Zombos' Closet

Bring the Can Opener Vacation

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good 

There's a little of Soylent Green and C.H.U.D mixed in with the greens in Matthew Costello's Vacation, where zombies are replaced by humans gone cannibalistic bonkers as global warming and blight bring food shortages and dietery change. Costello's clippy writing style--lots of one-sentence paragraphs-- is often too lean where it needs to thicken in detail and depth. The basic premise provides ample opportunity for action, but it's hard to shake the notion you're reading yet another zombie-that-is-not-zombie gimmick; and Costello doesn't exploit those opportunities to pile on the action or terror, which is surprising given the subject matter potential.

Can Heads are what the human-chompers are called. They're fast, smell bad, crazed, and nearly unstoppable in their one goal: dine out often. Jack Murphy's a cop in the 76th Precinct on Union Street in Brooklyn. Things aren't going well for cops: the can heads are eating their way through the boroughs, leaving the city a no-man's land of dwindling hot and cold running safe places to live. An attack on an apartment building late at night--can heads only come out at night--leaves him hurting. His captain recommends a vacation before Jack rethinks his job status, and Paterville Camp in the Adirondacks is the ideal destination.

Jack, his wife Christine, and their kids pack themselves, along with lots of fire power and C4, into his Ford Explorer and head upstate. The New York State Thruway is fenced off, manned by checkpoints, and relatively can head free. A brief pee-stop at the equivalent of a qwik-e-mart provides brief action. The rest of the trip is uneventful. I've had more action traveling the NYS Thruway myself, rest stops included.

Traveling through a few small towns to the camp provides even less action, although Costello's staccato paragraphing keeps you asking 'are we there yet?' in anticipation. When they reach Paterville Camp, which is filled with rustic cottages and surrounded by the mountains, they're greeted by Ed, the camp director, and Shana, his assistant. It's all smiles and handshakes and Jack fixating on Shana's girlish figure. Jack, being a cop, is also fixated on seeing if the place is all it's cracked up to be. Another family, the Blairs, introduce themselves, and while Christine and the kids hit the lake, Jack goes exploring.

The electrified fence, the hidden cameras, and the service road he's not allowed to use start him wondering what Paterville Camp is hiding. All that firepower he brought along comes in handy, providing the most action-packed camp activity in the novel. When the camp's secret is finally revealed you won't be surprised, but Costello supplies enough action to keep you from being disappointed.  

Vacation is a snack not a ful meal, but it will tide you over until the next zombie gimmick is served up.

The Monster's Corner

ZC Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

Ghoulies, ghosties, beasties, here be monsters all, hobnobbing their way through the mortal realm in 19 tales assembled by Christopher Golden, with book-body parts supplied by Jonathan Maberry, David Liss, Kevin J. Anderson, Nate Kenyon, Sarah Pinborough, and many more. Squatting in the monster's corner is you, metaphorically speaking of course, as the next meal, the next victim, and next sideline viewer or partaker of nasty events. Identifying who the monsters and victims are can be a little challenging because sometimes they swap places or appear similar, depending on your vantage point, and the tone of monstrosity varies from story to story, as does the terror. 

Perhaps the clearest monstrous vision here is seen through Pinborough's The Screaming Room. Having snakes for hair and turning people to stone doesn't make the Gorgon a social butterfly, but when her dates do eventually show up, she does get to spend a very long time with them, enjoying their constant song of love. Only they aren't singing and she's deluding herself, turning her loneliness into happiness. A simple premise sustains a truly terrifying revelation, and this story will not easily leave you once you put the book aside.

Often the monster ranks are swelled by those we unleash ourselves, and in Maberry's Saint John, you may be hard pressed to find the saints, but sinners abound. Armageddon leads to madness, but sometimes madness can lead to redemption, and here the sinners must face a holy roller to reckon with, dressed in swirling white robes and long sharp blades wielding salvation.  Not surprisingly, coming from an author who specializes in death and destruction in apocalyptic measures, Maberry creates an unbalanced world populated with unbalanced people, and places his heroic protagonist, who's either deep-dish crazy, made so by the monstrous events of his past, or following God's crib-notes, within it, preaching one slash and thrust sermon at a time. There's an intimacy here as Maberry focuses on one small street corner and those people stepping into it, coming under Saint John's light. Victims and monsters are interchangeable. Salvation is tenuous. The emotional complexity deep and disturbing. Maberry may have created a new and noble antihero ripe for novelization.

For a swim with Lovecraftian primevalness, Tananarive Due brings us to Graceville, Florida in The Lake. Abbie's new job, new house, new life is growing on her so much she's becoming a whole new person; or thing, anyway. People say not to swim in the lake in summer, though the reasons are hushingly unclear. She swims anyway. The lake's calm water is so inviting. Slowly changes in her attitude start to match the physical changes between her toes, and the changes in her appetite. Is she dreaming? Is she delusional? Is she embracing a whole new Abbie? Her understated tranformation unfolds in carefully building paragraphs, rendering the terror mood gently and matter of factly, until the ending reminds you it's not wise to swim in the Graceville Lake during the summer months.

You won't find gore or check-the-door scares in The Monster's Corner, but you will find, hanging out in its dark recesses,  a well varied assortment of true monsters, seeming monsters, and would-be monsters, all either vying for your understanding--as carefully outlined in Gary A. Braunbeck's witty And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is To Kill You--or your blood.

In Extremis The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley

ZC Rating 5 of 7: Excellent

Reading John Shirley's In Extremis is like sticking your moistened middle finger into a live lamp socket: it's punishing but oddly exhilirating after the initial shock. These stories are nasty; they're rude, roiling attitudes of sludge scooped up into the palms of your hands, all greasy slippery feeling and gnarly intense, forcing you to look behind you fearing someone's going to catch you reading them. And you will. Read them. Losers abound, sick humanity thrives, and the scariest thing about Shirley's bowery dark environs is they're crazy batshit and familiar and you sitting there wishing they aught'nt, really shouldn't be. 

The acid test is getting past Just Like Suzie. The two stories before it, Cram and You Blundering Idiot may trip you up, but they're the warm up acts for the burlesque and grotesque reality show in  Just Like Suzie. Sure, getting caught in a train during an earthquake, and maybe hiring some guy to kill you but he's a shlub so he has to keep doing it to get it right are enough to dishearten you from continuing, but if you can keep going after Just Like Suzie, you've earned it. Seriously.

I can't describe the story too much, it's got that 1970s badassness to it, along with its gritty, adult comedy of errors, with those errors piling up into one big clusterfu--like I said; its all 70s badassness. Suzie's a prostitute who dies, I can tell you that, but her attachment to her junkie-john, a guy named Perrick, is fast and rock solid. In all the wrong place. Without any doubt you will squirm and sweat along with him, and find it well darn funny, too. Bad habits are hard to break and some break you hard, and some just leave you whimpering, dangling limp in resignation.

I can describe Faces in Walls for you a little more, though, and this one and Just Like Suzie are my favorite nightmares in this collection, but there are plenty more to go round. Imagine you're paralyzed, neck down, vegetating in Wemberly Sanitarium for years, bedded in a lifeless room with walls peeling their green paint, bed sores pressing angrily against you, and no one visiting you except for Sam Sack and those faces in the walls. Conversation with one of those faces in particular holds your interest, but Sam's attention you don't want. He wears a pillow case over his head and comes into your room late at night to play. His kind of play you don't need. But you can only lie there.  Until that one particular face tells you more.

There's a short story by Oliver Onions--can't quite put my finger on it I read it so long ago-- that Shirley reminded me of with this one. And no it's not The Beckoning Fair One. It had a fairy tale quality to it as I recollect, a girl, and a curious friend. Shirley's less prosaic than Onions, of course, but darker in intent, and his rythm between narrative and dialog is more insolent and unforgiving, and with the psychological horror of each situation leeching the life out of his characters captured with such exhuberance, Shirley wins hand over fist. I wonder if Shirley looks over his shoulder while he writes, fearful someone might catch him in the act?

So pour yourself a glass of Shiraz, volume up The Three Tenors, and sit near a mirror so you can reassure yourself there's no one looking over your shoulder while you read. The wine and music will help sweeten the bitter spirit aftertaste when you've finished the book--if you get that far.

But not by much.

Dog Blood Every One Has Its Day

ZC Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

This conflict wasn't faction versus faction or army against army; it was individual versus individual, more than six billion armies of one. Beyond that, the Hate didn't care who you were, where you were, or what you were. You were simply on one side or the other, your position in this new, twisted, f**ked-up world decided without your involvement by unknown variables and fate.

The beauty of David Moody’s Dog Blood is how you can read so much or so little into it. Pile on the metaphors of your choice and pontificate away, or ignore them and become mired in a broken world crumbling down around broken lives. This downward spiral of  hopelessness, of collapsing societies, of forlorn, shock-weary masses of people crushing in on themselves, and of mindless hatred leading to endless killing is depressing, frightening, and shamefully engrossing.  

Picking up the apocalyptic speed from Hater, his first book in this it's-them-or-us trilogy, the Unchanged are struggling against shattered selves and the Haters, those aggression-infected individuals who hunt and kill anyone not like them; family members kill family members, strangers kill strangers, friends kill friends, grinding them into bloody pulp in the process. As in any good horror play, the Haters are more organized, more determined, and much more deadly than the Unchanged, who are herded into the cities and penned up by the military providing questionable protection while stripping away their humanity, and quelling any incursion of agression by mass obliteration of the infected area. Making a terrible situation worse are the Brutes, a new generation of Haters that are stronger, totally unreasoning, and never tire of killing. They're like Saruman's Uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings.

Danny McCoyne, a Hater, has one goal: to find his five year old daughter, Ellis. He will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal because she is like him. We watch and follow him through his own voice, but this is no longer only about him. There are millions of others, on both sides, and Moody slices chapters between Danny's search for his daughter and Danny's Unchanged cousin, Mark--and his squalid existence--to open up the bigger situation all around both of them enough to slip it all neatly into a handbasket and kick it hard and fast down a steep slope leading straight to a hellish climax of destruction. 

Mark is one of thousands of Unchanged, holding on with exasperation and desperation as food, water, shelter, and safety dwindle. Assigned a small hotel room by the military, he shares it with his pregnant wife, her overwhelmed-to-shutdown parents who can't get out of bed, and someone else hiding in the locked bathroom. Mark tries to keep it all under control but failure is imminent when another person, a loudly complaining stranger, is dumped in the room with them, by the military, in spite of his protests. 

As Mark deals with escalating frustration and worries over his unborn child, Danny fumes at being delayed from finding Ellis by an organized group of Haters who have a secret plan for killing every Unchanged man, woman, and child, and by the bipartisan-thinking Mallon, a man who forces Danny to control his hate enough to keep him from bashing heads in at every opportunity. Their combined effect on Danny make him question the ultimate purpose of everyone involved, including his own.

Moody piles up the rotting bodies in every nook and cranny without remorse or compassion because heroics and sanity play no part in this shattered world. His paragraphs are long but concise and filled with small details to describe much, like the ubiquitousness of the dead when Danny realizes he's stepping on a corpse only by the crunching sound of its brittle fingers he's grinding underfoot.

Even now I can hear those metaphors rustling furtively in your brain and similes kicking up gray dust. Just remember it's only a novel, though it would be best if you read it on the beach during a bright summer day. 

Angel of Vengeance By Trevor O. Munson

ZC Rating 5 of 7: Excellent

The music oozing like toxic waste from inside is almost enough to turn me around and head me right back home. I brace myself against the toxicity and move past a line of pasty-looking undead wannabes. Every one of them is dressed in black. Up and down the line both guys and girls wear heavy black eye makeup, black lipstick and black nail polish. The androgynous nature of the look makes it difficult to tell the sexes apart. Maybe that's the point, but it makes me wonder exactly when people got the idea that in order to look like a vampire you had to adopt a transvestite-in-mourning look. (Mick Angel, on his visit to the Tomb Room Club)

"What are you looking at?" asks Zombos.

I find myself standing at one of the library windows. I don't know why. Wait, yes I do.

"Pretorius is having trouble with the snow blower again." I nod Zombos' attention down two-stories as he steps over to where I'm standing. We look out the window together.

"Where is he?" he asks.

I look harder. Pretorius is gone. The snow blower is idling, puffing up oily smoke. I shake my thoughts out one by one, grab onto the last image I remember. Oh, right, now I know. I point to the hand sticking up from the voluminous snow bank, its five fingers curling tightly--death grip, really--onto the snow blower's handle.

"Oh, dear Heaven's!" yells Zombos. He runs out of the library. I think about it, but decide he can handle the situation. I have a more pressing task to finish. I'm reviewing Trevor O. Munson's Angel of Vengeance.

Twice the Terror: The Horror Zine Volume 2

 

Lately I've been waking up
Where I am, I cannot tell
It seldom looks like paradise
And it usually feels like hell
(from Lately by John Frazee)

ZC Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

I've been mostly disappointed with the spate of small press and digital press horror books and comics pouring out of late, especially those solicited to me. Either the writing is mediocre or structurally bad, or the comic art is so attrocious it soils the story--you know, like spilling a bowl of soggy bran flakes and milk on a table: a mess that not only looks terrible but becomes worse the more you look at it as you wipe it up.

Then I go and succumb to another request. Perhaps, deep down, I'm hoping to find a diamond in the coal pile. My stone wall of decisiveness cracks and I agree to review another book or comic, dreading having to say it's not what it should or could be in case it turns out to be not what it could or should have been--in my opinion--so don't bum-rush me with invectives about that: all reviewers have critical opinions.

Twice the Terror: The Horror Zine, Volume 2, is not quite a diamond, but it shines almost as much with its stories, poems, and art. It's edited by Jeanni Rector and anthologizes submissions to her Horror Zine website. Her impressive selection of stories, finely printed by BearManor Media, are what I hope for when reading an anthology, and provide a variety of lengths and styles and glimpses into the ether between terror and the unknown. Paragraphs, poems, and graphics read shoulder to shoulder instead of poking you in the eyes with shoddy typesetting or a high school sense of layout. I'll just mention a few of my favorites, but this anthology is full of high caliber work.

Terrence Faherty's Uncanny hints at an older style of foreboding, one akin to an Arthur Machen story where spirits best left unseen refuse to hide. Or is it the main character's unhappiness about being forced to take an Alaskan holiday that's causing some fellow passengers on the cruise to vanish? Mean spiritedness or a mean spirit at play? Faherty does his best to leave you guessing.

Were I forced (ouch, stop twisting my arm!) to confess to my absolute favorite story in the anthology, it would have to be Christopher Fowler's The Threads, in which an unhappy couple, the Markhams, taking holiday in Africa, hope to keep their marriage from completely unraveling--she hopes, anyway. Unfortunately for Mrs. Markham, Mr. Markham begins to unravel after he insists on stealing a small carpet from an odd little shop. The desperation from being in dire need in a foreign land, where aid is not forthcoming, creates a level of tension in this story that energizes the macabre situation the couple finds themselves even more.

 A Bad Day is had by Melanie and the robber who shot her in Larry Green's quick and tidy story of a deadly convenience store robbery, but it turns out to be very convenient for Melanie in the end. In the same vein, Soul Money by Terry Grimwood is a quick journey into and out of evil, only the lucky wallet Nick finds turns out to have a really big and nasty owner who insists on being paid every last cent. It's a stretch that, nearly ludicrous in it's idea, still manages a wicked-wild sense of comeuppance scariness, the kind often seen in anthology television shows like Tales From the Darkside.

The poems, including those from Joe R. Lansdale, Peter Steele, and Alexandra Seidel, to name a few contributors, either ryhme or don't, and set the odd tone, the out of place, and a conjuration of lightness and heaviness in lines describing twisted thoughts, weird imagery, and unhealthy situations. The artists are just as disturbing (or is it disturbed?): I'll leave you with this happy couple photographed by Beth Robinson. She must have taken this right after they read Twice the Terror.

 

A courtesy  copy of Twice the Terror: The Horror Zine, Volume 2, was received for this review from Jeanni Rector.

The Best of Joe R. Lansdale: Dark Flavors Over Gristle

What Batman did for me, though, was make me understand that the world was bigger than I knew, that there were things beyond getting out of high school and going to work and waiting for retirement. Like Batman, I wanted to be something special. (Joe R. Lansdale, from his introduction to The Best of Joe R. Lansdale)

Take a big fat oak barrel, pack in Ray Bradbury and Charles Bukowski, slice and dice a few big young scorpions with all six juicy segments of their tails, add some boiled spinach and watery buckwheat, pickle all with half Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey and half Southern Comfort, piss, and spit some chawing tobacco into the mix, then seal it up good. Let the barrel sit for a few years, forgotten, in a beat up Pontiac pickup truck parked in the last row of the last aisle in the last drive-in down a long dusty road. When you finally open it up you'll find an author like Joe R. Lansdale. Just stand back a bit when you do 'cause he might be cussin' up an awful lot and swinging low.

Lansdale is as important an America Original as Mark Twain, only if he had written The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he'd have had good ole boy Tom bashing Huck's brains in with a tree branch, for chump change and just to see him bleed, on a bright sunny day, close to a white picket fence to show the blood spatter better. Then he'd have Tom go smiling off to eat some warm apple pie as a hungry dog ate the rest of Huck up, with both enjoying every bit of their meal. Slowly.

Peter Straub's A Dark Matter: Mesmerizing To A Fault

A DARK MATTER evolved out of a desire I had to think about the various sages and gurus I had seen pass through Madison, WI, in the mid-sixties. I think there were three altogether; at least, I witnessed the actions and behaviors of three of these gents. They were all articulate, interesting, and predatory. Almost all of what they said was nonsense, but they did get a bunch of kids to look into the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I started to wonder: what might happen if one of these sleazy wisdom-merchants did actually reveal a portion of the Other World, the World Unseen, in the course of a home-made ritual. (Flames Rising interview with Peter Straub)

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good (but very clever structuring overpowers the simple plot)

Peter Straub opens wide his magic bag of literary tricks in A Dark Matter, weaving a mesmerizing occult tale of mystery, told through colorful characters, each in turn recalling memories of a tragic day in 1966. But this illusory tale, while executed with masterful artifice, is tepid in its effect, and climaxes into a theistic mumbo-jumbo of outrageous imagery and philo-babble wordplay that intrudes, more than it reveals, with its copious stream of self-conscious dime-store novelty diatribe.

Straub wields his sleight of sentence flourishes with ease. Meta-fiction rolls adroitly across his fingers as author Lee Harwell, spurred on by a chance meeting with recollection, and goaded on by Garvin, his agent, to maybe try a non-fiction book to rekindle his writing ardor, begins to ask what really happened to his school chums in the agronomy meadow on that day in 1966; a day that left one torn apart, one missing, one blind, and one, speaking only in quotations from literature, confined to a mental institution

H.P. Lovecraft 101 on io9

Take a deep breadth, look well behind you, and be prepared to run at any time if you hear a c'therring sound...here's a concise and essential introduction to Lovecraft's cosmic horror fiction courtesy of io9.

You've heard about Cthulhu, and you've probably heard about the man who created this tentacled horror, H.P. Lovecraft. Now you want to try delving into the world of Lovecraft, but where to start? Let us help you.

23 Hours A Vengeful Vampire In Maximum Security

 

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

Knives. Always with the knives. Half-deads loved knives, hatchets, cleavers, anything sharp. This was a hunting knife, six inches long and painted green--so the white-tailed deer wouldn't see it glint when you pulled it out in the woods--and had a nasty serrated edge and a wicked curved point. The half-dead brandished it with obvious pleasure and stepped inside the cell.

 

Laura Caxton, David Wellington's vampire-hunting Special Subjects Unit agent, is neck-deep in it again in 23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale. Not only is her vengeful nemesis Justinia Malvern, the world's oldest vampire (with decrepitude to match her age), looking to put the bite on her for good, she also has to deal with being locked up in maximum security while dozens of half-deads, those killed by Malvern and revitalized to do her bidding, take over the penitentiary. Complicating things further, Clara Hsu, Caxton's lover, turns up just in time to become a hostage, and persausive bargaining chip, for Malvern. With a jailhouse cliffhanger-styled pace and Caxton backed up against all four walls with only the questionable help from her stimulant-loving celly, Gert, the situation moves from bad to worse and then really bad.

Moody's Hater Whose Fear Is It?

I phoned the office a few minutes ago but there was no answer. I was relieved when I didn't have to speak to anyone but then I started to panic again when I thought about how bad things must have got if no one's turned up for work. There's nothing else to do now except sit back on the sofa in front of the TV and watch the world fall apart (Hater by David Moody).

It takes a little over a week for the world to fall apart for Danny in David Moody's Hater; not that his life was all that together before everything else goes to hell. Family, neighbors, people around him are propelled into a Ballardian new world order where fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to violence. But this dark side, in Moody's first book of his Hater trilogy, depends on whose point of view your seeing the escalating, spinning out of control, events from. As Danny describes his much less than ideal job, dissatisfying life, cold marriage, and children-interruptus, you wonder how much worse it can get for him. A lot, surprisingly.

Dying to Live: Life Sentence Unmutual Fallout

Dem zombies! Dem zombies!"
Dem dry zombies!"
Dem zombies! Dem zombies!"
Dem dry zombies!
Now hear the word of the Lord!

 

"Where am I?"

"In the Universal Village."

"Who are you?"

"The Burgomaster."

"What am I doing here?"

"We need information. You must explain yourself."

"Explain myself? Why? What for?"

"You've been very naughty to the absolute degree. Writing about zombies that think and feel will not do, you know. It goes against the natural expectation and sense of every zombie fan, against the foundations of good, clean, commercial horror itself. It simply won't do, you know. You must cease being different and join us. Embrace us."

"You'll get nothing from me. I've got tenure."

"By hook or by crook, we will. Follow me please."

College professor Kim Paffenroth shrugged his shoulders. He'd been called on the carpet before, and by bigger critics than this Burgomaster. Compared to them this guy was simply a number two; another cog in the great horror machinery waiting to be greased quiet. He followed the Burgomaster through the village square, where someone with a feather in his hat was singing as people danced round and round.

Bestial: Werewolf Apocalypse

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

"Hello?" I answered my desk phone.

"Is this Zombos?"

"No, I'm Iloz Zoc. Zombos is out and about."

"This is Billy Castle from Monumental Studios."

"I'm sorry, who?"

"Monumental Studios. You know, "If it's done right it's Monumental."

"Oh, right, I remember that tagline now," I said.

"Right. Right. Look, I'm calling about this script Zombos sent us. He's gotta spice it up if he wants a chance at a straight to DVD release. You know, it needs lots more hooters or gore or hooters  with gore to stand out from all the other hooters and gore titles cramming the shelves. What he's got here is boring as hell. I mean who's gonna go for werewolves and moonlight and silver bullets these days that's old, old, old ...."

"But Dog Soldiers had lots of gore and action, and it--" I said.

"Well, okay, yeah, but this script ain't no Dog Soldiers. He's got transvestite werewolves attacking cross-dressing vampires, in San Francisco for god sakes. Hell, they're all males. Got it? No hooters. And location shooting over there is a bitch."

My cell phone started playing Clap for the Wolfman. "Hold on a minute will you? I've got another call on my cell. Okay, thanks. Hello?" I answered the other call.

"Hello, is this Zombos?"

"No, he's out and about. I'm ILoz Zoc his valet," I said.

"Damn, I keep missing him. Look, Zoc, this is William D. Carl. I wrote Bestial: Werewolf Apocalypse. Zombos was supposed to do a review of my book. Do you know if he's finished it yet?"

"Him review a book? I don't think he's ever done a review for anything, but he does criticize everything. No, actually I've just finished it myself. Enjoyed it a lot. But I'm not sure I can get to it before the next full moon. Just kidding. William? William? Oh, I thought I lost you. Anyway, I'm backed up with other Permuted Press titles before I can get to it."

"Oh, crimminy! Can't you knock it up to the top of the pile? Who's ahead of me?"

"Bowie Ibarra. You know, the zombies down the road guy."

"Oh, c'mon, not another zombie review! I like Bowie, but zombies are old, old, old," said Carl.

Amy Grech's Apple of My Eye

"The corpse plants are blooming," yelled our groundskeeper, Pretorius.

It was a rare day when any one of our amorphophallus titanums bloomed, and to have them all opening their fetid inflorescence at once is quite a red letter day.

Zombos poked his head out of the window. "I thought I detected a whiff of their potent fragrance. Excellent." He took a deep breadth. "It will make a perfect centerpiece for our Fourth of July party."

He noticed I was still in my doldrums.

"Haven't you finished it yet?" he asked.

"No. Lost, lost, simply lost. I'm not sure why I've been so writer's blocked on this."

"My word, this is the longest time you've spent hemming and hawing on a simple review."

"That's the problem," I said. "It's not that simple."

"Well, then, perhaps if you think it aloud, that would help." He sat down by the window, closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips together, and took a deep breadth.

I looked at my empty cup of coffee with a sigh. Times like these required strong coffee, and lots of it. I sighed. "Well, after reading Amy Grech's thirteen-story collection, Apple of My Eye, I can safely say she has a fetish going for coppery-tasting, bright red blood, shiny sharp implements in dangerous hands, and bad relationships built on—usually terminal—masochistic tendencies. I can best describe her approach if I liken it to walking down a Brooklyn tenement alleyway late at night. Lined with shaded windows, I imagine her standing tiptoe on shaky garbage cans to peak into the rooms beyond. Not all of her clandestine observations are as clear as we voyeurs would like, but there's a hint of the darker side of human nature in many of her stories that makes reading them an unsettling experience. Her characters tend to act a little out of kilter with our reality, giving them a dreamy, or nightmarish tinge of behaviors that don't quite make sense if you only take them at face value." I paused.

"That's good. Make sure to write that down," Zombos said without opening his eyes. "What else?"

Tim Curran's Dead Sea

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

They expected torment and death.They expected thirst and drowning. They expected starvation. They expected suffering in all its guises and, yes, they expected things to come at them out of the mist, the sort of things that had crawled alive and breathing from nightmares and cellars and dank dark places. And on this matter they were right.

--Dead Sea

"Oh, stop being such a spoilsport," Zombos said, helping Zimba aboard the yacht. Chef Machiavelli, dressed in his Speedo Fiji Garden watershorts, pouted as he passed me, waving his finger.

"No. No. And no again." I was adamant. "Let others go down to the sea in ships. I'm not setting foot on that deck, no way, no how."  Zombos threw up his hands in disgust. I folded my arms tighter in defiance.

After reading Tim Curran's novel, Dead Sea, there was no way in or outside of hell I was going to put one foot aboard any ship. I didn't want to have my eyeballs sucked out of their sockets through my butt, nor did I want some gelatinous, throbbing, hairy ovoid turning my insides out. Between Jaws, the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, and now Dead Sea, I hate the water and every hungry, slimy thing swimming through it. Jacques Cousteau be damned.

And damned is what the crew of the Mara Corday find themselves when the oily luminous fog washes over them and knocks out all of their high-tech navigation equipment. Unlike Scott Carey's increasing problems with his diminishing stature in The Incredible Shrinking Man, after a similarly bizarre encounter with a luminous mist while boating, the Mara Corday's crew has to deal with the increasing encounters--and sizes--of the ubiquitous and ever-larger pelagic inhabitants of an ungodly and unearthly ocean. And boy are they hungry; both the crew and those slimy, endlessly-tentacled inhabitants, that is.