Christopher Golden excels in combining the horrifically fantastic with the relatable mundane placing believable characters into a realm of nightmares. His latest, The Night Birds, is an atmospheric, supernatural tale of mankind taking on a magical force while dealing with brutal Mother Nature. The Night Birds is an action-packed, soul-plummeting novel that makes for a scary adventure, even when Golden’s prose gets a little soggy.
The Night Birds features Charlie Book and Ruby Cahill former lovers with an understandable loss. Charlie, going by his surname Book, is a researcher for Texas Parks and Wildlife. Ruby is a musician a few gigs away from making a name for herself on the touring circuit. They are both dealing with life separately until an unexpected baby and a major category hurricane brings them back together.
Along with the witches. A whole nasty coven of them.
| Title: The Night Birds (2025) Author: Christopher Golden Publisher: St. Martin’s Press Book jacket: Charlie Book and Ruby Cahill have history. Now they are on the run. Only it isn’t the police who are after them, it’s a coven of witches whom has hideous plans… for a helpless infant. Joe says: The Night Birds is an action-packed, soul-plummeting novel that makes for a scary adventure, even when Golden’s prose gets a little soggy. |
Golden goes through the paces of setting up Book, his team, and their homebase the Christabel, a 19th century freighter that lies half-sunken just off the shore of Galveston, perhaps fictitiously based off the SS Selma. Similar to his previous works of Ararat and All Hallows, Golden crafts relatable people with all their charm and faults in place. He gives them stories and lives, showing that these characters need to be a worthy investment, especially for when the peril kicks in and those numbers start to dwindle.
Similar to those aforementioned works, Golden’s foundations here are nearly too solid so when the magic does occur that bedrock does not easily sway. When the uncanny finally hits, the result should be eye-opening. At first, though, any such revelation is merely eye-rolling.
Until it isn’t.
Golden, after all, is a craftsman who can easily manipulate both characters and readers. Otherwise the storm that threatened to capsize the Christabel could have inflicted similar damage to the narrative.
Golden remains a thrilling contemporary horror writer. Both Road of Bones and his more-recent The House of Last Resort, has Golden at his best as he properly balances human lives with undead terror. While The Night Birds sometimes gets a little rain soaked in its repetitiveness, when Golden finally unleashes the crazy, he has the volume cranked to eleven. As waves of water pummel the Christabel, darkness and dread choke the reader in a glorious page-turner of read.
The witches are after the baby who has come into Ruby’s possession – her nephew. Golden plays with Old World fairy tales and intermixes it all with 21st century comic book action. Even when some of Book’s labors fall to the laborious, Golden builds the tension with Ruby, the renegade witch Mae, and Book’s compatriot Gerald, that keeps the blood flowing. And spilling.
In previous stories, both aforementioned as well as the fun read Snowblind, Golden hints and teases at the monsters from the shadows. With The Night Birds he goes deep into the origins of witches, witchcraft, and their strange, dark power. While he could have gone even deeper, bringing the past’s history into the relevant present, Golden keeps his book focus on Book, making the reluctant hero all the more valiant. The Night Birds, regardless of its few unkempt feathers, is a striking entry in the world of modern horror.
Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for this finely-feathered advance treat.
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