Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 18

Review: The Nightmare Room (The Messy Man Book 1) by Chris Sorensen

The Nightmare Room (The Messy Man Series) (Volume 1)

By Chris Sorensen






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A narrator of more than 200 audiobooks and author of the middle-grade book, The Mad Scientists of New Jersey, Chris Sorensen make his horror novel debut with Book 1 in The Messy Man series, The Nightmare Room.

After moving back to his hometown to care for his sick father, Pete and Hannah Larson move into an old farmhouse with more than its fair share of problems. The stairs going to the second floor are slightly crooked, the third step to the basement poses a hazard, and rowdy teenagers have been using the abandoned homestead for raucous parties. It's also inhabited by an unwelcome occupant Pete comes to know as The Grey Man, a malevolent spirit with a sinister past.

Sorensen draws from his own experiences as a narrator with Pete, who assembles his recording booth in his new home's basement and begins to notice strange artifacts in the audiobook files he's working on. Having a horror author as the everyman at the center of a horror novel is a common, well-worn trope, and I have to admit that having a children's audiobook narrator as our main protagonist is a nice change of pace, and a timely one at that given the rise in popularity of services like Audible. Sorensen gives us a nice insider's glimpse at narration without getting bogged down in the details.

The heart of The Nightmare Room, though, is one of tragedy and loss. On top of dealing with a sick father and a mother stricken with dementia, the Larson's are struggling to cope with the recent loss of their son. Sorensen weaves various strands of familial grief throughout his narrative, tackling each of its different permutations with an honesty that is sometimes raw but never saccharine.

The human component of The Nightmare Room is strong, and it's because of this that the elements of horror work so well. Sorensen fleshes out the Larson's so well, Pete in particular, that we can't help but feel for his plight when the surprises start coming and the farmhouse begins to awaken. Simply put, The Nightmare Room is a surprisingly strong haunted house story and a heck of a horror debut for Sorensen. This is an author with some serious chops, and he paints a number of vivid scare scenes. It's safe to say I won't be able to look at a child's drawings quite the same way after some of this book's segments.

The Nightmare Room was a gripping read, one that kept me glued to my Kindle, Kindle app, and Kindle Cloud Reader the whole way through. I finished this book in two days, a genuine rarity for me these days given all the constraints on my time and limited hours I have for reading anymore. Once I sank into this book, though, I made the time and got sucked into it rather deeply. It's one of my favorite reads of the year thus far, and Sorensen is officially on my list of authors to watch out for. I'm not sure how much elasticity the central conceit of The Messy Man series ultimately has or how many books are planned, but I'm definitely game to find out.

Filled with a number of well-drawn characters and several terrific fright scenes, The Nightmare Room impressed the hell out of me. This is a lock all the doors, keep all the lights on creepfest that will keep you reading late into the night.



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Review: Jimbo Yojimbo by David W. Barbee

Jimbo Yojimbo

By David W Barbee






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Imagine Fallout as written by Anthony Bourdain drunk off his ass on Saki while communing with the ghost of Kurosawa and you'll have a pretty good idea of the vibe and flavor David W. Barbee is aiming for with Jimbo Yojimbo.

A thousand years ago, the world was decimated by a plague of frogs. Bushido Budnick, an immortal master chef and insane scientist, saved the human race and rules the planet through his famous fast-food Buddha Gump Shrimp Company. Five years ago, Jimbo Yojimbo and his father waged war against Budnick and his army of mutant crawdad warriors. They failed, and Jimbo lost his freedom while his father lost his head. Rotting in Budnick's prison, Jimbo is spurred on by the ghost of his father to escape and declare revenge. Oh, and Jimbo has also been surgically altered by Budnick and has had his face replaced with a cephalopod.

Jimbo Yojimbo is a surprisingly straight-forward post-apocalyptic, hillbilly samurai actioneer. Once free of Budnick's prison, Jimbo goes on a sword-swinging killing spree to take down the man who took everything from him. Barbee delivers plenty of mayhem and bloodshed against a number of varied mutant creations, all set against a weird world overpopulated with frog and frog-like creatures. There's plenty of inanities and strangeness in Barbee's violent, southern-fried story, but to his credit he plays it all straight, which works well and helps keep the more whackadoo stuff grounded.

While the samurai elements were certainly engaging, one of my favorite parts of the book was Barbee's creativity in crafting a number of Southern-Asian fusion dishes, like egg-drop gumbo, jambalaya rolls, and various unnatural sushi concoctions washed down by Buddhaweiser beer. They're fun, if minor, elements to the story, but they help illustrate Budnick's constant tinkering. When he's not rejiggering a little girl's skull with cybernetics, he's scouring his pantry and cobbling together fresh, innovative recipes to keep his fast food chain hopping.

Budnick has created an entire world around his peculiarities and strangeness, and Barbee does a great job populating the landscape with various factions of redneck pirates, sell-swords, and bookish cultists, giving us a rich, diverse region that's both odd and insanely dangerous and as familiar and comforting as country gravy. It's a weird, heady, highly unique combination. It's also entertaining as all get-out. Jimbo Yojimbo was my first experience with David Barbee's work, and with Bizarro fiction in general, and I can tell you right now I'll be searching out more of what he has to offer.



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Review: The Hunger by Alma Katsu

The Hunger

By Alma Katsu






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


With The Hunger, Alma Katsu does for the doomed Donner party what Dan Simmons did for the Franklin Expedition in his massive work, The Terror, giving the ill-fated cross-country voyage a supernatural twist while maintaining historical authenticity (well, to a degree anyway).

In May 1846, a group of American pioneers set out for California in a wagon train led by George Donner and James Reed. Their journey was beset by a number of problems and delays, which ultimately caused them to be stuck in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada during the start of an early and very harsh winter, and with barely any supplies left. Starving and stranded, the travelers wee forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.

Or did they?

Katsu gives the historical record a slight twerk, and while she works tightly within the confines of what we know of the Donner party she still manages to deliver an interesting alternative, threading in a fine line of horror that weaves its way through the expedition and culminates in a savage finale. The Hunger is a slow-burn work of quiet horror, one that draws on Native American folklore to deliver moments of hearty suspense in several well-depicted scenes of terror.

What makes the horror truly effective, though, is the cast of characters Katsu focuses on. The supernatural threat is well depicted, but the Donner party itself is a microcosm of horrors and threats all its own. Taking a group of people and thrusting them into a situation, in this case a months-long journey, that slowly breaks down and decays their trust in one another is fraught with its own perils. Tacking on a mysterious horror lurking in the dark, stalking them across the plains and the Great Salt Lake Desert and up into the snowy, impassable mountains of the Sierra Nevada only serves to amplify the frayed nerves of both the Donner party and readers alike.

While I dug the heck out of The Hunger and appreciate its gentle reminder that I really do need to read more works of historical horror in this vein, I do wish Katsu had spent more time on the grislier affairs this expedition is best known for. An awful lot of anticipation is built toward these travelers' final months, and while it's all very necessary and quite well-told, we're short shrifted by the time December and January 1847 roll around. I will admit, though, that I am a bit of a gore hound, and one that has perhaps been spoiled by small press horror titles that aren't afraid to dive headlong into the darkness. I found myself wondering what Jack Ketchum would do with this book's climax, and I wish Katsu would have been more willing to deliver on the depravity she'd spent so long building toward. I really wanted to see her dig into the blood and guts of it all and get her hands filthy. After nearly 300+ pages, the finale is too much telling and not enough showing, and feels practically weightless in light of all that came before.

This reservation aside, though, The Hunger was ultimately satisfying despite a climax that didn't forcefully enough deliver on the promise of Alma Katsu's premise. Had there been more pages devoted to exploring and fleshing out the last few grisly months of the Donner party, this could have easily been a five-star read for me. In the end, it feels like too much was glossed over for the sake of playing it safe, which is unfortunate to say the least. Still, the characters are superb and have engaging histories, and there are some worthwhile shocks along the way that give The Hunger plenty of intrigue to keep the pages turning.

[Note: I received an ARC of this title from the publisher.]



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Review: The Rising: Author's Preferred Edition by Brian Keene [audiobook]

The Rising: Author's Preferred Edition

By Brian Keene






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When I first read The Rising five years ago, I didn't much care for it. Here's why: early on in Brian Keene's zombie adventure, we discover that it's not just humans that can become reanimated. Animals are fair game for zombification, too, and the demonic Siquissim that possess Earth's corpses give all these zombies the ability to talk. This means that in addition to talking zombie humans, we also get talking zombie fish and talking zombie lions. My first encounter with these creatures seriously disrupted my suspension of disbelief. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a talking fish was enough to take me right out of this zombie novel.

Over the last few years, though, as the book marinated in my psyche and I've become a regular listener of Keene's podcast and privy to the stories and behind-the-scenes discussions he's given us about his books and influences, I grew tempted to give The Rising another shot. Joe Hempel's narration of the audiobook edition sealed the deal. I love Joe (necessary disclaimer: I like Joe so much that I hired him to narrate my own novel, Mass Hysteria), and given the fandom and devotion surrounding The Rising, it was time to give it a second chance.

Boy am I glad I did! In fact, knowing what to expect out of this book helped me enjoy it a heck of a lot more. My prior reading gave me the inside track on what's what here, and without any jarring surprises, like a talking fish, to snap me out of the reading I was able to really sink into the narrative and accept it for what it is. And what it is is a heck of a lot of dark, occasionally silly, pulpy fun.

Keene's conceit for the zombie apocalypse is a nifty one. A Large Hadron Collider-like bit of science opens up a portal between this world and The Void, allowing the evil Siquissim entry into our dimension where they take up residence in our recently dearly departed. When a person shuffles off their mortal coil and their soul escapes the confines of the flesh and blood, a Siquissim takes its place. This is a zombie apocalypse by way of demonic possession and cosmic horror, and it's an interesting, original take on the end of the world as we know it.

At the core of all this is our every-man hero, Jim, who just wants to make it to New Jersey to save his son. He's joined along the way by other survivors, but when a rogue platoon of National Guardsmen begin rounding up and enslaving folks, it's only a matter of time before everybody is set on a collision course. There's an urgency to Jim's situation, and the perils he faces on his road-trip serve to heighten the tension. Keene makes you feel his desperation as the clock ticks down, right from the opening chapter. I was surprised at just how emotionally resonant and earnest our introduction to Jim was, and Keene is sure to pull on our heartstrings every now and then, reminding us of the humanity of our small band of survivors even as he grips us in moments of true despair and shocking violence.

Joe Hempel's narration is strong throughout, and I particularly liked the affectations he gave to the zombies, particularly Ob, the malevolent leader of the Siquissim. He voices each character well, providing enough subtle distinction and occasional accents or tones that each line of dialogue is unique to each speaker. Hempel's narration is top-notch, and his reading makes for a truly compelling listen. He's a great fit to Keene's sensibilities, and I'm looking forward to listening to his reading of City of the Dead next.

While the text is the Author's Preferred Edition, I think it's safe to say the audiobook is my own preferred edition. Listening to Joe Hempel's reading of Brian Keene's Bram Stoker Award-winning debut horror novel was a terrific amount of fun, and it gave me a new appreciation for the work as a whole.



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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