Original title: Zatloukání hřebů
Genre: horror novel
Publisher:
Host, 2024
ISBN: 978-80-275-2145-6
Pages: 215
Rights sold to:
Poland (Stara Szkoła), Macedonia (Muza)
Disturbing horror that uncovers family trauma and long-held secrets
If someone calls you at a strange hour and addresses you by your full name, you had better sit down: good news doesn’t tend to be given this way, as Ema Březinová can testify. Death and loneliness have come for her – along with the twisted family history she has always tried to forget, and from which there is now no escape.
Ema has no choice but to open old wounds and hope that after long years of festering they will finally heal. Not all questions should be answered, however. Nor can every mystery be solved without human sacrifice.
Ema’s life is shrouded in darkness, choked by depression, and governed by paranoia. Because her search has awakened powers that are not to be messed with…
"Vilém Koubek proves to be a master exponent of the atmospheric horror that disturbs by what appears real and what appears supernatural. A weighty book that makes a deep mark."
Jiří Štěpán, editor
"I had planned to read it over several evenings, but it ended up being just one night, which lasted almost till daybreak. In this book, Vilém Koubek presents himself as something of a Czech Jozef Karika: he artfully combines elements of horror, psychothriller and mythology in a terrifying setting where abandoned blocks of flats are disintegrating, along with the human mind and all our certainties. One by one. The descriptions play with all the reader’s senses, the lines of the book deliberately fill your head with the sounds, tastes and smell of fear. You can almost touch it. No slow pacing or fallow patches here, the author builds up the eerie atmosphere from the first page, slowly thickening it, coming up with the unexpected and reversing course, until the tension physically hurts at times."
Petra Klabouchová, writer
"Vilém Koubek moves in the horror genre with confidence and ease. He knows how to evoke an eerie, brooding atmosphere that builds up at just the right moment into a fright for connoisseurs. At the same time, he’s very well aware that it’s not a specific evil that scares people the most, but just one that is hinted at, hidden away in the reader’s imagination.
Koubek plays with the imagination very skilfully, deliberately confounding and confusing the reader with each new chapter. No sooner do we get a rough idea of what and how things might have happened in that abandoned pigsty, than a twist comes to smash our hypotheses to bits, and in the nape of our neck we feel the writer’s searching, intent gaze, which seems to suggest that not everything he has told us through the mouth of Ema Březinová can be relied upon.
Ambiguity and the opportunity to come up with your own interpretation are very welcome ingredients e.g. in the horror genre, which Vilém Koubek has understood very well and skilfully worked out in the pages of Hammering Nails."
Jindřich Göth, MF Dnes
