Blog Tour Review - The House on Blood Street by Josh Hanson

 Blog Tour Review - The House on Blood Street by Josh Hanson

Jack and Avery’s new home on Calliope Street is a fixer-upper’s dream. The lurid collage of pornographic clippings on the basement wall seems like a quirky (and campy) feature. But once the house awakens, what seemed harmless becomes as horrifying as the blood seeping from the carpet. The house is alive. It is intelligent. And it demands homage.

The House on Blood Street is a very weird and pretty darned creepy horror story.

It is beautifully written. Throughout, the language, the imagery and the sense of tension and threat are all exquisite. The presentation is stunning too, a glorious, shiny hardback with lovely sprayed edges, everything about it evoking the horror movies it riffs off of. There's a poetry to the language, and it is full of references to poets, myths and songs, that give it a depth and power.

I love the characters too. The relationship between Jack and Avery feels very real, very grounded. The neural diverse aspects of Jack's character are well demonstrated without ever being described in such terms, which works well because I don't think they really needed to be. Likewise, the trans representation with Avery is fairly subtle but very well done. She is a trans woman, and where this impacts on her lift and her story it does, but wherever it doesn't she's just a woman, just Avery. There's a subtlety to the representation that works incredibly well. This couple aren't defined by these characteristics, it's just another part of their make up.

The themes around the links between true crime, obsession and horror are well handled as well. The portrayal of a horror movie as a kind of a ritual, the views of victims just being seen as that, victims, trapped on celluloid or in photographs for the gratification of the viewer, and the blending of horror with classical myths, all of this is incredibly well done.

There is a surrealism to it all too. It is definitely not a straightforward narrative, a deliberate homage, I feel, to the surrealist Italian horror movement. This gives it a hard to grasp quality, that is frustrating at times. It's all incredibly skilfully done and a beautiful read, I just feel like some kind of resolution would make it a lot more comfortable.

But this is horror. Who needs to be left feeling comfortable?

The House on Blood Lane is a beautiful, surreal horror with growing tension and little resolution. I think ultimately, whether or not that works for you depends very much on your own taste. Personally, I'm still a little undecided, but also rather entranced.

The House on Blood Lane by Josh Hanson is out now from Black Crow Books.

I was gifted a free copy in return for an honest review and participation in this Black Crow PR blog tour.

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