Just because the weather outside is no longer frightful doesn’t mean your reading experiences have to be. Welcome the spring season with scares with these unlucky seven books, either recently released or soon-to-be, from authors established and up-and-coming. —Rod Lott
DESCENT INTO DUST by Jacqueline Lepore — Twenty-five-year-old widow Emma Andrews grew up in the shadow of her mother’s madness, so when she arrives at Dulwich Manor in the midst of a mysterious plague and soon thereafter begins to see specters, her family fears fate has finally caught up with her. But one guest among them knows Emma’s visions are more than a trick of the mind. Valerian Fox has hunted the great vampire lord Marius through time and across continents, and he knows Emma has a remarkable destiny. She is Dhampir — a vampire hunter.
A DARK MATTER by Peter Straub — The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body — and the shattered souls of all who were present. Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives.
BLOOD PRESSURE by Terence Taylor — Christopher Jude Miller, fully grown and still human, has returned to New York to seek answers about his past. It is there he meets Joie, a young woman connected to his past, and falls into a twisted love triangle. He and Joie also realize that the magical forces that made both their lives possible have unexpected side effects, as they discover that united they have abilities neither knew of before, including the power to cure vampires. Created after the incidents that brought in the National Guard to contain the vampire zombie plague on the Lower East Side, Clean Slate Global is a covert ops organization formed to rid the world of vampires.
BLACK HILLS by Dan Simmons — When Paha Sapa, a young Sioux warrior, “counts coup” on General George Armstrong Custer as Custer lies dying on the battlefield at the Little Bighorn, the legendary general’s ghost enters him — and his voice will speak to him for the rest of his event-filled life. Haunted by Custer’s ghost, and also by his ability to see into the memories and futures of legendary men like Sioux war-chief Crazy Horse, Paha Sapa’s long life is driven by a dramatic vision he experienced as a boy in his people’s sacred Black Hills.
FEED by Mira Grant — The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED. Now, 20 years after the Rising, Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives-the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will out, even if it kills them.
SNOW by Ronald Malfi — When a brutal snowstorm shut down all the flights in and out of Chicago, Todd Curry and a few other stranded passengers rented a Jeep to drive the rest of the way to their destinations. But along a forested, isolated road, they picked up a disoriented man wandering through the snow. His car wouldn’t start and his daughter had vanished. Strangest of all were the mysterious slashes cut into the back of the man’s coat, straight down to the flesh …
THE BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR: VOLUME TWO edited by Ellen Datlow — What frightens us, what unnerves us? What causes that delicious shiver of fear to travel the lengths of our spines? It seems the answer changes every year. Every year the bar is raised; the screw is tightened. Legendary editor Ellen Datlow knows what scares us; the 17 stories included in this anthology were chosen from magazines, webzines, anthologies, literary journals and single-author collections to represent the best horror of the year.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Black Hills has been catching a lot of buzz recently – I’m hoping I’ll find time to read it. Descent into Dusk looks interesting too. Thanks for sharing!
Cool, I wasn’t aware that Datlow had started up an anthology of just horror stories.
VOLUME ONE came out last fall (or at least that’s when it was sent to me), so I was surprised to see VOLUME TWO so soon. The first one has stories by Joe R. Lansdale. Laird Barron and Margo Lanagan; the second has Michael Marshall Smith, Suzy McKee Charnas and John Langan. Both have “yearbook”-type essays upfront that cover the year in horror. I’m thrilled to see this start up since iBooks’ similar project was aborted, and Prime Books never got beyond its initial edition.
I read A Dark Matter. It is a worthless piece of shit. Not one scare lurks beneath STraub’s tortured and overworked prose. I’d like to hit him in the head with a flounder and get my money and time back.
The only good book Straub has written in the last twenty years (maybe thirty) is Mr. X. He has fallen into the Stephen King zone of writing, meaning that his editor no longer bothers to trim away the excess fat of his prose. The book should have been called A Dark Bloated Matter.
The “author’s cut” of A Dark Matter — to be published as The Skylark by Subterranean Press — suggests that the editor actually did a good deal of work this time around. The Skylark is 200 pages longer!
Wow. 200 more pages? After slogging through Straub’s overwritten book, now I’m curious as to what the editor had to cut out. Recipes? Shopping lists of what each character bought at the store? A scene of the main character visiting the dry cleaners? really, does anyone else out there agree with me that Straub and King both have great short story ideas, but they stretch them out to 1,000 page tomes that are a bear to get through?