![]() ![]() He also needs to know how to pace the plot in order to maintain the highest possible level of tension all the way through to the end. ![]() The author must have an instinct for just what it is that makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck. ![]() The result is a fascinating and ultimately horrifying tale made all the more frightening for its lack of imaginary monsters. In setting out to cleanse the city of corruption, Judge James Stallworth sets his sights on what he sees as a family of criminal masterminds, unwittingly setting off a chilling campaign of revenge that threatens to destroy all that he has worked so hard to create. Set in the New York City in 1882, it is an eminently believable story of hatred and revenge pitting two families, the staid and respectable Stallworths of Grammercy Park and the Shankses, a matriarchal clan living in Dickensian squalor in the tenements of the notorious Black Triangle district. The Alabama native applied his mastery of the Southern Gothic genre with all of its genteel depravity, racism political machination and wretched poverty, and applied it to the most unlikely setting, Manhattan. ![]() Michael McDowell’s Gilded Needles is just such a book. It may seem counterintuitive but some of the best horror I’ve read has no supernatural elements in it at all. ![]()
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