Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 10

Review: White Death by Christine Morgan [audiobook]

White Death

By Christine Morgan






My rating: 3 of 5 stars


My original WHITE DEATH audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Few things attract me to a book faster than cover art by the estimable Matthew Revert, the promise of a snowy, frozen terrain, and a wicked creature hellbent on mankind’s destruction. All three of these elements are present and accounted for in Christine Morgan’s White Death, narrated by Matt Godfrey. While there are elements of horror and the supernatural, White Death is primarily a work of historical fiction. What segments of savagery it possesses are primarily due to all-too-human factors, as well as the inhospitable climes of a killer blizzard and a long, cold winter in the Montana Territory, circa 1888.

After Pierre LeCharles’s wife falls sick, the hunter and trapper must seek out the mythical wanageeska in order to cure her. Their violent encounter early on only prompts further revenge as the unnatural wanageeska unleashes a brutal storm upon the men invading its territory, and the settlement of Far Enough soon becomes enshrouded in a blinding blizzard.

The story of LeCharles, his wife Two-Bird, and her father Runninghorse serve as a narrative framing device for the violence inflicted upon the settlers of Far Enough. Morgan gives us plenty of detail on how the men and women settlers fare this Storm of the Century in a story that strikes a powerful chord, and at its heart, this is more than merely a story of man versus the elements. This is a story of American exploration, and even exploitation, as the borders of the US expanded westward and further encroached upon Native land and settlements. The wanageeska may be a monster of myth, but its encounter with LaCharles and the Far Enough settlers serves as a powerful parable of mankind overreaching in its attempts to conquer nature. Nature is violent and toothsome, and more often then not, it can have the last say on who is really at the top of the food-chain. Spoiler alert: it ain’t us!

Morgan’s cast of characters is expansive, and oftentimes unwieldy so. Listening to White Death, I found myself repeatedly questioning who these characters were, if they were being newly introduced or had already been presented, and I simply couldn’t keep track of who was who as Morgan regularly switched up perspectives. I suspect it might be easier to follow such a large group in print, where you can flip back a few pages to refresh your memory. It didn’t help any that the characters are fairly thin in terms of development. They lack any distinguishing features or wow-moments to separate them from the pack, and most of them pretty well blurred together. The main exception was William Thorpe, the founder of Far Enough, who aims to establish the territory as a real town fueled by miners and prospectors rushing for gold and silver in the nearby mountains. Although mighty in his own mind and rich in wealth, Thorpe, too, is no match for the blizzard and the harsh winter alters him ingloriously, frighteningly violent fashion as the weather wears on.

It’s in the details of Far Enough’s settlers braving the grueling arctic snap where White Death is at its strongest. None in Far Enough are free of the wanageeska’s wrath and Morgan skillfully depicts the horrors of being caught in a blizzard, of the human body succumbing to freezing temperatures, frostbite, and fatal cases of hypothermia. While the nature of the wanageeska is mythical, the impact of the arctic horror is utterly real. Several sequences are downright brutal as Morgan describes in unflinching detail the ways in which extreme weather conditions can break down a man, woman, or child, both physically and psychically.

Equally unflinching is Matt Godfrey’s eight-hour narration. Over the course of this past year, Godfrey has become one of my favorite narrators and I trust him to deliver a crisp reading with solid production values. White Death is certainly no exception, and he exhibits a wide range of tones and character voices, hindered only by the large number of characters presented on the page. The overwhelming number of speaking parts eventually blurred together for me, until the majority of characters separated from one another only by gender.

Despite the abundance of characters, the constant rotation through which hindered my attention and made following the various threads of this story difficult in audio form, I did find plenty else to like in White Death. Fueled by Native America myth, Morgan presents a number of sequences of arctic survival horror, giving readers compelling looks at the determination of the human spirit, as well as the fragility of one’s psyche in obscenely pressing trials brought on by extreme weather. White Death may not be a consistently captivating listen, but it is most certainly a fascinating one.



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Review: The Smile Factory by Todd Keisling

THE SMILE FACTORY (Precipice Chapbook Series 1)

By Todd Keisling






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Here's a newsflash for you: office jobs are fucking mundane. Day in, day out, almost always the same. Sitting at the same desk, answering phone calls, going to meetings, typing e-mails, dealing with customers with various mental instabilities, psychotic tendencies, and degrees of entitlement, co-workers who drone on and on and on about their vapid, insignificant little lives. Stuck in a dead-end position, toiling away simply to make those stuck in higher positions than yours look good, so they can get raises, a new car, a bigger house, better vacations. And you do it all with a goddamn smile on your face because you have a mortgage, a car note, a family, bills to pay, food to buy. It's all such an endless cycle of monotony, every single day, same as the last, same as the next. Punch in, punch out. Rinse and repeat.

This is, in short, the perfect environment for hell to unfold. Shit, office life is practically a horror story already - trust me, I know. I've worked one kind of dead-end office job or another for almost exactly half my life now. Such dreary day-to-day mundanity is absolutely, positively ripe fodder for the scary books, but not one I see all that often. I know of J.F. Gonzalez's The Corporation (sadly unread at the time of this writing), and I'd be surprised if Bentley Little didn't have at least one book set in this playscape (The Store is the closest I can think of off-hand, with its retail hell setting). There's a few movies, too, like The Belko Experiment and Mayhem. Largely, though, the environs of any given office are far less exciting than zombies or vampiric sexy-times, and office romance or erotica books are a dime a dozen, but the potential for straight-up office horror stories is most certainly there. You could say it's an untapped market.

As a new hire of [REDACTED], you are greeted by the front desk security man who is giving you the inside scoop on legendary office worker, Marty Godot. We don't talk about Marty Godot. His name has been stricken from employee records, and everyone who worked with him, his associates and bosses, have all been promoted and never heard from again. We. Do. Not. Talk. About Marty Godot. You must wear your smiling mask and you must live only to serve [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] is your life now.

Todd Keisling, a writer I would suspect is an office drone simpatico or at least woefully familiar of such a life, recognizes just how much existential terror lives at the core of every office building in America. The Smile Factory, a slim novelette published in chapbook form (and ebook), is easily one of the most scarily honest depictions of office life I've encountered, all wrapped up in a writhing, worm-infested, tentacled snare of cosmic horror.

The Smile Factory is wonderfully satirical, but also deeply honest. A lot of office drones will read this and shrug it off with a chuckle to make themselves feel better, to feel separated from the truths Keisling lays down. Me? This sucker feels awfully fucking familiar on way too many uncomfortable fronts. I've seen too many similar cultish depictions and fetishizations of corporatism to dismiss The Smile Factory as anything other than an accurate and faithful depiction of modern American work-life in all its savagely hostile and soul-sucking underpinnings. Keisling obviously exaggerates things with his Eldritch depictions here, but only just barely.

The Smile Factory is a super quick read, only about thirty pages, so short enough to read over a lunch break presuming you are allowed to detach yourself from your terminal and find that your eyes aren't bleeding too profusely from a day of idly staring at a computer screen. Depending on how much you love your office life, though, reading this on your break will either help you crumble into despair or remind you to keep smiling and let your misery feed the world. Either way, it's a damn enjoyable read. Just remember two things.

Keep smiling.

Don't ask about Marty Godot.



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Review: The Siren and The Specter by Jonathan Janz

The Siren and The Specter (Fiction without Frontiers)

By Jonathan Janz






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've been anticipating the launch of Flame Tree Press for a good while now, not least of which because it meant brand new books from Jonathan Janz and Hunter Shea. Both authors launched their careers at the now-ancient history Samhain Publishing, and while both have found publishers elsewhere since that publisher's collapse in 2016, it feels good to have them reunited beneath a common imprint and the guiding hand of editor Don D'Auria. I've been waiting for a new Janz novel ever since finishing Exorcist Falls early last year, so turning toward The Siren and The Specter as my inaugural read of Flame Tree Press was a no-brainer.

As expected, Janz delivers a fun, gruesome, and highly compelling read that happily kept me up past my bed-time on a few occasions because I absolutely had to know what would happen next. This is a good and true "just one more chapter!" kind of read.

Noted skeptic and supernatural debunker David Caine is invited by an old college buddy to stay for a time in the Alexander House, the most haunted house in all of Virginia. Built in the 1700s, its owner, Judson Alexander, was the worst sort of man, one who held the village around the Rappahannock River in an iron fist, raping and killing at a whim. His house was a source of bloodshed and torture for a number of those villagers, the land tainted forever. David rightfully expects the urban legends surrounding the Alexander House to be rubbish, but even he can't deny the quiet ache of his own personal losses that being back by the Rappahannock causes. As events unfold, David's skepticism is put to the test and soon enough the Rappahannock will run red with blood.

The Siren and The Specter has a lot going for it. As the title indicates, you get not one, but two - two! - supernatural entities to torment our lead protagonist. You also get a fair amount of carnage, a host of depraved sex acts, and a number of ghostly encounters that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. One of the best parts, though, was the sense of history Janz imbues the Alexander House and its surrounding region with, a history that is deeply personal to David and the peninsula where this book is set. The country is young, but the land is old, and the pre-colonial mythology surrounding the titular siren was a welcome counterpoint to the horrors inflicted by Alexander upon his neighbors. What struck me most, though, was the historical interplay between the siren and the specter themselves. Although these are two distinct entities in the mythology of the Rappahannock, both are fueled at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of both their gender and their bloodlust, one a victim and the other a victimizer. Janz slowly reveals the stories of each in highly compelling ways, using the dual spirits to illustrate mankind's proclivity toward wrath, cruelty, and the possession of others.

I'll confess that on first blush, I wasn't entirely sold on the siren's involvement in terms of this book's plot. Initially, it felt like a bit of unnecessary overreach, even a minor element that could have been cut without any detriment to the work. After some consideration, though, I find myself appreciating the thematic importance of the siren more and more, and the things she represents for David as he is forced to reconsider his skepticism toward the supernatural. There's a strong sense of duality at play in this book, and as a figure herself the siren is emblematic of several things in terms of both plot and character. The Siren and the Specter is very firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition, which demands readers to use their imagination, suspend their disbelief, and accept that there are more mysteries in this world than we can possibly understand. Judson Alexander is the most in-your-face mystery that both David and the reader must confront, but Janz asks us to accept just a little bit more than that as we carry along, challenging us to confront our own skepticism alongside David and accept some additional horrors and wonders beyond Alexander. Both are integral to David and his personal evolution during his stay on the peninsula. And after all, if we can accept the specter, why not the siren?

While there are plenty of Gothic traditions on display here - the fallen hero, death and romance, loss and terror, an emphasis on sexuality, dashes of political violence, an atmosphere of dread, a focus on the architecture of the Alexander House - in the end, it's this broadening of imagination that proves most fascinating and compelling. In fact, there's a lot about The Siren and The Specter that fascinates, from the character dynamics and their relationships to Alexander, the perversions of the Shelby family, David's struggles to be a better man and the appreciable easiness of those around him to call him out on his foolishness, and, of course, Janz's flair for violence. Janz is not the type of author who gets squeamish writing about blood and guts, and he clearly enjoys splashing around in gore with all the delight of a mad sadist. This is a big win for horror fans, and even when you know certain macabre acts are just a page away, he still manages to pull off a few surprises in each of the big reveals.

It's clear why Flame Tree Press chose The Siren and The Specter as one of their launch titles, and it's a delicious springboard into this new imprint. I suspect this book will also (rightfully) earn Janz a legion of new and devoted readers, readers who will enjoy sinking their teeth into the author's considerable back-list, which will be republished by Flame Tree Press over the remainder of 2018 and well into 2019. Introducing an imprint, and even to a certain degree reintroducing an already established author, with a work of Gothic horror like The Siren and The Specter is a smart move, and one that instills a lot of confidence in this new brand. Get ready to expand your imagination.

[Note: I received an advance reader copy of The Siren and The Specter from Flame Tree Press.]



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Review: Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road, edited by D. Alexander Ward

Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road

By Rio Youers, Joe R. Lansdale, Josh Malerman, Damien Angelica Walters, Jonathan Janz, Rachel Autumn Deering, Matt Hayward, Kristi DeMeester, Bracken MacLeod, Jess Landry, Michael Bailey, Richard Thomas, Doungjai Gam, Ed Kurtz, Robert Ford, Lisa Kröger, Orrin Grey, Kelli Owen, Nick Kolakowski, Cullen Bunn, Christopher Buehlman






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Traveling long stretches of a dark highway it's easy to imagine the horrors lurking in the dark, some of them all too real. Drunk drivers, car crashes, vehicles flipping and sliding along the asphalt, glass breaking and sparks flying as metal meets road and the smell of gasoline perfumes the air. The black hidden world beyond the lane markers and past the guardrails is more ephemeral, the secrets hiding just past the road darker and wilder.

In Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road, D. Alexander Ward has compiled fresh writings from more than twenty authors (only two are reprints, Joe R. Lansdale's "Not From Detroit" and Rio Youers' "The Widow") who have reached into the darkness of the highway, a darkness that travels upon the road beside you, or maybe follows behind you just a bit too close for comfort, or hides just off the exit or in the woods beyond the stretch of road, hoping for some unsuspecting soon-to-be victim to come their way.

Two writers, doungjai gam (writing with Ed Kurtz) and Jess Landry, managing editor of JournalStone, make their fiction debuts with "Crossroads of Opportunity" and "The Heart Stops at the End of Laurel Lane," respectively. Both deal with elements of personal loss, tragedy, death, madness, and the ghosts we carry with us in wildly different ways. These themes occur time and time again throughout Lost Highways, with veteran writers like Joe R. Lansdale and Christopher Buehlman tackling similar concepts of death and the carriage he rides in that could not have been handled in ways more different than here.

Throughout Lost Highways there exists certain plays on a theme, particular notes that are reinforced thanks to Ward's organization of these stories, and elements that are echoed in various and striking ways across the book. Yes, there are stories of cannibals and killers, of urban legends and people grappling with madness, but it's the overwhelming amount of heart that resonates and overlaps the stories here, creating miniature story arcs of emotion that are strengthened or that chafe against one another.

Kristi DeMeester's "A Life That is Not Mine" is an excellent story of madness, but it's all the things that aren't on the page that ring the most true and provide a powerful examination of depression and self-destruction. Schoolteacher Hannah has forgotten what morning looks like, all the light in her life having left. She lives a solitary existence in the dark, one with no happiness, no joy, only drudgery and an escalating insanity. "The Widow" by Rio Youers takes a similar tack, but one that is strikingly different as his protagonist, Faye, grapples with the roadside death of her husband and stumbles upon a centuries old supernatural mystery while those around her constantly worry about the state of her mental health.

Michael Bailey's "The Long White Line" is an exquisite paradox of a story, albeit one with a very simple premise. Still, it's difficult to discuss without veering sharply into spoiler territory and revealing the catch. This one is all about the concept, and it's the stuff of urban legend. Kelli Owen sharpens her blade with her own bit of urban legend involving a small, sleepy town past a Northern Michigan highway exit in "Jim's Meats." Owen hit a lot of sweet spots for me with her story of a wrong turn gone seriously awry, and one character's early mention of the film Deliverance provides a glimpse of where things are headed. I love these types of B-movie pulps, and Owen delivered one of my favorite stories in Lost Highways. Speaking of movies, it feels safe to say that Matt Hayward found some inspiration from John Carpenter and Stephen King with his story of a roving fog that demands the worst memories of those that drive through it. "Where the Wild Winds Blow" ends on a satisfying note that makes one's imagination run wild at the prospect of what comes next, and I certainly wouldn't mind it if Hayward opted to explore this story further somewhere down the road.

Lost Highways is also notable, at least for me, in presenting a return to prose fiction from Rachel Autumn Deering, who depicts one of the most honest stories of heartbreak I can recall, in "Dew Upon the Wing." I was a fan of Deering's 2016 debut novella, Husk, so it was terrific to find her traveling the dark passages of Lost Highways. Of particular note, too, is Cullen Bunn, a scribe best known for his work in comic books, particularly his Bram Stoker Award-nominated Harrow County, whose "Outrunning the End" makes a nicely apocalyptic short story involving a man on the run, chased by demons both personal and otherwise.

At its best, Lost Highways presents some truly engaging, mysterious, and unique stories to captivate. At its worst...well, frankly, there isn't really a worst to be had here. Lost Highways is the rare anthology that even when it's not running hot with its pedal to the metal, it's still pretty damn good. With a line-up that includes a number of outstanding authors, like Jonathan Janz, Bracken McLeod, and Damian Angelica Walters, and a number of strong works from its lesser-known and debut contributors, it's truly hard to go wrong.

Lost Highways offers a number of trips, and more than a few satisfying detours, across the nation's highways and byways that you'd be remiss not to take. Just make sure you've got enough fuel in the tank - you don't want to have stop at some small Podunk gas station late at night in a place you've never heard of, or stall out alongside the road, your cell phone's signal mysteriously lost, with no help in sight. You don't know what's out there...lurking...waiting...and thirsting for blood.

[Note: I received an advance copy of Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road from Crystal Lake Publishing.]



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Review: Practitioners by Matt Hayward and Patrick Lacey

Practitioners

By Matt Hayward, Patrick Lacey






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Authors Matt Hayward and Patrick Lacey inject fresh life and more than a few sparks of originality into some familiar and well-worn tropes in Practitioners from Bloodshot Books, genre-hopping with apparent ease to flesh out a novel that feels like a dream come true.

On the trope side of things, we have police officer, Henry Stapleton, who is reeling from the death of his wife and is fueled by revenge. Thankfully, Hayward and Lacey upend our familiarity with such a heavily trod character almost immediately. Stapleton, it turns out, is completely off his rocker and his vivid recollections of finding and torturing his wife's killer are psychotic breaks with reality. What's more, he's having waking dreams that lead him to a spate of fresh corpses. His attempts to control his lucid dreaming send him even deeper down the rabbit hole, straight into a paranoid nightmare that could reshape and destroy reality.

Practitioners is a novel all about escalation. The more things Stapleton tries to fix, the worse things get. While Hayward and Lacey embrace the initial noir aspects of their pseudo-cop drama, their story stretches beyond any one genre, preferring to take an everything but the kitchen sink approach. Equal parts cop shop, horror, and fantasy, Practitioners is a hefty blend of cross-genre scares that admirably chugs along without losing sight of its cataclysmic destination.

Stapleton's journey from police officer to dream warrior comes off far more plausible than it should, which is a credit to how well the author's have constructed this story. It helps that Stapleton is initially presented as a bit of a suspect character and we're never quite sure how crazy grief has made him. Hayward and Lacey slowly weave in the supernatural elements, giving us small doses that are just enough to jilt expectations, while embellishing Stapleton's waking-world life with enough paranoia, New Age mysticism, and investigative do-right to prepare us for the headlong dive into madness. This is a book that starts off small and personal and blows up in a wildly cataclysmic and bloody climax that presents a war on two different fronts of consciousness.

It's heady stuff to be sure, but the authors make it all look disconcertingly easy. Practitioners is a highly successful collaboration and the styles of Dublin-based Hayward and Massachusetts-native Lacey mesh seamlessly. I didn't notice any peculiarities in syntax, cultural oddities, or awkward turns of phrase that occasionally occur between authors writing together from opposite sides of the pond.

If I must voice one complaint, though, it's that the various dreams and dream worlds Stapleton journeys through never quite felt strange enough for me. Through it all, there's a certain linearity and even almost-normalcy to it, despite even the occasional appearance of strange creatures. While there's a healthy dose of oddity to the surrounding events that prompt Stapleton to travel between his neighbor's dreams, I wish some of the dream states he found himself in were even more unusual. More often than not, the authors rely on presenting dreams that are either alternate realities where the dreamer engages in particular sexual fetishes or the book's setting of Bellville is depicted as an apocalyptic wasteland. While this latter depiction of Bellville is well-rendered, I could have done with a bit more variety in the various dreamy landscapes. It is also possible I'm simply too inured to stories of my wife's crazy dreams.

While I loved Practitioners and its pulp-noir and chaotic creature-feature sensibilities, few things within Stapleton's lucid dreams are as weird as my darling wife's dreams after she's had Chinese food. This is perhaps too high a bar to set, though, as even the most wildly inventive and creative writer would have a tough time competing with some of my wife's doozies in dreamland. Personally, it's rare that I even remember any of my own dreams, so it's entirely possible my wife is just weird and Practitioners depictions of dream-life are more common and realistic than my spouse's anecdotes would lead me to believe. So, as far as complaints go, this one is certainly nothing to lose sleep over.

Hayward and Lacey pack in enough freshness and a few honestly earned surprises to make Practitioners a book I can easily recommend. It really did hit all the right buttons for me between its awesomely designed cover by Rachel Autumn Deering, and a highly cool concept and well articulated vision from the authors, one that exists on multiple planes of reality and features some neat-o fantasyland magic and killer monsters. I mean, who doesn't love killer monsters?

[Note: I received an advanced review copy of this title from the author.]



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Review: The Switch House by Tim Meyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I try to approach each book I read with an open mind, but with the hopeful expectation that it will, at the very least, be a decent read. I want to let the author do their thing and then judge for myself how well their story worked for me. Overall, I think I'm pretty good about selecting titles that should work for me based on their synopsis. Sometimes I'm disappointed, sometimes I'm pleased. The best, though, is to discover a work, particularly from a new-to-me author, that proves itself to be positively exceptional.

The Switch House is a slim novel that absolutely rocks right from the get-go, firing on all cylinders the whole way through, catapulting readers from one crazy violent encounter to the next. Tim Meyer takes a no-holds-barred approached to the scenes of bloody mayhem, and there were a few impactful moments that made me wince. He also proves strikingly adept at crafting psychological horror, and one big reveal in the book's climax wrung me dry, my heart lurching as I mentally screamed "HOW COULD YOU?" at one character.

Meyer uses tragedy as the framework here, building his house of horrors around it, revealing additional levels of complexity with each chapter. Bereft over the loss of their child, Angela and Terry sought an escape from their normal lives by auditioning for, and winning a spot in, the reality show, Let's Switch Houses! Returning to their normal lives isn't easy for Angela, especially after she spots a hole in the bathroom wall that peers into...well, elsewhere. She begins having vivid nightmares, realizing that whoever lived in their home during the swap did some very dark things there.

There's so much I want to say about this book, but I fear that so much of it would dive headlong into spoiler territory. I will say that The Switch House is twisty as all get-out, and is the kind of read that will have you questioning the reality of the events and the characters depicted here. I found myself flip-flopping a few times on whether or not Meyer intended this to be a straightforward narrative and on the reliability of Angela's viewpoints. I think I have my answer, but I suspect yours may be quite different.

Despite its short page count, there's an awful lot to digest here. The Switch House is slim in pages, but filled to the brim with concepts and ideas. Meyer pulls in cosmic horror, psychological horror, chaotic and frightening depictions of hell, plenty of paranoia, and bucketfuls of bloody mayhem. It's a rare thing indeed when I finish a book's prologue and already find myself questioning whatever life choices I've made that I'm only just now discovering Tim fucking Meyer. How the hell have I not read this guy before? That's gonna change real fast, I can tell you that right now.

[Note: I received an advance reader's copy of this title for review.]



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Review: Suspended in Dusk II, edited by Simon Dewar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In his foreword, Simon Dewar discusses the themes behind the period of dusk, noting that this is a moment of change, a "time between times", when light turns dark, when good can turn bad. It's a flashpoint for life and death, an instant where the inevitable can turn on a dime, where one's greatest fears or greatest hopes can be realized, a time when people are forever altered and either ruined or reborn. Collected in Suspended in Dusk II are 17 stories that realize these instances of change, to varying degrees. Some are poignant, others are subtle, and all work together to make this a seriously strong anthology of dark fiction.

Much of this strength lies in this anthology's commitment to diversity. Plenty of hay has been made, in certain social media circles, over the lack of inclusiveness in certain high-profile anthologies recently announced and how, in 2018, certain publishers, editors, or compilers could release an all-white male anthology and completely ignore the breadth of voices dark fiction has to offer. Suspended in Dusk II makes no such mistake, giving readers a number of strong voices from across the gender and sexual spectrum. Dewar has collected here several powerful women, writers whose names may be instantly recognizable and lesser-known talents who deserve to become household names, people of color, authors with a wide range of religious affiliations or no religion at all, from a handful of continents. Each, of course, are storytellers first and foremost, but their works carry a certain depth and breadth of experience to challenge publishing's oftentimes default homogeneity.

Take, for instance, Dan Rabarts's Riptide. Rabarts is a New Zealand author, and his story of loss and revenge is built upon the foundations of Māori mythology as a bereaved father and widower battles a taniwha. Gwendolyn Kiste tackles issues of childhood abuse and sexual trauma through an allegorical tale of monsters. Karen Runge, too, tackles similar subjects and their fetishization in this anthology's opening story, Angeline. It's a powerful opener, and Runge's writing is flat-out wonderful. I haven't read Runge's work previously, but you rest assured her novel Seeing Double will be in my hands soon.

Suspended in Dusk II runs the gamut of dark fiction. Not every piece included here is a work of straight-up horror, although it's certainly an element common to most of the stories here. Some are more subtle horrors drawn from the tapestry of life, or death in the case of Bracken MacLeod's story of an injured hiker. Christopher Golden's The Mournful Cry of Owls is a fantastical coming-of-age story, and an incredibly well-drawn one at that, told from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl about to celebrate her Sweet 16, as she passes through the dusk separating adolescence from adulthood and the secrets in between. Others carry overtones of the apocalypse, such as Paul Tremblay's There's No Light Between Floors, a sort-of 9/11 event with Lovecraftian overtones, and Ramsey Campbell's Another World. Campbell's in particular is an excellent use of a decidedly foreign perspective, whose central character encounters our modern world through the filter of religious extremism. Letitia Trent takes her own tract on another world, giving us an encounter with infected, rabid children cast out into the wild and fenced off from society.

Dewar does a fine job balancing the tonal rhythms and themes of each story, giving the anthology a unique pulse. The stories dovetail between their similarities and differences, giving readers slight arcs across the narratives, book-ending them all between Runge's and MacLeod's wildly different, yet thematically similar, stories of a central figure cast out, either by choice or by circumstance, into the wild and left to survive by their own wits, suspended in a moment of dusk.

[Note: I received an advanced reader's copy of this work from the publisher, Grey Matter Press.]



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Review: Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


On his podcast, The Horror Show with Brian Keene, Keene has mentioned a few times that Darkness on the Edge of Town was partly inspired by Stephen King's The Mist. Commonalities certainly exist, but there's also more than a touch of King's Under the Dome, as if Keene and King had tapped into similar wavelengths and wrote their works concurrently, and likely unbeknownst to each other. King's Dome was published at the tail-end of 2009, and the first edition of Darkness was published by Leisure Books at the start of 2010, so clearly something was in the air, reaching into their minds from the beyond. I mention this only because there's a cool kind of synchronicity that can exist between creators and it fascinates and amuses me in almost equal measure that in being influenced by a much earlier King story, Keene wrote a somewhat similar story to a then-more current King tome (even if Dome itself is highly derivative of earlier, superior King books). For my money, though, Darkness on the Edge of Town is easily the better of the two.

As the title indicates, darkness is the predominate theme to this particular work. The town of Walden has been blanketed in perpetual night thick enough to blot out the stars. This darkness encases the town, and to leave Walden is suicide (but staying put could also mean certain death). Those who cross the city limits are never seen again, the violent cries of their death throes the final thing that is ever heard from them. Trapped within this small-town, madness begins to take hold as time loses all meaning and supplies begin to grow as scarce as hope.

Darkness on the Edge of Town is, suitably, a dark story. Darkness infests the town as much as it soaks the pages, and the people of Walden are driven toward their baser instincts, guided by their own inner darkness and personal torments. Keene slowly ramps up the violence, escalating from grocery store looters to gang-infested streets, home invasions, and rapes and murders that occur right in the middle of the street. It's bleak, but compulsively readable. I had to know what secrets the darkness held, and whether or not Robbie, Christy, and their neighbors were going to survive this endless night.

I also had to know if and how this book tied into the larger mythos underpinning Keene's narratives. Once the homeless man, Dez, made his appearance and began spouting off arcane craziness, my ears perked right up at the familiar concepts the fine folks of Walden brushed off as insane drivel. My patience was rewarded, and I can say that Darkness on the Edge of Town is most certainly one of the levels in Keene's overarching Labyrinth mythology. I got hints of it in the Clickers books he wrote with J.F. Gonzalez, as well as The Rising, City of the Dead, and The Complex, so I was absolutely delighted to see more of that mythology discussed and elaborated on here.

I'm a sucker for multiplicative Earth's and alternate realities and I dig the way Keene has merged scientific principles, like string theory and quantum mechanics, in a very layman way, with mythological stories to create a multi-storied overarching narrative to connect his works. Best of all, though, is that each of these works function independently. You need not have read The Rising to understand Darkness on the Edge of Town, but if you have you'll find some sweet name-drops along the way. This book in particular is a solid stand-alone, but it's made richer by the baked-in connectivity to Keene's other works.

While all that stuff is certainly cool to be sure, the story surrounding all these little Easter Eggs is just as good. I dug the characters and how they responded to the darkness encroaching upon both the town and their psyches. There's some great interpersonal dynamics at play, as well as some smaller examinations of mob mentality and how vicious and extreme human behavior can get in dire, pressing situations. Darkness is a bleak read on the whole, but a highly infectious one. Like Robbie and his neighbors, the darkness got into my head, too, and it forced me to keep turning the pages. Thankfully, I had plenty of light to read by.



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Review: Eat the Rich by Renee Miller

Eat the Rich

By Renee Miller






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ed is at the end of his rope - a bit of an asshole, frustrated by the dead-end rut his life has fallen into, and trapped by debt and a loveless marriage. He makes the decision to walk away from it all, to trade his home and wife for a life of homelessness and freedom. What initially sounds like a glorified camping trip, minus even those simple luxuries of a vacation spent roughing it, ends with Ed directly involved in an alien overthrow of Earth. Led by Dahl, the human-looking invaders have gone planet to planet, freeing the local populations from the tyranny of oppressive capitalism. As the title might indicate, the aliens have a little bit more in store for Earth's 1%. Freeing humanity from the scourge of inequality is great and all, but even more important is the simple fact that rich people taste delicious.

Eat the Rich isn't quite the in-your-face work of message fiction I was expecting, and even mildly wanting, and while there is some exploration of the good and bad in contemporary capitalism Renee Miller is more focused on delivering a work of super-fun alien pulp horror. Economic politics may be the instigating premise behind Eat the Rich, but Miller is careful not to pound readers over the head with her personal opinions as she explores the ways in which certain ideas may appear superficially attractive but can quickly descend into madness. The denouement is very much a 'be careful what you wish for,' particularly in terms of utopian fantasy, let alone one involving life under extraterrestrial rule.

Of course, any kind of politics in fiction is too much for some reader's to handle, but if one were that worried about confronting opposing viewpoints or afraid of encountering even fictional liberal or conservative values in the first place, you probably wouldn't be looking at a book entitled Eat the Rich lest you're deliberately attempting to offend your own delicate sensibilities. And in which case, you probably shouldn't be reading horror or science fiction in the first place, both of which genres are present in this book in spades.

On the other hand, you have at least come this far in considering Eat the Rich, even if only superficially, and either have some kind of backbone, decent taste in fiction, and are either a cannibal or have a serious axe to grind, and so I encourage you to give it a read. It's fun, schlocky, gory entertainment, with sparse prose that makes for an easy breezy read. I quite enjoyed reading about Ed's encounters with various aliens, the police detective Marin, who is charged with investigating the murders of local elites, and the quisling Gopher who hesitatingly introduces Ed to Dahl. The relationship between Ed and Dahl, in fact, is reason enough to check out Eat the Rich and provides an interesting bit of meat and particular complications as the narrative progresses.

If I have any complaint about Miller's story, it's that it moves a bit too fast, with certain big acts getting glossed over. Some aspects of the alien invasion are told through second-hand sources, like news reports and characters telling other characters about things that occurred off-page. I would have preferred Miller to write about such instances directly, giving them a bit more prominence and a wider stage to play out on. On the whole, this is a fairly minor quibble, but it would have been nice to get some more face-eating action on page.

What action does make it to the page, though, and there is plenty, is highly entertaining. Eat the Rich is more Mars Attacks than in terms of alien invasion concepts, and Miller's focus is more on fun than extrapolations of sociopolitical dynamics. This isn't a book that will change the world, and maybe that's a good thing. After all, one person's utopia is another's dystopian nightmare.

[Note: I received an advanced print copy of this title from the publisher, Hindered Souls Press. It came delivered in a biohazard specimen bag, as somebody at this small press publisher is clearly a marketing genius. Alas, no bones or tissue samples were included.]

No rich people were harmed in the writing of this review.



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Review: Halcyon by Rio Youers

Halcyon: A Thriller

By Rio Youers






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Halcyon is my first novel-length exposure to Rio Youers, although I had previously read only a single short story from him in the anthology Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror. In fact, it was that short story that made me eager to read more of Youers work, and Halcyon served as an excellent introduction to his long-form writing. I suspect, though, that a simple WOW! isn't quite satisfactory enough for a review, but it encapsulates my feelings perfectly.

For the first 30-50%, Halcyon is a bit of a dual narrative that ultimately meets in the middle. On one hand, you have a cult whose members are carrying out unrelated terror attacks in various American locales. On the other hand, you have Martin Lovegrove and his family, who are doing their best to cope with daughter Edith's night terrors. Her night terrors, in fact, are premonitions of violent incidents linked to Mother Moon's cult activities. As the story progresses, and without spoiling the nitty gritty of it all, Martin's family and Mother Moon's cult grow inextricably entwined.

Rio's writing is top-notch, and his storytelling prowess is honed to a knifepoint's edge, cutting bone deep at times. He lulls you in with a naturalistic style, and builds up his characters in ways subtle enough that even minor events carry the strength of a powder-keg's blast, but when he really goes for the heart and soul it's with unflinching brutality. Halcyon gave me two particular moments of tragedy in which I had to set the book down for a bit in order to regroup; it's been a while since a book has done that to me on an emotional-level, so huge kudos to Youers for that.

Beyond his excellent character work, I absolutely loved the concept of Mother Moon's cult, which felt perfectly real to me, as well wholly understandable, even a little bit sympathetic. Building off present-day American politics and disillusionment I could, perhaps too easily, believe why people would want to escape to Halcyon and Moon's promise of a simpler, back-to-basics lifestyle. It's more than tempting to leave behind our world of daily mass shootings and the instant-rage machine of social media to live off the grid on an idyllic island retreat, free of the daily grind, where you can reconnect with your family, know your neighbors, and enjoy the beauty of nature. Of course, there is that bit of fine print warning you to be careful what you wish for and if it sounds too good to be true, well then...

This is a book that's packed with suspense, tragedy, several moments guaranteed to ramp up your blood pressure, and plenty of horror from both the supernatural kind and the all too-real world around us. I really cannot recommend it enough, and I think this is a title that is just as deserving, if not more so, than some of this summer's much-hyped reads. Halcyon perfectly balances moments of soul-crushing despair with uplifting hope, reminding us that even in our darkest moments there's still some light to be found if only we look hard enough.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher, St. Martin's Press, via NetGalley.]



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