Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 8
September 14, 2018
September 12, 2018
Review: The Dragon Factory (Joe Ledger #2) by Jonathan Maberry [audiobook]
The Dragon Factory: A Joe Ledger Novel
By Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Only two books in and the Joe Ledger series has become a fast favorite of mine. Maberry effortlessly entwines a wide range of genres - military thriller, horror, science fiction, comic book action - to create an incredibly entertaining and compulsively listenable story.
In The Dragon Factory the extinction clock is ticking, counting down to global genocide. Cyrus Jakoby is a brilliant geneticist, his research building off the horrific medical tests conducted by Nazi scientists in World War II, and he has perfected the ultimate means to deliver the Final Solution and offer the white race complete domination over the Earth. It's up to Captain Joe Ledger and Echo Team to stop them, but time is running out and the Department of Military Sciences are caught off guard, stuck playing catch-up after inter-agency politics prompts the NSA to curtail their investigations.
There's a lot going on in The Dragon Factory and Maberry is an expert wrangler, maintaining almost complete control of the story's various plot threads and its multitude of characters. There's enough 24 and James Bond-style shenanigans and to keep listeners thoroughly engaged. The Jakoby family themselves are practically plucked right out of a Bond flick, with the incestuous albino assassin twins of Paris and Hecate conducting their own secret science experiments on a secluded island research base. Not every story thread gets wrapped up sufficiently (but hey, more fodder for book #3!), and some story elements simply fall by the wayside along the way to larger, more intriguing action sequences until they're briefly revisited and fairly neatly and quickly resolved in the book's epilogue, but taken as a whole The Dragon Factory is consistently good and completely captivating.
Published in 2010, The Dragon Factory feels less outlandish today than it may have at the start of this decade, as some of its more seemingly implausible aspects have been fulfilled in reality in only a handful of years. Take, for instance, the subject of white supremacists manipulating and controlling the White House and various government agencies, plotting to destroy the world by poisoning Earth's waters. Certainly this seemed more far-fetched in 2010, but here we are in 2018 with a band of white supremacists in the Oval Office, passing bills allowing our waters to be poisoned by mining waste and appointing the enemies of various government agencies to lead those very same agencies, like the EPA, and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, and placing immigrant children in concentration camps, and on and on and on. Sadly, the idea of virulently evil racists plotting to destroy the world from within America and through a network of highly-placed and influential government agents isn't quite the extraordinarily imaginative work of fiction it used to be.
Besides the white supremacist bad guys, Maberry injects a metric ton of cutting edge science and plausible-enough horrors stemming from transgenic experimentation to create superhuman animal hybrids to give Ledger and company a savagely violent run for their money. Using the concept of scientific terrorism to fuel a series also gives Maberry a hell of a lot of elasticity in redefining the shape and scope of various horror genre staples. In Patient Zero, Maberry wrote about a militarized unit's response to the zombie plague. Here, we get rogue government operators, assassins, and a bevy of massive, berserker monsters, alongside a spate of other genre concepts.
It's clear Maberry is having a ton of fun writing this stuff, and his enthusiasm is infectious. The Dragon Factory is awful lot of fun to listen to, and Ray Porter delivers another knock-out reading as he firmly settles into these characters and brings them to life (and in more than a few instances death as well). He manages to make each of the characters distinct, utilizing tonal ranges, inflections, and accents to differentiate Maberry's large cast, always making it clear which character is speaking at any given moment. His is a pitch perfect narration, hitting the highs of each action scene and the softer lows of emotional reflection and devastation. Porter further solidifies the simple fact that he is the definitive voice of the Joe Ledger series, and I can't imagine listeners wanting it any other way.
Patient Zero instantly hooked me, roping me into the thick of things and making me a Joe Ledger devotee. The Dragon Factory shows that this series most certainly has legs, and that it can run for miles. While the action is fast and fluid, this is a series that is more than just muscular brawn - it has a hell of a lot of smarts, too, both on and off the page.
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September 10, 2018
Review: Red War (Mitch Rapp #17) by Kyle Mills
Red War (A Mitch Rapp Novel)
By Vince Flynn, Kyle Mills
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Red War, the seventeenth Mitch Rapp thriller and fourth penned by Kyle Mills, finds the CIA assassin on a mission to execute the Russian president, Maxim Krupin. Recently diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, Krupin has grown ever more unpredictable and uses his final months to further consolidate his power, executing his enemies and political rivals, as he takes the world to the brink of World War III.
As with Tom Clancy before him, Vince Flynn's series has always been rather timely in its reflections on current events. Red War is no different, with Mills setting Krupin's actions and the CIA's response in the wake of Russian hacking efforts to disrupt US elections. One would have to be blind to miss the real-world context Mills uses as a spring broad to launch into his story of black ops and Krupin is most certainly a familiar character right from the book's opening pages.
Described as a president who keeps his citizens blinded with nationalism and memories of his country's glorious past, Krupin's behavior is irrational and erratic, his power built on a platform of lies he has told both enemies and allies in order to erode trust in anyone or anything beyond himself. If Krupin is not immediately recognizable to American readers as a Trump analogue, in addition to an obvious riff on Vladimir Putin, then he is most certainly the kind of dictator the United States's manchild of a president openly worships and models his own behaviors upon. With regular reminders that this physically and mentally ill state-head is in possession of nuclear arms, Krupin is broadcast as a legitimate threat (and by association, his real-world counterparts that so clearly served as an inspiration here) to democratic norms and the safety of the free world.
Mills gives us a nice bit of escapism in Mitch Rapp gunning for Krupin, aided by former Russian assassin Grisha Azarov, who is violently pulled out of retirement to aid the CIA's efforts, particularly after the last several years of the US falling victim to Russian hacking efforts. As Rapp notes at one point, Russia will never be an ally to the US but they can at least be contained. The promise of the CIA delivering justice in fiction is a soothing and necessary, if short lived, balm, especially since our real-world government is content to simply maintain complicity in exchange for power. It's safe to say Mitch Rapp is needed now more than ever.
Mills continues to build on Flynn's characterization of Rapp, as well, helping to move the assassin away from the buffoonish conservative cartoon he was becoming in Flynn's later novels, edging him closer and closer to the methodical and thoughtful man of action audiences were first introduced to in Transfer of Power nearly twenty years ago. Mitch has survived a lot since then; those experiences have helped to both age and wisen him, and he's been a significant player on the global stage. It's refreshing to see Mills break away from the typical Arab threat that has been the backbone for so many of Rapp's stories, moving him into strange and unfamiliar territory with this book's Russian theater of opposition.
Red War arrives at a crucial juncture in American history, and carries with it a decidedly appropriate title. Particularly given that this book's biggest problem, potentially, may lie in convincing those Trump supporters who read it to accept Russia as a legitimate threat, even if only fictionally. Clearly, we've come a long way since the "Better Dead Than Red" days of the Cold War, but with Emily Bestler Books planning national ad campaigns to put Red War in front of the audiences of Fox & Friends and Rush Limbaugh, one must wonder just how receptive they'll be of Mills' very thinly-veiled repudiation of their red hatted leader and their likely-stained "I'd Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat" t-shirts. Are MAGA readers willing to accept government operatives as heroes after being spoonfed so many reports of so-called fake news in regards to Russian meddling in US affairs and attacks on the various justice agencies by their Dear Leader? On the other hand, if the publisher is merely looking for an audience already lost in a fantasy world, you can't do much better than consumer's of Limbaugh and Fox News.
[Note: I received an advance reader's copy of Red War from Emily Bestler Books after being selected as a Mitch Rapp Ambassador. This is my third year as a Mitch Rapp Ambassador, however this status conveyed upon me by the publisher has in no way swayed my opinion of this work or prevented me from delivering an honest review of this title. Many thanks to the publisher for once against selecting me and providing me with this ARC.]
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September 6, 2018
Review: Bay's End by Edward Lorn
Bay's End
By Edward Lorn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
REMINDER: 3 stars on the Goodreads metric means "I liked it" and is in no way, shape, or form a negative rating. And in fact, I did like Bay's End, even as I have some mixed feelings about it.
I believe Bay's End was Edward Lorn's first novel (although I could be wrong!), and it serves as a fine introduction to the town and landscape where a number of his other later works are set. It does have some of the creakiness and odd pacing issues of first novels, but as a coming of age story it also has plenty of heart and honesty, as well as a group of teens worth rooting for, and a clean, easy-going writing style that makes it compulsively readable.
I must note, though, that I came into Bay's End having already read Lorn's incredible novel, The Sound of Broken Ribs, my #1 pick for best book of 2017, and in preparation for his latest release, The Bedding of Boys. While these are each stand alone titles, these initial two books are separated by a number of years wherein Lorn grew tremendously as an author. I don't mean this as a knock, nor do I wish to infer that Bay's End is by any means a bad book. It's actually quite a fine introduction to Lorn's style, a style that he has honed and improved on over the course of his career. We must all being somewhere, though, and Bay's End is a bit of a time capsule in that regard, and a fitting one at that.
The story itself is a time capsule, as a haunted man recalls the summer of 1992. Then, Trey was twelve going on thirteen, and he's made a fast friendship with the new neighbor kid, Eddy, a bond that will last all of Trey's life, long after Eddy's untimely demise. It's a summer of first loves, near-death accidents, and the intrusion of adulthood upon adolescence far too soon. Eddy is foul-mouthed and brash, and after they run afoul of Officer Mack he has the bright idea of tossing cherry bombs into the cop's patrol car. It's a moment that changes the course of these boy's lives forever and embroils them in larger events, sinking them into the meaner, darker secrets hidden in Bay's End.
As I said, I came into Bay's End after The Sound of Broken Ribs and a few of Lorn's other short horror stories, so color me surprised at the total lack of supernatural elements! I admit, I was expecting some kind of monster to rear its ugly head, and while there is definitely a fair share of ugly heads a-rearing, the horrors herein are strictly human. Bay's End, as we discover alongside Trey, has its fair share of dark corners and corrupted souls.
My chief issue with the book, though, comes down to pacing. There were times where it simply felt like the story was moving too fast, and I wanted Lorn to ease off the gas pedal and explore the town and its people a bit more. Instead, we kind of race from one set piece of action to the next and there's not a lot of time to decompress and regroup. Such is the way of those teenage years, though, always on the go, in a hurry to get to the next big thing and rush through it for whatever next big thing lies beyond. As it is, Lorn covers a lot of ground and stumbles across a few unsavory characters along the way, but it also feels like an awful lot of stuff happening too soon.
Mostly, I just wanted to spend more time with Trey, Eddy, Candy, and Sanders. I wanted to see more of their hijinx and eavesdrop on their foul-mouthed and unerringly accurate teenage talks. Adult Trey tells the part of his psyche haunted by Eddy and the ghosts of '92 that this is a story of only a few miles, but I could have gone for a longer journey and wouldn't have minded clocking a few more miles through Bay's End.
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Flame Tree Press Launches Today!
Launching today are the six inaugural titles from Flame Tree Press. Over the last month or so, I've been working my way through advance review copies of these launch titles from Jonathan Janz, Hunter Shea, Tim Waggoner, and Ramsey Campbell.
David Tallerman, and J.D. Moyer are also making their Flame Tree Press debuts with The Bad Neighbor (a crime thriller) and The Sky Woman (sci-fi), respectively. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to dig into those two non-horror releases just yet, as I've had a bit of a time crunch between getting sick, my two boys and my wife getting sick, and the whole lot of us going round-robin again and again with various batches of illnesses cooked up by our daycare's biohazard division. By all means, though, click on through to check out those book's Amazon pages for more information on 'em.
Of the four horror titles I was able to read, though, I was largely impressed with Flame Tree's debut, and I am genuinely looking forward to see how this publisher shapes up in the coming months and years. If this first batch of books is anything to go by, Flame Tree most certainly deserves your support and attention, and I hope they're able to stick around for a good long while. Click on the cover images below to read to my review and visit the link within to purchase your copy of these books from Amazon.
In the coming weeks, I'll have reviews of more forthcoming Flame Tree Press books, including John Everson's The House by the Cemetery and D.W. Gillespie's The Toy Thief. I'll also be circling back around to Tallerman's and Moyer's book, as well. Stay tuned!
You can also find each of these Flame Tree Press reviews collected in the first issue of The Horror Book Review Digest.
This quarterly publication reviews the latest horror novels, novellas, and short stories published by the Big 5, small presses, independent authors and publishers, and emerging voices in horror, as well as less recent, classic, and soon-to-be classic horror titles.
In this debut release, horror author and HWA member Michael Patrick Hicks reviews new releases from Stephen King, CV Hunt, Rio Youers, John Connolly, Mary SanGiovanni, Jonathan Maberry, and Paul Tremblay. This volume also features reviews for each of the six launch titles from Flame Tree Press, a brand-new genre imprint launching in September with titles from Jonathan Janz, Hunter Shea, Ramsey Campbell, and others, as well as Fangoria’s book publishing debut with their title, Our Lady of the Inferno by Preston Fassel. Plus, we take a look back at the classic Jack Ketchum novels, Off Season and The Girl Next Door, as well as Brian Keene’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, and many, many more.
This special first volume of The Horror Book Review Digest features reviews of over 50 books that promise to give you chills and nightmares. Settle in, keep a light on, and find your next read.
September 3, 2018
Review: Doorbells at Dusk: Halloween Stories, edited by Evans Light
Doorbells at Dusk
By Josh Malerman, Evans Light, Jason Parent, Gregor Xane, Adam Light
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Nothing says Halloween quite so much as a new horror anthology devoted to carved pumpkins, witches, ghouls, and murder as we turn toward the darker half of the year. Doorbells at Dusk is a solid entry into the annals of such anthologies, gathering fourteen short stories from a range of the horror genre's talents like Josh Malerman, Amber Fallon, Chad Lutzke, and more.
Doorbells at Dusk showcases a broad range of Halloween horror themes, as well. There are some truly fun and occasionally depraved and psychotic stories (my favorite kind, personally), as well as gentler, spookier slice of life riffs. I always find anthologies to be a mixed bag, and this latest from Corpus Press proves to be no exception. While there a few stories I didn't care for, I still found plenty of others that impressed and delivered exactly what I was looking for in terms of haunting effectiveness and unbridled mayhem. Most of these latter were from authors whose works I've enjoyed in the past, and I found them delivering the best of the bunch here.
Adam Light's "Trick 'Em All" was easily my favorite of this antho. As I said, I like my Halloween stories depraved and bloody, and Light delivers with his story of a psychotic teen receiving messages from his newly carved pumpkin to kill his family. This is a brutal, crazy gorefest and I'll be damned if it wasn't straight up my alley.
Jason Parent serves up a fun little treat as a group of thieves break into the wrong house in "Keeping Up Appearances." Gregor Xane's "Mr. Impossible" is a fun bit of science gone wonky as a neighorhood is drugged and costumers believe they actually are whatever they are dressed as. "Rusty Husky," from Dusk's editor Evans Light, delivers on its premise of revenge on a serial killer in a nastily inventive way that's all about its tricks and treats.
Amber Fallon's "The Day of the Dead" puts a cool little The Twilight Zone spin on Día de los Muertos, one that will definitely make you want to dress up for Halloween this year. Chad Lutzke's "Vigil" goes in an entirely different direction and stands proudly as a bit of the odd man out here. Eschewing the paranormal entirely, Lutzke focuses on a different sort of monstrosity altogether as a stunned and shaken neighborhood gathers to watch the police discover and exhume a score of bodies from an abandoned house. There's no shocks or scares, but Lutzke writes so well, and so honestly, that this small town vignette captivates the whole through. Sean Eads and Joshua Viola present a historical slow-burn work of Halloween horror that good and truly sticks the landing once the full scope of "Many Carvings" atrocities are fully revealed.
Doorbells at Dusk is a welcome addition to the pantheon of Halloween horrors. Not that this is much of a shock, mind you. Evans Light knows how to deliver a great Halloween antho; you don't need to look past any of the three Bad Apples books he co-created to find proof of that, and Doorbells at Dusk serves as further evidence to this claim. Doorbells at Dusk, in fact, is a natural outgrowth from those earlier anthologies, and this one is larger and more diverse in both its stories, their premises, and contributors. Unlike Bad Apples, though, it also seems rather deliberately aimed at a wider, more general audience of horror readers, forgoing the occasionally vulgar, gruesome, splatterpunk sensibilities of its harder-edged, dare to offend cousins. This isn't a bad thing, certainly, but I still found myself wanting Doorbells at Dusk to get a bit meaner and dirtier than its raison d'être permitted. It's safe to say, though, that Light has deftly generated a small library of Halloween attractions to satisfy any number of tastes.
Doorbells at Dusk presents a fine sampling of tricks and treats for readers jonesing for some good and proper seasonal reads as the leaves turn color, a chill sets in, the world turns a little bit darker, and it arrives just in time as the membrane separating this world from another grows thinner and thinner day by day.
[Note: I received an advanced reading copy of this title from the publisher, Corpus Press.]
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September 1, 2018
Review: Patient Zero (Joe Ledger, Book 1) by Jonathan Maberry
Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel
By Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've been meaning to read Jonathan Maberry's Joe Ledger series for a number of years now. Having finally dived into Patient Zero, the first Ledger book, I'm immediately left kicking myself 1) for having waited so long, and 2) because now I have a dozen audiobooks between the core Ledger series, short story collections, and an anthology book involving Maberry's creation that I must proceed to binge posthaste.
Imagine 24 with zombies and you have a very basic understanding of Patient Zero's framework. Joe Ledger is an action hero in the Jack Bauer mold, or maybe John McClane is a more apt comparison given Ledger's tendency to crack wise and spurn authority, up against a ticking clock and a seemingly endless supply of terrorists to confront and kill. What could have been your by-the-book post-9/11 military thriller, though, is elevated to a whole other higher level of bad-assery by a wonderful mixing and intermingling of various other genres.
Maberry introduces us to the Department of Military Sciences (DMS) in a book that leans heavily on its genre tropes but succeeds in making them feel if not entirely original than at least fresh, comfortably familiar, and welcome. Riding high on the success of 9/11, a band of Middle Eastern terror cells within the US are preparing to launch a biological weapons attack that will introduce an unstoppable plague and destroy America. If not for the welcome injection of plenty of high-tech wizardry and terrific horror-based set pieces, Patient Zero could have been just another Vince Flynn clone. Instead, Maberry takes the military technothriller and turns it sideways by forcing a team of special ops point-men (and -women) to confront a horror genre staple. The bioweapon isn't just your run of the mill plague virus, like Ebola, but a genetically engineered plague that can spark a zombie outbreak.
To put it simply, Patient Zero is freaking awesome, and the premise behind it is brilliant. Maberry's taken two of my favorite genres - military technothrillers and horror - and smashed them together into a wonderful, perfectly formed hybrid. This sucker is practically non-stop action; a mid-point set-piece at a warehouse is deliriously violent and intensely claustrophobic, and the story is routinely punctuated with gunplay and fisticuffs galore. In addition to all the brawn and bravura there's a whole lot of brains - and not just the zombie food stuff! Maberry takes the zombie genre and explores it from an honest-to-goodness real world basis. What are the military tactics that would be used to confront such an outbreak? The forensics? The actual science? We spend a lot of time in the field with Ledger and his crew of Echo Team, but Maberry doesn't shy away from all the lab work and biochemistry that goes into giving Patient Zero a grounded, realistic edge to make it all scarily plausible.
It's clear a helluva lot of thought and research went into making Patient Zero a credible thriller, one that's as high in science and combat acumen as it is in horror. Making it even better, though, is Ray Porter's narration. This is my first Porter audiobook, and his reading here is impactful enough to have sold me on the rest of the Ledger series in audio format. This dude is an outstanding narrator and Patient Zero showcases his versatility marvelously. He can really sell the rapid-fire action but it’s in the deeply emotional moments of combat and the resultant fallout from the darker corners of zombie violence Maberry writes where Porter truly shines. He’s incredible to listen to! Porter draws you in with subtlety, gets your blood pumping at the intense highs of a grueling action sequence, and then emotionally devastates you with a perfectly delivered line. He's a seriously phenomenal talent, and in Joe Ledger Maberry writes a multidimensional hero that allows Porter to give a nuanced and multi-layered performance.
Ledger is a smart-ass tough guy, but one who also possesses a highly welcome degree of self-awareness. He understands his propensity for violence and the consequences of his anger. The dude is blessedly in touch with his feelings, something more of our masculine action heroes could do with, and not only regularly meets with his therapist, Rudy Sanchez, but is freaking best friends with the guy! He even encourages the testosterone-laden boys of Echo Team to consult with Rudy and emotionally unload after some particularly nasty encounters. It's absolutely wonderful to see such a positive portrayal of mental health and from an alpha male hero no less. Fantastic work, Mr. Maberry (and thank you).
Patient Zero hit all the right notes for me the whole way through (although I do have some questions about Ledger's military history, which I suspect runs a bit deeper and blacker than is alleged here, but only time will tell), and I positively love the horrifying spin Maberry has given the military thriller. I mean, Jack Ryan and Mitch Rapp are great and all, but they ain't fighting zombies, so Ledger is already at least one step up from those guys. Maberry very well may have just ruined Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn for me in one fell swoop, in fact (but again, only time will tell there, too).
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August 26, 2018
The Horror Book Review Digest: A New Compilation
I've been reading reviews ever since I was kid, primarily film reviews, and writing my own reviews for nearly a decade now, initially as a freelance writer and, later, for my own entertainment. Back in 2010, I began writing reviews of comic book trade collections and graphic novels for Graphic Novel Reporter, before I decided to switch over to writing primarily for own blog and the occasional audiobook review for the Audiobook Reviewer website.
I've always been a fan of reviews and there are a few reviewers I follow religiously, like horror film critic Scott Weinberg, book reviewer Char at Char's Horror Corner, and Sadie Hartmann, aka Mother Horror, who writes for Scream Magazine and Cemetery Dance, to name but a few. Growing up, I was always sure to watch Siskel and Ebert At the Movies, and every Friday morning I was the first one in our house to tear the newspaper apart to get to the Entertainment column for the new movie review columns. I've always loved reading, writing, and movies, and if I could distill all three into one single job I'd have my dream career. Unfortunately, making a living as a critic isn't so easy nowadays, and I've had to forego a professional platform in favor of my own.
However, after reading a bit of Weinberg's independently published compilation of his horror film reviews in MODERN HORRORS: An A to Z of Horror Movie Reviews, I decided to try my own hand at it, but with the focus being exclusively on horror books.
The Horror Book Review Digest is intended to be a quarterly compilation collecting the book reviews I've published here and elsewhere. The bulk of the reviews are centered on recently released and upcoming titles from Big 5 publishers, small presses, and independent authors and publishers, as well as the occasional older title or classic work in the horror genre. Much of this first volume of The Horror Book Review Digest is devoted to 2018 releases, including upcoming titles from Flame Tree Press and Fangoria Presents, two new imprints launching in September.
At only $2.99, purchasing The Horror Book Review Digest is a cheap way for you to show your support for the work I do at this site and for my publishing efforts in general. It's a handy, easily-accessible guide for the latest horror reads, with reviews organized in alphabetical order by author. And yes, each of these reviews are readily available on this site and external sites for free.
Is this a good idea? Frankly, I don't know. I don't know if there's a market for this type of material to begin with, or if people feel my reviews are sufficiently well-written enough to pay me for my time and effort. The Horror Book Review Digest is, first and foremost, an experiment. Maybe it'll succeed, maybe it'll fail. I don't know.
Back in July I ran a Twitter poll that netted some very limited responses, but the results indicated there was a measure of support for this initiative. I also posted a question asking if there was any interest on Facebook, and also as an Instagram story, and again the feedback to both was largely positive. Positive enough, anyway, to convince me it was worth a shot. Now it's time to put those minor bits of market research to the test.
I'm hoping and planning to release a few more volumes like this over the course of 2019 but it all depends on how well this initial book sells, if there's any enthusiasm for this kind of release, and what kind of response I get now that The Horror Book Review Digest is out in the wild. You can buy it right now at the following retailers (iBooks link coming soon!).
Amazon | iBooks | Nook | KoboGoogle Play | SmashwordsAugust 25, 2018
Review: The Devil's Fingers by Hunter Shea
The Devil's Fingers (Hunter Shea: One Size Eats All)
By Hunter Shea
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Rounding out Hunter Shea's trilogy of One Size Eats All novellas is The Devil's Fingers, a story of fungus getting freaky in wonderfully grotesque ways. The primary theme of this trilogy has been mankind struggling to survive against some particularly vicious assaults from Mother Nature, and Shea goes all out in this third entry with some wild and gory set pieces.
Native to Australia, Clathrus archeri, aka the devil's fingers, is a highly exotic fungus that looks like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's wet dreams. Upon reaching maturation, bright red tentacles burst out of an egg, covered in dark green slime. They smell like a rotting corpse, the perfect odor to lure in flies to carry off fungal spores so that the devil's fingers can reach ever and ever farther.
When a group of hikers stumbles across a mutant strain of Clathrus archeri deep in the woods of Washington, the plan to spread the ashes of one of their companion's recently deceased father becomes an insane battle for survival.
Shea wastes no time getting straight to the creepy point as the hikers become infected and rapidly fall victim to the devil's fingers, pushing each of them to the brink of both mental and physical collapse, straining their bonds, and driving them ever deeper into a hellacious nightmare scenario.
The Devil's Fingers gorgeous cover immediately sets one's expectations for the story within, and Shea delivers an almost pitch-perfect round of craziness, and the strongest entry in the One Size Eats All series. The plot and characters are a bit flimsy, and there are maybe one or two more names bandied about than there needs to be given their thin development and the short page count, but it's an minor complaint since most of these people exist solely to become fungus fodder. And sweet, stinky, glorious fodder they are!
Take another look at this book's cover because what you see is what you get. If you like that image of ornery tentacles bursting out of some rando's torso, then you're gonna love this one. Me, I'm a sucker for this type of story. A group stuck in the woods, cut off from civilization, stumbling upon their own brutal, insane deaths? Count me in! Make their means of destruction something natural, like a plant or fungus, and you've got me by my wallet for sure. Hunter Shea is one of the most consistently reliable writers of fun creature-feature horror, and he delivered exactly what I wanted in The Devil's Fingers - ruthless natural horror, a high body count that never skimps on the gore, and an overriding sense of hopelessness balanced against man's indomitable fight for survival no matter the odds. Lean and mean, The Devil's Fingers held me tight in its grip the whole way through.
[Note: I received an advanced reading copy of this title from the publisher, Kensington, via NetGalley.]
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August 23, 2018
Review: Our Lady of the Inferno by Preston Fassel
Our Lady of the Inferno
By Preston Fassel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Following the death and subsequent resurrection of horror film magazine Fangoria by the Dallas-based entertainment firm Cinestate, it was announced that not only was the magazine returning to print as a quarterly publication, but that Fangoria was to become a media franchise all its own. Under new ownership, the brand is to branch out into podcasts, film production (it's first film in this new role, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich premiered recently on VOD and with a limited theatrical run), and book publishing. The first book to see print under the Fangoria Presents banner is Preston Fassel's Our Lady of the Inferno, a 1983 New York serial killer thriller.
A Houston-based author, Fassel has written for Scream Magazine, Rue Morgue, and will be a staff writer for Fangoria when the magazine relaunches in October. Although he is a Texas native, Fassel convincingly brings to life the grime and squalor of early-80s Manhattan and the red light district of 42nd Street, an area known as The Deuce. Our Lady of the Inferno captures the seediness of Time Square prior to the area's revitalization and rehabilitation as a tourist-friendly destination, giving readers front-row seats in run-down theaters playing second-rate horror flicks where prostitutes trade blowjobs for quick cash, to the graffiti tagged hallways of the Motel Misanthrope where heroine junkies shoot up in the stairwells and the daytime streetwalkers of 42nd live, breathe, and work.
Damn never every single page of Our Lady of the Inferno radiates a seedy grittiness of the era, so much so one might be inclined to check for an STD on the off-chance you've caught something simply from reading this book. This sucker bleeds atmosphere, but it also has a surprising bit of heart at its dark core.
In a book involving prostitutes and a psychotic, religiously-motivated serial killer, it would have been all too easy to write a story that was all sex and violence, with various bodily fluids soaking these pages from one deviant act after another. And while there's a fair amount of dirtiness herein, much of that comes from how realistically Fassel has written this by-gone period of New York history. Rather than focusing primarily on the titillating, Fassel instead leans hard into the characters, sparing readers the violence and carnage for the vast majority of this title's page count (but make no mistake, when the story does take a turn for the violent, it does so with remarkable brutality).
Our Lady of the Inferno is a slow-burn, ultra-methodical study of its lead women. Ginny Kurva is a prostitute, yes, but that's hardly the be-all, end-all to her existence. Nicolette Aster is a vicious and insane killer, but the degrees of her mental instability are striking. Fassel presents each of these women and then slowly, piece by piece, deconstructs them to show us what makes them tick, revealing all their various facets, their virtues and their flaws, and most certainly their sins.
Ginny trades her body for money, but she's far from the stereotypical portrayal of a New York whore. She's got smarts from both the streets and her years in college. She loves movies and books, and prizes education in both herself and others. She's hardly the Hollywood-standard hooker with a heart of gold, though; she's manipulative, and when angry her rage burns with a red-hot intensity. Prepared for any potential violence that may flare up without warning, she is both victim and victimizer, but through it all there runs a strong undercurrent of empowerment for both herself and for the other women in her life.
A similar vein of empowerment is at the core of Nicolette, as well, and it's striking the ways in which she acts as a mirror image to Ginny. If Ginny owns the day, then the night belongs to Nicolette. And while Ginny attempts to improve the lives of her fellow prostitutes, Nicolette is hellbent on destroying them, hunting them down and carving them apart, limb from limb, joint by joint. That these two women are on a collision course is a no-brainer, but Fassel spends so much time studying each of them, building them up, that by the time they meet head-on you fully understand how much is at stake and what each of them has to live, or die, for.
I will admit, I was fairly surprised by Our Lady of the Inferno; Fassel delivered a story that was a great deal different than I had expected, particularly given the Fangoria branding. I was expecting something much more rapid-fire, chock full of gore and violence and sex, and while each of those do appear in fair doses throughout, I was initially caught a bit off-guard by the focus and commitment to characters. Our Lady of the Inferno is not a piece of disposable slasher horror, or a check-your-brain-at-the-door riff on B-movie pulps. Possessing an intriguing amount of literary depth, it's far smarter than that, and far more astute in its capturing and subsequent rendering of a specific time and place and the characters that inhabit it. Fassel presents several moments of fascinating horror, but its the long and extended moments of quietude, the moments of heart and fellowship and the struggles of daily living, and the amount of research that clearly went into giving this labor of love its necessary and invaluable credibility, that truly make it something special and unique. Our Lady of the Inferno is not simply about the horrors of a meeting a deranged killer in a dark alley, but about the horrors of life itself, the horrors of personal inner-demons, the horrors of the day to day that each of us burn alive in.
[Note: I received an advance reading copy of this title from the publisher, Fangoria.]
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