Sunday, October 1, 2023

Eight fictional dinner parties gone wrong

Lee Kelly is the author of City of Savages, a Publishers Weekly “Best of Spring 2015” pick and a VOYA Magazine “Perfect Ten” selection, A Criminal Magic, which was optioned and developed for a television series by Warner Bros., The Antiquity Affair, co-written with Jennifer Thorne (2023), With Regrets (Fall 2023) and The Starlets (forthcoming, Fall 2024).

Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Gingerbread House, Orca, and Tor.com, among other publications, and she holds her MFA degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. An entertainment lawyer by trade, Kelly has practiced law in Los Angeles and New York. She currently lives with her husband and two children in New Jersey, where you’ll find them engaged in one adventure or another.

At Electric Lit she tagged "eight of my favorite recent novels featuring a dangerous dinner, with the term 'danger' encompassing quite a variety of threats and menacing situations." One title on the list:
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

Tremblay’s horror novel chronicles the dynamics of a New England family that begins to unravel when eldest daughter, Marjorie, starts exhibiting signs of demonic possession. Though is Marjorie the victim of a diabolic hold . . . or is she suffering from acute schizophrenia? Things still aren’t clear when the family sits down to dinner in one of the most unsettling scenes I’ve ever read, a harrowing sequence where, regardless of the truth, Marjorie proves to be an unequivocal danger to herself and her family.
Read about the other entries on the list.

A Head Full of Ghosts is among Wendy Webb's eight top modern gothic mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue