Gabino Iglesias Reviews Daphne by Josh Malerman
Daphne, Josh Malerman (Del Rey 978-0-59315-701-5, $19.49, 272pp, hc) September 2022. Cover by Caroline Cunningham.
When I wrote about Josh Malerman’s Goblin in this same space back in 2021, I was already saying we should be talking about the Malerman Mythos given the cohesiveness and recurring themes and places in the author’s oeuvre. Now that I’m writing about Daphne, Malerman’s latest, I’ll add to that: We should also start calling Malerman the David Bowie of horror fiction, because he’s always himself while also undergoing a perpetual change that makes his work wonderfully chameleonic and always fresh.
Kit Lamb should be having the time of her life. She’s living the last year of high school, has a great group of friends, and she’s just sunk the game-winning shot at an important basketball game, making her the biggest thing at her school for a while. Unfortunately, anxiety is preventing her from having fun. The night before the big game, a friend of Kit’s who’s also on the basketball team told them all a spooky story about the murderous ghost of a girl named Daphne. According to the story, Daphne went to their school and died under mysterious circumstances; some say she was brutally murdered and others say she was struggling to cope with being an outsider and killed herself. Regardless of how she died, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that Daphne is still roaming around, obsessed with revenge. She has killed in the past and might kill again. The only way to keep her away? Don’t think about her. But how do you not think about the thing you’re supposed to not think about? This, for Kit, is even harder, because she’s always suffered from an overactive brain and a heavy dose of anxiety. And then more girls die, all of them in brutal ways and some of them at home, right next to their families. The killer has an uncanny ability to evade the authorities, and the one thing no one wants to say out loud – what no one wants to think about – is obvious: Daphne is back.
On the surface, Daphne is a great horror story about a supernatural slasher. However, it is also one of the sharpest studies of anxiety I’ve read in a very long time. Kit, who once even called the cops on herself, keeps a diary to help her cope with her anxiety, and readers get to read it, which gives the narrative an unexpected depth and a different angle from which to see the story unfold. It also adds a great deal of tension because it gives a first-person POV from which to feel the fear and apprehension that permeate the story.
While mental health, camaraderie, and the mixed feelings that come growing up and inhabiting the interstitial space between being a teenager and adulthood occupy a big part of this novel, it’s also very clearly a horror novel that brings to life (to…undeath?) a truly unique serial killer with a great origin story.
While being the killer, Daphne is as memorable as Kit. She’s a big woman, a big ghost, and readers might even feel sympathy for her once her story comes out… although there are other things about her that make her worse than they might’ve originally thought. This playing with sympathies, not to mention the constant tension, the rogue female detective obsessed with finding the killer, and the love of basketball that drips from its pages, make Daphne a great addition to Malerman’s already impressive catalog.
Malerman is a great storyteller, and here, again, he brings readers into a universe he has created, and it’s a world in which readers of his previous work will recognize a few places. This familiarity is great, but not necessary as this is also a perfect place to start reading Malerman. This is a creepy, smart book, and it might just be one of Malerman’s best.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the March 2023 issue of Locus.
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