Leisure / February 2010
Reviewed by: Rick R. Reed

Synopsis: One morning the residents of Walden, Virginia, woke to find themselves cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of darkness.

Review: The premise above sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Especially for fans of books like Stephen King’s Under the Dome or even Michael Grant’s Gone. Like Darkness on the Edge of Town, those books both had apocalyptic breakdown of civilization premises and both of them worked, more or less. I wish I could say the same for Keene’s work.

The simple synopsis above, taken from the book’s Amazon detail page, is chilling – and it pretty much encapsulates the whole novel – and that’s too bad, because the premise offers so much more potential. The dark is one of our greatest human fears, with us from as far back as most of us can remember. To imagine a world where a thick wall of darkness has surrounded it, cutting off rain, wind, electricity, and other humanity beyond the confines of our one small town is some genuinely creepy fodder for spine-tingling horror. What lurks in the darkness? What if the darkness were a real thing? A force, evil and unconquerable?

To his credit, Keene does explore those last couple of questions in his story of a small town where suddenly darkness reigns and it appears that its twelve thousand or so residents are the only people remaining in existence. But it almost seems as though he set out to downplay what could have been a genuinely horrifying thrill-ride and mute it, burying it in shades closer to gray than black.

Like Stephen King, to whom this author is often compared, Keene gives us a ragtag assortment of working class characters, everymen and everywomen, and sets them down in circumstances that are bizarre and terrifying. Here we have the good-hearted average Joe pizza deliveryman, living with his pot-smoking girlfriend in a rundown apartment. The deliveryman narrates the story, or what there is of a story. The characters, like the story, are bleak and hopeless.

Unfortunately, Keene doesn’t give us much of a story; he gives us a situation. Darkness falls. Darkness is a real thing, a hungry beast capable of preying on our worst fears and longings. Darkness may have destroyed the rest of the world save for the inhabitants of this small Virginia town. Darkness is driving the townsfolk crazy, pitting them against each other and causing them to revert to raping, killing, and mutilating beasts.

But that’s really it. We watch as things go from bad to worse. We listen in on endless conversation about how hopeless the characters’ plights are. We see them feebly try to beat back the pitch. But there’s no real tension. There’s no suspense. The book plods along and never really finds a good foothold, not in sympathetic characters or in a careful building of conflict and tension. I kept reading, partially because I knew I was reviewing the book for this column and partly because I have read other Brian Keene books and loved them. I hoped that this one would redeem itself. I longed for a crackerjack of an ending, a devious twist, maybe an explanation of why.

And I got no payoff. The book, like some of the town’s residents, limped along to an anticlimactic ending that left me feeling dissatisfied and disappointed.

I usually try and write about books that cast a spell in a good way for this column. Unfortunately, Darkness on the Edge of Town cast only a spell of impatience to move on to the next book.

Purchase Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene.

Columnist Rick R. Reed is the author of thirteen novels, three collections, and has short fiction in more than twenty anthologies. He lives in Seattle, WA. Find out more about the author at his official author website.

EOS (Harper Collins) / October 2009
Reviewed by: Martel Sardina

How could two people with no supernatural abilities be expected to save Raine’s Landing when a twisted serial killer finds his way into town? Ex-cop Ross Devries and his sometimes partner, Cassandra Mallory, have to be wishing they knew the answer. The threat they’re facing in Night of Demons, Tony Richard’s second book in this dark fantasy series is a grave one. Raine’s Landing is supposed to be protected from the outside world. How Cornelius Hanlon made it past the magic that keeps Raine’s Landing off the map is anyone’s guess. But now Hanlon’s here and he’s wasted no time in putting his talents to work finding his own brand of “special fun.”

Richards opens the novel by giving readers a terrifying look at “The Shadow Man” – the moniker given to Hanlon after terrorizing Boston on a nearly year-long killing spree. Hanlon was a formidable opponent before finding his way to Raine’s Landing. When he kills one of the town’s most powerful adepts and gains control of the Wand of Dantiere, Hanlon’s possession of the device gives the term “Shadow Man” a whole new meaning.

Meanwhile, Devries and Mallory have their hands full as a series of bizarre murders begin cropping up all over town. Raine’s Landing is generally is quiet place, free from the troubles of the outside world. Nothing makes sense until another outsider, Lauren Brennen, the cop who has been pursuing “The Shadow Man” links Hanlon to the current crimes. Ross is grateful for Lauren’s assistance; however, Cassie is put off by it. Will the trio be able to work together? Or will “The Shadow Man” find a way to pit them against each other?

As the tale unfolds, Richards successfully cross genres, giving readers elements of mystery, thrills and sheer horror. In stories like this, you are not supposed to root for the villain, but it’s so hard to find a good serial killer in fiction these days. This reviewer found herself taking delight in certain lines of dialogue spoken by “The Shadow Man” and wishing that Richards had given him more time on the page.

Not having read Dark Rain puts this reviewer at a bit of a disadvantage, removing the ability to comment on how the series up to this point works on the whole. In Night of Demons, Richards provides enough backstory to ground readers in the current action and leaves out enough of the details so if you haven’t read Dark Rain yet, you’ll want to. And if the villain in Dark Rain is half as deliciously evil as “The Shadow Man,” you won’t be disappointed regardless of which book starts your journey to Raine’s Landing.

Purchase Night of Demons by Tony Richards.

Thomas Dunne Books / August 2010
Reviewed by: Daniel R. Robichaud

David J. Schow, the father of splatterpunk (well, the term, anyway), returns with his latest excursion into novel as weapon, this time targeting the espionage-thriller genre with a tale of bad guys and bad guys.

The story revolves around an advertising man, Conrad Maddox, who finds himself in accidental possession of someone else's airport locker key. Curious as anyone would be, he uses the key and discovers an unclaimed Halliburton case. Still curious, he opens the case and seals his fate.

The Halliburton contains deadly weapons, in depth reportage for the assistant to a politician his company is working for, and false Federal credentials. A simple act--opening the case--is enough to drop kick him into the subterranean world of espionage, double dealings, and assassination. He soon finds himself drowning deep in trouble, but rescued from imminent death by a shadow ops man called Dandine (for whom the case was intended). What follows is a sometimes frantic, sometimes talky tale of the strange bond these two men form while tracking down answers about the mysterious forces at work (an organization called NORCO), the motivations for those forces, as well as reeducating its readers in the workings of modern day international espionage. In a nutshell: This isn't your granddaddy’s James Bond.

The plot often treads familiar ground, unsurprising as it is derived from "the wrong man" idea underlying several of Alfred Hitchcock's films as well as assorted hardboiled paperbacks from Fawcett Gold Medal (as well as the more recent Hard Case Crime series). Maddox's tale offers twists and turns aplenty and a few authentic surprises, a large cast of helpful and/or antagonistic bastards (a majority of which are macho males, sadly), and concludes with a finale that leaves few dangling threads unresolved. However, the plot is not really the point of this novel.

As this is a work from the World Fantasy Award winning author of "Red Light" and the International Horror Award winning author of Wild Hairs, it is anything but a light or mindless romp.

The title alone suggests slaughter as well as dangerous conflict. Plenty of both are found in these pages. As well as a sizeable pool of fictional characters, Internecine takes quite a few thoughtful shots at popular culture. Here is where the novel's real meat can be found. Apart from the almost-too-easy skewering of unrealistic thriller films (especially pop portrayals of the material herein portrayed), Internecine takes a hard and cynical look at the field of advertising and the mindset of the advertiser. The ugly world of shadowy subterranean operators acting outside the awareness of normal folks (dubbed "the walking dead" because they lack real lives) but influencing their world in subtle ways is a sure stand in for the even uglier world of advertising, and Conrad Maddox acts as both eyewitness and tour guide to both realms via first person narration.

While Conrad is no killer, no government torturer, in short order he reveals himself to be decreasingly likeable. His narration reveals the detached voice of a sociopath whose target is not human life but human minds. The passages explaining his manipulative outlook is where this book gets truly dark.

Longtime readers of horror fiction, whether they cop to it or not, become rather desensitized to certain violent acts. A level of depravity is expected, and as such loses its shock value. However, the one thing that still nails me is the ugly mindset operating behind those violent acts. Not the clichéd serial killer's flashback-to-momma chapters in banal novels, but the sorts of deeply wrong monstrosities that otherwise look and act and reason like normal human beings. A rogue's gallery of them already populates Schow's fiction (i.e. "Bad Guy Hats," "Refrigerator Heaven" and "Unhasped"). Internecine offers further specimens aplenty, but the at once sympathetic yet awful narrator himself, provokes me the most.

Maddox is a paid manipulator, a man who is himself incapable of making lasting relationships with normal people, yet who understands "the walking dead" world of lawyers and accountants and gas station attendants and independent contractors and book reviewers and soccer moms well enough to understand the ways to make them think what he wants them to think and to act how he wants them to act. In fact, at several points, the book takes pains to manipulate the reader and then reveal how the trick was done. It succeeded on me quite a few times. This is an unusual, shaming and disturbing instance of intelligent but mean-spirited text.

Schow's prose is as finely honed as ever. At turns sparse, at turns poetic, and always dead on the mark, it is a pleasure to see this level of craft. The subject matter is typically grim, often witty, but always engaging.

On the surface, Internecine succeeds as a nasty thriller. However, underlying this somewhat comfortable story is something even nastier: a challenging, confrontational text. A book with real bite.

Purchase Internecine by David J. Schow.

Screaming Dreams / March 2010
Reviewed by: Martel Sardina

Yuppieville.  Now why would anyone want to live in a place like that? 

That’s exactly what Frank is thinking when his wife, Joannie, proposes the idea of leaving Los Angeles for a quiet suburban life in Youngesville, Nevada. Frank is not quite ready to give up city living. But Joannie’s biological clock is ticking and there’s no way she’s going to raise a baby in a neighborhood rife with gang shootings and crime.

Eventually Frank gives in. Joannie has no trouble making the transition and figuring out a way to fit in.  For the first time, she seems genuinely happy. Frank, on the other hand, isn’t. After a strange encounter with his new neighbor, Leonora, Frank’s left wondering what kind of person she really is. Was her come-on some kind of a test? How will he tell Joannie about it? Or would telling her be a big mistake?

While Joannie becomes more entrenched in their new life, Frank sees more and more that he dislikes. Youngesville and its residents are too perfect. And Frank knows that Utopia doesn’t exist. He enlists his brother to help research the history of Youngesville, to find out what is really going on in town.

Richards does a wonderful job of creating conflict, tension and suspense as Frank struggles to find the answers he’s looking for. Youngesville is a creepy place, inhabited by equally creepy people. But what makes them scary is the doubt and the illusion of normalcy. Are there monsters hiding in plain sight? Or is Frank just paranoid?

Yuppieville is full of surprises. It’s not Stepford, Connecticut or Twin Peaks, Washington. But if you liked either of those fictional places, a trip to Youngesville, Nevada might be up your alley. Stay as long as you dare.

Purchase Yuppieville by Tony Richards.

Chelsea Station Editions / April 2010
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Ghosts haunt a gay guesthouse and prompt its proprietor to re-examine his spirituality and the meaning of life in Jameson Currier’s latest novel, The Wolf at the Door.

Avery Greene Dalyrymple III is a middle-aged gay man whose everyday life is a series of small calamities revolving around the New Orleans guesthouse he runs with his ex-(life) partner. Overworked and overwrought on the business front while underwhelmed in the romance department with his current beau, Hank, the last thing Avery needs is to play innkeeper to a bunch of lost souls who have come to regard Le Petite Paradis (grammatical misnomer deliberate) as a holding station for the deceased.

What follows is a delightfully spooky, often kooky, gay vision quest of sorts that finds Avery reevaluating his belief system, questioning his sanity, and more than occasionally dipping into the better bourbons and whiskeys on tap in the guesthouse’s adjacent café.

The Wolf at the Door is the perfect expansion of Currier’s previous genre effort, his Black Quill Award-winning collection of gay ghost stories A Haunted Heart and Other Tales. He continues to skillfully combine the supernatural with the more recurring themes of modern gay literature — the creation of extended families of friends and lovers as support systems, the struggle of gay men of a certain age for societal relevance, even the lingering specter of AIDS.

Prominent throughout The Wolf at the Door is the exploration of religion and faith. From Avery’s first otherworldly encounter that manifests itself as a sexual tryst to the uproarious denouement in which topless lesbians chant voodoo incantations, Currier shines with his deft balance between Avery’s thought-provoking spiritual journey and the acerbic wittiness of his inner monologues:

“But why would a soul want to hang around this place? And why now, after all the years we had lived here did they have to show up? Heaven and hell were just human creations. Human interpretation. A state of mind. Maybe everyone before us had gotten it all wrong. Maybe souls never departed earth’s atmosphere, just lived on in eternity outside the perspective of time and vision. Maybe ghosts of the living were like humidity, rising and falling according to the whims of Mother Nature, Father Sun, and the orbit of Planet Earth. Or maybe we all needed more fiber in our diet to make sure that we did not disturb anyone else in another life.”

As the paranormal pressure surrounding the guesthouse is amplified, Avery opens his mind and the long-renounced homiletic rhetoric of his Southern evangelist upbringing slowly yields to a decidedly more diverse and flexible cafeteria spiritualism, “a mumbo-jumbo gumbo of different beliefs and superstitions.” Currier wisely employs a subtle tone and pace to Avery’s spiritual awakening – using most of the novel’s duration to chart his progression from would-be atheist to firm believer in an elusive higher power – so that when Avery finally arrives at a place of spiritual conclusion, the moment never feels forced or heavy-handed:

“Was this desperation or true faith? I thought, sitting on the edge of the bed, going over in my mind my newest theory, my newest insight into the problems at hand. What if the ghosts and God were related somehow? What if it all had to do with the psychic consciousness and something beyond it, what the mind of the living believed before the soul died, whether the religion was Catholic, Baptist, or Buddhist? What if God created ghosts in the same way he created men and women and animals and plants – but for ghosts, he had created windows of passages from one world to the next to allow them to pass along meaning or messages from the world of the divine and the afterlife to the world of the living? Of course his theory meant that I must accept the fact of the existence of a Higher Power and that life was not just a random clashing of misadventures and unlikely coincidences as I had always felt my life has warranted and exhibited. This wasn’t accidental. God had planned it. And the ghosts, in a sense, proved to me His existence.”

The Wolf at the Door is imbued with a deep sense of history, with several interweaving stories from the 1820’s Louisiana slave trade that parallel some of the characters’ present-day lives. Although some of the characters from these stories appear in ghostly form, we learn about them mostly through a series of old journal entries. Although in moderation these lend a sense of historical authenticity to the proceedings, at times these extended passages slow down the momentum and take the reader out of the main narrative for a bit too long. By the novel’s third act, additional citations from newspaper clippings and an unpublished manuscript also clog up Currier’s otherwise steady pacing, but it’s one small criticism in an otherwise well-executed tale.

With an eclectic and entertaining cast of characters and strong sense of setting, Currier may not even realize himself that he’s got the makings of a potential series here — his very own paranormal French Quarter-set Tales of the City. Like Armistead Maupin’s Mouse Tolliver, Currier’s Avery Dalyrymple is larger-than-life and intricately flawed, and the fact that he just can’t seem to get out of his own way makes him primed for misadventure and gay mayhem.

And, like Maupin’s iconic San Franciscan tableau of Barberry Lane, Currier’s Dumaine Street guesthouse and adjacent Café Surtout become fictional focal points of Big Easy authenticity here. One of Currier’s strengths has always been the ability to soak his narrative in a rich, authentic ambiance and The Wolf at the Door is no exception, with sentences that resonate with the decadent rhythms of the French Quarter and paragraphs that positively drip with Southern gothic moodiness. His fully-realized locale comes even further to life when set against the culinary backdrop of the café, with savory descriptions of the cayenne-drenched Creole cuisine adding texture and local spice to his fictional world.

While The Wolf at the Door is less likely to scare and more apt to beguile, genre fans will nonetheless find plenty to appreciate in Currier’s otherworldly version of It’s a Wonderful Life fused with all the ensemble wit of Tales of the City and the regional gothic texture of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Savor this one like a bowlful of spicy jambalaya and a sniffer of fine aged bourbon on a hot, humid night.

Purchase The Wolf at the Door by Jameson Currier.

Kensington / July 2010
Reviewed by: Rick R. Reed

Synopsis: Award winning author Louise Marley’s compelling, intricately layered story of a beautiful soprano who shares an everlasting bond with the world’s most notorious musical genius…

Octavia Voss is an ethereal singer whose poise and talent belie her young age. In truth, she is a centuries-old vampire who once “shared the tooth” with Mozart himself. To protect her secret, Octavia’s even more ancient friend Ugo stalks the streets to find the elixir that feeds his muse’s soul.

With Mozart’s musical prowess coursing through her veins, the ageless Octavia reinvents herself with each new generation. But just as she prepares to take the stage at La Scala, Ugo inexplicably disappears, leaving Octavia alone — and dangerously unprotected. Octavia vows to find Ugo, but his fate is in the hands of forces much darker than she could ever imagine. And when she learns the truth behind his disappearance, Octavia realizes too late that the life hanging most in the balance is her own.

Review: Just when you think you’ve read everyone in horror who matters, along comes Louise Marley with her amazing and lyrical vampire tale, Mozart’s Blood. Gripping, artful, tellingly detailed, and impossible to put down, Mozart’s Blood is that rare kind of horror novel that works on more than one level. It’s visceral. It’s evocative. It’s scary. It envelops you in atmosphere and delivers on its promise to tell a compelling story.

There’s that old saw – you know the one – about there being nothing new under the sun. Well, I’ve often heard that about vampire stories. They’ve been around so long and told in so many ways and with so many variations, is there really anything new left to say? Or is everything written about vampires just a rehash of the same old tropes we know, love, and dread?

Louise Marley has taken the vampire mythos (and, stunningly, the werewolf one, too) and breathed new life into it. Breathing new life into the undead, whether you’re speaking literally or about literature, is no easy feat. But Marley, with her tale of an opera diva who was “turned” during a ménage a trois with Mozart himself and a Czech aristocrat, has used her imagination to craft something wholly original and often beautiful to behold. I love the way Marley takes us through the various lives of the singer, having her go away and then return as a new persona, so she can continue to indulge in her true passion, which is not blood, but music. And what music! One of the conceits of the book is that vampires, each time they take blood, they also take the memories of their victims. Our opera diva has the memories – and feelings – of Mozart himself. Who better to sing Donna Anna in his Don Giovanni? Any good opera singer knows half the battle is not in the voice but in the intention and the emotion behind the notes.

The book is infused with music, with global color (the descriptions of Italy and La Scala in Milan in particular are rich and detailed), and with a kind of strange love. A Sicilian werewolf she meets during the great earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco looks after our opera singer. His story is as compelling as hers and their intertwined lives over the years make fodder for fascinating reading. This was one book I was sorry to see conclude.

Marley also cleverly uses music as metaphor for immortality, tying it all together superbly with her paranormal creatures and showing how they’re linked as both curse and blessing.

Mozart’s Blood is one you won’t want to miss.

Purchase Mozart’s Blood by Louise Marley.

Columnist Rick R. Reed is the author of thirteen novels, three collections, and has short fiction in more than twenty anthologies. He lives in Seattle, WA. Find out more about Reed at his official author website.

St. Martin’s Press / January 2009
Reviewed by: Blu Gilliand

In writing Haunted Heart, an unauthorized biography of Stephen King, Lisa Rogak had a couple of major hurdles to clear. Whether or not she was successful in doing so is going to depend entirely on the reader’s familiarity with King prior to picking up this book.

As I understand it, the allure of the unauthorized biography is that they often share information that the subject has been reluctant to discuss, especially in our day of carefully manicured and polished public images. These are the places you go to get the kind of juicy behind-the-scenes dirt that helps magazines like People and websites like TMZ thrive. Rogak even comments on this in her introduction, where she writes: “The running joke among biographers is that if it is authorized, the book makes a good cure for insomnia.”

This idea may be true when the subject is someone like Oprah Winfrey, whose very existence depends on having total control over her public image, but in King’s case Rogak’s comment simply doesn’t fit. As both die-hard fans and casual readers are sure to know, King has always been extremely forthcoming about the personal demons that infuse his work and life. He’s talked in countless interviews about his years of substance abuse, his run-ins with obsessive fans, and his doubts and insecurities about the quality of his writing and the legacy he’s leaving behind. This is the man who, after all, once compared his contributions to literature as the equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. This is also the man who wrote On Writing, and it’s the “C.V.” section of that very book – King’s short but no-holds-barred memoir – that really serves to derail Rogak’s efforts.

You see, there’s precious little in Haunted Heart that King hasn’t already talked about or written about, whether it’s in On Writing or in the thousands of interviews he’s participated in over the years. So, Rogak’s first hurdle was in finding material that will be new to people. She may well have succeeded in this with casual readers of King’s work, but anyone who has moved beyond that description into full-blown fandom will know everything contained in her book already.

The second hurdle comes in re-telling (or re-writing) material already shared with us by one of the most talented and distinctive voices in writing. Rogak’s writing is not bad, but it is a bit workmanlike, without a lot of real personality or style. It almost reads like a book report instead of a book. When compared with King’s own autobiographical effort, which contains so much of the same material, it’s really no contest.

Haunted Heart is not awful, and it might even be revelatory for someone who’s only read a couple of King’s books and is curious as to what makes a guy write all that horror stuff. But for anyone who’s followed King’s career with anything approaching fandom, move along — there’s nothing to see here.

Purchase Haunted Heart by Lisa Rogak.