Books (Fiction)

My review for Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena first appeared in The Horror Zine. It is reposted here with permission.

Editors Donald Armfield and Maxwell I. Gold have taken their book, Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena, very much to heart in selecting the poems and stories within (a hybrid format in itself), to include bizarro, noir sci fi, sword and sorcery, and speculative fictions for a reading that has something for just about anyone. These tales will either provide you with a straightforward reading or something to puzzle over, leading your thoughts to deeper meanings. Or maybe no meanings at all, just some go-with-it and enjoy moments. A good collection of mixed authors should always make you want to seek out their other works and this book will certainly have you doing that. It should be noted too that the cover design and illustration by Luke Spooner (we often overlook the graphic designers when doing reviews, don’t we?) is quite good.

The first story, Making Friends, is a comedy of errors involving a happy dog, a curious but unhappy creature, and a couple of farmers meeting the neighbors they never knew they had. Angela Yuriko Smith paces it all into a 1950s sitcom-like nocturnal interlude for Miriam and Bill. It is a good choice as the opening story, breezy and light, and visually funny: there be monsters here, but they are not all gloom and doom and gory pieces.

That is, except for what happens to the villagers in the Ruination of the Gods by Dr. Chris McAuley (Stokerverse) and Claudia Christian (Babylon 5 and Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator). A wizard tries to raise the dead but gets caught. As all diligent readers know by now, what happens to people who get on the wrong side of wizards, caught in the act of doing questionable things, means terror to come. Kail, the Conan-like warrior (or Kali, since the proofreader must have been out to lunch with this one), ignores the giant stew-pot death waiting for him for doing the same punishable act and gets into trouble quickly. Luckily for him the monsters from the sea provide a bloody good diversion for the villagers. While this story uses the standard sword and sorcery approach (an angry wizard, a beguiling witch, and a warrior torn between duty and personal need), McAuley and Christian handle the action, the gory pieces, and the tragic fallout of his decision well, leaving the path open for future adventures.

If you lean towards a 3 Stooges-like bizarro storyline, go to Hopital Automatique by D. Harlan Wilson first. It defies description, as any good bizarro fiction should, but if you have watched the 3 Stooges in the comedy short, Men in Black (1934), that provides a bit of a warm-up to the absurd mayhem wrought here. It is an I-don’t-know-what-is-happening narrative and therein lies the fun. The pace is frenetic, the characters and milieu insane, and this opening line will sum it all up for you: “The car didn’t run over the nurse until she had changed my bedpan and injected a second dose. It was a Datsun.” I question how a Datsun got into his hospital room in the first place, but at least it was not an elephant*, and that second dose sounds like a clue. On the plus side, she did manage to change his bedpan before being run down. The only other meagre clue I can give you for this one, without giving up and speaking to Wilson first, is that Hopital is the French word for hospital. For the rest, you are on your own.

More sensible humor will be found in Alicia Hilton’s Savages Anonymous. A funeral home basement in Trenton, New Jersey, provides haven for a nude extraterrestrial with two heads, an extraterrestrial arachnid and other assorted aliens—along with some mutants—griping about the challenges of getting along with humans. A boy’s ghost interrupts their proceedings, sending Xapanna (the two-headed alien) on a vendetta for the boy’s murderers. The Crime Stoppers Tip line sends her in the right direction. The action and humor are conveyed through very short paragraphs, many one to two lines long, and an endearing ending that ties back to the difficulty of getting along with way-out others.

The Scoocoom of Big Rock Mountain is a more serious weird western with a more traditional approach to hybrid terror. Taking place sometime between the 1860s to early 1900s, a former buffalo hunter, Max, now sheriff, has family and Big Foot problems (skookoom is a Chinook word meaning Big Foot). Max, having helped to decimate the Indian tribes by hunting the buffalo to near extinction, is partially responsible for the scoocoom putting the bite on the settlers for its food source. Max also has a drinking problem that makes his aim a bit tricky and his step a lot unsure. Once you get past the proofreader still out to lunch (scoocoom flips to skoocoom a few times), Michael Knost delivers a simply plotted western with all the right emotional and weird elements for his characters and events.

The Big Foot theme is seen again in Maero by Lee Murray, a poem where a day packer is enjoying his hike until he comes across a severed limb and “glossy giblets quivering.” This first-person account with the Maero (Māori for Big Foot) is not the usual “train-train” encounter. A sadder one is to be felt in Kolkata’s Little Girl, in which Bandhura is “waiting, in front of a blue-clothes shop for someone to tell her story.” A too long and heavy mala hangs around her neck, hinting at a deeper meaning hidden among the poem’s lines. Alessandro Manzetti’s acheri is haunting and begs for a longer treatment.

There are many hybrids to be found in this collection of twenty stories and poems. The editors have crafted an engaging reading experience across genre types, of which this review has only scratched the surface. As Dark the Night will trap you in Stella’s depression-fueled shadows; the noir science-fiction Vis-à-Vis puts you there in Punktown among the low-lives and no-lives; and Slo-Mo will make you mind the sloths and give them a wide berth and forget the selfies. All these stories make for an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

*For those not familiar with the Marx Brothers, the reference comes from Groucho’s quip as Captain Spalding: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got to my pajamas I don’t know.”  Feel free to also substitute proofreader for elephant if you are so inclined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horror fans will appreciate that.

While reading Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October I kept wondering how it could be made into a movie. The challenge is not so much the talking dog, cat, bat, or rat (they are demon sidekicks, of course), but how Zelazny let their dialogues provide the main flow of the story. The reader needs to rely on the dog named Snuff, and his powers of observation, because he is the one narrating what is happening each day of October, leading up to the eventful battle royale that will take place on Halloween; but his owner is Jack the Ripper, so there is some question as to his sense of good versus evil nose sniffing to be sure.

That pending battle, with the apocalyptic tendencies, will  be waged by the openers and the closers. The openers are more the bad players and the closers are more the good players, but since Saucy Jack, along with Snuff, are on the good players side, using the term "good" requires some stretching. Count Dracula is also in the game, but no one really knows which side he'll be on when push comes to shove as those slimy, multi-tentacled monstrosities, looking for a new footfold into our dimension, make their move on Halloween night. And so the game begins in this Victorian period piece, played over each day, with each demon sidekick doing a lot of the legwork, trying to figure out who will be an opener or a closer, and how the lines of power are being drawn in the neighborhood. As the maneuverings for power take place, Sherlock Holmes (referred to as the Great Detective), dons disguise and guile to reveal the mystery emanating from the deadly game. Even Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, puts down all fours, providing assistance to Snuff. What part Talbot will play at the end can go a tail wag either way, but he proves invaluable to Snuff. If Lon Chaney Jr. keeps popping into your head as you read, you will already know how Talbot will play it. 

Snuff is rather stiff-lipped and steely pawed and clever at gaining information while strategically sharing it. Mostly with Graymalk the cat as the two strike up an unlikely alliance. Each helps the other out of bad spots as the days move closer to the eventful night. Zelazny keeps his words and paragraphs stiff-lipped too, and there is a prim tempo to each chapter; one chapter for each day in October, with the first one putting the reader imediately into the story with little fanfare. 

Interesting little tidbits of the uncanny wind up in odd places. There's Jack's monsters trapped in a mirror and furniture, always looking to escape; a human sacrifice is chained, awaiting her doom; a tour of a Lovecraftian dreamscape where ancient beings wait patiently to walk the earth again, and murder most fowl when the going gets rough. Zelazny writes it all as matter of factly as possible, with close calls, bodies turning up, and the tools of the dark arts trade slowly revealing themselves. His economy of words creates a magical opening all by itself, wherein the reader can infer much and imbue each player in this great game, either good or bad,  with feelings and intentions, even if that player crawls, flys, howls or walks on two legs by night. His description of Dracula's actions, merely a few drops of blood worth, is more chilling than any of the recent Universal endeavors for the ruddy Count. Perhaps Universal should look into doing the movie version? This would make quite a monster rally indeed for the big screen.