Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 28

Occultober Day 16 Obsidian Butterfly by Laurell K. Hamilton

Occultober Day 16 Obsidian Butterfly by Laurell K. Hamilton

Laurell K. Hamilton is one of the writers who popularized the urban fantasy genre with her Anita Blake series. Obsidian Butterfly is hands down the best book in the series, so it’s surprising that it is totally separate from the carefully crafted setting in St. Louis with all of Anita’s friends, enemies, and romantic interests. In fact, the only person who has appeared before in this novel is Edward, the assassin who trained Anita to survive being a vampire hunter. Edward, who’s legal name in New Mexico is Ted Forester, is a cold-blooded sociopath who’s only pleasure in life comes from killing things. The tougher the kill, the more he likes it. Or at least that’s what Anita always thought of Edward. Then she meets his flower-child fiancé and her two children and everything she thought she knew is overturned. The problem, she fears, is that she wasn’t wrong in her first assessment. Edward has gotten himself into a social problem he can’t extricate himself from and she’s worried it might end up killing these three innocents.

 

But that isn’t the problem that brought her to New Mexico. Someone—the feds think it’s a serial killer or two—is murdering people by chopping some of them up and skinning the others. The true horror comes from the fact that the skinned people are all still alive. They can’t talk, but they can move, and sometimes bite, and no one can figure out how this horror was inflicted upon them. This is a fate that is much worse than death and Hamilton does a wonderful job at showing how the possibility of ending like this is unsettling some of the hardest killers in the world. She also does a great job of unfolding the mystery, laying out the clues that show how Anita, with her peculiar background as an animator, can contribute to these major investigations despite tremendous hostility toward her as a woman, a civilian, and a “zombie queen”.

 

As if all of that wasn’t great enough, Hamilton introduces two more of Edward’s associates: a bounty hunter, and Olaf—a serial killer almost as disturbing as whatever is killing these people—and these two—especially Olaf—really ratchet up the tension as we come to realize that Anita fits this disturbing man’s victim profile.

 

Yet, even this isn’t enough, because Edward’s pacifist fiancé has gotten herself into some trouble of her own with a biker gang that threatens to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back in this adventure—and I haven’t even mentioned the super spooky master vampire whose name is also the title of the book. She’s a thousand years old and think she’s an Aztec goddess and she brings oodles of additional drama into an already extraordinary tale.

 

If you’ve ever read an Anita Blake novel and enjoyed it even the tiniest bit, you should make time to read this one. If you’ve never read one, I think you can come into this novel fresh. It does build on what’s happened earlier in the series, but because all of the action is outside of Anita’s usual stomping grounds, I think this one makes a good standalone book for anyone wondering what all the fuss is about.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

 

If you’re interested in Obsidian Butterfly, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

 

 

Occultober Day 15 Lazarus Key by Gilbert M. Stack

Occultober Day 15 Lazarus Key by Gilbert M. Stack

As we start our third week of the Occultober season, we return to the theme of isolation and mix in a little visual deception as we visit the island graveyard called Lazarus Key. Mitch Pembroke is the son of a steel tycoon who, having survived becoming an ace in the Great War, has been struggling to spend a bit of his father’s wealth enjoying himself. Kit Moran is an ex-boxer who saved Mitch’s life during the war and now has a fulltime job keeping Mitch out of trouble. That was pretty easy until Mitch met Lorali Sinclair.

 

Lorali is the exotically beautiful biracial scion of the old money Sinclair family and Mitch doesn’t think right when she’s around. When things start getting serious between them and she flees to her island home, Mitch drops everything and goes after her. But Mitch isn’t the first man to follow Lorali home and like his predecessors, he may not survive the visit.

 

Lazarus Key is the first novella in my Pembroke Steel series—books that blur the line between historical fiction and dark fantasy—so you never quite know what you’re going to get—a horror story with a supernatural monster at its core, or one that only looks that way…

 

The Pembroke Steel stories were a lot of fun to write in a large part because I got to play with reader expectations in each and every tale. You can try them all for free on Kindle Unlimited, or purchase them at the same link on Amazon, starting with Lazarus Key for 99 cents.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

 

If you’re interested in Lazarus Key, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 14 The Hallowe'en Folk Legend of White Horse Hill by Philip Gegan

Occultober Day 14 The Hallowe’en Folk Legend of White Horse Hill by Philip Gegan

I’m going to close out the second week of Occultober with a children’s book, The Hallowe’en Folk Legend of White Horse Hill. It’s an unusual pleasure to encounter a different style of storytelling. In this short work, Philip Gegan uses poetry to sketch the narrative of the origin of Halloween. The overall effect is one of an epic poem, although it is not nearly as long as the great epics of antiquity. I would guess that the author intended the story to be read aloud to children. It’s short enough to be read in a single sitting and it comes with pertinent illustrations that add color to the story. The end result is an enjoyable and creative look at the origins of Halloween.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in The Hallowe’en Folk Legend of White Horse Hill, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 13 Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard

Occultober Day 13 Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard

The Cthulhu mythos has become one of the cornerstones of the modern field of horror and as we near the end of the second week of Occultober, we’re going to take a look at Carter & Lovecraft, a fresh new book in the genre. Carter is a police detective whose partner commits suicide minutes after shooting a horrific serial killer of children. Lovecraft is the last living relative of H.P. Lovecraft. The two come together through what certainly appears to be a supernatural intervention and quickly become involved in investigating a sorcerous-style murder in a world that doesn’t think these things are possible.

 

There’s a lot to like about this book. The first is the concept of the twist or the fold—a way in which the Cthulhu mythos warps reality. Magic is about working with the twist (the serial killer was trying to understand it) but some people can naturally influence it which is the key to the story and a hint at why the original Lovecraft and his friend Carter were so important.

 

At its heart, this is a great supernatural mystery with a ton of fun interactions (such as a man drowning in his car without any water being present). But it’s also laying the groundwork for a new vision of the Cthulhu mythos which certainly seems worth exploring.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

 

If you’re interested in Carter & Lovecraft, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 12 Ferocious by Jeff Strand

Occultober Day 12 Ferocious by Jeff Strand

At the heart of the horror genre are people. If you don’t care about the people to whom terrible things are happening, it’s hard to care deeply about the book. When I picked up Ferocious by Jeff Strand, I was a little bit worried about his ability to pull off the characters mentioned in the blurb—a recluse raising his niece off the grid in the middle of the wilderness. It seemed quite likely the author would slip into caricatures as he wrote about a zombie apocalypse in the backwoods. I could not have been more wrong. In the very first chapter he establishes Rusty Moss as both a hard man who hates people and someone that you absolutely have to love. In the next chapter he establishes Rusty’s niece, Mia, just as credibly. And this father-daughter style team will capture your heart as they struggle to survive one of the weirdest twists on the zombie apocalypse that I have ever read.

 

Strand is a master at building tension—not only with the ever-growing level of danger but with the very credible mistakes that Rusty and Mia make throughout the novel. They never do anything stupid, but many of their plans and reactions go badly awry. This makes them remarkably human as they deal with a horror they can’t quite believe is really happening to them.

 

One of the best distinguishing features of this novel is the vast array of zombie creatures that threaten Rusty and Mia. Strand has really thought out the strengths and weaknesses of the various undead forest animals so there is never a point in which the action gets routine. Even the smallest animals are dangerous, and this gives the novel a decidedly different flavor from every other zombie story I have read.

 

Finally, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the vocal talents of narrator Scott Thomas. It’s not an easy thing for a man to craft a believable voice for a seventeen-year-old girl, but Thomas pulled it off and without his ability to do this, the audio book would not have worked nearly as well. He also catches the humor and affection in the back-and-forth banter of Rusty and Mia. His narration takes an excellent story and gives it that extra touch of magic to finish bringing it to life.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in Ferocious, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 11 Supermarket by Bobby Hall

Occultober Day 11 Supermarket by Bobby Hall

Sometimes the spookiest things around us happen in our minds. That’s the question at the heart of the story for Day 11 of this year’s Occultober. Are the events really happening? Or are they figments of the narrator’s imagination?

 

Supermarket is the story of Flynn, a young man desperately trying to put his life back together by finishing a novel. His girlfriend left him because of his inability to finish things and he has convinced himself that failure here means he’s destined to be a loser all of his life. His novel takes place in a supermarket, so he gets a job as a minimum wage “floater” hoping that working in an actual supermarket will help him complete his book.

 

Flynn is an untrustworthy narrator, something that the reader immediately begins to suspect when his best friend, Frank, is never around when anyone else is. Frank is a weird guy who is messing with Flynn’s life, but Flynn never really does anything about it. He likes Frank, is fascinated by him, and believes he is critical to finishing his book. But the reader recognizes very quickly that Frank exists only in Flynn’s head, making the reader wonder how many other things exist only in Flynn’s head. Part I ends with a predictable crisis leading to part two in an insane asylum where doctors try to help Flynn and the reader sees more signs that he is continuing to invent reality around him even while in recovery. (Again, keep your eye out for people who no one else ever talks to.)

 

Flynn has evidently spent two years in the insane asylum without actually ever taking his medications. This really bothered me. People on meds get bloodwork done all the time so that the doctors can analyze whether or not the meds need to be increased or decreased. The doctors would have known almost immediately that Flynn wasn’t taking his medications and done something about it. So this will cause you to wonder if even the insane asylum is a figment of Flynn’s imagination. This playing with reality is really the heart of the whole story and it continues to the last words of the book. It’s clever, but at the end I had to ask myself, was Flynn even writing a book?

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in Supermarket, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 10 Hiding Among Us by Gilbert M. Stack and Marc Hawkins

Occultober Day 10 Hiding Among Us by Gilbert M. Stack and Marc Hawkins

One third of the way into Occultober and the spookiest things are yet to happen. Case in point, Hiding Among Us, a novel I co-authored with my friend, Marc Hawkins. Marc and I wanted to craft a paranormal adventure that held within it the seeds of all the classic monsters—werewolves, vampires, zombies, etc.—but didn’t actually use any of them. Instead, we created what I believe is a unique paranormal race of creatures and placed them all over the planet fighting their own little wars while humanity goes about its business blissfully unaware of the monsters hiding among them. At least humanity was unaware until Mina Raintree stumbles into a situation that forces her to confront this terrifying reality.

 

Mina’s entry into the darkness begins when her bad-news sister, Ally, is the victim of a hit-and-run driver and is bleeding out all over the road—saved only by a passing stranger who is too good to be true. As the hit-and-run driver returns again and again, looking for something Ally stole from him, he begins to fixate on Mina with pathological fury. But the stranger who saved her sister is showing up to, turning up in all the wrong places at all the right times. And how do both men do the impossible things they do?

 

There’s a supernatural community hiding within Philadelphia pretending to be human and Mina, thanks to her younger sister, is about to learn what happens to people who discover there are monsters hiding among us.

 

Hiding Among Us is on sale on Amazon for 99 cents during the Occultober celebration. It and its sequels, Searching Among Us and Hunting Among Us can also be read for free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

 

If you’re interested in Hiding Among Us, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 9 Crow Country by Emily V. Sullivan

Occultober Day 9 Crow Country by Emily V. Sullivan

Crow Country builds an atmosphere that any horror author would be proud to craft, even though I’m not absolutely certain that it’s intended to be a horror novel. An excellent addition to the growing post-apocalyptic western subgenre, Crow Country focuses on the west some thirty years after what the reader guesses was a nuclear war that destroyed civilization. It doesn’t appear that nuclear radiation is a major problem in this particular part of the United States, but it looks like the accompanying EMPs brought the country to its knees and then kept driving the citizenry even lower.

 

What’s left are a smattering of cult-like communities each dependent for survival on a big personality. The “kindest” of these communities would appear to be Genesis where it’s leader, Law, is determined to save civilization by attracting and keeping only those who can help produce a healthy new generation of human beings. Others are built around a strongman dictator who is either clearly insane or more interested in his personal comfort than the people under his protection.

 

The problem confronting all of these communities is that nothing they are building is sustainable. While Sullivan doesn’t go into a great deal of detail on this problem, it seems obvious that they are scavenging much of their needs off the old world and are not large enough to produce everything they need for the new one. If that was the only problem, they might have overcome it. But, unfortunately for everyone, there are also the crows to contend with.

 

The crows are the most fascinating part of the novel, and Sullivan purposely keeps them ambiguous for the first half of the book even as they threaten the community of Genesis. It’s hard not to think of the Hitchcock film, The Birds, every time they appear. They have become vicious flocks (the technical term is “murder” and isn’t that just the perfect name for a group of predatory birds) of human-eating monsters—and they really appear to prefer warm living flesh for their meals. What’s not clear at first is whether or not they are mutating as a result of the nuclear war. I’ll leave it to the readers to make that determination for themselves.

 

The novel focuses around a very dangerous addition to this completely desolate existence—the introduction of hope. This perilous emotion comes in the form of a train—a modern day myth that promises the return of at least part of the old world to these desperate communities. The story circulating the west is that one of the communities further east has rebuilt one of these relics from the past and is traveling their way—and everyone wants to get and control the train. For Law and Genesis, the train promises an elusive chance of security as it would give Law the power to take his whole community out of their current circumstances in search of something better—wherever that might be. I should point out here that no one interested in the train seems concerned with what the owners of the train (if it exists) might want to do with it. They immediately begin thinking of this mythical mechanism as their own.

 

Crow Country is the story of that train—or rather the journey across incredibly dangerous territory to find and presumably capture that fabled artifact. It’s told from the perspective not of Law, but of the forty-year-old, Judge, who has a troubled relationship with the founder of Genesis, and whose story is what makes this novel so very wonderful to read. It’s Judge’s job to expel from Genesis anyone who is not able to produce a healthy child. It should not be lost on the reader that Judge himself appears to be childless—a fact that is not directly talked about much but underlies many of his most important relationships in the novel.

 

Oh, and lest I forget to say it, Judge is also the most dangerous man in Genesis. He’s the person who gets sent out to kill the crows whenever a nest appears near their territory. He’s also the man who has to deal with just about every other nasty problem that arises on their journey. He is far from being a superman, but so far, at least, he has always gotten the job done regardless of the personal cost to him.

 

This is a beautiful written book filled with flowing passages of extremely vivid prose. Sullivan’s ability to bring this world and Judge’s relationships to life is the greatest strength of the novel. It’s matched only by narrator Will Hahn’s extraordinary reading of the story. Between her words and his voice, the reader is pulled fully into this bleak future where the chance to grasp hold of myth becomes more important than life.

 

I was very lucky to get to read an advanced copy and am happy to announce that it is published today.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B...

 

If you’re interested in Crow Country, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 8 The Werewolf???s Fifteen Minutes by Jonathan Maberry

Occultober Day 8 The Werewolf’s Fifteen Minutes by Jonathan Maberry

From vampires to werewolves for the eighth day of the season, and what a delightful treat you will discover if you read this short is. Rarely do I finish a book and immediately want to restart it again, but that’s what happened with The Werewolf’s Fifteen Minutes. The plot revolves around the consequences of a totally down on his luck young man named Gary posting to YouTube a video of himself transforming into a werewolf. At first, everyone thinks it is just great special effects, but then Gary proves he really can transform, and he is rocketed into stardom. But there’s a reason we talk about “fifteen minutes of fame” and when Gary’s time is up, things get really interesting as anyone with even a smidgeon of empathy will feel for this guy. But the reason the story is so wonderful is what happens next. This is quite possibly the best ending to any werewolf story ever. An utterly disturbing delight!

 

This was an Audible Originals story and I don’t know if you can read it any other way.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Werewo...

 

If you’re interested in The Werewolf’s Fifteen Minutes, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

Occultober Day 7 Vampire on the Orient Express by Shane Carrow

Occultober Day 7 Vampire on the Orient Express by Shane Carrow

To close out our first week of Occultober, we turn to the vampire…

 

A lot of people have set mysteries on the Orient Express in homage to Agatha Christie’s famous novel, but I’ve never before seen one quite like this. Carrow’s undead are quite frightening and the threat feels very real…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

Carrow opens by introducing his two main characters—an American deserter from the French Foreign Legion and an English spy. Both are on the famous train and the early chapters show them meeting members of the supporting cast and settling down for their long trip. Then screams break the peace of the night and they encounter something that their minds don’t want to grapple with—but which they know in their hearts is not human. I want to stress here how well done this first encounter is. They don’t just discover a victim with fang marks on her neck—they metaphorically grapple with something clearly supernatural and being young men of the early twentieth century, that’s not something they easily accept.

 

From that point forward, things get much worse very quickly. They meet an Eastern European count and countess whose eyes are so sensitive to light that they wear shaded glasses. The reader is quick to think Dracula, but honestly, things are far worse than I thought they would be. Carrow is drawing more on the early Eastern European myths rather than on the modern urban fantasy genre for his source material, and frankly, this makes his undead much spookier.

 

The pacing also surprised me. Midway through the book, Carrow gives us what I had expected to be the climatic concluding action but it’s really the tip of the iceberg. If you like vampire stories, this is a good one.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

If you’re interested in Vampire on the Orient Express, why not join the discussion on my author page at Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...