Chadzilla ROARS!!!

Creature from the Black Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon - by Paul Di Filippo

The year is 2015 and Global Warming is changing the Earth's ecosystem.  Forward thinking scientist Brice Chalefant believes that humanity's long term survival depends on its adapting to a more amphibious state of being.  Big fan of Waterworld, I guess.  Although his theory is not embraced by the scientific community, Tarquin Hasselrude, an elderly and highly respected scientist, shares with Chalefant the startling discovery of an honest to goodness Gill-Man in the upper Amazon in 1954...

There's more to it than that, stuff involving time machines and ancient Gill-Men and women from the stars, I think, settling Devonian era Earth, but I didn't make it that far.  I gave up at the start of Chapter Five.

When Dark Horse books first announced that they would be publishing a series of novels based on the classic Universal Monster movies of yesteryear (Frankenstein and his Bride, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) I was every bit as excited and I was intrigued.  What better place to start, I thought, than with my all-time favorite Universal Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon?

I went into Creature from the Back Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon hoping for a loving retro-style return to the "Lost World" pulp adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others.  What I got instead was a mix of shoddy futurist dystopia tinged science-fiction, clumsy plotting, and stick figure sketching that was somehow meant to pass for character development.  Not once in the sixty pages I managed to wade through did I find a single solitary moment of 50s B-movie fun.  Where were the larger than life heroes?  The smart talking heroine that delivers coffee to the LTLHs before getting carried off, kicking and screaming, in the arms of the Creature?

Come to think of it, where was the Creature?  Yes, I know, there was that prologue featuring a "smart and gentle" Creature fleeing from the "Coarsened Ones".  But that wasn't the Creature of the 1950s movie series and that, more than anything, is what I wanted.  I wanted Beauty, Beast, and a square jawed Man of Action that fights the Beast to save the Beauty for himself.

I know enough about write-for-hire projects to not lay the blame entirely at author Paul Di Filippo's word processor.  Whoever was given editorial control over how the property was handled by the owner of the rights to the Creature (which would probably be someone representing the commercial interests of Universal) is to blame for allowing the Creature to be mucked up this badly, and mucked up badly it was.  I tossed Creature from the Black Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon back.  It can sleep with the fishes as far as I am concerned.

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.

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.

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.

ALIENS: DNA War - by Diane Carey

Rory Malvaux is a cop that needs to not only get out of town, he needs to get off the planet itself.  His brutal dispatching of a man that had killed a fellow officer and his family has landed Malvaux in serious trouble, so he takes the job of legal officer on a forty-odd months round trip space mission.  The mission?  Collect a scientific team stationed on Rosamund 6, a habitable planet that has become infested with the dreaded alien Xenomorphs.  Extracting the team proves to be more than a bit of a problem...

Diane Carey's Aliens: DNA War was everything that I had hoped it would be and almost nothing that I dreaded it could be.  It's a short and simple siege story that, despite a chaotic and shaky start, delivers plenty of thrills, chills, and brutal, bloody action.  It does James Cameron's seminal sequel proud.  Well, it does if your only criteria for a good ALIENS book is one that doesn't skimp on the chest-bursting, acid splattering action; and that is precisely where my quality line is drawn.

Character and plot wise, the book offers up the usual collection of space opera/B-movie character types (rogue cop with an attitude, colonial marines, nutball scientist with delusions that she is God incarnate, etc) and runs them through a plot wherein they all have to behave just so in order for the story to work.  There were several times where I could sense a contrivance to get the story from plot point B to plot point C.  But Carey had done such a solid job of constructing her plot that my sense never blossomed into certainty.

Michael Jan Friedman's Aliens: Original Sin, the first book in DH Press's relaunch of their ALIENS series, left me cold.  But Diane Carey's Aliens: DNA War, the imprint's second title offering, had me begging for more.  It was an excellent trip to the literary equivalent of the Drive-In.  I can only hope that my next visit will be every bit as much fun as this one.

Hunter's Moon - by Lori Handeland

Leigh Taylor is a hunter, a Jager-Sucher; a killer of werewolves, in the simplest of terms, and is one of the best there is.  She has been given an assignment to train Jessie McQuade, Sheriff of Crow Valley, Wisconsin, on how to hunt and kill werewolves and stay alive to be able to do so again.  Taylor is not happy with the assignment, she prefers to "work alone."  But that happiness turns to confusion when she meets the mysterious and moody Damien Fitzgerald.  Leigh is drawn to this man that is as sad and withdrawn as he is gentle and generous.  Although the nightmarish and painful memories of how her last affair ended (with a werewolf slaughtering her entire family and marking her as its mate) warn her against ever taking the risk of loss again, her growing feelings for Damien refuse to be denied...

With Lori Handeland's Nightcreature series I do believe that I have found a romance series capable of simultaneously scratching my incessant reader's itch for Happily Ever After love stories as well as for Go For The Throat thrills n' chills.  (Is it too much to ask that, after putting the characters through Hell, a horror story allow them a little taste of Heaven as a reward?  Evidently so.)  Hunter's Moon delivers ample - and almost equal - amounts of both thrills n' chills and warm n' fuzzies and, at this point, I can only assume/hope that the other novels in the Nightcreature series do the same.

The morose and clearly guilt plagued Damien Fitzgerald is a wonderful counterbalance for Leigh; his also being a werewolf (not really a spoiler, while the hints are blatant, a lot of dramatic tension is built from Leigh's denial of the obvious) that kills other werewolves makes him appear to be a kindred spirit.  Or his he?  For there is also a rogue werewolf that is eating other werewolves, absorbing their power for its own nefarious purpose.  Is Damien that werewolf, or is it the White Wolf that slaughtered Leigh's family and marked her as its mate?  Remember, wolves mate for life and werewolves live forever.

I loved almost every page of Hunter's Moon and can easily see myself reading it again at some point in the future.  If Romance Novels with monsters are your kind of thing, then this book should be one you will enjoy curling up with, especially if there is a full moon hanging in the sky above you.  Highly recommended.

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.

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.

Fatalis - by Jeff Rovin

A pride of Saber-toothed cats attacks Santa Barbara.  (Do you really need to know any more about the book's plot than that?  I think not.)

Fatalis is author Jeff Rovin's (Tom Clancy's Op-Center series) follow up to his fun and pulpy, not to mention bestselling, killer bats invade New York novel, Vespers.  While Fatalis is every bit as pulpy as Vespers was, it isn't nearly as much fun to read.  The reason for this might be the issue I had with the book's rather questionable moral stance.

Rovin's story is pretty standard stuff, as far as monster novels go.  The template for it is clearly Jaws: the protagonists (Jim Grand, an Anthropologist and widower, and Hannah Hughes, a left leaning newspaper reporter/publisher living off of Daddy's money) and the antagonist (Sheriff Malcolm Gearhart, a tough-as-nails Vietnam veteran that will do anything to protect his city) investigate a series of mysterious, and bloody, disappearances in the Santa Ynez mountains.  The attacks continue, each one showing more of the monster, until a massive attack reveals the saber-toothed cats in all their horrifying glory.  Then the chase is on, with Grand (the Brody) and Hughes (the Hooper) knocking heads with the bloodthirsty Gearhart (the Quint, obviously) over whether or not they should capture the saber-toothed cats or just kill them.  It all culminates in a bloody battle between the cats, Grand, Hughes, Gearhart, the police, and the National Guard at the La Brea Tar Pits. 

The only thing unique about Rovin's story is that he doesn't bestow it with a human villain.  Gearhart, although a power wielding authoritarian, is never cast in a truly negative light.  He just wants to protect his people.  There is a moment at the end that is rather over the top, but it fits the over the edge Quint Character behavior pattern.  Grand and Hughes actions, however, are nowhere near the nobility of protecting innocent civilian life .  The pair fight tooth and nail to have the saber-toothed cats sedated and captured, despite the pride having killed what seems to a hundred or so people.  I lost count by the time the pride hit Los Angeles.  While Grand pondered the "spiritual meaning" of the miraculous resurrection of a pride of freeze dried saber-toothed cats in the 21st century, I could only think that a dangerous animal had been unleashed into an eco-system that it was not meant to be a part of and that the sooner it was destroyed, the better.  Having read more than a few articles about alien species of insect, animal, and even vegetation destroying an eco-system that they were inadvertently set loose upon will do that to you.  I also found the novel's ending to be disturbing rather than uplifting.  Although Rovin tried, he just could not get me dewy eyed over the tragic fate of a pride of vicious carnivores running loose in the Santa Ynez mountains.

Meg: Primal Waters - by Steve Alten

It has been almost twenty years since the giant Megalodon shark named Angel escaped from her pen at the Tanaka Oceanographic Institute.  Jonas Taylor, now in his mid-sixties, is writing his action filled memoirs in the hope that the book sales will help to pay off the Angel sized bills brought upon by the giant shark's money draining absence.  Further irritants for the already far too stressed Jonas are his rebellious seventeen year old daughter, Danielle, as well as the emotional troubles his beloved wife Terry suffers as a result of her battle for survival in the previous Meg adventure, The Trench.

Then TV producer Erik Hollander offers Jonas Taylor what sounds like an easy job, provide color commentary on a reality show called Daredevils.  The lure of lucre is too strong to resist and, with daughter Danielle at his side, Jonas is soon sailing the high seas with a bunch of adrenaline junkies.  What Jonas, and even the TV producers, don't know is that the whole trip is a scam meant to get Jonas Taylor into the mouth of a hungry Megalodon shark...

In MEG: Primal Waters author Steve Alten offers up not one, not two, but three carnage soaked giant shark stories.  I'm guessing that, with the book being the third in the ongoing "Meg" series, and with a fourth novel is already in the works, the number of Megs is some kind of attempt at an in-joke.  Third book, three sharks...get it?  It also gives Alten ample opportunity to cram the adventure with what fans of the series want, lots of Megalodon fueled carnage.  On that level, the book is every bit as much pulse pounding fun as both MEG and The Trench were.  The human drama, as was the case with the previous books, is just one dimensional soap opera stuff meant to fill the pages between the shark attacks.

Not content with an ocean suddenly teaming with sixty plus foot long glow-in-the-dark albino sharks, Alten also hints that there are far worse monsters in the deep than his title creatures.  Undoubtedly those fearsome beasts will make an appearance in the fourth Meg novel.  I'm looking forward to reading it next summer.

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.

Aliens: Original Sin - by Michael Jan Friedman

Clone Ripley and the other survivors of the ill-fated Auriga wage a continuing battle with Weyland-Yutani and Earthgov to prevent yet another outbreak of the dreaded alien menace.  But another alien, one only glimpsed in fossil form back on Acheron, is determined to see that the monstrous creatures return.

Michael Jan Friedman's Aliens: Original Sin is a bumpy start for the Dark Horse Press relaunch of its Aliens tie-in novel series.  Not surprisingly, the story picks up moments after Alien Resurrection, the fourth and, to date, final Alien movie, ends, with the survivors landing on Earth.  The story then jumps ahead in time to a point where Clone Ripley, the android Call, brutish Johner, and the wheelchair bound Vriess (and one or two others) are engaged in some kind of clandestine chicanery that has to do with buried information concerning the "erased histories."  (Anything that has to do with the events that unfolded in Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3.)

Friedman makes a game effort at filling in some of the minor-to-major plot holes in the Alien franchise, but the revelations are hampered by what could be called the "Yeah-but-then" Factor.  Case in point, Friedman asks the reader to believe that a select number of humans (I'm assuming representatives of Weyland-Yutani, the soulless Company that is obsessed with capturing, studying, and somehow profiting off of the acid-blooded creatures) have been in clandestine contact (and business with) the "pilot's people" (Mala'kak) for over three hundred years with no one ever becoming the wiser.  I found that impossible to believe.  It also negates the need to have cloned Ellen Ripley in the first place, because the Company would have, supposedly, limitless access to the alien eggs.  Each revelation seemed to make less sense.

Not helping is that the story is a continuation of my least favorite Alien movie, with the android-with-a-soul Call being the only truly sympathetic character of the bunch.  There is also very little alien action in the book, which is strange.  One would think that an Aliens novel would have move aliens in it.  But the attacks are pretty much confined to the last fifty or sixty pages of the book and read as being rather rushed.

Dark Horse Press unleashes another Aliens book later this year, Aliens: DNA War by Diane Carey.  I am hoping it will be a better one, I can't see how it could be worse.

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.