Boys in the Valley is the most frightening novel of the year. There, I said it! The story takes place in an isolated Pennsylvania orphanage in 1905, where the boys’ lives of drudgery, clerical surveillance, and casual cruelty are bad enough, but the arrival of policemen and their demonically possessed prisoner kicks things up a notch or two on the “oh shit” scale. When hell breaks out (very quickly), it falls to Peter, the most senior of the boys, to differentiate evil from innocence and keep his peers alive. What follows is a blueprint for the creation of steady, unsettling dread, with enough explosions of outright horror to release the pressure, like pus from a wound. It’s easy to overfocus on how horrific a book is, but there are other things at play here than fear alone. Emotion, characterization, pacing: each is critical in making us care enough to be frightened. But Boys in the Valley is as committed to hurting the heart as it is to shocking the system. Between this and last year’s A Child Alone with Strangers, Fracassi looks to be at the very vanguard of the next great charge in horror.