Countdown to Halloween 2024 at SFFWorld is a Wrap!

Well…Countdown to Halloween 2024 is a wrap at SFFWorld. We had a lot of reviews go up this year and as ever, our friend Randy M (noted Horror expert) contributed quite a few. Take a look at what we (Randy, my long-standing SFFWorld colleague Mark Yon, and I) did this year at Countdown to Halloween 2024. For my part, I’ll provide just a little bit more with the links below. 

I started off October / Countdown to Halloween 2024 with reviews of Jonathan Janz’s two Children of the Dark novels: Children of the Dark and Children of the Dark 2: The Night Flyers. I’d have to say, my favorite “new to me” horror writer I started reading the past five years is Janz and these two books just might be his best. They play on the great trope of Kids on Bikes/Kids vs. Monsters to a very satisfying degree.

Next was Murder Road by Simone St. James. I’ve read a few novels from her prior to this one and they’ve all been a very enjoyable mix of mystery and supernatural. This one continues that trend.

The following week, I posted a book that is going to be a favorite read of 2024 for me, Todd Keisling’s Devil’s Creek. A story of a cult/dark church that has some Lovecraftian overtones. A truly dark and harrowing novel.

It is always great to read new voices in the horror genre, especially when those voices bring something you haven’t seen before or a perspective that is different than your own experiences. That’s Del Sandeen’s This Cursed House, which was an extremely impressive debut novel. 

Next up is another new-to-me writer, but a writer who has received (arguably) the highest honor a horror writer can receive, the Bram Stoker award for Life Achievement. I refer to Nuzo Onoh’s fable-like horror novel, Where the Dead Brides Gather.

Closing it out is a book by a writer with an interesting personal connection. Nicole M. Wolverton and I both own dogs…these dogs happen to be sisters. We adopted our dogs (Dusty for my, Myrtle for her) from the wonderful Angel’s Retreat dog rescue. Little did I know that one of the side benefits to bringing the perfection that is Dusty into our lives is that I’d “discover” such an engaging horror writer with A Misfortune of Lake Monsters. There you have it, a half-dozen +1 batch of horror novels for your reading pleasure.

October 2022 Reading Round Up

October, shockingly, was all about horror. Well, the books I read, at least. The first weekend in October was New York Comic Con and it was the fist time since 2019 I was able to attend. They limited the press passes in 2021 and it wasn’t held in 2020 because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. One of the books I’ve already read, but you can click over to these three posts at SFFWorld to read my recaps of my time during the convention:

• New York Comic Con 2022 Panel Recap: Authors on the Best Advice They Ever Got 
• New York Comic Con 2022 Panel Recap: Spooks, Shivers, and Shrieks: Horror 
• New York Comic Con 2022: Wrap Up!

As I said above, every book I read in the month of October either had some horror flavors or was flat out horror. Three of those books were review books part of the annual “Countdown to Hallowe’en” series we do at SFFWorld

Little Eve by Catriona Ward 

Little Eve touches many topics in its slim, but potent length. There’s the concept of “grooming,” psychological manipulation, cults, animal cruelty, and of course child abuse (both mental and physical). Although this is a fictional tale set nearly a century prior to today, the games Uncle plays with his family are frighteningly real and are very much cultish in nature.

Leech by Hiron Ennes 

Hines manages to generate a wonderful atmosphere in the novel, there are hints of things familiar in the genre, but mixed up in a way that feels quite refreshing. With a creepy mine, there’s some definite horror vibes of the dark dwellers flavor of the genre and even something of an old west feel…In addition to The Thing, I also felt a sense of resonance with some of Jeff VanderMeer’s weird horror fiction and in the way the Institute “helps” humanity, I couldn’t help thinking of Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis books. Like I said, some familiar echoes that when fully projected are a story of its own.

Lute by Jennifer Marie Thorn 

What I found as unnerving as the black cloud over “The Day” was the affect it had on Nina’s relationship with her husband Lord Hugh. He initially seems quite stable, but as Nina begins to stray from the home as the “Day” draws ever closer, he seems to unravel. As it turns out, Nina is a quick learner and the true impact and import of “The Day” begins to settle into her mind, she understand what it means to be a resident of Lute and somehow begins to find herself more resolute.

A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson

Compulsive…that’s the word that comes to mind when I think of this novel. Gibson has lovely prose and the tale is told with both auras of relaxed prose as well as elements of urgency, but through it all, the narrative of Constanta’s confessional is powerfully compulsive, which is why I read this book in only a couple of days. Her tale is gripping and you want to see her overcome her abuser.

Of the non-SFFWorld review books, let’s start with Ronald Malfi’s Black Mouth, which is the first novel I’ve read by the author. I’ve been seeing good things about his work for the past couple of years (Come with Me in particular), but this one’s description grabbed me for its very superficial similarity to books like King’s IT and Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night - friends reunite in their hometown to take down a monster they thought was gone. Those similarities, as I noted, are just superficial. Malfi’s tale is a little more confined, in that there are fewer characters and much more despair surrounds the characters; protagonist Jamie Warren is an alcoholic struggling with his addiction; his mother is a junkie who killed herself, thus brining Jamie back to Sutton’s Quay, VA. His disabled brother was found wandering. Dennis’s other friends Mia and Clay have their own demons, but they were very close friends when they were kids, but haven’t seen each other in years, since an eerie man known only as the Magician touched their lives. Malfi excels with his characters and building a sense of creepiness, between the Magician and the haunted region of Black Mouth itself.

He tells the tale in intertwining chapters that focus on the present and past when Jamie and his crew initially encounter the Magician. Malfi has a very deliberate pace and that pace works perfectly in Black Mouth to build up empathy for all the characters, the horrific nature of the Magician, the unsettling nature of Black Mouth itself, and how the tension builds towards the conclusion.

Black Mouth is one of my favorite novels of the year and I’m looking forward to reading more from Malfi in the future.

One of the books I picked up at New York Comic Con was Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters, which he then signed. I’ve read two of his books so far (The Remaking and Whisper Down the Lane) and enjoyed both and shared both with my wife to read. This one focuses on a drug called Ghost that allows the people who consume it to see dead people, or ghosts. Thinking about seeing dead loved ones might bring a swell of positive emotion to your heart…Clay goes the opposite direction. 

I won’t spoil what that means, but damn. The story focus on Erin and her toxic ex-boyfriend Silas. She keeps trying to get away from him and his addictions, but she finds it difficult. He eventually turns up dead of an overdose. Erin can’t hold on, she always feared he may wind up dead, but it actually happened and she has difficulty dealing with it. Then she learns about the aforementioned drug called Ghost. There’s an escalating creep factor that sets it apart. Chapman’s characters seem genuine and are empathetic and not since Jeff VanderMeer have mushrooms been so very creepy. 

The other non-SFFWorld review book I read was Nick Cutter’s Little Heaven, which I was looking forward to reading after The Troop earlier in the year because I enjoyed it so much. I can’t say I felt the same way about Little Heaven. The book started off fine, I was into it. But it just turned into a slog as it felt everything was happening at a glacial pace.

The audiobook I read (and have yet to finish) took up all of October, but it was a re-read, Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which I reviewed back in 2019 for SFFWorld when it published. The book was released before the COVID-19 Pandemic, but damn if Wendig’s story wasn’t prescient for what we’ve experienced the last few years. Seems more horrific in hindsight than it did at the time. Here’s some of what I said back in 2019: 

In short, between the potent politics, graphic nature, and embracing of the tropes, Wending doesn’t shy away from ANYTHING in Wanderers. As a writer, Chuck is far from a shy person, as people who follow him online and in fiction already know. I’ve read a few of Chuck Wendig’s novels and I see some pieces of those works, here, except maybe a little more refined an in your face. Wanderers is a magnum opus for him, it seems like a work of fiction he’s been working towards, and is a powerful achievement ...  Wendig has shown himself at the very least an equal storyteller/writer of the Epic Apocalypse with Wanderers. For me, it is an instant classic, an immediate Modern Masterpiece of the genre, and will probably be my favorite 2019 novel, and a book I will hold very high in my pantheon for years to come.

I’ll close out with my bookstack from New York Comic-Con 2022.

Hallowe'en 2018 Recap

Looky here, another post on the old 'o Stuff.

October is obviously a great month for Horror and dark stories and this past October, I had a pretty good fill of darkness. The month started with Seanan McGuire’s enormously fun, Boneyard, a weird western/horror novel set in the world of the Dead Lands RPG. I reviewed that for SFFWorld so you can head over there for my full thoughts, but bottom line: engaging, harrowing, and entertaining.

But backtracking a little, September ended and October began with a vampire novel, but not an ordinary vampire novel. The late Octavia Butler’s contribution to the vampire mythos, Fledgling is more science fiction than horror, although there are of course some dark elements to the novel. Butler is never one to shy away from uncomfortable elements in her fiction and making her vampire appear to be a young girl leaves a great deal of room for many uncomfortable scenes. I love her Lilith’s Brood / Xenogenesis series and this one is pretty good, too. I really like her concept for the Vampire and how even the “vampires” themselves are unsure of their own history at times. This was an audio read.

Right about the time I was juggling those two books, I watched You Might be the Killer the movie based on the entertaining twitter conversation between Sam Sykes and Chuck Wendig. The film was at Fantastic Fest in late September and premiered on the SyFy network on the first Saturday in October, which also happened to be the Saturday of New York Comic Con. The movie was a lot of fun and works as sort of a mash up of Scream and Cabin in the Woods. The film stars Fran Kranz (who also starred in Cabin in the Woods, which happened to air just before You Might be the Killer premiered on SyFy) as an out of breath, on the run camp counselor named Sam who calls his friend Chuck, a video store clerk portrayed by Alyson Hannigan. The movie doesn’t waste time with revealing the obvious – that Sam is the killer. From there, it is a fun 90 minutes or so. I’ll be making this a re-watch come every October. The film worked for me on a few different levels, I like horror, I like humor, and I like both Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes. Beyond that, the film is a fun send up of the Slasher subgenre of horror movies.

I finally started and finished a Clive Barker novel - Damnation Game, his first novel, in fact. The novel was a bit slow, but a very nuanced novel I thought. More subtle, at least in some parts and through some plot movements, than I would have expected from the man who gave us Hellraiser. Simon Vance is a renowned narrator and he did bring a nice level of class to the performance. The story tells the tale of an ancient man who is in debt to an even older creature. This is very much in the vein of the classic Faust tale and mixes in some pretty gruesome imagery.

Another solid page turner for the moth was Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground. This is a horrific post-apocalyptic tale of women randomly giving birth to spider like creatures. Some great character stuff throughout against gorrific imagery. I would have liked a clearer explanation of the how and why of everything, if I’m being honest. Nonetheless, a good page turner.

The Witch is a movie that’s been on my radar since it hit theaters in 2015 and I finally watched it in the middle October. In the early 1600s of New England, a family of 6 (Mother, Father, baby, young twins, and eldest daughter) is banished from their church. They are left to make a home at the edge of a forest that holds dark secrets. Immediately, the baby of the family disappears and because eldest daughter Tomasin is last seen with the baby, she is blamed for the disappearance and even called a witch by the twins of the family. The film is extremely tense, has a wonderful atmosphere which lends such an immersive feel to the film, and leaves much of the terror to build on the raw emotions of the family. It was a fairly slow-moving film, but that pace was a deliberate effect that worked to reward patience. A modern classic, one might say about The Witch.

As the month changes to November, I’m in the middle of the audiobook of Within These Walls by Ania Ahlborn narrated by R.C. Bray. I am thoroughly enjoying this novel which tells the story of a down on his luck true crime writer who is given a golden ticket to interview an infamous mass murderer. Think Charles Manson, except this killer never talks to the press. The catch – protagonist Lucas Graham has to live in the house where the murderer committed his heinous acts. As of this post, I'm about a third to halfway through the book. The novel is filled with negative emotions and anger, but that combination makes for an extremely compelling read especially from the great performance by R.C. Bray.

Cover design by Doogie Horner

The absolute standout Hallowe’en thing for me, and book/novel that is on my top 10 of the year and one of my instant classic favorite horror novels of all time was We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix. In a brief amount of time, Grady’s become a leading voice in the horror genre and although I’ve only read one other novel (the outstanding My Best Friend's Exorcism) by him, it is clear to me he’s a writer with great skill and honesty in his fiction. I also adore his Paperbacks from Hell book, an appreciation of Horror fiction of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s as well as his Great Stephen King Re-Read at Tor.com.

In We Sold Our Souls Grady managed to combine two of my favorite things in the world with this novel: heavy metal music and horror fiction. To that combo, he added a phenomenal protagonist in Kris Pulaski, the lone woman in the band Dürt Würk and our primary P.O.V. character. Kris is at the bottom of her rope despite having a once moderately successful gig as the guitarist for 1980s Metal band Dürt Würk. That all changed when her one-time best friend and lead singer of Dürt Würk Terry Hunt broke away from the band on “Contract Night.” This was a night few can remember, but changed the fate of the band forever. Grady does a masterful job immersing the reader in the heavy metal world and playing with some dark elements like Black Iron Mountain, the driving force behind Terry’s new band Koffin.

Grady takes readers on a cross-country journey that never falters, never takes a guitar solo of a break and is a relentless novel. Highly, highly recommended.

So there you have it, a recap of Hallowe'en fictional adventures for 2018.  

Friday Round-Up: Hallowe'en Edition (Featuring Hill, Maberry, King, Priest, & Zelazny)

Time for a preemptive Friday Round-Up for Hallowe’en weekend, since the few books I’ve covered  recently have been very much horror, as has much of my October reading.

Earlier this week, my review of the audio version of Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero read by Ray Porter posted to SFFWorld. This is Maberry’s first Joe Ledger novel and I am hooked. I think this is the first series I'm going to "consume" audio-only.

Zombie stories are a dime a dozen, they come in all shapes and sizes and are very much a pop-culture phenomenon that have transcended the horror genre. Military Science Fiction is one of the most popular of subgenres of speculative fiction. Take those two great tastes, mash them up and add a wonderful amount of wit and you’ve got Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger novels, which begin with Patient Zero.

Maberry masterfully crafted the character of Joe Ledger, a tough-as nails, smart character who epitomizes what it means to be an ultimate “warrior.” While he is a rugged wise-ass, he doesn’t come across as a macho asshole, either. That trap is one many a writer/storyteller has fallen into, but Maberry assimilates many archetypical elements of the hero in his construction of Ledger. Joe is a guy you immediately want to have a beer with, want in your foxhole, and don’t want to piss off. His comradery with Rudy comes across as a friendship that has seen a great deal; his interaction with Church is entertaining for Joe’s wise-ass snark against Church’s dry humor; and his introduction / assumption of Echo Team leader is pure gold.

The next day, my first Completist column in a few months posted to SF Signal. In it, I gush about two novels that climbed very quickly up my top horror reads, Cherie Priest’s Borden Dispatches, a superb Lovecraftian duet:

Lizzie Borden and her axe is as much of an American myth as she is an historical figure, but what if those forty whacks she took were in self-defense against creatures that bore a stronger resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft’s aquatic Cthulhu monstrosities than her father and step-mother? That idea serves as the launch pad for Cherie Priest’s darkly delicious “Borden Dispataches,” which is comprised of Maplecroft and Chapelwood. Priest magically mixes historical figures and events with the horror of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in an elegant concoction that seems so logical that it almost begs the question why hasn’t it been done before? Well, Priest’s storytelling skills and lyrical, completely convincing voice elevate these books to greatness.

..

The Borden Dispatches aren’t simply great horror tales (and they are at the top of the list of horror novels I’ve read in the past decade), but an examination of some less savory social structures. The primary protagonists are all women, with Lizzie/Lisbeth at *the* protagonist and inMaplecroft, her relationship with her lover Nance is central. Dr. Seabury, in his “diaries” expresses disapproval of such a relationship, but he is able to get past that and still help Lizzie. In Chapelwood, there’s a layered examination of the racism and gender bias of the day, Ruth’s marriage to a Puerto Rican man is not viewed kindly, and the aura of racism haunts Birmingham nearly as strongly as does the Lovecraftian monstrosities. Those two evils work quite well together under the roof of the Chapelwood Church.

In addition to those three books, I’ve spent much of my October reading on Horror. The fine folks at audible put together a marvelous audio adaptation of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key graphic novel series. (My favorite thing Hill has done and a top 5 all time comic/graphic novel series for me).

That one was free to audible members and will be for a few more days (until November 3), so I highly, highly recommend downloading it.

With my October audible credit, I went for a big, deep cut. A horror novel I read twice before, but many years ago (at least 20 years ago was the last time I read it). I’ve been wanting to revisit IT for a few years, but the piles of review books kept pushing it away, so I finally jumped back to Derry, Maine for Stephen King’s largest book, but with the shortest (and most un-Google-able title), IT. I am thoroughly enjoying it IT even if I can see some “issues” throughout (if Bill Denbrough isn’t Stephen King, then I don’t know what writerly character is)

Over the course of a couple of days, I read through Roger Zelazny's classic A Night in the Lonesome October and had a lot of fun playing the literary guessing game. Snuff might be a new favorite literary canine. 

In the end, this October for my All Hallows Reads, I revisited two big-time favorites and found two new writers whose backlist I need to go through.

Hallowe'en Reading 2014 - 'SALEM'S LOT by Stephen King

I have a long association with Stephen King’s fiction, as I may have mentioned in the past. I would say I’ve read about 80% of his novels and many of short stories, but before last week, one of the major oversights of his bibliography for me was his classic vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot. Well, that oversight has been “corrected,” to borrow a term from another of King’s work. In short, I enjoyed the hell out of the novel.

Cover of original US Hardback.
My dad has a copy of this.

As has likely been recounted about this novel, ’Salem’s Lot is King’s mash-up of Peyton Place and Dracula. Both novels are referenced in the text of ’Salem’s Lot: one character (Matt Burke) is remarked to remind the others of Van Helsing and Peyton Place is even called out by another character. After a brief prologue featuring Ben Mears and a young boy after the events of the novel transpire, King introduces the populace of Jerusalem’s Lot in a leisurely fashion. ‘Salem’s Lot (or The Lot), as the inhabitants call it, seem to know each other and each other’s business; the quintessential New England small town. Their everyday life is shaken up when visitors arrive: writer Ben Mears arrives looking to exorcise some past demons through writing a book and Straker & Barlow, two antique salesmen who arrive looking to set up a new shop. Ben and Straker & Barlow are both interested in the old Marsten house which overlooks the Lot to the point that Ben was going to rent it out until he discovered Straker & Barlow have taken up residence in what many feel is a haunted mansion.

Cover of the MMPB I read. I've
had the copy for at least a decade.

While some of the characters can be considered to lean towards cardboard cut-out territory, King gives a lived in, familiar, and quaint feel to the Lot. This is one of the novel’s strengths, its sense of place and initial comfort. The other strength is the subtlety and slow reveal of the terror hiding in the shadows, aside from the dog’s head on the pike early in the novel, of course. The subtlety is when the human characters interact with the vampire; there are more hints than description, allowing the reader to finish the scene with their own imagination. Though King can imagine terrifying things, it is this cooperative horror that proves to be so effective in ’Salem’s Lot.

Where the novel stumbles is two-fold and both of these I’ll generously attribute to the time the novel was published and the fact that it was King’s second published novel. The relative lack of female characters stood out to me. We have one primary female character – Susan Norton – and while it is through her eyes we initially see the novel she’s little more than a romantic entanglement used to drive Ben Mears through the plot and provide him tension and action. The only other truly (and fully) positive female character in the novel is Eva Miller, owner of the boarding house where Ben takes up residence during his time in the Lot. Most of the other women are portrayed in varying degrees from middling to quite negative.

The other stumble is some of the flowery early interaction, between Susan, her family, and Ben. I’ll chalk this up to being a novel of its time in how the characters talk. Susan and Ben fall for each other quite quickly and the language King uses to show them falling for each other reads as a bit put upon by today’s standards.

Some other points to note about ’Salem’s Lot:

• It is the first (of many) Stephen King novels to feature a writer as the protagonist
• King would return to similar themes, specifically small town with a dark cloud of monster(s) hovering: It, Needful Things, The Tommyknockers and to a lesser extent The Dark Half
• Tangentially, like Needful Things, ’Salem’s Lot features a small town disrupted by the arrival of a strange visitor
• Like IT, ’Salem’s Lot features a small town with some historically recurring darkness
• As the King constant reader knows, Father Callahan later shows up in the fifth Dark Tower novel, Wolves of the Calla
• I think part of the reason Needful Things has a lesser reputation in King’s bibliography might be because of how it echoes ’Salem’s Lot (I personally liked Needful Things but it has a special spot for me relating a great deal to when I read it, as I point out in that link at the top of this post).

My colleague (though we’ve never met, and I mean colleague in the sense that some of our writing appears at the same place) Grady Hendrix over at Tor.com wrote about ’Salem’s Lot as part of his Great Stephen King Reread. While he does make some points I can grok even if I don’t agree with them, one interpretive point I can’t agree with is his assessment of the Marsten House. He suggests there’s no real reason for Barlow and Straker to set up residence at the Marsten House. The answer, for me, is right there in the novel. Throughout the novel, characters remark that The Marsten House is a magnet for evil, ever since old Hubie Marsten lived there and committed horrific acts, supposedly demonic sacrifices, killing children, and killing his wife.

The other point on which Grady is also flat out wrong is the character of Mark Petrie; Grady makes Mark out to be something like Harold Emery Lauter when in fact, Mark is fairly well-adjusted and manages to take out the school bully early in the novel. This sort of informs us that Mark, coupled with his love and knowledge of horror/monster movies, is as well-equipped as any character in the novel to take out Barlow. Mark’s calculative methods prove very useful to the plot and if he were nerdy and off-putting, the two other kids we see in the novel (the Glick Brothers) would have been more hesitant to visit him. (Admittedly, Grady recants some of his thoughts on Mark).

I’ll split the hairs regarding Grady’s take on the one-dimensional hillbilly characterization of the ‘Lot’s inhabitants. Most of them don’t really stretch beyond their cliches, like that of a cheating spouse or an abusive mother, but those folks don’t need much more attention than their archetypes in this particular story for me. Again, I see Grady’s point here and can agree with it to an extent.

As for the adaptations of the novel, I watched the old TV miniseries once years and years ago. I hadn’t been aware of who James Mason was at the time, but now I want to rewatch it just for James Mason. I did not see the 2004 remake with the stellar cast of Rob Lowe, James Cromwell and Rutger Hauer but that interests me now, too.

’Salem’s Lot was an incredibly addictive read and I can understand why this helped to set King on the path of superstardom. I’m not sure exactly where it ranks against the other King novels I’ve read only because the later books I read were after he became a more polished writer and storyteller. All told, I really enjoyed the novel despite some of its flaws.

A post-script: Any and all King fans and Constant Readers should check out Grady’s reread project, there’s some good insight to the books in his articles and I’ve reexamined my own thoughts on some of King’s work.