A wickedly clever take on a well-worn trope, The Hobgoblin of Little Minds explores lycanthropy through the lens of mental illness and shows Matthews at the height of his powers as a cartographer of the many shades of darkness that inhabit human minds. This bleak, Odyssean, and impeccably well-wrought fable proves what many of us have known for quite some time: Mark Matthews is the reigning king of modern psychological horror."
~KEALAN PATRICK BURKE, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Kin and Sour Candy
"Matthews delivers a shocking new asylum mythos. At Northville Psychiatric Hospital, longstanding literary horrors of tunnels, malign treatments, and twisted minds receive new Frankensteinian life, patched together into a frightful blend of existential dread and family entanglements."
~TROY RONDINONE, PhD, author of Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination
"A stunningly daring descent into madness. Dank, dark and scary as hell. Brimming with tragic characters and monstrous villains--think Nurse Ratched by way of Dr. Moreau under the direction of Cronenberg. Proves once and for all that reality is often the strongest fuel for the nightmares burning bright. This one is a belter. An absolute beast!"
~JOHN BODEN, author of Spungunion and Walk the Darkness Down
"Matthews twists pioneering ideas from epigenetics and neuroscience into a classic horror tale, producing a nightmarish adventure that breathes new life into the werewolf legend."
~BILL SULLIVAN, Ph.D, Professor of Pharmacology at Indiana University, Author of Pleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are
"As a new take on the werewolf story, it is a fascinating read, but as a deep dive into the realities of mental illness, the book is an absolute triumph."
~IndieMuse.com
2020-12-23
In Matthews’ dark horror novel, a woman searches for her mentally ill father in an abandoned psychiatric hospital and finds more than she bargained for.
Twenty-four-year-old Kori Persephone Driscoe’s father, Peter, has been missing for years, so she and her mother decide to empty the house where he lived alone after divorcing Kori’s mother. Kori also visits the soon-to-be-demolished Northville Psychiatric Hospital to look for her dad, as she’s done many times before. There, she finds disturbing graffiti in a tunnel and dwells on her father’s troubled past. A security guard discovers and chases her—but then a rock golem appears and murders her pursuer. She finds her dad in the tunnels, as well, but he seems disturbed, and committed to feeding genetically altered patients called Vrykolakas. Flashbacks relate Peter’s past involving the devious Dr. Zita and a patient named Maya with a troubled tale of her own. The Vrykolakas attack Kori, and later, she wanders in the woods outside the hospital; before long, she learns about a rogue doctor’s bizarre project. Matthews’ worldbuilding over the course of this novel has a contagious verve, as well as psychological complexity. Sometimes, though, it veers into undefined psychiatric jargon; for instance, unwary readers may not know that to “decompensate” means to lose the ability to maintain one’s mental health. There’s also some awkward phrasing (“Her arms wanted to embrace him, but her hands disagreed”) and moments of purple prose, such as a description of moon’s “endogenous rhythms of circalunar periodicity.” Nonetheless, this well-researched novel is likely to grab horror fiction readers’ attention like a sudden howl at the moon.
A fresh and eccentric monster tale.
