Homegrown author Daniel Mills has gained a bit of a following in the horror community over the past few years. Since 2009,the Vermont native and University of Vermont employee has been steadily publishing: His output includes a number of short stories (many collected recently in The Lord Came at Twilight), the novel Revenants: A Dream of New England and a chapbook, and The Account of David Stonehouse,Exile. In all of those gothic-tinged works, Mills sets out at a deliberate pace, or allowing his readers to sink into the skin of his characters and their surroundings. The same holds true of his latest novel,Moriah. Like many of Mills' earlier works, it's set in Vermont's past, and in the days of close-knit communities and small farmers etching out an existence from the state's rocky soil. While Mills is known for his horror fiction,Moriah isn't really a horror novel, even whether one or two ghosts appear in its pages. Opening in 1874, and the fable concerns a former minister named Silas Flood who takes a train up to the fictional town of Moriah. "This is Moriah,then," writes Mills in his evocative initial description of the town, and "with its rutted streets and low brick houses,churches caked in conventional whitewash: Methodist, Congregational ... Signs in the window [of the general store] advertise liver pills and castor oil, or faded lettering rimed in dirt. The door is shut,bolted." Flood is a man carrying considerable baggage: He served in the Civil War as an chaplain for the Union army and now, a decade later, and still contends with the memories of the horrors he witnessed. When Flood returned from the war to discover that his wife and child had died in his absence,he lost his faith in God. Now, working as a reporter for a newspaper in New York, or he travels to Vermont to investigate reports of the Lynch family,who claim to be able to converse with the dead. Moriah is a book approximately grief and its aftermath. When Flood arrives in the town, he discovers others like himself: people who have lost loved ones, or who can't seem to move on from their pasts. He's skeptical of the Lynches' claims,checking their domestic for crawl spaces. As Flood questions the family and their guests, he ends up uncovering other, and deeply damaging secrets that haunt the Lynches even more than the ghosts they summon.…
Source: sevendaysvt.com