The Store may be the worst horror novel I’ve ever read. When I try to think of something positive to say about it the two things that come to mind are 1) it was easy to read (more on this shortly) and 2) it didn’t set my hair on fire. That’s about it.
I’ve never read any books by the prolific Bentley Little (24 novels published since 1990) but he’s a two-time Bram Stoker winner, his novels get consistently good ratings on the usual sites (3.86/5 for The Store on Goodreads) and the premise of The Store intrigued me, so I decided to finally check out his work (there’s a little shopping joke in there if you look, ho ho).
But what could have been a sly take on people turning into obedient sheep beholden to a mega-retailer, with a supernatural twist thrown in, is instead a preposterous and laughably melodramatic story.
Suspension of disbelief can be tricky in horror stories and even more so in horror novels where the author must maintain a book-length narrative alongside the usual supernatural hijinks. The essential problem with The Store is that it’s not believable. It feels like something written by an unsophisticated teenager trying to tell a scary story. The characters are stereotypes, often acting in irrational ways in order to further the plot and the writing is not merely plain, it’s simple to the point of being banal. In The Store, a luxuriously-appointed living room would be described thusly:
The living room was luxuriously appointed, with fancy chandeliers and fancy carpeting. The sofa had big soft cushions like the kind you would find in a five star hotel.
Instead of describing how something is creepy, Little will just say it’s creepy. That doesn’t make something creepy (or scary or sinister or whatever). An example is below. (Warning: creepy!)
That was it exactly. There was something artificial here. Clean and wholesome, yes. But not in a good way. In a creepy way, an unnatural way.
The adults and teenagers all talk using the same speech patterns, “playful” insults and slang. The story repeatedly has scenes set in city council meetings. It’s as exciting as it sounds.
As a reward to those who push through to the end, the story jumps the shark about three-quarters of the way in. The stalwart protagonist Bill the technical writer is subjected to treatment that is probably meant to shock or disgust the reader but instead it’s ludicrous, eye-rolling stuff. The story concludes with a gross “twist” ending that is left unresolved and adds nothing. The characters cry a lot. You may cry if you read The Store. Don’t. There are many horror novels far better than this one.
It does many things right and kept me interested and reading through to the end to find out what happened next, and yet it still ended up as somewhat unsatisfying. It’s still a good story and if you like horror and aren’t squeamish, it may be worth checking out.
The rest of this review has major spoilers, so skip if you are spoiler-averse.
On the plus side, The Ruins moves at a brisk pace, the prose is lean and direct and there is an inexorable sense of moving forward, of events heading toward a definite conclusion. The characters are varied without lapsing into stereotypes and behave much in the way that you might expect people in their early 20s would–with adult care and thought, but always with the undercurrent of their not-distant childhood running beneath, sometimes erupting in emotional outbursts and petulant actions. Basically these people aren’t shy about yelling and fighting with each other.
The story is a variation on people-trapped-in-a-hostile/haunted-environment. In this case it is the area surrounding the titular ruins. My first pet peeve is that there really aren’t any ruins at all. There’s a mineshaft at the top of a hill and that’s about it. But “The Ruins” sounds a lot cooler than “Mineshaft” so there you go.
We follow what ends up being six people, two couples, and two other young men, one Greek and the other German. The German, Mathias, convinces everyone to join him to find his brother, who is with a group of archaelogists at the ruins, located about 11 miles away from the Mexican town of Coba. And so the group of twenty-somethings leaves behind lazing about on tropical beaches to venture into the jungle.
Things start going sideways when one of them backs into some seemingly innocuous vines. This causes the Mayans of a nearby village to freak out and, using bows and pistols, they force the group up the hill. It eventually becomes clear that the vines are very bad and the Mayans, having salted the earth, are determined to not allow anyone who contacts them to leave the ruins. Well, the hill with the mineshaft.
Over the next few days things deteriorate rapidly. The Greek breaks his back falling down the mineshaft, the vines worm their way into one of the men, the vines actively plot and move against them. Several times the vines literally laugh at the group, mocking their fate. How would you feel being laughed at by a plant? And then when you say “I’m out of here” there’s some Mayan standing there ready to fill you full of arrows. You’d probably feel a bit bummed out.
The group struggles to maintain hope as they ration their meager supplies and wait for potential rescue but the story strongly and repeatedly makes it clear that they are doomed. And they are. Spoiler: everyone dies.
Now, some people may have a problem with sentient, evil plants that can plot, mimic human voices, manufacture scents and smells as traps and generally carry on in ways that are unlike any plant you are likely to come across. And really, it’s quite silly. But if you buy in–and author Scott Smith offers no explanation for the vines, which actually helps with this–you can focus on how well the story plays out.
Watching the group struggle with the vines, the elements, and each other, is interesting and for the most part believable, but I think Smith tips his hand too early, leeching the story of suspense when it seems obvious everyone will die. And when everyone does, you start looking for the big picture, the commentary on society or whatever and it’s not really there. The takeaway I got is “if you’re going to some ruins in a place you’ve never been before, be more prepared than these nitwits were. Also, if all the locals act spooked and tell you to stay away, you may want to listen to them.”
A few plot contrivances struck me as implausible, undercutting the reality that had been built up. Eric, the would-be teacher and manbaby, essentially flays himself with a dirty knife, yet improbably lingers on after losing what seems to be most of his blood. He also manages to accidentally stab Mathias directly in the heart. Speaking of lucky hits, when Jeff, former Eagle scout and de facto leader, decides to try breaking through the Mayans’ gauntlet, the first arrow shot at him manages to pierce straight through his neck. Apparently Mayans are uncanny archers.
Another nitpick is certain writing affectations Smith adopts and uses repeatedly. I’m usually okay with these but for some reason they starting standing out like blood-sucking vines on a patch of barren rock and became distractions. One was a beat that ended many scenes, variations of “And so they did” or “And that’s what happened.” The second and one that stood out much more, was the excessive use of “of course.” It felt like there was a sentence on every other page that ended with “of course,” such as “Amy wouldn’t actually kiss the Greek, of course” or “The Mayans would still be waiting for them at the bottom of the hill, of course” or “And that’s what happened, of course.” It started bugging me toward the end. On the one hand, it’s a convenient shorthand that gets across tone in a few words. But anything used to excess is going to be too much, of course.
Still, I liked the writing overall. As I said up top, the prose is lean and direct, Smith is economical and efficient but the writing never seems perfunctory or threadbare. He manages to take a very limiting situation and keeps it interesting and varied. The characters are at times petty and annoying, but never to the point of being genuinely unlikeable.
The Ruins, then, gets a provisional thumbs-up from me. Its premise is goofy, the story telegraphs the ending too early, but the journey to get there is still an interesting one.
Horrorstör is one of those horror stories that can be easily described in one sentence. Heck, just a phrase: a haunted Ikea knock-off. I found this book by perusing NPR’s Best Books of 2014 and couldn’t resist. I don’t know about you but I find the bewildering and deliberately maze-like design of Ikea stores scary even with the lights on.
Horrorstör leads the reader through a terrifying night where five employees of an Orsk store find themselves trapped in retail hell. Except this time it’s a little more literal. Riffing on the old ancient burial ground theme (this time a long ago prison), we find our plucky/weird/selfish heroes trying to survive a night of being locked in storage cases with names like Liripip by vengeful ghosts.
The story starts out light and funny, with Hendrix making witty observations on the retail experience. Somewhat predictably the funny stuff largely disappears once the horror starts cranking up. Apart from catalog illustrations of weirdly-named furniture that grace the start of each chapter, there is little humor to be found in the latter half of the book. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but it seems like a lot of authors who write comic horror tend to dispense with the funny once the gore starts flowing, making for an uneven tone.
Hendrix still does a nifty job in describing the horrors taking place within the cavernous confines of the Orsk store, though. You may never look at a sofa with an umlaut in its name the same way again. In fact, the liberal use of authentic-looking catalog pages and other related paraphernalia make me recommend reading this novel on a larger tablet (like the standard iPad), to better appreciate these illustrations. They’re neat and well-made additions.
If you want a short and (mostly) funny horror story, Horrorstör comes recommended.
This collection of short stories by Nathan Ballingrud could also be called Deeply Troubled Men and the Monsters They Hang Out With. Each story chronicles men who are trapped in unhappy relationships, who are spiritually lost or battling booze, drugs and shambling horrors, which are sometimes also their wives. The writing is full and ripe, like a bloated watermelon sitting on a picnic table under the furnace glare of the late August sun, ready to explode in a gout of watery pulp. Ballingrud loves similes (and metaphors) the way a cat loves a mouse. Both are sought after and mauled with great enthusiasm.
Do you like a little humor sprinkled about to lighten the mood of otherwise grim, dark stories? You will find none here. These stories may vary slightly in tone but they are all very, very serious. Whether it’s a boy becoming a vampire or a man running from a werewolf, these tales are relentlessly bleak. Do you want sympathetic characters? That’s also difficult to find. Most of the men are detached, emotionally distant/stunted, often the source of their own troubles, with the horror elements used to highlight how terrible and flawed they are (“Wild Acre”, the aforementioned werewolf story, is a good example of this, as the werewolf amounts to little more than window dressing for a story about a troubled man and his ongoing financial and marital problems, made worse because, well, werewolf).
The closing story and one exclusive to this collection, “The Good Husband” can be read as darkly humorous, given the increasingly ludicrous turns the story takes. Perhaps I wasn’t correctly seeing the earnestness of the prose as very dry sarcasm. It didn’t help that the characters felt somewhat unreal throughout (more understandable with the wife, with her being dead/not quite dead). Still a great premise, though.
There is no denying Ballingrud’s skill at creating evocative imagery (if sometimes going a bit further than needed) but after awhile I began to weary of reading about these very flawed, troubled, yet strangely uninteresting people. Maybe not caring about them makes ME the monster. Twist ending!
Also, if Ballingrud ever teamed up with Laird Barron, they should totally bill themselves as The Brothers Grim.
I picked up this book (well, it was an ebook, so the picking up was virtual) for three reasons:
1. It was on sale. Cheap is always a price I like.
2. I’ve loved these sorts of nutty topics (out of body experiences, telepathy, Bigfoot, ghosts, Bigfoot ghosts with telepathy, etc.) since I was a kid.
3. It seemed like good background material for a novel I’m writing that coincidentally embraces the subject of death and near-death experiences.
Journalist Patricia Pearson draws from a range of studies and personal accounts stretching back decades to dig into the near death experience (NDE) and other related phenomenon. The deaths of her sister and father serve as a framing device for the book and Pearson is up front about how their deaths and oddities around the deaths helped develop her interest in and shape her point of view on the subject.
Despite the title of the book, Pearson paints NDEs as more of a spiritual awakening rather than a religious experience. Indeed, more people have apparently turned away from religion after having an NDE while at the same time becoming more spiritual. Throughout the various studies and research Pearson shows how little science has been able to quantify what happens when someone comes close to dying and recovers or just plain dies. In the main the affected individuals seem to traverse into another realm or reality, out of their bodies, often meeting other people they know who are already dead, and for the most part the experiences are positive, even joyful. As you may suspect, conducting experiments around people who have just escaped death is a bit tricky, as scientists, smart and diligent as they may be, cannot hang around intersections indefinitely waiting for near-fatal traffic accidents to occur. Well, they could, but probably not with funding from a university.
My biggest issue with the book is its relative shapelessness. Pearson writes well and has put in a lot of research on the subject (the bibliography and notes are extensive), the tone remains respectful and she never makes declarative statements one way or the other (“The Buddhists are right, if you screw up in your post-life you come back as a dung beetle!”), but the book has no sense of progression. She documents the subject and then the book ends. Maybe I’m trying too hard to impose a narrative structure on something that doesn’t necessarily need one.
In any case, if you have any interest in the subject matter–and yes, most NDEs center around being surrounded by glowing light, a tremendous sense of love and no fear of death–this is a sober and serious look at it.
I’d probably give this book 3.5 stars but Goodreads (where this review originates) doesn’t allow half stars, so I’m giving it four, since I lean more toward that than three.
This 1987 novel is dated politically (set in 1996 but not foreseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union) and technologically (it predates the Internet so a lot of data in the story is gathered and stored on fancy optical disks) but otherwise feels fairly fresh nearly thirty years later.
The plot is a downer–mysterious aliens arrive to destroy Earth–and the resolution, such as it is, is a bit abrupt because the story continues in the 1993 follow-up, Anvil of Stars. But The Forge of God is more about the journey than the destination, as Bear unfolds what begins as a galactic mystery and ends with humanity reduced to a murmur in the great vastness of space.
The story almost feels like two different tales stitched together. There’s the initial mystery and scientific investigation–a moon of Jupiter disappears and months later strange artificial rock formations appear in Death Valley and other spots around the world. The leading characters are geologists and there is much speculation before an alien appears out of one of the formations with a dire warning that Earth is doomed, destined to be torn apart by a fun bunch described as “planet eaters.” The latter part of the story chronicles the months leading up to what appears to be the end of the world as we know it (and no one feels fine), with a plan by the mysterious but apparently beneficent warning aliens to cobble together the remnants of the world in order to create some aspect of it elsewhere.
These two halves also stand apart with distinct tones. The first half is filled with politics, scientific theorizing, investigation and generally lots of “big picture” stuff, while the second half zooms in on some of the characters and becomes more personal, following them as they grapple with a seemingly sealed fate. Bear does a good job transitioning from the big picture to a more intimate one, capturing the despair–and faint hope–as the last days of the story (and possibly the planet) play out.
If you like a good doomsday scenario supported by credible science, a chilling answer to the Fermi paradox, and have always wanted geologists to be the leads in a novel, The Forge of God comes recommended. My only regret is I didn’t research ahead of time to find out it was part of (an admittedly very short) series, so I know feel obligated to read the sequel, to find out how it all turns out (until the inevitable sequel after that one).
The Deep starts out strong but has an odd ending that perhaps goes a little too far in explaining the proverbial man-behind-the-curtain and the overall story is diminished somewhat as a result.
Conversely, if you hate horror stories that end with “it’s all a spooky mystery that no one will ever be able to explain!” you may actually prefer the almost Bond villain-level of explanation that wraps up the novel. I discuss the ending a bit more in the spoiler section at the end of the review.
The premise is in broad strokes similar to Cutter’s previous novel, The Troop (Cutter is the macho pseudonym of Canadian author Craig Davidson). Both stories feature a small group of people confined to a space where very bad things are happening. In The Troop, it’s a scout troop on a woodsy island that gets visited upon by a man carrying a horrifying and very contagious disease. In The Deep it’s the crew of an underwater facility researching a substance that holds promise in curing “The ‘Gets”, a disease that causes people to essentially forget how to live.
The rest of this review contains spoilers. The biggies are behind spoiler tags at the end.
Where The Troop’s premise is straightforward and further fleshed out through interviews, journals and other bits sprinkled between chapters, The Deep aims for a greater mystery and ratchets tension by revealing more and more disturbing little details, layering on levels of psychological horror until it finally goes all out with blood and body parts everywhere.
The story starts out with a global scale suggested–The ‘Gets is a worldwide phenomenon–but quickly focuses on a handful of scientists on the Trieste, a research station situated eight miles below the ocean surface in the Marianas Trench. It is there that a seemingly miraculous healing substance dubbed ambrosia is found. After the lead scientist, the misanthropic Clayton Nelson, sends out a strange request to have his estranged brother come to the station, the story plunges (ho ho) into the meat of the matter.
The protagonist, Luke Nelson, is a troubled veterinarian, divorced from his wife after their son vanished from a park when he briefly let the boy out of his sight some seven years previous. On top of that, his brother is essentially an unfeeling robot that likes to experiment on animals, his father is a cowed, ineffective guardian, and his mother–deceased as the story begins–was pretty much a monster. He joins a tough but sensible soldier named Alice to descend to the Trieste and find out why his brother summoned him.
Things get increasingly weird after that.
Cutter again uses journals to document large parts of the action that the protagonist would otherwise have no knowledge of. While it’s a blatant cheat, it’s done with enough finesse that it didn’t pull me out of the story. The concept of slipping into “dream pools” is handled well, too. At times the characters realize they have nodded off and moved around, having dreams that feel seamlessly connected to the waking world, producing extreme disorientation when they awaken.
It gets increasingly bizarre and disturbing until Luke decides to get out before it’s too late. It’s at this point that the story abruptly shifts tone as the ending goes into specifics about what is behind the mystery of the ambrosia.
The creatures responsible for the ambrosia go on at length describing their thought processes and rationale for essentially creating a trap to lure people down to the bottom of the ocean and as I mentioned at the start of the review, the dialogue in this section feels like a Bond villain going on and on about his clever and dastardly plot.
On the one hand, kudos to Cutter for actually trying to tie everything up, but at the same time it felt hokey, sort of like Trelane playing with his human toys on the original Star Trek. It also turns out that The ‘Gets is just a coincidence so what is billed as a major plot element ends up seeming like a red herring.[/spoiler]
Despite my issues with the ending, the trip there is still one worth taking. If you like old-fashioned horror that doesn’t shy away from gore, The Deep is recommended.
“Why would you read a book about how not to do something?” he asked quizzically, his eyebrows knitting together like two large black caterpillars intent on copulation.
“I don’t trust myself. I never have!” I sobbed sadly. “If I don’t have someone telling me what not to write, surely I will write it!”
“You sound just like my Uncle Norman the unpublished novelist!” he said ruefully.
“I’m drawn to cliches but try to avoid them like the plague,” I explained earnestly. “I’ve told myself a million times to never use hyperbole when creating characters but I never learn. But this book–How Not to Write a Novel–has been like manna from Heaven when it comes to what not to write.”
“Tell me more!” he exhorted.
I began counting on my fingers in order to visually illustrate my points. It was a technique I learned in college and have used throughout the long, lonely years since then, often counting out the days of relentless rain, when everything is as gray as the embers that once sparked inside me, beaten down into dust by the burden of living in a heartless and unfeeling world. I took a sip of my Pepsi Cola that I purchased in a six pack at WalMart, then continued. “The book shows you how to write unbelievable characters, how to change tense in whimsical, nay, unpredictable ways, how to insult your reader with strident or weird positions you hold that are expressed by the people populating your story, and how to write unconvincingly about things you love to talk about but have little to no knowledge of. It wraps up with examples of the worst query letters and pitches you could possibly compose, anything likely to turn away an editor or agent forever.”
“Wow!” he blurted.
“So I just do the opposite of everything and walla–yes, walla!–I’ve written a surefire bestseller!” I smiled broadly, my grin an irrepressible rictus.
“Wow!” he shouted again, spittle flying from his mouth like a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier. “This book sounds great. How would you rate it?”
“Hmm,” I puzzled. “On a scale of one to ten failed writers living on dirt and gum, I rate it a solid eight failed writers.”
His face suddenly caved in, like a cave where the top part collapses onto the floor. “Eight out of ten? So there is room for improvement?”
“There’s always room for improvement,” I said sagely. “Now I must get back to my epic tale, All the Shades of Grey The Light Cannot See Games.”
It’s probably accurate to say that most people think of UFOs–Unidentified Flying Objects–as being craft controlled by extraterrestrials. This is to say that few people think of UFOs as being quite literally what the acronym stands for, objects in the air that are unidentified. Since the modern UFO era began in the 1940s the subject has, especially in the U.S., been treated as one not worthy of serious study or investigation. Project Blue Book, the Air Force group tasked with checking out UFO reports, was closed down in 1969 with a summary that essentially said “UFOs lol!!”
UFOs (the book) argues the case for returning to the serious study of UFOs, advocating the U.S. government take a leadership role as the world’s leading technological power. With the current congress stuffed full of climate change deniers, it seems a less likely prospect than when the book was published in 2010, but stranger things have happened. Many are documented in this book.
The book’s chapters switch between the author’s advocacy for serious investigation, with ideas on how such investigation could be organized in the U.S., to first person accounts of UFO sightings from credible witnesses ranging from commercial and military pilots to generals and even a state governor. Throughout, none of the witnesses nor Leslie Kean, the author, assert that UFOs must be alien-controlled craft. Instead, she describes herself as a militant agnostic, refusing to commit to what UFOs are because we simply don’t know yet. She doesn’t deny that extraterrestrial craft may be the likeliest explanation.
On the question of the validity of UFOs as a phenomena, she is much more certain. There are hundreds of well-documented sightings (often by multiple credible witnesses) with physical evidence, radar tracking and photographs that stand up under the scrutiny of modern image analysis. In light of all the evidence, Kean argues that the question isn’t if “UFOs are real” but rather, what are they? She repeatedly comes back to a primary reason for investigating and that is the unknown nature of the UFOs, coupled with their physics-defying properties (ignoring gravity, being able to move instantly and silently at great speed and so on) and the tendency for so many to appear near sensitive sites like military bases and nuclear power plants makes them potential threats.
I wonder how many skeptics will read this book and come away buying into Kean’s arguments. Her case is well-researched, detailed and presented without sensation, but as she admits, the taboos surrounding the subject are strong and have become ingrained over the last half century, especially in government circles, where admitting to the reality of UFOs–whatever they may be–is tantamount to acknowledging that with our current technology, there is little to nothing we can do to control or if need be, defend against them.
If you have any interest in the subject, this is a highly recommended read.
This is one of King’s thrillers, with no supernatural elements, and because of that it has a decent ending, a plus right from the start…er, finish.
Mr. Mercedes is a book with few surprises. The good guys have their flaws but they’re all nice people. The bad guy is a psycho with loads of issues but not so much that you feel any real sympathy for him, more pity than anything.
The good guys–recently retired police detective Bill Hodges, a teenage boy who helps the Hodges with various chores, and a woman in her mid-40s with mental issues–are sufficiently clever enough to put together the identity of a mass killer that Hodges couldn’t collar before retiring. The villain, the 30ish Brady Hartsfield, is portrayed as a man brilliant with technology but one who also shifts between thinking of everything and being strangely careless and sloppy. In a way the depiction of the protagonists and antagonist reminds me of Stoker’s Dracula, where the heroes easily outmatched the vampire. Here the retired Bill Hodges and helpers make all the right guesses and even when they slip up they recover in time. Brady not so much.
King gets most of the technical details right, though there is some over-explaining, particularly by one character to another. There is the expected noble sacrifice and the brief final scene is a cute callout to Halloween.
The way I’ve described the book probably makes it sound predictable, even boring, yet King’s writing is smooth enough I found myself willing to forgive the flaws. It also helps that I don’t read a lot of thrillers so I’m likely easier to please in that regard.
Thumbs up, then. This is better than King’s sloppiest work but falls short of his best.
Shirley Jackson has apparently fallen out of favor these days, though many still get exposed to her work in school through the classic short story, “The Lottery.”
A take on the Gothic ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House applies some modern touches by having the characters gather at the house under the pretext of a scientific investigation of the alleged ghostly phenomenon, a nod, perhaps, to Stoker’s use of science to battle Dracula in the self-same novel (I was amused at just how poorly the ol’ vampire managed against the array of instruments and techniques used against him).
Hill House does not surrender so easily and focues its malice on an emotionally vulnerable woman named Eleanor. While the characters are at times a little too busy saying clever and silly things to each other, Jackson still does a nice job of casting the house as a sinister character of its own. This is as much a tale of psychological terror as it is about things that go bump in the night.
Worth reading if you are interested in one of the early modern horror classics.
One warning if you are reading the Penguin Horror edition — Laura Miller has an opening essay that is filled with spoilers. It would probably have been better at the end of the book.
This is the most depressing book I’ve read this year.
Rathgeber, now sitting as an independent in Parliament, is free to write without repercussion from political masters on what exactly he feels is wrong not only with the current Conservative government, but with the fundamental structure of Canadian government in general.
His main contention is that the federal government has become little more than an elected dictatorship for two reasons, the first being the concentration of power around the Prime Minister’s Office (a trend greatly accelerated by Stephen Harper, who prefers absolute control) and the second being the failure of MPs to act as a balance against the government/PM by being little more than cheerleaders for the governing party or powerless members of opposition who simply rail against everything the government does to better position themselves as a “government in waiting.”
He offers some solutions, some of which already exist in BC (recall and citizen initiatives), most of which make MPs more accountable to their constituents and less so to party leadership. One can argue about the details of his suggestions but it’s difficult to deny the reasons calling for reform.
Rathgeber even surprised me by presenting persuasive reasons for reforming the Senate rather than just shoving it into the ocean, my previously preferred solution.
One of the biggest problems we face in Canada or any democracy, is a disengaged electorate. It lets politicians–and governments–get away with too many things. Politics is depressing and this book, despite presenting solutions after laying out a disheartening litany of problems with our system, is also depressing. But it’s short and whether you’re a fiscal conservative (like Rathgeber) or a tree-hugging socialist (I’m somewhere between the two extremes), you should read it. And tell your MP to read it.
