horror

The Fireman by Joe Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joe Hill prefaces The Fireman with a list of people who inspired him and cheerfully admits to stealing the title from Ray Bradbury and “all the rest” from his father. It’s true in a couple of ways–the story of a global pandemic that causes people to spontaneously combust has homages aplenty to King’s own end-of-the-world novel The Stand, as well as references and call-outs to The Dark Tower series. And it’s also true in that, like King, Hill tells a ripping good yarn, with vividly-drawn heroes and appropriately evil bad guys.

The story focuses on a band of infected that learn to control the “dragonscale” spores inside their bodies through group singing, something that not only prevents them from literally going up in flames but also leaves them feeling pleasantly buzzed in a communal sort of way. This turns out to have its downsides as the story plays out.

Harper Willowes, having escaped from her revealed-to-be-monstrous husband, joins the other infected in a summer camp where they lay low, wary of being found by “incinerator” gangs devoted to killing the infected. She meets the titular Fireman, a British ex-pat named John Rookwood who can not only keep the dragonscale under control but can use the fire it creates willfully.

Made pregnant by her estranged husband just days before she flees from him, Harper draws closer to the Fireman while growing increasingly concerned about the pod people-like behavior of the other infected in the camp.

As you might guess, things go sideways through intentions both good and evil, with plenty of fireworks (literal and otherwise) and mayhem resulting. Hill also demonstrates that he is not above using a well-placed fire pun. All the better to burn the reader’s expectations (ho ho).

The Fireman is a messy, bloody romp. The bad guys will have you hissing while the heroes are flawed but believable and sympathetic. The many call-outs to The Stand and The Dark Tower are fun to spot. Hill tosses curve balls from time to time to keep things interesting and doesn’t cheat much with coincidences, letting the characters largely push the story forward (there is one instance near the end where the sudden arrival of a character felt all too convenient, but Hill at least deals with it quickly and moves on).

This is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys post-apocalypse stories or just quality horror written in vintage King style. Hill may steal from his father but he has his own voice and with each consistently excellent novel, proves himself a valuable addition to modern horror writers.

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Little Heaven by Nick Cutter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Little Heaven pays homage to both early Stephen King and low-budget gorefest movies of the 70s and early 80s. Rather than turn the “camera” away from a gruesome attack, pseudonymous author Nick Cutter zooms in to capture every detail. At times it seems like every other person, creature, and object in the story is “pissing blood.”

Shifting between 1966 and 1980 (the present day for the novel as written), Little Heaven tells the story of a self-styled Jim Jones who follows a voice from San Francisco into the wilderness of New Mexico to construct a religious compound where he and his followers live simple, God-fearing lives.

Except for all the monsters lurking in the woods, most of which seem to be amalgamations of various woodland creatures squashed together into multilegged, multi-headed horrors, all the better to bite, tear and create incidents of pissing blood.

In the 1966 portion, which comprises the bulk of the novel, a woman whose nephew is part of the commune hires three mercenaries/assassins to check out Little Heaven and see if the boy is okay. The three are broadly-drawn, one a black Englishman who all but “pip pip Cheerio’s” his way through the story, a feisty young woman with a sharp tongue and Roland DesChain from The Dark Tower. Whoops, I mean Micah Shugrue. A few of his rougher edges get sanded down in the 1980 part but the language and mannerisms of the character straddle a fine line between homage and rip-off. I didn’t mind that much since Roland is a terrific character to emulate, and his cadence and speech is perfect for a stoic and eminently practical sort of person.

This is old-fashioned horror through and through. The bad guys are very bad, the horrors are nigh-insanity inducing and have no small appetite for removing limbs from anyone they can catch up to, but while there are hints and suggestions, there’s ultimately no real explanation for why they exist and where they are from. They just are. I again didn’t mind this because it’s better than Cutter’s approach to the end of his novel The Deep, which overexplained to the point of undercutting much of the preceding story.

I was least fond of the 1980 section and here’s why: if you remove it in its entirety, the 1966 part still tells a complete story. The 1980 events implausibly set up a “noble sacrifice” but it’s so superfluous to the overall story that it has no emotional resonance.

The whole thing also felt longer than necessary, the equivalent of one of those low-budget gorefests running three hours. Cutting the 1980 segment would make the story tighter and, I think, better.

This is my least-favorite of the three Cutter novels I’ve read (the others being The Troop and aforementioned The Deep) but it’s still a decent read. For someone craving old school horror it may do the trick.

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Monster Maelstrom: A Flash Fiction Halloween Anthology by George Donnelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second Flash Flood anthology, focusing on Halloween/horror-themed stories.

I found this collection of stories a little more uneven than the first collection (Bite-Sized Stories: A Multi-Genre Flash Fiction Anthology (Flash Flood Book 1) but the price (free) and commitment (minimal, given the whole idea is to present short-short stories that can be read in a few minutes, I can still give this a solid thumbs-up for the standout stories.

It’s not easy to pull off a fully self-contained story in so few words so when it comes together it almost feels like a little alchemy is involved.

On the negative side, the collection starts off weak, with a flat zombie story set against the backdrop of a strip bar. There are also enough stories from the first person POV where that person ends up being dead by the end that I’m wondering if this is some new trend in fiction. If so, it should be stopped immediately because it is lazy, cheating storytelling, the equivalent of those hokey twist endings on The Twilight Zone that we laugh about now.

On a more positive note, there are some nicely rendered stories here, including:

– “Teddy Bear Defenders” (Tom Germann). A cute story with a (horror-tinged) Toy Story vibe.
– “What I did at Halloween” (Edward M. Grant). A little girl thwarts a would-be robber with Bob. Bob is Bad. But this story is good. The ending seemed a little too on-point but doesn’t diminish the amusing interplay between the characters prior to it.
– “Monsters Like Us” (Jeanette Raleigh). An atmospheric take that initially feels like it might be yet another vampire story but turns into something more interesting–and chilling.
– “In the Eye of the Beholder” (Bill Hiatt). This *is* a vampire story, in a manner of speaking, and though the twist might be obvious to some, it is nicely executed (no pun intended–mostly).

There are other stories worth checking out but really, just grab the collection and have a look. The stories that don’t work breeze by so quickly it’s akin to dabbing something sour on your tongue before moving onto something sweet.

Overall, I can recommended this anthology for both horror fans and anyone looking for new writers to discover.

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A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

Recommended.

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Lovecraft’s Monsters by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

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Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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.

And it’s still better than The Rising.

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Lisey’s Story by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

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Slade House by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(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.

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Carrie by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some spoilers ahead, in as much as you can spoil a novel published in 1974.

King’s first published novel is in a way the ultimate teenage tale of revenge. Dowdy, introverted Carrie White, a 16 year old girl raised by an extreme Christian fundamentalist mother, is taunted and bullied through high school and does her best to ignore it all while bearing the incessant, borderline insane ravings of her mother. Things seem to be turning around when good boy Tommy Ross invites her to the prom but if you’ve seen the movie, you know how that turns out.

Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to take revenge on those who have humiliated and teased her, eventually spreading her wrath to the entire small town of Chamberlain. Basically, everyone dies.

King writes the story as an epistolary, inserting interviews, book excerpts, commission reports and newspaper stories between the more conventional narrative scenes. Two things I found interesting were how King tips his hand early–less than halfway through you learn that a lot of people are going to die, often which specific people. The story, bracketed by the interviews and reports, becomes less about what will happen and more about what did happen. There is still a slow-burning dread that builds as prom night approaches, a kind of Doom That Came To Chamberlain, if you will.

King also approaches telekinesis as something worthy of scientific study, showing experts speculating on its likely genetic origin and whether more “taunt me and watch me destroy the world” Carries might be out there. Perhaps this was meant as a way of making Carrie seem more sympathetic, a victim of both a brutal upbringing, and a terrible, albeit, natural ability she could not control (or could control all too well, perhaps).

Unlike many of King’s later novels, Carrie is fairly brief and some of the characters feel a bit thinly drawn as a result. There’s just enough meat on the bones here but only just. One of King’s affectations is in full force, though. This is where he’ll break a paragraph abruptly

(and put something in parentheses to emphasize a specific mood or line of thought)

and then continue on with the narrative only to

(switch back to the parenthetical interjection, often making liberal use of exclamation points! italics and word repetition word repetition o the words o the interjections over and over)

While it can certainly emphasize a particular mood or thought pattern, it looks a bit hamfisted now.

Still, any fan of King’s work would be remiss to not read Carrie. King’s skills are still being refined here and not every character or turn feels true (Carrie’s mother especially seems way over the top, something Piper Laurie took to heart in the 1976 film adaptation), but even at this early stage he shows an effortless ability to get a narrative rolling and keep it moving.

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