Entries from July 2007 ↓

Vampires and zombies are not only difficult to vanquish in horror novels; they are irresistible to fans and writers.  It is a common lament that far too many of these types of stories flood the market.  On the flip side when a story of this ilk is received with positive feedback you can be guaranteed that is a superior effort.  Kim Paffenroth provides a class 'A' exhibit to support this hypothesis.

Aptly titled, Dying To Live provides the requisite gore the zombie genre demands and marries it with a deep psychological exploration of the survivors left to carry on in such a world.  The exploration begins from the opening scenario where protagonist Jonah Caine is drifting aimlessly across the countryside.  He has no purpose after returning home and finds no family waiting for him in the aftermath of the zombie plague.

Literally and figuratively lost, Jonah contemplates his life and purpose as a lone zombie stands vigil below the tree he has spent the night in. The imagery here is unmistakable.  The zombie is praying or worshiping Jonah as it looks up to him.  From Jonah's position the zombie below represents what he can fall to.  Faced with such an outcome, the struggle to survive seems futile.  This is the  material which Dying To Live contemplates.

Paffenroth has created an intelligent zombie story without skimping over moments of tension, horror, and gore.  Character names are often biblical references, and the colony  Jonah eventually joins even has a prophet.

Milton is not your stereotypical prophet but a reluctant one.  In fact, Milton finds his position in the colony embarrassing.  It is only through a twist of fate that Milton finds himself infected with a nonlethal variant of the zombie virus.

Milton's infection leaves him with open sores and the same decayed stench of the undead.  All of this leaves Milton a pariah to the zombies.  They have no interest in Milton's flesh and even fear him.  Milton discovers he can herd the zombies which Paffenroth uses to evoke THE most bizarre imagery of a shepherd leading his flock ever.

Readers would be doing themselves a great disservice if they skipped this book because it's "just another zombie novel".  A good story is a good story regardless of genre.  Dying To Live is an intelligent and insightful story, which also features nice touches of light humor sprinkled throughout the book.  The conclusion, which arrives on a hopeful up note, is another refreshing  divergence from the mostly nihilistic  zombie fiction released today.

Dying To Live by Kim Paffenroth
Permuted Press
Published 2006
190 pages

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Much has been made of Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner (and Oprah Book Club selection) The Road. While this work draws on the tried and oft repeated speculative fictional chestnut of the post-apocalyptic journey story, McCarthy's previous works (which, as of this writing, are all still in print) are certainly open for revisiting.

Wait a moment, some of the readers out there might be thinking, isn't Cormac McCarthy a "literary" writer? What's a review of that sort of book doing here on Horror Reader?

Well, yes, McCarthy's books are shelved in literature, and Oprah neeeever selects genre writers as her Book Club picks (her loss); however, if anyone makes the claim that literature and horror are absolutely different beasts well they obviously haven't been reading much.  Sure, the tropes of genre don't often enter the world of the "literary", but sometimes they do.  Besides, horror is an emotion not a yadda-yadda.  Regardless of Oprah or the literati's suggestion to the contrary, genre can be literary, and literary works often draw on genre conventions (and I'm not talking about the literary writers who dabble with a genre novel and succeed only in generating a formulaic and forgettable work).

Horror is alive an well in many of Cormac McCarthy's works.  Case in point: the 1968 novel Outer Dark. It's an older piece, sure, but I haven't heard it thrown about much among horror readers. Since, I've finally taken the opportunity to read it (so many books, so little time) and found it packed to the proverbial gills with the stuff of horror, I thought I'd share.

The story is set in Appalachia around the turn of the twentieth century. A woman bears her brother's son, only to have her brother -- ashamed of this product of incest -- abandon the child in the wilderness (though he claims the child died at birth). When she discovers this falsehood, she sets out to find her child. What follows is two different journeys across a landscape at turns bleak or hopeful and populated by grotesques reminiscent of the works of Flannery O'Conner. In addition, three dark and murderous strangers (possibly human, possibly devil, or probably some weird combination of the two) seem bent on scourging the world, with a dark mission all their own.  At the heart of all these plotlines lies this abandoned baby.

The prose, if one is not accustomed to McCarthy's style, takes some time to get used to. The language is often spare but occasionally lush -- there is an evocation of hell on earth wrenched from beyond Clive Barker's wildest nightmares -- and the words themselves read at times like Faulkner, at times like Hemingway. There is very little punctuation and no quotation marks. Initially, this might confuse, but the ultimate effect is of listening to someone relate a story. And what a story it is.

There is certainly horror here, some of it might be supernatural, but much of it is derived from the awful things that humans do to one another. The poetry of the language provides a pervasive ambience of dread and awe, and the characters -- many of them only brief players in this rather slender volume -- are well drawn.

I certainly recommend this as an alternative take on horror. While not quite a "genre novel", Outer Dark is as engaging as any genre work, with a relentless pace and a climax that is absolutely chilling.

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
256 pages
Vintage Books

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A conversation between two unseen speakers denying mercy to "monsters like them" -- just who speaks and whom are they talking about? A man climbing a mountain, barely hanging on, but still going -- are the demons he's fleeing more than mere psychology? A woman waking in snowy, predawn hours for a horrifying encounter -- just who is this being she calls Mr. Hands, and why does he seek a child? A stranger in a bar, calling up the suspicions of the bartender -- just who is he? That last question is easy enough to answer: this stranger is the key to our understanding the previous three puzzle pieces. This stranger, you see, has a story he wants to tell. It's about a woman's sorrow at the loss of her daughter, of a child murderer who vanished some years ago, of palmistry, and of someone or something called Mr. Hands...

Gary A. Braunbeck's latest novel, which previously appeared as a serial in Cemetery Dance magazine, tackles some difficult subject matter. Of course, long time readers of Braunbeck's work are familiar with this; the man's novels have yet to dwell on something quite so simple as a zombie apocalypse (though his short fiction has traveled there, once) or vampires beseiging a small town. No, readers familiar with this author come to him for something unique, instead of the tried (and often tired) hoary horror clichés. While this novel features something of an echo of the Zuni fetish doll made famous from Richard Matheson's short story "Prey" (and, of course, the final sequence from the Made-For-Television anthology film Trilogy of Terror starring Karen Black), there is more going on in this work than possessed fetish dolls. At its heart, this is a novel about an anger born of helplessness and murder born of mercy.

The novel offers two protagonists for us to connect with.  Probably the most accessible is Lucy, a young woman and mother who endures every parent's worst nightmare, when her daughter is taken and later found murdered. It is from her that the anger comes.

The second protagonist, a mentally challenged fellow named Ronald James Williamson (everyone calls him Ronnie, though he prefers RJ), is special. While, yes, this does mean he is a "sped" or special-education kind of guy, there's more to him than short bus jokes. RJ, you see, has the ability to understand others' pains. Through physical contact he achieves a full awareness of another's misery as well as this misery's source. Being the good-hearted fellow that he is, he does what he can to try to alleviate this pain. Thus, the child murderer "Uncle Ronnie" is born when Ronald James Williamson (only a child himself) smothers children's pains. Though this brief description paints RJ as something of a monster, the work itself makes his character quite sympathetic. This is no mere psychopath, no serial killer, this is a man trying to end anguish through unspeakable acts.

Here, we find Braunbeck operating at full strength. He evokes an emotional landscape for the characters; one this reader could not help but become enthralled by. While the language is as lyrical and the plot as engaging as any pageturner by Dean Koontz, Braunbeck's ability to invoke these characters and make readers empathize with their often difficult decisions really sells the work. Ronald and Lucy's stories -- from individual beginnings and growth, to the three times they meet, to the rise of the eponymous supernatural being from their relationship -- are transformed from what might have been a pedestrian shock show into a fine dual character study in Braunbeck's capable (ahem) hands. This work is not content merely to shock, its horrors stem from character choices and the ability (or inability) to cope with real world pains.

In addition, Leisure's release of this novel includes the International Horror Guild Award winner "Kiss of the Mudman." This novella -- set in Braunbeck's fictional town of Cedar Hill, Ohio -- revisits several of the characters from the novel's wraparound story, as a homeless shelter is visited, one Thanksgiving night, by the supernatural. At turns humorous and chilling, this novella provides a bittersweet chaser to the turbulent Mr. Hands.

Braubeck's prose truly sings. He's easily one of the ten best writers currently working with the stuff of horror. Read him and marvel.

Mr. Hands by Gary A. Braunbeck
368 pages
Leisure Books
Release Date: August 2007

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Charity Alert!  A minimum of 10% of the royalties earned on this paperback will be donated to Protect.org, an organization charged with protecting at-risk children.  Buy the book and help this worthy cause!
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When Living Shadows arrived on my reading stack, I was, to say the least, thrilled. As much as I enjoy John Shirley's novels (check out our review for Cellars), I enjoy his short fiction even more. That said, the book's subtitle of "Stories: New and Preowned" did make me hesitate.  A quick check of the table of contents showed several reprints, which is wonderful news for the Shirley initiate, but not so much for the long time fan; these are all fine stories, make no mistake, but how many copies of "Jody and Annie on TV" do I really need? However much I believe otherwise, not everyone has a voluminous John Shirley collection (a shame, really). Are there enough quality, new stories to make the book worthwhile? Why yes, yes there are. Seven of these twenty stories have as yet been uncollected (appeared in rather recent publications) and one of them -- a white knuckler called "The Sewing Room" -- is original to this book.

In some ways, this book can be considered along the lines of a greatest hits album. It's got plenty of classics, some pieces that have found more recent "air time", and a dynamite new single.

Of those seven newer selections, we've got some doozies of story. From a dark satiric jab at Hollywood ("Seven Knives"), to an all out assault on the Lovecraftian Mythos ("Buried in the Sky"), to a near future emotional apocalypse ("Isolation Point, California"), to the dysfunctional familial backdrop for a suspected suburban psychopath ("The Sewing Room") these stories run the gamut of dark lit.

From these blurbage summations, we find one of Shirley's best qualities as a writer: he's not content to dip his writer's tool (not much of a pen, anymore, is it?) in a single genre. In Shirley's fiction, it's not surprising to find ingredients such as crime, human evil, supernatural horror, sf, the fantastique, satire, philosophy, or that above mentioned shot of the Lovecraftiana dumped into the genre blender and pureed. This concoction can then be mainlined by eager readers, where it will promptly explode genre conventions and clichés.

Here, darkness dwells in many locales: from the mean streets of the inner city to the apparently quieter suburbs, from the glistening halls of a high rise mall/apartment complex to a nineteenth century town... There's a little something for everyone and quite a bit for discerning readers.

As with the author's previous collections (Darkness Divided and Black Butterflies), the book is divided into two sections. The first of these, "A Few Blocks Down, Around the Corner", is reserved for the stories that could be happening right now, while the second, "Through a Laser-Scanner Darkly", contains the stories with stronger sf/supernatural/bizzare elements. Of course all of these tales fall under and contributes to the overall theme encapsulated in the book's title, Living Shadows.

New readers to Shirley's work will find this a fantastic starting point. However, be warned: a collection like Living Shadows is a gateway drug. Do not be surprised if you find yourself jonesing for more Shirley fiction after your first taste. For longtime readers... Hell, you probably already own the book.  Right?

Living Shadows by John Shirley
351 Pages
Prime Books
Published May 2007

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