These four new horror books involve undead weddings, bizarre sex rituals and ants under the skin

Penguin Canada, 384 pages, $27.95

Memoirist and short story writer Lindsay Wong turns to the Chinese tradition of corpse marriage in her first novel for adults, the story of a young MFA dropout who signs herself up to be buried alive with a dying suitor to pay off her family’s debts to a Triad. The practice, which began in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), has continued sporadically in some form right through the current century, Wong informs readers in an author’s note at the end of her sprawling, unsettling and genre-bending book.

Having signed up as a corpse bride with the ironically named Joyful Coffin & Co., protagonist Locinda Lo undergoes a rigorous training process that includes physical and emotional torture along with nights spent sleeping in a “practice coffin” to prepare for eternal rest with her as-yet-to-be determined dead spouse. While all of this is going on, flashbacks detail Locinda’s relationship with her undead younger sister, Samantha, and her grandmother, Baozhai, a “villain hitter” adept at cursing people for money.

Wong includes material that would fit comfortably in any traditional horror story, including depictions of body horror and the hideous results of Baozhai’s curses. But “Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies” also operates as a critique of the Chinese experience in the 20th century and a postmodern take on Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism in the west. The novel’s overlength only slightly mars the total effect.

Itch!

Gemma Amor

Hachette Mobius, 352 pages, $32

There’s a word for it: formication. The sensation that ants or other insects are crawling over — or, worse, under — your skin. It’s a sensation Josie, the protagonist in Bristol, U.K., author Gemma Amor’s latest novel, is very familiar with, thanks to an encounter with a horde of ravenous red ants after she literally stumbles across a decomposing body in the woods. Whom the corpse is and how it came to be there are central questions that begin to obsess Josie, who starts listening to the ants she imagines (or perhaps not) moving beneath her flesh and directing her forward in her search.

Meanwhile, she must deal with her grief over her mother’s death, her difficult relationship with her widowed father and the interest of an inquisitive police detective who suspects Josie might know more than she is saying about the dead woman in the woods. As Josie tries to find answers, the town of Ellwood prepares for the annual Devil’s March, an autumn ceremony that culminates in the ritual sacrifice of a stuffed effigy at the so-called Devil’s Pulpit.

Amor uses tropes from folk horror that recall Robin Hardy’s classic 1973 film “The Wicker Man” — even referencing the name of Christopher Lee’s character at one point late in the book — and combines these with elements of a police procedural and a serial killer thriller. The result is a shivery read made even more uncomfortable by the phantom formication the reader ends up succumbing to as the ants go marching across the pages.

Persona

Aoife Josie Clements

LittlePuss Press, 280 pages, $24.95

Calgary writer and musician Aoife Josie Clements takes aim at Gen Z anxiety and the gig economy in this story of a trans woman who stumbles on a pornographic feed featuring herself in a scene she did not make. Her online double, meanwhile, is part of a group of bohemian artists that ends up performing an ad hoc exorcism of her cramped apartment. The women, Annie and Amy, both have connections to a shady marketing company that keeps its executive offices literally buried in the underworld beneath the Earth’s surface.

Doppelgänger horror stories have been around at least since Poe, and Clements rejuvenates the trope for the 21st century, traversing some of the same territory as Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s 2018 film “Cam.” But Clements is equally concerned with the horrors of grunt work online and the commingled dangers and freedoms inherent in modern sex work. The novel’s title is an explicit allusion to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film of the same name, which, not incidentally, also involves two women whose identities begin to morph into one.

“Persona” is a bleak, surpassingly strange novel that reveals its secrets gradually. The connective tissue is the faceless marketing company, but its importance — not to mention what the novel is really about — isn’t made clear until the final pages. This may leave readers feeling that the story is meandering in its middle, but those readers should bear with it because the payoff is as creepy as it is cathartic.

We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

Ronald Malfi

Titan, 362 pages, $24.99

“I don’t consider myself a very good short story writer,” claims author Ronald Malfi, but the 20 selections in this, his first collection, put the lie to that assertion. A bumper crop of tales published in journals and anthologies between 2002 and 2015, the stories in “We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone” can stand with the best of the new century’s horror and demonstrate why the form is so compatible with the genre.

Malfi delights in high-concept scenarios. A hit man retreats to a seedy hotel after a job only to find the walls of his room are closing in on him. An obsessed office drone trails his co-worker to a bizarre sex club where the participants indulge in erotic non-human ritual behaviour. The proprietor of a rare book shop receives a strange delivery — a book with no title and blank pages that is highly prized by a mysterious and threatening broker. And in the bravura opener, a mother suffering postpartum depression makes a terrible miscalculation.

This collection, originally published in 2017 by the U.S. micropress JournalStone, has been unavailable for some time; Titan Books has done a valuable service by re-releasing it for a new and doubtless highly appreciative audience.