Books: We Are All Completely Fine By Daryl Gregory (2014)

 

"Harrison is the Monster Detective, a storybook hero. Now he’s in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses. Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these likely-insane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within and which are lurking in plain sight."

As I mentioned in my Harrison Squared review, I discovered while reading it, author Daryl Gregory had written We Are All Completely Fine novelette released a year before H2. Set some twenty years after the YA title, this short novel only hints at Harrison’s previous life as some sort of monster hunter. He recollects some stuff to the group in this tale –but some are bit different here than in Harrison Squared- and that his “adventures” inspired a series of YA horror novels called Jamison Squared.

This is a much more complicated story than H2, darker, more violent and gory. While it’s clear that Gregory will continue with at least two more adventures featuring the young Harrison, this novelette is either an open-ended epilogue or, once finished telling Harrison’s younger days, the beginning of something different.

I’m unsure if Gregory intended this to be a short story from the get go, a first attempt to see if a full length novel could support his idea –and maybe take on Stephen King is some subtle way, ala a interconnected universe- or Harrison Harrison’s voice took over his thoughts and so he needed to address that story first before moving on. I mean, there are a lot of good ideas here, some half-baked, some nicely fleshed out, but we’ll see if he intends to follow through.

Still, as I read Daryl Gregory, the more I love his work, his style, his attempt to blend horror and humor.

Books: Harrison Squared By Daryl Gregory (2015)

 

"Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who’s been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished.  One of the “sensitives” who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school. On Harrison’s first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Dwellers, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother."

 

Harrison Squared is fun little tale from author Daryl Gregory, who is able to vacillate easily between adult horror/supernatural (and offbeat family dynamics in Spoonbenders) tales rooted in early horror writers, to this YA title that carries some of the same themes, but presented in a less frightening way. Still, it’s basically Lovecraft’s Cthulhu meets a modern-day Scooby gang. Harrison is deft sixteen year-old, who must deal with the town of Dunnsworth, its often creepy adults (and sometime creepy kids), and the kidnapping of his mother.

 

Gregory has an affinity for witty dialogue and it shines here, as he creates some wonderfully fun characters (I enjoyed Aunt Selena a lot). And while this book (which does hint at further adventures to come) is not that original –I mean, clearly Daryl Gregory took all his teenage passions and dumped them into this book- he is able to keep the balance between horror, humor and things we’ve seen before going through to the end.

 

I also discovered after finishing this book that Harrison was featured in a previous short novel (or novella, I guess) released a year before Harrison Squared. We Are All Completely Fine is about physiologist Dr. Jan Sayer, who gathers survivors of supernatural violence. One of those people it turns out to be Harrison, who is in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time popping pills and not sleeping. He apparently was, at one time, a monster hunter.

 

I’ll need to track this one down to see how much backstory is revealed about Harrison. While it shouldn’t bother me, knowing that Harrison is alive twenty-years after this book, it means that if Daryl Gregory continues from this book, any danger he puts Harrison in is lessened by the fact he is alive at 35.