October Rust drops you immediately into the middle of the action with the story already in progress… Mickey is being haunted by a vengeful spirit (evidently someone from her past who has a bloody axe to grind) and has made the incredibly unwise decision to flee the relative safety of her home and loving fiancé and head off to a cabin in the woods. Alone.

Has this girl never seen a horror movie before?

Needless to say, her ill-advised excursion does not go well. In fact, the entire trip is a disaster. Much sooner than she anticipated, Mickey flees in the opposite direction (back home) with the malevolent haunt still in hot pursuit, which is hardly convenient for her nine-to-five obligations.

Poltergeist-like harassment quickly escalates into white knuckle terror, and it soon becomes all too clear that this spiteful spook has dastardly plans for Mickey — and is only too willing to murder Mickey’s friends and loved ones in order to get back at her.

The good news is that Mickey has an enviable support system that not only includes her fiancé Hector, but also his parents (Eliza and Yunior) and best friend (Cisco). The problem is that in supporting Mickey, they too put a target on their own backs.

As it turns out, the unrelenting entity is indeed a deceased figure from Mickey’s past; back in the day, she was an antisocial criminal who got into all sorts of trouble that she should by rights be in jail for. She might have avoided prison and turned her life around, but this phantom isn’t going to let her past misdeeds go unpunished. After all, revenge is a dish best served cold — and it’s even more delicious when it’s Doordashed from beyond the grave.

October Rust is a thrilling and fun ride that barely lets up, employing the trope of a vengeful phantom to ultimately tell a story about hope and new beginnings. When we first meet Mickey, she has more or less got her shit together; her villainous past is far behind her, and she’s striving and surviving in the working class purgatory that is suburban Baltimore — she even has a cat and her own apartment, so she’d be doing pretty damn well if it wasn’t for that pesky spirit.

Or spirits, rather. Because the ghost isn’t Mickey’s only albatross — she’s also fighting a losing battle against her long-term alcohol addiction, a situation which has only been exacerbated by the revenge-seeking revenant who refuses to relent.

Roughly a third of the way into his novel, Van Horn beautifully articulates the headspace of Mickey and her struggle as she wrestles with her booze fiend nature in a way that feels all too real and relatable. Like Incidents Around the House and It Follows, October Rust is a horror story firmly set in the mundanely ordinary world we all inhabit. The stakes confronting Mickey are not only insurmountable they should be impossible, meaning there’s very few viable avenues actually available. In which case, why not go on a solo sojourn to a cabin in the woods? What other options are there? For what it’s worth, Van Horn’s horror bona fides are clearly evident — and he namechecks enough genre faves and deep cuts to make Stephen King blush (Child’s Play, Night of the Demons, Shadow People, and Ghostquake all get a shoutout).

The world of this book feels deftly real, relatable, and lived in. This is in no small part thanks to the specificity of Mickey’s day-to-day existence which is breathed to life just as much by the details of her dead end customer service job at a snack company as it is by her familiarizing herself with the Catholic religion (she’s in the process of converting before marrying Hector) and Eliza’s experience with Santeria (a syncretic African Yoruba-Roman Catholic mysticism). Likewise, the characters are convincingly drawn, multi-dimensional, and entirely compelling.

There have been many stories about protagonists being haunted by their prior sins, but October Rust plays a remarkably fresh tune with familiar notes. Mickey may well have buried her dark past, but the dead refuse to let sleeping dogs lie. And as much as you’re rooting for Mickey to accomplish a happy ending, simply accompanying her on the journey is rewarding enough.

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Horror Harwood

October Rust by Ray Van Horn, Jr.