Small Town Horror reads like a spiritual successor to Come With Me, in the sense that it’s a crime thriller/murder mystery rather than a supernatural horror (but—like Come With Me—there is a smidge of horror, a smidge of supernaturality), and has plenty of what seems to be autographical elements. Keyword: seems. Unlike Come With Me, Small Town Horror subtly fortifies itself with the slasher genre, perhaps even a supernatural slasher—i.e., there’s a revenge component interwoven into the mystery.
Andrew Larimer, with a pregnant wife, is a rising talent in a New York law firm. Reminiscent of Stephen King’s It, one day he gets a call from a childhood friend and is summoned back to the small town of Kingsport, which he thought he had escaped for good. But he has unfinished business involving the disappearance of his friend’s wife, and each of his childhood friends having nightmarish visions of a teenage boy with a glowing eye. It’s soon revealed that they’re collectively hiding a very dark secret.
This novel is taut and has no superfluous details—even when you think it meanders here and there, you realize later on how essential those moments were for setting up a sensational conclusion. While Malfi is often compared to King, with Small Town Horror he seems to reach a bit higher and really distinguish himself as his own writer. There were elements of Stephen King (in fact I feel like Ronald Malfi himself feels like a character ripped out of a Stephen King novel), Peter Straub, Alan Wake, and Mike Flanagan. I think Small Town Horror is his best novel, and best-written novel. I highly recommend it.
Side note: In Black Mouth, Malfi did display a strange habit of replacing "and" with "then" (it was a bit excessive and ultimately took me out of the story), but with Small Town Horror he was much more conscientious.
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