If you don’t know the name Joe Hill—or if it only conjures thoughts of the turn of the century songwriter, labor activist, and infamous Wobbly—then allow me the great pleasure of introducing you to your new favorite author. He’s written two fantastic horror novels, Horns (about to be a major motion picture, thankfully sans Shia LeBeouf) and Heart-Shaped Box, as well as a collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, and the comic books The Cape and Locke & Key, the latter of which is so good I’m eventually going to prise a tattoo out of it (but first I have to decide which key...). NOS4A2, a hefty tale about a vampire, a slayer, and the boy caught between them, is his latest creation, and like everything else Hill’s put his magic fingers to, it’s hard to put down and impossible to shake.

[“THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH”]

In the early 21^st Century, the world is crumbling. The economy is failing, the world is ravaged by storms, and people speak of a mythic figure named the Crowman, (aka Black Jack or the Scarecrow), who haunts peoples’ visions and dreams. Some see him as a Satan-like figure, some as savior, while many see this figure as the harbinger of the Black Dawn, the apocalypse that will transform the Earth. Gordon Black is born at the turn of the century just as the apocalyptic slide begins. As a baby, corvids are drawn to wherever Gordon is and as the boy grows, he begins collecting the fallen black feathers from the birds. Throughout Black Feathers, the strongest thing I felt D’Lacey was trying to convey in this dark, apocalyptic tale through his characters is that hope is ever-present.

[The world may be dying, but hope is alive….]

If, for a time, we could talk to the dead, what would we say to said?

Jonah Miller, duty reviver for the Forensic Revival Service, asks the dearly departed how they died, in an effort to find out why, and by whose hands. Understand that his subjects have all met a hellish end, mostly through means cruel and unusual, and their posthumous testimony, however hard to extract, could make all the difference if and when their killers are caught.

Though Jonah and his co-workers are out for justice, in the better-paid private sector, other revivers act as mediums between the living and the lost... albeit for the right price. Mercenary as this practice often is, at the end of the day, what wouldn’t we give for the opportunity to whisper sweet nothings or simply say goodbye to our much-missed loved ones?

On the other hand, what would we be taking away?

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The virtues of Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! have already been extolled in this column, and I am happy to report that her new short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, is tailor-made for fans of both magical realism and horror. Employing intensely awkward humor (think The Office) and melding it with dark sensibilities (think Poe), she’s written a book that belongs on your shelf next to Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Bas-Lag-era China Mieville. Russell’s subjects have grown up a bit—there are teenagers, but there are also dead presidents, ancient vampires, a middle-aged divorcé. And while Swamplandia! had plenty of darkness, the creepy factor has been dialed up here to the point where you might consider not reading certain stories after dusk.

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It honestly feels like only a couple months ago (though a whole year has certainly passed) that Being Human made some very brave choices in their fourth season and changed their entire lineup, bringing stories to an end for George, Annie and little Eve. But Honolulu Heights is still occupied, and we’ve got a new team who has a lot to learn. One newly-minted ghost, one werewolf who is still getting used to having friends and his own room, and one vampire with OCD who just fell off the wagon after being clean for 60 years.

Alex, Tom, and Hal are going to need some house rules.

[And a rotor, and jobs, and some guy tied up in their basement… wait, what?]

Consume them independently at your own peril, but taken together, the eleven dark tales contained in Revenge by Yoko Ogawa make for a single, delectable dish. One best served cold, of course.

Behold the beauty of the quote below. Know, though, that there’s something very wrong with this picture:

It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings.

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Rarely is revenge so sweet. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is notorious for being the book that King thought was too scary to be published, and that one idea became its entire marketing campaign when King refused to do any interviews or publicity to support it. He refused not because Pet Sematary was “too scary,” but because it was his final flipped bird to Doubleday. It was a contractual obligation book that had been sitting in a drawer for years that he only released grudgingly and, strangely enough, it became his first mega-blockbuster. The last Stephen King book Doubleday had published was The Stand and they’d barely printed 50,000 copies, while holding their noses. This time they acknowledged his success by printing ten times that number and rolling out a massive ad campaign. But it was about more than just revenge. In an interview given one year after Pet Sematary was released, King said, “If I had my way about it, I still would not have published Pet Sematary. I don’t like it. It’s a terrible book—not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness. It seems to be saying that nothing works and nothing is worth it, and I don’t really believe that.” Really? Because that’s what he’s been writing about all along.

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A child of the 50’s, cars have long fascinated Stephen King. There’s Billy Nolan’s ‘61 Biscayne in Carrie, Jack Torrance’s clapped-out 1968 Volkswagen in The Shining, the sentient trucks of Maximum Overdrive, Cujo’s Pinto/hotbox, the killer station wagon in Mile 81, the extraterrestrial Buick Roadmaster in From a Buick 8, and the car crash that launches the plot of Misery. Cars are a part of King’s all-American palette along with denim, rock‘n’roll, and acne, so everyone expected that it was only a matter of time before a car headlined a Stephen King book. But when the book came out, everything about it was unexpected. Its deal was unusual, its setting was different, and even its quality came as a surprise. Rambling, sloppy, boring, and bloated, Christine is the book that lived up to every accusation ever leveled at King by his detractors.

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In the Fall of 1977, Stephen King moved to England to write a ghost story. Much like the move to Colorado which resulted in The Shining and The Stand, he was looking for inspiration. “If I wrote about Maine all the time,” he said in an interview, “I’d go crazy.” New American Library duly sent out a press release which read, “With its history of eerie writers and its penchant for mystery, England should help Stephen King produce a novel even more bloodcurdling than his previous ones…” And it did. The book was called Cujo but it wasn’t about ghosts, it was about a rabid dog. It was a thriller so experimental that not many writers would try it today. And it wasn’t set in England at all. It was set in Maine, in the summer, during a heat wave.

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It’s the special sorcery of serial fiction that it can make you look forward desperately to the very point at which there will nothing left of it. Having enjoyed successive cliffhangers, you’re happy to be taken just short of the last ledge, while the story leaps into history and you’re left with a lifetime memory.

In periodical fiction, there’s a lot a lot to be said for succeeding in finishing your story—we all have our fave TV dramas that were cancelled before their natural conclusion and comics suspended with years of tales left to tell.

So it was that 2012 offered more than its share of comic series with finales well worth there being literally nothing more to look forward to.

[Only the Beginning]

Presumably for want of a better word, the work of North American author Jesse Bullington has been branded fantasy, but stand his latest alongside a cross-section of novels more obviously of the genre and you’ll see immediately how inept a description this is. The Folly of the World features no firebolts, has Belgians where banshees might be, and most telling of all, it occurs in the real world...or else a setting very much resembling what you’d expect from said six centuries ago:

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Some of the easiest cultural influences to trace are the hardest cultural artifacts to track down. I’d heard of Carnival of Souls most of my life, but didn’t see it until five days before Halloween, 2012. The first-time rewatch was staged in the fittingly phantasmal setting of the Lowe’s Jersey, a shadowy movie-cathedral from 1929 in somewhat better shape than the ghostly Victorian pavilion that Carnival’s heroine is drawn to. That once-merry shell is found in the middle of the Utah desert, and the movie had to cross a similar limbo to arrive in the graces of several generations of filmmakers and enthusiasts. 

[step right this way]

Two years ago, The Reapers Are the Angels took the horror novel by storm. A literary rendition of the traditional zombie apocalypse more interested in exploring questions of innocence and obligation than, say, the pursuit of brains, it announced the arrival of an awesomely promising author, whose haunting voice I could not wait to encounter again, and gave the genre its most memorable character in recent memory.

The good news is, Alden Bell’s back, and his painstaking prose is as evocative as ever it was. Add to that the following fact: herein he returns to the wonderfully wasted world of his Philip K. Dick and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated 2010 novel.

But Exit Kingdom is a prequel rather than the expected sequel, taking place over a period of weeks some years before the heart-rending events of The Reapers Are the Angels, and its sole perspective is similarly surprising: after all, Moses Todd seemed a merciless monster in Bell’s remarkable last. Complete with the motive and the means, he spent the larger part of it anticipating the opportunity to murder our enterprising young heroine, whose absence in Exit Kingdom feels like a hole in the heart.

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A village on the Devil’s Moor: a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition. There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village’s darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and evocative of Stephen King’s classic short story “Children of the Corn” and the films The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke and Village of the Damned by Wolf Rilla.

“You steal into your sister’s room and sit down on her bed. You say the words I’m going to tell you, and when her soul appears on her lips, you catch it for me.”

[Continue Reading...]

The annals of mad science are full of great men who selflessly put their bodies and minds on the alter of scientific research.

They cut corners.

They employed questionable logic in the pursuit of their grand dreams.

But hey, at least they had the certitude to experiment on themselves rather than the crop of buxom teens imprisoned in their basement.

Which leads us to our monster of the week: Dr. Jacob Freudstein.

[Get to the science...]

To celebrate the US release of his Flu series, Wayne Simmons has written a review of one of the movies that started it all. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).

The first zombie was a runner.

That’s right, the case of Fast vs Slow zombies is officially over, as far as I’m concerned. In 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, Bill Hinzman’s Cemetary Zombie ran down that gaddam hill in pursuit of damsel in distress Barbara.

That’s a fact.

And if it’s good enough for George A. Romero, then it’s good enough for me: sometimes zombies like to run.

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First impressions have a nasty habit of lasting forever, so it was well that The Mall made an immediate impact, harrowing off the bat and darkly hearty thereafter. But more than a year on, what’s remained with me is its cutting criticism of consumerism; its self-aware skewering of today’s culture of consumption.

The first collaboration between South African authors Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg under the open pseudonym S. L. Grey was a hair-raising horror novel in its own right, however: an unsettling study of two fractured characters trapped in a mega-mall as magnificently twisted as their own minds. It took us downside, to a world somehow under ours, where legions lived simply to shop, or serve, or else squash those individuals who refused to submit to management’s demands.

Though the story of Dan and Rhoda is over—and how!—The Ward embiggens this nightmarish scenario brilliantly, introducing downside more quickly than before and giving readers a longer look at its larger infrastructure.

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Lady of the Shades has been a long time coming.

In a pointed postscript tacked on to the short horror novel we’re going to talk about today, bestselling young adult author Darren Shan acknowledges that he began writing Lady of the Shades in 1999. This, then, is the end result of thirteen years of blood, sweat and tears.

An ill omen, one wonders, or a flourish of metafictional foreboding?

In the grand tradition of uninspired writers everywhere, Lady of the Shades’ central character is exactly that: an uninspired writer, searching for a suitable subject for his next novel. To that end, American horror author Ed Sieveking—whose work has been a modest success—has come to London to facilitate his research into the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion.

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Sometimes it feels like the world has been ending forever.

But hey, who’s been around that long? So let’s begin again... a little less expansively, perhaps. In recent years, at least—in fiction and in film; in video games, comic books and on TV too—there has been an interest in the apocalypse that borders, if you ask me, on the obscene. A fascination has emerged fully fledged, an obsession if you will—and for some folks it is exactly that—with how the world will end, and what, if anything, could come after.

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