I think Stephen King may write faster than I can read. From a Buick 8 is another of his novels that I did not read upon release and have gone back to years later, in the hope that I can eventually catch up to his output.
I’m undecided on the outcome of that.
From a Buick 8 is old school King as far as that goes–it’s classic horror, with a scary unknown thing at the heart of the story, and ordinary people pushed into extraordinary circumstances–but it’s well-crafted old school King.
As with Christine, a classic car is at the center of the shenanigans, this time a Buick Roadmaster abandoned at a gas station by a driver who disappears shortly after arriving. Unlike Christine, this particular vehicle is not haunted, it’s possibly from another dimension. The story focuses on Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police, who impound the car and keep it in a shed out back of their barracks. Weird things happen in that shed, ranging from strangely diving temperatures to funky purple light shows and the appearance of things that live, briefly.
King starts the story in 1979 and flips back and forth between then and the present (2002, when the book was published), juggling the time periods effortlessly, shifting between first and third person as he does so. Hanging the story’s heart on the bereaved son of one of the officers killed in the line of duty provides the emotional core and King makes it pay out…then things get even more funky and weird when you think everything is about wrapped up.
While From a Buick 8 is not a deep or profound story, it’s a smooth, effortless ride (sorry) that expertly plays off the innate creepiness of so many toothy-grilled cars from the 1950s. Recommended for King fans and for anyone who enjoys an uncomplicated horror story.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings is one of the better horror collections I’ve read in the past few years. The stories are, true to the title, all relatively recent in terms of previous publication, and while editor Paula Guran confesses to fudging a bit sometimes on ghosts being the subject matter, the exceptions are still consistently good stories. There’s even some local flavor in “The Castle”, set in a hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
The stories cover a broad range of styles and tone, from traditional tales of hauntings, like the 9/11-themed opener “There’s a Hole in the City” to the Twilight Zone-style twists of “Faces in Walls”, in which revenge is maybe not so sweet after all. Laird Barron is featured here and given that the protagonist of his “The Lagerstätte” is female, the tale of ghostly beasts is not dripping with testosterone and overripe metaphors as usual. Here the metaphors are only just slightly past ripe, and the story is tight and involving.
The worst of the bunch aren’t worth singling out because I found none of the stories to be poor or even mediocre, something I have found pretty rare when reading a set of stories from a variety of authors. Paula Guran has chosen skillfully here and struck a terrific overall balance. If you’re set on a particular type of ghost story you may find the sheer variety less satisfying but if you’re ready to meet insane djinns, soldiers that hanker for closure or perhaps something more sinister long after being felled in battle, ghosts that are in turn friendly, vicious, mystifying and sometimes maybe not ghosts but something far worst, then Ghosts: Recent Hauntings will leave you pleasingly spooked.
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.
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.
A surprisingly meaty (and slimy/bloody/gooey) collection of stories using Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Horror anthologies are notoriously uneven in my experience so I was pleasantly surprised at how solid this anthology is. While there is no singular standout story here there are also no outright clunkers that I was tempted to flip past. The weakest efforts are probably those that attempt to mimic Lovecraft’s actual writing style, like Brian Lumley’s “The Fairground Horror”. People probably shouldn’t do this.
The highlights include Laird Barron’s “The Men from Porlock”. While I found his style a bit ponderous at times in his own collection, his concluding story set post-World War I is wonderfully weird, gruesome and filled with men who curse like lumberjacks because they are, in fact, lumberjacks.
Charles Stross imagines weaponizing Cthulhu in “A Colder war” and the results are appropriately horrifying, while Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoths in Bloom” takes a quieter, science-focused approach to Lovecraft’s horrors that makes them almost cute. Almost.
Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Crawling Sky” features a sharpshooting preacher out to battle evil Old Testament-style. The speech and manner of the preacher reminded me (favorably) of The Dark Tower’s Roland.
The remaining stories cover time periods ranging from the early 20th century to the present day and shift in tone from not-quite-outright comedy to relentlessly grim, with a few detours into “What the hell is happening?” territory. There’s really something for everyone here, especially if you like faces filled with writhing tentacles or hair that is actually wriggling sentient worms.
Son of Rosemary is the sequel to Rosemary’s Baby, and is set in 1999, 33 years after the original (and was written in 1997).
The book retains Levin’s glib, breezy dialogue, coupled with terse description that keeps the action rolling along. In the story Rosemary falls into a coma in 1971 and only wakes up after the last member of the Bramford coven is killed in a car accident. During her decades-long nap her son has grown up and claims to have resisted his darker tendencies (being the son of Satan and all), has started a religious charitable organization and orchestrated its crowning event, a global lighting of candles to usher in the year 2000 and a new era of peace, love and all that jazz.
Rosemary has her doubts and Andy’s occasionally nutty behavior underscores them. Without going into spoilers, the story gets increasingly dark, the ends with a twist at the end that will delight or infuriate, depending on how you felt about the story up to that point.
I was left nonplussed.
Tonally this is, despite the potential for worldwide domination by big letter Evil, not to mention Armageddon, a lighter read than Rosemary’s Baby. There’s never much connection to the shallow characters, and those who are more fleshed out waver back and forth like pendulums in their thoughts and actions, making it hard to empathize. The twist ending almost feels like Levin saying, “You wanted a sequel? Here ya go, suckers!” Or maybe it’s too subtly clever for me to properly appreciate.
In the end the book is carried on the strength of Levin’s skill as a writer. If you enjoyed Rosemary’s Baby and think you might be interested in a goofy “What if?” scenario on events following that book, give Son of Rosemary a shot. There are otherwise better horror novels out there.
This short and surprisingly breezy novel answers the question of what you get when you combine group therapy sessions with body horror and unseen monsters trying to bust into our world, Lovecraft-style. In the hands of a lesser writer this might turn into a muddled mess but Daryl Gregory keeps a sharp focus, adroitly mixing humor and horror as a group of five individuals meet to discuss their common monster issues. These issues end up requiring more than just primal scream therapy to deal with. But there is assuredly screaming as well.
My only real complaint with the story is its thinness. It’s short to the point of robbing some of the emotional heft of the characters because events unfold so rapidly and speed toward the end. I wouldn’t say this feels like a first draft because the prose is nicely polished, but it does seem like there’s not quite enough meat on the bone. I was left satisfied but only just.
On the other hand, it’s kind of nice to read something where the author doesn’t spend dozens (or hundreds) of pages world-building and going deep into the backgrounds of every character, no matter how insignificant.
Recommended, particularly for those looking for a fresh take on the usual monsters-all-around-us plot.
There is no doubt that Laird Barron is a fabulous author name.
This collection of long short stories is populated by Barron’s tough guy protagonists who plow through Lovecraftian landscapes with their fists out, often telling their stories in the first person as they battle demons both personal and perhaps real. But no matter how tough these guys are, they all demonstrate an equally dense vocabulary and gift for imagery and metaphor that would leave the everyman with his jaw hanging, a “What did you just say?” look etched on his face.
And that is, perhaps, the biggest flaw of this collection. At times it almost feels like Barron is simply taking the same macho-but-well-spoken bruiser and working him through different variations of a surreal (and typically present day) world. Most of the stories take place in the Pacific Northwest, around Olympia and Seattle but the cities are left largely as sketches, more background to the mood, which is forefront. The mood is invariably dark, the only humor bitter and cynical, as these men get caught up in cults, the gaps between worlds best left unexplored and more horrific things.
Barron luxuriously works the description of things both ordinary and uncanny, taking his time to draw the reader in, letting the strangeness of his settings settle around like a big cozy blanket. A blanket with teeth and soaked in something that smells not quite alive, not quite dead.
The major issue I had with the stories is I found the protagonists, for all their bravado and quips, strangely unaffecting. I didn’t care what happened to them. Worse, Barron cheats with the first person perspective, using its intimacy to full effect while ending several tales with no real way for the protagonist to have been left in a state to actually tell them. It’s not quite “and they turned out to already be dead!” but it’s in the same territory.
I can’t deny the care Barron gives to each piece, though. The stories are like lovingly handcrafted carvings, the maker working carefully to get every facet just right. The highlight is probably the title piece, in which a brutish (but literate) small-time collector/muscleman gets a look at a photograph that literally changes him. Barron does a lovely job of drawing out the horror, revealing it though obscure photographs and nightmares. “Parallax” uses a gimmick (see the title) but is an effective and unsettling take on one half of a couple disappearing and the other being fingered for possible murder. “Hallucigenia” has a similar feel to “The Imago Sequence” but does just as well in creating its surreal environments.
Although I am left with mixed feelings on the collection as a whole, I can say without reservation that if you like any of this collection you will invariably like all of it. Barron’s writing is very strong and consistent. I’m just not totally sold on all of his characters and the writerly tricks he employs.
When I picked up The Best New Horror 6 (Stephen Jones, editor) I didn’t realize it was first published in 1995, so this made it not just an anthology of horror stories but also a bit of a trip down memory lane because as hard as it is for me to wrap my head around, 1995 was nearly twenty years ago.
Without any overall theme driving it, this collection covers everything from splatterpunk to Lovecraft homage, with plenty of sex, drugs and rock and roll mixed in. Overall I found the stories worthwhile, without any I actively disliked.
The introduction by Jones is a rather exhaustive look at the year in horror writing, along with a forecast of doom for the genre in the years ahead, a curious way to set the tone for the stories he has collected. Likewise, the book concludes with a look back over notable people related to the horror industry (book, film, TV) who have died that year. It’s been twenty years since Claude Akins died. That seems kind of weird to me.
My favorite stories were:
Sensible City (Harlan Ellison). The world’s best curmudgeon writes a horribly fun tale of just desserts about a pair of thugs who take a very wrong turn. This one has a neat Twilight Zone feel to it and is written with a nice economy and droll wit.
Sometimes, in the Rain (Charles Grant). A moving story about old age and the ghosts that haunt those still hanging on.
Isabel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring (M. John Harrison). Another tale that uncoils its horror quietly, about a woman obsessed with flying and unfortunately getting her wish.
The Alternative (Ramsey Campbell). Another Twilight Zone-ish story about a family man with everything who seems to have an alternate life where he has nothing and what happens when the two collide.
The Singular Habits of Wasps (Geoffrey A. Landis). A Sherlock Holmes story told from the perspective of Watson that blends Jack the Ripper with alien intrigue.
Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright (Kim Newman). A long story that weaves together two narratives, one about a modern British journalist riding along on police patrol in near-future Los Angeles, the other about a werewolf in the past that co-ops (or creates) the Zorro legend.
I didn’t dislike any of the stories, which is surprising for me, as I’ve found horror collections to be notoriously uneven. The weakest was probably “Dead Babies” and it wasn’t bad at all, just a very conventionally told horror tale. Recommended.
I am not the fastest reader so it usually takes me a few weeks to plow through a book. In the case of Wildwood Road (Christopher Golden) I was able to finish it in a mere six days. This was a nice change of pace–a novel that tells its story without any real padding. The downside is the experience almost felt too brief and a bit perfunctory.
It tells the tale of a nigh-perfect couple living in Boston and how a few too many drinks at a masquerade party leads to nearly running down a mysterious little girl on a quiet night road. From there things get weird as Michael the guilty husband tries to set things right by taking the girl back to her home, a ramshackle old house on top of a hill that seems to be haunted by…things. These ghosty creatures do a number on Jillian the wife to scare off the husband from pursuing matters further. More to the point they turn her into Ultra Bitch, which is kind of fun to watch. Golden does a good job in making her a wildly unpredictable force and I was actually fooled–whether by design or not–by a scene in which a friend is asked to ‘babysit’ her, the outcome of which I hadn’t predicted. I was less convinced by the depiction of memories as physical things you can pluck from the air as they float by.
Oh, and the little girl, she wore a peasant blouse and blue jeans. I remember this because Golden mentions it approximately five thousand times over the course of the novel.
The story is told with economy but the omniscient voice is perhaps a little too all-seeing as it hops from character to character. There is very little for the reader to work out for himself as everything gets neatly explained in time. In a way it’s nice to not have things remain murky just for the sake of conjuring up an atmosphere of mystery, but a little more subtlety would have worked, too.
Overall this was a fast, enjoyable, but unremarkable read, a novel I would describe as solidly good.
From a Buick 8 by Stephen King
