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Jon Richter's Disturbing Works, Volume Two: Another Collection Of Dark Stories
Another compendium of delightfully macabre stories by Jon Richter, author of Deadly Burial and Never Rest. Jon's first short fiction collection was described as 'Black Mirror meets Tales Of The Unexpected', and here he brings you another chilling assortment of twisted tales encompassing killer creatures, terrifying technology, and scientific experiments gone horribly wrong... These dark fables are perfect for anyone who likes their reads short, shocking, and laced with a dash of black humour.
- GenresShort StoriesHorror
277 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 31, 2019
2 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
Jon Richter
16 books41 followersJon Richter writes dark fiction in a variety of genres, including critically acclaimed crime thrillers, horror, science fiction and fantasy. His novels include gripping whodunnit mystery Rabbit Hole, psychological techno-thriller The Warden, the disturbing illustrated collection of short horror stories DARK FICTION, and his latest release, the fantasy epic Scarred.
He hails from the northwest of England but now lives in London with his (extremely patient) wife, and loves immersing himself in all things dark and sinister, whether that's books, films, music, video games or even board games – any way to tell a great story! As well as writing, he co-hosts two podcasts: the dark fiction podcast, Dark Natter, and the cyberpunk podcast, Hosts In The Shell, which you can find wherever you get your podcast fix.
He also develops video games and recently released his debut game, a comedy horror RPG called Reanimation Ltd, which you can download here: https://jonrichter.itch.io/reanimatio....
If you want to chat to him about any of this, you can find him on Twitter @richterwrites, Bluesky @jonrichter, or Instagram @jonrichterwrites. His website haunts the internet at www.jon-richter.com, and you can find his books available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2OXXRVP.
He hails from the northwest of England but now lives in London with his (extremely patient) wife, and loves immersing himself in all things dark and sinister, whether that's books, films, music, video games or even board games – any way to tell a great story! As well as writing, he co-hosts two podcasts: the dark fiction podcast, Dark Natter, and the cyberpunk podcast, Hosts In The Shell, which you can find wherever you get your podcast fix.
He also develops video games and recently released his debut game, a comedy horror RPG called Reanimation Ltd, which you can download here: https://jonrichter.itch.io/reanimatio....
If you want to chat to him about any of this, you can find him on Twitter @richterwrites, Bluesky @jonrichter, or Instagram @jonrichterwrites. His website haunts the internet at www.jon-richter.com, and you can find his books available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2OXXRVP.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 9, 2020
This is a collection of 10 deliciously dark short stories.
There’s a mix of the grotesque, creepy and monstrous tales each with a marvellous twist and some really dark humour, which really appealed to me. That giggle of fear and the unexpected.
Dark, disturbing and thoroughly entertaining. Brilliant.
Thank you to Blackthorn Tours for the opportunity to take part in this blog tour, for the promotional material and a free copy of the ebook. This is my honest and unbiased review.
There’s a mix of the grotesque, creepy and monstrous tales each with a marvellous twist and some really dark humour, which really appealed to me. That giggle of fear and the unexpected.
Dark, disturbing and thoroughly entertaining. Brilliant.
Thank you to Blackthorn Tours for the opportunity to take part in this blog tour, for the promotional material and a free copy of the ebook. This is my honest and unbiased review.
March 9, 2020
The first thing I have to say about Disturbing Works volume 2 is that after reading it I need to get my hands on Volume one. These 10 short stories both shock and horrify as we are plunged into what feels like a realistic nightmare. I was hooked from the first story where something as believable as a garbage strike springboards into a tale of corruption, murder and monsters.
There are stories of mythical creatures, medical breakthroughs that go horribly wrong, which I suppose is to be expected when one has the option to be injected with animal DNA to address human weaknesses or aging. The scariest factor for me was my belief that in reality if such medical treatment became available there would be people willing to try it. Have you ever watched any of those Urban Exploration videos online or maybe even considered exploring an abandoned place on your own? I have watched a few and often thought it might be exciting to join in but the story Urbex cured me of that desire. Sometimes abandoned places are best left to decay in peace. John Richter's writing is smooth and expressive, making me feel as if I did not merely read these stories but experienced them.
I received a complimentary copy for review.
There are stories of mythical creatures, medical breakthroughs that go horribly wrong, which I suppose is to be expected when one has the option to be injected with animal DNA to address human weaknesses or aging. The scariest factor for me was my belief that in reality if such medical treatment became available there would be people willing to try it. Have you ever watched any of those Urban Exploration videos online or maybe even considered exploring an abandoned place on your own? I have watched a few and often thought it might be exciting to join in but the story Urbex cured me of that desire. Sometimes abandoned places are best left to decay in peace. John Richter's writing is smooth and expressive, making me feel as if I did not merely read these stories but experienced them.
I received a complimentary copy for review.
March 10, 2020
On the living and the dead, and other things between...
I have nightmares. They are obsessive. I know what they’re about and I’m not telling you.
Evidently Jon Richter has nightmares too, and after reading this collection of stories, it’s pretty clear what his nightmares are. Perhaps he doesn’t even have nightmares anymore. Perhaps he has lost the boundary between sleep and waking, and his nightmares inhabit the keyboard that he stares at, creeping out like maggots from between the keys. I think Jon Richter’s nightmares – awake or asleep – are about two things, overwhelmingly.
They are about the shocking possibility of dismemberment; the possibility that the beautiful continuity of body and soul might be compromised, fragmented, torn apart, dissolved. This is not the same as the fear, simply, of death. It is something more specific. It is about the possibility of the body’s consciousness looking on, powerless, as the flesh is dismantled around it. Again and again, his more sympathetic characters have to witness the dismemberment of comrades, friends, rivals. Some have to see the same fate, coming to themselves. They survive, at least for a little, beyond the shattering of their bodies in the pit. Long enough to know. The ghost without the machine.
Richter’s other nightmares are about something almost opposite. Most of his less sympathetic characters are flesh without souls. As a minimum, the human ones are painted with ‘dead eyes’, hinting at the absence within. The most troubling of them are unnatural animations: concatenations of decaying flesh and rubbish in The Pit, of bits of personal junk and household appliances in The Truth and in Interface. I think he has nightmares about the possibility that a creature might be somehow assembled, not as the beautiful, continuous, integral, organic, indissoluble casing of a soul, but cobbled together out of ugly bits and pieces, empty, dead, decaying or mechanical: alive but not alive. The machine without the ghost.
In some of his most compelling images, the two nightmares coalesce. In Endurance, our unlikeable, heartless hero finds himself violently drawn into a world of partly dismembered atavistic creatures of the backwoods, their deficiencies compensated by hand-crafted wooden prostheses – a leg, teeth, in prospect even a head. In Source, somnambulant chimeras of human spare parts are inexorably sucked into a vortex of mutilation, ending up as empty shells, dead or less than alive.
These are, of course, amongst the familiar obsessions of horror. Zombies? Frankenstein? Dracula? They are also, oddly, entertaining.
Freud, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious picks up the idea of something mechanical encrusted in something living as a key juncture on the road to humour. ‘It is a cross at which we must halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in different directions’. One of these paths takes one to ‘a mechanical tampering with life’. Freud gives the example (chilling, but tastes and toys have changed) of the empty ragdoll in which a living bird may be placed, causing the doll to jerk and dance (oh how we laughed and laughed!) until the bird expires and the fun is over. Jon Richter, by inversion, gives us the electrode-implanted humans of Interface, meekly queuing like empty puppets, or murderously turning upon each other, their strings pulled by disembodied electric signals. Another branch on this path to humour leads to insentient bureaucratic procedures taking precedence over animate purpose – as in ‘the operation was successful but the patient died’. In Richter’s Monolith, Big Pharma, focused on its creation of ever finer humans, mindlessly eliminates their very humanity. In the final branch, perhaps the crudest, the humour derives from the sentient being treated as a thing: slapstick, the clowns beating each other over the head with giant batons, the man shot from a cannon. More brutally, in Jon Richter, a body may be simply a store of food, a bleeding cat might be smeared like lipstick on a face, a hand or a limb may be discarded in a corridor, a piece of rubbish.
Humour has moved on since Freud nagged away at it, but these founding anxieties persist. The living thing encrusted within the dead: the dead within the living. The anxious laughter at the breaching of the proper boundary between them: the living foot, squelching into a decaying corpse. Is there really no discontinuity between the enormous vital ‘ME’, and this complicated bundle of decaying organs? Is the solipsistic delusion actually wrong? Are we not gods? Jon Richter opens up this existential box, looks in, unpacks it, stares. That gaze is almost palpable behind each of the stories, looking on as his readers recoil. And he is laughing. These stories are, ultimatedly, rather fun.
So do I, actually, quite like this collection of obsessions? They are certainly well-crafted, well-written, well-imagined stories. They are written with confidence, humour, a knowing wink to his audience, a sideways glance that says Yes, our nightmares do come true in the end, but so far we have survived. On the edge of this abyss, (before we are kicked into the pit, or dropped in our own locked coffin into the fathomless depths of the sea) we can be amused.
This is, in its place, a fine collection.
But no, I don’t like them. Not because they dismay or disgust me particularly, but because they do not. They inspire in me – as you see – more analytic curiosity than visceral reaction. That’s not a criticism of the stories: if your nightmares lie on the same journey as his, you will find them gratifying, and I heartily recommend them to you. It’s just that my nightmares lie somewhere else.
I greet Jon Richter with respect, fellow feeling even. I salute him from the sidelines as I see him striding past, a man who not only lives with his nightmares, but mines them, perhaps even makes a living from them. If nothing else, he manages them with panache, and far better than I do mine. I won’t say more: after all, the great Jon Richter may read this review, and he doesn’t need my nightmares. He is clearly a man with enough nightmares of his own.
Book purchased from Amazon. Review prepared as part of a Blackthorn Book Tour, March 2020
I have nightmares. They are obsessive. I know what they’re about and I’m not telling you.
Evidently Jon Richter has nightmares too, and after reading this collection of stories, it’s pretty clear what his nightmares are. Perhaps he doesn’t even have nightmares anymore. Perhaps he has lost the boundary between sleep and waking, and his nightmares inhabit the keyboard that he stares at, creeping out like maggots from between the keys. I think Jon Richter’s nightmares – awake or asleep – are about two things, overwhelmingly.
They are about the shocking possibility of dismemberment; the possibility that the beautiful continuity of body and soul might be compromised, fragmented, torn apart, dissolved. This is not the same as the fear, simply, of death. It is something more specific. It is about the possibility of the body’s consciousness looking on, powerless, as the flesh is dismantled around it. Again and again, his more sympathetic characters have to witness the dismemberment of comrades, friends, rivals. Some have to see the same fate, coming to themselves. They survive, at least for a little, beyond the shattering of their bodies in the pit. Long enough to know. The ghost without the machine.
Richter’s other nightmares are about something almost opposite. Most of his less sympathetic characters are flesh without souls. As a minimum, the human ones are painted with ‘dead eyes’, hinting at the absence within. The most troubling of them are unnatural animations: concatenations of decaying flesh and rubbish in The Pit, of bits of personal junk and household appliances in The Truth and in Interface. I think he has nightmares about the possibility that a creature might be somehow assembled, not as the beautiful, continuous, integral, organic, indissoluble casing of a soul, but cobbled together out of ugly bits and pieces, empty, dead, decaying or mechanical: alive but not alive. The machine without the ghost.
In some of his most compelling images, the two nightmares coalesce. In Endurance, our unlikeable, heartless hero finds himself violently drawn into a world of partly dismembered atavistic creatures of the backwoods, their deficiencies compensated by hand-crafted wooden prostheses – a leg, teeth, in prospect even a head. In Source, somnambulant chimeras of human spare parts are inexorably sucked into a vortex of mutilation, ending up as empty shells, dead or less than alive.
These are, of course, amongst the familiar obsessions of horror. Zombies? Frankenstein? Dracula? They are also, oddly, entertaining.
Freud, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious picks up the idea of something mechanical encrusted in something living as a key juncture on the road to humour. ‘It is a cross at which we must halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in different directions’. One of these paths takes one to ‘a mechanical tampering with life’. Freud gives the example (chilling, but tastes and toys have changed) of the empty ragdoll in which a living bird may be placed, causing the doll to jerk and dance (oh how we laughed and laughed!) until the bird expires and the fun is over. Jon Richter, by inversion, gives us the electrode-implanted humans of Interface, meekly queuing like empty puppets, or murderously turning upon each other, their strings pulled by disembodied electric signals. Another branch on this path to humour leads to insentient bureaucratic procedures taking precedence over animate purpose – as in ‘the operation was successful but the patient died’. In Richter’s Monolith, Big Pharma, focused on its creation of ever finer humans, mindlessly eliminates their very humanity. In the final branch, perhaps the crudest, the humour derives from the sentient being treated as a thing: slapstick, the clowns beating each other over the head with giant batons, the man shot from a cannon. More brutally, in Jon Richter, a body may be simply a store of food, a bleeding cat might be smeared like lipstick on a face, a hand or a limb may be discarded in a corridor, a piece of rubbish.
Humour has moved on since Freud nagged away at it, but these founding anxieties persist. The living thing encrusted within the dead: the dead within the living. The anxious laughter at the breaching of the proper boundary between them: the living foot, squelching into a decaying corpse. Is there really no discontinuity between the enormous vital ‘ME’, and this complicated bundle of decaying organs? Is the solipsistic delusion actually wrong? Are we not gods? Jon Richter opens up this existential box, looks in, unpacks it, stares. That gaze is almost palpable behind each of the stories, looking on as his readers recoil. And he is laughing. These stories are, ultimatedly, rather fun.
So do I, actually, quite like this collection of obsessions? They are certainly well-crafted, well-written, well-imagined stories. They are written with confidence, humour, a knowing wink to his audience, a sideways glance that says Yes, our nightmares do come true in the end, but so far we have survived. On the edge of this abyss, (before we are kicked into the pit, or dropped in our own locked coffin into the fathomless depths of the sea) we can be amused.
This is, in its place, a fine collection.
But no, I don’t like them. Not because they dismay or disgust me particularly, but because they do not. They inspire in me – as you see – more analytic curiosity than visceral reaction. That’s not a criticism of the stories: if your nightmares lie on the same journey as his, you will find them gratifying, and I heartily recommend them to you. It’s just that my nightmares lie somewhere else.
I greet Jon Richter with respect, fellow feeling even. I salute him from the sidelines as I see him striding past, a man who not only lives with his nightmares, but mines them, perhaps even makes a living from them. If nothing else, he manages them with panache, and far better than I do mine. I won’t say more: after all, the great Jon Richter may read this review, and he doesn’t need my nightmares. He is clearly a man with enough nightmares of his own.
Book purchased from Amazon. Review prepared as part of a Blackthorn Book Tour, March 2020
March 16, 2020
I've really come to love anthology books over the last couple of years. They feel like they're quicker to read than full length novels, they usually have a great variety to them, and they can help you discover new readers. One of the best things about anthology books is that they tend to present a range of different authors. This will mean that if there's a particular story or style that you just don't get along with you'll probably find the next story in the book to be different enough to be an improvement. When you come to an anthology that is all from the same author, however, I sometimes get a little worried. I mean, what if I don't like their style or way of writing? That's a whole lot of short stories that could end up being not my kind of thing.
When I came to Jon Richter's Disturbing Works I did have a little trepidation. Not only was this an anthology all from one writer, but one that I've never read before. But I shouldn't have worried one bit. Not only is this easily one of the best anthologies I've ever read, but it's very firmly in my top ten books of the year so far.
As the title may suggest, the stories included in this collection are disturbing, all of them having some kind of horror element to them. What really surprised me the most, however, is how each story seems to draw upon a different type of horror theme; and how they varied so much that I could have easily thought that they came from very different minds. It doesn't take the whole book to realise that Jon Richter is an incredibly talented writer, one that's able to slip into these different styles with ease and produce incredible quality.
'The Pit' is the first of ten stories offered in this collection, and very quickly sets a tone for the whole book. Set in a town where the local council is in negotiations with striking refuse collectors, the town has descended into a toxic nightmare of rubbish and rot. Uncollected waste sits in the streets, decomposing around peoples homes and workplaces. Whilst people have begun to throw their rubbish in the local quarry, nicknamed the pit, it's not doing much to halt the spread of disease and infection. The story is gross. Richter manages to create an atmosphere that's so disgustingly real that even reading it makes you feel a little dirty, almost like you've been infected through the pages. As the story goes on more disturbing things begin to be revealed to the reader, and it makes you truly hope that your own town never has to go through anything like this.
'Polaris' is a great little monster horror story that reminded me a little bit of 'The Thing'. Set at an abandoned mining station in Antarctica, it's filled with creepy atmosphere and haunting visuals as a small group of explorers attempt to track down a mysterious creature that has been killing local wildlife. Despite not getting long with the core cast of characters they're very quickly and very clearly defined, consisting of a pilot, a tracker, a hunter, and a cryptozoologist. The story relies on slow burn and mounting tension rather than in your face horror, and this makes it one of the creepiest stories in the book. As the story progresses we get a few answers as to what might be happening on this remote island, but never get any definitive answers. By the end of the story I was so fascinated with this thing hunting the main characters and just wanted to know more. Of all the stories in this collection this is the one that I wanted longer with. Not just more to this story, but a whole book to itself. Hopefully this could be something that Richter will revisit one day in the future.
'Leviathan' tells an intriguing period piece, written through a series of journal entries. It follows a reporter who has been assigned to follow a record breaking deep sea diving attempt, where a scientist and a rich explorer are attempting to descend deep beneath the ocean in a new submersible. The change in writing style, to one written in journal form, reminded me of Victorian era stories such as 'Dracula', 'Frankenstein', and even a little bit of Sherlock Holmes. 'Leviathan', however, is set later than this, in the mid 1930's. Because of this setting and the focus on travelling beneath the ocean, and the prevalence of tentacled sea creatures, it did bring a little bit of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos to mind. I really enjoyed this story thanks to these nods to other literary styles and settings, and found its slow burn thriller style approach to be incredibly engaging.
Many of the stories in this collection felt like takes on some of the best known horror themes and tropes, and 'Endurance' was quickly identifiable as Jon Richter's version of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' or 'Wrong Turn'. Set during an extreme endurance race around a remote mountain, the lead character finds themselves stumbling into the territory of a group of frightening mountain folk. Very much in the vein of the films previously mentioned, they're mutilated, twisted versions of humanity out to hunt, kill, and eat their fellow man for no other reason other than their personal endurance. Despite not being a particularly likeable lead, the battle for survival overrides what comes before, and leads you to start actively rooting for someone who just pages before seemed like a complete arse hole.
These are just a few of the stories presented in the book, and some that jumped out at me as being particularly good. Despite highlighting these ones, I would say that every single on of the ten stories presented here are equally as good. The quality of writing is consistent throughout, with engaging and varied characters, interesting themes and settings, and interesting takes on some of the best loved horror stories. I'm confident in saying that if you like horror this book will definitely make you happy. There may be some stories that you like more than others, but Id find it hard to believe that any of them would fail to keep you entertained. Luckily, there's a whole other volume like this one that I haven't read, but will definitely be checking out now.
When I came to Jon Richter's Disturbing Works I did have a little trepidation. Not only was this an anthology all from one writer, but one that I've never read before. But I shouldn't have worried one bit. Not only is this easily one of the best anthologies I've ever read, but it's very firmly in my top ten books of the year so far.
As the title may suggest, the stories included in this collection are disturbing, all of them having some kind of horror element to them. What really surprised me the most, however, is how each story seems to draw upon a different type of horror theme; and how they varied so much that I could have easily thought that they came from very different minds. It doesn't take the whole book to realise that Jon Richter is an incredibly talented writer, one that's able to slip into these different styles with ease and produce incredible quality.
'The Pit' is the first of ten stories offered in this collection, and very quickly sets a tone for the whole book. Set in a town where the local council is in negotiations with striking refuse collectors, the town has descended into a toxic nightmare of rubbish and rot. Uncollected waste sits in the streets, decomposing around peoples homes and workplaces. Whilst people have begun to throw their rubbish in the local quarry, nicknamed the pit, it's not doing much to halt the spread of disease and infection. The story is gross. Richter manages to create an atmosphere that's so disgustingly real that even reading it makes you feel a little dirty, almost like you've been infected through the pages. As the story goes on more disturbing things begin to be revealed to the reader, and it makes you truly hope that your own town never has to go through anything like this.
'Polaris' is a great little monster horror story that reminded me a little bit of 'The Thing'. Set at an abandoned mining station in Antarctica, it's filled with creepy atmosphere and haunting visuals as a small group of explorers attempt to track down a mysterious creature that has been killing local wildlife. Despite not getting long with the core cast of characters they're very quickly and very clearly defined, consisting of a pilot, a tracker, a hunter, and a cryptozoologist. The story relies on slow burn and mounting tension rather than in your face horror, and this makes it one of the creepiest stories in the book. As the story progresses we get a few answers as to what might be happening on this remote island, but never get any definitive answers. By the end of the story I was so fascinated with this thing hunting the main characters and just wanted to know more. Of all the stories in this collection this is the one that I wanted longer with. Not just more to this story, but a whole book to itself. Hopefully this could be something that Richter will revisit one day in the future.
'Leviathan' tells an intriguing period piece, written through a series of journal entries. It follows a reporter who has been assigned to follow a record breaking deep sea diving attempt, where a scientist and a rich explorer are attempting to descend deep beneath the ocean in a new submersible. The change in writing style, to one written in journal form, reminded me of Victorian era stories such as 'Dracula', 'Frankenstein', and even a little bit of Sherlock Holmes. 'Leviathan', however, is set later than this, in the mid 1930's. Because of this setting and the focus on travelling beneath the ocean, and the prevalence of tentacled sea creatures, it did bring a little bit of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos to mind. I really enjoyed this story thanks to these nods to other literary styles and settings, and found its slow burn thriller style approach to be incredibly engaging.
Many of the stories in this collection felt like takes on some of the best known horror themes and tropes, and 'Endurance' was quickly identifiable as Jon Richter's version of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' or 'Wrong Turn'. Set during an extreme endurance race around a remote mountain, the lead character finds themselves stumbling into the territory of a group of frightening mountain folk. Very much in the vein of the films previously mentioned, they're mutilated, twisted versions of humanity out to hunt, kill, and eat their fellow man for no other reason other than their personal endurance. Despite not being a particularly likeable lead, the battle for survival overrides what comes before, and leads you to start actively rooting for someone who just pages before seemed like a complete arse hole.
These are just a few of the stories presented in the book, and some that jumped out at me as being particularly good. Despite highlighting these ones, I would say that every single on of the ten stories presented here are equally as good. The quality of writing is consistent throughout, with engaging and varied characters, interesting themes and settings, and interesting takes on some of the best loved horror stories. I'm confident in saying that if you like horror this book will definitely make you happy. There may be some stories that you like more than others, but Id find it hard to believe that any of them would fail to keep you entertained. Luckily, there's a whole other volume like this one that I haven't read, but will definitely be checking out now.
March 18, 2020
Jon Richter writes dark fiction (Yesssss!), including his two gripping crime thrillers, Deadly Burial and Never Rest, (adding to my to-be-read list) and his two collections of short horror fiction Jon Richter’s Disturbing Works Volumes One and Two, – Volume Two – featured in this review.
You know, that thrill you get when you are first introduced to a writer’s work that you have never read before, that ‘Where have you been my whole life!?!?’, feeling.
Okay. Not that dramatic, but you get my point.
Jon Richter is one of many authors over the years whose writing has pulled me into a narrative by way of a tentacle or two, or in the case of my favorite author, a tentacle and the razor-sharp teeth of an evil clown known to the kiddies of Derry, Maine as Pennywise. Yep, I’m definitely okay with that!
'You're Demented!' you say. Nah, just a Horror Fan since I was ah kiddie.
I won’t touch on all ten short horror stories in this collection, but I will highlight many favorites:
Jon Richter’s Disturbing Works Volume Two opens with ‘The Pit’ – About a disused quarry that quickly overflows with garbage when sanitation workers go on strike, and the surrounding neighborhood becomes, well…
‘The streets were choked with rubbish, including a reeking mound right outside his own house. […] And it really was the flies that were the worst part… despite closing every window, blocking every crack, they somehow found a way into your home. They buzzed around, bloated and content, jubilant in their dominion.
‘Then they bit you.’
‘The Truth’ – without revealing spoilers, I can tell you this short centers around a husband, his pregnant wife, and his fathers’ secrets…
‘There were many words to describe the day that loomed before me, words like ‘bizarre’, ‘disturbing’, ‘addictive’. But nothing remotely ‘lovely’ awaited me, in the dark cellar beneath my father’s house.’
‘Polaris’ – Is set in Canada, centered around two abandoned zinc mines know as Polaris A and B and a small group who are tasked with finding what lurks within…
‘She gestured to the pack at her feet, from which the barrel of a .375 Holland & Holland Magnum rifle protruded menacingly […] What did we need protection from? Establishing the answer to that question was the reason the four of us were out here.’
‘Source’ – Another short of creepy goodness (Loved It!) that I won’t spoil for you, I will, however, leave you with this…Your in bed, your wife who was sleeping next to you is no longer by your side when you hear a crash down stairs…
‘I dashed towards her, grabbing her, yanking her head away from the freezing rain that had already lashed her face, making the blood run in rivulets from the cuts […] I will never forget her expression, as she turned to look at me with a scalding mix of rage and hatred in her eyes.'
‘“He wants it…” she was shrieking, without forming the consonants properly, almost as though she was drugged. “He wants it back!”’
‘Monolith’ – Aka, the Domino, is the latest addition to London’s skyline and home to a pharmaceutical giant, which is…
‘“We have to assume the worst here,” she barked at her five male subordinates as they traveled towards the scene. “There could be a terrorist incident, with active hostiles. Maybe multiple hostages. Going dark for this long means…’
Nope, no spoilers; you will just have to read the book and find out.
‘Leviathan’ – Loved it! This short story is set in July of 1936, narrated by a young journalist, or more specifically penned in a journal by his hand, an account of his nautical adventure aboard the Leviathan …
‘Today I received a most unusual assignment from my employers at the Patriot. I will confess to a not insubstantial measure of trepidation, but, for an aspiring young journalist, such opportunities as this are rare, and demand to be grasped.’
‘Urbex’ – I had never heard of the word ‘Urbex’ before reading this short – and honestly – it sounded kind of fun after learning what it was, that is, before reading this story…
‘Exciting, frightening, dangerous, clandestine. Soaking in that mood was what urban exploration was all about. That was why Callum preferred the darkness.’[…]There was something about mortality, too. Watching the rot and the weeds slowly reclaiming these buildings felt like documenting the inevitability of death…’
‘Endurance’ – The race is called the Wheezing 100, the ultra-marathon, an event that is known as the ‘best-kept secret.’ There is no marketing, no fundraising, no banners or sponsors. Just a few local volunteers, a Vietnam war veteran, and his hellish brainchild.
‘”I’m not looking for show-offs, or sightseers, or god damn Instagrammers,” he’d said. “I’m looking for people who want to test the absolute limit of what they can accomplish.”’
‘Interface’ – Loved it – Sooooo Good!!
‘Whatever had caused that initial, feverish surge of bloodlust – replaced now by this ominous docility or, in the case of most of the creatures, mysterious absence – seemed able to discern between those affected and those immune to its horrifying effects.’
I want to thank Blackthorn Book Tours and author Jon Richter for letting me take part in promoting a book I had such a pleasure reading.
If you like Dark Horror Fiction as I do, then I highly recommend Jon Richter’s Disturbing Works Volume Two!
You know, that thrill you get when you are first introduced to a writer’s work that you have never read before, that ‘Where have you been my whole life!?!?’, feeling.
Okay. Not that dramatic, but you get my point.
Jon Richter is one of many authors over the years whose writing has pulled me into a narrative by way of a tentacle or two, or in the case of my favorite author, a tentacle and the razor-sharp teeth of an evil clown known to the kiddies of Derry, Maine as Pennywise. Yep, I’m definitely okay with that!
'You're Demented!' you say. Nah, just a Horror Fan since I was ah kiddie.
I won’t touch on all ten short horror stories in this collection, but I will highlight many favorites:
Jon Richter’s Disturbing Works Volume Two opens with ‘The Pit’ – About a disused quarry that quickly overflows with garbage when sanitation workers go on strike, and the surrounding neighborhood becomes, well…
‘The streets were choked with rubbish, including a reeking mound right outside his own house. […] And it really was the flies that were the worst part… despite closing every window, blocking every crack, they somehow found a way into your home. They buzzed around, bloated and content, jubilant in their dominion.
‘Then they bit you.’
‘The Truth’ – without revealing spoilers, I can tell you this short centers around a husband, his pregnant wife, and his fathers’ secrets…
‘There were many words to describe the day that loomed before me, words like ‘bizarre’, ‘disturbing’, ‘addictive’. But nothing remotely ‘lovely’ awaited me, in the dark cellar beneath my father’s house.’
‘Polaris’ – Is set in Canada, centered around two abandoned zinc mines know as Polaris A and B and a small group who are tasked with finding what lurks within…
‘She gestured to the pack at her feet, from which the barrel of a .375 Holland & Holland Magnum rifle protruded menacingly […] What did we need protection from? Establishing the answer to that question was the reason the four of us were out here.’
‘Source’ – Another short of creepy goodness (Loved It!) that I won’t spoil for you, I will, however, leave you with this…Your in bed, your wife who was sleeping next to you is no longer by your side when you hear a crash down stairs…
‘I dashed towards her, grabbing her, yanking her head away from the freezing rain that had already lashed her face, making the blood run in rivulets from the cuts […] I will never forget her expression, as she turned to look at me with a scalding mix of rage and hatred in her eyes.'
‘“He wants it…” she was shrieking, without forming the consonants properly, almost as though she was drugged. “He wants it back!”’
‘Monolith’ – Aka, the Domino, is the latest addition to London’s skyline and home to a pharmaceutical giant, which is…
‘“We have to assume the worst here,” she barked at her five male subordinates as they traveled towards the scene. “There could be a terrorist incident, with active hostiles. Maybe multiple hostages. Going dark for this long means…’
Nope, no spoilers; you will just have to read the book and find out.
‘Leviathan’ – Loved it! This short story is set in July of 1936, narrated by a young journalist, or more specifically penned in a journal by his hand, an account of his nautical adventure aboard the Leviathan …
‘Today I received a most unusual assignment from my employers at the Patriot. I will confess to a not insubstantial measure of trepidation, but, for an aspiring young journalist, such opportunities as this are rare, and demand to be grasped.’
‘Urbex’ – I had never heard of the word ‘Urbex’ before reading this short – and honestly – it sounded kind of fun after learning what it was, that is, before reading this story…
‘Exciting, frightening, dangerous, clandestine. Soaking in that mood was what urban exploration was all about. That was why Callum preferred the darkness.’[…]There was something about mortality, too. Watching the rot and the weeds slowly reclaiming these buildings felt like documenting the inevitability of death…’
‘Endurance’ – The race is called the Wheezing 100, the ultra-marathon, an event that is known as the ‘best-kept secret.’ There is no marketing, no fundraising, no banners or sponsors. Just a few local volunteers, a Vietnam war veteran, and his hellish brainchild.
‘”I’m not looking for show-offs, or sightseers, or god damn Instagrammers,” he’d said. “I’m looking for people who want to test the absolute limit of what they can accomplish.”’
‘Interface’ – Loved it – Sooooo Good!!
‘Whatever had caused that initial, feverish surge of bloodlust – replaced now by this ominous docility or, in the case of most of the creatures, mysterious absence – seemed able to discern between those affected and those immune to its horrifying effects.’
I want to thank Blackthorn Book Tours and author Jon Richter for letting me take part in promoting a book I had such a pleasure reading.
If you like Dark Horror Fiction as I do, then I highly recommend Jon Richter’s Disturbing Works Volume Two!
February 17, 2020
This is one hellish collection of the weirdest and most disturbing short stories of Jon Richter's mind. It is captivating, strange and hypnotic, each inviting you in if you dare. I loved how each story was so unique, at times grotesque and always leaving me with unease like it must be an alternate reality, I hope and not the shape of things to come.
There are ten stories, timeless tales of the unpredictable with an added twist in the tale. I can say that there wasn't a story that I didn't like but there were a couple that just tickled my warped sense of humour that little bit more.
The Truth, this just blew my mind, oh boy, cellars at not really my thing to start with so I felt my reading pace hesitate with every step that the story took me and what was in there stopped me dead before I saw the next words. "Ahhh, there you are," said the monstrous thing that lived down there. "I was wondering what time you'd get here. I'm fucking starving."
Now I am not one to be lost for words but I really kept my mouth shut with this one. What was in there, well you will have to find out but I didn't know whether to laugh or get out of there. I was like a rabbit in headlights. It is a beaut story!
Jon Richter is such a talented author, I have read his novel a while ago and it still remains so very clear in my mind and so will these stories. If you would like something just off-key but totally entertaining then go no further. Brilliant stories highly recommended.
There are ten stories, timeless tales of the unpredictable with an added twist in the tale. I can say that there wasn't a story that I didn't like but there were a couple that just tickled my warped sense of humour that little bit more.
The Truth, this just blew my mind, oh boy, cellars at not really my thing to start with so I felt my reading pace hesitate with every step that the story took me and what was in there stopped me dead before I saw the next words. "Ahhh, there you are," said the monstrous thing that lived down there. "I was wondering what time you'd get here. I'm fucking starving."
Now I am not one to be lost for words but I really kept my mouth shut with this one. What was in there, well you will have to find out but I didn't know whether to laugh or get out of there. I was like a rabbit in headlights. It is a beaut story!
Jon Richter is such a talented author, I have read his novel a while ago and it still remains so very clear in my mind and so will these stories. If you would like something just off-key but totally entertaining then go no further. Brilliant stories highly recommended.
March 13, 2020
An awesome collection of 10 short stories that are somehow similar in terms of the presence of gothic elements , Dark humour, mysterious aura and interesting plot twists yet each takes a different approach in explaining themes such as betrayal, loss, fear, survival, misuse of technology, revenge, and etc .
I liked them all but My favourite of all were "Interface" these smart devices whom were once controlled by humans are now Controling humans ...
And "the truth" , a story of a shocking betrayal ! I could sympathize with brazen head the way i did with the Monster of Frankenstein ( as he was mentioned in the story) ! Both created and deserted to die !
I liked them all but My favourite of all were "Interface" these smart devices whom were once controlled by humans are now Controling humans ...
And "the truth" , a story of a shocking betrayal ! I could sympathize with brazen head the way i did with the Monster of Frankenstein ( as he was mentioned in the story) ! Both created and deserted to die !
March 10, 2020
A collection of ten short stories that all have a dark science fiction edge to them. The author writes well, with an assured voice, and the mixture of styles is pleasing. I look forward to reading more by this author.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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