Books (Fiction)

Yes, my dear friend, I’m sure you’ve made the connection that’s been my secret for all these years. My stories don’t come from my own inner fears, but from my mother’s mad ramblings and whispery rants. (Horrifica: Collected Stories, by Sheldon Woodbury, Nightmare Press)

Sheldon Woodbury. Sounds like a rich person in a noir film, doesn’t it? A scriptwriter and former advertising agency suit, he writes a fatalistic and darker side of fantasy life, with thirty-one short stories that, mostly, would fit nicely into a 1950s horror comic. He traps them into three categories: Grotesqueries, Monstrosities, and Depravities. His characters are usually headed one way (downward), with few side trips along the way. There is no bright serendipity or goodwill for anyone found in these pages. Well, then again, the monsters do quite well, though. He keeps the terror very horrible indeed. Not gory, just terrible and very no way out, with endless ways to bury his victims, deep and dark, giving no inch or breath to escape.

Reading each story, you see his tight setups and ghoulish penchant for bad situations that fester into high mortality statistics as they wrap around his victims like butcher paper tucked snuggly around a steak. And then he tickles your eyes with some classically-tinted horror, which stands out for us growing old in the genre; Halloween, Jack Pierce (the maker of Universal’s monsters), eldritch abominations, hellscapes, revenge served hot, apocalyptic worlds, secret clubs and dark cityscapes, all are fair game for his macabre mindset.

From the things coming at the stroke of midnight for an errant preacher, the lonely woman who could just eat you to death, and the mom with a penchant for knives and revenge, Woodbury sticks to narratives with little, if any, dialog, and people who, whether on the receiving or giving end of it, strut and fret their hour on the page and then are heard no more (well, except for the screaming or last gasps).

Each tale has a few or fewer acts, (you could argue some Freytag’s Pyramid tossed in, maybe), that run mostly linear, driven by narratives providing excellent examples of the term short and sweet. He likes to keep it impersonal through third-person description with an occasional first person talking, but, without dialog, he conveys characters’ emotions through their responses and thoughts, with beats (those small amounts of action) shifting them toward his bleak endings. Woodbury is not one for a lot of description, but what he does choose to describe sets the mood perfectly for each story, as well as keeping the pacing brisk but not too fast. He wants you to savor each spilled red drop like a good single malt whiskey that’s sipped and not gulped.

In his Gift From the Stars, a young man writes a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, regarding his mother’s peculiar malady, and in The Last Horror Show, a bittersweet life in horror is drawn until the end, where we are left with the knowledge that “monsters should never be ignored.”

Just the thought of Woodbury mentioning authors like Clark Ashton Smith made this reviewer smile. I can imagine him opening a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in the dead of night or watching the black and white monster movies as well as the more colorful ones to hone his bad taste buds. Woodbury’s choice of subjects, and his styling, from story to story, as he switches gears to accommodate a bit of nostalgia in The Monster Maker or revealing why “real monsters are hard to kill” in The Last Halloween, draws inspiration from earlier horror fiction and pulpy terrors to frame his modern monstrosities. You can imagine these stories flickering on 1980s television horror shows.

So, if it’s monstrosities you like, there’s the mystery of Extinction, where what killed the dinosaurs is finally solved. Unfortunately. If you like depravities, perhaps Midnight Town will provide that beckoning side trip you’ve always wanted to take, after the sun goes down; just follow the “flicker in the desert” as you leave the city lights behind. Perhaps you like grotesqueries more. If so, just go Down Where Nightmares Dwell, but mind the basement steps. In Woodbury’s world, mothers can be hell as much as the monsters. And, if you like all three, well, he’s got you covered neck deep in Horrifica. Just take breaks to keep breathing and you’ll be fine. Maybe.

The Horror Zine staff book reviewer, JM Cozzoli

Partly Lovecraftian, partly folk horror, there is a terror permeating the upstairs floor at The House at Black Tooth Pond and throughout the forest surrounding it. A horribly mutilated body covered in some sort of transparent gel, “like wet shellac,” kicks the horror in gear, bringing together Sheriff Gordon Parrot and coroner Melissa Crawford (looking like “a fourteen-year-old kid”) to the threshold of something quite nasty and relentless.

The Pritchett brothers take the brunt of the nasty, however, and their walks through that forest lead them further into the mystery, but more on the receiving end than the investigative one. As detectives they fall short, but their roles as victims lean toward the terminal side as they succumb to hallucinations and actions not best suited for survival. But they were not the first, and clearly, will not be the last, so expect another novel to move this terror along to flesh out the whatsis and, hopefully, how to kill it: and, on that point, rather carefully, Rainey leaves us on a suspenseful note, making you wish he writes the story’s continuance quickly.

He likes to spin tales best suited for campfires and dead of nights, so this one naturally gives credence to the small Virginian town of Sylvan County’s shady history, where his usual geographic haunts and creatures fuel the local gossip and tall tales. There is even a local folklore expert to assist the Sherif along his investigation: beginning with the Yck, which, as Professor Shelton Scales relates, originated with the Algonquin Indians. Sort of like the Wendigo, it incessantly hungers. Given the weirdness of the case, the Sherif begins to believe in the weird to find the answers, so he starts thinking maybe those tales of the Fugue Devil and assorted baddies are not all superstitious tall tale nonsense after all.

The stomping ground of the badness this time is Black Tooth Pond, the place where “despite a low breeze, the air carried no sound—no bird songs, no rustling of squirrels or other small animals” and where the sunlight’s “brilliant rays never filtered all the way down through the overhanging branches.”

Rainey’s characters’ dialogs, relationships, and positionings in his stories are always on target for moving the story along, pacing the plot, and, most importantly, creating that small town, hidden secrets, environment naturally. You also feel for every character caught in his cosmic web of Black Tooth Pond’s nefarious entity, so much so, you may find yourself wondering “you idiot!” or “okay, you’re smart, what are you going to do about it?”

Every cosmic baddie needs a home and Rainey dresses up a dilapidated homestead, situated deep in the forest of Black Tooth Pond, where the brothers discover a newly revealed pathway leading to it. A monstrous magnolia tree stands as sentinel in front of the Caviness family’s abandoned home, where a sycamore tree has taken root within, shooting its branches up to and through the ruptured roof. The upstairs is dark and brooding and best to leave alone (the darkness and those stairs look foreboding). But something calls to them and an unsettling whippoorwill’s cry is heard at the oddest times, increasing their sense of a dangerous presence in the dark. Old news clippings of dire and catastrophic events are found, piled up on the coffee table, sent in letters to the Caviness family, whose fate and background are lost in time. When Martin starts seeing “shadows of human beings— smoky, insubstantial— wavering before a nebulous, electric-blue backdrop” he begins to question his sanity, and worse, fear he is sane.

Moments of suspenseful dread are experienced by both the sheriff and the brothers independently, as their two lines of inquiry bring them closer and closer to the evil in the house, across the forest, and maybe even into the town. Whatever lurks, it had done so for a long time, and it was something the earlier locals had tried to destroy with fire. Making matters worse and weirder, the writer of those letters, filled with awfully bad news, sent to the Caviness family many years ago, shows up, moving hell a little bit closer for everyone involved.

The House at Black Tooth Pond is filled with keep-turning-those-pages suspenseful chapters. The other chapters carefully build the mystery, wrapped in layers both the sheriff, his coroner, and Martin and Phil try to unravel, which also keeps you turning those pages. Rainey is one of a handful of writers who can give you the supernatural, the cosmic, and the eldritch terror in carefully measured doses that intoxicate you their simple cleverness and their absolute dread. Lovecraft would be proud. So keep the lights on while you read, even if you are on a Kindle. You may just start hallucinating something bad in the dark, just out of reach, but some thing definitely reaching for you.

I wrote this review for The Horror Zine.

I won’t be using words like masterpiece or homerun, or the usual hyperbole punted around too easily in reviews these days, but Nick Roberts is a writer to reckon with and his The Exorcist’s House: Genesis is rather a bold attempt at moving the exorcism-horror trope a rung up on the ladder of creativity, through a more complex story structure tied into his growing novel-verse, centered around a recurring evil. It doesn’t reach quite high enough, though, with its overarching story split across twenty-seven chapters alternating between two distinct timelines that don’t mesh until one, by necessity, takes precedence toward the end. It is as if Roberts wrote two novels, then decided to combine both into one. Each half moves itself up the ladder, but the two main timelines and their multiple past and present events and summaries, to tie in Robert’s prior novel, The Exorcist’s House, serve only to stifle the main narrative flow, killing its suspense-building and leading to a one-sided climactic battle (which, not so surprisingly, primes the next book in this exorcism-fueled novel-verse).

The more immersive narrative comes from the backstory timeline of 1967 with Merle Blatty, whose farmhouse becomes the titular epicenter of evil. Merle is quite a character: plain spoken, simple-living, smokes too much, but he is a reluctant yet determined exorcist. Note Merle’s last name too, which is a nod to William Peter Blatty, who wrote the granddaddy of them all, The Exorcist (and its sequel, Legion). Roberts gives nods to other fictional works here and there, usually through a character’s dialog. Horror fans may find that gratifying, but it tends to pull at the threads of Robert’s own storyline logic with these incessant, wink-wink, intrusions.

The 1967 timeline begins with chapter one, and what a chapter it is. Not only the best chapter in the book, but an exemplary chapter that sets a tone and mood that fails to continue through the alternating timelines of Merle’s for 1967 and 1973, and those of the Hill Family for 1997. Every action and description in chapter one is saturated with Merle’s determination and the evil power he is up against as he meets the Spider—the main entity of destruction hopping into Merle’s life and taking up residence in his farmhouse—through a visit to Ward F, the criminally insane ward of Weston State Hospital.

From there the book alternates between Merle’s trials and tribulations and Daniel Hill’s struggle against the ever-increasing terrors facing his family in 1997 when his none-too-bright brother Adam, looking to do an Amityville Horror-styled expose for quick money, returns to the farmhouse and opens the well in the basement–actually rather easily, given how it was supposed to be sealed good and tight after the last foray into the supernatural.

The well provides the otherworld portal between the story’s here, and the hellish there, and a cramped home for the Spider, an emissary (outcast?), looking to please something older, more powerful, and just as malevolent. Robert’s Spider is a unique supernatural character in that it is serving (or hopes to serve and impress) another being who seems indifferent to it, to curry favor and personal stature. It is also described as having combined demonic and human qualities, giving it the power to send strands of control through minds and souls across great distances, even when sealed in the well. So anxious to please its master, the Spider’s intentions provide a depth to its nature and goals, creating a more dimensionally fleshed-out creature beyond its usual deadly persuasions while still keeping it all very mysterious and even pitiable, like some Igor-like mad scientist’s assistant. While Roberts is not one for lengthy character descriptions, he does devote his best efforts to the Spider’s gory handling of anyone, either possessed or getting in the way, with aplomb.

The 1997 timeline kicks into high gear as it moves between the two Hill brothers, Daniel and Adam, as Adam unwittingly unleashes the Spider from the well and both Daniel’s family and Adam’s friends fall under the Spider’s growing control, increasing the body count gore and the blood flow. Two priests, although mentioned in flashback and in the current predicament, remain mostly referred to instead of active participants until the climax, which, given the buildup Robert’s painstakingly assembles through his complicated narrative structure, makes priestly intervention less stellar than anticipated. Remember how Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining treated the Dick Halloran character? That’s the same treatment given in the final battle between the Spider, Daniel, a priest, and assorted living and dead family members: lots of build-up to a too quick and one-sided, mostly, ending.

A simpler story structure and more good versus evil give and take would have made The Exorcist’s House: Genesis a stronger entry on the exorcism theme. But as a critic, my jaded mileage varies from yours, the reader, who just wants a good horror to snuggle up to. If that is where your mileage takes you, then, yes, Nick Roberts provides enough terror and bloody bits to make you want to snuggle up with a hot drink, a single light on, and this novel, especially if you have already read The Exorcist’s House. He may also sour you from visiting old farmhouses with old wells in their basements too, but that’s entirely on him. I personally find such places way too creepy anyway. I recommend you read the Merle Blatty chapters completely through before turning to the Hill Family’s struggles in their chapters. Taken in that order the horror mood may just leap up at you even more.

John M. Cozzoli, Staff Book Reviewer for The Horror Zine

Here’s my review for Threshold by Murphy St. John that appeared in The Horror Zine.

Malcolm is having a rough night. First there is the suicide in the apartment next to his, smelling up the place, and then when he tries to wheelbarrow the body as far away from his nose as he can, his mouth suddenly tastes salt water and his feet are slipping on a sandy beach. The jungle nearby clues him in on the something-is-wrong possibility. Of course, he soon learns he is dead too, but that turns out to be the least of his problems.

Murphy St. John keeps pushing the threshold for Malcolm and his fellow bewildered travelers he meets in this self-published novel, aptly titled Threshold. I will state up front that the book is good, with a fast, pulp-style pace, is descriptively weird enough with ample monsters to beset them—especially if you are into religious-based nightmares—and certainly well worth your summer reading time spent alongside a nice cold glass of lemonade (or, if you prefer, in the fall, with a nice cup of hot tea). I felt I needed to say this now because self-publishing has a stigma attached to it for some readers, but Threshold is not problematic regarding editing or writing cred, not one bit.

But the problems Malcolm and his confused companions face are definitely a mix of unpleasant things, following one after the other. Ellis, Annette, Cameron, Doug, and Travis, each with a good reason bad enough to get them running room only in limbo, have to face various challenges orchestrated by Thalia, a mask-wearing demi-god, with demonic leanings and a tight schedule to keep. Winning each challenge, to work together to survive, gets them further up the celestial sphere so they can go back to the living, properly chastened. Losing means a fast trip to the hot basement of endless torment.

So, of course, they start fighting among themselves as much as they try to outlast Thalia’s dark minions, the frayed, and her wicked games of damnation. All of which provides the story’s momentum through dialog, puzzling solutions, and escalating fraying nerves and tempers. Interestingly, St. John set up Malcolm in the beginning—will he or won’t he survive, what’s his story anyway?—as something of a leader for the group, but then St. John twists Malcolm to a different direction; one decidedly more downward leaning. Another takes his leadership role to keep everything together (as in body parts) and moving forward. Bodies and minds begin to buckle under the strain of trying to stay alive, which paradoxically, in their cases, means less dead, and trying to figure out where each portal is to the next dire situation before the frayed gobble them up.

Like in a video game with multi-levels, each win or loss brings with it a new terror-filled scenario to surmount. St. John creates his symbolic monsters based on the sins each person has committed, although they cannot remember those sins, as Thalia reminds them, “whether you remember or not, you’re in my domain for a reason. Rehabilitation.” She has a funny sense of rehabilitation.

In Greek mythology, Thalia was one of the Muses, presiding over comedy and idyllic poetry. Clearly, St. John’s Thalia is not in that family. She has none of that refinement, unless black comedy, and a penchant for deathtraps like you see in the Saw movie franchise could be called poetic. But that is not to say there is gore because the action is more sardonic than gratuitously bloody. St. John makes both monsters and victims players in a grander scheme involving redemption versus damnation, with both acting as pawns. His limbo is a dark landscape filled with trapped people looking for souls to leverage their escape, and a lot of doom and gloom to spice it all up. And always at Malcolm’s and the others’ heels are the frayed, dark things that devour everything in the wink of an eye, employed by Thalia to keep things lively.

Malcolm and the others also have a mystery to solve: what ties them altogether? Slowly, memories return and past deeds reveal themselves, but they are running out of time and as Thalia clarifies it for them, “You’re all on the express train to hell.” Lucky for us, St. John makes it one hell of a ride.

Zombos Says: All the numbers add up to imaginative terror.

If you thought you had a fear of math, wait until you get a load of these numbers, courtesy of the well assembled selection of authors and terrifying themes in Arithmophobia: An Anthology of Mathematical Horror, neatly curated by Robert Lewis, to make sure its unfortunate characters find too many lethal numbers are out to get them. From Lovecraftian inklings to multi-dimensional unknowns to the evil math teacher down the block, this anthology is an elegant and delightful sampling of abstract and more concrete plot-theorems; and you do not even need to be a Poindexter or use a pocket protector to enjoy the terminal numerical terrors popping up in each story.

The two stories you should read first are short and long in length, respectively, and refreshingly elementary in their plots and execution. Martin Zeigler’s Trains Passing, the shorter story, is like reading a script from one of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour’s episodes. A teacher and a stranger meet aboard a high-speed train for the trip of a lifetime. The teacher is fulfilling her dream of solving one of those mind-numbing algebra speed and distance problems by experiencing it. The stranger becomes her reluctant but smart student to be lectured. Cue the wonderfully shocking revelation at the end and go to Hitchcock (in your mind, of course), summing up the story with his usual sardonic wit. Short, and building the textual blocks to the point they are toppled over with a jab in your eye climax, this one is a standout in this collection of standouts. …

Arithmophobia Edited By Robert Lewis
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This book review first appeared at The Horror Zine.

Halfway through The Bed Makers by Chad Lutzke and John Boden I realize it is not a horror novel. Not in a practical sense. There are no other-worldly monsters, no stalkers slicing and dicing, and everything from the characters to the small Mayberry-like town where Genie and Calvin wind up in, well, there is no hint of the supernatural at all; no under the bed nightmares, no hints of ghosts prowling the graveyard, no vampires, zombies or cryptids or apocalyptic wastelands. But there are some bad people; some confused; and some just looking to do the right thing.

It all seems so normal. The people you will meet are the friendly and unfriendly sheriff and his deputy, Pastor Paul, who needs gravediggers–oh, and there is his son who sleeps in a coffin. That is a bit weird. There are some twisted-up people too, acting in ways stunting their humanity or making others fearful or making a few people dead.

Not the haunting dead, mind you, but the dead that haunt the lives of the living; and that is where the title of this novel makes a little more sense. We all make our own beds, so to speak, which is at the core of this structurally simple character study that is like watching one of those early live and intense television dramas from the 1950s: slices of life cut all sorts of ways–with commercial breaks–until somebody finally realizes they need a decision that works better than the ones previously made before time runs out. All played in a few simple but important locations.

Of course, no commercial breaks are needed here. The decision that gets Genie and Calvin, two down on their luck homeless ex-army buddies, long on years, to leave 1979 Chicago and hop on a train heading west, to find something better, also gets them into trouble. Not their fault, either. The ride is uneventful except for a pending storm and some boys up to no good. They meet those boys hiding in the second train car they hop into. Reluctant at first, the boys act friendly until they are not. What takes place in the train car follows Genie and Calvin to a television sitcom-perfect town, where they decide to settle down. Now if only the deputy would leave them alone it would be a quiet spot for them. But that deputy has some hidden agenda and a lot of room for personal growth.

Pastor Paul’s son, who should be away at school, who I already said sleeps in a coffin, prowls the graveyard messing up fresh dug graves, making Genie and Calvin’s new job a real hassle. On top of that there is a person they thought dead now back to blackmail them. Or kill them.

The Bed Makers pins its dialog to the center of the world these ex-army buddies inhabit, trying to eke out a living, avoid being hassled, and wanting to end their days with some comforts. The interest-pull here is how they watch out for each other, deal, together, with all the bad luck that comes their way, and their efforts to solve a murder mystery hiding in plain sight.

Lutzke and Boden keep their style and descriptions in period, perhaps taking a little too long at the start in getting to that small town, but then pick up the pace to provide the growing mystery and danger, leading to the climax. For Genie and Calvin, their lives wind up like riding around a merry-go round and missing the brass ring at every turn in their lives, holding on for dear life and still reaching for that brass ring just out of reach. But now, reaching that small town, the brass ring is almost theirs.

What keeps this story engaging is how they do not take no for an answer. Sure, they accept a little too much, demand too little, but when it comes time to really matter, they will not let go. All they needed was to be left alone, enjoy a decent meal, and make a clean bed for a change. As Genie told the pastor, “We threw our dice back in Chicago, hopped on a train to come west, hoping we’d find something. Luck has landed us here.” Not quite the word he wanted to use, but they finally have a warm bed, a paying job digging graves, and a kitchen with food in the cupboards. There is also the diner they can now afford, one of their few luxuries.

The dialog is measured with a bit ‘oldish’, pegging the generation Genie and Calvin grew up in. For instance, “Damn, that Fred’s a good egg,” meaning someone you could trust, and “peckerhead,” a person you definitely could not, have long whiskers on them but they flesh the tone of the novel.

Eventually you start to wonder how Genie and Calvin wound up homeless and hankering for a new life, and what their backgrounds had to say about them.  A few allusions to it are made but you do get a sense, based on their placid philosophical take toward their up and down predicaments that the authors really did write those backgrounds to add more depth to these two men.

The Bed Makers is a subtle, less horror-oriented, and dramatically rounded story that offers a satisfying conclusion. It is a drama about life, loss, and the perseverance of Genie and Calvin, who, despite their struggles and the uneven luck that comes their way, keep working through it, especially when others are in need. The authors successfully create a period-appropriate atmosphere and develop their characters’ backgrounds to add depth to a quietly strong story, making it a rewarding read for those who appreciate a more nuanced, character-driven approach to storytelling whose power keeps you from putting it down. I heartily recommend it.

With the imprimatur of S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s own Boswell, you would think that Nancy Kilpatrick’s collection of Thirteen Plus-1 Lovecraftian Narratives would be a classically written addition to the oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft’s influence across the decades.

Well, you would be wrong, sort of: while it is classily written to the literary essence of that lonely man from Providence, while her contemporary characters get no fair treatment as expected, she makes us feel every last terror as they live it. They may be Lovecrafted with all the fears, alienness, and cosmic-joking punishments she can throw at them, which is bad for them, good for us readers, but she imbues that cold otherness at the fringes of the cosmos, and the sanity-slippage that travels with it, with their emotions. Those feelings can be cruel to see and Kilpatrick excels at showing it. Her awareness of the social forces affecting her characters helps provide depth and a greater natural fit going against the unnatural.

In his forward, S.T. Joshi notes that “there was a time when writing pastiches of the work of H. P. Lovecraft was the literary equivalent of slumming.” You can rest assured there is no slumming in this collection. The opening salvo, A Crazy Mistake, hits its target, bringing a touch of madness that slowly grows as Kim, a researcher of myth, legend, history, and anything that would make a sellable movie, peels back reality to find something more sinister. And just will not let it go.

It starts with an inebriated director’s request to find “the first women aliens have knocked up. You know, the Amazons or something.” Kim’s research leads her down the rabbit hole to find more than the Amazons, to pre-historic, goddess-worshipping societies and the oldest, weirdest images. Soon she’s learning about the Great Old Ones, mentions of an expedition in the 1930s initiated by Miskatonic University, unusual remains found in Antarctica, and eventually to an image of a huge woman with a beehive-head, matching a clay figure Kim’s infatuated with. Kilpatrick moves quickly and methodically, using key Lovecraftian references, replacing Kim’s enthusiasm with the horror that comes from her realization of what she is uncovering.

Here are some of my favorites from the collection.

In Always a Castle? Dana Keenan becomes caught by the unexpected in her new position as companion to an aged widow, in a way not mentioned in the job description. The Tudor-Jacobean styled estate of the Whaterleys is a long drive from its neighbors and her degree in antique décor shows through the many fine furnishings she notices as she makes her way up to the room where her charge is bedridden. Unfortunately, the growing odor emanating from that room, the many generations of that family and their weird traits, and her eventual plan to kill off the family, if she can survive, seal her alienation from the normal.

Alienation from the normal, a key Lovecraftian theme, is embraced by Dr. Todd, a grotesque dermatologist with “a face a lower lifeform might admire” who leads Liz down a dark path of poking and prodding to make her more pretty because she was thirty-eight and, worst of nightmares, could die single and childless. At least that is what her best friend and cousin kept telling her. The Eye of the Beholder is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s The Skeleton but with a very different, maternally morbid, and body-horror twist that brings the alien otherness of Lovecraft and societal preconceptions together with a bit of madness.

Esmerelda is the Gurrl Undeleted, sitting in first class, car 2, cabin 3, on the train to the Black Forest, her dream vacation. So much for that goal. The trip takes an odd turn when first class brings her close to an unpleasant group of short, square people, shoe-horned in with her. Leaving her stifling job where no one appreciates her talent, and worse, even steals her work, she now finds herself in another unpleasant situation. But what is real?

When Genna reluctantly returns to Innsmouth in Mourning People, the last of her line, will she survive the family madness as she deals with her past? Will Kinsey survive The Oldies’ support group and their problems, and those dark places from where the Old Ones wait? That her friends meet up at a place for drinks called The Eleusinian Mysteries may be a clue. Is Ian dreaming in The Visitor, when the Palmetto talks to him? It is not often a bug tells him it is his spirit animal.

Kilpatrick has a knack for writing between the lines, interjecting the humanness-baggage each of her characters must carry through their jobs, their lives, while handling the monstrous tossed their way by the unexpected malevolent forces surrounding them. In this regard, her stories’ points of view are that of the person experiencing the horror instead of the horrible experience happening to a person. In this way she goes one better than Lovecraft, where he remained clinical in his details, she intensifies the horror through the feelings, thoughts, and varying degrees of awareness her women and men cycle through.

Each person in this collection may not experience multi-tentacled beasties or traverse cosmic landscapes where angles are oddly ignored, but each person here steps from the mundane to the bizarre, from the light to the dark, from the comfort of familiar surroundings to the alien discomfort when those surroundings change in ways that challenge the soul and the mind.

Kilpatrick breathes Lovecraft’s doom-soaked vapors into each of her people and the question each must answer is how they will survive. As if they even had a chance?

This review first appeared in The Horrorzine. Please go there to read more reviews and delectable horror stories.

This review was written for The Horrorzine. Special thanks to the author for providing a review copy.

Zombos Says: Good

What is Faherty thinking? He takes the awkwardly slow-moving ancient mummy of Hammer and Universal Studios fame, inhales the plot-thickening of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, Lot. 249, and wraps a tidy bundle of revenge killings and weird menace that would fit quite naturally into a pulp magazine like Strange Detective Mysteries. On top of this, he adds a unique quality to the mummy’s bandages as they take on a life of their own and wreak bloody havoc: and all this without a tana leaf in sight! Such thinking, hopefully, will lead to more supernatural detective adventures with Reese, Reardon, and one determined forensic scientist, Joanna, who is married to Detective Dan Reese.

And that is where the friction heats up between Detective Reese and drummed-out-of-the-police department, ex-partner, former detective Reardon. Now they are hateful of each other, the only other person more despised, by both of them, is Driscoll, a sloppy, almost-retired to pension slacker, counting the days, just-close-the-books kind of detective messing things up and going for the easy but false answers. The true answer is one they all have trouble wrapping their heads around.

It involves a revengeful mummy resurrected by sucking the life force out of others unfortunate enough to cross his path (leaving people looking like mummies themselves), and another demonic mummy (a ushabti), very tall, very determined, and intent on dismembering those he is summoned to kill. All because a group of men, many years before, betrayed one of their own while stealing sacred artifacts from the Temple of Sokar. Seemingly unstoppable and able to appear out of thin air and return to it, Reese, Reardon, and Joanna are hard pressed to stop it or convince anyone else of what is happening; especially when it is finally directed to go after them.

In between the escalating carnage, the sexual tensions and a sullied past history caused by a strip poker game gone wrong, Reese and Reardon’s ability to work together is skittish at best, and the fumbling Driscoll keeps pushing to close the case with false leads in spite of the facts as the rich descendants of those tomb plunderers wind up in pieces, one at a time.

Joanna uses her forensic connections and skills to dig deeper into the nature of the enemy they are facing: a deadly giant mummy on one hand and its unseen guiding force on the other. They must piece together the why before they can figure out the how, to stop the deaths piling up from an event begun in 1888, now coming to its climax in New York City. When the ushabti goes after people not connected to the original descendants’ curse, matters take a turn for the worse.

Faherty does a wonderful job giving his people everyday problems tossed in with the supernatural ones, making his characters believable and endearing, even when they overstep each other's personal boundaries. His monsters are not too simple, not too complicated, and usually have personal boundary issues too, and here those issues lead to point-blank death or narrow escapes from it. Those death-defying escapes provide the quickly moving action in Ragman, and his villains here, aside from the titular demonic one, have either valid grievances or imagined ones, providing the mystery that pushes Reese, Reardon, and Joanna together again to solve it while staying alive trying.  

Zombos Says: Good

This book review first appeared in The Horror Zine.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there are five points of view to tell the story: five narrative voices that include Jonathan, Mina, Lucy, Dr. Seward, and Van Helsing. Stoker signposts each one with dates so the reader does not get lost in the story as it progresses. Dan Klefstad’s Fiona’s Guardians also uses a multi-narrator approach too, though he uses section headings to mark their first-person narratives as they move back and forth. Pay attention to those signposts because he does switch often. He also tosses in flashbacks, challenging the reader even more to keep pace with the story he unfolds by shifting between past and present events. A weakened element from all this is the why, as his approach, moving between the vampires and the humans, which include Fiona, Daniel, Wolf, Soren, and the rather comical secret religious order of brothers called Mors Strigae, along with some key actions that take place off-page, make their motivations, with the inherent whys and wherefores, a bit vague at times.

Fiona is a century old, give or take, vampire with a long-standing problem. Gone are the nights she could hit up the local village for a few warm pints. She addresses her daily need for blood by hiring special domestic help (guardians) through job postings. The listing promises much but it makes clear that instant death is a possibility if the applicant does not work out, that the position is permanent, that being an orphan is a plus, having a strong aversion to gossiping with the neighbors also much desired, being able to improvise and invest smartly a minimum requirement, and able to tie loose ends neatly or wrap a corpse tightly, complete the job description. Oh, and to find blood, of course, from more civilized sources like hospitals and blood banks (known in the trade as ‘banking’), to keep a low profile.

Wolf is a new hire and Daniel, a long-time guardian, shows him the ropes. Soren, one of Fiona’s more demanding and condescending vampire lovers, makes it tough for the guardians, and Daniel, especially, would like to see Soren burn in the daylight. Complicating the job of keeping Fiona supplied with blood are the brothers of the Mors Strigae, who cannot seem to do anything without making a mess of it. Guns with wooden bullets and drones are their primary weapons as they track down vampires, with Fiona their primary long-time target. Her fellow vampires also start gunning for her, but she’s pretty tricky. She is a female vampire in a male-dominated vampire’s world. To change that she will need to go up against her own kind and the antediluvian vampire who dominates them all.

Brother Raymond and Father Abbott hatch plans or pick up the pieces after those plans usually fail, Daniel and Wolf bicker over the on-the-job training, Fiona and Soren, along with the backstabbing vampires and Mors Strigae politics and power struggles, thicken and enrich the plot. Betrayal, loyalty, some lust, and human and vampire foibles and wickedness complicate who the reader should be cozying up to and rooting for. But their dialogs are a versatile highlight throughout the book, handled expertly and with proper inflexion for each personality. At times it continues past its freshness date, but it never becomes perfunctory or out of character. Through it all, Fiona schemes and maneuvers her way with her own purpose in mind. And she is one vampire who gets what she wants, by smile or by bite.

My review for The Mouth is a Coven, by Liz Worth, first appeared in The Horror Zine. Please go there to see more reviews by me and other staff book reviewers as well as fiction, poetry, and art by many of today's established and up and coming horror-creatives. This review is reposted with permission.

Liz Worth saves no cats in The Mouth is a Coven, but she does manage to challenge the reader with a very questionable omniscient narrator, who may be somewhat insane and possibly one of the sordid people trapped in this novel; or maybe she is just completely telling the truth, as weird as it is. “Now I’m just a girl in someone else’s dream, pointing at a sticky note pasted to a wall and saying, “This is all you need to know about this story.”’

I tossed in the towel about half-way through, then had the towel tossed back in my face. There is a rhythm to the many “there’s a story told…” lead-ins to the mysteries surrounding the locale, and there is a method to the folie à deux here. Worth dives deep into the empty lives of Blue and Julie as they desperately seek escape from the mundane through vampirism with the help of some living, and dead, acquaintances.

Why all of her doom-buggy riding people (actually, there are many folies à deux) are so empty inside and out—and intent to be so—makes this novel something you can take at face value as the horror extant, the search for Matter, the godlike vampire Blue and Julie hope will give them immortality and power; or the horror internal as you disbelieve the truthfulness of the narrator as she recalls events like a bat on the wall* and the shaky social relationships recalled.

This is not your usual vampire story. No romantic yearnings with fangs, no frilly-sleeved pathos.

Instead, there is the weird Starling City, deep with its vibe of a Lakeside or Derry or Sunnydale, where people go missing often, ghosts walk the streets often, and the Goth scene is thick as clotted blood.* Then you have Matter, the supreme vampire, who, hopefully, will turn Blue and Julie, but he is hard to find and indifferent to mere mortals. There are others: Jenny and Dorian, the oracles of Starling City, leaving witch bottles around town full of screams; the ghost of Samantha, Blue’s sister; Crook and Cassie, who may or may not have sex on freshly dug graves; and the girl buried in the basement of an old house who may know how to get Matter’s attention.

Blue and Julie dig her up and she provides messy guidance to them. Sacrifices must be made and without a handbook for the recently turned vampire to guide them, things soon get out of hand and very bloody. Like all gods, Matter is aloof and bored with mortals who come calling.

Worth weaves a series of mixed memories recalling memories—are all these people really ghosts, haunting their actions over and over again?—and provides descriptions that carry depth beyond the showing.

    Blue takes a towel off the rack. It’s gone through the washing machine so often that it’s frayed at the edges. The towel is so old that it looks dirty, even though it’s clean. He hugs it around himself and ignores the dust that sticks to his wet feet, the pebbles that lodge between his toes, as he pads back into his room. He lays back on his bed and closes his eyes. The sun is in a different place in the sky now and when Blue wakes from his nap, it will be even deeper into the horizon, signaling the late afternoon.

Blue is revealed through his actions: he is often oblivious; he is taciturn; he is not sexually interested in Julie; he is aimless except when it comes to extending his aimlessness by drinking blood. For him it would be cool to be a vampire. For Julie, she has a different reason but the same need.

    Julie is one of many in Starling City who hold fantasies of immortality and power. Julie lives for the depth of midnight and craves the dampness of the dark basement bars she frequents. She seeks obscure clubs and strange faces in the hopes that the rumours she’s always heard about who and what lives in the shadows of Starling City are true. She works her wishes around the idea of escape: Escape from a life of work, the mundane realities of rent payments and errands and aging. Julie watches old Dracula movies as stories of hope. She doesn’t see them as fiction, but as veiled truths that promise an alternate route.

One wonders which Dracula Julie likes. Lee, Bela, Langella maybe? Both seek change but soon realize that being vampires is not at all what they thought it would be and, as Blue soon realizes, teeth are useless.

“Experimental” and “conceptual” are words used in the marketing for this novel but they tend to be apologetic sounding more than revealing. The Mouth is a Coven needs no apologies for its piercingly unnerving look into the lives of those not knowing what they are getting themselves into; a deeper and deeper plunge into the sanguine void for immortality as mortal weaknesses get in the way. Worth presents an engrossing narrative that leaves the vampire fluttering* in the background while focusing on the Renfields, those who truly yearn for the vampire mythology. There is no toothy gothic romance here, no glorified blood-soaked staking of hearts, and no Van Helsings. If you are looking for a refreshingly different take on vampiric horror, you should put the bite on this one.*

*To pun, to really pun, that must be glorious!