Gabino Iglesias Reviews Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison
Black Sheep, Rachel Harrison (Berkley 978-0-59354-585-0, $27.00, 304pp, hc) September 2023. Cover by Katie Anderson.
Horror, perhaps the best dancing partner when it comes to genre because it gets along very well with everyone else, can be a lot of things, and that includes hilarious. Rachel Harrison’s Black Sheep contains all the elements you’d expect from a horror novel – a creepy presence, dread, emotional turmoil, bloody sacrifices, Satan. However, it also contains a lot of humor, and that is what makes it memorable.
Vesper Wright grew up in a strange family. Her mother never showed her much love, her father was mostly absent, and everyone around her was incredibly devout and very involved in the local church. When she left home at 18, Vesper never looked back. For years, she worked crappy jobs and thought about her father and the life she left behind as well as the special treatment she received while living back home. No one contacted her, and she had no plans of ever going back, but then she received a wedding invitation to her beloved cousin Rosie’s nuptials. The invitation is bizarre, especially because her cousin is marrying Vesper’s ex, but also too tempting to ignore. Vesper has no clue who sent the invitation, and after much internal debate, a mix of curiosity and a petty desire to shock everyone and maybe ruin the wedding win out, and she decides to go. They say you can never go back home, and in Vesper’s case, that might be true, but she goes back anyway, and what she discovers will change her life forever.
Black Sheep is creepy. Vesper’s mom is a famous horror movie actress, a gorgeous woman from whom Vesper get her looks, who has decorated her home with props and mementos from her movies. She’s also cold, distant, and very vocal about not wanting Vesper there. The home’s decor makes it extra eerie when Vesper realizes someone might be following her, touching things and moving stuff around in the middle of the night. Also, Vesper’s relationship with her mom haunts her, and even though she’s an adult now and has spent years away from home, she finds herself once again craving her mother’s love. While the combination of horror and familial drama is great and makes this a multilayered novel with some great emotional writing, what pushes it into must-read territory is Harrison’s knack for mixing it all with Vesper’s snarky voice and a lot of humor.
There are a lot of elements to Black Sheep that I can’t discuss here because they would give away too much, but I think it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Vesper’s family and her entire community are Satanists. The big revelation changes the atmosphere of the narrative and manages to make it simultaneously darker and funnier, which has Vesper (an eternal atheist) and everyone around her constantly talking about Lucifer and quoting scripture. I’ve read and seen some great humorous horror but have never encountered a funny narrative so willing to fully embrace, deconstruct, and celebrate the satanic aesthetic while also making fun of it.
Black Sheep masterfully combines horror, familial drama, humor, and a story about the way we learn to navigate the world while trying to find our place in it. Harrison has shown she has a unique voice and distinctive style with her previous novel, but this, her best so far, shows that she’s also one of the leading the voices in contemporary horror.
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 December and January 2023 issue of Locus.
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