Zombos' Closet of Horror

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.

Book Review: 23 Hours A Vengeful Vampire In Maximum Security

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 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.

Cthulhu Unbound From Permuted Press

From Permuted Press, It is coming for you. You know. You want it.

Cthulhu Unbound Volume One, edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri. With contributions by C.J. Henderson, Kim Paffenroth, DL Snell, and others.

"Imagine being free. Free from everything that defines you, that makes you easily recognizable as who you are. Welcome to a place where bleak noir cityscapes share a Technicolor sky with combat fighters, where you can find gunslingers from the Old West and a lost chapter from a literary classic, all with something in common: Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

"This is a place where the Crawling Chaos has to solve his own murder and the Old Ones come up against the Gods of Las Vegas, a place where the new player in London's underground isn't human and masked heroes go toe-to-tentacle with eldritch horrors. This is a Mythos collection unlike any other. This is Lovecraft in many colors, many guises. This is Cthulhu--Unbound!"

Book Review: 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."

Bram Stoker Award-winning author and 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 ApocalypseSomething to Howl About From Permuted Press

"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

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.