Jamie Warren has spent almost twenty years trying to escape his life with alcohol. He’s unable to run any longer when his mother passes away and the police find his disabled brother walking, sun burnt and bloody. He’s forced to return to his hometown, the one place he swore he would never go back to. As children, Jamie and his two best friends spent their time playing near the mining tunnels in the area known as Black Mouth. With really terrible childhoods and abusive guardians, they found themselves desperate to find a way to escape. When a strange man known as The Magician arrives, he promises to teach the children the secrets of life and death. Now as adults, they realize that a major accident they caused may have had more of a ripple effect than expected, and the Magician might not be dead and gone.
Ronald Malfi’s Black Mouth is the type of book you read, set down, and realize you’re still thinking about two weeks later. With horrifying and intricate visuals, picturing the actions of this book can be far too easy for those with strong imaginations. It’s the type of book that would make a killer Netflix series, and you wouldn’t need much. Take one part dying mining town, one part Stand By Me vibes, and a whole lot of dashes of chaos and destruction. Malfi does an incredible job of keeping readers walking the line of whether or not this is really something supernatural, or the madness left behind from alcoholism and abuse. My one caution is to skip this book if you are sensitive to stories involving child abuse, because not one single character in this book has had a happy life.
Black Mouth is now available from Titan Books.
