A Stephen King deep dive and a Toronto author's unhinged Fountain of Youth novel

Shortwave, 512 pages, $29.99

In 2024, American writer Nat Cassidy published the novella “Rest Stop,” one of the most exhilaratingly terrifying works of horror to appear in some time. Taking place in a single setting — a gas station rest stop where the protagonist, Abe, pulls over to use the bathroom — it’s a claustrophobic exercise in extreme tension.

The head of a death metal band who is travelling by car to attend his grandmother’s deathbed, Abe soon finds himself locked in the restroom and besieged by an array of fearsome arachnids, snakes and one very determined masked killer. Shortwave has done horror fans a great service by repackaging the novella along with a dozen other stories that neatly display Cassidy’s range and craft.

An epistolary tale told entirely via emails finds a young woman trapped in a sprawling English castle; a malevolent Elf on the Shelf gets more than he bargained for when he convinces a child who loves Christmas to join team naughty; and a Beatlemaniac discovers a time machine that allows him to travel back to the exact moment John Lennon met Paul McCartney and insert himself into musical history. Many of these dialogue-driven stories began as stage or radio plays; their transformation into short prose works is, for the most part, fluid and engaging.

Stephen King, who provides the introduction to the volume, says of these stories simply, “They rule.” If you don’t already know Cassidy’s work, this is a fine place to start.

Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King

Caroline Bicks

Hogarth, 304 pages, $39.99

Speaking of King, some of his earliest — and best — books are the subject of Caroline Bicks’ combination memoir/analysis of her experience with the master’s work.

The inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at King’s alma mater, the University of Maine, Bicks was granted access to the author’s archives, which include early drafts of works such as “Carrie,” “Night Shift” and “’Salem’s Lot,” all of which are given close, devoted readings here. A Shakespeare scholar by background, Bicks brings a high level of erudition to her evaluations, but what is most interesting is her examination of what King’s edits — sometimes structural, sometimes confined to words and phrases — says about his creative process and evolving sensibility. It is fascinating, on a critical level, to learn of the decision to change one of the most iconic lines in “Pet Sematary” — “Sometimes dead is better” — from its original iteration, which had “death” instead of “dead.” Bicks unpacks the significance of such minor emendations in passages that may, to be fair, appeal more to hard-core fans or professional editors than average readers.

Though Bicks can come across a bit hagiographic at times, her annotations of some early departures from the published works are revelatory: Carrie White was at one point meant to devolve into a bulbous-headed monster, while the original ending to “The Shining” seems absolutely nihilistic.

The Dorians

Nick Cutter

Gallery, 400 pages, $41

King is a huge influence on Canadian horrormeister Nick Cutter, the genre pseudonym of Toronto’s Craig Davidson. That influence is all over Cutter’s latest book, as are elements from “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” “Frankenstein,” “Jurassic Park” and, most notably, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

The novel tells the story of elderly terminal patients who pass up the opportunity to avail themselves of MAID so they can travel to a remote location where a young medical prodigy has found a way to reverse the aging process. Her method involves implanting a particular type of jellyfish into her subjects. One man’s Parkinson’s disappears, another’s heart trouble resolves itself, and all the subjects find their sexual prowess and erotic interest restored.

They start calling themselves the Dorians in reference to Oscar Wilde’s novel, but they should probably have considered how that particular novel works out: what begins as a fantasy of a real-life Fountain of Youth devolves into an orgy of body horror and madness. Cutter’s novel is a slow burn that starts off placidly but becomes more unhinged the longer it goes on, until it reaches a climax that goes totally off the rails. Don’t expect the science underpinning the book to hold up, but fans of Cutter’s earlier work should enjoy this piquant, and in places unexpectedly poignant, look at aging and corroded wish fulfilment.

Molka

Monika Kim

Erewhon, 304 pages, $37.99

Korean American Monika Kim’s second novel is a creepy piece of psychological horror set in Seoul.

Dahye, a woman mourning the death of her sister Eunhye, finds herself in an unexpected romantic relationship with Hyukjoon Jang, the son of a wealthy media magnate. Meanwhile, at her office job, she has unknowingly become the obsessive focus of Junyoung, an IT worker who has installed spy cameras in the stalls of the ladies’ washroom to satisfy his voyeurism. When Hyukjoon disappears after being caught in a sex scandal involving Dahye and another hidden camera, it appears that the woman’s world is coming apart. But, as readers of Kim’s debut novel, “The Eyes Are the Best Part,” will know, feminist revenge is swift and satisfyingly bloody.

The novel’s title is a portmanteau for molrae-kamera, literally “sneaky camera,” the term used for the kind of surreptitious digital voyeurism that proliferates in Korea. A definition and an author’s note explain how pervasive this odious activity is and how police in the country tend to let it go unpunished. The subject is clearly important to Kim, but that does lead her to indulge in some overly didactic passages in the book, and her author’s note is somewhat redundant given how directly and explicitly she dramatizes her fictional situation.

Readers waiting for the gory payoff will have to wade through some slow and overly preachy stretches on the way there. But Dahye’s revenge, spurred in part by her dead sister’s ghost, is satisfyingly gruesome and well-earned.