For many, Stephen King’s “The Body” (part of his collection DIFFERENT SEASONS, so memorably adapted to film as 1986′s STAND BY ME) is like a hypodermic full of nostalgia jammed straight into the heart. In a story that both conveys and creates a deep sense of loss and longing, King makes you feel the rich potential and the real pain of being young in the summer of 1960 — even if you weren’t young then, or alive.
His new novel, JOYLAND, will be to such fans — and maybe a host of new ones — a glorious return to his glorious returns, a reminder of his artistry in tapping that moment when youth stumbles away from romance into realism.
[click to continue…]
David Searls’ YELLOW MOON has an odd provenance, coming out this month through Samhain Publishing almost 20 years after its initial publication. Its earlier incarnation in mass-market paperback was packaged with a close-up of a child’s face with fierce yellow eyes. The new edition has a (very cool) painting of a bleak volcanic landscape; tomato-like red bulbs on snarled vines in the foreground; a sickly yellow sky; a winged, Q-like beast hovering as if to pounce on the reader.
Is this a reframing of a poorly marketed lost classic? Or something more like mere nostalgia?
[click to continue…]
Two scuzzy, “spun” meth-heads take their first glance out the window after a few days’ sabbatical from the world and get a glimpse of apocalypse: They see a small girl, a vision of “innocence,” approaching a fierce-looking Rottweiler, and they fear for her. And then the dog crouches in fear, cowers away, and the child leaps for it. Hearts hammering, they shriek and close the curtain. A couple moments later, they cautiously peek back out.
… Innocence is standing two feet from the window, bloody like the First World War, and before I can scream and close the drapes, I take one close look, like really study her. Pieces of her flesh peel off her face like thin slices of gyro meat.
[click to continue…]
Samhain Publishing is one of the smaller presses nurturing the authors and the readers in love with genre fiction. Its output has a consistent aesthetic sensibility: a love for core conventions of horror film complemented by an attention to, you know, actual words. Its catalog is populated by promising writers testing, shaping and refining their style, but not at the expense of story — and vice versa.
When I’m grading papers, a nod to the form of an essay (“I appreciate your careful attention to the proper format for headings”) is often the sign of a teacher casting about for something — anything — positive to say, right before lamentations (or rage) about the lack of substance. And I’ll admit that what follows is a modest thumbs-down for the two novellas collected in Greg F. Gifune’s INTO THE SHADOWS.
[click to continue…]
Somewhere in the weird mess that is HEMLOCK GROVE is a germ of a good idea: Two teenagers — one a werewolf, the other a vampire — team up to catch the savage monster preying on the teenage girls in their town.
How anyone could screw up such a simple, yet fun idea as that is beyond me. But debuting author Brian McGreevy, in his effort to reinvent the Gothic horror novel as a tale of modern teen angst (think THE CATCHER IN THE RYE if it were written by Anne Rice — on second thought, don’t), serves up an overwritten and overstuffed novel that ultimately goes nowhere, with a cast of characters that are, well, characters.
[click to continue…]
