Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 16

Review: The Detained by Kristopher Triana

The Detained

By Kristopher Triana

Publisher: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing 

ISBN-10: 1943720266 | ISBN-13: 978-1943720262

112 pages

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Kristopher Triana's The Detained is a bit like a haunted house (or in this case, haunted school) version of The Breakfast Club. Child psychologist Phoebe arrives at Bonneville High for her 20th reunion, to find only four other attendees locked with her inside the cafeteria and a grisly array of keepsakes pointing toward a student who each had wronged in various ways back in 1996.

At the outset, I wasn't quite sure where The Detained was heading, and, sadly, I found myself disappointed that it ended up in supernatural territory. For me, the paranormal aspects initially felt a bit tacked on and too easy an answer. When all of the trapped alumni began to immediately seize upon the reality of their haunted cafeteria, I expected Triana to offer up a bigger and badder plot twist to redirect the story. Unfortunately, that twist never came. The haunted cafeteria plot, and the easy willingness of these former classmates to accept a ghostly foe, felt too convenient for me. I wanted a bit more depth and struggle, and for Triana to juke instead of jive, to lead us one way and then pull the rug out from under our feet with a grander reveal.

The Detained is certainly well written, and Triana puts his talents on display here, despite the story feeling a bit too basic, a bit too run of the mill. While it's an entertaining story to be sure, it just doesn't quite go far enough to make itself memorable. It's enjoyable enough, but not as ultimately satisfying as it should have been.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, and I would like to thank Max Booth III for the opportunity to read this work.]



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Review: Quilt: A Story of Dark Horror by Dan Padavona

Quilt: A Story of Dark Horror

By Dan Padavona






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After one of her students disappears from class, inner-city high school teacher Annalise is bound and determined to discover why. Jadyn is a surprisingly successful student from the Jasmine Heights ghettos, a slum that has only produced four graduates over the course of several decades. While everyone else is content to chalk up Jadyn's absence as nothing more than a typical drop-out, Annalise is hopeful. She ventures into the heart of Jasmine Heights, to a part of the city she's been warned away from, a city block where not even police or gangs feels safe enough to tread, and into the lair of the Halloween man, who haunts the slums as a murderous urban legend...or who may perhaps be something else altogether.

Dan Padavona does a great job giving us a heroine to root for in Annalise. She's sympathetic and stubborn, willing to defy the school's administration to do what she believes is right by her students. She's an endearing figure, even as her hard-headedness puts her directly in the path of danger. I spent this whole novella rooting for her, and the author portrayed her fish out of water, outsider status rather effectively.

It's in the creation and execution of the Halloween man where Padavona really excels. Although the gritty urban streets and status of legend that surround the Halloween man give Quilt a serious Candyman vibe - a tone I suspect Padavona happily played up in the naming of his character - this novella's second half goes for broke in some truly hair-raising sequences that gave me a serious case of the creepy-crawlies. Once he stands revealed, the Halloween man is a nicely depraved and bloodthirsty creation of horror with heck of an MO.

Quilt is a solid read, even if it does recall a number of other similar stories in reader's minds and displays its influences rather openly. While it feels too much like a composite of other works of horror, it is at least highly readable and engaging. I absolutely had to know what was going to happen next, what would follow on the next page, and what, exactly, lurked around the corner, in the dark, waiting for me. Having bought this as a 99c new release, I can positively state I certainly got my money's worth. As a reader new to Padavona, I can also say Quilt was a fine introduction to this author and I'm curious to explore his other stories in short order. Mission accomplished, Mr. Padavona. Bonus points for the slick, highly effective cover art from Kealan Patrick Burke!



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MASS HYSTERIA Audiobook Giveaway

Last month, my extreme splatterpunk novel, Mass Hysteria, narrated by the wonderful Joe Hempel, was listed as a finalist in Horror in the first annual Audiobook Listeners Choice Awards. So, how about a giveaway to celebrate?

First, a warning! Mass Hysteria has some pretty graphic depictions of violence against children and animals. There's a reason so many reviewers have called this book "brutal" since it was released last August. If you're a long-time fan and reader of hardcore horror, then this one is for you! I have three (3) US Audible Mass Hysteria codes to giveaway. To enter for your chance to win one of these codes, do one (or more for additional entries!) of the following:

1. Save and Share this image promoting Mass Hysteria on social media. Be sure to tag me!
2. Save and Share this image promoting Broken Shells on social media. Be sure to tag me!
3. Purchase a copy of Broken Shells in ebook or print and e-mail me a copy of your receipt.
4. Purchase a copy of Mass Hysteria in ebook or print and e-mail me a copy of your receipt. 
5. Leave an honest verified purchase review for any one of my titles on Amazon and e-mail me the link to your review.

If you're sharing the images, tag me and make sure your posts are set to public so I can see them!
Twitter - @MikeH5856
Instagram - mphicks79
Facebook - Michael Patrick Hicks

And be sure to e-mail me those receipts and verified purchase reviews at mphicks@michaelpatrickhicks.com.

Be aware that these giveaway codes are valid for US Audible users only.

Contest runs until March 16, 2018.

Be sure to vote in the 2018 ABR Audiobook Listener Awards! Just click this image to head to the polls.

To find out more about Mass Hysteria, click here.

Review: Widow's Point by Richard Chizmar and Billy Chizmar

Widow's Point

By Richard Chizmar, Billy Chizmar






My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I suspect I'm going to be the odd-man out on this one for a bit...

I'd been looking forward to Widow's Point for a while, having ordered the limited edition hardcover (which is beautiful, by the way), and then bought the Kindle edition for reading. I'm not disappointed in these purchases, mind you, but I also think I may have had my hopes raised a bit too high by all the advance praise. This particular book has a lot of love from so many other readers that I know, interact with, and trust, so this is probably just a case of 'it's not you, it's me.'

Richard Chizmar, co-writing here with his son Billy, can most certainly write, there's no doubt about that. Everything I've read of Richard's work leaves me content knowing that he has talent and style to spare. His success in the wake of Gwendy's Button Box, where he shared a co-writing credit with the one and only Stephen King, is well-deserved and much-earned, make no mistake about it.

Widow's Point is certainly very well written, but it also treads a heck of a lot of well-worn ground.

Thomas Livingston is a famous author who's made his bread writing nonfiction accounts of encounters with the supernatural. His latest endeavor sees him spending a weekend in solitary confinement within the mysterious lighthouse Widow's Point, named such due to the number of lives and ship's lost off the rocky Nova Scotia coast it's situated upon. The lighthouse has enough history to make it an urban legend, and more than its fair share of dead families and curious visitors lying in its shadows.

Framed as a found footage narrative (I swear, I've read at least three found footage stories over the last year in various anthologies...), the Chizmar's recount Livingston's weekend by way of audio transcriptions and video description. This gives us an intimate point-of-view and we experience Widow's Peak directly through the eyes and words of Livingston himself as he's physically and psychologically put through his paces over the course of a July weekend.

If any of this sounds even the least bit familiar, well, that's because it is. Widow's Point is a capable story with a strong in-your-face narration, but it lacks any shred of originality. If you've read any previous haunted house story, you've pretty well read Widow's Point. You know the beats and you know the encounters, and it all occurs according to spec, each segment coming in right on time like a well-engineered train schedule. This sucker is one trope-heavy novella, and each one gets trotted out with unsurprising regularity in machine-like fashion. There's no surprises to be had, no shocks to the system. By the time I hit the end of the book, it was with a shrug and a mental, "That's it, huh?"

At the end of the day, this is a well written ghost story, but it's made hollow by its familiarity. On the other hand, the limited edition hardcover sporting Francois Vaillancourt nearly-monochromatic artwork of skulls in the sky surrounding Widow's Peak is gorgeous and a nice addition to my bookshelf. I certainly cannot complaint about that.



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Review: Haunted Nights: A Horror Writers Association Anthology Edited By Lisa Morton And Ellen Datlow

Haunted Nights

Anchor






My rating: 3 of 5 stars


My original HAUNTED NIGHTS: A HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION ANTHOLOGY audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Co-edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, Haunted Nights: A Horror Writers Association Anthology presents 16 original Halloween-themed short stories from authors Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, Stephen Graham Jones, Kelley Armstrong, Paul Kane, and plenty more. Each story is read by a different narrator, giving this anthology a wide range of flavors and vocal styling that keep the pace fresh over the course of nearly 12 hours.

As far as the content goes, I often find anthologies to be a mixed bag and this is no exception. The audio production end is strong throughout and the narrators give fine readings for each of their segments, so I have no quibbles on that end of things. However, a number of the stories contained herein struck me as largely forgettable. Still, there are a handful of standouts. Stephen Graham Jones delivers an awesome ghost story in “Dirtmouth,” and Jonathan Maberry gives us a fun bit of straightforward culinary revenge in “A Small Taste of the Old Country.” Garth Nix’s “The 17-Year Itch” provides a cool story of possession in a prison setting – I thought I had this one figured out from the beginning but was pleasantly surprised to find out I was wrong. “The Turn” by Paul Kane gives us a demon’s perspective on Halloween, and John Langan reports on a found-footage movie that may be more documentary than genre fiction in “Lost in the Dark.”

The one aspect I appreciated above all else was the diversity in theme. Plenty of other Halloween-focused anthologies focus mostly, if not entirely, on a familiar, oftentimes whitewashed, North American approach to the holiday, but there’s a nice mix of cultural representation and beliefs from this HWA production. Maberry focuses on Austrian customs while Armstrong delivers a Welsh-based Halloween story. Eric J. Guignard gives us an LA-based Day of the Dead celebration alongside some gang fights in his “A Kingdom of Sugar Skulls and Marigolds” and Elise Forier Edie tells us a story from the perspective of a 19th Century Irish immigrant to New York. John R. Little examines Halloween with a sci-fi speculative bent, as a small group of human survivors living on the moon attempt to recreate the lost traditions of an Earth they never knew in the year 2204.

My chief complaint, though, is that Haunted Nights just isn’t particularly horrifying. There’s some nice ghost stories and plays on familiar horror tropes, but there are no real scares and only a few of the stories dare to approach anything truly horrifying. This anthology is rather placid, with the authors playing it far too safe and refusing to take any risks. Frankly, taken as a whole, this is far too tame for my tastes and I found myself pining for edgier material nearly the whole through.

[Note: Audiobook provided for review by the audiobookreviewer.com]



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Bookstagrams!

I thought I'd share some recent Bookstagrams I've been posting over on Instagram. If you're not already, give me a follow! There's plenty more bookish fun to be had, and more on the way.

A post shared by Michael Patrick Hicks (@mphicks79) on Feb 18, 2018 at 10:56am PST

A post shared by Michael Patrick Hicks (@mphicks79) on Feb 3, 2018 at 9:31am PST

A post shared by Michael Patrick Hicks (@mphicks79) on Jan 20, 2018 at 3:39pm PST

Review: The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum

The Girl Next Door

By Jack Ketchum






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I don't know that I've ever been so completely gutted and repulsed by a book before. The Girl Next Door was a sickening read - it's grim and grimy, and so dark it's a miracle you can even read the words on the page. This is a bleak, bleak, bleak story of child abuse of the worst kind, and just when you think the depictions of imprisonment, assault, and torture cannot get any worse, Ketchum peels back yet one more layer of the onion to draw tears from your eyes. I did not enjoy The Girl Next Door, but I respect the hell out of Jack Ketchum for writing it and it is a masterclass, perfectly executed, powerhouse of a novel. You don't just read The Girl Next Door - you experience it, and if you're really lucky you survive it.

After their parents are killed in a car crash, Meg and her crippled sister Susan are left to the care of their closest kin, an embittered single-mother, Ruth. Ruth has several boys of her own, but anytime her ire rises it is Meg who becomes the focal point of her anger. We learn of their relationship and the repulsive degradation that defines it, as well as the reason for Ruth's aggression toward Meg, through the eyes of 12-year-old David.

I read The Girl Next Door as a part of a buddy read with Sadie, Richard and our Instagram friend, Dani. One point of contention that arose early on was the issue of David himself. Each of us found ourselves angry at the boy, hating him for his complicity by way of inaction, and wishing he would do something, anything, to stop the torment occurring at his neighbor's house. We kept wanting this little 12-year-old, this child, to step up and be the hero, to rise up against the evil adult Ruth and end her. We found ourselves hating him almost as much as Ruth and the rest of Meg's abusers.

This story is horrifying on multiple levels, but knowing that it is based on the very real victimization and murder of Sylvia Likens makes it all the more gut-churning and infuriating. You want so badly to make it stop, and the only comfort seems to be in knowing that this is a fictionalized account, and that Ketchum actually is pulling his punches. While the cases of Meg and Sylvia are comparable, The Girl Next Door, despite it's extreme brutality, is blessedly sanitized (if only barely) from the real-life events it's inspired by. Like Sylvia, Meg is abused by her guardian, the guardian's children, and even other neighborhood children over the course of her captivity.

Our minds struggled to conform and accept the plausibility of all of this. How could this possibly happen? When confronted with the truths inherit in The Girl Next Door, we rebelled and tried to deny, but that's simply impossible. We know better. And we know that the mob mentality that sweeps through the Chandler house and the small New Jersey cul-de-sac they inhabit is entirely all-too plausible. This story is extreme, but it does not exist in a fictional bubble. We wanted to insist that this couldn't happen here, or to us, that we would have been better than David, that we could have and would have stopped Ruth despite the odds against us. Maybe we could and would have. Or maybe, if push came to shove, what truly frightened us most of all was the possibility that we would have been just as indifferent, just as willing to ignore it, as Meg's neighbors. We would have failed her and Sylvia Likens and Kitty Genovese and scores of countless others who are abused and murdered.

The Girl Next Door broke me. But, clearly, it's also given me plenty to think about, and more than enough things to feel. Beneath the brutal violence against Meg and the psychological assault this book wages against its readers, it's a startling and well-realized depiction of the horrors of mob mentality and bystander effect. What makes it so damn chilling is it's realism, it's plausibility. This is not exploitative torture porn, and nobody should read this book for enjoyment or escapism. This is a book designed to make you angry, to drag you out of your comfort zone and infuriate and shatter you completely. What makes it so damn frightening is that, at its core, the demons within these pages are not imaginary monsters but actual human beings. Humans are the worst monsters of all.



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Review: The First One You Expect by Adam Cesare

The First One You Expect

By Adam Cesare






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Tony Anastos is a smug, smarmy, self-involved, low-budget indie horror filmmaker. He and his friend, Burt, make and release low-rent slasher flicks, but when they cross paths with Anna, a sexy minx with dreams of stardom, Tony is struck with a minor epiphany. Anna is his new star, and her glitz and glamour are going to catapult both of them into the big-time. She's his key to creating a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his next film, which will see Anna wow the gore-hounds as a cinema's new, preeminent, slasher villain.

As is the case with prior books from Adam Cesare, particularly Video Night and Con Season, the author's love and affection for the horror genre in all its many forms bleeds through the page. And as with Con Season, you get an authentic insider's feel for the material as Cesare, a former Boston University film student, guides reader's through the behind-the-scenes process of indie film-making. If you've read any of his prior material, or check in with his YouTube channel with any degree of regularity, then you know first-hand just how much a horror buff Cesare is. He knows his stuff and all the various levels of genre fandom, from the low-budget indie flick scene to the sprawling conventions.

All of this is, of course, on display in The First One You Expect, a quick, down-and-dirty horror novella about film-making and the price one may pay, willfully or otherwise, to reach their dreams. Tony's an odd-duck of a character, one that isn't really likable but who is at least depicted honestly. He's not a good guy, but possesses an unusual amount of self-awareness, even as he brushes aside whatever thin, shallow bits of morality remain. He does stupid things and makes plenty of bad decisions over and over again. While he worries about the long-term repercussions of these actions, it's usually not enough to stop him from dreaming big, even if these dreams only serve to dig him a deeper hole. Tony is really his own big bad in this story.

Anna makes a wonderful foil for Tony and Burt, and by book's end I found myself wishing this title were longer than its novella length simply to see more of Anna in action. Like Tony, I wanted to know more about her and get inside her head (an impossibility, as The First One You Expect is confined only to Tony's POV). You can sense a deep sea's worth of story surrounding Anna, even if the story is strictly about Tony's reactions to her. She's a great character, though, and her and Tony's burgeoning work relationship gives this book an edgy noir flavor that I appreciated.

Fun and compulsively readable, The First One You Expect kept me turning the pages, and Cesare's prose is deceptively easy writing that rapidly moves the story along. The ending caught me a bit off guard with its abruptness, and what I wouldn't give for a few more pages to spend in Tony's cynical and bloody world. This is a good one gang!



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Review: Glimpse by Jonathan Maberry

Glimpse: A Novel

By Jonathan Maberry






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Forced to give up her child at the age of sixteen, recovering drug addict Rain now lives a life in the shadows of regret and plagued by nightmares. When she finds herself running extraordinarily late for a job interview, she's discovers she's even later than imagined - Rain has, inexplicably, lost an entire day and has no memory of the twenty-four hours between Thursday and Saturday. Dejected, Rain encounters a mysterious woman on her train ride home who gives her a pair of cracked glasses and then vanishes. When looking through the fractured lens, Rain catches glimpse of people otherwise unseen...including a strange young boy in the company of an even stranger, older man - a man she knows as Doctor Nine, a man who has been haunting her nightmares.

Jonathan Maberry is a hugely prolific author, and one that I wish I could say I've read more of over the years. Although he's perhaps best known for his Joe Ledger series, I've only previously read his zombie stuff, the YA Rot & Ruin series and Dead of Night. I enjoyed those five titles quite a lot, but they did little to prepare me for what to expect here.

Glimpse is a far cry from those zombie thrillers, and Maberry crafts here a complicated, twisty, layered work of horror. I spent a good long while puzzling over how the various pieces and characters fit together while Maberry constructed and slowly built this tapestry of damaged characters and haunting encounters within New York and the strange, ethereal land of The Fire Zone. This is an assuredly more complex story than those earlier, straight-forward zombie pulps. It also has a surprising amount of depth to it, and the amount of information and story within belies the page count. When I say Glimpse feels like a much longer work, I mean this in the best possible sense. This one's a dense little sucker, hefty in its ideas and methodical execution.

Glimpse also feels a heck of a lot like the offspring of Joe Hill's NOS4A2, and I couldn't help but wonder how inspired Maberry was by that earlier work, or if this book would have existed without Hill's influence. There's a lot of commonalities between the two books, circling a number of similar themes and occurrences, and while they share a lot of the same genetic material (a strange villain capable of maneuvering between this world and another by way of a uniquely identifiable classic car, and The Fire Zone is almost a direct inverse of Christmasland), Glimpse stands well enough on its own, and Maberry is certainly comfortable enough in his own authorial skin, for this work to feel similar without being a derivative retread of the other.

At it's core, Maberry is writing about hope and redemption, of fighting for a better life in times of hopelessness. I would have liked to have seen more of the nicely creepy Doctor Nine, but the apocalyptic intonations and mythological folklore baked into the character are absolutely wonderful. Glimpse slowly builds toward a catastrophic, potentially apocalyptic, climax whose scale so terrifyingly casts a huge shadow over the characters that you can't help but feel a foreboding sense of hopelessness. The question then, of course, is how, or even if, Rain and her small support group of recovering addicts, can possibly overcome the all-encompassing terror surrounding them.

It's heady stuff, and Maberry does a remarkable job strumming all the various strings he's pulled together here. Glimpse is loaded with great characters, and I'd be remiss not to mention the tattooed psychic PI, Monk, who deserves a book of his own one day, and some very well depicted moments of fright and terror. All of this is wrapped up in a mind- and time-bending, perfectly executed, package.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley.]



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Review: Weekend Getaway by Tom Deady

Weekend Getaway

By Tom Deady






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've had some crummy weekend getaways in my time, but certainly nothing on par with what John and Rachel Baxter are forced to endure. Rather than spending a romantic weekend repairing their marriage, the two's road-trip gets off to a rocky start when they're followed by a menacing, souped-up black truck to their rental cabin in the woods.

To say much more would be to spoil Tom Deady's fast-paced novella of violence and mayhem, so that's all the synopsis you'll get from me. Weekend Getaway chugs along with eye-watering rapidity, and while the abuse John and Rachel Baxter endure are well depicted it's the emotional element of the work where Deady really shines. John suffers from panic attacks, and filtering the first half of this novella through his paranoid, anxious viewpoint provides a wonderfully charged narrative. I couldn't help but get swept up in John's nightmares, while at the same time questioning their validity and his reliability as a narrator. Deady uses this paranoia to great effect, directing readers toward a specific threat and then an even grander reveal.

I will admit, though, that there were a few specific plot-points and conveniences that very briefly interrupted my willing suspension of disbelief, though. There's a late-game revelation about the nature of the sadistic villain that didn't quite jibe with me and felt like an unnecessary addition. Although this particular aspect didn't entirely work for me, it did nothing to rob me of this story's sheer entertainment value overall. I was pretty well swept up in the Baxters misadventures and curious to see how Deady was going to wrap up everything.

Weekend Getaway is the perfect, breezy, weekend read. It's jam-packed with peril and occasional viciousness, kind of like the Baxter marriage, come to think of it...



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