Chadzilla ROARS!!!

Just After Sunset: Stories - by Stephen King

As I nibbled away at Just After Sunset, I kept thinking about a comment that Stephen King made during an interview on the radio program Fresh Air.  He said, with his trademark candor, that he was very well aware that his creative hot streak was over, and that it would not be heating up again, ever.  The reason that I kept thinking about that comment was due to the fact so many of the stories collected in this book are tired rehashes of material King has done before, and far better.

The best two examples of just how cold that creative hot steak has become, came early in the anthology.  The Gingerbread Girl covers the exact same ground as Misery and the almost identical Lunch at the Gotham Cafe, while Rest Stop is just a bland and suspense free recycling of themes King explored to far greater effect in The Dark Half.  Other examples are the slight to the point of pointlessness Harvey's Dream and Graduation Afternoon.  Dream, with a little effort, could have been shaped into something more than the wasted opportunity that it is; but Graduation Afternoon, from start to finish, is the kind of tired narrative cliche one would expect from a High School student, not a seasoned professional of King's caliber.

Willa and Ayana are middle of the road disappointments.  The former is a ghost story that is far too heavy handed to achieve the emotional resonance it clearly is striving for, while the latter is a "miracle worker" fantasy that is far too light handed to satisfy.  The other middle of the road story is The Cat from Hell, a "Golden Oldie" from King's hot streak era that will be familiar to any that have seen Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.  It is an entertaining tale, both not a particularly memorable one.

The book perked up when I finally reached the suspenseful fantasy thriller, Stationary Bike, an enthusiastic "Fuck You" to all those pieces of exercise equipment (and exercise junkies) that are clogging up those ubiquitous Fitness Centers out there.  The Things They Left Behind packs the emotional punch that is missing from the above mentioned stories and is a great meditation on survivor's guilt and the need for "closure."  The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates is a fine little story that sits somewhere between Willa and The Things They Left Behind.

But the crown jewel of the book is N., which is, flat out, the collection's best offering.  A spooky slow burn of a nightmare that is a gorgeous narrative homage to Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and the celebrated mythology created by H.P. Lovecraft.

Which leaves A Very Tight Place, the book's final yarn.  The less said about this nauseating story of a man forced to work is way out of the business end of one of those Port-O-Sans, the better.  It's disgusting, nasty, gross, and very well written.  Stephen King is every bit as sick in the head as he is talented, which is why I always look forward to reading him.  Make of that comment what you will.

A Special Place: The Heart of a Dark Matter - by Peter Straub

Keith Hayward's Uncle Til is supposed to give the boy a stern talking to about what Keith has done to a neighborhood cat.  Instead the man educates Keith on the importance of having a special place in which to torture and kill, so as not to be interrupted or discovered...

While many a writer has had a segment, or even an entire section, of a work in progress grow and split off into a separate "stand alone" story- F. Paul Wilson describes just such an occurrence when introducing a tale in his anthology Soft & Others that began as a chapter in his novel The Touch- Peter Straub has made it an integral part of his body of work ever since the publication of Koko, the first book in his Blue Rose trilogy.

A Special Place is a small part, a mere 80 pages small, in fact, of A Dark Matter, a soon to be published novel formerly titled The Skylark, that grew apart and fell off of the larger manuscript during the creative process.  While this brief and brutal story sheds crucial light on an integral character in the forthcoming novel, A Special Place stands alone.  For very good reason.  Those who dare to read it must be very careful, for its bite is savage and wounding.  Place is one of Straub's darker, if not one of his darkest, short stories in ages.  (Straub's Bunny Is Good Bread, also known as Fee, is its only current rival.)  It builds slowly and methodically to a stomach churning finish that cannot be easily shaken off, and I loved every word of it.  It is easy to see why Borderlands Press opted to publish A Special Place as a limited edition book.  (At the time of this writing there are only 250 copies available, signed and numbered by the author.)  Despite its brevity, or because of it, A Special Place is a powerful story that deserves to be read.

Having had a taste of what is to come, I am now looking forward to reading A Dark Matter even more.

Contagious - by Scott Sigler

The battle may have been won in Infected, but the war wages on in Contagious...and it is getting nastier by the hour.

A great judge of a book for me is its "nibble" factor.  Do I find myself cracking it open to nip at a paragraph here, or a page there, whenever the slightest opportunity to do so presents itself?  Those are the best kinds of reads.  The ones that demand that I finish them ASAP.

Scott Sigler's Infected was just such a book.  I cannot say the same for Contagious, Sigler's gruesome sequel to his first published, and every bit as gruesome, novel.  In fact, I put the book down and read several others before picking it back up and finishing it.  That is not a good thing, obviously.

As I strolled through horrifying set piece after horrifying set piece (and believe me, some very nasty action is splashed across the book's pages) with a strange sense of detachment, I kept wondering what was wrong.  Why wasn't Contagious grabbing me the way Infected had?

The reason turned out to be a simple one.  Sigler rides shotgun with his characters, and there are a lot of them this time around, but he very rarely crawled into their hearts and minds the way he did with "Scary" Perry Dawsey, the tormented anti-hero of Infected.  Even worse, Dawsey, who has survived his infection, but with psychosis inducing scars, is pushed into the background of the story.  Sigler also makes the mistake of telling the reader of the father/son bond the develops between CIA operative Dew Phillips and Perry, rather than showing it.

Those interested in a strictly visceral reading experience should enjoy Contagious.  The alien threat morphs into an entirely different kind of beast.  One that peppers the book with some truly disgusting (albeit fascinating and entertaining) set pieces.  But those hoping for a more emotionally resonate reading experience will, more than likely, set the book down disappointed.

Friday the 13th (#2): Hell Lake - by Paul A. Woods

After he is executed, the serial killer Wayne Sanchez - a.k.a. the Devil Boy, so-called for his penchant for carving pentagrams into his numerous victims - finds that Hell IS a bad place to be.  The corner of the Underworld he has been consigned to is crowded with countless psychotics and perverts, all of which seem happy to take their boundless frustrations out on one another at a moment's notice.  The only good thing that could be said about Hell is that Sanchez finally gets to meet one of his beloved idols, Jason Voorhees.  Sanchez's other idol, the Big D itself, is noticeably absent.

Sanchez and Voorhees manage to bond and, before the boredom of eternal damnation can drive the former Devil Boy mad, Sanchez convinces Jason to lead a revolt to escape Hell.  They are successful and, on Friday, January 13th, 2006, the damned souls of innumerable serial killers, rapists and perverts erupt from the once placid waters of Crystal Lake.

Okay, what can I say about Friday The 13th #2: Hell Lake that I haven't already said about each and every other Friday the 13th / Jason X tie-in novel published by Black Flame?

While the novel's central idea is certainly an interesting one brimming with potential, it does not marry all that well with the established Friday the 13th mythology.  Also not helping is how Jason disappears for large chunks of the story and when he does appear, he does not behave all that much like Jason.

After starting off the story and getting the revolt of the damned underway, Wayne Sanchez also disappears from the story.  He does not resurface until the end, when he and several other characters can have their "just desserts" moments of poetic justice.  Why go to all the trouble of introducing and developing a strong character, only to have that character vanish and NOT interact with the protagonists?  It makes for a weak and fragmented story.  The various plot threads should come together into a tight little know of tension, not continue to slither off in opposite directions.

Then there is another, quite different problem with the story.  Jason has routinely returned from the dead since Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Why does he need a go nowhere friendship with Wayne Sanchez to motivate him?  Hell, the simple fact that there is a sex, drug and rock n' roll fueled rave being held on the shore of Crystal Lake on his birthday would be more than enough to get the murdering behemoth stomping back to his killing grounds.

Oh, and why is his mother absent?  Shouldn't she also be in Hell, considering the body count she racked up?

Then there is the fact that this book just drags on and on and on...which brings me to my previous criticisms of these Black Flame tie-ins.  They're just too damn long and overwritten.  Paul A. Woods spends way too much time over developing characters and over describing details because there is a completely uncalled for 90,000 plus word count to be met.  Yet again a potentially fun story (and this story could have been a Hell of a lot of action packed fun, all that was missing was a wise cracking demon, or two) is drug out to a maddening snapping point.  This book not only over stays its welcome, it eventually dies from the morbid obesity of its excessive word count and then begins to rot.  Eventually the only thing it managed to accomplish was to stink up my inner Reading Place.

Soultaker - by Bryan Smith

Jake McAllister returns home to help save his younger half-brother from the clutches of girlfriend from the worst side of the tracks, Hell itself.

I'm sure that Bryan Smith is a good, decent and hard-working man.  But good mythical-lord was this novel awful.  It breaks the supposed first rule of storytelling by telling instead of showing.  Another problem is that there isn't a single character in the book, or at least in the first 58 pages that I read, that was interesting, likable, or sympathetic.  Outlandish stuff is just shoved into the readers face, with no perceptible effort taken to put them into context or create a feeling of suspense or dread.  Soultaker is a truly dreadful book.

No matter your gender, I think that you will agree that every narrative artist (writer, poet or filmmaker) has a Lover from Hell story in them.  Sometimes these stories are told with humor, other times with melodramatic bombast, or, as is the case here, as battle of the sexes horror story.

The power of First Love and the inevitable painful lessons in harsh reality that it teaches (one lesson being that loving a bad person doesn't make said person want to be good, another is that it can make a smart person very, very dumb) have birthed countless therapy sessions in fictional form.  Soultakerappears to be one, although author Bryan Smith goes to considerable lengths in his acknowledgments to let the reader know that his novel is not autobiographical.  Every seasoned spinner of tales knows that sometimes all it takes is a single image, or hearing a word said in a certain way, to fertilize the egg of imagination.  Even if 99.9% of the narrative is utter make-believe, it is that .1% inspirational kernel that readers and critics will try to sniff out.  Who the hell was she and what the hell did she say or do to inspire this book?  Then again, maybe there is no she at all.  The world will probably never know, and it will be a better place for it.

Castaways - by Brian Keene

The cast and crew of the realty series Castaways have to fight for their lives when the supposedly uninhabited island they are on turns out to be inhabited, by a tribe of carnivorous monstrosities.

Castaways is the first novel by Brain Keene that I have read, but it sure won't be the last.  It was the kind book I love reading.  One that snags my attention and refuses to let it go until I reach the last word.  Then it walks away, while I stand there calling after it, "Come back, book!  Come back!  At least call me!"

But do they ever call?  No.  They never even write and they'e frakking books.  I'd expect books to write a You're Welcome note, you know?

When I started reading Castaways I was expecting a cross of Survivor (which the titular realty show is clearly based on) and the 80s schlock classic Humanoids From the Deep. With both the ad copy on the back of the book and the text itself stating up front that the monsters kill the men and keep the women for mating purposes, what else could I compare it to?

But I was wrong.

Although author Brian Keene states in his afterward that the inspiration for his book is 100% Richard Laymon (to whom the novel is affectionately dedicated) I knew differently.  No, I knew without a single doubt in my mind that the inspiration for Castaways lay in an almost forgotten piece of crap/guilty pleasure grade-Z 80s horror movie when I read this passage on page 154:

Jeff pointed into the darkness.  The others turned in that direction.  A pair of yellow eyes stared back at them.  The eyes blinked, and then returned.  Then another pair appeared.  And another.  Then six more.  Then a dozen.

I kid you not when I say to you that Castaways is Survivor meets Attack of the Beast Creatures.  If you have seen that movie then you are incapable of ever forgetting it, and you cannot read the above passage and not be reminded of a scene just like it in Attack of the Beast Creatures. The major difference between the two is that the book is scary as hell, while the movie is unintentionally laugh out loud funny.

Okay, I do not doubt for a moment that Brian Keene was not influenced by Attack of the Beast Creatures in any way, shape or form.  But the surface similarities between the two were just so strong that I had to give a shout out to a forgotten movie that is a perfect Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode contender.

Keene's novel, if it were a movie, would be at home on the Drive-In circuit, though.  It is nothing more than a terrific B-monster movie captured on paper.  It's gory as hell, but not excessively so.  Keene also keeps the "necessary" rape stuff to an unpleasant minimum, something for which I am profoundly grateful.  From the comments he makes in the novel's afterward, wherein he shares the novel's origins in a short story based on Richard Laymon's Beast House novels, his opinions on the matter seem to reflect my own.  If that had not been the case, then I might not have been able to finish to book.  Instead I hit only one extremely distasteful rough spot in an otherwise excellent thrill ride of story.  One that I can highly and happily recommend to any and all monster fans.

Mr. Hands - by Gary A. Braunbeck

While resting at Hangman's Tavern, a "watering hole" located half way between Cedar Hill and Buckeye Lake, a tired drifter tells a trio of sympathetic and understanding listeners the story of Mr. Hands.

Gary A. Braunbeck has to write the saddest horror fiction being published today, and I do not mean sad as a synonym for bad.  No, Braunbeck's stories can movie you to tears even as they are making icy chills skitter up and down your back and race through your blood. 

Even sadder is how the title Mr. Hands will be, unintentionally I am certain, confused by many with the disgusting excuse for humanity named Kenneth Pinyan, and all those sickening videos he made.  Yuck. 

Braunbeck's novel has nothing whatsoever to do with animals.  For that you'll have to crack open his heartbreaking horror/love story Keepers, I recommend it unreservedly, no matter what my original review said about it.  Track it down and read it.  That book haunts me to this day.  (That review is also a good example as to why all reviews should be taken with that proverbial grain of salt.) 

Mr. Hands returns Braunbeck to the foundation of his novel In Silent Graves and focuses on the plight of abused, abducted and exploited children.  Rather than rub his reader's face in cheap shocks that mask the exploiting of the aforementioned abuse behind a veil of false sympathy, Braunbeck instead misdirects the reader by guiding them through the lives of the people that will create and unleash Mr. Hands upon those that would, they assume, knowingly hurt or kill children.  Ingredient one is Ronald James Williamson, a developmentally disabled man with a very strange power that he loathes.  With a touch he can see, and experience, everything that has and that will happen to the person he is touching.  Some of the things he sees when he touches children are so horrifying that he knows he has no other option than to euthanize the poor souls, so that they are spared the pain that is to come.  Ingredient two is Lucy Holcomb, a woman who cannot handle the abduction, and apparent murder, of her beloved six year old daughter, Sarah.  How these two are brought together to form Mr. Hands is the emotional heart of Braunbeck's effective chiller.  I could feel the beat of that heart on every single page.

Also included in the Leisure Books edition I have is the novella Kiss of the Mudman, a story referenced by the wraparound characters hearing the story of Mr. Hands.  A lot of Braunbeck's stories take place in the fictional city of Cedar Hill, Ohio, so reoccurring characters, or simple cameo appearances, abound.  Those very same characters play significant parts in Mudman, a creepy and, as any frequent reader of Braunbeck's work would come to expect, sad exploration of the nightmarish cost of exceptional talent.  It's an excellent coda to Mr. Hands and a wonderful way to revisit characters that, by the end of the novel that comes before it, have come to feel like old friends.

I look forward to the time when I can visit them again.

Jake's Wake - by John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow

Small-time Televangelist Jacob "Jake" Connaway is dead, murdered by the jealous boyfriend of the latest bar trolling skirt that Jake caught.  But those attending the hypocritical minister's wake find that you can't keep a truly good bad man down, when Jake wakes up and climbs out of his coffin...with Hell following with him.

Jake's Wake is one of those odd disappointments: a very well-written novel that goes nowhere, but looks and sounds good while doing so.

What little meat there is on the skeleton narrative that collaborators John Skipp (The Light At The End, The Bridge) and Cody Goodfellow (Radiant Dawn) have constructed is largely of the sex and violence variety.  Although the novel's "story" takes something like one hundred pages to finally move from plot point A to plot point B, the rather large cast of cannon fodder really isn't developed to any great depth.  Skipp and Goodfellow seem content to simply describe the horrific events in the brisk "cinematic style" of a film novelization.

The reason for this might very well be that Jake's Wake is a novelization, sort of.  John Skipp's section of the author acknowledgments states that the book "started out as a motion picture."  That certainly explains the odd lightness to the novel's first two hundred pages.  But it does not forgive that a collection of characters that arrive on the scene in the third act, just to liven things up a bit, with car chases, gun fights, and gruesome death set pieces, are better developed than the supposed cast of primary characters the reader has spent the previous two hundred pages "getting to know."

Then there is the novel's ironic twist ending, which is a nice one.  Hell, it's even a brilliant one.  While, in retrospect, there are a few subtle hints for it sprinkled throughout the book, Skipp and Goodfellow don't really dig into it.  Probably because, as with most theologically themed mainstream horror stories, the religious aspects have to be kept vague, so the book can appeal to a variety of Believer (or Non-Believer, such as myself) backgrounds/doctrines.

As I said at the start of the review, this book was a disappointment.  Not because it is "bad," because it isn't.  It is very well written book, for both Skipp and Goodfellow are exceptionally talented writers, that held my interest even during the so long as to be noticeable stretches of narrative padding in the novel's first hundred or so pages.  It's just that the damn feels so slight.  As I was reading it, I found myself thinking that this book would have made a great novella, rather than a weak, although modestly effective novel (there is a moment in a darkened basement that is a textbook perfect example of horror done right) that could have very easily been so much more than it ultimately wound up being.

Black Cathedral - by L.H. Maynard & M.P.N. Sims

The psychics of Department 18 (the UK's crack paranormal defense unit) are sent to investigate the mysterious disappearances plaguing an inhospitable and remote Scottish island.  What they find is a very old and very powerful evil.

The first one hundred pages of Black Cathedral were filled with icy little moments and creepy images that scared the ever living crap out of me.  Then the investigation started and, while the book held my interest, the icy little moments and creepy images began to lose their power to terrify the way they had at the beginning, when everything was mysterious and new.

Then there was the ending, which was a confusing jumble of "What the hell?"  A jumble that didn't seem to end so much as just stop on a frustrating excuse for a cliffhanger that had me cursing my getting hooked so deep and so hard into this horror series entry.

Yes, horror series.  As the subhead beneath the title states, Black Cathedral is a "Department 18" novel.  That means the surviving characters will be back for another go around against either a returning evil, or an all new one that may or may not have some kind of link to the old one.  Who knows where Maynard & Sims plan on taking their characters in any and all future adventures that may, or may not, sales always determining such things, be forthcoming.

I found the characters to be an interesting and likable lot.  Interesting enough that I dreaded any harm coming to them and wanted to see them all survive the dangerous investigation.  Didn't happen, but it says something about the talents of the writing team that I wanted it to.

Frustrations with the rushed and unresolved nature of the climax aside, Black Cathedral had enough scares and compelling characters to not only hold my interest for the entire narrative, it also got it to a level where I'm not only eager to find out what happens in the next book, but what has happened in the Department 18 book's prior to this one.  2009 should find me making some return visits to this Dark Fantasy world.

Shock II - by Richard Matheson

Thirteen tales of the fantastic, the frightening, and the wondrous by one of science-fiction, fantasy and horror's true Grand Masters.

A Flourish of Strumpets: With everyone else selling things door-to-door, it was bound to happen that prostitutes would attempt to do the very same thing.

Brother to the Machine: A tormented soul attempts to escape from the seemingly inescapable nightmare that is our war torn and space faring future.

No Such Thing As A Vampire: Although vampires do not exist, one appears to be killing Dr. Petre Gheria's wife.

Descent: The bomb is going to be dropped, so America moves underground.

Deadline: A doctor visits a most unusual patient.  A man dying of old age who claims to be only one year old.

The Man Who Made the World: Doctor Janishefsky has a most interesting visitor, a man who claims to have made the world five days ago.

Graveyard Shift: A woman's brutal murder uncovers a monstrous secret.

The Likeness of Julie: Eddy Foster had never noticed the girl in his English class until...

Lazarus II: A domineering mother refuses to allow her son's suicide to keep her from him.

Big Surprise: Mr. Hawkins tells the neighborhood children, "Dig a hole and find a big surprise."

Crickets: Ever wonder what crickets are actually saying?  One man learns the terrifying answer to that question.

Mute: Paal was raised to speak with his mind, not his mouth.

From Shadowed Places: An anthropologist consents to perform a ritual that will lift a juju curse that is killing a young man.

Those inclined to read a blog such as this really do not need to have Richard Matheson introduced to them.  Anyone that grew up during the 50s, 60s, or 70s (and thanks to the miracle of UHF syndicated reruns during the latter, you could experience them all in a single decade) is already familiar with his impressive body of work, if not his name.  But just to give a roll call of his contributions to the above mentioned genres, his novels include The Incredible Shrinking Man (which Matheson also adapted for the big screen), I Am Legend (which has been adapted for the big screen three times, as The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price, The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith, and that George A. Romero admitted ripping off for Night of the Living Dead), Hell House (which Matheson, again, adapted for the big screen, as The Legend of Hell House), Somewhere In Time, What Dreams May Come, and A Stir of Echoes.

If that were not enough, Matheson has also written numerous short stories that have been adapted (by himself and others) into classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, classic TV movies such as Trilogy of Terror and Duel, and the not so classic Masters of Horror episode Dance of the Dead (based on the short story of the same name).  He also wrote the screenplays for The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.

The man is hardcore, and so is this anthology.  There isn't a clunker in the bunch.  All of them are terrific - albeit somewhat dated, times have certainly changed for the better since the 1950s - science-fiction, fantasy and horror stories.  Several of them will be easily recognizable as the source material for memorable, if not outright classic, episodes of genre television.  The Likeness of Julie, with a little narrative tweaking, became a segment in Trilogy of Terror, Big Surprise became a goose-flesh inducing "Gotcha!" vignette for Night Gallery, and Mute, again, with a little tweaking, became one of the better hour long episodes of The Twilight Zone.

While I enjoyed reading those classic stories in their original form, always a good thing to do, my picks for favorite stories are Brother to the Machine, Descent, and Graveyard Shift, which featured a nightmarish image that made my skin crawl.  The comedy opener, A Flourish of Strumpets, gets an honorable mention.

No genre fan should require encouraging to read Richard Matheson.  But if you haven't, then this anthology, or any of the books listed above, are an excellent place to start doing so.

The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Volume 2 - by Edward L. Ferman & Anne Jordan, Editors

The title says it all, really.

Glory: A slick talent agent and a hack writer find that resurrecting an undead starlet's acting career can be a rather draining experience.

Bug House: A woman's attempt to hide from her straying husband lands her in an even worse situation.

Hand In Glove: A heartbroken woman discovers the perfect way to mend it.

Stillborn: A young woman uncovers a horrible evil in a local mine.

Balgrummo's Hell: A simple robbery turns out to be nothing of the sort.

The Old Darkness: When the power goes out during a fierce storm, the residents of an apartment complex rediscover the true reason for being afraid of the dark.

The Night of White Bhairab: A collector of supernatural oddities brings home the demonic mother lode.

Salvage Rites: One must be very careful when visiting the local dump, because you can never tell exactly who is scavenging for what.

Test: A simple Driver's Test is no longer quite so simple.

The Little Black Train: Silver John searches out another unique mountain song and winds up facing down its inspiration.

The Autopsy: A dying pathologist discovers that there are far, far worse things to be infested with than the simple cancer that is killing him.

The word best brings with it certain expectations.  Namely that whatever it is that you will be sampling will be a noticeable cut above the usual.  Of the eleven stories collected in The Best Horror Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Volume 2 only three reached a level that I felt earned the accolade of "best."  Because they were the only stories in the anthology that actually scared me.  Those stories were Balgrummo's Hell, The Old Darkness, and The Night of White Bhairab.  Of those three I thought the best was The Old Darkness.  That sucker scared the ever living crap out of me.  The other two simply got my hair standing on end, with Balgrummo's Hell adding a much appreciated sprinkling of goose-flesh to my reading experience.

Of the remaining offerings only Hand in Glove and The Little Black Train could qualify as being above average representations of the horror genre, although Train is more of a dark fantasy yarn than an outright horror story.  Glory is a Robert Bloch pastiche that would have been a hell of a lot better if Bloch himself had written it.  Bug House was spoiled by my having seen an adaptation of it on the syndicated horror anthology program Monsters.  Stillborn managed to hold my interest, but The Autopsy lost it long before it crept its slow as a snail narrative to the final payoff, and Salvage Rites and Test don't belong in any sort of anthology that uses the word best in its title.  Then again, the use of a descriptive term such as best is a highly subjective one and your results will no doubt vary from mine, should you ever choose to crack open The Best Horror Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Volume 2.  I think it's worth doing so, if only for the three stories mentioned above.

Succulent Prey - by Wrath James White

When he was a child, Joseph Miles was abducted, brutally tortured and sexually assaulted by a deranged pedophile.  Now a handsome young student at University, Joseph finds himself waging an inner war against an unspeakable urge.  He has an almost uncontrollable hunger to taste human flesh, nothing else arouses him.  Not wanting to become a monster, and believing he has been contaminated by his childhood attacker, Joseph vows to track down and destroy the source of his "infection."

Wrath James White's Succulent Prey holds an interesting, albeit a none too original, idea at its core.  (The Italian action/horror exploitation shocker Cannibal Apocalypse did a far better job of exploring/exploiting the idea of cannibalism as contagion.)  But the sex and gore drenched first fifty pages shows that White has precious little interest in exploring it.  He would much rather wallow in copious amounts of sex and violence, while making disturbing connections between them.  Although I do acknowledge that some of the behaviors White describes do have real life counterparts.  So, no matter how repugnant portions of Succulent Prey are, reality is far, far worse.

My biggest issue with Succulent Prey isn't with its the sex and violence, while it is horrid, I have both read and even written stuff every bit as bad elsewhere.  What ruined it for me was that his protagonist is doomed from almost page one.  Long before he reaches adulthood, Joseph Miles has already killed a human being.  The battle with his "illness" is clearly lost before it ever begins in the story proper.  We don't watch a good man fall victim to a nightmare he cannot control, we just watch a very sick man become sicker.  It gets boring after awhile.

Because of this, when I read a particular passage on page 73 of the Leisure Books edition I have, I had to laugh out loud:

A deep depression settled over him as he considered himself, who he was, and who and what he was becoming.

Save for the harrowing description of Joseph's captivity, there is not a moment where we get the slightest glimpse of who/what Joe was.  White does an excellent job describing the urges that propel the man, but he never gives us a glimpse of the man himself.  Much is said of Joseph Miles resemblance to the comic book character Superman, but nothing at all is made of it.  There is not a single moment in the novel where Joseph Miles is credibly human.  He remains a one dimensional monster from the novel's gruesome start, all the way to its gruesome end.

Infected - by Scott Sigler

A bizarre and deadly new disease, one that is turning average citizens into delusional, paranoid, and homicidal psychotics, has caught the attention of the CIA.  While a small, but brutally efficient team of field agents and scientists struggle to put the clues confusing together, Perry Dawsey, a former football star with a pronounced violent streak, becomes infected.  But Perry's illness is no ordinary disease, nor is it the bio-engineered weapon that the CIA suspects it to be.  It is the mere beginning of a much larger, far greater threat to all of humanity.

Although I had heard Scott Sigler's name mentioned once or twice on the Slice of Sci-Fi podcast, it wasn't enough to get me interested in listening to his podcasted novels.  At this point in my life I have the luxury of being able to kick back and actually read a book rather than having to listen to one get read to me.  But things change and, if I find myself trapped in a car for long drives, or spending more time working out at the gym (yeah, right) then I might start plugging in, down loading and listening to Sigler's books.  But until then, I will just be content in reading what he has to offer the old fashioned way.

Right now the only old fashioned way offering that Sigler has is Infected, a nasty little bio-nightmare that would make for an utterly kick ass David Cronenberg movie.  One that could be nicely sandwiched between his two classic transformation nightmares, Videodrome and The Fly.  While Sigler is nowhere near Cronenberg's level (yet) his debut novel is a solid enough effort to have gotten me looking forward to the day when he gets there.  But he still has a ways to go.

The book's strong points are in its blunt force trauma approach to horror (squeamish readers beware, Sigler pulls not a single punch and is really eager to go for the throat) and a fast paced narrative that had my eyes burning across the page.  The weak points are Sigler's narrative voice, which cracks with distracting and unnecessary folksy vernacular descriptive phrases, and his thinly developed supporting cast of characters.  He does such a good job developing Perry Dawsey, who comes truly alive as the story unfolds, that the sketchy nature of the other characters becomes painfully noticeable.  But don't let that discourage you from picking up a copy and reading it.  It delivers more than enough chills and thrills to justify the cover price.

A word of warning though, you just might find yourself becoming Infected with an addiction to Sigler's fast paced storytelling style.  Good thing then that Contagious, a sequel to Infected, will be hitting bookstores at the end of December.

Torments - by Lisa W. Cantrell

It has been two years since The Manse burned to the ground, literally taking over thirty souls down with it to hell, on that nightmarish Halloween night.  Although the town of Merrillville, North Carolina has tried to bury its painful memories, and the nearly completed Beaufort House Condominiums now stands where The Manse once did, the evil has not been fully exorcised.  Now the scarred and still scared survivors of that Halloween night are being called home to face the House of Horrors one more time.  But they are not alone, two unwitting newcomers have also become trapped within the demonic strands of The Manse's fatal web.

Reading Lisa Cantrell's Torments made me realize just how much I am going to miss Charles L. Grant, for her novel is an excellent example of the kind of Quiet Horror/Dark Fantasy fiction that Grant excelled at writing.  The book was also the perfect way to cap my Halloween themed reading for the month of October.  It had just about everything I wanted from a horror novel: likable and realistic characters, a small town setting where everybody could logically know everybody else, heavy doses of creepy atmosphere that had me literally feeling the cold, clammy dread of the season as my eyes rolled across the prose, and some good, old-fashioned scary moments.  My favorite being a drunk graveyard caretaker witnessing a reanimated corpse digging itself out of its grave.  The only thing that I have to fault the novel for is that its narrative never truly settles into its setting.  More often than not, the town of Merrillville seems every bit as three dimensional a setting as the town in Lars von Trier's Dogville.

Now back to the novel's pluses.  The biggest, and final, one for me was Cantrell's refusal to indulge in any of that overly graphic sex and violence that so many of the post-splatterpunk writers of today seem to adore doing.  Or maybe I have just been browsing and thumbing through the wrong kinds of horror novels these days.  What I really want to be reading, and at one point would love to be writing, are more horror novels like Torments.  No Halloween loving horror geek's library should be without a copy.

In the Night Room - by Peter Straub

Timothy Underhill, best-selling author of The Divided Man and the soon to be released lost boy lost girl, is having a very bad day.  First he sees the ghost of his dead sister, April.  Then he is menaced by a delusional "fan."  After that he begins receiving strange e-mails from people he soon learns have recently died.  What the hell is going on?

Willy Patrick, Newbery Medal Award winning author of the young adult novel In the Night Room, finds herself drawn to a warehouse parking lot.  Although she knows that her daughter Holly is dead, murdered alongside her father, Willy's husband, Willy cannot stop herself from thinking that her daughter is being held captive inside the warehouse.  What the hell is going on?

When their strange but somehow linked circumstances finally bring Underhill and Willy together, the question as to what the hell is going on is answered with a reality shattering and utterly impossible truth.  A truth that forces Underhill and Willy to undertake a journey together; one with a bitter and grief filled ending...

Peter Straub's In the Night Room is a meta-fiction sequel to his brilliant - and Bram Stoker award winning - return to supernatural meta-fiction form, Lost Boy Lost Girl.  While In the Night Room has intriguing ideas and plot twists to spare (more than enough to make the novel well worth reading) it falls far short of the book it follows.  Especially after the major plot twist (one that has been revealed in several reviews, but that I will refrain from giving away in this one) when Straub unwisely ignores a splendid opportunity to explore that twist on several different levels; despite the fact that his novel is clearly being told on several interconnected levels already (i.e. Straub's now trademarked story within story within yet another story narrative structuring).

Not helping matters is that the book never really reaches the blood chilling level of creeping dread that Lost Boy Lost Girl did.  Oh, there are several creepy moments prior to the "big reveal" and there is one particular moment at the end that chills the blood and sends a delightful shiver racing up and down the spine, (well, that was my reaction to it) but that moment is followed by what has to be one of the most anti-climatic endings I have read in ages.  My jaw literally hit the floor and I was gasping, "That's it.  All that build-up for this!?!"  If I was prone to disrespecting books I would have thrown In the Night Room across the room. But I'm not, so I didn't.

I know that this sound like I hated the book, I didn't.  I found its ideas and plot twists fascinating and stimulating; excellent reminders of why Peter Straub is one of my all time favorite writers.  But the book felt incomplete, as if there were huge chunks of narrative missing.  The best way I can describe it is that In the Night Room reads like the middle novel of a trilogy.  Perhaps it is and, in the not too distant future, I might be treated to a concluding chapter that ties up all of the far too many plot threads that Peter Straub has left dangling from this novel.

Others - by James Herbert

Nicholas Dismas, a private investigator cursed with severe physical deformities, is hired by wealthy widow Shelly Ripstone to find her missing son.  Dismas is reluctant to take the case, for the child "died at birth" and all records regarding the incident were destroyed in a cataclysmic fire.  But the woman is despondent, desperate and determined, and she convinces Dismas to at least try to find her long lost child.  He takes the case and soon after begins to suffer nightmarish visions.  Those visions, however, are child's play when compared to the grisly horrors his investigation eventually uncovers.

For the first half of Others I kept wondering where James Herbert, author of numerous lurid, sex and gore laden novels such as The Rats and The Fog, had disappeared to.  The pace of the story was slow, the tone sedate and, despite some dark moments, almost gentle.  Had James Herbert gone soft in his old age?

No, he most certainly has not.  For at the halfway point the James Herbert of old tears out of the shadows, grips you by the throat, and proceeds to mercilessly throttle you for the remaining 200 or so pages.  It turns out that the slow, sedate build up was just an old pro adding layer after delicate layer to his characters, using it as a sleight of hand to hide the slowly building tension and the gradually darkening of mood.  When hell does finally break loose and come calling to Dismas, both his character and those of the supporting cast have been so well developed that reading the horrors that follow is tantamount to watching good friends suffer the torments of the damned.

It is also like reading what Tod Browning's Freaks would have been like if it had been directed by Michael (The Sentinel) Winner and written by Andrew Vachss.  Strong stuff.  Very strong.

The only complaint that I would have to make is how, during the novel's action laden finale, Herbert maintains the slow, methodical pace, dragging out Dismas's battle with a deformed monstrosity inside a burning building far past the point of believability.  Nonetheless the book remains a solid work and an excellent example of just how much James Herbert has grown as a writer.

Cold Whisper - by Rick Hautala

Sarah Lahikainen's imaginary friend Tully is far from imaginary.  Just ask any person that was ever unlucky enough to get Sarah good and angry.  You probably won't get an answer, though.  Because they are all dead.

Plagued by guilt and self-loathing, Sarah manages to successfully drive Tully away.  But a short time after doing so the man who raped and murdered Sarah's mother abducts Sarah so he can tie up some "loose ends."

Rick Hautala's Cold Whisper is the latest addition to my short and inglorious list of Novels-So-Incredibly-Awful-I-Could-Not-Finish-Reading-Them.  It joins literary debacles such as Clive Barker's Imajica and Richard Laymon's Island on my Bookshelf of Shame.  But while I found Imajica to be insufferably overwritten and dull, and Island to be insufferably overwritten, grotesquely sleazy and drawn out to the point of becoming dull, Cold Whisper was simply offensive and insulting to my intelligence. 

Hautala's book, like all his others, is plagued by a writing style that swings back and forth from poor to lazy.  There is no such thing as narrative subtlety in a Rick Hautala novel.  He delights in going needlessly overboard, always choosing to drive home each and every plot development with a sledgehammer made of soap opera styled melodrama.  Sarah Lahikainen is not only an unlikable character, she is almost impossible to relate to, as her inner turmoil and suffering is manifested as the worst kind of self-centered self-pity.  The supernatural "character" of Tully and his murderous exploits have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the real life terrors that Sarah faces in the book's final hundred pages.  This is where the book offended and insulted.  In the first half of the novel, Tully rips apart Sarah's pet cat, kills her baby brother, her pregnant stepmother, and some stupid drunk slob that attempts to sexually assault her at a graduation party.  Yet he is somehow incapable of coming to Sarah's aid when her mother is brutally raped and murdered right before her eyes.  The worst he can do is freak the guy out by giving him a gentle tap on the shoulder.

Yeah, right.

Then there is the matter of Sarah's abduction and sexual assault that kicks off the book's final hundred pages.  That was the point where I decided "no more" and closed the book without finishing it and, for personal reasons, I refuse to even discuss that disgustingly lazy attempt at inducing "horror."

But if you are ever in the mood for a scary story about a troubled teen and his murderous imaginary friend, then track down a copy of Charles L. Grant's novel The Pet instead.

Masters of Terror Volume One: William Hope Hodgson - Edited by Peter Tremayne

Seven tales of terror from an almost forgotten Genre Grand Master: William Hope Hodgson.

I was first introduced to the skin crawling terror of William Hope Hodgson's fiction in the pages of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (the only periodical that I ever read with the same devotional regularity as Fangoria).  The story chilled me with both its creeping dread and gruesome imagery and, to this very day, I can remember what an experience it was to read The Voice in the Night, the story that begins this first volume in the proposed Masters of Terror anthology series, for the first time.  (Trivia: The Voice in the Night served as the inspiration for the cult classic Japanese thriller Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People.)

While the chills weren't quite as pronounced the second time reading The Voice in the Night, I cannot say the same for the six tales that followed it.  Each and every one of them had at least one segment that was almost unbearably suspenseful and several of them delivered some truly gruesome horror.  Hodgson's accolades as a Genre Grand Master are well-deserved.

A Tropical Horror, the second story in the anthology's line-up, is my current choice for favorite story in the book.  Short and simple, Horror unleashes a nightmarish sea serpent upon a vessel trapped in a sweltering calm.  It isn't so much what happens, but the expert manner in which Hodgson narrates the horrifying tale that makes it work so well.  Next was The Mystery of the Derelict, in which a brave search party makes a nightmarish discovery aboard a derelict sea vessel.  Hodgson reuses the story's "search party in peril" framework again in The Finding of the Graiken, The Stone Ship, and The Derelict.  Of the three The Stone Ship was the weakest, due in large part to my not liking the story's conclusion.  But Graiken rivals H.G. Wells The Sea Raiders for octopus inspired terror and The Derelict ends the book with gruesome jolt and runs a close second for the coveted favorite story in the book slot.  That leaves The Terror of the Water-Tank, the only story of the seven to be set on dry land.  But Hodgson brings just as much terror to terra firma that he does to the high seas.

The only complaint I can make about this particular book is that seven stories is just a tad too little.  Rather than satiate my hunger for Hodgson's work, it only succeeded in wetting my appetite and leave me craving more.

God Laughs When You Die - by Michael Boatman

Nine short stories "from the Wrong Side of the Tracks," written by actor Michael Boatman.

Folds:  The Co-Executive Producer/Director of the tabloid trash heap that is The Morrie Stapler Show schedules the ultimate guest, a one hundred and twenty pound five year old that will eat anything.  Anything.

The Tarantula Memoirs:  Jack Greer, the former "Super Soldier of Hope, Happiness, and the American Ideal" known as the Tarantula, is called out of retirement to hunt down one of his Super Hero brethren that has gone bad.  Very, very bad.

The Drop:  Cyrell has lured Buster out onto Lake Armstrong to kill him, but a colored mermaid gets in the way.

Katchina:  Leona Brinkmore learns the monstrous secret her abusive husband Lester has been hiding in their closet.

Bloodbath at the Lansdale Towers:  Drug dealer Lennox Ravanaugh, who delights in humiliating those addicted to his wares, get a gruesome taste of his own medicine.

Dormant:  Mr. Hopkins learns that he only has twenty-four hours left to live, and they aren't going to be pleasant.

The Ugly Truth: An ugly man with the gift of understanding is called to action.

The Long, Lost Life of Rufus Bleak:  Rufus Bleak thought he lost everything when he was brutally murdered in 1920.  But then the Night Mother appeared and offered Rufus a chance at revenge...

The Last American President:  George W. Bush meets Cthulhu..sort of.

When it comes to thinking up gruesome and unpleasant things to make a reader go "ick," actor Michael Boatman certainly has what it takes to stand tall and proud alongside the established and recognized writers of what was once called "splatterpunk."  Hell, author David J. Schow (The Kill Riff, The Outer Limits Companion), one of splatterpunk's acknowledged heavy hitters (Remember Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy?), goes so far as to call Boatman "a brother from another mother" in his laudatory introduction.  But when it comes to crafting compelling stories for those gruesome and unpleasant things to inhabit, well Boatman needs to work at it a bit more.

With the exception of four stories, Folds, The Tarantula Memoirs, Dormant, and Katchina, God Laughs When You Die is comprised of work that reads as if it were pulled out of the idea oven a little too early.  The biggest offender is Bloodbath at the Lansdale Towers, a story that, upon a second reading (it first appeared in the anthology Badass Horror, which I reviewed April of 2006), was impossible to figure out, in a bad way.  With no context upon which to hang the over the top violence, Lansdale starts and stops at the exact same place, leaving the reader none the wiser about what just happened.  The Ugly Truth is a near miss, a fantasy tale with a touch of romance and a dollop of horror that needed some sturdier world building and back story exposition.  Between those two is Rufus Bleak, another confusing collection of interesting ideas that left me wondering just what the hell the story was supposed to be about.  Somewhat better is The Drop, but it's a noticeable comedown in terms of characterization, exposition, and overall quality following the far superior Tarantula Memoirs.  (Methinks that somebody in the Boatman family is a Marvel Zombie.)  Which brings me to the anthology's closer, The Last American President, a black as pitch comedic piece of splatstick that tears apart an administration that is somewhat similar to the Bush Crime Family.  (Me also thinks that Mr. Boatman really doesn't like Dubya.)

Although the weaker stories out number the good ones, the stronger ones show that Michael Boatman will be writing some worthwhile reading in the future.  But this collection is strictly for the die hard horror "fans" that like to brag about how they were reading a particular writer long before he (or she) managed to break into the larger markets and "sell out."

The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets - by Mark Dawidziak

Reporter Carl Kolchak, having lost his job at I.N.S. for trying to expose the rather unique safety hazards lurking deep within the Merrymount Underground Storage Facility, located beneath the city of Chicago, now works for the tabloid Los Angeles Dispatch (a.k.a. the Disgrace).  While the times (it is now 1992) and Kolchak's stomping grounds may have changed, Kolchak's ability to uncover ghosts, goblins, and all manner of unpleasant and nightmarish beasties has not.  Neither has the reporter's tendency to step on all the wrong toes, which he promptly does at the press conference regarding the murder of land baron Glen Gilmore. 

Kolchak smells a cover-up, but his aforementioned toe stepping gets him banished to Goodland, Ohio, where he is to do some simple background research on Gilmore's recent housing development project.  What Kolchak uncovers, however, is the stuff of nightmares.

Mark Dawidziak's The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets, originally published in 1994 (and now out of print), was intended to be the premiere novel in an all new series of original Kolchak novels.  Things did not go as planned and the second novel, The Kolchak Papers: Grand Inquisitor by Doug Murray, failed to appear.  I do not think that it was for lack of trying.  Dawidziak's novel is a fun read, it's just doesn't contain the characterization of Kolchak that I cut my budding fan boy teeth on.  This might have to do with Dawidziak's being a far bigger fan of Jeff Rice's original novel, and the two TV movies it spawned, than the fun-yet-flawed TV series I remember so fondly.  Janos Skorzeny and Dr. Richard Malcolm, the villains from The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, respectively, are mentioned more than once.  However, with the exception of a passing reference to Kolchak: The Night Stalker's final episode (the aforementioned Merrymount matter), the television series might as well have never existed. 

But that obvious bias doesn't stop Dawidziak from bringing back some of the series beloved characters.  Ron "Uptight" Updyke, Ms. Emily, and even Gordy "The Ghoul" Spangler have all managed to follow Kolchak from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Ditto the memorable Janie Carlson and Kirsten Helms, characters from Kolchak's sophomore adventure, The Night Strangler.  Oh, and some guy named Vincenzo shows up a time or two, as well.  The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets is just one, big happy reunion.  For the Kolchak fan, that is.  Carl might disagree, although he does love having Ms. Emily around.

Story wise, Dawidziak's novel doesn't rise too far above the level of the show he loves to dismiss.  (Just read his excellent book The Night Stalker Companion: A 25th Anniversary Tribute and you will see what I mean.)  I could see where potential commercial breaks could be placed in the story.  Since Secrets is a trim 200 hundred pages, the mystery Dawidziak concocts to fill those pages doesn't really give Kolchak all that many red herrings to chase, and the story seems to want to set up its climax within pages of Kolchak's arrival in Ohio.  The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets reads as a three act play that somehow misplaced its middle section.  While the book is a blast for the Kolchak fan, it will, more or less, leave those unfamiliar and/or curious about the character scratching their head and wondering why this odd and out of date character is so damn popular.

Shadows 4 - Edited by Charles L. Grant

Seventeen chilling tales of Quiet Horror edited by the Master of the Genre, Charles L. Grant.

Cracking open and reading this superlative entry in the equally superlative, if not outright seminal, Quiet Horror anthology series was a bittersweet reminder of what the horror genre lost when Charles L. Grant passed away earlier this year.  Grant was the closet the genre had ever come to having a Ray Bradbury of its very own.  Yes, Grant was that good as far as I am concerned.

He also had excellent taste in horror fiction.  The seventeen stories gathered in the fourth volume of the long running Shadows series are all wonderful examples of the form Grant liked to call Quiet Horror.  If blood and guts and/or sex and violence are what you think horror is all about, then you really need to read more of what the genre has to offer.  Fear shouts, terror whispers...

In both the introduction to the book and certain stories, Grant claims to have had "strict" rules about what he considered acceptable material, but he also states that he routinely ignores those rules when a good story lands on his desk.  Submissions were supposed to be set in contemporary times, yet The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands by Stephen King and The Spider Glass by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro are both set in times long past.  "Traditional" monsters were discouraged, yet Waiting for the Knight by Beverly Evans is about dragons and the aforementioned Yarbro tale is a romantic dark fantasy centered around the vampire Count Saint-Germain.

For reasons of space and sanity, I will not go into detail about every story in the book.  Although there were all quite good, the ones that stood out from the pack for me were The Blue Chair by Tabitha King (who is a far better writer than her husband, Stephen), Echoes from a Darkened Shore by Cherie Wilkerson, Meow by Tanith Lee, The Giveaway by Steve Rasnic Tem, Need by Lisa Tuttle, Under My Bed by Al Sarrantonio and Snow, Cobwebs, and Dust by John Keefauver.  The Keefauver story actually gave me an honest to goodness nightmare.  Come to think of it, I could not give the book a better endorsement than that.  So I will end my review on that chilling note.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - by Max Brooks

Author Max Brooks surprised me.  In the last 30 or so years I have seen more than a few zombie movies and have read more than a few zombie books (both comic and prose).  Needless to say, but I have become very (perhaps even overly) familiar with the sub-genre's rules and largely Night of the Living Dead influenced narrative structure.  World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War managed to perform the neat trick of covering the now (for me) overly familiar narrative ground while taking its multiple viewpoint stories into intellectually intriguing and emotionally powerful new directions.  And here I had begun to think that all the fresh narrative ground in the flesh-eating zombie sub-genre had pretty much been gardened into lifelessness.

WWZ more or less starts where every other zombie story does: the first attack/outbreak of the flesh-eating zombie menace.  Then the story weaves its way through the standard threat escalation as the dead begin to overwhelm the living through sheer force of numbers.  (During this period author Max Brooks offers up some biting social commentary and satire, and that pun was most definitely intended.)  But then Brooks pushes his story far past where every other zombie story has chosen to end: with the fall of mankind being more or less a sure thing.  World War Z shows how a crushed and almost extinct humanity manages to fight back from the grave and begin to recapture its place in the world.  Brooks also chooses not to shy away from the environmental, economic and political damages such an event could (and more than likely would) unleash upon the world.

As good as the commentary and satire were, the individual stories that make up the whole were a very uneven mix.  Some were excellent, my favorite being a female pilot's harrowing journey through the zombie infested swamps of Louisiana.  Others were less so and, more often than not, the book's weaker stories seemed to drag, going on for far too long and overstaying their welcome.

But the book's pluses far outnumber its minuses and this impressive novel is easily the equal of just about any zombie movie that George A. Romero has ever made.  World War Z should be considered essential reading for any and all zombie genre fans.

Jason X: The Experiment - by Pat Cadigan

My entry in the Final Girl Friday the 13th Blog-A-Thon:

Jason Voorhees has crashed onto Earth II and sunk to the bottom of Veronica Lake.  (Yes, I know.)  But his miraculous healing capabilities, combined with the remaining nano mechanisms in what is left of his charred body, quickly begin to rebuild the bigger, stronger and deadlier Uber-Jason.

When restored to full health, the Uber-Jason strides out of Veronica Lake (sigh) and immediately goes on another killing spree that wipes out a brand new nuclear power plant.  However the radiation from the plant's core causes an overload in the nano mechanisms filling Uber-Jason's body and renders him immobile.  The military, seeing the defensive potential in this strange mutant, ships Uber-Jason off to a secret research facility so that his healing capabilities might be harnessed and used to create unstoppable, unkillable soldiers.  But all the military has really done is lock future victims in with an unstoppable, unkillable killing machine that is about to wake up...

The old saying "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is proven true once again as novelist Pat Cadigan wastes no time restoring the tired-and-true Friday the 13th status quo to the supposedly futuristic world of Jason X.  Although it is some 450 years in the future, and humanity has had contact with alien life forms, the way of life, and technology and slang, of Earth II is no different from that of 21st century Earth I.  Talk about arrested development.  Considering all the new directions that could, and should, have been taken, this book is just a big, lumbering step backward that utterly wastes the pulpy fun potential that was laid out in the source film and Cadigan's own novelization of it.

The Experiment also falls victim to the same problem that befell Church of the Divine Psychopath (an entry in the publisher's Friday the 13th spin-off series), in that it is just too freaking long.  The narrative strolls when it should be sprinting, and its sub-plots - due in large part to the overall nature of the source material - meander needlessly before terminating in an anti-climatic dead end.  Even worse, the overly padded story reads like two stories (the first being the events at the nuclear power plant, the second the experiment of the title and its inevitable aftermath) that were stapled together to fill up the utterly unnecessary 90,000 word count.  What these books need more than anything is for an editor to go Jason Voorhees on the word count and get them down to the quick n' dirty fun style read they're meant to be.

The Ruins - by Scott Smith

Eric, Stacy, Jeff, and Amy are all celebrating their recent college graduation with a vacation in Cancun, Mexico.  During their stay the group befriends an English speaking German named Mathias and a trio of non-English speaking Greeks, who call themselves Pablo, Don Quixote, and Juan.  Mathias has a brother named Henrich, who has followed a romantic attachment into the jungle to investigate some Mayan ruins.  Mathias intends to visit his brother at those ruins, to check up on him, and invites Eric, Stacy, Jeff, and Amy to come along.  The group agrees, and so does Pablo, in the hope that they will have one last memorable adventure before starting their lives back home.

What the travelers find at their destination isn't an adventure, it's a nightmare...

WARNING: Although I always try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, my critique of The Ruins, by necessity, will touch upon events that could ruin (no pun intended) some of the surprises the novel holds for the first time reader.  If you plan to read the book regardless of what I think of it, just know that I did not care for it all that much and do not read the paragraphs that follow until after you've read the book.

Now that you have been suitably warned, on with my review:

Scott Smith's novel The Ruins can best be summed up as follows, "Imagine if George Romero had adapted Stephen King's short story The Raft as a Night of the Living Dead style homage to The Day of the Triffids."  Now, two of those comparisons will give the genre savvy reader far too much information as to what kind of read they will be in for, but life is filled with such disappointments and, sad as it is for me to say, The Ruins qualifies as a major one.  Then again, I wasn't all that impressed with Smith's first novel, or its film version, either.  (I stopped reading A Simple Plan when I realized I didn't care one bit about whether or not the narrator got the stupid money, and I only watched the film version because Sam Raimi had directed it.)  Maybe it's just me, but I liked both King's and Romero's versions of this grim-and-gory style story a lot better than Smith's.

The marketing for the book has been quite coy about revealing that The Ruins is not only a horror novel, but a horror novel that has an honest to goodness monster as its central threat.  As far as monster novels go, The Ruins could be best described as adequate.  It digs under your skin, but it doesn't do anything particularly unique while doing so.  If you have read the aforementioned Stephen King short story, The Raft, then you have already read a shorter, scarier, and far less grueling (grueling in a bad way) version of this novel. 

Once the nature of the threat is revealed, The Ruins forgoes any further attempt at building suspense and instead focuses on just how horrible things become for the group.  And things get very, very horrible indeed.  Smith, who narrates the story in a manner so detached that it is almost clinical, doesn't flinch away from the gruesome fate that awaits many of his characters.  He relishes in describing every small, disgusting detail.  While what happens to the group is unsettling to the point of being horrific, the novel never becomes truly frightening.

Like many other contemporary horror stories, The Ruins overflows with xenophobia (whatever you do, do not leave the safety of this country and venture into foreign lands) and torture (physical, as well as psychological).  It also overflows with some logic defying moments, such as the characters repeatedly chasing after a cell phone that, despite being at the bottom of a shaft that seems to be fifty feet deep, at least, can still work days after its battery should had been drained of any and all power.  Not to mention the simple fact that it's still working in that location.  Hell, my own cell phone doesn't work in certain rooms of my apartment, and I live well above the ground.  Obviously I chose the wrong service provider.

Considering how simple its story structure is, it came as no surprise to hear that a film version of The Ruins is currently in preproduction.  A March 2008 release date has been scheduled, but I think I'll just wait for the DVD.

Slither - by Edward Lee

Professor Nora Craig and her teaching assistant, Loren Fredrick, are the two foremost experts in the field of polychaetology, the study of segmented worms.  No one is more qualified than them to escort wildlife photographer Annabelle Omart on her assignment to capture images of the scarlet bristleworm for National Geographic.  The group arrives at Pritchard's Key, a small island off the Florida coast, unaware that a field test of a genetically modified worm (one that can grow to well over thirty feet in length and causes fatal mutations in its human hosts) is being conducted there.

Slither is the first novel by the "notorious" Edward Lee that I have read, and the book is just good enough to insure that it will not be the last.  On the plus side of the equation, Lee both starts and climaxes the novel with a gruesome bang.  Sprinkled in between those moments are plenty of others featuring enough sex, violence, and slimy, icky things doing slimy, icky things to human bodies to satisfy the gorehound reader.  Lee also seems to have done a great deal of research into the different species of worm and what those species are capable of doing.  The book is filled with enough technobabble to make the monster elements seem feasible, at least within the confines of the story.

Slither stumbles, however, whenever it turns away from the worms to focus on the humans.  Lee's characters are a childish lot that aren't developed beyond two dimensions, at best, and, considering the book's length, there isn't near enough dramatic conflict between the humans to keep the non-monster stuff interesting for very long.  There are only so many scenes of an ugly duckling simmering with rage while the snooty gorgeous bitch gets all the male attention, and then gleefully rubs it in the ugly duckling's face, that I can take.  The "I'm so frustrated with being a virgin geek" thing might resonate with a teenaged reading audience, but I just found it to be irritatingly immature.  Finally there is the book's cumbersome length.  Buried within Slither's 357 pages is a taut and gruesome novel, one that really needs to lose about 50 to 75 pages of narrative weight before it can effectively strut its stuff.

Despite those weaknesses, Slither managed to deliver just enough queasy thrills and gruesome chills to keep me turning the pages.  The last hundred of which were well worth the sometimes frustrating task of getting there.

Cell - by Stephen King

The modern world comes to a sudden and violent end on a pleasant October afternoon; when all those using their cell phones at a particular moment, and everyone that is unfortunate to use theirs in the moments that follow, are turned into mindless killing machines.  Or so it seems, at first.

Have you read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend or Simon Clark's Blood Crazy?  (If you haven't, then you really should.)  Have you seen any of George Romero's Dead Series: Night of the Living Dead or its trio of sequels, Dawn, Day, and Land of the Dead?  (If you haven't, then you really should.)  Hell, have you seen 28 Days Later or have you read, or are reading, Robert Kirkman's comic book serial, The Walking Dead?  If you have, then Stephen King's Cell isn't going to impress you all that much.  The narrative ground the story covers has already been tread upon, countless times.  But, to advocate for the King instead of the Devil, it is the manner in which a story is told that matters far more than the story itself.  To twist King's favorite catchphrase around, "It is he who tells it, not the story."

Because this is Stephen King's version of 28 Days Later, the main character is yet another struggling writer from the state of Maine.  Clayton Riddell has come to Boston to pitch his comic book, Dark Wanderer, to a publisher.  Although Marvel has secured the rights to print a comic book adaptation/spin-off based on King's decades in the writing fantasy series, The Dark Tower, Riddell's successful meeting is with Dark Horse.  Nothing like smashing the competition, huh?

Clayton is celebrating having made the Big Sale when the Pulse, as it comes to be called, strikes.  The people around him, either making or receiving calls on their cell phones, suddenly become violent and gibberish spouting lunatics.  Within seconds people are getting ripped apart, cars are being smashed into each other, people, or buildings; planes are slamming into the ground left and right, and all those who weren't on their cell phones during that first wave are quick to pull them out and call 911 for help...it is the last phone call they will ever make.  While the source of the Pulse is never explained, that it is some kind of high tech terrorist act is the accepted theory amongst the novel's cast of characters.

As Steven Spielberg did with his version of War of the Worlds, King saturates Cell's explosive opening with plenty of 9/11 imagery.  "The bastards are using planes again," one character calls out while clouds of ash roll over Boston's carnage laden streets.  Calling up the images of the Katrina victims, King then follows Riddell and two survivors he has befriended, Tom McCourt and Alice Maxwell, to what the trio hope will be the relative safety of Tom's house in Malden.  That they are able to safely make the journey at night soon becomes an important plot point; for, when the sun rises the next morning, it lights a strange and dangerous new world.  A world in which the phone-crazies are noticeably changing. 

These unsettling developments are mere distractions for Clayton Riddell.  What he wants more than anything is to return to Maine and see if his estranged wife and son are safe.  Most of all he wants to know if his son, who has a cell phone, has managed to escape the effect of the Pulse.  As the three make their journey to Maine, King manages to achieve some sporadic moments of genuine fear; just enough to make the purchase of a paperback edition of Cell feel like money well spent.  The Constant Reader of King, however, might find his or her self wondering if the Titan of Literary Terror's best work is behind him.

Jason X - by Pat Cadigan - Based on the Motion Picture written by Todd Farmer

Jason Voorhees has finally been captured, but executing the fearsome mass murder proves to be more than a little difficult.  There seems to be nothing capable of killing him.  So a plan is made to put the Voorhees problem on hold, literally, by freezing him in a cryogenic chamber.  Things don't go quite as planned and Rowan LaFontaine, a young and attractive scientist working on the project, is frozen along with the vicious killer from Camp Crystal Lake.  The two remain frozen for 450 years...until 2455.  That is when a group of students from New Harvard University discover the cryogenic chamber beneath the storm scarred surface of the now dead Old Earth.  Hoping to capitalize on retrieving two valuable pieces of history, Professor Lowe has them brought aboard his ship, where he hopes to resuscitate the female subject.  The hulking corpse with the hockey mask is deemed a lost cause and placed in another lab so it can be cataloged and put back in cold storage.

But Jason Voorhees is already getting warmed up enough to pick up where he left off 450 years ago...

In the days before saturation distribution, not to mention home video and cable television, made watching and re-watching movies pretty much a ubiquitous form of entertainment, film novelizations were fairly routine.  Just about every major studio, and even low to modest budgeted independent efforts, had a novel version of their movie sitting in book racks "wherever paperbacks were sold."  Being a movie buff that was, and is, a voracious reader, novelizations of movies that I wanted to see, or had already seen, were a large part of my youthful entertainment diet.  After all, other than making recordings of my favorite movies on audio tape, which I did, there was no other way for me to easily revisit and enjoy a movie that I had liked.  Having it in book form was the closest I could get to actually owning the movie itself, in those pre-video era days, that is.  All that changed with the home video explosion in the 80s which, coupled with the gradual death of regional film distribution and the growing rental trade, made film novelizations unnecessary and they quickly became a marketing thing of the past.  The novelizations of today are sporadic and, more often than not, are only done for a select few films with ties to a pre-existing genre readership.  Novelizations of comic book films, say, or science-fiction epics with robust media novel spin-off series, like Star Wars or Star Trek.  While there will be a novelization of Snakes on a Plane, back in the day there would also have been novelizations of When a Stranger Calls, Slither, The Hills Have Eyes, and Silent Hill sitting in book store racks as well.

But enough with the dewy eyed nostalgia for days gone by, what about Pat Cadigan's novelization of Jason X?  What is up with that, yo?  Because of the publisher's odd decision to have all of their media novel spin-offs of the Friday the 13th, Jason X, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Final Destination series run a cumbersome 90,000 words, Pat Cadigan has plenty of room in which to both deepen the slim characterizations and expand upon the future world in which the story takes place.  She does a pretty good job of it.  The subtle tinkering with the characters personalities, along with their world building back stories, makes Jason X read more like an original novel than one based on a film script.  However, in the early portions of the book, some scenes are bloated with what reads as an excessive amount of description and character detail.  Cadigan takes two or three paragraphs to describe something that would have worked better with just a sentence or two.  This was the same problem that befell Scott Philip's Church of the Divine Psychopath, which served as the first book in Black Flame's traditional Friday the 13th line.  It is also the same problem that has befallen this review.

Cadigan not only wrote the Jason X novelization, she also penned a follow-up spin-off entitled The Experiment, which is the first original novel in the futurist Jason X line.  After doing such a nice job of world building, going as far as to introduce routine contact with alien life forms into the mix, which gives the Uber-Jason a potentially fertile playground in which to do his thing, I am looking forward to cracking it open.

Badass Horror - Edited by Michael Stone and Christopher J. Hall

Seven tales of tough guy terror.

Pool Sharks by Gerard Brennan: A friendly game of pool becomes a bare knuckled and torture laden barroom brawl for survival.

The Stray by Garry Kilworth: Tom was a quiet and gentle soul, and the hookers in the whorehouse liked having him around.  But one dangerous costumer didn't.  He wanted Tom to vanish, permanent like.

Hardboiled Stiff by Michael Hemmingson: Private Investigator Arthur "Artie" Gordon awakens in his own grave, with two bullet holes in his chest letting him know how he got there.  His desire to learn why he was murdered is only slightly more powerful than his new found hunger for human brains.

All the Pretty Girls by Ronald Damien Malfi:  Pablo Santiago has a very special place where he communes with God, inside of a rusted wreck of an abandoned car in the desert.  Pablo believes the car is God, and God wants a special woman.  Pablo can't seem to find her, though.  So he keeps looking, and keeps making offerings.  He's starting to lose count of just how many he has made, but Pablo knows it has to be at least six, so far...

Moving Pictures by Gord Rollo:  Ronnie relishes his new job as a "protection" money collector for the local crime boss.  But Ronnie soon discovers that accepting the offer of a freebie from the owner of a newly opened tattoo parlor wasn't the smartest thing to do.

The Essences by Davin Ireland:  When a man dies mysteriously at an insurance fraud investigation site, field operative Paul Gemson takes advantage of a clue he found on the deceased person and goes hunting for reparations.  What he finds is the very essence of humanity.

Bloodbath at Lansdale Towers by Michael Boatman:  Drug dealer Lennox Ravanaugh enjoys torturing the rich white kids he gets hooked on his poisonous wares.  Right at this moment, he's enjoying forcing a strung out brother and sister into doing certain things to one another.  Too bad Ravanaugh's little party is crashed by a strangely dressed man and his red hot assistant.  What Ravanaugh and his crew don't know is just how bad their surprise visitors are, beneath their polite exteriors.

Badass Horror is the sophomore effort from Dybbuk Press, a small press publisher "dedicated to producing quality works of strange and innovative fiction" with an emphasis on horror and experimental writing.  Dybbuk's first offering was the better than average, albeit wildly uneven, anthology Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre.  In terms of both content and presentation, Badass Horror is the better anthology.  The stories are all good and, for the most part, are appropriate to the title without being too shackled to a single constraining theme.  Even better, the anthology has a description on the back that will give perspective readers an idea of what kind of book it is they are holding:

"This collection of horror stories will slap you in the face, kick you in the teeth, and burn cigarette holes in your couch."

Well, the book's opening and closing tales, Pool Sharks and Bloodbath at the Lansdale Towers, certainly live up to that hyperbolic ad copy.  Sharks is, by far, the better of the two, while Towers tries a little too hard to emulate the over-the-top narrative styling of Mr. Joe R. Lansdale hisownself.  In between these two rough rides are a solid little sampling of noir laced nightmares in varying shades of gray.  On the lighter side, there is Hardboiled Stiff, a private detective turned zombie yarn that manages to mix murder, mystery, necrophilia and brain noshing zombie mayhem into a story that truly satisfies.  All the Pretty Girls is my choice for the most beautifully written story in the anthology, it casts a spell that The Stray wished it could, but can't.  Not helping is how The Stray is all but derailed by an incredibly weak ending that hinges on a poorly delivered pun.  Moving Pictures felt overly familiar.  I am certain that I read it, or at least a story very much like it, at some point in the past.  I just can't for the life of me remember where or when.  It also shares some minor similarity with a William Friedkin directed episode of the HBO series Tales from the Crypt.  The penultimate story in the anthology, The Essences, is a wonderful little morality tale suitable for The Twilight Zone.

If you find this anthology for a reasonable price, remember it contains only seven stories, so it runs just a page or two over one hundred and forty pages, and the idea of [for the most part] bad boys being in very bad situations appeals, then grab Badass Horror.  Just don't blame me for the holes that it might burn into your couch or favorite reading chair, okay?

Mistress of the Dark - by Sephera Giron

Abigail Barnum is an odd young lady.  Her roommate is a skeleton named Monica.  Abby, as she likes to be called, works as a waitress at a New York City hot spot called Ooolala.  Although a regular customer, one that looks a lot like actor Johnny Depp, has captured Abby's eye, and her heart, she is also actively involved in an affair with her stripper friend Vicki and a man named Brad.  Abby, Vicki, and Brad play all sorts of fun and inventive BDSM games together.  But on Halloween night the games go too far, and Abby kills Brad.  While keeping Vicki sedated with drugs, Abby disposes of Brad's body.  (First cutting it up into easy to cart around pieces.)  Except for the head.  She keeps that.

It seems that this isn't the first time that Abigail Barnum has killed, and it won't be the last...

Sephera Giron's Mistress of the Dark takes a pinch of Lucky McKee's May and mixes it with a dash of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho to help spice up her first person account of a social misfit's descent into psychosis and serial killing.  Despite all the glowing blurbs from fellow authors and critics sprinkled across the front and back cover, I can't say that the book was all that impressive.  Despite its being a trim three hundred and twenty-five pages, it read slower than the four hundred and three page Friday the 13th novel I polished off a few weeks ago.  (And that is saying a lot.)

The novel gets off to a promising enough start: with Abby slowly introducing her creepy and depraved life style to the reader via a domestic scene with Monica-the-skeleton, and then describing her first run-in with "Mr. Johnny Depp Look-Alike," as she likes to call him.  But then it goes off track when the love triangle with Brad and Vicki starts up.  It just seemed off, and it bogs the novel down with about one hundred or so pages of kinky sex and parties.  Having lived in a major city on a service providers salary, I could not suspend my disbelief that Abby would have been anywhere near able to support the lifestyle she claims to have.  (And yes, I know that she is supposed to be a very unreliable narrator.) 

Mistress of the Dark works best when it's trapped inside Abby's subtly creepy and depraved mind, teasing the reader with hints and lies about her past and current activities, and when it keeps the social interaction with other people vague and ill defined.  Such as when she snares an angelic looking girl at the library, or her frequent trips to night clubs to loose herself in anonymous binges of solo dancing.  What shatters the books hypnotic spell is the cluttered nature of Abby's needlessly over complicated social life, one that a disorganized serial killer like her seems incapable of having, and how the two primary story lines don't diverge at any one moment.  Brad and Vicki could have been relegated to cameos, or taken out of the book entirely, and the end result could have been a far tighter and terrifying novella, instead of a slow and only occasionally disturbing novel.  One that really over stays its welcome.

Friday the 13th #1: Church of the Divine Psychopath - by Scott Phillips

Father Long has brought his Ministry of the Heavenly Vessel and its fanatical followers to Camp Crystal Lake to start a communal life of religious purity.  He also hopes to resurrect the "Hand of God" that is Jason Voorhees, so that all deserving sinners are punished.  For some strange reason Long erroneously believes that Jason Voorhees only kills sinners.  Walter Hobb is a disgraced Tactical Squad Leader for the "Agency."  After a bungled assault on a meth lab, Hobb is demoted and sent out on a peculiar mission with a team that seems to be made up of the Agency's worst of the worst.  The mission?  Find and destroy Jason Voorhees.  The resurrected Voorhees is determined to kill them all, and let God sort them out.

Church of the Divine Psychopath is the first in Black Flame's "New Line Cinema's House of Horror" line of Friday the 13th spin-off novels.  (Other lines include novels based on Jason X, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Final Destination series.)  While it could have been worse, it could also have been a whole lot better.  Author Scott Phillips, who cut his teeth writing the low-budget schlockers Horrorvision and Cryptz, as well as writing and directing The Stink of Flesh, tries hard to marry the nearly plotless Friday the 13th narrative formula to a format that requires not only plot, but some degree of characterization.  For the most part he is successful, but the novel is hampered by its unnecessary length of 403 pages.  This book could have been cut by 50 to 100 pages and no reader would have been the wiser, and it would have made the book a faster, more entertaining read.  The main characters, and several supporting ones, (namely Lauren, Walter Hobb's wife, who all but vanishes from the story after Walter goes off on his suicide mission) are all over developed, while others never get past the one dimensional stereotype that long time Friday fans, and detractors, are overly familiar with.  This also makes it pretty easy to see who will survive to the final pages, though it also gives some of the deaths a bit of an emotional sting (if sympathetic) or a cathartic release (if not).  The cumbersome amount of padding also requires that Jason, in his "unstoppable force" persona from Jason Lives, be kept out of the action for long stretches of time, so the book shuffles when it should gallop.

When this line of books was announced last year, I was pretty excited (being a Friday the 13th fanboy) and more than just a little bit curious.  Could the Friday the 13th series really be translated to the media novel format?  (In all honesty, both the Elm Street and Final Destination movies are far better suited to the media novel format than Friday the 13th.) Church of the Divine Psychopath says: Yes and No.  So my inner jury is pretty well hung for the moment, until I crack open Friday The 13th #2: Hell Lake, that is.

Chamber of Horrors - by Robert Bloch

Twelve stories of psychological horror, crime, and the macabre by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.

Over the years I have read more than a few Robert Bloch anthologies, or a short story of his that popped up in a magazine or collection.  So I have become familiar with his "standards," the classics that would be reprinted in "Best of" and "Classics of" anthologies over the years.  Of those, Chamber of Horrors gathers together The Head Hunter, the tale of a Nazi executioner who becomes obsessed with his work, The Screaming People, about an amnesiac's troubled dreams, and Frozen Fear, a vengeance from beyond the grave story that B-movie fans will remember from the Amicus anthology movie, Asylum.

But the new to me stories were just as much fun.  Pride Goes - has a wayward wife attempting the perfect murder, Fat Chance has a wayward husband doing likewise, (my, what a little gender reversal can do for a story), Two of a Kind revolves around a most odd job interview, and Untouchable has a racist and drunken "Ugly American" actor discovering the true meaning of the word.

While many of Bloch's stories had genre trappings, such as mad scientists, ghosts, zombies, and all manner of other supernaturally empowered beasties, it was the twist endings and macabre humor that lifted them to the level of greatness.  Bloch's ability to create fully developed characters with just a handful of descriptive sentences certainly helped.

Fans of quality suspense writing (Impractical Joker, The Unpardonable Crime, and the aforementioned Pride Goes - and Fat Chance, to name but a few, are more deeply rooted in the crime genre than they are horror) really need to search out the books of Robert Bloch.  They are essential reading.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles - Edited by Joe Gentile, Garrett Anderson, and Lori Gentile

Moonstone Books presents twenty-six tales of the surreal, bizarre, and macabre featuring intrepid journalist Carl Kolchak battling various ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged beasties, and all manner of nasty things that go bump in the night.

While it has taken well over thirty-years, Carl Kolchak is finally getting a much deserved second chance at life after cancellation.  (The first was Mark Dawidziak's attempt at launching a new string of original Kolchak novels in 1994 with The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets.)  Moonstone Books' original anthology (as well as its wonderful comic book and graphic novel series) starts up where Dawidziak's novel left off.  With Carl Kolchak, Tony Vincenzo, and all the I.N.S. staff regulars (Ron Updyke, Miss Emily, and Monique Marmelstein) working for the disreputable Left Coast tabloid, the Hollywood Dispatch.  The location may have changed, but Carl is quick to find that the City of Angels is really the City of Monsters.

It is easy to think of Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles as the second season that could (and should) have been.  The stories range from radical re-inventions of Kolchak's character, (The Last Temptation of Kolchak by Steven Grant, The Pretty Dead Girl by Brent Matthews) to faithful recreations of the show's Monster of the Week story format, (The Ungrateful Dead by James Bates, Shadows from the Screen by Richard Valley, Barrens by Chuck Dixon, to name but a very few) and playful examinations and/or ruminations about Kolchak's impact on the world and what the monsters (or the forces that govern them) think of it.  (The Way of the Matter by P.N. Elrod, Interview with a Vampire? by Mark Dawidziak, What Monster Do by Peter David). 

Most of the stories in Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles are fairly solid tie-ins to both the television show and its comic book series "sequels."  Characters and events from the movies, the series, and the comics are all mentioned  and, in some of the stronger stories, come back for an actual appearance, rather than a simple mentioned-in-passing cameo.  Being a somewhat conservative fan, (i.e. one that is resistant to major changes in the "canonical" and/or established Kolchak: The Night Stalker characterizations and/or story structure) the stories I enjoyed most were the ones that followed the established format of the show almost to the letter.  (Shadows from the Screen gets my vote as the anthology's best story.)  I was less than impressed with the ones that played around with the concept too much.  Those stories just didn't have the "feel" of either the show or of Kolchak's character, but I am sure that they will find some appreciative readers.  I also had slight problems with the Kolchak as private investigator stories.  In his own words Carl is just a "Dumb reporter doing his job," and the stories worked best when the writers remembered that.

While the reinvented Kolchak series didn't make it past six episodes, the comics and this collection show that there is more than a little life left in the continuing adventures of the original Carl Kolchak.  Keep reporting Carl, and I'll keep reading.

Night Prayers - by P.D. Cacek

Allison is a vampire, changed by the smoothing talking Seth.  But now that Seth has had his fun, he leaves Allison to fend for herself.  What is a freshly turned, and utterly clueless, vampire to do?  Get a meal, for starters.  Mica is a street preacher who has fallen, both figuratively and literally, upon hard times.  When he isn't trying to spread the gospel to the lost souls of Hollywood, he's working as a barker for a strip club that caters to the furvert crowd.  He knows that God has placed him there for a reason, he just cannot figure out what it is.

When Allison, drunk off a wino's blood, stumbles upon the club and is invited into the fold, Mica struggles with an even greater temptation than mere sexual lust.  Allison looks exactly like the one woman that Mica loved, both physically and emotionally, more than God.  The reason for Allison's quick hire at Luci's Fur Pit is that the dancers are all like her, creatures of the night.  Mica and Allison are about to discover that God indeed works in the most mysterious of ways.

If you want a horror novel that will have you chuckling more than shivering, then Night Prayers is the book to read.  It isn't all that scary, there are, maybe, two or three genuinely tense sequences, but it is a lot of fun while it lasts.  The main characters are well developed, both Mica and Allison are likable and easy to relate to.  Allison's struggles to both cope with and learn about her new way of un-life allow the reader to learn the "real" rules of being a vampire.  (Yes, the novel is yet another post-modern deconstruction/reconstruction of an old myth with a contemporary outlook.)  Mica's devout fundamentalist Christian world view could have become a one note Holy Roller parody, but author P.D. Cacek gives his spiritual struggle enough real world depth to make him a sympathetic hero.  A real good touch is having his struggle not rooted in lust, but in the festering guilt for having abandoned his first love (a beautiful agnostic named Piper) to return to his life as an amateur street preacher.  The supporting cast is given some good individual shadings, with the exception of the black vampire stripper Gina.  She's just a walking, talking, and blood sucking street smart black chick stereotype.  Can't have it all, I guess.

Fans of Ray Garton's vampire stripper novel Live Girls should enjoy Night Prayers.  It's like that novel's cute kid sister.

Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre - Edited by Tim Lieder

Eleven tales of fear, obsession, and killer clowns.  (According to the title page, that is.)

On its web page Dybbuk Press states that its intended goal is to publish "strange and innovative" fiction, with emphasis placed on horror (that'd be the "strange" side, I'd wager) and experimental writing (being the "innovative" side, naturally).  Dybbuk's premiere effort is an anthology entitled Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre and while the stories collected within are certainly strange (and entertaining, for the most part), they are also far from innovative.

In a previous review I commented about my issue with reading theme anthologies.  How reading one short story after another about the same subject gets old to me, and fast.  Oddly enough, I had the opposite problem with Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre, because the anthology is a collection of short stories put together with no editorial comment whatsoever, not even contributors bios.  This made the book a somewhat uneven read at first, because I could not understand what kind of anthology it was I was reading.  Horror?  Humor?  Both?  Neither?  I wish editor Tim Lieder would have given me some sort of clue as to what to expect in an introduction, at least.

But what about the stories?  They are the usual mix of classics and clunkers.  On the classic side, there are Cameron Hill's Hermetic Crab (about a novice magician and his hermit crab familiar), Rob Steussi's Head Drippers (a sane man's intellectual exercise at an asylum leads to an insane discovery about the place), and Michael Stone's Clob (wherein a shy man's "imaginary friend" gives some much needed assist in the girl meeting department).  All three are more than worth the price of book.  The clunkers are C.C. Parker's Formaldehyde (a hodgepodge of slackers, murder and corpse play), Trina Shealy Orton's Brilliant Suspension (an anonymous character undergoes a magical, albeit torturous, transformation) and Rats, Wrong Alley by Tim Johnson (mutant guess whats).  These three stories, while not "bad," really needed to spend a little more time cooking in the idea oven.  The middle range stories are Paul Haines Doof Doof Doof (one of those post-modern twists on the Fairy Tale characters we grew up reading about), Roberta Rogow's Peppercorn Rent (a playful yarn about a strange rental agreement and a young woman's rather animalistic monthly visitor), Brian Rosenberger's Something Funny Is Going On (the killer you know what story), and William Brock's Berries Under Snow (a somber examination of frustrated and/or spurned love - and a perfect closer for the anthology).  Jenifer Jourdanne's modestly amusing non-fiction ramblings, Blue Elephants, is the only writing that does not have some sort of connection to horror, science-fiction or fantasy and, while reading it, I could only wonder what the hell it was doing in this anthology, because it doesn't belong.

Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre gets Dybbuk Press off to a somewhat promising start.  Each of the contributing writers shows promise and I'm pretty sure, if they stick to it, their work will start showing up in more widely distributed magazines and anthologies.  If they already have, then clearly I need to diversify my reading.  I'm missing some good stuff.

Keepers - by Gary A. Braunbeck

"...the keepers are coming."

Gil Stewart's quiet life changes forever when he witnesses a horrible accident on the freeway.  An elderly man chases his hat into traffic and is struck by a minivan.  Gil notices two other things, the man was being watched by two angry dogs from the side of the road and he mouthed "Hello, Gil" just before being run over.

Gil then returns home to find a very sick dog on his lawn.  He also receives a package full of bittersweet memories and a call from the group home where his Down's syndrome nephew lives.  It seems that Gil's nephew has gone missing.

What Gil does not know is that all these occurrences are connected to a horrifying event in his past.  Something he would understand if he would only allow himself to remember that which he has forced himself to forget.  But remember he must, because the Keepers are coming.

I enjoyed Gary A. Braunbeck's novel In Silent Graves, but his sophomore effort Keepers left me a little cold.  While it contains many a disturbing scene, the book pretty much follows the plot structure of Graves a bit too closely for my taste.  Both books feature a narrator that, after experiencing a traumatic moment, finds himself on a phantasmagorical journey into a nightmare that turns out to be something quite different than he had originally believed it to be.  In Silent Graves focused on abused and neglected children, while Keepers is, for the most part, focused on abused and neglected animals.  For me, reading Keepers was akin to simply reading In Silent Graves all over again.  Not something I had been planning to do so soon after reading it just last year. 

To use a music metaphor (one I will probably mangle horribly, for which I apologize in advance), I think there some writers that are like jazz musicians.  They can take a theme and are able to twist and twirl it around and around in countless unique variations.  Others are like a funky rock band that only seems to know three cords, like Brian Johnson era AC/DC.  While they can play the hell out of those three cords, it is still only three cords.  At this point it seems that Gary A. Braunbeck seems to know only three thematic cords.  He can play them artfully and wring some real emotional impact from them, but they are still only three cords.  I hope he learns some more for his third novel.

Lost Boy Lost Girl - by Peter Straub

Writer Tim Underhill returns to his childhood home of Millhaven to attend his sister-in-law's funeral.  Something horrible had driven the woman to suicide.  A short time later, Tim's nephew Mark goes missing and Underhill returns yet again to assist his estranged brother Philip in the search for the lost boy.  Philip and the police suspect that Mark has fallen victim to the Sherman Park Killer, a suspected serial murderer who targets teen-aged boys.  Tim suspects that the disappearance might be linked to Mark's sudden obsession with the abandoned house just behind the Underhill home.  A house with a very dark past, one with a familial connection to Mark's mother.

Peter Straub has almost become a literary genre of his very own and Lost Boy Lost Girl is an excellent example of it.  While the book is a rather unsettling ghost story, it is also a complicated mystery, thus connecting together the supernatural stories that first made Straub an international bestseller (Ghost Story, Shadowland, and Floating Dragon) with the complex psychological mysteries he penned in the late '80s and early '90s (the Blue Rose trilogy - Koko, Mystery, and The Throat).  Mr. X, the novel just prior to Lost Boy Lost Girl, had Straub returning to the supernatural with a vigorous and fascinating evil twin story, one with a Lovecraftian twist.  Here he uses the supernatural to add a deeper level to the human horrors at the heart of the tale.

From page one Straub is fully in control of his story's sharp twists and turns.  The labyrinthine maze that is hidden within the walls of the abandoned house is an excellent illustration of the Straub's own complex narrative.  He surges forward, jumps back, feints to one side, then the other, each time dropping a vital clue of the revelations to come.  From an early reference to serial killer Dr. Herman Mudgett (a.k.a. H.H. Holmes) to the rich, delicious smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies, Straub builds layer upon layer.  When the pieces were all in place, I could only marvel at the masterful job that he had done with this deceptively simple story.

Suspenseful, scary, and packing an emotional wallop, Lost Boy Lost Girl is classic Peter Straub.