Nikolas P. Robinson's Blog, page 26

Follow the Maggot Wagon by Robert Essig

Follow the Maggot Wagon takes the road trip narrative in a deliciously awful direction. Jamie and Adam had been friends for most of their lives, but they’d gradually grown apart as Adam’s impulse control issues and drug use led him down paths Jamie wouldn’t follow. Though Adam’s poor impulse control might have helped to push the friends apart, it was also the thing that contributed to years of pranks, dares, and manipulation by Jamie and other friends. Old tensions arise as the two friends find themselves stuck behind the maggot wagon, a truck that smells like it’s hauling a full load of carrion beneath the tarp in the back, and Jamie takes this as an opportunity to push Adam into doing something risky and juvenile, pushing his buttons along the way.
The true surprise of Essig’s story isn’t what’s going to happen, as the reader begins to suspect where things are going long before we arrive at the farmhouse. The shock is the motivation behind it. Throughout the story, we catch glimpses of the eroding facade of civility between the two friends, as the interactions take on an increasingly cruel and bitter tone. We think we know why we’re speeding toward the inevitable outcome, only to find ourselves just as stunned as Jamie and Adam are when more secrets get revealed.
I suspect many of us have friendships like this, where old grudges and recrimination are difficult to forget and perhaps more challenging to forgive. Thankfully, most of us don’t decide to follow the maggot wagon as Jamie and Adam did.
This was an excellent character study, portraying both individuals with vivid and tragic dimensionality. Both Jamie and Adam are relatable, and that makes it all the more disturbing because one has to wonder how much or how little it might take to push us into either the driver’s or passenger’s seat.

This title was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. You can obtain a copy for yourself by going to the website or downloading the app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:

Follow the Maggot Wagon by Robert Essig

Growing Dark by Kristopher Triana, Narrated by Kristopher Triana, Dani George, John Wayne Comunale, Michael Zapcic, Kevin McGuire, Thomas Mumme, and Jennifer Mumme

Growing Dark truly showcases the eclectic range Triana is capable of in a way a reader would otherwise only discover if they took the time to read half a dozen books. Running the gamut from intense cosmic horror to something that could be considered kid-friendly, there’s no doubt any lover of dark fiction will find something to love in this short collection.
From the Storms, A Daughter kicks everything off, sharing the story of a town that’s been going through hard times, and they’re only getting harder as the region gets flooded. First responders in boats are struggling to locate stragglers to take them to safety, but what they find instead is evidence that there’s more to fear than the water.
Eaters is a post-apocalyptic excursion into the remnants of the old world, as a small party of hunters is clearing the area of zombies. As with most tales like that, things don’t go smoothly. Triana manages to bring some originality to the topic, and an ending that readers/listeners are unlikely to see coming.
Growing Dark is a coming-of-age tale gone wrong, as a farm boy surrounded by sickness and decay desperately wants to prove to his father that he can be a man. Sometimes being a man involves making some hard choices, and sometimes they’ll be bad choices as well.
Reunion is an insightful story of childhood regrets and how the mistakes we make can haunt us well into adulthood, altering the courses we travel and where we ultimately end up.
Before the Boogeymen Come was the most surprising inclusion in this collection. Triana entertains readers as he breathes life into the monsters who plague the imaginations of young children before media and experience provide new monsters to replace the old.
The Bone Orchard is a heartbreaking western tale that could be read, depending on the reader’s perspective, as being either pro-life or pro-choice in its message. An old shootist returns to an old haunt and old love, only to discover there’s a sinister secret behind keeping the brothel running smoothly.
Soon There’ll Be Leaves is a character study framed by multiple horrors, the most potent of which being reflection on a life not well-lived and the looming loss of family. Returning to a place he’d sooner never see again, our protagonist is approached by an old flame who proves the adage that one can never go home again, as an attempted affair takes an unforeseen twist.
Video Express is a nostalgic exploration of the video rental stores of our youth and condemnation of how we quickly turned our back on the family-run establishments in favor of places where we could easily snag the newest titles.
Giving from the Bottom is another character study, this time focused on the horrors of everyday life and the gradual erosion of both one’s ability to care and one’s will to live when nothing seems to turn out as expected.
The collection ends with the strangely epic Legends, a vision of an afterlife that is not at all what one might expect. In Triana’s captivating narrative, we discover that the dead–if they’re famous or infamous enough–become eidolons of a sort. Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin come together as paragons of what generations of moviegoers and fans imagined them to be, and as such, they are bestowed with purpose and power to protect the world from infernal entities who may have similarly familiar faces. For me, Legends was the best of the whole collection, providing a glimpse into a world I could see the author fleshing out into a much longer piece.
The narrations provided by Dani George, John Wayne Comunale, and Kristopher Triana himself were the best of the bunch. Triana especially did an excellent job of providing his characters with distinctive voices, and in the case of Before the Boogeymen Come a level of caricature that was enjoyable. The additional narrators, Michael Zapcic, Thomas Mumme, Jennifer Mumme, and Kevin McGuire were satisfying as well, just not as memorable as those provided by the three previously mentioned.

Unfit by R. J. Benetti

Unfit is a fascinating mix of dystopian science fiction, bizarro, and splatterpunk that blends smoothly into a narrative that is equal parts disturbing, heartbreaking, and sardonically hilarious.
Clarissa has a crying baby in her cart. We’ve all seen it before, many of us having experienced it from Clarissa’s perspective.
It’s frustrating.
It’s embarrassing.
Other shoppers judge her as she desperately struggles to get the baby to be quiet…but nothing calms the infant.
There’s only one way to silence the crying and screeching, and this is where everything takes a particularly dark turn, followed by a few more turns.
R. J. Benetti has essentially written an episode of Black Mirror that hasn’t been optioned yet, and it’s almost a shame this isn’t a more visual medium, except that I’m not sure anyone would want to see this played out on screen.
If you’re looking for social commentary and bleak prognostication, this is the story for you.

This title was released as a Godless exclusive title that you can obtain for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app to your mobile device. The link is below:

https://godless.com/products/copy-of-unfit-by-r-j-benetti

Lushbutcher: Volume 2 St. Practice Day by Lucy Leitner

Jane Lushbutcher hits the streets with a vengeance in her second outing for of The Godless League, St. Practice Day. The least stable of the bunch, Lushbutcher is always sure to provide an entertaining and gratuitously violent experience for readers.
It’s Saint Paddy’s Day in September, or it will be next weekend, and in preparation for the festivities, Pittsburgh drunks are pub crawling for St. Practice Day. Everything is all fun and games for the green-clad alcoholics until Jane’s outing with her elderly friends is interrupted by God’s warning that there is danger afoot.
Lucy Leitner kicks it up a notch from the previous installment, leaving a trail of bodies (or parts of bodies) in the wake as Lushbutcher seeks out the mastermind behind the pub crawl. By the time she’s done, there’ll be so much red and green on the ground that it’ll look like Christmas in September instead.

You can grab this title as well as the previous Godless League titles by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:

https://godless.com/products/godless-league-5-lushbutcher-st-practice-day-by-lucy-leitner

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

My Best Friend’s Exorcism is a nostalgia-packed excursion into the life of adolescent girls in the 1980s. We meet Abby and Gretchen when the girls are in fourth grade, as Abby attempts to celebrate her birthday party at a roller-skating rink. Alone with her family, Abby fears no one will show up, but the strange new girl from school appears. What begins as an awful experience for the birthday girl develops into the best friendship either of them could hope for.
We’re provided with snapshots of the friendship between these two girls throughout the narrative, the bulk of the story devoted to character development.
The meat of the story picks up when the girls are in their Sophomore year of high school at the prestigious Albemarle private school. They’re near the top of the class, and they have bright futures ahead of them. That’s when everything changes. Abby finds herself helpless as she watches Gretchen changing into someone she no longer recognizes, and everything becomes a dizzying nightmare of lies and manipulation that she struggles to navigate while learning that there’s more going on than she can easily comprehend.
As a story about friendship and coming-of-age, it’s pretty fantastic, really delving into what it means to be best friends from childhood. As a horror or thriller story, it falls well short of the mark. I have the same issue with this Hendrix novel as I had with The Final Girl Support Group, in that the story grows tedious before it truly begins to get to the point where anything is happening that propels the narrative forward. Much like that novel, when this story starts getting good, it gets great, but it takes an awfully long time getting there. There are points when it appears to be picking up speed, only to revert to a meandering, detail-filled exploration of Abby’s day-to-day life, and it was challenging to make it through those intervals.
The narration provided by Emily Woo Zeller brings this story of youth and friendship to life in a way that it desperately required. Her performance of the various girls, notably Abby and Gretchen, was terrific. The voice provided for Christian (The Exorcist) was amusing and captured the absurd, muscle-bound character in such a way as to make him almost feel real. The audiobook edition of this novel made an otherwise unsatisfactory experience a much better one, and that is due entirely to the quality of the narration provided.

Picture Perfect by Allisha McAdoo

Picture Perfect tells the tale of a mother and daughter plagued by a cursed or haunted painting brought into their home by the mother. While the daughter finds the imagery depicted on canvas repulsive, her mother seems strangely fascinated by the grotesque artwork.
The fixation takes on a more sinister quality as the picture begins whispering, and driving the mother to madness and self-destructive outbursts. It’s only after the daughter begins hearing those haunting whispers for herself that she understands the helplessness her mother felt under the painting’s influence.
McAdoo provides readers with a story of inescapable fate, loss of control, and suffering, all with a twist and a glimmer of cruel hope at the end.

This story was released on Halloween as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com and you can find it for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app to your preferred mobile device. The link is below:

Picture Perfect by Allisha McAdoo

Demophobia by Gerhard Jason Geick

As peculiar, violent, and perversely humorous as Demophobia happens to be–and it is all of those things–it is also a deeply sad story about survivor’s guilt and an insightful discourse on being an outsider.
Mr. Foicus is a Pus-Eater, or as he prefers, an Eiterfresser. A packed auditorium watches his multimedia lecture on the history of his kind, distorted and sanitized to elicit sympathy and hopefully engender less of a freakshow aspect to his existence. He’s one of the last of his kind, and he’s regretful of that. While he may be an inhuman, vicious monster, he suffers from the same melancholy any human might experience under similar circumstances.
All of this doesn’t change the fact that Mr. Foicus is still a monster, and it doesn’t take long before the story takes a violent and revolting turn when the Pus-Eater shows his true colors. Through the perspective of someone hoping to capture images amid the panicked crowd, we experience the dread of knowing that everyone should have left when things turned sideways. That’s the problem with a crowd, though; they feel safety in numbers, and if a large number of the individuals begin to relax, everyone else will go along with it, even if they think there’s something wrong.
I’ve never been more grateful for the fact that I loathe being in crowded spaces with large groups of people than when I imagined the carnage and wash of bodily fluids in the lecture hall.
Geick does an excellent job of building the reader up to a conclusion that feels both fitting and depressing.

This title was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. You can obtain it for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:

Demophobia by Gerhard Jason Geick

For the Love of the Game by Thomas R. Clark

Ricardo “Blackie” Sanchez is the best MLDBB has to offer. The five-time Home Run Derby champion knows he has nothing to fear from his rivals as he steps up to bat for championship number six, as long as he can keep focusing on the ball…or on the ball being a ball.
Unless you live under a rock, chances are you’re familiar with MLB (Major League Baseball), even if–like me–you have neither the patience nor even passing interest in the sport. If I broke down what MLDBB stands for, it would ruin the whole surprise you have in store for you.
Wondering where Thomas R. Clark came up with this whole concept has led me to only one conclusion; this is the result of the punchline of a specific subset of offensive jokes being nurtured and allowed to grow into something awful and perversely hilarious. There’s something very wrong with our friend Thomas, and I suspect maybe someone needs to take him out to the ball game, buy him some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and supply him with a rain poncho like he’s in the front row of a Gallagher performance or an old school GWAR concert.
Of all the ways one might think of to celebrate America’s Past Time, this is not within the first dozen or so things I’d have imagined. We just have to be grateful that Mr. Clark went there on our behalf, to liven(?) up the most tedious sport known to man.

This story was released as an exclusive title at http://www.godless.com and you can obtain it for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app to your preferred mobile device. The link is below:

For the Love of the Game by Thomas R. Clark

Black Friday by Todd Keisling

Retail is a thankless job, but working retail on Black Friday would be an absolute nightmare. For Doug, it’s not so bad. He knows it’s a job he wouldn’t want to make a career out of, but it pays the bills, and he gets to work with his girlfriend, Jenna.
As challenging as he expects the day to be, Doug never anticipates just how bad it can get. Black Friday is rough, but when it might just be the end of the world, things are about to get worse.
In the tradition of George A. Romero, Todd Keisling provides us with a funhouse mirror distortion of the American obsession with consumerism. Providing commentary on the mindless or single-minded hunger that grips wide swaths of the population on the biggest shopping day of the year, Keisling forces us to wonder how much difference there is between one shambling horde and another.
Even in a genre run into the ground, Keisling manages to create something fresh and entertaining with well-developed characters, fantastic writing, and plenty of wit added into the mix.

Black Friday was released on Halloween of 2021 as part of the 31 Days of Godless event. You can pick it up for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the app on your mobile device. The link follows:

Black Friday by Todd Keisling

A Predisposition for Madness by Aurelio Rico Lopez III

Aurelio Rico Lopez III has provided readers with a robust assortment of free-verse narrative poems. There are literally dozens of stories and set pieces conveyed through poetry in this collection, and it’s well worth the time spent properly digesting each and every one.
A Predisposition for Madness has certainly put this writer on my radar in a good way. In these pages, you’ll discover monsters both human and far from it, you’ll witness new pandemics and sickness ravaging households and the world, you’ll see warfare and apocalyptic scenarios played out, and you’ll encounter things far more challenging to describe. There’s most certainly something in here that will suit the tastes of any reader, assuming that reader enjoys poetry. Even if you don’t typically enjoy it, I’d recommend giving this collection a chance.
The title is an apt one, the cadence of the poems coming across almost as if the stream of consciousness ravings of a madman in a padded cell, alternating between mumbles and screams.

This title was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. You can read it for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app on your preferred mobile device. The link is below:

A Predisposition for Madness by Aurelio Rico Lopez III