Doorways Publications / August 2007
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Single-author short story collections are often hit or miss with readers. While some authors excel at the craft of the short story, others prove that the format isn’t everyone’s forte. Fortunately, Shaun Jeffrey falls firmly into the former category with this deliciously macabre collection of 15 twisted tales dealing with observations on death – often told from the viewpoint of the deceased or soon-to-be so.

The collection starts of strong with the whimsically titled “Flibbertigibbet”, a well-crafted tale steeped in Scottish lore and dripping with atmosphere. Jeffrey takes a jab at corporate life here with the simple story of a revived pagan God loose on the moors of a tiny Scottish island marked to become a commercial resort and the company man who learns that corporate dedication doesn’t quite hold the promises he thought. Jeffrey excels at description here, from the baleful mourning of the stag-like creature to the seaside fishing village and old pub.

While in “Flibbertigibbet” one marvels at how Jeffrey manages to pull off a fairly ambitious story in a mere ten pages, the second story demonstrates that economy doesn’t always satiate. “Watchers” boasts the most intriguing premise of the collection – a modern-day lover’s lane with a voyeuristic twist – and blends elements of impending dread with the erotic to excellent effect. The inherent problem here is that this is a story with long legs that’s chopped down at the knees. While satisfying, the story feels constricted and rushed in the short word count, leaving the reader to wonder what horrors the story would have held had it been allowed to breathe a little. It’s a bit like eating one’s favorite meal while standing up, on the go; you simply wish that you had the time to sit down properly and savor every morsel.

In “Paranoid”, Jeffrey puts a uniquely disturbing spin on Tooth Fairy mythology, here set against the backdrop of a thinly-veiled psychiatric wing and employing amnesia as an atypically clever red herring to keep readers sympathizing with the wrong character. One of the finest of the collection, “Paranoid” is a showcase for Jeffrey’s unmistakable talent in the short story format.

“The Tunnel” is a surprisingly effective ghost story that explores the bonds between brothers and how those bonds transcend life and death. Imbued with a sense of childhood nostalgia that evokes Stephen King’s own uncanny explorations of adolescence best exemplified in It, Hearts in Atlantis, and his short story “The Body”, “The Tunnel” spooks while tugging on heartstrings, leaving the reader with a satisfying mixture that’s simultaneously bittersweet and chilling.

It’s in stories like “The Quilters of Thurmond” that readers really catch a glimpse of the storytelling genius that Jeffrey seems destined for. With shades of How to Make an American Quilt crossed with The Witches of Eastwick, “Quilters” offers up a delicious dose of surrealism wrapped in a tidy little tale of rites of passage and how our own sense of tradition and history are integral to our future well-being. Jeffrey fashions a cautionary tale here, warning readers not to forget where they come from. It may very well be what saves us in the end.

Like the aforementioned “Watchers”, “Sin Eater” also suffers from its meager length. Jeffrey sets out to put a fresh spin on the idea of a creature who sustains itself by feeding on the sins of others, but the story fell quickly flat for this reader and left hunger pains in place of a full stomach.

Luckily, in the title story of the collection, Jeffrey again boils an ambitious narrative down into a breakneck-paced story in which every word counts and the reader is left engorged on a satisfying story of life and death and what happens when one straddles the line somewhere in between. A car accident, marital infidelity, betrayal and revenge come full circle in this action-packed story.

“Life Cycle” is a trippy, hallucinogenic tale of a drug-addicted mother-to-be and her offspring. Again richly steeped in atmosphere and mood, “Cycle” nonetheless feels slightly out of place in the collection. Jeffrey once again shows remarkable imagination here as he explores deeper themes in which the bonds between mother and child are put to the extreme.

Jeffrey channels Brian Keene’s Dead Sea in “Dark Inside” in which cruise ship passengers are overrun by some particularly nasty rodents carrying an unnamed plague that turns them into the living dead. Whereas much of popular zombie fiction is told from the survivors’ POV, Jeffrey adds a refreshing first-person narrative to his zombie contribution, allowing the reader to experience the transformation from living to dead to living dead first-hand. It’s a wise choice that saves the story from cliché.

As a reader, I’m again struck by King’s influence on Jeffrey’s work with the well-crafted “Clockwork”. With its distinctive Pet Sematary vibe, “Clockwork” is a creepy chiller in which a deaf boy uses his penchant for making clocks to reanimate some unfortunate critters. Jeffrey soccer-punches here with his King-esque ending.

“Venetian Kiss” is the standout of the collection. Building on the anxiety of its “stranger in a strange land” theme, “Kiss” tells the story of an ill-fated tourist couple on holiday in Italy during carnivale who run afoul of a secret society of decidedly carnivorous Venetians. Again, Jeffrey uses his carnavalesque setting to optimum effect – from the 18^th century masks and costumes to the classical music emanating throughout the narrow streets and gondola-laden waterways of Venice – and creates a thoroughly moody nightmare. It’s a shame that Showtime decided to axe its Masters of Horror anthology series because this reviewer could easily see “Venetian Kiss” being adapted for the screen.

Having explored the bonds between brothers and those between mothers and their children in previous stories, Jeffrey ventures into father-son territory for “The Peacock Lawn”. A malevolent marshland takes center stage in this story of a son who has failed to live up to a tyrannical father’s expectations and is reduced to a stuttering incompetent in the man’s paternal eyes. Strong imagery courtesy of shrieking peacocks, a labyrinthine hedge maze, and spectral visions in a foggy marsh add up to an effective little shiver with a competent Tales from the Crypt-like ending.

Narcissism and the idolatry of celebrity are the vices in need of otherworldly retribution in the red carpet shocker “Envy”. Perfect for this time of year as we are about to be inundated by an awards show season in which what dress someone wears overshadows actual artistic achievement, “Envy” tells the story of a rising actress who’s consumed by finding the perfect dress that will make her the stand-out at an upcoming movie premiere. In the most classic “be careful what you wish for” sense, the young starlet finds out that high fashion can have dire consequences. Brilliantly satiric in this age of Paris Hilton superficiality, “Envy” is another standout in the collection.

Even talented writers aren’t immune from current trends as Jeffrey proves with his uneven “The Snake Charmer”. What starts out as the promising and titillating premise of wife swapping gone bad (or more on the “be careful what you wish for” theme) quickly goes Hostel on the reader with a ghastly climax involving genital torture. Not for the faint of heart.

The collection ends somewhat abruptly with the shortest story in the compilation, “Park Life”. Jeffrey seems determined to show us what he can do in as few words as possible, and he ably accomplishes that with this page-and-a- half zoological shocker in which tables are turned and all is not what one thinks at first glance.

Reading Voyeurs of Death is like going to a wedding and gorging on the appetizers – delectable tidbits of taste that aren’t necessarily satisfying individually but satiate when consumed in volume. The handful of tales offered here show a writer of notable promise and talent, one who has a refreshingly original imagination and the lean writing chops to make us hungry for the full buffet likely to follow. Even when occasionally under seasoned (“Watchers”, “Sin Eater”, “The Snake Charmer”), Jeffrey’s five-star ingredients (“Venetian Kiss”, “The Quilters of Thurmond”, “Clockwork”, and “Envy”) make Voyeurs a mouth-watering stew of short fiction. Pick out the carrots and consume heartily.

Purchase Shaun Jeffrey’s Voyeurs of Death.

William Morrow / October 2007
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

It was inevitable that this collection of ghost stories by Joe Hill, originally published by PS Publishing in the UK in 2005, would find a second life following the massive success of his New York Times bestselling Heart-Shaped Box novel earlier this year. And it’s a good thing that it has because it would seem a shame to have the gems of short stories contained within relegated to the small press in which many first appeared without the chance for mainstream consumption.

Much ado has been made out of Joe Hill being his own man, one (understandably) reluctant to suffer the comparison to his famous father. In this collection of fifteen tales, however, it’s difficult not to read one without thinking of the other when Hill takes on so many of his father’s favorite subject matters and thematic backdrops: baseball, the bonds between fathers and sons, the trials and tribulations of boyhood.

The collection starts off with “Best New Horror”, the story of an uninspired editor whose obsession with tracking down the author of a disturbing short story leads him afoul of some seriously deranged literary rednecks. Solid and engaging, “Best New Horror” is an odd choice to kick off an anthology of ghost stories, and it hints less at twentieth-century ghosts than it does at 1980’s slasher movies. Even “Buttonboy”, the short story within the short story here, hints at the misogyny of the slasher era, so that by the pull of the first chainsaw ripcord at an isolated farmhouse, it’s clear we’ve crossed into Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wrong Turn territory. “20^th Century Ghost”, on the other hand, would have been the ideal leadoff – obviousness of its title aside. The story of a haunted movie theater and the young girl who haunts it, “Ghost” offers a true ghost story in the most traditional sense – one that Hill imbues with an epic feel in a mere twenty pages.

Whereas it took years for King to develop his knack for subtler stories that speak more to the human condition than to the anatomy of fear, Hill bypasses this learning curve altogether with “Pop Art”. Told here in a loving, fable-like narrative, this deeply affecting tale of a teenage boy and his inflatable friend will surprise. Hill nails the bittersweet nostalgia of that first true, best childhood friend. Anyone who can remember the loss of that childhood friend – the one who moved away or was tragically struck by childhood disease or whose presence simply faded over time – will be awestruck by Hill’s poignancy. The last thing one expects when reading a horror anthology is the warmth of their own tears rolling down their cheeks; don’t be surprised when your eyes well up reading the final pages of this remarkable, heartrending story.

Hill switches gears from childhood poignancy to adolescent anxieties in “You Will Hear the Locust Sing”, in which a teenage boy transforms into a giant locust and wreaks havoc on the town he is otherwise doomed to suffer. While immediately reminiscent of those 1950’s, radiation-era B-movie monsters, “Locust” has some serious underlying post-Columbine subtext that warns of kids pushed to the edge. Likewise, “Abraham’s Boys” warns of fathers pushing sons too far in their desire to have them carry on the family legacy in this expansion on the Van Helsing vampire mythos.

It’s back to ghosts in “The Black Phone”, a chilling tale of child abduction, ghostly revenge, and the resiliency of children’s spirits that will ring especially relevant in this age of Amber alerts. Hill expertly blends the harrowing realism of kidnapping with the spooky surrealism of an antique phone that transmits otherworldly calls.

The fine line between heroes and villains is explored in the next two stories – “In the Rundown” and “The Cape.” In the former, Wyatt is an aimless video store clerk who finds himself an accidental Good Samaritan and makes a shocking discovery. The reader realizes that he’s been tragically set-up, caught between two equally hopeless situations just like the fateful Little League play that left him trapped between first and second bases and seemingly derailed his future. In the latter, brotherly rivalry and the roles brothers are relegated to playing in each other’s lives take the form of a magical superhero cape that enables flight. Both are well-executed stories, if middling concepts.

“Last Breath” is by far the creepiest tale in the anthology, a unique and clever spin on the classic ghost story. A retired doctor traps the last breaths of his dying patients, bottling them and putting them on display in a macabre “museum of silence.” The story is unnerving and atmospheric, with the perfect Twilight Zone ending. “Dead-Wood”, on the other hand, is the least effective entry in the collection. The shortest of the stories in the collection, it gets reluctantly swallowed up in the middle and almost comes off as a mindless distraction that interrupts the flow. Proving again that placement of stories within an anthology is key, “Dead-Wood” would have been better served as an italicized introduction to either an individual story or the collection itself.

Every anthology has a story or two that never quite hits its mark; “The Widow’s Breakfast” is that story here. Killian, a homeless drifter who hops boxcars and relies on the kindness of strangers for sustenance, is taken in by a kindly widow who serves him up a hearty breakfast and gives him some of her dead husband’s warm clothes. The story chugs along nicely as another fine example of Hill’s talents in literary realism, with themes of loss central to the tale. Disappointingly, the ending derails an otherwise likable story with an incongruous hint of horror in the form of a ghoulish game being played by the widow’s daughters. The reader is jolted by the abrupt turn in mood and is left hankering for a story that never comes in a creepy scene that seems to exist solely to support the (admittedly) killer closing line.

Ghosts of past memories haunt the protagonist in “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead”, a solid example of Hill’s ability to paint a literary fiction foreground against a horror-tinged background. When two ex-lovers unexpectedly meet on the 1977 film set of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the specters of unrequited love come back for struggling actor Robert Conroy. A poignant tale of humans reconnecting and finding acceptance when life moves us in different directions, “Bobby Conroy” is both an engaging portrait of two people trying to sort through the distance of years and an obvious fan letter to the creator of the Night of the Living Dead film franchise.

Hill returns to the surrealism of Twilight Zone territory in “My Father’s Mask”. Imaginary games, creepy masks, and some decidedly villainous playing cards masquerading as people are at the center of this eerily effective story about the relationships between mothers and fathers and sons, with allegorical whispers of marital infidelity, divorce, and the perceptiveness of children.

The collection wisely closes with the haunting novella, “Voluntary Committal.” As if the final paper in a masters course in short story writing, “Committal” bridges all the gaps, incorporates all the lessons learned, and deftly blends horror and literary fiction in one last hurrah of a tale. Essentially a story about the bonds between brothers, simultaneously tenuous and unbreakable, and the devastating effects of schizophrenia on families, “Committal” skillfully balances between the eerie and the earnest. There are plenty of genuinely creepy moments here amongst the labyrinthine cardboard box forts that double as otherworldly portals into the unknown. With this imaginative and layered story, Hill easily steps out from behind any lineage shadows others might be liable to cast him in.

But wait. Like the surprise ending in a horror film, Hill hides one last tale in the acknowledgements section. “Scheherazade’s Typewriter” concerns a ghost in the machine – in this case the titular IBM Selectric – and the notion that ghosts write about the dead with great authority. Following a frustrated writer’s death, his trusty electric typewriter maintains his nightly writing ritual – three pages a night – and the results amaze his family. Toiling writers take heart: success on the bestseller list is only a death certificate away.

Fans of Heart-Shaped Box will no doubt enjoy discovering Joe Hill’s literary beginnings with the stories included in 20th Century Ghosts. Although uneven at times in theme, the collection nonetheless succeeds on the strength of Hill's uncanny observations of the human condition. Consider the precision with which he nails the solitude of adolescence in this passage from "The Cape":

It was misery to try and keep up with other kids, so I stayed inside after school and read comic books. I couldn't tell you who my favorite hero was. I don't remember any of my favorite stories. I read comics compulsively, without any particular pleasure, or any particular thought, read them only because when I saw one I couldn't not read it. I was in thrall to cheap newsprint, lurid colors, and secret identities. The comics had a druglike hold over me, with their images of men shooting through the sky, shredding the clouds as they passed through them. Reading them felt like life. Everything else was a little out of focus, the volume turned too low, the colors not quite bright enough.

Not every novelist makes a good short story writer; not every short story writer makes a good novelist. But Joe Hill proves he is adept at both, showing a literary maturity that belies his years and a promise of even better things to come with stories here like “Pop Art”, “Last Breath”, and “Voluntary Committal”. Fans can settle in for a long ride. Cynics can blame in on the genes.

Purchase Joe Hill’s 20^th Century Ghosts.

Woodland Press LLC / October 2007
Reviewed by Martel Sardina

Genre anthologies are a tough nut to crack. Readers are typically drawn in by the big name authors and expect those to be the only “good” stories in the collection. The bar is set high when names like Monteleone, Waggoner, Nassise and Burke appear on the list of contributors. It is rare to find an anthology where every story in the collection is not only well-written, but also compelling. Legends of the Mountain State is one of the rare cases where every story delivers on both counts.

The collection opens with Tom Monteleone’s “Images in Anthracite.” Our hero, Cort Fallon, lost his father at the age of ten due to an accident in the Pickman Mine. Years later, he receives a strange letter from a man who claims Cort’s childhood home is haunted by the ghost of Cort’s father. After much debate with his friend, Kevin, the two decide to investigate the man’s claims and find the ghost’s reappearance may be connected to General Energy’s plan to re-open the Pickman Mine. Now that Cort has learned more about his father’s accident and General Energy’s plans, what can he do to stop them?

What happens when a detective can’t solve a case in time to save lives? In “How The Night Receives Them,” Kealan Patrick Burke’s detective has been dubbed “The Poet” due to writing a poem about a case that continues to plague him despite the fact the killer is being brought to justice. Burke paints a gut-wrenching portrait of a man consumed by regret.

Editor Michael Knost must have known that for every good detective story there should be a story of equal merit examining the other side of the law. In Legends of the Mountain State, we are given a couple of different glimpses into how the bad guys live. Joseph Nassise’s hit man in “Money Well-Earned” is hired to kill a monster, the legendary Mothman. When he learns that the Mothman’s touch brings warnings of future evils, he must decide who the real monster is. Bev Vincent plays a game of smoke and mirrors using the legend of “Screaming Jenny” to cover up a crime.

West Virginia as a setting is rich with the necessary elements for weaving ghostly tales. Coal mines, remote farms, and winding mountain roads in small towns combined with people who believe the lore makes for a fantastic backdrop for the collection’s adventures to unfold. Those who are unfamiliar with West Virginia may come away from reading this collection wondering which of our states can really call themselves the “most haunted.” West Virginia may now be a contender for that title.

Purchase Legends of the Mountain State, edited by Michael Knost.

Bad Moon Books / September 2007
Reviewed by: Jeff Burk

Author and Slime City director Gregory Lamberson returns with his second novel, Johnny Gruesome. Essentially a splatter-movie in prose form set against an authentic 1950’s backdrop, a teenage zombie exacts revenge on those who have wronged him. Imagine Grease meets Re-Animator.

Johnny Grissom is just your average pot-smoking high school bad boy with a wayward past. After being strangled by a coked-up friend, his life becomes even more interesting as a bloodthirsty member of the undead. As the story unfolds, his few surviving friends are struggling to beat murder raps and hold on to their sanity while trying to stop their deceased friend.

With its fast cars, leather jackets, and wholesome small town vibe, Johnny Gruesome feels like the drive-in movie you never saw. Lamberson saturates the grisly ordeal with an ever- present sense of fun and melodrama - meant here in the best possible way. Unrequited love, rival gang clashes, and drug disputes are prominent alongside disembowelments and dismemberments. The affecting side dramas are engaging and infuse the story with enough humanity to balance it.

What makes it all so enjoyable is the literary competence Lamberson brings to the proceedings. While he is primarily known for his visual works, there is no denying his skill with the written word. The story is tight and flows along at a very quick pace. While the subject matter may have an adolescent, comic book feel, Lamberson's treatment is anything but. Substance abuse and addiction play key roles, and he treats the material with a grim seriousness not appropriate for younger readers.

While Lamberson may not be charting any new ground with Johnny Gruesome – let’s face it, tales of the vengeful dead have been done innumerable times - his sense of fun and the expert presentation make Johnny Gruesome a blast. It’s like reading an old EC Comic at the sock hop. Lamberson has gone all out with promotion, too; there is a mini-movie, CD, an official mask of the titular character, and online comics - all Johnny-themed - and all on his official website.

This one's for anyone who fantasized about lighting up a joint, knocking back a beer, and decapitating the local jock.

Purchase Gregory Lamberson’s Johnny Gruesome.

Permuted Press / December 2007
Reviewed by: Michele Lee

Skillfully edited by the Stoker-winning Paffenroth, this anthology of the undead starts out strong with the hair-raising "This Reluctant Prometheus" by David Dunwood. Not content to merely tell the clever story of a caveman-era zombie horde, “Prometheus” opens with a shambling undead mammoth and the prehistoric meal that sours Cro-Magnon man into perversions of nature. Dunwood's story is a success not only because he inventively sets zombies in a new era, but because he explores the nature of these beasts, adding a new level to an already terrifying machine in the process. Thoroughly creepy throughout, Dunwood also adds a last kick to keep the horror going.

"The Gingerbread Man" by Paula R. Stiles is a very interesting take on zombie mythos. Here the beast isn't of the mobile dead, flesh-eating creature variety, but rather a god who’s bound to his body and trapped eternally by small deaths that force him to watch over the land. Much like a zombie starts human and turns into a hungry, undead thing, so too does this god start out a peaceful creature only to end with an insatiable thirst for blood. Stories like Stiles’ will easily sustain the zombie sub-genre while simultaneously taking it to new places.

What sets "The Barrow Maid" by Christine Morgan apart from the more common undead warriors-going-into-battle stories is the depth in which it captures the people and setting of its time. Fairy tale-like in its narrative structure, “Maid” is a war story centering on Sveinthor the Unkillable. And while the name alone might tip readers off to the storyline, especially in the context of the anthology’s theme, this tale of a great warrior, betrayed and slain, is interwoven with Viking traditions and culture which really brings the ancient warriors to life.

"Harimoto" by Scott A. Johnson is a Japanese inspired tale where a driven ronin, or masterless samurai, finds that the zombie-like jikininki, or man-eating ghosts, he has vowed to slay to restore his honor aren't all they seem to be. Their leader, Kama, holds the secret to the crowd gathering at a fouled temple. While “Harimoto” presents an interesting variation on zombies, most of the actual story is explained from one character to another rather than discovered by the reader, thus rendering a resolution that isn't as strong or satisfying as it could be.

"The Moribund Room" by Carol Lanham is set in Tudor-era England and stars Ridley, a deaf-mute boy who is set-up to be victim in a king’s political maneuverings and ends up falling for the future queen. Complicating matters, Ridley is also assistant to the king's barber/surgeon, also his uncle, and privy to the strange Dr. Frankenstein-like experiments his surgeon uncle has been performing in secret. Using his knowledge of the body and the science his uncle has taught him, Ridley hatches a plan to save the woman he loves, even if it means she has to die to be with him. More a twisted tale of love than a zombie story, Lanham’s entry succeeds in bringing the undead to yet another interesting era in human history.

"Theatre is Dead" by Raoul Wainscoting is an absolutely hilarious tale of a doomed stage play that occurs when old England is besieged by both the walking dead and one William Shakespeare, who possesses a good dose of an artist's grandiose ego. When the community-minded Shakespeare writes a play to educate the common man about the disposal and prevention of "postvitals" (Shakespeare-speak for zombies), he never suspects that one of his actors isn't just suffering from stage fright but rather from an infectious bite. Even when it become obvious, it takes the Great Baird two acts and quite a few actors before he admits there might really be a problem. Unwilling to let the show falter, Shakespeare and his postvitals expert take to the stage themselves for a spectacularly bloody Shakespearian ending. Sure to be one of the most remembered stories of this anthology, this ghastly comedic gem is true to a Shakespearian play - entertaining, darkly humorous, and lethal for the characters.

Jenny Ashford's "The Anatomy Lesson" holds a surprising bit of soul at its center with its tale of the corpse of Aris Kindt, a man hanged then dissected by the local doctors of Amsterdam. Aris' father first travels far to recover his son's body, then brings it back to a woman, who for a few coins raises it in order for Aris to seek revenge on the people who wrongly accused and hanged him. But the sad, soulful ending shows that the corpse doesn't walk for vengeance alone. Ashford adds remarkable human spirit to this undead tale set against the historical backdrop of Rembrandt’s famous 1632 painting , Anatomy Lesson of Professor Nicolaes Tulp .

In "A Touch of the Divine" by Patrick Rutigliano, we jump to the time of the Black Plague, during which a greedy ruler has lured a strangely immune monk named Stephen to a city where the plague has mutated, causing the dead to walk the streets. While the guards surrounding the city are happy to let him in, they neglect to tell him that the rulers have ordered that no one is to leave and have gone to great lengths to lure people into the town to make sure the fields are farmed and the shops manned. But while Stephen might be a monk, he is not servant of the rich and entitled, instead a patron of the common man – or patron of the common dead man, as the case here may be. He was brought into the city to restore hope to the villagers, and so he decides to do just that, in the most effective way possible. It’s likely that the reader won't know whether to cheer for the zombies or not.

Plague-ridden London is also the setting for Linda L. Donahue’s "A Cure for All Ills", the tale of a plague doctor who brazenly confronts Death on the dark streets and is cursed to see for himself why death is a mercy. Ripe with authenticity from the well-researched plaque details to the accurate feel of the protagonist’s medical profession, the story's only flaw is that the reader figures out what is happening quicker than the main character himself, causing the reader to lose investment in the protagonist’s plight early on.

The prim and proper literary stylings of "Society and Sickness" by Leila Eadie may be off-putting to some readers, as might the cloying obsession the parent characters have with marrying their daughters off. But after their town is infected with a zombie disease, and the Adler family escapes a social event interrupted by an attack, the forethought by the Adler's oldest daughter and the practicality of how it is revealed will make up for any lost ground. Another humor-infused zombie tale, “Society” proves that not even imminent death from gnashing undead teeth can save children from their plotting parents.

"Summer of 1816" by James Roy Daley tells a fictional account of the famed writer Mary Shelley, and how one stormy night when she slipped out of the castle she was staying in, she found her inspiration not on the banks of storm-tossed lake as legend would have it, but rather in the basement of a mausoleum. In Daley’s compelling tale, that inspiration came to her courtesy of a fictional grave keeper who, unable to bury his wards in the torrential rains, instead improvises by chaining them in the basement (lest they wander away...cue the ominous music and thunderclaps). Another tale steeped in historical fiction, here there are no last minute rescues from the wandering dead, no bites or festering wounds, just inspiration and fuel for Shelley’s immortal tale.

"The Hell Soldiers" by Juleigh Howard-Hobson is the story of Stampley, a Confederate soldier who, along with the haggard remains of his division, witnesses a tidal wave-like clash between undead Union and Confederate soldiers. This tale is graphic, and while it doesn't try to explain the existence of zombies, it goes instead for tension and terror and an abrupt ending that makes no suggestions as to who survives, if anyone.

Rebecca Brock's "Junebug" is a post-Civil War tale set in a secluded bit of Tennessee. The titular character is the oldest daughter of devoutly Christian parents who are convinced they are witnessing the end of days; the zombies wandering around outside do nothing to help with their illusions. The danger to June comes not by way of hungry zombie hordes, though, but rather in the form of a nefarious local preacher, who through deception and manipulation ends up getting her pregnant. June is blamed for her moral lapse and must endure her family's abuse and hatred until it spins past mistreatment and into outright murder. "Junebug" capably switches back and forth between the present and past through the use of flashbacks, never once losing the tension Brock successfully creates in each preceding segment.

"Starvation Army" by Joe McKinney is almost more of a ghost story than a zombie story. Nettle, an American man with a bleeding heart who seems to think he can save all of London from starvation and poverty, takes a job at one of the city's first homeless shelters. There he finds an overwhelming number of vacant-eyed starving people, all with outstretched hands begging for his help. When he realizes he can't save them all, he chooses one who he believes to be a deserving underdog, a man hated by the other street people. But Nettle learns soon enough that some people can’t (and shouldn’t) be saved, and that some are hated by others for very good reason. Competently written, but not terribly remarkable in execution or concept, this story isn't as tight as others in the collection. McKinney’s richly detailed depictions of a poor London stand out.

Jonathan Maberry's "Pegleg and Paddy Save the World" is a humorous tale that gives an alternate account of the Great Chicago fire of 1871, in which a zombie, and not Mrs. O’Leary’s mythical cow, starts the famous conflagration. Unlike other stories in which zombie origins are attributed to vague diseases or curses, the cause of the zombie infestation in “Pegleg and Paddy” is directly attributed to a burning green comet that crashes to Earth, killing and then reanimating Paddy O' Leary's horrid old Aunt Sophie. Once Paddy and his friend Pegleg get over their surprise and shock over seeing Aunt Sophie eating the famed O'Leary cow, they start to plot ways to use this tragedy to better their lives. Although Paddy admits to himself later in the story that his ideas sounded better in his head, readers will be delighted. An amusing tale after a streak of gloomy ones, Mayberry's contribution is a lighthearted and welcome reprieve in the anthology.

Set in the old American West, "The Third Option" by Derek Gunn starts off with an amusing premise as well but proves by story’s end to be anything but humorous. An angry Indian shaman has cursed the white man, declaring that the dead shall walk and take that which the white man craves most. Except in the old west, the white man placed higher value on gold than his own life. “Option” packs a surprising punch of political seriousness when an undead Texas Ranger, who legally still has the right to kill anyone based on his own judgment, shows up in town where the mayor is about to decide if the dead still have rights or not. The local lawman, Carter, foresees an extreme flip in the town’s cultural balance, a future where the mayor is undead, the majority is undead, and the living find themselves the oppressed minority. Chilling in its connotations to the current immigration debate in this country, Gunn's story is a bonafide standout in the anthology.

"The Loaned Ranger" by John Peel is also western-themed, opening with the vicious ambush and slaughter of six Texas Rangers. Whether for revenge or self-preservation, a token Indian raises one of the dead rangers, pointing him back in the direction of his killers in a dark, bloody parody of The Lone Ranger. Fans of the old show will likely get a few kicks out of this zombie rendition of the classic TV show.

"Awake in the Abyss" by Rick Moore is the Jack the Ripper story in the bunch. While many may find themselves drawn in by the always-fascinating subject matter, there's not much substance in this tale of Ripper victims rising again to stomp the streets in search of their killer. The story opens with one of the victims witnessing her own death; but rather than recounting it for the reader, she prattles on about it in a hackneyed tone meant to convey the period setting. It’s a miscalculated point of view character certain to irritate some readers. Somehow the victims’ spirits come into contact with each other and essentially will their way into life as the risen dead, knowing just where to find their killer. The gore is here for gore hounds, but the characters - especially Jack himself - are paper thin and rather uninteresting. The mindless internal ramblings of the protagonist and short page time of the famed serial killer are most disappointing as so much could have been done with this premise. Ultimately, there's not much soul to the story, which is disappointingly exactly what it seems to need.

"The Travellin' Show" by Douglas Hutcheson detours from the standard zombie invasion fare. In this one, the zombies are part of a traveling sideshow, led by the good Reverend Tool who possesses the power to raise the dead. Although the sad little Texas town they've stopped at has asked the carnies to leave with its unholy zombie act in tow, a small group of the townsfolk kidnap Reverend Tool and attempt to force him to raise the victims of a recent mining accident so they can return to their families. The zombies here, human and animal varieties alike, are exactly what legend says they should be. What sets Hutcheson’s story apart is the feeling of melancholy that permeates the story, a prevailing sadness that stems from the townspeople’s desperation to have those who have died tragically back. Think Pet Sematary here versus Romero movies.

Wrapping up the anthology is "Edison's Dead Men" by Ed Turner, a tale of the famed titular inventor who, as the story opens, has gotten his hands on a few reanimated corpses. Possessing a wicked bite of dark humor, this story is a perfect ending point, focusing on the origins of modern technologies, the promise of what they might become from that point forward, and the machinations of the mind that made them. This story leaves the anthology musing toward the future - our present - and almost promising that the undead will be threaded as tightly into our lives as they have been woven into the stories of this anthology.

Even readers who don't consider themselves zombie fans will find something to like within the pages of History is Dead. The only criticism of the anthology is that most of the entries are American and UK-set tales, giving the collection as a whole limited scope. One is left pondering the results had a few of the stories contained within depicted more exotic locales - South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, maybe even ancient Greece. Some zombie globetrotting might have given the anthology a more large-scale feel to this living dead invasion. But perhaps it just gives readers something to hunger for should word of a second volume be forthcoming in the foreseeable future.

Purchase History is Dead: A Zombie Anthology, edited by Kim Paffenroth.

Necro Publications / January 2008
Reviewed by: Jeff Burk

Hardcore horror king Edward Lee is back with another small press offering, and it’s a doozy. This winter, Necro Publications is releasing The Minotauress, a new full-length novel packaged with the rare novella The Horn-Cranker. Fans will be pleased to know that Lee’s latest offering is of the same caliber as the cult-classic The Bighead and The Pig.

When a local occultist travels to Spain, Dicky Caudill and Tritt Balls Conner, two redneck moonshine runners, decide to clean out the old man for all he's worth. The plan goes awry as they encounter a very foul prostitute, a pompous writer, a serial killer, and something suitably horrifying called the Spermatogoyle . Starting from the opening pages, the novel never relents in its visceral assault on the reader. Through all the horror, the book has an overriding sick sense of fun – so much so that the reader can almost picture Lee giggling with demented glee as he wrote the book's many grotesque set pieces.

The long time Edward Lee fan will find many surprises scattered throughout The Minotauress. Characters and events from The Bighead, Mr. Torso, and Gast pop in and out for some very amusing inside jokes. The new reader needn’t be put off by this as none of these references are vital to the story and serve only as a bonus wink to longtime fans. In fact, with its combination of monsters, the occult, deranged rednecks, and metaphysical rants, this may be the very best book for the Edward Lee newcomer to whet their appetite for the author's many extreme themes.

As a bonus, the reader also gets The Horn-Cranker, the dark novella prequel (which appeared well before Minotauress in the 2002 novella collection Sex, Drugs, & Power Tools) about a redneck who moves to Seattle and becomes the antithesis of what he once was. When bodies start turning up in his hometown, he travels back to take care of the family and put his championship horn-cranking skills to use. Especially following The Minotauress, The Horn-Cranker is a weaker offering. While Lee frequently uses humor in his work, The Horn-Cranker is almost all humor. Lee's unique style does not fit a strictly comedic piece, and many of the literary gags here fall flat.

While his past several novels have been enjoyable, The Minotauress recaptures the sheer excitement and fun of Lee's early works. Quite simply, this among the best books he has ever written. Fans of extreme horror need this book. For anyone who has been curious about the gruesome delights of Edward Lee, The Minotauress is the perfect starting point. Like an overdose of South Park and Halloween candy, The Minotauress is sure to keep you giggling and gagging long into the night.

Purchase Edward Lee’s The Minotauress.

Delirium Books / January 2008
Reviewed by: JG Faherty

The Condemned has earned advanced praise from such luminaries as David Morrell, Thomas Monteleone, T.M. Wright, and Jack Ketchum, and there’s a reason: This is a damn good book. 2007 has been a banner year for fresh, new horror, at least in my experience. Having read some of David Jack Bell’ previous stories, I expected The Condemned to be good.

I didn’t expect it to be great.

On the surface, The Condemned is another entry in the zombie category; reading the back cover blurb doesn’t do the book justice in this respect, though, because The Condemned is much more than a zombie tale. It’s a whole new kind of zombie tale, where the zombies are living, breathing victims of a terrorist attack of dubious origin, and the government - who may or may not actually be responsible for their plight - has given over our country’s cities to the zombies - City People, they’re called - in order to focus all its efforts and resources to fighting an unnamed war overseas.

The basic premise of The Condemned is that the book’s protagonist, Jett Dormer, has returned to work as a metal reclamation driver following the death of his partner at the hands of the City People during an unexpected ambush. Jett is a hero in the Rambo sense of the word: world-weary, filled with self-loathing for letting his partner die, and only interested in fulfilling his promise to his partner’s widow that he’ll somehow make things right.

What Jett decides is that to make things right, he somehow has to recover his partner’s body and bring it out of the city for a proper funeral.

Jett gets saddled with a borderline homicidal maniac veteran, who agrees to go along with Jett’s plan on the condition that they kill as many City People as possible during the process. Jett reluctantly agrees, and soon finds himself snared in web of conspiracy and betrayal as he digs deeper to find the truth about his partner’s whereabouts.

Another writer might have stopped here, delivering an action-thriller with the subplots of Jett’s internal struggles and his ever-increasing problems at home. But David Jack Bell isn’t an ordinary writer.

Instead of settling for a run-of-the-mill story, Bell has layered his book with subplots, and filled in the spaces with deft commentary on America’s war against terror, the follies of the Bush administration, and the plight of the homeless.

In Bell’s world, Jett’s betrayals don’t just come from the outside - the government, his partner, his boss. They come from the inside as well, as he’s forced to go against his better judgment in order to achieve his goals. He needs his new partner’s help, but in order to get it, he has to become a murderer. He gives up his relationship with his wife and child, because he has to honor his promise to his ex-partner’s wife. He allows himself to become embroiled in a criminal conspiracy, just so he can get the information he needs.

And, like any tragic hero, when confronted with the truth about the City People, he sacrifices himself in order to expose the government’s lies.

Bell’s City People are shambling, dirty humans who hide themselves away in the daytime and come out at night to scavenge for food. They are the homeless in any big city, the ones whose populations we see growing every year and yet the government does nothing about. In The Condemned, the idea that the government, and not a terrorist group, has poisoned the water supplies of the cities and created the City People, is broached more than once as a possibility.

And who among us can’t see this as an entirely real possibility, the idea that our government might just try to wipe out all the homeless in a single blow, only to have their top-secret project explode in their faces? Especially if, as in Bell’s story, the government uses the supposed terrorist attack as an excuse to go to war? I remember when people were saying the same thing about the Twin Towers, and the anthrax scares. In fact, if you know someone with a real fear of government conspiracy, it might be best to keep them away from this book, or you could be in for weeks of “See? It could happen!”

Bell doesn’t limit his sly commentary to the terrorist angle, either. Jett’s new partner (‘the Kid’) talks about being involved in the torture of prisoners of war, and being sent to a combat hot zone - where he loses a leg but gains a new perspective on authority - when the torture results in the death of a prisoner.

At one point, Jett talks longingly about going into the city as a boy to see baseball games, and how even before the City People took over, the neighborhood around the stadium had gotten so bad you feared for your life just going to a game. Living in New York, I know that fear - any time I go to a Yankee game, or a Mets game, I wonder if my car will be there when I come out. And you don’t dare go near Yankee Stadium on mini-bat giveaway day, not if you value your skull.

All of this adds up to a fine book, but there is one more thing that elevates The Condemned from the rest of the pack - Bell’s writing. I don’t remember how long he’s been writing fiction, but I do know that a couple of years ago I had the opportunity to read a manuscript of his that hasn’t been published yet, and it was incredibly real. So I wasn’t surprised that The Condemned has the same quality - you feel like you’re there with these characters, part of the conversation. Belief is hoisted up and suspended as if it weighs nothing more than a feather, all thanks to Bell’s dialog and prose.

Take a look at this conversation between Jett and the Kid, just before Jett brings his new partner into the city for the first time:

“You must have seen some shit over there.”

“Oh yeah. It was ate up.”

I nodded to show I was impressed.

“You’re in the city now. You haven’t seen anything like it.”

Later in the book, Jett and the Kid meet with a man named O’Neill, a subversive who has information on the City People.

“And what exactly do they do?” I said.

“The same thing anybody does. They look for food. They fuck. They look at the stars and moon and say to themselves, How the fuck did I get so screwed? They live their lives.”

“Sounds like my life,” the Kid said. “Except for the fucking part.”

I had to laugh. O’Neill grinned like a withered jack-o-lantern.

If I had any complaints about The Condemned, they would have to do with the ending. I won’t give it away here, but it didn’t have quite enough closure for my taste. Of course, other readers will undoubtedly feel differently, and it certainly isn’t the kind of vague, ending-without-an-ending you see all too often these days. More importantly, it’s no reason not to go out and grab this book as soon as you can. Because The Condemned is something you don’t see every day.

It’s more than just a horror novel.

It’s literature. And anyone who thinks horror can’t be scary and literary at the same has spent too much time living at the paperback shelves of Barnes & Noble or the local drug store.

Purchase David Jack Bell’s The Condemned.