The killer on the road The babysitter lives

Jones (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, 2025) returns with a single volume featuring two short novels, reminiscent of taking in a double feature by a favorite horror director. On the surface the novels appear vastly different in tone, gore, and scare level, yet both are firmly united by Jones' unique narrative voice and his ability to pull fresh takes from established tropes, in this case the hitchhiking serial killer and the hungry haunted house. The never-before-published "Killer of the Road" is the action-driven, visceral, in-your-face, final-girl tale of Harper, as she attempts to run away but ends up in a high-speed fight for her life on Interstate 80 headed west from Laramie. In the previously audio-only "The Babysitter Lives," readers watch helplessly as Charlotte's routine babysitting job sets her on a harrowing hunt through a house of inexplicable terror. Both stories will hold readers rapt with their sympathetic and well-developed heroines, begging them to finish each in as few sittings as possible even as their emotions are put through the wringer while simultaneously forcing them to confront a fear that jumps off the page, straight into their guts. But they will love every second of it.

A one-two punch of grindhouse horror from one of the craft's most inventive practitioners. Jones is riding high on his much-lauded vampire Western (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, 2025) but this isn't a step back by any means, just a palate cleanser, two novels joined back-to-back. These twinned tales of Final Girls under threat from paranormal entities swings less literary, but fans of the author's Jade Daniels trilogy, not to mention slasher flicks in general, should be delighted with the gruesome results.Killer on the Road finds moody 16-year-old Harper hitting the road after a fight with Mom and hooking up with her best friends, Kissy and Jam, not to mention ex-boyfriend Dillion and tag-along little sister Meg. Before they get very far, they're attacked by a malevolent truck driver with murder on his mind. This nasty business lifts from all sorts of genre touchstones to make its case--the cat-and-mouse game in Spielberg'sDuel is just one that includes serial killers, physical transformation, and good old American road violence. After the vociferous gore inKiller on the Road, readers might expect a respite fromThe Babysitter Lives, but no such luck. Harper would probably be friends with high school senior Charlotte, not least due to their shared Native American heritage and ferocious spirit. In Charlotte's case, what's a babysitter to do on the night before Halloween except babysit two creepy twins for their secretive, mistrustful parents? Except that, as her girlfriend, Murphy, reminds her, the scariest local legend is about a mother who drowned her children on that very night, years ago. What resembles a modern gothic quickly turns into something else, as Jones visits all sorts of horrors upon his creation, from insanity-inducing portals to somewhere down under, to murderous doppelgängers and other visitations. An acquired taste that's much like the rest of the author's body of work: bloody, terrifying, triumphant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.