Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog

September Morn

Welcome back to another installment of my monthly newsletter! There’s September just about behind us, which puts us that much closer to Halloween and Thanksgiving. Thankfully not much of real significance happened this month. I mean, I guess some bigoted, right-wing, white supremacist, windbag nutjob who advocated for gun violence got himself taken out by another right-wing nutjob in a targeted act of gun violence. Not exactly a big loss for humanity all in all. I’m sure he’ll be just as forgotten as Rush Limbaugh and Saddam Hussein soon enough, despite the efforts of other right-wing nutjobs holding political office trying to score points with their base by doing even more fascism than usual. On the bright side, following Trump’s usual narcissism to make the funeral all about himself, complete with fireworks, film critic Eric D. Snider noted on Bluesky:

Here’s to hoping, Eric!

September also brought about the Rapture, or at least speculation from the whacky corners of social media that the Rapture was finally going to be upon us. Unfortunately, the rapture was a no-show and took another L for the 2,025 consecutive year. I know, I know, it’s all very surprising. It’s almost like religion is nothing but absolute bullshit or something.

Hat-tip to Evan Peck at the Indie Reads message board for this one!

Over the last few months, I’ve kind of worried that my interest in reading was declining and found myself slowing down quite a lot. I found it hard to focus and, worse, hard to care about whatever I was in the midst of reading. Some of this boils down to the Reviewer’s Dilemma — when you’ve spent years and years and years reading at a high volume, it gets harder and harder to find those real nuggets of originality and stuff that breaks the mold versus all the generic, run of the mill garbage that publisher’s push out for mainstream audiences who might only read a couple books a year. Readers of our reviews can sometimes find it fit to claim that we’re overly harsh or meanspirited in our critiques, and sometimes that’s true, but it really does all stem from a place of love for books and stories. So much so that we read far more than is typically common.

The state of reading in America is an absolute travesty with, according to various polls, the average American reading somewhere between 1 to 12 books annually. Given the state of our political dysfunction, I’d guess this sounds about right, yeah? You can tell America as a whole isn’t big on the whole reading thing given that we’ve elected as president the most intellectually incurious man to ever hold office and who seems to be functionally illiterate. Big shocker, right?

Add on to that, the fact that more than half of all Americans are reading below a sixth-grade level, and 1 in 5 are reading below a third-grade level.

After working my way through a few advance reader copies that were basically slop the authors got lucky with in finding a publisher, it’s hard not to see the audience a lot of these writers and publishers are catering to. Unoriginal, derivative, heartless, soulless, trend-chasing works with plots and story beats that have been done a thousand times previously, and have all been done better elsewhere, have taken up too much of my time recently. The saddest part is, it was clear I wasn’t the target reader simply because I actually read, and read a lot. These books felt like they were all aiming for that adult reader at the third-grade level who might make this their one book of the whole fucking year. What one reader called a work of sparkling originality was, in my too well-read eyes, just more derivative bullshit aping better works by better authors.

And that’s not even getting into some so-called publisher’s delusions about forcing AI written stories on us (pro-tip: do not, under any circumstances, buy that fucking shit, ever). We’ve already got human writers writing at, or arguably worse than, AI level. It’s just so much lowest-common denominator word vomit that forcing myself to read this dreck was killing my passion for reading. There was just way too much samey-samey garbage.

This feeling of same-old, same-old was my biggest complaint about The End Of The World As We Know It, a new anthology set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand. It’s a huge book, and unnecessarily so. The first section of the book is arguably the biggest slog to get through simply because so many of it’s stories are set during the initial stages of the spread of Captain Trips, which makes for a lot of repetition in terms of plot, character sketches, and story concepts. Too many of the stories just all blurred together, with only a few that were even the least bit memorable. Things got a bit more interesting when it moved beyond the US borders, and even beyond the ending of King’s original novel. I think editors Brian Keene and Christopher Golden, both authors whose works I’ve appreciated greatly over the years, got a little too carried away trying to make an anthology as big as King’s original novel, rather than making an anthology that was as good as King’s original novel. Theirs is an anthology that would have been made better with more judicious editing and more ruthless cuts to carve out the fat and restrict the number of authors involved. I think it would have been a stronger ode to King’s magnum opus if it were at least half as long and with a much stronger focus on quality over quantity. Unlike The Stand itself, I don’t see myself revisiting this add-on tome in full ever again, but may go back to a handful of stories here and there.

Between forcing myself to read through the whole of The End of the World As We Know It and life and work shit, September was a slow month for me reading-wise. I only have a few reviews to share and found myself falling way behind on ARCs. There were a few DNFs along the way because the writing wasn’t to my tastes, or the book was too much of a slog to push through, or it was far too evident that the author was cribbing from various other books and stitching together popular ideas from various sources to give us their own not at all unique spin.

Surprisingly, given all I said above, my favorite book of the month ended up being the fourteenth or fifteenth installment in Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s long-running Hell Divers series. Granted, I do like Nick’s stuff quite a lot and he made a smart decision with making Into the Storms a prequel set 300 years prior to the 12 core novels (there’s one other prequel, Rhino, which I also enjoyed, and at least one book set in-between books one and two, but they feel very much a part of the series they grew out of), which went a long way to bringing some much needed freshness to this corner of his many storytelling universes.

I did not do a formal review of TEOTWAWKI simply because by the time I finished the book, I was finished with it in total and just did not feel like trying to muster up some long-form thoughts about it given everything else I had to read for review. So, consider this a newsletter exclusive review of The End of the World As We Know It!

SEPTEMBER REVIEWS

As always, these reviews can be found on FanFiAddict.com, along with loads of other reviews from other great reviewers. Give ‘em a click and show some support!

The Extra by Annie Neugebauer (audiobook)

Tracer by Brendan Deneen

Into the Storms: A Hell Divers Prequel by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Currently reading: The October Film Haunt by Michael Wehunt

Currently playing: Baldur’s Gate 3 (PS5). An absolutely perfect RPG. No notes.

Currently listening: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, narrated by Jeff Hays. This fucking thing is hilarious.

That’s it for now, gang; see you on Halloween! In the meantime, feel free to drop me a line and ask some questions if you got any — maybe they’ll make it into next month’s newsletter!

The August Rundown

I was originally going to spout off with yet another political rant here, as has apparently become my custom these last few months, and rail against the useless quislings who got upset over me referring to Trump as President* Rapey McPedophile last time around, but I promised myself I wouldn’t. So I deleted all that shit. What’s the point? We all know this country’s in the toilet and sinking deeper into the shit with each passing day/week/month/year under our current fascist regime, and we all know it’s because 77 million American’s failed the one incredibly easy test they had to ace back in November before deciding that lying, bigotry, racism, hatred, rape, pedophilia, treason, insurrection, and endless streams of grifting from a professional, greedy, power-hungry con man were preferable to having a mixed-race woman as president and so now we have had the military occupation of two American cities with the promise of more to come because so many of our friends and neighbors wanted to know what it was like to live with the gestapo. So instead of ranting again about all that, here’s a picture of a rainbow I took from the front porch of my house during a lull in the rain on Tuesday night.

My wife and I stood outside our front door, only partially shielded from the smattering of big fat raindrops coming down, and took pictures of what you see above with our iPhones. The rain had come down pretty hard and had mostly stopped only a short while prior. The workday had been shit, the drive home through a storm had sucked, the news crossing my BlueSky feed, the only social media feed I have these days, was all bad. But then the rain cleared up and my youngest darted outside to see the rainbow overhead, and my wife and I followed. It was a nice reminder that not everything is shit and not everything is sinking into a hellish realm of depravity, even if it often feels like it, and even if everyone on social media insists it in fact is. It’s not. Not always. At least not here, for me, at that time. Life was, actually, pretty OK all in all, and it’s nice to have that kind of reminder.

And also, fuck AI.

Instead of a big political rant, what I actually wanted to talk about this time around is, wonder of all wonders, BOOKS. Not mine. Fuck that. I’m talking about BIG books. Doorstoppers. Big ol’ chunky bastards like the ones Stephen King used to write.

This year kind of feels like the year of big books. Maybe this is kind of silly, since I can only think of two books off-hand that really qualify — Joe Hill’s forthcoming (and excellent!) King Sorrow, and The End of the World As We Know It, the recently released anthology set in the world of King’s The Stand. King Sorrow is almost 900 pages, and Chris Golden and Brian Keene’s antho clocks in at 800. Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter came in at around 450 pages, but has a hell of a lot of depth and richness to it. There’s a few advance copies of upcoming titles on my desk that I’ll be getting to soon, including another Hell Divers prequel, Into the Storms, from Nicholas Sansbury Smith that’s almost 500 pages. Peter Clines’s God’s Junk Drawer is another one, and that’s nearly 600 pages. So, not small books at all, those ones.

I like a nice thick read, provided the story justifies the page count or presents characters compelling enough that I want to spend that much time with them. If it’s a good book, it doesn’t matter how many pages it is, really. But if it’s good, then the more pages the merrier. If it’s bad, no amount of pages are gonna save it either way. Film critic Roger Ebert once said something along the lines of ‘no good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.’ I’d say it’s a pretty fair maxim and applies to books, too.

King Sorrow didn’t feel anything at all like 900 pages. That sucker had wings and flew fast, and I was more than happy to be lost in that book for the week-plus I spent living in it. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter felt longer than 450 pages, but that’s only because of how much history and texture Jones wove into that story.

I’m about 500 pages or so into TEOTWAWKI. It’s been a bit of a slow-go because I just haven’t had much time to really sit down and plow through these short stories in quick order. And a handful of them are on the longer side of a short story, which means I’ve only been able to tackle one or two of these stories each night this past week. I’m hoping to spend a bit more time with it over the weekend and see if I can’t knock out a good chunk of it along the way.

This year (and no doubt the next few coming at us) seems like the absolutely perfect time to get lost in a good, strong book of epic proportions. I want an excess of pages, but more importantly I want an excess of good story, good world building, characters I can relate to or rally against, for a good long while. Something to take me out of this world and transport me elsewhere for an extended period, away from all this real-life madness and chaos, and into a world that makes a modicum of sense that can only exist in a fictional realm. I want to escape, not just for an afternoon getaway through a short story or novella, but for days, maybe even weeks on end, with a story that will consume me and infect me, populated with people I’ll not only grow close to but will continue to think about and fondly remember well after I turn that last page.

NEW REVIEWS

Speaking of King Sorrow, Hill’s latest was among a small batch of books I reviewed over at FanFiAddict this month. I also gave Wendy N. Wagner’s Girl in the Creek and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me the ol’ read and review treatment, so check those out too.

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

Currently reading: The End of the World As We Know It, edited by Brian Keene and Christopher Golden.

Currently playing: Fortnite (PS5). My youngest insisted I try this game, so I did. It’s actually kind of fun, but not my usual kind of go-to for gaming. However, once I found out it was two-player, my son and I have been playing together every night for this past week and it’s made for a great bit of bonding. He now rushes to greet me at the door when I get home from work to ask if we can play Fortnite before I even have a chance to kick my shoes off. And since he just asked me again, I’m off to go do that now.

Currently watching: Peacemaker (Season 2).

That’s it for August, gang! Happy Labor Day and I’ll check back in September. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a line and ask some questions if you got any — maybe they’ll make it into next month’s newsletter!

What You Might Have Missed In July

Well, that’s just about a wrap on July! Here in America, we began the month by celebrating our freedoms and independence from tyranny just days after President Rapey McPedophile opened a concentration camp in Florida, popularly known as Alligator Alcatraz. There’s even merch you can buy, which I’m sure will be impacted by his reckless and inane tariffs to tax American consumers even harder, but let’s not lose sight of the simple fact that this is, indeed, nothing less than a concentration camp and yet one more brick in the road to fascism.

Oh yeah, where’s those Epstein files at? Hmmm. Kinda strange on he promised to release them during the campaign and now, months later, he thinks they’re old news and no big deal. Oh well, them’s the breaks, I suppose. Guess we’re just supposed to enjoy losing jobs, medical coverage, and paying higher taxes while the rich get even more breaks. Elect a clown, the joke’s on you.

Over on the other end of the political spectrum in true This vs. That culture war fashion was the new Superman movie, which I’m in the minority of thinking was inane rubbish. Supershit, indeed.

!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! Skip on down to the next section if you prefer. Yes, seriously.

OK, let’s proceed.

Superman 2025 is one of those movies that you can tell is fictional not because it’s a comic book movie featuring a heroic alien clad in form-fitting pajamas, wears his underwear on the outside of his clothes, and who can blast laser beams out of his eyes but because it’s a movie that features American journalists working hard to uncover dirt on a corrupt billionaire and expose his criminal attempts to overthrow a government and bring him down once and for all. Yeah, right, as if that would ever happen.

Beyond its kindergarten-level political naiveté, it’s a wildly underwhelming and uninspiring take on Superman, giving viewers what must be, quite literally, the weakest depiction of the character in recent memory. While I appreciated him not being overpowered and nigh invulnerable, Gunn goes a bit too far in the opposite direction with Superman being such a weak and ineffective defender of humanity that he requires a shitty little yappy dog to save his ass during every single challenge he faces. Our introduction to the titular hero comes with the man crashing into the Arctic, near death’s door, bones broken and bloodied. He doesn’t fare much better in subsequent confrontations with anybody. Superman spends damn near the entirety of his own movie getting his ass kicked from one end of the globe to the other, until the smarmy little dog can save him. It’s pathetic. Why does Lex Luthor even need an army of armored goons to tackle this Superman when he could probably just kick him in the shin and have the Man of Steel crumple like tinfoil? I can’t imagine anybody leaving this movie believing a man can fly, let alone finding any of inspiration in this latest incarnation of Superman. I suspect that purse dog sales will skyrocket, though.

Ma and Pa Kent are embarrassing, soft-headed country bumpkin caricatures that easily make them the worst on-screen depiction of the Kent’s thus far. If Gunn’s Superman wasn’t so earnest and the movie so sickly-sweet saccharine, one might wonder if Clark became a smart, whizbang journalist just to spite their dull, dimwitted golly gee shucks bumbling. Thankfully they don’t get much screen time here, which is a blessing considering how much other silliness gets crammed into every other frame.  

Mr. Terrific is a standout, though, and one of the more compelling side characters Gunn jams in here. Unfortunately, aside from Rachel Brosnahan’s turn as Lois Lane, and Nate Fillion’s Guy Gardner (complete with the horrendous, comics-accurate, god awful bowl cut hairstyle) that’s about where the positives end. I have nothing else kind to say about this picture. It’s not quite as bad as the cinematic trash fire known as Batman & Robin (and dear fucking god, given the tone and silliness of Gunn’s Superman, I am now desperately worried about how they’re going to treat Batman in this latest incarnation of the DC Cinematic Universe and bring back Schumacher’s worst instincts about what a comic book movie should be and how flippant and garish it need be), or more recently The Flash or Black Adam, but it’s nowhere near as good as the Dick Donner/Christopher Reeves flicks it tries, and badly fails, to imitate. I thought about leaving the theater multiple times, but stuck it out, hoping it might somehow redeem itself. It never did. I didn’t bother waiting for the post-credits stinger, though, having already had more than my fill of Gunn’s nonsense, and was left wishing I’d have waited for the HBO Max premiere and saved myself the $11.

Truth, Justice, and The American Way — in 2025? I feel like Will McAvoy in The Newsroom just thinking about it.

Congratulations to Marvel, though, for not having to worry about the DC Cinematic Universe as a serious rival for nearly a whole decade, even at their lowest points. I expect they’ll be enjoying another decade of zero competition by way of DCU 2.0. Maybe DCU 3.0 will finally get things right.

Again, though, I am among the amazingly small segment of the population who didn’t care for Gunn’s latest — and I thought I had gone in with sufficiently low expectations! Having seen so much effusive praise for this flick over the last few weeks, I really do wonder what exactly I’m missing here and whether or not if I’ll find more appreciation for it on a rewatch. Time will tell, I suppose.

Either way, hopefully Supergirl will be better. Maybe somebody will blast that insufferable, stupid, little dog into the middle of a giant red sun for me.

END SPOILERS.

In case you missed the news earlier this month or over on BlueSky, all of my books are currently heavily discounted as part of a promotion on Smashwords for their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! This is a chance to get all my books, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading. The bulk of my works are 75% off their usual retail price, with short stories available for the low, low price of absolutely nothing at all. And you’ll be able to download the ebook file to save to your computer and keep forever, without the hassle of some corporate oligarchy deciding you no longer own the books you buy.

But July 31 is the last day! So, if you haven’t already, go check out the sale and grab some books!

SERIOULY, IT ENDS TOMORROW! JULY 31. THAT’S IT. IT’S OVER.

You will find the promo here:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/vi...

Please be sure to share this promo with friends and family. You can even forward this email to the avid readers in your life! Just be sure to let them this offer expires very, very soon!

Thank you for your help and support and, as always, Happy reading!

NEW REVIEWS

July was another productive month on the reviewing front for me over at FanFiAddict. You can go check out my thoughts on the following and, if ya ken it, go grab a copy of the books for yourself!

Secret Lives of the Dead by Tim Lebbon

Breathe In, Bleed Out by Brian McAuley

Mushroom Blues by Adrian Gibson

Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman

Currently reading: King Sorrow by Joe Hill. Goddamn, this one’s a doorstopper! Due out in October, King Sorrow clocks in at around 900 pages, give or take. I just started reading it yesterday, thanks to the publisher having supplied me with an advance copy, and I’m having real difficulty putting it down. I just want to keep reading it! In a nice bit of serendipity, I also received my ticket to attend one of Joe’s tour stops in the fall, so I have that to look forward to.

Currently playing: Death Stranding 2 (PS5)

Currently listening to: Packing for Mars audiobook by Mary Roach, narrated by Sandra Burr.

Zombie Bigfoot by Nick Sullivan

[Note: This review was originally published at FanFiAddict on April 2, 2025.]

Certain names immediately spring to mind when you think of classic literature. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway. Add to this canon Nick Sullivan, with his estimable literary debut, Zombie Bigfoot.

OK, maybe — just maybe — Zombie Bigfoot isn’t quite on par with Romeo & Juliet or Crime & Punishment, or any other half-dozen works forming the concrete backbone of any self-respecting English Lit program, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun. Besides that, Sullivan’s creature feature is clearly inspired by a number of other foundational artworks, like Jurassic Park, Planet of the Apes, and at least a few King Kong flicks, with or without the honorific, and that gives Sullivan an edge over the so-called greats in my book.

As the title indicates, the premise here is pretty straightforward and Sullivan delightfully delivers exactly what’s promised. Russ Cloud is a reality-TV survivalist star in search of a ratings boost. He’s joined by Dr. Sarah Bishop on an expedition in search of Bigfoot, a high-tech, backwoods trek funded by Musk-like (and Musk-lite) billionaire, Cameron Carson. Bishop has a personal stake in finding Bigfoot, as her disgraced, and now deceased, father claims to have made contact with one during a previous hiking incident that left him injured and on the brink of death. Was it all an elaborate hoax he concocted, or a truth that was derided as lunacy? She believes her father and aims to earn him the posthumous legacy he deserves.

Simply hiking through the woods to find Bigfoot isn’t quite good enough for Sullivan, though. It’s a story that’s been done to death elsewhere, and Sullivan smartly ups the ante by bringing in another horror staple and mashing them up together to create a new breed of monster. It’s not just Bigfoot and people crowding these here woods — there’s zombies, too, and when one of them latches onto a violent, mean-spirited alpha Bigfoot, woo boy, it’s off to the races toot sweet!

I’m usually not a fan of anthropomorphizing animals, or making animals central point-of-view narrative figures, but I guess if you’re going to do it Bigfoot is a fairly reasonable species to get away with it. In fact, I was surprised at how much I actually enjoyed Sullivan’s Bigfoot POV chapters, mostly from the lead BF, Brighteyes, who has a particular fascination and affectation for humans. We also get a few segments as seen through the eyes of zombified Bigfoot to help drive home the distinguishing characteristics between what might reasonably be viewed, respectively, as the missing link and an altogether broken link.

Sullivan puts a lot of work into humanizing his Bigfoot characters, and it pays off pretty damn well. The human characters are of mostly familiar stock but are at least entertaining in their interactions and enjoy the gift of gab. I think Sullivan knows we’re really here for the zombie monsters, though, and he smartly focuses on the action, which is gnarly, gory, over the top, and almost non-stop chompy-chomp save for the momentary, and necessary, pauses to allow would-be victims to catch their breath for a moment and deliver some exposition to flesh things out. I also appreciated Sullivan’s take on billionaire Carson, an eccentric who has begun to use “his vast wealth to fund several high-profile stunts that had all ended in epic failures.” It’s a pretty clear, and highly welcome!, jab at Musk, but with Zombie Bigfoot having debuted in 2016 we can only be grateful that Carson is off fucking about in the woods with zombie Bigfoot instead of dismantling the government, disrupting Social Security, and destroying cancer research with a gaggle of teenage coders. Then again, there is a just-released sequel to consider, so… we shall see.

The most welcome aspect of Zombie Bigfoot, though, is its offering of escapist entertainment in a time when it’s sorely, desperately needed. It likely won’t be the subject of any aspiring doctoral lit students’ thesis, but I’d rather it be a fun, gory spectacle anyway, one that can help take my mind and attention away from the massive burning trash fire that is America circa 2025. Sullivan delivers that in spades, along with a promise of more to come. Zombie Bigfoot is a joyous B-movie-inspired creature feature, perfect for fans of Hunter Shea and Chris Sorensen, and you can bet your ass I’ll be reading the follow-up next. Now, onward to Zombie Billionaire! I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us there!

Rhino: The Rise of a Warrior: A Hell Divers Novel by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

[Note: This review originally appeared at FanFiAddict on March 7, 2025.]

Nicholas Sansbury Smith trades the apocalyptic skies for the stormy seas in this Hell Divers prequel novel, Rhino: The Rise of a Warrior. The titular character became a fan-favorite following his debut in Captives, the fifth entry of the Hell Divers series, as a grizzled warrior in the cannibal army of the Cazadores.

Here, Smith winds the clock back a good thirty years, taking us back quite literally to the very beginning of Rhino’s story as an infant who only barely survived his birth in a run-down underground fallout shelter. As Nick Baker grows and becomes a part of the community, he wants nothing more than to become a Ranger, one of the men tasked with not only protecting their bunker but journeying into the Texas wastelands to determine if humanity can return to the surface. The radiation levels from the Third World War two hundred years prior have left most of the world uninhabitable, and what life is out there has been radically mutated. When a small team of Rangers respond to a distress call from a fallen airship, Nick sneaks out with them and into a trap laid by violent warmongers known as the Cazadores, who have been raiding the fallen cities for slaves and supplies. The bunker comes under attack and Nick, along with many others, are captured and forced into a life of bondage, and worse.

Captured, imprisoned, and forced to fight in gladiatorial games for the amusement of the Cazador king, Nick has only one goal — to free his love, Sofia, and escape from their hellish new lives.

As the decades pass, the once-frail and scrawny Nick grows into a muscle-bound leader, earning the respect of the other Cazador warriors, including the king’s lieutenant, the violent madman el Pulpo, as war is waged across the seas and wastelands of a destroyed world.

Smith is known for his impressive, post-apocalyptic world-building, a trait that has carried across the swath of his bibliography since his self-published debut in 2013 with The Biomass Revolution. With the Hell Divers series, the Earth is little more than an irradiated, large-scale disaster zone and what little of humanity is left has taken to the skies aboard massive airships…and their fleet is perpetually shrinking. As the series expanded, so did the discoveries made by the Hell Divers, such as those of the underground bunkers where Nick Baker was raised, as well as the secrets lost to history in the wake of World War III. The land is populated by mutant plants and animals, along with horrific flying creatures known as Sirens, who are sharp in tooth and fang, and hungry for human flesh.

While the Sirens are certainly brutal, they pale in comparison to the Cazadores, the epitome of the human monster. Selfish, thuggish, cannibalistic, they are a warrior tribe constantly in battle against not only themselves but everyone whose paths they cross. We’re constantly reminded of the good-hearted boy Rhino once was, but as his story evolves across the pages it becomes harder to reconcile. Smith does a fantastic job capturing Nick Baker’s evolution into the fearsome Rhino, a man who practically lives dual identities at cross-purposes in service to the Cazadores. Each life he takes is a stepping stone to his eventual freedom and his plans to free Sofia, but it constantly comes at a cost.

The question becomes, of course, how do we root for such a group of psychotic warlords and murderers? The answer is simple — by making the other survivors they find themselves entangled with even worse! There’s little room for empathy in this corner of the Hell Divers world, where the metaphorical bleeding heart becomes a direct path to the literal en route to a violent death. The sun may shine down upon the Cazador Empire, but there’s little brightness or warmth to be found.

It’s dystopian pulp hewn close to perfection, and at its absolute worst, Smith still manages to find moments of humanity even in the most dehumanizing situations possible. We root for Rhino because we understand the abject horrors of the various no-win scenarios he is thrust into, and because Smith has taken the time to show us the real Nick Baker, rather than man he presents himself to be in order to survive. He may live among the Cazadores, but he is not a Cazador. What would you do to survive, how far would you go for the ones you love, especially in an apocalyptic hellscape such as this? In the world of the Hell Divers, the logical conclusion is anything and everything, even as an overriding sense of morality and humanity puts natural limits in place. Survivors are forced to do awful, terrible things in order to live, but the good ones do so in service to the ideal of a greater good.

The catch-phrase of the Hell Divers series as a whole is, “We dive so humanity survives!” In Rhino, Nick Baker kills in order to live, and lives as a slave in order to be free. It’s an interesting series of blood-soaked contradictions, but that’s life at the end of the world.

Phengaris by Anna Orridge

[Note: This review was originally published at FanFiAddict on February 21, 2025.]

In the final moments of Phengaris, a character reflects on what has just occurred and finds things to be “so very far from satisfying.” Unfortunately, I had similar thoughts on Phengaris itself.

Reading Anna Orridge’s novella hot on the heels of Todd Keisling’s The Sundowner’s Dance, I couldn’t help but compare the two given the surprising overlap in their subjects. Both deal with life and grief in suburbia and unnatural insectile infestations, with an undercurrent of cosmic horror running beneath it all. Sadly, Phengaris disappoints in almost all the same areas where The Sundowner’s Dance proved so successful.

My biggest hurdle with Phengaris were the characters and their motivations. So much of the latter came across as simply being too oblique, particularly with Aurora, the seldom-seen antagonist who effectively bookends the narrative. Both her and Mark, our central teenage protagonist, do things for little reason beyond the plot requiring them to do so, and they lack any kind of interiority to compel them forward.

I kinda-sorta understand Mark’s motivations for working at uncovering the hidden secrets of Thurstrop Wood. He’s an ornery, standoffish teenager who, like so many other teens the world over, feels like society is beset against him. As a closeted gay man, this is certainly true, and there exists a massive disconnect between Mark and his mother, who is dying of cancer. They mysteries of Thurstrop Wood compel him simply because they are, indeed, mysterious, and digging into them gets him out of the house and gives him something to do.

Aurora, though. Aurora occupies so little narrative space in Phengaris that she never feels like anything other than a second thought. We don’t get to know her at all, or why she does what she does. It seems that part of her plan is to create an army of worker bugs, but to what end? What purpose do they serve? If Orridge has any answers, she’s keeping them to herself.

Too much of what drives the plot of Phengaris is murky and opaque, leaving readers to suss out the hows and whys of it all, with characters acting the way they do for little more reason than just because. While Mark is not quite the cipher Aurora is, he’s not exactly the kind of character that’s easy to get attached to, either. One one hand, Orridge captures the aura of the surly teenager well, but on the other hand I never felt invested in his plight or concerned for his safety. Further, I was never quite convinced that he was anything more than just a character going through the motions in an ill-defined situation. There’s no sense of life to him beyond what’s on the page and he comes across as much too hollow and superficial.

Phenagris feels equally empty as a result. It’s flat, dull, and lifeless. There’s no sense of urgency, even as we’re given the specter of a looming death in Mark’s mother, until the plot suddenly requires a measure of urgency because we’ve hit the climax. Phengaris exists as a solid and intriguing idea, but it never feels fully fleshed out, and I couldn’t help but wonder, by book’s end, if I had missed something. By the time we get a sense of the stakes at play in Thurstrop Wood, it’s too little too late, and we haven’t been given enough reason to care about Mark or Aurora’s success or failure.

To her credit, Orridge does craft a few memorable scenes with some truly creepy and surreal imagery, not to mention a vivid, squirm inducing scene of body horror. They don’t quite make up for all that Phengaris lacks, but they do at least help keep it from being a total wash.

The Sundowner’s Dance by Todd Keisling

[Note: This review originally appeared at FanFiAddict on February 20, 2025.]

Reeling from the loss of his wife, retiree Jerry Campbell decides it’s time for a change. The house he and Abby called home is too big and filled with too many memories. He wants to retreat and spend what little time he has left in solitude. Fairview Acres, a retirement community in the Poconos, looks like the perfect escape. But no sooner than he’s moved in does the strangeness begins. His sleep is disrupted by late, all-night parties and strange noises that sound like somebody is walking across his roof. His neighbors seem a little too invested in his life and punctuate their concerns with strange phases, like the oft-spoken “By the moon’s eye.” And then Katherine, another widower who may be suffering from dementia, appears on his doorstep warning him about the worms and insisting he leave Fairview while he still can.

Slowly but surely, the oddities begin to pile up, and author Todd Keisling does a sublime job of ratcheting up the tension and creeping paranoia that provides The Sundowner’s Dance with a pervasive sense of dread. Obviously there’s more going on in Fairview Acres than meet’s the eye. The community itself is built in the bowl of a meteor’s impact crater, with the meteor itself a prominent feature on display at the heart of Fairview. And then there’s the nightly parties and the mysterious drink the revelers consume, a concoction they refer to as a “potion.”

The Sundowner’s Dance reads like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone by way of The Prisoner, seamlessly mixing cosmic and cult horror and topping it off with a thick dose of small-town conspiracy vibes. Keisling perfectly paces the plot, slowly revealing the various aspects behind these horrors and the history of Fairview Acres in a way that keeps the pages effortlessly turning.

While those mysteries are intriguing on their own, they’d be nothing without Jerry and Katherine, and the bond that forms between them. Personally, I found a hell of a lot about both these characters to be relatable, and much of what they went through felt incredibly familiar, at times uncomfortably so. There’s a raw honesty to the way Keisling writes about depression, anxiety, and dementia that make it clear these are all topics he’s personally experienced or has otherwise impeccably researched. I know from following Keisling across various social media sites that he’s personally acquainted with depression and anxiety. I’m not sure how much he’s dealt with elder care and coping with a parent’s dementia, but I suspect based on what I’ve read here that he certainly has more than a passing familiarity.

Like Jerry and Keisling, I’ve also suffered from depression and anxiety for the bulk of my life. Although Jerry didn’t realize what he was dealing with mentally and emotionally until he was in his fifties, it wasn’t until Abby entered his life that he had a support system to help him cope and to encourage him to see a doctor and find better living through chemical assistance. So much of Jerry’s story not only rang true but mirrored so many of my own experiences and thoughts, from being an introvert seeking solitude to realizing the simple truth that I probably wouldn’t still be alive if not for my wife’s love and care. “Abby had made him feel strong and capable,” Keisling writes, “had cheered him on when the chemicals in his brain were hellbent on destroying him from the inside.” I’ve lost count of how many times my own wife has done this for me, and I can only imagine how lost I’d be without her. Keisling captures these feelings of being so lost and adrift at sea eloquently and accurately.

I lost count, too, of how many times I nodded in recognition at Keisling’s portrayal of dementia and the reactions of those left to cope with an afflicted loved one. Dementia’s a terrible, frightening ailment, and Keisling is spot-on in his description that it can steal “a personality, a soul, and left a stranger in its place,” in addition to robbing one of their dearest memories and leaving them confused, lost, paranoid, and angry. Dementia turns the person you once knew so well into a radically twisted stranger. One character recollects to Jerry about a time their dementia-addled father pulled on a gun on them, not recognizing him and convinced he was there to steal the old man’s stamp collection. Although my own father was unarmed, I couldn’t help but recall the time he was convinced I had come home to kill him and steal his silverware, and then, just as fast, mistook me for somebody else entirely. On another occasion I was peppered with questions because he thought I was his long-deceased brother, and then ranted at because he was convinced his various illnesses were the result of a conspiracy between Russia, China, and Al-Qaeda. My dad never warned me about worms, or that the moon is watching, like Katherine does, but Keisling’s handling of dementia certainly rang uncomfortably true with my own lived experiences.

Is there a more fitting topic for horror than the process of human aging? Of the tortures and transformations once must endure, or to bear witness of in others? Of the losses one accumulates across a lifetime until you’re left alone with only your grief and your memories? And that’s not even getting into the abuse and exploitation of the elderly, and how growing old and frail and ever-more reliant on others makes one a ripe target for predators and scam artists, a topic that lies at the heart of The Sundowner’s Dance. Granted, the predatory relationship here is far more Lovecraftian than the poorly worded emails from Nigerian princes offering grandma a huge inheritance if only she responds with her SSN, and at least twice as insidious.

A lot of what makes that danger work so well here is just how grounded it all is. Fairview Aces and its inhabitants feel familiar. We all know that nosey neighbor, and we’ve all dealt with the disturbances they can bring, from loud music and late-night parties to shooting off fireworks until 1:00 AM on New Year’s without a care in the world about how their actions might affect those around them. We know the greed and ego and selfishness of these types of communities and the people in them. Jerry and Katherine, they feel real, and their growing friendship is natural and naturally charming. They’re not just characters on the page, but familiar faces with stories we can relate to. The narrative is informed by so much real-world, lived-in experiences, not to mention earnest tenderheartedness, that we can’t help but go along for the ride once Keisling starts to unearth the dark, rotten underbelly at the core of this piece of Americana and expose it in the moonlight. And that moon’s eye everybody speaks of? Well, as Tom Cullen might say, M-O-O-N, that spells trouble.

July 2025… Or, what you may have missed since… March?! WTF.

Time has been slipping by me faster and faster as I get older. It got really bad during the pandemic — I suspect it did for a lot of us — and has been wonky ever since. I’m never quite sure what day, week, or year it is anymore and find myself having to double-check just to make sure. I’ve caught myself dating things years that are wildly out of synch with the calendar, as if my body reflexively wants to write 2018 or 2019, forgetting that the whole last five or six years actually, you know, happened. It’s like those pandemic years at the height of covid exist in some kind of time capsule that is, itself, removed from time. Some of this has to do with the drudgery of living under an insane, dementia-addled, authoritarian regime and Trump’s unrelenting blitzkrieg upon the media and the country as a whole. Vox wrote about this effect during the first Trump administration, which feels like a hundred years ago, and we’re feeling similar effects again as we try to grapple with the fact that it’s only been six months and a handful of days since he was inaugurated again after a failed insurrection back in January 2020, which was at least a half-century and about 80 gazillion constitutional crises ago.

Of course, age has a lot to do with it, too, I think. Not that I’m particularly old, but I’m definitely not as young as I once was and my body is keen to remind me of that with some ill-timed injuries, like throwing my back out while putting on socks a couple months ago and leaving me bedridden and in pain for several days. I’ve had to pay much more attention to my health, and my heart especially. My workout regimen has helped me lose a ton of weight, but has also given me a serious case of tendonitis in my right elbow and some occasional shoulder pain. Some days, when the weather changes especially, my back acts up from when I fractured a vertebrae fifteen years ago, and my knees start to complain.

Last month I turned 46. My youngest has begun to note, with regularity, that I have more gray in my hair and in my beard than brown. I’m not bothered by the number or the gray hairs. I’m more shocked that my oldest will soon be 10 years old and I have absolutely no idea how that whole decade went by so quickly. Of course, I also recently saw some movie site put up their worst pictures of the last 25 years list and was both shocked and appalled that the 90s were entirely absent! How could that possibly be? Well, the list covered 2004 to 2024, and I was forced to realize that the 1990s was thirty years ago and that it is currently 2025. What the hell happened?

Probably a lot of the same shit that kept me from sending out this supposed-to-be monthly newsletter, which I’ve been absent from since the end of March. So, hi there! No, I haven’t quit writing (again) or reviewing, much to the dissatisfaction of my detractors. I’ve simply been existing and trying to be content, which isn’t always easy.

That last newsletter lost me some subscribers, possibly because I stand against AI, railed hard against Mark Zuckerberg for stealing damn near all my books via a pirating site instead of paying for them in order to feed his plagiarism machine, and being anti-Trump. Over on BlueSky I’ve been added to a blocklist called “AI-Hater Brigade,” which I’m quite proud of and hope to be blocked by many, many, many more techbros and talentless hacks and talentless techbro hacks soon! So, for those of you just joining in now, and who may have missed the obvious sentiments in many of my writings here and elsewhere, allow me to reiterate just so we’re all clear. Fuck AI. Fuck Trump. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of his traitorous billionaire class, and especially Elon Musk. (Reminder, too, that there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, nor is there such a thing as ethical AI use.) If this bothers you, the unsubscribe button is at the bottom.

Phew. OK. Now that all that’s out of the way, what have I been up to?

Reading, of course, and plenty of reviewing. I’ve covered a heck of a lot books over at FanFiAddict since I last updated you all some months ago. You can get caught up on all that below.

But first, the obligatory book promo, because I am, first and foremost, a starving artist in need of some book sales and I hope you’ll find some stuff to pick up.

I’m excited to announce that my all of my books are currently heavily discounted as part of a promotion on Smashwords for the whole month of July as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! This is a chance to get my books, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading. The bulk of my works are 75% off their usual retail price, with short stories available for the low, low price of absolutely nothing at all. You can grab those free. And you’ll be able to download the ebook file to save to your computer and keep forever, without the hassle of some corporate oligarchy deciding you no longer own the books you buy.

You will find the promo here starting today, July 1, so save the link:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/vi...

Please share this promo with friends and family. You can even forward this email to the avid readers in your life!

Thank you for your help and support and, as always, Happy reading!

NEW REVIEWS

It’s been a busy few months for me over at FanFiAddict since the last issue of this newsletter, so let’s dive in. Here’s what I’ve read and reviewed over there since March.

Zombie Bigfoot by Nick Sullivan

Zombie Billionaire by Nick Sullivan

Overgrowth by Mira Grant

To Those Willing To Drown by Mark Matthews

Veil by Jonathan Janz

Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud

Stay on the Line by Clay McLeod Chapman

A Game In Yellow by Hailey Piper

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

Looking back over these last few months, there’s been some truly stellar reading. I have to give particular shoutouts to Janz, Piper, and Cosby for their phenomenal new releases. King of Ashes is available now, but there’s still a bit of a wait for Piper’s and Janz’s new books to drop in August and September, respectively. Do keep an eye out for those and, if you haven’t already, be sure to preorder. They are absolutely excellent books! One of these days, I’ll actually get around to crossposting those FFA reviews to my site…

As for what all else is keeping me busy, aside from work, wife, and the kids?

Currently reading: I just finished S.H. Cooper’s upcoming Bottling His Ghosts, which releases in two weeks from Raw Dog Screaming Press. I’m planning on starting in on my digital ARC of Tim Lebbon’s Secret Lives of the Dead. Beyond having absolutely killer cover art, this one’s been getting a lot of advance buzz and has been billed as a work of folk horror noir, which excites the hell out of me. Look for reviews on these soon!

Currently playing: Death Stranding 2 (PS5)

The first Death Stranding was polarizing amongst gamer and game reviewers, but I found a hell of a lot to love about it and thought those who derided it as being nothing more than a walking sim really missed the mark. I’m only a few episodes into the new game (each level is broken down by episode and I think I’m on episode 6 currently) and have been blown away by it. This is the first title I’ve played that feels like a next-gen console release that fully harnesses all the power and beauty the PlayStation 5 is capable of. The graphics are stunning, and at times completely jaw-dropping. There have been several instances already where I find myself staring at the scenery and appreciating the beauty of it all, particularly in the game’s Mexican desert-set opening. A few of the game’s moments have been just as emotionally powerful, as well. It’s the type of game that makes the case for videogames as art, and I am loving the hell out of it.

That’s it for now, folks. Presumably I’ll be back in August with more reviews to share with you, and maybe some other tidbits and/or rantings.

If you’re in the US, have a safe and happy July 4!

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Publication Date: March 18, 2025 | Saga Press | 448 pages

[Note: This review was originally published at FanFiAddict on Feb. 28, 2025.]

Nobody writes like that Stephen Graham Jones. That’s not hyperbole, just simple fact. Jones’s voice and style is unique, and his stories unfold in an intensely conversational way, utilizing stream of consciousness, occasional tangents, and prose and dialogue that can prove circuitous and sometimes confusing until an act or deed provides clarity (or the reader just figures it out on their own). As a Blackfeet Native American writer, Jones brings the oral tradition of Indigenous storytelling to his writing, and in doing so has carved out a distinct and special space within the horror genre, writing books that are unlike anything else out there.

His style makes for a comfortable bedfellow with the epistolary technique, with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter unfolding across a series of journal entries from 1912, many of which concern the life of Blackfeet Indian Good Stab and the events of 1870 and the years following that made him the undead man he is. Good Stab has come to the church of Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, who records the confessions shared with him over a handful of months. The overarching mystery, of course, is why Good Stab has chosen Beaucarne as his confessor and what unites these two men, especially as skinned corpses are discovered in the snowy banks around Miles City, Montana.

On the surface, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a revenge-driven vampire story. The afflicted Good Stab hunts the mountains and prairies for those who have attacked his people and who are hunting buffalo in an effort to eliminate the Native’s dependent on the animals for their survival. There’s plenty of bloody violence, of course, befitting a 21st Century vampire book, but there’s a heck of a lot more going on between the covers here.

What The Buffalo Hunter Hunter really is, is a piece of history being told through the lens of slow-burn historical horror. It’s America’s story, of land stolen, of murders committed, of genocide enacted in the name of white supremacy, as told by the victims of a nation founded on their blood and tears. As one character writes late in the proceedings, “This is an Indian story…and you’re on Indian land whether you admit it or not.” And the vampiric Good Stab, well, he’s “the Indian who can’t die…. the worst dream America ever had.”

Jones’s latest certainly arrives a timely moment with contemporary American politics being what they are. Right-wing school boards and Moms Against Literacy orgs across the country have, for years now, been working to strip history classes of actual historical content and ban books from their libraries in an effort to help make white America even more coddled and unchallenged by facts, the existence of other races and cultures, and the sins of our forefathers. Rather than confront the multifaceted truths of America’s heritage and legacy, the answer of these fascist-loving nutjobs is to sanitize and whitewash the past and silence everyone else. All of which helps make The Buffalo Hunter Hunter a necessary and vital breath of fresh air, as well as a reminder about the power of truth in fiction and the importance of reading diverse voices. It’s awfully crazy that in order to get a better understanding of American history in 2025 and the horrors inflicted upon Indigenous peoples we have to turn to a vampire book, but that’s where we’re at nowadays in post-truth USA where simple facts are decried as woke and evil.

There’s a necessary and righteous undercurrent of anger at the (un)beating and deeply empathetic heart of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter as Jones challenges readers to confront one’s complictness in a violent and ugly past. This may be Jones at his absolute best, too, reminding readers of just how potent a literary powerhouse he can be. By the time he lays all his cards on the table late in the game, it’s one hell of an emotional sucker-punch that has been preceded by a number of incredible moments that eventually give way to startling revelation. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter has long, sharp teeth to sink into readers, but more importantly, it forces you to think and feel. If you disagree, you might want to check your pulse.

Trog by Zachary Ashford

Publication Date: March 11, 2025 | Unnvering | 104 pages

Note: This review was originally published at FanFiAddict.com on February 14, 2025.

Sometimes you just want some fun, good, old-fashioned monster mayhem chockfull of gore and dismemberment. Enter Trog, by Zachary Ashford, a bit of Aussie B-movie schlock in print form from Unnerving Books, a release that would have been right at home in their now-defunct line of yesteryear-tribute Rewind-or-Die novellas.

Fifteen-year-old Aisha and her family have only just moved into their new and deeply secluded home in the outback when they find themselves under assault by a trio of masked maniacs. As if that weren’t enough, there’s all these strange noises coming from below the house, deep beneath a hidden hatchway that leads into an underground cavern. What else are a bunch of thrill killers to do but investigate and make whatever’s left of everybody’s now much-too-short lives an even bigger hell as they unwittingly let a captured beast loose?

Ashford wastes no time in laying waste to, well, everything. We get a brief set-up involving Trog’s capture and confinement to kick things off, and then it’s off to the races for roughly a hundred pages of gnarly violence and bloody slaughter. The premise is streamlined-simple: take The Strangers, mix in some family dynamics, add in a hungry, hungry cryptid, and presto-chango, Trog.

Viewers of The Strangers will recall the chilling reason for that flick’s psychos terrorizing a young couple as “Because you were home.” Ashford covers similar ground with his thrill killers here, who insist their motives boil down to little more than sheer enjoyment. It’s a way for them to cut loose and party hearty, with their de facto leader explaining to his captive audience, “I want to kill you because it’s fun. This isn’t a political statement. It’s entertainment.”

We eventually learn, of course, that this isn’t quite 100% true, but for the vast majority of Trog it’s easy enough to accept this as a mission statement for both the killers and the book itself. In fact, given recent political turmoils on- and offline, the lack of deep, in-your-face politicization in Trog makes for a welcome, and occasionally cathartic, just-in-time escape from the real-world and its multiplying crises. Still, Ashford subtly weaves in a commentary on naturalism versus capitalism and the war between the haves and have-nots, not to mention those caught in the middle. Trog himself is a monster transformed against his will by another’s pursuit of financial excess, and who finds himself torn by memories of a more natural and peaceful existence against his now-insatiable hunger for human flesh. In the end, money makes destructive, and self-destructive, monsters of us all, even moldy Aussie offshoots of Bigfoot.

Granted, for every moment of potential deep reflection, there’s about a dozen instances of splattery, gore-caked violence, brain slurping, and intestines spilling to keep any potential opining about Marxist philosophy far at bay, all of which is nicely wrapped around a young heroine’s story of trauma survival and unlocking her inner badass. This is, after all, entertainment!