True Confessions: Day One

4/4/14

It’s a summer Saturday, and I’m with my dad at Tower Records & Books. I must have been 11 or 12, not quite yet too cool to hang out with my dad in public. We are in the book section, as we Wards are wont to be, and I have been promised a paperback of my choice. I had recently discovered epic fantasy; Narnia and Middle Earth, Arrakis and Earthsea, they were all digested and well-loved by then. (Excepting the dismay and betrayal I felt upon realizing the magnificent Aslan was a Christ analogue, but that’s another memory). I was looking for a new world to live in for a while.

Then my brain was ambushed by the most skin-crawlingly disgusting book cover I’d ever seen. I was almost afraid to look at it, like I thought what I saw would ooze into my brain and infect me somehow. But I also could not stop looking at it, just stood, fascinated, as my dad sauntered over to see if I had made my selection. When he saw the book, he plucked it off the shelf and said with relish, ”Well! ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ that’s a good one.” I let my dad buy me “The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre,” with gruesome cover art by Michael Whelan.

My brain would never be the same.

That guy in the window in particular freaked me out. 

The dude in the web was also pretty upsetting.

P.S.: "Pickman's Model" was my immediate favorite.

Book Review: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, by John Langan

5/5

This book opens with one of the coolest stories I've read in awhile: the short, brutal, and, honestly, kind of hilarious "Kids." Within just a few paragraphs, Langan had me both howling with queasy laughter and wondering if he was plundering my mind for its deepest fears, and that's very much the way to my heart. (Other than through my chest, natch.)

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies has been on my TBR list ever since it came out last spring. I can only say I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because this collection is as close to perfect as it gets. There are no bad stories here, not even any "meh" ones. Just a series of really inventive tales, well told.

Of course I had favorites. But I had several. Besides "Kids," which I won't spoil by even hinting at its contents, there was also "Technicolor," a wild (and darkly genius) take on "The Masque of the Red Death," which may have inspired me to re-evaluate Poe. (I secretly find him awfully florid.) There are two new-Lovecraftian tales: "The Shallows," a slice-of-life story about a man and his mutant crab, going about their business in a world where the Old Ones now control reality; and the truly disturbing "City of the Dog," which takes as its inspiration H.P. Lovecraft's underused ghouls (think "Pickman's Model"), and turns Albany into a carnivorously haunted blot on the landscape. Finally, the closing, and longest, tale in the collection is "Mother of Stone," in which a bloody pre-historic rite is accidentally resurrected when a strange statue is unearthed at an otherwise homey Hudson Valley inn. Also, do not miss Langan's end notes (which illuminate several of the stories in unexpected ways), and Laird Barron's hilarious afterword. Final rave goes to Santiago Caruso for the gorgeous cover art. Let's look at it again:



Bottom line: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies is an excellent collection, and is so very going on my best-of-2013 list . . . just a little late. If you like weird fiction with just a twist of dark humor, do not miss it. 

Fangirl Squee of the Day: in my mailbox today . . .

Book Review: The Monstrumologist, by Rick Yancey

5/5

What a wonderful, terrible, hilarious, disgusting, compelling adventure yarn The Monstrumologist is! I've never read anything even remotely like it. In easy-to-digest list format, here's why you need to read this book.

1) The monsters -- Anthropophagi -- are refreshingly terrifying. Savage, headless man-eaters out of ancient lore (some of which Yancy's titular character references on the case), they are fierce, fast and thoroughly, foully, inhuman. This rarefied species has inexplicably appeared in a small New England town and embarked on what promises to be a no-holds-barred feeding frenzy. These nasty beasties are a welcome addition to the horror pantheon, which has nurtured so many romanticized monsters of late. You do not want to date one of these fellows, of that you can be sure. On they other hand, they'd love to have you incubate their offspring. They look a little something like this:


2) The sweet-and-sour relationship between the peculiar Monstrumologist (who is something like a bizarro-world Sherlock Holmes on one of his manic benders), and our narrator, the plucky and resilient twelve year-old orphan Will Henry. Will has, sadly, recently inherited his father's position as the monster-hunting scientist Dr. Pellinore Warthrop's assistant, and is about to be plunged into the kind of mayhem that makes even professional monster-hunters quail. Before the tale is told, Will will see (and do!) unthinkable things in the name of science and saving the world; learn the fine art of being indispensable; and forge himself a new family from the ashes of tragedy.

3) Yancey's writing is simply wonderful. Densely descriptive without being dull; poetic without being pretentious. Top notch plotting as well. I've seen reviews suggest it was slow at points, but I couldn't put it down at any point. When the action slows down, the character development picks up the slack with sharp, funny dialogue and moments of painful honesty about the human (and inhuman) condition. These quiet sections sometimes also serve to subtly build and attenuate the dread that hangs over Will's every step to a spectacular payoff. Beware this book's potential to induce squealing like a little girl and/or jumping out of your skin. Also? Some barfing, because . . .

4) It's viscerrific! The Monstrumologist is one of the bloodiest (and brain-iest, and pus-iest, and maggot-iest) books I have ever read. The gore is so over-the-top that at times I laughed and cringed simultaneously. I know it's considered a YA novel (and has the Printz-prize sticker to prove it); however I'm pretty sure it would have terrified me, even as a teen. Granted, I was kind of a wuss, but there were at least two scenes where the jaded, adult me felt the need to avert my gaze -- just skip ahead, la-de-da -- because I really didn't want any more detail about the particular variety of disgustingness happening on the page. (No, no, no, no, NO. A world of no.) You'd better be sure your kid can take the relentless gross-out -- I'd read it first, just to see if you can.

Grotesque, rollicking, unique and scary fun, The Monstrumologist has made a Rick Yancey fan out of me. I can't wait to get my hands on the second installment, The Curse of the Wendigo.

The Number 121 to Pennsylvania & Others, by Kealan Patrick Burke

5/5

I am finding it hard to make time to review all the books I'm plowing
through lately, but The Number 121 to Pennsylvania and Others demands I make the time, for several good reasons.

I fully enjoyed every story in the collection, which is a rare thing. I've read several of Burke's books recently (Kin, and the whole Timmy Quinn series, review to come soon, I promise) and have yet to be disappointed; in fact I'd lay money that with his talent and his abundant output, he could be the "next big thing" in horror. With a nostalgic, sometimes elegiac, nuance that nods to Stephen King (especially in short form) and a deft treatment of the dark things lurking on the fraying fringes of normalcy that brings to mind John Connelly's Charlie Parker books, what's not to like? Also, Burke turns some lovely and evocative phrases: a graveside priest becomes "an oversized raven with a scabrous pink beak and a silver crown"; and a melancholy retiree watches "the sun die a phoenix death, bruising the clouds as it struggled to stay afloat." Maybe it's that Irish gift of palaver, but I'm hooked. The stories are so uniformly great I want
to write about them all, but that would ruin the fun, so I'll just mention a few that represent Burke's range.

On the black-comedy side, I loved "High on the Vine," a clever suburban retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with disgruntled neighbors and paparazzi. And, as someone who went through the misery of quitting cigarettes fairly recently, I still have empathy for smokers, and snickered all the way through the nanny-state horror of "Prohibited," sort of like King's "Quitters, Inc." with a shot of post-911 paranoia.

As for the more traditional scare, Burke has an eerily evocative way with that helpless, paralyzing fear unique to childhood, the cold certainty that something is coming to get you -- and you can't do a thing about it -- which he uses to great effect in "Snowmen" and "Mr. Goodnight." And the tension-fueled, almost novella-length closer "Saturday Night at Eddie's," an excerpt from the novel Currency of Souls, made me buy the longer work immediately. Can't wait to dive in.

Finally, and this is big, there were two stories in this collection that are going to stay with me -- in fact, they horrified the absolute bejayzus out of me. I'm not an easy scare (but I keep trying), so that was a real treat. I would caution readers so very much not to take on the back-to-back brain-f**k that is "Empathy" and "Peekers" just before bed. I read "Empathy," an information age nightmare in the vein of "Ringu/The Ring," but rooted in an actual atrocity, and knew that shouldn't be the last thing on my mind before I slept. So I blithely continued on with the short, sharp and aggressively uncanny creepfest that is "Peekers," a story which makes me wish fervently that I lived in a wide-open warehouse space with no corners or doorjambs. (Alas, I live in a Victorian with many nooks, crannies and sliding pocket-doors just perfect for . . . peeking.) I stared at the space between my sliding doors until sleep finally carried me off. I felt like I was ten again, sleeping with the light on so nothing could get me. The following day I watched the short film made from that story (there's a link on Burke's author page here), hoping that if I saw it, it would somehow banish the lingering unease. No such luck.

So . . . well-played, Mr. Burke. You win, and so do your readers with this fine collection. Five solid stars.

Book Review: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, ed. Paula Guran

4.5/5
Dark fiction editrix supreme Paula Guran has put together another huge, mostly excellent selection this year, with enough variety to please most tastes. Here you'll find everything from cowboys vs. vampires, to pitch-dark fairy-tale revisions, to zombie baseball. There's also a visit to Marie Laveau, a "Maltese Unicorn," a  non-zombie apocalypse (for a change), a sand dune that predicts death, and a wardrobe that contains the whole sea.

She's also managed to draw some very well-established names -- like Stephen King, Charles de Lint, Caitlin Kiernan and Joan Aiken -- to sit side-by-side with relatively new talents. Some of my favorites include:

A book-lover's nightmare set in a dystopian near-future San Francisco, Glen Hirshberg's "After-Words" introduces the crazed leader of a book-cult whose end-time plans rely on remarkably old-fashioned methods. Hirshberg, a fellow SF denizen, always captures the tiniest nuances of the city, right down to the smells, night sounds, and neighborhood weather (yes, in SF we have different weather in different neighborhoods). Since the world in this story is quite grim, the verisimilitude adds an extra dose of shiver for me.

Joe R. Lansdale's "The Bleeding Shadow" has a Lovecraft-on-the-bayou vibe. Callow bluesman Tootie makes an unwise trade at Cross Roads Records: in exchange for a drop of his blood, he gets a platter full of unearthly music that, when he plays it, bequeaths him equally unearthly musical skills. Unfortunately, it also opens a doorway for those pesky things that should not be. (And if you like this story, I'd highly recommend picking up John Horner Jacobs' awesome novel Southern Gods.)
Yoon Ha Lee's "Conservation of Shadows" re-visions the ancient myth of Innana's journey to the Underworld as a MMORPG dungeon-like challenge, complete with mazes and inventory slots. I'd never read Lee's work before, but the juxtaposition of an eons-old tale with a futuristic gamescape makes for a memorable story, and Lee's language is beautiful and poetic.

"The Lake" by (the mellifluously-named) Tannarive Due, delivers a sneaky yet genteel brutality with the story of Abbie LaFleur, a Bostonian transplant to the deep south . . . where she really takes to her new environment.

And Laura Anne Gilman's "Crossroads" puts a quick and clever new spin on the standard deal with the devil.

I could go through the whole book like this. I am such a sucker for the short form, and Guran's choices are almost always top-notch: out of 33 stories, only one or two are a little meh, and that's probably just down to personal taste. (In fact, I'm not even gushing about other favorites -- Maureen McHugh's emotionally savage "After the Apocalypse," Elizabeth Hand's eerie "Near Zennor," and Tim Powers' clever and creepy "A Journey of Only Two Paces" -- because I have or plan to write about them in separate reviews of their authors' own collections.)

Verdict: if you like horror, and you like short stories, put this 2012 collection on your holiday wish list -- it's a real treat.

Book Review: Breed, by Chase Novak

4/5 - MA-LSV             

Blurbs keep comparing Chase Novak's debut* novel Breed to Rosemary's Baby, and there is something there, in that both books tell the stories of well-off Manhattanites and their unusual offspring. And indeed, there's a scene early on that feels very much like an hommage to Levin's classic, but that's really where the similarities end.

A more satisfying comparison might be: Breed is to the dark side of contemporary parenting as American Psycho is to the cutthroat financial world of the Reagan era. Violent, creepy and at times unexpectedly touching, Novak's novel delivers the squicky medical/body horror, and reads as a vicious satire on the lives of the mega-rich who know they'll get everything they want simply because they have the money to pay for it. (And pay they do.) Breed might also be read as a smack upside the head to helicopter parents, a tweak of the nose to the fertility industry, or a Frankenstein-ian take on the hubris of tampering with the natural order. But I digress . . .

Meet Leslie and Alex Twisden, New York power couple. They have satisfying careers (he's a high-profile attorney, she's a respected editor), old money, and a fabulous Manhattan townhouse full of antique heirlooms. They are also madly in love. The one thing they don't seem to have is the ability to conceive. After three years and going on a million dollars spent on "everything from laser surgery to Chinese tea," they've had no luck. So when Alex and Leslie run into old friends from an infertility support group, now hugely with child, the Twisdens  pull some strings to learn their secret. (Weirdly, I liked the Twisdens, particularly Leslie, in spite of themselves. They sound terrible on paper, but they felt authentic, if not quite sympathetic.)

Cut to the Ljubljana, Slovenia clinic of one Dr. Kis, purportedly a cutting-edge pioneer in "fertility enhancement treatments." His unorthodox methods clearly worked for their friends, so Alex made the arrangements and convinced a tired and reluctant Leslie to try this one last treatment. Within the week, they are standing in a bleak waiting room, swallowing their dismay at the shabby premises, the doctor's inability to speak English, and his uncouth bedside manner. Shortly, they will undergo Dr. Kis' groundbreaking procedure: painful injections filled with genetically questionable material, administered with a roughness that could be confused with assault.

But back at their hotel that night, Leslie and Alex fall on each other like teenagers. Like animals.

Ten years later: The Twisden twins, Alice and Adam, are thriving, and well-loved, if more than a little sheltered. The Twisdens have always been a close-knit family, needing or wanting few outside connections. But of late the twins have become concerned -- frightened, even -- about their parents' increasingly erratic behavior. The nearly raw meat they eat at dinner, the strange, animalistic sounds coming from the master bedroom, and also sometimes the basement. And then there's the fact that Leslie and Alex lock the twins into their own rooms each night . . . from the outside. Finally, Adam's fear and curiosity lead him to buck the status quo, and his actions trigger a bloody and disturbing series of events that will have repercussions far beyond just the Twisden family.

To say any more about the plot would deprive you of discovering its twisted joys, but I will say I've never read a horror story -- and I've read more than my share -- that addresses this truly taboo territory.  Breed is inventive and propulsive reading. It's hard to put down, even as you're pretty sure you don't really want to know what's going to happen next.

Breed certainly isn't flawless -- sometimes it's difficult to suspend disbelief in the characters' actions, for example the key bit about flying off to get an experimental treatment from a creepy doctor in an unfamiliar Eastern European city with seemingly no medical regulations. Never having been desperate to, um, breed, maybe I just don't understand the lengths to which people will go. To me it seems like a colossally stupid idea; but -- something like climbing Everest with no mountaineering experience -- perhaps it would appeal to those with more money than sense.

One other flaw is that the denoument of the book, though emotionally satisfying in its way, is completely rushed. Some of that may be stylistic choice, an attempt to indicate heightened stakes and anxiety levels, but for me it was like an episode of "24" -- too much happened, too fast and too conveniently. If I hadn't been told there was a sequel in the works I'd have thought Breed full of dangling and/or unnecessary plot threads. I'll suspend critique on the dangly bits until I see where Novak's overall arc is heading, but the main events of this book did wrap up just a little too neatly.

Still, I'd highly recommend Breed to anyone who's looking for something innovative in the horror field; it's frequently disgusting, and its theme just plain wrong (in the right way). Not even remotely for the squeamish. 

* Since the cat is already out of the bag on this nom de plume, it can't hurt to tell you that, while this is Chase Novak's first novel, the talent actually belongs to two-time National Book Award nominee Scott Spencer, author of 11 novels, one of which is Endless Love. (Don't worry, the book was way better than the movie. It was stalkerrific!)

Book Review: The Diviners, by Libba Bray

4.75/5

(Mild spoilers ahead)

Libba Bray's The Diviners, yet another YA novel with a seriously dark streak, is set in the glittering Manhattan of the 1920s -- where jazz clubs are hopping, stars are being made, illegal hooch is flowing, and just about anything can happen.

Including the apocalypse.

A small-town girl from Ohio who commits a tipsy and socially ruinous party-foul, seventeen-year-old firecracker Evie O'Neill has been packed off to stay with her bachelor uncle Will in Manhattan (some punishment, right?). Despite the fact that she's stuck with a stuffy academic who runs a creepy museum (formally known as "The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition and the Occult," but mostly referred to as "The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies"), Evie is thrilled at the chance to taste big-city life for herself, and proceeds to duck Will and drag her quiet friend Mabel into fabulously-attired trouble at every opportunity.

But then Will is called to consult on a brutal murder with ritualistic occult overtones, and Evie brashly invites herself along to the crime scene. Here, her "party trick" again rears its ugly head: Evie has the ability to see a person's history just by touching their belongings. And, when she unthinkingly straightens the buckle on the dead girl's shoe, Evie has a vision like never before: she sees the killer, and he's not like you or me. In fact, it's the infamous occultist John Hobbes (also known as Naughty John) . . . and he's been dead for 50 years. Impossible as it may seem, he's back, and he's got a plan to bring on the end times -- one that's going to take several more bloody rituals.
 
Though it takes Evie, Will, and a host of friends (among them Will's taciturn assistant Jericho, shy Mabel, and street-smart scoundrel Sam Lloyd) almost 600 pages to unravel the supernatural killer's complex and gruesome intentions, The Diviners has never dull moment. Manhattan in 1926 is a huge canvas, and Bray brings it to life with flair -- the catchy slang, the clothes, the music, the promise in the air -- so "everything's jake," as Evie might say. The cast is also quite large, and full of vivid characters like iconoclastic Ziegfeld girl Theta; her charming "brother" Henry (read: gay bestie); Memphis, a poet who longs to be part of the Harlem Renaissance but runs numbers in the meantime; and Memphis's little brother Isaiah, who is having apocalyptic visions of his own. Each provides additional interest and intrigue, since they all have unique secrets and nightmares to conceal.
And, as the plot thickens and the killer counts down to a rare comet's appearance in the sky, they all, knowingly or not, play a part in the action.

I'll freely admit I thoroughly enjoyed every page of The Diviners, but do have one or two slight reservations, the foremost being that at times this book is extremely frightening and/or bloody, and it also includes scenes of sexual violence. While I found the book (appealingly) disturbing as a horror-jaded adult, it certainly would have scared the bejayzus out of me when I was the tender target age for YA lit. 

Also, some aspects of the novel are almost laughably revisionist. For example: were seventeen year-olds really nightly fixtures at underground gin-joints, and did unescorted white girls often go to Harlem to hear jazz and flirt with black musicians, or wind up at hush-hush gay nightclubs? True, Bray is focused on boho underground culture -- theatricals, artists and musicians -- but the easy attitudes her characters have about race and sexual preference certainly weren't the norm at the time. In fact these kinds of "transgressions" regularly got people beaten or killed up until at least the 1960s, and (sadly) still might in some places. I guess I really can't fault Bray for trying to inject a little tolerance into her imagined 1920s -- after all, if we can buy a supernaturally resurrected serial killer, I guess Theta can fall for Memphis and Henry can dance cheek-to-stubbled-cheek with whomever he likes.

In the end, I might hesitate before handing The Diviners to my (imaginary) thirteen year-old cousin, but it's most definitely going on my Best-of-2012 list. And despite frequent rants about "sequelitis" on the YA and paranormal fiction shelves, I am not at all unhappy to hear Evie and company will return for further adventures. If nothing else, they bring the kind of clever vibe to fighting apocalyptic evil that calls to mind a different set of supernatural white-hats, also led by a sassy blonde. In fact, sometimes you can almost see Will cleaning his glasses -- and if you get that reference, you'll love The Diviners.

Book Review: 99 Brief Scenes from the End of the World, by T.W. Grim

3.5/5 -- MA-LSV

This book started out as a 2.5 and performed the unusual feat of raising itself to a 3.5 by the time I finished it. 99 Brief Scenes From The End Of The World  was stealthy, sneak-up-on-you-good, despite some intrinsic flaws, and I'm glad I stuck with it.

The bad news first: Right out of the box I was irritated that the structure of the book was not as implied by the title. I expected something more like David Eagleman's strange and wonderful Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, only with splatterrific zombie gore. So, when characters and locales began to make repeat appearances, I had to revise my expectation (99 unique pieces of apocalyptic flash-fiction), to reading what is better described as a novel with 99 chapters. These are not always "brief scenes," and some are a bit filler-y, not strictly necessary to the story as a whole. It seems to me that a final round of edits could have pulled this all together into a tight, suspenseful novel not reliant on the random titular number for its structure.

Now for the good news: Grim's book does have a number of things going for it; despite my initial irritation I found it impossible to put down. First and foremost, Grim -- a talented, descriptive writer -- does good character work. Once I finally got to know the core cast of survivors, I became invested their fate(s), and admired the way his craft allows their singular stories to eventually dovetail. Some of the global-picture characters (the foaming-at-the-mouth US President, or the morality-challenged leaders of a Japanese science/weapons lab) certainly might have been excised or toned down a wee bit. Though I suppose they serve to give us a window into the global situation, I found that the struggle for survival (and sanity) of the everyday citizens was more tethered in realism, and gave me more to sink my teeth into.

Speaking of which . . . absolutely key to this particular genre is the splatter, and Grim pours forth an endless stream of surprisingly innovative mayhem. The man knows his gore, and and has a million ways to spill it. in fact, a couple of unbelievably disgusting scenes really worked their way under my skin -- and I eat dinner while watching "The Walking Dead," so do the math. Grim also conceives an unusual twist on the now-standard zombie/rage virus trope (tiny spoiler: it's neither one!) which might allow a continuance of the story . . . something challenging to achieve when writing about an extinction-level event.

Because the unexpected twist piqued my interest, and because it takes a lot to actually gross me out, I not only upgraded this book to "liked a lot" status; I'll happily read any follow-up work Grim gets out there.

Book Review: The Horror of Lisa Mannetti

4.5/5 -- MA-LSV

3/5 -- MA-LSV

                    

 (Spoiler warning in full effect.)

This has been a damnably difficult review to write; I read both of these back-to-back a couple of weeks ago, and am still not sure what to make of Mannetti's freaky and deeply disturbing modern gothic. The Gentling Box won the Bram Stoker for Best First Novel in 2008; Deathwatch is made up of two novellas -- Dissolution (a 2010 Stoker nominee for Long Fiction) and Sheila Na Gig. All three tales, though varied in setting, explore similar psychological ground, and some of the themes -- including necromancy, blood sacrifice, possession and (in particular) medical horror and taboo sexual transgressions -- are most unpleasant. As in, "WTF is wrong with Lisa Mannetti?" unpleasant. Of course I intend no insult; from the interviews I've read she seems like a warm and intelligent woman with a quick sense of humor, someone you'd like to chat with over tea or a beer. Which makes these dark, unforgiving, and ultimately rather misogynistic stories all the stranger. But in the horror field, the provocation of, well, horror, in the reader is kind of the point . . . right?

Set in the Romany culture of Hungary and Romania in the 1860s, The Gentling Box is as claustrophobic as a gypsy caravan, and as bone-chilling as an open grave. Through skillful, atmospheric prose, intense research and a wicked imagination, Mannetti recreates a world where fear, superstition and magic still hold sway; impeccably detailed, exotic enough to feel like a dark, bloody fairy tale, this book is definitely not for the squeamish. The Gentling Box is the tragedy of horse-trader Imre, his Romany wife Mimi, and their daughter Lenore. The two women become targets (and in Mimi's case, a meat-sack) for the ghost of Anyeta, Mimi's scheming mother, in life a powerful gypsy witch with a lust for immortality (among other things). Anyeta's power springs from "The Hand of the Dead," a repulsive fetish that grants the possessor power over life and death, and her goal is the acquisition of a fresh body. Anyeta's assault on the family includes poisoning the desperately protective Imre with disease and hallucinations, particularly sexual illusions -- she seduces and mocks him while possessing his wife's body, and curses him with unbearable and humiliating desire for the adolescent Lenore. The more Imre struggles to save his family from Anyeta's foul gypsy curse, the more it  tightens around him, until he's left dying and helpless, faced with an impossible choice. There's no question this deserved a Stoker: The Gentling Box, though unrelievedly dark and dreadful, is ambitious and uniquely haunting.

However, the novellas that make up Deathwatch are more problematic for me. That they again feature wicked women wielding supernatural powers to manipulate men into destroying other women (children, really) is what disturbs and somewhat dismays me. In Dissolution we meet another ghost, the mother of twelve-year-old conjoined twins Abby and Ellie, who seeks to live again through the body(ies) of her daughters. Again the ghost plays manipulative erotic tricks, this time upon the young surgeon  burdened with separating the twins, and to even more disastrous and disgusting results. In Dissolution, the medical/body horror works, but the young doctor's slide into madness and pedophilia plays like a repetitive and far less subtle version of The Gentling Box's horrors. And in Sheila Na Gig, an Irish crone uses ancient fertility magic to keep her family and its fortunes firmly under her control. If I told you her manipulations result in several deaths and an adolescent girl incestuously impregnated, I think that might be enough of the plot with which to make my point.

So here it is: the but-face. You know I love me some horror, the darker and more hopeless the better. I also  love the way Mannetti writes . . . The Gentling Box is unforgettable and alone warrants her a place at the big kids' table. But so far my experience with her work has left me equal parts impressed and repulsed. I think her various violations of the body -- possession, radical surgery, and the twisting of the erotic to make it unpalatable and unnatural -- work, even as they are profoundly disgusting. But I can't say that the repetitive theme of violence done to women by other women  (using men's lust and gullibility as their weapons) is a good look for any writer to be stuck in, let alone a woman. I'm pretty shock-proof, so when something makes me want to throw up on a book, that's news. Dissolution in particular openly crosses a line that is difficult to stomach. I'm no prude, but there were points at which I felt contaminated by the text.

Now . . . is that good horror or not? 

More: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

4/5

Okay, so I think I'm finished with this book, if lacking even the remotest textual sense of an ending can be called "finished."

 Lev Grossman, in a recent review of the new David Foster Wallace bio, talks about the genre that DFW helped to birth, and that James Woods referred to (in a review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth) as "hysterical realism." Grossman says:

            

               Wood coined the phrase to describe the big, hyper-inter-connected,
               hyper-detailed, hyper-annotated, novels that Rushdie, Pynchon,  
               DeLillo, DFW and Smith were writing at the time . . ..  Hysterical realism treats
               the world as an infinite network, but we already have an infinite network, the
               Internet, and our nose is rubbed in it on an hourly basis. We don’t need more of
               that—more hysteria. We need novels that help us manage hysteria instead.

It's interesting (or maybe just inevitable) that this branch of postmodernism began to peter out even as the internet was remaking the way we process information. House of Leaves, published in 2000, also tries that sort of remaking . . . in fact, it may represent the genre at its most excessive, with multiple layers of narration, endless footnotes, experiments in typography and page layout, and several appendices that may or may not enhance the reader's experience of the story ("novel" feels like a misnomer).  And of course there are no answers to its endless riddles, aside from the ones the reader wants to see.

Is House of Leaves hysteria inducing, or just a lot of work? I think that depends on how much you enjoy puzzles, or maybe how much time you have to devote to puzzling. I remember reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in the good ol' days pre-Internet, and desperately wanting to look up every historical reference to see if he was pulling my leg or not. Fact was, I enjoyed it immensely without (in fact, it's one of my permanently earmarked desert island tomes, and I never have bothered with that web research now that it's available). I also enjoyed DFW's Infinite Jest when the only stylistic point of reference I had was Nabokov's Pale Fire (yeah, he did the footnote/end-note/gloss thing way back in 1962).

So . . . House of Leaves was good, but not great. Maybe I'd have been more impressed had I read it when its its stylistic quirks were still fresh; maybe I'd care more about putting the reams of clues together if I were writing some dry academic treatise on it. (On the other hand, HoL makes a great deal of indirect and snarky fun of dry academic treatises, so . . . maybe not so much.) Yes, I was amused by the endless invented scholarship; yes, some of Johnny Truant's prose sings like a nightingale; but, much like Nabokov's annotated poem, HoL relies almost completely on the interpretation of a text by an unreliable narrator, taking that conceit one step further to a level of TWO unreliable narrators -- each telling his own story as much as the Navidsons'. And the rub is that the narrative buried deepest in is the most intriguing.

The Navidson Report had me at "bigger on the inside," and the uncanny nature of the great dark void at the center of the house is what really kept me going. I expect the text is intended to be as much a mystery as that inexplicable darkness -- which, ironically, is the only narrative thread with an emotionally satisfying conclusion. I'm not even sure what I'm saying anymore, so I'll leave it at this: 5 big shiny stars for The Navidson Report, which is creepy beyond measure.  3 stars for the rest, which can be both lyrical and amusing, but in the end amounts to an entirely different tale, which is nowhere near as compelling.

Some Observations: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

                                                                                      This is a book about an aspiring tattoo artist obsessed with reading a found manuscript 

 (authored by a dead man) 

which analyzes and critiques a documentary made by a family who lived in a house that's much bigger on the inside. (Not nearly as well-appointed as the TARDIS, though.* )

Crappy resolution on those bottom words, but the large one kinda says it all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this book is all kinds of postmodern weird, using and abusing all the usual suspects: footnotes, more footnotes, footnotes about footnotes, text boxes, strange page layouts, codes, backwards type -- you know the drill. (And if you don't, I wouldn't suggest going anywhere near it.) 

There are in fact pages that look like this:

Also? Lots of quotations in foreign tongues (some translated; others not so much). The word "house" and all its non-English correlates are always printed in blue... Other sections are in red, or in strikethrough

font.

Yes, all the bells and whistles can be distracting, but so far, not too tedious. Granted, I'm only just over halfway through, but I know there's a truly unsettling story buried in here; the bits called "The Navidson Record" are creepy and fascinating . . . and they are keeping me awake much later than they should be. I'll be back with a full review (as if that were even possible!) as soon as I climb out of the abyss. Meanwhile . . .

one more for the road:

* For more about the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), see the beloved and long-running BBC TV series "Doctor Who."

Book Review: Kin, by Kealan Patrick Burke

4.5/5

 Kin begins at what is more usually construed as an ending: on the well-trod path of the "final girl" staggering away from a massacre, the lone survivor after a family of backwoods cannibals takes an unhealthy interest in a group of teenage backpackers. (What's the big deal?, I thought, slasher movies and torture porn. Yawn.)

But then . . . the story turns itself inside out and slaps the reader upside the head by becoming not merely revenge fiction (though it's that, too), but an investigation of the ripple-effects of an unthinkable crime, and the ways in which formidable bonds can form from even the most tenuous connections in times of crisis. For Burke, the word "kin" is key, and the story clearly implies a broader sense of "family" than just that of the bloodthirsty Merrill clan.

Kin is told from multiple, disparate points of view, all of which cross and weave together seamlessly as the hold-your-breath climax approaches. Among the sharply delineated characters are Claire, the survivor of unthinkable horrors; Peter, a slow but kind farm boy who, along with his father, finds the dying Claire on the road and takes her to the local doctor; Finch, a struggling Iraq war vet and the brother of Claire's boyfriend (now numbered among the cannibalized dead); and Luke, eldest son of the God-fearing, torture-loving, and flesh-eating Merrill clan. Burke's acute psychological profiles invite the reader to empathize not only with the crippling PTSD and survivor's guilt of victims, but also to approach an understanding of the repugnant family values that breed savages.

You should know what you are getting into when you pick up Kin: the violence level is exceptionally high and graphic (although one might intuit that from the blurb). Burke's book is certainly not for the faint of heart, but once you get through the first few raw, stomach-churning chapters, you'll find the payoff in beautiful (and hideous) prose, imaginative detail that takes you places you never wanted to see, well-turned dialogue and believable characters, and a tautly constructed plot that keeps twisting until the very end. Kin gets four-and-a-half stars and not five because of one scenario that felt a bit hard to swallow, but it's a major spoiler, so I won't share it here. Suffice it to say, I won't be able forget this novel anytime soon.

Book Review: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, by Laird Barron

4/5

I kind of went at Laird Barron’s oeuvre backwards. Though I had previously read the short stories “Old Virginia,” and “The Broadsword,” in “new-Lovecraftian" anthologies, I picked up his excellent new novel The Croning before fully exploring either of his story collections (the other being Occultation and Other Stories). Of course I fell madly in fascinated disgust, and had to immediately devour everything he had in print. So I started at the beginning, with The Imago Sequence.

To read this set of stories, which range over a period of about six years just after the turn of the millennium, is to watch Barron’s uniquely horrific talent slowly unfold. Though quasi-Lovecraftian at times, Barron really has his own voice – in TIS  themes are introduced which will  eventually coalesce into a truly original mythology.

Heavily masculine and vaguely noir, most of the pieces in TIS feature a manly, tough-guy protagonist: an aging spook; a white-collar spy; a Pinkerton man; a crippled wrestler; the adventurer scion of a wealthy and privileged family. Fellow weird-fiction writer Brett J. Talley said of Barron that he “writes like Hemingway might have if he weren’t so boring.” That’s a perfect blurb if ever I saw one.

In Laird Barron’s horrorshow, however, these men are more often victims than heroes: we watch in disbelief as the kind of men who have never learned how to lose are broken down, turned inside-out, chewed up in the maw of a world become uncanny. Incidentally, gaping maws, too, are a thematic preoccupation of Barron’s. His is a cthonic, subterranean horror, lurking in the damp, hot darkness of mouths and caves, and in the primitive lizard-brain, unleashed by drugs or driven to insanity.

Standout stories in the collection are “Old Virginia,” the tale of a CIA agent nearing the end of his career assigned oversight on a very special MK-ULTRA project; “Procession of the Black Sloth,” a fevered nightmare set in an ex-pat community in Hong Kong; and “Hallucigenia,” about a man who has it all, but can’t avoid the slide into horror and madness after his young wife discovers something unspeakable in an abandoned barn. The title story, about a series of legendary and unpleasant photographs, is something of a sly nod to “Pickman's Model,” but also sets the stage for Barron's own developing mythos.

Be forewarned: these stories are not pleasant, and should leave you uneasy. There are no happy endings in Laird Barron's world, only variations on death and madness.

Book Review: Occultation and other Stories, by Laird Barron

 4.5/5

Barron’s second book of short stories absolutely delivers on the promise of his debut volume,  The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, and is in fact an even more accomplished and various collection, one in which his writerly scope, symbols, thematic preoccupations and chilling mythos all find room to grow. It's also deeply, deeply disturbing.

In my review of TIS I noted that, in keeping with the noir vibe of the collection, most of Barron’s protagonists were “tough-guy” types. Occultation, in contrast, offers a number of stories which prominently feature women, and the female voices and tragedies feel true . . . make what you will of the fact that each one is batshit insane. (Hell, most of Barron’s characters end up that way, or worse, regardless of gender.) Here, we meet Danni, a recent widow with an intermittent fugue state and a persistent urge to rejoin her dead husband in “The Lagerstatte”; in the Machen-esque “Catch Hell,” grieving mother Katherine and her anthropologist husband visit The Black Ram, an inn with an unsavory history and a reputation for black magic, to which they have come to enact an unspeakable ritual. (Sidenote: I've just run across another fantastic story featuring The Black Ram -- “Blackwood's Baby,” in  The Best Horror of the Year (Vol. 4). I enjoy watching worldbuilding in progress and love the way Barron is populating his with referents that appear across several works.)

Barron shows a real flair for the dialogue of couples, the petty jibes and secret histories they share lurking just beneath the surface. In the title story two lovers in a motel room speculate about a seriously freaky spot on the wall while passing a bottle; in “--30--” (which feels like an hommage to “Who Goes There?”), two naturalists, former lovers, are thrown together in isolation on a three-month wilderness project. Their repartee is barbed, quick and clever, until strange things start happening and the discovery of an ancient artifact tips them over into insanity and fatal paranoia.

Barron’s developing mythos also gains steam in Occultation. From the heartbreaking first story, “The Forest,” in which we meet the mysterious Dr. Toshi Ryoko, who seems to have a line on the horrors in store for the human race, to “Mysterium Tremendum,” in which Barron's cthonic cult  sprouts a text of its own – The Black Guide, a rare guidebook through the more unpleasant nether regions of Washington State. Following its lead, a group of weekend outdoorsmen stumble into a special kind of hell, one which contains revenants from their own troubled histories.

My favorite in the collection is the masterful haunted house story “The Broadsword.” This was the one that made me leave the lights on. Set in a Victorian apartment building which has seen better days, this is where we finally learn the name of the horror haunting Barron’s mythic landscape: the "children of Old Leech" have come out to play, and you will not forget them anytime soon. And once you have met, they will not forget you, either. Prepare to see a good deal more of them.

Book Review: Martyrs & Monsters, by Robert Dunbar

 4.5/5

I devoured Robert Dunbar’s excellent Martyrs & Monsters almost entirely at one sitting. A collection of short works, the stories in this book are so various in tone and style that it almost felt as if I were reading an anthology of tales by many different authors. Okay, that’s not entirely true, as some of the stories are intended to expand upon or follow others, but the scope is truly impressive. Ranging from simply melancholy to outright tragic, from splatterpunk to whimsy, the primary commonalities are a graceful economy of language and an uncanny insight into the deepest and strangest parts of the human animal.

The absolute standout of Martyrs & Monsters would have to be the creepily lyrical “Mal de Mer,” which reminded me, weirdly, of both Ramsay Campbell’s incredibly disturbing “The Voice of the Beach” and the heartbreaking The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Strange bedfellows, indeed, but this story of repression and release, desire, disappointment, fear and compulsion, contains perhaps my favorite lines in the book, ones which immediately reveal the soul of the protagonist: “In her younger years . . . her essential lack of warmth had discouraged colleagues from bonding with her. It had that effect on most people. Yet she believed herself not to be entirely lacking in empathy, only in its myriad pitying applications and ubiquitous expressions, which she considered both squalid and pointless.” (Maybe this just reminds me a little bit of me.)

On the other hand, the punchy gross-out of “Saturday Night Fights” is all rock & roll, splatterpunk and 50s B-movie, rolled together in one juicy and satisfying package. You’ve got to love a story that begins “By the time the two of them woke up, their friends had already met with disgusting deaths. But then they both slept pretty late that day.” And the monster? Personal phobias notwithstanding, just ew.

“Gray Soil” and “Red Soil,” two of the linking stories, are told in simple, almost mythic language. Together, they uncover the blood-soaked history of a desolate place – the first a story of a mother’s brutal sacrifice, the second a tale of unchecked appetites, human and otherwise, and again of hard choices made for the sake of loved ones.

Other favorites include “The Folly,” a southern gothic almost-spoof which involves an eccentric family, Bigfoot, and a house shaped like an alligator; “High Rise,” the story of a nymphomaniac ghost and her victim(s); and “Killing Billie’s Boys,” an oddball tale of warring witches and their rent-boy catspaws.

And, despite my going on, that’s fewer than half of the stories in Martyrs & Monsters, each one unique and haunting. Half a star off for my only complaint (and it’s not that dire), the sometimes distracting typos, of which there were many. Possibly this is just a side-effect of the e-book format, and almost certainly out of the author’s hands, but it’s the kind of thing that can break the spell of an otherwise compelling narrative. At any rate, I look forward to reading more from Robert Dunbar, a truly literary fabulist.

Book Review: The Place Called Dagon, by Herbert S. Gorman

 4/5

This great little weird novel was recently rescued from obscurity by publishing house Lovecraft's Library. According to Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, HPL mentions having read The Place Called Dagon in his letters (1928) and also in Supernatural Horror in Literature. Though he called it "purile" at the time, there is much academic speculation that TPCD may have influenced classics such as "The Dunwich Horror" and "Dreams in the Witch House," and perhaps fear of comparison even played a part in HPL's reluctance to release "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." Conversely, it is almost certain Gorman had never heard of Lovecraft -- the name "Dagon" wasn't original to HPL's 1917 short story -- and just happened to stray into the weird for this one novel. (Gorman wrote several, though he is now mostly forgotten).

Despite its anomalous state, TPCD actually sits quite proudly in the weird tradition, somewhere between Blackwood and Lovecraft: in some ways it recalls Blackwood's classic tale "Ancient Sorceries," but instead of time-haunted Europe, is set instead in HPL's eldritch and inbred New England.

(Mild spoilers follow.)

Gorman's hero, a young doctor who has assumed a practice in an out-of-the-way Massachusetts valley, soon begins to suspect ancient and evil secrets persist beneath the hard, practical veneer of the town of Marlborough. Lo and behold, it seems the locals are in fact descended from survivors of the Salem witch-cult, and strange rites are being resurrected in the dark woods. The cast contains some pretty stock weird figures, including an arrogant arcane scholar, his disturbingly alluring wife, and a dour and malevolent preacher. Sometimes assisting the determined doctor in his search for the truth: Marlborough's now housebound former doctor -- a reticent (and mildly alcoholic) adviser on town matters; a beautiful and friendless orphan ingenue; and a stolid local farmer who is both kinder and cannier than he appears.

It's Gorman's rather modern writing which prevents TPCD from being "just" another forgettable pulp horror novel -- certainly, he's less long-winded than Blackwood and less purple than Lovecraft. His lyrical descriptions of atmosphere and landscape and keen insights into human motivation keep the tale interesting, and his candid take on female sexuality seems quite progressive for 1927. TPCD is a quick and enjoyable read, and deserving of being resurrected into the pantheon of the good weird. Four solid stars.

Book Review: Under the Dome, by Stephen King

5/5

Likely King's best novel in years, Under the Dome grabs you at the first page and never lets up, with a propulsive narrative that is both as disturbing as you might expect, and even more so. Everything you need to know is right there in the title: the town of Chester's Mill, Maine has become cut off from the world by a mysterious transparent "dome" which appears out of nowhere on a crisp fall day. No one can leave, and no one can enter. The town is on its own.

Less a traditional horror story (though there's plenty of gruesome moments), and more a hostage situation on a grand scale, UtD is most effective when showcasing the evil men (and all the other inhabitants of beleaguered Chester's Mill) can do when traditional moral structures collapse around them, when the world shrinks and becomes alien and full of menace, when any idea of a sympathetic, or even rational, god has gone the way of fresh supplies . . . and fresh air.

Along the way the reader meets a cast of characters roughly the size of a small Maine town; chief among them the corrupt Selectman who views the crisis as a golden opportunity; the adolescent whiz-kids intent on helping to solve it; the Revelations-spewing meth addict who runs the town's Christian (and only) radio station; the overtaxed PA who becomes the town's de-facto doctor; and leading the cast, a former soldier on the drift, who manages to just miss his opportunity to get out while the getting is good.

With strongly delineated heroes  -- flawed though they may be -- to root for, and plenty of despicable self-proclaimed "good guys" to hiss at (small-town cops and elected officials take rather a drubbing, as do unchristian Christians),UtD takes an inexplicable disaster and puts a human face on the toll it exacts. I won't say any more than this -- when I was halfway through the book, I couldn't imagine any way things could get worse for Chester's Mill. Fortunately, good old Uncle Steve's imagination is a long way from running dry.

Book Review: Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

 5/5

I can't believe how long it took me to pick up a book by China Mieville, and now I can't shut up about about him. Perdido Street Station is stellar and wholly original, truly literary weird fiction from a writer determined to subvert the reigning sci-fi/fantasy cliches. (In fact, Mieville is notorious for having referred to Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature.") Nevertheless, Perdido Street Station is, like LotR, essentially an epic quest tale, in which a mismatched group of everyday people must face overwhelming odds to rid their world of a menace so great -- and seriously unsettling -- it might mean the end of civilization as they know it. But that's where the similarities to "traditional" fantasy end.

 I know several otherwise perfectly sane and intelligent people who refuse to read Mieville on the grounds that he is "too hard" (as in "I'm not in grad school anymore, so fiction shouldn't hurt my head," hard). And to be sure, his postmodern political education credentials and ginormous vocabulary are intimidating; but Mieville is his (our? whatever.) generation's reigning master of the weird, and his strange and lyrical mastery of the English language is currently unparalleled in the genre.

Like a sci-fi Rushdie or Dickens, Mieville revels in detail and lush descriptive language, and his city of New Crobuzon -- with its vile slums and peculiar brothels, political machinations and crime networks, artists and renegade scientists, "xenian" races, sentient constructs and horrific "Re-made" underclass -- reflects world-building on such a massively detailed scale that by the time you've finished you feel as if you could navigate its strange, seething streets yourself. On a few occasions, especially as the many narrative threads start coming together and the nail-biting climax approaches, these dense descriptive passages feel as if they are bogging down the tale, but their intrinsic beauty and alien horror are well worth the time spent in detour.

As a sidenote, Perdido Street Station is the first of three books set in the world of Bas-Lag. The second, The Scar, is not really dependent on having read the first, but The Iron Council (review coming soon) really is. Read them all, and I guarantee you will never forget Bas-Lag.

Book Review: The Light is the Darkness, by Laird Barron

 4.5/5

Conrad Navarro, modern gladiator with a genius IQ, is the apotheosis of all Laird Barron’s previous tough guy protagonists. He is their perfection – the imago, if you will – a poetic image which Barron invokes repeatedly in his body of work. The story of Conrad's transformative journey is violent, hallucinogenic, and terribly sad by turns; it's also surprisingly challenging in its execution.

Known simply as “the American,” Conrad makes his living fighting in ludi (singular ludis, after the games held in conjunction with Roman religious festivals): secret and meticulously orchestrated blood sports in which combatants fight to the death for the pleasure of the wealthy and powerful. Between bouts, Conrad obsessively searches for his missing sister Imogene, an FBI agent gone off the reservation on her own dark odyssey: she’s hunting the ancient, elusive and sinister Dr. Drake, a radical experimental physician who may have killed their cancer-stricken brother Ezra in a botched treatment . . . or was it an unspeakable ritual? Following her trail, Conrad finds the cryptic messages she has left for him, parlaying each into another step closer to his beloved “Genie,” and his own fate.

However, nothing in Conrad’s surreal world is as it seems. What really happened to Ezra and the others under Dr. Drake’s care? Why did his mother drive herself off a cliff, and what drove his father – less literally – around the bend? Why does Conrad, “a special case,” according to dear old Dad, seem impervious to death, and get stronger, heal faster by the day? And where has Imogene really gone?

What Conrad fails to grasp until it’s far too late is the extent of the conspiracy that enfolds his family, or the cruel cosmic game in which they are merely pieces on a board. In his blundering search for the truth, he has caught the attention of the darkness, and he will have to pay.

Short, fast and unapologetically brutal, The Light is the Darkness is a gut-punch that shares more stylistically with Barron’s first anthology The Imago Sequence than it does with his most recent (and more subtle) novel, The Croning . . . though one does get the feeling that all of Barron’s stories are taking place in the same savage world, that the cosmic horrors we meet are related, and that human beings almost always exist primarily as “provender” for their obscene needs.

At first I was mildly disappointed with LitD; so much happens so fast
 . . .  it's like like bright strobes illuminate various setpieces, and then, before you can make the necessary connections, it’s over. But it had crept into my brain and wouldn’t leave me alone, so I went back to it. Though it's just novella-length, its fairly experimental style requires a closer look in order to fully appreciate the layers of imagery and sometimes nonlinear plot trajectory. Upon a second reading, symbolic patterns and foreshadowing emerge, and cryptic hallucinogenic stream-of-consciousness passages that seemed intrusions on (or excursions from) the main storyline click into place and make Conrad's story richer and ultimately more horrific. For me, real enjoyment of this incredibly weird book demanded study. The Light is the Darkness may not be anybody’s idea of light summer reading, but once again Laird Barron challenges the prevailing assumption that so-called "genre fiction" can't also be intellectually challenging.