Hampton Heights by Dan Kois: Review by Gabino Iglesias
Hampton Height, Dan Kois (Harper Perennial 978-0-06335-875-1, $16.99, 208pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Jackie Alvarado
Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is very much like its title in that it shouldn’t work, but it somehow does. Entertaining, touching, and funnier than I expected, this short novel about a group of kids spending a night trying to sell newspaper subscriptions in a haunted neighborhood takes some beloved horror tropes – witches, werewolves, trolls – and makes them feel fresh.
It’s 1987 in Milwaukee, and there are half a dozen middle-school boys walking the streets of Hampton Heights, a weird neighborhood none of them has been to before, as they try to sell newspaper subscriptions. There is a dinner at Burger King and maybe a cash prize for the duo who sells the most subscriptions. But selling newspapers isn’t easy, and there are a lot of weird things happening in Hampton Heights that make things even harder.
To tackle more houses, the kids split into three groups. Sigmone, a Black kid, is paired up with Joel, a white kid who loves rap and Black culture. Their night takes a turn when they knock on a door and find Sigmone’s grandfather, who vanished from his life a few years ago. Also, Sigmone meets a group of young werewolves as he discovers certain things about himself. The second group is Mark, who has been struggling to understand his sexuality, and Ryan, who Mark has a crush on. Before the night is over, Mark and Ryan will meet two witches, fall in love, and mostly forget their previous life as they build a new one in the witches’ house as they hear the story of their lives and how they came to be together, which is an endless, timeless story bound to repeat itself over and over again. The last two kids are Nishu, a somewhat shy second-generation immigrant, and Al, a natural-born hustler who is the poor kid at his rich school and has a knack for coming up with business opportunities. Together, they will face a monster who feeds on people’s memories. While the boys fight to survive the night, Kevin, their manager and the guy who drove them all to Hampton Heights in a van and promised burgers, has his own perilous adventure when he meets a woman at a bar and ends up learning about the dark secret she keeps at home.
Hampton Heights feels more like a linked novelette collection than a novel. The narrative is held together by the kids arriving together at the neighborhood and then coming together again at the end for something that feels like a final battle, but most of the book is about what happens to each of the duos, and each one takes up around one third of the book. Kois has a knack for humor and his characters are well-developed, which makes his collection of tropes feel entertaining and like he truly made them his. Also, this is a horror book, but it’s a story that focuses more on the kids’ experiences and lives instead of the horrors they experience, and because of Kois’s sense of humor, the story never fails to entertain.
For a while, nostalgia horror was all the rage, and Hampton Heights is firmly planted in that subcategory, if we can call it that. However, the way the author writes about childhood, friendship, and growing up makes this novel a standout instead of one more forgettable entry into the nostalgia horror catalog, which is already pretty long. Surprisingly tender but also full of childish scatological humor, Hampton Heights is a love letter to horror and growing from an author who clearly loves the genre.
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 October 2024 issue of Locus.
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