Wicked Run Press / March 2025
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

The current renaissance of horror fiction is due in no small part to the willingness of its authors to stretch the boundaries of the genre. Although there may still be a place for the simplicity of good versus evil, it’s writers’ willingness to expand the scope and depth of the latter that is making the current crop of horror literature both scarier and more culturally relevant. From psychological terrors that emanate from the human psyche like isolation, grief, and post-traumatic response to societal fears and anxieties such as weaponized technology, pandemic, and environmental catastrophe, horror is no longer confined to the long-dormant creature unearthed or masked maniac with a knife.

It's in this new, expansive view of horror that Shirley Jackson Award finalist Mark Matthews’ excellent To Those Willing to Drown falls squarely, if heavy-handedly at times. This short, punchy novel follows dual narratives—one belonging to an unhinged Civil War surgeon with an affinity for bodily amputations, the other to a young camp counselor who makes an ill-fated deal with the proverbial devil (here in the form of a lake witch) that follows her into marriage and motherhood. Matthews tells his tale from multiple viewpoints, clearly delineated at the beginning of his short, muscular chapters. At the center of his story is the profundity of grief and the extent to which some will go to assuage its suffocating weight. It’s from each character’s relationship to his or her own sense and degree of grief from which the horror of the novel springs.

To Those Willing to Drown is steeped in a rich folklore surrounding Michigan’s Torch Lake, which embodies Matthews’ novel with a suitably ominous background and emboldens its deep empathy for its characters and their respective plights. His multi-sensory descriptions of the lake, its sparkle, its depth, its temperature render the body of water a character in and of itself. Scaly creatures slithering under canoes and tentacled arms snatching beachgoers give the story its requisite creature-feature cred, with Matthews ably painting grotesque word pictures of these monstrosities for the reader. As effective as the horror elements are to the novel, it’s Matthews’ sincerity and unrelenting examination of grief that’s the star here. He pulls the scab off the concept of grief and then holds the reader’s eyes forcibly open, sparing them from none of the anguish he puts his characters through:

"I sat in the group, and as I often did, posed a theoretical question: 'What would your morning be like if your child were still alive? Not sick, not pale and weak from chemotherapy or in palliative care, but alive and thriving.' I was poking exposed nerves, some fresh ones, and could feel the pain dripping.

Each mother answered and it summoned forth the soul of their child, their grief rising together like steam from a boiling pot. I was a conductor with his symphony, asking one side of the group, then the next, to speak on their child. They spoke with voices cracking from tears, a mix of sadness and joy."

This use of grief as the guiding force of the novel also permits readers to sympathize with the characters, even when their actions warrant otherwise, which is either a clever or convenient conceit. Either way, it works marvelously. Equally effective is Matthews’ use of—for lack of better term—psychic vampirism, which his antagonist uses to infuse the souls of deceased children into his (literal) bloodstream like a junkie needing a fix.

In his simultaneously gut-churning and gut-wrenching To Those Willing to Drown, Matthews masterfully demonstrates that the depths of man’s grief can be as scary—or scarier—than what lurks in the depths of a lake at night. It’s when you illuminate the surface that you get a hint of both the humanity and the horror that lie in wait within the darkness beneath.   

Purchase To Those Willing to Drown by Mark Matthews.