Goblin is a 2017 novel by Josh Malerman, the author of Bird Box. The novel is made up of six novellas (plus a prologue and epilogue which together make their own story) which tell various tales of the strange little city of Goblin, Michigan, and its equally strange inhabitants.
This work contains examples of:
- Animalistic Abomination: The Great Owls that live in Goblin's North Woods are huge, with red eyes, and are also rather murderous, as Neal Nash's friend Harvey discovers the hard way. They also seem to display more intelligence than the average owl, and in "The Hedges," one of them helps Margot escape the Goblin Police.
- Cruel Twist Ending: All of the stories except for "The Hedges" end with the main character of the novella encountering some worse fate than the situation they just got out of.
- "A Man in Slices": Richard is about to be murdered by Charlie, so that Charlie can have more body parts to send to his girlfriend as proof of his love without having to cut off any of his own body parts.
- "Kamp": Walter Kamp suffers a heart attack after working himself into a frenzy of fear and then being scared by his reflection and believing it to be a ghost, and thus is scared to death just like he dreaded.
- "Happy Birthday, Hunter!": After illegally entering the North Woods to kill a Great Owl and leaving his friend Harvey to be killed by them, Neal Nash is presented with another dead Great Owl by his wife Barbara... who reveals that she snuck into the Woods and killed it the day before, robbing Nash of his title as the first person to ever shoot one and making the adventure and Harvey's death all for nothing.
- "Presto": Roman Emperor does indeed engage in "dirty magic" and it's revealed that in every town he performs in, dozens of his audience members go missing because he is sacrificing them to the spirit of Death that granted him his magic. This includes the show that Pete, who idolizes Emperor, snuck into.
- "A Mix-up At The Zoo": Dirk didn't quit his job at the slaughterhouse after finishing his last day. Instead, he killed Eula the gorilla in a dissociative episode and quit his job at the zoo.
- Deal with the Devil: A near-literal example in "Presto," as it is revealed that Roman Emperor made a deal with Death in exchange for genuine magic powers. In return, he has to dig up at least 50 bodies in every town he visits, magically float them into the sky to an unknown fate, and sacrifice new victims to fill the now-empty graves.
- Don't Go Into the Woods: The North Woods are a dark, labyrinthine tangle of trees housing dangerous animals, and possibly other things like ghosts and an immortal witch. The witch is real, as it turns out.
- Egomaniac Hunter: Neal Nash is famous in Goblin for being a big game hunter who has killed one of almost every species of animal one could possibly want to hunt. Even the animal being endangered isn't a deterrent for him, so much so that he intends and succeeds to bag a Great Owl, Goblin's rare and protected species.
- Eye Scream: In "Happy Birthday, Hunter!" Harvey has his eyes pulled out by the Great Owls as they kill him. Upon finding his body, Saul notes that his eyes aren't missing; the Owls simply pulled them out and left them dangling on the optic nerves, in a surprisingly cruel move that underscores their intelligence.
- Humanoid Abomination:
- The Goblin Police, who are most often described as "rubbery." All of them look exactly the same, speak like a slowed-down tape recorder, and as revealed in "The Hedges," their eyes appear to be painted onto their faces somehow, and they can shapeshift into something even worse.
- Roman Emperor's assistant Maggie was created by Death itself. She is ice cold to the touch, doesn't sleep, and gets aroused by whatever it is Emperor does to the corpses in graveyards he digs up before his shows.
- I Love the Dead: An odd variation, though still indelibly tied to the dead. Maggie, Roman Emperor's assistant, masturbates while he digs up corpses and sends them into the sky as a sacrifice for Death before his magic shows.
- A Love to Dismember: In "A Man In Slices," Charles's long-distance girlfriend demands that he prove his love by cutting off his toe and sending it to her. He can't bring himself to do it, so he breaks into the morgue, cuts a toe off a corpse, and mails that to her instead. She's thrilled and wants even more body parts from him.
- Only Friend: In "A Man In Slices," Richard has been Charles's only friend since childhood because he is the only person who was not driven away by Charles's sociopathic behavior. In adulthood however, it's clear that he has only stuck around for as long as he has out of obligation and an ability to compartmentalize Charles's more disturbing behavior.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Walter Kamp's greatest fear is being scared to death. The lengths he goes to in order to avoid this fate leaves him in such a state of constant fear and anxiety that he eventually gives himself a heart attack.
- Serious Business: In "Presto," stage magic is taken so seriously by practitioners that something like Roman Emperor refusing to reveal the secrets of his tricks is enough to get him nearly blacklisted from the industry. Rumors that someone has "dirty magic," which is how they refer to genuine magical or psychic powers, can also be damaging to one's career.
- Too Clever by Half: Margot, the little girl in "The Hedges," solves Wayne Sherman's supposedly unsolvable hedge maze in about three hours, discovers that he has the key to the city hidden at its end, and then manages to outwit the Goblin Police when they drag her along in their pursuit of Sherman to get the key back. It's revealed that she would have been able to successfully lead the Police to Sherman at the center of the North Woods too, as she and Sherman ended up using the same strategy of constant right turns to move through the Woods. Her main problem is that she feels the need to brag to others about how smart she is so that they will feel impressed, which directly leads to the trouble that both she and Sherman endure during their story.
