Death need not be feared, right? Syke! Or, should I say, scythe? One day, the Grim Reaper will get us all … and he’ll take us down in a blade of gory. In THE REAPER, a new novel by horror author-on-the-rise Joseph McGee, people find this out the hard way, not to mention prematurely early.

The first person to learn this cold, bitter truth is Maggie, a young woman who finds herself strangely compelled to visit the sixth floor of the nearby abandoned psychiatric hospital. That’s where she finds the kids with ink-black eyeballs, as well as the shadowy, robed figure ready to slice you open.

Maggie’s boyfriend David finds an enigmatic letter she left behind before venturing out, and panics. He knows exactly where she’s going, so he heads that way, but arrives obviously too late. At the scene of her doom, she leaves him another note that suggests how he can stop the Reaper’s reign, so he digs in to the research and vows revenge.

The end suggests McGee’s not done with the Reaper, and I’d like to see him return to the material again. But the ending that is here doesn’t quite offer necessary closure; in fact, at first, I wasn’t aware that it was the ending, because the book then segues into a trio of short stories, without having identified them as such anywhere in the package.

Once I unraveled that confusion, I was much better with it. (My only other beef: three characters are named Michael or Mike.) By keeping this story lean and mean — the entire contents comprise less than 140 pages — he prevents the story from having any real problems that would damage your enjoyment. It’s all about telling a spooky tale in the same Halloween vein as, say, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” or even your average episode of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE. On that level, as a modern-day myth, it really works.

THE REAPER is the latest in a string of economical yet effective horror novels from indie publishers that prove it’s worth it to deviate from the big, established names for literary scares (Mark Tarrant’s THE BLOOD RIDER is another). Like many up-and-comers, this one seems informed by horror films of the ’80s and ’90s, so if you consider this book ripped from that cloth, you’ll be in the right frame of mind for it. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.