Books (Fiction)

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!  

My review for Les Femmes Grotesques, by Victoria Dalpe, 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.

Emptiness is the keystone of horror. From it are built all the monsters and victims in both cinema and literature, old and new to come. Any reviewer of horror stories, whether short stories or novels or collections of tales, looks to see how an author embraces that void. When the grotesque is involved, the challenge becomes where that emptiness begins and how it intrudes into the commonplace, or presumed commonplace. Is the person really grotesque or the environment or both? Victoria Dalpe, in Les Femmes Grotesques, an assortment of tales to bother you in the wee darker hours of the day, gives her victims a solid balancing pole on their hi-wire act between the grotesque and the emptiness with aplomb.

While I could prattle on about the eighteen stories unfolded within, the long and short of it can be explored in a careful sampling of just a few, beginning with Folded into Shadows.

I often look for the stories in an author’s collection that would make for good novels or screenplays. Folded into Shadows gets my top vote. There are many haunted house tales to keep you busy until doomsday, but only a bunch will give you the chilly embrace of the otherness, the alien landscape hinted at, the mystery of what’s it? that makes the little hairs on your arms stand up.

From real-life spooky places like Borley Rectory and Waverly Hills Sanatorium to the fictional Hill House, the Tremaine House in Folded into Shadows fits the bill perfectly. Its notoriety: people seem to either die outright or disappear inside with unusual regularity. Agnes’s brother died in the house and she returns, with a production crew, to film the renovation of the house. The grotesque situation for her is that the house appears to not like being renovated and is not  cheerful with the workmen knocking about its walls. She bought it, “a house where it seems always dusk,” but has her doubts. Her emptiness of knowing exactly what happened to her brother, and the numerous others, warps her life. Either she will solve the mystery or become part of it. If you like classic haunted house tales, this one is for you.

If you are a reader who knows who Arthur Machen was, well, The Guest is best read with a nice cup of tea. I cannot say for sure that Dalpe is up on her classic (and mostly forgotten) authors, but I will say that an infatuation with moss leads Angeline, at age seventeen and already missing something in her life, to meet Mr. Lich, a strange house guest. Both become inseparable, and therein begins the grotesque relationship that ends beautifully. For some. Here, the paragraphs are longer, the narrative in first-person, and the pacing quite mindful of an earlier time for storytelling.

The first-person narrator in Big Rash is a working woman who works truck stops: “not old, but I’m no spring chicken.” Looking for greener pastures, she happens on the town of Sanctuary. A trucker warns her that there’s something not quite right with the place, but she smells money as thick as the oil the town has tapped into. She rents a hotel room and sets up shop. The men smell of oil and something else, but the payout is too good to pass up. Until people start showing up with odd rashes, that also start appearing on her. Something is not quite right in the town of Sanctuary, but her emptiness—the need to make a living—and the grotesqueness of what is happening to her and the town may not be enough to make her leave. But will it be too late even if she does?

Mabel Gray drowned and wanted company in The Drowned Siren. Unfortunately for the narrator of this tale, which moves between classic ghost story and Japanese yokai-styled horror, she keeps hearing a voice that would gladly lead her to doom in the water. There’s even a commemorative plaque on the bench by the sea where Mabel drowned. Terry, a local expert on the tragedy of Mabel Gray, gives our targeted victim some sage advice. It will either save her or make her look awfully foolish as she drowns in Mabel’s wet embrace. I’ll give you one hint: rusalka. When her waking and sleeping hours are filled with that inviting, yet sinister, voice, will she follow that advice?

The old mill building, a grotesque structure in itself, is not empty. Within A Creak in the Floor, A Slant of Light, people live in their divvied-up spaces within its walls and floors. Mostly keeping to themselves, they do not seem to mind that some of their neighbors have gone missing. Charlie Chan (not the fictional detective by Earl Derr Biggers) arrives at the old mill to find his friend Pete is missing too. Chan soon meets the various oddballs living there and also learns about the weird happenings going on, like unseen things biting people in the elevator that barely works. A whole Goth band, the PitRats, went missing too, so you know the situation is serious. There’s a bit of Lovecraftian devilment going on through the sewer drains and the basement, but exactly what, Charlie is not sure. Me, I would stay out of the basement if I were him. While most of the action takes place through dialog and hearsay, it builds to a definite conclusion for Charlie.

I breezed through only five stories in a collection of eighteen. My favorites may vary from yours, but here is the skinny. Ms. Dalpe does not dabble in sub-genres, she excels at them, delivering deft performances of terror ranging from the ghostly to the pit-dwelling terrors to the monsters, demons, and gods dressed in ordinary surroundings. Her feminine grotesques are either a little different or a lot, a little bad or a lot, lost or, unfortunately, found. Their emptinesses will either keep the darkness away or let it in, but it is their call (more or less). You can take these stories at face value or dig a little deeper to find the hidden bodies of meaning. Whichever way you choose, go for it.

My review for West of Hell 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.

I became hooked on outre Western tales after watching Gene Autry's The Phantom Empire, a 1935 serial on television (the black and white variety). To see cowboys, ray weapons of mass destruction, a mysterious subterranean empire's technology being sought after by unscrupulous businessmen, and Gene Autry getting a snappy song or two sung in-between the cliff-hanger episodes, left quite an impression on my younger mind. Since then, I have watched movies and read stories that used a weird western vibe with high expectations. The Western genre, whether old-time or saddle soap new, provides a simple backdrop for primal themes of characterization, plotting, and rip-roaring action that are ripe for mixing with the bizarre, the steampunk, the techno-goth, and the traveling horror sideshow's worth of oddities

In West of Hell: Weird Western Horror Stories, three stories bring an assortment of supernatural ills to the Wild West, making for wild-in-the-sagebrush goings on to bedevil the townsfolk and other characters that James A. Moore, R.B. Wood, and Michael Burke have tasked to try and keep the peace. The beauty of this sub-genre is that it can be written as simple or as complicated as an author chooses, and here, each story focuses on the characters and their actions in dire situations with straightforward plots, which make for an enjoyably light read with enough of the supernatural to bring the weirdness home.

One notch I would put on my reviewer’s gun belt, though, is that the beginning and ending stories seem like parts of, respectively, a greater whole (meaning a novel-length adventure instead of long story). The characters are all well developed through their dialog and descriptions, but I found myself hankering for more story with them; or, at least, more adventures to come. Which, in itself, is not a bad thing at all. The middle story is neat and tidy as is, and although predictable in its outcome, still carries a solid narrative to its proper conclusion.

The first story by Moore, Ghost Dance, combines the nitty gritty Western elements we all have seen in movies and read in novels, with a supernatural red herring covering a more pressing threat reaching out to the two taciturn men, Mr. Crowley and Mr. Slate, who are called in to investigate a bizarre phenomenon that has some locals spooked. The tried-and-true elements that Moore has nailed down well are the dialog between the two men and between those around them, with few words that infer much, and the stoic demeanors of both men setting the mood: driven they are, maybe a little too crusted with experience, and always eager to get on with the matter at hand with less interference and little distraction from everyone else. Dead men walk, weaponized by a vampire, a vendetta is about to reach its end, and the trail always beckons, yearning for more adventures with Mr. Crowley and Mr. Slate (one would hope).

The middle story by Wood, The Trickster of Paradise, finds the young Thaddeus tasked with saving his townsfolk from a murderous cavalry captain bent on committing a massacre. As the captain plots his attack, White Feather, Thaddeus’s close friend, relates the legend of the White Bison, whose pictographs are found in the local cave, and how Mica, the coyote trickster spirit, became jealous of the White Bison and schemed to become more important in the eyes of the tribesmen. Both fought a mighty battle, but as to who won, that is left unanswered (well, at least until the end of the story). The legend becomes key to Thaddeus’s survival and his only hope of stopping the captain.

Wood employs nine scene shifts, separated by asterisks, which seem to hold back the story’s impact by shifting back and forth between characters and situations a bit too much. There are reasons for and against using too many scene-shifts and using them can become an easy way to avoid bridging each scene with words instead of asterisks. Unless the goal is to build dynamic tension, show time passing in a building-tension sort of way, or to quick-edit from scene to scene, like in a movie to enhance the visual impact (albeit in the mind’s eye of the reader in this case), handling them can be a challenge for any writer. My personal pet peeve aside, his plot still holds together well, and the characters remain strong and engaging with his pacing measured evenly to the end. I will give Wood credit for his competence in handling the asterisks this time around.

I do question the cost of a slice of apple pie though. In the story it is a penny. The instances where I have seen prices given, in movies or in actual menus from the period, place the cost of a slice of apple pie at five to ten cents. I am happy to arm-wrestle Mr. Wood over the matter of authenticity as long as the winner (and loser, more likely me) gets an apple pie free of charge.

The final story, Last Sunset of a Dying Age, is the longest and most complicated with many characters facing the evil that has engulfed Copper City. Burke tosses in a ronin, Ibuki Shibuya, a saloon owner, Fronnie Camus, a young, gun-happy upstart, Rattlesnake Dick, and an assortment of colorful townsfolk squaring off against an unknown (until the end, of course) horror terrorizing them. Social challenges of the time are sub-texted through Shibuya, the Japanese ex-samurai in hiding from his former master, the Chinese general store owner Zhu Shi, and their mutual dislike for one another mingled with how the townsfolk view both immigrants.

Burke also tosses in a foreshadowing with a Steyr gas seal revolver, which pegs this story taking place no earlier than 1893. Disappointingly, the gun is not pivotal to the outcome, and so loses its luster of possibilities when the monster is eventually faced down. Also disappointing is how Burke does not take full advantage of his uniquely back storied Shibuya. I cannot explain more without revealing too much, but you may see what I mean and have the same feeling.

White Feather, in The Trickster of Paradise, suffers from the same missed opportunity; though, rewriting his trajectory to the story would have required Wood to take a direction he may not have desired to explore.

Like Wood’s use of asterisks to shift scenes easily, Burke uses a time stamp instead, with date and location added for good measure in an excessive display that does not build tension or, in some cases, is not really needed where the time jump is mere minutes, not days. I kept thinking of imagined commercial breaks each time a scene heading appeared. Yes, I have watched too much television growing up. And yet, the story is still very strong because the characters and the nature of the monster add depth and interest to the plotline.

My pet peeves may not be your pet peeves, so saddle up, pardner, and do not hit that dusty trail without a copy of West of Hell in your saddle bag if you have the need for the weird in your git along. West of Hell is an enjoyable excursion into the past, where there be grievous monsters keeping the trails from being lonesome.