Hail Holy Queens: A Novel

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By George Mac Allister

Chris McGinley has always known how to make a landscape feel like it's watching you. His Kentucky mountains carried that quality in Once These Hills, and now he has moved his particular gift for atmospheric dread to the snow-swept Berkshires of 1887 and produced something genuinely unlike anything else publishing right now.

The setup of Hail Holy Queens is so audacious it almost sounds like a dare. An isolated Romanesque convent where nuns brew Italian amaro and keep to their devotions. A predatory creature from the caverns above, part wolf, part wolverine, covered in quills and possessed of a maw full of curved incisors, descending on the sisters in the night. And then the nuns deciding, collectively and with remarkable conviction, to hunt it back.

That premise has no business working as well as it does, and it works completely.

What keeps the book from being merely a clever genre exercise is Henrietta, or Henry, the protagonist whose diary entries carry the entire narrative. Her character arc is the kind reviewers instinctively want to protect from description, because discovering who she becomes across the course of the story is one of the genuine pleasures of the book. McGinley trusts the diary format to do something specific: it creates intimacy and distance at the same time, a confessional voice that feels honest even when it is clearly managing what it reveals.

The comparisons to Robert Eggers, Emerald Fennell, and Tarantino that early readers have reached for are not wrong, but they undersell the literary quality underneath the genre machinery. McGinley is a writer who came to horror from literary fiction, and that background is felt in how carefully the atmosphere is built, how precisely each character is drawn, and how much the violence actually costs within the world of the story.

For readers who love gothic horror with genuine literary ambition and a protagonist they will not soon forget, this is exactly where to start.