“Dead people don’t come back. They don’t come back and they can’t hurt you.”
I want you to do something: I want you to read Sarah Pinborough. Start with THE TAKEN. Pin the sentence above to your bed’s footboard, or on your desk, or the ceiling above the couch, or wherever it is you do your reading. You’re going to need it. You shouldn’t need to make several copies of the mantra, as you’re likely to polish the book off in one frantic sitting.
But you will need to repeat it, again and again, if you’re to convince yourself it’s true as you experience Pinborough’s chilling tale of a vengeful murdered girl. It’s one of the best of its kind since Peter Straub’s GHOST STORY. Really.
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They say winners write history and Harry Turtledove writes alternate history. In THE OTHER END, John Shirley writes a futuristic alternative tale of Armageddon – set “about a year from whenever you’re reading it” – until now monopolized by fundamentalists like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
Fundamental religious issues are too often black-and-white. Non-believers are told that eternity is too long to be wrong, regardless how true their moral compass directs them, but rarely do the purveyors of such warnings lose sleep over the idea of Muhammad descending from the clouds instead of Jesus or vice versa. But I’ll leave it to THE OTHER END to deal the proverbial Judgment Day hands.
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Jack Ketchum is very rarely off his game, and I’m delighted to say he is in top form in CLOSING TIME AND OTHER STORIES. This too-thin collection from Gauntlet Press brings together 17 hard-to-find gems, one previously unpublished piece and the brilliant title story, which won the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for long fiction. It’s so good I can almost picture the other finalists drowning their sorrows together in the hotel bar … before the ceremony even began.
It should come as no surprise to his fans that Ketchum pulls off feats of violence and poignancy with equal aplomb, as in “Olivia: A Monologue,” collected here, but those only familiar with novels like THE GIRL NEXT DOOR and especially OFF SEASON will find themselves pleasantly moved reading these stories.
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Richard Matheson had published six novels and three collections of short stories by the summer of 1959, when he attended a private screening of the pilot episode of a new television series called THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Rod Serling, the show’s driving force and the man behind the famous narration which would bookend most episodes, already had purchased and adapted two of Matheson’s stories for the first season – an early indication the author of classics like I AM LEGEND and HELL HOUSE would make the perfect bedfellow for the fledging series. Matheson would go on to write 14 episodes, regarded amongst the series’ all-time best.
RICHARD MATHESON’S THE TWILIGHT ZONE SCRIPTS: VOLUME TWO (I know what you’re thinking, you haven’t read the first one, but that’s okay, because neither have I) begins with “Mute,” long-winded by TZ standards, only because Serling reluctantly went to a short-lived hour-long format to boost ratings in the show’s fourth season.
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A friend of mine noticed a copy of Poppy Z. Brite’s THE DEVIL YOU KNOW on my coffee table, picked it up and said, “That’s … different.” She was referring to the misshapen cat sprawled across the cover, but as I’d come to find shortly thereafter, her first impression was spot-on.
The stories within aredifferent. A couple of them, most notably the FIRESTARTER-esque “Burn, Baby, Burn,” may appear derivative upon first glance, but while readers are likely to think Charlie McGee for a time, they’re more likely to remember Liz Sherman from the Kansas side of Kansas City (Hellboy fans already know her, anyway) with as much fear and cautious adoration. And “System Freeze” is set inside the world of THE MATRIX movies, though Brite tells us in her introduction that the characters are hers. Not a big fan of the films themselves, it’s easily my least favorite story in this volume of gems.
The title story kicks things off after a telling foreword by the author (I sometimes skip these things but even after Brite’s permission to do so, I kept reading). “The Devil You Know” is strange, funny and, like most of the book, compulsively readable. In fact, if you’re looking for the slow, Gothic style employed in Brite’s previous collections like WORMWOOD, you’ll either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised.
Throughout the collection, the writing is tight, the author’s sense of humor soars and the dialogue especially rings true. I’d say that the style lies somewhere between the saturated trappings of the aforementioned WORMWOOD and Brite’s horror novels like EXQUISITE CORPSE, but even that’s not quite right. There’s a maturity here that was never actually missing from her previous efforts, with the best example of this probably being the poignant coming-of-age tale “Lantern Marsh.” Though I never read it in its original form, the author explains that it is an old story — written around 1983 — that she reworked for the Halloween anthology OCTOBER DREAMS.
“The Heart of New Orleans” is current and moving, and “Marisol” will have you remembering the old adage about dishing it out and taking it, and you’ll be smiling and cringing at once. Believe me, it’s possible.
If you’re familiar with the author’s post-horror offerings, you’ll find plenty of familiar characters and voices sprinkled throughout this thin volume. If you’re not, don’t worry — it’s still her best collection yet. –Jason Light
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