Via Dolorosa

by Ronald Malfi

A young soldier and his wife go on an idyllic island vacation but they can't escape a tragic past that is slowly unraveling their future, even as they try desperately to hang on to each other. A story of war, love, and moral fortitude, told from the perspective of a man who must reexamine his concept of everything he once believed to be right when everything has gone wrong.

Genres: Horror

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Ronald Malfi is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling, award-winning author of many novels and novellas in the horror, mystery, and thriller genres. In 2011, his novel, Floating Staircase, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for best novel by the Horror Writers Association, and also won a gold IPPY award. In 2024, he was presented with the prestigious William G. Wilson Award for Adult Fiction by the Maryland Library Association. Perhaps his most well-received novel, Come with Me (2021), about a man who learns a dark secret about his wife after she's killed, has received stellar reviews, including a starred review from BookPage, and Publishers Weekly has said, "Malfi impresses in this taut, supernaturally tinged mystery... and sticks the landing with a powerful denouement. There’s plenty here to enjoy."

His most recent novels include Senseless (2025) and Small Town Horror (2024), both of which received favorable reviews and saw Malfi stretch his authorial voice.

Come with Me (2021) and Black Mouth (2022), tackle themes of grief and loss, and of the effects of childhood trauma and alcoholism, respectively. Both books have been critically praised, with Publishers Weekly calling Black Mouth a "standout" book of the year. These novels were followed by Ghostwritten (2022), a collection of four subtly-linked novellas about haunted books and the power of the written word. Ghostwritten received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called the book a "wonderfully meta collection...vibrantly imagined," and that "Malfi makes reading about the perils of reading a terrifying delight."

Among his most popular works is December Park, a coming-of-age thriller set in the '90s, wherein five teenage boys take up the hunt for a child murderer in their hometown of Harting Farms, Maryland. In interviews, Malfi has expressed that this is his most autobiographical book to date. In 2015, this novel was awarded the Beverly Hills International Book Award for best suspense novel. It has been optioned several times for film.

Bone White (2017), about a man searching for his lost twin brother in a haunted Alaskan mining town, was touted as "an elegant, twisted, gripping slow-burn of a novel that burrows under the skin and nestles deep," by RT Book Reviews, and has also been optioned for television by Fox21/Disney and Amazon Studios.

His novels Little Girls (2015) and The Night Parade (2016) explore broken families forced to endure horrific and extraordinary circumstances, which has become the hallmark for Malfi's brand of intimate, lyrical horror fiction.

His earlier works, such as Via Dolorosa (2007) and Passenger (2008) explored characters with lost or confused identities, wherein Malfi experimented with the ultimate unreliable narrators. He maintained this trend in his award-winning novel, Floating Staircase (2011), which the author has suggested contains "multiple endings for the astute reader."

His more "monstery" novels, such as Snow (2010) and The Narrows (2012) still resonate with his inimitable brand of literary cadence and focus on character and story over plot. Both books were highly regarded by fans and reviewers in the genre.

A bit of a departure, Malfi published the crime drama Shamrock Alley in 2009, based on the true exploits of his own father, a former Secret Service agent. The book was optioned several times for film.

Ronald Malfi was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977, the eldest of four children, and eventually relocated to Maryland, where he currently resides along the Chesapeake Bay.

When he's not writing, he's performing with the rock band VEER, who can be found at veerband.net and wherever you stream your music.

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Reviews

[Karl]

This hardcover is signed by Ronald Malfi.

[Timothy Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am amazed at how much this story moved me. It is art that is felt as art. All the details of the island hotel, the mourning people he meets, the conversation with his wife and how they are struggling to admit and forgive in order to love again, the mural he is painting in the lobby and how it illustrates his inner turmoil and the turmoil you feel reading his story, the weakness in his painting hand working both to show his self hatred, his ineptitude and his failures in a way that is real and possibly inescapable... All of this had to be read because it so magnificently blended together in sorrow and angst, a longing for a fresh start so that love and peace could heal them of their past mistakes. I've said before that I'd like to always have a Ron Malfi book nearby, but with books like this, I probably wouldn't read anyone else. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

I interviewed the author about many of his books for the Adventures in Scifi Publishing podcast:
Part one: http://www.adventuresinscifipublishin...
Part two: http://www.adventuresinscifipublishin...

[Rob Twinem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this immediately after the brilliant Floating Staircase and it was a completely different experience. It tells the story of Nick D'Nofrio, Afghanistan war veteran recuperating at the Paradis d'Hotel in the Carolinas with his girlfriend Emma. It's a dark journey into the mind of a mentally drained and wounded soldier, a tough uncompromising read but well worth the effort. There are some great and wonderful characters including the mysterious Isabella Rosales, a talented jazz player, and the ghost of a long dead comrade Myles Granger. Ever so slowly Nick's world begins to unravel as the blackness in his soul threatens to drown him and destroy his marriage. Malfi is a marvelous writer creating memorable tormented characters in his own special elegant style of prose and this book is highly recommended.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

So before anything else, a confession: that before the opening of CCLaP last year, I was only a casual fan of the horror genre at best, occasionally picking up a book by Stephen King or Clive Barker or HP Lovecraft but otherwise naturally gravitating more towards hard-science-fiction in my own life, whenever I was in the mood for genre-specific work. But that all changed when I became a book reviewer; more specifically, when I changed my day job into being a full-time champion of basement presses and self-published authors, and made a deal with the public that I would review pretty much any book that a writer sends me directly. (By the way, I will review pretty much any book that a writer sends me directly; please just drop me a line at [cclapcenter at gmail.com] to obtain a mailing address.) That in turn has unsurprisingly enough brought a lot of basement presses and self-published authors out of the woodwork and to my attention; and you know what they say, that when it comes to this subject, you're automatically starting to look at a lot of genre writers and a host of specialty niche publishers, including not only horror and science-fiction but romance, mystery, military thrillers and more. And of all the genres just mentioned, science-fiction is the only one that naturally appealed to me before I was a daily book reviewer, meaning that I've been learning a lot about all these new genres as well as reading a lot of books within these genres for the first time.

For example, one of the first basement authors to contact me after CCLaP opened was Californian "weird" writer Jeremy Shipp, whose Chomskyesque black comedy and 2008 Stoker nominee Vacation I reviewed here earlier this year; that led to me hearing from yet another author on the roll-call of fascinating basement horror publisher Raw Dog Screaming Press, a gentlemen around my age named Ronald Malfi, asking if I would mind reading through and reviewing his latest book, yet another experimental genre exercise called Via Dolorosa. And so then reading these two books, as well as doing research about Raw Dog itself, has made me realize something about the entire horror genre as it exists in 2008, something I would've never realized without these authors contacting me; that there are in fact a whole lot more interesting things going on in horror these days than non-fans of the genre might think at first, certainly a lot more than simply Cujo and Pinhead and C'thulu and the other icons we go to when the term is usually mentioned. That's not to say that there aren't problems with such books, because there are certainly problems with Via Dolorosa that deserve to be pointed out, some genre-related and some expressly Malfi's fault; just that there are a lot more interesting things going on within such genre projects at such obscure presses than a lot of us realize, lending yet more credence to the oft-repeated argument that the most exciting things going on in the arts these days are to be found in genre projects, not with so-called "mainstream" literary works.

For example, I think many of us who only casually follow horror have a general expectation of such projects being bombastic; that their main appeal lays with the GHOSTS! and the CADAVERS! that have COME TO LIFE! and are GOBBLING UP HUMANS! while the HEAVY-METAL SOUNDTRACK blasts away! But what if you were to write a quiet, minimalist, deceptively realistic horror story, one centered around a subject that lends itself well in the first place to artistic trickery and a dreamlike narrative? That's what Malfi attempts to do here with Dolorosa, after all, setting the story at a quirky crumbling resort hotel on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, among a youngish beautiful couple who are celebrating their honeymoon, the husband obviously a wounded Iraq War veteran and who just happens to be there for professional reasons too, in charge of painting a representational mural in the lobby because the grief-stricken dad of one of his fallen comrades happens to work there, and happened to secure the job for him through backroom channels as a favor for a wounded vet.

It's very obvious that Malfi wants us to languish in all of this for awhile, to simply wallow in the atmosphere and heavy characterization of it all; and that's why hardly anything "happens" in the traditional plot-sense throughout almost the entire first half of the novel, with Malfi instead concentrating on establishing a slow, Southern-Gothic-like pace to the entire proceedings. It's what leads us, for example, to only very slowly discovering the unmitigated disaster that actually happened in Iraq while our hero Nick was there, via a series of dreamlike flashbacks that reveal just a tiny bit more each time; the rest of the time is spent, frankly, watching Nick and his new wife have a strange on-again, off-again relationship, as well as witnessing the two of them pick up a strange new resort friend named Isabella, a mysterious dark-skinned beauty who serves two different functions in the husband and wife's individual private lives.

Ah, but as the story continues in its unhurried way, we start seeing more and more the cracks at the edges of the sanity that is holding this surreal atmosphere together; how the mural that Nick has been hired to paint, for example, starts more and more becoming an Iraq-inspired Hironymous-Bosch-style testament to pain and misery, with Nick not even noticing until the staff of the hotel start quietly suggesting that he should just be paid and shown the door and the resort cut its losses. Or how Isabella starts acting more and more strangely around Nick with each passing evening, eventually acquiring a gun and constantly prodding him to violence while the two are liquored up on one of their regular nights out at the island's jazz clubs. It is then and only then that we even start getting a hint of why this novel might be called a "horror" one, and why a basement press known for horror like Raw Dog would want to publish it in the first place; and that's an interesting thing, I think, a minimalist and atmospheric genre thriller, where the entire point is to be deliberately slow and to concentrate on the kinds of things that most genre thrillers don't.

But like I mentioned, there are problems with this manuscript as well, problems not overwhelming in nature but too big to be ignored; and some of these problems, frankly, are inherent in the very tricks that Malfi uses to great effect too. For example, there is definitely a certain point for everyone I think with this book where you simply start shouting, "Okay, it's raining! You're moody! Things are weird! Will you just f--king get on with it, already?!" and that this point comes at different places in the manuscript depending on who you are. I also think, for example, that Malfi was influenced by the trippy 1990 Adrian Lyne Vietnam-vet horror movie Jacob's Ladder, but failed to match the exquisite and complex weirdness that Lyne managed to capture in that particular project, and also failed to make Iraq seem like anything else but a third-rate Vietnam television drama with sand substituted for jungle. And yes, I think that Malfi is guilty here of something I've complained about before from white male authors, the thing that the Onion AV Club in their infinitely smartass wisdom refer to as the "Magic Negro;" of having that one deliberately weirdo black character who always acts in a delicious magical-realism kinda way, using horrific "magical rural black guy" vernacular and voice that so obviously comes from a nerdy white guy, as cringingly embarrassing as watching your uncle get drunk at a wedding reception and suddenly decide that he too knows how to rap. ("I'm your uncle DAN and I'm here to SAY, that things are ILL DOPE on Mary's wedding DAY!") Seriously, white guys, enough with the Magic-Negro vernacular already.

But all these things I think are minor problems only, things that will naturally go away with each continued year of Malfi's career as a novelist; much more interesting, I think, are the new directions in genre-writing that Malfi goes with this manuscript, and the fact that there are publishers out there like Raw Dog ready to take chances on such literature, to sign such books and spend a certain amount of money on each one, and really try to be a public advocate for these types of envelope-pushing projects. In a world where reading novels for pleasure is becoming a daily activity for less and less people, I think such books as Via Dolorosa to be particularly important, in that they imagine old genres in new and exciting ways, even as most such projects also contain the kinds of problems that will justify a person turning their nose at them, if a person is determined to turn their nose and is just looking for an excuse to do so. If you're generous with Malfi, if you're willing to let him slide on a few mistakes, you'll find a startlingly original novel here in Dolorosa, one that I in particular am very glad I took the time to read, even knowing that some people will laugh at me for saying so. I will always take the slightly flawed work of a sincere artist in partnership with a struggling basement company over the more polished work of a team of corporate charlatans; as I mentioned, that's the entire reason I opened CCLaP, and I hope that the creative professionals I recommend here reflect that overall mission.

Out of 10:
Story: 7.2
Characters: 8.2
Style: 9.2
Overall: 8.2, or 9.2 for fans of atmospheric horror stories

[Travis Prino · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

[Mike Kazmierczak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I need to immediately start this saying that I did not finish this book. I got a little more than halfway through (52% according to Kindle) when I gave up. The book started fine; it was a tad slow moving along. However, FLOATING STAIRCASE by Malfi was also a slow burn and I liked that book. I figured that Malfi liked to build his way at a slow, comfortable pace. My problem was that I never got hooked into the story. There was nothing pulling me back. I only found one character interesting (Isabella) but she just moved the story around, not moving it forward or backwards. The two main characters (Emma and Nick) just annoyed and frustrated me. I finally realized that nothing was going to pull me in. There was no mystery, no suspense, no drama. That no matter what happened in the second half of the book, I wasn't going to care or be interested. There wasn't even a tad of curiousity that had me wondering how the book would end. At that point, I realized it was useless to continue reading. I do have four more books by Malfi on my To Be Read stack so I'm not giving up on him. This one though just did not work for me.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very different from his other works but still done well. I'm a big Hemingway fan and the style reminded me of Hemingway.

[Mitchell Ashby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does anybody have a copy of this book they are willing to sell?

[Patricia Esposito · Rating 5 out of 5]

When a single cicada lighting on a window creates a climactic tension, compressing all the sorrows of war and relationships into one moment, I know that a novelist has been hard at work, though subtly, from the start. In Via Dolorosa by Ronald Damien Malfi, two children stand at a hotel window, observing the cicada suctioned to the outside, tapping at it when it doesn't move, rattling the panes, and rousing their mother to whisk them away. The cicada remains undisturbed. Malfi gives us one small moment of human curiosity and determination against unflinching nature, and that one moment compresses the horrors of war, the sadness of failed relationships, and the inconsolable sorrow of loss, into the epicenter of the difficult dream that is this novel. From there, what has been smoldering explodes to a final, uneasy release.

Nick D'Nofrio is haunted by his time in Iraq, and the idyllic hotel that is the setting of his honeymoon becomes the heart of guilt and sadness. And Nick isn't alone. A seductive, consuming photographer, who had been brutally raped, films the ruins of the island's storms and tells Nick she wants to photograph the dead children in Iraq, how they're piled in trucks and their "heads turn funny on their necks when they are lifted from the streets." The bell captain wanders the hotel, haunted by his son who died in Iraq under Nick's command, the same ghost who keeps begging Nick to shoot him in the head. Nick's wife follows the call of the limbo contests--how low can you go--watching their marriage disintegrate. A bartender rows out to sea every night in search of his drowned daughter. And the newspapers relate tales of seventeen Chinese divers drowned at sea, while the 17-year cicadas prepare for their island assault.

There is also a jazz musician who remains balanced despite the world around him, balanced under the assault of Isabella's snapshots, as "flashbulbs exploded over and over again, the light briefly igniting Claxton's black skin, over and over making him look like a skeleton." Claxton is a man with the "most unconcerned face" Nick has ever looked upon. Claxton would never find himself in war. In that he resembles the natural world around them. And it's with the natural world that the novel begins.

The setting in Via Dolorosa nearly tells the story throughout, from the rolling slopes of lawns and the verandas shaded with sweeping palms, to the onslaught of the storm that strips "the magnolias bare" and "pounds the sand and the roiling sea," to the desolate, desert landscape of Iraq that haunts Nick and obscenely materializes in the idyllic mural he was hired to paint. The reader gets their first view of the story from the outside looking in, rather than from the character looking out. But rather than create a cold distance from its characters, the effect is all-encompassing, a view of life from the largest perspectives first--from nature and time and how things move in the world, then moving closer to the immediate outskirts of this story (in small things like insecticides being sprayed, which implies by other people who have other complete lives), then finally up close with the characters of this particular tale. For me, this is how the author keeps the world always in sight and moves the reader beyond the broken specks of glass that reflect our immediate lives.

Via Dolorosa is a multi-layered, rich novel that holds the reader firm on a sorrowful journey, but instead of leaving me desolate, I'm oddly consoled. Because somehow the landscape of this author's vision makes me see past the mistakes and the horrors of humanity, see something within reach, maybe something in nature's constant rejuvenation and people's constant need to create and their longing to forgive and be forgiven. I suggest taking this path; step into Via Dolorosa and let it take you.

[Brice · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Malfi's heaviest books. Long, winding descriptive passages and minimal dialogue may exorcise this short novel from some readers' list and that would be a tragedy. A tale of an Iraqi war veteran struggling with a failing marriage, the ghosts of the war and questions of whether he actually returned home make this an emotional read.
This stands out from Malfi's other novels and while it carries some of his trademark features it comes off like a different writer trying to mimic his style.
An amazing work that leaves many questions rattling in your head long after you close it.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Via Dolorosa is a book full of subtle metaphors as well as expressive descriptions, and offers something new to the reader with every encounter. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a thoughtful and rewarding read. Overall, I enjoyed Via Dolorosa and look forward to future books by Ronald Damien Malfi.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: My company published this book

A dark and brooding novel full of beautiful descriptions that really bring the setting to life. You can read this one for the atmosphere alone