Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 60

Occultober Day 3: Strangers by Dean Koontz

Occultober Day 3: Strangers by Dean Koontz

For Day 3 we turn to a novel that has haunted and intrigued me for decades. I think I was in high school when I first read it, and its scenes and images have lingered in my thoughts for decades. And by scenes, I don’t just mean an image or two. From the very first chapter, Koontz starts cultivating feelings of suspense and ever-increasing tension that will have you desperately turning pages, or, if listening to it in audio as I did this time, finding excuses to keep the book playing long after your commute is done. What is especially impressive for an author who made his reputation in the horror genre is that it’s not even clear that there is going to be a supernatural element for half the book. It opens with a man who finds himself hiding in the closet after apparently sleep walking. He’s sore, he’s frightened, and he has no idea what is going on. But it isn’t until he pulls himself together and sits down at his computer to continue writing his book that things get really eerie. He finds that while sleep walking he has typed page after page of just two words: “I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared.”

 

Koontz then shifts focus to a young doctor on her day off who panics and flees in a fugue state when she notices a pair of black gloves. Next we meet a retired marine who is suddenly terrified of the dark and is trying desperately to hide his fear from his wife. None of these people have any apparent connection, yet they are all showing evidence of psychological suffering they can’t explain. Later in the book we meet a young child who has become terrified of doctors and a priest whose deep and abiding faith suddenly collapses so that he throws the chalice in the middle of Mass. And the list goes on. What makes this all the more frightening is it is way too easy to imagine yourself suffering these almost normal problems which means that you will enjoy a high level of empathy with each of these very well drawn characters.

 

As we get deeper into the novel, elements of a vast conspiracy begin to be uncovered with the real possibility of danger for the people trying to find out why they are suffering these bizarre symptoms. This ramps up the tension to a whole new level as we also began to meet people who have gone over the edge and even killed themselves as a result of the psychological harm they have suffered. At the same time suppressed memories begin to pop free in those sufferings and they separately begin to evolve plans that will ultimately bring them together to find out what incredible event triggered all of this.

 

I don’t want to give away the end of this novel, but I found it to have a totally satisfying conclusion. The chief villain, when he is revealed, is both frightening and believable. This is a long book—nearly 30 hours in audio—but every page is worth reading.

 

 

Occultober Day 2: The Siberian Incident by Greig Beck

Occultober Day 2: The Siberian Incident by Greig Beck

For day two of Occultober we make our first venture into the world of alien invasions with Greig Beck’s fantastic novel, The Siberian Incident. First contact horror stories are a dime a dozen, but this one really worked for me. The horror part of the story starts in flashbacks to the distant past while the modern storyline gets established. American Marcus Stenson has won a contract to restock the sturgeon supply in Lake Baikal deep in Siberia. He and his wife are excited about the project but are unready for the interest that the Russian Mafia takes in their venture. That storyline alone was worth the price of admission and it almost makes you forget that Beck has something much more sinister in the works for his readers.

 

The actual aliens are wonderfully done. They’re creepy, they’re lethal, they’re absolutely terrifying, and while we expect at least some of the cast of good guys to survive, it’s not clear at all how they’re going to do it. Most importantly, the eventual resolution to the storyline is credible. The bad things are as bad as we expect them to be and the good guys efforts mostly make sense as well.

 

So if you’re looking for a novel with interesting challenges of both a real world and a horror genre nature, you should give The Siberian Incident a try.

 

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

 

Occultober Day 1: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Occultober Day 1: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Welcome to Occultober 2021! Over the course of this month, I’m going to introduce you to 31 books or series that play with the horrific and the supernatural. You know what I mean, books that delve into the darker side of fantasy and fiction and get downright spooky. So tighten your seatbelts, and brace yourselves for a thrilling ride. And if you like what you see, please feel free to leave a comment on the review or a recommendation of a book you think I might want to feature in next year’s Occultober event.

 

Now, to launch all of the spookiness for 2021, I offer Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero, a book clearly inspired by everyone’s (at least everyone of my generation) favorite cartoon, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

 

I’ve been watching Scooby Doo television shows and mysteries my whole life. The early series is almost a meme in and of itself. The episodes were totally formulaic and they always ended with a mask being pulled off the monster’s head to expose the villain. Later the gang began to encounter some genuine supernatural entities, but nothing truly terrifying. All that’s going to end if you open Meddling Kids, because the Scooby gang—or at least Cantero’s counterparts for the famous quintet—is about to uncover one of the ancient entities of the Cthulhu mythos and this is every bit as disturbing as such an encounter should genuinely be.

 

First off, let’s be clear that while Cantero has great fun playing with the Scooby formula his characters are not one-for-one knock offs of Fred, Velma, Shaggy, Daphne and Scooby Doo. So push that out of your mind and you’ll enjoy the story a lot more. Instead we get Peter, Keri, Nate, Andy, and their dog, Sean (later replaced by his grandson, Tim). Together these intrepid pre-teens formed the Blyton Summer Detective Club where year after year they protected Blyton from a lot of creepy villains wearing masks. They thought that’s what they did in their last case too, but it turns out that a lot more was happening beneath the surface. There really was some serious supernatural stuff going on that their young minds couldn’t process and thirteen years later it has driven one of them to suicide, another to alcoholism, a third to uncontrollable bursts of rage, and the fourth to commit himself to an insane asylum in the hopes that the doctors can stop him from seeing the ghost of his dead friend.

 

So this is not the Scooby Doo of my childhood, but that’s good because this is a much more awesome story than that cartoon was structured to tell. The surviving members of the Blyton Summer Detective Club have to pull themselves together, return to the scene of the original crime, and come to grips with the unbelievable fact that the apocalypse is about to occur and only three meddling sort-of-grown-up kids and their dog have any chance at all to save the world. Cantero knows both the Cthulhu genre and the Scooby Doo classics and he brilliantly mixes both together here for a story that kept me on the edge of my seat never knowing where he was going. Every few chapters he hit me with another surprise. And now I find myself sad the story is done and desperately hoping for a sequel, even if it is just a crazy villain hiding behind a mask.

 

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

 

Review: Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

I enjoyed half of this novel very much—the half from the POV of the supervillain. Dr. Impossible is just a great villain—a megalomaniac who fights against his need to rant about his plans as he tries for the umpteenth time to take over the world. I enjoyed every second he was “on the screen”. Unfortunately, the opposite was true when it was the heroes’ turn—most of whom proved to be jerks and none of whom inspired me.

 

So that’s a problem, because this is a book moving toward the ultimate confrontation between insane and “really not very nice” and I really wanted insane to win. I think it would have been fascinating to have the sequel be about learning to live in Dr. Impossible’s new world, but unfortunately, that was not to be. I don’t expect to read the next one.

 

Review: Firing Line by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 41 Firing Line by Warren Murphy

With Firing Line, Murphy provides another strong volume in the Destroyer series. This time, Remo and Chiun have to go head-to-head with a villain who can make fire with his mind. He’s only a teenager, but he’s got a taste for burning buildings—and people—and Remo is on his list. Chiun is particularly concerned because of an ancient Sinanju legend involving the only time a Master of Sinanju failed in a mission—and a pair of curses that ordain that a descendent of Sinanju and of the original fire maker will refight the battle in the future. It's always nice for Remo to have to solve different problems, and the fact that the bad guy is technically a child adds a lot of complexity as the traditions of Sinanju abhor killing children. But how can Remo stop this firebug without killing him?

 

This novel is also worth reading as it is the last appearance of Ruby Gonzalez. Ruby started strong in this series and then was poorly written for most of the rest of her appearances. Fortunately, she ends on a strong note. She’s decided to leave CURE and Smith has decided that means she must die. Remo, her friend, naturally doesn’t want to take that assignment. Ruby’s fate is worth reading the novel for.

 

Review: Deadly Quicksilver Lies (Garrett Files #7) by Glen Cook

Deadly Quicksilver Lies (Garrett Files #7) by Glen Cook

Even though I am rereading the Garrett Files series, I was not anxious to pick up this volume. Memory told me that it was of significantly lower quality than the first six books and it’s just hard to get excited about rereading a book like that. Unfortunately, my memory was correct. I started and stopped the novel roughly ten times before biting the bullet and reading it through to the end. The problem is one of pacing. This book with “quicksilver” in the title reads like frozen molasses trying to find enough heat to drip off a table. It’s not that any particular part of the plot, or any particular onion layer of the mystery isn’t good, it’s that it happens so incredibly slowly.

 

It's a shame, because there are actually a lot of really good elements to this story. Garrett gets slammed into an insane asylum. The Deadman is asleep for the whole novel leaving Garrett to figure things out totally on his own. The primary villain is a fascinating figure with big surprises. There’s actually some very good action scenes as well. But these elements are stretched so far out that it just doesn’t save the story. Maybe if Cook had cut one hundred pages it would have been all right, but this one, I sadly report, just didn’t work for me.

 

Review: The Hijack by Owen Bennett-Jones

The Hijack by Owen Bennett-Jones

This ten episode podcast shows a lot of the potential of the podcast medium as Bennett-Jones explores what occurs when three men hijacked airplane in 1981 in an effort to force democratization in Pakistan. In many ways, the cause is one that reverberates well in western civilization—the quest for political freedom and the rights that come with it—however, kidnapping and murder are not tools that human rights advocates favor. In each of the ten episodes, Bennett-Jones explores the background to the crisis and the day-by-day development of the event through a combination of narration and actual interviews with survivors and even one of the hijackers. The whole thing is a tragedy however you look at it, but the podcast is absolutely riveting.

 

Review: SpaceMan by Tom Abrahams

SpaceMan by Tom Abrahams

After listening to this audiobook I went back to the book blurb to see if perhaps I had misunderstood what I was purchasing. After all, I thought that I was getting a book much like The Martian only this time the astronaut who is in trouble is in earth’s orbit. Sure enough, that’s what seven out of eight lines of the blurb is about. Why then was it only about twenty percent of the story? Out of the one hundred twenty-seven words that form the blurb, there are six pesky little words that tell you what the real story is about: “And the family he left behind”. Honestly, I find this a little misleading because this should have been titled “The SpaceMan’s Family.” It isn’t that the story of what’s happening to the astronaut’s family on earth when the lights go out doesn’t make for a potentially good story, but it isn’t what I thought I was buying.

 

And it is only “potentially” good. Perhaps I am naïve, but I hope that when a solar storm knocks out all the computers on the planet (which the vast majority of people don’t know has happened—they just know the lights are out) I hope it takes more than six or eight hours for the world to start down the road toward a Mad Max-style apocalypse. But honestly, the lights go out late enough at night that many people are already asleep, but a weird cult has already mobilized shortly after dawn the next day, and within another hour instant-street-gangs are forming and people are trying to steal from each other, and a couple of hours later cops are getting in on the stealing. I mean, it could happen that way, but honestly, the whole story happens in less than 24 hours and I just found the break down of society a bit rushed.

 

To complete my frustration, the novel ended on a cliffhanger. Now I recognize that in a series there are often unresolved events, but really, there is no pretense at even coming to a resolution point on two of the three storylines.

 

That being said, I did like the cast of characters, and that’s important. I just think that the blurb would have been much more honest if it had focused on the astronaut’s family struggling to survive and reunite during an apocalyptic crisis while the astronaut tried to find a way back to earth.

 

Review: Welcome to Probet: How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis by V. Moody

Welcome to Probet: How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis by V. Moody

Here’s a twist on the glut of books that have people from our world get stuck in a game environment where they have to advance levels so they don’t get killed. There are no levels or classes in V. Moody’s new series. There are no special skills magically imparted into people’s brains. There’s only plenty of monsters—each capable of killing people—and a world that thinks this is normal and needs help cleaning out the deadly beasts.

 

To make matters even more difficult, Moody’s heroes aren’t heroes. They aren’t jocks. They aren’t special forces soldiers with useful training for surviving in this new world. They aren’t even successful geeks—they’re the unsuccessful outcasts with no real athletic ability who also lack (as most of us would) a mindset that would help them survive in this environment.

 

Yet if they can’t adapt they will be killed—and therein lies the key to a very engaging adventure. For all the gamers out there who have wondered how they would do if they entered their fantasy world, this book gives you a much more realistic look than you ever imagined—and still manages to be quite entertaining.

 

Review: Andrea Vernon and the Superhero Industrial Complex by Alexander C. Kane

Andrea Vernon and the Superhero Industrial Complex by Alexander C. Kane

The quirky superhero universe of Andrea Vernon is back for another round of the ugly side of superheroing—that is the lobbying side of the game. This time the Corporation for Ultrahuman Protection (CUP) is up against Nevermore, a supervillain who has decided to take over the country from the inside by becoming a superhero organization and lobbying (read that as bribing and blackmailing) Congress into changing the regulations in a way that will allow her to effectively become the dictator of the country. The only things standing between Nevermore and dominating the U.S. is CUP and its Executive Assistant Andrea Vernon who also happens to be Nevermore’s best friend. But if Andrea is going to stop Nevermore, she’ll have to make peace with her own brother, the Senator who has made taking down the superhero industrial complex his life’s work.

 

This novel is fun from start to finish even if the major twist of the book was completely foreseeable. Heck, maybe we were supposed to foresee it. Kane certainly foreshadowed it quite strongly. The heart of this novel, like the first one, is the incredibly quirky cast of superheroes, and now supervillains. These are not the heroes you grew up reading in the comics—and yet, at times they feel like they could be.

 

So if you like your super heroics with a healthy dose of satire, pull up a chair and start reading this novel.