June 2022

My book review for Dancing With Tombstones first appeared in The Horror Zine. It is reposted here with permission.

Turns out evocation is a good word to describe Michael Aronovitz’s collection of short stories and one novella in Dancing with Tombstones. Sure, there are the de rigueur sudden or drawn-out deaths, but then there are power tools wielded and heavy machinery painfully bumped in to. In-between all that his girls, psychos, martyrs, sacrificial lambs, students and teachers, and unbeknownst victims dance closer to their graves’ edges before toppling in. It is especially in the academic milieu where he nails it, from actual experience, along with some hands-on knowledge of power tools and heavy construction, oddly enough.

His love for tools and tech stretches from Toll Booth—where heavy construction figures in—a story told in flashback where the ghost is alluded to while the tired-of-living main character does all the haunting of himself, and Soul Text—where cool tech turns hot—a convergence of instant access, social media, and a special neural implant, all colliding into quite a freak-out. Where Toll Booth executes a neat little trick that Aronovitz pulls off with a bit of heavy machinery, a mean hand at dialog and inner monologuing, and a bad bully-buddy relationship as the instigator for the downward spiral that begins with one bad act too many, Soul Text lulls us into a potentially real problem to play with our heads because of our childlike acceptance of tech. If you thought Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 wall-sized televisions were prescient of where we are heading as a society, you aint’ seen nothin’ yet until you read Soul Text.

The dénouements and dire situations evoked through his characters’ thoughts, words, and points of view will make you loosen your collar a little and have you listening more attentively for unusual sounds as you read. Do not fight it: you will succumb to their words and aching lives and unpleasant quietuses with a knowing nod of guilty satisfaction. His people know or should know, or do not want to know, and there lies the bare bodkin each in turn plunges and twists into themselves. Aronovitz has a knack for extending the twisting part and shortening the plunge, driving home the terrors faced in this collection with a nonchalant yet poetic turn. Perhaps a little too well as he stalls the terror until it creeps in towards the end, suddenly, to wreak its havoc.

Unless he is writing about serial killers, however.

With them he extends the terror throughout, as in The Exterminator and The Matriarch. Between evil clowns and “they all look like Mama” he cracks open the minds of his killers cleanly, in a judicious use of words and descriptions that capture the craziness with a matter-of-fact approach that is unsettling as they crack open their victims. Interesting tidbit: The Matriarch later turned into a pre-chapter for his novel Phantom Effect. In The Matriarch he delivers perhaps the best and most concise fictional witness statement put to print. It comes at the end and goes to the dark heart of experiencing real terror. It will leave an impression.

His plentiful terrors, both large and small, begin with a teacher, in How Bria Dies, who whips up a spooky tale for his unruly middle schoolers, but one so good it evokes something bad. His last terror ends with The Boy in the Box, a lose-win-lose hometown baseball story that gets the boy out of the gear box and onto the field, but that box lies waiting all summer long for a replacement. In the Girl Between the Slats, a surgically structured plot twists into an unexpected personal tragedy stretching three years of delusion and avoidance. In Puddles, an obsessive-compulsive paranoia leads to an improper use of an industrial shop-vac. Clearly, Aronovitz should never be left alone in a Home Depot.

Put to more proper and skillful use are his choice of words, which elevate his stories to a unique balance between the show and the tell, the basic challenge of fiction writing. His paragraphs give both internal thoughts and external actions and situations a depth that is vivid with emotions, that emanate from his characters but, in turn, are then invoked in his readers. An example can be found in How Bria Died, where the word “juking” is used as in “He was in the far corner of the room listening to his iPod, juking his head a bit…” Not many writers would use the word. It’s North American, informal, and means to do a sham move; or, it’s Northern English, Scottish, and means to turn or bend quickly to avoid something. Now think about it. The sentence imagery has the character listening to an iPod, presumably shaking his head to the beat of the music. Either definition you choose, you can see the character’s head bobbing a little up and down or doing a slight downward side tilt, back and forth, like a prize fighter shying away from a well-aimed glove. One simple word, yet he gets maximum impact for imagery in the mind’s eye of the reader.

Here’s another interesting example from Toll Booth. “The woman and I shucked hard against each other.” Not many writers would use “shuck,” either, especially in the way Aronovitz does. It’s North American and has a slang meaning, but it usually means the outer covering of corn or shellfish. Its past tense means to remove the outer covering or husk. The way it is used in the sentence is curious. Especially when you realize the woman mentioned is dead. It almost has a sexual connotation given the sentence’s rhythm, but there appears to be a more direct relationship-driven implication here. Perhaps you will figure it out, but only after you read the story to learn more about that unfortunate relationship.

He broadens his approach with more careful choice of words like “Rayovac” (a brand of flashlight for you newbies), “Bazooka” (bubble gum that came with a Bazooka Joe mini-comic), “bent up Genesee Cream ale bottle cap” (soda bottled in Rochester, New York, from 1960), “Good and Plenty” (licorice candy that also had a cartoon character called Choo-Choo Charlie): not just words, but specific products that evoke a location, an age, an environment, and an identity for the narrator more so than simply saying “flashlight” or “bubble gum” or “bottle cap” or “licorice” could ever do. Possibly even evoking a sense of nostalgia in some readers that translates to an emotional tug, connecting them with the character. A sneaky way to endear yourself to your readers, but an effective one because it is so subtle.

One could summarily say that Dancing with Tombstones is filled with teachers making bad choices, kids making bad choices, kids with special needs not being given those choices, and crazies making bad choices for themselves and everybody near them. All those bad choices create bad outcomes, horrible outcomes in so many splendidly imaginative ways. And Aronovitz loves to make you suffer through it all through his honed knives of words and handy power tools of plotting structure. You will love it too.

Eventually. Once you get past the terror of it all.

My book review for Fugue Devil: Resurgence first appeared in The Horror Zine. It is reposted here with permission.

What started out as a dream for a young Stephen Mark Rainey turns into nightmares for his fictional people in Fugue Devil: Resurgence. In his introduction to this collection of thirteen tales of, mostly, the unfortunate, he notes how his younger self was “most enamored of monster movies” and how he “religiously collected copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Castle of Frankenstein, [and] The Monster Times.” These were monsterkid magazines that showcased his favorite cinematic horrors. Indeed, Rainey’s allusions to literary and cinematic themes pepper his stories, putting the salt in the wounds he inflicts on those caught between this world and those mysterious other ones his horrors hail from.

It is through these other worlds that his pulp-style approach (a focus more on outward events rather than inwardly emotional ones) makes him a close relative to H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers, a distant one to Robert E. Howard, and a family all his own with his vision of the Fugue Devil; of which, three stories directly pivot on, while relatives of the Great Old Ones appear in the other stories.

Those three stories include Fugue Devil, Threnody, and The Devil’s Eye. Every seventeen years a mysterious event happens to the town of Beckham, Virginia; a monstrous thing that “if you know about it, it knows about you,” emerges from the woods and people go missing. Is it a tall town’s tale or something more sinister? Newly arrived kid around town, Mike, convinces Ronnie to tell him more about the Fugue Devil, and that gets others involved. The terror begins when they decide to see for themselves if the gossip and fear is real or not. Rainey contrasts the terror to come with another kind of terror within Mike’s family, moving this story beyond the pulp-only framework, to better explain Mike’s interest in the Fugue Devil beyond mere curiosity, which provides a stronger motivation for him doing something we all know, from horror movies and horror fiction, will usually prove to be a bad decision.

But where Fugue Devil presents the “present” horror as it stands, Threnody tells us how it possibly started in pure pulp style. Here is where the younger Rainey’s influences and interests foster allusions to Lovecraftian beings and the summoning device in the Evil Dead movie. These allusions involve a scarce and odd book called The Spheres Beyond Sound by Maurice Zann and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Also written in first person as Fugue Devil, a man inherits his family’s house in Barren Creek, a few miles from the town of Aiken Mill, that is surrounded by dark and brooding woods. He finds the book, falls under its spell, and finds tapes recorded by his grandfather. Listening to those tapes, he turns up the volume and hears the results as his grandfather leads some neighbors in playing music from the book. Need I say more?

With The Devil’s Eye, we return after the events of Fugue Devil, but seventeen years later, when Jack, brother to someone who went missing that fateful night years ago, returns to find the truth. He enlists the aid of a local independent film maker to assist him, to capture proof with a camera, either way. Unfortunately, without him knowing, others are invited to act in the documentary event, and the situation worsens from that point on. More background to the Fugue Devil is provided: as the story goes, it appeared on the summit of Copper Peak when a man from Beckham played his violin to summon it. Still, there remains mystery surrounding why someone would do such a thing and mystery why the Fugue Devil returns every so often to do so much harm.

Moving from the Fugue Devil’s Virginia woods to a necropolis far from Viroconium in Roman Britain, Pons Devana (pons means bridge), leans more toward Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery, but with a theme of yet another dark, other, space exerting its evil influence on ours. This is one story that cries out to be made a novel because it ends while still in progress. As it stands, Quintus Marcius is ordered to investigate the maneuverings of centurion Titus Fabius, who is acting strangely. When Marcius finds Fabius, the centurion is wearing peculiar armor he has not seen before. Odder still, Fabius is married to a strange woman and there appear to be rats scuttling around in the shadows, though none are ever seen. Dark rooms and narrow hallways, tombs and crypts, and malevolence hanging in the air do not bode well for Marcius or Fabius. Unseen things grow close and even here Rainey brings the horror to the woods too. The story is reminiscent of the shadow beings in Babylon 5, but we are left with not knowing more beyond the unknown threat emerging from the necropolis.

Turning from Howard to Robert W. Chambers, whose supernatural work figures prominently in Masque of the Queen, we meet a twenty-eight-year-old woman, Kathryn, desperate for an acting job. She finds it with a play whose story follows, oddly enough, the fictional play The King in Yellow. As rehearsals continue, the play and those acting in it, become more and more disturbing and disturbed. Three actors leave but she is convinced to stay. It is at this point that the use of the word “fugue” by Rainey becomes most clear, explaining his approach to each of his stories in this collection. On the one hand, fugue means a musical composition, and we see that in his stories centering around the Fugue Devil and other horrors. The word also means a loss of awareness of one’s identity, and it is here in Masque of the Queen, that the loss of identity becomes all too real as the crescendoing moment in the play, where the character of Cassilda sings her song, and acting gives way to stark terror and another other space intrudes with dire consequences for her.

This other space is set aside, briefly, for an inner one in Somewhere My Love, where a music teacher practices a more personal sorcery on a young student, who continues the spell into adulthood. One gets the feeling this is a more personal and less fictional story for Rainey, but it goes deeper than pulp-style and garners more emotional involvement. The musical summoning theme reappears with a boom When Jarly Calls. A couple on a wine-holiday find out who the true vintner is and what else gets crushed along with the grapes. This story also ends on a more positive note, or so you may hope.

Through all these stories, other-worldly music, bizarre sounds, and big and little monstrous things that should not be seen or heard in a normal world, intrude into the woods, the towns, and the cities with their deadly intentions. This is not a book for those who like happy endings.

Horror fans will appreciate that.