Although I’ve been spending almost all of my time feverishly slaving over my exciting TOP SECRET project, I’ve had some moments here and there to read. It helps me keep my mind off my poor broken heart. It’s also a good thing because I do book reviews on this site.
In the lifetime of a monster, you end up seeing many things. You see the seasons change. Years come and go. Continents sink into the ocean. You make new friends and you lose others. For example, one of my biggest disappointments in life was arriving too late save the Wicked Witch of the West from that Dorothy and her little dog.
When I’m reading a book or watching a movie, like any good student of the arts I look for a scene, paragraph or sentence that really encapsulates what the book (or movie) is about. A good example of this is the scene in The Conformist where the protagonist, Marcello, stands and watches everyone else dance. Every once in a great long while, the key sentence of a book is the very first. In Weird Horror Tales, you have only to wait until sentence four:
“If the issue of human and god is always a monster, was Caleb Elliot that child?”
I had to read that sentence several times to make sense of it, and I think that it encapsulates the following pages very well.
The book follows a town in Maine and the happenings there, along with one or two of the families in the town. The town is blessed with a sort of secret society which resembles a satanic cult. The town, the families, and the secret society show up in most of the thirteen tales in the book.
Many of the stories in this book resemble a Twilight Zone episode, or the plot from horror comics like Eerie and Tales from the Crypt from the 1950s and ’60s. You have a story about a corrupt politician who makes an ill-advised trip back to the scene of a crime he inflicted on an entire town. There is a tale of a man who kills his own brother and pays the inevitable grisly price for it. In another, two men play a psychological game of chess, both knowing that one has come to murder the other.
Although the plots are imaginative, the characters are two-dimensional and unlikeable. At times, the writing makes the proceedings vague and hard to follow. The author tries to set mood with vocabulary to ill effect (the word “soughing” is not creepy.)
If you really love Eerie or Tales from the Crypt or really loved the Twilight Zone to the point where you would enjoy reading short stories in that style, then Weird Horror Tales might be for you, if you can overlook some of the warts I list above.
Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5 (for Wishful Thinking)
Suspense Factor: 1 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5 (yes you read that right: Zero!)
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 1 out of 5
Final result: The book aspires to be “Thirteen Harrowing Stories of Horror and Suspense in the Lovecraft Tradition!” but what it ends up being is a text version of horror comics like Eerie and Tales from the Crypt from the 1950s and ’60s. The publisher should really leave Lovecraft out of this. If you’re going to invoke the name of H.P. Lovecraft on the cover of your book, you better make sure you can back it up.
Weird Horror Tales – Michael Vance – Illustrations by Earl Geier – Cornerstone – 2009
Weird Horror Tales on Amazon
Thanks for Cornerstone for sending me a pdf of this to read. (See my disclosure policy.) Thanks to you for reading another one of my book reviews. Hopefully next time I review a nice juicy horror novel with loads of Weird Erotic Tension. I’m working on it! See you next time!
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Thank you for your review of my novel. I’m sorry that you didn’t enjoy it more, but I felt your review was even-handed.
Thanks for visiting. This production struck me as more independent and I was excited to check it out. I noticed that the folks over at Hellnotes gave your book a more positive review.