Itch!

Amor (Full Immersion) delivers a relentlessly bleak but successfully surprising horror novel. Protagonist Josie has just moved back to her small hometown of Ellwood, England, after leaving an abusive ex-girlfriend. There’s little for her in Ellwood, where she works at the local pub, is haunted by memories of her dead mother, and must contend with her uncaring father. Matters are made infinitely worse when she discovers a decomposing, ant-infested corpse in the nearby woods—a dead woman who looks uncomfortably like Josie herself. As she investigates this mysterious death and her potential connection to it, she becomes convinced that she is now the host to that same colony of ants, causing her to scratch uncontrollably. With nothing to leaven it, the sheer quantity of unpleasantness in Josie’s life makes the beginning difficult to wade through, but persistence pays off here; the plot becomes much more propulsive when both the body horror and the murder mystery pick up, leading to some well-executed surprises in the book’s back half. Squeamish readers need not apply, but this is sure to get under horror fans’ skin. Agent: Becky LeJeune, Bond Literary. (Jan.)