Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 59

Occultober Day 13 The Trellborg Monstrosities by John Houlihan

Occultober Day 13 The Trellborg Monstrosities by John Houlihan

Things Man Was Not Meant to Know return for the thirteenth day of Occultober as I feature a novel H.P. Lovecraft fans are going to want to read.

 

Toward the end of World War II, British intelligence learns that the Nazis are messing with Eldritch powers somewhere in remote Norway. Nazis make an excellent villain in these sorts of powers because, let’s face it, they are an example of the human equivalent of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

 

Fearing that whatever the Nazis were up to could impact the war (which is finally moving in the Allies’ direction), the British send a team in with a civilian expert to eliminate the threat. The novel is a first-person account by the major who led the mission and we watch him slowly come to grips with the fact that the world has supernatural elements in it.

 

On one level, the novel reads like any WW2 covert operations story. The team has to infiltrate enemy held territory in great secrecy, and the occupying Nazi troops are a tremendous threat. But on another level, there is this growing understanding that things are not right and not normal, and when they finally learn what’s going on the novel pops into high gear as the British soldiers desperately try to stop the Nazis from releasing a force that could turn the tide of the war. It’s exciting from beginning to end, and the feel of the book is very much as if Lovecraft was writing it himself.

 

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

 

Occultober Day 12 Black Dawn by Nathan Ameye

Occultober Day 12 Black Dawn by Nathan Ameye

Video games have long experimented with the horror genre, so it’s not surprising that the Literary Role-Playing Game subgenre does the same. I was quite skeptical of the whole LitRPG concept when I first heard of it despite the fact that in college I wrote a novella (unpublished) that fits squarely into the category. Now I read a ton of them and many are very well done. My favorites tend to be those in which the experiences in the game world help the characters face and resolve their problems in the real world. Black Dawn takes that concept to the extreme by making the real world become the game world.

 

The premise of the story is that aliens screw with earth’s physics to make them follow game mechanics—a process that kills the vast majority of earth’s population. The suggestion is that five or six thousand years ago, this is how the world functioned and for some reason that stopped. Now it’s back and demons have begun to populate the world. Three friends are camping when the event happens and they manage to survive character creation and their first encounter with a demon. Then they set about finding out what’s happened to their town.

 

Okay, so the premise is definitely weak, but how else are you going to get game mechanics into modern day earth. On the positive side, this is an action-packed, fast-moving adventure which is frankly lots of fun. It mixes the need for the heroes to combine solid real-world tactics with game strategies. It captured and held my interest throughout the novel. The only thing I didn’t like is that dice are actually rolled when the characters try and use their skills. While it’s true that dice are rolled in RPGs, my friends and I always saw that as an approximation of the chance that our characters could perform an action. If we were actually trying to perform said action instead of pretending to while we sat around a table, the dice would be unnecessary. We would succeed or fail. I thought the dice were just a little too much RPG in the LitRPG, but other than that, I loved the book.

 

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

 

Occultober Day 11: Monster Aces by Jim Beard, et. al.

Occultober Day 11: Monster Aces by Jim Beard, et. al.

The modern urban fantasy genre is mostly grounded in the world of today, but a few authors like Jim Beard and his colleagues have created fantastic adventures grounded in the 1920s when the genre opening works of the pulp masters were first being written creating a sort of historical fiction urban fantasy.

 

The two volumes of Monster Aces brings together a multitude of capable authors sharing a group of adventurers who have dedicated their lives to destroying monsters that most people don’t believe exist. The series reminds me a lot of Doc Savage and his crew. There is no scientific genius among the Monster Aces, but they each have their specialty and the camaraderie between the men and one woman works well.

 

The stories cover many of the classic monsters (sometimes with a twist) and frankly interesting situations. We also see the authors play with historical figures like Gilgamesh and Ponce de Leon. There’s always something to enjoy in these pages.

 

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

 

Occultober Day 10: Terminus by Peter Clines

Occultober Day 10: Terminus by Peter Clines

H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu keeps popping up in more and more works today, but few people have thought through the concept and modernized it as well as author, Peter Clines. Cthulhu or Cthulhu-like beings threaten in many of his novels, but in Terminus he gives us a full-blown invasion of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and it is everything you would expect of such a horror.

 

What puts it over the top, however, is that Clines has given substantial thought to how the Cthulhu-esq creatures could survive depopulating planets. In other words, why haven’t creatures this powerful already eaten the entire planet. And his answer is…they have. And they’re getting ready to do it again.

 

While the end of the world plays out, heroes and villains struggle to either keep the monster away or bring it here (because obviously life will be so much better after there isn’t any left on the planet—yes it’s crazy but you would have to be crazy to want Cthulhu to come to town). Throw in some mad-scientist-style science and a great cast of characters and you have a novel that I think H.P. Lovecraft would have been proud of. This novel does for the Cthulhu subgenre what Clines’ Dead Moon did for the zombie apocalypse—gave it a totally new and interesting spin. If you like stories about Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, you’re going to love Terminus.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Terminus/dp/B0...

 

 

Occultober Day 9: Devil's Island by Mark Lukens

Occultober Day 9: Devil’s Island by Mark Lukens

It’s time to get back to the genuinely spooky stories that are the heart of Occultober. To that end, I present Mark Lukens’ Devil’s Island. The plot is pretty straightforward. A dying billionaire has decided to make a documentary on a haunted island and the mansion that still stands on it. To accomplish this, he draws together some desperate individuals and pays them lots of money to help him make his film. The reader recognizes right from the beginning that the documentary is a scam and that there is something on this island that the billionaire thinks will save his life. Seeing as there is a lot of supernatural horror here (and in the opening chapter we actually witness demonic things kill and chase people) it feels like the unwitting employees are serving a role as primarily sacrifices or bait.

 

And that’s really where all the scariness comes from—investigating a haunted house where there is very real danger while we wait for the billionaire to betray everyone. Lukens builds a ton of tension and it’s really a great story, but what puts it over the top is the ending—very well thought out and exceedingly creepy. It’s always a relief when all of the tense buildup turns into a threat that is worthy of it.

 

There is a minor problem with the book which I feel should also point out. You should skip the first chapter. My guess is, an editor insisted it be written so that everyone would know that the island was really haunted, but it built up unfair expectations in me. The victims in chapter one appear to meet their end about 30 minutes after they reach the island and that made me expect people to start dying right away when the main story begins. Instead, Lukens takes his time, building tension and empathy with the characters. So just skip the first chapter and enjoy the real story on Devil’s Island.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06...

 

Occultober Day 8: Working for Bigfoot by Jim Butcher

Occultober Day 8: Working for Bigfoot by Jim Butcher

For the eighth day of Occultober, I present to you Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden—the most famous wizard in urban fantasy. He’s not quite got Gandalf’s name recognition yet, but he’s probably a close second. If you read Butcher’s fantastic Dresden Files, you get presented with an extremely well thought out urban fantasy world and get to watch Harry grow tremendously from a young wizard with a chip on his shoulder to a mature man striving to save the world.

 

For Occultober, I considered offering the first book in the series, Storm Front, which is a wonderful first novel. On reflection, however, I decided to offer Working for Bigfoot instead as it gives you three different glimpses of Harry Dresden as he develops in his career plus Bigfoot—and who doesn’t like to read about Bigfoot?

 

Bullies, evil teachers, and a girlfriend’s family from hell…those are the sorts of problems that Harry finds himself in the middle of when he agrees on three separate occasions to take on the job of looking after a sasquatch’s half breed son. The boy doesn’t know his father is a bigfoot. He doesn’t know anything about magic or supernatural creatures. But his problems all involve that hidden world to some extent or another—which explains why he needs Harry Dresden.

 

The book is broken up into three novellas, each with their own little mystery, and each with a solution so unique that there is no feeling of “following a formula” to the set of stories. As they happen over the course of the young man’s childhood, they also show the son of bigfoot growing and maturing, figuring out how to be himself in a world that doesn’t quite know how to respond to him. He’s very tall, rather homely, and filled with strength and energy which makes no sense to those who don’t know the truth about him. (That includes himself.)

 

Jim Butcher has always been a great author and this book showcases his talent quite well. If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss about Harry Dresden is about, this is a great place to start.

 

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

 

 

Occultober Day 7 Hunting Among Us by Gilbert M. Stack

Occultober Day 7 Hunting Among Us by Gilbert M. Stack

For the seventh day of Occultober I’d like to spotlight the latest book in one of my own series, Hunting Among Us.

 

Urban fantasy is filled with vampires and werewolves and other creatures out of legend. For Among Us, I and my co-author for the first two books, Marc Hawkins, wanted to create something unique that the reader could see inspired the stories of other supernatural creatures. So we created the dynum and the aegrum, both former humans who were transformed due to their exposure to a mysterious substance called the dark waters. Both groups are long-lived, with the dynum effectively immortal if they avoid violence. The aegrum, for their part, mutate as a result of their exposure to the dark waters and suffering creeping madness.

 

The story focuses on a young woman, Mina Raintree, who accidentally comes to the attention of this shadowy community and the two rogue dynum who are trying to help her survive her discovery. In this third book in the series, the conflict explodes again as truly ancient dynum become directly involved in the conflict. Here’s the back-of-the-book blurb:

 

War is coming to Philadelphia as the unaging converge upon the city, threatening to take their battles out of the shadows and into the glaring light of the modern day. These horrors out of legend represent different houses and hold different agenda, but all agree that it is time for the rogue dynum, Trevalian de Treville and Mutswana the Hunter, to pay for the crime of refusing to bow to the great powers that rule this shadow society. And the blood brothers have never been more vulnerable. Trev has given his heart and his protection to a young mortal woman who refuses to understand the very real danger confronting them. Her insistence on publicly staying in Philadelphia has told the unaging world where they can find the hated duo. Can even the Iron Count and the Hunter survive when their enemies are Hunting Among Us?

 

Hunting Among Us (and the whole series) is available on Amazon both for purchase and as part of the Kindle Unlimited program where it can be read for FREE.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09...

 

 

 

Occultober Day 6: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton

Occultober Day 6: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton

When Laurell K. Hamilton published Guilty Pleasures in 1993 there weren’t a lot of other books like it out there—now the urban fantasy genre is packed full of tough female protagonists who go toe-to-toe with the undead and other supernatural beings on a regular basis. With Guilty Pleasures and the following books, Hamilton helped to establish the modern urban fantasy subgenre. The first novel and its immediate sequels have all of the components generally thought of as urban fantasy. The setting is a recognizable United States of America with the big change being that supernatural creatures are known to exist and society is trying to wrap its head around the implications that result from that. There’s a touch of romance, but the basic story is about our heroine, Anita Blake, and a mystery/adventure involving the supernatural side of her world. The stories are gritty and very violent with much of the excitement being the uncovering of this alternate world.

 

Urban fantasy series are not static and Hamilton’s Anita Blake has evolved tremendously since its ground breaking beginning—an evolution which has pulled her far away from her “I don’t date vampires, I kill them,” beginnings. The middle part of the series involves Anita being infected with a supernatural condition called the ardeur and needing to feed succubus-like on lovers to survive. She also gets increasingly confused as to whether the vampires and the werewolves are all bad guys. By the final third of the books, she’s become something the Blake of Guilty Pleasures would have hated, but the world is not black and white to Anita anymore.

 

I started reading these books in 2001 just before Hamilton made her first shift in the direction of the novels. Like most authors (maybe all of them) a good book/series gets me thinking about how I would do a spin off, or what character I would insert into this world to add some excitement without stealing the thunder from the main already-established characters. More important yet, Blake’s adventures made me seek out a lot more urban fantasy novels and eventually led me to write a bunch of urban fantasy books myself. I can’t give the Anita Blake series total credit for that interest, but it certainly greatly strengthened my appreciation for and love of the genre.

 

When Hamilton’s interest changed, my enjoyment in the series diminished. It started to change right after Obsidian Butterfly (the single best novel of the series) and went off the deep end with Cerulean Sins. The love triangle and the mystery/adventures that had dominated the first books just didn’t seem to interest Hamilton anymore and so Anita Blake got infected with the ardeur and suddenly needed to have sex with seemingly every man she met. If she didn’t feed, really bad things happen. Since Anita Blake had always been interested in monogamous relationships, this new power was emotionally difficult for her to handle, but handle it she did and book after book became much more about sex and the emotional baggage that came with it than how she would defeat the latest threat to St. Louis and the world. Frankly, I found the change disappointing and off-putting. These passages always felt like distractions from the plot of the story and I always felt like the novels would have been better if the actual sex had happened behind closed doors. But, based on reviews I was reading, I did what most people did. I skimmed through Hamilton’s new obsession as I sought out the nuggets of plot that had originally attracted me to the series.

 

Eventually, Hamilton got interested in plot again and sex began to take up a smaller percentage of the story. To be fair, the series lost me before the transition and I stopped buying the books, but every once in a while I’d pick one up in the library and see that worthwhile things were happening again. Based on the number of books in the series, it’s about time for Hamilton to change it up again. I wonder which direction she will take it.

 

 

Occultober Day 5: Irkalla by John Triptych

Occultober Day 5: Irkalla by John Triptych

I have always found caves to be a great location for spooky literature. They’re dark, they’re claustrophobic, they’re a little bit alien, and those inside of them are isolated from the world at large. Everything is just a little bit worse when your hundreds of feet underground and can’t easily get back to civilization.

 

In Irkalla, four cave divers exploring a new and elaborate cave system in the Philippines stumble into John Triptych’s version of a threatened zombie apocalypse. The problem begins with a billionaire industrialist with non-existent ethics who is funding a search for a cure for cancer. He has to do this in secret because he is already in legal trouble all over the globe for his gene and DNA manipulations. He has been creating a monster to test his cures on and—you guessed it—the monster has escaped. What’s worse, the monster has infected humans with a mutant form of rabies that has had the unfortunate side-effect of turning them into aggressive “zombies” who can infect others.

 

The cave divers find themselves in the middle of all of this when they stumble upon both the monster and some infected while exploring the cave network. The group was often frustrating as they made some truly terrible decisions but that is often par for the course in this sort of novel. It certainly breeds a lot of tension as the plot winds its way toward the conclusion.

 

This book is free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

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

 

 

 

 

Occultober Day 4: The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams

Occultober Day 4: The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams

Midway through our first week, I’m turning our attention to the multi-talented painter-author-poet, Chris L. Adams. Chris is an expert on the pulp era adventure stories and brings that sense of horror and adventure into his paintings and his stories. He’s also carving out a reputation as quite the painter of authentic-looking maps and I’m proud to say that he’s painted two for me—one for my Legionnaire series and one for my Winterhaven books. You can find examples of all of this at his website at https://www.chrisladamsbizarretales.com/

 

In his short novel, The Valley of Despair, Chris creates a story that the great authors of the past—people like Burroughs and Howard—would have been proud to pen. It took only one short chapter to convince me I was in for a thrill ride. German WWI pilot Erik von Mendelsohn has crashed in the jungle and is trying to survive a group of apes that have taken the wrong kind of interest in him. Desperate to escape, he reaches the edge of the jungle near a high cliff face and the apes who are in hot pursuit…refuse to follow him past the tree line. It’s a simple idea very subtly conveyed in the story, but it set all the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. These totally aggressive and fearsome animals won’t follow our hero as he attempts to climb the cliff face to get away from them. It’s difficult not to ask yourself—what are the apes afraid of? What the heck is Erik getting himself into? And the tension just keeps ratcheting higher from this point forward.

 

Erik is a well thought out character—he’s smart, a bit impulsive, and a little too curious for his own good. The supporting cast is equally interesting. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the people Erik finds and gets into trouble with are equally brave and capable—and the problem they have to confront is better thought out than most “lost world” adventure-style stories I’ve encountered. In short if you want a fast-paced well-developed adventure story with great characters, you should give Valley of Despair a try.

 

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