from Shroud Magazine / Issue 9, Summer 2010
Reviewed by: Daniel R. Robichaud

Shroud Magazine's ninth issue opens with Marie (Midnight Never Come) Brennan's variation on a classic fairy tale.

In "Footsteps" readers find a prince searching for a wife, a grand ball attended by masked guests, and a mysterious party crasher who rushes away at the stroke of midnight, leaving muddy footprints.  Of course, we are squarely in "Cinderella" territory. The tale is brief, yet readers will find several different masquerades, a kingdom-wide search for an unidentified lady (complete with specially crafted footwear), a heartfelt proposal, and the big reveal that this is not a happily-ever-after story but a chilling tale of an unwelcome surprise guest.

The plot is straightforward and perhaps predictable to anyone familiar with the "Grim Fairy Tales" from Haunt of Fear comics. The Rule of Three tells savvy readers how many balls there will be. This tale's appearance in a magazine dedicated to the macabre tells us not to expect a straight "Cinderella" retelling. However, the story remains enjoyable due to its descriptions, its playful skewering of the familiar, and several enjoyable turns of phrase. Just take a look at the first line:

"Among the noble flowers that have gathered for the ball, the hopeful young ladies in lavender and spring green and pink, she stands out like a rose, red-black as venous blood."

How could readers resist venturing on?

Since 1993, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have edited several anthologies that offer dark re-imaginings of fairy stories (like 1993’s Snow White, Blood Red). Brennan's tale hearkens back to those anthologies in all the right ways; it uses the familiar to weave a well written dark fantasy.

"Footsteps" is a tasty treat, a literary morsel to be savored for its rich sentences, its images, and the way it builds to a chilling conclusion.

Purchase Shroud Magazine, Issue #9 (Summer 2010), which includes “Footsteps” by Marie Brennan.

Cemetery Dance / December 2010
Reviewed by: Blu Gilliand

Brian James Freeman has gotten a lot of attention for the way he's gone about marketing his new book from Cemetery Dance, The Painted Darkness. In case you're one of the few who hasn't heard — he gave it away. Every word, available for free as a download. There was no gimmick. There was no agreement required that those downloading the file would turn around and purchase the physical book when it comes out in December. Hey, he even gave it to this reviewer twice — not long after I downloaded the electronic version, he was kind enough to send me an advanced copy of the printed product.

So, while we've heard a lot about the way Freeman is publicizing his work, we’ve yet to hear a lot about the work itself. I have no doubt that's going to change as we march closer to the publication date, and I'm happy to be among the first voices moving beyond the cry of "It's free!" and into the realm of "It's great!"

Because it is, you know. It's an ambitious piece of storytelling that delves not only into the mysterious act of creation itself – something that many in Freeman's audience will be able to relate to – to something we can all relate to: the crippling power of childhood fears. The fact that it does all this in quiet, understated tones reminiscent of the likes of Charles L. Grant makes it all the more amazing, moving and powerful.

Henry is a painter, living in an old rural farmhouse with his wife and young son. His attic is his workspace, and lately he's been spending a lot of time up there – even more than usual – painting canvases that he promptly turns to face the wall. He can't remember what he's painted on those, and for the time being it doesn't seem important. On this particular day, he's poised in front of another blank canvas, seeking that thin entryway into the state of semi-dreaming that he enters when he works. It's not coming easy, though, as there's more than art on his mind — his wife, upset at the amount of time he's been zoning out and working lately, took off with his son last night, and he hasn't heard from them since they left.

Eventually, though, he eases into work, only to be brought out of his reverie a few hours later as the boiler in the cellar begins making ominous sounds. As he breaks away from painting to take care of the boiler, Henry finds that the threads of a childhood memory are beginning to come back to him — a memory that ties right into the core of his artwork. Freeman presents that memory to us in a series of flashback chapters intercut with the chapters following present-day Henry, allowing us to discover the incident even as Henry is recovering its memory for the first time in his adult life.

In The Painted Darkness, Freeman is doing far more than telling a scary story (although he is telling a scary story, and doing it quite well). He's looking at the questions that all artists are frequently asked. Questions about where ideas come from, and whether something imaginary becomes real once the artist brings it to life. Writers in particular talk often about how their "real" and "imaginary" worlds blend together — how often have you heard writers say that their characters speak to them, or that they feel less like they're making something up and more like they're transcribing events that are really taking place? If characters in books seem real to readers, imagine how they must seem to the one that created them.

For Henry, the reality of his creations is even more, well, real than most. And as the events of this book unfold, both in the present-day sections and the flashback, we begin to understand how dangerous that reality is, and how important his work has become.

Freeman balances both narratives expertly, dovetailing them together at the end so that we are presented with one cohesive, impactful story. Jill Bauman contributes a series of black-and-white illustrations that perfectly convey the mood of the tale.

The Painted Darkness is a quick read, but it’s one that sinks in and stays with you for a while. Artists will have a special appreciation for Freeman’s views on the nature of creation, but anyone who has an appreciation for the work that artists do – not to mention the appreciation of a good old-fashioned spook story – will enjoy this book.

Purchase The Painted Darkness by Brian James Freeman.

Library of Horror Press / August 2010
Reviewed by: Daniel R. Robichaud

Kody Boye's collection Amorous Things (originally published by Lame Goat Press in 2009, new edition from The Library of Horror) contains 17 stories that range from dark fantasy to gory horror, from moody meditations to terror tales in the spirit of Stephen King and Tales from the Crypt.  As with most collections, this is a mixed bag — readers will encounter some truly moving prose and some overwrought sentences, some stories that succeed and some that don't. As this is Boye's first collection, it is no surprise to find such range. The surprise comes not from its low points, but from the highs of its successes.

Until reading this book, I was unfamiliar with Boye's work. These stories reveal a writer with promise, though that promise is not yet fully realized.  The fiction is often written with a lyrical language, playful turns of phrase, and some honest emotions. What the stories lack in subtlety, they often make up for with passion.

Unfortunately, several pieces lacked the necessary life details to hit full on verisimilitude. The stories they tell are fantastic in ways they should not be, in ways that broke my ability to suspend disbelief. Whether it's a matter of a homeowner giving no concern to a water bill hike when he wakes to find the outside spigot has been running all night, to the technical detail that completely exposed lungs should collapse instead of continuing to work for weeks/months while the victim watches, there are dozens of places that broke my belief in the fictional situations' reality. Fantasy and horror require a baseline of believability or else a good clue to the ways the story's world is different from the one readers know.

That said, when Boye's fiction is really working, it achieves a dreamlike lucidity and emotional authenticity. The collection's standout story ("Dreams") follows a teacher and his star high school student who share dreams about swans, dragons, and fantastic landscapes. The two discover these nocturnal visions are more than metaphors, when they learn of a swan nested in pollution threatened land. Their struggle to save this majestic creature from its toxic environs makes for a moving tale, a spiritual horror piece. The questions it considers are not only topical (in these days of Gulf oil spills and other environmental issues) but prescient. In many ways, the story reads as purposeful provocation – as stated before, the prose can be unsubtle – but it seldom stoops into either the propagandistic or pedagogical. Answers are not made explicit; questions are.

Boye's driving themes are plain in these tales. The title of the collection suggests affection, and this makes its way into the contents. Many of the stories center on relationships — the two most popular are either widowed men with their remembered spouses, or fathers and their sons. A few surprises leap out however, including a pair of stories that feature well-developed homosexual relationships. One of these, the moving "War is in the Hearts of Men," tackles its Don't Ask, Don't Tell material with a fresh approach and authentic pain.

The stories dealing with the horrific and the supernatural from odd angles are often the strongest pieces in this work. Such fiction as "Elijah" (about the dysfunctional relationship between a beautiful young man and his elderly lover, which builds to a macabre conclusion) and "An Amorous Thing" (exploring the sensations a corpse experiences after its brutal murder) stand head and shoulders above some of the more "traditional" horror pieces, such as "Beautiful Woman" (wherein a masked woman-creature uses the question "Am I beautiful?" to determine what boys she will mutilate with a hook). Boye's strengths lie in evoking the unfamiliar otherworldly. Reliance upon the familiar ghosts or torturing lunatics often results in less interesting reads.

Boye is still finding his way in his fiction. While Amorous Things has its share of shortcomings, its contents also suggest a promising future for this storyteller. Many of these tales are still early pieces, but they are not amateur works.

Purchase Amorous Things by Kody Boye.

Signet / September 2010
Reviewed by: Daniel R. Robichaud

Bentley Little's latest excursion into terror fiction delivers creepy thrills and unexpected twists as a group of adventurous college students find themselves victims of strange circumstances.

Before beginning another year at UCLA, Gary and his friends head into Nevada's Black Rock Desert for the Burning Man project. They expect a fun excursion at the week-long festival. Instead, mystery cuts their pleasure short. Waking from a surprise drugging, the friends find one of their number has disappeared. At first, they suspect Gary's girlfriend Joan has just wandered off. When this proves not to be the case, suspicions take a darker turn: Perhaps she has been taken against her will.

The local sheriff's department is no help. Officially, missing persons cannot be reported for 48 hours. In the end, Gary's friends convince him to return to Los Angeles, in the hope that Joan might have somehow made it back there.

Joan is not waiting for them. In fact, her dorm roommate has also vanished. Involving the LAPD reveals even odder turns: there are no school records, no DMV files, no social security information, no documentation for either of the disappeared girls.

Gary cannot stop searching for answers behind Joan's disappearance. His near-obsessive struggles to understand how someone can suddenly cease to exist brings troubles aplenty. Soon the friends face dangers beyond their expectation or experience.

Bentley Little's fiction is often at its best when it quirks normal situations by introducing elements that are both oddly funny yet chilling. Novels like The Store, The Ignored, University, and Dispatch (as well as stories such as "The Washingtonians" and "The Wheel") use surreal and satiric terrors to create engaging fiction often unlike anything else in the mass market. The Disappearance's opening half channels the bizarre and the unexpected. The deepening mystery starts strong and grows increasingly intriguing, hinting at either real world or supernatural conspiracies. The book seduces its reader through disparate clues.

However, The Disappearance's narrative is not a single-minded tale of horrific uncertainty. When the novel hits its second half, the mystery is quickly resolved. At this point, it leaves behind the ambiguous horror of its beginning and marches into thriller territory, where it remains through the close. The protagonists become increasingly more active, as they explore their discovery and its macabre implications.

The result is a book with distinctly different moods. This reviewer found the opening half incredibly effective. Little possesses extraordinary skill at imbuing the mundane with menace. Strangely dressed figures skulking across a college campus, a scroll begging protection from someone or something called "The Outsiders", a phone book containing entries identified by role instead of name, and authority figures hiding possibly sinister motivations provide the basis for some surreal but gripping chills.

While the latter half provides violent, thoughtful, page-turning action, once the novel shifts its focus from horror story to straight-forward thriller, readers may find themselves losing some of interest. This is not due to the actual writing; Little's prose remains engaging throughout, as immersive as Richard Laymon's best works. This reviewer’s lessened interest was due more to plotting that relies on overly familiar thriller tropes and expectations. That said, well-developed characters can hold readers' attentions despite almost any plotting decisions, and enough interesting personalities occupy this work to keep even jaded thriller readers going.

The characters Little employs are especially interesting. The college kid-heavy cast calls to mind many, many horror flicks and suggests this book might be a sadistic tale of slashers and sex. Instead of playing to this expectation, Little's cast serves a different purpose. They are old enough to know a thing or two about the world, but they are not so old as to be fully trusting with or entrusted by The System. Experience changes them, clarifying the novel's curiously schizophrenic structure.

In the beginning, the characters are beset by an apparently hostile world; threats arise from any direction (particularly from adult sources). Over the course of the novel, Gary and his friends mature into active parts in the world, ultimately shaping events instead of being continually pushed, pulled, or shaped by them. This is clearly coming of age material.

The Disappearance marks a welcome turn in Little's impressive catalog, diverging from the grim-but-gleeful horror stories of his previous works. It is always nice to see writers venturing into new territory and exploring their driving themes from new directions. Here, darkness is identified but not wallowed in; hope and humor peek through in equal measure. The result is an intriguing novel that stands alongside other coming of age thrillers, such as Richard Laymon's The Traveling Vampire Show, Joe R. Lansdale's The Bottoms, Jeff Strand's Pressure, and Dean Koontz's The Voice of the Night. As a regular Bentley Little reader, this is one reviewer who wonders just what he’ll do next.

Purchase The Disappearance by Bentley Little.

Oceanview Publishing / July 2010
Reviewed by: Martel Sardina

Thrillers: 100 Must Reads is a collection of essays written by today’s top thriller writers on the one hundred “best” books of the genre.  For readers who are unfamiliar with the thriller genre, this collection provides a quick and easy way to find books that are worth reading.  For current fans of the genre, this collection provides the opportunity to find out which books have inspired their favorite authors along the way.  And for those writers aspiring to be the next Lee Child or David Morrell, this collection provides critical information about the craft behind each of the selected works.  The deconstruction of plot and character, and analysis of such, is a virtual blueprint for writers seeking to pen stories of their own.

The “100 Must Reads” list was compiled by seeking the opinions of noted reviewers as well as members of the International Thriller Writers organization.  While Morrell and Wagner readily admit that limiting the number of books selected for analysis was arbitrary, that does not mean that they did not go to great lengths to ensure that the books that were selected had a measurable impact on the genre.  Those that were selected made the list by being groundbreaking in some way — subject matter, character type, writing style/technique, etc. 

The list itself covers a wide range of fiction, starting in 1500 B.C. with Lee Child’s essay on the ancient Greek myth, “Theseus and the Minotaur,” and ending with Steve Berry’s take on The DaVinci Code which was published in 2003.  There are also some unexpected choices on the list, books that this reviewer never thought of as thrillers per se, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans or Jack Ketchum’s Off Season, a novel that would probably be shelved in the horror section of many bookstores.  However, the fact that Morrell and Wagner would broaden their horizons to include books that some might think to be outside their scope is actually proof that the editors carefully considered the merits of each of the titles that were initially suggested.

What made this collection of essays most interesting was the opportunity to find out which books today’s top thriller writers were passionate about and drawing comparisons between the books they chose to write about and that author’s own work.  It’s no surprise to learn that J.A. Konrath is a fan of John D. MacDonald’s The Green Ripper.  Or that Konrath believes that the character of Travis McGee is the “template for the modern day thriller hero.” However, having reading Konrath’s Jack Daniels mystery series, this reviewer can see the practical application of that template when Konrath created his series character, Lt. Jacqueline Daniels. 

The essays are presented in a similar format. Essays average three pages long, beginning with some biographical information on the author of the selected work, moving into the critical analysis and wrapping up with a short bio of the essay’s author.  The consistency in terms of format gave the collection a textbook feel.  In addition, several authors that contributed essays to this collection (F.Paul Wilson, Lee Child, and Jeffrey Deaver, to name a few) have works that are also the subject matter of essays themselves.

Readers should be warned that many of the essays do contain spoilers.  Writers who are looking to deconstruct stories to figure out what makes a “good” thriller work may not mind these revelations.  However, casual readers and fans may want to steer clear of essays for books on their “to be read” list in order to avoid disappointment in the event some critical plot or character elements are revealed in the analysis of said works.

Morrell and Wagner have compiled a collection that is useful to both readers and those aspiring to write in the thriller genre.  The only downside to reading this collection is the likelihood that your personal “to be read” pile will no doubt get larger as a result.  But that’s a problem that can be overcome in time.  And one that most readers won’t really mind.

Purchase Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner

from Asimov’s Science Fiction / Oct-Nov 2010
Reviewed by: Daniel R. Robichaud

After a quick perusal, Kij Johnson's contribution to the October/November issue of Asimov's Science Fiction might read like an optimistic science fiction vignette. Upon closer examination, however, something far more chilling lies beneath "Names for Water."

The straightforward plot revolves around Hala, a student running late for her Complex Variables class. As this is a course she doubts ever succeeding at, she pauses for a phone call from an UNKNOWN CALLER. She answers only to find a strange hissing sound on the other end. This is not a hissing at all, she realizes, but the sound of crashing surf. What follows is a catalog of oceans and lakes and rivers and cloud types as Hala tries to identify the water's source.

By the story's conclusion, the reader becomes privy to not only the call's uncanny source but to the course of events that stems from this odd event. This contact shapes both Hala's future and humankind's progress for the next couple of hundred years. This sequence invites interpretation. Whether the reader takes it as literal truth or as a student's momentary dream/delusion, the story itself ends on an unsettling note. This is due to Johnson's spare but deliberate prose.

Manifestations of loneliness, death, hopelessness, the alien, and the unknowable fill this story. These bring a manic quality to Hala's mission to identify the caller. Her actions recall those of Ramsey Campbell's obsessive characters or the unnamed narrator from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

And how about that ending? Despite the lack of tentacles or conical Yithians, I cannot help but see a nod to Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" here. Perhaps "Names for Water" is not interested in perceiving the end of the human race, but the flash forward sequence remains both reassuring and eerie.

Purchase the current issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, containing "Names for Water" by Kij Johnson.

PS Publishing / December 2009
Reviewed by: Jason S. Ridler

Since arriving on the scene in the mid 1980s, Lucius Shepard has written quite a few literate, magical, twisted and often surreal stories, novellas, and several impressive and engaging novels like Softspoken and Handbook of American Prayer.  His fiction has roamed from SF to magic realism, from describing in detail the people and landscape of Central and South America to the gritty underworlds of North America and fabled landscapes.  In a recent interview I did with him, Shepard referred to himself as an “expatriate writer of exotic tales.” So I find it fitting I read his most recent collection, Viator Plus, beautifully produced by PS Publishing with a wonderful cover by Jim Burns, on buses, planes, and an epic three-hour wait at a Toyota dealership that could have been a JG Ballard play in disguise.

In many ways, Shepard’s work is meant to be read on the move, in places lost in between, and in Viator Plus, Shepard takes us all on exotic journeys through the shifting landscape of his imagination, from punk rock queens to Scandinavian death quests, and all points in between. Unlike some of Shepard’s collections, this one doesn’t weigh a cubic ton, and might be a great way to get new fans interested in a masterful scribe of the lush, dark, and strange.

“The Emperor” was first published at the late, great Sci Fiction. Within a ravaged, environmentally tortured mining planet, a band of unlikely heroes attempt to survive personal and environmental catastrophes through an almost tragic picaresque road story. Grim and desperate action and a dollop of black humor infuse the story’s rich (though bleak) world and environment with humanism amidst the grief.

Like a switchblade, we snap into a completely different vein with “Larissa Miusov”, an unrequited love story involving intoxicating beauty, the lure of Hollywood, and choosing fantasy over reality until reality punches back, hard. No real genre elements here, but it knocked me out and was a fast favorite.

The reader is then treated to two stories featuring the rotten punk rock singer Queen Mother. Both stories – “Carlos Manson Lives” and “Handsome, Winsome Johnny” – appeared in the Polyphony anthologies, and were written under the penname Sally Carteret. According to Shepard, the editors were low on female submissions, so he invented a female penname to go along with these tales of a self-absorbed rock singer whose decadent and self-destructive lifestyle leads her to shimmering moments where reality and the fantastic leach off each other in terrible and compelling ways. Though, the fact that the editors needed an unknown female penname more than that of Lucius Shepard on the table of contents is sad and a bit odd.

With “After Ildiko”, we get a tragic romance based on Shepard’s own misadventures in Guatemala, a river fable of love and loss and the self defeat that makes you wish it wasn’t based on a true story.

The gripping and chilling “Chinandega” is a hunt story where a young man searches for his sister in a corner of Honduras that is both decadent and depraved, and what he finds at the heart of his quest makes me shiver just recalling it.

This reviewer first read “The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast” in Ellen Datlow’s excellent anthology Inferno. And, for me, it was the star story in an amazingly strong collection (though Lee Thomas’s “An Apiary of White Bees” was a close second). It is a tale of rage, of young and unrestrained anger, and how the seduction of power manifests itself and consumes those who play with it. This is perhaps one of the most compelling “angry young man” stories I’ve read where the harshness of the subject matter – and the vitriolic nature of the emotions at play – did not degrade into hyperbole, but created such a strong and terrible world that you felt like you needed a shot of adrenaline after the story was done.

But the dark star of the entire collection is the finale, the novella “Viator.” The original story was published in a cut form, and here we get Shepard’s unvarnished and complete tale of a man whose thread bare existence becomes entwined with an Alaskan salvaging operation aboard a Scandinavian vessel, Viator, that may or may not be alive, may or may not be causing him and the crew to see the world in a surreal light, may or may not be preparing them for a Nordic death quest into parts unknown.

This was an uncomfortable, difficult, and powerful story. Shepard’s talent for  description, for mapping the minds of men who are dissolving into the dark recesses of themselves without purchase, for showing the unraveling of human ties in the wake of mental anguish, are at their peak. It is a relentless story of hardship, livened with moments of wild and mythic imagination as rich as any of Shepard’s masters, but the sum total of the experience leaves you wasted. There is an ember of hope in this story, but it is almost going out by the final paragraph. In the story notes at the end of the collection, I was not surprised, but no less sad, to read that the experiences detailed were in some part taken from Shepard’s own descent into clinical depression while writing the original version. While one of the most draining stories I’ve read, I’m glad, as I am sure Shepard is, to have survived the journey.

Lucius Shepard’s work can be, at times, easy to get into but difficult to hold on to. He loves long paragraphs as much as the Russian realists, and his powers of description can lead to beautiful digressions that can shove some readers off the page. But his talent and craft are killer. Perhaps one of the best writers of his generation, in Viator Plus, Lucius Shepard demonstrates the wide arc of his mad skills and it makes for a heady trip. Just be sure to hold on with both hands.

Purchase Viator Plus by Lucius Shepard.