by on

One thing about me is that I don’t like stories featuring violence against women. There are certain works of fiction I’ll just never be able to enjoy for this reason. For instance, the movie Strange Days. Although in many ways it sounds like something I would be interested in, I have never seen it because of certain plot elements.

I knew, just from the cover and the description, that this book was not the sort of thing I would normally read. But, Adam Bertocci is one of my favorite authors. I have enjoyed many of his literary short stories, usually featuring millennial women in a post-college malaise but otherwise unharmed. As I’ve said many times, Mr. Bertocci is the voice of our generation, and his fiction deserves to be widely-read.

And another thing about me is that I respect versatility and a willingness to experiment. So when I saw that an author noted for his wit, insight, and gently ironic sense of humor had written a horror story, I was naturally intrigued. And, not without trepidation, I picked it up and began to read.

The book tells the story of Wade, a high schooler who recently ended his relationship with Kiki Malone, shortly before she died in a car accident. The entire school and surrounding sleepy town of Red Corners is in mourning for the effervescent young girl, gone too soon.

But Wade’s relationship with her is far more complicated, and the circumstances that led to their breakup are more than just a simple school crush gone awry.

For the first three-quarters or so, the book is in many ways a standard Bertocci story. Witty and ironic, with more than a little clever one-liners. Some of the humor is more offensive than Bertocci’s usual fare, and this is because it comes from Wade’s friend Aaron, who is the epitome of the snarky, wise-cracking, too-cool-for-school loudmouth that I think every school has. But even Aaron has feelings—he just chooses to conceal them beneath a veneer of being an insensitive jackass.

And for those first three-quarters or so, I was thinking, “Oh, maybe I needn’t have worried. This isn’t so bad after all.” Like M.R. James before him, Bertocci knows that the really effective horror story has to first lull the reader into a false sense of security. James did it by making you think you were reading a normal Edwardian comedy of manners before he broke the seals and let slip the demons. Bertocci, of course, is not writing in the early 1900s, so he has to pitch for what qualifies as “normal” for his audience—that is, the typical American high school.

Then, in the final pages, the trap is sprung. The nightmare unfolds, in unsparing detail. And at the end, as is often the case with effective horror, we are left with more questions than answers. Who did what to whom, and why? Multiple answers suggest themselves. The influence of The Turn of the Screw looms heavily over this book. It’s what I call the “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” school of horror.

Well, I got what I was afraid I would get. But note the use of that word, “afraid.” It’s horror, isn’t it? If you read horror, and you’re afraid of it, and your fears prove justified, well… isn’t that the highest compliment you can pay a work of horror fiction?

This isn’t for everybody. It wasn’t even for me, but I still greatly admire how Bertocci crafted it. Is there anything darker than what lurks in the mind of an average high-school kid? This is what the book asks, and the answer is unsettling. If you want something raw, disturbing, and haunting, then this is most assuredly for you.

by on

In case you forgot, according to the Gambrel/Schoch Treaty of 2022, January 31 is Second Halloween. And since it falls on a Friday this year, I have to review something appropriate to the season.

But what would that be? I already reviewed plenty of Halloween and Halloween-adjacent books back in October. For this, I felt that something slightly different was in order. So, after some searching, I was able to scare up (ha!) this curious little volume.

If you’ve read much Lovecraft, you know he had a distinctive writing style. A style sometimes described as, “why use fewer words when more will do?” More charitably, we might say he liked to employ unusual adjectives to convey how strange and horrible many of the creatures and places he imagined were. So for instance, despite his own atheism, he would use “blasphemous” as an intensifier to describe just how thoroughly out of line with our normal rules of reality something might be. And of course, he more or less singlehandedly kept alive the use of the word “eldritch”, to the point that it is now almost synonymous with his style of horror.

The Lovecraftian mode is surprisingly seductive. Once you’ve read a couple of his stories, even if you smirk a little at how overwrought they are, you’ll likely find some of his literary mannerisms seeping into your own writing, like unhallowed shadows from the penumbra of unlighted corridors beyond time; nameless abysms swaying horribly to the piping of a damnable flute held in cacodaemoniacal claws…

See what I mean?

Osvaldo Felipe Agorarte clearly does, and has become so enchanted with HPL’s anti-lyrical prose that he has adapted famous historical documents in this manner. So for instance, the Declaration of Independence is rendered:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but that there are dark powers beyond our understanding that seek to destroy our free will and replace it by a tyrannical rule.

And the Gettysburg Address is rewritten as:

It is for us to continue the fight against the terrors that threaten our world, to resist the madness that grips our enemies, and to ensure that our nation, under God, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.

(For the sake of politeness, let’s just ignore what Lovecraft’s opinions on the actual versions of either of these texts would likely have been, okay?)

Is this rewriting amusing? Yes, it is, at least to me. It’s not quite as catchy as “I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg and her mighty state of hysteria,” but still, it makes me chuckle.

On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily continue to be amusing after the first five or six times. It reminded me of a typical Saturday Night Live skit (at least from the days when I watched SNL, which I really haven’t done since Tina Fey stopped appearing regularly), in that it takes a mildly funny joke and carries it on way too long.

As with SNL skits, to fully flesh it out to feature length, the joke needs some sort of development. What I would have liked to see would have been something where the documents start out more or less like we know them, but keep hinting, with increasing urgency as time progresses, at the terrible forces which threaten our world. Like a good Lovecraft story, or even better, an M.R. James story, the horror needs to creep up on you gradually. If we got the feeling that Jefferson was getting vague premonitions of cosmic horror, and by the time we get to say, Calvin Coolidge, he’s really staring down the barrel of a Nyarlathotep-style apocalypse, that would be interesting. (Although it’s tough to imagine “Silent Cal” talking like Lovecraft, no matter what was going on.)

But as it is, it’s kind of a one-trick pony. Admittedly, some of the historical documents are interesting in their own right, and I’d never even heard of some of them, so it was educational in that respect. And it is illustrated with some appropriately grotesque artwork, like that seen on the cover. On the other hand, it’s set in a font that I guess is meant to be Gothic, but frankly looked like a baroque, serifed equivalent of Comic Sans, which makes it a bit of a chore to read.

All in all, it’s an interesting concept, and could be the basis for something promising, but probably isn’t worth buying at its current price, unless you are madly in love with HPL’s prose and simply can’t get enough of it.

by on

This is a post-apocalyptic survival story with supernatural romance elements. Neither of these are genres I particularly like, but this book pleasantly surprised me. Part of what makes it work is that not a lot of time is spent on explaining why the apocalypse occurs. One minute everything is fine, then bam! It’s… not fine. Everything is destroyed and monsters are coming out of the Earth to kill everyone.

The story follows a woman named Sairha, and a man named Sven whom she had just met prior to the apocalypse. The couple, as well as Sairha’s friend Cassandra, start out on a trek across the wasteland. Along the way, they meet other survivors, as well as plenty of monsters and other dangers.

It’s pretty much what you would expect from a post-apocalyptic story, but what makes it work is how the monsters are kept out of sight for much of the time. They are most threatening as a lurking menace, hinted at without knowing exactly what they are.

What also makes the story effective is how the tension is built. More than once, the party goes to some sinister location, such as an abandoned store, and, after a nerve-racking buildup, nothing particularly bad happens. This has the effect of ratcheting up the fear so that when something does finally happen, it’s like an explosion of energy. “Hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of terror” as the saying goes. Not that the story is boring, of course, but you can see how the endless hiking across a wasteland is going to wear down the characters’ patience.

There are a few decisions the characters make that I questioned, but as I have said before, it wouldn’t be a horror story if everybody made the right choices. All told, if you like dark supernatural fiction with just a bit of romance, this is an excellent choice.

by on

It was H.P. Lovecraft, you know, who wrote the phrase “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” By that, Lovecraft meant that putting together seemingly-unrelated facts, human beings could discover undreamable wells of horror.

But, that was Lovecraft, and his business was horror. Naturally, he looked at everything from the horrorist’s perspective. Can correlating dissociated facts have other uses too? Well, let’s put a pin in that for now. (Either a pushpin or a grenade pin; your choice.) For now, we must get to the work at hand: reviewing The Thing From HR by Roy M. Griffis.

If you’re like me, when you see “HR”, you probably think “Human Resources.” But in this case, it means “Human Restraint.” The narrator of our story, Narg, is a shoggoth who works in benighted vistas beyond time. If you have read Lovecraft, you know what that is. If you have not read Lovecraft, just know that shoggoths are scary tentacled monsters.

And yet “Human Restraint” and “Human Resources” are not so different after all. As Narg explains, his work involves lots of tedious paperwork, office politics, and all the other things we associate with bureaucratic offices. The fact that his department deals with human souls is incidental; the annoyances of clerical life are, it seems, truly universal.

And then Narg is sent to do some field work among the humans. His consciousness is installed in the form of a Professor Weisenheimer, a newly-arrived faculty member at an American college. To guide him among the humans, the upper management has also provided him with a human guide also existing in the same body. A good idea in theory, but like so many bureaucratic operations, it is administratively bungled, and the human consciousness that guides Narg is that of a surfer dude named Murphy, or “Murph.”

Together, the two extremely different minds are forced to guide the vessel of Professor Weisenheimer among the humans. In addition to trying to discover why Narg has been given this assignment (again, like so many organizations, the memos are not clear!), they are soon drawn into a conspiracy among the college faculty involving stolen uranium, communist spies, and of course, eldritch blasphemies and horrifying rituals. This is a Lovecraftian story, remember.

And yet… it’s also profoundly anti-Lovecraftian at the same time. A fittingly-Schrödingerian duality. (And yes, this book does include a cat named Schrödinger.) Not only is it a comedy, which is not a word often used in connection with the gloomy old prophet of Providence, but it is ultimately about very human concerns and concepts; the things that make life worth living. Sentimentality, in other words, which is a concept almost entirely absent from the Cthulhu mythos.

I recently watched the film Living, starring Bill Nighy, which is a remake of an Akira Kurosawa film Ikiru. Both films are about a government clerk who, on receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, is forced to confront the question of how he wants to spend his remaining time on Earth. Ultimately, what he discovers is that he wants to spend doing a modest bit of good in the world. Both versions are extremely beautiful films, and I highly recommend them.

But why am I bringing this up? What can a pair of slice-of-life drama movies possibly have to do with this Lovecraftian horror comedy? Well, this is where that bit about correlating contents from earlier comes in: because despite differences in setting, tone, genre, etc. The Thing From HR has basically the same theme: that what’s important in life is helping out as best you can. Even if you’re just a lowly bureaucrat in some department nobody cares about, you still may have a chance to, in some small way, make the world better. And you should have the courage to do it, even if it means going against standard practice and talking directly to the big boss.

Now, of course The Thing From HR is largely a bawdy, irreverent, horror-comedy, with all that entails. Lovecraft purists might object to that; but I would guess most readers will find it hilarious. Particularly enjoyable are all the exchanges between Narg and Murph trying to understand Earth slang. And by at least one metric, it’s the most suspenseful book I’ve ever read: for the first time ever, I actually skipped ahead a little to see if one character would be okay. (The answer, as it turned out, was ambiguous.)

If you like Lovecraft, but also don’t mind affectionate parodies of his oeuvre, then I highly recommend this book. Even if you’re not a fan of Yog-Sothothery, though, this one will likely be a hit. It’s got plenty of horror, but also plenty of humor, and plenty of heart.

by on

I found out about this book from Lydia Schoch’s review, and anything Lydia likes is something I’ll give a try. And I’m glad I did. This is a shorty story–5,501 words to be exact–but it’s effective, and it uses all those words to good effect.

The only problem with a story so short is that it’s hard to go into much detail about spoiling the story, so I’ll deliberately keep the plot synopsis vague. It’s about a fishing trip that goes wrong. More generally, it’s in the grand tradition of the ghost story, where people get warned not to do something, do it anyway, and suffer the consequences.

This is the kind of tale you tell around a campfire on a dark night, maybe changing the details here and there to make it better suited to your present location. You don’t need thousands of pages to tell a good scary story; you just need to evoke the feeling of being in a fog and then, when then tension is at its highest, spring something out of it.

The Killer Catfish of Cape Cod is an effective horror short story.

by on

This is a collection of short stories about various cryptids. Some of the stories are creepy, some are funny, some are just mysterious.

I admit it, I’m a sucker for tales of legendary creatures. I think I’ve watched every episode of the TV show Boogeymen, which could spin a compelling yarn about nothing more than an oversized otter. How much more fun is a cryptid legend when imbued with the dramatic structure that fiction allows?

I think what really makes this collection so strong is how easy it is to relate to the characters in every story. Engelhardt makes sure never to forget to make them interesting, even when it might be easy to rush to the bit about the legendary creatures.

It’s hard to review short story collections because you can’t necessarily discuss the stories without also spoiling all of them. So, let me borrow a technique from H.R.R. Gorman, and quickly discuss my favorite, least favorite, and the most memorable stories from the collection:

Favorite: “Serpent in Paradise.” This is a story about two monster hunters who visit a resort where they hunt for a sea monster. I really liked this story; it has a good balance of characterization and plot, and all of it is very economically done. The dynamic between the two main characters helps ground the story in reality, which is important when telling a tale of the outré and bizarre.

Least Favorite: “How Jackrabbit Got His Antlers.” Let me clarify that just because it’s my least favorite doesn’t mean it’s a bad story. It’s not at all. It just felt more like a fairy tale than the rest of them. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just not my thing.

Standout: “Oh, the Places You’ll Hide: A Brief Guide for the Library Specialist After the Undead Uprising.” A mock-scholarly treatise on the changing role of the librarian in a post zombie-apocalypse world. The funniest story in the whole book.

The collection is almost perfect. The only thing it is missing is, of course, the greatest cryptid of them all: the Mothman. I’m always up for a Mothman story. I wouldn’t mind seeing the two monster hunters featured in the first and last stories in this collection take him. Just an idea.

Still, lack of Mothman aside, this collection is a fantastic tale to read of an October’s e’en. Highly recommended.

by on

Last year, Lydia Schoch and I made an agreement that January 31 would be “Second Halloween.” Accordingly, I’m observing the day by reviewing a book appropriate for that spooky season.

And look at that cover. How, I ask you, could I possibly not read a book with that cover? Even though it is the sixth book in Boyack’s “Hat” series, and I have not read any of the others, I simply could not resist.

Fortunately, Boyack writes such that you don’t have to read the others to understand it. Maybe a few references went over my head, but I could follow it well enough. It tells the story of a musician named Lizzie, her magical talking hat, and a friend of theirs who has been revivified Frankenstein-style and needs to find medicine to stay alive.

But, finding the medicine means finding the doctor who restored him, and he has fallen into the clutches of the titular monster, the sinister-looking entity pictured above.

The book is fast-paced and action-packed. Lizzie and her friends must mow down waves of pumpkinheaded zombies to reach the Rambler in time. There are also moments of downtime when they gather clues by listening to a paranormal late-night radio show along the lines of Coast-to-Coast AM. As you can imagine, I loved these parts of the story.

This is a fun and enjoyable read for Halloween. Or, in this case, Second Halloween. Which is going to be a thing, by golly! What better way to liven up this dreary time of year?

by on

A classic ghost tale in the Gothic tradition. The protagonist becomes obsessed with the romantic legend of a ghost said to haunt Arlen Hall, and will stop at nothing to meet the specter face-to-face. But, as the cover says, be careful what you wish for…

Speaking of covers, I know we’re not supposed to judge books by them, but simply considered as a standalone artwork, is not that cover perfect? It’s practically a story in itself.

This is a super-short book; easy to read in one sitting, but it’s still highly enjoyable all the same, and a good introduction to Painter’s dark, often ironic sense of humor. Just don’t expect a sprawling novel; this is a more of a quick sketch.

As I write this review, there’s a debate raging on Twitter about whether a traditional mystery story can have supernatural elements. (The word “traditional” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) This book is a good example of how a story can include the supernatural, yet still be resolved in a logical and consistent manner.

My suggestion is to pick this one up along with some other short Halloween stories, and read all of them on one of these dark October evenings, when the wind is howling and the leaves are rustling, and the rain is lashing at the windows, and there are strange lights in the mist but you can’t remember the neighbors putting out any decorations yet…

by on

This is a dark paranormal thriller. I don’t want to say too much about the plot. Just think Rosemary’s Baby meets The X-Files. It tells the story of Moire Anders, a woman who finds herself waking up in the middle of the night in the park, with no memory of how she got there. Eventually, trying to figure out what is happening leads her to uncovering a sinister conspiracy, of which she is the primary target.

Anyone who enjoys a good, creepy mystery will probably like this. There are some pretty disturbing elements, which I can’t discuss too deeply without giving away plot elements, but if you’re accustomed to stories like those I mentioned above, you probably can guess what’s coming.

In other words, this is definitely a departure in tone from Painter’s other books, which tend to be light-hearted fantasies. It’s a significant enough difference that the ebook is only available via the author’s Payhip website, and not on other sites that recommend through algorithms. (A paperback version is available through Amazon.)

I understand this decision, from the author’s perspective. One doesn’t want readers who are used to magical comedies seeing a book by the same author and being unwittingly plunged into a world of sinister scientists conducting fiendish experiments on unsuspecting and unwilling people.

At the same time, though… this is something about the modern entertainment market that bothers me. It rewards taking the safe path, putting out similar stories again and again, rather than risk-taking. Painter has decided to boldly experiment in her fiction, but the market is against her.

Therefore, we will just have to adjust the market and change the incentives. So! If you like eerie, mysterious thrillers with some strong horror elements, and in particular if you enjoyed X-Files (or better yet, the old Coast-to-Coast AM radio show), give this a spin. A quirky comedy, it most certainly ain’t, but it’s a good, creepy story all the same.

by on

I saw this in Lydia Schoch’s weekly list of free books a while back, and I just had to give it a try. Look at that cover! How cool is that?

Well, as great as it is, the book is even better. It begins by telling the story of Lord Oisin, who fought to avenge the raiding of his town by a bandit known as Cumhil.

Fast forward a few centuries, to the 1780s, when a disillusioned British soldier returning from the war in America finds himself billeted in Cahir Mullach, the castle of Lord Oisin. And on All Hallows’ Eve, no less!

You all probably know that I love Halloween, but you may not know that I also love the American Revolutionary period and everything associated with it. The way Callahan portrays the British infantrymen here really grabbed me: Corporal Michael Snodgrass is a brave man, who witnessed many terrible things in a futile war against the rebelling colonists. Rather than the common American conception of British soldiers as sneering, inhuman, “imperial stormtroopers with muskets,” Snodgrass is depicted as a real person, with an essentially good heart turned bitter by the war, and suffering from what we in modern times would call PTSD.

The other characters are great too: from the kindly priest of the town of Baile, to the greedy, conniving landlord plotting to evict the town’s populace, to the mysterious old woman who, despite the Catholicism of the era, has not forgotten the pagan knowledge of older times.

How it all ties together, I won’t say, but it’s in the great old tradition of stories about spirits meting out justice for old wrongs. It’s true, after a certain point I knew where it was going, but that’s not a bad thing, because I enjoyed every minute of the ride. What I liked best was how the characters grew over the course of the story.

And the atmosphere! Did I mention it’s Halloween? In Ireland? It simply doesn’t get much more Halloween-y than a thick fog late at night, on some lonely trail, ghostly voices whispering in the dark, and then, suddenly, a castle, looming out of the mists!

I thought about waiting to review this book until October, but I couldn’t. It’s too good; I had to tell you all about it immediately. Buy it now, and save it for a chilly Autumn evening, and then let yourself be drawn into Callahan’s marvelous tale of the horrors of war, of ghostly vengeance, of Pagan mysteries and Christian charity, and most of all, of redemption and healing.