Two characteristics distinguish Simon Strantzas from many contemporary horror authors. For one, he prefers the short story format rather than novels (making him, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury, “a sprinter” rather than a “long-distance runner”).

More notable, perhaps, is Strantzas’ preference for subtle, thought-provoking effects in contrast to the graphic, violent shocks that define much of modern horror. Both of these characteristics are wonderfully displayed in NIGHTINGALE SONGS, his third and latest story collection, available from Dark Regions Press.

In a few stories, Strantzas utilizes familiar horror settings and situations. One example is “Out of Touch,” about an 11-year-old boy, his sickly friend and the strange things going on in the abandoned house across the street. Another is “Her Father’s Daughter,” where a young woman’s car breaks down on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere, and she seeks help from the two spinsters living in a huge house nearby. In both, Strantzas makes the familiar his own through his vivid characterizations and subdued, unexpected endings.
 
Somewhat similar is “Everything Floats,” where the shadowy presence in a house haunts the lives of two young parents. But by the time the presence forces them to an unspeakable act, Strantzas has made us so intimate with the couple’s emotions that the result is almost more heartbreaking than it is horrifying.
 
The author is equally effective in stories with less familiar settings. In “The Deafening Sound of Slumber,” we follow the odd experiments conducted in a sleep study lab, and learn why the doctor in charge insists that the subjects never come in contact with each other. “An Indelible Stain Upon the Sky” follows a man returning to the seaport town he and his girlfriend used to love, only to find that a recent oil leak has spoiled not only the area, but his soul as well.

In most of these tales, the horror is quiet and makes its full impact moments after finishing a first reading. But in stories like “Out of Touch” or “The Nightingale,” where a man discovers why he is so obsessed with the music of a sultry nightclub singer, the frights are more overt, but still work without resorting to blood-soaked gore and splatter.

The subtlety that Strantzas evokes is not easy to achieve and, it must be said, more “literary” in its effect. But please don’t get the impression that these are the dull, dry stuff of college literature classes. His work is delightfully dark and thoroughly entertaining, much like the works of Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell — two influences noted in John Langan’s introduction.
 
These eight previously published stories, along with the four written exclusively for this collection, provide an excellent introduction to shadowy world of Simon Strantzas. He notes in his afterword that “Many of the stories included here are the best I have ever penned.” I agree. Treat yourself to NIGHTINGALE SONGS, but wait until it’s late at night and the room is quiet with just enough light to read comfortably. Then prepare yourself for some good ol’ shuddering. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Dark Regions Press.

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) is regarded as one of the early influences and shapers of popular fiction, including genres such as suspense and horror. Those who never read her are still familiar with her work, thanks to the many notable movie adaptations of her novels and short stories, including REBECCA, JAMAICA INN, DON’T LOOK NOW and THE BIRDS.
 
Now Cemetery Dance has located the eight du Maurier short stories previously published many years ago in the collection EARLY STORIES, along with five additional, uncollected tales published in the early 1930s, and published them in a handsome, but limited trade edition titled THE DOLL: THE LOST SHORT STORIES.

Like most of her early works, the settings of many of these stories are small, exotic locations off the coast of England, and the style is somewhat formal. Yet there is an unmistakable sense that du Maurier will soon break away and find the slightly more conversational voice of her latter, better-known works. Still, many of the images and themes she became known for were first examined in these early efforts.
 
In “And Now to God the Father,” credited as her first published short story, du Maurier presents a lively portrayal of an energetic and popular local vicar whose compassion, we learn, is alarmingly misdirected. “A Difference in Temperament” details the disintegration of a couple’s love when they discover they are no longer the center of each other’s lives.
 
The macabre and the eerie sense of foreboding that distinguishes many of the author’s popular works are found in such entries as “East Wind,” where the lives of the inhabitants of a tiny deserted island are fatally disrupted when a fierce east wind forces a huge brig full of boisterous sailors into their lives. In the title story, a man falls passionately in love with an elusive young musician and then, to his complete horror, learns who the musician’s secret and true lover is.
 
It’s also fascinating to see du Maurier experiment with different narrative techniques. She uses the popular final-line zinger structure in stories like “Frustration,” while “And His Letters Grew Colder” is told entirely through an exchange of mail correspondences.
 
This collection is recommended most especially for du Maurier readers, as well as those curious to see how the kind of fiction that would define national best-seller lists was formulated in the early portion of the last century. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Cemetery Dance.
 

“Who is Todd Grimson?” That was the first thought I had when someone recommended his work to me.

Apparently, he’s an author of quirky subject matters who burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s, and then faded just as quickly. Although from what I’ve read about him, he never stopped writing; he simply wrote under a different name. Now, Grimson is back with his older work — STAINLESS and BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR — reissued by Schaffner Press, and a new novel on the horizon.

STAINLESS is a love story (of sorts) between Justine, a 400-year-old vampire, and Keith, a former musician and heroin addict. Justine is not the stereotypical angst-ridden Anne Rice vampire, nor the anti-hero vampire so prevalent in today’s paranormal romance novels.

Instead, she’s what you would expect a 400-year-old vampire to be: part alien when it comes to understanding humans and the modern world, and part savage animal when it comes to personal survival. Justine is a different species, after all, and her connection to us mere mortals has become an insubstantial fever dream over the centuries.

Keith is just as disconnected, although more from his own personal tragedies and the loss of his career due to damage to his hands (and that pesky smack habit). He is Justine’s caretaker and servant, her “Igor” as he has come to think of himself, who is both frightened of her and also in thrall to her — equal parts Sad Sack and tortured tragic figure. If David Goodis had ever written a vampire novel, STAINLESS would not have been far off from what he might have come up with.

In fact, reading STAINLESS made me think quite a bit about Goodis. There’s a sense of hopelessness to everything and a general despondency to the story, much as Goodis had in most of his novels (off the top of my head, I can think of only two happy endings to a Goodis story, maybe three). 

Grimson spends a lot of time developing his characters and the frequent flashbacks to Justine’s past and Keith’s doomed love affairs (pre-vampire servant status) build dimensions to their personalities, which keeps them from becoming flat or unsympathetic to the reader — an easy trap to fall into when your two protagonists spend most of their time hunting for victims.

Grimson does the same for the secondary characters, some of whom take on surprising roles later in the story. There are shifts in loyalty and some characters who begin as minor one-note players later take on an important role. But at the heart of the story is the burgeoning love between Keith and Justine — two disaffected and dead-inside people who find acceptance in each other.

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a “happily ever after” type of romance, you won’t find it here. As we all know, happy endings always cost extra.

BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR has the distinction of having the coolest title I’ve seen this year. And maybe last year, too.

Lisa Nova is a wannabe director in the film biz who takes bit roles in grade-Z horror flicks for money and has sex with powerful men to get ahead. When one 90210-type film exec reneges on a promise, she decides to get revenge. And not the keying-his-Porsche kind of revenge, either.

No, Lisa’s idea of revenge is to consult with a voodoo/Mayan magic warlock and enlist his aid. Of course, this is the baddest of bad ideas (akin to selling your soul to get back at the guy who swiped your parking spot and then hoping the devil is an honorable fellow), and it all goes downhill from there.

You would think that the first sight of zombie bikers and collection of shrunken heads would have given her pause, but no. Lisa makes a deal with Boro, the voodoo Mayan jaguar prince, and then very bad things happen.

Grimson wrote BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR in the 1990s, but the book has more of an ’80s feel to its Hollywood/L.A. setting and its cast of self-absorbed industry hangers-on. Lisa’s looks are based on former arthouse mainstay Nastassja Kinski, a fact mentioned more than once by other characters in the story. From there on, I couldn’t help but see Kinski as the protagonist (which also meant her father, Dr. Nova, automatically morphed into Klaus Kinski — weird, I know).

The first third of the novel is tight and suspenseful, with a sense of urgency that kept me turning the pages. Then there’s an abrupt change in locale and the urgency is lost. The middle of the book loses its direction and threatens to derail completely.

Grimson ultimately gets the story back on track, and although the final third of the novel winds down satisfyingly, there is still a feeling that much of the middle part could have been excised without loss to the story or narrative flow.

Also, too, there’s a minor fault in that none of the characters in BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR, not even Lisa Nova herself, are the least bit sympathetic. This means that when bad things happen to them, there isn’t much concern for the reader. But that’s neither here nor there.

Grimson compares this novel to the early work of Thomas Pynchon. Personally, I saw more of Tom Wolfe in its uneven parts, specifically THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (also about self-absorbed, unlikeable people), except set on the West Coast with zombies, sorcery and psychic tattoos thrown in the mix. It’s a mixed bag, but with enough cool ideas to make it worthwhile.

Of the two, however, I would recommend STAINLESS as the more satisfying reading experience, if anyone wants to give Mr. Grimson a try. —Slade Grayson

Buy them at Amazon.

With SUPERNATURAL NOIR, prolific and award-winning editor Ellen Datlow set out to find stories that would combine the characteristics of her two favorite types of genre literature. So, per her brief introduction to this original anthology, she put the word out for “smart, edgy, complex, harder-than-nails stories of the supernatural with at least a few of the trademarks of noir.”

The challenge is a lot harder than it seems. Noir, as Datlow herself notes, is “an attitude” — that is, a mostly interior-oriented, cynical and pessimistic view of the world, most often incorporated in crime fiction. Stories of the supernatural, both horror and fantasy, are mostly about external forces — an extraordinary being, power or imagined world.

Combining these two seemingly opposite elements results is what most readers will recognize as dark fantasy, especially considering the authors Datlow approached are known mostly for horror/fantasy/science-fiction works, as opposed to those in crime fiction. Still, the 16 stories presented here do an admirable job and are all worth reading.

A few contributors give in to the temptation to recreate a classic noir crime setting. In “The Dingus,” Gregory Frost presents the gritty world of boxing in the 1940s in his story of a former trainer who investigates the strange, horrific death of his former protégé. Joe R. Lansdale takes a slightly lighter tone in “Dead Sister,” where a wisecracking, Chandler-styled private eye in Lansdale’s fictional Mud Creek, Texas, is hired by a woman to look into the desecration of the title girl’s grave.
 
“The Getaway,” by Paul G. Tremblay, is a modern-day tale of a robbery that takes an unexpected turn when the perpetrators begin to die mysteriously as they flee the pawn shop they just held up. Jeffrey Ford’s “The Last Triangle” is told by a homeless drug addict taken in by elderly, retired school teacher who employs him in a search for an ancient, protective curse surrounding the skid-row section of the city.
 
Perhaps the most memorable story here is “But for Scars” by Tom Piccirilli, where a deranged young girl escapes from a brutal mental institution and returns to the house where her outlaw biker parents were murdered. The narrator, a former gang member now living in the house, helps the girl discover who killed her parents — whom he knew intimately while alive. The supernatural component is mostly hinted at here, but Piccirilli’s unwaveringly creepy characters and mood make this one of the darkest stories of the bunch.
 
The other contributions, including works by Elizabeth Bear, Laird Barron and Brian Evenson, are all well-written, but vary in their attempts to unite the two required elements.
 
Still, SUPERNATURAL NOIR is recommended to all genre fans, but especially to crime-fiction fans who otherwise avoid horror, and horror/fantasy readers unfamiliar with noir’s allure. If you enjoy the intended effect of these stories, proceed immediately to the SANDMAN SLIM novels by Richard Kadrey for an accelerated course on how these two rudiments are sustained in longer forms. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

Each year, the Horror Writers’ Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement for horror and dark fiction, named after the author of the quintessential vampire novel.

No, not TWILIGHT.

If you don’t know that Bram Stoker was the author of DRACULA, then chances are you stumbled upon this column by accident, and the rest will be meaningless to you. I’ll wait while you hit the back key …

So the Stokers are basically the Academy Awards (or maybe it’s more like the Golden Globes) of the horror genre, which is called “dark fiction” more and more these days. Dark fiction sounds classier, while horror is traditionally associated with slasher movies and monster stories.

Personally, I prefer “horror” over the other label. I’m not even sure what constitutes “dark fiction.” (Is it the opposite of “light fiction”?)
         
THE HORROR HALL OF FAME: THE STOKER WINNERS is a collection of stories that have the distinction of winning the prestigious award since its humble beginning back in 1987. The collection jumps around a bit, but many of the names represented in this volume are well known to horror readers, as well as a couple who are not generally associated with the genre.
         
I like anthologies that collect award-winning works because the reader can count on top-notch talent and stories that are a cut above. The stories are included because it received recognition from others in the field, and perhaps was voted “best of” a certain category, not because the editor owed a friend a favor. Of course, like any award-giving presentations, people will tend to disagree with some of the winners.
         
Looking at the HWA website, I see that Peter Straub’s A DARK MATTER won the Stoker Award for best novel. Okay, so we totally disagree on that one.
         
THE STOKER WINNERS, published by Cemetery Dance Publications, has the distinction of being edited by Joe R. Lansdale, a very talented horror and suspense writer in his own right. Lansdale has a story in the collection — “The Night They Missed the Horror Show” — and it is the most disturbing of all because it doesn’t have a supernatural element.
         
Instead, the story focuses on racism in a small Texas town, and the trouble two loser outcasts can get into by messing with a dead dog. And actually, to say the story is disturbing is a bit of an understatement. It stayed with me long after I finished reading it because the characters are all too human … which makes what they do so hard to comprehend, and their ultimate fate so hard to watch. The lesson the characters learn is that no matter how bad a person is, there is someone worse out there.

The scariest part of Lansdale’s story? Much of it could be based on real events.

Some other standouts from the book:
• Robert Bloch’s “The Scent of Vinegar,” about an old abandoned brothel once rumored to employ penangallans, which are a form of Asian vampires, only much more terrifying. Of course one man decides to investigate the claim for his own nefarious purposes, and what he finds … well, let’s just say that the fact that penangallans having razor-sharp teeth didn’t disturb me as much as the idea that their heads can detach from their bodies and fly after their victims, with their digestive organs still attached and dragging behind them. Bloch was a master of the short horror story, and this one clearly shows why.

• David R. Silva’s “The Calling,” about the reality of watching a loved one die from something scarier than a monster: cancer.

• “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R.R. Martin, about one of those oddly shaped people with bad body odor and poor eating habits who seem to inhabit most apartment complexes, but no one truly knows where they come from. Martin’s story delves into the truth behind them and why the little soda-swilling, cheese doodle-eating people should not be mocked or pitied, but rather, should be feared.

• “The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead” by Alan Rodgers, about … well, the title is self-explanatory. The twist of this tale is the fact that the boy’s family and classmates are not exactly pleased to see him come back from the dead, but instead, he finds himself to be a bit of an outcast.

• “Metalica” by P.D. Cacek is not about that overrated band (note the one “l” in the title). It’s a sick little story about a woman who finds sexual pleasure in undergoing gynecological exams. And by “sick,” I mean it’s both squirm-inducing and strangely erotic at the same time.

Like any collection of award winners, there will also be a few head-scratchers in the bunch. As much as I love Harlan Ellison’s work, and as much as I thought his contribution, “Chatting with Anubis,” had a stellar idea and an interesting main character, the story ends with one of Ellison’s one-liners.

It’s a troublesome habit Ellison will employ from time to time, as if he’s working the Catskills and trying to wrap up his story with a zinger that will bring down the house. Unfortunately, it cheapens his work; it’s like watching Lenny Bruce set up a bit, and then Henny Youngman comes out and delivers the punchline.

I wasn’t impressed with Jack Ketchum’s “The Box,” either. Although the premise of a boy looking into a stranger’s gift box and then suddenly losing his desire to eat seemed as if it could have gone in any one of a million different, yet intriguing, possibilities, the story ultimately doesn’t go anywhere.

It’s as if Ketchum couldn’t think of what could have possibly have been in that box (alien artifact? Mystical statue? The severed head of Gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins?) to cause such an effect on the kid, and subsequently his siblings, and so he decided to go with an ambiguous ending.  

I had the same problem with David Morrell’s “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity,” which is also the same problem I’ve had with much of his suspense and action fiction: Morrell comes up with an interesting set-up, some good characters, and a plot that keeps you reading along … until somewhere along the way he’s found himself stuck in a corner and decides to go with the Occam’s Razor ending (i.e. the simpler, the better).

Example: In “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity,” a college student’s friend decides to look into the background of an insane artist’s final years. The friend ends up succumbing to the same fate, so the student, now a successful commercial artist, investigates. Guess what happens?
 
The other stories — contributions from Nancy Holder, Elizabeth Massie, Thomas Ligotti and Jack Cady — are all fine and technically sound, but none of them sparked my interest much. I suppose reading this collection would be like only watching movies that won an Academy Award for Best Picture: Sure, you would see some great films, but you would also see some boring ones, as well. And you would miss out on some quirky and interesting ones that the Academy would never deign to watch.

You know what? Read a collection of Bloch’s work instead. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Cemetery Dance.

Pity the poor vampire as he/she (it?) tries to hang onto its dominance as the go-to monster in this age of zombie apocalypses. The vampire has undergone a softening of its original concept, from the homoeroticism of Anne Rice’s novels to the recent romanticized figure of teen and tween literature (if you can call it that).

Tell me: Who thought sparkly vampires was a good idea? When did they become the modern-day Tinkerbells? Anyway …

There are still the occasional stories that pop up where the vampire is the creature to be feared, but more and more, it is the hero of the story — the antihero P.I. who has come to terms with its bloodlust, or at least keeps it under control, and fights to protect the humans from the other monsters. Part of this evolution comes from the idea that many people would like to be a vampire, which can’t be said of zombies, and the whole “it’s been done” factor. You know, the Dracula template of a mysterious stranger coming to town and people start dying or disappearing, until a few individuals band together, etc. (see ’SALEM’S LOT, THEY THIRST and just about any vampire flick from the ’60s and ’70s).

BLOOD AND OTHER CRAVINGS from prolific editor Ellen Datlow is a collection of stories that focuses on the subject of vampirism in all its many forms. You won’t find the stereotypical vampire in this anthology, although one story comes close with a supporting character that is reminiscent of the Texas vampires of NEAR DARK. More on that in a moment.

The theme of BLOOD AND OTHER CRAVINGS is vampirism, but in the nontraditional sense. There are psychic vampires, sexual vampires (not as attractive as you might think), emotional vampires and, sure, maybe a few of the bloodsucking kind, but their stories are told in a different, fresher way. In fact, some of the stories are so far off the beaten path of a traditional vampire tale, that I occasionally struggled with the question of how or why some stories made the cut. Case in point:

Reggie Oliver’s story “Baskerville’s Midgets” is a quirky tale of a touring actor’s experience at a rooming house besieged by a visiting troupe of performing midgets. The story is unpredictable, creepy and decidedly off-kilter. But a story of vampirism? Um … I don’t know about that. If anything, I thought it was more of a “haunted house” tale than anything else.

Which is not to say that I didn’t like “Baskerville’s Midgets.” Quite the contrary. The story was my favorite of the bunch. Oliver’s writing evoked fond memories of Roald Dahl’s TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, with its sense of impending gloom, increasing dread, unexpected twist and a clever final line that made me smile.

Another favorite was “Needles” by Elizabeth Bear, the story of two travelling companions — one the aforementioned NEAR DARK-type vampire and the other a Lamashtu, which is a Mesopotamian female demon that generally terrorizes breastfeeding mothers. The camaraderie between the two different beasts is a compelling story in itself, with its soft touches of character development and oddly poignant moments. I found myself wanting to read more about these two characters, even after they commit horrible acts.

Michael Cisco’s “Bread and Water” presents a twist on the story of the vampirism as a newfound plague, and shows what it might be like for the first batch of newly infected from the viewpoint of Patient Zero, while Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Miri” tackles the vampirism of a succubus … which, as I said earlier, is not as attractive a proposition as many men might think. The quasi-Goth ex-girlfriend of the protagonist of Tem’s tale sucks not only his will to live, but also the color from the world around him.
 
Barbara Roden’s “Sweet Sorrow” shows vampirism in the form of an elderly couple who feed off the despair and sadness of a missing child. Of course, the couple is more horrific than the main character can see…until it’s too late. Melanie Tem’s “Keeping Corky” keeps the reader alternating between pity for the mentally challenged main character, and fear when it’s revealed that she possesses a godlike ability. Another standout is Kathe Koja’s “Toujours” about a servant slowly finding his position usurped and the desperation it invokes. I found myself reading some of the well crafted lines more than once, as well as the near-ambiguous ending.

Datlow has an eye for good writing, and although I thought the beginning of Laird Barron’s “The Siphon” (about a Graham Greene-type character caught up in espionage, intrigue and, ultimately, horror) could have been trimmed and tightened, and Kaaron Warren’s “All You Can Do is Breathe” and Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg’s “Caius” had anticlimactic endings (despite very strong build-ups), I wouldn’t say there’s a bad story in the book. But I occasionally found the link to vampirism in each to be tenuous at best.

So pick up BLOOD AND OTHER CRAVINGS for the fact that Datlow has been editing books forever and knows how to pick interesting stories. Just don’t do it because you’re looking for the traditional vampire tale … or, God forbid, because you’re a member of Team Edward.          —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.

Zombies, zombies, everywhere! Long a staple of horror movies, the living dead have recently lumbered their way to prominence on TV, in comics, novels and dozens of story collections. So why then should we pay particular attention to a novel with the innocuous title DEAD OF NIGHT? Because it’s from Jonathan Maberry, one of the most inventive and reliably entertaining authors currently mining the undead trend.

Desdemona “Dez” Fox, and partner JT Hammond, police officers in the small town of Stebbins County, Penn., are called one morning to the grounds of Hartnup’s Transition Estate, a local mortuary, for a suspected break-in. They find two horribly mutilated corpses, and evidence of a third gone missing. As Dez and JT inspect the grounds, the two bodies suddenly come back to life and attack them.

Meanwhile, Bill Trout, a local tabloid news reporter (and Dez’s on-off boyfriend) follows a lead that the body of a recently executed serial killer was secretly claimed by a family member in town, but now that body is missing. Trout takes the story trail to the Hartnup’s Transition Estate, where he is quickly chased away by Dez.
 
Trout’s research eventually leads him to Dr. Herman Volker, the man who gave the serial killer the lethal injection in prison. Trout leans that Volker instead injected the murderer with a drug that would keep his consciousness alive while his body decomposed — part of the secret government biochemical weapon research Volker once conducted.

But the drug had a serious side effect: It reanimated the killer’s body, filling it with an immediate hunger for human flesh. Additionally, the reanimation virus is highly contagious and transferred by a bite from the carrier. Now the killer has escaped, and he and his resulting victims are infecting the entire town.
 
As the number of infected grows, a hurricane-force storm approaches the town, forcing the children to seek shelter inside a school building. Before long, the place becomes a potential feeding ground for the hungry zombies. At the same time, the federal government in Washington, D.C., has been alerted of the outbreak and launches an immediate military-containment campaign which essentially would fire-bomb all of Stebbins County.
 
This combination of race-against-time and manhunt stories is presented through chapters alternating the action and focus between the main characters and several others. Lots of narrative ground must be covered, so Maberry frequently introduces characters who last no longer than a chapter or two.

It might take a little while to find the flow with all these frequent shifts, and the action seriously stalls during the long passages where Volker explains the plausible science behind his secret project. But the scenes involving Dez and JT are where Maberry kicks in his suspense thriller techniques, and then the pages can’t be turned fast enough.
 
By far the most notable moments are where Maberry takes us inside the intimate thoughts of the infected zombies. Such stories usually ignore this kind of insight, but the author shares with us the utter confusion and suffering these victims feel as they slowly lose the memory of their previous existence, not to mention control of their bodies, and give themselves over to the unrelenting hunger; turning them into what Maberry calls “a lost soul in a hollow body.” In the midst of all the breakneck action and tension, these moments remain long after the last page.
 
Since his groundbreaking 2009 novel, PATIENT ZERO, Maberry has distinguished himself as an author constantly bringing fresh and unexpected perspectives to the zombie subgenre. If you’ve been wondering what the appeal is to all the current zombie-apocalypse trend in multimedia, DEAD OF NIGHT is an excellent place to find out.  —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

If you haven’t read THE STRAIN and THE FALL, I’m offering up a spoiler alert here: Spoiler alert!
 
Jesus, I hate people who complain about spoilers. Anyway, if you have read the above two installments of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy, you’ve got to be on board for THE NIGHT ETERNAL, right?

I mean, the end of book two was some pretty hardcore apocalyptic shit. Luckily, the third and final book provides a meaty examination of the new, vampire-dominated Earth, with lots of explanation of how things work now, two years after the events of THE FALL.

The vampires are well-coordinated, worldwide and running things pretty well, for evil monsters. The Master’s world is surprisingly well-thought-out: Humans are the only food, and their numbers and well-being are given just enough thought that the human race has survived, if not thrived, in the New Vampire World Order.
 
Oh, you ask if our charming cast of characters is still around? Why, yes. Eph Goodweather; his girlfriend, Nora; Fet the exterminator; and gang-banger Gus are still alive and kicking, if a bit worse for wear since they’re fugitives in a world run by monsters in which the sun only shines for a couple hours a day. Eph’s son, Zack, is around, too, but he’s not in a good spot.
 
So, our heroes haven’t made a ton of progress since THE FALL’s finale. They’re still trying to decode the mysterious vampire bible they acquired in that novel, and without their Van Helsing stand-in, Abe Setrakian, nobody’s made much progress. They kill a lot of vampires and such, and eventually, an endgame comes into view.
 
Here’s where the Big Bad of THE NIGHT ETERNAL rears his head: God. Really? You had to resort to God to solve this problem? There’s a religious aspect of THE NIGHT ETERNAL that seems really, really convenient, as if the authors painted themselves into a corner with the previous books and realized that the human race that they depicted was so absolutely powerless, nobody could beat the bad guys but God, who all of a sudden is vastly important after two books with barely a mention.  
 
If you can come to grips with that whole mess, this final book’s pretty good. There are some nice explosions and suitably horrific, gory scenes, and our vampire-run planet is well fleshed out. I just wish the authors had found another way for our heroes to win, because they worked a lot harder to fight the vampires than He did.   —Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.
 

Dark Regions Press is one of those publishers that is hard to pigeonhole. Sure, it publishes dark fiction/horror, but seems to go out of their way to take chances on new or relatively unknown writers and unusual concepts. When I pick up one of their books, I never know what to expect … which is a good thing.

Keep me guessing, and you’ve won half the battle. Hit me with the same old paranormal romance; vampire-as-tragic-romantic figure; or high-concept, end-of-the-world scenario, and I’ll probably sigh and look to see what new, snarky comments are posted on Twitter.

I’ve got four recent Dark Regions releases in front of me. Let’s attack them one by one:

OUR LADY OF THE SHADOWS is a collection of stories and one novella by Tony Richards. All the stories are ghost stories in some form or fashion, and they span Richards’ career, going back 30 years. Some writers get better as time goes on, and some fizzle out, as if they used up all of their best ideas in the first few years and are simply retreading the same ground. Many rock bands have the same problem: They produce one or two great albums, then spend the rest of their careers trying to capture that same lightning in a bottle. It almost never happens.

It’s a compliment to Richards that I could not have guessed which stories were written in the 1980s and which ones were written in the last few years without looking at the copyright page. His work retains the same energy today as it did at the start of his career.
         
There wasn’t a story in this collection that I didn’t enjoy, but if I had to pick favorites, I’d choose “Lightning Dogs,” about a pack of ghostly hounds terrorizing late night London commuters, and “After Dark,” about a sax player back from the dead and intent upon revenge. All of the stories are moody, atmospheric and slow-building, like a great ghost story told around a campfire.
 
ARENA OF THE WOLF by Jim Gavin had me conflicted. On the one hand, I enjoyed the premise of werewolves being kept as attractions in an extreme sports-style rodeo. On the other, the change in POV and some of the more outlandish concepts introduced as things went on threatened to derail the whole thing.

The story starts off being told by Jerry, a former trucker/werewolf who wakes up to find himself trapped in a hellish rodeo where he is forced to compete in twisted variations on the whole bronco-busting, bull-riding scenario. Except in this case, he’s the bull.

There’s also an ultimate fighting event between the werewolves, which is staged like a professional wrestling match, complete with a predetermined outcome of the winner. At first, Jerry is determined to escape the rodeo, but as time goes on and he becomes the star attraction, he finds his resolve slipping.

The first third is told in first-person narration, and I enjoyed getting into Jerry’s furry head and watching as he was seduced by the faux stardom and seedy glamour of being an extreme sports star. But then there’s an abrupt shift as Gavin switches to third-person once Jerry escapes the rodeo and begins his plan for revenge on his former captors.

That’s a bit of a shame because I liked Jerry’s viewpoint, and although the story still focuses on him until the inevitable violent showdown at the story’s conclusion, I still felt a sense of loss. But I still enjoyed Gavin’s unusual take on werewolves as prisoners/reality-TV stars enough to recommend ARENA, and liked his writing enough to want to seek out his other work.

THE ENGINES OF SACRIFICE by James Chambers is a collection of four stories based in a H.P. Lovecraft-inspired setting. You know: old gods, other-dimensional creatures, weird tentacle things trying to break through into our world. Chambers doesn’t imitate Lovecraft, which is hard to do without slipping into parody, but instead crafts modern stories based on some of the legendary horror author’s ideas.

It all works well, I have to admit. Each has a slow-building creepiness factor that is refreshing in today’s modern, gross-out slashfests. I prefer my horror to be more psychological than gory, and although there are some horrific creatures in these pages, it’s the dread of the approaching monster that is the scariest part.

The stories are all loosely connected and have a history; they function independently, but can be read as a universal whole. I liked all of them, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be “The Ugly Birds,” about a failing publisher who travels to a small town to convince the artist/writer of a hit graphic serial to continue her story so as to keep his magazine from going under. The fact that the artist/writer is his ex-wife, and that her current husband appears to be going insane, adds to the pathos.

There’s more, of course: strange, ugly bird creatures; dead sea life that resembles nothing in a marine biologist’s textbook; a palpable sense of oncoming doom that surrounds his ex’s house. Much of the imagery reminded me more of early Stephen King rather than Lovecraft … until the conclusion when Chambers doesn’t disappoint the reader with a cop-out ending. Good stuff.

ISIS UNBOUND is the debut novel from author Allyson Bird, who has previously had a collection of short stories, WINE AND RANK POISON, issued by Dark Regions Press. Her tales were more psychological suspense than traditional ghost stories, although there were a few of those in there, too. But she seemed more interested in the darkness of mankind’s soul than the supernatural kind.

If I had had to guess what the subject of Bird’s first novel would be, well, I wouldn’t have guessed an alternate-history/steampunk/horror/fantasy mash-up. It sounds like it should be a mess, but strangely, it all works!

Cleopatra and Anthony, with the help of the goddess Isis, build a massive empire. Cut to 1890: Cleopatra’s descendants are still in power, but Isis has been murdered by her sister, the goddess Nepythys. Now the dead are unable to pass over to the underworld and readers are treated to zombies stumbling through a traditional steampunk setting.

There’s a pair of unlikely heroines in Ella and Loli, the daughters of the chief embalmer, who find themselves caught up in the machinations of the Egyptian gods. But more than a steampunk story or a horror story, this is a tale of fantasy with Egyptian gods slowly losing their hold on a decaying empire. Bird weaves it all together, and best of all, does it without the bloat that most fantasy writers fall into.

ISIS UNBOUND is a stellar example of what I said earlier: Dark Regions Press is not easily defined by what it publishes. Horror, suspense, werewolf Western, steampunk zombies — it seems intent to create subgenres rather than milking the same old ones. —Slade Grayson

Buy them at Dark Regions Press.

The old-fashion technology of Victorian-era fiction, especially the “scientific romances” of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, obviously inspired the various steampunk authors of today. But as editors Jack Dann and Nick Gevers note in the introduction to GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT: STORIES OF STEAMPUNK AND SUPERNATURAL SUSPENSE, another type of fiction was also popular in those times: the ghost story, with all its psychological implications, written by such authors as M.R. James and J. Sheridan Le Fanu. The original stories Dann and Gevers have gathered here pay tribute to both of these enduring influences.
 

The opener, “The Iron Shroud” by James Morrow, actually combines both influences into a single story. A scientist specializing in vibratology is called upon to reverse the work of his mentor, who has trapped dead spirits in bodies made from a special alloy and has thus created an army of golems. The tale not only demonstrates Morrow’s formidable imagination, but his familiarity with Victorian narrative techniques, told through a combination of first-person narration and journal extracts.

Most of the other stories are tributes not only to ghost stories but the many other forms of Victorian-era supernatural horror, with an occasional nod to technology. John Langan’s “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” shows the more sinister aspects behind seemingly charming paper balloons that highlight the tale. The ghost of a murdered lover of a boarding school founder haunts the dreams of two of the school’s young students in “”Christopher Raven” by Theodora Goss. Garth Nix attempts a lighter touch in his “The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder,” but his homage to Sherlock Holmes is ironically heavy-handed.
 
The 17 represented authors — including Gene Wolfe, Peter S. Beagle, Laird Barron and Jeffrey Ford — are familiar to horror or fantasy fans. The most pleasant surprise, however, is the inclusion of Robert Silverberg, whose recent work has been restricted to novels and novellas. Apparently, the sci-fi master couldn’t resist the opportunity to acknowledge his favorite Victorian authors, especially Rudyard Kipling, whose voice and structure Silverberg successfully channels in “Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar.”
 
Dann and Gevers are to be commended not only for their diverse selection of authors, but also for the excellent presentation of the stories. Each is preceded by a short, informative introduction and then followed by a brief author’s afterword. These extra touches, once common to such collections, not only show respect for the authors, but significantly aid readers new to any of these writers and anxious to seek out previously published works.
 
While not strictly stories marrying steampunk with horror, as might be inferred by the title, GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT is recommended for demonstrating how significant the authors of the bygone era were to the writers who carry on most of its traditions. —Alan Cranis

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The apocryphal legend of bluesman Robert Johnson says he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his uncanny (and continuously influential) talent. This was no doubt what inspired John Hornor Jacobs, whose SOUTHERN GODS blends the Johnson legend with a bit of H.P. Lovecraft. It works impressively well for the most part, and Jacobs’ debut is a thoroughly entertaining, although uneven, horror novel.

Lewis “Bull” Ingram, a World War II veteran living in the South in the early 1950s, makes his living doing collections and occasional muscle work for a local bookie. Then Ingram’s boss refers him to a record label owner in Memphis. The record executive wants Ingram to find a missing employee: a promoter who went in search of a reclusive blues musician known as Ramblin’ John Hastur.

As he begins his search, Ingram hears a recording of Hastur’s music that was broadcast by a pirate radio station late at night. The forceful rhythms and haunted lyrics fill Ingram with an inexplicable rage. He soon understands why it is said that Hastur’s music has the power to drive men insane, and even raise the dead.
 
Meanwhile, Sarah Willis leaves her alcoholic and abusive husband and, with her young daughter in tow, returns to her ancestral house in Gethsemane, Ark. There she finds comfort, even though her elderly mother is slowly dying in the upstairs bedroom. As Sarah rediscovers her past while exploring the old house, she finds clues to a horrific family secret that’s been hidden for many years.
 
At the same time, Ingram’s investigation brings him to Arkansas, where he discovers that his story and Sarah’s have more in common that expected. Together, they must prevent and unspeakable evil related to her family from re-entering the world through Ramblin’ John Hastur’s music.
 
Jacobs not only presents two seemingly separate stories, but two abruptly different prose styles. The sections involving Sarah are pastoral, filled with lush descriptions of the Southern landscape and architecture, evoking strains of William Faulker or Eudora Welty. The Ingram story is more hard-boiled, like something out of Dashiell Hammett, with lots of tough talk and an underlining threat of violence.
 
The Ingram style eventually dominates as the story reaches its last chapters. Unfortunately, Jacobs incorporates a glaring series of coincidences that strain the credibility and dampen the resolution. Additionally, Lovecraft devotees might be put off with the author’s less-than-literal interpretation of the Cthulu mythos. While not directly from Lovecraft, it still serves the purpose of the story rather well and adds a new, slightly Southern-spiced element.
 
For its entire uneven shortcomings, SOUTHERN GODS still has enough going for it to be recommended, especially to horror-fiction fans. At its best, especially in the Ingram sections dealing with the lure of blues music and Southern musicians in the early ’50s, the book is reminiscent of the early Nick Travers novels of Ace Atkins, as if Atkins were an aspiring author of horror rather than mysteries. —Alan Cranis

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Many a zombie book has made the monster in vogue, but Max Brooks’ WORLD WAR Z: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR arguably has been the most high-profile of them all, spawning a now-shooting, hope-it-doesn’t-suck movie starring Brad Pitt. It had to have sold a kajillion copies, because it’s just now hitting mass-market paperback, a full half-decade since its first publication.

The novel is exactly what it says it is: A series of loosely connected interviews with various survivors of the worldwide zombie plague. Because of government repression (and censorship), our narrator notes in his introduction that he thought it vital his story — meaning everyone’s story — be told. Thus, we get more than 300 pages of roughly chronological accounts and remembrances (in transcripts, interviews and monologues) of the zombie war, from coast to coast, hemisphere to hemisphere.

With so many stories being told from so many disparate characters we barely get to know, there’s not much to latch onto. The brief chapters may make WORLD WAR Z bathroom-friendly, but it also keeps it from achieving cohesion. The subjects range the gamut of interest, depending on your tolerance for cliché — of course, you get the point of view from the righteous scientist, but who would’ve expected one of a mentally handicapped girl?

Brooks sold a lot of copies of 2003′s THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE, a “humorous” how-to parody that had nary a laugh in it. To his credit, he’s not trying to be funny here (which must be hard when your own father is Mel Brooks), and he more than acquits himself as a good writer. But other books, primarily from the small, indie press, have done it better, at a fraction of the pages, with none of the marketing muscle and exponentially more imagination. —Rod Lott

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I don’t get book parodies. Sure, I can understand the parody of a classic story as a set-up for a sitcom plot or a segment on THE SIMPSONS (e.g. “The Count of Monte Fatso”). A novel-length parody, though? Seems a bit stretched too thin, like when they take an SNL sketch and turn it into a 90-minute movie. Hell, most SNL sketches seem stretched too thin as it is.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Night Shade Books’ THE TWILIGHT OF LAKE WOEBEGOTTEN by “Harrison Geillor” is a mash-up of the TWILIGHT series and Garrison Keillor’s LAKE WOBEGON stories. In other words, it’s a send-up of a saccharine paranormal romance that appeals to teen girls and middle-aged moms, and a radio show turned prose series that only people in their 70s found funny. Let the laughter commence.

Bonnie Grayduck leaves behind her troubled Santa Cruz past when she relocates to Lake Woebegotten, Minn., to live with her estranged dad, the town’s chief of police. There, she meets the brooding Edwin Scullen, who is (of course) a vampire. Bonnie Grayduck and Edwin Scullen are meant to be parodies of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, the two leads of TWILIGHT. Clever name change, don’t you think? Are your sides splitting yet?

The twist is that Bonnie is actually the monster. She’s a sociopath who manipulates everyone around her to get what she wants, and is not adverse to committing murder if it will help accomplish her goals. She’s also the only intelligent person in a town full of simpletons, which at times works to her disadvantage. Bonnie will scheme to put herself in a dangerous situation to force Edwin to rescue her, thereby allowing him to play the role of hero and winning his heart, but the guy is such an idiot, Bonnie is often forced to save herself.

Not that the book is totally lacking in cleverness, but a whole novel as parody? It gets old rather quickly and you’ll find yourself sighing at the predictability of it all. It would’ve worked well as a short story … maybe.

Unless you’re a TWILIGHT fan and you secretly wished the whole story had been played for laughs, and you wanted Bella to be psychotic (more so than she was already, I mean) along the lines of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley protagonist, I’d give this one a pass.
         
Meanwhile, THE CRANSTON GIBBERER by Martin Mundt is an odd release from Bad Moon Books. It’s a slim novella that parodies the stories and letters of H.P. Lovecraft. It also has the distinction of its title constantly getting changed to THE CONSTANT GIBBERISH in my head.

Told as a series of letters between “H.” and “X,” THE CRANSTON GIBBERER recounts the story, in his own words, of a man’s descent into madness. Or perhaps it’s the story of a man plagued by an otherworldly creature. Or a man’s transformation into his exact opposite. Yes, it’s all of those folks, because CRANSTON is a combination of homage and parody of the works of Lovecraft.

Our subject, “H.,” is a high-strung, prissy man for whom buying a can of beans or shopping for a new suit is a frightening adventure that skirts the edges of the otherworldly. Author Mundt is adept at both copying Lovecraft’s flowery, Gothic-style prose, and exaggerating it further, which I had not thought possible. But as clever as Mundt’s wordplay is, again the whole thing drags on too long. Such a parody would have been suitable for a quick, four-pager, but at novella length, it wears thin rather rapidly.

And really, Bad Moon Books? Fifteen dollars for a 49-page book? (Note: I’m not counting the title and acknowledgment pages — only actual story pages. And yes, I got the review copy for free, but still.) Better to check out Mundt’s blog, where you can read a far more interesting story about Christopher Walken foiling a 7-Eleven hold-up. It’s both an interesting satire of the nature of celebrity, and a parody of today’s hyper-violent action flicks. Best of all, it’s free! —Slade Grayson

Buy them at Amazon and Bad Moon Books.

Mallory Caine is an attorney who moonlights as a zombie. Or maybe she’s a zombie who moonlights as an attorney. Anyway …

By day, Mallory works as a defense attorney. By night, she dresses up as a prostitute and kills unsuspecting “johns” for their brains.  If life (or un-death) weren’t hard enough, her latest client is a vampire charged with killing a man that she killed on one of her hooker-bait feeding binges.

Welcome to PAY ME IN FLESH by K. Bennett, which has a great title. Unfortunately, that’s about all it has going for it.

This novel has plenty of plotlines thrown out in the wind:
• Mallory remembers waking up in the morgue after being shot, but as to who shot her and why are a mystery, as is how she became a zombie rather than a rotting corpse;
• birds and owls inexplicably chase her;
• a demonic priest attacks her;
• in a crowded courtroom, a vampire turns into a coyote and attacks her; and
• people suddenly appear and try to kill her.

All of the above could be worthwhile plotlines to explore, but Bennett throws them out there as if they were cooked spaghetti: Throw enough at the wall and see what sticks. I’m not sure which author said it, but I vaguely recall a quote about whenever he was stuck for how his story should go, he would simply have someone walk in the room with a gun, and the rest would write itself. This book reminds me of that type of thinking.

Bennett, however, doesn’t resolve 90 percent of what he throws against the wall. PAY ME IN FLESH is essentially a sequence of events without consequence. We find many set-ups, random occurrences that lead to an action-filled sequence, but then the pay-off is forgotten. Nothing pans out to a satisfying conclusion, and we move on to the next event. It’s like listening to a story told by someone with ADHD: “Then this happens, then this happens, and oh, hey! Check out that dog over there!”

The story of an attorney who has to eat brains while working to maintain a semblance of a human life sounds like a failed sitcom premise. There’s even the added conflict of her former boyfriend working as the prosecutor against Mallory’s current client — you know, the one charged with the murder that Mallory actually committed? There are so many conflicts of interest there, it’s as if Bennett is basing the law practices used in this book off of old episodes of LAW & ORDER and THE PRACTICE.

Here’s a good example of the author’s wacky sense of how the judicial system works: Since Mallory’s client is a vampire, she needs blood to survive and needs to stay away from sunlight. Mallory gets the court to agree to keep the defendant in a cell away from direct sunlight, only have trial proceedings at night and — get this — the defendant will be given blood to consume. Yes, folks, you read that correctly: Mallory Caine is such a convincing attorney, she is able to get the court to agree to give her client blood. To drink. Now that is some outstanding legal maneuvering!

Yes, of course, I understand that the author’s world is populated with zombies, vampires and shapeshifters. But the best fantasy fiction, in my opinion, is always based with one foot firmly in reality.

If you like plotlines introduced, then quickly brushed aside or forgotten, PAY ME IN FLESH may be the book for you. (Or go watch the first season of LOST … or any season of LOST, for that matter.) If I haven’t dissuaded you from reading this book, please do me the favor of purchasing the electronic version. I’d hate to think trees are dying so print versions of this dreck can be made. —Slade Grayson

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Horror stories told completely from the perspective of the antagonist — the source of the horror — are rare. A novel might occasionally shift its focus to the perpetrator, but most often, the victims carry the story. That’s probably why the concept of THE MONSTER’S CORNER: STORIES THROUGH INHUMAN EYES, original stories told entirely from the monster’s point-of-view, so appealed to editor Christopher Golden and his impressive array of contributors. Golden then took the theme a step further and stresses in his introduction how the stories were an opportunity to examine the various “monstrosities” in us all.

What he and company overlooked, however, was that this shift, while increasing the empathy for the various monsters, diminishes the essential suspense that results in scaring the reader. Not surprisingly, THE MONSTER’S CORNER contains lots of exceptionally fine writing, but very few actual frights.

Some of the contributors took the challenge as a way to express homage to the monsters who inspired them. Kevin J. Anderson, for example, uses Frankenstein’s monster in his “Torn Stitches, Shattered Glass,” a sort-of sequel to the Mary Shelley novel in which the monster is living among the Jews of Nazi-occupied Ingolstadt in 1938. While different in style and tone, Anderson manages to underscore many of the themes of Shelley’s classic. David Moody takes a more contemporary stance in “Big Man,” a story that references such giant monsters as King Kong, Godzilla and several from the B movies made by Roger Corman.
 
Lesser-celebrated creatures from myth and folklore are also featured. In “The Cruel Thief of Rosy Infants,” Tom Piccirilli presents a beguiling tale about a member of the ancient race of baby swappers and what happens when one of his swaps goes very wrong. Sarah Pinborough focuses on Medusa in “The Screaming Room,” which imagines the effects of her stare taking much longer than previously believed.
 
Golden instructed his contributors to avoid stories about vampires and zombies, and to keep the monsters inhuman. But he admits that he let that last rule slip at times. So the central character in Jonathan Maberry’s atmospheric “Saint John” is a man who is convinced that his violent killings are guided by the voice of God in a post-apocalyptic future.
 
A real standout for sheer creativity and imagination is Gray A. Braunbeck’s “And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is to Kill You: An Alphabetical Faux-Manifesto,” featuring the author as a character in his own story, forced under duress to list the various, centuries-long grievances dictated by the monsters. Among the often humorous points stressed are the monsters’ favorite writer (Joyce Carol Oates), their regret at using H. P. Lovecraft as “a PR man,” their fear of Ken dolls, and other surprising revelations.

Other contributors, 19 in all, include such horror-fiction notables as Kelly Armstrong, Sharyn McCrumb and Simon R. Green. THE MONSTER’S CORNER is not for the occasional reader of the stuff, but rather for those who have read enough (and seen enough horror movies) to fully appreciate the change of perspective concept. Such readers will not find many new or different horrors in this collection, but, upon reflection, should be impressed — and perhaps even moved — by the insight, sensitivity and imagination featured in these new stories. —Alan Cranis

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During his life, H.P. Lovecraft corresponded with a group of fans, many of whom were aspiring writers themselves, who were so inspired by his pulp tales of the banished Elder Gods that they wrote their own stories using the same themes and thus contributed to what would later be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.”

Lovecraft never envisioned that his stories and novels work would remain continuously in print for decades after his death, culminating in a collection published by the prestigious Library of America. Nor did he know that countless authors would carry on the Mythos to this very day.

Now, Ross E. Lockhart, managing editor of Night Shade Books, has gathered together 27 contemporary Mythos stories for his first anthology, THE BOOK OF CTHULHU. It is not the first such collection — indeed, many of the stories appearing here were first published in similar Lovecraft-themed anthologies. But thanks to the wide variety of contributing authors, as well as Lockhart’s keen understanding of horror fiction and Lovecraft in particular, it is the best of such anthologies out there.

At its most basic, the Mythos states that a group of horrific deities (including Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and others) who once ruled the planet are now banished to a parallel world and worshiped by cults and individuals who attempt to return these “Great Old Ones” to their ruling status, often with disastrous results. Many authors use Lovecraft’s understated tone while transporting the setting to a slightly later period.

A fine example of this is “Andromeda Among the Stars,” the Caitlin R. Kiernan story that begins the collection. It’s a moody and effective tale of the Mythos appearing amidst the conflicts of the world in the mid-1900s and one family’s sacrifice to keep the Elder Gods in their place. Gene Wolfe, known for his dense, complex science fiction and fantasy stories, contributes a similar tale in “Lord of the Land,” where a Nebraskan folklorist interviews a rural family to learn of their encounters with an unworldly “soul sucker.”
 
Other authors bring the Mythos further into the contemporary world. Most notable among these is Charles Stross’ “A Colder War,” where a portal to the world of the Elder Gods is discovered by modern technology and used as one of the arsenal of potential weapons in the standoff between the super-power nations of today — a theme Stross would later expand in his novels THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES and THE JENNIFER MORGUE, and other similar stories. Ramsey Campbell, a novelist who has often displayed his Lovecraftian influences, presents a contemporary journalist whose disturbing dreams leads to his investigation of a secret cult of worshipers heralding the return of the Old Ones in “The Tugging.”
 
Further proving the range of different authors touched by Lovecraft is the wonderful Joe R. Lansdale. His “The Crawling Sky” incorporates his recurring character of Reverend Jebediah Mercer, the damned but determined battler of evil, whose wanderings take him to a small town in East Texas plagued by a monstrous deity minion. And T.E.D. Kline’s “Black Man With A Horn” is distinguished for its first-person narrator who was once a contemporary and correspondent of Lovecraft.
 
For all these varied contributors — which includes such renowned authors as Kage Baker, Brian Lumley, David Drake, Laird Barron and several others — THE BOOK OF CTHULHU is amazingly consistent in quality, even while the stories inevitably vary in their attempts of frighten.
 
Highly recommended, but obviously not for the uninitiated. Those who somehow missed seeing why Lovecraft is now considered the literary links between Edgar Allan Poe and today’s modern horror writers should first find one of the many available Lovecraft collections, settle in with stories like “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Dunwich Horror,” and then make room on their bookshelf for Lockhart’s excellent anthology. —Alan Cranis

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Robert McCammon’s THE FIVE follows a fictional rock band on its last tour, and perhaps the last leg of its members’ very existence. It reads almost like a love letter to songwriting and music, and to the creative process in general. McCammon, with numerous short stories and 16 novels and counting to his credit, no stranger to the creative writing process, sprinkles snippets of The Five’s (the band’s name, too) original song lyrics throughout.

Songs are written in different ways, for different reasons, and can take on a life of their own. Before I finished reading THE FIVE, I went to a live concert, and it struck me how the words everyone knew, and the familiar notes and chords coming through the instruments, once began as a thought in one person’s head, or as a musical doodle at one person’s fingertips.

And yet there were the collective voices and sounds, hundreds or thousands of miles from where they first came to be, almost as if they were living and breathing on their own.

As McCammon’s creation trundles across the hot and dusty Southwest in the Scumbucket (only a relatively safe mode of travel because it’s a van on the ground and not a plane in the air), they begin writing their own swan song, to be played at their final gig, at the indirect behest of a mysterious woman whom they encounter on the road, and in response to the announcement that two members of their team have decided to pursue other interests once the tour is over.

Remarks in a fateful interview don’t sit well with a disgruntled war veteran, and it soon becomes apparent that what lies ahead for the members of The Five may be more than just the end of their last tour. It’s a long road, but one which readers will be more than happy to ride to the very end.

Stephen King calls THE FIVE McCammon’s best novel, but King also fancies himself a musician, which I think would add some value to the reading experience. As for McCammon’s books, I would rank THE FIVE after SWAN SONG and MINE, but ahead of BOY’S LIFE, which is still saying a whole lot.

I’m not a musician — my brother’s a drummer — but you don’t have to be to enjoy THE FIVE or appreciate its characters and their trials and triumphs. My brother has played in local bar bands for as long as I can remember, and he’s told me lots of stories about bickering band mates, about breaking up, about losing friendships, and finding new ones. And they don’t even travel, don’t live together in a commune like Black Oak Arkansas did, or write hit songs based upon the fracture of internal marriages like Fleetwood Mac, and still count on their day jobs to put food on the table.

It’s easy for him to understand why The Beatles couldn’t “Work It Out,” or why Slash told Axl, “You’re Fuckin’ Crazy.” But he keeps doing it, and even after nearly 30 years, says he can’t imagine not doing it. As one of the characters in The Five says, “One thing about being in a band never changes: the more passion, the more smashin’.”

And there’s plenty of passion in McCammon’s tale, his first contemporary such since 1992’s GONE SOUTH. After three books in the historical Matthew Corbett series (2002’s SPEAKS THE NIGHTBIRD, 2007’s QUEEN OF BEDLAM and 2010’s MISTER SLAUGHTER; the fourth installment, THE PROVIDENCE RIDER, is due next year), which marked McCammon’s return from the publishing abyss (his choice), it’s nice to have him back writing in a contemporary setting.

Back in the New Old World. —Jason Light

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These DEAD MAN books are coming out as fast as possible, never allowing the readers to catch a breath. And that is a good thing. Especially with the fifth entry, THE BLOOD MESA, which goes from 0 to 60 really quick.

It begins with Matt Cahill once again on the road, but this time, he has a destination: the title site, in the middle of the desert, nicknamed Blood Mesa. Luckily, if one can say that, he comes across a broken-down truck. One of the two passengers is an archaeologist whose face is rotting away rather quickly. Matt helps out this pair and accepts a job offer of becoming their driver. Their dig site is going on at the top of the mesa, so how could Matt resist?

He is destined to go there, and he wants to make sure that Dr. Andrew Hammond, aka Rot Face, can be closely observed. Once at the camp, Matt is given the quick rundown of the other people at the campsite, mainly graduate students with one love triangle of sorts in play.

When the group makes a discovery while digging, the trouble reveals itself: a pit of human bones which have human teeth marks. But that is nothing compared to what is discovered next.

At that point, author James Reasoner never lets up with the action or tense moments. There is plenty of ax-swinging to go around, and again, more of the Mr. Dark mythos of the series in full effect, showing that Dark has been around a lot longer than believed. Reasoner really lets loose with the gore and throws in a human sacrifice to cap things off.

This is actually the shortest so far for the DEAD MAN series, but readers will not feel cheated since once the action kicks in, it does not stop until the last page. “Bring on book six!” is all I can say. —Bruce Grossman

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Something you’ll never hear me say: “You know what we need? Another zombie book.” All joking aside, however, Rhiannon Frater’s THE FIRST DAYS: AS THE WORLD DIES isn’t bad. It isn’t great, either … but it isn’t bad.

The story begins with Jenni looking at tiny fingers reaching for her from under a door. We soon discover that the oft-foretold (at least recently, anyway) zombie apocalypse has finally hit, and Jenni’s husband has snacked on their two children and turned them into flesh-eating undead. Now they’d like a taste of her.

Luckily, she is rescued by Kate, a sharp-shooting lesbian. Jenni was an abused wife, so she’s used to taking orders and is relieved to let Kate make all the decisions as they make their way through a world gone to shit. Or gone to zombies.

So far, it sounds like THELMA & LOUISE with zombies, right? Well, to a certain extent, it is. But Frater throws in a few side elements that keep the story crackling along. Originally written as an online serial, the novel is the first in a trilogy and plays like a soap opera with many of the melodramatic moments and “Oh, now come on!” unbelievability that marked long-running daytime dramas. Yes, it can get ridiculous at times, but it is also entertaining and addictive viewing — er, reading. (The soaps lasted for decades for a reason, after all.)

Frater’s prose can be juvenile at times, and the plot points occasionally take a groan-inducing turn — Jenni seems more interested in impressing a potential new love interest (no, not Kate) mere days after seeing her children eaten and zombified — but as I said, the author keeps things moving at such a brisk clip, we barely notice how ludicrous it all is.

Some of the points I especially enjoyed:
• The moral question of whether to kill someone who has been bitten by a zombie. Depending on the severity of the bite, some people are turned almost immediately, while others may take days. The survivors struggle over whether to kill them right away or wait until after the change.
• Jenni’s knowledge of zombies, which proves useful, comes from the fact that her husband would make her watch zombie movies. (So if there’s ever a cartoon apocalypse, I’m all set.)
• The survivors appear to be based on random luck. Those who you may think possess skills that will see them through the attack of the ravenous hordes? Not always the case. Sometimes it’s the unlikely ones who survive, and the ones you thought might become a major player in the grand scheme of the story meet a brutal and gruesome end.
• There’s an interesting murder mystery: an annoying meth addict is bound and thrown to the zombies. Who killed him? We don’t find out, but perhaps in book two? Still, it’s an interesting twist and raises more moral questions, such as if society is broken down into survival of the fittest, or luckiest, then do the old laws still apply?
• The zombies don’t all act the same. Some are slow, à la George A. Romero, while others are surprisingly fast, like DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. And some apparently have the ability to think, just in a limited capacity.

If you’re looking for new ground to be broken in the genre, well, you won’t find it here. In fact, much was already tread over by Madeleine Roux’s ALLISON HEWITT IS TRAPPED, a novel I kept thinking about while reading this one. Both feature strong female characters who find themselves caught up in situations that force them to become heroic. Both show that the survivors of the zombilypse might be as dangerous as the zombies themselves. Both have a general feeling of, “Okay, we survived. Now what do we do?” tone to their stories. And more importantly, both began as online serials that generated loyal followers and, ultimately, book deals.

Of the two, Roux’s is a more polished read. But sometimes you’re just in the mood for a dopey soap opera with zombies. When that day hits, hopefully before the zombie apocalypse does for real, then give Frater’s novel a chance. The sequel, FIGHTING TO SURVIVE, arrive in November, and the final is forthcoming. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.

I’ve made no bones about the fact that I’m a proponent of the small publishers. They are the ones who are putting out the cutting-edge, experimental stuff rather than the celebrity bios, the latest self-help/fad-diet book, and the 500th cookie-cutter mystery/thriller/suspense novel from John Grisham/Stephen King/James Patterson.

A recent trend is to release novellas as self-contained published works, whereas in the past, they were usually included with short-story collections or released as special chapbooks. Releasing them individually would seem to be a sales gamble, but they are ideal for those readers who want their reading entertainment to last only as long as their lunch break. Thankfully, Bad Moon Books is just that in the horror/suspense genre.

First up: HEART OF GLASS by David Winnick, an ultra-slim story of a married couple on the downhill slope. Adam is married to a woman who essentially has as much passion for him as she does for cleaning the bathroom in her house. (That is to say, not much.) He’s desperate to rekindle their old passion, but Sonia is more interested in shopping for antiques than figuring out why he leaves her colder than yesterday’s breakfast.

While searching for old pulp sci-fi novels, Adam comes across an antique glass jigsaw puzzle, which he sees as a means for the two of them to spend time together, perhaps rediscover each other, but it quickly locks an unnatural hold on him. He becomes obsessed by it to the exclusion of everything else in his life, including Sonia.

This slim, little story is shorter than a novella. In reality, it’s a short story and only clocks in at 39 pages, of which 27 is actual story. But for a 99-cent download, you could do worse. Winnick has a way with getting you to know the players in his little drama, their backstories and personalities, and has a quiet buildup that pays off in a major way at the end.

Downside: The title had that Blondie song stuck in my head while I read it. Upside: It only took about 15 minutes to read.

URSA MAJOR by John R. Little starts off with a premise that seems tailor-made for a David Fincher film like PANIC ROOM: A man brings his girlfriend’s 6-year-old daughter to a remote Alaska cabin to watch a meteor shower. It’s his way of bonding with the girl and trying to get her to accept him as a possible future stepfather. Things go awry when a grizzly traps them in a storage room inside the cabin. And the bear has no intention of letting them leave.

I had several problems with this premise, the most glaring one being: What mother would let her 6-year-old daughter travel to a remote Alaska cabin with her boyfriend, and not insist on accompanying them? For that matter, why would a man, desperate to be accepted or not, want to spend such a thousand dollars on plane fare to win the girl’s acceptance when it would have been cheaper just to buy her a couple of toys? Or candy? Candy always works.

The bulk of the story is the protagonist’s mission to protect the girl and somehow get them out of the cabin without being eaten. The antagonist’s mission is, apparently, to stay right there and eat them if it can. And roar a lot.

I had more problems with this story because — although the initial setup is suspenseful and you keep turning the pages to see what happens — ultimately, like in my case, you can probably think of a couple of ideas to solve the problem. But the protagonist is intent on doing things the hard way or the wrong way, and so you’re left with that vague frustration you get when you’re watching a horror movie and the idiot campers insist on staying at the haunted lake.

URSA MAJOR is also a slim novella, with 87 pages, but only 65 pages of story. Unfortunately, the reader is subjected to “witty” banter between Gene O’Neill and Gord Rollo, two distinguished authors in their own right. The piece is supposed to be an introduction to Little, but instead is mainly a 10-page (!) exchange of jokes about the differences between Canada and the United States.

Really, did we need that waste of pages? And the whole “Canada is so lame” shtick was old back when SOUTH PARK started goofing on them. Guys, stick to the genre stuff. Note to Bad Moon Books: Get rid of the unnecessary fluff.

Finally, there’s ALICE ON THE SHELF by Bill Gauthier, a slightly longer work than the others. It clocks in at 125 pages – 114 pages of story.

Newly divorced Brad has a crush on his BFF, Miranda, who is still stinging from her recent breakup with her boyfriend. She only likes Bill as a friend because … well, quite frankly, he’s as exciting as a wet dishrag.

One night, Miranda goes missing and Bill finds a familiar creature lurking around her front yard: a giant, white, talking rabbit, like out of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. He follows the animal down a hole and discovers a land that is a twisted combination of all the storybook worlds, but through a darker lens.

The characters in this cross-sectional world are R-rated versions: Tweedledum and Tweedledee are lovers; the Scarecrow from THE WIZARD OF OZ is suicidal; Hansel and Gretel have modern names and sensibilities; and the Cheshire Cat is just plain evil and dangerous. There’s more, of course, and Gauthier comes up with interesting mature takes on established children’s story characters.

I won’t give it all away here, however, other than to say that our hero has to go on a quest of sorts to rescue the fair maiden (Miranda/Alice). He meets allies along the way and faces adversaries. My chief complaint, however, is the ambiguous ending. Could have done with something a bit more satisfying.

Actually, scratch that. My real chief complaint is the prices. Although 99 cents for the Winnick download seems … well, fair, I suppose (even if it is only a short story), but URSA MAJOR and ALICE ON THE SHELF retail for $15 and $17.95, respectively. That seems a bit steep for two trade paperbacks that are a third the size of most books that sell for the same price. Unless you’re a hardcore Little or Gauthier fan, I’m not sure I’d recommend spending that much for such thin volumes as these. —Slade Grayson

Buy them at Bad Moon Books.

Author Joshua Jabcuga delves into horror, where every Friday is Friday the 13th!

This review is being written on the day Borders has begun liquidating the last of its bookstores. It’s a sad day, and many feel it was inevitable, but personally, the loss stings and frustrates all at once. Borders was once a thriving epicenter of culture and ideas.

Does that sound over-the-top? I assure you, at one time, Borders was fairly influential. Hell, the store offered its own horror section, a place where one could procure copies of Brian Keene, Richard Laymon and Jack Ketchum, right beside Stephen King and Richard Matheson.

Whether it was a combination of lagging sales (read: a crash in the DVD and CD market due to pirating and file sharing), competition from Amazon.com, executives who took their eyes off the ball, or a combination of all of the above, slowly but surely, like a black mass on an X-ray, things worsened.

Feeble and often illogical attempts were made to keep the store open. The suits were simply digging a grave, instead of digging out from the hole in which they found themselves. Fewer floor space was given to music and movies, and instead of filling that with more racks of books and offering a deeper selection, the void was filled with plush bears and calendars and trinkets and assorted kitsch. Black beret-wearing hipsters fought for counter space at the café to suck down their cappuccinos and flavored Italian sodas, believing that the concept of a bookstore and a library were mutually exclusive.

Some will point to the statistic that paperback sales are down, and cite this as one of the causes for Borders’ demise. If anything, I’ve purchased more books in the last four or five years than at any time in my life. A fraction of what I read is on the Kindle. Sure, Amazon offers a great discount on much of their selection, but not all of my purchases come from there. I also order directly from the publisher in many cases (to show my support), when it still may be cheaper to go to Jeff Bezos’ superstore.

The bottom line is, I make the majority of my purchases online. Why? Because I was sick and tired of dealing with the tools who took up all the space doing their homework, or pretending to work on that first manuscript on their laptop while I was shopping for books. And while I understood the employees were just doing their jobs, they often became a nuisance, trying to push me to sign up for frequent-shopper programs or to purchase e-readers. I know they were just following directives, but it drove me out of the store.

All too often, the books I wanted, from the same authors Borders used to carry, were no longer in stock, or carried at all. I was tired of employees telling me, “We can special-order it.” I didn’t need them to special-order it for me. If that’s what it takes, I can do it myself, thank you very much. Amazon will get it to me in a third of the time, and for nearly half what I’d pay at Borders. Essentially, I cut out the middleman. Apparently, I was not alone.

I’ll take some of the blame for the death of Borders, but don’t expect me to shoulder all the guilt. If it just stuck with carrying the books I wanted, having more than a single copy in stock, and discouraged some of the freeloaders, I would have stuck around.

I still think there’s a market for a good bookstore: one that, you know, sells books. Where a knowledgeable staff is eager to discuss their favorite authors or recommend something new to me, something that wasn’t being forced upon them by the higher-ups. Sorry, kid, if I wanted the latest James Patterson, I could get that at Walmart along with a bag of chips.

Back in the day, when Borders was thriving and when the store was actually hip, I’m almost certain they would have carried a magazine like SHOCK TOTEM. This is the type of publication that is worthy of your money, worthy of shelf space, and worthy of recommending to customers. Sometimes you have to educate an audience; sometimes you have to be patient with a publication and give it time to find an audience.

This is exactly the type of anthology that I would have anxiously awaited for at my local Borders, and it would have been the type of publication it would have carried, when it was still relevant.

When it was still primarily a bookstore.

When it was still in business.

All of that sounds harsh, as if I’m condemning them, but this is where some of that aforementioned frustration comes into play. I used to drop a lot of coin at the store, so I feel I’m entitled to my two cents. With that being said, my heart does go out to the many employees who have been affected by the closing of the stores, and the subsequent ripple effect that will be felt in publishing houses and distributors and down from there.

SHOCK TOTEM #3 (with issue #4 about to hit the streets) is quite exquisite. We can’t resurrect Borders, but we can still support the arts, our favorite authors and even our favorite publishers, whether they’re one of the ol’ big guns in NYC or a promising indie/small press such as Deadite Press or ChiZine Publications.

From cover to cover, SHOCK TOTEM is a quality, must-have collection of fiction and nonfiction. When I’m done with my advance review copies of books and such, I donate them to the library or pass them on to friends. But this is one of the few anthologies that I’m going to keep and plan on revisiting. I purchased the first two issues and I plan on collecting the series.

“Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted” is a pitch-perfect subtitle for SHOCK TOTEM, as it approaches horror from many angles — some of the stories being subtle and quiet, others garish and bizarre, although no less effective.

All of the authors contribute intelligent horror. The heavy hitter here is John Skipp, and while at first glance, his “Worm Central Tonite!” appears to be a glorified cameo, don’t let the story’s length (less than two pages) dissuade you from picking up SHOCK TOTEM, whether you’re a Skipp completeist, or just a fan of horror in general.

There’s a reason Mr. Skipp is a master of horror (that’s right, I said “Mister” — show some respect to the man, he’s earned it). No one writes like Skipp. Skipp is Skipp, the same way that Joe R. Lansdale is Joe R. Lansdale: “his own self.” These people are not imitators, but originators. Many aspiring writers would sell their souls to inject themselves with just a spoonful of Skipp’s X factor. If you’re tempted, all I can say is take a number, punk, there’s a line here.

SHOCK TOTEM has a great feature called “Howling Through the Keyhole” where it allows the authors to describe “the stories behind the stories.” A mini-version of the director’s commentary on a DVD, if you will. I don’t think I’ll be spoiling Skipp’s story when I share his humorous insight about “Worm Central Tonight!” with you here: “Squiggly existential carrion-eater stories are a dime a dozen, I know. But far be it from me to resist the latest trend!” That should whet your appetite. If something along those lines doesn’t appeal to you, isn’t there a copy of the latest installment of TWILIGHT you can whack yourself in the head with a few more times?

What about these unknown quantities that publisher/editor K. Allen Wood and assistant editors John Boden and Nick Contor, and nonfiction editor Mercedes M. Yardley have shoveled like coal into the fiery belly of SHOCK TOTEM, the little engine that could, to keep things on track? You may not be familiar with many, or any, of the names outside of Skipp, but don’t let that fool you. After reading three issues, it’s becoming crystal-clear this team has a keen eye for talent, and for creating a certain, well, macabre and twisted vibe.

Also, big kudos to Mikio Murakami on the phenomenal cover design. That tried-and-true warning of never judging a book by its cover? In this case, go right ahead. Here, Murakami’s work is the perfect way to set the tone for the heart, soul, bones and guts inside SHOCK TOTEM.

John Haggerty’s “The Meat Forest” feels like a nightmare Clive Barker might have if he overdosed on Takashi Miike films and sour milk. Take this passage: “Dmitri’s skin flared a dull red, his bioluminescent implants responding to his anger. He stepped up to Oleg, who flinched in spite of himself. ‘I said he’s mine,’ he whispered, the thin sibilance of his voice somehow carrying to the edge of the crowd. ‘One more word and the forest will have you.’” The story is disturbing, disorienting and carries with it an undertone of compassion. It’s even existentialist — a tall order, but Haggerty pulls it off.

Continuing along this Bizarro thread (which seemed more focused in the first half of SHOCK TOTEM #3, perhaps my only criticism) is a fitting interview with none other than D. Harlan Wilson. In his insightful interview with John Boden, Wilson describes the Bizarro movement thusly: “Bizarro is a subgenre of speculative fiction, I suppose. Mainly it’s distinguished by cartoon absurdism, grotesque playfulness, and cult (film) aesthetics.”

The interview runs after Tim Lieder’s “Bop Kabala and Communist Jazz” and Haggerty’s “The Meat Forest,” respectively, so chances are, if you made it that far into SHOCK TOTEM, you’ve already jumped into the deep end of the pool. It’s a bold choice by the editors, who don’t ease readers into issue #3, instead pushing them right in, but I think that’s more a sign of respect they have for the intelligence of their readership.

Honestly, I questioned the inclusion of a review section in SHOCK TOTEM, but after reading the reviews, I was totally won over. There’s a rhyme and reason with most of them, including the films PIECES, JACOB’S LADDER and Jan Švankmajer’s ALICE (aka NECO Z ALENKY), and 1985′s lost gem of a novel with a cult following, TOPLIN, by the late Michael McDowell (who received a writing credit on Tim Burton’s wacky masterpiece BEETLEJUICE).

Wood interviews Count Lyle of the band Ghoultown, and I enjoyed the piece so much it gave me the urge to track down the group’s music. Similarly, Boden and Simon Marshall-Jones begin the first part of a series examining the relationship between horror and music, and no discussion would be complete without Alice Cooper, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Cramps and even Aphex Twin. Boden and Marshall-Jones know what they’re talking about, and I look forward to more in this series.

Hands down, my favorite piece in SHOCK TOTEM #3 is “Wanting It” by Aaron Polson. While some of the other stories were flashier, or tried to dazzle with inventive wordplay, some even citing Chuck Palahniuk as an influence (while others may have been indirectly influenced by him, and there’s no shame in that, as Palahniuk’s voice has influenced many great writers, some veterans, too), Polson’s piece felt the most natural and confident.

I was genuinely moved by Polson’s entry, one about nostalgia and memories, and as some of us know, these ghosts of what-was or what-can-never-be-again can create the most haunting experiences of our lives, the kind that no amount of beer can drown, no pill can numb, and the type where no amount of distance or time will help us escape from it.

“Wanting It” reminded me very much of J.J. Abrams’ SUPER 8, but with no real Hollywood ending. To me, that’s horror at its finest. I hope to see more work from Polson in future editions of SHOCK TOTEM. He has a novel of historical horror, LOATHSOME, DARK AND DEEP, from Belfire Press, and I’ll be tracking down a copy shortly.

While I’ve singled out some stories for this review, SHOCK TOTEM #3 has something for everyone. Each contributor should be proud of his or her work, and I’m sorry I don’t have more time to examine and praise the work of Christopher Green and his fascinating “Stitched” or Joseph Morgado’s “Eye, You”, which is told in the second person and is a home run that would make Rod Serling proud.

After only three issues, SHOCK TOTEM already has found its voice. That’s an amazing accomplishment. This publication deserves every opportunity to find an audience. Sadly, Borders will be one less avenue for it to pick up new readers and increase circulation.

But the world will go on without Borders. And with your support, so will this great genre that we love. Vote with your dollars. Wherever you find SHOCK TOTEM, do yourself a favor and purchase a copy. Seek it out. You’re getting a glimpse into a crystal ball, with a showcase of some of the brightest up and coming and under the radar voices that the horror genre has to offer.

And to my friends at Borders: I’ll miss you. I’m sorry I won’t be able to convince the higher-ups to stock something like SHOCK TOTEM. I doubt they would have listened anyway. I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life, so I’m not sure I was the target demo for your most recent and last incarnation.

But I love to read and add books to my collection. Viva horror! Viva SHOCK TOTEM! —Joshua Jabcuga

Buy it at Shock Totem.

THE DEAD WOMAN, the fourth book in THE DEAD MAN series, keeps the franchise going strong, with David McAfee taking the ax and runs with it. This time out, we find Matt Cahill on his last few dollars on a bus trip to the middle of nowhere down South.

He arrives in the town of Crawford, where he figures he can find some odd jobs to continue in his travels with no fixed destination. Once there, he watches as what looks like the whole police force tears through town with the word being they found “another one.” By that, they mean a dead body, courtesy of the local serial killer who has been killing off the local women.

A nonplussed Cahill finds a job at a local antique store run by Abbey, who needs his help with moving things into storage. Of course, this being a DEAD MAN book, his power of seeing the evil in people is soon to appear. And this time, he watches a local man storm off with a hint of the darkness appearing on his face.

Abbey shares a secret with Matt: She has the same power. Throw in an angry ex-husband who is also a cop and cue the accusations of Matt, and the story quickly takes a great turn involving the Mr. Dark character, leading to a fantastic reveal that may hint at Matt’s future.

Without spoiling the story, this book definitely delves more into the series’ mythos, with McAfee seeming to have solid ideas for a future entry; hopefully, creators Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin once again will give him the keys to the DEAD MAN kingdom. What really makes these horror novels so enjoyable is how quickly they can be devoured, leaving readers wanting more. Thankfully, they’re coming out quicker, with plenty of other great authors waiting in the wings. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

Readers curious about some unifying theme to the 19 stories in the CRUCIFIED DREAMS anthology edited by Joe R. Lansdale won’t get much help from the title. It’s eye-catching, to be sure, but what the hell is a “crucified dream?” The subtitle, TALES OF URBAN HORROR, is even more misleading, as not all of the stories are horror, nor all take place in a city.

A far better insight comes from Lansdale himself when he reveals in the introduction, “the original idea was that we would do something along the lines of the kind of stories I might write or like to read.”

Aha! So from this — as any devoted Lansdale reader knows — we should expect a book full of audacious but entertaining stories about all manner of crime, horror and dark fantasy from authors who never miss an opportunity to stretch boundaries. That’s what we get in this collection of reprints from some of the most innovative, diverse and popular names to ever fill a title page.
 
Leading it off is “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” by Harlan Ellison, who, heaven knows, is no stranger to audacity. This nightmarish story, revealing why New Yorkers witness acts of violence with what appears as apathy, has lost none of its power in the 38 years since its first publication. Equally intense, but with an entirely different setting, is Charlie Huston’s “Interrogation B,” with its clever, gender role-switching in a otherwise familiar crime-fiction setting.
 
Stephen King, whose name tops the list of contributors on the cover, offers “Quitters, Inc,” a darkly funny story of a man who quits smoking by hiring a firm with deadly effective methods. The late and sorely missed Octavia E. Butler offers “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” a subtle but haunting meditation about genetic disease and how it dictates the lives of its carriers.
 
Perhaps the closest to what Lansdale might write is Norman Partridge’s “The Mojave Two-Step,” a near-future work of two thieves making their way through the desert to Las Vegas in a stolen ice cream truck and the surreal events that change their luck. Lansdale’s actual contribution is “The Pit,” a nasty and violent story of how a backwoods town gets its entertainment with the help of captured strangers.
 
A few stories don’t work as well as you’d want them to. David Morrell’s “The Front Man,” about how a once-successful but aging screenwriter battles the entertainment industry’s obsession with youth, is unfortunately too predicable. And Jonathan Lethem’s “Access Fantasy” contains a fine futuristic idea, but is marred by its endless-paragraph structure that quickly becomes irritating.
 
Even with these few shortcomings, this is one of those rare anthologies where you’ll want to read each and every contribution. Doing so will not only provide more than your money’s worth, but introduce you to the worthwhile works of Tom Piccirilli,  Lucius Shepard, Michael Shea and others. You’ll also get some impressive, slightly off-the- beaten-path moments from more familiar genre authors like Joe Haldeman, Jeffrey Ford and Michael Bishop.
 
So don’t be overly concerned with its title or any of the shorthand attempts to describe its contents. Get CRUCIFIED DREAMS and put yourself in the capable hands of Lansdale as he guides you through his wonderfully twisted sensibilities and tastes in reading. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

In Greg F. Gifune’s A VIEW FROM THE LAKE, Katherine and her husband, James, own a small summer vacation resort comprised of a main house and small rental cabins around a quiet Massachusetts lake. It’s an idyllic existence until one morning, a small, Japanese boy wanders out of his parents’ rented cabin and drowns in the lake. James finds the boy’s body and takes the death unnaturally hard. From there, he starts to slowly lose his grip on sanity.
         
Katherine attempts to console her husband and urges him to get therapy, but James slips further and further away … until one day, he disappears completely. The lake is dragged, but James’s body isn’t found, although he is believed to be dead.

From that point on, Katherine’s life spirals downward. Business suffers, because who wants to vacation at a lake where a child drowned and a poet has gone missing? She decides to sell. She just needs to get through one more winter first …

Of course, weird things happen, because this is published by Bad Moon Books, purveyors of fiction featuring weird things. Weird things such as Katherine hearing James’ voice and seeing apparitions of small children. She enlists the aid of her alcoholic college friend, Carlo, who is (conveniently) still in love with her. Together, they discover that James may have had a sketchy past, and someone or something is trying to draw them into the lake.

This is a slim book ­­­— barely 190 pages — but overall, a well-written one, with some creepy scenes that reminded me of THE SHINING. The author knows how to set a scene and draw the reader in, and the 190 pages fly by, which is not meant to be a criticism at all.
 
Also from Bad Moon Books is THE RED EMPIRE by Joe McKinney, an author who is apparently attempting to have books come out from as many different publishers as he can. Pinnacle recently released his zombie/natural-disaster novel FLESH EATERS, while Gutter Books put out the crime-oriented DODGING BULLETS. Here, McKinney turns his writing talent to weird sci-fi that sounds like a modern-day take on a cheesy 1950s movie.

“The Red Empire” is actually a species of engineered super-intelligent, very adaptive, inch-long fire ants, created by the military as a weapon of mass destruction. Their purpose is to be released into the Middle East to eliminate the civilian population, and therefore, the insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers. Unfortunately, the truck transporting them across Texas is washed away in a hurricane-strength storm, and the ants are off to ruin every picnic they find. Just kidding — they’re going to kill everything that crosses their path.

Amy Bloom and her daughter, 14-year-old Casey, return home from a San Antonio hospital where Casey was the recipient of a cornea transplant. Due to the storm and washed-out roads, they barely make it, but when they do, they find an escaped — and armed — federal prisoner named Ricky Fallon hiding out in their home. Ricky just wants to head to Mexico, but he won’t pass up the opportunity to take hostages.

Meanwhile, Dr. Preston Baum was widowed a few weeks before when his wife died in a car accident. He hears about Casey’s cornea transplant and is desperate to find out if she has his dead wife’s eyes. Baum may be the only hope the Blooms have of being saved from the psychopath in their midst, and the army of killer ants advancing on their home.

As I said, the whole thing sounds super-cheesy, but it all works. At 151 pages, this book is even slimmer than the other, and the story itself covers only a matter of hours, but it doesn’t feel incomplete or rushed. McKinney even manages to tell it from multiple perspectives, which is a nice touch. There’s enough action mixed with character development that no reader should feel shortchanged.

Although with his list of credits, I do wonder what McKinney has coming out next. Chemistry textbook? Harlequin romance? —Slade Grayson

Buy them at Bad Moon Books.

In THE STRAIN, the first book of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s “vampires reimagined” horror trilogy, New York and its surrounds were consumed by zombie-like, stingers-that-can-shoot-out-of-their-throats monsters commanded by a mysterious master over the course of a week. Now in paperback, the second novel, THE FALL, picks up where we left off, with our previously independent protagonists finally banded together, and the new vampire race slowly gaining intelligence.

In the wake of STRAIN’s down ending, our fearless vampire hunters — government epidemiologists Eph Goodweather and Nora Martinez; New York exterminator Vasiliy Fet; and would-be Van Helsing Abe Setrakian, whose history with these monsters dates to his childhood — are holed up in Setrakian’s well-fortified building, planning their next steps and trying to determine what the monsters will get up to next.

Unfortunately, Eph’s ex-wife is a vampire with a radar lock on Eph’s son, and she remains determined to find the boy and vamp him up. Meanwhile, there is already a vampire clan in North America, and it’s none too pleased with this new infection, so it recruits gang members to help them with their own vampire-hunting efforts.

On the other side, twisted psychopath billionaire Eldritch Palmer’s partnership with the vampires’ master nears its endgame, while the Big Cheese Vampire and his former rock star vampire assistant work toward global domination.

The best parts of the STRAIN were the little vignettes showing the impact of the infection on the city — grisly tales of infection and survival. (Author’s note: I listened the the audiobook version of THE STRAIN, read by the always-awesome Ron Perlman, so that might have had an impact on my opinion of that book. I read THE FALL with my own eyes, untainted by Perlman’s gravelly goodness.)

In THE FALL, the action focuses on a handful of factions over just a couple of days, and a lot of THE STRAIN’s flavor is lost as the authors push the plot relentlessly forward. Setrakian sets his focus on acquiring an ancient book that supposedly holds the vampires’ secrets, and flashbacks into his past provide fascinating backstory to the trilogy’s rich mythology.

In the present, though, there’s not a lot of really interesting stuff going on. The other vampire clan is pretty cool, but isn’t fleshed out nearly enough. There’s lots of gore, but there are very few genuinely suspenseful, dreadful moments. As trilogies go, THE FALL is less a traditional second act than it is an attempt for the authors to get the main players (and the world at large) where they need to be for the third book. But lots of stuff does happen, and plenty of information about the vampires is trotted out amid all of this, even if character development stands still for the most part.

On the plus side, some crazy shit happens at the end of the book that I really appreciated — the trilogy’s world can never return to the old “normal” after everything that happens, and I like that kind of boldness. There’s also a nice bit of dark humor here that’s much appreciated and never discordant.

If you’re already invested in THE STRAIN trilogy, THE FALL is worthwhile, if nothing else, for the great imagination behind the vampires on display here and the superb flashbacks and backstory. Del Toro’s got a twisted mind, and Hogan takes that and runs with it. But THE FALL reads like it’s more Hogan than Del Toro, for the worse. —Ryun Patterson

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This is only the third BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR anthology from San Francisco’s Night Shade Books, but don’t let that low number dissuade you. Ellen Datlow, as many readers know, is one of the most skilled and prolific editors covering the field today, with more than 50 collections and dozens of Hugos, Stoker, Locus and other awards to her name.
 
Even if this is the first “best of” book you’ve ever encountered of hers, you can’t help but be impressed with Datlow’s knowledge of the many publishing sources — both major and esoteric — as well as the diversity of styles and subjects that fall under the horror category.

Take, for example, “Transfiguration” by Richard Christian Matheson, a bleak tale about a most unlikely angel working as a trucker on the frozen highways of northern Alaska. Then there’s “The Folding Man” by Joe R. Lansdale, a riotous and unexpectedly inventive story following three teens during the worst Halloween night of their lives; it’s spiced with just enough Southern twang to remind us that it’s Lansdale doing the telling.
 
Zombie stories? Sure, they’re here. But Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Days of Flaming Motorcycles” presents a whole new perspective on the overworked subgenre as the surviving narrator expresses the aching loss of those she loves to the zombie virus while offering an observant, sober definition of the undead at the same time. It’s one of those stories worth the price of the entire anthology and one of the best of its kind you’ll ever read.

Notable also is “The Fear” by Richard Harland, an entertaining and affectionate look at horror-film fan culture as a group of cinema students track down the frightening, unfinished movie by a favorite cult director. Tanith Lee, a veteran of many year-end collections, demonstrates her dark fantasy skills in “A Black and White Sky,” a slow-building story of a deadly plague of birds that blends myth with modern sensibilities. And John Langan’s “The Revel” manages to tell a werewolf story while analytically examining the traits and traditions of such tales.
 
All 17 stories are Datlow’s picks from a seemingly endless array of books, magazines, chapbooks, journals and other formats that appeared in print as well as online during the past year. Her opening 40-page “Summation” article lovingly details her research, including many brief summaries of the various works she read. Even the most devoted horror reader will be humbled by how much they missed, while frantically adding authors and titles to their to-read lists.
 
The quality and bottom-line fright factors vary, as is the case with any such anthology. But there is easily more than enough here to keep both longtime and occasional horror readers happy, satisfied and scared stiff. Best of all, even those who faithfully follow other annual anthologies will find little or no overlap from collections gathered by Stephen Jones and others.
 
If there were such a thing as a “best of ‘the best of’” list, this would certainly be a top contender. For the moment, let’s all be grateful to Datlow for getting us caught up with the many great authors and their works in the horror world, while she is no doubt busy scouring the shelves and URLs for her 2011 compilation. —Alan Cranis

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Crime author Jason Starr, who has also been busy lately writing comic books and graphic novels, extends his reach even further into urban horror thrillers with his latest novel, THE PACK. The title alone tells anyone remotely familiar with horror fiction that it’s about werewolves. The obvious question: Does Starr pull it off?

Yes, mostly. It’s not a completely original approach to the theme, but brings a few new elements to the concept and — thanks mostly to Starr’s skills at character and suspense — is an engrossing and entertaining story.

Simon Burns is a successful New York advertising executive who feels he is in line for a promotion, thanks to a big account he just landed. Instead, he discovers that his position has been “eliminated,” and his former boss refuses to answer his phone calls and e-mails. Simon is devastated, but his wife, Alison, sees his unemployment as an opportunity for Simon to get closer to Jeremy, their 3-year-old son.

So the next morning, as Alison rushes off to her job, Simon begins his new life as a stay-at-home father. It’s disastrous at first, but slowly gets better. One afternoon, Simon meets three other dads — Michael, Ramon and Charlie — in a park on the other side of town. They seem different — not only comfortable in their roles as fathers, but noticeably confident about everything and in excellent physical shape as well. After meeting a few more afternoons, they agree to spend an evening out together.
 
The following morning, after a frightening and disorienting experience, Simon notices a whole series of inexplicable changes. He can’t seem to eat enough red meat to satisfy his hunger. He can’t get enough of his wife, and their renewed sexual passion improves their previously dull marriage. His sense of hearing and smell is sharpened, and he feels stronger than he can ever recall.
 
It’s all wonderful at first, until Simon is haunted by disturbing violent nightmares. He begins to wonder what has happened to him and eventually learns that he, along with Ramon and Charlie, is slowly becoming part of a werewolf pack lead by Michael. Horrified by what his future might be Simon tries to halt the transformation before it’s too late.
 
Rather than the traditional transformation brought on by a full moon, Starr elongates Simon’s evolution into wolf over most of the novel main section. It has to do, we learn, with how werewolf power is passed on, and is perhaps the most strikingly original ingredient Starr brings to the legend.
 
Sadly, THE PACK’s structure feels choppy. This is especially true in chapters involving Michael’s sexual conquest of a woman he meets in a singles bar and the unforgettable effect he has on her. The point feels overly stressed until we see the role she plays in the book’s last quarter. Starr seems to go far afield to make it all fit together when he finally connects her with Simon and the rest of the players.
 
On the other hand, Starr’s prose, like most of his previous novels, is hip but comfortably inviting. We feel an immediate empathy for Simon as he goes through the series of real and supernatural changes in his life.
 
Ultimately, THE PACK is reminiscent of the underrated 1994 movie WOLF where a man (played by Jack Nicholson) slowly changes into a beast, and uses the newfound power to exert himself in both his professional and personal life. The film’s tone is darker and more subdued, but the component of the wolf pack and the threat it poses is what really distinguishes Starr’s story. And, as indicated both by the book’s open-ended conclusion and the information in the dust-jacket bio, a sequel is in the works.
 
Contemporary horror fiction fans may find THE PACK too mild for their liking, but crime-fiction followers and those who have followed Starr’s work will welcome this alluring blend of supernatural and suspense. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.
 

Lee F. Jordan is probably not going to like me much.
         
The author sent me his novel HELL’S DOCTOR to review here, and even wrote an inscription thanking me for reading it. It’s a bold move for an author to send out free copies of his work — especially one with a cover price of $18.95 — in order to get publicity in the form of a (hopefully) positive review.
         
I mean, that’s what it’s all about, right? Positive word of mouth. You want rave reviews from both critics and readers. Get enough five-star reviews on Amazon and people will buy the book no matter the subject or genre (that’s how we struggling authors like to think, anyway).

So you’re an author with a new work and you decide to put it in various hands and ask for feedback or a review. You hope for a rave, but even a critical pan is acceptable, because bad publicity is just as good as good publicity.

Example: Two decades ago, Bret Easton Ellis’ AMERICAN PSYCHO was rejected by his publisher for its controversial subject matter. He sold it to another, smaller publisher, and a major media blitz erupted over it. Many people, myself included, went out and bought the novel just to see what the hubbub was all about.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but to hear how shocking (at the time) some of its scenes were, that the author’s original publisher had considered it too … sick, I think one article referred to it as … well, I just had to see for myself. Like your friends talking you into watching a video of someone being eaten by a polar bear, you really don’t want to, but part of you is curious to see how bad it really is.

AMERICAN PSYCHO turned out to be a piece of crap. It read as if it was a book written by someone on a serious cocaine binge while watching an endless loop of slasher movies. Side note: I did enjoy the movie version, but mainly because of the performances and the subtle nuances the filmmakers added.

So why am I talking about that lousy novel when I’m supposed to be talking about Jordan’s HELL’S DOCTOR? Because I know that what I’m about to say, although in my mind is negative and is meant to discourage people from reading it, will actually cause some of you to buy it strictly for the curiosity factor: This book turned my stomach.

I’m not a person who will shy away from unpleasantness. I’ve seen things that would give many people nightmares, and I’ve experienced things that would break a lesser man. I’ve been through the wringer, hit rock bottom, and survived hell on Earth. And to meet me, you wouldn’t know any of that, because I carry a stoic expression that would not look out of place on Easter Island. I’m putting this disclaimer out there because I don’t want anyone to think that I’m a milquetoast by any means. But this book? It turned my stomach.

The story is set in Hell, literally. The city of Hell is not a nice place. In fact, it’s so awful, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. Pain and suffering is commonplace, and there’s no end to it. It’s split into levels, however, the interesting twist is that the lower levels are far more endurable than the upper ones. If you’re on an upper level, you want nothing more than to move down.

Former detective Mack Teacher is in Hell because he killed himself after the death of his wife. Hell’s royalty utilizes his skills for their own ends, which benefits Mack because it keeps him out of the upper levels. He’s ordered to find an object that holds great power — possibly the power to open the portal between Earth and Hell.

At the same time, Hell’s doctor, Vincent — whose primary responsibility is to inflict as much suffering on the “pain babies” (the term used to refer to newest arrivals) as possible — has just come upon the knowledge that there might be a way to lengthen the time the portal between Hell and Earth stays open. These two men on opposite sides of the moral spectrum begin their individual quests, but of course, they run parallel to each other.

The plot is an interesting one, and I enjoyed the intrigue behind the scenes of Hell, as it reminded me of what the last days of Caligula’s empire might have been like. But the endless torture, mutilation and gross-out passages wore on me. The “ick” factor, as one friend would describe it, detracts from the story, to the point that I had to give up at the halfway point.

So here’s my recommendation, such as it is: If your favorite scene in RESERVOIR DOGS is where the cop gets his ear sliced off; if you thought the movie HOSTEL was robbed at Oscar time; if you liked SAW, but thought there was too much talking; if AMERICAN PSYCHO (the book) makes you yawn at how tame it is … then you’ll probably enjoy HELL’S DOCTOR.

Me? I’ll stick with my HELLBLAZER comics. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.

I’ve bitched about the proliferation of zombie novels and, of course, much like the ravenous undead they feature, the novels keep coming. Call it a fad. Call it a subgenre that won’t go away. Call it my karma coming back to haunt me.

Call it what you will, but here are a quintet of recent books that feature a possible cause of the apocalypse … at least according to the CDC.

A ZOMBIE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: FROM THE MASSACRE AT PLYMOUTH ROCK TO THE CIA’S SECRET WAR ON THE UNDEAD by the pseudonymous Dr. Worm Miller takes the position that zombies have been an intricate part of history, but largely covered up. Miller tells the story of the United States’ last 200 years and how zombies played a major part in its formation.

In Miller’s alternate history, there are two types of zombies: the berserkers who are essentially mindless eating machines, and hybrids, who are zombies capable of thought and reasoning, but who are sometimes overcome by their more animalistic urges. His book reads like an entertaining history textbook: Washington crossing the Delaware while fighting off an undead horde; Lewis’ (of Lewis and Clark) obsession with proving that a zombie cure works, to the point that he experiments on himself, and the inevitable tragic end result; Jim Bowie’s ferocious fight against an army of zombies at the Alamo and his own heroic sacrifice; the zombie hybrids who were used as super-soldiers during World War II (take that, Captain America!) …

These scenes are all fun to read and to imagine, but too often, Miller’s book gets bogged down in real-world situations and obvious setups. He depicts zombies as a minority lower down on the scale of being prejudiced against than any other, and of course, there are civil rights scenes that play out because of it. Sometimes it’s clever and it works, but more often, it’s predictable. Yes, of course they would be hunted for sport. Of course they would be experimented on. Of course they would be ostracized.

Most disturbing, at least in my mind, is that Miller depicts the Civil War as more of a fight for zombie freedom than what it was originally fought for. I understand he has a message here, but something about taking the history of the African Americans in this country and rewriting it with zombies doesn’t sit quite right with me.
         
In AUTUMN: THE CITY, author David Moody constructs a more realistic approach to what a zombie plague would entail. A cover blurb compares his AUTUMN series to Matheson’s I AM LEGEND, and although I see the similarities, I think Moody falls short of that lofty ideal.

Much like Matheson’s novel, a plague erupts without warning and suddenly billions of people drop dead. A few days later, the dead begin to move and slowly, almost imperceptibly, they exhibit awareness. Naturally, this means trouble for the scant few survivors.
         
Moody is good at creating realistic characters with scenarios that engage the reader. A cover blurb also compares his series to George Romero’s LIVING DEAD films and 28 DAYS LATER, but I was reminded more of King’s THE STAND: The world changes overnight, leaving the few survivors are leftscrambling for food, shelter and safety in numbers; there’s a large cast and multiple subplots; unlikely bonds form between disparate characters; and everyone is moving towards a common goal. All the elements are there, and without the hokey good-vs.-evil crap that King forced into that novel.
             
AUTUMN: THE CITY is an enjoyable read with true moments of suspense. But the “best horror since Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND”? Sorry Wayne Simmons, author of that hyperbolic blurb, but I think you should re-read Matheson’s book.
         
ZOMBIE, OHIO by Scott Kenemore tells a zombie tale … from the viewpoint of a zombie. It’s a quirky take on this overused subgenre (although one that is increasingly becoming more common), and it works on several different levels.

Peter Mellor wakes up after a car accident with no memory of his past life. There’s a reason he’s amnesiac: The top of his head was sheared off in the accident, and he’s now a member of the living dead who are roaming the countryside. That’s right: The zombies are out in full force and people are scrambling to survive.

But Peter is different from the other zombies: He can think and reason and talk, and as long as no one asks to take his pulse (and he keeps his baseball cap covering his exposed brain), he can pass for a member of the living. Peter is an über-zombie.

Therein lies Peter’s dilemma: As a thinking being, he has a moral code and a conscience, but as a zombie, he has a craving for brains. To him, brains taste better than a peanut-butter-and-crack sandwich. So what’s an undead man to do when he’s caught between two worlds? And how long can he resist his hunger?
         
Kenemore has a background in humor writing, which shows to great effect. His prose is sharp and witty, and there are situations and bits of dialogue that made me chuckle and occasionally laugh out loud. At the same time, his main character is a tragic figure, a man reborn as a monster who tries to hold onto his humanity, but finds it slipping further and further away.

Favorite line: “I grabbed some of his brain and downed it before continuing. It galvanized me, like fucked-up Popeye spinach.”

Joe McKinney’s FLESH EATERS takes more of the traditional approach. Houston is hit with a hurricane, and amid the flooded streets, the dead are rising and attacking the living. Sgt. Eleanor Norton has her hands full with helping survivors and struggling to keep her husband and daughter safe from not only looters, but also an impending second storm. Now she has to contend with zombies, as well.

McKinney is a good writer and his plot seems geared for a blockbuster movie adaptation — like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD crossed with HARD RAIN (that crappy ’90s Christian Slater/Morgan Freeman flood movie) — but he takes his time in getting the story moving. I found myself wondering, “When are the zombies gonna show up?” for a good 60 pages or so. I mean, in a zombie novel, you want to get to the zombies as quickly as possible. Right?

There’s a concurrent running plot about a group of men who are using the flooding to hide their plan to pull off a major heist. It’s an interesting scenario: a foolproof plan to score millions of dollars … if only those damn zombies hadn’t of shown up. Despite the book’s slow start, this secondary plot and the plight of Eleanor keep the novel moving.

Finally, there’s S.G. Browne’s BREATHERS: A ZOMBIE’S LAMENT, a tale of zombies as told from the viewpoint of one. (See what I mean about it becoming more common?)

Andy lives with his parents because he died in a car accident and now he’s one of them, the world’s newest and most hated minority. His wife is dead (she didn’t reanimate like he did) and he’s unable to see his daughter. The only thing he has in “life,” if you can call it that, is a support group for zombies like himself.

There, he gets to mingle with suicides, other car crash victims, robbery/murder victims … and they all are as miserable as him. One day, they meet a zombie who introduces them to the joys of eating humans. Then Andy’s undead life becomes more interesting.

Browne also has a quirky take on zombies, although it doesn’t snap with the same electricity that Kenemore’s ZOMBIE, OHIO conducted. Browne’s zombies are 21st-century slackers with a mixture of self-loathing and lack of self-worth — emo-zombies, if you will. The cast is interesting and there’s a bit of mystery that kicks the story off in an interesting fashion. Browne also throws in tidbits like the zombies having to consume products that contain formaldehyde in order to stave off further decomposition. It’s a fun bit that adds — dare I say it? — flavor to the plot.

Of the two, I found Kenemore’s book more enjoyable, but why quibble? Read both for two sides of the same coin.

Footnote: Jonathan Maberry, an author of many a zombie book himself, seems to be the go-to guy for zombie-novel blurbs. His name is on the majority of these books’ covers, which I guess means that publishers are actively soliciting his endorsement. I wonder if he still enjoys the genre, or if he’s wishing he had made a name for himself writing something else. —Slade Grayson

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THE DEAD MAN series has become one of my favorite things to look forward to on a monthly basis. On top of that, they are lean and mean reading material, and the third book, HELL IN HEAVEN, amps up the mean aspect. For fans who have been wondering where the ax has been, it’s back in a big, bloody way. For new readers, it’s best to at least read the first book in the series, which lays the foundation.

This time, we find Matthew Cahill riding a beat-up motorcycle instead of hitching rides. From that point, you know Cahill is in trouble, especially when he takes an exit marked Heaven, and arrives in a town that looks stuck in a time warp. We are talking seriously local, with no makings of the 21st century: no strip malls, fast food restaurants, or branded clothes. And then there is the huge banner.

It reads, “Welcome Home Matt.” He should turn around then and there, but this being a postmodern pulp, we know full well he’s there for the duration. What is weird to Matt is that he does not see any of the evil in anyone, as his power normally allows him.

The townspeople are welcoming to the stranger, and explain the sign was meant for a local resident returning from Army service. Of course, their hospitality is just a ruse, giving Matt has some serious business to handle, such as blood and gore spilled at his hands. The terror ramps up from there, as Matt finds out the truth behind the eye-for-an-eye town and his reasons for being there.

Co-authors Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin seem to revel in making THE DEAD MAN: HELL IN HEAVEN be as over-the-top as possible, while always keeping readers entertained. For anyone who has not taken up in the world of Matt Cahill yet, you are missing out on some truly crowd-pleasing fun. Sure, it may not be book-club material, but what are you expecting, JANE EYRE? —Bruce Grossman

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Several years after Anne Rice re-examined vampires as a species, but before Stephenie Meyer presented them as the objects of teen desire, British author/critic Kim Newman published ANNO DRACULA in 1992. It was an “alternate history” novel that imagined a different ending from Bram Stoker’s original tale. While it never achieved the popularity of either Rice or Meyer, it nonetheless became a cult favorite, spawning three sequels.

Now, like its title character, ANNO DRACULA has been resurrected (okay, reissued) in a new, expanded trade paperback edition from Titan Books.

It is 1888. Vlad Tepes, also known as Count Dracula, has escaped the attack of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing and flourished in London, his new home. So much so that he has managed to marry Queen Victoria and become the new Prince Consort. This influential position has allowed him to continue his scheme to populate vampires throughout England and eventually the rest of the world. Along the way, the presence of vampires has become a much more commonplace and nearly accepted reality in London, as though the undead were a group of recently settled and assimilated foreigners.

But a recent series of murders is starting to disturb the investigators of Scotland Yard, and eventually the royal family as well. Prostitutes have been found brutally but surgically cut and murdered in the streets of Whitechapel. What’s more, the killer has taken the extra effort to seek out whores who have recently become vampires, and offing them with a scalpel made of silver to ensure their permanent death.
 
Obviously, “Silver Knife,” the popular nickname of the murderer, is on a personal vendetta against vampires, so Scotland Yard enlists the help of Genevieve Dieudonne, a vampire whose lineage is even older than Dracula’s, to track down this obstacle to the Prince Consort’s plan to enslave humans. Several political and personal complications stand in the way of the hunt for the killer who soon begins to identify himself as Jack. There is even reason to suspect that The Ripper is one of the Prince Consort’s trusted insiders.
 
Newman’s prose style is stately and protracted, perfectly in keeping with the Victorian period of his novel. His attention to period detail is also impressive, if at times exhausting, right down to the exact number of buttons and hooks on a lady’s dress.

Noteworthy also is the way he playfully but skillfully weaves both historical and fictional characters throughout his story. Along with actual member of the ruling class and political figures of the time, ANNO DRACULA features names from the Stoker novel, of course, plus several from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and other, lesser-known authors of the period. These include Inspector Lestrade, Mycroft Holmes and the rest of the Diogenes Club, and even Lord Ruthven, a vampire whose fictional appearance predates Stoker and Dracula.
 
But the most distinguishing feature is how Newman combines his speculation of Dracula’s domain with the legend of Jack the Ripper, a figure whose has fascinated and endured as long as Dracula himself. By imagining the Ripper as a vampire killer, the author adds an entirely new element to the political underscoring of the novel’s events, as well as occasional bits of dry satire.
 
This new edition features Newman’s chapter-by-chapter annotations after the novel’s conclusion, where he reveals the depth and scope of his research and influences. Also included are a related article and short story by Newman, an alternate ending to the novel, and even an extract from a proposed movie script.

ANNO DRACULA will most certainly appeal to those whose recent hunger for vampire stories rivals the count’s thirst for blood. But there is also plenty here to appeal to those who are less enthusiastic about the current vampire craze, or who have gone out of their way to avoid the whole thing.

Titan Books will soon reissue the other novels in the series. I you missed them the first time around, now is your chance to experience this creative but lesser celebrated addition to the Dracula canon. —Alan Cranis

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Man, this is going to be tough. Not very long ago, I wrote a positive review about small publishers — and Dark Regions Press in general — and voiced my opinion that small publishers were the ones truly providing the reading public with quality and variety. The small publishers are the ones putting out the cutting-edge books: the stuff that doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter, Hollywood-prepackaged, Oprah-geared pablum-type of literature.

In that particular piece in which I ranted against the big publishers, I gave favorable reviews to a handful of Dark Regions’ books. So wouldn’t you know it: The very next Dark Regions release I pick up … well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

VOYEURS OF DEATH is a reissue of a collection of short stories by Shaun Jeffrey, with the bonus of five extra stories added in. They’re all in the vein of horror and/or suspense with truly strange concepts and weird premises. Jeffrey can write: His prose is descriptive without being dry. He’s articulate and the stories flow well … so why can’t I recommend it?

Ultimately, the stories don’t go anywhere. The author starts off with a cool concept that generates a feeling of expectation in the reader, and then either the climax is predictable or the story simply stops rather than ends, as if he grew bored and decided to move on to the next one. I don’t have a problem with abrupt endings per se, but the predictability factor is a pet peeve of mine.

In “Life Cycle,” a pregnant prostitute living in a bug-infested apartment gives birth to an egg. The egg hatches, and inside is a large, caterpillar-type creature with a humanoid face. Instead of going for the super-size can of Raid as I would have done, the mother decides to raise her bug/child. Then one day, she discovers that the caterpillar kid is now in a cocoon. Can you guess what happens next?

In “Skinner,” a very attractive woman picks up an average Joe in a bar and heads back to her place for a game of canasta alternated with Scripture readings. (Just kidding; they go back for sex, of course.) The man is so eager to do the deed with this gorgeous woman, he’s willing to ignore the rotting flesh smell that permeates the place. (As every man knows, that part is entirely believable).

What follows is some graphic sex stuff that I am unashamed to admit was my favorite part of the story, until the next morning when the man discovers a skinless creature using the woman’s shower. It seems the woman was merely a suit of skin worn by the creature, who has to discard its borrowed skins as they begin to deteriorate, and then moves on to a fresh victim. Can you guess what happens next?

In “Clockwork,” a deaf girl who lives with her mother and young sister finds a dead cat and takes it home to give it a proper burial. Once there, the girl decides to replace the cat’s guts with workings from a clock. The cat is alive again, sort of, although it now requires a periodic winding up with a key. It’s also acquired a mean disposition. (Or maybe the cat was always mean.) The cat kills a bird, so the girl performs the same trick, and the bird is alive again … sort of. Then the deaf girl’s baby sister dies. Can you guess what happens next?

You probably can, and therein lies my problem with this collection: There’s no real surprise on the last page. Everything is set up and falls exactly into place. It’s too bad, really, because there are some startlingly original concepts contained in many of the tales.

The best one? “On the Brink of Extinction,” about a couple who break into a warehouse and discover old artifacts that transport them back in time. It actually has a twist ending, although I much prefer Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound of Thunder,” which the author credits as an inspiration.

Why is this one the best? Because I’m a sucker for time-travel stories. But I can’t recommend VOYEURS OF DEATH solely because of one entry. I recommend picking up a collection of Ray Bradbury fiction instead. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon or Dark Regions.

Now this is how a series should be handled: Keep putting them out with a variety of authors tackling the material. James Daniels comes to the literary plate of Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin’s THE DEAD MAN series and knocks it out of the park in RING OF KNIVES.

For those who have not read the first book — and why have you not? — a brief recap: Matthew Cahill had an accident that froze him under an avalanche for some time. Once revived, he realized he has a bizarre power: seeing the evil in people to a horrific degree. Daniels takes that idea and continues with the large arc of this character.

This second volume opens with Cahill getting a lift in a tow truck to his destination: a mental hospital, because he has found out about another person who also might have his power. But as soon as he arrives, trouble is afoot. To say the hospital makes Creedmoor Psychiatric Center of the ’70s look like a country club is an understatement. It’s run like some fiefdom, and the second shift is where it really gets nasty.

Cahill is told the patient no longer is there and that the doctor who was in charge left. But that does not stop him, especially when a nurse tells him that the doctor is actually a patient. The book goes into overdrive with creepy aspects, and there are plenty to go around. Cahill becomes the men’s-adventure hero that the book promises, more Penetrator then Executioner, in the sense of his action. It all builds to a fantastic fight sequence to close it all out.

Daniels does some work to build upon the mythos of the series, providing readers with some information that will be explored more than likely as it progresses. I can’t stress how much fun the DEAD MAN books have been, especially since they are both under 100 pages and can be read in no time. Let’s hope the steak continues. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

Just went you think Bram Stoker’s DRACULA has been reimagined, rebooted and repurposed in every way possible, along comes Bekka Black’s IDRAKULA. File this one under #surprise

Black sticks to the story of Stoker’s classic novel, but updates it to the here and now. But that’s not all. Much like how Stoker utilized journal entries, letters and multiple points of view to tell his tale in a unique way, Black employs smartphone texts (“how did u know he wanted to bite u?”), e-mails and iPad browser screenshots.

You’d think that approach would be gimmicky (well, yeah, it is) and that it would get too old, but it’s much too breezy to do so. The pages are illustrated in that the texts are formatted as they would appear on an iPhone (even framed in a leopard-print case for Lucy Westenra’s device).

Unlike many other vampire pastiches, this one took some real thought, thereby resulting in a fun little book without making fun of its source material. It’s not meant to replace Stoker’s original — nor should it — but to prove how timeless the tale truly is. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

THE DEAD MAN: FACE OF EVIL, a short novella from the very prolific authors Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin, is the first step in an intriguing series, for which this lays the groundwork. Matthew Cahill is a likable guy, a person you can always depend on and who looks out for his friends. But he was left frozen under an avalanche for three months and lived.

Once revived, Matthew has bizarre dreams involving, at first, an evil clown. These dreams seem so real and surreal all at the same time. The basics of the plot tell of his life before he became a human Popsicle, as we watch his job at the mill become nonexistent; his best friend, Andy, finally fessing up to a childhood prank; and then Matthew dealing with the loss of his wife.

Now fully back into the real world, Matthew sees life a bit differently. When he runs into his old friend — who now occupies Matthew’s house, having been bequeathed it in Matthew’s will — Andy seems to have a hole in his face with pus and maggots freely coming out. Matthew, of course, is the only person who can see this.

Goldberg and Rabkin really go for the gore factor in this story with a nice dose of humor. I’m hopeful they continue with this character since it’s set up so well. I’ve not seen a writing tandem like this since the glory days of Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy who wrote a pretty prolific series back in the day. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

The next book to come off my to-be-read stack was ALLISON HEWITT IS TRAPPED by Madeleine Roux. I looked at the cover, then flipped it over to read the plot rundown on the back. Instantly, I was struck by three burning questions that flitted periodically through my conscious mind while reading this novel:

1. Another zombie book?

2. Are zombies more popular than vampires now?

3. Why can’t I get an agent to look at my werewolf novel? Should I change the werewolves to zombies?

Okay, technically that was four questions, but really, what’s the deal with all the zombie books? Why are they becoming the new go-to menace once reserved for serial killers, fanatical terrorists, secret government agencies with evil agendas, and vampires? Funny that George Romero was 40 years ahead of the curve. But anyway …

Allison Hewitt is trapped (hence the title) in the bookstore/café where she worked before “The Outbreak” occurred that turned everyone within biting distance into flesh-eating zombies. The Outbreak doesn’t just affect people; in this scenario, all living creatures are subject to being, uh, zombified. Basically, you can’t trust dogs and cats, and even squirrels are a potential threat. Yes, you read that right: squirrels.
           
She is stuck at her former place of employment with her boss, some co-workers and a few customers who were lucky (or unlucky) enough to be shopping at the time the rest of the world went to shit. They live on junk food they can scrounge from the café, and generally bitch and moan about what they’re going to do. The ones with families obsess over the fates of their loved ones, to the point where they become essentially a liability to the other survivors, while the others become determined to survive no matter the cost.

Allison, armed with an ax and a can-do attitude, is a member of the latter group. As she battles zombies and comes to the realization that her group of survivors will have to leave their makeshift fort if they are to survive, she also keeps a running blog on the SNet — the military’s emergency wireless network — about her experiences.
           
Roux originally wrote this novel as a series of blogs, and here she incorporates those blogs (written by her main character) while intermingling with various subplots, such as militant religious female zealots attempting to breed forcefully with the surviving men so as to keep the human race from becoming extinct. There’s also the ubiquitous subplot about survivors being more treacherous than — and just as dangerous as — the zombie hordes due to their looter mentality of “there’s only enough for me.”

If anything, the reader comes away with two messages: “The meek shall inherit the earth” and “Adapt or die.” The people in the story you would expect to be natural leaders (i.e. Allison’s former boss) fall apart under the pressure and practically shut down as they mistakenly believe the government will find a way to rescue them and put the world right again.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the mousy, formerly meek people (e.g. Allison) take on the role of action hero and try to lead the others to safety. It’s not terribly original, but it is fun to watch.

The blog format keeps the story running at a breakneck pace, which is good and bad: The reader never gets bored, but then again, there’s hardly room for character development or introspection. The story takes twists and turns, and doesn’t quite end up where you expect, but still …

Another zombie book? —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.

In the past, I’ve been pretty vocal about my disdain for the bloated excesses of horror writers Stephen King and Peter Straub. In their early novels, these two authors were capable of delivering suspenseful plots and lean prose that delivered on chills and thrills.

As their popularity grew, however, the publishers of their books apparently decided that no editing need be done, and the readers have been subjected to short story ideas padded with 900 pages of filler that on the surface might appear to be atmosphere and character development, but in truth are the ramblings of two authors clearly in love with the sound of their own voices.

So along comes Christopher Fulbright, author of THE BONE TREE, a slim horror novel that proves the adage that less is oftentimes more. At slightly more than 90 pages, his novella can be digested in an hour or two, yet you come away feeling satisfied that you’ve read and experienced a complete story without being subjected to reams of time wasting scenes that have little to no bearing on the story. It’s the difference between being invited to a dinner party where the host provides just enough food to satisfy his guests’ appetite, and a dinner party where there is so much food, that much of it is thrown away at the end and the guests leave feeling slightly ill.

It’s 1978, and Bobby and Kevin are best friends who enjoy hanging out in their treehouse after school and trading comic books back and forth. One day, they see a younger boy named Tom running through the creek, scared half to death. Tom tells them that he is being chased by a “shadow man.” 

The boys investigate, which involves retracing Tom’s steps back through a Civil War-era graveyard, and they see the shadow man along with what they call “the bone tree,” a stark white tree that appears to be possessed by a malevolent force that may be a gateway for evil entities. The worst part is, the shadow man (and the tree itself) are now aware of Kevin, Bobby and Tom.

Fulbright layers on the suspense and keeps a feeling of impending doom and a sense of hopelessness about the whole thing because, after all, the protagonists are just kids and what adult would believe such a story? Add to that a subplot about racism: Bobby is black, and his friendship with Kevin is not widely accepted by their classmates, and you have a cast of well-drawn characters. You get the sense that you know them completely and, most importantly in a horror story, you care whether they come through the story unscathed. There are also some genuinely creepy moments and a truly horrifying aftermath scene that is left mostly to the reader’s imagination.

I could go on about THE BONE TREE, but as I said, it’s a slim little book that delivers more wallop in its 90-plus pages than King’s last dozen novels. Yes, I could go on and on … but unlike certain writers, I know when to shut up. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Horror Mall.

Back in the good old days of the 1930s and ’40s (which probably weren’t really that good, but still), lovers of action, mystery and horror could enjoy weekly servings of each through the pulp magazines of that era. Every seven days, there were new adventures of their favorite heroes: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, plus a smattering of generic hardboiled P.I.s, more costumed crimefighters, horror tales, locked-room mysteries, supposedly true detective tales, etc.

The pulps died out over time and in its place, comic books thrived. But comic books today deliver very little story for their relatively high cover price, and as their sales have plummeted to a 10th of what they were two decades ago, I believe the monthly comic book might soon be a thing of the past.

But I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t tried to revive the pulp format: a magazine edition of prose stories featuring one or more recurring characters. It would be smaller stories that readers could pick up on a regular basis and follow the exploits of a character, or perhaps several features, and then put aside until the next edition came out. Stories offered in a cheaper format rather than a full-length novel, more palatable and quicker to digest.

Thunder Peak Publishing is doing that with Guido Henkel’s JASON DARK: GHOST HUNTER series, a handful of pamphlet-sized stories that sells for $2.99 (cheaper than many 22-page comic books) and runs around 60+ pages. So the stories are longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella. Actually, they’re the perfect size for this series, as the stories are all plot and no characterization or background. But you pretty much know going in that you’re getting a dumb fun story, not WAR AND PEACE.

Jason Dark is a Victorian-era occult detective, part Sherlock Holmes and part Fox Mulder. He comes from a long line of Geisterjägers, which I thought was a drink enjoyed by college kids, but turns out it’s a German phrase that means “ghost buster” or “ghost hunter.” Jason carries a cane that conceals an enchanted silver sword, and is accompanied by his trusty sidekick, Siu Lin, a beautiful Chinese woman who is proficient in Wing Chun kung fu and Chinese magic.

In fact, Siu Lin is more than just a sidekick; she has the fortunate habit of saving Jason’s ass at least several times during each adventure, which made me wonder how the Ghost Hunter survived so long without her. But anyway, I sampled four of the JASON DARK adventures.

VOLUME 2: THEATER OF VAMPIRES starts off with Jason accompanying an old friend to see a performance art piece/play about vampires, and I’m sure I give nothing away when I say that the actors in the troupe are exactly what they seem. Jason has to take on the vampires to save his friend’s life, but it appears there’s someone working against him. Hmmm … There’s also a cute cameo by Dr. Watson (of Sherlock Holmes fame).

VOLUME 3: GHOSTS TEMPLAR is my personal favorite of the four, in that it has the most interesting story about eight resurrected Knights Templar who exact vengeance on the village that had them burned at the stake 500 years previously. It’s my favorite because the story was multilayered — Who resurrected them? Why are they intent on slaughtering one villager a night? — and it also has a really cool, bloody, knockdown, drag-out fight between the undead knights and Jason and Siu Lin that had me wondering how our plucky heroes would survive (turns out, they were extra-plucky).

VOLUME 7: DEAD BY DAWN begins with the seemingly innocent death of Jason’s neighbor, but soon goes into the mysterious circumstances of 100 Londoners dropping dead every night, a giant owl, the sleazy workings of a snake-oil salesman, and just about anything else the author can drop into the mix. It reads like a potboiler crossed with Dickens’ OLIVER TWIST. There’s a tight little mystery here: Are the people being poisoned, or is there a supernatural menace at work? This being JASON DARK: GHOST HUNTER, you know it’s the latter.
  
And finally, I sampled VOLUME 9: TERRORLORD. The Terrorlord is a Big Bad from Beyond who wants to open the Seven Gates of Hell and really mess with humanity. There’s nothing terribly original about this premise, as I saw it played out on several seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, but the twist in this one is: Jason is possessed by the , and Siu Lin must enlist the aid of Jason’s friend Herbert G. Wells (yes, that H.G. Wells) to save him. Jason, in fact, has very little to do in this story other than run around town and act all possessed, but it’s a nice showcase for Siu Lin to strut her stuff. Oh, and Wells, too.

As I said, there’s nothing groundbreaking in this series. In fact, it’s highly derivative of the long-running German series about Geisterjäger John Sinclair, who shares many similarities with Dark: Both in their mid-30s, both from a long line of ghost hunters, both with Chinese sidekicks … oh, and Sinclair is written by Helmut Rellergerd, who uses the nom de plume of Jason Dark. Coincidence? Or homage?

The writing is also a little rough at times, with awkward phrases and sentences that would have made William Strunk Jr. (of THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE fame) groan in despair. In other words, there are plenty of words that could have been trimmed to make the reading smoother. Examples from VOLUME 2:

“A breeze caressed his body ominously and, with a start, he realized that he was naked, except for a thin robe.”

Well, is he naked, or is he wearing a thin robe? Right now, I’m naked, except for my shorts, shirt, underwear, socks and tennis shoes.

“The two men embraced and exchanged friendly smiles, like two old friends who are thoroughly happy to enjoy each other’s company.”

Okay, the first part of the sentence pretty much tells me what the second part hits me over the head with.

“Siu Lin had maintained the grave beautifully and came by almost every day to pay her respects to her parents who had meant so much to her.”

As opposed to the parents she didn’t give a crap about?

Henkel also uses a lot of “almost” and “seemingly,” two words that my old English teacher would have crossed out with his red pen and said, in a voice not unlike Jerry Stiller’s, “Passive descriptions!” But perhaps a stronger editorial hand would be wasted on this series, as it’s really all just meant to be fun. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Jason Dark: Ghost Hunter.

In 2005, Pocket Books published Joseph Nassise’s HERETIC: THE TEMPLAR CHRONICLES, the first of a mass-market trilogy … and then never published the other two, reading readers in the lurch. Finally, Bad Moon Books comes to the rescue with a three-in-one omnibus titled simply THE TEMPLAR CHRONICLES. In addition to HERETIC, it includes the complete novels A SCREAM OF ANGELS and A TEAR IN THE SKY, all in just under 700 pages.

The novels introduce one of the coolest concepts of genre literature in the aughts: In modern day, various headquarters of the Templar Knights come under attack by an unknown enemy, resulting in mass deaths among their men, yet sporting no visible bullet or stab wounds. To investigate, the Knights call upon Cade, aka “The Heretic,” a former Special Ops officer with a Snake Plissken-esque eyepatch and the gift of seeing the memories of anyone he touches.

For his “Echo Team” unit, Cade recruits a fellow Knight named Duncan, whose touch has the power to heal. Although not exactly pals, the two join forces against the Necromancer, a hooded practicioner of black magick, who summons demonic spectres from a bank of fog and reanimates corpses from Templar graveyards, Romero-style.

Killer, right? Damn straight.

Cade’s unorthodox methods and bad attitude serve him well as he leads the Templar Knights — that secret military arm of the Vatican — in their quest to quash the supernatural and protect the Spear of Destiny, the holy relic in the Knights’ possession that pierced the side of Christ during His crucifixion. Part of this mission involves a journey or two into another dimension known as the Beyond; you get there by jumping through household mirrors.

As if you couldn’t tell, Nassise’s work is full of imagination, combining elements from THE X-FILES, CONSTANTINE and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with a side order of sword ‘n’ sorcery. Although the cliché has it that too many cooks spoil the kitchen, each new layer of genre goodness slapped on to the narrative only serves to make the story more delicious. From fast-paced action and extreme horror to discussions of military-grade weaponry and theories of the theological, these CHRONICLES do them all well without losing focus.

With the continuing post-Dan Brown success of fiction with religious themes, Cade’s adventures have breakout potential beyond Bad Moon’s hardcore audience (Nassise knows this; he’s turned his concept into podcasts and comics). Whether you’re a fan of the creature-laden tales of H.P. Lovecraft or the military-driven adventures of Tom Clancy, HERETIC holds something to please. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon or Bad Moon Books.

This is a love letter more than a book review. A love letter to all the small publishers out there, and especially Dark Regions Press, for whom I have read three short story collections (four if you count the recently reviewed Steve Vernon’s DO-OVERS AND DETOURS). 

This review covers CHARNEL WINE by Richard Gavin, WINE AND RANK POISON by Allyson Bird and A HOST OF SHADOWS by Harry Shannon. But as I said, it’s not really about the books; it’s about Dark Regions and all the other small, indie publishers out there still doing their own thing in the face of the giants who have swallowed up, or put out of business, many of the smaller companies, much the same way Borders and Barnes & Noble put the indie bookstores out of business.

Yes, there are still some independent bookstores out there, but by and large, the chains put a hurting on most of them. Now Borders is in its death throes and B&N is ailing, so what does that tell you? It tells me that all things are transitory and cyclical, and although the big publishers rule the market share of the print world, they are experiencing problems of their own, as seen by their layoffs and “restructuring” and closing of divisions.

In the present day, when an author can upload a book and sell it online, or pay a company to print copies for him/her and develop a network of readers through blogging/Tweeting/Facebooking/YouTubing/etc. (I think I just invented some new words back there), then the stranglehold the big publishers have on what can see print and what people can read can’t last. At present, everything is homogenized and copied and flooded into bookstores with major marketing/advertising, while the midlist books go the way of the T-rex.

Don’t believe me? Check out the fiction section — especially the genre fiction — of any of these major chains and tell me how much of it is experimental and cutting-edge, and how much of it all looks like the same stuff that gets released over and over again, or is copied from somewhere else. If you want something different, something that would never end up on Oprah’s Book Club or the bestseller list, but is geared more toward the reader rather than the mindless consumers out there, then the small press is the place to look.

Okay, enough of my ranting.

Gavin’s CHARNEL WINE is subtitled THE MEMENTO MORI EDITION, because it was originally published in 2004 by Rainfall Books. It quickly went out of print, but is now back thanks to Dark Regions Press, with added material. It’s a collection of horror stories, or perhaps “dark suspense” would be more appropriate a description, as much of the horror is psychological.

But that’s neither here nor there. Suffice it to say that the stories are dark and gloomy, and owe more to H.P. Lovecraft and early Peter Straub than much of the slasher fiction or flavor-of-the-month monster stuff (usually zombies or vampires) that passes for it today.

Personal favorites from the collection: The title story about a man who has nightmares of being forced to drink a bitter liquid by rotting corpses, and his lover who knows more than she’s saying, was abruptly short, but nevertheless powerful; “Mrs. South,” about a man caring for his ill mother while simultaneously being haunted by a long-dead witch, and its “Yuck!” moment at the end; “The Folly,” an unusual take on the end of the world; and “The Alchemy of Slumber,” about a man’s encounter with a supernatural creature, his inability to sleep afterward, and inevitable transformation he undergoes as a result. Good stuff.

Not so good? There were a few short-short pieces, some no more than a page or two, that appeared to be mere snippets of something, or ideas for scenes at the very least, but that didn’t evolve into anything and seem little more than filler. Most are in the center of the book and could have been cut without damaging the integrity of the rest of the collection. Just my opinion, of course, but as always, you’re welcome to it.

Bird’s WINE AND RANK POISON has probably what is the longest author bio I’ve ever seen located on the very last page. But I won’t hold that against it.

It is a collection of stories that range from horror to drama, all the way to dark fantasy. It also contains an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale, who says that the stories in Bird’s book “are full of fantasy and magic and dark places.” Joe says it better than I can, although I must admit I didn’t become as huge a fan of her work as he predicted I would. Still, I did enjoy the stories and it is a slim, little volume of some interesting ones.

Personal faves include “The Convent at Bazzano,” about a family on vacation in the Italian countryside that has one of the coolest character descriptions ever: The husband reads Dan Brown, and the wife reads Harlan Ellison and Fritz Leiber. Can you see who the person who is attuned to the supernatural forces will be and who will be the blind idiot? I also enjoyed “Vulkodlak,” an unusual werewolf tale that’s more about the “why” of the curse then the “how.” 

There were stories that didn’t work for me, such as “The Last Supper,” about a long-missing sister and a devious, coldly plotting sister, that telegraphed the ending a little too early, and also “The Legacy,” about a mob guy with many enemies who strikes up an alliance with one such enemy when the world becomes overrun with homicidal maniacs … but the story ends too soon and wastes what was an interesting premise.

Last but not least is Shannon’s A HOST OF SHADOWS. By far, this one was my favorite of the three, but maybe because it was more of a flat-out horror collection rather than the eclectic mix of the other two. Or it could be because Shannon likes to dive deep into the darkness of the human soul and shine a light on the snarling things he finds scuttling around in there, whereas the other two are content to watch from a distance.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed the contents of A HOST OF SHADOWS, and especially the section in the back (“A Few Notes”) in which the author talks about the inspiration and evolution of each tale. Normally, this is a section wherein an author becomes pretentious and gives a “Look how clever I am” speech, but Shannon avoids that and gives some insight into the creative process.

Personal faves: “Blood and Burning Straw,” a truly horrific story about Vietnam and vengeance from beyond the grave; “A Handful of Dust,” about a hit man who has the tables turned on him; and “And The Worm Shall Feed,” a horror story set during World War II that shows what desperation will do to men when they come to believe Hell exists on Earth.

But the best one, the one worth the price of the whole book, is “Violent Delights.” I’m sure you remember the case of the woman who hit a homeless man, then drove home with his body still stuck in her windshield, and then kept him in her garage until he finally expired. Well, in “Violent Delights,” the author uses that as his story premise, but this time gives it the ending that the real-life event should have had. If only.

Support Dark Regions Press and the other independents out there. If not for them, the world would be filled with cookie-cutter fiction, self-help crap and celebrity tell-alls. Oh, and if you find them, give some business to the small bookstores, too. —Slade Grayson

Buy them at Dark Regions Press.

In DO-OVERS AND DETOURS, Steve Vernon’s collection of short stories from Dark Regions Press, the author describes writing one of his stories when he was in a “Bradbury/Bukowski mood.” While I do see the influences of both venerable authors on Vernon’s style, I think his stories can best be boiled down thusly: If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon.

Okay, so I read that the author’s next book is a YA novel and I’m curious if they’ll use the “sex romp” description as a cover blurb (I’m guessing no), but I really did enjoy this collection.

The stories are lean, yet packed with enough descriptive power to make Raymond Carver blush. That is, if Carver was still alive to read these stories. Like any short-story collection, there are favorites, ones that are good or simply okay, and then there are the “not so much” ones.

My personal favorite is “Voodoo Chicken Do-Over,” a clever tale of an unhappily married man who loses his life in an accident and then gets raised from the dead. There are more than a few funny moments and unique turns of phrase. For example: “Thelma used to be the object of my desire. Ever since I knew her I hankered to squeeze her sweet caboose. Am I being too crude? Well excuse me for farting out loud but twenty-three years of wedlock will piss the illusion out of anyone.”

The story retains its humorous tone even when the main character becomes a zombie, but the ending is so unexpected and horrific, I immediately had to re-read the whole thing just to again experience the sledgehammer transition with which Vernon hits the reader.

Another favorite is “Tinselled Trailer-Court Viscera,” about a man living in a trailer with a secret lair and a collection of jars that give him, with simply a word or two spoken into them, the powers of life and death. It’s eerily creepy and compelling, and made me think it would have been great as an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. While reading it, I even pictured it in black and white, and saw Rod Serling in the corner, delivering his customary opening and moral-of-the-story epilogue.

There are a few others I liked as much: “A Fine Sacrifice,” about three fathers talking about their sons and about baseball, but all the while not talking about the terrible things they’ve done. The author describes the story as “fine and clean as a well-honed hunting knife,” and I have to agree. There’s also “Rolling Stock,” about a hobo riding the rails who comes across a dangerous entity, and also “The Takashi Miike Seal of Approval,” about an unlikely angel of vengeance exacting an appropriate, yet brutal, form of revenge.

While I can’t say there’s a badly written one in the bunch — even my least favorites have a paragraph or two that made me smile or made me squirm at how intelligently constructed they were — there are a couple that I didn’t like as much. “Under the Skin, Under the Bones,” about German soldiers during World War II encountering a worse menace then the Russian soldiers they’re battling, has an interesting premise and scenes that read like Clive Barker writing a DIRTY DOZEN remake, but ultimately, the story falls flat at the end.

There’s also a couple that feel more like the author had an interesting scene in mind, but no real story to tell outside of that. Like “Hyperactive Cleaning Power” about a Laundromat that houses an unlikely time machine, or “Once More Around the Block,” about a taxi passenger with an unusual and seemingly insatiable appetite.

They start with premises that draw you in, but that’s all they turn out to be: simply premises. It’s like watching an interesting scene from a movie, then finding out that’s it. There’s no other scenes. That was the whole movie right there. Frustrating.

But maybe that’s the purpose. When I was a kid, I would stare at pictures of fantasy artwork — usually Frank Frazetta, but occasionally another artist — and wonder at the backstory to each. I would make up my own stories to go with the scene depicted in the art. Perhaps that’s Vernon’s intention there: The reader is forced to fill in the blanks.

In any case, DO-OVERS AND DETOURS is well worth seeking out, and Vernon is a writer from whom one hopes to read more. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Dark Regions Press.

I read a lot of young adult books, so I can say with some bit of authority that it’s not too often a novel like Rick Yancey’s THE CURSE OF THE WENDIGO comes along. It’s macabre and nuanced, a Gothic horror novel wrapped in a literary package. And told through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy.

It’s the rare YA that pushes the boundaries of the genre and isn’t afraid to use a vocabulary beyond what you’d expect. “Don’t know what I’m on about,” the book seems to say (but in a gorgeous, visually lush voice), “look it up.” Here’s a bit from the opening of Chapter 12: “He had spoken of it as one speaks of a lover. The eternally young, fertile bride; the ancient, barren spinster; the siren; the sibyl — she was all these things at once for whom he denied himself the companionship of mere mortal company, against whom even the breathtaking Muriel Chanler paled.”

Like I said, absolutely gorgeous and unwilling to set its sights lower just because it’s written as YA.

THE CURSE OF THE WENDIGO is the sequel to 2009’s THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST, a Printz Honor-winning book. In a neat bit of set-up, Yancey writes the prologue and epilogue as himself. He has been called to a nursing home to look at the curious journals of a recently deceased man, William James Henry. Little is known about Henry — he came to the home as an indigent — except for the year he claims to have been born, 1876, and the outlandish contents of his journals.

Those outlandish contents comprise the two novels, written from Will’s point of view as a child apprenticed to a Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, a monstrumologist. A monstrumologist does exactly what you think he does … except the humorless Warthrop would say the creatures he studies are not monsters, but natural beasts standard zoology has overlooked.

Yancey’s two books undulate between rich prose that examine tiny details of Will’s late-1800s existence and a gut-clenching speed of grotesque monsters and their victims. And those monsters are grotesque. Yancey doesn’t shy away from taking readers right into the slobbering maw, even when us readers really, really want to look away. There’s one paragraph in particular, late in THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST, when a man-eating monster called an Anthropophagus (and I can’t neglect to point out that term means “cannibal” — very clever) bites Will, so Will bites it right back and there commences one of the most nauseating visuals I’ve ever experienced. But I won’t spoil the puke-inducing fun.

And it’s not all monsters and gore. Yancey isn’t afraid to examine human folly, either. THE CURSE OF THE WENDIGO deals not so much with the beasts that can be catalogued in the monstrumarium, but what horrors humans are capable of. It is more tense and suspenseful than the action and monsters of THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST, and there is no tidy ending, but it was a powerfully effective book.

Although no other titles have been released for the next book(s) in the series, the epilogue makes it pretty clear we can expect more from Will Henry. I, for one, can’t wait. Although my stomach will enjoy the rest. —Jenny Coon Peterson

Buy them at Amazon.

Kaaron Warren’s debut novel, SLIGHTS, is about death. That alone is not what separates it from other horror novels. There are no monsters, no vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters — really none of the characteristics that distinguish “horror fiction.” Instead, it is an often absorbing and truly horrifying portrait of a young woman losing her grip on reality as death becomes her personal obsession.
 
One night, while driving home after having a bit too much to drink, Stevie Searle loses control of her car and crashes into a wall. The accident kills her mother and almost kills Stevie as well, but her near-death experience is unlike anything she (or we) have ever heard of. There is no bright light beguiling her to follow, and certainly nothing like heaven. Instead, she finds herself in a dark room, confronted by the dead and often disfigured people she either remembers or vaguely recalls. They all claw, grab and bite at her while making demands she hardly understands.

While her older brother, Paul, has the responsibilities of a husband and father-to-be keeping him occupied, Stevie spends her time living in their dead parents’ house. She quickly becomes a quirky, semi-recluse with only minimal social skills and a fleeting sense of personal hygiene.

But two things endlessly motivate her: one is recalling and trying to understand the dark room of her near-death; the other is digging through her backyard and uncovering bits and pieces of bones and other buried odds and ends, all of which she catalogs and keeps.
 
Before long, her desire to know more about death drives her to murder people around her, only to revive them just before death to demand, “What do you see?” What little she finds confirms the dark room experience, but gives her very little insight. She concludes that the only way to learn more is to go back to the dark room herself.
 
Warren details Stevie’s decent in long, drawn-out detail. Her life becomes an ongoing series of awkward encounters with her family, friends and sometime-lovers, all cloaked in black humor or head-scratching oddities. Most fascinating is the way Stevie, in her first-person narration, alternately acknowledges and denies crucial events (“This is what should have happened … This is what really happened”).
 
But Warren makes us work hard for her intended effect. Far too many chapters are devoted to the various minutia of Stevie’s existence. Most add to her obsession, but only a few provide any real insight. Not surprisingly, we find ourselves longing for another episode in the dark room that is far more interesting than Stevie’s wide-awake world.

Still, SLIGHTS is recommended for its gruesome, unexpected portrayal of the afterlife, the controlled — if overly long — depiction of undetected obsession and madness, and proof that horror need not have fangs, wings or a pointed tail. —Alan Cranis

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I’m pretty picky when it comes to horror books and horror movies. The usual splatter stuff doesn’t interest me much, and I’m not a fan of unnecessary gore. In this day and age, I find the idea of religious extremists flying commercial airlines into buildings, or strapping bombs to themselves and walking into crowded shops and restaurants, to be more frightening than Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, and Freddy Krueger combined.

As far as horror in the world of print, most books today seem more focused on showing the monster in a romantic light rather than an object of dread. Remember when vampires were something to be afraid of, and not a sparkly undead teen with a James Dean complex? There are even zombie romance stories now, for God’s sake (plug for my review of HUNGRY FOR YOUR LOVE). Luckily, there are a slew of small publishers out there like Cutting Block Press that are working to keep the traditional horror genre alive and well.

Cutting Block’s HORROR LIBRARY: VOLUME 4 presents a collection of short stories from 30 writers who run the gamut from the traditional supernatural horror, to the psychological suspense at which writers like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch used to excel. Horror works best in the short story format, in my humble opinion, because just as the suspense peaks, the story is done and the reader moves on to the next one.

Even Stephen King, who hasn’t written a decent novel since 1980 (again, in my opinion) has done his best work in the short story format. Give me a collection of King’s short stories over crap like CELL, a cool idea that quickly devolved into his stereotypical motley crew of heroes (Christ-child savior, wizened old-professor type, middle-class schlub trying to save his family, spunky girl who’s tougher than the men, etc …) and a plot that should have been about zombies, but turned out to be some convoluted mess about a psychic mass-mind entity. Or something like that.

Editors R.J. Cavender and Boyd E. Harris have the distinction of writing the first story in the collection, and it’s a weird one. Telling a story in second-person narrative is a tough way to go because “you” are the main character. It’s difficult to pull off, and even more difficult to pull off well, but Cavender and Harris succeed in “A Very Important Message for Those Planning to Travel to Costa Rica.” Not only does the story have a twist ending, but it’s one of those endings that kept me thinking long after I finished reading.

Tim Waggoner also employs the second-person narrative in “Sleepless Eyes,” but less successfully. The story is very short — two pages at most — and is one of those experimental pieces that reminds me of the kind of stuff I used to turn into my creative writing class: something brief that I wrote late the night before class and attempted to make it clever enough to wow my classmates and maybe make my instructor smile, but really has no substance.

There are a few other stories like that, longer but no less insubstantial, like “Driving Deep Into the Night” by Harrison Howe, about a prostitute who has an unnatural effect on her clients; “What Was Once Man” by Michele Lee, a modern twist on the zombie genre; and “Final Draft” by Mark W. Worthen, about a Vietnam vet who continually has brushes with death over the course of his life. Not that these particular stories are badly written, but they left me feeling unfulfilled, as if the writers simply grew tired and decided to tack on an ending to get the story in before deadline.

On the other hand, there are some real good ones: “Into the After” by Kurt Dinan is one of the best short stories to use post-9/11 trauma as subject matter — a young man hires a psychic to convince his father that his mother really did die on Sept. 11, 2001 — and has a twist ending that truly took me by surprise and had me re-reading the last two pages over and over again.

“Drain Bamage” by Jeff Strand is about a young boy put in charge of his infant sister who makes one mistake that affects the rest of his life. “All Dead” by J.G. Faherty is about a man in a mental hospital who is continuously visited by the ghosts of his loved ones (or maybe they’re figments of his crazed mind, he can’t be sure) who want him to kill himself so that he can join them. This one also had a powerful ending that stayed with me long after I put the book down.

A couple of stories — like “Flicker” by Lee Thomas, about a group of actors employed to star in snuff films over and over again, and “Testaville, Ohio” by M. Alan Ford, about a man who returns home to a town that is occupied by malevolent beings only he can see — had me wishing for novel-length treatments so the premises could be carried further.

On the other hand, stuff like “Jammers” by Bentley Little, about what really causes traffic jams read like King writing during his Richard Bachman phase. And Lorne Dixon, who somehow manages to get two stories included in this collection, channels Joe R. Lansdale for “Ash Wednesday,” an okay story about firefighters trying to save a cult leader from a burning insane asylum, but then channels bad Lansdale for his second story, “Continuity,” about filmmakers who see more than what’s on the screen.

One interesting thing to mention about HORROR LIBRARY VOLUME IV: Very few of the stories actually involve supernatural forces, or if they do, they generally don’t make an appearance until the climax. Many of them border on pulpy crime/psychological suspense stuff, and many have incest incorporated into their subject matter. But when the monsters do appear, they are horrifying monsters. Not the sparkly kind. —Slade Grayson

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Unearthing buried treasures from pulp literature’s yesteryear!

Most pulp fans agree that WEIRD TALES’ most significant rival in the realm of dark fantasy was the short-lived STRANGE TALES OF MYSTERY AND TERROR, which lasted only 10 issues from 1931 to 1933. Perhaps the strongest novelette published in STRANGE TALES was Jack Williamson’s always-fascinating WOLVES OF DARKNESS in the January 1932 issue.

Clovis McLauren has received a telegram from his father, Doc McLauren (one-time professor of astrophysics and currently an independent researcher), asking for help with an experiment. Clovis rushes to the small town of Hebron, Texas, and arrives on a snow-covered night and asks the station agent for help getting out to Dad’s ranch.

The agent does all he can to talk Clovis out of visiting the ranch, especially at night, but the younger man finally determines to find his own way. He hires farmer Sam Jenson to convey him to his father’s place. On the way, they are attacked by a pack of wolves. Jenson is killed and Clovis is horrified to see a beautiful young woman running with the pack. She is Stella Jetton, the daughter of his father’s assistant.

“Her head was bare,” Clovis tells us, “and her hair, seeming in the moonlight to be an odd, pale yellow, was short and tangled. Her smooth arms and small hands, her legs, and even her flashing feet, were bare. Her skin was white, with a cold, leprous, bloodless whiteness. Almost as white as the snow.

“And her eyes shone green.

“They were like the gray wolf’s eyes, blazing with a terrible emerald flame, with the fire of an alien, unearthly life. They were malevolent, merciless, hideous. They were cold as the cosmic wastes beyond the light of stars. They burned with an evil light, with a malicious intelligence, stronger and more fearful than that of any being on earth.

“Across her lips, and her cheeks of alabaster whiteness, was a darkly red and dripping smear, almost black by moonlight.”

Now, of course that’s overwritten in that grand, penny-a-word way of the pulps, but it also adds to the eerie suspense Williamson has been building from the beginning. Tod Browning’s film of DRACULA had hit theaters about a year before this novelette was published, and the opening scenes reflect the movie quite closely: Innocent stranger arrives at country town and the locals tell him not to go to the castle — or, in this case, ranch. He goes anyway and is followed by wolves.

When he arrives, he is welcomed by Doc McLauren and Stella (think Dracula and his vampire bride) and given a meal in which they do not participate. And just as the film displays several telling details, Williamson give us this carefully placed observation: “Another fearful thing I noticed. My breath, as I said, condensed in white clouds of frozen crystals, in the frigid air. But no white mists came from Stella’s nostrils, or from my father’s.”

But you sense a shift from the supernatural to the science fictional as Clovis talks more and more of Doc and Stella acting and speaking like aliens. Williamson presents us with a grab bag of popular genres, from the supernatural and science fiction to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the physical grotesqueness and pain of weird menace:

“Her teeth caught my trousers, tore them from my leg from the middle of the right thigh ownward,” Clovis tells us about the torture his father demands that Stella institues when his son refuses to help him. “Then they closed into my flesh, and I could feel her teeth gnawing … gnawing….

“She did not make a deep wound, though blood, black in the terrible red light, trickled from it down my leg toward the shoe — blood which, from time to time, she ceased the gnawing to lick up appreciatively. Occasionally she stopped the unendurable gnawing, to lick her lips with a dreadful satisfaction.”

And later, when Clovis escapes, he is pursued by the wolves and what appear to be zombies:

“Judson, the man who had brought me out from Hebron, was among them. His livid flesh hung in ribbons. One eye was gone, and a green fire seemed to sear the empty socket. His chest was fearfully lacerated. And the man was — eviscerated! Yet his hideous body leaped beside the wolves.”

More and more, we sense that these are not just ordinary wolves. We assume they are werewolves, but as the adventure progresses we begin to question that explanation. Will the final answer come from the horror genre or from science fiction?

WOLVES OF DARKNESS is one of Williamson’s most popular early novelettes and it has been reprinted many times. You can read it for free online. Enjoy. —Doug Bentin

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While some authors try to nudge the horror and crime genres toward literary respectability, Mario Acevedo — bless his twisted heart — prefers we never forget their naughty, pulpy roots. Rather than give his novels oblique titles that no one would be embarrassed to be seen carrying around, he would have you tote around paperbacks with such in-your-face titles like THE NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS or X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS.

But there is an inviting and often highly entertaining method to his madness. Thanks to WEREWOLF SMACKDOWN, newly available in mass-market format, it’s easy to enter his riotous fictional world. And you really ought to.

Felix Gomez, the hero of these novels, was once a soldier fighting in Iraq until an ambush skirmish resulted in him being turned into a vampire. Now back in his hometown of Denver, he earns a living as a private investigator. Most of his time is spent working as an Enforcer for the Araneum, a worldwide network of vampires whose mission is to protect the Great Secret.

That secret is, of course, that vampires and other supernatural creatures are not just the stuff of stories and myths. They exist, which must never be revealed to the world of humans, because if word ever got out, the Araneum knows that humans would not stop until every vampire and other undead entity were destroyed.

But supernatural beings often act all too much like humans, so Felix often has to prevents such petty behavior from getting out of hand and risking the Great Secret. That’s what brings Felix to Charleston, S.C., at the opening of WEREWOLF SMACKDOWN. Two local werewolf packs are at war with each other, the leader of one pack wants to hire Felix to kill the competing boss.

Felix wants no part of it — vampires usually stay out of such were-rivalries. But a coming full moon signals an international conclave of werewolves in Charleston, where they will choose the Alpha of all clans. At least one pack would prefer their boss over the anticipated Alpha elect, so they can reveal their existence to the world and, along with their human “allies,” take total control. Felix knows he must put a stop to this. Meanwhile, why is a renegade team of vampires trying to kill him?
 
Again keeping in the pulp traditions, the pacing for the most part is wonderfully swift and smooth. At times, Acevedo crams too many tangent strains into his narratives, like the confusing politics of real-estate preservation in WEREWOLF SMACKDOWN. While they certainly add touches of reality to his otherwise mad mash-ups of mystery and horror, they often end up slowing things down.

But the author’s strong and assured characterizations and his equally fine ear for dialogue carry us through such slow patches until Felix and company find their way back into the action. Plus, he keeps the first-person narration as cynical and sharp as any hard-boiled P.I., only with a hankering for blood instead of rye whiskey.

Purists may scoff at how the various icons of horror and crime fiction (and even science fiction, in an earlier work) run amok in these novels. But there isn’t an ounce of pretension in Acevedo. His sole intent is to hook us into his stories and keep us reading and smiling with lots of action, suspense and heaping helpings of sex and violence, too.
 
Acevedo’s novels may never end up on the required reading lists of undergraduate genre literature courses. On the other hand, it won’t be long before their popularity busts out beyond the core of devoted followers. So you better discover him before the rest of the world catches on. —Alan Cranis

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She’s back each Tuesday, pimpin’ out notable new releases to place on your radar, so let the tempting plot descriptions begin!

THE EMPEROR’S TOMB by Steve Berry — Former Justice Department operative Cotton Malone’s life is shattered when he receives an anonymous note carrying an unfamiliar Web address. Logging on, he sees Cassiopeia Vitt, a woman who’s saved his life more than once, being tortured at the hands of a mysterious man who has a single demand: “Bring me the artifact she’s asked you to keep safe.” The only problem is, Malone doesn’t have a clue what the man is talking about. So begins Malone’s most harrowing adventure to date — one that offers up astounding historical revelations, pits him against a ruthless ancient brotherhood, and sends him from Denmark to Belgium to Vietnam to China, where danger lurks at every turn.

THE MIDNIGHT SHOW MURDERS by Al Roker and Dick Lochte — Billy has never liked going to the West Coast, but when he runs into high-energy comic Desmond O’Day, he reluctantly agrees to play second banana on the funnyman’s new late-night talk show. Los Angeles holds bad memories for Billy. Twenty years ago, he had suspected obnoxious chef Roger Charbonnet of murdering his ex-starlet girlfriend there, and told the cops. A tricked-up alibi freed Roger, who vowed vengeance. And now Billy might be on the verge of getting burned. After a horrifying explosion during a TV taping kills more than Desmond O’Day’s chance at high ratings, Billy believes that he was the intended target — and that Roger Charbonnet was somehow involved.

THE ATHENA PROJECT by Brad Thor — When a terrorist attack in Rome kills more than 20 Americans, Athena Team members Gretchen Casey, Julie Ericsson, Megan Rhodes and Alex Cooper are tasked with hunting down the Venetian arms dealer responsible for providing the explosives. But there is more to the story than anyone knows. In the jungles of South America, a young U.S. intelligence officer has made a grisly discovery. Surrounded by monoliths covered with Runic symbols, one of America’s greatest fears appears to have come true. Simultaneously in Colorado, a foreign spy is close to penetrating the mysterious secret the U.S. government has hidden beneath Denver International Airport.

SEED SEEKER by Pamela Sargent — A new light appears in the night sky. The River People believe it might be Ship, a sentient starship, keeping its promise to return, but the Dome Dwellers, who have a radio to communicate with Ship, are silent. So Bian, a 17-year-old girl from a small village, travels upriver to learn what they know. As she travels through the colony of Home, gaining companions and gathering news, Bian ponders why the Dome Dwellers have said nothing. Has Ship commanded them to be silent, in preparation for some judgment on the River People? Or are the Dome Dwellers lying to Ship, turning Ship against their rivals?

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In THE STRAIN, the first book of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s “vampires reimagined” horror trilogy, New York and its surrounds were consumed by zombie-like, stingers-that-can-shoot-out-of-their-throats monsters commanded by a mysterious master over the course of a week. The second novel, THE FALL, picks up where we left off, with our previously independent protagonists finally banded together, and the new vampire race slowly gaining intelligence.

In the wake of STRAIN’s down ending, our fearless vampire hunters — government epidemiologists Eph Goodweather and Nora Martinez; New York exterminator Vasiliy Fet; and would-be Van Helsing Abe Setrakian, whose history with these monsters dates to his childhood — are holed up in Setrakian’s well-fortified building, planning their next steps and trying to determine what the monsters will get up to next.

Unfortunately, Eph’s ex-wife is a vampire with a radar lock on Eph’s son, and she remains determined to find the boy and vamp him up. Meanwhile, there is already a vampire clan in North America, and it’s none too pleased with this new infection, so it recruits gang members to help them with their own vampire-hunting efforts.

On the other side, twisted psychopath billionaire Eldritch Palmer’s partnership with the vampires’ master nears its endgame, while the Big Cheese Vampire and his former rock star vampire assistant work toward global domination.

The best parts of the STRAIN were the little vignettes showing the impact of the infection on the city — grisly tales of infection and survival. (Author’s note: I listened the the audiobook version of THE STRAIN, read by the always-awesome Ron Perlman, so that might have had an impact on my opinion of that book. I read THE FALL with my own eyes, untainted by Perlman’s gravelly goodness.)

In THE FALL, the action focuses on a handful of factions over just a couple of days, and a lot of THE STRAIN’s flavor is lost as the authors push the plot relentlessly forward. Setrakian sets his focus on acquiring an ancient book that supposedly holds the vampires’ secrets, and flashbacks into his past provide fascinating backstory to the trilogy’s rich mythology.

In the present, though, there’s not a lot of really interesting stuff going on. The other vampire clan is pretty cool, but isn’t fleshed out nearly enough. There’s lots of gore, but there are very few genuinely suspenseful, dreadful moments. As trilogies go, THE FALL is less a traditional second act than it is an attempt for the authors to get the main players (and the world at large) where they need to be for the third book. But lots of stuff does happen, and plenty of information about the vampires is trotted out amid all of this, even if character development stands still for the most part.

On the plus side, some crazy shit happens at the end of the book that I really appreciated — the trilogy’s world can never return to the old “normal” after everything that happens, and I like that kind of boldness. There’s also a nice bit of dark humor here that’s much appreciated and never discordant.

If you’re already invested in THE STRAIN trilogy, THE FALL is worthwhile, if nothing else, for the great imagination behind the vampires on display here and the superb flashbacks and backstory. Del Toro’s got a twisted mind, and Hogan takes that and runs with it. But THE FALL reads like it’s more Hogan than Del Toro, for the worse. —Ryun Patterson

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When our humble editor asked if I was interested in not only reviewing the latest book by cult movie icon Adrienne Barbeau, but interviewing her as well, my response was enthusiastic and immediate (and might have even included a celebratory expletive to signify the passion of my response).

But my enthusiasm cooled and turned to apprehension when I realized that the book in question, LOVE BITES, was a vampire novel (or — more accurately — a vampyre novel), and there was the very real possibility that I would hate it, which would then make doing the interview just a wee bit awkward.

Like many people, the sheer ubiquity of the vampire in today’s culture is mostly responsible for my antipathy toward them, although I’ve never been that keen on those bloodsuckers to begin with. Once, when a past assignment required me to compose a list of five great vampire movies, I immediately wrote down FRIGHT NIGHT and CAPTAIN KRONOS — VAMPIRE HUNTER … and then stared at my computer screen for two hours trying to come up with just three more titles.

In that time, I came up with hundreds of possibilities (including NEAR DARK, THE HUNGER and pretty much every movie Hammer ever made), but none that I felt actually deserved to be called “great,” if only because the trappings of the genre had by now become so clichéd that even the successful efforts seemed little more than pointless. It got to the point where I actually added LOVE AT FIRST BITE just to help me get the stupid thing over with. But I never did.

So, having made that confession and now having read both LOVE BITES and its predecessor, VAMPYRES OF HOLLYWOOD, I can honestly report that I can’t fucking wait for Hollywood to turn this series into a big-screen franchise so I can finally finish writing that list!

It turns out that changing an “i” into a “y” makes all the difference, because while most vampires suck, Barbeau’s vampyres rock! Eschewing the emo pathos that renders so much of the genre as juvenile dross, LOVE BITES is an often funny, adult thriller that just happens to feature a smoking-hot, 500-year-old protagonist who can transform into a dragon when the situation calls upon it.

The novel begins just a short while after the events of VAMPYRES OF HOLLYWOOD, where we were introduced to legendary Hollywood “scream queen” and mini-mogul Ovsanna Moore, whose position as the CEO of Anticipation Studios sometimes takes a back seat to her role as the “Chatelaine” of Los Angeles’ vampyre community.

In that first book, her secret was uncovered by a handsome Beverly Hills police detective named Peter King, who was in charge of investigating a viscous serial killer targeting people connected to Moore. When we start LOVE BITES, Moore is trying to get ready for their first date (Christmas Eve dinner at his parents’ place!) when she finds herself fending off a werewolf attack in her backyard without the benefit of clothes.

Now if you’re anything like me, there is no truer sign you’re reading a great and important work of fiction, when it begins with your heroine wrestling naked outside with a bloodthirsty lycanthrope.

And the book only gets better from there.

Barbeau more than capably weaves together various plot threads, including King’s need to find a non-crazy explanation for the previous book’s murder spree, the bizarre behavior of Moore’s jealous lesbian lover/assistant (whose inconsistent portrayal between the two books is perhaps LOVE BITES only serious flaw), the presence of what could be a new serial killer, a group of werewolf paparazzi, and Moore and King’s burgeoning attraction/possible relationship.

It’s a lot to take care of, but Barbeau never seems to stumble and manages to juggle these elements while also delivering an affectionate look at the city and industry that first made her famous. While I am certain the book will entertain casual fans of both the vampire and thriller/mystery genres, it ultimately is best suited for movie buffs such as myself, who will delight in all of the in-jokes and Hollywood history she cleverly inserts into the narrative.

But none of this would matter if she failed to create compelling characters for her narrative. It’s a good thing, then, that Moore is as exciting a personality as you’re likely to find in a genre tale. A gorgeous movie star/businesswoman with both half a millennium of back-story to explore and an admirable ability to kick ass whenever the situation calls for it, she is definitely the kind of character lengthy and successful franchises are made of. Having read her first two adventures, I can’t wait to read more. —Allan Mott

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OVERWINTER is the second in David Wellington’s werewolf series that began with last year’s excellent FROSTBITE. It continues the adventures of its main characters while incorporating some events from their past, while introducing several inventive surprises. Along the way, Wellington places his own unique stamp on the entire concept of werewolves; much as he did with vampires in works like 99 COFFINS and VAMPIRE ZERO, and zombies in his MONSTER ISLAND trilogy.
 
Cheyenne Clark, a former werewolf hunter who now carries the cures herself, travels northward in Canada toward the artic circle. Leading the way is Montgomery Powell, the man who previously was hunted by Chey, who killed her father as a werewolf, and then transferred the curse to Chey.

Over the months, Chey has come to rely on Powell for survival — both in human form and as a nocturnal wolf — and now feels an odd but undeniable affection for him. Powell pushes on in the hopes of finding a cure that will free them from their lycanthropy curse.

Along the way, the pick up two companions — one welcomed, the other feared. The welcomed companion is Dzo (whom we met in FROSTBITE), a native Inuit who, although human in form, is actually an animal spirit and immune to the dangers of werewolves.

The feared fellow traveler is Lucie, the French werewolf who imprisoned Powell and gave him the curse during his days as a soldier in the first World War, and has periodically followed Powell across the world, claiming him as her husband. Powell denies the connection, but Chey quickly learns that Lucie is vengeful and demented in both her human and wolf forms.
 
But there are other threats following the trio of werewolves and their spirit friend. Oil has been discovered in the territory where the creatures travel, and Preston Holness, an agent for Canadian Security Intelligence Service, is responsible for ridding the area of the werewolf danger.

For this, he has hired Varkanin, a Russian werewolf hunter whose strange, blue-tinged skin makes him particularly qualified for the job. We learn, however, that Varkanin’s reason for killing the lycanthropes goes deeper than his professional responsibilities. Along with all of this, Chey is slowly losing control of the balance between her two lives, as the wolf side fights for total dominance of her body and soul.
 
With Dzo’s help, Chey, Powell and Lucie invoke other animal sprits and learn both the origins of lycanthropy and the ritual that could very well free them. But the cost of the ritual could be more than any of them can bear. Meanwhile, Varkanin and his crew are gaining.
 
As he did in FROSTBITE, Wellington wraps us up in the varying and conflicting emotions of his characters, while shifting back-and-forth between the hunted and the hunters. Yet the narrative races forward with a pace that never staggers nor strays.
 
Also like the preceding novel, some of the most fascinating moments occur while Chey and the others are wolves. Wellington amazingly details the overwhelming smells and tastes that motivate them, along with the sheer ecstasy of running on all fours. Then there is the instinctive internal politics that drives the three wolves to form a pack — with alpha and devoted followers.
 
Wellington makes the werewolf archetype truly his own with the deep history of “the curse” that pre-dates civilization and explains, among other things, why silver is deadly to them, as well as the key to their freedom. Regardless if it’s all based on historical research or entirely from his fertile imagination, it is spellbinding reading, enhancing and adding to the suspense that, like the moments of violent horror, keep the pages flying.
 
If you love the very best that horror fiction can be (and desperate for something other than the endless barrage of vampire and zombie novels), you owe it to yourself to get into both FROSTBITE and then immediately OVERWINTER. But then, if you’ve already been following the creative and innovative slash David Wellington has been cutting across the genre, all you need to know is that his latest novel is now on the shelves. —Alan Cranis

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