A Quirky, Creepy Tale...with some Laughs

REVIVAL HOUSE by S.S. Michaels (2012 / 200 pp / eBook)

Caleb is a young man who takes over his uncle's funeral home in Savannah, Georgia. He's a tall, pale-skinned loner in love with an overweight goth girl named Scarlet. But Scarlet has eyes for Caleb's old college buddy Avery, who has come to Savannah to continue his reanimation experiments on local pets. Taking all this in is Caleb's friend, the oddly named Four, who runs a haunted attraction tour.

When Scarlet dues after a bad fall, Avery convinces Caleb they could bring her back. Caleb reluctantly agrees and the operation is sort-of successful until Scarlet escapes with some minor brain damage (and a scalpel) into one of Four's haunted tunnels and injures one of the tourists. Now Caleb is going crazy trying to track her down, and a popular ghost-hunting TV show comes to town to see the strange tunnel-dweller for themselves.

REVIVAL HOUSE is a quirky horror tale, a cross between HEATHERS and REANIMATOR with plenty of dark humor thrown in. Michaels develops Caleb quite nicely, making us care for this dark, gloomy freak, and while we feel bad for Scarlet, it's hard not to laugh at the thought of a fat goth girl in a dirty sheet running around the tunnels with a cage on her head.

If you have a twisted sense of humor or a taste for some horror from a different angle, check out REVIVAL HOUSE.