 2022 and that is no exaggeration. It is full of incredible set pieces which are now living rent free in my mind (and I am not mad about it),

Comparisons to Stephen King’s It were inevitable as technically there is a clown, a fairground and the painful , necessary experience of growing up for 3 outcast children (I don’t count Dennis as he is technically not entirely aware of what is going on around him). The real horror exists beyond the supernatural elements, it lives between the lines where Clay (a black boy with vitiligo leaving him stranded between two worlds), Mia, a tomboy obsessed with death who lives with her uncle, and brothers Jamie and Dennis are repeatedly, consistently let down by the adults around them.

They create their own support group, in the town of Black Mouth where Dennis and Jamie grow up in the shadow of terrible , cataclysmic events as children-Jamie leaves, yet at the beginning of the book he is pulled back by the death of his mother and a ethical, moral obligation to take care of Jamie. Having spent the years between in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Jamie is the principle narrator of the tale of his childhood, which he has, ever since, tried to block out. But out of chances, out of luck, and out of hope, he returns home to the place where, as the old maxim goes, they have to take you in.

Taking care of mentally challenged Dennis, who lives in his own universe populated cartoon turtles and an unswerving belief in his brother, Jamie finds that he, Mia, and Clay are being drawn back to a place of tragedy, death, manipulation and, hopefully, redemption.

A man named The Magician, a carnie at the travelling Horace’s Carnival, a man who should not exist, has been spotted by Mia, and driven her need to reconnect with Jamie and Dennis. Clay, now a social worker trying to provide the stable home environment for the children who come into his sphere of practice , sues his outsider status to reach those who feel untouchable. The thing which bound them together as children, the trauma bonded young folk who have been through unspeakable violence, bullying and abuse demands an encore. And the Black Mouth is waiting to once more pull them in….

I completely fell in love with this quartet of flawed outsiders, the misfits who have been abandoned by pretty much every authority figure and as a result, an alternative stepped in. It is dirty, gritty and endlessly dark, the depths to which Jamie plummets are far from the often sanitised depictions of addiction and mental health struggles to stay sober, this is further enforced by the first person narrative when Jamie takes the wheel.

The oral/mouth imagery is endlessly played with, for a mouth can swallow, bite, spit and chew, it can suck you in, but it can also throw things out. And the blackness of not knowing what is at the end of the hole, the mouth which is the remainder of the town’s mining history, just lying there , in the dark, is something I can completely relate to as a person who lives amongst the Welsh valleys steeped in mining history, tragedies and that all encompassing blackness.

The sheer terror in the eyes of a patient I once cared for who, having post operative hallucinations, was reduced to the child who had been in a cave in is not something I will ever forget. The darkness and suffocating terror he described was immediately brought to mind when I was reading Black Mouth, as an allegory for addiction and suffering, it is pretty damn near perfect.

And as the daughter of a man with vitiligo, born before people really knew what it was, thank you for giving us Clay. It is rare to see the real life experience of those who have this condition so well written, and as a black child,in the 80’s, I cannot begin to imagine the world he had to live in, Trying to live with this condition when you were white was bad enough.

I cannot think of what else to say other than please pick up a copy of Black Mouth, any way that you can, and get ready to be swallowed whole, by some of the most inventive and memorable characters. Mia, Jamie, Dennis and Clay are unforgettable.

About the author…

Ronald Malfi is an award-winning author of many novels and novellas in the horror, mystery, and thriller categories from various publishers, including ‘Little Girls’, summer’s 2015 release from Kensington.

In 2009, his crime drama, ‘‘Shamrock Alley’‘, won a Silver IPPY Award. In 2011, his ghost story/mystery novel, ‘Floating Staircase’, was a finalist for the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for best novel, received a Gold IPPY Award for best horror novel, and the Vincent Preis International Horror Award. His novel ‘Cradle Lake’ garnered him the Benjamin Franklin Independent Book Award (silver) in 2014, while ‘‘December Park‘, his epic coming-of-age thriller, won the Beverly Hills International Book Award for suspense in 2015.

Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi’s dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977, and eventually relocated to the Chesapeake Bay area, where he currently resides with his wife and two children

Links-http://www.ronmalfi.com/

Twitter @RonaldMalfi @TitanBooks