Katie by Michael McDowell

Here’s a contender for favorite read of the year.

Katie‘s a delightfully dark pastiche of penny dreadfuls and Victorian sensation novels, like Wilkie Collins by way of the grislier Hammer horror flicks. It’s set in the north eastern USA during the 1870s  with a good-hearted heroine, Philo Drax, pitted against the evil Slape family, and in particular their hammer-wielding, utterly bonkers, clairvoyant daughter, Katie.

If any of that even seems slightly cool, don’t walk, but run to read this. It’s just brilliant page-turning entertainment, gory, wry, and more literate than it has any right to be.