horror

Wastelands 2 – More Stories of the Apocalypse by John Joseph Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A second volume in a themed horror collection might seem like a good candidate for more experimental work that may not be entirely successful and such is the case with Wastelands 2, although I enjoyed the majority of the stories.

Post-apocalypse tales are one of the enduring favorites in horror fiction. Some of the classic boogeymen like nuclear war have faded as threats to all humanity while others like global warming have risen–Wastelands 2 delivers on both of these, along with biological terrors, Lovecraftian beasts from the sea, really mean flowers and, of course, Kevin Costner. Sort of.

While the stories are bound by the theme of apocalypse, style and tone is all over the place. There is little in the way of humor (as one might expect), though Keffy R. M. Kehrli’s “Advertising at the End of the World” with its androids-as-literal-walking-advertisements still searching for buyers after a super-virus decimates humanity, is quietly absurd. Most are dark or darker and the majority betray little hope regarding humankind’s ability to come back from the brink of extinction. You’ll also put down the book thinking most people are jerks.

This is not exactly feel-good material is what I’m saying.

A few standouts for me include Jack McDevitt’s “Ellie,” which presents a nice twist on a story about caretakers keeping things running at a massive particle collider in the hope of staving off further disaster. The aforementioned “Advertising at the End of the World” is a relatively original take on post-apocalypse, with the sensible protagonist Marie trying to deal with an army of annoying androids as humanely as possible. George R. R. Martin’s hippie-fest “…For a Single Yesterday” reminded me a bit of the novel Station Eleven, with entertainers providing a focal point in surviving communities, with a bit of time-travelly drugs tossed in.

“Monstro” is a deliciously weird story about a virus inducing strange and dangerous groupthink among the infected quarantined in Haiti. Author Junot Díaz steeps the story in local culture while slowly unwinding an ever-widening apocalypse that may or may not be contained on the island state.

Jake Kerr’s “Biological Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince” is an epistemological accounting of how an author survives, writes about and in a way is consumed by a meteor impact that devastates North America in the first half of the 21st century. I feel this format–excerpts from Wikipedia, interviews, news reports and so on–is trickier to pull off than it looks but Kerr handles it expertly, lending an authentic feel to these glimpses of Prince’s life and the apocalyptic event that sits at its core.

On the negative side, I found David Brin’s “The Postman” (a novella version of the novel) was fine but oddly undercuts the whole enterprise on the very last page with the protagonist turning weirdly flippant and derisive. I have no idea if the book (or the Costner movie) are the same, but I found it jarring.

But while “The Postman” was still a pleasant enough read overall, I only managed a few pages of Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Traditional.” The story features an unlikable and uninteresting protagonist and is written in the second person: “You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere.” I’ve always been the kind of person who finds the second person point of view a very tough sell. I was not sold. I didn’t even rent.

There are more than enough stories in Wastelands 2, however, to recommend it to anyone looking for some post-apocalyptic fun.

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The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Victor LaValle takes one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most clumsily racist stories, “The Horror at Red Hook” and expands it into a novella that both builds on the original while dealing head-on with Lovecraft’s ill-informed and offensive take on race. The author does this by dividing the story into two parts, one from the perspective of police detective Malone, as in the original, and the other from the viewpoint of the titular Black Tom, also known as Charles “Tommy” Tester, a 20 year old living with his father in Harlem of 1924.

Tommy is both hero and villain, an agent of despair and a victim of senseless violence and racism. He and Malone cross paths when both encounter the enigmatic Robert Suydam, a man trying to unleash Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones on the world so that the oppressors may be wiped away while the oppressed are justly rewarded for awakening these elder gods.

The world LaValle depicts is one of easy cruelty and racial division, where hope is tamped down and then crushed, and songs play not to soothe souls but to help speed them along to a certain hell. He does this while effortlessly weaving in Lovecraft’s original characters and story and it is there that The Ballad of Black Tom is perhaps at its weakest, as the original material was rather thin to begin with.

Still, LaValle elevates the original far beyond what Lovecraft had achieved, creating a tragic tale that trades melodrama for something more human, even as the world is threatened by cosmic horrors.

If you enjoy Lovecraft’s work you’ll almost certainly enjoy this. LaValle’s prose is concise, sometimes wry and always on point. His expansion of the original simply works in every way you would expect. If you enjoy Lovecraft but have always been troubled by the racism weaved throughout so many of his stories, The Ballad of Black Tom comes even more highly recommended. LaValle has managed the difficult trick of both paying respect to and being scornful of a very flawed author.

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Day Four by Sarah Lotz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Note: some minor spoilers ahead.

While not a direct sequel to Lotz’s previous novel The Three, Day Four does take place in the same timeline, one where the mysterious crash of four airliners on the same day and the decidedly weird doings of the three (or was it four?) child survivors leads to talk of the Apocalypse being on its way and the election of a deeply religious President in the U.S., one who oversees an extremely conservative federal government that seems to be doomsday preppers writ large. And official.

Day Four references the plane crashes, survivors and spookier stuff while sidestepping talk of the political landscape. The main story is largely self-contained, though, so reading The Three is not a prerequisite.

One might glibly describe Day Four as The Love Boat from Hell–and you would actually not be far off. As the story begins, the first three days of a cruise on The Beautiful Dreamer, of the fictitious Foveros Cruise Line, encounters nothing out of the ordinary after leaving Miami. On the fourth day it runs into mechanical problems. Then virus problems, rapist/murder problems, why-isn’t-anyone-coming-to-help problems and finally, possible ghost and maybe worse-than-that problems.

Lotz does an excellent job of ramping up the tension as conditions on the ship deteriorate, switching between a large cast of characters with the same ease she demonstrated in The Three. The crew of the ship is split into cabals and cliques, divided along lines of rank as well as ethnicity, each group typically speaking in their native tongue to better exclude others from the conversation. Even with the cruise running optimally it’s clear a lot of the people on board are never going to get along. And there are enough skeletons to fill a walk-in closet.

The passengers are a quirky mix of gossip bloggers, psychics, tourists and suicides-in-waiting. As things go sideways (literally, as the days without rescue go on) clashes among the passengers and crew increase. The power goes out. Toilets stop working. Ghosts start working.

To say more would be to enter into major spoiler territory but suffice to say the ending seems very much to set up another book, though whether it will follow the characters of Day Four or not is unclear (though I lean toward no). What is clear is that the people that inhabit this alternate present-day timeline are likely in for a bumpy few years.

If you approach Day Four on its own, the references to The Three may feel a bit oblique and the ending may be less satisfying but I still feel it works well on its own. As a companion to The Three, Lotz has crafted a nightmare cruise that neatly sets up even worse things to come. Recommended.

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Blackout by Tim Curran
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Note: Minor spoilers in the review.

Blackout uses the same broad theme as Stephen King’s novella “The Mist,” replacing the titular fog with an all-encompassing darkness than envelops a small town, all the better to unleash alien horrors on its citizenry. While the story moves swiftly, it never quite clicked for me. It’s a fast and easy read but I felt indifferent to the fates of the various characters.

The writing is for the most part solid, but unremarkable. Passages like the following, where the main character state the obvious, are not uncommon:

And being a science teacher, I knew that if the sun did not rise day after day after day, there would be no photosynthesis. The plants and trees would no longer process carbon dioxide and release breathable oxygen.

One of my pet peeves–characters doing dumb things to advance the plot–is also in play here, though to his credit, Curran at least has the main character own up to his behavior:

I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it. I touched the cable.

(The cables are bad, as you may have guessed.)

If you feel the need for a bleak, hopeless tale–that’s not a spoiler, as the first line of the story admits as much–you could do worse than Blackout, but I found it curiously joyless.

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The Three by Sarah Lotz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The symmetry of the three stars I’m giving The Three is unintentional. If Goodreads supported half stars it would be 3.5. I quite enjoyed this tale of potential apocalypse but a few issues keep me from giving it a slightly higher rating. That shouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it if they find the premise interesting and enjoy the epistolary format.

The Three chronicles how three children survive three separate plane crashes, all on the same day, leading to speculation ranging from “it’s just a coincidence” to aliens to how the children are the four horsemen of the apocalypse and are ushering in the end times. It is the last theory that takes hold most firmly, particularly in the U.S. and especially among Christian evangelicals and their right wing political allies.

The book uses the epistolary format, framing it largely as an account written by an American journalist (From Crash to Conspiracy) who includes news reports, interviews, chat logs, flight recording transcripts and more to piece together the aftermath of the crashes, the fate of the child survivors and the rapidly deteriorating political landscape as people get swept up in Rapture fever.

Apart from a few lapses where author Sarah Lotz has Americans using British slang, the various reports, interviews and chats are handled quite well, with characters emerging naturally through their own words. The narrative builds slowly as each chapter adds more pieces to the puzzle, though some may be frustrated by the ambiguous ending. I discovered afterward that Lotz has a book out that is apparently the follow-up to The Three, which may partly explain why things aren’t neatly wrapped-up by the end, though to give Lotz credit, the ambiguity feels more like a deliberate stylistic choice–and one that I feel works.

Having said that, I miss the art of telling a story in a single book. Sometimes I just want a good tale, not thousands of pages of world building spread across multiple volumes. Oh well, The Three still works well as a standalone novel, letting the reader decide on their own terrible-things-will-almost certainly-be happening ending.

While I found the characterizations compelling and convincing, the rapidly-shifting geopolitical environment never struck me as particularly credible. The idea that the U.S. could so quickly change into what amounts to a fundamentalist theocracy simply because of the improbability of three plane crashes on the same day with a single child surviving each doesn’t feel plausible. Perhaps even more ludicrous is the idea that China, Japan and the Koreas would form an alliance.
These events are important to underpinning the overall story and in the end never struck me as even being that necessary.

Still, the accounts of those around the survivors are vivid, funny and often harrowing. This book may forever convince anyone feeling a little down to stay far away from spooky Japanese forests.

Recommended. Unless you’re looking for something to read while passing through an airport.

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The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The alternate title for this collection of short stories could be Old, Dead or Dying.

That said, Bazaar of Bad Dreams is not quite as grim as you’d expect for a bunch of tales that largely center around death in its various forms, both real and unreal. As King gets older it’s clear his mind is turning more and more to the twin topics of old age and death and he presents visions of each that are at times hopeful and, unsurprisingly at others, horrifying.

I had read a number of these stories before as many appeared previously in magazines or other formats (like the formerly Kindle-exclusive “Ur”, which I ironically read on a Kobo ereader) but King explains that many have been revised or polished further. Writers love tinkering with their stories.

There are no duds here, though if pressed I’d say the two poems are the weakest points of the collection. King writes poetry the way I do, less as poetry and more as differently-formatted prose. There’s no real meter or rhythm to be found, no clever or trenchant word choices, just old-fashioned stories told through a framework of structured prose. But even the poems have their merits.

Highlights for me include “Mile 81”, featuring yet another of King’s sinister car-like things. It’s a good ol’ goofy horror romp. “Ur” marries modern tech (the ereader, which may already be going the way of the CD if the big publishers have their way) to the classic “try to stop terrible future event” trope and does so in fine style.

“Bad Little Kid” has the feel of a dark Twilight Zone episode–one rated M for language. The titular bad little kid has an enthusiastically vulgar vocabulary.

In the intro to “Blockade Billy” King implores the reader to have a look, even though it’s a story about baseball, noting that it’s still a King story. King’s absolute love of the game gives the tale a richly authentic feel as he carefully builds on the “all is not what it seems” of the title character.

A lot of these stories don’t score high on originality but King’s typically deft hand with characterization propels them past such trivial concerns. He even has a few good endings (not a giant spider in sight).

There is a pleasing variety of styles here, ranging from the light “Drunken Fireworks” to the melancholy “Summer Thunder” and with a number of stories drawing specific inspiration from other authors. For fans of King, this collection is a no-brainer. For someone looking for stories that tackle the subjects of aging, loss and death, both with and without supernatural elements, Bazaar of Bad Dreams is still a very good choice.

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Swan Song by Robert McCammon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

NOTE: This review contains spoilers. If you are spoiler-averse, skip this review. If you want a short take, here it is: there are better post-apocalypse books out there.

I bought the paperback of Swan Song when it first came out in 1987 after reading and enjoying McCammon’s science fiction/horror romp Stinger. For some reason I never got around to reading Swan Song, but nearly three decades later I finally got the ebook and jumped in. Unlike 1987 I did so with more trepidation, as I’d recently read McCammon’s short story collection Blue World, which I found rather uneven.

Swan Song is like a cartoon version of a post-apocalypse world. Or maybe it’s more a fantasy dreamed up by a high school kid extended to epic length. Either way, the book has most of the right ingredients but doesn’t know how to combine them effectively.

Set in the present day (at the time the mid-80s), Swan Song begins with political tensions ramping up and then someone–it’s purposely obfuscated who–starts launching nuclear attacks, and before you can say drop, roll and cover, the entire world has been blasted by nukes and the survivors are faced with years of nuclear winter.

As with most epic tales, the story chronicles different groups of survivors who ultimately converge and confront each other, to determine if good or evil will triumph. The characters range from pro wrestlers to ex-military, to religious fanatics and ex-military haunted by the ghosts of war. So far so good, yes?

Yes, more or less. The first part of the story chronicles the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks, with survivors scrabbling through destroyed cities, collapsed shelters and hellish landscapes filled with destruction and littered with corpses. This is all in service of laying the groundwork for the rest of the story, which jumps ahead seven years and picks up on all the characters’ lives as they slowly begin to converge for the final battle.

But before that seven year jump happens, the reader is tipped off to the sledgehammer subtlety to come. As the missiles fly at the novel’s beginning, the president is on a plane flying high above the nukes. As he tries to activate launch codes from a briefcase, the fiery apocalypse below spits up a bus filled with corpses that disables the plane and causes it to crash. This is Emmerich-level disaster here, presented straight-faced and without irony. The president later shows up as a crazy hermit who wants to destroy the world.

The premise of Swan Song is broadly similar to The Stand, perhaps the best-known post-apocalypse novel, and while there are similarities–a devastated world, supernatural elements, the meeting of good and evil to determine the future of the world–King focuses on the struggle to rebuild civilization while McCammon depicts a world where people turn savage and fight relentlessly and without remorse. Swan Song is filled with long, vividly-detailed battle scenes. There are a lot of really nasty people here–usually also insane because that’s what nukes do to you, I guess–and it’s all relentlessly grim.

I’m not saying this is a bad approach. In fact, it could have been compelling, but the problem is McCammon’s writing is so clunky. I keep trying to think of a better way to describe it, but that’s the word I keep coming back to. A lot of the prose here is fine, if unremarkable. McCammon keeps things moving, even if the story feels too long, but so much of the execution comes off as, well, clunky.

Here’s an example featuring the ex-military man, Colonel James Macklin, as he heads back into his Airstream trailer, which serves as the command post for the budding army he’s assembling:

He turned back toward the trailer. Sheila Fontana was standing in the doorway, and suddenly Macklin realized that all this excitement had given him an erection. It was a good erection, too. It promised to stay around awhile. He walked up the carved staircase with its banister of demon faces, entered the trailer and shut the door.

This is just bad. No one should ever use the phrase “it was a good erection” outside a clinical test report or soft porn. Mercifully, McCammon declines to depict the actual sex acts. The banister of demon faces is made by a crazy person, by the way. Did I mention there are a lot of crazy people in Swan Song?

Oh, and the military force that Macklin is assembling is called the Army of Excellence. Yes. Maybe Army of Total Awesomeness was already taken.

The titular character of Swan, who has the ability to rekindle life in plants and trees, rejects the advances of a potential paramour:

All she could think to say was, “Don’t bother me again!” Instantly she felt a pang of pain that sliced her open from head to toe.

That is one serious pang of pain. Fortunately, she magically stitches back together so the story can continue.

One last example, which is something that regularly pulled me out of the story. Analogies are dangerous things. I try to avoid them because they are almost always terrible and best used if played for laughs.

For a few seconds bullets had been whizzing past as thick as flies at a garbage men’s convention.

This is terrible writing. It doesn’t even make sense as an analogy. In a way I can’t really blame McCammon. An editor should have cut this. Given the length of the book, maybe the editor didn’t cut anything.

Another big issue with the story is the depiction of the big bad guy, given various names and identities throughout, such as Friend. Yes, when asked his name in one of the final scenes, he says, “You can call me Friend” and that is literally how he is referred to for the rest of the book by the author. Friend. Friend is not very friendly, and has a few spooky tricks up his sleeve. He can change his appearance, moulding his face to look like others, or sometimes he just gets all silly and puts on a face full of mouths if the mood strikes him. He also changes the colour of his eyes a lot, for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s a nervous tic. He sends out fly-like things from his mouth that act as drones, allowing him to spy on others. He can make his hands catch on fire.

With this bag of tricks he should be fairly intimidating, but his character comes off as flat and without menace, even as he goes about doing Bad Guy things. Why? Because McCammon, perhaps in trying to be coy and not come right out and say he’s THE DEVIL, instead creates a character who acts like a temperamental teen, who wants to bring about the end of humanity, but never offers a compelling reason for this (other than his juvenile cries of “It’s my party!”) and at the end of the story he just kind of goes away. Maybe there was going to be a sequel? Maybe something did get cut? He’s a one-dimensional villain who doesn’t really do anything. It’s actually kind of baffling. Maybe McCammon was saying the real bad guys are us. His depiction of most humans post-apocalypse is not exactly flattering, after all.

I wanted to like Swan Song, but the writing and many of the characterizations left me underwhelmed. I’d rate this one as a major disappointment.

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The Illustrated Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read most of Lovecraft’s fiction back when I was a teen, initially drawn to his work not by his reputation or fame but by the lurid Michael Whelan cover art found on the 1981 paperback editions published by Del Rey. The art is fantastically creepy, even if it doesn’t particularly relate to Lovecraft’s stories. You can see the two pieces (chopped up to span seven paperbacks) at Whelan’s site here and here.

I picked up this particular collection because it assembles all of Lovecraft’s stories in chronological order, allowing the reader to experience both the growing skill of Lovecraft as a writer and the expansion and iteration of his favorite themes, settings and tentacles. The included illustrations are merely serviceable but given the price of the volume, that’s a non-issue.

I read the collection over the course of many months, usually taking in a story or two between novels. Not to get all up in the puns, but this is probably the sanest way to read his work. Lovecraft wrote some frightful horror but most of it is delivered in the form of dense, baroque prose that feels as antiquarian as the tombs and ruins his narrators stumble upon. His characters are also strangely mute, with little in the way of spoken dialogue–but this turns out to be a good thing, because as elaborate as Lovecraft’s phrasing could get, he had an undeniable style and facility with language that was completely absent when he presented characters talking to each other. No actual person would ever speak the way a Lovecraft character does. It’s like watching an early rehearsal of a high school play in 1915. A bad high school play.

But if you tackle his body of work with some restraint there are some great stories in here, and any horror buff would be remiss in not sampling at least the better-known works, ranging from the mythos-establishing “The Call of Cthulhu” to the short novel “At the Mountains of Madness,” which eschews most of Lovecraft’s excessive flourishes and in turn stands as one of his most chilling stories, as an expedition explores and uncovers the horrors found in ancient cyclopean ruins deep in the Antarctic.

Lovecraft is at his best when he paints surreal landscapes, often literal dream worlds that his protagonists wander through, sometimes emerging mad, sometimes not emerging at all. Conversely, he is at his worst when his racism and classism comes through, with villains typically described as “swarthy,” “thick-lipped” or otherwise not white and more specifically, not English. You could argue that he lived in a less-enlightened time but that’s really no excuse.

And don’t ask about the cat*.

Still, his influence and unique voice make him one of the essential horror authors and this collection allows one to experience his growth, if not as a person, then as a storyteller.

* the cat in his 1924 story “The Rats in the Walls” is named Nigger Man, after a cat Lovecraft himself owned

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Hell House by Richard Matheson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although Hell House may take its inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, mainly in the broad premise of a group of people investigating a haunted house, it departs from the relatively mild chills of Jackson’s tale and goes straight for the throat–and every other body part. The ghosts in Hell House are nasty things that mean to injure and even kill those daring to solve the home’s decades-old mysteries.

Matheson, perhaps best-known for his contributions to the original Twilight Zone TV series (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” among others) has written a ghost story that leaves the reader wondering who is right–Florence Tanner, a medium brought to the house with three others to help uncover and perhaps banish whatever malefic force dwells within–or Lionel Barrett, a physicist who theorizes that ghostly doings are nothing more than residual energy that can be neutralized by a “reversor,” a large contraption covered with dials, buttons, switches and filled with vacuum tubes. You know, like a typical computer from 1970 (when the story takes place).

Tanner and Barret are joined by Barrett’s wife, Edith, and another medium, Ben Fischer, who as a teenager had been part of a disastrous attempt to clean the house in 1940, an attempt that left everyone but Fischer dead.

Promised loads of money by the house’s current owner if they can wrap up their investigation of life after death in a week, the foursome quickly discovers that the house is primed for a party in which everyone is invited…to die! Exploiting personal weaknesses of the four, the house’s spirits move quickly and violently to divide and conquer.

Matheson does a terrific job balancing tensions both between the four and between the sides of spiritualism and science. Also to his credit, there are no eyeball-rolling moments where characters do stupid things in order to advance the plot. There is a battle here between the living and the not-so-living and Matheson lets it play out in as believable a manner as you are likely to get in a story about a haunted house.

For a novel published in 1971, Hell House is surprisingly timeless. Apart from the above-mentioned “reversor” it could be updated to the present day without any substantial change, a testament to Matheson’s straightforward, character-driven approach. If you want a ghost story that is more than people wandering around the dark and hearing a few odd noises (ie. every limp ghost-hunting show ever), Hell House’s bricked-over windows, profane chapel and steam(ed to death) room will serve you well.

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The Gate at Lake Drive by Shaun Meeks
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the benefits of this kooky ebook thing is how it’s made it easier than ever for new authors to get their work out before the public. What was once a terrifying trip on roads filled with insane drivers, followed by navigating the madding crowds at the mall before arriving at your favorite bookstore outlet to look for and purchase a new book–hopefully they had it in stock if you didn’t call ahead–is now just a couple of clicks on a website. You can do the entire thing with one hand, even, like so many other fun activities.

The ease of getting books out there and the much more variable pricing–many new authors opt to discount their books well below what typical bestsellers go for as enticement–means the reader has a greater selection of choices than ever before.

All of this can be summed up as: sometimes I see a book by an author I’m unfamiliar with and the price is low enough that I am fine with taking the risk that the book will be a stinker.

The good news is that the eminently affordable The Gate at Lake Drive is not a stinker. The less-than-good-news is that author Shaun Meeks would have benefited from a sharper editor and another pass to strengthen recurring problems with the writing, primarily the use of unnecessary modifiers that serve to sap the strength from the prose. Told in the first person by monster hunter Dillon, the writing is often weakened by unneeded verbiage. I’m not saying adverbs are a prime evil as Stephen King would have you think, nor do I believe that every story needs to be written with a Hemingway-level obsession with being lean to the point of minimalist, but The Gate at Lake Drive is filled with equivocation, describing things as slightly this or somewhat that, giving the prose a mushy feel. Sometimes it’s better to just be direct and not worry that your writing will come off as spartan.

The Gate at Lake Drive is set to be the first of a series of books featuring monster hunter Dillon, who brands himself as a monster detective. His rationale is presented thusly: “And calling myself a monster detective beats the hell out of monster exterminator or buster or whatever else you want to call it. A detective seems slightly more serious in my opinion.” But he then adds “I called my site Monster Dick, knowing that eventually people will run a search on it and then BOOM, there I am in front of you.” The contradiction here–wanting to appear “serious” then using the terrible pun of “monster dick” to lure in potential customers (do people seeking large male members online often have monster problems?) feels less like a character quirk and more something the author thought was funny and simply determined to make work.

Now, with this pun being so prominent, I expected the story to be presented in a light, funny manner. And it is, sort of. The tone is light, with Dillon making regular sarcastic asides, but the humor never feels fully committed to. And that may be my biggest issue with the book. On the one hand, Dillon is a veritable dervish with his daggers and magical demon-fighting equipment, slicing and dicing and dispatching monsters with ease, yet he is also a paunchy virgin who somehow attracts a burlesque performer and instantly they fall for each other because who knows why? All of this is great material for an absurd, over-the-top story, but it never really takes off and the main reason is the way the character of Dillon tells the story. He is a cipher (there’s a twist) but also kind of bland. Meeks doesn’t exploit the the conflict between his bad ass monster-fighting and his allegedly awkward way around women. Instead, there’s an instant romance, sex (mercifully not described) and none of it connects because there’s no work done to connect it. It just happens.

A stronger editor would have helped, too. As someone who regularly bumbles through his own rewrites and misses things that are glaringly obvious, I can appreciate the fresh eyes of a skilled editor to see things an author doesn’t. There are numerous typos and other errors, problems with continuity–Dillon dons gloves at the beginning of one scene then mysteriously doesn’t have them on later in the same scene–that should have been caught and corrected.

The Gate at Lake Drive has the ingredients to be a fun romp but the different pieces never fit together as well as they should. The romance is the very definition of tacked-on. It almost feels like an entire subplot is missing. It’s obvious Meeks enjoys the character of Dillon, though, and with a stronger editor, I’m certain his next entry in the series will be an improvement.

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Legion by William Peter Blatty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1983, twelve years after The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty wrote Legion, a sequel of sorts that switches focus away from Regan MacNeil to the rumpled, philosophical and schmaltz-loving police detective William Kinderman as he investigates a series of gruesome murders in Georgetown. The novel presents the possibility that the supposedly deceased serial killer known as The Gemini Killer (modeled after the real-life Zodiac killer) has somehow started murdering again. As Kinderman investigates he begins to see signs that tie the new killings to the events surrounding the exorcism of Regan more than a decade earlier.

Kinderman is a character Blatty obviously loves writing about and it shows throughout Legion. The detective goes from long ruminations on the nature of evil to complaining about a live carp his mother-in-law is keeping in his bathtub (she likes her fish fresh). As the body count rises and Kinderman heads into the psych ward of a hospital looking for leads, things turn increasingly dark before coming to a head when it seems no one is truly safe from the killer or killers. Blatty has characters fighting to determine what is real and what isn’t as the demonic influence strengthens. Although I never found the novel especially scary, it is unnerving and the suspense toward the end is well-executed (pardon the pun). The prose often has a lyrical, dream-like quality to it, most obviously when Kinderman or others muse about life, the universe and other suitably cosmic topics.

Legion manages to retain many of the same strengths The Exorcist had while standing apart as something more than just a sequel. If you’ve read The Exorcist and enjoyed the character of Kinderman, Legion is easy to recommend.

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Dreamcatcher by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Going in, I knew a few things about this novel:

– a lot of it took place in or around snowy woods
– they made a big budget movie of it
– something something shit weasels
– it is regarded as perhaps not Stephen King’s finest hour

Having now read the book I can confirm all four of the above are accurate. That said, lesser King is never truly awful and the ending of Dreamcatcher is still a lot better than It or a half dozen of his other novels.

If you’ve never read the book, imagine Alien taking place on Earth but with way more farting. We’re talking apocalyptic levels of farting here, all in the name (and really ripe stench) of otherworldly being proliferation.

Four high school buddies, along with one of King’s favorite archetypes, the magical mentally challenged man, form a kind of psychic bond and then find themselves in the middle of what turns out to be a clumsy alien invasion. They puzzle and struggle and flee and fight as the military moves in to seal off an area of Maine known as the Jefferson Tract. Said military is led by a man named Kurtz. Here King eats his cake and has it, too, directly drawing comparisons to Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, playing the “Is he crazy or just acting crazy?” card before making it clear that this Kurtz is pretty much like the other one.

This was the first book King wrote after being hit and nearly killed by a van in 1999 and he transposes the physical anguish of his injuries and subsequent recovery onto one of the main characters here. As an application of writing what you know, the pain and suffering is understandably authentic. The characters are vivid and colorful, as one expects in a King novel, but the story suffers from horror elements that are more cartoonish than chilling (the aforementioned shit weasels, alien thingies that explode from people’s butts after a gestation period, preceded by bouts of extreme flatulence) and science fiction aspects that teeter on the line between deliberately hokey and plausible. It’s an odd combination that is carried along primarily by King’s strengths with character.

I would probably say this one is a safe pass for people not set on being King completists. It’s not outright bad but is brought down by the uneven tone and sillier elements. If you want to read King, there are a lot of other books of his to recommend over Dreamcatcher.

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