Hamill has crafted something truly remarkable, and if you have to sprint through it so that the gaudy demons can’t grab you, that’s intentional. “Cosmology of Monsters” is like that as well. The nameless city is a place where each of the Turners visits in his or her worst moments and never fully leave it behind. By the time you reach the end, you’re willing to believe anything. It’s, well, just like a haunted attraction. He leads a reader very slowly from general unease and a few cheap scares to a mind-blowing realization about the truth behind all our fears. What makes “Cosmology of Monsters” both fun and awful to read is how expertly Hamill threads the line between normalcy and atrocity. They can be as small as a bullying religion that drives two young lovers away or as large as a nightmarish metropolis populated with demons, but they all still are just individual bricks in the wall. The book is a mesmerizing, meandering, dark tale of growing up and finding monsters all around you. “I realized that there was something inside them that made them just love frightening people.” “I became fascinated with the kind of people who worked there,” Hamill says. Naively, he didn’t anticipate the surprise scare from the on-site staff who couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

Hamill was inspired to include them in his novel, thanks to an invitation to visit Zombie Mansion (now moved to Canada) in the off-season.

Like the Turner family one, the professional enterprises grew out of the backyards of horror enthusiasts, and that’s not even counting the Christian Hell Houses that also dot the state every Halloween. Haunted houses are everywhere in North Texas. Rep kentdwolf (he/him) Arlington, TX linktr. THE DISSONANCE forthcoming from pantheonbooks. Meanwhile, children in the neighborhood begin to disappear. A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS from vintageanchor. But even that is constantly aggravating their mental state to the point of snapping. The family rallies to run their annual haunted house, which goes from their father’s pipe dream to their main source of income. Shaun Hamill will be at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet, at 6:30 p.m.

Shaun hamill a cosmology of monsters