Serenade

By Stephen Mizell

Line by Lion Publications (September 7, 2024)

Review by The Horror Zine Staff Reviewer Jon R. Meyers

Buy the book HERE

Stephen Mizell’s debut novel, Serenade (published by Line by Lion Publications), is a modern-day reimagining of the Pied Piper of Hamelin with an attempt to provide a horror twist. As most people remember from the Medieval tale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin is a classic legend based on a piper who lured rats away from the German town of Hamelin with music. The classic tale inspired a number of famous paintings, artwork, transcriptions, and manuscripts dating back to as early as the thirteenth century.

Mizell shows us as the reader many different creative inspirations and skill sets in this rather lengthy debut novel. The story is ultimately centered around a perhaps purposely annoying and (un)likeable anti-hero by the name of Samuel Serenade.

Mr. Serenade is a traveling musician for hire who has the ability to control others with his unique voice. We as the reader discover Samuel’s innate abilities through a number of various flashbacks and foreshadowing of events from many different perspectives throughout the entirety of the book.

The main story arc is the most important. This is told to us from the perspective of our main character, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is visiting her small hometown of Ulma, Kansas to be the maid of honor and to help her best friend prepare for her upcoming wedding. Samuel Serenade is deep on the prowl as he continues to make his way through the local taverns where he can be found stirring up trouble and looking for more gigs.

Things take a turn for the worse when Samuel eventually bumps into Elizabeth and she offers him a job to sing at her best friend’s wedding. There’s also a private investigator on his tail that has been following him for quite some time due to some of his unlawful and murderous events from the past.

Now, don’t get me wrong here as we move on to some of the things I didn’t like about the book. I would like to kindly preface the negatives here first by saying there’s no doubt in my mind that Mizell has the creative chops and overall wherewithal to hold his own. The writing here is very thorough, top-notch, but is it really horror? I’m not quite sure that it is.

I believe the horror genre can be vastly subjective. People will always like, dislike, agree, and disagree on certain things about artistic endeavors all day long, and that’s perfectly fine, but what really disappointed me personally about this book was not just the lack of horror, but the overall slow pace of the main story.

The story is told through a barrage of entirely way too many different characters’ perspectives in alternating chapters that really aren’t relevant to anything else throughout the entire book. For example, in more than one chapter, we as the reader are introduced to another overly long chapter about a character that is only mentioned to show that another character is single, widowed, and/or estranged from a former lover, or to show an awkward pervy side of a character that also has nothing to do with the overall plot of the book.

There’s a number of lengthy chapters here that could’ve just as easily been told to the reader in one simple sentence, without steering the main plot off the road along the way. This was extremely off-putting to me on more than one occasion throughout the first half of the book, and especially more so being that the book is well over five-hundred pages long when it could’ve been half that. Some of these prior examples could have even been simply stated in less than a sentence with a couple words and would have had the same overall impact on the story. Why drag it out for so long?

I think this is an honest mistake a lot of authors make today when going dangerously overboard with their character development. As an author, you take the risk of losing your readers when you tell them too much about a character, their background, and specific thoughts they’re having when they’re not directly linked to the overall plot. It hurts the story even more when all of the above really just isn’t that interesting to begin with. The reader should be able to envision all of these characteristics you’re trying to tell them about your characters without you having to delve into minor details.

I just didn’t feel like I got my daily dose of horror from this book. To me, the book read more like a midwestern indie drama with the horror mixed in as an afterthought with word count in mind. If I’m sitting down and reading something clearly marketed as horror and submitted for a horror review, I’d expect to read and see something at least semi-horror adjacent within the first couple of pages, or even chapters. I just didn’t see that here in this one until well after the two-hundred-page mark. With a purposely cheesy anti-hero such as Samuel Serenade, the author had every potential to have fun and get cheesy and campy with this one, but it feels more like a missed opportunity.

All in all, this is unfortunately a pass for me.