The actress Adrienne Barbeau, probably best known for the ‘70s tv series Maude and more recently the HBO series Carnivale, teams up with prolific author Michael Scott (his YA novel The Alchemyst is being made into a movie) to write her second novel, Vampyres of Hollywood: a modern tale of vampires, murder, and the movie-making business.


This novel differs from other tales of that bloodsucking creature of the night in that it claims that Hollywood was essentially created by vampires. After all, it provides the perfect environment for them. It allows them to satisfy their narcissism and it gives them a means to perpetuate all of those fallacies and even create some new ones, like having no reflections, in order to keep the true nature of their existence from being discovered.

Vampyres of Hollywood opens with a murder, and the subsequent chapters alternate between the first person point of views of Osvanna Moore, legendary horror film actress and studio head, and Peter King, the detective with movie-star good looks and a penchant for nice clothes (he is, after all, working the Beverly Hills beat.) But one murder quickly becomes several murders, and all of the victims are somehow linked to Osvanna.


From Osvanna’s point of view, we are given glimpses into her long and rich past from her relationship as body guard, friend and occasional lover to Catherine the Great to that of muse to Van Gogh. We learn that many great historical events and persons were somehow related to vampirism like Jack the Ripper and the fall of Pompeii. Barbeau and Scott manage to make it all seem plausible, and it works mostly because the novel doesn’t strive to take itself too seriously.


Through Detective King’s investigations, we are introduced to more than a few interesting characters. His tenant, SuzieQ (that’s her real name, it says so on her driver’s license) is an exotic dancer, snake wrangler, and sounding board for the detective, often offering insightful comments and useful insider information (Hollywood is a small town, you know.) Since the suspect in this case has been dubbed The Cinema Slayer, we are introduced to his mom, who knows the movie industry inside and out. She once had aspirations of being an A-List actress, but was always relegated to roles such as “girl in the bar”, “woman in the bar, and “woman behind bars.” Eventually, her penchant for saving movie set mementos and collecting signed film scripts paid off when eBay provided the perfect venue for selling those mementos. Then there’s John Trueblood who stands at 6’8” and goes by the nickname Little John. He’s an ex-convict and ex-professional wrestler, tattoo artist and parlor owner, and avid collector of movie memorabilia (he‘s one of Mrs. King’s best customers.) These folks may be secondary characters, but they add interest and color to the story in addition to helping move King’s case forward.


Minor inconsistencies (vampires don’t feel the cold, but in one scene Osvanna feels “Brittle cold but no pain.”; it’s pointed out that vampires can be seen in mirrors because of the laws of physics yet no mention is made of those same laws when they change into animal forms) and a tendency to state the obvious do little to detract from the fact that this is a briskly paced and entertaining story that doesn’t pause long enough to give the reader time to worry too much about these minor criticisms. There are plenty of references to the Hollywood of yesteryear as well as currently running shows to appease most movie and television buffs. There are scenes of gore and a grand finale of flesh-eating to give horror fans something to wince about. In the end, Vampyres of Hollywood provides a fitting metaphor for Hollywood’s movie industry as well as a vampy, campy fun read.


Since I don't have the option of rating this book something between a 6 and 7, I gave it a 7.


(This review refers to the Advance Uncorrected Proof.)

 

So recounts Steve, one of the characters in Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem's fantastical memoir The Man on the Ceiling, about his wife Melanie. And Melanie's character, in one of her narrative turns, tells us how a strange and lost man did one night climb through her bedroom window, only to flee when she awoke. The Tems describe their book as "loosely autobiographical" (the book's jacket adds a parenthetical "maybe" to the common descriptor "A Novel") and we can guess that this episode may be one of those that are, as the word is typically understood, true. Given this starting point, a more creatively blinkered author or pair of authors might have left the "man on the ceiling" as a minor aside, a passing nightmare to be commented on and then dismissed. We would instead be holding a straightforwardly autobiographical account of the Tems, of the love and anxieties they have for each other and their family, likely titled "The Man in the Window." And everything in that account would be true. But such a mechanically truthful account wouldn't be the whole story, or the whole truth.

There are of course limits to the written word: we can seldom know, much less share, the whole truth. But we can approach it, and it is in approaching the truth that the man on the ceiling (and The Man on the Ceiling) become our guide. The man on the ceiling is the sort of quintessentially fantastic creation that, in Ursula Le Guin's impossible phrase, puts into words what cannot be put into words. But to attempt an approach: throughout the Tems' accounts of domestic joys and tragedies, the man on the ceiling serves as a representation of the imagination's need to represent what we imagine as meaningful units of Story.

In a book that includes a section on the importance of names, it is telling that the book's name is the naming of the imagination. Melanie's man in the window is a creature of "simple physics," a collection of biochemical processes bound by gravity. In those terms, his mutters are only "nonsense," his actions "not meaning me anything." It is the man on the ceiling who represents how "we make things mean." The gravity-defying man on the ceiling is impossible, obviously so: a creation of imagination. And it is our imagination that encodes positive possibilities for the future into stories we call hopes; our imagination that coalesces negative possibilities for the future (of which death is but the most obvious) into discrete units of story called fears. Our imagination stories the past as individual memories. It stories a house into a home; a stranger into a spouse; legal and biological relationships into a family. The man on the ceiling may be an angel or a demon, as the Tems variously suggest in their narrative, but in the end both identities amount to the same truth: both are "masks of God" (echoing Joseph Campbell), representations of the transcendent. The man on the ceiling is a "necessary angel," of meaning, of sense-making.

 

As the man on the ceiling represents the drive towards many types of story, so The Man on the Ceiling incorporates many types of storytelling. The book is divided into eleven thematic sections with titles that include "Naming Names," "Telling Tales," "Down the Dark Stairs," and a phrase repeated often throughout the book: "Everything We're Telling You Here is True." The third section, "The Man on the Ceiling," is closely based on the Tem's year 2000 novella of the same name that won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the World Fantasy Award. The other sections, and thus the majority of the book, are new. At different points these sections incorporate both fiction and non-fiction; The Man on the Ceiling is a mixture of fantasy and horror, an essay on where fantasy and horror come from, a family memoir, a how-to book for aspiring writers, and perhaps most abidingly, a snapshot of family life in contemporary America.

It is this last that marks the primary change between the original novella and the new book. The original "Man on the Ceiling" (now most readily found in Datlow and Windling's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection) was an obsidian knife of a story, knapped down to a raw and beautiful universality. In contrast, the new sections situate and ground the book firmly in early 21st century America. Many sections take familiar scenes of Americana as their starting point: sitting down to a family dinner; a visit back to the old neighborhood; a family road trip; the death of a pet; telling stories to grandchildren; a restless night in the large family house. The authors then riff on these scenes, giving their imaginations rein to make connections, add meanings. The road trip -- where "the route coincides with the map only occasionally and, even then, deceptively" -- becomes a metaphor for the imaginative journey of creating a family (the Tems' children are all adopted, but we come to realize that Melanie and Steve have conceived them all the same), and then a metaphor for creating a story. The death of a pet becomes a ghost story, and an essay on why we tell ghost stories. A collision between two small planes near the Tems' Colorado home becomes the man on the ceiling's defiance of gravity (he is "out there, on the ceiling of the world, masquerading as ... the wingtip lights of a doomed plane"), becomes, for post 9/11 America along with much of the rest of the world, a symbol of the looming uncertainty and fear of raising a child at a time when planes do fall out of the sky.

The impact of the additional sections on the original novella is nothing less than a fundamental transformation. "The most disturbing thing about the figures of horror fiction for me," writes Steve, "is a particular vagueness in their form." Yet the additions to the novella sufficiently name, shape, and ground the man on the ceiling so as to dispel a large measure of his vagueness. If the original novella was based in the affective language of horror fiction, the new book in both form and content captures -- indeed literalizes -- the more ambivalent theme of "making a home in the weird" that I noted in the Interfictions anthology of recent interstitial fiction. The Tems certainly realize the magnitude of the transformation, from the questioning of "A Novel" to their word of choice to describe their account, a "testament." Their story has become a self-conscious work of contemporary social observation. It is something we could imagine as the product of a more humanistic Milan Kundera (who shares a similar obsession with gravity), except that the Tem's novel has the layered redundancy of a distinctly collaborative construction. The change from the universality of the novella to the novel's grounding in the zeitgeist acts to highlight the Tems' understanding of the present: how difficult and scary, how impossible and necessary, it is to love in the 21st century; and the kinds of stories we require to do so.

 

All this largely works because the Tems have crafted a believably honest book. The expanded, sectional nature of the new edition does lead to passages not so much irrelevant as extraneous, artifacts of the Tem's need to fill spaces with tellings and explanations, with connections and meaning. But as this is precisely what the book is about, we are inclined to forgive them. As careful readers, we suspect that the characters of Steve and Melanie are to some unknowable degree both more and less than the authors themselves. (Given the subject matter, it would be surprising if the Tems did not ever engage in the storying of each other, as well as themselves.) Yet the book's frequent refrain that "everything we're telling you here is true" adds an implicit assurance: the we. The we asserts that everything here has been seen and verified not just by the characters of Steve and Melanie, but by the thing called "the Tems" that exists behind the characters, between the real people. What the Tems write may not be the whole truth, but the believable manner and form of its construction let us suspect that it approaches the truth.

The most truly horrific segment within The Man on the Ceiling occurs as we approach the end of the book. The maybe-novel has so far been narrated by Melanie and Steve. Then, a sudden shift of perspective: we're in the head of one of their children. The immediate sensation is one of profound invasion, a breach of trust that a parent would use a child so to tell a story. But then we pull back and realize that of course people imagine stories about those they love, that such imagining in the face of never knowing the whole truth, of never having full control, is one of the necessary attributes that make a good parent, or spouse, or storyteller. The fantastic imagination has ever provided a chronicle of all that humanity cannot know or control. With The Man on the Ceiling, the Tems have created an entry for our time in that chronicle.

-- Matt Denault

Ok, what the hell does that mean? Unfortunately all of you this book has been published in Dutch only for the time being. I understand there is an English translation being prepared but I couldn't find any details on a release date, publisher and title so I stuck with the original Dutch title. I'd translate it as Apprentice Wizard Father & Son but they may come up with something else entirely. And perhaps they should. The title doesn't really work for me, it sounds like the title of a cheap fantasy novel and that would not do the book justice. Other than the title I have to admit I am impressed by this book.

The story is set in San Diego for the most part. The 14 year old Travis Lauper has just lost his father in an accident at sea near the mouth of the Tijuana river. A place much favoured by local surfers for it's huge waves but also a severely polluted area. Both reasons why Travis' father was interested in the region. Travis does not recover well from his loss. While his mother tries to get on with her life, Travis withdraws from the rest of the world, incapable of sharing his loss with anybody. Until he meet local surfing hero Buster Chavez. Chavez draws him out of his shell and teaches him to ride the waves like his father did. He doesn't do this out of the kindness of his heart though. Buster wants something and for years after their final argument Travis doesn't realize what.

Eighteen years later Travis is married and has a fourteen year old son himself. His life is not a happy one though. His wife is suffering from cancer and his son is turning into a very peculiar boy. Travis himself is stuck in a dead end job at a morgue (no pun intended). Then he is offered a job by Sheldon Green, a man who deals in human tissues and organs. Travis seizes the chance but quickly get's constricted Greens a macabre and barely legal deals. Then Chavez decides to show up again.

This book is my latest attempt to find some speculative fiction worth reading in Dutch. So far I haven't found anything that would rank above entertaining unfortunately. Olde Heuvelt is a coming man in Dutch (genre) literature so when this novel was announced several months ago I decided to check it out. Leerling Tovenaar Vader & Zoon definitely manages to rise above entertaining as far as I am concerned. He seems to be an ambitious fellow. This novel is clearly written with a larger audience than just a the relatively small Dutch market in mind. Olde Heuvelt is quite obviously influenced by Stephen King, thankfully without King's excessive use of pop culture references.

The story itself is quite dark, macabre even. A lot of the characters are obsessed with death, the death of a loved one, their own impending death, or avoiding death at all cost. On top of that the book also deals with the, how shall I put it, more physical reality of death. Olde Heuvelt goes into detail on that particular subject. That doesn't make for a happy story, or light reading.

Leerling Tovenaar Vader & Zoon is an ambitious novel by a promising young writer. For my taste it leaned a bit to heavily on the supernatural themes in the books end that prevented it from really capturing me. I also have some issues with his use of the Dutch language, it is very influenced by American English expressions. So much even that sometimes I could have sworn I was reading a translation. Leerling Tovenaar Vader & Zoon is not Olde Heuvelt first book but this novel will definitely put him on the map, here in the Netherlands at least. It will be interesting to see if it will appeal to international audiences as well. In the mean time I think I’ll go see if his older work is still available.

Should I come across any information on translated editions I will keep you informed of course.

Morganville is a small town, with a strange secret. Claire Danvers is a brilliant student, who starts a new college a year ahead of normal abilities to advance her studies.
But in Morganville you are either food or owned by the local Vampire's and Claire find's herself on the recieving end of town bullies and in danger of becoming someone's meal.

Morganville quickly becomes a nightmare for Claire, were the local college girls hate her so much, they threaten to beat her to death. In the hopes of escaping their bullying, she takes up lodgings at Glass House, run by an strange young musician, Michael.
The house is an haven for two other town outcasts and it's here that Claire learns that Morganville is Vampire capital of America.

With her outcast friends watching her back, she fights to get her dream education and stay clear of the ruling vampires.

Personal Thoughts
Fast paced, well written and entertaining. The author manages to create strong, interesting characters, and despite her main being only 16 years old, Claire is able to carry the reader through the strange twists and turns of Morganville vampire politics.
Her room mates are quite interesting and I enjoyed learning of Michael's secret and how the vampires have affected all their lives. It is aimed as a teen, YA read, however, I found it quite mature enough to keep me interested.

There are violent story elements in the plot, but not in-depth. The ending is left on a cliff hanger, very frustrating, but did leave me eager to read the next book.

“One night, I dreamt that trapped cries of ecstasy were turning to water between the floors, staining my ceiling with the shape of a naked woman. I woke and turned on the light, but couldn’t make out anything from the scattered bruises of damp and the cracks in the wood-chip wallpaper. As I was a bout to drift back into sleep, I heard a faint stirring and a dull moan, then a long shuddering wail. I curled into a fetal position as my crotch spasmed uncontrollably, impregnating the dark shape of my dream….” (The Bootleg Heart)

Mostly set in England’s industrial north, The Lost District Joel Lane’s second collection of short stories uses bleak, unrelenting cityscapes to explore the human condition. The burnt out factories, the grey weather and the depressed economy are ever-present characters in his tales. The cover of the edition, by J.K. Potter, is an apt representation of the imagery within. Smoking grey chimneys, and a sepia-tinged image of an emaciated person’s hand that looks like it’s begging or asking for help. The landscape mirrors the souls that prowl through these tales.

The first thing you notice about a Lane story is that they are full of description. The narratives are dense and layered, mostly unbroken by dialogue. The work of Thomas Ligotti comes to mind—the textuality of the page and the insularity of the imagery are major weapons in the author’s arsenal. The stories also move at a leisurely pace, and linger over descriptions. The action is slow and deliberately torturous. The supernatural content in the story is often implicit in the establishment of mood rather than any explicit action. What action that does happen occurs within the character’s mind, as much as it occurs in the physical world. Lane’s characters come from a variety of milieus; all lead lives of “quiet desperation,” to coin a phrase.

Lee, the protagonist in “Pain Barrier,” is visiting a gay bar, aimlessly looking for sex in a soulless city. He meets Tony, who he recognizes from an avant-garde fetish film. The two of them go to the abandoned house where Tony is squatting, and have sex in a decaying room. The sex scene is explicit but tender, and filled with tension, as Lee recalls disturbing images from the film that Tony appeared in. What threatens to become a gorefest , a la Dennis Cooper, is a meditation on loneliness.

This dark slice-of-life form reappears in “Scratch,” a story about a young man in a Council Estate who befriends a stray cat. The story follows the narrator through the downward spiral of his life: running away from home, stormy relationship with his girlfriend, and living on the dole. The cat Sara is the one constant in his life, until she is killed by hooligans. Lane brilliantly uses cat behavior as a philosophical symbol of human nature:

“People say there’s no such thing as a domestic cat, and it’s true. Females in particular. Whatever you feed them, they still hunt. When they bring you something they’ve killed , it’s not a gift. It’s a lesson. They’re trying to train you, like you’re a kitten…A cat’s world is full of territories, friends and enemies, safe roads and dangerous roads. Patterns.” (Scratch)

The outright horror tale here, “Among the Dead,” is an ironic allegory about vampirism. Corporate culture and the culture of ghouls are compared/contrasted with a skill that doesn’t beat you over the head.

Most of these stories are short, but they are heavy pieces. Like Ligotti, Lane is a writer’s writer. It’s as much about craft as it is about story. For fans of cerebral horror, vectored in the direction of Kafka, The Lost District is an exquisite gem.

The pool is deep; there is no shallow end.

With these words Brett Alexander Savory begins the climax to his second novel. That single line is as an appropriate a description of the novel as you will find. It’s an unsettling journey from the carnival that opens the story to the world of The Freekshow that Michael journeys to in his dreams.

In and Down is, on the surface at least, the story of two brothers, Michael and Stephen. But as Savory takes you in to the narrative and down to the depths of Michael’s mind it becomes much, much more.

After the disappearance of their mother, Michael and Stephen are living with their father. A father who doesn’t look at his son the way a father should. Despite Michael’s near-drowning the man can’t help but put in a pool behind their new home. Michael knows he will die in that pool. But then Stephen doesn’t look at his brother the way a brother should either, and on one occasion made Michael drink weed killer.

While the boys stay at their uncle’s house, Michael begins to dream of a man in a green suit and top hat. A man who calls him Mr. Head, a man who Michael will name Hob. Hob is Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter. Alan Moore’s Joker. The sinister ringleader of The Freekshow. And a man who looks a little like Michael’s father.

After the boys return from their uncle’s house, where Michael has found a letter from their missing mother, Michael’s waking and dream world begin to collide. One of the very interesting things about the novel, in fact, is that the letters have been reproduced on the page, in handwritten type on what looks like loose leaf paper. Little illustrations and other similar notes follow, exactly as Michael has found them.

It’s interesting that the dedication page bears only the symbol for women. No women appear in the novel. They simply don’t exist. They haven’t existed since Michael’s mother left the family. Michael comments on this as he remembers tossing a rock off of an overpass. It hits a woman’s windshield, and she nearly dies. Michael worries that his father will be mad, not at his unthinking childish act, but that he could have killed something that didn’t exist. Something imaginary.

In and Down is being marketed as a horror novel. That is probably as close a label as one can attach to this unsettling piece of psychological disquiet. The novel’s only real shortcoming is Savory’s preference for ambiguity and a narrative that while it opens itself to the imagination of its reader, provides few if any clear answers.

Escorted from prison under heavy guard, murderous psychopath Frank Snow is scheduled for an emergency brain scan at Tanglewood Memorial Hospital, an institution that is closing its doors after one final night of operation. But Snow has something far more terrifying planned. And once the lights go out, a fiendish game of hide-and-seek begins.


Alone in the dark with a homicidal madman who knows their fears, their secrets, and their every move, MRI technician Mike Hughes, his wife and child, and the other unlucky souls trapped in the hospital have no choice but to duel with the devil incarnate. If they play by their stalker’s twisted rules, some of them might just survive. But there’s more to Frank Snow than the naked eye can see . . . or the sane mind can bear.


Last year I was introduced to Joe Schreiber's debut novel Chasing the Dead, by chance as I took advantage of a specially priced hardcover. I'm glad that I took that chance because it wound up being one of the best debuts that I read last year.

Eat the Dark is a tense and tightly plotted gothic fiction story told in a modern setting. The book is basically divided up into two parts. The first is when the power is cut and everyone is thrown into darkness and the second if after the power has been restored. The scenes leading up to the loss of power are tightly plotted and are really effective at keeping you on your toes. There are a couple of great moments where you want to yell at a character 'no, don't go in there' and these moments harken back to the great horror movie moments of yelling at the TV.




Some of the best parts of the book occur when everyone is plunged into the dark. What is normally an easily navigateable and familiar terrain immediately becomes alien. Your other senses over compensate. Something so simple that is taken for granted like walking across the room slows down to a groping crawl and becomes a challenge. We dont realize how much we rely on our sense of sight until its not there any longer. All of these feelings are vividly rendered and really showcase Schreiber's ability to convey feelings of panicky dread.




As abruptly as the power goes out it comes back on. The "light" scenes become more of a game of cat and mouse and lack some of the stark tension of the scenes in the dark but benefit from a faster pace. If the dark scenes are the middle game then the light scenes have a feeling of rushed excitement as the characters begin to find each other, form small alliances and move towards the inevitable showdown. When compared to the ending of Chasing the Dead the ending of Eat the Dark is a little tame by comparison, things just kind of wrap up and end. But I will say this, the final climatic battle in Eat the Dark involves an original "weapon", one that I haven't seen used before.




One of the interesting things about this book is that it takes place over a couple of hours and, due to its length, you could read it in a couple of hours. So, in effect, Eat the Dark is a kind of real time novel.


Overcoming a couple of minor flaws Eat the Dark is an exiting and tension filled book that manages to reach some pretty high levels at times.


--Brian Lindenmuth

John Dies At The End began as a short story on author David Wong's website. Due to popular demand, it was expanded into a serial posted in installments and finally published in book form.

Featuring Wong himself as the narrator of his and the titular John's adventures, John Dies At The End takes place in a nameless Midwestern town. After being introduced to a mysterious drug - dubbed "Soy Sauce" due to the resemblance to same - Dave and John realize that an unknown evil is being unleashed on the world as an effect of Soy Sauce use. Due to the evidently permanent effects of Soy Sauce, they are the only ones who can act to stop it, much less even see the hideous things that stalk among their fellow humans. They will confront everything from malformed interdimensional horrors to things spawned of their own nightmares.

On the surface, John Dies At The End appears to draw a bit of inspiration from various sources like Stephen King's It, the classic 80s horror film From Beyond and even Ghostbusters - but Wong's imagination far outpaces even them. Every time I thought I'd seen it all, Wong invented something else - from the prologue featuring a creature spawned from the contents of a meat locker to the bizarre "flesh spiders".

I also enjoyed Wong's warped sense of humor - with everything from slapstick humor to sarcastic commentary coming into play as he narrates his and John's increasingly bizarre adventures. Despite this - the story does manage to accomplish a certain amount of terror at times. In particular, the idea that only Dave and John can see the things invading their world lends itself well to a number of particularly spooky moments - like the apparitions appearing in a reflected TV screen.

Granted, there are some parts of the story that don't quite work and with so much going on, Wong seems to have left some things unclear, like the purpose of the underground chamber beneath the Jamaican's trailer or the origin of Soy Sauce. However, Wong's afterword states a sequel is in the works - which may help clear up some of the mystery.

All in all, I'd have to say I enjoyed the book - it sets out to be entertaining without taking itself too seriously and accomplishes exactly that.

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol’ Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death.

Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town. He’s willing to risk everything, including his life, to be a winner for once. But before the night is over, Pete will look into the saw-toothed face of horror--and discover the terrifying true secret of the October Boy . . .

Every October I like to read a couple of horror books, so the release of Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest at the start of the scary season was a fortuitous one. Having never really heard of Partridge before it was actually the cover art that first grabbed me. As I have said elsewhere this cover is one of the best that I have seen in quite sometime. It’s an evocative, eerie image that sets the tone for the book.

Dark Harvest manages to take just about every image and item associated with Halloween and bring it down to its essences and then combine them all into what is, in many ways, the ultimate book about the holiday. Everything from cornfields and candy to jack-o-lanterns is in Dark Harvest and not only do these things appear but they also have a more sinister meaning in their place in the holiday then what you might expect. It will definitely throw the trappings of the holiday under a new light.

Dark Harvest is a lean and mean story that reads like a mixture of horror story and hard-boiled crime fiction story. Once the story kicks into gear the relentless pace never lets up. I wont go into a great amount of detail but the thing that really impressed me the most about Dark Harvest is how complex the story managed to be in such short page span. What starts off as a story giving the impression of quickly going from A to B pretty linearly becomes a much more fleshed out and complex tale of dark secrets, family, loyalty, the destructive power of lies of omission and one boys struggle to break free.

Not only was I very impressed with Norman Partridge’s writing but I have now officially kicked him off of my ‘read only in October’ list and will gladly seek out his other books.

Spend this Halloween reading Dark Harvest; your time will be well spent.

--Brian Lindenmuth

Punktown, on the planet Oasis. In this sprawling metropolis, a Lovecraftian evil is stirring - spreading its shadowy tentacles through the city. When his girlfriend discovers a copy of the Necronomicon - an ancient text reputed to summon the Great Old Ones - Christopher Ruby is thrust into a nightmare as his girlfriend falls prey to the dark forces unleashed. Fleeing into Punktown's underground, he searches frantically for clues to what his girlfriend has brought into the universe...

I have to admit I had trouble rating Monstrocity. On the one hand, the setting of Punktown itself is intriguing. However, the mythos underpinning the story doesn't fare as well. I liked the ideas Thomas came up with, but in the end, it doesn't stray far from its inspiration and the story feels a bit rushed. Additionally, the writing is serviceable if rough at times.

It's unfortunate, because Thomas does have some great material to work with and an evidently fertile imagination. In the end, I'd like to rate it higher but I feel like there's potential here that was a bit wasted on a retread of Lovecraft's work. Perhaps if the book had been longer, allowing more time to build up tension and focus more on the "evil city" feeling, that could have helped.

In the end, it's a nice effort and I'm interested to read Thomas's other Punktown work to see how it compares.

“Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny” by Jaspre Bark is based on the videogame “Sniper Elite” by Rebellion Games. It is the first in a projected series from Abaddon Books.

The story centers on Karl Fairburne, an elite American sniper fighting in the last days of World War II’s European theater. Germany has all but fallen when Fairburne’s superiors give him dire news: Germany has built a working nuclear weapon, and a rogue SS general plans to defect to the Soviet Union and take the secret of the atomic bomb with him. With the United States and Soviet Union still officially allied, Fairburne must go deep undercover and battle Germans and Russians alike to keep this terrible new weapon out of Stalin’s hands.

I liked the central idea for this story, but the execution of the initial premise was disappointing. The plot is competent but not particularly gripping, consisting in large part of the protagonist going on a series of sniping missions assigned by his commander, with battles and complications arising on each mission. Unfortunately, the main character and overall story arc isn’t interesting enough to keep the individual episodes from getting repetitive after a while. There are some interesting developments near the end, but my lack of investment in the events and characters weakened their effect.

The book is badly weakened by the lack of interesting major characters. The hero and viewpoint character, Karl Fairburne, is not very compelling- he has little personality, and the back story he is given did little to provoke my interest. Fairburne’s lack of personality could have been effective if used to further a characterization of a man with his emotions dulled by the horror of war (as is skillfully done in some of David Drake’s work, for instance) but I didn’t get a sense of that from Fairburne; he didn’t come across as damaged, just uninteresting. This is especially unfortunate because there are some plot twists towards the end that would have been far more effective if I had been more interested in the main character.

On the plus side, the book’s atmosphere is strong. Bark paints an evocative picture of war-ravaged Berlin. He does a good job of creating a sense of despair and decay in his descriptions of the ruined city. The book’s action sequences are fast-paced and exciting, and Bark is good at creating a sense of tension during the sniping sequences. The violence is fairly graphic, and Bark uses that to good effect- the frequent descriptions of bloody injury and death, which could have been repetitive if handled poorly, did a good job of creating an atmosphere of horror.

All in all, I see “Spear of Destiny” as something of a missed opportunity, with an interesting premise, effective atmosphere, and a few potentially strong plot moments weighed down by a repetitive, mostly middling narrative and flat characters. To be fair to Bark, some of this may be due to the limitations of the source material, since he was presumably expected to follow the plot and characterizations of the video game. Unfortunately, despite some elements that make me suspect that Bark is a better writer than this book suggests, I can’t recommend “Spear of Destiny.”

Resident Evil: Extinction by Keith R.A. DeCandido is the novelization of the movie by the same name, both based on the Resident Evil video game franchise. DeCandido is well known for his novelizations of many media intellectual properties including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Command & Conquer, and Star Trek to name a few. Extinction marks the third volume in the movie series that DeCandido has written. Extinction follows popular characters Jill, Alice, and Carlos along with a new hero, Claire Redfield. The group of heroes make an attempt to reach the perceived safety of Alaska all the while fighting off the zombie menace, ruthless survivors, and of course the Umbrella Corporation.

Extinction takes a new path in the Resident Evil world: beyond Raccoon City. The T-Virus has been spread across the globe and the world is in a state of apocalypse. Survivors are scattered in tiny pockets, each one trying to fight off the zombies created by the Umbrella Corp. This is quite a departure from the first two novelizations that take place mostly in or under Raccoon City. At the time of the story, thought it is not stated exactly when it takes place, it has been years since the massive outbreak that eventually spread across the map. Food, ammunition, and just about everything else have become extremely scarce fueling feuds and infighting among the survivors. Some of the most dangerous things in the world are no longer the zombies. Extinction has a definite post apocalyptic feel to it and somewhat reminds me of Mad Max meets Land of the Dead mix with a little Painkiller Jane for good measure.

DeCandido continues with the solid characters from the first two films. Extinction doesn’t expand too much on character development. Since this is the third book in the movie series, the lack of development of some of the core characters isn’t as big a deal as it might have been if this was a stand alone novel. Not to be worried, if you haven’t read the other books or don’t know much about the Resident Evil franchise, you should still find the characters pretty well defined. Sure, there are plenty of the clichéd character archetypes present but they are well done and don’t come off as cheesy. The obvious star character is Alice the superhuman badass, but Jill is also an interesting character who fills the “loner” role. The only issue I see with any of the characters is the dialect used for the African American characters is all the same (despite the fact that they are not all form the same area) and over the top to the point of nausea, at times.

DeCandido’s style isn’t one that is likely to wow you , but it is surprisingly clean, quick, and easy reading. This book read especially quick given the writing style and the hardcover print size. The action scenes are well done and are laced from one end of the novel to the other , always keeping me alert and into the book. I was also impressed with DeCandido’s effort in writing a novel more akin to other zombie fiction currently available. He managed to make zombies and a setting that would do Romero himself proud. If there is anything to complain about I’d have to say that Extinction lacks the spine chilling and thrilling twists that would make it a truly great story.

As a hardcore zombie fan I can recommend this book to those with a love for zombies where I could not recommend the other Resident Evil novels. As a fan of post apocalyptic fiction I can recommend this book to those who enjoy dying worlds. Extinction is not a great novel, but the end to end action and stand alone nature of the story makes this fun and entertaining read no matter how much exposure you have to Resident Evil and its T-Virus.

Most of us have read a zombie story or two: some good, some bad, and others that made us wretch. We hear the word "zombie" and immediately think of the slow shambling dead of Romero's films. Many of these stories are clichéd and spin tired stories with typical plots, with typical characters, and with predictable endings. Roses of Blood on Barbwire Vines by D.L Snell is not one of those stories.

Roses of Blood brings together two of the more popular monsters in horror fiction today: Zombies and vampires. The story follows Shade (the vampire queen and daughter of the slain king), General Frost who is cold as his name would suggest, and Ann a human blood doll left deranged by the horror she has experienced. Shade fights to honor her fathers Kingdom (The City of Roses), while Frost pushes for relocation to the island to avoid the zombie hordes. Ann simply wants to survive, be free, and save her breeding slave sister. As the vampires attempt to fight off the zombies and keep there blood cattle (the humans) alive- betrayal, tragedy, and all-out fight for survival takes place.

The zombies in roses of blood are not your typical Romero style shamblers; they are the result of Nazi experiments. Instead of a virus, which is the common mode in zombie fiction these days, Snell's zombies are powered by parasitic creatures that infect the brains of their hosts. The parasites, tentacled Cthulhu like creatures, have appendages growing from the head of the bodies they invade. The zombies learn and adapt unlike most zombies and that makes them scarier.

Snell's vampires are akin to the vampires in Underworld, with amped up libido, one hell of a mean streak, and downright evil nature. They can be killed by wood spike or sunlight, but regenerate from most other injuries. Largely, the vampires are cruel and cold beings.

Humans are cattle used solely for their blood. Some are taken for breeding purposes and have their limbs amputated and are given a lobotomy. The Torsos, as they are called, are then placed in harness swings where they are breed. The non-breeding humans are used for feeding and repeatedly bitten and drained, but not to the point of death. The humans seem to have been dominated to the point of despair and have become docile pets of the vampires.

The novel takes place in "The City of Roses" which has been complete overrun with zombies leaving their fortified building as the only isle of safety. Snell does a great job weaving description of the setting in without being blatant, but instead by implication. I truly felt the sense of dread and hopelessness that is the existence of few remaining humans and vampires.

Roses of Blood's plot certainly hooked me and the action kept me on my toes. Gun-fu is the order of the day for the pistol, M-16, and Uzi toting vampires and the action scenes are excellently described. The pulse pounding action starts early and powers all the way through the novel. Fear not, if you are looking for character exploration and development, Snell wedged some of that in there as well.

It's hard to find a true weak spot in the novel because Roses of Blood is great example of a subgenre novel. However, I do have an issue with Snell's style. He describes it as a more poetic style ,and I can appreciated what he was trying to do, but in the end it just came off as a little overly metaphoric. The overuse of metaphors at times makes reading difficult and keeping track of what's going on a chore. It's not all bad though because, even if overused, the metaphors did add vivid images throughout the novel. The other minor complaint I have is that gratuitous sex in the novel is a bit off putting. I'm not against sex scenes in novels if they serve a purpose, but I could not find enough purpose to warrant the amount of sex represented. Indeed, Roses of Blood comes out swinging with a savage right hook of the erotic. If the erotic scenes in the beginning don't destroy your interest you should find the rest of the book quite enjoyable. After the first few chapters the sex tones down and the story gets back on the rails. I will admit that someone more into erotica will likely enjoy the same scenes that I found to be gratuitous.

Roses of Blood is a great new addition to the zombie and vampire subgenres. It's clear that this book should be an adult's only type of book with its absolute bestial, brutal nature and vivid sexual content. I can recommend this book to anyone who is looking for an excellent horror novel where zombies and/or vampires are not used in their traditional roles. Roses of Blood on Barbwire Vines is a hard charging action packed book where the cruel and unusual are the norm: I liked it!

Dreadful Skin by Cherie Priest isn't a full-fledged book, but rather a collection of three separate novellas that suitably co-exist with one another. The first part, "The Wreck of the Mary Byrd," originally serialized at Subterranean Press and available online, introduces us to a handful of characters and launches them into a frightful midnight descent down the Tennessee River. A werewolf—Jack Gabert, fleeing from India—is on board, and the captain, the slave cook, the gambler, and the gun-toting nun all get in its way. This is the story of a ship's last night, told by each of them that watched it fall under attack. Truthfully, of them all, this is really Eileen Callaghan's undertaking, and it's brimming with enthused vivacity that grabs the reader by the heartstrings and never lets go.

Priest's two finest traits are as sharp as Jack's teeth in Dreadful Skin's opening act—characters and setting. Having previous experienced the south in her Eden Moore novels, Priest glides through the locale, hitting all the marks that make this experience moodier and moodier with each turn of the page. Everyone talks the way they should, the language representing the time period quite well while also giving each character a certain level of charm and/or spice. Eileen's view point is the most interesting as it's clear that she and Jack have some history together. The gambler, Christopher Cooper, made for a sort of quiet man, the kind that you have to watch just because you're never sure what they might do at any moment.

Of the three sections of Dreadful Skin, "The Wreck of the Mary Byrd" was my favorite, simply for how undaunted Priest was in throwing her characters into the worst of worse situations and letting them resolve it in their own manners. The writing and pacing is top-notch, showing why Priest is quickly becoming a household name in the field. Well, dammit, she at least should be.

Following this was a more tepid piece, "Halfway to Holiness," with Eileen still chasing after Jack after the events on the Mary Byrd. Heading to Holiness, Texas, she's a changed woman. She's caught wind about a traveling revivalist camp with a less-than-godly Reverend Benjamin Aarons steering it along. This part is all about building up to an ultimately predictable encounter, but Priest keeps things interesting along the way. Eileen forms a new relationship Leonard Dwyer, a man who'll become integral in the final act of all things.

I, surprisingly, enjoyed the final part of Dreadful Skin. "Our Lady of the Wasteland and the Hallelujah Chorus" is presented as a series of letters and diary/journal entries. Normally, this sort of narrative structure turns me off as I spend too much time dissecting the letters and crying, "What? No one writes letters like this!" After the first few though, I lost myself in them. They play out just as exciting and suspenseful as the POV chapters in "The Wreck of the Mary Byrd." Granted, this last section could have been written in much the same manner as the first two novellas, but I suspect Priest wanted it to be different on purpose. The letters reveal that Melissa, a love of Leonard's, is stuck within a revived traveling camp, this time run by Reverend Aarons's son Daniel. Leonard writes to Eileen, asking for her help again. She comes again, now fully devoted to ending the existence of these ravenous beasts that prey on the members of the revivalist camp.

Sprinkled throughout the text are some black-and-white drawings by the original Green Mile artist, Mark Geyer, which really help to establish the look of certain scenes. They have a loose "sketchiness" to them, which kind of gives the book a certain amount of credibility. The story is set in the past so it'd seem ridiculous to have colorful Photoshop-ed pieces throughout. Kudos to whoever thought that out. If no one, then kudos to me.

One aspect I did notice was that Eileen Callaghan shared some similiar traits with Eden Moore from Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Wings to the Kingdom: she's a strong if independent woman, feisty with just the right pinch of attitude, and able to hold in the secrets that others might be put off to know. Not that this is a bad thing, just something I noticed. Funny how close an Irish ex-nun and a ghost-hunting girl can seem when placed in similiar hair-raising situations. Hopefully in future work, her women protagonists will be more than just a new version of the same old same old.

Still, Priest shows with Dreadful Skin that she's both a versatile wordsmith and storyteller, and most comfortable in the south where the ghosts and ghouls roam wildly. If you enjoyed Priest's other work, Dreadful Skin is highly recommended.

-- Paul Abbamondi

Punktown, crime-ridden metropolis on the colony world, Oasis, is home to the scum of countless alien races. Stalking its mean streets is Jeremy Stake, the private detective with chameleon-like abilities he does not want and cannot control. There’s his wealthy client, Fukuda, whose company makes synthetic life forms as playthings for the rich. Then there’s Fukuda’s beautiful teenage daughter, whose priceless one-of-a-kind living doll has been stolen. And there is the doll itself, growing in size, intelligence, and resentment.


The destinies of all these individuals will converge, and collide, in Punktown.


MY biggest complaint about Deadstock is that I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Thomas was talking down to me as a reader. I don’t need an author to hold my hand all the time. In this book there are multiple instances where Thomas uses the same exact group of words and sentences to describe people, places and events. This isn’t done as a haunting refrain or as a link between what would otherwise be disparate or opposing images. This isn’t done to produce a mirroring effect or for humor. I'm not going to catalogue all of these occurrences but it does happen enough times for it to warrant attention. Here is one example.


There are a group of characters that are cloned soldiers whose main identifying feature is their blue skin.

Then just a few pages later we find the following passage.




Perhaps it’s just a case of me being too critical but I think that things like this should have been caught in the editorial process.


I question Thomas' decision to skirt the moral issues that are presented throughout. I do so because Stake, who is clearly presented as a PI protagonist, should be possessed of a personal moral code born from his personal code of honor. He is cognizant enough to notice the moral issues and even mention them, but then quickly drops the matter because, well, there isn’t really a good reason that the matters are dropped but they are.


As a thriller or again a PI tale the success of the story is at least partially contingent on the successes of the reveals. But, unfortunately, there wasn't a single plot twist or plot point that I didn't telegraph early on. The twists that are associated with Stakes client are especially maddening because they wallow in dramatic devices that only the worst soap operas use. **Spoiler** There are dead twins, dead wives, the daughter is the clone of the dead wife, the brother alive is really the one thought dead, vice-versa. The more it twists the more cartoonish it gets. **Spoiler end**


I've said before and it bears repeating that I'm a firm believer that the mystery/SFF mix is a tough one to pull off. If an author is going to write a book that is very clearly a mix of two genres then it has to pull double duty in clearly being identifiable as both. While there is a lot of imagination of display in Deadstock it does ultimately fail in its ability to present a credible PI tale.


One of the highlights of the book, though not without its own problems, is Thomas' success at updating the haunted house/ghost story. Two gangs find themselves trapped in an abandoned apartment building. They have to form a unified front against a group of faceless automatons that are programmed to defend the integrity of the building. These parts of the book are done well for the most part.


--Brian Lindenmuth