A Head Full of Ghosts could be described glibly as “The Exorcist meets Discovery Channel Reality TV show” but that sells it short.
The story of a 14 year old girl who may be possessed by a demon or may just be suffering from mental illness, is told from the perspective of her younger sister, eight at the time and 23 in the present day. There are three threads that Meredith “Merry” Barrett presents to the reader. One is a straight re-telling of the events that happened to her family in 2001, another is as analysis of the Discovery show “The Possession” presented in a blog under a pseudonym, and the third is Merry sharing her story with a writer putting together a book on the events.
Tremblay does a terrific job in capturing the essence of the eight year old Merry, a smart girl still prone to the flights of fancy that seem perfectly natural in the mind of a child. The slow unraveling of her parents and sister is both sad and horrifying to witness.
The relationship between the sisters forms the core of the story and it is by turns touching, funny and freaky. Marjorie, the older sister, initially appears whimsical, but that whimsy turns macabre as she comes apart. When the Discovery crew arrives to record the family’s activities, hoping (and to an extent trying to manufacture) some really weird stuff, the story eases up and lets the reader breathe easy for a bit. Then it turns even darker as the father brings in a priest (and yes, another, younger priest–Trembay openly pays homage to almost every possession-themed movie out there) and everything turns toward an inevitable exorcism.
The thing I enjoyed most about A Head Full of Ghosts is the way it constantly challenges the reader to determine what is real, what is fake, what’s being done for show and what’s being done because people no longer have control. It’s not an especially scary book–though there are scares to be had–but it is disturbing. Conversely, the deconstruction of familiar horror tropes is to the point and often quite funny. Somehow Tremblay makes the two work together.
I was turned onto this collection by one of the contributors, a fellow forum poster and author of a published novel (so one more than me!) This is a free collection and can be found at all major ebook sites. The idea behind it is simple–offer a bunch of very short (3-4 page) stories from a raft of authors to allow the reader to quickly sample their styles. The hope is the reader will enjoy at least some of what they read and seek out more work from the same authors.
It’s a good idea and, I think, a successful one. The stories cover a range of genres so there’s bound to be something to interest any reader (though romance and literary only have a single entry each) and each story is short enough that there is minimal investment. Even if a story outright stinks (and none in this collection do) it’s only a few minutes of reading before you move on.
At the same time it’s difficult to pull out highlights because a lot of the stories trade on twist endings, are more sketches than stories, or skip nuance because there’s only four freaking pages to say everything. And the horror section in particular is a bit disappointing in being so zombie-heavy. At least it’s not wall-to-wall vampires.
But there is a lot of entertaining stuff here and I will indeed be seeking out work by some of the authors.
The collection is free, it’s a quick read and it’s a handy introduction to a lot of indie authors worthy of your time. Recommended.
If you want a collection of stories where more than a few people have “that Innsmouth look,” then Lovecraft’s Monsters will leave you happy as a shoggoth.
Most of the stories are as weird or horrifying as you’d expect, as the various authors draw on Lovecraft’s pantheon on Old Ones, Great Ones, Elder Gods and more, but a few are lighter in tone, most notably Neil Gaiman’s opener, a tale of a werewolf in Innsmouth, with a healthy (?) mix of arcane rituals, fish people and time-to-change-into-a-hairy-eating-machine thrown in.
One of my favorites is “The Same Deep Waters as You” which tells of an animal behavior specialist conscripted by the U.S. government to go to an island off the coast of Washington state in order to communicate with people (?) who have been held there since 1928, people with “that Innsmouth look.” It takes one of the established and best-known parts of Lovecraft’s lore–the fishy doings in and around Innsmouth–and tackles it as a scientific problem (that also worries the military). I felt the end, which takes a turn more into straight-up Lovecraft weirdness, was a bit of a letdown but the story as a whole remains strong.
Laird Barron’s “Bulldozer” features the usual rumpled pile of machismo protagonist with the heart of a poet. When he’s not ladling on metaphors, he’s swinging his fists or firing his pistol. Barron also continues to be a big believer in eschewing the whole “you can’t tell the story from first person POV if the character ends up dead/rendered unable to communicate to the reader because of various non-Euclidean horrors.” The story actually picks up steam as it progresses, so the excesses end up not feeling as excessive.
There’s a bunch of other stories here and most of them are worth a read. There’s even a few poems if you’ve ever wanted to see someone try to rhyme something with “Cthulhu.” (I’m kidding, no one does that, though I wish they had.) Overall there’s 21 stories and poems, enough to sate the appetite of any Lovecraft fan looking for stories drawn from the mythos he created, but pruned of the purple prose and occasional racism.
On a scale of five star-tipped tentacles, Lovecraft’s monsters rates four out of five tentacles.
As a series of website updates that present the daily journal of a soldier surviving a zombie apocalypse, Day by Day Armageddon works fairly well. Collected into a novel it feels a little creaky but fans of zombie apocalypse fiction (you may have noticed a few* books of this type have been released over the last few years) will likely enjoy this particular take on what happens when the dead don’t stay dead.
True to its name, the story is told through journal entries, covering the first five months of a zombie outbreak that devastates the world, forcing survivors to navigate hordes of shambling, mindless people. Wait, that’s the mall during Black Friday (ho ho). Supplementing the journal entries are maps, letters and other bits typical of an epistolary novel.
The story doesn’t follow a traditional narrative, given its unique structure, though Bourne does ramp up the action/tension from time to time by placing his protagonist and others in especially perilous situations. And while the story does build toward a showdown of sorts, it ends abruptly, with an author’s note promising there will be more in the form of sequels. Not surprisingly, there are sequels. A reader looking for a strictly self-contained story may be disappointed by the ending.
The prose is workmanlike, as befits journal entries, but at times I wished the protagonist was a struggling writer rather than a soldier. Sure, he wouldn’t know which way to hold an assault rifle (a handy zombie survival skill) but he would not how to wax poetic about the existential dread of facing each morning not knowing if you’d make it through to the end of the day. Plus there’d be comic relief when he tried using an assault rifle.
The ebook edition has a fair number of spelling errors in it, but I’m still not sure if they are actual editorial slips or if Bourne was trying to portray his protagonist as being as fallible as most when it comes to the difference between “to” and “too.” The repeated use of “lightening” over “lightning” grated, though.
The women in the story seem to mainly serve as props, with Bourne referring to them as “the females” and of course they don’t know how to handle guns (not to worry, the protagonist teaches them). At least there is no requisite romance, though the possibility is hinted at (“I am a man, after all,” as the protagonist puts it).
Overall, this was a quick and effortless read. Given the day-by-day approach, Bourne does a good job in keeping things moving along, but the whole presentation feels a bit slight. This isn’t a knock, exactly, because I think Bourne did about what you would expect given the parameters he set out for himself.
One of the nice things about ebooks is how they allow you to easily analyze aspects of a book that would have been much more tedious or time-consuming to analyze back in the days of books made through the sacrifice of trees.
For instance, in just a few moments I was able to find out Slaughterhouse Five repeats the phrase “so it goes” 106 times. Amazon lists the paperback edition as being 224 pages long.
The repetition of the phrase is a device used for varying effects and at first I accepted it as such a device and nothing more. Toward the end of the book, though, it finally became grating. Maybe that was the point all along.
So it goes.
Slaughterhouse Five is irreverent and droll and makes important statements about the purpose and meaning of life, contrasting its absurd characters and banal suburban life against the horror of World War II and specifically the firebombing of Dresden, something Vonnegut experienced directly as a POW. Vonnegut’s time as a journalist undoubtedly influenced his writing style, which is as concise and straightforward as his subject matter is sardonic. The contrast between grim reality and the absurd is constant and lends the novel a surrealistic feel, as if one is not really reading a narrative but instead catching glimpses of a life or lives that are dull and depressing, filled with few moments of genuine joy.
For as light as the writing style is, Slaughterhouse Five is a glum thing. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, but I admire Vonnegut’s technique and the ease with which he draws out scenes with simple phrases–the buttons of a man’s spine, the tearing of a coat too small, the grit and grime in window sills. In many ways it’s a fascinating book but not one I’d particularly want to revisit.
Lisey’s Story is, at its heart, about a woman, Lisey Landon, coming to terms with the death of her husband, two years dead as the novel begins.
It is also about family and the sacrifices made to keep them together–or to merely survive them.
Along the way are ruminations and reflection on the life of a famous author, being the wife of a famous author, the attendant unhinged and occasionally violent fans, flashbacks to exceedingly ugly childhoods, and a bond that reaches from the past and through an extraordinary place out of time that helps bring closure on a life and love over too soon.
There’s also a creepy monster in some spooky woods and the deranged fans (two, one via flashback, the other a more immediate concern) keep things from getting too maudlin. This is still a King story, after all.
A lot of interesting ideas and themes are at play here and for the most part King juggles them as ably as you would expect. At one point you may even believe the deceased author Scott Landon is not entirely dead–and you may be right, in a way–but in the end Lisey’s story is one in which doors to the past are quietly closed.
The weakest part of the story may be in the overall structure. It’s a sprawling and at times rambling work, sometimes feeling like a lazy ride down a river in summer that suddenly and briefly changes to a plunge into unexpected rapids before easing back into that slow drift again. This is to say the pace is often languid but at times uneven. Some may mistakenly think the deranged fan is the central plot when he actually just serves as another piece to the puzzle in getting Lisey to where she can put the past behind her.
King plays with several of his familiar elements here, and while I roll with them without blinking, others may find the unique phrases the characters use, like “bad-gunky” and “smucking” a bit twee.
Despite its girth, Lisey’s Story has an intimate feel. There is no big bad evil here, no world-destroying plagues or zombie apocalypses. There are supernatural elements, but the most horrifying parts are contained in the depiction of Scott Landon’s childhood at the hands of a deranged and violent father.
Lisey’s Story ultimately succeeds because Lisey’s journey feels authentic and earned. Strip away the creepy “long boy” and the demented fans, the land of the Boo’ya Moon where the dead gather, the flashbacks to childhood terrors, and you are left with a story that simply tells of how one person deals with the grief of a lost love. And that story is told well.
And you may look twice the next time you see someone hefting a spade.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of All Out is that Kevin and Alex Newman wrote their own chapters independent of each other, allowing the reader to directly compare the father’s and son’s take on events and more importantly, how the two saw each other, which forms the heart of the book.
And they often saw each other very differently, creating a tension that existed between the two men until they were both adults.
In a journey that starts with the senior Newman co-hosting CBC’s Miidday, moves onto his brief (and disastrous) stint as co-host of Good Morning America, and ends with him back in Canada as part of CTV’s W5, Kevin Newman provides insights and observations about the TV news business, ranging from the long hours that necessitated so much time away from his family, the sometimes farcical demands of producers and handlers (on Good Morning America he was asked to dye his eyelashes to make them darker and presumably more masculine) and ultimately how for decades his work defined so much of his existence–at the expense of family and life outside work.
Alex’s journey begins as a young boy, sensitive and creative, bullied in school and seemingly failing at living up to the masculine ideals of his father, showing little interest in sports or other “guy” pursuits.
It comes to a head when at age 17 Alex realizes he is gay and comes out to his family. Or rather, he tries to come out but his father actually cuts him off at the pass, so to speak, by asking his son (who had called a family meeting), “Is this about your sexuality?” From that awkward beginning, the two start a process of testing and challenging each to accept each other as they are, not as they wish they were.
For Kevin he finally realizes that work is just work and family matters more. He lets go of his own hangups regarding what he sees as the masculine ideal and confronts his discomfort with homosexuality. In the process he achieves a breakthrough in his relationship with his son and with his own father as well.
Alex’s struggle with being gay stems not so much from being afraid of how others would see him–virtually everyone he knows was accepting–but in how it defined him in a way that he didn’t like. Being gay meant he could never be that ideal son that Kevin wanted and tried so much to shape through the years. At his darkest moments he contemplates suicide, as many gay youth do, but a network of friends and acquaintances keeps him from going too far into the abyss.
The writing by both men is fine if not extraordinary, though Alex ably captures the voice and mentality of his younger self. Kevin’s behind-the-scenes look at TV news is in some ways quietly horrifying and in other ways warmly affirming–it turns out Peter Jennings really was a warm, wonderful person. But it is the intertwined story of the two men that speaks strongest here, and it is difficult to not be moved by the self-realizations that allowed Kevin to fully embrace his son for who he is–and to finally let go of the mental baggage he had carried for decades, allowing him to finally, truly be content.
And not have to worry about dying his eyelashes ever again.
(Note: Slade House features references to characters and settings from Mitchell’s other stories, but is completely standalone even if you’ve never read anything else of Mitchell’s.)
Answering the question, “Should you ever try entering a strange black iron gate embedded in the imposingly tall brick wall of a long, twisting alley to see what’s on the other side?” (the answer is no, you probably shouldn’t), Slade House begins in the 70s and moves to the present in nine year jumps, recounting the visits of various people invited/lured to the titular house, one that turns out to be both real and unreal.
Starting with a young boy addled on his mother’s Valium and ending with someone a wee bit more together, Mitchell lays out what is essentially a collection of short stories recounting the people drawn to the house and their typically horrifying experiences there, each story further revealing the mystery of what Slade House is. The stories are told from the first person POV and Mitchell grandly cheats on this, so much so that you’re likely to just accept it or, if you’re feeling cranky, perhaps put the book down.
Trading more on the bizarre and funny and less on outright horror, I found the main strength of the book comes in the variety of the assorted protagonists, ranging from hapless kids to hapless would-be paranormal investigators. Mitchell’s glee at tormenting them is almost palpable.
To say much more would spoil the story. While the revelations are likely to be worked out by those steeped in the genre, I still enjoyed the ride. Or visit, if you will.
Andrew Michael Hurley completely disregards several of Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of good writing in his debut novel The Loney, notably in regard to the weather, regional dialects and detailed descriptions of characters. His disregard is justified, however, because the weather–bleak, rain-soaked days–is as much a character in the story as the people that suffer through the constant downpours, whipping winds and blanketing fog while on a pilgrimage to northwest England to renew their faith and seek a miracle that will restore the voice of the mute boy “Hanny” Smith.
Told from the perspective of the boy’s older brother, The Loney winds back to the early spring of 1973 and details how a mini-bus of parishioners head out to The Loney, taken there by Father Bernard, a new priest who has recently replaced the much-loved and equally feared, Father Wilfred, whose unexpected death remains clouded in suspicion. Their task is to follow the rituals of past visits, as directed by the near-fanatical mother of the two boys, culminating in a ceremony at a shrine intended to demonstrate their faith and to seek a cure for Hanny’s silent ailment.
All is not as it seems, with some of the locals acting in both strange and intimidating ways. The sense of menace grows as the days move closer to the final ceremony, with disturbing discoveries and events that may have a supernatural–but decidedly unholy nature–taking place.
Hurley uncoils the tension steadily, building it as much by what is merely suggested but never seen. The Loney itself is a frightening entity, the sea lashing the shore and strong tides ready to sweep away the unsuspecting at a moment’s notice. Adding to this are the unpredictable actions of Hanny, derisively referred to as “the retard” by several sinister men who are paradoxically helpful and threatening.
The atmosphere Hurley creates feels so authentic you may almost want to open an umbrella while reading. Likewise, Hurley does a terrific job in slowly revealing mysteries, often leaving out just enough information for the reader to fill in the gaps with whatever hideous things they can imagine. My only disappointment comes with the somewhat bland ending, which doesn’t match the emotional impact of the events leading up to it.
The strengths of The Loney are more than enough to compensate for the weakness of the ending, though. The journey of these characters is fascinating to witness, as quiet niceties and the routine of ritual gives way to darker matters, testing the faith of all–and breaking it forever for some.
I decided to pick this up because it recently got re-released as an ebook.
This is a collection of letters received by Anne and Whitley Strieber after the publication of the latter’s book Communion, and some its subsequent follow-ups. (The book came out originally in 1997.)
I’ve always enjoyed Strieber’s Communion books because a) he’s a novelist, so he knows how to tell a story b) the stories he recounts are by turns freaky and fascinating and c) they satisfy a part of me that is intrigued by the possibility that the reality we see and the reality that might be could be vastly different things. There is some scientific evidence to suggest the possibility of parallel dimensions, for example. Imagine if we had definitive proof–it would shatter our current conception of the universe. The mere thought that multiple Adam Sandlers could exist is almost too much for the human mind to comprehend.
But I digress.
The Communion Letters is loosely themed into chapters focusing on specific types of encounters with beings that may be aliens or have some connection to the dead or could be super-evolved humans come back from the future to keep us from screwing up the planet. Each chapter has a short introduction from Whitley (Anne’s task was to read through the staggering 200,000 letters they received) but the bulk of the book are the letters themselves.
They range from odd incidents that may or may not be explainable through conventional means, to stuff that would fit right in with the wackiest theories floated on Ancient Aliens. The quality of the writing is just as varied, with some letters being somewhat disorganized as the authors backtrack on their thoughts or interject in the middle of a recollection with something else, while others have that “just cracked open a thesaurus” feel to them. More than a few are not just well-written, the stories they tell are riveting, filled with details of small town life interrupted by strange, sometimes wondrous and often terrifying events.
In the end no definitive conclusion is drawn by Strieber, other than a wish that science would study the people reporting these experiences, to help demonstrate that their stories are not just the products of over-active imaginations or even mental illness (Strieber says he read over many writings from people suffering mental illnesses and found a clear distinction between their work and the stories recounted in the letters they received).
At times creepy and at times so out there that I had to fight the urge to roll my eyes, The Communion Letters is an interesting showcase for ordinary people to sound off on their experiences with the “visitors.” If the subject matter intrigues you, this is worth a read, even if the selection of letters could have been a bit stronger overall.
The Songs of Distant Earth uses “terabyte” as if it’s a near-impossibly huge amount of storage space, but other than being a bit dated tech-wise (it was published in 1986 and the genesis of the story began as a piece originally written in 1958), this short, brisk novel details events surrounding the improbable chance of two separate colony ships sent hundreds of years apart encountering each other light years away from Earth.
To be more precise, the first colony ship has already landed on the water world of Thalassa, its crew having settled there hundreds of years earlier, populating the three islands that form the entirety of land on the planet. One of the last ships to leave the doomed Earth centuries later stops by on its way to its own destination, the hostile but tameable world of Sagan Two. Choosing Thalassa in order to use its water to reconstitute a massive ice shield on the bow of their colony ship, the crew of the Magellan is surprised to find the planet inhabited (after losing contact due to a broken antenna on Thalassa, it was assumed its colony ship had never completed its journey), thus beginning a clash of cultures, ideas and philosophy, pitting the laidback Thalassans and their seeming Utopia against the crew of the Magellan, who still face a massive amount of work to make their chosen planet livable (an edict passed in the dying days of Earth forbids colony ships from colonizing worlds with any notable life, sort of a variant on Star Trek’s Prime Directive).
There is a lot of debate about what makes life worth living, with a fairly heavy hand directed against the alleged scourge of religion–the Thalassans are non-religious and live in a democratic society where procrastination and non-monogamous relationships are the norm. Clarke has characters from both the planet and the Magellan intermingle–on projects in and out of bed–to help illustrate the risk of “contamination” between the two groups. Complicating things further, the paradise-like nature of Thalassa leads a small number of Magellan’s crew to attempt mutiny.
The tension Clarke creates as these two peoples work and play together for the months it takes to rebuild the Magellan’s ice shield is low and never really threatens to boil over, but the discussions the characters have are filled with insights, dry humor and observations about humanity that feel authentic, if somewhat studied.
The Songs of Distant Earth sometimes feels a bit thin compared to denser works of science fiction, but Clarke does not so much skimp on detail as focus precisely on what he feels is most important to the story. In the end, the novel offers hope that humanity will mature and flourish among the stars, albeit not without some bumps along the way.
I first read this book back in 1984 when the Cold War was still a legitimate threat–just before Gorbachev started the policy of Glasnost and Reagan was still joking about bombing the Russians. It left an indelible impression of how even a limited nuclear attack could have devastating, world-changing consequences that could stretch on for decades. Reading it now there is a certain sense of distance with the old U.S./USSR rivalry long dead, Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock notwithstanding, but the reality is most of these nuclear missiles still exist, with more than enough firepower to ruin your day and then some.
The book is written as a first person account of the effects of a limited nuclear war five years after the bombs fell. The authors, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, place themselves into this fictional scenario set in the year 1993, starting a journey across America that takes them to both coasts before heading back to their adopted hometown of Dallas, where they work as reporters.
The story opens in October 1988 with Strieber’s recollection of being on a bus in downtown New York when the bombs fall. New York is one of three cities targeted in the first volley (the other volleys do not follow due to U.S. retaliation disabling the Soviets’ ability to counter-attack), the other two being Washington and San Antonio. He survives because the bombs miss New York proper, landing over Brooklyn and off the coast. He still gets dosed with enough radiation that he is later classified under the triage system as not treatable, as the radiation is expected to kill him within years and those with better survivability are given priority.
Bombs exploded in the upper atmosphere create an EMP effect that blankets the country, disabling nearly all electronics, ranging from computers to vehicle ignitions and most forms of communication. The final blow comes in the form of volleys aimed at missile silos in the Dakotas and other states. Winds sweep the radiation from these blasts across the bread basket of the U.S., devastating crops and leading to widespread famine.
Against this grim backdrop–the book suggest 7 million die on the day the bombs fall and up to 60 million die from the effect in the following five years–the authors find that some places have prospered, others have become uninhabitable, and assistance has been offered from other nations, albeit with a price.
The bulk of the story captures Strieber’s and Kunetka’s journey from state to state–mostly by rail, as air travel is still rare five years after the attack–conducting interviews with government officials and ordinary folks, supplementing these accounts with official documentation of the effects of the war. The level of detail in these mock documents is impressive and help paint a picture of a country that has been split apart, where deflation has reduced most items to cents, gold is the favored currency and the federal government, now in L.A., is a stunted shadow of its former self.
The narrative works because it presents its fiction so plainly, even when specific scenarios seem absurd when taken out of context. At one point the authors are escaping authorities in California–which was spared attack but has emerged as a near police-state, locking down its borders–dressed as priests. They make a daring escape from a prison bus to continue their journey through the devastated heartland before heading to New York and then back to Texas. It sounds ridiculous and yet the details that are drawn of California, at once prosperous, yet cold, allow these occasional dramatic embellishments to at least seem plausible.
The bulk of the story is in the interviews, where survivors talk about living through famine and flu, abandoning cities and entire regions killed by radiation, some drifting, others settling, with a general sense that the people are banding together and helping each other where they can. International aid comes from the British and Japanese primarily, but both seem willing to only do so much, with a strong suggestion that the other nations of the world are not exactly eager to see the U.S. re-assert itself as a global power again.
One especially chilling interview is with a British naval officer who works as part of a crew of sub poppers, so-called because their job is to find nuclear-armed submarines that are still at sea–and thus presenting a threat–and disabling or destroying them. He recounts taking out subs with enough firepower on board to cause devastation many times greater than what happened on Warday itself, a grim reminder of how terrible and terribly effective nuclear weapons are.
Although the specific scenario of Warday is no longer plausible–the Soviets launch a first strike due to the U.S. being on the verge of putting together a seemingly indestructible space-based defense system (how Reagan would have approved!)–the story remains as powerful now as it was over 30 years ago, simply because nothing at all has changed regarding the almost incomprehensible effects of nuclear bombs, and as mentioned, there are still an awful lot of them sitting silent in their silos, one launch code away from unleashing their destruction.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
