The Crawlspace

Review: Monsters In America by W. Scott Poole

2011-08-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

Review by Jess Peacock

Nobody could be blamed for mistaking Monsters In America for a book that it simply is not. Whether a result of the title itself, or the gnarled trees shrouded in an ominous fog serving as the cover art, this is not some compendium of hauntings in the heartland or a documentation of personal eyewitnesses to the antics of the Jersey Devil. Author and history professor W. Scott Poole has constructed a work that is far more in-depth, scholarly and imaginative than any throw-away bargain bin schlock that fills the bookshelves every autumn, and has set the bar ridiculously high for any future research exploring the locus of historical and cultural studies, particularly as it pertains to the horrific.

Equal parts thoughtful and frightening, Monsters In America explores the darkest recesses of American history, using the distorted reflection of fictional monstrosities to tease out the true horror of this nation’s unflattering past, ideologies, and political & religious nightmares uniquely suited to these shores. Poole writes:

Monsters are “meaning machines,” excavating all manner of cultural productions depending on their context and their historical moment. In American history they have been symbols of deviance, objects of sympathy, and even images of erotic desire. They structured the enslavement of African Americans, constructed notions of crime and deviance, and provided mental fodder for the culture wars of the contemporary period.

Monsters In America is not a simple Sunday stroll through analogous genre icons as they pertain to interesting footnotes in American history. Poole has written an important text that serves as a clarion call for readers to closely examine the commonly accepted narrative of history that has been steadily spoon fed to a people who want to, need to, believe in the overt goodness of America. Monsters, Poole successfully argues, serve to pull back the membranous protective tissue of historical revisionism to reveal the charnel house of injustice and lies found beneath. As Poole so eloquently writes, “American exceptionalism and innocence are nothing but happy bedtime stories for children rightfully afraid of the dark.”

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein serving as a metaphor of slave rebellion, to the monstrous Saturday matinee mutations standing in for the horrors of The Love Canal tragedy, to a resurgence in the popularity of the Universal Monsters in the 1970’s serving as an anchor for kids living through the “restructuring of American family demographics,” Monsters In America challenges, enlightens, and, quite honestly, frightens in its prescient view of American history, as well as the seeming ubiquity of the monsters of our past and probable future.

Monsters in America | Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting from Baylor University Press on Vimeo.

Cellar Dweller Review: Midnight Mass by F. Paul Wilson

2011-08-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

Review by Jess Peacock

F. Paul Wilson’s Midnight Mass is actually three books, or, perhaps more accurately, three genres, in one. The first half of the novel is horror writing at its finest, leaping out of the shadows on page one and relentlessly chasing the reader through the darkened streets of their imagination until it deftly transitions into a metaphysical musing on what it means to be human. From there, Wilson’s storytelling violently downshifts into an action soaked revenge tale couched in the nightmare world of a vampire apocalypse.

Lamenting the absence of truly ghastly vampires in the horror genre, or, as Wilson describes in an author’s note preceding Midnight Mass, “the soulless, merciless, parasitic creatures we all knew and loved,” the author set out to pen a tale that countered “the tortured romantic aesthetes who have been passing lately for vampires.” On all counts, Wilson succeeded at constructing a work that has continued to be underappreciated over the last seven years, finding itself seemingly lost in the shadow of his wildly popular Repairman Jack series.

In all likelihood having influenced David Soznowski’s equally wonderful novel Vamped and the sub-genre busting Spierig Brothers film Daybreakers, Midnight Mass introduces a world where humankind suddenly finds itself teetering on annihilation at the hands of a swift and violent vampiric worldwide assault. Save for a few regions of the United States where the undead have not yet sunk their teeth into, inhabitants of communities around the globe are relegated to camoflaging their existence as best they can, or serving as blood cattle for the new dominant species.

Thankfully, Wilson does not attempt to post-modernize his brand of vampire. Rather, he reclaims the popular mythology associated with the monster, as evidenced when he writes, “My premise going in was that all the legends about the undead were true: they feared crosses, were killed by sunlight, were burned by holy water and crucifixes, cast no reflection, etcetera.” By embracing this traditional approach, the author swings wide open the theological door that one would have to walk through if, in fact, vampires existed. And by setting the bulk of the first half of the novel in a Catholic church under siege by the undead, and populating the pages with intelligent, determined, and tough-as-nails survivors struggling to maintain their faith amidst the gore and insanity, Wilson is able to explore spiritual questions that have every right to manifest in this type of horror novel. “But you’ve got to take the next step,” explains Father Joe, the protagonist of the novel, to his atheist niece who is wearing a crucifix around her neck for protection. “You’ve got to ask why the undead fear it, why it sears their flesh. There’s something there. When you face that reality, you won’t be an atheist or agnostic anymore.”

The pleasure involved in reading a razor sharp novel celebrating the spiritual trappings of the traditional vampire aside, with Midnight Mass one can blindly apply any number of positive adjectives and labels: wickedly smart, thrilling, often horrifying, emotionally draining, devastatingly violent, and surprisingly tender. Because of this, F. Paul Wilson’s addition to the undead bookshelves undoubtedly deserves to sit amidst such classics as Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and John Steakley’s Vampire$, two other important literary works that explore the confluence of faith and vampirism by slamming the door on the unfortunate revisionism that has plagued the undead sub-genre for decades.

Cellar Dweller Review: Gospel of the Living Dead by Kim Paffenroth

2011-08-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

Review by Jess Peacock

Five years ago, Kim Paffenroth, a professor of religious studies and author of several works of zombie fiction including the Dying to Live series, penned Gospel of the Living Dead, an exhaustive look at the mostly sociological and theological implications of the undead cinematic portfolio of George Romero.

In order to thoroughly dissect the director’s work, Paffenroth examined Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and even the Romero-less Dawn of the Dead remake, through the lens and surprisingly similar motif of Dante’s Inferno. The author writes, “Dante’s greatest and most surprising notion, that hell is not so much a place of external torments…inflicted on the damned from some force outside of themselves…both Dante’s hell and the hell of a zombie-infested earth are places where the hell is primarily internal, of our own making.”

Paffenroth proceeds to bolster this belief by analyzing the various issues at play in Romero’s zombie films (both symbolic and overt) such as sin & redemption, consumerism & materialism, racism, sexism, and class warfare to name only a few. For example, with regard to Day of the Dead, the author writes, “It is not the military, government, or church that exercises real power, but the wealthy…according to Romero, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Vatican do not run or exploit the world – Wall Street does.” This type of critical analysis of what some might write off as a mindlessly violent film gives Gospel of the Living Dead a resonance that a general analysis of the Romero library might not provide.

Paffenroth particularly excels when dissecting the theology of the undead, a task made particularly difficult in the light of the overt anti-religion stance George Romero has assumed over the years, both cinematically and personally. “More than any other movie monster or mythological creature,” Paffenroth writes, “zombies vividly show the state of damnation, of human life without the divine gift of reason, and without any hope of change or improvement.” It is from this subtle perspective that the author analyzes potential theological springboards in the films, avoiding, for the most part, heavy-handed allegorical images that fit only with a shoehorn and a mallet. One unfortunate lapse involved the direct comparison of Big Daddy and his zombie followers from Land of the Dead crossing a protective river in order to reach the humans on the other side to the story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea found in the Hebrew Bible.

Other than a few missteps in that vein, the only major critique with Gospel of the Living Dead is the lengthy synopsis that Paffenroth provides for each film/chapter. It is probably a safe assumption that a reader of such a specifically targeted compendium already knows the referenced works of Romero, making these sections nothing more than page-count padding.

While often overly academic in its style of prose and somewhat repetitive in its content, Gospel of the Living Dead still provides sharp and important analysis of a body of work that has always had more on its mind than bloodlust and gut munching. Paffenroth takes George Romero, the horror genre, and fans of the zombie sub-genre seriously, and dives headlong into not only an apologetic of the seminal zombie series, but a true celebration of the social and theological layers buried within.

Review: Chasing the Moon by A. Lee Martinez

2011-08-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Approximately one hundred pages into the latest novel from A. Lee Martinez, Vom the Hungering, an ancient singular entity who, as the name implies, loves to eat…anything, explains to the protagonist Diana, “If you want everything to make sense, you’re only going to be continually disappointed.” And therein lies the truth and beauty of not only Chasing the Moon, it is also a purposeful declaration that firmly bolts down the nexus of the unknowable yet oddly accessible universe which Martinez has built into his wildly eccentric overall body of work.

Past reviews of works from Martinez such as Monster and Divine Misfortune accuse the author, albeit in a positive tone, of being light and breezy, nothing more than simple summer reading for the beach. And while the author’s prose does indeed move along at an exciting and easy to read clip, Martinez is dealing with cosmological and theological concepts that should give one pause, reflecting not only on our role within the universe, but upon the vast unanswerable questions of existence itself.

In Chasing the Moon, the reader is immediately and inexplicably thrust into a world where a gash in the universe results in the emergence of a bizarre amalgam of monsters and extra-dimensional entities supervised, moderated, and maintained by various tenants at a not-so-typical apartment complex. Diana, being the latest occupant of Apartment Number Five, is tasked with administering the control and care of the previously mentioned Vom the Hungering until the creature either eats her, or she goes mad from an eternity of multiverse nanny duty.

Toss into the mix a floating, all destroying tentacled eye, the reintegration of a god-like entity with his fractured greater eldritch self who is tirelessly pursuing the moon in order to devour it (which would result in the meltdown of our existence, of course), innumerable alternate realities, a mind reading landlord, disembodied voices that spoil movie endings, and you have just the slightest hint of the Lovecraft meets Christopher Moore genius of Chasing the Moon.

In the absolute best sense, Martinez is the ideological love child of Stephen Hawking and Douglas Adams, with the literary dynamism of a Duane Swierczynski tossed in for good measure. While a fast-paced, witty, and altogether enjoyable read, Martinez also forces the reader (directly or indirectly) to contemplate the nature and durability of the cosmos, best illustrated when Diana is confronted with the destruction of the human race at the hands of an all powerful and eternal being. The god in question asks her, “If you stepped in an anthill and someone told you not to move your foot for fear of stepping on any more ants, would you do it? Why is your convenience worth a million ants, but mine isn’t worth a billion humans?”

Aside from the existential metaphysics wormholing through his latest novel, Martinez succeeds in populating Chasing the Moon with characters (both human and not) who basically want the same thing: a place to belong. Strip away the giant bugs, the uncontrollable spawning, and the devolution of the human race, and what you might be left with is the simple truth that we all just want to be loved. And how much it hurts when that love leaves.

Review: Pariah by Bob Fingerman

2011-08-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

EDITORS NOTE: I read Pariah and interviewed Bob Fingerman a year ago with the intention of writing a feature on the author and his second novel for Rue Morgue Magazine or possibly Famous Monsters of Filmland. Unfortunately, I conducted the interview a week before starting graduate school, which quickly consumed my life. And even though I made promises to myself and Bob that I would use my vacation time to complete the piece, the article simply fell to the wayside, as did The Crawlspace overall.

Fast forward to the present. Grad school is still an oppressive blanket of academic responsibility, however one cannot simply abandon what they love in life to the black hole of higher education. Therefore, The Crawlspace was reanimated, and with it some unfulfilled promises. Pariah is an exceptional novel, and one that deserves the highest praise, even if that praise is one year too late. Bob gave up his valuable time to conduct an interview that never saw the light of day, and for that I hope he might be able to forgive me. So, without further adieu, a better-late-than-never look at Bob Fingerman’s Pariah.

Review written by Jess Peacock

“The weird thing about Pariah,” author Bob Fingerman explains, “is that I think it’s more a novel with zombies than a zombie novel.” Please do not mistake Fingerman’s assessment of his latest book as a ploy to distance himself from the horror label, the strategy of an author seeking a more market friendly thriller tag for his work. Pariah is a grim, claustrophobic, darkly humorous look at the end of the world at the hands (and teeth) of the ambulatory dead, with all of the unrelenting violence, gore, and intensity that one would expect from the sub-genre. Fingerman takes it a step further, however, by creating an ensemble cast of characters and trapping them in an Upper East Side apartment complex in New York City while examining the results of a maddening and monotonous life of survival through their eyes.

Rather than building elaborate set pieces showcasing the final stand of mankind against the walking dead, Fingerman constructs his story through the drudgery of the day-to-day, building tension as the cast interacts, clashes, and occasionally cooperates. Ultimately, these are people with no plan or goal to speak of, no brighter future just around the corner, possessed only of a soul crushing certainty that their efforts have absolutely no chance of paying off in the end. This caustic atmosphere paves the way for Fingerman to tease out his uniquely black brand of humor as a way to highlight the humanity of most of the survivors, with the zombies working in the background as a frame to facilitate the compelling and riveting performances within the apartment complex.

This daily grind is dramatically disrupted, however, when, approximately halfway through the novel, Fingerman introduces Mona into the mix, a lone teenage girl who is able to walk amongst the zombie hordes unscathed. This sudden shift in the narrative radically propels the story forward, as Mona is looked upon with eyes of fear, lust, and messianic hope (biblical images of her parting the sea of the dead abound) as her presence and apparent power over the zombies succeeds in bringing some semblance of comfort and normalcy into the lives of the survivors.

While Pariah is in fact just one more zombie novel on the already crowded undead bookshelf (although the story itself was planned as a graphic novel fifteen years ago), Fingerman points out one salient truth: “Once you acknowledge that you’re playing with George Romero’s toys, then every kid can play with those toys differently.” And it is those differences that elevate Pariah beyond a standard us versus them fight for survival into a piece of literature that transcends the zombie sub-genre and stands on its own as a superior work of art.

Review: Monster by A. Lee Martinez

2011-08-05T22:39:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

If one were to gather the mind of Douglas Adams, classic episodes of In Search Of, and the offbeat sensibility of Christopher Moore writing at the top of his game, throw them into the Large Hadron Collider, and watch as they slam together at the speed of thought, then one might get a sense of the unique treat that A. Lee Martinez has produced with his novel Monster.

When you’re scrambling around town trying to scrape together a living as a freelance crypto biological containment agent, there really isn’t a lot of time to contemplate the larger questions of life: Why are we here? How did we get here? How did here get here? However, when Monster, the protagonist of the tale, meets Judy while cleaning up a messy Yeti problem in the frozen foods aisle of the Food Plus Mart, he is unwittingly lured into a cosmic game of chess where the very fabric of the universe hangs in the balance, and where the answers to those very questions could come crashing down around him.

Despite populating his novel with enough creatures and beasties to fill a cantina on Tatooine, Martinez anchors his twisted yarn with a lean, fast moving prose, wickedly intelligent dialogue, and, most importantly, a relationship between Monster and Judy that feels genuine, never obligatory, developing in an organic approach that allows for the truth that we sometimes fail to immediately appreciate those we would ultimately trade our very lives for.

For Martinez, the unfolding complex metaphysical plot in Monster is secondary to the emotional journey his characters undertake. From the relationship (or lack thereof) between Monster and Judy, to the determined loyalty of Monster’s pan dimensional partner Chester, to the relational angst of the literal girlfriend from hell, these are people we either have known or will know at some point in our lives. And that is where Monster succeeds where other novels of this ilk have failed: characters that feel lived in, who live on long after the final page, and who the reader hopes to spend even more time with in the future.

Monster is a quick, light, and enjoyable read with more on its mind than initially meets the eye. A. Lee Martinez has succeeded in creating a work that operates on several different levels, asking the reader to look beyond the cavalcade of cryptos, step past the sophomoric humor, lift the veil of existential intrigue, and see the heart that beats within his various creations at play within the pages. Then again, perhaps I might be reading a little too much into a book that kicks off with a Yeti eating Rocky Road ice cream and concludes with a pamphlet entitled Dragonkeeping For Fun and Profit.

Review: The Griff by Christopher Moore and Ian Corson with Jennyson Rosero

2011-08-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Christopher Moore is coasting. Considered at one point to be one of the more original and cutting edge voices in genre literature, his last novel, Fool, drowned in a quagmire of Shakespearian buffoonery, while his latest endeavor, the graphic novel The Griff, is simply pointless and ineffectual.

Opening with scant elucidation, a recently discovered artifact submerged in the South Atlantic Ocean shoots a mysterious beam into space, and by page three our planet is under attack from countless hordes of flesh eating dragons that resemble the mythological griffin.

Within days, the majority of humanity has been devoured, an alien ship shows up and crashes off the coast of Florida, and a small cast of Christopher Moore stock characters wax sarcastic as they fail to contemplate the destruction of civilization, or even the death of their loved ones. Between Mo, the sharp tongued goth hottie, Steve, the awkward nerd wagging his tongue after her, and Liz, a buxom (of course) marine biologist, Moore seems to simply be regurgitating his more popular characters from previous novels.

The Griff suffers from many problems, not the least of which is the haphazard and confusing action that takes place on the comic panels. More often than not, the details of the action are lost with very little exposition to assist the reader in discerning what exactly is transpiring and why. Unfortunately, the character development suffers from the same lack of attention to detail, allowing the cast to coast on nothing more than snarky quips.

In addition, the graphic novel reads more as an exercise in Christopher Moore-lite. The author is at his best when he is entirely unleashed, free to explore the depths of comedic, sexual and occult profanity that Lamb, Bloodsucking Fiends, and Practical Demonkeeping made him famous for. However, The Griff finds Moore wearing a creative muzzle, nodding only slightly to the sexual tension between the various leads, choosing rather to focus on the uninspired and hackneyed dragon slaying that fills the pages.

Originally written as a screenplay with Ian Corson, The Griff is clichéd and worn out, with nothing separating it from the countless apocalyptic stories that have come down the pike in recent years. Existing for no other apparent reason than a quick cash grab (The Griff retails for $22.99), one can only hope that Christopher Moore will break out of this apparent creative slump with his next full-length novel, Sacre Bleu, due out soon.

Review: Vickie Van Helsing by Solomon J. Inkwell

2011-08-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Stop me if you’ve heard this: An ancient vampiric force awakens. A teacher intent on finding the one student who can stand against the evil, a young, attractive high school girl with a secret lineage as a slayer. A “Scooby Gang” of friends who unite to prevent a wave of undead terror while dealing with the expected teen angst and cruel politics of high school. Before you blurt out Buffy the Vampire Slayer, think again. This is Vickie Van Helsing, written by Solomon J. Inkwell, the enchanted fountain pen (I wish I were kidding) of author James Grea. Which begs the question of whether you can call yourself an author if your magical pen does all the work?

Before this review continues, a few words of clarification: I am a critic, yes, and it can be extremely easy to sit behind a laptop and be…well…critical of the hard work of authors both famous and obscure. However, more than anything I am a fan of the horror and sci-fi genre. I want to read material that forces me back on my heels, tweaks my imagination, and transports me to an alternate reality where monsters exist, evil and hope is incarnate, and fantasies materialize in the hands of talented and competent writers. The Crawlspace is not here to shit on everything that gets sent to us, nor is it a site to rubber stamp an author who is kind enough to send us his or her work. The hope here is to simply be a tool that plays a very small part in elevating the art form. However, from time to time we receive a Vickie Van Helsing.

Aside from blatantly ripping off the Whedonverse, author James Grea also lifts his characters directly from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. In addition to Vickie, the direct descendant of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, the Count is also resurrected in all his glory, as well as guest appearances by the relatives of Mina Murray and Renfield. Somehow they all apparently just happened to be living in the same neighborhood. If you are able to work your way past this absurd premise, you only have an entire novel of weak prose, shallow to nonexistent character development, and overly predictable plot points to work through.

At this point it would be problematic to continue this review without simply eviscerating the entirety of the book, which is neither helpful nor desired. Suffice to say, there is genre work out there you should be spending your hard earned money on (see David Wellington, Bob Fingerman, David Moody, etc.) over the amateurish Vickie Van Helsing. Or maybe just catch some Buffy on Netflix.

Review: Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

2011-07-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

It is difficult to review a work where the critical reception is unanimous and widespread. Whether positive or negative, it can be far too easy to allow ones opinion to be influenced by the overwhelming consensus floating around the cloud. Or worse, to be the one to serve as the lone contrarian simply because the entirety of the herd is moving in a singular, lock step, direction.

Such is the case with S.J. Watson’s inaugural novel Before I Go to Sleep, widely praised by critics and acquired for film adaptation by Ridley Scott’s production company Scott Free. Quite literally the Amazon.com flavor of the month for June 2011, Before I Go to Sleep serves as an adequate novel and a fast read. Unfortunately, that is about it.

The novel concerns Christine, a middle-aged woman afflicted with a form of amnesia that prevents her from forming new memories. When she awakens each morning, the previous days memories are erased, leaving her in a perpetual state of emotional and societal limbo, with only her husband Ben around each morning to help sort out her bewilderment. While Christopher Nolan’s Memento (based on his brother Jonathon’s short story) similarly tread this path cinematically ten years previous, Watson initially does an excellent job of branching off in a unique direction, exploring the natural human responses of confusion, fear, anger and claustrophobia that this affliction would necessarily produce in someone such as Christine.

Unfortunately, the author quickly steers the novel into standard whodunit territory. At the behest of her doctor, Christine begins a journal as a way to not only remember what is happening in her life, but also as a potential agent of healing for her fractured psyche. Due to her condition, Christine needs to read her journal each new day, and so it is with great shock that she discovers, written in her own handwriting, the words Don’t trust Ben scribbled on the front page. While the novel does not necessarily fall apart at this point (the note is quickly revealed at the end of chapter one), it enters the blasé world of meh, bowing to standard Hitchcockian tropes such as the unreliable narrator, unreliable supporting cast, unreliable memories, and, well, just about unreliable everything.

Without venturing too deeply into spoiler territory, Christine’s treatments from her doctor pry open memories of a life that fail to connect with her current surroundings. And her growing paranoia, while a tool of Watson’s to keep the reader off balance, proves to be justified. While this avenue provides the stimulus for what will undoubtedly be an exciting Hollywood thriller, the true psychological horrors of Christine’s affliction are touched on only briefly, a terror that, if handled correctly, might penetrate the reader at a far deeper level than mere conspiracy theories. Who are we without our memories? What do we believe about others and ourselves simply because we are conditioned to? Without a firm foundation of identity how might the slightest stimuli (external or internal) alter our daily paths? And, without sounding overly trite, what defines reality?

In addition, Before I Go to Sleep suffers from several hard to overcome leaps of logic, as well as an overly rushed climax that leaves the reader backtracking several pages in order to fully understand where all the players fit on the game board. While Watson has produced an interesting first novel, it unfortunately fails to live up to the manufactured positive hype generated over the last several months. Unreliable in tone and depth, perhaps his next novel will reveal a consistent voice that is able to avoid the lure of easy revelations and convenient conclusions.

Review: The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse Created by Stephen Jones

2011-01-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Over the past several years, bookshelves have buckled under the considerable weight of apocalyptic horrors focused on the walking (or running) dead. As a result, there is a growing concern that the glut of flesh eating stories will ultimately warrant a backlash that could force the sub-genre underground, or worse, into becoming a self-parody. Fortunately, in the hands of creative people like Stephen Jones, zombies can still offer new and fresh storytelling opportunities for horror bibliophiles.

Jones, the winner of several Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards, has assembled almost twenty authors to create a zombie themed novel that is less anthology and more epic tale of the possible end of humanity told through multiple mediums such as text messages, diary entries, twitter, e-mails, blogs, and medical reports. Surprisingly cohesive in its disparate structure, The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse recounts the yearlong zombie crisis as it explodes outward from a historic church in London, soon engulfing the rest of the world.

The opening of the book sets a surprising humanist tone for the rest of the novel with a man’s heartfelt letter of farewell to his mother before joining his wife in death. From there, everything from a blogger sharing his own personal film festival as the world goes to hell (Braindead, Bio-Zombie), to the journal of a biological researcher racing against time to find a cure to the pandemic, to the chilling transcript of the last broadcast of a Mexico City radio show, all lead to a surprising and rather unique twist that, upon reflection, reshapes many of the entries.

Not a perfect work by any measure, the 500+ pages, while indeed mammoth, often produces slow and somewhat uneven moments that would have benefited from some tighter editing. That said, The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse succeeds at creating an immersive experience that feels genuine in all of the various mediums it reflects.

Clever and smart, Stephen Jones has managed to add an original and fun take on the zombie sub-genre, with plenty of carnage, popular culture touchstones, and political subtext to appeal to a wide reading audience.

Review: Horror Movie Freak by Don Sumner

2010-11-11T20:13:00.000-08:00

Review written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reprinted from Rue Morgue Magazine)

After reading Horror Movie Freak, one cannot help but wonder whether author Don Sumner is aiming at creating a primer for budding scary movie newbies, or making a definitive statement on essential horror viewing for those who consider themselves aficionados of the genre. Formulated as a pseudo-reference text, Horror Movie Freak categorizes movies into various broad sub-categories such as Classics, Evil From Hell, Supernatural Thrillers, and Aberrations of Nature, the last of which loses some credibility at the inclusion of the blatant Jaws rip-off Grizzly.

After an elementary introductory essay entitled Why We Love Horror Movies, which cribs the rules of surviving a fright flick straight from Wes Craven’s Scream, Sumner writes, “Horror Movie Freak is not a listing of ‘best’ horror movies, but rather a collection of ones that fall into a variety of horror subgenres with the simple inclusion criteria that they don’t suck.” Unfortunately, what sucks and what excels can be a tricky road to travel, subject to the tastes and predilections of the viewer. Does James Wan’s mediocre Dead Silence or 2003’s clichéd Darkness Falls really rate above the criminally omitted Guillermo del Toro ghost story The Devil’s Backbone or John Carpenter’s classic The Fog (the remake, by the way, gets a nod in the book)?

Toward the end of Horror Movie Freak, Sumner shakes things up a little by looking at the trend of remakes (featuring The Omen, Thirteen Ghosts, and Pulse), pays tribute to the genre’s Scream Queens, and creates a list of ten movies one should watch before October 31st, of which inexplicably includes Bob Clark’s yuletide themed Black Christmas.

Ultimately, Horror Movie Freak fails to satisfyingly flesh out any of the films it highlights with interesting facts, anecdotes, or trivia, which will undoubtedly leave the majority of advanced terror fans wanting. However, with its easily digestible plot synopsis of each featured movie, as well as an abundance of stills, quotes, and marketing materials littering the two-hundred and fifty plus pages, Horror Movie Freak could easily succeed as that Intro to Horror class you’ve always been hoping to enroll your significant other in.

Review: Grim Reaper: End of Days by Steve Alten

2010-10-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reprinted from Fangoria Magazine)

Grim Reaper: End of Days, the latest novel from Steve Alten, aspires to work on a number of levels. Primarily, it attempts to re-imagine Dante’s Inferno as a post-modern apocalyptic thriller while also functioning as a scathing commentary on the perceived moral breakdown within the United States, using the recent financial crisis and the Iraq War as a double fisted soapbox with which to proselytize from.

Unfortunately, End of Days reads as an incomprehensible amalgam of literary and cinematic end-of-the-world stereotypes swirling amidst a heavy dose of pseudo-spiritual babble more fit for Christian retailers than proper horror fiction.

Predominantly taking place in and around Manhattan after a psychotic chemical weapons researcher unleashes the Scythe virus (a form of the Black Plague), the novel follows Iraq War veteran Patrick Shepherd as he battles his way through disease, mayhem, and the United States military to locate his estranged family.

As Shepherd, accompanied by psychologist Virgil (subtle), dodges bullets, crashes helicopters, and, inexplicably, duels with Death himself, the side-effects of the virus and its antidote enable him to see behind the veil of the physical world and into the spiritual nine circles of Hell first illustrated by Dante Alighieri’s epic poem Divine Comedy.

Uncomfortably paranoid in its endless ranting on the evils of society, Alten pulls out every conceivable modern day conspiracy theory as fodder for his opus, including the Bush Administration’s alleged complicity in the attacks of 9/11 and the 2001 Amerithrax incidents.

Aside from the ridiculously convoluted story within Grim Reaper: End of Days, Alten fills his 500-plus pages with paper-thin characters who speak in a wooden, overly expository manner that often comes across more as a textbook on Gnostic mysticism and less a fictional form of entertainment. To make matters worse, the author displays an embarrassingly poor grasp of basic writing technique when he regularly switches from present tense to past tense, often within the same paragraph.

While Alten has found a moderate amount of success with his prehistoric shark series MEG, his latest effort falls flat in every respect, more akin tonally to Glenn Beck’s abysmal Overton Window than an apocalyptic classic such as Stephen King’s The Stand. Fans of the horrific would be well advised to avoid this unfortunate new release.

Review: The Fall by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

2010-10-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reprinted from Rue Morgue Magazine)

The Fall, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s follow-up to The Strain, not only changes everything we’ve come to know in this stellar vampire series, it dazzles the reader with a kinetic narrative that sacrifices none of the vivid character development that was established in the first book.

The new novel picks up immediately following the events of The Strain as a geometric vampiric wave spreads outward from New York City, with only a small resistance movement, led by CDC scientist Eph Goodweather and Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian, that knows the truth. Making matters worse from the newly ordained vampire hunters is the inexplicable complicity of key officials in the upper tiers of power, never mind that Eph’s ex-wife Kelly is turned and stalking their son, and a war is unfolding between Old and New World vampires for control of humanity. Fortunately, Hogan and del Toro have successfully avoided the pitfalls traditionally associated with the dreaded middle act, retaining the same epic scope of the original novel, while focusing even more on the evolution of their protagonists.

In addition, Sardu, the ageless vampire progenitor of the Apocalypse, is everything a Big Bad should be. His plan for world enslavement is focused and overwhelming, as he expertly moves his various pawns toward the unthinkable checkmate that concludes The Fall.

While one assumes that veteran author Hogan pulled most of the weight writing the book, it is undoubtedly del Toro’s imagination smeared over every page. The vampires here are not sexy or in any way romantic. In fact, they are more akin to the Reapers from del Toro’s Blade II. They are monsters, with just enough of their former existence rooted in their rapidly evaporating humanity to covet the lives of their Dear Ones when they set out into the night.

The Fall succeeds in not only continuing to effectively re-imagine the modern vampire mythos, but also in bringing some genuine horror to the bestseller lists. If Hogan and del Toro laid the groundwork for the seminal vampire series of the new decade with The Strain, they only build upon that rock-solid foundation with The Fall, delivering a psychologically devastating marathon of suspense, heartache and terror.

Review: Overwinter by David Wellington

2010-08-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reposted from Famous Monsters of Filmland)

With his latest novel Overwinter, David Wellington has continued to solidify his status as one of the most talented (and underrated) writers working within the horror genre today. With an oeuvre that spans the sodden trail of zombies, vampires, and werewolves, Wellington has consistently put an original spin on these classic monstrous icons, while creating vividly imagined worlds filled with rich characters that consistently live on long after the final page is dispatched.

The sequel to the stellar werewolf tale Frostbite (see review here), Overwinter continues the journey of newly turned lycanthrope Chey Clark as she struggles with not only her developing pedigree as a supernatural beast of legend, but also her increasingly complex attraction and dependence on Powell, the werewolf who killed her father and ultimately turned her.

Complicating matters is the appearance of Lucie, the twisted sociopath who sired Powell, as well as the brilliant hunter Varkanin who is seeking revenge against the werewolves. In addition to these substantial new wrinkles, Chey must contend with the horrible realization that with every metamorphosis, she surrenders more and more of her humanity to the beast within threatening to break free of her psyche once and for all.

While performing at less of a breakneck pace than its predecessor, Overwinter expands the origin of the Werewolf mythos, making excellent use of Inuit animism legends originally hinted at with the mysterious Dzo in Frostbite. In doing so, Wellington grounds the story firmly in the midst of the origin of mankind, giving the ensuing events an epic scope and resonance.
Prolific by any standard, Wellington’s novels (Overwinter being no exception) consistently succeed at avoiding the rushed and anemic narratives that many modern horror authors and publishers seem to be falling victim to. These are not stories written simply for leisure, immediately forgotten and discarded into the stacks. This is an author who writes stories of depth, emotion, and passion, ratcheting up the tension and horror by connecting with the reader on a visceral, deeply human level.

Lean, exciting, and filled with enough carnage to satisfy hardcore genre fans, Overwinter continues the author’s creative dominance (whether recognized or not) of the horror lists. If you’re not reading David Wellington, you are simply missing out on a writer at the top of his artistic game.

Review: The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer

2010-08-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reposted from The Novel Blog)

The entertainment industry has been overrun with zombies, a veritable undead tidal wave flooding everything from movies, to television, to video games, and, yes, literature. Particularly literature. Bookshelves are buckling under the weight of apocalyptic horrors focused on the walking dead, the running dead, or just really angry people who want us dead.

This is not a complaint, necessarily. I love the zombie sub-genre, however I nurse a growing concern that the glut of flesh eating stories will ultimately warrant a backlash that could force the sub-genre underground, or worse, into becoming a self-parody. And let’s be honest with ourselves, there is a lot of garbage out there produced by people who simply view zombies as an opportunity to cash in on the craze.

I hate to say this, but I think I just need a vacation from the whole zombie thing.

Because of this, I initially balked at reading Amelia Beamer’s surprisingly fun debut novel The Loving Dead. To my discredit, the book sat face down on my desk for at least a month, Beamer’s spectacled eyes framed in golden dreadlocks on the back cover, willing me to partake of its bloodied contents. I finally relented, based solely on the notion that an author with such a kick ass hairstyle wouldn’t dare steer me wrong.

“People like to predict the death of genres or sub-genres, but I like to see it from the other end,” Beamer explains of her initial foray into the scene while addressing fears about the state of the subject matter. “Zombies are everywhere: that means that everyone is familiar with them. What matters are the stories we can tell using this tool. Since everyone knows what zombies are, we can really play with the material.”

The Loving Dead may be the world’s first hipster zombie tale with its cast of young, ironic, culturally savvy characters (“I'd like to think that my friends would get along with them”) who probably spend a considerable amount of time reading cooler-than-thou websites like Pitchfork.com. The story follows Kate and Michael, two friends struggling not only to come to terms with who they are, but what they mean to each other as a slow-burn zombie apocalypse descends upon San Francisco. “My characters work at Trader Joe's; they have real people problems and joys,” she says. “All of my characters come out of me and the people I've met.”

Beamer, whose day job involves editing the science fiction magazine Locus (“It's a great job for a writer”), effectively transcends the typical survivalist end of days tropes of zombie fiction by focusing on the relationships and interactions of the characters. “I spent the few years before I wrote The Loving Dead mostly working on literary fiction, the kind where two people meet and discuss their failed relationship,” she explains. “Nothing happens in them! And the trick is to make somebody feel something, but there isn't a massive readership for this kind of fiction outside of The New Yorker. So I figured, throw some zombies in, and bam, we'll have a plot! Readers like plot.”

“Ultimately, plot and character are the same thing,” Beamer continues. “Plot is what happens to characters, and characters exist only in relation to what's happening to them. If I'd forgotten to put in the zombies, my characters would still have problems figuring out whether they're dating the right person: the zombies just make survival a big concern, too.”

More akin to Shaun of the Dead than the grim nihilism of most zombie fare, The Loving Dead is often genuinely funny amidst the horrific violence and destruction that surrounds the protagonists. “Humor and horror are very closely related,” the author points out. “Horror, as a genre, is when we see a tragedy unfolding and we identify enough with the people involved that we don't laugh at them. And at the same time, people make terribly dark jokes about the things that scare us. We have to in order to stay sane.”

Stylish and clever, although slightly uneven at times, The Loving Dead provides an original take on the zombie sub-genre (infection as STD), with enough requisite carnage and relational missteps to appeal to a wider reading audience. Beamer has succeeded in adding a fresh voice to undead fiction, and will be returning in September with her contribution to The Living Dead 2 anthology entitled Pirates vs. Zombies.

Thanks to Beamer, I’ll be rethinking that vacation.

Review: Go, Mutants! by Larry Doyle

2010-08-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reposted from Famous Monsters of Filmland)

As a kid growing up in central Ohio, the weekends were a very distinctive time for me. There was no school obviously, but Fridays and Saturdays throughout my childhood also provided a specifically unique education. With horror host instructors such as Big Chuck and Little John on channel 8, Super Host on channel 43, and the Ghoul on channel 61, I was emotionally raptured into an otherworld filled with monsters from the farthest reaches of space and beyond. Others could have their football games and Wide World of Sports; I was more concerned with blithely living in a universe filled with giant lizards, Ro-Men, She-Creatures, and horrors on various party beaches.

Perhaps this nostalgic affinity for classic horror and science fiction fare has unduly influenced my enthusiastic opinion of Larry Doyle’s novel Go, Mutants!, a delightfully brilliant masterpiece that successfully pays homage to classic creature features and space operas, while brutally skewering both high school and national politics (let’s face it, sometimes there’s no difference) with equal wit and genius.

Set in an alternate history where both iconic and obscure 1950’s & 60’s genre aliens and beasties have been integrated into society, Go, Mutants! tells the story of an alien teenage outcast, J!m, looking for his place in life. More akin to Exeter from This Island Earth, J!m hangs out with a green motorcycle riding ape and a love hungry glob of goo named Jelly while pining after Marie, the earth girl of his dreams.

"After the success of the book I Love You, Beth Cooper, the publisher wanted to know what else I had,” author Larry Doyle recalls. “Go, Mutants! was it. It was a notion I had been kicking around for a few years, but hadn't figured out a thematic underpinning until the events of the past few years, when I realized that politically and socially, we were reliving the fifties. That gave me a reason, and excuse, for using all these cool aliens and mutants in a story.”

“I wanted to show them living on the periphery of society, objects of derision but also fear and desire,” Doyle says. “And I wanted to do it without being as obvious as what I just said.”

Troubled by his bewildering passion for the human Marie (not to mention the merciless bullying he experiences daily at school), J!m must deal with his Rebel Without a Clue-ish high school existential funk while simultaneously coming to terms with an unwanted legacy as the son of Andy, a brilliant, British accented alien allegedly killed during his diabolical pursuit of world domination. “The aliens and mutants represent the Other, in the way that Communists, blacks, Muslims and now illegal aliens do in our society,” explains Doyle. “The events of 9/11 propelled us back into a Cold War mentality, only with radical Islam replacing Communism as a boogieman, with all the attendant hysteria, witch hunts and loyalty tests. As in the fifties, it’s not that no threat exists; it’s that our reaction to the threat probably does more damage to our underlying principles than the threat realistically poses.”

Avoiding the numerous literary pitfalls that such politically metaphoric material can present, Doyle, a former writer for The Simpsons, spins a frenetic sophomore effort that deftly avoids heavy handed proselytizing in exchange for wicked smart dialogue, colorfully rendered characters, and a world that many of us have fantasized about since adolescence.

Still a fan of classic genre fare such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (“Still works”) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (“Holds up pretty good”), Doyle remembers fondly his early years consuming endless hours of the material that would ultimately make up Go, Mutants!, including Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. “Famous Monsters made a perfect accompaniment to Creature Features, the local horror show in Chicago on Friday nights,” Doyle recalls. “Fresh magazines and books were not provided at my house, so wretched was my childhood, that I would cadge them off a friend, or at a garage sale or by shoplifting it.”

Fortunately for those of us who look fondly upon the days of wild eyed mad scientists, stop motion beasts from the deep, and radiation giving life to, well, just about anything, Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment has purchased the rights to Go, Mutants! “I just handed in the second draft of the screenplay,” Doyle reports. “A lot can happen between that and a movie coming out, including a movie never coming out. It will depend, to a certain extent, on how well the book does. So please buy 10,000 copies.”

I bought mine…

A Dark Place: Wednesday 13 and the Rebirth of the Murderdolls

2010-08-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock
(Note: While I am not a music reviewer, I had the opportunity to interview Wednesday 13 about the reformation of Murderdolls and their new album out on August 31st. I wasn't about to pass it up. Enjoy!)

The chronicles of the Murderdolls are, for the lack of a better expression, complex. Founded in 2002 as a side project for Slipknot’s drummer Joey Jordison, the band emerged as a musical chimera of sorts, eventually forming from the discarded pieces of several other rock projects. Most prominent of these disparate elements was Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13, Wednesday 13’s horror punk outfit, the gory fingerprints of which are smeared all over 2002’s Beyond the Valley of the Murderdolls.

After several years of extensive touring in support of their only full-length release, Murderdolls vanished from the music scene. “We’ve always kept the conversation going about the Murderdolls,” explains lead singer Wednesday 13. “But we both had so many other things going on. Joey did two Slipknot albums and the world tours associated with that and I put out three solo albums and two country albums. That consumes a lot of time.”

On August 31st, however, after an eight-year “absence” from the industry, Murderdolls return with a new full-length album entitled Women and Children Last. “We honestly didn’t think it would happen,” Wednesday says. “About a year ago we spoke, and Joey was really into doing it again, so we hit the studio and knocked the album out in thirty days.”

“Working again with Joey was easier than remembering how to ride a bike,” he continues. “Doing my solo stuff for the last five years, I missed having that partner, a collaborator. Joey and I feed off of each other and how we work together is insane. I’ve never had that with anyone else before.”

If the blistering onslaught of the recently released single, My Dark Place Alone, and the seizure inducing supporting video are any indicator, then the regenerated Murderdolls have not missed a step during the prolonged hiatus. In addition to their signature punk/hard rock barrage of sound, there also seems to be a slightly more mature, even relaxed, element to the music. “We want to keep people guessing,” Wednesday reveals. “So we tried being a little different. We didn’t want to be painted into a corner, so we really mixed it up on the album.”

“The album is a fun, violent rollercoaster ride,” he adds with a smile on his face and a distinct sparkle in his eye.

In addition to the growth and maturation the duo experienced after eight years apart, another change for the 2010 Murderdolls, albeit slight, is a reigning in of the horror tropes that have dominated Jordison and Wednesday 13’s collaborative projects. “The first album had a lot of horror imagery,” Wednesday points out. “For this record, we still have the horror imagery, but this time I wrote stories as opposed to horror themes.”

Whether singing about overt horror staples (Dawn of the Dead) or the more internal terrors of a mental breakdown (My Dark Place Alone), Wednesday 13 is quick to assure everyone that Murderdolls is as ghastly as ever. “They’re my own stories this time, but the imagery is still going to be there. We’re not trying to be a horror band; it just seems to come naturally. I went way beyond my means on this record and stepped out of the box I had put myself in. I had more tricks up my sleeve than people realized, and this record is filled with them.”

Concerning the future of Murderdolls, and the apprehension of some fans wary of a musical cash grab, Wednesday is anything but vague. “This isn’t what you’d call a side project,” the singer-songwriter clarifies. “We’re set to tour for a good two years as the Murderdolls, so we’re not taking an eight year break,” This statement would seem to be backed up by the recent announcement that Murderdolls will join the Halloween Hootenanny tour, headlined by Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie. “We’re going to show people this time what we meant to show them last time.”

“This is my baby,” Wednesday 13 admits. “My favorite thing I’ve ever done. I don’t want to be cliché and say that this album is the best work I’ve ever done. But what I left behind and what I personally put into this album, it is the biggest record of my life.”

Four Color Beast: The Comic Book Work of Rob Zombie

2010-08-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reposted from Famous Monsters of Filmland)

Few people within the entertainment industry have so successfully mastered and effectively entertained the masses across multiple forms of media as Rob Zombie. From his outrageously popular albums with White Zombie and as a solo artist, to his directorial efforts on movies such as The Devil’s Rejects and his Halloween remake (the highest grossing Halloween installment in history), to the animated feature film The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, Zombie has emerged as a prototype of the culturally savvy post-modern Renaissance Man.

In addition to his well-documented exploits in music and cinema, Zombie has additionally carved out a thriving niche in the aggressive world of comic books. Since 2003’s Spookshow International title, the man known by millions as the Superbeast has maintained a steady presence in the four-color format. “I started collecting comics in the early 70’s,” he explains. “I remember the first book I ever bought was a Fantastic Four. Growing up, my comic tastes were pretty limited to either Marvel or DC. It seemed like there were only about ten titles, so it wasn’t hard to collect everything.”

Along with a sturdy diet of comics, this period of Zombie’s adolescence was also profoundly influenced by another publication: Famous Monsters of Filmland. “Famous Monsters was a part of that weird time period I remember as a kid during the late 60s monster boom,” he recalls. “But there wasn’t that much to be had for a typical kid. It seems absurd now because everything is everywhere, but I remember convincing our parents to drive us somewhere so we could buy Famous Monsters because that’s all there was. And looking through them and thinking wow, check out all these movies that we’ll never see!”

“Famous Monsters of that time felt like a cool club,” Zombie continues. “It wasn’t judgmental, because everyone reading it loved monsters.”

Bolstered by his devotion to comics and monsters, Zombie’s unique path through life was essentially assured. Before embracing superstardom, he worked as an art director for a porn magazine and as a production assistant for the television series Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, ultimately rocketing to national prominence with his band White Zombie. The success of his music career opened numerous creative doors that the tireless entertainer had been hoping to explore.

In 2003, Zombie and writer Steve Niles pooled their talents to form CREEP Entertainment International, a collective steeped in both men’s love of comics and all things horrific. “It is a rare moment when you can find someone to collaborate with,” remarks Zombie. “We did a couple of books together. The Nail was my idea, and we did another one, Bigfoot, which was his idea. And we each had one more thing but we didn’t get to go any further.” The venture at the time was intended to encompass movies and music, including a rumored Lords of Salem comic that would feature an album to be released in conjunction with the book. “For whatever reason we only did the two books. It was fun. We’re still friends and nothing ended for bad reasons. I had movies and he was busy with other comics.”

“I don’t feel like I’m up to speed enough because I don’t really have time to read the books anymore,” Zombie says in regard to the current comic book scene. With a packed schedule of writing and recording albums, touring, publicity appearances, and writing and directing movies, it’s a miracle the horror rocker has time for any side projects at all. Fortunately, the storyteller in Zombie had something to say, and Image Comics gave him the forum to express himself with the recently released Whatever Happened to Baron Von Shock?

“The inspiration came from living in Hollywood and from people I know,” Zombie explains of the eight-issue comic which reveals the fickle nature of celebrity through the story of Leon Stokes and his alter ego, the television horror host Baron Von Shock. “I don’t want to mention their names, but there are several people I’m friends with that are sort of that type of personality. They did a movie role 25 years ago and that’s their entire identity. One friend in particular…if a studio remade his movie and didn’t ask him to be in it he’d be so crushed, he would be destroyed.”

Unleashed on May 26, issue 1 of Baron Von Shock stunned the industry, and Zombie, by selling out in less than a week. “It took me by surprise, because you never know what to expect,” he says. “It’s not like playing a show and sensing what people are feeling. You just do the comic and it goes out into this vacuum. But the feedback has been amazing!”

More realistic in tone, Baron Von Shock eschews the signature creeps and beasties of Zombie’s previous comics work such as Spookshow International, Bigfoot, and The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, for a more dramatic, and surprisingly cinematic, storyline. “I kind of saw it as a movie,” he explains. “Baron Von Shock was something I had sitting around for a long, long time. And I hate when a project hangs in limbo. That’s why I thought I’d turn it into a comic, then a graphic novel, then you have something concrete that makes it getting turned into a movie that much easier.”

“With something like Superbeasto which was just every kid’s idea of what Scooby-Doo could be if it were filthy, there wasn’t a master plan,” he continues. “I would literally make it up as I went along. With Baron Von Shock I actually wrote the whole thing as a finished script from start to finish so it actually made sense. It’s more real life stuff, so there’s no cheap ways out of it.”
“The great thing about the people I’m working with on Shock,” Zombie adds, “Is that I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. My comics are a way of getting things out of my system, but it’s really hard to find people you can work with. We had one person who started the book and bowed out after a couple of pages. Some can’t draw nudity and some don’t like the language.”

With the release and success of Whatever Happened to Baron Von Shock? (“It’s the classic Hollywood story”), Rob Zombie has once again proven that his appeal as a multimedia horror auteur has far from waned. With regard to potential future plans in comics, Zombie is open, yet noncommittal. “There are a few ideas I have partially written that, again, if I can find a good artist that gets it, I want to do. So I’m just looking for the right person.”

A Life in the Cinema: The Dark Fiction of Mick Garris

2010-08-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reposted from Famous Monsters of Filmland)

For most fans of the horror genre, Mick Garris is perhaps best known as being Stephen King’s preferred darling director. Since 1992’s Sleepwalkers, Garris has adapted The Stand, The Shining, and Desperation for television, as well as a theatrical production of the novella Riding the Bullet. In addition, Garris is slated to direct the film adaptation of King’s superb supernatural mystery Bag of Bones.

What some might not be aware of, however, is that Garris has recurrently dipped his toes into the volatile world of dark fiction. His collected works of short stories, Life in the Cinema, as well as his full-length novel, Development Hell, are the result of a life inspired by the fantastic. “I was a serious reader from my earliest years,” he explains. “I always loved books and movies about the darker side. I grew up on Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson…Twilight Zone, the Universal classics…all of the stuff that litters the brain of a kid my age.”

“I think a lot of people in our genre are outcasts of a sort,” Garris continues. “They turn to books and movies and television for either a glimpse of a better world… or a worse one.”

Instrumental in Garris’ development as a genre aficionado was Forrest J Ackerman’s seminal magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. “Famous Monsters was a huge influence!” he says. “This was the first time that I ever saw that there were other people like me who liked this stuff! It was a great awakening, and I hope the relaunch can instill the emotional connection to the genre that the magazine did under Forry.”

While filmmaking is Garris’ raison d’être, he has consistently written fiction as an outlet for his creativity. “I approach it as therapy,” he reveals. “Writing fiction is more personal than filmmaking as it only involves myself telling a tale to the reader. And the short form is a lot easier and a lot of fun.”

It was Garris’ passion for short stories that provided his first opportunity for publication with A Life in the Cinema. “I decided that I had enough short stories published that I could collect them and maybe get them published in a stand-alone book. A Life in the Cinema was a short story I originally wrote for David Schow’s collection, Silver Scream. I loved the character at the center of that story, and thought it was time to revisit him, so I wrote a sequel [Starfucker] that picked up where the first had left off.”

A Life in the Cinema, published in 2000, is a dark, kinky, and altogether twisted collection of eight stories by Garris, dragging the reader on a bizarre excursion through the author’s id. From the murderous obsession of Chocolate (which Garris adapted for his Masters of Horror series), to the It’s Alive-inspired cinematic exploitation of a deformed baby, to horrific antics of necrophilia, Garris succeeds at creating unique individual narratives that convey the confidence of a far more seasoned writer.

“Development Hell came directly out of A Life in the Cinema and Starfucker, Garris confides. “I still wanted to revisit that character and wrote another short story about him, picking up where Starfucker left off. Every time I’d finish a film or something, I’d do another story in the same way.”

Garris took the bold step of allowing friend and sometimes collaborator Stephen King to read his collection of stories that chronicled an unnamed protagonist’s exploits in the fabled land of Hollywood. “He told me that it felt ‘like a loose novel’, and then the light bulb went off,” recalls Garris. “I finished the nine stories, knowing that they would all one day get published together. Then went back to the beginning and rewrote it with the mission of making it a self-contained novel.”

The resulting work, Development Hell (“It’s been surprisingly well received, even though it’s so profane and offensive”), emerged as a riotous violence and sex filled romp through “Lady Hollywood” by way of the significantly demented, yet uniquely informed lens of the author. Garris’ brisk prose guides the unnamed protagonist through a series of misadventures, ultimately discovering that, even in death, the bottom line in Tinseltown is the unforgiving judgment of the almighty Box Office.

Despite the modest success and positive feedback stemming from his two initial forays into dark fiction, Garris assures his fans that he is, foremost, a filmmaker. “There are many filters when you make a film,” he explains. “Directing is a creative explosion, where you’re…surrounded by stimulating, creative individuals all working hard to realize your vision.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that the director has abandoned the written word. “I’m writing all the time,” Garris says in response to his future writing plans. “This year I’ve written a couple of screenplays and a pilot and I’m still doing short stories. I had three of them published in collections this year. And I like all of it.”

Review: A Gathering of Crows by Brian Keene

2010-07-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Say what you will about Brian Keene, but the man has made an impact in horror fiction. Since his Bram Stoker award winning debut novel The Rising landed on bookshelves in 2004 (credited by no less than the New York times as instrumental in kicking off the zombie craze), Keene has attained a dark prose Grand Poobah status in the eyes of genre fans around the globe. With no less than eleven novels since The Rising, assorted short stories, comic book gigs, and a free ongoing serial published through his website, Keene is practically a one-man publishing industry.

Unfortunately for Keene’s latest, A Gathering of Crows has proven to be sparse and unimaginative, devoid of any tangible characterization or depth. And while layered nuance may not be what horror fans want out of the author, I can’t imagine that a bland narrative overrun with wooden dialogue is high on the list either.

Set in a small town in West Virginia, A Gathering of Crows brings back Levi Stozfus, an ex-Amish Hebraic witch featured in Keene’s book Ghost Walk. On his way to Virginia and stopping only for the night in Brinkley Springs, Levi inconveniently finds himself trapped within the borders of the forgettable hamlet as five demonic entities lay siege to the citizenry, ripping apart anyone and everyone they find.

A Gathering of Crows’ whisper thin plot seems more like an appendix for Keene’s burgeoning Labyrinth universe than a stand-alone novel. Filled with alternate earth timelines under attack by The Thirteen (evil forces sworn to destroy God’s creation), the Labyrinth is the Lovecraftian mythos Keene has constructed connecting his various books and the assorted cosmic horrors within. The inter-dimensional conflicts continually spill over into physical reality, unleashing zombies, giant worms, ghouls, and now soul-consuming revenants manifested in a murder of crows.

While I am not one to necessarily share advice with bestselling authors (and let’s face it, a book like A Gathering of Crows is red meat to his ravenous readers), Keene could potentially profit more from abbreviating his enormous literary output and focusing on developing stories that operate on more than the primal nihilistic levels that he has explored ad infinitum. The notion that these cataclysmic events are happening simply due to vengeful antics of The Thirteen creates a redundancy of back-story that grows tiresome novel after novel. While Lovecraft was able to loosely connect his pantheon of dark tales with the backbone of the celebrated Cthulhu Mythos, it must be noted that the legendary writer’s body of work manifested primarily in the short form and, in all honesty, should not credibly be compared with Keene’s (even though I just did).

With regard to A Gathering of Crows, those who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like. Keene is somewhat of a name brand in the horror market, making him to some extent review proof. Ultimately, his fans will read him no matter what, and Leisure Fiction will continue to pump out his material. His next book, Entombed, already scheduled to drop in February, is a return to Keene’s zombie wheelhouse, and hopefully a homecoming for the sheer narrative velocity and character development of The Rising.

Siren Song: A Profile of John Everson

2010-07-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock
(Note: Reposted from Bloody-Disgusting.com)

“Siren was a little different for me,” confides John Everson regarding his most recent novel. “I didn’t want to do vampires. I didn’t want to do zombies.” A cursory glance at retail bookshelves over the past several years does indeed bear the burden of tiresome and predictable subject matter. Without the endless variations on undead adventures and flesh eating apocalypse epics, genre choices have proven somewhat anemic.

“I started thinking about what hadn’t already been done a million times before,” Everson continues. “And then I thought of the siren, which has a solid mythological base, and has never really been the subject of a horror novel as a lead character.”

The siren, originating in Greek mythology and popularized in Homer’s Odyssey, were alluring supernatural creatures who led sailors to their death with their seductive and irresistible music. “During my research, I came across an old painting of the sirens laying nude on a pile of human carcasses. I thought that this was a really good basis for a horror novel.”

Everson, who won the Bram Stoker Award for his debut novel Covenant, has always had an attraction to the darker side of the universe. “I was a sci-fi kid, so I watched a lot of Outer Limits and the Twilight Zone. When I started writing, everything I did ended up being short stories with a nasty twist at the end. So I started focusing more and more on horror.”

“Throughout the nineties I published short fiction in all sorts of magazines,” Everson continues. “I love the short form. You can do one in the afternoon and feel a great sense of accomplishment. There’s closure, it’s done, and then I can go watch a movie.” Despite fifteen years of working primarily in short stories, however, Everson made a splash in the publishing world with the previous mentioned Covenant, its sequel Sacrifice, the Argento influenced The 13th (“A result of sitting on my ass and watching Italian horror movies for six months”), and now Siren.

“I think I’m becoming more of a novelist now,” he asserts. “When you’re working on a novel, it’s six months of slogging through. Of course, at the end, you’ve got a novel that could be on shelves for years. I’d have to really work to do a 2,000 word story again.”

Unfortunately, while it benefits from a premise ripe with potential, Everson’s latest work reads like one of his short stories uncomfortably stretched to a 300-page novel. The tale finds itself trapped in a repetitive loop of a man’s erotic midnight encounters on the beach with the Siren, peppered with the standard gory deaths of random, underdeveloped supporting players (both modern and historic).

“Siren also centers on dealing with the loss of a child,” Everson reveals. “This subplot definitely came from being a new father, which makes this book very important to me.” It is through this secondary narrative involving the drowning death of the protagonist’s teenage son where the novel actually shines. The palpable sorrow and guilt from his loss inexorably drags hero Evan into the blackest depths as surely as any wanton Siren. The author’s rendering of a father lost in his pain is brilliant in its emotional agony, a poignant through line that is unfortunately dampened by the ultimate revelation of the truth behind his son’s death.

Despite any weaknesses affiliated with Siren, Everson’s immediate writing future promises to be productive with the March release of his fifth novel, The Pumpkin Man (“The jumping off point for the book is a short story I published in Doorways Magazine several years ago”), as well as continued publishing efforts with his own label, Dark Arts Books. “We’re now on our sixth title,” he shares. “Our whole modus operandi is to put together collections of four authors, usually an established author, a couple of cult status writers, and a newbie. We want to introduce people to other authors.”

“The market for small press stinks,” Everson discloses. “But we’re still breaking even on every title, making people a little bit of money.”

No matter the literary pursuit, Everson plans on remaining firmly within the boundaries of horror. “Horror gets to the root of what it is to be human,” he explains. “We are all driven in a large part by our fears and obsessions. We’ll always have horror stories, we’ll always be wondering if there’s something beyond…unseen. And that’s what the horror genre is all about.”

Review: Frostbite by David Wellington

2010-07-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

What is it about werewolves? In the early-80’s, some of the first cinematic horrors I was exposed to was An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. We could spend hours debating which was the better film (coughthehowlingcough), but this is a lit review, not a fanboy forum on Aint It Cool News. I simply draw attention to these movies in order to illustrate how lycanthropes have never quite grabbed the pop culture imagination since John Landis and Joe Dante’s cinematic one-two punch of 1981. Yes, books have been written, and yes, there have been other movies produced, however the werewolf often stands envious of the attention granted to its genre cousins the vampire and zombie.

This lack of adequate consideration for the werewolf mythos is unfortunate, if only due to the fact that David Wellington’s stellar novel Frostbite probably won’t receive the proper diligence it deserves. After redefining both the walking dead and the undead with Monster Island and 13 Bullets respectively (in addition to their sequels), the author has turned his razor sharp prose to the criminally underrepresented lupines.

Set in the vast Northwest Territories of Canada, Frostbite wastes little time as it plummets into a world of survival, redemption, and forgiveness. Chey, the protagonist, is resolute in her determination to track down the man/wolf who violently ripped her father to pieces before her adolescent eyes, setting the young heroine on an emotionally aimless course through life. That is until she is offered an opportunity for revenge.

As is often the case with Wellington’s stories, the plot of Frostbite, while superbly effective, is incidental next to the intense characterization of not only Chey, but also Powell, the alpha wolf who has spent more than a lifetime searching for a sufficiently isolated home to veil himself from civilization. It is through their stories that the author deconstructs the typical Manichean good versus evil dynamic of the werewolf, and reveals the devastating toll that the curse takes on its victims.

As for the rendering of the actual werewolves, they are a uniquely supernatural creature manifesting in a type of spiritual transformation, emerging as a separate conscious being with all the fury and power of nature’s wrath thrown in for good measure. Rather than the oft utilized trope of the werewolf representing the primal state of man, these wolves simply stand alone, with a remorseless desire to be free, to be forever wolf. More akin to the prehistoric dire wolf, Wellington imbues his creations with an intelligence and ferocity that overwhelms the humanity of the cursed whenever the moon rises.

Frostbite is breakneck in its pace, frenetic even in its more casual moments with the ever present underlying ticking clock of nightfall. Furthermore, the narrative perspective of the fully transformed wolf is breathtaking in its descriptive palate, cognizant, yet predatory and instinctual in its fragmented style.

The first in a series (Overwinter premiers in September), Wellington has successfully laid the groundwork for an epic werewolf legend. Mythological in its scope while grounded in an organic reality that provides depth and weight to the proceedings, Frostbite is an exhilarating, gruesome, and enthralling literary creature feature for modern horror fans.

More Than One Life to Live: A Profile of Alexandra Sokoloff

2010-07-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock

(This is the second time The Crawlspace has had the fortune of featuring Alexandra Sokoloff. Click here for the previous article.)

“I am staggered at how lucky I am,” exclaims Alexandra Sokoloff, author of the newly released novel Book of Shadows. “I’m making a living writing exactly what I want to write, and getting everything I write published. That’s a delirious kind of success!” Where she sees luck, however, others might see a boundlessly creative and deserving writer dedicated to her craft.

No longer a fresh face to the scene, Sokoloff has happily transitioned from her role as frustrated screenwriter to bestselling author, producing four well-received works of fiction since 2006. “Writing novels is a slower, deeper rhythm, and I love that. Publishing is worlds different from Hollywood. You get to complete every project you start, which is so incredibly satisfying. It’s fantastic!” In addition to her novels, Sokoloff is involved in several side projects, such as her non-fiction workbook Screenwriting Tricks For Authors (and Screenwriters!), as well as numerous other upcoming ventures. “I am extremely excited about a novel I have just finished with Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk, [entitled] Apocalypse. It’s actually four novellas that are intricately interwoven into a single book. [And] I’ve written a paranormal for Harlequin… called The Shifters. Not quite as scary as my others, but lots of sex to make up for it.”

Since leaving Hollywood to focus on her Bram Stoker award winning debut novel The Harrowing, Sokoloff has found that her particular blend of eroticism, horror, spiritualism and mystery has conjured a devoted audience. “I am very aware of my mandate to scare people,” she explains. “But it’s a nail-biting, hair-raising, psychological kind of chill that I’m going for. I think The Price is my only true horror novel, but it’s so psychological that the horror creeps up on you.”

“I’m proudly writing in a long Gothic horror tradition,” expounds Sokoloff. “I think what distinguishes my stories from a lot of obvious horror is that I always ground everything that happens in reality, which means that there could be a psychological or criminal interpretation to the supernatural occurrences that are going on.”

This subjective approach to Sokoloff’s fiction claws its way to the forefront of her recently published novel Book of Shadows. The story unfolds initially as a James Patterson-ish police procedural, following Boston detectives investigating the violent and apparently ritualistic murder of a young college student. Not surprisingly, things run askew for the authorities when bewildering evidence and the sudden emergence of a mysterious woman threaten to rupture the unassailable case against their swiftly apprehended suspect. “It’s my most realistic book. I wanted to write a [story] that would pit a very outwardly rational, logic-driven man against a very otherworldly, psychic, subconsciously driven woman, and play with the line between what is real and what is supernatural.”

“I thought I could create some great chemistry and distrust between the characters there,” she explains. “A paranormal noir, if you will.”

Another reoccurring theme in Sokoloff’s work is the decidedly pronounced focus on strong, yet considerably troubled, female characters. “I write…from a specifically feminine point of view, and that’s a very conscious effort. Women know a lot about horror.” Robin from The Harrowing, Laurel from The Unseen, and now Tanith from Book of Shadows adorn Sokoloff’s hall of heroines possessing dark pasts filled with secrets, hidden agendas and raw trauma. “You don’t live in this world as a woman without becoming troubled in some way. We know what it is to be raped, battered, prostituted, enslaved, disenfranchised, underpaid, demeaned, harassed; we live horror on a much more intimate basis than most men ever do.”

While a serviceable and solid police thriller, Book of Shadows falls well short of the standard set by Sokoloff’s superlative novel The Price. Slightly uneven in tone, her newest seems unable to decide exactly what kind of story it aspires to be. Garrett, the detective caught up in the middle of an is-it-real-or-not journey into the paranormal, seems to waver every other chapter despite mounting evidence that not only have they arrested the wrong killer, but that the source of the danger is unquestionably not of this world.

Despite these issues, Book of Shadows moves along at an exciting clip, dragging the reader into a wholly satisfying hallucinogenic whirlwind of criminal investigations, witchcraft, and suppressed sexual desires. With her latest, Sokoloff has established herself as one of the more exhilarating writers working in the industry today, churning out dark and often erotic adventures that both stimulate and thrill.

“I have vast distances to go on this whole journey,” the author observes. “But the way I’m writing now, I can easily write one or two books a year. That is a lot of stories to write, a lot of worlds to explore, a lot of lives to live.”

Characters Welcome: A Profile of David Wellington

2010-07-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock

The journey of David Wellington from aspirant published author to horror genre literary powerhouse is well documented, and the source of infinite envy for those attempting to photocopy his success. “I couldn’t get published to save my life,” Wellington explains. “A friend suggested I could put some of my work on his blog. The first day I got seventeen hits. By the time I was finishing up my first serialized novel, it was something like forty thousand hits per update. That was when the publishers came calling.”

Since 2006, Wellington has unleashed a consistent barrage of creature features, starting with his three-book zombie epic Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, the riveting Laura Caxton centered vampire series that spans four books (soon to be five) beginning with 13 Bullets, and most recently his spin on the werewolf mythos Frostbite, with the sequel Overwinter due out in September. “I grew up reading genre novels when I was a kid. They were meant for…fans of those genres. I was one of those fans. Still am. I love horror because I like old monster movies and all the gothic trappings.”

Wellington’s greatest success thus far has undoubtedly come through the aforementioned Laura Caxton, heroine of the author’s vampire tales. Undeniably stalwart and intelligent, Caxton also bears the distinction of being one of the only lesbian leading ladies in modern horror literature. “She's based on my sister, who is in fact gay. She used to tell me these horror stories of what she went through before she came out. A lot of that went into the character.”

Wellington was determined, however, not to make Caxton’s sexual orientation a hollow gimmick. “Caxton being gay has very little to do with her character. I didn't even know she was gay until I wrote the scene near the beginning of 13 Bullets when she comes home from work and climbs into bed. I said, okay, there's somebody in the bed already waiting for her. It turned out to be another woman, which surprised me as much as anybody.”

“I’ve gotten a lot of very nice comments from individuals saying that they appreciate the fact that Caxton is gay,” Wellington continues. “But that doesn't define who she is. I fully expected some kind of backlash, but it turns out that the kinds of people who read books are also the kind of people who live in the 21st century.”

This type of deep, nuanced characterization is one of the hallmarks of Wellington’s work. From the adolescent girl soldiers in Monster Island, to an incarcerated baby killer in 23 Hours, to a conflicted lycanthrope in Frostbite, the author fills his novels with consistently well-rounded and motivated cast members. “I'm the kind of guy who, if I see somebody on the subway train wearing a bizarre hat, I need to know why he put that hat on. And because you can't just ask people, I end up making up my own story.”
“I do a fair amount of outlining beforehand, and a lot of research, but mostly it's about the characters,” Wellington explains. “The idea is usually a scene, or even just an image. Typically it will be the climax of the book, the last big scene. Then I work backwards thinking: How did those characters get into such a preposterous mess? When I reach the beginning, the moment when destiny conspired to put them in that scene or image, then I start typing.”

For Laura Caxton, destiny, in the form of Wellington’s rich imagination, will continue to push her into the fray with 32 Fangs, due out in 2011. “I'm working on it right now,” he reveals.” Readers will recall that, at the conclusion of 23 Hours (see my review here), Caxton was a fugitive from justice, breaking out of prison while also avoiding the clutches of the malevolent vampire Justina Malvern. “I don't want to give anything away, but there are plenty of other people involved in the plot now, and some of them are up to some surprising things.”

In addition to his ongoing vampire marathon, the author has provided a free new online serial novel entitled Plague Zone, an original zombie adventure featuring a hero Wellington describes as “the toughest librarian in post-apocalyptic Seattle,” something the former Library Science major might know a little something about. Decidedly different from his Monster series zombies, these flesh eaters are more akin to victims of mad cow disease than anything supernatural.

Beyond the releases of Overwinter and 32 Fangs, Wellington is decidedly non-committal about his future plans (“How about a vacation?"). While a break would be well deserved after redefining the zombie, vampire and werewolf subgenres, one can only wonder what comes next for the prolific writer. “I try never to predict the future,” he muses. “That way I'm never wrong.”

Review/Spotlight: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

2010-07-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock

“My stuff tends to skew dark,” explains novelist Cherie Priest, author of the Hugo Award nominated novel Boneshaker. “But I’m comfortable with that. I kind of bounce around between genres.” Considered a vanguard of steampunk, Priest’s Boneshaker creates a densely imaginative alternate 1880 (“I don't let the facts get in the way of a good story”) where a large section of Seattle has been walled off from the rest of the world after a massive drill, the titular Boneshaker, inadvertently unleashes an ominous gas that transforms those who inhale it into the walking dead.

More akin to the late 1960’s television series The Wild, Wild West (“It’s absolutely an early steampunk work”) than the typical Victorian-era British locales most associated with the subgenre, Boneshaker nevertheless delivers the expected trappings with crudely fabricated zeppelins, peculiar pneumatic powered weapons, and mechanized surgically grafted prosthetics. “Steampunk is a lot of fun,” Priest says. “It has these undercurrents of conservationism (it's very reduce/reuse/recycle in its philosophy), and it overlaps nicely with the do-it-yourself movement.”

“There's a great deal of neat stuff going on in the subculture right now,” Priest continues. “It's really exploding all over the country, so I'm thrilled and proud to be part of it.” This upsurge in the popularity of steampunk is undoubtedly due in some small part to the hybridization of other genres found in Boneshaker. By infusing Romero-like walking dead into the mix, Priest cracks open the door to prospective readers who wouldn’t normally be concerned with the exploits of their goggle-wearing brethren. “Steampunk,” she lightheartedly explains, “is what happens when Goths discover brown.” For horror aficionados, however, the zombies of Boneshaker may prove wanting, as they exist more for nudging characters toward their narrative destinations, and less as a tangible threat to the cast of characters. Aside from one disposable individual succumbing to zombification (due to the gas and not an attack), the undead hordes in Boneshaker seem to be nothing more than a pointless piece of window dressing feigning horror legitimacy.

This use of such a menagerie of styles can be traced back to Priest’s adolescence, where an appreciation for many of the classic genre writers may not have been encouraged by her family, but was certainly tolerated. “My first big influences were the horror and mystery writers of the nineteenth century, mostly Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Those were the first writers I loved. I wasn't allowed to read much fiction, but if it was old enough to qualify as ‘literature’ then sometimes I could get away with it.” These traditional brush strokes bleed through in Boneshaker, as the main villain Minnericht bears a distinct philosophical similarity to Professor Moriarty (as well as a physical one to Cobra Commander), the mysterious and brilliant arch-nemesis to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Packed with such a potentially interesting cast culled from classic westerns and science-fiction stories alike, Boneshaker works overtime at creating its share of memorable players, not the least of these being the aforementioned Minnericht. “First and foremost, it has to be about people,” Priest explains of her work. “I’ve read some books with outstanding world building and magic systems, but they have no soul if they don't have characters for people to relate to.” Despite this mandate, while Boneshaker succeeds in creating an exquisitely organic world, it unfortunately fails to similarly render the characters inhabiting the story. Briar, the heroine, and her son Zeke show very little growth or internal development, accompanying the reader from one glorious steampunk set piece to the next with very little emotion or heart. Furthermore, while the protagonists interact with the astonishing and often alarming world around them, they ultimately have very little impact on their environment as a whole.

This is not to say that Boneshaker entirely fails as a novel. At times, Priest’s prose succeeds as an epic work of family and loyalty, tapping into parental concerns of misshapen legacies, adolescent rebellion, and heartbreaking self-realization. Combined with the inspired world called forth in the novel, Boneshaker is at least deserving of the attention it has garnered, even if it shouldn’t be highly recommended to a darker audience.

Review: Bite Me by Christopher Moore

2010-07-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

It has been 15 years since Christopher Moore introduced us to Jody and Flood, the titular characters of the delightful novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. Since then, we have become acquainted with a motley supporting cast of characters, including an Emperor of San Francisco and his loyal canines, a raucous group of corner store employees tagged the Animals, a Hot Topic Goth girl with nosferatu dreams, a nefarious blue skinned Las Vegas stripper, a sadistic vampire Lord, and a pair of detectives who constantly find themselves way in over their well intentioned heads. So when Moore adds a giant vampire cat into the mix, suffice to say it seems perfectly fitting.

Picking up right after the events of the second novel You Suck, Moore leans on the narration of the returning Abby Normal, a love struck vampire wannabe with delusions of dark poetic grandeur, to bring the reader up to speed. And while it is Normal’s somewhat annoying, often hilarious commentary that opens and concludes Bite Me, the story is still effectively that of Jody and Tommy’s passionate, albeit troubled relationship. Throughout the trilogy Moore has effectively mined the pitfalls of falling in love (Bloodsucking Fiends), finding balance and compromise in a committed relationship (You Suck), and now, with Bite Me, the author explores the uncertainty and heartache that can result when two people who love each other want different things in life, and the difficult choices they must make as a result.

Honestly, the plot of the book is thin to nonexistent, which is pretty much par for the course with Moore’s vampire series. Chet, the previously mentioned feline bloodsucker, is running riot throughout San Francisco while building an unstoppable undead cat army, and it falls on everyone involved to stop the encroaching menace. While there is a little more to it than that (a feral Tommy, a crispy Jody, and a rat tail on Abby), the focus of Bite Me is more concerned with bringing to a conclusion the intimate journey of our vampire lovers.

Lest you assume that Moore has decided to cash in on the schmaltzy pseudo-Harlequin romance of the Twilight series, rest assured that Bite Me provides its share of blood, action, and signature bawdy humor that the “authorguy” is known for. Not to mention a fun cameo or two of other characters from the Mooreverse, including an entirely unexpected Rastafarian (hint, hint) spin on Bram Stoker’s Renfield.

A pleasant return to form after the abysmal Fool (read my review here), Moore’s Bite Me is perverse, touching, and hilarious, often all within the same page, a fitting conclusion to an epic tale of undead love, hot monkey sex, and frozen turkey bowling.

Review: Hater by David Moody

2010-06-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

You have undoubtedly seen the faces and stories: The mother who suddenly drowns her two children in the bathtub. The dedicated father who shoots his family before turning the gun on himself. We ask how such seemingly well-adjusted people could suddenly turn so violent and so heinous as to brutally murder those they hold most dear? We reassure ourselves that we could never harm the ones we love, that we are above such societal aberrations. What would happen to our world, however, if half of the population did exactly that?

Hater, written by David Moody, throws society into a chaotic tailspin after violent assaults by ordinary citizens, tagged Haters by the media, skyrocket. No rhyme or reason can explain who will suddenly attack, or who the victims will be. Before long, nobody can be trusted, and civil unrest quickly spreads in a riveting tale that is part 28 Days Later, part The Crazies.

Moody personalizes the rapidly deepening paranoia by primarily focusing on the first person narration of Danny McCoyne, an everyday schlub struggling to support his young family with a monotonous, low paying city job (his daily routine is only slightly less horrific than the Haters). As the violent attacks spread, McCoyne holes up inside his home with one eye on the frustratingly vague news reports and the other on every potentially suspicious action of his wife, kids, and father-in-law.

The looming division within McCoyne’s family is reflected in society at large. From gays vs. straights, liberals vs. conservatives, and religious fundamentalists vs. everyone else, we are growing increasingly wary and antagonistic of anyone who does not think exactly as we do. Moody simply upgrades these ideological clashes into physical attacks, highlighting the danger society is faced with when nuance and empathy are exchanged for a strict black and white, us versus them worldview.

While based in the U.K., Hater has presciently tapped into the current political and cultural zeitgeist in the United States. Abhorrent rhetoric, while always existing in American society, has reached a critical mass coupled with mainstream legitimacy as of late. While aggressive lines have already been drawn symbolically in our culture, one must wonder how long we can keep the logical next step at bay.

Without spoiling the fun, it must be noted that Hater takes a sudden sharp turn part way through the novel, forcing the reader back on his heels and elevating the story from clever horror fare to an ingenious psychological and spiritual metaphor. However, at the risk of leaving too many clues, a deeper discussion on the importance of the twist will have to wait for the upcoming Dog Blood (book two) review.

While the journey of Hater from self-published phenomenon to pet production project of genre powerhouse Guillermo del Toro could easily outshine the power of the story, Moody has managed to invest in his novel a message of modern importance that should continue to resonate for years.

Review: Level 26: Dark Origins by Anthony E. Zuiker and Duane Swierczynski

2010-06-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Billed as the world’s first digi-novel (it’s not, see the far superior Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman), Level 26: Dark Origins is a horribly flawed attempt at immersing the reader in a world that, ironically, doesn’t always involve reading. The creative offspring of co-author Zuiker (best known for creating the hit television show CSI), Level 26 provides access to a website where the reader can watch video “cyber-bridges” intended to deepen the novel’s experience. Unfortunately, it is the actual experience of reading the book that proves wanting.

The novel focuses on the hunt for Squweegel, the latex and butter (yes, butter) covered serial murderer who has the distinct honor of being the worlds fist Level 26 killer (based on a ratings system that previously topped out at 25…duh). Always a step ahead of the authorities, it falls on the shoulders of ex-detective Steve Dark, a previous victim of Squweegel’s murderous predilections, to slay the monster once and for all. While it would be nice to gush over Level 26’s original spin on well-worn serial killer plot devices, unfortunately the story is about as uncomplicated as it sounds.

To be fair, co-author Swierczynski (see my review for his novel Severance Package) does an amazing job of moving a story along that seems doggedly determined to mine every overused uncatchable killer convention ever put to film or print. A preternaturally skilled, resourceful, and devastatingly clever serial killer? Check. An emotionally scarred super detective with a mysterious connection to said killer? Check. Religious imagery elevating the villain to Thomas Harris levels of bombastic flare? Check. And long diatribes about the hunter and the hunted simply being two sides of the same coin? Check. Swierczynski’s brisk pace helps somewhat in obfuscating these glaring stereotypes, however Zuiker seems to have more of a passion for the gimmick of splicing television production with seventh grade level literary plot devices.
According to the website, the “cyber-bridges take the experience to the next level, immersing you in the action and putting you inside the minds of a twisted serial killer and the man sent to take him down.” Regrettably, Zuiker fails to grasp that an imaginative and dense story is what immerses readers generally looking to escape the force-fed nature of the visual medium. I couldn’t shake the paranoid feeling that there was a Pied Piper at work here, leading unsuspecting victims into a world of visual passivity through a well-publicized novel (an inverted Reading Rainbow perhaps?)

Unfortunately, as is the norm these days, Level 26: Dark Origins is only the first in a series that seeks to expand the interactivity by opening future novel plots to reader suggestions. Next up is Dark Prophecy, with the Level 26 website already raving over how well the cyber-bridges are coming together in post-production, with barely any mention of the actual book.

Ah, listen to that piper play…

Review: 23 Hours by David Wellington

2010-06-18T10:49:00.001-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Author David Wellington has managed to craft what few people have even attempted over the last decade: an exciting and fresh literary vampire series that is neither romantic nor youth driven. With nary a sparkle in sight, Wellington’s vampires are bloodthirsty and brilliant, the new apex predator on the planet. As grotesque in their appearance as they are in their ethics, these nearly invulnerable monsters don’t want to so much suck your blood as rip your head off and gulp down what gushes forth.

From 13 Bullets, the first novel in the series, through 99 Coffins and Vampire Zero, Wellington has thrust his lesbian-cop-heroine Laura Caxton into a ferocious and sadistic milieu of politics, personal sacrifice, justice, and the supernatural. In the latest entry, 23 Hours, Caxton is forced to sacrifice everything, including her freedom, as a consequence of her violent campaign against the vampires.

Buried deep within Pennsylvania’s Marcy State Correctional Institution, Caxton not only has to contend with other prisoners who would covet the opportunity to kill a former cop, she must also survive Justina Malvern, the world’s oldest and most cunning vampire. Equally enraged and fascinated by her long-term adversary, Malvern overruns the correctional facility, giving Caxton twenty-three hours to either become a vampire or die.

Aside from the action and intensity that Wellington brings to the table, what sets this series apart, particularly in this most recent outing, is the level of realism within which the horror manifests itself. Caxton’s incarceration feels genuine, conveyed with a lean prose that paints a grim and gritty veracity. Personally, this is as close to prison (or Wellington’s vampires for that matter) that one would like to get without a visitor’s badge and some heavily armed guards. However, for the sake of an excellent read, the author’s authenticity sets the stage for one of the better vampire novels in quite some time.

While not a fan of the author’s zombie trilogy (Monster Island, Monster Nation, Monster Planet), Wellington has succeeded at carving out a solid genre niche for himself with the Laura Caxton series, while joining a small list of horror writers breathing new life into the vampire mythos. With Frostbite, Wellington’s current take on the werewolf legend, one only hopes for equivalent success.

Review: Feed by Mira Grant

2010-06-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

I have to admit, I have a tendency to trumpet my love of the zombie sub-genre on the grounds that the walking dead are often a wonderful metaphor for larger social ills. George Romero tackled out of control consumerism with his seminal film Dawn of the Dead, while Max Brooks addressed global relations in his superior novel World War Z. The truth of the matter, however, is that while social commentary is a mainstay in zombie fiction, a walking dead novel without the appropriate amounts of carnage is nothing more than a rose without petals. In other words, entirely useless.

Feed, the first book in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy, is a distinctly bloodless zombie novel that leans heavily on addressing issues of new and traditional media, terrorism, and a little political cynicism thrown in for good measure. Interesting subjects, especially when mixed into a post-post-apocalyptic society where the zombie holocaust is 25 years old, parts of the world are still off limits due to the walking dead, and the population is divided between isolating themselves from any potential danger versus attempting to reclaim some semblance of real life. Unfortunately, Feed is a 599-page zombie novel with very little focus on the zombies.

Despite its shortcomings, Feed does provide some brief moments of fascinating futurist thinking with regard to how society would operate in a world recovering from an undead onslaught. From the advanced blood testing technology (manufactured by Apple, of course), to the restrictions on pet ownership (animals of a certain size run the risk of zombification), to the abolition of the death penalty (who needs one more zombie in the world?), Grant has obviously done her due diligence in attempting to create a fully fleshed-out near future that feels genuine and tangible. However, her overly redundant focus on safety procedures overstays its welcome within the first two chapters, dragging Feed into tedious monotony.

Ultimately, Feed never succeeds at creating any suspense, fear, or even acceptable violence that one would expect in a zombie novel. By focusing on the political machinations at play within the story at the expense of any substantial undead action, Grant seems to be dragging out the well worn trope that humans are the true monsters in the world (been there, read that). Perhaps Grant will amp up the horror in Deadline, book two of the trilogy due out in 2011. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I even care to find out.

Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

2010-06-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Walk through any bookstore these days and you’re bound to see some familiar, albeit slightly modified, classic book titles: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter. Little Vampire Women. Jane Slayre. Not to mention my personal favorite, Android Karenina. Over the past two years, the bestseller lists have been inundated with a veritable gold rush of literature’s most iconic and historic characters and stories…with a horrific twist. Kicking off this literary mash-up mad dash was Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2008 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which transformed Elizabeth Bennet from playful paramour of Mr. Darcy into a zombie killing martial arts expert. The success of Grahame-Smith’s remix of Jane Austen has not only spawned the aforementioned onslaught of imitators (including a prequel: Dawn of the Dreadfuls), it also nabbed the attention of Hollywood, as Natalie Portman is set to produce and star in the film adaptation.

Perhaps bookending this fad, Grahame-Smith is back with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a well-researched and surprisingly emotional novel that suggests an alternate reason for the American Civil War and the rise of arguably our greatest President in history. Written by the author after the discovery of Lincoln’s secret diary, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shares how young Abe was thrust into destiny after the discovery that his mother, as well as several others close to him, was murdered by vampires.

Confronted with far too much tragedy, fueled by revenge, and driven by the sharpest of minds (not to mention a sharper ax), Lincoln sets off into a world filled with vampires, intent on playing some role in an end to the secret scourge plaguing our young nation.

As would be expected, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is chock full of historical cameos, not the least of which is the inclusion of Edgar Allen Poe, who explains to Lincoln that the vampires are being pushed out of Europe due to the bloody excesses of the notorious Elizabeth Bathory, only to find anonymity and a steady food supply (i.e. slaves) in America’s south. Unfortunately, Mr. Poe meets his end on the streets of Baltimore under mysterious circumstances soon after encountering Lincoln, denying us the pairing of an occult battling dynamic duo.

Nevertheless, the metaphor of vampirism in relation to slavery is surprisingly prescient here, as we are a nation built by enslaving, feeding off of, and growing strong from the blood of an entire race of people. Despite what seems like just another capricious book title designed to squeeze a few more dollars from the genre crossover fad, Grahame-Smith handles this historically sensitive issue with surprising taste and grace. In addition, Lincoln’s assassination, which could have easily devolved into the realm of action cliché, is treated with the magnitude and solemnity it deserves.

In the end, Seth Grahame-Smith avoids the clownish and ridiculous to construct a novel that speaks to the heart of our national history and identity, while also serving up plenty of the genre staples that readers are hoping for. Fast-paced and fun with surprising depth to its characters, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a must read for horror and history fans alike.

Review: The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw

2010-06-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

Since its publication in 2003, Dan Brown’s wildly successful novel The Da Vinci Code has inspired innumerable knockoffs hoping to hitch a ride on the Robert Langdon money train. The Atlantis Code is just one more.

Charles Brokaw (a pseudonym) has patched together a Frankenstein’s monster of tired clichés, well-worn plot devices, and stereotypes straight out of every standard Hollywood blockbuster of the last twenty years. The hero, Thomas Lourdes, is half Robert Langdon half Indiana Jones, a world famous linguist and archeologist (I’m not entirely sure how one becomes a celebrity by studying languages) who quickly finds himself drawn into a very real search for the mythical Atlantis. Replete with foreign baddies, complex puzzles that only Lourdes has the capacity to solve, and revelations of global and historical significance, The Atlantis Code certainly does its best to out code all of the other codes out there.

Thrown into the mix is a dastardly secret society tucked deep within the Vatican (where else?) that will stop at nothing to prevent Lourdes from uncovering the uber-religious secret Atlantis hides. Joining Lourdes on his globe trotting adventure are two women, one a tough as nails Russian policewoman, the other a not so bright television host. Both are amazingly gorgeous. Both end up in Lourdes’ bed (of course).

It is this portrayal of the female characters within The Atlantis Code that truly drags the read into utter ridiculousness. From the heavy handed, lascivious descriptions of their physical attributes, to the Harlequin romance inner monologues of their irresistible sexual attraction to Lourdes, these female supporting players were seemingly cut from the adolescent Playboy fantasies of a writer who simply failed to grow up and accept women as more than trophies for display.

With the Atlantis Code, Brokaw does his damndest to create the next pseudo-intellectual action-adventure literary blockbuster. Not surprisingly, however, the piggybacking of so many overused stock cinematic and literary tropes only serves to spotlight the absurdity of Thomas Lourdes and the inane plot that drives his journey. There is absolutely zero character development or growth in the book, and the climax only succeeds at inducing some confused head scratching, not to mention plenty of regret for dropping the cash on this hardcover abortion.

Review: The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler

2009-12-20T21:56:00.000-08:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

There was a time, not too long ago, when struggling novelists would find a certain amount of success writing treatments and screenplays for television and film. Recently, however, that trend has reversed itself as creative concepts that begin their lives as big budget movie pitches find an outlet on the bestseller lists. Take, for example, The Strain, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampiric literary hit based on del Toro’s treatment for a new television series (which, not surprisingly, has come full circle as a green lit small screen project).

Enter Thomas Wheeler, a low level Los Angeles based screenwriter with a gem of an idea that may have been a little too smart for Hollywood: bring together some of the most imaginative minds of the early twentieth-century to battle an evil so dark and insidious even they may be woefully inadequate to emerge victorious. Harry Houdini, Marie Laveau, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle form The Arcanum, a group whose purpose is to stem the flood of supernatural wickedness continually tearing at the seams of our reality during a period of history where everyday life was transforming technologically and spiritually.

Wheeler introduces us to The Arcanum after they have disbanded after decades of working together, years which have produced strained relationships, buried emotions, and, for Lovecraft at least, a battle with encroaching madness as he balances on the shaky precipice between our world and the unknowable void of the occult (which, let’s face it, is not too much of a stretch for Lovecraft).

Faced with a tragedy that potentially forecasts the end of humanity (naturally), Doyle must travel to Old New York to re-form the one group that stands a chance of stopping the accelerating evil. The rest of the group has moved on, however, and the creator of the greatest literary detective of all time finds that one member’s celebrity and another’s imprisonment for a series of ghastly murders threaten to halt the rebirth of The Arcanum before it even begins.

Not surprisingly, The Arcanum is traveling a similar path to that of The Strain, and is set to be directed by Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) with Wheeler writing the script. While the translation from book to screen should be relatively easy given the very cinematic nature of the prose, one cannot help but remember the on screen abortion known as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen based on Alan Moore’s amazing graphic novels recounting the exploits of a similar team comprised of literary figures such as Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo.

Despite this concern, it can be said that The Arcanum is a close to brilliant blend of various strains of magic, over the top action, Gnostic Christian mysticism, the Cthulhu Mythos, and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries. In addition, it wildly succeeds at seamlessly constructing a history that many of us desperately want to be true, and a fascinating fictional window on some of the more colorful and fascinating characters of our time.

Abbreviated Cuts: Severance Package, Hell's Aquarium and Jailbait Zombie

2009-07-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

Reviews written by Jess Peacock

Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

Describing Severance Package as Office Space meets The Bourne Identity (“Yeah, I’m going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday…and die”) would not be an entirely fair description, but not an entirely unfair one either. Like Swierczynski’s prose, the plot of Severance Package is lean and mean, belying the author’s other paying gig as a writer for Marvel Comics.

Severance Package wastes no time in thrusting everyman Jamie DeBroux into the ultra-violent world of espionage, terrorism, dismemberment, and even death by potato salad. After he is summoned, along with six other of his office mates, to an important Saturday morning meeting on the 36th floor of his Philadelphia based financial company, DeBroux learns the chilling truth about his employer. Worse still is the revelation that, unfortunately, this particular company meeting will be his last…ever.

Severance Package is a novel with nothing more on its mind than dragging readers by the hair through its twisted and twisting maze of shattered bones, gory set-pieces, and triple crosses that beg to be adapted for the big screen (and just may, as Lion’s Gate has recently purchased the film rights to the novel).

Meg: Hell’s Aquarium by Steve Alten

The Meg series is a little like sex or pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s probably enjoyable. Meg: Hell’s Aquarium (book four in the bestselling series) is far from a well-written novel. Like a glutton gorging at the buffet, however, it keeps you reading, page after ludicrous page, until you finish off the beast, replete with literary indigestion.

Hell’s Aquarium continues to follow the re-emergence of the formally extinct Carcharodon Megalodon, a 70-foot, 70,000-pound prehistoric cousin of the great white shark (think Jurassic Park meets Jaws). Throughout the series, the various Megs run riot in the open ocean attacking whales, boats, helicopters, and subs. They are captured, escape, captured again, and even do the aquatic nasty and have some babies. Throughout all of this, they find the time to perform as main attractions at a type of Sea World on steroids, not to mention engage in mortal combat with various other formerly extinct prehistoric beasties.

Seriously.

The action is far-fetched and absurd, the characters (especially the victims) paper-thin, and, for some reason, Alten chose to write Hell’s Aquarium in the present tense which simply bugged the hell out of me. However, a book such as this serves a purpose as a palette cleanser, a bit of a no-brainer in between novels of more depth and importance. This is feint praise to say the least, so dive into the Meg series with fair warning.

Jailbait Zombie by Mario Acevedo

Felix Gomez has problems. The least of which is the fact that he’s a vampire private investigator tasked by his undead masters to stop a zombie uprising that threatens to expose what the regular world can never be privy to: the existence of the supernatural. From there, it only gets worse for Gomez.

Having already faced down aliens, survived the porn industry, and kicked more than his share of ass (living and undead alike), Felix’s fourth adventure forces him to confront the circumstances and guilt that preceded his introduction to the supernatural realm. Seemingly damned to live an eternity with the pain of his actions, Felix encounters a girl who, potentially, offers the opportunity for some type of path to redemption. Standing in his way, however, is a literal blood soaked trail of dead bodies, the mob, and supposed allies that have lost their faith in his ability to get the job done.

Author Acevedo succeeds in combining the traditional hard-boiled noir detective narrative with elements of modern horror. Namely, a mix of Humphrey Bogart and Re-Animator with bits of Shaun of the Dead swirling around for good measure. The combination is inventive, fun, and, in this latest installment, capitalizes on the current wave of zombie popularity in film and literature (vampire vs. robo-zombie, anyone?) Acevedo also succeeds in structuring his most satisfying ending to date by paving the way for a truly frightening and powerful villain for Gomez to face off with in book five. All told, Jailbait Zombie is an outstanding addition to what was already a fantastic series of novels, vampire or otherwise.

Review: The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

2009-07-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

Review by Jess Peacock

It was a good year, 1979. I was a skinny runt of an eight year old, held fairly non-neogotiable aspirations of a career as a Jedi Knight, and lived, as every eight year old should, oblivious to the fact that childhood was a finite arrangement. It was on my eighth birthday, as a matter of fact, when I settled in with my family to watch a highly anticipated CBS mini-series by the name of 'Salem’s Lot. Little did I know the effect the show would have on my life.

How intensely my heart pounded when young Ralphie Glick emerged from the heavy fog outside of his brother Danny’s window…the deathly scrape of dirty fingernails on the window...those eyes...that smile. The visceral blanket of terror that gripped me when newly turned Danny Glick visited a sleeping Mark Petrie. The living nightmare I suffered through when Mike Ryerson returned for Jason Burke, patiently sitting on a rocking chair in the kind old man’s guestroom (“Look at me, teacher…”). It was these pale visages that haunted my nightmares for weeks after, hovering above my bed as I slept, smiling, leering at me from the impenetrable blackness of my closet (which always seemed to be ajar no matter how many times I closed it).

One might assume that such terror would have driven me to the lighter side of childish pursuits. I found myself, however, drawn to the unsettling fear I experienced as I gazed out the window of my bedroom at night, wondering, in all of that darkness, if some evil thing was staring right back at me. And so I petitioned, pleaded with, and cajoled my parents into buying me the novel 'Salem’s Lot. While only eight at the time, I was already a voracious reader, tearing through various Hardy Boys novels and whatever else passed for young adult literature during the waning years of the 1970’s. They soon relented, and on Christmas Eve, 1979, as my family drove around visiting various relatives with a car full of presents, I started to read what would become my favorite novel of all time.

This is an important preface to my review for The Strain, the first book in a planned trilogy from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, for it looks to carry on a worthy tradition. 'Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King’s own admission, was a homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with just a dash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers thrown into the mix. The Strain goes a step further, mashing together Stoker and King while adding a healthy heaping of CSI procedurals, with just a hint of eschatological histrionics thrown in for good measure.

Since the mid-1990’s, it has been next to impossible to find truly horrific tales of the vampire anywhere in the media. It seemed the gothic and theological roots of the undead had been gutted, leaving the vampire to become either kick-ass kung-fu anti-heroes, or tortured emo souls who bitch and moan about how horrible it is to live forever with ultra-cool super powers. With the exception of author David Wellington’s excellent vamp-centric novels (13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, etc.), this shockwave of virtually fangless immortals continues today in Underworld, Twilight, and the vampire chic-lit movement which has spawned the HBO series True Blood.

Similar to the undead in 'Salem’s Lot, The Strain’s vampires are not sexy, brooding, or suddenly endowed with Matrix-like fighting abilities. They are monsters, plain and simple, with just enough of their former lives embedded in their quickly evaporating humanity to remember their loved ones and neighbors when they set out into the night, scratching on windows and knocking on doors. They are demons, more akin to del Toro’s Reaper vampires from Blade 2 than anything else. A hive minded geometric growth of writhing darkness that enters New York City on the wings of a fictional Boeing 777, and rapidly tentacles out into the sewers, basements, and subway tunnels of the Big Apple.

The epic scope of the novel covers a lot of ground. The big bad of the story, an ageless vampire by the name of Sardu, is everything an eternal beast should be: powerful, hungry, vicious, intelligent, and unabashedly evil. He does not lament his plight, but revels in his power and blood lust, always a step ahead of the few humans who know the truth, eager to unleash a literal Hell on Earth. The only thing standing in his way, of course, is a small band of humans led by an aged Professor, Abraham Setrakian, who faced off against Sardu once before in the living nightmare of Treblinka (in the world of The Strain, vampires nest near tragedy, and Sardu’s New York lair is no different).

While one assumes that Hogan, winner of the 2005 Hammett Award for Prince of Thieves, pulled the heaviest of the plough through the writing process, it is undoubtedly del Toro’s fingerprints and imagination smeared over every page. The director of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy reportedly wrote the outline for the literary trilogy as a proposal for a television series for Fox, envisioning a three-season arc akin to The Wire.

Not a perfect novel by any measurement, The Strain perhaps suffers from an overabundance of characters, diluting opportunities to flesh out and expand characterizations of the central heroes and villains. My guess and hope is that these minor roles, which seemingly vanish in the final third of the book, will play a recurrent role in the next two titles. Otherwise, del Toro and Hogan would be wise to allow deeper cuts in future editing sessions.

Despite such minor issues, The Strain succeeds in not only updating and expanding the modern vampire mythos, but also in bringing some genuine horror to The New York Times bestseller list. Hogan and del Toro have effectively laid the groundwork for what could become the seminal horror series in literature for years to come.

The Straw Men by Michael Marshall

2009-04-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

When I was 22, I experienced the nightmare of watching my father waste away from brain cancer. After his death, I was faced with several revelations that retooled much of how I remembered the man. The news was not earth shattering, nor did it change how I felt about him. Nevertheless, the rose tinted glasses were off, and I was left recalibrating my family history in the spotlight of such a sudden contextual shift.

It is this unnerving change in what we may or may not know about our parents that lures us into The Straw Men, Michael Marshall's much heralded serial killer novel, praised by Stephen King as no less than "a masterpiece!"

Ward Hopkins returns home to bury his parents who died in a car accident, but soon finds that things are not what they seem upon finding a hidden note from his father that reads, "We're not dead." In addition to the ominous message is a mysterious videotape containing several disparate images that force Hopkins to rethink his childhood, the life his parents led, and what he must do to survive the answers to some very horrible questions.

A congruous through line also focuses on John Zandt, an ex-homicide detective who has displayed an uncanny ability for tracking and apprehending serial killers, save for The Upright Man who not only remains at large, but who also abducted and murdered Zandt's daughter.

The first third of The Straw Men is truly riveting, knocking the reader off balance with a senseless mass murder in a small town McDonalds, then continues to move the ground under our feet as Hopkins and Zandt are inexorably lured into the paranoiac truth of their investigations.

As the novel progresses, however, Marshall loses the aura of emotional claustrophobia that he develops in the previous pages by introducing characters to assist Hopkins and Zandt. The latter teams with former lover and FBI agent Nina Baynam, while Hopkins is blessed with the presence and resources of Bobby, a conveniently armed CIA operative. By providing this well equipped support team, the author effectively strips the story of its horror and suspense, devolving into a vanilla flavored Hollywood style thriller.

Without discussing what would undoubtedly be spoiler material, The Straw Men also suffers under the weight of major leaps in logic and discrepant plot elements conjoining advantageously. Moreover, while most fantastic fiction requires us to suspend disbelief for the duration, a skilled writer is able to make the reader an accomplice to the process without even realizing what has happened.

This is not to say that The Straw Men fails as an intense thriller. Despite feeling uneven tonally, one can't help but plow through the pages to discover what the past will visit upon Hopkins as he searches for answers to both the life and death of his parents. Culminating in a sufficiently thrilling, albeit predictable finale where Zandt and Hopkins face mutually opposing resolutions, The Straw Men succeeds at being both satisfying and rather disappointing.

Review: Fool by Christopher Moore

2009-04-21T14:56:00.001-07:00

Review written by Jess Peacock

First things first: I am a major fan of Christopher Moore. If geekgasms are real, then Moore knows my G-spot, pounds away relentlessly, and even has the courtesy to cuddle in the afterglow. I never miss an opportunity to push his quirky, smart, scary, laugh-out-loud brand of storytelling to unwitting fellow lit lovers. It all started with Practical Demonkeeping and simply snowballed into a passion for every word the self-proclaimed “authorguy” wrote. Quite simply, Christopher Moore is my Kurt Vonnegut.

Oh, and did I mention I hate his new novel, “Fool”?

I want Moore’s new book to be completely wiped from my mind, eliminated from the pantheon of his modern classics such as “Lamb” and “A Dirty Job.” I want to see something better in its place, even if it is nothing more than a quickie sequel to “The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove.” Anything but the molasses-like quagmire I painfully trudged through in the author’s recent attempt at putting a humorous spin on Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”

Oh, Christopher, what hath thou wrought.

Continuing the tradition of retelling Shakespeare’s works from different perspectives, Moore’s eleventh novel joins Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” and James Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Mystery” in placing a different slant on the famous playwright. As mentioned, “Fool” retells the story of King Lear through the eyes of Pocket, the King’s Fool. In a recent interview I conducted with Moore, he explained that, in an effort to lend a modern sense of humor to the classic tale, “[Pocket] speaks in a hybrid dialect that I invented that’s a mix of Elizabethan English, modern Britcom slang, and complete balderdash. It had to be comprehensible to my American audience, but seem authentic to the period.”

Balderdash, indeed. Moore’s admitted boiling stew of competing slangs, eras, and made-up words congealed into a mess of tiresome reading. I often found myself backtracking through paragraphs in an attempt to make some sense of what I had just read. Compounding the problem were regular footnotes explaining obscure cultural terms that, while often humorous, served no purpose to the flow of storytelling.

Moore, in our interview, stated, "Because I write comedy, I sort of see the Fool as being an archetype for my profession. Especially the ability of the Fool to speak truth to power. I've written about tricksters throughout my career, so I wanted to write a book about someone who, more or less, has the job of being a trickster." Appropriately, tricks are aplenty in “Fool” as Moore takes the details of “King Lear” (an aging King, ungrateful siblings, etc.), and tosses us down an alternate rabbit hole where Pocket pokes, prods, cajoles, and deceives the various players into murder and war for the most noble of reasons: love and loyalty.

Along the way we are treated to quirky takes on Shakespearian staples (“There’s always a bloody ghost”), an overabundance of sex and masturbatory adventures, and Moore’s signature satiric observations on contemporary politics and religion. These disparate elements, when tossed together, create an atmosphere of Benny Hill gone awry. Unfortunately, it all falls flat.

I will admit that Shakespeare has never, and will never, be in my wheelhouse of literary fascinations, and my familiarity with the bard’s writings fails to extend past what I needed to pass Introduction To Shakespearian Literature in college. Nevertheless, Moore fails at creating an original piece that stands alone, assuming, rather, that the reader would be as familiar with “King Lear” as he undoubtedly had become while researching this latest book. Ultimately, one becomes lost in the various plots and machinations perpetuated by Pocket, Goneril, Regan, Edgar, and Oswald, causing any interest in the ultimate goal of our hero to rapidly dissipate.

Moore’s attempt at transforming such dark material into a comedy/adventure/romance/fairy-tale is undoubtedly ambitious, and will most certainly find willing admirers among Shakespeare lovers in much the same way “Lamb” surprisingly found support among Christians. However, at the end of the day, with the obvious parallels between Westley/Buttercup and Pocket/Cordelia, one would just be better off reading William Goldman’s vastly superior “The Princess Bride” and calling it a night.

Fools Gold: A Profile of Christopher Moore

2009-03-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock

When writing of the The Middle Ages, the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch wrote, "Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom." Darkness? Dense gloom? Substantial stuff. So, who better than the "authorguy" himself, Christopher Moore, to show us the lighter side of that particularly difficult period of human history labeled as The Dark Ages.

Perhaps most famous for tackling the hot button issue of the life and death of Jesus with his signature mix of high and low brow humor ("I think the act of faith is perhaps the most active commitment to imagination that the normal person ever makes"), Moore then confronted the difficult experience of caring for his dying mother with his Quill award winning novel A Dirty Job. Now, Moore is set to get medieval on our collective ass with Fool, currently scheduled for release in February 2009 from HarperCollins.

"This one is set in Medieval England, my first foray into that time period," Moore explains. "Basically it's my take on Shakespeare. King Lear from the point of the Fool. Because I write comedy, I sort of see the Fool as being an archetype for my profession. Especially the ability of the Fool to speak truth to power."

A writer not easily categorized ("Everything inspires me, especially shiny things"), Moore has targeted his razor sharp wit on everything from alien(ish) controlled whales, yuletide zombies, a homeless Emperor of San Francisco, a giant talking fruit bat, human devouring demons, lovelorn vampires, and a globe trotting Jesus. Therefore, it seems as if Pocket, the titular Fool of Moore's upcoming novel, would fit right in with such a motley pantheon of characters. "I've written about tricksters throughout my career, so I wanted to write a book about someone who, more or less, has the job of being a trickster."

A historical comedy with a literal Fool as the protagonist is somewhat in Moore's wheelhouse with the success of his biblical epic Lamb and it's crass, yet big-hearted narrator Biff. Ostensibly nothing more than a bumbling idiot next to his best friend Joshua (Jesus), Biff inadvertently reveals many timeless truths that propel the Messiah forward to his inevitable destiny. "I think they are similar in that they are both tremendously sharp in some ways and completely dense in others," Moore says in comparing Pocket and Biff. "I'd say that they are also pretty brave and, at heart, noble, despite being hopeless horn dogs."

Having already spent three weeks in Israel in an attempt to inform the life of the characters in Lamb, Fool once again took the author overseas. "I took two trips to England and one to France, focusing on medieval sites. I also read most of the complete works of Shakespeare and attended many live performances of King Lear. Strangely enough, I also watched a lot of BBC sitcoms so I could pick up the modern British idiom."

As happy as one might be to discover that sitting on the couch and watching sitcoms from across the pond can be construed as research, that is exactly what made Pocket one of Moore's most challenging characters to write. "It was the language that made it difficult. He speaks in a hybrid dialect that I invented that's a mix of Elizabethan English, modern Britcom slang, and complete balderdash. It had to be comprehensible to my American audience, but seem authentic to the period…plus he's living in the 13th Century."

After Fool, Moore is planning on a sequel to his bestsellers Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck. Currently titled Bite Me, it's a return to fan-favorite vampire lovers Tommy and Jody, characters close to the author's heart. "Tommy's a kid from the Midwest trying to make it in California as a writer, while suffering more than a little culture shock. Short the vampires, that's sort of who I was when I was nineteen. So his personality is like a snapshot of my youth."

"It's going along well," Moore explains of Bite Me. "I've written most of the characters and the setting before, so it's just figuring out how to make stuff happen."

Making stuff happen does not seem to be a problem for Moore who already has another book planned after Bite Me ("I'm going to write a book set in Paris next. I can't really tell you more than that") and a potential sequel to A Dirty Job ("I'm holding off to see if Chris Columbus does anything with the movie.") On top of all of this, Moore has expressed an interest in following up on his whale adventure Fluke, "but everyone from my agent to my editor is down on me doing a whale book."

Whether we end up in Paris, return to Asher's Second Hand Store, or find ourselves back on the darkened streets of San Francisco with a certain red-headed vampiress, Moore plans on continuing to deliver his brand of humor infused genre bending tales of faith, hope and love. "I think as long as I have the mental facilities I'll keep writing. I've actually tried to do straight horror," he explains. "But something usually ends up being funny."

Spiritual Nihilist: A Profile of Brian Keene

2009-03-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock

"Most of my novels have begun as an observation on everyday things," explains Brian Keene, author of the upcoming novel Castaways, available from Leisure Books in February 2009. "The Rising was, at its core, simply about visitation between a father and son after divorce. The Conqueror Worms was about growing old and being helpless to stop it."

Keene, who has been credited by The New York Times as one of the faces who reinvigorated the zombie sub-genre ("I don't know if that's true or not, but if so, then I am very pleased and humbled"), started writing his first novel in 1999. The result of those efforts was the Bram Stoker Award winning novel The Rising, which Delirium books purchased in 2003. "[Delirium] released it later that year as a hardcover, right around the time 28 Days Later came out. Then Leisure Books bought the paperback rights and issued a mass market release in 2004."

"It's been very successful," Keene added.

That success spawned two sequels with City of the Dead and The Rising: Selected Scenes From the End of the World, and quickly set Keene apart with his potent mix of spirituality, anarchy ("Author Nick Mamatas once described me as a 'spiritual nihilist'"), and extreme violence. "I'm bothered by the fact that I still don't know what I believe spiritually," Keene explains. "I believe there's something out there, but I don't believe that mankind knows what it is."

Perhaps the nightmarish Lovecraftian beasts of The Conqueror Worms and the larger underworld hinted at in Ghoul ultimately sheds a little light on a spiritual worldview that Keene describes as a very big puzzle. "Whatever [God] is, I don't think it likes us very much. I think it's fucked with us for a long time. I think it's time we started fucking back."

Keene's latest is a self described tribute to horror author Richard Laymon, who won the Bram Stoker Award posthumously in 2001 for The Traveling Vampire Show. "[Castaways] is intentionally written in a style similar to his. It's about the cast of a reality television show who've been taken to an uninhabited jungle island where they have to outlast the other players in order to win a million dollars." The Survivor-esque setting takes a turn for the worse, naturally, with an approaching Hurricane and the introduction of the island's native inhabitants.

"We all do the same things to survive," Keene says in explaining the underlying theme of Castaways. "It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from."

The terrors in his latest novel, however, are not as mythical in origin than previous outings. "The monsters in Castaways are more along the line of crypto zoological nightmares than Lovecraftian beasties," he explains. "They are the result of evolution gone bad, rather than anything supernatural or otherworldly."

Aside from Castaways, the new year will bring a landslide of work from Keene. "You'll see at least three more books in 2009," he promises. "Urban Gothic (Leisure Books), The Cage (Cemetery Dance), and a short story collection called Unhappy Endings (Delirium Books)."

In addition to such a prolific book release schedule, Keene has also been involved in the world of comic books with his Dead of Night: Devil Slayer series drawn by Chris Samnee (Daredevil). "I can tell you that there will be more...comic books in the pipeline. I'm pitching some stuff right now."

On top of the overwhelming success Keene has experienced in print, The Rising, City of the Dead, and Ghoul have all been optioned for film adaptations, The Ties That Bind is in post-production, and the author recently alerted his fans to the exciting news that his novel Terminal is being developed for the big screen. "The screenplay is finished and they have some actors in mind," he explains. "There's some big news coming."

Always accessible to and grateful for his readers ("Ideally, I'd visit each of them at home and buy them a beer or coffee"), Keene has been posting a free serial online entitled Deluge, a sequel to The Conqueror Worms. "I wanted to give something back to my fans. I wanted to thank them for their support, both morally and financially, over the last ten years. So I decided to give them a free book, something that they didn't have to spend money on."

"I think we're going to see more [online books] as time goes by," Keene predicts. "Not just from me, but all across the medium. Personally, I prefer good old-fashioned paper, but this next generation…who knows?"

Ultimately, Keene somehow finds a way to balance his parade of book releases, dealings with Hollywood, and ventures into the world of comic books and online publishing with the domestic side of things. "I've got an eighteen year old son in addition to my six month old son," he explains. "These days I write whenever I get the chance."

"It varies," he explains of his writing schedule, "based upon the baby's needs. Sometimes I write all night long. And some days, I don't get any work done at all. But it's worth it. He's only going to be this age once. The writing will still be there later."

As for concerns that domestic bliss could smooth away Keene's nihilistic edge, the author is quick to reassure his readers that the reality is quite the opposite. "It makes it worse, because now I have a whole new array of things to be scared of."

The Haunting of Alexandra Sokoloff: A Profile

2009-03-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Written by Jess Peacock

For writer Alexandra Sokoloff, true horror is found in the every day. "I'm not afraid of supernatural monsters," she explains. "Just human monsters. Walking out to the parking lot alone at night. Being lost on a country road. Anything like that."

Despite what realistic bogeymen scare her, however, her debut novel, The Harrowing, tapped into the supernatural as well as the psychological to create an otherworldly force that is equal parts seducer and destroyer. "I took an actual – possibly! – poltergeist experience I had with a group of friends when I was sixteen, one that made me a bit obsessed with the question of whether supernatural events are paranormal, or psychological, or a bit of both, and I combined that experience with a very spooky long weekend I had staying over Thanksgiving break in my dorm at Berkeley."

"There really is nothing scarier than a deserted college," she continues. "The Harrowing has a very contained setting, a diverse and lively group of characters, and a lot of psychological scariness. So it was a perfect setting to explore the idea that a bunch of troubled students could attract an equally troubled spirit – or manifest one psychologically."

Both in tone and subject matter, The Harrowing draws comparisons to The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's classic 1959 novel that tells the tale of a supernatural investigator, his guests, and the purportedly haunted house they plan to inspect. "I was especially influenced by Shirley Jackson, the perfect psychological horror writer. I don't think there's anyone better than Jackson at finding terror in the ordinary," Sokoloff says. "She's a touchstone for me in every way."

Working as a screenwriter soon after moving to Los Angeles ("Hollywood is a seductive mistress,") Sokoloff was more than adept at spinning an interesting story. "Having done so much screenwriting helped enormously with things like story structure, pacing, visual storytelling, and suspense," she explains of her transition from Hollywood scribe to novelist. "It's pretty much all the same steps to develop a story and characters. So for that first novel I wanted to tackle something I had a halfway decent chance of pulling off. I thought I could probably tell the story very much inside the POV of the young protagonist."

For her efforts on The Harrowing, Sokoloff won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, an honor bestowed in the past on such genre dignitaries as Clive Barker, J. Michael Straczynski, Bentley Little, Poppy Z. Brite, and Brian Keene. "The Harrowing was my debut novel, but as a screenwriter I've written psychological thrillers, horror, erotic thrillers, and mysteries. It was the story I thought I had the best chance of carrying off in my first attempt at what was for me a completely new medium. It was a practical decision most of all."

Sokoloff followed up The Harrowing with The Price, an eerie novel that doubles down on its predecessor in both gothic atmosphere and spiritual overtones. "Yes, spirituality is important to me," she confirms, citing Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time as a literary influence ("Talk about spiritual!") In addition, it is these spiritual echoes that reverberate throughout The Price as a powerful political family struggle with the seemingly inevitable death of their young daughter from cancer, and what lengths they might be willing to go to in order to save her.

"I tend to think all good horror is spiritual," Sokoloff continues. "Because it's about issues of good and evil, life after death, what is human and inhuman, what is beyond this plane of existence, and especially what is reality itself?"

With her third novel, however, Sokoloff intends to take things in a slightly different direction. The Unseen, which is due to drop in June 2009 from St. Martin's Press, has "more of a sense of adventure and intrigue. The Unseen leans more toward mystery and the unexplained than the outright spiritual. [It] is lighter in tone than both The Harrowing and The Price, [but] it's definitely spooky."

Sokoloff shares that the impetus behind the story is based on the real life parapsychology experiments conducted at Duke University by Dr. J.B. Rhine, who founded the parapsychology lab at the University (now known as the Rhine Research Center), and who coined the term parapsychology. "I'd been reading about Dr. Rhine and the lab's experiments for years. Most people are aware of the ESP experiments, but not so many know that the lab also did field studies of poltergeists."

"The Unseen is a thriller I've wanted to do for a long time," Sokoloff says, eager to share a few plot details. "A group of researchers attempt to duplicate a poltergeist experiment, unaware that all of the original participants went insane or met otherwise tragic ends."

Having carved out a nitch for herself among horror fans ("I don't see the dark going away any time soon,") Sokoloff has even found herself in the New York Times Sunday Book Review ("That's, like, a real newspaper from a real city, read by actual grownups,") being compared to the likes of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, creative company not shared by many writers today, whether male or female.

Through this success, however, Sokoloff manages to keep everything in perspective. "I'm proud that I've been able to make a good living at what I most wanted to do in life," she shares. "It's a huge accomplishment to be able to capture a story on the page in a way that another person can experience it. That's pretty amazing."