Toronto’s ChiZine Publishing is known for their strange, dark, and industrial type thrillers—novels considered too disturbing for mainstream publishers—and it’s clear to see from their burgeoning success, that they make there own rules in the publishing world.
Run by husband and wife team Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi, who bravely started their company during the recession in 2009, ChiZine is an independent publishing house who have conquered at a time a lot of other publishers, agents, and booksellers were putting up the for rent signs on their doors. An example of this is one of their latest titles reaping an abundance of success, Enter, Night, a debut thriller by Michael Rowe.
If I was to peg this novel into a particular genre I’d have to say “speculative fiction”. But I get the impression ChiZine, being the rebel publishers that they are, doesn’t adhere to the status quo and when it comes to genre. The story starts off feeling like a crime drama/suspense and then kind of segues into horror. It’s an intricately structured, unconventional vampire story. Although, I wouldn’t have guessed it to be a vampire story, so it came as a surprise when I read it. But, I’m thinking maybe they didn’t want to advertise this fact in the event Rowe’s book end up in the YA section competing with all the sparkly, adolescent-seducing blood suckers. Good call. Being a fan of the Anne Rice variety of vampire, however, J.R. Ward’s vampire series, and Lindqvist’s brilliant child vampire story, I couldn’t help comparing it, and I found Rowe’s not quite as accomplished. But that’s speaking strictly as a vampire story.
The vampire in Enter, Night is an ancient blood-drinking demon of Indian lore called Weetigo, who’s been whispering into the diseased brain of a psych patient named Richard Weal to come resurrect his corpse from it’s 300-year-long sleep. In the beginning of the story Weal travels by bus from Toronto to a small Northern Ontario town in search of the beast’s lair. While on the bus he beheads a passenger and cannibalizes him, which is reminiscent of a shocking true case a few years back here in Canada.
I found the pace does get bogged down a bit with the back story of a plethora of characters, and the shift in POV is a bit jarring. Despite this, there is a solid tension throughout the story that compels page turning. The “documents” at the end, belonging to a murdered professor who was researching the Weetigo legend, goes into a fascinating historical account of the early French explores in Canada and the evolution of the Weetigo creature. Overall, Enter, Night is an absorbing, edgy thriller that horror fans are sure to enjoy.
