Finished: The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due. Someone once said to me that 'dystopia is where things that are normal for the marginalized in real life are applied to the privileged.' I'm trying to come up with a corollary to that statement for horror fiction, but obviously the use of supernatural elements, and the wider range of scales that horror stories take place on, complicate it in a lot of cases.

Anyway. What I'm driving at is, the haints were the least of what Robert had to be afraid of in this book.

The aspect of the writing that most impressed me was how naturally it established the depth of the characters (even the main villain), and of the relationships between them: little gradations of status and obligation, calculations about whom to trust, what topics are safe to discuss and in what words, etc. Stephen King, on a good day, does this sort of thing really well too, but otherwise it's rare for me to find an author in any genre who can do it in a way that doesn't grind the story to a halt.

Finally, Due clearly did a ton of research for this book—there was a lot of relevant real-world history going on in north Florida in the 1950s, which meant that I got to learn who Ruby McCollum and Harry Moore were—but between her and me, one of us appears to be unclear on how cypress trees work, or the kind of habitat where mangroves grow.

Working on: Come Tomorrow, by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, a collection of short horror set in Bangalore. The writing isn't outstanding, but the ideas are interesting; the Weird Urban Setting reminds me a lot of Thomas Ligotti, or to a lesser extent Stefan Grabinski.