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Books (Fiction)

Book Review: The Monster’s Corner

Monsterscornerbook

Zombos Says: Very Good

Ghoulies, ghosties, beasties, here be monsters all, hobnobbing their way through the mortal realm in 19 tales assembled by Christopher Golden, with book-body parts supplied by Jonathan Maberry, David Liss, Kevin J. Anderson, Nate Kenyon, Sarah Pinborough, and many more. Squatting in the monster's corner is you, metaphorically speaking of course, as the next meal, the next victim, and next sideline viewer or partaker of nasty events. Identifying who the monsters and victims are can be a little challenging because sometimes they swap places or appear similar, depending on your vantage point, and the tone of monstrosity varies from story to story, as does the terror. 

Perhaps the clearest monstrous vision here is seen through Pinborough's The Screaming Room. Having snakes for hair and turning people to stone doesn't make the Gorgon a social butterfly, but when her dates do eventually show up, she does get to spend a very long time with them, enjoying their constant song of love. Only they aren't singing and she's deluding herself, turning her loneliness into happiness. A simple premise sustains a truly terrifying revelation, and this story will not easily leave you once you put the book aside.

Often the monster ranks are swelled by those we unleash ourselves, and in Maberry's Saint John, you may be hard pressed to find the saints, but sinners abound. Armageddon leads to madness, but sometimes madness can lead to redemption, and here the sinners must face a holy roller to reckon with, dressed in swirling white robes and long sharp blades wielding salvation.  Not surprisingly, coming from an author who specializes in death and destruction in apocalyptic measures, Maberry creates an unbalanced world populated with unbalanced people, and places his heroic protagonist, who's either deep-dish crazy, made so by the monstrous events of his past, or following God's crib-notes, within it, preaching one slash and thrust sermon at a time. There's an intimacy here as Maberry focuses on one small street corner and those people stepping into it, coming under Saint John's light. Victims and monsters are interchangeable. Salvation is tenuous. The emotional complexity deep and disturbing. Maberry may have created a new and noble antihero ripe for novelization.

For a swim with Lovecraftian primevalness, Tananarive Due brings us to Graceville, Florida in The Lake. Abbie's new job, new house, new life is growing on her so much she's becoming a whole new person; or thing, anyway. People say not to swim in the lake in summer, though the reasons are hushingly unclear. She swims anyway. The lake's calm water is so inviting. Slowly changes in her attitude start to match the physical changes between her toes, and the changes in her appetite. Is she dreaming? Is she delusional? Is she embracing a whole new Abbie? Her understated tranformation unfolds in carefully building paragraphs, rendering the terror mood gently and matter of factly, until the ending reminds you it's not wise to swim in the Graceville Lake during the summer months.

You won't find gore or check-the-door scares in The Monster's Corner, but you will find, hanging out in its dark recesses,  a well varied assortment of true monsters, seeming monsters, and would-be monsters, all either vying for your understanding–as carefully outlined in Gary A. Braunbeck's witty And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is To Kill You–or your blood.

Book Review: In Extremis by John Shirley

InextremisZombos Says: Excellent

Reading John Shirley's In Extremis is like sticking your moistened middle finger into a live lamp socket: it's punishing but oddly exhilirating after the initial shock. These stories are nasty; they're rude, roiling attitudes of sludge scooped up into the palms of your hands, all greasy slippery feeling and gnarly intense, forcing you to look behind you fearing someone's going to catch you reading them. And you will. Read them. Losers abound, sick humanity thrives, and the scariest thing about Shirley's bowery dark environs is they're crazy batshit and familiar and you sitting there wishing they aught'nt, really shouldn't be. 

The acid test is getting past Just Like Suzie. The two stories before it, Cram and You Blundering Idiot may trip you up, but they're the warm up acts for the burlesque and grotesque reality show in  Just Like Suzie. Sure, getting caught in a train during an earthquake, and maybe hiring some guy to kill you but he's a shlub so he has to keep doing it to get it right are enough to dishearten you from continuing, but if you can keep going after Just Like Suzie, you've earned it. Seriously.

I can't describe the story too much, it's got that 1970s badassness to it, along with its gritty, adult comedy of errors, with those errors piling up into one big clusterfu–like I said; its all 70s badassness. Suzie's a prostitute who dies, I can tell you that, but her attachment to her junkie-john, a guy named Perrick, is fast and rock solid. In all the wrong place. Without any doubt you will squirm and sweat along with him, and find it well darn funny, too. Bad habits are hard to break and some break you hard, and some just leave you whimpering, dangling limp in resignation.

I can describe Faces in Walls for you a little more, though, and this one and Just Like Suzie are my favorite nightmares in this collection, but there are plenty more to go round. Imagine you're paralyzed, neck down, vegetating in Wemberly Sanitarium for years, bedded in a lifeless room with walls peeling their green paint, bed sores pressing angrily against you, and no one visiting you except for Sam Sack and those faces in the walls. Conversation with one of those faces in particular holds your interest, but Sam's attention you don't want. He wears a pillow case over his head and comes into your room late at night to play. His kind of play you don't need. But you can only lie there.  Until that one particular face tells you more.

There's a short story by Oliver Onions–can't quite put my finger on it I read it so long ago– that Shirley reminded me of with this one. And no it's not The Beckoning Fair One. It had a fairy tale quality to it as I recollect, a girl, and a curious friend. Shirley's less prosaic than Onions, of course, but darker in intent, and his rythm between narrative and dialog is more insolent and unforgiving, and with the psychological horror of each situation leeching the life out of his characters captured with such exhuberance, Shirley wins hand over fist. I wonder if Shirley looks over his shoulder while he writes, fearful someone might catch him in the act?

So pour yourself a glass of Shiraz, volume up The Three Tenors, and sit near a mirror so you can reassure yourself there's no one looking over your shoulder while you read. The wine and music will help sweeten the bitter spirit aftertaste when you've finished the book–if you get that far.

But not by much.

Book Review: Dog Blood

DogBlood

Zombos Says: Very Good

This conflict wasn’t faction versus faction or army against army; it was individual versus individual, more than six billion armies of one. Beyond that, the Hate didn’t care who you were, where you were, or what you were. You were simply on one side or the other, your position in this new, twisted, f**ked-up world decided without your involvement by unknown variables and fate.

The beauty of David Moody’s Dog Blood is how you can read so much or so little into it. Pile on the metaphors of your choice and pontificate away, or ignore them and become mired in a broken world crumbling down around broken lives. This downward spiral of  hopelessness, of collapsing societies, of forlorn, shock-weary masses of people crushing in on themselves, and of mindless hatred leading to endless killing is depressing, frightening, and shamefully engrossing.  

Picking up the apocalyptic speed from Hater, his first book in this it’s-them-or-us trilogy, the Unchanged are struggling against shattered selves and the Haters, those aggression-infected individuals who hunt and kill anyone not like them; family members kill family members, strangers kill strangers, friends kill friends, grinding them into bloody pulp in the process. As in any good horror play, the Haters are more organized, more determined, and much more deadly than the Unchanged, who are herded into the cities and penned up by the military providing questionable protection while stripping away their humanity, and quelling any incursion of agression by mass obliteration of the infected area. Making a terrible situation worse are the Brutes, a new generation of Haters that are stronger, totally unreasoning, and never tire of killing. They’re like Saruman’s Uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings.

Danny McCoyne, a Hater, has one goal: to find his five year old daughter, Ellis. He will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal because she is like him. We watch and follow him through his own voice, but this is no longer only about him. There are millions of others, on both sides, and Moody slices chapters between Danny’s search for his daughter and Danny’s Unchanged cousin, Mark–and his squalid existence–to open up the bigger situation all around both of them enough to slip it all neatly into a handbasket and kick it hard and fast down a steep slope leading straight to a hellish climax of destruction.

Mark is one of thousands of Unchanged, holding on with exasperation and desperation as food, water, shelter, and safety dwindle. Assigned a small hotel room by the military, he shares it with his pregnant wife, her overwhelmed-to-shutdown parents who can’t get out of bed, and someone else hiding in the locked bathroom. Mark tries to keep it all under control but failure is imminent when another person, a loudly complaining stranger, is dumped in the room with them, by the military, in spite of his protests.

As Mark deals with escalating frustration and worries over his unborn child, Danny fumes at being delayed from finding Ellis by an organized group of Haters who have a secret plan for killing every Unchanged man, woman, and child, and by the bipartisan-thinking Mallon, a man who forces Danny to control his hate enough to keep him from bashing heads in at every opportunity. Their combined effect on Danny make him question the ultimate purpose of everyone involved, including his own.

Moody piles up the rotting bodies in every nook and cranny without remorse or compassion because heroics and sanity play no part in this shattered world. His paragraphs are long but concise and filled with small details to describe much, like the ubiquitousness of the dead when Danny realizes he’s stepping on a corpse only by the crunching sound of its brittle fingers he’s grinding underfoot.

Even now I can hear those metaphors rustling furtively in your brain and similes kicking up gray dust. Just remember it’s only a novel, though it would be best if you read it on the beach during a bright summer day.

Book Review: Blood Oath

Blood-oath-seal Zombos Says: Very Good

Nathaniel Cade is an 1860s vampire hoodwinked by President Andrew Johnson to serve and protect the President of the United States. His new partner, Zach is a modern day career-hungry politico hoodwinked into being Cade's human compatriot after a dalliance with the current president's daughter. Konrad is an evil Dr. Frankenstein type formerly of the Nazi SS who tries to hoodwink them both in Blood Oath, a race against time  supernatural spy novel assembling terrorist plots with nearly unstoppable zombie-steins to keep your blood running.

Cade's blood oath to protect the oval office, bound by Marie Laveau's Voudou in the 1800s–explained in a flashback to the events that prompted President Johnson to enlist Cade's services–keeps him from harming anyone except those who threaten the United States. He is incredibly strong, nearly indestructible, very self-assured, a natty dresser, and difficult to work with. 

In the opening salvo, a Special Ops mission in Kosovo pits him against a Serbian werewolf to retrieve a mysterious box. His constant battle with the Other Side's horrific threats is hinted at here, but as soon as the box is safely returned to the Smithsonian, where Cade has his digs, another terrorist plot begins.

Christopher Farnsworth keeps the story concise and the reading tuned to non-stop pitch as Cade and Zach get to know each other's foibles, strengths, and annoying habits in their search to find the truth behind a container shipment of badly decomposing body parts. Cade suspects his nemesis, Dr. Konrad Dippel, an alchemist who discovered the Elixir of Life and thus has lived for over 300 years, is behind the mystery. Konrad's penchant for assembling body parts into dead-men-walking automatons of destruction doesn't hurt, either, to implicate him. But another covert operation and shadow organization interferes with the investigation, providing more obstacles for Cade and Zach to overcome. These obstacles push each to their limits, revealing both men's vulnerabilities and their importance to each other.

The strength of bond that slowly grows between them, the stoic vampire who refuses to drink human blood and attends AA meetings (though he doesn't know why), and the flippantly selfish younger man, lends the story a deeper and continuing interest that will garner a following of loyal readers. Through little touches of their actions, dialog, and silences, Farnsworth softens Cade's and Zach's innate inhumanness into revelations for both of them; ones they didn't know they had buried away inside.  

Book Review: Zombie, Ohio

Zombos Says: Good

Zombie ohio

I looked into the bathroom mirror for a long time, studying the ridges in my brain, and thought: "Is that the top of my brain? That's not the top of my brain…is it? It can't be. There's no way. But wait–is that the top of my brain?

Peter Mellor, a philosophy professor at Kenton College, has a serious problem: he's dead. He just doesn't realize it until he notices a chunk of his head is missing, along with a corresponding piece of skull. It's when he sees his exposed brain that he slowly starts to remember who he is and quickly starts thinking like a zombie. His amnesia after the car accident still clouds his memories. It's a wonder he isn't dead after going through the windshield like he did. Or maybe I should say deader.

Scott Kenemore's Zombie, Ohio is all about Mellor's zombiefication after the accident. Even before then, Ohio, along with the rest of the world, has been overwhelmed by the dead reanimating and chowing down on the living. A unique twist makes the cities safer than the surrounding countryside, leaving survival a tricky game of banding together, staying together, and knowing who to trust for the rustics. Gangs roam around pillaging and killing, and zombies roam around eating to their decaying heart's content.

The question Kenemore poses to Mellor is which side will he choose. Will he decay with his humanity intact, or become dead-set on acting like a zombie because he is one? The difficult Taoist answer to his predicament comes too easily for this philosophy professor. This is where Kenemore falters. For a philosophy professor at an uppity-scale college, Mellor says "Dude" too many times and doesn't let all the ramifications of being undead sink into that exposed brain of his. No axiological or ontological thoughts impede or accelerate his actions. It's all basic zombie chemistry–all about brains–and unknowing. Amnesia provides a convenient excuse to sidestep all of his introspection and focus more on how tasty he finds brains to be. Too convenient.

It doesn't take long for Mellor to crave fresh brains to savor. The urge takes hold after he believes his significant other, Vanessa, is non-zombie dead. After that he revels in his undeadness and starts a battalion of walking dead to feed on every adult he can trick into trusting him. His knack of appearing normal–a talking, thinking zombie–has it's advantages. We follow Mellor's exploits at cheating his way to a meal. Along with his growing band of grateful deadheads, he tricks two sorority girls, some survivalist-minded adults, and the just plain clueless into becoming king-sized HotPockets.

The military doesn't know what to make of this flipping-the-bird-at-them zombie who walks and talks and acts alive. Mellor's reputation grows as he and his fellow zombies terrorize the countryside. From a downed helicopter pilot he learns the military refers to him as the "Kernel." The name comes from the "Cedar Rapids Kernels" sewn into the baseball cap he always wears.

Kenemore pens a broad line between being humorous but sticking to the usual zombie gore tableaus, being mysterious–Mellor finds out he was murdered–and uproarious when Vanessa turns up with a band of ass-kicking survivalists, upsetting his zombie zeitgeist. The pen never leans too much in any one direction, leaving what happens to Mellor competently told but not as uniquely filling, as say, a heaping mouthful of fresh brains is to a zombie. And Kenemore's penchant for resorting to parentheses to convey Mellor's thoughts on his thoughts creates a stuttering effect in Mellor's narrative. Sometimes they can be funny–I chuckled at Mellor's observations at least twice–but other times they're annoying, like lumbering zombies popping up when you really don't want them to.

Book Review: Angel of Vengeance

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

Autumn_david moodyZombos 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

Twicetheterror 

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.

  Beth_robinson

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

and falling, fly 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

Best of joe r lansdale 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.

God of the razorYou 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

Peter Straub 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.