Ho. Ho. Ho. I LOVE the writing of Liz Williams, whose Detective Chen series I absolutely adore. My rat army has orders to pick up any Liz Williams novels they may find. 15% supernatural romance, 30% drug-induced fever dream, 10% science fiction and 60% dark fantasy, THE POISON MASTER schemes to bring freedom to a planet populated by humans but ruled by cruel trans-dimensional giant WTF insect things that don’t make any sense and I don’t know how else to explain what happens here. Hmmmmm. OK. How about this? A woman is forced to go on the lam and is subsequently pulled into a treacherous multi-world intrigue after she accidentally kills a rich divorcee with recreational hallucinatory drugs (that she happens to take a lot of herself, being an apothecary). With nowhere else to turn, she finds herself employed by the Poison Master, a rich assassin from another world who CLAIMS to want to overthrow the insect things. But can he be trusted? Did I mention that she’s helplessly attracted to this dangerous man? His daughter calls our heroine a “junky”. I’m not doing a good job of describing this book. It’s a good book!
The Poison Master by Liz Williams – 2003 – Bantam Books

While we’re on the subject of authors I’ve been reading lately, let’s talk about something by Mr. Kim Newman, author of Anno Dracula. Wonder what it would be like to read a book that followed the century-spanning lives of one of the older vampires from Anno Dracula? Our monster isn’t really a vampire that drinks blood so much as a vampire that finds sustenance in human terror and BAD DREAMS. This novel had: So. Much. Promise. Too bad the full last half of it was our protagonist’s experience of a bad dream created by this vampire to entrap and murder her. More like murder her with boredom. We read as she wanders through a hundred and some-odd pages of dreams that really should have been terrifying, considering the author and subject matter, but more closely resembled those dreams where you are looking for something but you can’t find it and everyone in the restaurant breaks into song and then suddenly you’re walking down a hallway looking for the bathroom but there’s a foot of water on the floor and you wonder if that’s water from the bathroom because if that’s the case then you might want to look for higher ground and here you are wearing your best shoes. Oh wait! Is that a character from that Pulitzer prize winning play? He knocks back a shot of whiskey and turns to the bar. He doesn’t know that his fiancee’s lover is about to march in with a gun, but suddenly it’s raining and the bridge is washed out. What were you looking for again? You can’t find it. Am I boring you yet? ZZZZZZZZZZZ. Somebody wake me up!
Bad Dreams by Kim Newman – 1990 – Carroll & Graf Publishers

Many thanks to TOR/FORGE for the review copy of The Haunting of Twentieth Century America.

Wow! What a lurid cover! Make sure you enlarge that baby to get the full effect. Another 1960s Corinth anthology of weird menace pulp fiction from the 1930s, DEATH’S LOVING ARMS AND OTHER TERROR TALES is entertaining, annoying, interesting, and wholly gratuitous. We have here five stories in total: “Death’s Loving Arms” by Hugh B. Cave, “Vampire Meat” by Frederick C. Painton, “Blood Magic” by G.T. Fleming-Roberts, “From Out the Shadows” by Frances Bragg Middleton, and “Village of the Dead” by Wyatt Blassingame. All of them have that pulpy fast-paced tough-guy prose and feature ready men who either save their damsels in distress or nearly fall victim to murderous exotic jungle ladies. Like your typical Scooby Doo mysteries, almost all reveal a mundane source for what seemed to be a supernatural mystery. Snoresville “Village of the Dead” wins the worst offender award for being ridiculously sexist and overtly racist in detailing the victimization of a crippled girl and her sister by some inbred bayou hicks. “Vampire Meat” wins best in show for being short but sweet with a mad scientist, high body count, and an ending that cries out for a cackling crypt keeper.
Death’s Loving Arms and Other Terror Tales – 1966 – Corinth Publications. This book is out of print and rare, but shows up on eBay from time to time. Search here.

The latest issue of RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT is in, and it is subtitled STRIKINGLY TRUE. All I have to say about this book is that there is a clown who puts fish hooks in his eye sockets and then uses them to pull his face all out of shape AND THE PICTURES WILL GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. I love these books! Really I do.
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Strikingly True
– 2011 – Ripley Entertainment

One man’s desperate search for his lost daughter leads him to perform a dark piece of magic that simultaneously blinds him and makes him able to see the supernatural creatures and ghosts who live among us. The protagonist’s name, “Jeremiah Hunt,” speaks volumes and even sets expectations, doesn’t it? Yes, yes. A straight-up supernatural mystery novel, EYES TO SEE delivers the goods in a no-fuss no-muss manner. We have here the tough cop turning up the heat on our brave protagonist, the sensitive witch who is falling in love with him, and the mysterious Russian black marketeer who cannot help but become his trusty sidekick. All of them are working to solve the mystery behind a horrifying string of bizarre murders before it’s too late. Looking for a lightweight supernatural thriller to read in between all that serious literature you’ve been poring over? Look no further.
Eyes to See (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) by Joseph Nassise – 2011 – Tor Books

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Graham Annable was selling a book titled HIDDEN. If you are fan of Annable’s creepy short animations, and you’ve been holding off from picking up a copy of this marvelous little gem, wonder no longer – or continue to wonder NOW, because it’s sold out. Like his short films, the book is well illustrated, impeccably paced, and deliciously creepy.
Hidden by Graham Annable – 2011 - Kabinett (is that his own imprint?)

Many thanks to TOR/FORGE for review copy of Eyes to See. Also thanks for Ripley’s Entertainment for the review copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

In fact, today’s zombies are full-on politicized. In today’s world, it’s no longer sufficient to simply be a zombie. You have to crave brains, be a symbol of mindless consumerism, a walking pin-cushion for the human race, an unthinkable scientific experiment gone horribly out of control, a house and home for various social ills, an easy personification of moral decay, or maybe even the very end of the world as we know it. Horrifying death without malice. I don’t really know how zombies can take all this pressure. To tell you the truth, sometimes I think they don’t exactly wear it gracefully. Let’s talk about the zombies in this book:

• Zombies created by: New technology that reanimates the dead.
• Fast or Slow: Kind of slow and with bad memories.
• Killing zombies requires: Decapitation, maybe. Probably need to burn.
• Zombies are hungry for humans: Only when they “go feral”
• Zombies make more zombies: No
• The rest of the world: Basically went back to business as if nothing happened.
• Voodoo: No
• Lots of gore: Yep

I have to mention here that I thought Stefan Petrucha’s last book, Blood Prophecy (review here), was a great read.

In this book, a technology corporation came up with a way to restore animation (and probably soul) to dead bodies. The good news is that the zombies get something of their personalities and memories back from before they died. The bad news is that their memories are unreliable, their bodies are in bad shape and continue to degrade, and eventually the zombies “go feral.” This means that they degrade to the point where they start craving brains, or whatever. Our hero Hessius Mann is a zombie who was wrongly convicted and executed for murdering his wife. When the mistake was discovered by the state, Mann was revived. Seeing as how he was a policeman before he died, he became a private detective as a zombie.

Yes I said private detective. This means that the private detective genre (please refer to this article for a detailed description) gets mixed in here as well. So Mann is hired by a normie (a.k.a. liveblood) who wants to track down a zombie and things get much more messy after that. Multiple attempts are made on his life, he falls for a femme fatale, a rich gangster gets involved, and all the other tropes of the genre come into play.

The zombies in this book are politicized in that they are the untouchables of this dystopian futuristic society. As untouchables, they are rejected and marginalized by the normies in the book. The police not only look away while zombies are brutalized by gangs of bored hicks, but if one of the hicks gets hurt, the police join in against the zombies. Zombies aren’t tolerated in expensive neighborhoods, and etc. Sadly, the zombies are no longer capable of living normal lives and so they end up being powerless to avoid fulfilling their own stereotype. Actually, before you get even halfway through the book, the list of social ills portrayed really starts to weigh down the story.

So yeah, we have here a heavily-politicized zombie fiction pulp detective novel that takes place in a dystopian future. It’s like having a chocolate-flavored pumpkin pie served on a steak with hollandaise sauce. Maybe it’s going to be your thing, and maybe it isn’t. I ended up being reminded of Richard K. Morgan’s extremely annoying Th1rte3n. The good news is that this book kicks the shit out of Th1rte3n. For one thing, it has a sense of humor.

Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 1 out of 5 (leathery zombie stripper anyone?)
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5 (leathery zombie stripper anyone?)

Final result: There’s something about books where the main characters live under the boot of a dystopian society, and it’s something I might be tired of. This books has its up and downs. The ending, though, is amazingly suspenseful. If you like pulp detective fiction and zombies, this book may be exactly what you’re looking for.

Dead Mann Walking by Stefan Petrucha – ROC Books (a division of Penguin) – 2011

Dead Mann Walking on Amazon

Thanks to the author for sending me a copy of this book to review. See you all next time!

Although there are a large number of tales and characters woven together in the book, Harbor mostly follows the story of two men who are related, but not by blood. There is Anders, who is really the focus of the book, and Simon, who is basically a step grandfather to Anders. Simon and Anders both live on a remote island where life moves a little more slowly than the rest of the world. The book opens with the mysterious disappearance of Maja, the temperamental daughter of Anders, during a family trip to a local lighthouse. The unsolved disappearance of his little daughter breaks Anders, breaks his marriage, and sends him into a downward spiral. After several years away from the island, Anders decides to return, find his life again, and perhaps exorcise his ghosts.

Once he returns, however, he finds that things aren’t as simple as they might have seemed. The island is haunted by strange happenings and a long history involving human sacrifice and mysterious disappearances.

Simon is a retired professional magician (of the kind who pulls rabbits from hats, does tricks with cards, and saws pretty ladies in half on stage) who has stumbled onto an insect-like creature that grants him supernatural control over water. Simon and a host of other island residents help Anders, whether they mean to or not, as he attempts to piece together what really happened to his daughter.

Joining in on the fun are:

• Anna-Greta, Simon’s long time partner and de facto matriarch of the island.
• Elin, the girl from Anders’ generation who everyone was hot for, who got rich and famous, and who returned to the island to hide away and make herself look old and deformed with plastic surgery.
• Two resurrected and violent teenaged thugs who speak only in Smiths lyrics and terrorize the locals, Elin, and Anders.
• The Sea

The source of the haunting in Harbor is the sea. Necessary to Anders’ understanding of what happened to his daughter we find several hundred years of stories of people who were lost at sea (or more appropriately, taken by the sea) before her. As the book progresses, Anders is simultaneously solving a mystery and losing his mind. As with Let the Right One In, there is a fascination or play with childhood, immaturity, and maturity. And failure. Incidentally, those of us who are familiar with songs by The Smiths might find Sheila Take a Bow going through our heads. Let’s see the numbers:

Creepy Factor: 5 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5

Final result: I loved this book and had a hard time putting it down. Harbor is a series of ghost stories that fill in different parts of a larger painting by an author who doesn’t feel the need to answer every single question he raises. It has depth and scope, and it’s not afraid to do something really unthinkable to itself in the bathroom when it hits bottom.

Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist – 2011 – St. Martin’s Press

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As the title might suggest, Blood and Other Cravings is a collection of short stories on the subject of vampirism. So you’ve got some of the standard vampires that don’t have reflections, drink blood, and have to be invited in; some vampires who feed on the control that they have over their victim’s lives; other vampires that breathe and put their pants on one leg at a time like you and I do; and some vampires that might just be sucking your soul out of the hole that you call “memory.”

Stories that Stand Out to Me Are

All You Can Do is Breathe by Kaaron Warren – a believable story of a simple man who, simply by accident, falls into a void in the world. The kind of void that people refuse to look at.

Needles by Elizabeth Bear – a conventional “American Gods in the SouthWest” kind of adventure story that reads like a chapter out of a bigger, probably very interesting novel.

Baskerville’s Midgets by Reggie Oliver – must be read to be believed. Warring factions of little people and an unhinged lady innkeeper. Ever have somebody warn you about something, and you ignore the warning because it just doesn’t make sense? Then, much later, you see what they were trying to tell you? Ah ha ha. If you haven’t done that, you haven’t lived! Anyways, this story has something like that happen. The Baskerville’s Midgets is simultaneously hilarious, imaginative, and creepy.

Keeping Corky by Melanie Tem – reminiscent of Azimov’s stories. The ones where you hope it doesn’t go where you think it’s going and then it goes there and then somewhere worse. Then you think about it later and it’s like pushing a sore tooth with your tongue? Like that.

Miri by Steve Rasnic Tem – That vampire I mentioned above that might be sucking your soul out of the hole we call memory.

Mrs. Jones by Carol Emschwiller – Completely different from, but in effect like Baskerville’s Midgets: funny, imaginative, and creepy. Three flavors that go great together.

And then for me it was kind of a long slog before that one story that’s the chocolate with the cherry in it: The Siphon by Laird Barron. A gainfully-employed psychopath with a cigar box of kill trophies in his closet discovers a magical alternate world where he is not important.

Here is where I would usually provide some numbers, or a vampire classification chart, but neither makes any sense with a collection of stories. I think this is a good collection of stories, and if you’re looking for something to get you in the MOOD for October, Blood and Other Cravings would be an excellent place to start.

Blood and Other Cravings edited by Ellen Datlow – Tor Books – 2011
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Many thanks to Tor Books for the review copy of this book.

(Five bucks says this is the back of China Miéville’s head.) While it was sold to me as a dystopian dark science fiction novel, Feed is more accurately a retelling of that classic tale Romeo and Juliet. Except that in this case, Romeo is from the vapid consumerist future and Juliet is from the intellectual alt-culture past.

In this future world, most people have direct Internet feeds implanted into their brains soon after they are born. The plus side of this is that everyone is a walking encyclopedia as long as they have the patience to use Wikipedia. The bad news is that banner ads have followed the Internet into our brains, and instant access to everything, everywhere, at any time has inculcated a deep laziness into the masses. Nobody has to learn anything, fashionable hairstyles change by the minute, and mankind has lost the patience to use Wikipedia (hmmm. This last part sounds familiar.)

Our star-crossed lovers meet in a restaurant on the Moon, and later that evening are dancing at a night club when their feeds are hacked by a member of dissident organization of some sort. The details of this dissident organization aren’t explored fully because the protagonist (our lethargic representative of the vapid consumerist future) doesn’t really care about anything other than his next meal or pair of jeans, so he never investigates.

Some YA books are gratifying to adults. If you get annoyed easily at young adult books, you may wish to skip this one.

Oh Juliet (or in this case, Violet), how unlucky you are to have fallen for this oaf. Halfway through the book we wonder, “when does the adventure start?” You must have wondered that, too. Luckily for us, you and your lover’s stars are crossed, and so the tragedy in this young adult dystopian broth is rich and thick.

Feed by M.T. Anderson – 2004 – Candlewick
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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The plot of this book is Neil Gaiman’s standard: Protagonist discovers a secret world where he/she is important. As a child, our protagonist Jacob was told lots of strange and yet borderline-believable stories by his grandfather. Now that he’s 16, it’s become clear to Jacob maybe his grandfather might need a little more medication than the average bear.

After his grandfather is killed in suspicious circumstances, however, Jacob finds himself compelled to investigate, and of course it was all true. All of it! The levitating girl, the invisible boy, the ridiculously strong girl, the bird, the horrible monsters. Everything and more. The good news is that everybody at the Home likes Jacob, and he likes them. The bad news is that Jacob has unwittingly led the horrible monsters to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Adventure ensues.

The book itself is well-written and suspenseful. Despite the World War II setting, the period flavor at the Home is decidedly Victorian. It’s a little on the YA borderline, but if the premise sounds interesting and you are attracted to the odd vintage photos that pepper the inside, you should give it a read.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs – 2011 – Quirk Books

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One day a mysterious man with leathery skin appears at his shop, terrorizes his manservant, and asks George to repair a mysterious device (a regulator) that George’s father created. This sets off a chain of events in which George finds himself completely out of his very limited depth. Two or three (or four?) different organizations have designs for George, the regulator, and an automaton which George’s father created that looks exactly like George.

George, finding himself in the midst of what he considers a mystery, spends the rest of the book blindly floundering. Along the way he encounters, and is often mishandled by, a race of half-breed fish people, a pair of con-artists (one of whom is a sexually voracious lady), the leather-skinned man, a wealthy man who wants to end the world so he can speak to aliens, the (often violent) head of a morality organization, and various assorted seedy lowlifes. Did I mention that some time travel is involved?

The very fate of the Earth hangs in the balance, and the plot is built of wheels within wheels. The comedy is thick, and this reader was delighted as George’s fate and wits turned from bad to worse, to worse still, and then even worse. It’s a long way to the bottom, and all George really manages to do properly is throw a fit like he’s Niccolo Paganini. OK. OK. He manages to do more. Like avoid being murdered by a lynch mob.

Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 5 out of 5

Final result: I said it was a farce, and I stand by that. Definitely not horror, but certainly nice and dark. Cthulhu is mentioned. Do I really need to gush more? I hope not. You should read this book.

Infernal Devices – K.W. Jeter – 1987 – St. Martin’s Press
Republished by Angry Robot – 2011

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As it follows pretty much the same central characters as Anno Dracula, but occurs 30 years later, there are a lot of similarities between Anno and Bloody Red Baron. The book is very readable. Set in an alt-historical World War I being fought with Dracula himself goading the Kaiser, a parade of real historical figures and fictional luminaries make cameos or serve as main characters. Included in the bunch are Edgar Allan Poe (here eschewing his middle name and living the unfortunate life of a Kafka character), the Mata Hari, Count Orlok, Manfred von Richthofen, and the Baron’s brother, Lothar. There is no Genevieve Dieudonne, sadly. As with Anno Dracula, the plot is meandering and sometimes seems headed nowhere. In Anno, this meandering supplied more delicious background. In Bloody Red Baron, this meandering led your undeserving servant to distraction and annoyance. I find myself hesitant to read the next and last in this series.
Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman – Carroll & Graf – 1995
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After having read The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and love love loving it, imagine my delight in finding that Bullington had published another book this very year. The Enterprise of Death is a parable on how tricky it can be to rise above the circumstances from which we emerge. In the case of our heroine, Awa, those circumstances are rather dire. Awa is a former slave who, along with her mistress, is waylaid by a cruel necromancer shopping for a rather rare sort of successor. The kind of successor who, if they learned their true fate, would not go willingly. The good news, if it could be called good, is that Awa learns how to be a passable necromancer. We witness her horrific training, and follow her later adventures. As in the Brothers, the violence is hyper-photographically brutal, the sexy bits are graphic and never kink-free, and the main characters are caught in machinations that remain mostly beyond their ken. There is a scene late in the book where Awa is magically granted greater intelligence and she is stunned to look back and see how stupid she’s been. For years. My gripes: The ending does not ring true to these ears, and the Bullington’s carefully measured language is suddenly peppered with frank explicit sexual vocabulary starting at about one third of the way through the book, and I found it distracting. Still, The Enterprise of Death is an entertaining read. Those who are not entertained will be offended, and the Hyena wins my award for the most horrific monster of the year.
The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington – Orbit Books – 2011.
The Enterprise of Death on Amazon

Ha ha ho ho hee hee is it awkward explaining to all my friends that I’m not just reading these thinly veiled vampire/werewolf romance novels, but that I think they’re fantastic. See my review of the first, here. Yes. Yes I’ve read all of them now. They are in order, after Soulless: Changeless, Blameless, and Heartless. Another, Timeless, is due March 2012. Gail Carriger continues the fascinating adventures of Alexia Tarabotti as she thwarts enemies, spouts wry observations, and dodges multiple assassination attempts by various nefarious 19th Century organizations, all while keeping appearances and providing proper guidance on manners. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and found one nit to pick with these books: The covers are not getting better, and they really need to get somebody working on that. Everything else is grand. The books are an easy read and hard to put down. New York Times Bestselling. Still not ready to take the plunge? Just repeat after me: Low-brow is high-brow. Low-brow is high-brow. Low-brow is high-brow. There’s no place like home.
Changeless, Blameless, and Heartless by Gail Carriger – 2010, 2010, 2011 – Orbit Books
Check it out! The first 3 books available CHEAP for the Kindle.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Tim Powers On Stanger Tides. One thing that becomes obvious when you read this book is that IT MUST HAVE inspired the movie series Pirates of the Caribbean. Indeed, the Wikipedia page on that topic makes the claim that Pirates of the Caribbean was inspired by the popular video game Monkey Island, which in turn was inspired by On Stranger Tides. It is further noted here that the fourth film in the series Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, has an even closer relationship (which I guess should be obvious from the title).

In the Tim Powers universe, this book comes directly after the somewhat forgettable Dinner at Deviants Place (review here), and before the uneven but mostly brilliant Stress of Her Regard (review here). I think of all the Powers books I’ve read so far, it is the one that most closely resembles Anubis Gates, which is a book I can’t seem to stop talking about. It was nominated for, but did not win, the 1988 Locus Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards.

Here’s the story: An ex-puppeteer bent on avenging his father reluctantly joins two bands of pirates as they pursue a mission to travel to, and make use of, the legendary Fountain of Youth. Blackbeard leads one of the group of pirates, and we find him infested with ghosts and captaining a ship of zombies. The other group of pirates is working for a criminally insane Oxford Don who is bent on using the power of the Fountain to resurrect his late wife. Unfortunately for our hero, the villainous Don plans to do this at the expense of the woman he has fallen in love with. Also unfortunately for our hero, Blackbeard has plans for the same woman which are equally sinister (Blackbeard having been given a shot of Bluebeard by Powers).

Like most books by Powers, booze, magic (in this case voodoo), painful injuries, strangely pragmatic heroines, and desperate love each play a major part in the proceedings. Being one part revenge story, one part journey to hell, and two parts perilous rescue, the plot of On Stranger Tides probably sounds convoluted, but it’s all pirate treasure.

Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 5 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5

Final result: Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. I had a hard time putting this book down. It’s got comedy, terror, adventure, voodoo, comedy, and ghost ships. This brings us back to the topic that I started this review with. I could see reading On Stranger Tides first and forever after that feeling like it was the best Tim Powers book, ever.

On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers – 1987 – Ace

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And so goes the malevolent stupidity of the grave robbing pair. See: grave robbing isn’t wrong if it’s your family trade. Right? The brothers would agree. They would also add that they only throttled your ma because she was making too much noise (and she started it first). Although the tongue is placed firmly in cheek, it should be noted that this book is probably not for everyone. It even has the courtesy to provide a gatekeeper in the form of an atrocity, five pages in, where the brothers carelessly slaughter the wife and children of a turnip farmer. “Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here.” Setting the tone for the rest of the book, the violence in this scene is frank and anatomically descriptive.

The more sensitive readers may be right to put the book down. The rest of us will later begin to see slapstick in the many hyper-photographically detailed bodily insults recorded here. The brothers make enemies as naturally as we breathe air, and a large subplot of the book involves the vengeful people, witches, and supernatural beings on the trail of the Grossbarts. The Grossbarts themselves are focused on getting to Egypt, because they’ve heard many a tale of the fantastical graves there. Being grave robbers and all, they take a professional interest.

Plot-wise, the book reads very much like the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor as chronicled in the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. That is to say that the protagonists become tangled in machinations that are vastly greater than they are. The brothers manage to stumble through by the light of their own convictions, no matter how misplaced those convictions may be. In the Brothers Grossbart, this provides endless opportunities for dire humor. And at times these awful, stinking, disgusting, ugly, and appallingly stupid and violent men approach likability. I was also reminded of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (tragedy set in mythical surroundings), Tim Powers The Anubis Gates (historical hilarity and accretion of painful injuries), and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (a comedy that is not really about what it purports to contain).

I would be wrong to talk about this book without mentioning the masterful grasp that Bullington has on the English language. The language is used like a fine tool to disgust, appall, frighten, or even describe beauty. Upon entering Venice: “True to its visage, the sky let them advance only a short distance before a deluge crashed down on them.” The brothers and unfortunate henchmen are approached by three long dead, rotting men who are animated by demons: “The stench overpowered them, even the Grossbarts gagging on the suddenly wet air.”

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 5 out of 5

Final result: It is not wrong to want to murder the Brothers Grossbart. What a great book.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington – 2009 – Orbit

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