Book Review: DON’T FEAR THE REAPER by Stephen Graham Jones

God, this book. I'm sorry, but I have to gush here. I honestly can't remember the last time a novel had me so on the edge of my seat I was shaking. I'm not joking - DON'T FEAR THE REAPER is that intense, and not just during the jaw-dropping ending, either: it's that intense throughout the whole book. There's so much to love here, I don't even know where to begin. REAPER takes everything I loved about MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW and ramps it up to 11. It perfects what, in my opinion, was an already perfect book. The heart, the horror, the characters, the writing itself, all of it it just perfect. It's a bigger book in the sense that the POV has expanded to include several other characters, but it's also an incredibly insular novel, more so than CHAINSAW, I think; I don't know of another book I've read where I felt so...hemmed in. Claustrophobic, even. Through SGJ's masterful prose, you're stuck right there in Proofrock with Jade & Co. in the middle of a blizzard with a serial killer slasher on the loose. And, oh boy, Dark Mill South. What an incredible baddie! The way SGJ writes him will make you want to sleep with your lights on. Yeah. DON'T FEAR THE REAPER proves, once again, that Stephen Graham Jones is a masterful storyteller with a singular voice, style, and vision.