Keatings and Salutations

For a few years now, Mickey Keating has been my favorite up-and-coming indie horror director. While his newest project likely takes him away from the genre that staked his claim in the horror world, he's left behind a solid pallet of scary, low-budget indie gems in his young career. While he clearly wears his influences on his sleeve, he manages to create his own solid style from them. He likes to establish a sense of mood with his settings, with his visual style, and with music that encapsulates the period he's bringing to life.

I haven't been able to see his actual debut, Ritual, so his first feature feels more like 2015's Pod. The film has aa simpl enough plot - siblings Ed and Lyla go to their family lake house in Maine to retrieve their other brother, Martin, a dishonorably discharged vet whose paranoid schizophrenia drives him to erratic and suicidal behaviors. Ed is a mental health professional, and Lyla is a hardwired bohemian who basically had to be dragged along to  by the logical, level-headed Ed. Pod takes on the influences of The Twilight Zone and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and tackles the subjects of alien abduction, government cover-ups, and an unhinged family dynamic that makes for a solid debut. Pod is probably not the first Keating outing you'd want to see, but more one you view after seeing one or two of his later works. As a fan, I could appreciate Pod much more in that particular order.

Next up was 2016's Darling, which ranks among my favorite all-time horror films. It, along with others like The Shining, helped to establish psychological horror as my most preferred sub-genre. Darling blew me away when I first saw it, forcing me to remember why I find black and white movies so creepy. With these older movies, especially those that tend toward spookier sensibilities, I find myself searching into every corner and every shadow of every frame, looking for the subtle scares that may or may not lurk there underneath the veneer. Darling certainly has plenty of these types of scenes as we scan the plentiful still shots of the sprawling brownstone interior of "the oldest house in the city" of New York.

Darling is a mousy young woman taking on the job of caretaker to the massive mansion, one in which the last caretaker plummeted to her death from the balcony. The Madame, played by Sean Young, tells Darling that the house is filled with old ghost stories. This sets the tone for Darling as she explores the old home, finding a solitary room at the end of a long, spooky hallway locked. The locked door, and the upside down crossed fixed onto a dainty necklace she finds in a random drawer are the precursors for Darling's slow descent into madness - leaving us to wonder if  it is her mysterious past, or the old evils of the house manifesting themselves into her psyche. At the end, Darling cryptically tells the Madame by telephone, "I think I'll become one of your ghost stories now."

Keating uses a '60s flare for this horror gem, conjuring the sensibilities of both Hitchcock and Polanski. He was certainly influenced by the two masterful filmmakers with the monochrome direction and the Rosemary's Baby feel. Playing the titular role of Darling is Ashley Lauren Carter, the actress who played Lyla in Pod. Keating tends to use some of the same actors throughout the course of his films, ala Tarantino's use of Samuel L. Jackson and Zoe Bell. Carter is Keatings' muse of sorts in Pod and Darling, but shifts to a different actress in his next movie.

2016 also brought the film Carnage Park, yet another homage, but this time to the desolation and depravity of The Hills Have Eyes, and the spaghetti western tropes of the sheriff/outlaw pursuit. Carnage Park features dusty lawmen, seedy criminals, and something between Jason Voorhees and a Christian extremist/demented survivalist. What the movie lacks in overall scares, it makes up for with gore and dread. Keating uses a new leading lady in the effort, The Last Exoricism's Ashley Bell. Her performance in the demonic possession effort inspired Keating to put her into the hands of a sleazy criminal. Once there, both are on a collision course with a sharp-shooting madman in the middle of a hellish nowhere.

On a fateful day in 1978 in which Vivian (Bell) tangles with bank loan officers, she's caught in robbery perpetrated by the seedy Scorpion Joe, played by James Landry Hebert, who plays a similar role in a later Keating movie. The heist takes them into the middle of nowhere, a desert landscape where dust and blood rule the day.

The gory story soon takes a turn for a mine shaft filled with skulls and bones, stockpiled by the madman killer, Wyatt Moss. Wyatt is a very real bad guy, maybe a little too real. He's definitely the antagonist of the movie, more so even than Scorpion Joe, but he's not all that scary (except for when he's donning his mine shaft gas mask). I think Keating should have allowed the mystery of the killer to endure a little more instead of showing him to us early on. Otherwise, Carnage Park is a solid effort, and is probably Keating's most well-known film.

In 2017, Keating gave us his latest movie, Psychopaths. Ashley Bell returned as the escaped mental asylum patient, Alice, disillusioned by an alternate reality in which she graces audiences with her swanky love songs. Alice is probably meant to be the lead psycho on the proclaimed "Night of Chaos," but the most interesting character to me is The Mask, a killer driven by revenge in a plethora of masks that cover his horribly-scarred face.

The execution of serial killer Henry Earl Starkweather, played by Keating movie regular, Larry Fessenden, sets off a bloody night in which his grisly influence transports into his "vessels," four other psychopathic killers - Alice, The Mask, The Strangler, and Blondie. The Strangler, who soon crosses paths with Blondie for a night he'll never forget, is played by James Landry Hebert, who nearly resumes his Scorpion Joe role from Carnage Park. His first strangling episode comes to the sounds of the '70s-infused choruses of Jaye Jayle's "The Beast Keeps Cool." The entire movie is filled with the sounds of the seventies, giving it a certain period feel, much like Keating gave with Darling.

Though Bell and Hebert return from Carnage Park, they never meet in Psychopaths. What makes the killers tick is never really revealed to the audience, but more alluded to, Keating keeping to the mysterious aspects that made Darling brim with such horror brilliance. Psychopaths flips around its many agendas throughout the film, switching narrative to each of the killers, all with a singular mission to respectively meet out. Alice is a disillusioned star in a psychotic mind, Blondie is an ultra-feminist in the guise of a sociopath, The Strangler is a sleazy ladykiller, and The Mask is the Terminator and Michael Myers in one, murdering anyone who stands in his path toward vengeance.

Keating utilizes psychedelic, kaleidoscope colors, Tod Browning villain-like lighting effects, and a noirish narrative to relay his interweaving stories of absolute chaos. I had to wait a bit, but nearly squealed with glee when I found Psychopaths streaming on Amazon Video. I found Darling, Carnage Park, and Pod all streaming on Netflix, and have fanboyed my way through several viewings of each in my growing adoration for Keating.

While the writer/director has spanned the sub-genres of horror in his canon thus far (sci-fi with Pod, psychological with Darling, crime and chase with Carnage Park, and slasher with Psychopaths), he will next release Crooks, his first departure from the horror genre altogether. While Quentin Tarantino expands his movies by having them take place within the same universe, Keating creates this sense of continuity with his actors. Crooks will feature Mark Kassen, whose suburban businessman was murdered by Alice in Psychopaths. It also features Juno Temple and Lena Headey, proving that Keating is stepping outside his comfort zone as far as his female muses go. The official synopsis of the movie reads as such:

[Crooks] is set in sin city in 1968, where a pair of hustlers, Johnny, played by Kassen and Faye, played by Temple, rob the decaying Moonlight Casino. Faye double crosses Johnny and takes off with the money and is soon pursued by the oldest and deadliest assassin in town. Worse still, Faye meets Blanche, played by Headey, a friendly but crazy waitress, at a truck stop.

The film won't enter production until the summer, which means a bit of a wait for the project. With Crooks taking place in the '60s, Keating again sets up his universe in a past decade, claiming that the movie will run rampant with vintage music. With a Las Vegas heist movie in his capable hands, we might expect tunes from Keating regulars Jaye Jayle, Shayfer James, or actual tunes that shaped the decade. There's no word on whether or not Crooks will feature Larry Fessenden, who has appeared in every Keating movie, who was a mentor to the director, and whose Glass Eye Pix produced most of the Keating films.

As I'm quickly finding out that horror is my favorite movie genre, but that I'm highly-selective in them, another writer-director tends to often awe me with his unique style. Oz Perkins, the son of legendary Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, has delivered two stellar films in minimalist ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2015) and slow-burning demonic outing The Blackcoat's Daughter (2016). He doesn't have as many films under his belt as Keating, but while Mickey wows with his visual style and vintage flare, Perkins takes a more minimal route, terrifying his audience with dismal landscapes, eerie scores, and an overwhelming sense of dread.

                                                                                                                        Mickey Keating has passed the point of "director to watch," and surged into the category of "director to next be your favorite." His gets more and more ambitious with every movie, which is why he's pulled in bigger actors like Juno Temple and Lena Headey in his latest film. It will likely be less horror than any of the others in his canon, but being that he successfully skates around all the toughest sub-genres of horror, there's no reason why he can't step into a new domain altogether. While Crooks promises to give an unconventional take on the Las Vegas heist trope, we can look forward to a Keating-esque experience where the violence will flow and the style will be brimming with vintage flavor. 

The House Next Door

There is a certain morbid fascination we have with haunted houses. People love to be scared, myself among them, as there is something innate in each of us that's at least a little curious about the supernatural. Haunted houses are a hotbed for such paranormal activity, as some may claim. Based on those claims, stories have been told and movies have been made on the subject. Crinkly, old houses that are broken down and dilapidated are often written off as haunted, even if that is not truly the case. Why? Because people, even the ones scared by their own shadows, are at least a little captivated by the proposition of the dreaded haunted house.

Where the idea of the haunted house, or the haunted mansion originated, I can't be sure. The idea seemed to pop around the 19th-century and the creation of the Victorian mansion. Gothic architecture also played a large part in the equation. It in itself added was a catalyst for giving Victorian mansions their more spooky tendencies. Maybe it was the shoulders of the rafters, the head of the peak, shattered windows glaring out at the world with their palely-lit eyes. Maybe it was creaking stairs, the hollow halls, the passing light at the end of it that makes us question whether or not we'd just seen an apparition.

Maybe it was the dusty books on the shelves, the cold spots, the stoic, gloomy ancestors peering down from the walls, the bumps and groans in the night that make us question if it's just the house settling, or something more sinister emanating in through the plentiful cracks. The idea of the haunted Gothic mansion might have come from the penny dreadful novels circulating around Victorian London. Maybe it was even before that, with the tales of creaky, nefarious castles stemming from Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula.

The idea more than likely hit American soil with the morbid, bleak tales of Edgar Allan Poe, especially with his "The Fall of the House of Usher." Two long-lost friends reunite in a dilapidated, old mansion, one to try and see to the other's melancholic ailment. It seems to be over the one with the ailment, Roderick Usher, and his sister, who has just passed away. Her phantasm returns to take Roderick with her as the mansion crumbles to the foundation and the name Usher dies with them.

Alfred Hitchcock might make a good case for a filmmaking version of Poe, and brought his own vision of the eerie Victorian home in Psycho. Norman Bates runs a motel in the middle of nowhere on behalf of his mother, to whom he has a very macabre connection to. Norman lives in the spooky Victorian on the hill next to the motel, and while we can hear his mother talking to him, it's actually Norman himself, speaking for her as her corpse rots in an isolated room.

In 2012, we got a horrifying look into the English manor in the middle of a marsh in The Woman in Black. I saw this movie in the theater and it was scary, the image of the woman in black, the ghost of a jilted mother, sending a chill or two down my spine. Her Victorian home was surrounded by overgrown foliage, rusty, iron bars, and a gloom in the air that cast a plague over the entire town.

Crimson Peak showed us another haunted, Gothic house in England, complete with ghosts and just enough of a sense of desolation to make the heroine, and the audience, perpetually unsettled. The house is certainly a mansion, and is certainly isolated, which gives it all the fervor it needs to become its own uncredited character. It's lonely spires reach to the misty sky, the windows casting their hollow stares down upon those who dare tread the land of Allerdale Hall.

Netflix recently brought the Victorian and its ghostly sprawling manors in 2017 with The Lodgers. The house is a crinkling character, graying and dilapidated, surrounded by the past notions of a better time. The house is guarded by a complicated familial love and evil in one, with a young adult brother and sister looking to live threw the night in such an eerie locale.

Netflix also recently brought us The Haunting of Hill House, which is part family drama, part terrifying ghost story. It's Victorian mansion is definitely an antagonist, spawning spirits a plenty, and a curse that forces ropes around the necks of those drawn to it. The house is a breeding ground for the macabre, the culprit possibly black mold, or such a long history of death running rampant through its long, creaking hallways.

There is something about the Gothic Victorian Manor that makes our imaginations run wild. It appears to us as imposing, all-knowing, menacing, and teeming with spirits. The haunted question crosses our mind the second we step into them, whether we want it to or not. Just what happened there, we ask. A murder? A patricide? Suicide? Are the ghosts benign, or are they truly malignant, as foreboding as the gloomy exterior of the house itself?

Going to Extremes

The 2018 hidden gem, Extremity, provides excellent social commentary on how desensitized we can often be when it comes to all things horror and the macabre. It's also a cautionary tale that backs up the stoic philosophical theory, "everything in moderation." It doesn't end there either, when it shows how there's only so far you can push someone before they hit their breaking point and it comes bubbling up to the surface.
Allison Belle seems as normal as the next girl when we see her driving along a lonely road through the snowy landscapes of Canada. A little fixated on horror culture, but normal. She's been doing her homework on extreme haunts, the kind where subjects submit themselves to physical and psychological torture all for the sake of pushing themselves to their own limits. Allison needs this apparently, and we find that she's become desensitized to blood and gore from watching the darkest and most disturbing horror movies she can, a circumstance that thoroughly creeps out her girlfriend. Early on, Allison is in contact with Perdition, the extreme haunt experience that may finally be able to break her of her traumatizing past. She and Zachary, another participant, are almost immediately abducted, moved, and then subjected to their own disturbing intros into the isolated facility.

Allison and Zachary are moved through the building, the walls and floors covered in black sludge, the windows ushering in neon lights to fill the gloomy interior of the dank building space around them. The entire time Allison is being inducted through the house of horrors, we're introduced to snapshots on her disturbing past, the alluded-to death of the mother, and the physical and sexual abuse she's endured at the hands of her father. Why would someone with such a traumatizing childhood want to subject herself to such tortures of Perdition, as faux as it may be? A Japanese journalist and her sleazy cameraman are on hand for the action, reporting a story about the extreme haunt, and sneaking in clandestine shots of the haunt workers bickering and planning their dark work. Once the victims are released from their restraints, one is subjected to physical torture while the other is forced to watch, and to participate in a morbid sexual fantasy gone wrong. To try and escape, they run loose down the putrid hallways, where haunt workers antagonize them from behind fences, yelling and banging their gongs of psychological abuse.

Allison is subjected to a confined coffin space, triggering her flashbacks to her childhood brutalization by her father. She's also treated to a couple of different types of water torture, the second after defiantly headbutting and breaking the nose of a haunt worker. It's here she's approached and mentally manipulated by ringleader Bob, who moonlights as the masked Red Skull. He's set up the whole experience for Allison, and come to find out, he's done his research on her in preparation for her visit, making the entire experience a little more nefarious than it needed to be. The second water torture is more in line with a watery think tank, with more time for Allison to revisit her past and fuel her chances of snapping completely.

Allison and Zachary are soon taken out into the Canadian wilderness by the duo of the caustic Nell and her transgender sibling, Morgan. Nell yells in Allison's face before releasing them into the snow, offering freedom if they can evade recapture. Their scampering is brutal and cold and riddled with a picturesque brigade of trees that only prove to be their undoing. They are soon brought back to the original point of their escape and held at gunpoint. When Allison taunts Nell, the callous blonde shoves the gun into Allison's hand, commanding her to shoot Zachary. Memories come flooding back as she's prodded, a demonic, female version of Death guides her hand, and Allison sees Zachary as her father before pulling the trigger and throwing Nell and Morgan into a panic.

We soon come to find out that the vision of Death, likened to a grimy, tattooed version of Diana from the horror movie Lights Out, is a leitmotif throughout the movie, one that guides Allison as she slowly descends into the chaos exacerbated by Perdition. This is the best aspect of the movie in my opinion. Death may or may not be a manifestation of Allison's sister, who committed suicide after facing the same abuse as Allison. Allison referred to her mother early on, and we soon see that it's actually her sister who helped raiserher, whom she called her mother. She is cryptically labeled "Death/Allison's Sister" in the end credits. Death is played by model/actress Cam Damage, who slightly resembles the turn-of-the-century Italian muse, the Marchesa Luisa Casati.


Things really spiral out of control when Allison, Nell, and Morgan make it back to the facility to tell Bob what's happened. Come to find out, Zachary isn't really dead, a fact that only subjects Allison to even more psychological terror. As she sees that Zachary is perfectly fine back at the facility, he won't be for long. Allison snaps and lays him to waste with a spiked bat, channeling all the deepest and darkest horror movies she's ever adored. She pummels his head into a pile of slush before finding Bob cowering away in a closet. What she does to him, after stabbing him multiple times with a knife of course, I'll leave to the imagination. Before long, the scariest thing about Perdition is the version of Allison Belle they indirectly groomed to become a callous killer.

The movie is filmed near Winnipeg, Canada, somewhere rural and icy and brutal near the border with Minnesota and Michigan. With little subtlety, it takes on the mantra of extreme haunts, in that once the waiver is signed, you are wholly theirs for the physical and psychological mayhem. Fans of The Houses October Built, The Descent, and the French horror flick High Tension will appreciate the mayhem Extremity dishes out. As I stated, the coolest aspect for me was incarnation of Death that resides in the demented mind of Allison. Death is near and dear to her, in more ways than one, and the only thing creepier than the leitmotif is Allison herself once she goes full-on carnage. Extremity comes to us from the mind of The Last Shift director, Anthony DiBlasi, which only shows that his star is pointing up. The movie is a nice change of pace. It shows that the horrors of the extreme haunt is nothing compared to the horror locked away inside Allison. Once stirred up and reawakened by the Perdition experience, Allison unleashes all her mental restraints, making every single unfriendly face, including that of her sadistic father, pay to

Psychopathic Sycophants

A sycophant is basically a self-serving follower, and while the murderous killers in 2017s Psychopaths aren't exactly followers of the fictional serial killer Henry Earl Starkweather, they certainly carry on his grisly work the night of his execution. The movie comes from up-and-coming writer/director Mickey Keating, whose sense of style stands out among many of his contemporaries in the indie horror genre.

Psychopaths tells the story of Alice, Blondie, The Strangler, and The Mask, four killers in their own right, not as much inspired by Starkweather, but "vessels" bent on continuing his bloody work in their own nuanced ways. They all see to their own agendas through the lens of the freshly-executed Starkweather, who promised a night of chaos that would commence with the full moon. The story is told gritty and neo-noirish through the voice of an unnamed narrator. The Mask, pictured at the top, and Alice, pictured directly above, are the most interesting of the psychopaths, though Blondie and The Strangler add their own colorful flavor to the massacre.

The stories of the killers intertwine with one another. The Mask is on a deadly, cryptic mission of revenge, Alice is an escaped asylum patient who sees the world through rose-colored, blood-splattered glasses, Blondie seeks her vengeance on male predators, and The Strangler sees to the strangulation deaths of women across the city of LA. Keating's movie is an homage to the serial killer-filled 1960s, with vintage tunes and psychedelic colors swarthing through the screen.

Blondie and The Strangler share a bit of airtime together, Alice channels images of the glamorous macabre with show tunes and stab wounds, and The Mask takes his singular vision through a storehouse full of masks to a gritty, neon, Nicolas Winding-Refn-flavored nightclub before engaging in a showdown with the police. The movie comes complete with a grindhouse feel, and it may even borrow a bit from Oliver Stone's mind-scrambling Natural Born Killers.

While Keating is making a name for himself in the indie horror scene, Psychopaths comes off less scary than his other offerings, sticking to a bloody, B-horror-like pattern, offering a glimpse into the lives of four very different types of maniac. Keating paints his scenes in neon lighting, red bulbs, and kaleidoscopic mayhem, forcing every character to cross paths with at least one other before the blood-drenched conclusion is reached. Psychopaths isn't Keatings' best flick, though it does show his tendencies to avoid repetition. In his canon of movies, each are standalone gems in their own right with their own sub-genre (aliens, psychological, caper/heist, slasher).

Alice takes her time with her kills, perfecting her makeup and having duplicitous conversations with herself in the mirror. The Mask channels his inner Michael Myers to return from a would-be fatal gunshot wound to the neck, only to continue his deadly ways. He also reminds me a bit of Frankenstein's monster, a gauze-heavy, burnt mess underneath his plethora of masks. A crooked, sleazy, scruffy cop crosses paths with The Mask as well, resulting in a vendetta that seems to come full circle.

There's no main idea, no bigger picture behind the insanity of Psychopaths. Keatings seems to have just cooked up a violent, sordid, vintage tale of chaos, exploring the minds of four very different killers, all on very different paths. All, except for The Strangler, end their night on their own terms, which does well to level out the insanity of the overall experience. This is a love it or hate it sort of offering from Keating, who seems to have set out with a take it or leave it mentality. Alice (Ashley Bell) has the most depth as a character and serves as Keating's leading lady. Bell previously starred in his western nightmare, Carnage Park. While Darling is undoubtedly my favorite Keating outing, Psychopaths serves as a character study for psychos, chock full of hallucinations and whirlwind murder highs and the decadent neurosis of the unhinged mind.

Apart(ment) From Within

Stephen King is not the only author who writes horror novels. Jason Blum, the mastermind behind Blumhouse Productions, who's brought us a good portion of horror movies we've seen in recent years, is now dipping his beak into the literary world, where he brings us The Apartment by S.L. Grey. S.L. Grey is a pseudonym, a collaborative effort between novelist and screenwriter Sarah Lotz, and fiction writer and editor Louis Greenberg. The Apartment is a psychological horror based on the psychological torture of its protagonists. As for the apartment itself, most of the morbid happenings spiral quickly out of control when it, a subsidiary character in itself, officially comes into play.

Mark and Steph are a married couple living in Cape Town, South Africa, where they survive a violent home invasion. The event has damaged them, not physically but psychologically, marring their sleep patterns and causing Steph to at times resent her husband, who is 23 years her senior. They have a toddler together, Hayden, who slept through the event, and is none the wiser that her parents are hanging on by a fragile thread. Mark tries to stay awake all night to avoid another break-in, but this only creates a domestic ripple effect that makes Steph resent him even more. This is the second bad thing that's happened to him, as he's already had another family, losing a daughter, Zoe, to a tragic accident.

The story is told through the duel narrative of Mark and Steph, a form of narration that I find appealing being that I prefer to do it myself. We get different perspectives on the same event, something I'm doing in Romanticide, the horror novel I'm currently writing. Mark's peer, the impressive, liberal, fast-talking Carla, who intimidates Steph for several reasons, suggests that the couple get out of town to escape their troubles. She recommends a house swap with a French couple, which would of course send Mark and Steph to a Parisian apartment. While this sounds like just the thing Mark and Steph need to repair the damage done to their marriage, this is where the meat of the story gets shoved through a grinder.

The apartment is hardly what the pictures suggest, and while Steph went out of her way to make the welcome for mysterious French couple, the Petits, as warm as possible, the Parisian reception couldn't be any colder. Steph has brought her resentment of Mark's impotence in the home invasion and his distancing himself from Hayden with her, and it doesn't get any better as he is still reeling with the loss of his first daughter, Zoe. The ghostly memory of the brimming, blonde Zoe seems to follow him everywhere he goes, even to his new European locale, where those memories only manifest themselves.

After finding buckets full of human hair in one of the apartment closets and crossing paths with a cryptic neighbor, Mark stumbles across a life-size, moving, talking, teenage version of Zoe at a waxworks museum. The phantasm of his imagination (or is it?) speaks to Mark in tormented, accusatory bursts of French after he is treated to a horrific French history montage of waxwork plague babies and apocalyptic skeletons. Zoe died at age seven, and her waxwork ghost is aged seven more years to make her a teen of 14, revealing to Mark a French-speaking version based on how she might have looked had she lived. It's an alarming, sinister, provocative specter, one that further provides scars that Mark continues to hide away from Steph.

The cryptic neighbor, Mirielle, is a French national who's squatting in the otherwise abandoned apartment. She's an odd ball painter who has quite a negative reaction when Mark and Steph eventually invite her over for dinner. She rattles off mysterious ravings about keeping the curse with her before plummeting out their window to her death. Mirielle attempted the best she could to save the couple, but all to no avail. Mark and Steph are running low on money with their bank failing to activate their credit cards, and after the death of Mirielle, neither are too crazy about returning to the apartment.

The trauma and torment that started in Cape Town with the break-in only manifests itself once Mark and Steph reach the French apartment, and much to Mark's horror, it's waiting for him when they finally return home. Pieces of furniture and books have been moved from the places they were left, Steph is sure of it, and Mark eventually comes to agree when he finds one of Zoe's dolls, thought to be locked away with the rest of her things, on Hayden's bedside table.

Mark and Steph battle through a myriad of setbacks that keep their rollercoaster relationship constantly on the fritz. Steph still resents Carla, and inwardly cringes every time her name is brought up. Carla does go out of her way to help the couple while their trying to salvage their relationship in Paris, but Steph wonders if there was ever anything to she and Mark's subtle flirtations. His Zoe hauntings turn up the gas at this point, and it's finally revealed to the reader how the girl lost her life. We soon see Mark's downward spiral come into full fruition afterward, conjuring images of a South African Jack Torrance. Steph is a good, young mother to Hayden, and Mark can suppress it at times but never fully overcome the fate of his first family enough to be a good father.

While sad and eerie and overall enjoyable, The Apartment isn't the most aptly-named book I've read. While I can certainly empathize with the trauma, more of it takes place in Cape Town than in Paris. Sure, Mark takes his memories and his ghosts with him to France and some pretty awful things happen there, but Zoe and her haunts are waiting for him when he gets back. The apartment itself only seemed to exacerbate the curse of poor fathering, so in a sense, it is a catalyst. There's only so much one man can take. The book is more dreadful than scary, and the dread is almost a constant. Some portions are hard to read, with all the awful things the couple deals with in their tenure together.

The Apartment is a nice piece of psychological horror, written by the team of S.L. Grey. They are essentially our Mark and Steph, writing the flip-flop narrative that slowly unfolds a burgeoning sense of overwhelming dread. I'm not sure I was ever really supposed to like Mark, but when the couple was happy, I breathed a sigh of relief as a reader. Why I did as much in the midst of a horror novel, I'm not sure. Steph gives Mark the benefit of the doubt probably more than she should, so naturally, I didn't want to see anything worse happen to her. His erratic, crazed behavior drives her into the arms of a neighbor, and Mark himself serves up his own bout of infidelity, one that Steph fears from the onset of the book. Mark turns very self-centered in his mental collapse, and is perpetually calm on the surface while paddling like mad underneath.

Mark's backstory is heartbreaking, and while I felt the grief for him, I was also frustrated with his inactivity and complete stagnancy when the invaders took Steph into another room during the break-in. Steph is likable and is a pretty decent person, Carla is a true poet with an incorruptible loyalty to Mark, and Mirielle has been squatting in the abandoned apartment building for so long that she loses her mind completely. The Apartment is a nice bout of psychological horror that stays with you long after you put the book down for the night. I'm interesting to see what the team of S.L. Grey has in store next.