From Zombos' Closet

Book Review: Angel of Vengeance

Zombos Says: Excellent

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

"What are you looking at?" asks Zombos.

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

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

"Where is he?" he asks.

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

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

I return to the desk I had meandered away from to continue my review. I check my notes: Mick Angel, vampire, private dick, sleeps in a freezer to slow his decay--check; old fashioned, wears a fedora hat and smokes (he's dead, doesn't care)--check; drives a snappy Mercedes Benz 300 SL Roadster (make a note, I think Zombos has one tucked away in third garage)--check; can see his reflection in a mirror, but it's detestable (that's why vampires don't like mirrors)--check; rumored to be the novel that inspired the more romantic Moonlight television series--check.

I kick my chair back and stretch. What else? What am I missing? A gnawing sense of noir nibbles on the gray matter between my ears. Like in a Philip Marlowe Clue mystery there's the game pieces: the scummy rich guy living in the mansion at Beechwood Canyon; a 14-year old missing girl; a stripper who hires Mick to find said missing girl; and a recalcitrant Leroy--pronounced Leh-roy, a drug dealer with a score to tally. What about Munson? Sure, he's just an author, but he kicks around the vampire legend like a Del Monte tomato can down a long alley, leaving some new wrinkles on its worn label.

That's it. I smile with satisfaction. Those new wrinkles. Sure, there's the Dame from the Past, the love-interest, the one-and-only forever more. She's gone yet always there, isn't she? In flashbacks, Coraline fills Mick's thoughts and ours. Thoughts about his drug addiction leading to her addiction. Thoughts on how he's turned into a creature of the night; one who mainlines his blood--old habits die hard, right?-- but only takes it from bad guys he slurps dry, like one of those Go-Gurts.

Is Mick vampire-strong? Yes. But not too strong. Munson makes sure to keep Mick's blood habit  a workable annoyance, not a twilight walk in the glen. It makes him vulnerable. Funny, too, how Mick hates using cell phones. When he needs to make a phone call he goes to Canter's Deli; even if the smells now nauseate him because of his heightened nasal sensitivity. Why? Memories of the past?

It's always about the past in these stories, isn't it? Vampire ones and hardboiled ones, I mean. Munson writes Mick's case in present-tense (except for the flashbacks, of course), but Mick's living in the past while he's breathing in the present. He won't let go until he's forced to. He's forced pretty hard in Angel of Vengeance. Even with his hypnotic powers he's in deeper than he expects and bullets still hurt, and sometimes you really do have to hurt the ones you love when the truth is gearing up to hurt you.

You know how some books you hopscotch through the paragraphs and some you read word by word? This is one you won't be hopscotching.

 A courtesy copy for this review was provided by Titan Books

Book Review: Autumn, The City

Zombos Says: Good (but formulaic)

"We've got to kill it."
"How do we do that, then?" yelled Donna, shoving it back down with her foot. "F**king thing's been dead since Tuesday."

The walking dead in David Moody's Autumn: The City don't bite. He even avoids calling them zombies, using cadavers instead. That's what the few survivors call them when a mysterious virus, or toxin, or some biological event kills everyone else in the city. In this second book in the Autumn trilogy, the city becomes ground zero for thousands of inhabitants who violently die, then slowly reanimate--even as they continue to physically deteriorate--into predators.

Moody's undead predators do not crave brains or test the intestinal fortitude of the living by craving human flesh. They are so rotted away as to make them easy to knock over and avoid. One at a time. It's when they gather in groups they become a problem. Noise, fire, bickering living people, and just about any lively activity attracts them; and when the undead see a large group of undead they meander over to see what's so interesting. That's the problem faced by the survivors, with some holed up in the university, others holed up in an office building, and the 300 hundred or so soldiers holed up in their bunker. How they deal with the problem is the gist of Moody's story.

With his cadavers not exhibiting the usually more culturally popular and expected characteristics of gruesome dining, Moody deals with the post-apocalyptic angst his survivors are going through instead. His people aren't unusually resourceful or altruistic or despicable; they just want to survive with whatever semblance of their past lives they can keep together. Something not easy to do when food is scarce, the stench of decay is eye-watering, and thousands-going-on millions of undead want to beat the living daylights out of you, if only to pass their mordant time away.

With so many undead stumbling in the way, it wouldn't be possible for the survivors to reach each other, or find a way to escape, unless some leeway is given. Moody's cadavers are harmless initially, but begin to grow in to their new reality in stages: listless and clueless at first, then becoming faster, more aggressive, and more aware of those different from them. This transition from no problem, but they stink, to oh, crap, we better get out of here isn't played up for all it could be worth.  It generates a modicum of tension as the living argue over staying put or leaving, and how to get from point a to point b, without being noticed if and when they decide to go, but more of the novel's time is spent on primary actions without much character description or depth: the basics of arguing, despairing, avoiding, and finding transportation are here, and not much else. Unlike his Hater's first-person, roller-coastering now point of view, The City is written in third-person, past-tense, and, while breezily paced, doesn't hold the emotional clout of that novel.

One character stands out. Nathan. He's selfish, frightened--though he talks tough--and wants so badly for his normal life to come back that he's frozen to the spot. His goal is to find a club or bar and drink himself into a stupor; then find another club or bar and keep pouring into a deeper stupor. His single-minded, ultimately pointless, and altogether sad outlook, provides a fulcrum for emotional depth Moody tips at, but never loads heavy.

Like his cadavers, Autumn: The City is lightweight zombie fare and, while easy to read through, page by page, should be more threatening and oppressively dire in its possibilities.

A print copy of Autumn: The City was provided for this review by St. Martin's Press.

Twice the Terror: The Horror Zine Book Review

 

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

Zombos Says: Very Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A courtesy  copy of Twice the Terror: The Horror Zine was provided for this review by Jeani Rector.

Book Review: and Falling, fly By Skyler White

Dominic's voice is meltingly tender. "What if you're right? What if hope is the master of Hell? What if something in your own mind, in your own hopes, or fears, or ideas, is the cause of your suffering? What if you are not damned?"

"If I am not damned, what am I?"

"A woman in pain."

Zombos Says: Very Good

Ambiguity and certainty abound in Skyler White's novel and Falling, fly, along with fallen angels turned vampires, a neuroscientist traumatized by his cycle of reincarnations, and an Irish Goth-punk hotel that is either Hell, Limbo, or a comfortable bed and breakfast for its guests. In words thought and spoken, her characters shift between first and third person narratives to dwell on the certainty of their fate and the ambiguity of their despair: continue living fettered by their assorted curses or dare to surmount them even if it means painful loss. But are they indeed cursed as they believe or are they living a delusion? That's the tantalizing conundrum White presents with her words as they blend mellifluously into scenes ripe with irreconcilable decadence, sex, and mythologically-based--and sanctioned--angst over what may or may not be real.

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

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

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

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

There is something just not right with Lansdale and his stories. No one is ever really content, breathes in life easily, or dies happy--let alone quickly enough. Except for maybe Elvis in Bubba Ho-tep, and perhaps that resourceful survivalist woman who had an Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. But for every survivor, there's dead meat walking; for every flight from the Goat Man there's always a rickety bridge to cross to safety; and for every swim among the ghostly fishes in the primordial, phantasmic desert sea of Fish Night, there's a big old shark waiting to gobble down. It makes you wonder what kind of childhood Lansdale had. He tells us all about it in his introduction, Crucified Dreams, that it's filled with comics and good times, but I think he's hiding something. His childhood seems too normal for a guy who writes so twisted like he does.

You will find the long and the short of his stories here; human monsters, prehistoric monsters, mummified monsters, drive-in monsters, they all cast long moonlit shadows or walk boldly in sunlight. Like in Mad Dog Summer, they even live close by and shake hands warmly while they wait to spill your blood. Some are old, some are young, and some are timeless. Even their victims and near-victims and future victims are old and young and yearning to be timeless. Aging, death, and the molding process in-between provide the katas to many of his stories.

On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks we meet up with the bounty hunter Wayne and his fugitive Calhoun, at a honky-tonk called Rosalita's, for cold beer and dead dancing. Since the lab stuff escaped into the air there has been a lot of dead folk to take advantage of, let alone dance with. There's also a new time religion, a busload of zombies wearing Mickey Mouse hats, and nuns that give their all for Jesus to make this the really far side of the desert; as far as Jesus Land.

The Night They Missed the Horror Show turns out to be a hell of a night for one mangy dog and two buddies working their way hard to boredom. Leonard doesn't like the black guy in Night of the Living Dead; he doesn't like any black guys. But skipping the drive-in turns out to be the worst decision he will ever make. The second worst is what he does to that dog. Those Rednecked, snuff movie-watching, dog-loving fat ole boys do the rest. The imagery in this tale of human monsters, both dog-hating and dog-loving, is too real for a comfortable read. Stock up on those happy thoughts before you read this one: you'll need them to get through it.

Like a freak show banner unabashedly heralding the grotesque and arabesque, in this collection you will see the amazing aging Elvis finding his mojo again by taking care of business, watch in awe how Godzilla falls off the wagon in Gozilla's Twelve Step Program, taking most of the city with him, and nervously laugh at the Fire Dog for the fire department, which is a great job while it lasts, especially since they stopped using dogs a long time ago. And once Lansdale has you inside his ballyhoo tent of nightmares, there's more waiting to shock and horrify you.

Profanity-laced words coalesce into sentences punching with the precision of a martial artist, which he is. There is no complexity to his paragraphs, no grammatical excess in how he describes his people and places, but his chi (some would call it mojo) is  always directed to letting his characters tell their stories through their words, their actions, with insinuations of what makes them either unsure, fearful, or to be feared. Like a mischievous Jean-Paul Sartre, Lansdale shows them where the exit is, but takes great pains to block their way to it. There is no seeing the light or finding the faith here, and salvation comes at a cost.

A New York Times review quoted on the front cover states Lansdale has "a folklorist's eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur's sense of pace." Obviously the reviewer doesn't know him like I do. I rather imagine Lansdale's stuffed that folklorist's eye into his back pocket just before he ran down the back-porch steps with a steaming apple pie stole hot from that raconteur's kitchen. The eye's to toss to that mangy dog that ate poor Huck up because no one wants to be bothered when they're eating homemade apple pie. Not even Lansdale.

An uncorrected advance reader copy was used for this review.

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

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

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

Zombos Says: Good (but clever structuring overpowers the simple plot)

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

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

But can we trust Harwell? Is Straub subtly misdirecting us with the role of his questionable narrator, making us doubt how much his fictional author is actually telling us. Harwell is a writer after all and through his distillation of interviews with each survivor of that day, can we really be certain he relates everything exactly as revealed to him by the others? Especially since his wife, Lee Truax, nicknamed the Eel, is the most important person to be affected by what transpired in that meadow so many years before.

Straub's conjuring assistant for this literary illusion is Spenser Mallon, a vulpine-faced guru of the Esoteric who can recite lines from Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy as easily as lallation utters from a baby. Agrippa's major and minor arcana fever dreams provide Straub's flourish of textuality in fleshing out anthropomorphic visions of saviors and destroyers and unholy bystanders prowling the border between reality of the moment and the moment of reality for each of them, which leads to a dark matter within and without and in-between that shadows their lives.

Using dialog and vivid recollections--made by equally vivid characters--divvied into chapter and section beats evoking a 1960's syncopation of artsy and preppy, acid-trip intellectualism and pot-induced, faded blue jean mysticism, Straub unfolds his story revealing a little more each time, until at last the Eel reveals her meeting with those things inhabiting the borderland, unleashed by Mallon's parlour trick sorcery. The meeting is a tale wagging its own, and spins round and round in gorgeously compelling but obfuscating imagery and meaning. (The style and kind of which authors love to read because it inspires them to prove their mettle.)

A Dark Matter is intensely structural-conscious, executed with a skill few authors possess. But its structure delivers style over suspense and terror, and its denouement cops out with a let's-think-about-this-cosmological-horror-significance stream of consciousness wordplay that underwhelms with its lengthy pedagogical digression.

A bound galley from Doubleday was provided for this review.

Book Review: 23 Hours by David Wellington

Zombos Says: Good

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

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

Wellington's preamble wastes little time before mixing it up from page one. Caxton is reluctantly pulled into a discussion of the local pecking order by Guilty Jen, a martial arts trained gangbanger with a mean side kick. After Guilty Jen and her cronies receive some nasty topical points of contention from Caxton, the fight is broken up and Caxton is moved to special housing for her trouble. Meanwhile, Clara Hsu, Caxton's love interest, is knee-deep in the aftermath of a Tupperware Party that was crashed by Malvern, and torn between ending their relationship or hanging onto it as best she can.

She was surrounded by bodies, corpses, drained of their blood and then discarded like old ragged dolls. The women around her ranged in age from thirty-five to fifty, but with some it was hard to tell--their arms and throats had been torn at, savaged by vicious teeth, by a vampire who needed their blood and didn't care how much pain she had to cause to get it.

Twilight this is not. Wellington prefer's his vampires to be mean, armed with rows of sharp teeth, disposed to be very inconsiderate of the living, and gives them decrepit, zombie-like henchmen, the half-deads--who love to tear their faces off and fondle knives--to do all the heavy lifting. Not that Malvern is averse to sticking her thumb deeply into an eye socket or two when she cares to, but due to her age, she could use all the help and blood she can get. Spouting quaint T'is's and Ye's with a deceptive and condescending gentility, Malvern exploits the prison population to supply her with the large amount of blood she needs to replenish her faded good looks. In Wellington's vampire universe, vampires age badly and need more and more blood to bring them back to health. Malvern is the antithesis of Rice's Lestat; at her age of 300 plus years, she's moody, mug-ugly--patches of boney white shine through her parchment skin--and enjoys every minute of pursuing her sadistic needs; no crisis of conscience or philosophical discussions for her. Not a one. And she is very thirsty.

This time around, she has enlisted the aid of the prison warden, Augie Bellows. As the novel's chapters quickly alternate between Caxton's fight against the half-dead army Malvern has sent to find her, and Clara's visit and subsequent captivity by the warden, Wellington writes tight, no-frills, sentences and lots of action. Do not look for characters with deep thoughts here or flowery descriptions. In the best tradition of the pulp writer, Wellington locks you into the cell with Caxton, forces you to watch her back as she fights against the odds, and makes you wonder what Caxton will find next, waiting for her around the next corner, and how she will handle it.

Malvern has given her only twenty-three hours to surrender or try freeing Clara; after that, Clara's confusion over whether she should break up with Caxton will be a moot point: Clara will be dead.

Interview: Kim Paffenroth Dante in the Valley of the Dead

It and the girl were now both on Dante, the girl tugging at the hem of his frock, the boy getting a hold of his right arm. Dante grabbed the girl’s long hair with his left hand, pulling her away from himself before she could bite into his thigh or stomach. He tried to pull his right arm away from the boy, but the dead grip was powerful and tenacious. The two children were dragging him down, and for a moment he felt fairly sure he’d be dead soon, too (Valley of the Dead).

It was bound to happen sooner or later; zombies devour everything in their path, so why not devour the classics? While they may have their rotten pride and prejudices grounded in earthly appetites of the flesh, author Kim Paffenroth brings a sophisticated approach to their dinner table by introducing poet Dante Alighieri to the undead.

Unlike the one trick, novelty-book approach taken in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Paffenroth sets his scholar's philosophical eye on the situations Dante encounters as he meets both living and the dead in his journey across a strange valley during a zombie plague. Like any good zombie, I wanted a closer look into the brain of Paffenroth and his thoughts on writing Valley of the Dead.

 

You're a big fan of Dante and his poem the Divine Comedy, which details his journey through the Christian visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The allegorical nature of the Divine Comedy lends itself to various layers of meaning; but no one until now has mentioned zombies. What inspiration led you to have Dante square off against zombies?

When I was working on Gospel of the Living Dead (Baylor, 2006), my analysis of the Romero zombie films, it struck me how similar his zombies were to the damned in Dante’s Inferno – not so much tortured with flames and the usual trappings of hell, as just mindless, lost souls, endlessly repeating their stupid, pointless activities. Later it occurred to me to reverse the idea of the influence: what if Romero’s zombies were similar to the inhabitants of Dante’s Hell, because Dante had actually seen a zombie infestation during the 17 years that he’s off the map and could’ve been anywhere. Then, when he went to write Inferno, he incorporated the zombie horrors he had seen into his poem. Once I’d seen that possibility, it was just a matter of working carefully through Inferno, thinking of zombie analogs to each circle of hell. And that was the really fun part!

With Pride and Prejudice and Zombies poised to hit the shelves, you appear prescient of the unlikely melding of zombie and classic fiction. What is it about zombies that makes this oddball marriage work?

Well, two things come to mind. When zombies are about, mayhem and violence are sure to follow. So, it would seem pretty natural to either put them into a work that’s already full of gore, like Inferno, since they’d be right at home, or else put them in a story that’s so genteel and lacks any mayhem, like Pride and Prejudice, so they could stir things up and provide some comic relief.

The other thing I wonder about, is how when they’re not eating people, zombies are so unobtrusive and bland, so maybe it makes more sense to insert them into a work, rather than put in something like a giant robot or dinosaur or vampires, since those monsters would throw the fictional world into a deeper turmoil and upset its balance more. In other words, except during actual zombie attacks, I can have Dante talk about the same things he does in the Divine Comedy, and the author or PP&Z can have his characters talk about the same things they do in Pride and Prejudice. The zombies would thereby “fit” better and not disturb the fictional world as much as other monsters, leaving the world of the “classic” more recognizable and familiar.

Book Review: Hater Whose Fear Is It?

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

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

Book Review: Dying to Live: Life Sentence Unmutual Fallout

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

 

"Where am I?"

"In the Universal Village."

"Who are you?"

"The Burgomaster."

"What am I doing here?"

"We need information. You must explain yourself."

"Explain myself? Why? What for?"

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

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

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

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

Interview: Bestial,Werewolf Apocalypse

Zombos Says: Good

"Hello?" I answered my desk phone.

"Is this Zombos?"

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

"This is Billy Castle from Monumental Studios."

"I'm sorry, who?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello, is this Zombos?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: Apple of My Eye

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

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

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

He noticed I was still in my doldrums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought about it. "Her work is somewhat vexing because she has a habit of ending her stories much too soon."

"Like waking from a dream without getting the full sense of what it was about?" Zombos observed.

"Quite. That's a good way of putting it. I find her dialog a little off, too. Sometimes it's too pat in places," I said.

"I sense another thought on the verge of discovery," Zombos said quietly.

"I'm not sure what...well, now that you mention it." I picked up Apple of My Eye and paged through it while I collected my thoughts. "I'm not really into very adult dark fiction. Her stories can be erotically-charged. Take the lead story, Apple of My Eye for instance. The main character is a nightmare in red heels, cruising the darker watering holes of Greenwich Village. She hooks up with some schlub who's looking for a good time in private, but she has ulterior motives that are unsavory."

"And you were aroused by Grech's prose?" Zombos asked, rather astutely I might add.

"Why, yes, I found the story very effective in that regard. But it's a weird vignette. Why would any man go back to her apartment knowing her daddy's a psychotic, mother-killing, incestuous fruitcake who doesn't like seeing her with other men?"

"But you did find the story evocative?"

"It's creepy as hell, yes. Just out of kilter with my normal expectations for—"

"But dreams and nightmares have no expectations, do they? They just create a mood which can often be disturbing, but rarely does any of it make sense at face value." Zombos crossed his legs and leaned further back in his chair.

"I suppose that's true," I said.

"Which story is your favorite?" he asked.

"It's a close call between Rampart and Damp Wind and Leaves. Rampart reads like some P.G. Wodehouse's evil doppelgänger's bizarre sense of humor. It's a Tales from the Darkside-like episode about a very rich man going very very bonkers as he's trapped in a castle whose walls are not content to remain still. The narrative is cucumber sandwich-flippant, and the characters and tone light and breezy. The story reminded me just a little of Charlotte Gilman's more serious The Yellow Wallpaper. In Damp Wind and Leaves, which is also available from Amazon Shorts, Grech uses a masterful touch of understatement to describe one very special Halloween in a horror fan's life. It's a precisely measured story of loneliness and love, and like a soft gust of cool air on an Autumn day, that rolls over your cheek, it's there and gone in a moment; but the feeling lingers. The imagery is vivid, as are the characters and their feelings.

"Then there's Ashes to Ashes," I continued. "A story that's reminiscent of Bradbury's Dark Carnival in tone and imagery. The very idea of a husband's ashes no longer silently resting in his burial urn is wonderfully Gothic, but she writes it with a modern touch. The story seems to end too soon, but the mood it leaves you with, like many of her stories, is similar to the feelings you have after waking from a dream as your dream-emotions linger, leaving you with a curious feeling that's hard to describe.

"I also have a soft spot for Raven's Revenge. How can you not love a haunted Brooklyn apartment with a restless spirit looking for revenge? I'm not sure about Snubbed, though. It reads more like a woman's revenge fantasy rather than a realistic portrayal of a woman's revenge on her ex-boyfriend now rapist. Say, you know, this has helped me a great deal in..."

Zombos started snoring. His head had sunk to his chest, but his fingertips remained steadfastly pressed together, and his legs still curled tightly around themselves. I stood up, stretched, and finished my review. It was getting late. The guests for our Fourth of July party would soon be arriving so there was much to do. As I picked up my empty cup of coffee, looking for a much needed refill, I thought about Sanchez in Perishables, one of Grech's very short stories that didn't need any more words to convey its horror. Funny, I thought to myself, as I wondered what perishables we had in our pantry as I bounded down the stairs. Our guests would be hungry.