Charlie Walls's Blog

Award Finalist!

Below the Stairs – Tales from the Cellar edited by Steve Dillion and published last year by Oz Horror made the shortlist for the AHWA’s Australian Shadows Award in the Best Edited Work Category.

The anthology contains my short story “Below Ground,” the 2017 Aurealis Award winner for Best Horror Novella “The Stairwell” by Chris Mason, as well as stories by Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Kane, and many others.

If you haven’t read it yet, pick up a copy HERE.

A hardback edition is forthcoming.

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Available Now: Beneath the Waves – Tales From the Deep

Beneath the Waves – Tales from the Deep, an anthology of ocean horror, is available on Amazon now from Oz Horror in both hardcover and paperback form. The awesome cover art is by Bob Eggleton, with interior illustrations by Will Jacques and Greg Chapman.

My short story “Pierce’s Island” appears alongside stories by Clive Barker and Brian Lumley, among others. Get your copy HERE

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Coming Soon: Beneath the Waves – Tales from the Deep

This anthology of ocean horror comes out next month, published by Oz Horror Con. My short story “Pierce’s Island” appears alongside Clive Barker, Brian Lumley, and others. When I have the full TOC and more information I’ll post here. Very excited to be in this one–aside from sharing space with writers like Barker and Lumley, the cover art is phenomenal, done by Bob Eggleton. This is definitely my favorite cover of anything I’ve appeared in thus far. Here’s to many more. There will also be interior art by Will Jacques, such as below.

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Book Review: The Ritual by Adam Nevill

“The Gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world,” Algernon Blackwood. This quote from The Willows opens this creepy ass novel by Adam Nevill. I’d heard a lot about Adam Nevill but had yet to get around to any of his novels. When I saw Netflix was adapting The Ritual into a movie, I decided it’d be a perfect time and place to get started. I wasn’t disappointed.

The Ritual won the British Fantasy Society’s 2012 August Derleth Award for best horror novel. The story follows four friends on a camping trip in the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. A pair of accidents happen and the group decides to take a shortcut through a thicker part of the forest. They come across a mutilated elk hanging from a tree, higher than a human or any animal they know of would be able to reach. Then they find a house, an ancient deserted house with an odd shrine upstairs. Things go from bad to worse as the group becomes lost, hungry, and convinced of something ancient stalking them through a millennia-old forest.

The opening Blackwood quote perfectly sets the tone for the story. Here, like in some of Blackwood’s best, we have modern people venturing into a wilderness that doesn’t want them. In this case, a dark wilderness from mankind’s barbaric past. They find remnants of a pagan cemetery, a church, habitation, and all of it points to dark rites and the worship of a creature as old as the trees surrounding them. It is a slow, dark, creeping tale that weaves between the trees and under your skin, and leaves you disturbed long after you put it down.

About halfway through, the story shifts. One or more of the campers get rescued, or so they think. A Death Metal band has come to the wilderness to worship the creature, a god they call it. This is when the book slows down a bit for me, and why it gets four instead of five stars. While there are some very creepy scenes and important story points that explain the creature and structures found in the woods, it drags a lot. My paperback copy has 420 pages: the first 200 is all trek through the forest, the next 180 is captured by the band and pagans, with the last 40 being a fight against the people and attempted escape from the creature. The first half and the ending are great, but the 180-page section in the center could easily have been cut down to 80 pages without losing anything important. At 320 to 350 pages, The Ritual is a great, five-star horror novel, but 420 is just too long and slow. It really bogs down while at the pagan encampment.

The ending, those final 40 pages or so, pays off the drudge through the second half of the book and then some. It is creepy, well executed, and satisfying in a way that doesn’t always happen in horror stories—walking the fine line between a happy(ish) ending and an unhappy one. Who dies? Does the monster win? Do the main characters save the day or simply survive to see another one, or endure a painful, disgusting demise? The Ritual gets it right.

If you like remote settings, creeping dread, and ancient pagan rites come to life this book is for you. I really enjoyed, and look forward to watching the movie and to reading more by Adam Nevill. Here’s the Amazon link to the paperback.

Book Review: Chills by Mary SanGiovanni

I don’t give many books five stars, but Chills by Mary SanGiovanni, published in 2016 (my TBR pile is a little behind), is as good as any horror novel I’ve read and I regret not getting to it sooner. In Chills a small town in Connecticut is hit by a freak snowstorm in May, and then bodies start piling up. The novel follows the police taskforce assigned to the case, including occult crime specialist Kathy Ryan who was brought in due to the peculiar mutilation of the bodies. (Kathy is an awesome character who I believe returns in SanGiovanni’s forthcoming novel Behind the Door) The storm effectively cuts the town off from the rest of the world, as the story continues we see the detectives come up against monsters and cultists as they fight to stop what’s happening to their town, spiraling to one of the best endings I’ve read in a long time.

Being from the south, where it’s hot and rarely snows, the whole state shuts down with just the threat of flurries, areas with snow/ice are always favorite setting for horror reads to me, so this one already had a leg up before I opened page one.

Chills is of course well written with great pacing, exciting action, and fully realized characters. But one of the thrills of reading SanGiovanni is the monsters, and this novel doesn’t disappoint. Her creatures are always new and creative, and well described in ways that gives the reader a horrifying image but also allows you to fill in the blanks, making the horror unique to your imagination. The creatures in this one are scary as hell.

One of the blurbs about Chills said, “True Detective meets H.P. Lovecraft in this chilling novel of murder, mystery, and slow-mounting dread…” Yeah, that’s pretty much it, but make no mistake, this novel isn’t a simple pastiche or genre mashup. It is a fully original, fully engaging read. I’ve read a handful of her novels and about as many short stories and she’s easily one of my favorite authors working today. If you haven’t read her before, Chills is a fine place to start. Get to it!

You can get it Here.

Book Review: The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes

Occasionally I’m going to post reviews of books I read, usually in one of the following genres: horror, fantasy, science fiction, western, or crime. This is the first, The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes by Robert Block. I’ve also posted it on Amazon and Goodreads.

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The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes is a crime novel written by the living legend, Lawrence Block, and published by Hard Case Crime in 2015. Lawrence Block, named a “Grand Master” by the Mystery Writers of America, has written some great books over the years (I’m partial to the Matthew Scudder novels, myself), but this wasn’t one of his best. I give it three stars out of five.

Here’s the back-matter real quick just so you know what we’re talking about: “Cashed out from the NYPD after 24 years, Doak Miller operates as a private eye in steamy small-town Florida, doing jobs for the local police. Like posing as a hit man and wearing a wire to incriminate a local wife who’s looking to get rid of her husband. But when he sees the wife, when he looks into her deep blue eyes…

“He falls – and falls hard. Soon he’s working with her, against his employer, plotting a devious plan that could get her free from her husband and put millions in her bank account. But can they do it without landing in jail? And once he’s kindled his taste for killing…will he be able to stop at one?”

Sounds like a standard hardboiled plot, right? One that a master of the genre could tear apart and leave you gasping for breath until the final page, right? Well, that’s not exactly what happens here. It’s not that this is a bad book, but it’s definitely not plot-centric. Out of a two hundred and thirty-four page novel, maybe a hundred and thirty of that is taken up by the retired cop falling for the vixen and plotting to bump off her husband.

What’s the rest? Sex. Lots of it.

Around halfway through, I discovered a pattern. After the first thirty or so pages of set-up here’s how it goes: five pages of plotting a way to kill the husband, five pages of the protagonist, Doak, hooking up with someone, then another five to ten pages of Doak hooking up with the vixen with the eponymous deep blue eyes and then them talking about his other hook ups. Wipe off and repeat. And it gets kinky and graphic enough to make anyone in the Fifty Shades books piss themselves.

Now, I’m all for kinky sex, but this book reads like a B-rated porn flick. One of those where they slap on a plot in order to lengthen the video. A good two-thirds of the sex in the novel has nothing to do with the plot and only manages to distract from the story and pad the page count. This book is very light on the action or crime. I never thought I’d be one of those prudes who complain that the sex was unnecessary, but here I am.

I’ve read some reviews stating that those complaining about the sex should have known what they were getting by looking at the cover—a curvaceous naked lady with a gun. But all Hard Case Crime novels have similar covers as throwbacks to the pulpy covers of crime fiction’s heyday. I love the art style, but basically all hardboiled stories involve a beautiful woman with a gun, not just the spicy ones, as they were called. Blue Eyes is fully in the vein of the old spicy detective stories, but if I have any qualms with the Hard Case line, it’s that you can’t exactly tell what flavor of crime novel you’re getting before you’re thirty or so pages in.

So here’s my verdict—I love the cover, the novel is written well enough, and I like the characters (they’re all rat-bastards!), but a compelling plot was sacrificed for repetitious sex scenes that added little to the story. It’s also a quick and easy read. Not a garbage book, just know what you’re getting with this one. As said before, three out of five stars.

Extra Credit (and SPOILERS) ahead: One of the redeeming qualities of Blue Eyes is the ending. I’ve seen some who didn’t care for it, but I think Block knocked it out of the park.

Once again, the premise isn’t exactly original. Man falls in love with a beautiful and dangerous woman, and they plot to murder her evil husband for love or money; both in this case. And there are only a few ways this story can end. Usually with either the woman hanging her knight in shining armor out to dry or by both of them being hauled off to jail. Toward the end, Doak, who is a fan of the classic film noirs that so often recycled this exact plot, watches several of the movies on cable tv and notes the similarities between them and his own situation. It was a nice touch I thought, as I’m also a fan of the classic detective movies.

As the book is winding down, you catch yourself trying to guess which way it’ll go. Will Doak kill for Lisa or wise up and leave her high and dry? Will she stick him taking the wrap for the murder? Will they both go down? All of these seem like possibilities with still a few pages left.

One thought I had was that Doak would get himself caught. We learn the husband has his own side piece and when Doak breaks into her apartment, while in the bedroom, he mentions feeling eyes on him but all he sees is a teddy bear on the bed. Later, listening to the bug he planted in her room, he hears her talking to the teddy bear. This made me think that maybe the teddy bear was a nanny cam the husband gave her in order to keep an eye on his mistress and that once the murder was pulled off, the cops would find the nanny cam. They’d watch Doak do the deed and that’d be all she wrote. Despite his careful plan, killing both husband and mistress and making it look like a murder-suicide, the cops would have him red handed.

A second strand that caught my attention was that maybe Doak would kill Lisa, his blue-eyed girl, and then himself in much the same way he doctored the murder scene. We see him going through a days-long funk after the killing, expecting to be arrested any minute, contemplating suicide, thinking about Lisa taking off or turning him in, and talking about how it never ended well in the film noirs—the guy always gets screwed, he says several times. He even keeps both of his handguns handy: a revolver and a pistol, one registered to him and one unregistered, just like the murder scene. Then the night before his first hookup with Lisa since killing her husband, he takes both handguns into the living room and cleans them, as if preparing for something.

Lisa and Doak meet the next day. They hook up, talk about the murders, talk about sex, but through all this Doak is vague and distant. After the cops didn’t show up and the sheriff told Doak about the scene, appearing to believe the murder-suicide construction, I knew the nanny cam was probably out, but right until the last paragraph I expected Doak to shoot Lisa and then turn one of the guns on himself.

What happened?

Last chance before I ruin the ending for you.

Still here? Good, because I wanted to tell. Blue Eyes ends in the way I least expected. They get away with it, and they’re still in love and planning to make a go of it. A happy, for them, ending. These stories never end this way and this was a refreshing surprise, even for two rat-bastards like Lisa and Doak.

And that’s it. I was already thinking about doing a review halfway through, and flip-flopping between two and three stars. The ending made it a hard three stars and almost a four star for me. In the space of a paragraph I went from simply wanting to finish just to finish to being glad I read the book.

OUT NOW: Lovecraftiana

My short story “Father of Serpents” appears in this month’s edition of Lovecraftiana Magazine–their Candlemas 2018 edition. It’s currently only available on Lulu but should come up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble soon. It’s pretty cool to see my name and my story title on the magazine’s cover (the cover illustration isn’t for my story though), and I’m excited to get my hands on a copy. Mine are in the mail now.

Here’s a quick one-line synopsis of “Father of Serpents:” Research team unearths something sinister beneath the sand and rock in the Oklahoma scrubland.

If snakes creep you out, you enjoy desert settings, or like stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, this one’s for you. Purchase your copy HERE

Lovecraftiana is published by Rogue Planet Press, edited by Gavin Chappell.

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Below the Stairs – Tales from the Cellar

Out now from OzHorror. My story “Below Ground” appears next to Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell. I’m very excited to share a toc with two of my favorite authors. Get your paperback copy from Amazon HERE.

TOC:

The Thing in the Cellar by David H. Keller

The Root Cellar by Toby Bennett

The Basement Apartment by Mark Allan Gunnells

Trapped by Theresa Derwin

Purgatory in Perpetuity by David Turnbull

The Cellars by Ramsey Campbell

Breeding Black by Chad Lutzke

The Memory Man by Steve Dillon

Bloodworms by Noel Osualdini

Below Deck by K.N. Johnson

An Endless Echo in Every Empty Space by Matthew R Davis

The Vaults by Katherine Wielechowski

Creakers by Paul Kane

The Bone Vine by Erin Cole

The Stairwell by Chris Mason

Below Ground by Charlie Walls

Hell’s Event by Clive Barker

The Watchman by Brian Craddock

Eyes of Glass by Stephen Herczeg

Under the Pyramids by H.P. Lovecraft with Harry Houdini

Warding by Kev Harrison

Framing Devices

Framing devices are used as bookends to a larger story, creating a story within a story, and when applied to short story collections, adds glue that connects the individual stories together. This literary device isn’t new and if we’re being honest, most of the time it’s a tired cliché. I’m going to talk about a couple of my personal favorites in order of publication, not preference. A word of caution, I’m only talking about framing devices in single-author collections under the speculative fiction umbrella (one is science fiction and the other is horror), so feel free to point out other examples. I’m talking about The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury and The Books of Blood by Clive Barker. What are some of your favorites?

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THE ILLUSTRATED MAN – Ray Bradbury published 1951

The title story opens the collection. The narrator meets a formal carnival worker covered with tattoos supposedly created by a time-traveling woman. Each tattoo is individually animated and tells a different story. Each story in the collection is a different tattoo that is told as you watch the ink’s animation. Pretty freaking cool, huh? Yeah, I thought so. But one key to a great framing story is that the rest of the story(s) must be on the level of the device, and the stories here absolutely deliver. My favorite story of the collection: “The Long Rain”

Quote from “The Illustrated Man” frame story: “If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed with all his sulphurous color, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art. The colors burned in three dimensions. They were windows looking in upon fiery reality. Here, gathered on one wall, were all the finest scenes in the universe, the man was a walking treasure gallery. This wasn’t the work of a cheap carnival tattoo man with three colors and whiskey on his breath. This was the accomplishment of a living genius, vibrant, clear, and beautiful.”

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BOOKS OF BLOOD – Clive Barker published 1984-1985

Once again, the title story is the frame story. In the story, a psychic investigator hires a medium to communicate with the dead in a particular haunted house. Turns out the medium is a fraud and fakes his visions. But there are real ghosts in the house and they grow tired of the medium’s shit. The ghosts attack the fake medium and carve words into the flesh all over his body. The words in the medium’s skin make up the stories in the collection (bit of a more gruesome throwback to Bradbury’s, huh?). Just like Illustrated Man, Books of Blood is a great collection, one of the best horror collections out there. My favorite story: The Midnight Meat Train.

I’ll leave you with the quote that opens the collection: “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”

NaNoWriMo and more

This is just a short note about what I’m currently working on.

As of right now, I have ten short stories out on submission calls, so fingers crossed. I’m hoping for at least 3 to get accepted, but we’ll see. Going 0 for 10 sounds horrible, but given my luck, I wouldn’t be too surprised. Actually, I’m of the stories, 3 or 4 of them in particular,  so I worry I may be a little too confident. Hopefully, I’ll get a couple acceptances, but any that aren’t will get another edit and then sent back out.

 

NaNoWriMo-

This is my first year doing NaNo WriMo. So far, 6 days in and I’m just over 12500 words. Shooting for 60k. I’m cheating a bit, though. I’ve been planning to turn a 20k crime story I wrote last year into a novel, and that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got my old story, and a handful of notes on expansion and changing up the ending. Unlike most of my work, there is no supernatural aspect anywhere in this story–It’s straight crime/noir set in a small town in the rural south. My working synopsis is below.

“These Muddy Waters.” When bodies start turning up in a small southern town, Mal and Jay set out to find the murderer, but family blow-ups, prostitutes, and drug dealers get in the way. Will Mal or Jay be able to do what the police can’t or will the murderer move on to kill again?

 

That’s it for me. What are you working on? Any NaNo WriMo vets out there with tips? Anyone looking for writing buddies?

 

Charlie