“Black Mouth” is another knockout from Ronald Malfi. Like a beautiful love child of “It” and “Something Wicked This way comes”, Malfi has crafted a horrifying, pulse pounding, heartbreaking tale that can stand proudly next to those masterworks. 4 kids encounter a mysterious magician in the woods setting in to motion a series of events that will alter their lives. Now grown up, the ghosts of that summer still haunt them, Jamie Warren most of all. When his mother dies and his brother is found wandering the road Jamie and his friends are forced to finally confront the dark truths of their childhood and the magician in hopes they can banish their ghosts once and for all. I loved this book! Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I love coming of age horror. And this is another that is going straight to the top of my favorites list.
One thing I love about Malfi is how he hooks me in from the start. There's no getting to the good part, it's good right out of the gate. It's not overly fast paced, he just gives you enough to keep pulling you in. He weaves the supernatural & real life horror together flawlessly.
Needless to say at this point but I loved it!
If you also love coming of age horror I would highly recommend this. If you love carnivals, creepy magicians, family traumas, serial killers and family/friend bonds you'll love this too. And at the center, a heart. It was beautiful.
This is a 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/5

"Perfect for fans of Stephen King’s IT" says the blurb, but for me this had many King tropes (adults revisiting repressed childhood horror/alcoholic protagonist/kid with learning difficulties who is "magical") but without the characterisation, mood or quality of King's work.

It was a decent read and I liked The Magician character but overall it didn't resonate with me and I found myself skimming near the end (especially during the slightly bizarre "hippo" bit!).

Wow, I haven’t read a book this good since Come with Me. With Black Mouth Ronald Malfi has instantly become my favourite author. The characters are so well fleshed out and the emotion in the pages so raw I was enthralled. The story is full of horror but the writing makes you think well beyond the pages. I cried ugly tears at the ending just as I had in Come with Me. Can not wait to read more, if I could give this more stars I would.

Thank you NetGalley for this incredible arc

I have enjoyed Ronald Malfis other work, so I was pretty excited to receive an ARC of Black Mouth!

I loved this book, I literally could not stop reading it once I started. Black Mouth is a fantastically written cosmic horror. This was a satisfying slow burn and everything unfolded beautifully.

10/10 definitely recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I really loved this book - it was sweet without being sentimental, a difficult balance to strike in a book about horror and manipulation. I found myself caring deeply about the characters and what happened to them, my heart in my mouth through the last third of the novel. This is the second Ronald Malfi book I've read and he deserves to be HUGE imo.

Black Mouth is my very first Ronald Malfi book and it certainly won't be the last. I was in a Magor reading slump going into this but that was soon cured as I struggled to put this down.

The story follows Jamie, Dennis, Clay and Mia with dual perspectives of their childhood and adult lives. It explores how events from that fateful summer shaped them as they grew up, not all in good ways. I will mention there are some triggers so do look those up before reading. I don't want to spoil anything at all so I will leave it at this- if you like Stephen Kings IT then you'll love this.

I remember reading Malfi’s 2021 release Come With Me last year and being completely blown away by my introduction to this author. Black Mouth was much different but still hit on an emotional level. A difficult read with heavy themes and, in true Malfi fashion, had simply fantastic writing. I genuinely cared for every main character and felt they were well-developed. I love how their childhood trauma affected their lives in a variety of ways (as it so often happens in life, the same trauma shapes us in differently) and the acknowledgment that not all of the ways it shaped them was bad. I love the ways our life haunts us and how it’s represented in this book. The slow reveal of what happened to Jamie, Dennis, Mia, and Clay the summer of their 11th year was well-paced and, by the grand finale of it all, I seriously couldn’t put it down. The magic of it all was great too, no matter how dark it got. Malfi writes a very satisfying slow burn mystery and man, was the pay off worth it. I thought the villain was well done too! The way everything unfolded was just chef’s kiss. Malfi, stop making me feel things! Between this one, Come With Me, and December Park, Malfi is without a doubt a must-buy author for me and I’m always recommending his books! Excited to add this one to the shuffle of books I shove down other reader’s throats.

Usually I make notes whilst reading an ARC. I do it on my phone so I don't have to decipher my own chicken scratch later, I'm one of those people that will finish a read and immediately forget the name of the main character.
Not this time! I am fully winging it, so bear with me. I could not stop reading for even a moment to jot a single thing down.

This is my second Malfi novel, although I do confess to immediately purchasing three others when I finished Bone White earlier this year. His writing is just perfection.
Can I describe it better than that? Nope. Even the most mundane of sentences is crafted well, I think Malfi could write about paint drying and I'd still be enthralled.
Yes I am cringing at this hysterical fan girling, I'm not sorry.

Blackmouth is an insidious all encompassing horror. There's something extra scary about adults returning to a trauma holding the same palpable fear they felt as children. A fear so great that their entire lives are shaped around it, with the understanding that inevitably one day they will have to face it.

So here we are. Dual timelines of what happened to Jamie, Mia, Charles and Dennis as children of Blackmouth and as returning adults in the present day.
Malfi perfects the balance of show and tell by writing from main character Jamie's perspective in first person- ideal for tension- and using third person for the other characters.

I dont often provide trigger warnings, I suggest instead that you look them up if required but yikes I HAVE to mention that one animal abuse scene. I hugged my dog like I'd never let him go!

Blackmouth has been compared to King's IT and for once I would agree. A coming of age, cosmic horror in small town America that will blow you away.

Malfi has cemented a place amongst my favourite horror writers for sure.

In Black Mouth we follow Jamie, who, upon returning to his hometown for his mothers funeral, finds himself reunited with his childhood friends as they try to unravel the events that lead up to a traumatic event in their past and stop it from happening again.

The moment I started to read Black Mouth I was transported back to my first experience reading Stephen King's It over twenty years ago. It really had that coming of age horror feel to it and it hooked me straight away. The fact that Jamie was an unreliable narrator had me guessing the whole way through and the ending did not disappoint. My favourite read this year and I've now purchased more Ronald Malfi to read!

Thank you to Titan and Netgalley for the chance to read Black Mouth,

To compare this book to stephen kings IT is both a compliment and a insult, that being said I don't the author would be overly concerned by the comparison

Ronald Malfi does it yet again! Black Mouth is the third novel I’ve read by him (Bone White and Come With Me are the other two), and like those others, he scores a home run yet again.

The plot of Black Mouth, on the surface, seems to resemble that of Stephen King’s It, where childhood friends reunite to confront an evil from their past. But the books are very different. In It, the now adults confron a supernatural entity which they’d totally forgotten about. In Black Mouth, the evil character has haunted them their whole lives, and while they’ve tried to bury those memories, they keep coming back to haunt them. Yet, it may be magic that causes them to reunite and face the evil once again.

I could not put this book down. His characters are real, especially Jamie Warren, whose life has been shattered by past events and led him to to become an alcoholic. You care for them and you live the events in the novel with them. The plot is well paced, and the writing, as in the other novels, is perfect. In summary, this is an absolutely fantastic book.

My thanks to Titan Books and to Netgalley for providing an ATC of this wonderful book.

Black Mouth is a standalone horror novel by author Ronald Malfi. After only a few pages in I knew this one was going to be something special. Ronald Malfi's writing style is incredibly vivid and engaging. The descriptions, character development and suspense/intrigue that he creates is masterful. I read this in one sitting! The characters were flawed and incredibly likeable that you couldn't help but feel invested in what happened to them. I loved the way the author made you question what was real. This book was exceptionally well written, the words able to evoke a full range of emotions and senses in the reader. I gasped, I cheered, I frantically turned pages. I picked this one up on a whim, drawn in my the mysterious and eerie cover art. This was my first novel by Ronald Malfi but I have already started reading "Come with Me" by the same author and am excited to have found a new author to read. Thank you to Ronald Malfi for writing such a fantastic and engaging book and thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to read this early copy.