Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it. Well written, yes-if you like lapping up pus and maggots for fun.

Then Shee starts snacking unstoppably and brings in waves of creepy-crawlies, spiders, giant man-eating eels, and a tsunami, before Sean finds himself armed against her with the sword of the Lord of Light. But Sean has bad dreams, sees himself as Cuchullain. Traveling reporter Liz Cannon has photog Sean McCullain with her to eke out some feature stories in mild Kilgallan. But Donnelly soon slips into a rotting and drippingly pustuled ghoulishness, a picnic of diseased, grabbing, pullulating vulvas. These incidents might be retold in a family newspaper. A young woman teaching her nephew to swim in a stream strips naked and trapping the boy between her breasts drowns him amid orgasms. Another suckling mother suddenly can't pull her baby from her breast as the baby grows teeth, sucks out, bites off and gobbles down the whole inside of her breast-before really satisfying its hunger.

A mother suckling her newborn slowly smothers the child between her breasts. People (the luckier ones) get their heads eaten or sucked off-and so that there will be plenty of reader-identifiable folks to do away with later, a bevy of villagers, scientists, and reporters is fed into the tale early on.

Now Kilgallan is swept by monstrous murders. The story: some archaeologists uncover a mysterious tomb in the Kilgallan hillside and in doing so unlock the prison of a shapeless black demoness, the Shee, who was imprisoned there millennia ago by the hero Cuchullain. Scottish author Donnelly (in his first US publication) dumps out the worst he can dream up and-with his many graphically messy and pulpy deaths-brings a new grisliness to the horror novel. A 5,000-year-old Irish demoness is released from her burial mound in the countryside around seaside Kilgallan-and swims like spirochetes into the reader's brain.

The Shee by Joe Donnelly