Black Plague for Everyone! — Paul Finch’s King Death

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Robert

UK author Paul Finch has quietly built a solid body of work over the last decade, including three novels, seven collections, two British Fantasy awards and an International Horror Guild award, to say nothing of his work for the silver screen, which includes several optioned screenplays, and the recently released The Devil’s Rock (which I can attest is a fun flick). For his latest work, Finch has joined forces with chapbook publisher Spectral Publications to produce King Death, a picture-perfect period piece of historical horror set during the time of Europe’s Black Plague.

The story opens with an arresting scene, gazing upon a cavalcade of cadavers, a literal death-march carried on by the horses despite the condition of their riders and carriage-goers:

“…he had witnessed many horrors over the last year, yet there was something especially odious about this. The combination, perhaps, of rich awning, elaborate fashion, opulent garb – with the caked blood and seeping pus of a thousand plague sores, with the drone of feeding bluebottles.

How long had these dead folk been on the move, he wondered? Hours? Days? Where were they travelling from, and where to? No-one would ever know now. The stench was hideous – the stomach-turning fetor that hung over everything in these unhappy days, yet swam in waves from this grisly spectacle, this mobile feast for crows.”

There are only two characters in Finch’s tale: Rodric, a thief masquerading in a dead knight’s armor, who’s proven immune to the Plague and is now looting his way across a ravaged countryside; and the young boy he encounters in the wastelands, who has been orphaned by the death of his entire family and everyone else employed by his former Lord, and who is now gone in search of Death. When the boy comes upon Rodric, the petty criminal pompously announces that he is “King Death” — a proclamation that he will ultimately regret. To say much more would entail a spoiler, so I’ll refrain.

Even though King Death is only 14 pages in length, Finch manages to render a detailed, immersive venue, partially due to his liberal use of historically-accurate language and terminology, which serves to imbue the proceedings with a sense of verity. The only drawback is that the meaning of many of the words were unknown to me (and would be to most readers), and I was forced to infer or guess their meaning. Upon finishing the story, I discovered a handy glossary at the back of the chapbook, a reference which would have been better placed before the story, I believe.

Regardless, King Death is both atmospheric and authentic, a rewarding exercise in medieval madness.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

SoCal Creatures — A review of Lisa Morton’s Monsters of L.A.

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Robert

As I commented in my previous reviews of The Lucid Dreaming and The Castle of Los Angeles, Lisa Morton’s fiction output has recently increased significantly. In the last couple of years, she’s published not only that novel and novella, but also the novella The Samhanach and the collection Monsters of L.A., the latter of which I’ll be taking a closer look at here.

Published by Bad Moon Books, Monsters of L.A. is Morton’s first collection and includes 20 stories, all published here for the first time. Each story is named for and focuses on a classic trope — such as Dracula, the Mummy, the Werewolf, and the Hunchback — but each bears a twist that makes it a distinctively L.A. story. Take, for example, the aforementioned “The Mummy,” in which a vain trophy wife in search of the latest in skin treatments finds more than she bargained for behind the doors of a new spa with Egyptian influences. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” features a doctor specializing in gender reassignment whose zeal for greater efficacy leads her to try an experimental drug on herself, resulting in…well, you can imagine, given the title. In “The Invisible Woman,” a nondescript and oft-ignored woman begins to take advantage of her inconspicuous status. A unique perspective — that of the house itself, wanting to be rid of the crew of a Ghost Hunters-style TV series — distinguishes “The Haunted House.” And “Cat People” stands out due to its effective use of the Latin American legend of “La Japonesa” legend, transplanted to Southern California by the workers who migrated there.

Many of the tales are less horrific and more focused on other emotions, such as the poignant “Quasimodo,” wherein a gay high school student tries to finish the musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame that he’s creating while fending off abuse from fellow students. Or the darkly comedic “Dracula,” which concerns an aging film star who finds there’s more to fear than just a young upstart actor hastening the decline of his career. Or “The Creature,” which has an attention-grabbing beginning — an amphibious creature crawls from the La Brea tar pits, while onlookers assume it be a publicity stunt — but is too short and ends a little too abruptly, with a little too much of a tongue-in-cheek tone, to be successful. The issues of brevity and “winking” tone are ones that are evident at several points in the collection, and unfortunately detract a bit from the book’s overall impact.

At 55 pages, “The Urban Legend” is drastically longer than any other story in the book and, perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the best story in the book, featuring the Professor and Teaching Assistant from “Cat People” and focusing on legends of a series of hidden tunnels stretching beneath LA. It’s worth noting that this is not the only story to re-use elements from elsewhere — a handful of other stories are loosely-connected to one another and one features a reference to Morton’s novel The Castle of Los Angeles. These are neat little touches that serve to unify the shared milieu, creating more of a cohesive whole, and I would’ve liked to have seen Morton do more of this. Story notes close out the collection nicely, with Morton describing the inspiration for each of the tales.

Writing twenty original stories for a collection is admirable but challenging, and Morton is not up to the task with every story, but she succeeds more often than not, resulting in an unpredictable and entertaining collection.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Taste of England — Charlotte Bond’s Hunter’s Moon and Paul Kane’s Pain Cages

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Robert

UK writer Charlotte Bond has shown promise with some of her short stories, in markets such as Dark Horizons and Spinetinglers. Hunter’s Moon, a 114-page novella from Screaming Dreams, is her first longer work and it unfortunately does not build on the promise shown in her short fiction. Hunter’s Moon focuses on four twentysomethings, two male and two female, who were friends in college, have since stayed in touch, and are now embarking on a vacation to a remote rental cottage in the French countryside. Faster than you can say “that sounds like a standard set-up for a horror movie,” unsettling warning signs begin to emerge, including strange sounds from the attic, vivid shared dreams, and waking “hallucinations.”

The nearby ruins of a castle, once owned by the cruel torturer Lord Moreau, who “worked his serfs to the grave and commanded them with fear,” seems to be the nexus, although only Jenny and Reece, two members of the group who possess some varying degrees of psychic abilities, seem to realize the connection — and the very mortal danger that threatens the foursome. Speaking of said group… it’s their characterizations and annoyingly repetitive interactions that largely serve to detract from the story’s strengths. The aforementioned Jenny and Reece are nominally the heroes, and their unspoken attraction to one another initially simmers just beneath the surface before eventually turning lukewarm and then stone cold (from the standpoint of the reader’s interest). The other two members are Eleanor, notable both for her self-centered, manipulative ways in general and in particular for her desire to get Reece’s attentions and affection; and Steve, whose desire to bed anything that moves is matched only by his frequent and inane attempts at humor. Not that Steve has a license on ill-timed and awkward humor…late in the story, a stripped and bound Reece says to Jenny:

“I always hoped you [sic] see me n-naked, but n-never like this,” he joked.
“We’ve no time for idiotic remarks, Reece.”

Indeed.

There is some real tension built in the latter stages of the story, as Moreau seeks to fully return from beyond the grave, but the deadline for his would-be re-emergence seems strangely contrived, and the dialog in the climactic scene is painfully melodramatic. All in all, Hunter’s Moon is occluded by some rather unfortunate clouds.

*  *  *

Like some other authors I’ve reviewed recently, Paul Kane has proven impressively prolific during his career, with 16 titles produced in the last 10 years, to say nothing of a couple non-fiction titles and several anthologies he’s edited. His name is not as well known to US readers as some of the other fecund folks I’ve covered — such as Tim Lebbon, Michael McBride, and Ronald Malfi — no doubt largely due to the fact he’s British and many of his titles have appeared only from UK-based publishers.

Kane’s new collection, Pain Cages, is an exception to that, appearing courtesy of US publisher Books of the Dead Press. Pain Cages focuses on longer works, gathering four novellas, two of which are original to this collection. In his Introduction, Stephen Volk says that after reading this book “…you’ll realize ultimately that though the rough path through Paul Kane’s world involves a lot of pain and anguish, the pain isn’t what the journeys are about. Not really.”

There’s a lot of truth in what Volk says, because although the path through Kane’s work is indeed sometimes rough (in terms of both the characters’ journeys and, occasionally, the writing), and certainly describes no small amount of pain, the stories are fundamentally far more than mere exercises in sadism or vicarious shivers.

Take, for example, the eponymous title story, which appears here for the first time and leads off the collection. The protagonist, Chris, awakes in darkness, trapped in a cage with no memory of how he got there, nor the other unfortunate souls in adjacent cages, one of whom is being tortured and killed. As time slowly passes in his small prison, Chris finds out precious little about his captors or how he arrived in these circumstances, and his fellow captives are similarly clueless, but the reader gradually learns of Chris’s backstory via interspersed flashbacks. When Chris finally escapes his cage, the sights that await him as he seeks a way out of the facility initially seem a little over-the top metaphysically, but the denouement is unexpected yet perfectly appropriate

The other original novella, “Halflife,” is not nearly as accomplished, chronicling the fates of a former pack of teen werewolves, who’re reuniting due to the realization that someone may now, all these years later, be stalking them one by one. Reprint “Signs of Life” is sort of the dark literary equivalent of the mosaic approach that has proven so popular in films of the last decade or so, including the likes of Magnolia, Crash, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, and oh-so-many more. In Kane’s take on the approach, the perspective switches between several strangers on a train, each with a distinct and interesting backstory, and the focus is naturally on how their destinies ultimately intertwine and collide. It’s a well-done story, but I found the numerous astrological interludes, clearly intended to be a key aspect, to be distracting and failing to add anything to the work.

The collection closes with a very strong reprint, “The Lazarus Condition,” which begins with something of a “Monkey’s Paw” feel to it, as Matthew Daley suddenly shows up on his mother’s doorstep, despite the fact he’s been dead for seven years. Mrs. Daley and the police refuse to believe the interloper is truly Matthew, and his “ex-widow” joins that camp as well, leaving Matthew friendless and alone until he finally convinces a a nurse, who has first-hand knowledge of his case, to help him. Along the way Matthew’s story becomes even stranger, as he displays first a supernatural knowledge of others’ backgrounds (and, especially, sources of guilt) and later further extraordinary abilities, leading up to a confrontation with the man who killed him. It’s an engaging tale, and despite the presence of reanimated corpses, it’s about as far from a traditional zombie story as one can get.

There’s an impressive array of laudatory quotations fronting Pain Cages, from the likes of Clive Barker, Christopher Golden, Graham Joyce, and Sarah Langan, and while I can’t wholeheartedly agree with the most adulatory of those remarks, I can certainly concur that Kane’s insights into the human condition shine through the often cruel and harsh world that he depicts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

No One Can Hear You Scream – Simon Kurt Unsworth’s Quiet Houses

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Robert

A few months back I read Simon Kurt Unsworth’s collection Lost Places from Ash-Tree Press and found several highlights contained within, but also a couple…less-exceptional pieces. Unsworth’s new mini-collection from Dark Continents Press, Quiet Houses displays no such problems with inconsistency, instead presenting a uniformly excellent line-up. As the title implies, the horror found within these pages is of the “quiet” variety, as perhaps best exemplified by the work of the late Charles L. Grant — no gore or in-your-face creatures, but nonetheless very, very chilling.

Quiet Houses is a portmanteau collection of seven linked stories, five original to this volume, all revolving around paranormal researcher Richard Nakata, who — we eventually discover — has been hired by the attorney Tidyman to locate people who’ve had genuine experiences with the supernatural and document their encounters, so they can be used as reference material in a trial. In some of the stories, Nakata winds up being the protagonist, while others relate the experiences of his interview subjects. Throughout the first few entries, there are numerous allusions to an incident at the Glasshouse Estates involving Nakata’s former girlfriend Amy, although much is left unexplained.

The stories are simply named,  reflecting their locales (which, by the way, are extremely well-rendered), as with “The Merry House, Scale Hall,” which is related via a letter sent from the adult son (since disappeared) of one of Nakata’s subjects. While helping to search for a missing little girl, the son discovers the eponymous house, and the ultimate darkness within. “There is another world below this one,” the son says in his letter, “a world inhabited by ghost and demons and all the things that we have lost that we should not find again.”

The chilling “Beyond St. Patrick’s Chapel, Heysham Head” is a pitch-perfect tale in which Nakata visits a cemetery and finds several invisible beings, their presence betrayed only by the trail they leave across the grass, following him and then “herding” him into a cul-de-sac before he manages a narrow escape.

“The Temple of Relief and Ease” concerns the haunting of a most unlikely locale — a public men’s room — by the ghost of a wounded WWI veteran, whose injuries relegated him to the role of washroom attendant for more than four decades, a sentence that imprinted his frustration as a palpable presence in the now-abandoned room. Encountering that presence, Nakata wonders: “Forty three years, he thought. Forty three years here… How had the war affected Tulketh, he wondered?  Was he missing an arm… Or was it something less obvious, damage written on the inside of his skin rather than the outside.”

When Tidyman finally forces Nakata to face his own memories, we find out why Nakata refers to Amy in the past tense, and why he has avoided thinking about the incident. As he muses: “Since Amy…he sometimes felt like the things he investigated: only half there, less than real.” The collection closes with the story of the trial for which Nakata has been gathering data, and a nighttime field trip by the jury to the scene of the crime, complete with a barn full of homicidal ghost-cows (it’s much more frightening than it sounds!).

Quiet Houses is a darkly brilliant collection, a dusky jewel that deserves your attention as well as consideration from award judges.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A round-up of new horror small presses

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Robert

tThe list that I maintain of active small presses whose output is predominantly horror, dark suspense, or dark fantasy continues to grow, with the count growing to a rather astonishing 138 publishers. Over the last few months, I’ve added no less than 27 presses and imprints to the list, and I’ll summarize each of those 27 below.

The following presses are recently launched, recently discovered by me, or recently re-evaluated and found worthy of inclusion.

  • Acid Grave Press – an ebook-only publisher with one title to their credit so far — the anthology Living After Midnight, which contains six stories inspired by hard-rock/heavy-metal songs, by authors such as Randy Chandler, L.L. Soares, and David T. Wilbanks.
  • Altar 13 – a new imprint from Delirium Books publisher Shane Ryan Staley, which seeks to take classic genre titles that have only been published in paperback and reprint them in hardcover for collectors.
  • Bandersnatch Books – debuted in 2010 and has published a chapbook by T.M. Wright, a novella by K.H. Koehler, and an anthology, Dead West, containing some familiar names. Their website is currently a bit of a mess, however — among other issues, the “Bookstore” page offers no way to actually purchase any of the titles.
  • Belfire Press – a mult-genre publisher with 13 titles to their credit, including horror titles such as Gregory L. Hall’s At the End of Church Street, Aaron Polson’s Loathsome, Dark and Deep, K.V. Taylor’s Scripped, and several anthologies.
  • Black Room Books and the Zombie Feed – two new imprints of Apex Publications. The former will publish both horror and science fiction, with their first title being a reprint of Tim Waggoner’s novel, Like Death, while the latter is yet another zombie-focused publisher, with three novels/novellas and an anthology published.
  • Blasphemous Books – an ebook-only imprint of Black Death Books, with a single title so far, a min-collection by John Everson.
  • Camelot Books – restored to the active publisher list after previously assumed to be moribund (probably my mistake). Recent titles include a collection by Ray Garton and an anthology of four novellas that includes Brian Keene and Nate Southard.
  • Crossroad Press – formerly appearing to be only a distributor of ebooks from other publishers, but now publishing both print and ebooks under their own imprint. CP has quickly become a prolific publisher of ebooks, with recent titles from Elizabeth Massie, Tom Piccirilli, and Chet Williamson, among many others.
  • Dark Prints Press – Australian press founded in 2010, with three anthologies and a collection by Martin Livings to their credit.
  • Dark Silo Press – published a novel by Brian Kaufman, but an anthology originally scheduled for March 2011 still hasn’t appeared, so viability of this press may already be in question.
  • Fungasm Press – a new imprint from bizarro publisher Eraserhead Press, “Fungasm Press grounds its weirdest ideas in contemporary realities, meeting at the freaky juncture where genre and mainstream collide with indescribable strangeness.” Fungasm will publish 2-3 titles per year, starting with Laura Lee Bahr’s debut novel, Haunts.
  • Harrow Press – longtime publisher of The Harrow magazine began publishing POD books in 2007 and has so far produced two anthologies, with a third in the works.
  • Hersham Horror Books – UK-based publishers of the Alt-Dead anthology, with two more anthologies announced.
  • House of Murky Depths – UK publisher of a namesake magazine, several graphics novels, and four novels by Sam Stone.
  • Innsmouth Free Press – Canadian publisher of a novel and three anthologies, most recently Future Lovecraft, which features authors such as Nick Mamatas, Jesse Bullington, and James S. Dorr.
  • LegumeMan Books – an Australian press “devoted to extreme and/or unusual fiction for extreme and/or unusual people,” with twelve titles already to their credit, including novels by Steve Gerlach and Brett McBean.
  • NECON E-Books – Leveraging the connections he’s made from running the eponymous convention for thirty years, publisher Bob Booth has assembled an impressive roster of writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Golden, Charles L. Grant, Tom Monteleone, and Tim Lebbon. Despite the press’ name, they do offer print editions of some titles.
  • Necro Publications –  moved from moribund back to the Active Publisher list after recently publishing the Jeffrey Thomas novel Blood Society and an ebook-only collection by Edward Lee, Grimoire Diabolique.
  • Panic Press – UK-based multi-genre publisher with 11 books published already, including titles such as Jason Whittle’s The Dead Shall Feed and Nate D. Burleigh’s Sustenance.
  • Rainstorm Press – another multi-genre publisher, with apparent vanity leanings, as all four announced titles are either written or edited by the owner of the press. If Rainstorm turns out to be strictly vanity, they’ll be removed from the list.
  • Rocket Ride Books – SF/horror publisher who made an interesting debut with a new edition of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? (basis for three movie versions of The Thing), available in print and audio versions. Their second title is William F. Nolan’s Kincaid: A Paranormal Casebook, “in the tradition of The X-Files and Kolchak.”
  • Sinister Grin Press – launched at KillerCon 2011 with a chapbook containing original stories by Ramsey Campbell, Ray Garton, and Bentley Little, and have announced two upcoming novels from Wrath James White, one solo and one co-written with J.F. Gonzalez.
  • Strange Publications – taking a buffet approach since their 2008 debut by publishing a chapbook, three anthologies, and a collection (by Cate Gardner). As of this writing, their website appears to have been hacked, so it’s unclear how active the press still is.
  • Swan River Press – Ireland-based publisher of 28 chapbooks and mini-hardcovers, some of which are dedicated to writers from decades past (there are multiple Bram Stoker and J. Sheridan La Fanu titles, for example), and some of which feature work from contemporary writers such Gary McMahon, Rosalie Parker and Mark Valentine.
  • Terradan Works – announced as a multi-genre publisher, but their four titles published to date have all been horror or suspense fiction, including books by Jeffrey & Scott Thomas, and Wilum H. Pugmire.
  • Ticonderoga Publications – this Australian multi-genre publisher has been around since 1996, but I only recently concluded that they produce a sufficient amount of horror to be included on the list. Published authors include Terry Dowling and Kaaron Warren, and Ticonderoga recently launched an annual Australian Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror series.
  • West Pigeon Press – Putting forth a prospectus that is, depending on how one looks at it, either extremely ambitious or off-puttingly arrogant, WPP has one title so far, the collection You Shall Never Know Security, by J.R. Hamantaschen, which certainly sounds intriguing.

Conversely, the only publishers removed from the publisher list since my last column are Snuff Books and Twisted Publishing, both of which seem to have sunk without a trace. With 27 presses added to the list vs. just two removed, either the horror small press field is faring better than the overall economy, or the genre has a knack for converting overly-optimistic fans into would-be publishers.

While I’m talking numbers, the other thing I took the time to total up is how many of the 138 presses on the list are publishing at least some of their titles in ebook format. The result?  No fewer than 56 presses (40%) have jumped on the ebook train, strong evidence of the growing adoption of ebook formats.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Curran Events – Reviews of Tim Curran’s THE SPAWNING, BONE MARROW STEW, and FEAR ME

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Robert

I’ve been on quite a reviewing roll lately —  I’ve found at least something to like about every single book I’ve read for the past three months or more, and in several of them I’ve found quite a lot to like. My streak mostly continues with this post, which examines not one, not two, but three titles by Tim Curran, an impressively prolific writer who fortunately doesn’t sacrifice quality to achieve quantity.

First up is The Spawning, a meaty novel from Elder Signs Press that effectively combines eldritch Lovecraftian horrors with shape-shifting aliens a la The Thing, all in a harsh, foreboding Antarctic winter setting of nearly perpetual night.

The novel kicks off with a bang-bang prologue that seems like it will be impossible to follow, but Curran keeps the action flowing through the course of 125 short, punchy chapters. The plot initially bounces frequently between several Antarctic locales — The Polar Clime Station, NOAA Field Lab Polaris, and the Emperor Ice Cave — making the action a little hard to follow at times, especially given the large palette of characters used, but fortunately none of those characters seem cliched or stereotypical, and the identities of the primary figures are soon well-established.

Chief among them is Nick Coyle, the camp cook and confidante at Polar Clime Station and a veteran of 12 Antarctic winters. His good friend Frye and friend-with-benefits Gwen are also frequently on stage, and its eventually the plight of these three that the reader comes to most strongly identify with.

When a helicopter from the clandestine, military-controlled Colony Station crashes, a Polar Clime rescue team is first to arrive on scene and sees in the wreckage the body of something alien…and terrifying. Meanwhile, the research crew stationed at the Emperor Ice Cave make the ill-advised decision to thaw out their own alien discovery. The awakening creatures initially manifest their presence in the thoughts and nightmares of nearby humans, but then later in a more physical fashion. For those trapped in the station, all hell literally begins to break loose.

Curran leverages his setting well, juxtaposing the vast, foreboding Antarctic ice fields with the claustrophobic confines of polar shelters. Finally, Curran’s depiction of the shoggoths and shapeshifters are vivid and well realized, and his descriptions of the Old Ones’ master plans are likewise chilling, as here:

“Its kind waited it all out, sleeping away down here in their frozen tombs in black cellars of dead cities while men rose from ape-like ancestors and skittered across hillsides like white ants, self-important, brimming with conceit over their mastery of nature and their rising rudimentary intellect, never knowing, never guessing in their supreme arrogance that they had been engineered, created to fulfill a purpose and that purpose was to be harvested, wheat to the scythe as the Old Ones had engineered, modified, and harvested so many life forms.”

The Spawning is 384 pages of tiny print, easily 500 pages in a more standard font size and layout, and despite the onslaught of action, it does drag a little at times, usually when Curran gets a little overly fixated on providing a thorough description, and winds up saying essentially the same thing two or three different ways. That’s minor criticism, however, for a book that features generally stalwart pacing, admirable character development and — notably — strong, believable dialog.

The Spawning is sub-titled “Book Two of the Hive series,”  and on the plus side, I didn’t feel like I missed anything by not having read Book 1, but the ending of this novel does seem more like a pause than a conclusion, which is not unusual for the 2nd book in a trilogy. Hopefully there won’t be a five-year gap between books 2 and 3, as there was between books 1 and 2.

Bone Marrow Stew, a collection of Curran’s short fiction from Tasmaniac Publications, is another large volume, coming in at 455 pages, although the typeface is of a more standard size here. The book gathers 17 stories, with publication dates ranging from 1995 to 2007, plus two originals. It’s likely no coincidence that my favorite stories were consistently the longer ones, wherein Curran has more opportunity to develop his characters and his plotlines.

A case in point is the science fiction/horror tale “Migration,” which — like The Spawning — focuses on a group trapped inside an outpost under siege from outside forces — in the case, the group are part of a mining operation on the planet Cygni-5, and suddenly find themselves in the migrational path of a previously-unknown species of deadly arthropod. Although “The Chattering of Tiny Teeth” and “Long in the Tooth” feature vastly different settings, with the former taking place on the battlefields of World War I and the latter in the contemporary English marsh country, both build creepy atmosphere and feature similar creatures — small, childlike, but hungry and lethal. “The Legend of Black Betty” is a voodoo western, with a high Priestess cum bordello madame transplanted from New Orleans to Nevada, where she is angered by the local settlers and takes out her vengeance via a zombie uprising.  In “The Wreck of the Ghost,” a 19th-century whaling vessel encounters Cthulhu on the high seas, while in “One Dark September Night…” what starts out as an innocent coming-of-age story takes a very nasty turn when three boys find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, spying upon a man burying a body. As you can see from the wide variety of locales and subject matter, Curran is no one-trick pony — he writes on a variety of subjects, employing diverse styles, and the result is almost always entertaining.  There are only a small handful of stories here that I didn’t care all that much for.  The author does still at times display a tendency to become verbose and repetitive in his descriptive passages, but for the most part this doesn’t detract significantly from the stories’ impact.

The collection is rounded out with an Afterword from Curran, wherein he explains the genesis of each story. As an aside, I had wondered, given that Curran is American, why he had two titles appear recently from Australian publishers — this collection as well as Zombie Pulp from Severed Press. Curran’s Afterword offers a likely explanation, as he mentions that he appeared in all 10 issues of the Australian magazine Dark Animus, a fact that no doubt helped introduce his work to Australian readers and publishers.

Providing a fine overview of Curran’s shorter fiction, Bone Marrow Stew is limited to 250 signed, numbered copies, and also includes signatures from Intro-writer Simon Clark and artist Keith Minnion. It’s sub-titled Collected Works – Volume One, so perhaps Tasmaniac has plans for more Curran.

Last up in Tim’s trio is the novel Fear Me
 from Delirium Books. So, does this book complete a top-notch trifecta for Curran?  Well, not quite.  Fear Me is certainly not a bad book, but the repetitive passages that occasionally detract from the two titles discussed earlier are much more painfully apparent here in a story which, at 202 pages, is stretched well beyond what would seem to be the comfortable limits of the rather bare-bones plot.

Protagonist Romero is a hard-ass convict who’s a long-term resident of maximum-security Shaddock Valley prison. When he gets a rather wimpy-looking new cellmate, one Danny Palmquist, Romero figures it’s only a matter of time before Danny is forced to become a Daniela, made to perform sexual acts and stripped of all dignity and self-respect. Sure enough, Palmquist is not even in-house for 24 hours before the brutalization begins. But what Romero and the other cons don’t realize is that Palmquist is more than he appears. Far more.

At his last stop in the penal system, Brickhaven, multiple unexplained killings were left in his wake, resulting in his transfer to Shaddock Valley. And just like clockwork, Palmquist’s initial attacker at his latest correctional facility is soon found murdered, while locked in his cell. And not just murdered, as Curran describes:

“Weems looked like a pillow that had its stuffing scattered in every conceivable direction. His insides were on the floor, smeared on the walls, dripping from the ceiling.”

Despite the grisly fate that meets Palmquist’s attacker, there’s no shortage of others looking to do him harm, starting with an assassin seeking payback for the deaths that previously occurred at Brickhaven. Even though he knows better, Romero inexplicably begins to feel bad for his new cellie, and starts looking out for him… not that Palmquist really needs the help, given the seemingly supernatural presence that extracts revenge on anyone looking to do him harm.

Events proceed pretty much predictably, culminating in a bloody riot. None of the characters ever manage to rise above stereotypes, not even Romero, who at least does the unexpected at times, but he’s never given a backstory to make him more than two-dimensional. All in all, Fear Me isn’t a bad way to spend a few hours, but it’s far from Curran’s best work.



Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nightmares from Screaming Dreams — the enigmatic Herbert van Thal

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Robert

The Pan Book of Horror series ran for 30 volumes, between 1959 and 1989, with the first 25 installments edited by Herbert van Thal.  The series was notable both for its emphasis on contes cruels (and some would say too strong of a reliance upon tales of outright sadism) and for its strong sales numbers, at least for the early part of the series. In the biography/tribute Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares (Screaming Dreams Press, 2011), author Johnny Mains turns the spotlight on the somewhat mysterious and reclusive van Thal, who died in 1983, and delivers a a fascinating glimpse into the life of an eccentric but influential (at least in the horror field) man.

A slim 89 pages, the book is divided into five sections: a biography; a checklist of published works; facsimile reprints of some of van Thal’s correspondence with Pan authors; author interviews and comments; and a reprint of an article Mains wrote on van Thal for SFX magazine. The biography section is less than 40 pages, and leaves one wanting for quite a bit more, but it was obviously difficult for Mains to find many folks who actually knew van Thal, and were willing to talk about him. As Mains says:

“It took over a year to try and find a photograph of him and everywhere I turned I hit wall after wall. When trying to delve into his dealings as a literary agent at London Management nobody from those days who worked in the same building as HvT was willing to speak to me…”

Although the book’s smorgasbord approach to its subject matter feels a little disjointed at times, it makes for what is overall a compelling and insightful read. I should note, however, that I was never completely won over by Mains’ argument regarding the importance of his subject — “I believe that Herbert van Thal is one of the most overlooked yet important anthologists that this country has ever seen.” Given the critical disdain for much of the series, and the (admirably) blunt comments that Mains himself makes about many of the stories, it’s difficult to agree that van Thal deserves such accolades based on the quality of his output, although the quantity (i.e., sales figures) was indeed distinguished.

Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares is a very attractive book, featuring a striking cover portrait of van Thal by Les Edwards, and is limited to just 100 numbered copies, signed by Mains and Edwards. It may be necessary to be a horror geek like me to truly appreciate this labor of love (and it probably wouldn’t hurt to be British, either, in order to appreciate some of the local flavor), but for those with an abiding interest in the history of horror, there’s much to like here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Mucho Malfi – Ronald Malfi’s FLOATING STAIRCASE and SKULLBELLY

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Robert

A few months back, I picked up a copy of Ronald Malfi’s novel Passenger, with no real expectations, and was very pleasantly surprised by the suspenseful tale I found within. I’ve been planning to try more Malfi ever since then, and two recent titles gave me that opportunity — the novel Floating Staircase from Thunderstorm Books and the novella Skullbelly from Delirium Books.

Floating Staircase tells the story of horror novelist Travis Glasgow, who’s recently moved with his wife Jodie to a small town in Maryland, to a house just down the street from his older brother, Adam. But not just any house, as Travis soon discovers. He gradually pieces together his new home’s backstory, starting with a creepy, hidden bedroom in the basement and culminating in the discovery that the house’s previous family included a boy, Elijah, who apparently drowned in the lake behind the house, although his body was never found.

Travis’ curiosity about Elijah rapidly spirals into an all-out obsession, spurred in part by similarities between Elijah’s death and that of Travis’ younger brother Kyle, who was killed in a diving accident at age 13. It becomes apparent that Kyle’s death has affected Travis far more deeply than he’s ever been able to admit, a fact made abundantly clear when brother Adam points out that all of Travis’ novels feature a character who drowns or almost drowns, or an apparition rising from a lake, a revelation that leads Travis to further realize that the titles of his four books — The Ocean Serene, Silent River, Drowning Pool, and Water View — also reflect a certain preoccupation with water.

A series of strange sights and sounds, including repeated occurrences of wet footprints, serve to fuel Travis’ fixation and lead the reader to question whether there’s something supernatural afoot or Travis is a classically unreliable narrator. Observations from Malfi such as the following serve to further add to the mystery:

“…nature does not know extinction. In effect, it knows only change: nothing ever truly disappears, for there is always something—some part, some particle, some formidable semblance— left behind.”
My biggest concern while reading this fine novel was whether there was really enough plot to support the book’s 330-page length. To Malfi’s credit, he easily meets that challenge, delivering a taut thriller with strong character development and nary a bit of padding.And if Floating Staircase is taut, then Skullbelly
 is downright skintight, weighing in at a lean, mean 135 pages. Seattle-based private investigator John Jeffers has been hired to determine what happened to three teenagers who disappeared while on a camping trip in Oregon, and why only a single surviving member of the party, Tommy Downing, came staggering out of the woods, wounded and catatonic. Jeffers finds that the local police investigation was perfunctory at best, and perhaps purposely superficial.

Jeffers’ detective work leads to an encounter with a local artist, who relates the legend of the eponymous creature:

 

“They say it looks sort of like a man, if you don’t look too closely at it, only bigger than a man. It’s hair- less, too, and with skin like rubber. It’s got large claws on its hands and a dagger-like spike on each foot, which it uses to pierce the thick trunks of the redwoods so it can climb. Legend says it lives among the redwoods and eats bad children who don’t listen to their parents… it had this large, bulbous belly, and when it would eat a lot of children and get real fat, the skin of its belly would pull so taut that it would become transparent and you could see the partially-digested bodies of the children in there, sizzlin’ in its stomach acids.”
A subsequent trip to the edge of the dark, unforgiving forest where the kids disappeared results in a close encounter with…something unseen, leaving Jeffers a bit shaken and not quite so skeptical about local folklore.Jeffers is an offbeat protagonist, a 52-year-old loner and jazz aficionado; a former cop who was forced to leave the force after being wounded in a shooting. He’s cynical, self-deprecating, and occasionally bemused about where life has led him — in short, he seems like a real person, not just another fictional PI.

If there’s fault to be found with Skullbelly, it’s that the ending is a bit abrupt, and the whole thing feels like the first section of a longer work, not a complete story in and of itself. I’d like to read the longer version of the story if one should ever come to pass, but in the meantime Skullbelly is a fast, intriguing read.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Going Southard

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Robert

I reviewed Nate Southard’s He Went Through a while ago, and my very favorable impressions of that chapbook led me to search out more Southard, which brings me to two recent titles — Scavengers and This Little Light of Mine.

Let’s start with Scavengers, one of the first wave of titles from the zombie-focused Print Is Dead, an imprint of Creeping Hemlock Press. Scavengers is an expansion of a graphic novel, A Trip to Rundberg, which Southard earlier scripted. In his Acknowledgments, Southard states “The first two drafts of this novel were written in just over a week.” It wouldn’t be fair to say that the pace at which the book was written is evident in the finished product, but it is fair to say, I think, that expanding the story to novel length may be stretching it a bit beyond the plot’s comfortable limits.

Scavengers starts out seeming like your standard-issue “survival in a post-zombie-apocalypse world” story, with the only question being who, if anyone, will survive. The plot focuses on the plight of the small midwestern town of Millwood, which is a relatively safe outpost, but one that’s rapidly running out of food. Faced with the prospect of slow starvation, the town elects to send a scavenger party of five — three of whom are selected via lottery — to a supermarket in the neighboring town of Rundberg, which is believed to be overrun by zombies. Not surprisingly, the ragtag group is ill-prepared for the ghoulish gauntlet that awaits them.

Featured foremost among the quintet are Blake Ellis, an honorable young man forced to leave behind the woman he’s come to love, and Chris Stevenson, who, to be blunt, is an asshole of world-class proportions. In fact, it’s borderline unbelievable just what a jerk Stevenson is, even in light of what we eventually learn about his past. His behavior, and the other characters’ reactions, at times grows tedious, as there are only so many times that one can read variations on passages like the following:

“[Blake] breathed deep and swallowed the urge to jerk an elbow into the bridge of Stevenson’s nose. The smug prick was really beginning to work his last nerve.”

I feel ya, Blake, I feel ya. Similarly, the characters’ numerous narrow escapes from the hordes of zombies roaming Rundberg start to feel a bit repetitive, with the scenes becoming less tense and almost tiresome.

I’m afraid I’m sounding a bit too harsh, though — it’s not as if Scavengers doesn’t have some redeeming features. For example, the first two-thirds of the story, before the repetition creeps in, features some strong drama and ever-ratcheting tension. And it’s worth noting that, even though flashbacks can often detract from the pace of an action-oriented story like this one, Southard does a great job keeping his backward glances brief, making them informative without being unwelcome interruptions. Finally, there’s a chillingly inventive death scene crafted for one of the characters, and a grimly downbeat ending shortly after that — an upbeat ending would have seemed more than a little incongruous, so kudos to Southard for embracing his dark side.

All in all, Scavengers was a bit of a mixed bag for me, but zombie zealots will likely find much to appreciate.

Much more impressive is Southard’s This Little Light of Mine, a novella from Burning Effigy Press that benefits from wicked pacing sans padding, and features a refreshingly different type of menace. Set entirely in the claustrophobic confines of a parking garage that collapses in the opening scene, the plot focuses on two survivors trapped in the ruins of the garage. Protagonist Brandon is determinedly optimistic and intent on escaping and seeing his wife again, while insurance executive Clair is a bitch on her best days (Southard seems to have a penchant for deploying highly unlikable characters); not surprisingly, the overwhelming fear and stress of the situation brings out her worst.

Literally cloaked in darkness, choked by dust and ringed by rubble, Brandon and Clair struggle to stay calm and keep hope alive. Buried in the underground garage, there’s of course no cell phone signal available, but Brandon finds a hide-a-key on one of the nearby cars, and using the car’s radio is able to tune in a signal from what seems to be the only radio station on the air.

The radio announcer describes nationwide earthquakes and mass devastation, and then Southard twists the knife a little further by having the announcer add:

“Looks like the peanut gallery has decided to join in on the fun, guys and gals,” the man said. “Got reports from all over the damn place now. Ghouls and goblins or whatever coming out of the ground. Just ignore the bullshit, folks. Take care of yourselves and each other. I’ll stay on until they shut me down.”

There’s initially a third, unconscious victim trapped in the garage — Joe, a friend of Clair’s — but as they try to sleep at the end of their first day in the garage, Brandon shuts off the car’s headlights in order to save the battery…and later awakes to the sound of Clair’s screams and the sight of Joe’s eviscerated corpse. It seems the stories of creatures coming out of the underground are not just stories, and that Brandon and Clair’s predicament has gotten even worse.

Weighing in at 52 shuddering, skittering pages, This Little Light of Mine is a riveting read.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mortality Monopoly — Joel Lane’s collection DO NOT PASS GO

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Robert

UK author Joel Lane has produced some extremely impressive work in the last few years, most notably his novella The Witnesses Are Gone, which I reviewed for Cemetery Dance, and his collection The Terrible Changes. Lane’s new chapbook mini-collection, Do Not Pass Go (Nine Arches Press) is interesting because it collects urban crime fiction, as opposed to the surreal and haunting nature of the works I mention above.

The five stories in Do Not Pass Go include four reprints dating from approximately 2002-2007, and one original tale, and they’re all shot through with darkness — it’s no accident that the titles of three of the stories feature the words, “black,” “blue,” and “blues.” Speaking of titles, let’s start with the wonderfully-named “This Night Last Woman,” wherein a regular at a pub’s karaoke night meets a woman he hasn’t seen before and goes home with her, with the expected results…up to a point. When the man later finds that he was seemingly the one one among a string of the woman’s dates to *not* be victimized, he can’t rest until he knows why he was spared…and the reason she gives him is enough to send him straight to the pub, for a very long time.

“Black Dog” draws its title from a heap of asphalt that “looked like a huge  sleeping dog”, and which turns out to be a tarry blanket over the body of a murdered woman who was beaten and then suffocated beneath the paving material. There are more twists and turns to be found in this tale than in the others, and they’re nicely torqued. “Blue Mirror” and “No More the Blues,” meanwhile, are strongly focused on music — one on a failing band and the other on a hard-core fan — and while they both feature well-wrought atmospheres, they strike me as the two slightest tales in the booklet.

Conversely, the last (and most recently-written) story, “Rituals,” is probably the best, detailing the repercussions when a gang looking to use an abandoned building as the venue for a beat-down winds up stumbling on a gay porn filmset in flagrante delicto, and protagonist Finlay accidentally shoots and kills one of the actors.

Sadness, remorse, regret, lost chances and missed opportunities… these are the overriding emotions to be found in Do Not Pass Go. It’s probably a good thing that this is a mini-collection, because a book-length gathering of tales such as these might be enough to spur suicide…but I mean that in a good way. This is truly modern noir, with a distinctly British feel.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment