Signet / August 2007
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

In The Vanishing, Bentley Little’s eighteenth book, the prolific author offers up a tasty tale of murderous millionaires, nightmarish zoological hybrids, and his usual hints of Native American folklore. When wealthy businessmen from New York to LA suddenly go on violent rampages slaughtering their families, reporter Brian Howells is hot on the story. But when the story turns personal and the journalist’s own estranged father starts sending unsettling letters written in mysterious hieroglyphics and stained with bloody fingerprints to his mother, Brian is thrust into an escalating early Americana nightmare:

Yes, Brian thought. That was exactly what the shaky letters looked like, and he recalled the previous message, with its random vowels and consonants that seemed to be trying to break through the straightjacket of the alien language. It was as if his dad were gradually regaining his faculties, coming up from the bottom of some mental well and slowly remembering life in the real world.

Brian eventually meets up with social worker Carrie Daniels, who in a parallel story arc has discovered a network of hideously deformed children and their frightened mothers, all seemingly connected to the larger story unfolding around them. Brian and Carrie team up in the third act, a decidedly Mulder/Scully pairing that works well enough.

Little has always had a knack for creating realistic, average Joe kinds of male protagonists; in The Vanishing, it’s his heroine who stands out. Smart and resourceful, Carrie is a working-class Josephine fraught with Little’s patent insecurities, the kind of gal who has to go out and buy new underwear for a date. It’s always a breath of fresh air to see a character act intelligently in a work of horror, as too many of the genre’s terrors (implausible enough in their own right) often rely on the characters’ innate stupidity. But Little fashions Carrie as a refreshingly quick-witted and capable heroine as demonstrated in a key scene in which she makes a horrifying discovery while visiting the home of a wealthy suitor and purposefully cuts off her own 911 call to enhance the police’s impression of her imminent danger.

With hints of homage to everything from Stephen King’s Pet Semetary and the monsters-mounting-humans mating chiller Humanoids from the Deep to Sasquatch folklore and Day of the Triffids-like botanical horror, Little runs characteristically afoul of over-ambition in concept, yet he’s somehow able to keep his narrative from veering all over the map. Reading a Little novel is like watching an attention-deficit cannibal who overstuffs his cauldron with too many body parts, never really cooking anything all the way through yet crafting something edible nonetheless.

Like in his best works, the author also gives readers an authentic ambiance of historical fiction here with some California gold country folklore and a nifty Lewis & Clark tie-in that works surprisingly well. Likewise, the insertion of perennial favorite recurring character Phillip Emmons into the action, appearing here as an armchair detective version of The Night Stalker’s Carl Kolchak, is a welcome highlight and a clever, ongoing wink to longtime fans.

Somewhere in the midst of the bloody mayhem, one of the peripheral characters proclaims: “It’s like being in a goddamn science fiction movie”. And he’s right. Little’s books have always had the comfortable predictability of a cheesy Sci-Fi Channel movie – the man-in-a-rubber-monster-suit kind that’s entertaining enough even when one glimpses a boom mike in the corner of an action shot. Here, that old Chiller Theatre influence is evident from the lurid monsters to the laugh-out-loud, expletive-ridden nursery rhymes that keep them at bay. The ending, in particular, lends itself to this idea and one can almost see Casper Van Dien or Antonio Sabato, Jr. leading the band of mercenaries down the yellow brick road into Bigfoot land.

Little has elevated envelope pushing to an art form with passages of graphic sex and violence that are downright macabre in parts, revolting in others. It’s an uncomfortable blend of horror and erotica that often kicks you in the teeth. It’s often in this simultaneously titillating and nauseating mix of sex and violence that fans are either made or run screaming from the room, and The Vanishing will not disappoint in this aspect with its graphic depictions of creature-to-human connubiality and urine as facial treatments. Little should seriously consider coining the term “creature porn”. It’s almost a shame that such a solid writer seemingly sets out to appall because that shock value comes at a price, and the author’s brilliant underlying social themes (here a cautionary parable of environmental rape and the revenge of conservationism) get overshadowed in the grandeur of the titillation.

With the comforting nostalgia of a long-lost Saturday afternoon creature feature, The Vanishing will ably entertain despite its sometimes predictable matinee-like atrocities and Sci-Fi Channel silliness.

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Leisure / July 2007
Reviewed by: Jeff Burk

Brian Keene became a household name in the horror genre with the publication of The Rising in 2003 and City of the Dead in 2005. The books injected the literary zombie with some much needed life and innovation. After his two zombie novels, Keene went onto display his versatility in a series of popular books that included the bizarrely horrifying The Conqueror Worms and the child abuse-cum-corpse eating drama Ghoul.  With these books, Keene cemented his popularity and proved that he was more that just "the zombie guy." Now with his fifth novel from Leisure Books, Dead Sea, Brian Keene has returned to the monster that made him famous.

First off, Dead Sea is not part of the same universe as the seminal The Rising. Here we get classic Romero-influenced zombies instead of the malicious possessed corpses of Keene's previous zombie works. Though Keene does bring back the idea of zombie-animals, they are slow-moving and unthinking as well. In this world, a plague name Hamelin's Revenge has wiped out most of the world's human and animal populations. We are introduced to Lamar Reed, one of the few humans left alive, holding out in a plague ravaged Baltimore. After a city-wide fire forces him to flee his hiding place in Baltimore, he boards a ship along with about twenty other survivors. From there on, the characters simply battle to survive.

While Lamar is fleeing the ravaged city, he encounters two orphaned children, Malik and Tasha. In these two characters, Keene displays his talent for creating three-dimensional, engaging characters. They are children of the new zombie world. Both kids are interested in playing and just having a family, but are willing to put a bullet through a zombie's head when necessary. When they latch onto Lamar as a father figure, the novel benefits from the added family-drama subplot. The problems with the social idea of family are a common theme for Keene (see Ghoul for the best example of this). In Dead Sea, he explores the idea of families born of circumstance versus blood or even choice.

Plot is normally one of the places in which Keene's books shine. He has a talent for creating bizarre and unique stories that constantly keep the reader guessing. Dead Sea, unfortunately, does not live up to Keene's previous work in this aspect. Most of the book concerns the survivors making various stops and fighting zombies, and, while the encounters are suitably exciting and graphic, they are nothing that the avid zombie fan has not read and seen ad nauseum. In the final section of the book, Keene does manage to pull off some innovative new spins on zombiism, but by this point in the novel, it seems too little, too late.

While the plot itself is not very original, Keene uses some interesting literature conventions in its telling. The character of Professor Williams (one of the ships more colorful survivors) introduces the reader to the interesting idea of character archetypes. He purports that the various survivors are in fact fulfilling classic roles of literature; such as "the hero" and "the warrior". In the hands of many writers, this technique would commonly come across as cheesy and self-indulgent, but Keene manages to integrate this meta-commentary seamlessly into the classic survival-horror story.

Brian Keene consistently pumps out high-quality works of horror in both the small press and the mass market. While Dead Sea may not be as groundbreaking or as original as his previous works, it is still just as  gripping and fast-paced a read as anything else he has written. If you’re a die-hard fan of zombies or just like your horror tales with lots of action, Keene has another treat in store for you.

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Vintage (Reprint Edition) / July 2007
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Hailed by horror maestro Stephen King as the best horror novel of the new century, Scott Smith’s The Ruins lives up to the praise – and then some. With a set-up that doesn’t overstay its welcome and no chapters to punctuate the action, The Ruins barrels forward like a runaway roller coaster, leaving the reader breathless in some spots, teeth clenched in others. Put mildly, The Ruins will soccer-punch you and leave you for dead on the side of the road.

Smith’s long-awaited follow-up to his well-received 1993 debut novel, A Simple Plan, begins simply enough with the introduction of two couples enjoying a post-grad school Mexican getaway. Jeff and Amy and Eric and Stacy are the archetypes of the modern twenty-something – educated, carefree, and not quite sure of their ultimate direction. They meet up with two German brothers –Matthias and Heinrich – and three Greeks, who they jokingly dub Juan, Don Quixote, and Pablo. Despite language barriers and cultural differences, the group flirts, drinks, and bonds with one another - well enough that when Matthias suggests that the two couples accompany him to a Mayan archeological dig to retrieve his brother who’s gone off in pursuit of a girl, the four agree with a shrug and little reservation. As the hapless vacationers, with a hug-happy, tequila-toting Pablo in tow, leave the sunny, resort-style amenities of Cancun behind them and travel by bus, then taxi, to a tiny Mayan village west of Coba, they quickly find themselves in a jungle adventure in search of the fabled ruins. The recurrent theme of dislocation, both figurative and literal, underlies the narrative. While the four main characters are physically dislocated in an unknown land, they are simultaneously looking over the precipice between college and the real world where kid meets adult. Smith carries the notion of strangers in a strange land throughout the novel, and zeros in on the unnerving sense of dread that accompanies it.

To share even an iota of the horror the group encounters at the titular ruins would be a tremendous disservice to Smith’s masterful storytelling and skill in coaxing extraordinary terror out of the seemingly ordinary. Suffice to say that as the horror unfolds (or uncoils in this case), readers are treated to a gradual escalation of genre-bending fright unlike anything written in the last few years. Think Little Shop of Horrors meets The Descent.

Smith’s strength lies in his ability to make the unbelievable completely believable. He wrings his blood-soaked prose in sharp, at times gag-inducing, imagery - at once incomprehensible and authentic – and easily convinces readers to suspend their disbelief and simply follow him through the narrative. His characters are well drawn and overall likeable enough that when the horror encroaches, the reader cares. In the hands of a lesser writer, the four leads could be one-dimensional cardboard cutouts – the brainy Boy Scout, the pessimistic prude, the flirty ditz, and the party-ready jock. But Smith does marvels painting his foursome with depth and dimension, adding color and richness to his characterizations:

In the end – despite his hunger, his fatigue, his anticipatory sense of failure – it was Jeff’s upbringing that finally triumphed, his New England roots asserting themselves in all their asceticism, that deep Puritan reflex always to choose the more arduous of any two fates.

Smith’s pacing is brisk, with gasp-inducing shocks punctuated with momentary breaks in the action that provide essential detail and keep the narrative grounded. There are any number of adjectives that could be used to describe The Ruins – bleak, gory, shocking, horrific, to name but a few; yet Smith’s is an understated, simply told tale of terror that breaks new ground while remaining true to the rules of the genre. Simply put, this is storytelling at its finest.

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Leisure (Reprint Edition) / May 2007
Reviewed by: Shannon Riley

Jack Ketchum’s Offspring is the sequel to his novel Off Season (Ballantine, 1980; Leisure’s uncut mass-market paperback, 2006). In Off Season, readers met a brutal band of savages whose ancestors may have been the starving survivor of a devastating gale in the 1800s on Catbird Island, just off the coast of Maine, and her kidnapped companion. The clan grew and lived wild in the caves and forest devouring not only the animals they hunted and killed, but human victims as well.

Driven off the island, they made their way to the mainland where they lived in close proximity with civilization, cunningly preying upon unwary humans at every opportunity.

Sheriff George Peters had been instrumental in stopping the killers. He believed that he and other law officers had wiped them out, but one girl had escaped. Now in Offspring, Jack Ketchum’s chilling sequel, we find this tribe of savages again terrorizing the area around the little coastal town of Dead River, Maine, and Peters, sixty-six and ailing, racing to track down their leader and her newly formed “family” and stop the slaughter before more people die.

While the plot of Offspring is quite similar to its predecessor and holds few surprises, it maintains the suspense and rapid-fire action readers loved in Off Season with more than enough gristly chills for even the most hardcore horror fan. Like much of Ketchum’s fiction, the author brings so much more to the table than the violent nature of his work might suggest. His themes cut straight to the dark core of the human psyche.

Jack Ketchum, a two-time Bram Stoker Award winner for his short stories “The Box” and “Gone” and author of The Girl Next Door, Red, Hide and Seek, The Lost and many other titles, is one of the most powerful and unique voices in horror fiction today. His characters are so real we feel we know them; we understand their motivations, their strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and fears. His characterizations and delivery are nearly perfect.

Ketchum’s integrity makes him unwilling to betray his vision and to conform to expectations. Behind the visceral horror lies a terrible truth about the human condition. Reading a Jack Ketchum story is like peering through the cracked, heat-glazed window into hell.

Offspring and its prequel, Off Season, comprise one of the darkest and most riveting sagas in modern fiction. Horror doesn’t get any better than this.

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William Morrow / February 2007
Reviewed by: JG Faherty

I have to admit, I felt more than a little trepidation when I started this book, for two main reasons: One, no matter how much I try to read Joe Hill as a unique writer, in my head I’m always comparing him with his father. Will he write the same? Different? Better? Worse? Second, I’m not afraid to say that I wasn't a huge fan of his short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts. Not that it was bad, but I found it very uneven; the two or three really good stories were overshadowed by the several bad ones, and the many mediocre ones. In my humble opinion, it didn't rank with the really good collections I've read - including his father's first, Night Shift (there's that comparison again!).

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that by page 3 of Heart Shaped Box, I was totally hooked. Hill displays a maturity of writing, a grasp of how to use words to maximum effectiveness, and a talent for creating truly creepy, eerie scenes that his father didn't come close to achieving with his own first novel, Carrie.

At its heart, this book is a simple ghost story. A man buys a ‘haunted’ suit, but gets more than he bargained for when the ghost ends up to be a malevolent spirit bent on getting revenge for the suicide of his niece, a groupie dumped unceremoniously by rock star Jude.

A simple ghost story, yes. But in reality, it’s so much more than that; it’s a phenomenal exploration of the hearts and minds of the characters. Hill takes real, raw emotions and lets the reader not only see them, but feel them. When Judas Coyne, the main character, uses sarcasm as a defense mechanism, we understand why - we've all been there before, unwilling to let our true feelings show through, to let down the walls.

As any good ghost story should, Heart Shaped Box deals first and foremost with fear. And here again you believe in the characters - Jude, his goth girlfriend Georgia, and the cast of secondary satellites (perhaps fodder would be a better word, as Hill has no trepidation in letting people die) orbiting around them - because they react the same way you or I would if we found ourselves face-to-face with a vengeful spirit.

They freak out.

We empathize with Jude and Georgia as they experience fear, anger, terror, revulsion, self-loathing, and finally grudging acceptance for the situation they find themselves in. When they embark on their cross-country journey to try and rid themselves of the ghost who wants them dead, their weariness and exhaustion and self-doubt are yours as well. Long hours on the road, shitty hotel rooms, greasy junk food. Is it any wonder they snap at each other? Who among us wouldn't? Better yet, who among us hasn’t?

So yes, Heart Shaped Box is about raw emotions and the human condition. In that respect, it is more literary than the average 'horror' novel. And Hill is an expert at capturing personalities through speech patterns. He's obviously listened to conversations and accents; his southern drawls are instantly recognizable without being over-the-top; they belong to real people, not Deputy Dawg or Foghorn Leghorn. And his use of slang is just right, keeping the book current-sounding without making it so current it will sound dated in five or ten years.

All of this goes a long way to creating a well-written book that's a pleasure to read. But at the same time, Heart Shaped Box is a dark journey that you might not want to take at night.

Hill has managed to do something almost impossible these days, when so much of horror has become commonplace and standard: he's created a new type of monster. Not that ghosts are anything new, but he's done for the ghost genre what Brian Keene did for zombies - bring them into the 21st Century (no pun intended in regards to his other book!). Without giving away any spoilers, let's just say that Hill's description of his ghosts, especially the details of their eyes and the way their bodies change when they move between light and shadow, can only be described as fucking creepy.

And there’s no shortage of action, either, something that's not always the case in a sub-genre where too many stories follow a more sedate, gothic-style pace. The spirit tormenting Jude and Georgia is much more than an apparition or spectral poltergeist. No, the ghost of Craddock McDermott, a dead old man with a real grudge, has all sorts of ways to make his victims' lives miserable, from mind control to possession to physical violence. The action begins almost immediately. Jude 'purchases' the ghost online, and from the moment it arrives, his life is turned upside down, inside out, and round-and-round. Death becomes his closest companion, sparing no one who has the bad luck to know Jude or befriend him.

Before the book is over, Jude has taken more than his fair share of beatings, both physical and mental, but Hill never lets the plot deteriorate into something that provokes disbelief in the reader, or pulls the reader from the story. There is no 'magic cure,' no divine intervention, no out-of-the-blue rescue. Hill creates his world, and keeps true to the rules he's designed for it.

Of course, this isn't to say Heart Shaped Box is a perfect book. It's not. The final couple of denouement-oriented chapters could have been eliminated without taking anything away from the story. And there are a few chunks of dialog scattered through the book that read kind of clunky - with characters speaking in ways that don't match their personalities, such as uneducated groupies using words only a college professor or English major would think to include in conversation. But these are small details; every book has some faults, and Heart Shaped Box has far less than most.

In the end, this is a novel I'd not only recommend to any fan of horror or dark fiction, but to anyone who likes to read, period. Hill writes like a seasoned novelist. I can't help but think of how his father's writing improved during the period between Carrie and 'Salem's Lot; if Hill makes the same kind of leap, he'll be a shoe-in for a best-seller.

Heart Shaped Box is one of the best ghost stories since...well, since Peter Straub's Ghost Story, or maybe even Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, Heart Shaped Box moves faster than either of them, something that might make it even more appealing to the shorter attention spans of today’s generation.

Read it...you may end up having trouble sleeping afterwards, but it will be worth it.

Purchase Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box

Leisure / April 2007
Reviewed by: Derek Clendening

A storm brews at the novel’s outset, refusing to subside until the last word is cast in ink. The figurative and literal storm alive in Sarah Pinborough’s The Taken proves this British author as one who knows all the right buttons to push. It also adds the necessary sense of doom and gloom vital to any horror yarn. When cancer patient Alex visits her cousin Paul on his fortieth birthday, her aunt Mary unearths the corpse of a child thirty years dead. This archetype of the ghost child is the catalyst for a consistent, bone-chilling unease in The Taken. Alex struggles to discover the identity and motivations of other mysterious children playing in the Somerset storm. These children are ill-dressed for the weather and appear to originate from a different era. Their existence in a place called ‘the in between’, and the legend of Melanie Parr, are examples of the fear created by the archetypical child spectre.

The novel’s strength is that it doesn’t rely solely on vapid horror gloom -- the afore-mentioned storm -- to startle. Pinborough demonstrates an understanding of a common source of dread. Using children to supplement the Melanie Parr legend adds a creepy mystique to the novel. These children exist in ‘the in between’ to live out lives they would have lost early. This literary device is not only creepy, but it appeals to broad sensibilities. The prose itself is average, but the writing is tight.

The novel’s primary flaw is that it relies on a mode of story-telling all too common to the genre. The first convention used is the Melanie Parr legend. She was an evil child, which is still creepy, but the use of a sketchy past is very traditional. Parr dies and her remains are found ‘thirty years later’. Thirty years seems to be the magic number in much of horror fiction and The Taken is no exception. The second problem is the use of The Catcher Man. While the figure itself is appropriately unsettling, he seems like a re-packaged boogeyman.

Overall, the sense of dread and creepiness make The Taken a very enjoyable and genuinely terrifying read. It isn’t a book safe for late nights during real-life storms. Pinborough has proven why she’s earned a seat in the company of Leisure’s hottest new stars. Simply put: this is a very scary book.

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Mira / March 2007
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

With The Dollmaker, author Amanda Stevens conjures up James Patterson and Anne Rice in this creepy gothic chiller of a novel. Making the leap from the romantic suspense yarns for which she’s known to psychological suspense thriller, Stevens steers clear of the throwaway potboiler and crafts a well-constructed, multi-layered plot ripe with police corruption, child abduction, and enough creepy dolls to make one shudder at the next mention of Madame Alexander. It’s John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil meets House of Wax – minus Paris Hilton with just a hint of John Grisham’s Southern sensibilities.

Artist Claire Doucett and ex-husband Dave Creasy have never fully recovered from their heartbreak following the disappearance of their 7-year-old daughter Ruby. Seven years after the child’s vanishing and presumed abduction, both are battling demons – one a loveless marriage and visions of their missing child around every corner, the other alcoholism and a failed law enforcement career. When Claire spots a portrait doll bearing an uncanny likeness to Ruby in the window of a Garden District collectibles shop, she becomes convinced that if she can trace the origins of the doll, she will finally learn the fate of their daughter. The ex-spouses wade through the baggage carousel of their past to join forces and soon embark upon a harrowing journey toward the closure they so desperately seek on many levels. Complicating matters are an unsolved murder with police cover-up implications and the titular psychopath who cuts a deadly path through the Louisiana landscape with his doll making tools.

Elements of The Dollmaker are reminiscent of cinematic horrors, and savvy genre fans will glimpse snippets of Tourist Trap, Happy Birthday to Me, Dressed to Kill, and Psycho. And while Stevens offers up intersexualism as a plot device that readers may initially bemoan as clichéd, she integrates the twist so well into a genuinely chilling back story that it ultimately works here. Her secondary characters are also fleshed out well enough to be integral to the story – whether on the periphery of the action or smack dab in the middle of it.

Stevens boasts a gift for rich, sensory-infused description that she is able to balance with page-turning action to precision. In The Dollmaker, she has an acute awareness of the sights, smells, sounds, and textures of post-Katrina Louisiana – from the recovering French Quarter to the outlying bayous. Not since Anne Rice has a writer captured New Orleans in words with such skill. Stevens’ knack for description extends beyond the geographical locales of the novel as she proves by imbuing the narrative with strong doses of realism. Whether depicting alcoholism or the mounting hopelessness in the days and months following the abduction of a child or the art of glass blowing, the reader is invited to step into the narrative and walk alongside the characters, making the reading experience more active than passive.

That the resolution (albeit ultimately satisfying) comes fast in relation to the buildup is but a minor criticism in what is otherwise a thrilling story. With The Dollmaker, Amanda Stevens has fashioned a well-paced, spine-chilling tale of suspense in which the reader will find his or her chest tightening in anticipation and dread with each successive turn of the page.

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