Review: Josh Malerman's Goblin

When we enter Goblin we feel as if we're walking into something we know, maybe a fog banked small town that's only really creepy at night or a ghost town that hasn't quite died enough to be itself yet, but we're soon made aware of how wrong we are, the familiar edges slipping away and revealing something more like a monolith on a cold and forsaken hill in the middle of the woods that just happens to look like a town if we look at it from just the right angle. Goblin is a place with many variables and many, many moving parts. Just when you think you've figured it out another story begins, and with it, a new facet of the broader story of the town (and the terrible land it was before that town came to exist) reveals itself. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Goblin is also a character, but one that lurks in the wider edges of the camera, the ones that we just perceive beyond the shoulders of the characters experiencing its energy. There's a lot to unpack from the stories themselves, but it's clear the point was always that we find ourselves haunted by the town itself by the end, having taken on its weight without even realizing it. 

This is my first book from Malerman and I genuinely enjoyed the classic horror atmosphere, original narrative, and interesting characters. While it is made up of some conventional parts, or at least things that horror fans are familiar with, I absolutely wouldn't call Goblin a typical novel at all, and that's not just because it's a story made up of several smaller stories. I would go into each of the stories in turn here but I think that the actual experience of reading the book is just too good to spoil by laying every bit of it out and picking it apart in front of you. Instead, I"ll just express that Goblin is every bit its own city with its own legends and existing experiences, I really enjoyed reading each of the stories even when there were parts that left me feeling a little sad or conflicted, and that says a lot in itself. After all, how many authors manage to write something that allows you to feel those emotions and still find yourself genuinely glad to have experience them?