From Zombos' Closet

Book Review: Age of Blood A Seal Team 666 Novel

Zombos Says: Good

The military, once again, is charged to go above and beyond the call of duty when a senator's daughter is kidnapped. SEAL Team 666 is called in when the kidnapper appears to be a giant sea monster. 

Rapid firing military argot, precise munitions details, and procedural and gagdet-gear acronyms galore, Weston Ochse struts his literary military might with gusto, creating a fast moving, chupacabra slugfest against a very smelly rotting-skin-coat wearing cult called Followers of the Flayed One, the Los Zetas Cartel, and enough Mexican demons to let the blood and bullets flow and fly.

At no point, however, does Ochse let us even remotely think SEAL Team 666's dry-humored gun-toting whipcords of American might may be overwhelmed or ill-prepared for the job, and that's a suspense-killer.  With a final showdown beneath Mexico City, and a demon-driven return to the human sacrifices of the Aztecs taxing their limits, the expecation that all hell would break loose at any moment never materializes. 

Instead, his stalwart soldiers carry on, figuring it out and planning for the worst as they go, but always with a gung ho attitude that never says die. When one of their own is possessed by a dog-like demon (that barks a lot),  in service of the more powerful evil force orchestrating events, they stick to their operations protocols and dutifully work it into their schedule. This would be a complete drama-downer if Ochse didn't razzle-dazzle with his steady attention to that doing it by the book, then deviating a little here and there to intersperse short background breaks for his men that provide more character depth than their precision, training-driven action allows for. It's a wonder how he keeps his novel from becoming completely formula-driven even while it relies heavily on that formula.

So let's call this one at being a light thriller with good characterizations, the expected but still effective dialog that's in keeping with those characters, and a storyline that's part pulp action, part military-jargon mystifying, and overall quite satisfying because he structures enough supernatural and human mayhem along with plausible (werewolves aside) genre complexity that doesn't require us to read a field operations manual first to make Age of Blood entertaining.

But we may just want to read that manual afterwards because he's sparked our interest.

Book Review: Dying is My Business But Living is Hardest

Zombos Says: Good

Once you get past the funny sounding names of magical things and strange places, urban fantasy can be a lark. That's what's usually the main hurdle to surmount when writing an urban fantasy story: the whimsical and mystical nature of it can become too light-hearted, which is detrimental to suspense-building, or all those weird sounding names can take it too far out-there, making it hard to get that suspension of disbelief going while you're figuring out their pronunciations.

Nicholas Kaufmann in Dying is My Business clears the hurdle. His main character, Trent, wakes up from death in a Queens Playground--possibly his ninth death, but he can't be sure since he only remembers the past up to a year--and winds up being the muscle to a crime boss who strings him along, promising to tell him all about the whys and wherefores of those other years. Once Trent gets involved in the hunt for a mysterious old box his end of the business is complicated when the Black Knight, razor-clawed gargoyles that work for the Black Knight, and Bethany, a five foot whirlwind that may look like an Elf--he thinks--but kicks like a mule, shows up looking for the box, too. While he kind of saves her while she's kind of saving him, cue the romance as their bruises heal and the mystery of Trent's abilities grows. Is he a mage himself? Or something better? Or worse? Bethany has her charms and spell-castings, but Trent seems to have the golden touch of magic without needing objects to channel it through.

The book's title and the hunt for the mysterious box may bring to mind Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, but Trent's soft-boiled exterior doesn't take the novel to that level of bleeding gums and bruises. It's breezier, less grime-crime ridden, and with a touch of romance conducted in-between the gunfire and fighting more suitable for anyone who enjoys a novelous time of fantasy and magic. Kaufman brings likeable characters encountering fantastic events with a tone much like a Warehouse 13 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode: a little tongue in cheek, a lot of shadow and crimson. It's not the reinvention of urban-fantasy, but a well executed storyline that uses the genre's tried and true elements against the backdrop of New York City and the Cloisters.

Where Kaufman needs to conjure a little more magic is in his descriptions of scenery and people. He stops short of fleshing them out more vividly, leaving you with a good idea instead of a fuller picture. For instance, I'd beg for more on the city beneath New York City, hell, I'd even call it the land beneath New York City, and Gregor the Dragon ruling it. I'm sorry I didn't get to spend more time in it, but maybe in the next novel in the series we'll return and spend a few days.

And of course there are zombies. Not the messy people-eating kind, but the more traditional dead body controlled by Necromancer kind: also known as the revenant. And there are lots of them, topped off with walking-skeletons called Shadowborn, who can wink in and out, appearing anywhere in the blink of an eye, making them a bitch to kill. Lucky for Trent he has Bethany and her little group of evil-stompers, comprised of a werewolf, vampire, and magician, to fight along side of.

With the Black Knight and his gargoyle minions against them, and a Necromancer sending hordes of rotting corpses after them, they will need all the help they can muster. But only Trent has the knack for coming back alive after being killed. That comes in handy for him, but his friends aren't so gifted.

Book Review: Reviver by Seth Patrick Dead and Not Gone

Zombos Says: Good

The gimmick sustaining Seth Patrick’s debut novel, Reviver, takes a little something from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and then adds the always popular 'Eldritch Abomination from Beyond' trope: you've seen it; the ancient evil waiting to cross over the line between our here and its there, like in the recent supernatural thrillers Last Days and Red, White and Blood. It's the one conceit catalyzing more television and movie stories than you can ever remember, and it's about as old as that eldritch abomination, or at least the hills. It's an important trope, though at times cyclically over employed in supernatural stories. 

There's also the "secret agenda" being executed here, which is usually driven by either a secret organization, a known organization, or a dubious corporation. Here the secret agenda is masterminded by a known organization (that may have been incorporated), and although its use provides enough mass to drive the plot and set up the next two novels in this planned trilogy, it's not handled with enough finesse to make it either quirky or different or vexing enough to warrant more than a good showing for its inclusion. Patrick makes sure to also include a lost love, a possible newly found love, and more pages than he really needs to tell his story.

What's missing, and this goes for much of the coterie of genre writers today, is a less streamlined and formulaic approach to handling his characters, their plot threads, and how the story revelations flow--and they flow somewhere, for comparison, between a stream and a brook, if you're into fishing . If not, but you like cooking (or eating), the best alternative example would be the differences between Velveeta and Parmigiano Reggiano. Both serve a purpose, but one provides much more texture, flavor depth, and savory experience in the same mouthful. (And now I promise to lay off metaphors for a month. Honest.)

A hint of depth and savoriness comes in a few scary moments when Jonah Miller, working as a Reviver for the police department's  special forensics unit, makes unexpected contact with a presence other than the revived victim he's talking with. At first he's worried that "ghost traces," a malady that results from overwork and burnout from the revival process, is coloring his mind with false impressions. He doesn't let anyone know about his doubts, not even his closest friend and colleague, Never Geary. 

Then Daniel Harker disappears. He's the journalist who revealed the unique ability some gifted (or cursed) people have for reviving the dead. He made a lot of money from his book on the subject, but then found something more sinister going on to investigate for his next book. Jonah's investigation into Harker's disappearance, the revelation of a dangerous drug that can enhance the revival ability, but with serious side effects, and the growing mystery surrounding the motives of a radical group of After Lifers, perks up the narrative at around the 218th page. Until then we get a too-measured build up--and too slow--with digressions from the important building blocks of action events as dialogs take over for long psuedo-scientific discussions or backstory fill-ins in 'real' time with the characters, not flashbacks.

Hinting at a more thoughtfully planned out  methodolgy to his horror, Patrick delves into interesting facings for his revival dressing: like what if the military used the revival process as a standard interrogation procedure? Just kill the interrogee, revive him, interrogate his corpse--one important aspect of the revival process is that those brought back can't resist but tell the truth--and be done with it. And then there's a building uncertainty as to what exactly ghost traces are as Jonah investigates Daniel Harker's disappearance with the help of Harker's daughter and the journalist's notebook. This uncertainty leads Jonah to rethink who and what that dark figure following him around really is, and who exactly is whom when he does. 

Book Review: Red, White and Blood

Zombos' Says: Very Good

Nathaniel Cade, President Curtis's top secret vampiric super-secret agent returns to tackle the Boogeyman, a supernatural enemy from the Other Side that makes the killing rounds every so often. Taking human hosts, the entity grows as invincible as Cade, and has a fancy for using sharp weapons with maniacal glee for people carving. This time around the Boogeyman has help from another returning villain with a score to settle.

Christopher Farnsworth is a keep-it-to-the-action writer, the kind of mainstream author prevalent in today's supernatural horror novel arena, but it's through his characters that he provides the tone and mood polishing. His penchant for taking political digs (mostly at us Yanks) without long-winded excursions from the story proper keeps things lively in-between the backstory fill-ins fleshing out Cade's run-ins with the killing machine over the years--or It, as Cade prefers to call his eternal foe--and the dark dealings of the Shadow group that works to undermine the presidency and its policies.

Excerpts from Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces trilogy, quotes from Son of Sam and other serial killers, various real and fake news source snippets, and other sources (like Brad Steiger's Out of the Dark), are used to introduce each chapter, which at first is an interesting construction, but as the story develops, their discontinuity with the storyline becomes more distracting than complimentary. 

What keeps this series going is not so much Farnsworth's modus operandi as it is his characters and how they speak and act, especially the love-hate relationship between Cade and Zach. There is just enough villainy, political intrigue, reluctant comradery, and hints of deep dark powers maneuvering everyone into preferred positions to provide reasons to keep reading. Which brings me back to those excerpts at the beginning of each chapter: once you're well invested into the book, they only get in the way. You may find yourself skipping past them as I did.

It's those little touches that create involving characters: Cade's habit of using slang terms garnered from living across the decades; Zach's inability to have a normal life now that he's Cade's coffin watchdog and needed day-tripper (when Cade's lying in that coffin during the daylight hours); a moribund arch-enemy that refuses to die, half zombie and half cold-hearted woman; and a vice-president with his own nefarious plans. The president's daughter takes a more active role in this novel, but her dislike and distrust of Cade, and her on-gain-off-again romantic involvement with Zach, undermine her decision-making abilities. 

While the Boogeyman is strongest during the night, he can still move in daylight. Cade can't. This sets up the necessary tension when the president's secret service needs to take up the slack against an unstoppable enemy. Not helping anyone's morale is Cade's assessment that most of them won't survive, which he coldly tells them at the start, and their fear of the Boogeyman and Cade. 

Spicing up his story with a little more sex this time around, Farnsworth keeps this series going through his even balance showing Cade's personality--and lack of it when you most expect it--and how Cade accepts and hates his existence. And most importantly, this is one vampire who isn't a vegetarian. A fact that leads to one of this novel's most important scenes, fatal choices, and guilt to bear for both Zach and Cade.

Book Review: Blood Oath

Book Review: Apocalypse Cow

Zombos Says: Udderly Good

Reading Michael Logan’s novel Apocalypse Cow, I was reminded of the New Zealand movie Black Sheep. Both works of fiction are darkly humored and both don’t reach the level of wit of a Shaun of the Dead or that deadpan delivered outrageousness of a Dead Alive, but Logan’s Scottish cows contrast well with his acutely offbeat characters that fall into neat categories of meat lovers, vegetarians, and government cover-up specialists.

Terry's the abattoir worker who can't get the meaty smell off him, no matter how much Old Spice he sloshes on. He survives the cow uprising that slaughters his co-workers. Young Geldof is seriously undernourished, bullied about by the nasty twins living next door, and is forced to wear only natural plant-based clothing by his mum Fanny, the devout vegetarian. Geldof's allergic to the clothing, and both mum and dad like to doff their clothing while at home, making Geldof's home life equally uncomfortable. Fanny is an activist in search of her next diatribe and crusade against the establishment this or that, and she is vexed daily by her meat-eating neighbor David, who ate his pet hamster when his parents died suddenly, leaving him locked in his room for three days and quite famished. Geldof's dad is a pothead. He only crusades for his next high. Crusading for her big journalistic break is Lesley, who is about to be fired from her uneventful job just when the bovine zombieness breaks out. 

It's the odious government villain, Brown, and his evil intention to wipe any trace of the virus that leaked out of a secret testing facility from the public's eye, that brings everyone together. And sends them on the the run from him, the infected cows, the infected rats, the infected squirrels, and then just about anything else with four legs, hooves, paws, and could be mistaken for being cute and cuddly. Logan delivers the contagion-spreading with restraint, making it hard to tell when he's being deadly serious or earnestly cheeky, but each character participates in the action enough to make each chapter a good build on the previous one as they make their escape to the Chunnel and hoped for safety in France.

While about every overly modulated wave of the modern zombie outbreak codec is chewed on and regurgitated more than a cow's cud by Logan's pen (or keyboard), he does twist up the bits here and there to curveball a surprise, overindulge on squirrels that want more than nuts, and maintain what could have been a one-note gimmick with a very short half-life into an engaging adventure with a little social finger-pointing to broil up the parody.

Dare I say it, his novel is udderly good.

Book Review: Death's Apprentice

Zombos Says: Good

Meshing diverse story elements from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the writing team of K. W. Jeter and Gareth Jefferson Jones create their own tale of three heroes taking on the Devil, who lives in his dark tower of an office building. Of course I don't need to tell you what business he's in, do I?

Hero Blake is cursed. He's stuck with a raincoat that's stuck to him like his skin, and would choke him lifeless if it wasn't for his determination of will. The curse came courtesy of the Devil and the chance encounter where Blake chose poorly, but still managed to keep his soul intact. Hero Hank is a giant of a man with the strength to match his size and a complete lack of fear that makes him fearless. He's brought into a deal with a gnarly dwarf lawyer who wants him to kill people who may be a threat to the lawyer's unnamed client, but since the lawyer doesn't know who is a threat, specifically, Blake manages to clean up the city's riff raff rather quickly,  taking out anyone he thinks may be that threat. Hero Nathaniel is Death's apprentice, and at only 17 years of age, he's sold into servitude by his father who traded a little more life-- ten years worth--for his son's soul. Nathaniel's point of view makes this a young adult novel, but other points of view kick in as needed. Being a young adult can feel a lot like that--dealing with others' points of view--so it works well for the narrative.

Death likes Nathaniel, even though Death doesn't have the emotion to show it. And Nathaniel likes his job to some extent, even though the divine pins that keep his soul intact are weakening for some unknown reason that not even Death knows why. Which is surprising to both of them. When all three heroes are brought together, they learn their combined weaknesses are actually what makes them much stronger when united, and Nathaniel must choose between Death's direction to live his fate impartially or change it deliberately, but blindly.

And even here the authors have managed to include zombies.

I won't hold it against them. The walking dead work well within the story's context, although they stretch the fairy tale thematic fabric a bit thin with their presence. Then again, who else would you want to go against the Devil and his damned minions? The fisticuffs are directed with the usual ups and downs, tide turning this way and that sort of thing. The novel's style is also written concisely, without discernible highs or lows in sentence structure or cadence that will distract the reader.

While the Devil ponders the dessicated tree of life that suddenly bears fruit in the courtyard beside his tower, a forwarning of the ever popular prophecy angle that was foretold to him, and Death, who can see all the ends of life at all the ends of the world, but can't see Nathaniel's own end ponders why, Grimm City becomes another Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale: a location situated in close proximity to Hell, or is a suburb of Hell, or may just be a metaphorical Hellish morass; it's hard to say, and because of that it does present a bit of a learning curve when reading the early pages. Jeter and Jones hit the ground running and the reader will need to keep pace by accepting the premise without question and the goals as they come; further explanation may be forthcoming in the subsequent titles in this series. There are certainly enough loose threads to tie up at the end of this one to warrant more explanation.

Which leads me to the question of contextual integument, you know, the "word stuff" between the larger paragraphs of actions and motives that supports a novel by providing all those little background things that flesh out the world the characters are characterized in, or in this case the city around them. Jeter and Jones are light on contextual integument when they should be heavy with it. I've recently read a few novels where I felt the author needed to trim down the pages; here I felt they needed to add pages. To be fair, many fairy tales are focused in this way, telling their stories with minimal overhead while delivering their moral meanings.

But, then again, they don't normally resort to zombies to beef up their storyline. 

Book Review: Last Days by Adam Nevill

Zombos Says: Very Good

Adam Nevill never quite reaches the level of terror and suspense for his readers the way his characters are feeling it in Last Days, but readers do come close when the Presences come calling. 

Similar in subject matter to Peter Straub's A Dark Matter, there's a sinister cult called the Temple of the Last Days led by a charismatic, if mentally unbalanced, leader, a portal to a dangerous place opened that should never have been, and a man interviewing former cult members--the survivors--to find out what happened when its active members died by gunshot wounds, being gnawed to death, or by beheading one night some years ago. 

The person doing the inquiring is Kyle, a documentary filmmaker--he smokes Lucky Strikes and uses Canon cameras--hired by Max Solomon, a producer who wants to start a series of documentaries with a paranormal angle. At least that's what Max says. He leaves out a few important details, which we learn about later, along with Kyle. But Kyle is driven: he needs the money and also needs to prove to himself he's really as good as he thinks he is. Along with his cameraman Dan and his film editor, Finger Man, he's dead set on finding out why those cult members died, even if something that should be long dead and buried is set on finding him first.

The novel could be trimmed down from its 500 and some odd pages to tighten up the suspense and quicken the pace, but Nevill generates some scary moments when those nasty looking black stains Kyle begins to notice on the walls start to take on human shapes, and the smells of sewage and decay follow him as he visits the locations where the cult had headquartered. Accompanied by former members who left it before THAT night, he interviews them: there's Sister Isis at the Holland Park penthouse with her "small brittle body with a face that made Kyle think of a clown" and  Brother Gabriel, at the farm, who looked like "an Egyptian mummy wearing a Harpo Marx wig." Every one of them is scarred and scared of something they are reluctant to talk about but Kyle keeps digging.

After the interview in the penthouse during the day, Kyle and Dan return at night, after a few pints downed at a local pub, to collect their equipment. Odd sounds, a scampering presence, the sounds of doors slamming, and the smell of sewage scare them enough to question what they actually experienced. At the farm, more dark stains, nauseating odors, the sounds of unseen dogs barking, and Kyle left alone as the sunlight wanes ratchets up the terror, especially after he discovers what's living in a derelict bed.

You would expect the last location, the Blue Oak Mine where the murders took place, to increase this build-up of paranormal terrors, but Detective Sweeney's brooding, aloof, interview, even though it provides more disturbing and confounding news to Kyle, bogs down the momentum already built up. From this point on, Nevill illuminates the mystery more, but has lost his subtlety in involving our fears when doing so. Kyle experiences more and more strange nightmares, Max gets more and more involved, and those stains on the walls are getting nearer to Kyle. 

A secret meeting in Antwerp, to learn the history of the Blood Friends, depicted in a cursed triptych painted in 1556, is so richly captured in sordid detail, I wonder why Nevill chose to merely explain it through a static dialog exchange instead of bringing us back in time to experience it as it happened. The final showdown with these Presences and a revelation of the cult's ultimate purpose plays out much like the procedural difference between an A to B movie: tone, mood, and nuance are replaced by perilous action, blazing guns, and ill-planned-for contingencies that create discord for Max, Kyle, and Max's muscle for hire during their encounter with the damned; somewhat disappointing given the more artfully executed beginning. One gets the sense Nevill was reaching for his deadline instead of his limits.

But damn their luck, there are a lot of them to contend with, so a strong B movie ending it is.

Book Review: Portlandtown A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes

Zombos Says: Good

The gifted Wylde Family runs a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, a soggy place most of the time, both inside the bookstore (I'll get to that) and outside the town. The mayor wants the rain festival to be very wet, which complicates matters as zombies invade the flooded town (I'll get to that also). I won't get to why the mayor and the town celebrates rain, but you'll be able to figure that one out on your own.

Joseph Wylde is legally blind, but he still see's more than most other people, and his wife Kate has the uncanny ninja ability to make herself unseen. Author Robert DeBorde doesn't explain these abilities much, but they come in handy when Portland's mayor comes calling with an odd matter or mystery for them to work on, knowing they are a unique pair of sleuths who can handle the unusual. They're like a Wild West version of John Steed and Emma Peel in The Avengers television series, without their eccentricities.

While the mayor is preparing for the rain festival he asks the Wyldes to investigate the mysterious storm totem statue he's acquired, hoping it will unleash a steady flow of droplets for the festivities and make him look like a demi-god as he calls forth the rain with it. He does, it does, and he ends up looking less a demi-god and more a horse's behind, but the torrential result provides the rapid climax to Portlandtown: A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes. Unfortunately for the Wyldes, early experiments with the storm totem while in the bookstore prove successful.

Kick and Maddie, the Wylde kids, are Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew-ish spunky, and lend a hand as needed when not helping to run the bookstore. Their family business becomes very lively when the walking dead come to town. The zombies are courtesy of one formerly dead gunman who comes back to settle an old score and rack up a few new ones. He's the Hanged Man, and aside from the spellbook he uses to come back to life, he also brandishes a handgun that doesn't need to be reloaded and doesn't miss its target. The gun's handle is also colored red--some say it was stained red from the blood of its victims. Kick and Maddie wind up playing bobbing apples to the zombies dunking for them in the flooded streets of Portland, providing much of the energy of the novel's showdown between the marshall who put him six feet under, and the Wylde family member who helped (and barely survived the ordeal).

The marshall is Jim Kleberg, Kate's dad, and his memory of past events, and how he wound up keeping the deadly handgun, come to light slowly, through flashbacks and remembrances. As he remembers piecemeal, more graves are dug up, more dead rise, and various characters who aren't overly fleshed out in this first entry in the series come into play.

The spellbook belongs to Andre in San Francisco, who, with his mysterious female assistant, fight supernatural monsters like the Hanged Man. Not lost on Andre is his culpability in creating such a monster, so guilt drives him as much as his duty. The sorceror's cookbook appears to contain enough promising evil spells for future novels, so let's see what DeBorde can cook up using it. How Andre and the Wyldes mesh is not fully explained here, leaving much room for backstory in a subsequent novel.

A rousing shootout at a traveling carnival sideshow when the Hanged Man reanimates, after reluctantly being sold to the proprietor as an attraction, perks up the middle of the story, and the Hanged Man's unsavory ability to raise the dead as he passes near them creates a modicum of suspense. I'd expect townsfolk would be more alarmed and more confused when their relatives come back to bite them, but DeBorde keeps it low-key and never capitalizes on the gruesome or kinetic potentials of having so many feisty undead lumbering around.

Keeping his words between young adult in tone and historically informed but not preponderantly so, DeBorde doesn't pile up events or action quickly, and his fairly straight trail of characters' bad decisions (like digging up the Hanged Man in the first place) and wicked intentions (what the Hanged Man does directly and indirectly because he's so darn bad), is easy enough to follow. His paragraphs and interludes can be bland at times, or quaint--take your pick, but DeBorde provides clean starting and ending points with some keystones left unturned in-between.

Writers with a hankering for continuing series tend to do that. The only advice (or hope) I'll mention is that the second novel in the series, should it come to that, better switch from sarsaparilla to whiskey. Reanimating Readers will need something stronger to mosey down this trail again.

Short Story: Souling by Sally Bosco

And now a Halloween treat from author Sally Bosco...eat up...

Kyle sat in his mother’s Lexus with his arms crossed over his chest. “I don’t see why you have to drive me. The other kids get to walk by themselves.” His parents were always trying to protect him from some imaginary evil they thought would get him, and it drove him crazy.

“Listen, you’re still too young to go trick-or-treating on your own. You don’t know what kind of wackos might be out there, especially on Halloween. Next year you can get a group of friends together and go on your own in the neighborhood.”

He sighed, opened the car door and put his booted foot onto the pavement. His Batman cape caught as he tried to get out, yanking him back, so he had to pull it out from being stuck between the seats.

His mom stood in front of the car, watching him. Her blond hair was pulled up into a ponytail, and she wore a matchy jogging suit. She leaned against the car, pulled out her phone and started texting. “Don’t take too long,” she reminded him.

He didn’t really want to be there. What good was it if your mom drove you trick-or-treating like when you were a baby? As he approached the small wooden house he noticed that it had a single flickering light illuminating it. The night seemed to grow darker as he approached. He knocked on the front door. A dour woman in a brown floor-length dress with a dirty hem peered out. She eyed the young boy and handed him a dried up biscuit with no wrapping around it.

 The thing in his hand looked like a tiny shrunken head. “You gotta be kidding me. How about some chocolate?”

She scowled at him and yelled directly in his face with rancid breath. “If you’re a God-fearing child you’ll say prayers for the dead and be happy to get your soul cake.”

 “What? Soul-what?” Crazy lady.

 “Soul cake. Don’t act like you don’t know.” She grabbed his shoulder and tried to pull him into the house, but he wriggled away. That was it. He was outta there. He turned to run. When he got out onto the street, he saw a dirt road with no streetlights. The houses on the street were sparse, easily a quarter of a mile apart, and his mom’s car was nowhere in sight.

A feeling of panic overtook him like icy skeletal fingers wrapped around his throat. He wondered if he’d somehow gone out the back door of the house. No, this was so wrong. What was happening to him? He felt cold and confused. His eyes darted up and down the street looking for his mom.

Kyle stared down at himself. In place of his batman costume, he saw tattered rags. His hands should have been covered by Batman gloves but they weren’t; they were dirty and had jagged nails. He felt his face. It felt the same, despite the lack of the Batman hood he had on a few minutes ago, but when he wiped it with his hand, he noticed a dirty, sooty residue. His lips quivered as he tried not to cry.

 An old hag wearing a tattered ankle-length dress and brown scarf tied around mousy brown hair emerged from the murky darkness. “Where’s the cake?”

Kyle looked at the dried up cake the woman at the house had given him. It was nasty and not even sealed. He threw it at her. “Here’s your stupid cake. Now where’s my mom?” He stepped around her and called into the murky night. “Mom?”

The woman snatched the cake off the ground. “You should have more respect for your elders.” She grabbed him by the ear sending a shooting pain through his head. “Stop this foolishness right now. Our family needs those cakes to survive. You will go into the next house.”

The woman pulled him down the dirt road. Where were the streetlights? The bright suburban houses had disappeared, replaced by an ominous darkness he’d never seen before. Even the glow of the nearby city was gone. He’d been thrust into some kind of nightmare world.

She shoved him up a muddy path toward a rough timber house that was little more than a shack and pounded on the coarse wooden door. “Now you will bring a soul cake home to feed our family.”

 The inside of this house was even bleaker than the last. Two old people and five kids dressed in rags sat around a rectangular table that had something piled onto it. In the dim candlelight, he couldn’t tell what. Their faces illuminated by the single candle looked like Halloween lanterns. A terrible smell of something rotten with an incense scent masking it assaulted his nose.

As Kyle drew closer, he saw the outline of a head and small body laid out on the table, partially covered by a tattered sheet. When he realized that the people were sitting around a decaying corpse the vomit rose in his throat. He covered his mouth with his hand trying to block the horrible smell. The room spun as he stood there, so he grabbed onto a nearby post to steady himself.

 “You will say your prayer for the dearly departed,” the older man demanded. Then his voice cracked. “Our dearly departed son, Joshua.”

Kyle wracked his brain trying to remember a prayer. The sooner he could remember one and say it, the sooner he could leave. “Our father.” His voice shook as he mumbled. “Who art in heaven.” He stumbled over the rest of the prayer, hoping it was right.

“Hmmp. That’s a fine way to honor our Lord. Here’s hoping that you’ve properly eaten my boy’s sins.” He thrust the dried up biscuit into Kyle’s trembling hand. “Here’s your cake.”

He thought if he didn’t get out of there soon, he’d vomit, so he made a clumsy bow to the family and stumbled out the door. At the first whiff of fresh air, his insides relaxed, but his revulsion still caused him to vomit into the bushes.

Kyle wiped his mouth and tried to get his bearings. He took the dried up cake and stood up against a nearby tree, while trying to get his stomach under control. With his head down, he trudged up the path and held the biscuit out, handing it to the old woman. “Here. You can have your miserable cake.”

“What’s up with you? This is a Twix bar, your favorite.” He looked up to see his blonde mom in front of her Lexus. The streetlights shown brightly, the windows of the houses twinkled, and off in the distance the nearby city glowed.

He pressed himself against her and hugged her. “Mom, I love you so much. I’m sorry I gave you a hard time before.”

 “What happened? Did you have some kind of life-altering experience?”

“I don’t know what happened? It’s like everything changed for a couple of minutes.”

“Hmmm,” she said stroking his bat-caped shoulder. “You should have these kinds of changes more often.”

Kyle sank into the soft leather seat trying to erase the outline of the small corpse from his memory.

This story is copyrighted by the author.

 

Sally Bosco (SallyBosco.com) writes dark fiction. She is inexplicably drawn to the Uncanny, the shades of gray between the light and dark, the area where your mind hovers as you’re falling off to sleep. She loves writing young adult fiction because she strongly relates to teenage angst, the search for self-identity and the feelings of being an outsider.

Her published novels include: AltDeath.com, Shadow Cat (written as Zoe LaPage, her adult alter-ego), and The Werecat Chronicles, and she was a contributor to Many Genres, One Craft. She’s had short stories published in literary magazines and anthologies, including the Small Bites anthology and most recently Hazard Yet Forward, which is an anthology to benefit Donna Monroe, one of her Seton Hill classmates who is fighting breast cancer. She has an MFA degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.

Book Review: R. L. Stine's Red Rain

Zombos Says: Good

It's funny that author R.L. Stine's first adult novel, Red Rain, still has two, single-mindedly evil, murdering kids at its center and dumbfounded adults on its periphery. Usually his Goosebumps scares come from good kids caught up in bad things and dumbfounded adults barely paying any notice, so not much has changed. Stine does add a short but memorable sexual encounter and describes the entrail spilling and throat ripping with clinical precision; however the pacing of his short chapters (2 to 7 pages mostly) and the slicing of the novel into 4 smaller parts, allows for too much breakage in the momentum once it actually gets going.

Lea, an amateur travel blogger visits Cape Le Chat Noir off the coast of South Caronlina, ahead of a potentially devastating hurricane. Her attitude is neither here nor there as to the danger (she's from Long Island), which perfectly suits her amateur status, but part of the allure for her are the mysterious stories told about the Cape's enfatuation with reviving the dead. Over a cup of tea she listens to how the dead were raised to help rebuild Le Chat Noir after the hurricane of 1935. Later she witnesses a Magic Hands ceremony and becomes spooked by her brush with the supernatural. Stine hustles through all this, eschewing suspense-building for expediently setting up context for the next chapter.

Of course, to be fair, another possible scenario is that Stine's editor took a hatchet to his longer prose and removed Stine's more carefully crafted work. For instance, compare Peter Straub's 416 page Double Day edition of A Dark Matter with his unfettered and more artful longer version, The Skylark, from Subterranean Press. Whatever the case may be for Red Rain, the book as it stands reads more like a second or third draft, leaving us with intriguing inferences of otherworldly things instead of making us experience them more fully; and the gist of horror is in the experience of it.

Beginning with a promising hint of magic and death, Stine doesn't provide enough backstory to spook us as much as Lea was. The chapters follow this same approach: a tippy toe's worth of depth, then out of the pool and into another scene. There are very effective moments of terror, but there are also many lackluster moments in-between, especially when the adults talk. His adults don't speak as well as the kids do, and when he reverts to the usual buddy cop banter, it never reaches beyond the locker room, towel snapping level.

Not surprisingly, his kids, both evil and victimized, are the strongest characters in Red Rain, with the evil blond-haired twins, Samuel and Daniel, taking the horror-edge lead. They appear out of the hurricane that Lea didn't fear enough, walking through the carnage and death, appearing to her like blue-eyed angels. In a smartly daring move (or neglectful one, take your pick) , Stine pulls out a gruesome killing-ability-gimmick for Samuel, which balances the whole tone of the novel between 1980s exploitation-cool  and 1950s courageousness. The balance tips almost into absurdity when the evil twins plot to take over their new home and school, drawing blue arrows on themselves and those they convert over to their world-domination plans. It's silly, it's grotesque, and clearly a signature element of Stine's stories, which he uses quite well.

Given more pages describing the eerie background for Le Chat Noir, more of the destructive hurricane of 1935, more of the bizarre Magic Hands Revivification Ceremony (which, if tourists like Lea can so easily attend it how much of a mystery can it be?), and more on the origin of the twins' evil nature (here's a hint: Wake Wood), this novel would be more of a nail-biter. Instead, Stine holds back much and explains only enough to provide his plot points movement to get us to the next short chapter. For Red Rain, the goosebumps do not come often enough, but when they do, Samuel and Daniel make the most of them.

Book Review: This Book is Full of Spiders

Zombos Says: Excellent

6 Minutes to Review...

"What the hell did it say?" yelled Zombos, pulling on a black, multi-legged, watchamacallit tenaciously clinging onto his patent leathers. He was all dolled up for a night at the Metropolitan Opera, full tux and all, and boy does he hate to get it rumpled. 

"Give me a minute, will you!" I yelled back, peeling another watchamacallit from my neck. I flung it against the wall but it landed on its legs and brazenly stuck its tongue out at me. I flipped the bird with full malice as I rummaged across my desk for the press release from Thomas Dunne Books.  I didn't want to take my eyes off the little bugger so I had to shift  my attention back and forth a lot. Another of the little beaties jumped on my hand, but I shook it off...and onto Zombos's other shoe. He didn't like that much, either.

"Here it is!" I found the press release and scanned it. "Oh, I see the problem. There's a warning in really small print about not getting the book wet." I looked at my reviewer's copy of This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It! by David Wong. Then I looked at my spilled cup of coffee. Both were in close proximity. Too close.  I knew I should have just stuck to reviewing movies.

5 Minutes to Review...

"If you'd just give me your opera cape," I pleaded with Zombos, "we could trap the little buggers in it. Damnit, no one wears opera capes to the Metropolitan Opera any more!"

Zombos refused, his sartorial sense getting the better of him. Two watchamacallits were clinging to my legs, and another one was repeatedly sticking his furry behind in my ear. It seemed to enjoy doing that. The panel doors to the library started to open.

"Mr. Zombos, I have your maple pecan squares and espresso," said Glenor Glenda the maid.

"Don't open those doors! Not a good time. Come back later," I said while trying to make my way to the doors to keep them closed. The twin annoyances on my legs intertwined their legs and tripped me. On purpose. The little bastards. As I fell forward, Glenor Glenda entered the library with a large serving tray filled with maple pecan squares and a small pot of espresso.

All at once the watchamacallits jumped off of me and Zombos and onto the serving tray, knocking Glenor off balance and the tray to the floor. She screamed. They started eating the maple pecan squares.

"Now's our chance!" I reached around Zombos and flipped the opera cape over his head and protestations. I hurled it over the tray and the maple pecan square eating buggers, neatly grabbing a square from one's legs--and there were quite a few of them to contend with, the legs I mean--before bundling the ends of the cape under the heavy tray. "That should hold them for a while."

4 Minutes to Review...

Zombos looked at me, then at the maple pecan square in my hand. I sighed. I gave it to him. While he munched on it I helped Glenor off the floor and into the nearest chair. She always gets so frazzled when things like this happen. I turned my attention to the press release, hoping it would hold a solution to our problem. I continued to read the fine print.

"Wait, here's something." I read it out loud. " 'In case of wet accidents, let dry, and within ten minutes they will shrink to nothing.' Oh, that's good. Wait, what's this? 'Under no circumstances should you feed them sugary foods. This will make them grow larger.' Oh, that's bad. Really bad."

3 Minutes to Review...

"I tell you this will work." I picked up the now squirming opera cape, making sure the ends were tightly closed. "We run in and out without a peep. As long as they don't eat any more sugary foods, we're good. They'll dry out and shrink to nothing and that will be the end of it."

Zombos scratched his bearded chin. Glenor scratched her cheek. I got tired of waiting and headed for the hall closet. In the book, John and David use utility closets to hop around town, like Star Trek's teleporter or Stargate's, uhm, stargate, but without all the glittery special effects. It's more like POOF! you're now somewhere else, like Walmart's dressing room. I figured we'd try it.

"Okay, here goes," I said to Zombos and Glenor, with one hand ready to turn the knob on the closet door. "Ready? Just imagine being someplace else. Okay, let's go." I turned the knob and opened the door. We walked into the closet and found ourselves standing in an aisle at Costco's.

Zombos was amazed. Glenor Glenda not so much. She wanted to check out the paper goods, however. 

"Look, we get in and we get out. Here, Glenor, while you head over to the paper goods, just drop this tray wrapped in Zombos's opera cape someplace where it won't stick out and be noticed, and hurry back. Chop-chop!" She grabbed hold of the tray, and staggered down the aisle under its weight. Waiting seemed like an eternity, but it was really only a minute by the time she returned without the watchamacallits.

"Great," I said, "good job. Where did you leave them?"

"Oh, the only place an opera cape wouldn't stick out is by the Halloween section, so I put the tray in back of a deep shelf over there. Then made sure no one would see it by covering it with bags and bags of candy corn."

Zombos and I looked at each other, then at Glenor. She was smiling at being so clever. Us, not so much.

"Right then, time to go!"

Zombos agreed. We found a utility closet and returned to the mansion. Glenor went to the kitchen to get more maple pecan squares. Zombos and I returned to the library. I couldn't shake the feeling I had forgotten something. Of course, the review!

The Review...

Following on the heels of John Dies at the End, but not too closely, comes This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It!, a horror-comedy with enough spidery monsters and crazy situations to keep its pages gunning successfully for your laughs and shrieks at every turn.

Once again, John and David are smack in the middle of a calamity that befalls their town called [Undisclosed]: a spider-thingy invasion, which starts when David's bitten on the leg while sleeping. Following the best course of action, and with a town reputation that puts them somewhere between the likability of Attila the Hun and the credibility of a Republican (Note to Editor: please remove cheap swipe at Republicans before posting this and replace with "Philip Roth"), they choose the best course of action to contain the spread of contagion. Which, of course, means the town's a goner. Even the nearby all-night burrito stand isn't safe.

The spider-thingy invasion swings into high gear and the nasties can permutate human bodies like The Thing, and enter oral and more southern-leaning body cavities with annoying ease, like the slugs in Slither (or maybe even Night of the Creeps). Oh, and they're invisible to boot. John and David can see them, but that's because these guys are monster and calamity magnets. So is the town, apparently, especially after John Dies at the End (but he didn't because he's still here in this novel. (Oh, damn --Note to Editor: please remove spoiler, too.)

Watching their every move are the shadow men, who seem to be manipulating the mayhem for their benefit, as well as the nefarious doctor in charge of the government response that starts with containment, then blossoms to retreat and then more containment, just farther away.

The story's point of view shifts between David's snarky narration, his plucky girlfriend Amy's journal, and John's cut and dried observations. Molly the dog also gets her chance, too. Linear isn't a concept high on David Wong's list, so the story bounces between time periods and between countdowns to major events. After the encounter with the mysterious box that can't be opened and the GI Joe toy soldiers guarding it, expect more weirdness than you could find on the shelves of Wally's Videe-Oh! store, where David works when he's not front running the apocalypse or avoiding big spiders with human heads, and the zombies they create as the black, multi-legged furballs hide out in unsuspecting people's mouths after clearing a little room for comfort by eating a chunk of brain matter.

I usually add a quote from the novel to highlight the author's style. Forget it here.  After finding potential quote after quote, I gave up. I couldn't decide on which one to use. Gonzo? Perhaps. Cheap shots taken for humor? Sure. A novel you can't possibly leave unattended until you finish it? Definitely. It's wicked, quantum-flux horror, done with a Tango twirl and a twist of farce, where survivalists don't survive (score one for the zombies) and there really are nasty things hiding under the bed.

And oh yes, there will be Soy Sauce, and a Dorf like escape through a narrow and low-ceilinged tunnel, and the liberal use of duct tape.

(Note from Zombos: I say Zoc, isn't your editor a Republican?)

(Note to Zombos and Zoc from Your Editor: Yes, I am.)

Book Review: Dead Reckoning Little More Dead Needed, I Reckon

Zombos Says: Good

So what if they're Vood00-type  zombies, Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill attempt to turn the Wild West a wee bit wilder in Dead Reckoning, a novel that moseys down the Nancy Drew-ish trail with its modicum of walking undead pitted against three characters in search of a franchise worthy of a young adult series: a cavalry scout raised by Indians; a young girl gunslinger in male disguise riding her horse Nightingale; and a scientifically-inebriated, emancipated woman riding her steam-powered wagon.

A promising, action-filled start leads to a lengthier, predominantly lukewarm middle, which leads up to an action-filled climax. The authors spend many words on chit-chat when more rough-riding and sidewinding is needed, especially when Jett, the black-clad, silver-studded, gunslinging and gambling southern sister who's looking for her brother, ties one up with the snake oil and brimstone mastermind behind the zombie outbreak. The mastermind's lacklustre explanation of how he creates them doesn't move the story along much, and his leaden backstory intrudes into the suspense that's having trouble building up through fits and starts. For a novel with a lot of zombies, two feisty woman, and one even-tempered man stepping carefully between them, you'd expect more sparks to fly. I recommend the authors watch a few Roy Rogers movies for pointers on sizing up their cowpoke action around the sagebrush humor and campfire lulls. I also recommend they add sagebrush humor. Having Honoria pout and shout and bluster about is not the same thing.

During a stop-over in Alsop, Texas, Jett can't get her drink down fast enough at the local saloon before a bunch of zombies attack the town, wielding weapons! The encounter is mostly bloodless, although everyone in the town is killed. Jett's horse manages to rescue her when she's surrounded. White Fox, the scout, and Honoria Gibbons, the adventurous scientist who wears "rational dress," make Jett's acquaintance when Nightingale rides into their campsite, with Jett barely conscious. They go back to Alsop (although Jett rather gallop in the other direction) and find it deserted except for the town drunk, Finley Maxwell. Honoria sets up her portable laboratory in town while Jett and White Fox go investigating. They come across the Fellowship of the Devine Resurrection, led by one suspicious character named Brother Shepard.

The zombies are more meat-cleaver wielders than meat eaters. They're brought to undead life for a nefarious and clever purpose. Not much of a mystery as to who's doing the zombiefying, but the mystery as to why does provide some suspense in-between the zombie attack on the jailhouse and the town drunk's sudden death and resurrection.

Jett's agenda is mainly to find her brother and get out while the gettin' is good. White Fox's agenda is to follow the trail, as is Honoria's, that leads to the answer of why small towns are going empty and the townsfolk gone missing. Clever touches are sparse but promising if this series kicks into second gear: Honoria uses her rich and eccentric father's vast library like Google to research her troubling findings. Her telegraph skills come in handy as she sends her father the queries and he provides the lengthy answers. She also believes in the power of reason and science to help master any situation, and her rather dangerous steampunk-light vehicle, what she calls an auto tachy-pode,  hints at cleverer gadgets to come. There is also Jett's penchant for male clothes and attitudes to provide enough hard-riding gumption while she searches for her brother, who disappeared after the Civil War. Jett's southern leanings and anti-north sentiments can also stand some life-changing growth across a potential series.

Dead Reckoning has all the right ingredients for a tasty sarsaparilla soda, but the carbonation is a tad too flat for my adult taste. I'd reckon you'd have to be a Mennonite-type young adult to find it more than adequate, too. Less backstorying, stronger highs and softer lulls in the action, and a deeper look into what makes Jett, Honoria, and White Fox tick, need be provisioned before Lackey and Edghill saddle up for another adventure.