Tag Archive for 'dark fantasy'

Tiny Pitchfork Mob Two

Allow me to save some of you two trips to the bookstore: THE HAUNTING OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA sounds like it would be about famous ghost-hunting spots, unsolved mysteries, and hotel suites haunted by doomed lovers who met infamy. Not so. Here instead we find a history of European occultism, an entire chapter about Edgar Cayce, more chapters about past lives, spiritualism, astrology, and the New Age movement. Please don’t trust me to judge a book like this. I am not the intended audience. Fans of conspiracy theories who enjoy history should, at the very least, get a kick or two out of this voluminous, heavily-researched tome.
The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America by William J. Birnes and Joel Martin – 2011 – Forge

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.

Posted November 28, 2011 at 7:45 am in Book Reviews with Tags: 1990, 2003, 2011, Conspiracies, dark fantasy, history, Science Fiction, secret societies, vampires. See 0 Comments

A Small Pitchfork Mob of Short Reviews

This is happening more and more lately, and I’m just going to roll with it. It seems like every time I turn around, I’ve read several books and need to review them all, post-haste. So here they are.

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.

Posted November 22, 2011 at 7:17 am in Book Reviews with Tags: 1930s, 1960s, 1966, 2011, clowns, dark fantasy, ghosts, horror, mad scientist, psychopaths, secret societies, vampires. See 0 Comments

Book Review: Dead Mann Walking by Stefan Petrucha

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the past. Back in the days when men were men, women were women, and zombies were just shuffling dead things under the command of evil voodoo priests. Yep! Things were simple then. A voodoo priest would slip their victim some good old zombie potion, make sure the victim was buried with several spiders, and then dig up the result several days later, preferably hours after it screamed itself hoarse and turned its fingers to hamburger scratching at the lid of its coffin, buried deep under the ground. What could be more easy? Now things are all complicated.

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!

Posted November 10, 2011 at 10:56 pm in Book Reviews with Tags: 2011, dark fantasy, detective fiction, dystopian, psychopaths, ultraviolence, zombies. See 0 Comments

Blood and Other Cravings Edited by Ellen Datlow

Ah, short story collections. How I love to complain about them. Regular readers will recall that for me it’s more a matter of attention span as it is anything else. When you reach my age, the days fly. A monster wants long books, and better yet, long sequels to those long books. At the same time, a good short story collection can be like a box of assorted chocolates. There’s the one with a cherry inside, another with two colors of nougat, a couple with caramel, the chocolate filled with that crap white stuff with nuts in it. What is that stuff? If you’re like me and have a flying monkey army, there’s always one that some insensitive dolt bit into and then returned to the box. If you get a good assortment, most of them are good. I’m happy to report that in the chocolate assortment that Ellen Datlow has assembled in Blood and Other Cravings, we’ve got a good mix. And so that one chocolate with the cherry in it? It’s a good one.

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
Buy this book now on Amazon

Many thanks to Tor Books for the review copy of this book.

Posted September 14, 2011 at 8:40 pm in Book Reviews with Tags: 2011, creepy, dark fantasy, dystopian, horror, monsters, psychopaths, vampires. See 0 Comments

Sequels and Second Novels

I’ve got a terrible revue backlog, so the time has come to do some quickies. Coincidentally, most of what we have here today are sequels and second novels.

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
Bloody Red Baron on Amazon

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.

Posted August 9, 2011 at 7:09 am in Book Reviews with Tags: 1910s, 1995, 19th Century, 2010, 2011, dark fantasy, dystopian, horror, mad scientist, secret societies, ultraviolence. See 3 Comments

Tag Archive for 'dark fantasy'

Tiny Pitchfork Mob Two

A Small Pitchfork Mob of Short Reviews

Book Review: Dead Mann Walking by Stefan Petrucha

Blood and Other Cravings Edited by Ellen Datlow

Stories that Stand Out to Me Are

Sequels and Second Novels

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