Join Salad Fingers and its rotten teeth as it licks, fondles, squishes, and negligently murders the desolate world that it finds himself in. More information about the artist, here and here.
Om nom nom nom.
More mini reviews to put a further dent into my horrible book review backlog. Those pressed for time may wish to check the executive summaries (in italics) at the end of each mini where I rate each book for creepiness, suspense, violence, and erotic factor. Each executive summary ends with a one word summary of the book.
Several years of writing regularly has made it clear to me that it is deceptively hard to be entertaining. Roman Dirge is among those gifted with the ability to make even the weakest plot sing with life (or death, as the case may be). Read LENORE – WEDGIES to keep up with what dead megalomaniac little girls are up to these days. This book is the graphic novel equivalent of doing things like taping firecrackers to tomato worms, playing how-and-tell with scab collections, or putting a deceased, mummified lizard on a giant ant pile to see what happens. THRILL! As Lenore spends three pages playing with a dead frog. GASP! As Lenore realizes she pickled a fairy queen. LAUGH! As Lenore sends a bacteria-eating slime monster back to hell with a plunger. Creepy, funny, violent, and repulsive. Rotten. (Titan Books, 2010) Lenore: Wedgies on Amazon
As usual, Tim Powers carefully piles painful injures on his protagonist in DINNER AT DEVIANT’S PALACE. When Greg Rivas is hired by a brandy baron in post-apocalypse Los Angeles, he discovers that his mission is to rescue and deprogram his first love, who has been kidnapped by a dangerous religious cult. Along the way, he discovers the truth in the Residents lyric: “The only really perfect love is one that gets away.” As mentioned before, he also collects a dizzying array of non-fatal injuries, and we swoon as part of his skull becomes squishy. This being a dent left by a falling architectural feature after his meeting with the Deviant, who I can’t tell you about without spoiling the book. I thought the book was OK. Published right after THE ANUBIS GATES (still my favorite by Powers), this book was the 1985 Philip K. Dick Award winner and a Nebula Award nominee. Creepy, suspenseful, violent, and more about love than sex. Painful. (Ace Books, 1985) Dinner at Deviant’s Palace on Amazon
When I read the second novel in the Detective Inspector Chen series by Liz Williams, I wondered if the second was inferior, or if the novelty had worn off a little and made it seem not quite as stellar as the first. PRECIOUS DRAGON, the third book in the series, has made things clear by being made of awesome and dark fantasy based on Chinese mythology with strong female characters. If anything at all must be clear by my continued celebration of this series, it is that I am in love with it. You readers thirsting for truly imaginative adventure should really check it out. Start with SNAKE AGENT. See my reviews of the first two books, here and here. Creepy, suspenseful, can be violent, not really sexy. Awesome. (Nightshade Books, 2008) Precious Dragon on Amazon
Richard K. Morgan turns in another fine hard-boiled Takeshi Kovacs thriller in BROKEN ANGELS. After loving his novel ALTERED CARBON and hating THIRTEEN (see my review here), I was curious but a little worried. Protagonist Kovacs goes AWOL to help a group of rouge archeologists investigate a priceless alien artifact that leads to a massive abandoned space ship. It makes for a fascinating story with an almost nonsensical ending. Morgan includes a lot of gratuitous exposition about power, war, politics, and violence, which is rather thinly disguised as dialogue. There was enough of this that I got a little annoyed, but unlike THIRTEEN, some people in this book have a sense of humor. I liked it. Slightly creepy, rather suspenseful, ultra-violent, and hyper-sexual. Hard-boiled. (Del Rey, 2004) Broken Angels on Amazon
Many thanks to Titan Books for the review copy of Lenore – Wedgies.
I just found out about the Suicide Machine, a delightful service that helps a person delete their online self. So if you have accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter, the suicide machine will delete them, and do it in a way that erases all the data. How enchanting! It makes me want to create a new identity and move it around like a pawn on Facebook. Maybe I will choose to be a violinist who lives in Paris. I will name her Mlle. Belletienere.
She will be a great romantic. I will find a suitable portrait shot for her in the classifieds section of a weekly newspaper. I’m picturing her as a willowy brunette who usually wears black. Belletienere will be kind, witty and beautiful. Her grasp of English will be adorably shaky. She will have an identical twin who is not online. Her birthday will be January 1 and her relationship status will read “Tell me yours first.” She’ll always be reading the books that everyone wishes they were reading. She will start with Balzac.
Balletienere will make friends online and play farming games into the wee hours of the morning. And then years later, when she has lots and lots of friends, and even more farm animals, she will find that it has all become too much and after countless weeks spent in despair, she will decide on a quick, automated death. She will wonder if she did the right thing as she watches the suicide machine unfriend her entire contact list, delete her uploaded photos, erase her wall posts, and then axe her account. Afterwards, it will be as if she never existed. And I will be free of Mlle. Belletienere! But in my heart, I will always miss her. I am crying already.
web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.
Sometimes I yearn for the good old days. By “good old days” I mean the times of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The good old days where men were men, evil stepmothers dreamed up dreadful ends for their stepdaughters, and monsters were monsters and did monster things. Things have become so complicated! Now that we’re in the 21st Century, we have monsters who don’t really know that they’re monsters, (which I’ll admit isn’t exactly new), and this book chronicles the fall of one particular monster who is “programmed” by a secret cult to think she is evil and doesn’t deserve to live. Shocking, I know.
Here’s the setup: The Earth has been taken over by a race of parasitic aliens who take over the minds of their hosts. Despite being parasites, the aliens, who call themselves “Souls,” are altruistic, compliant, and compassionate. The Souls resemble centipedes and medically insert themselves into the back of the necks of their hosts. When a Soul takes over a body, it absorbs the memories of the host, and very often continues the life of the host. Because the Souls are altruistic and well-behaved, they have created a utopia on earth. Everyone helps one another, there is no more war, and there is no longer any need for money. There are still some humans left hiding out and the Souls have members called “Seekers” who hunt them down.
Enter one female from each species: Melanie and Wanderer. Melanie is one of the last humans who has not been absorbed by the aliens. Wanderer is a special Soul who earned her name by living on almost all the other worlds that the Souls have taken over. My OCD is making me list the ones I remember: She has been a giant thousand-eyed undersea flower, a bat-like flying creature, something resembling an ice bear, and, and, I think a spider? And other things. Melanie is a freshly-caught rogue human and she becomes host to Wanderer. Something goes wrong, however. Wanderer can’t fully shut Melanie out of her mind. Wanderer soon finds herself falling in love with the man Melanie was in love with, and is compelled to seek him out.
Here’s where the cult comes in. Under the influence of Melanie, Wanderer goes looking for Melanie’s boyfriend and brother. While searching for them, Wanda is abducted by a secret cult. The good news is that she finds Melanie’s boyfriend and brother. The bad news is that they’ve been absorbed and brainwashed by the cult as well, and take an active part in Wanderer’s programming. The cult lives in a large series of underground caverns, which is where the majority of the book plays out.
Meyer definitely did her research on brainwashing. Wanderer is subjected to the typical mind control techniques that cults use to program inductees. She is purposefully malnourished, deprived of sleep, and ritually abused (both physically and emotionally). Wanderer is held captive by the cult, and is forced to live like an animal for many of the early chapters as part of her programming. The leader of cult, Jeb, comes off as a kindly old man but is in reality the brainwashing master.
Once the spirit of Wanderer (who has now been renamed “Wanda” by the cult) has been totally broken, she is given nicer quarters and introduced to manual labor. Wanderer unfortunately sees manual labor as a way to gain the love of the cult members, many of whom still pretend to dislike her. The cult members begin to “love bomb” Wanderer, prey on Wanderer’s fears by telling her that the Seekers are out to get her, and also play “good cop, bad cop” with her in rather clever ways to keep her emotionally unbalanced.
Since Wanderer’s host, Melanie, is still present, we spend the book hoping that one of the two will catch on. Instead we watch in growing horror as Wanderer and Melanie continue to make bad decisions, like accepting physical abuse from people who claim to love her. I don’t want to spoil the whole book, but let’s just say that I was tied up in suspense, wondering if Wanderer would come to her senses, or if she would end up ready to drink the Kool-Aid.
Meyers is the perfect blockbuster writer. She knows how to pace a story, how to create cliff-hangers, and how to keep a reader turning the pages. To me, the first three quarters of The Host were really fascinating. I say three quarters because at some point the melodrama got a little too thick for my tastes. I haven’t read any of the Twilight Saga books, but when I started reading The Host, I could see why they are so popular.
Creepy Factor: 2 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 5 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 1 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 2 out of 5
Final result: Stephanie Meyer tackles the very first “monster gets brainwashed by human cultists” book that I’m aware of. The Host is quite the page-turner. I ended up wishing that more of the action happened outside the caves, but also see that it wouldn’t work so well for what she was trying to do with the book. I’m also kind of scratching my head over the language on the book cover, which states that it’s about a love triangle.
The Host by Stephanie Meyer – Back Bay Books – 2008
Buy The Host now at Amazon
Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews, and thanks to the Hachette Book Group for the review copy. See you next time!
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Recently I played this game with a friend. I commented that if there’s a hell for monsters, and I ever end up there, my punishment will be to wash dishes in a restaurant. Like any good creeper in basements and attics, I hate the three basics of washing dishes: Being wet, being covered with chewed-up bits of food and soda, and working. My friend helpfully pointed out that this might not be horrible enough. What if all the dishes came covered with saliva? What if I had to lick all the dishes to clean them? How could that get worse? Answer: Hundreds of paper cuts.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Robert Dunbar. If the question is “What’s the worst that could happen?” Robert Dunbar is the man with an answer. Martyrs & Monsters is a collection of short fiction by Dunbar and a lot of it is harrowing. I’m not usually a fan of short story collections, but every once in a while I’ll run across an author who can fill out a compelling one.
The stories here are varied. While most of them are horror stories, they run quite a range of subjects. Martyrs & Monsters covers everything from post-apocalyptic zombie fighters to murderous drug addicts. From a wildly dysfunctional geek love triangle to a straight-up ghost story. A few of the stories are quite humorous. Some others are horrifyingly bleak. To me it seems like the one common thread is that the characters in all these stories are battling their own demons.
Strangely, the book finishes with a story that is very much like an L-Word episode. It’s about a gay man who introduces his new boyfriend to a bunch of his friends at a beach house gathering. And his friends don’t like the guy. That’s as horrifying as the story gets, so I was left scratching my head. Maybe I missed the point. In the bigger picture, though, it barely matters.
Dunbar’s writing is creative and engrossing. As the background to each story is set up, Dunbar provides just the right amount of information. Everything is full formed. He’s very good at painting a bleak, horrifying picture with only a few strokes. As I mentioned earlier, Dunbar can certainly answer the question: “What’s the worst that could happen?” If you’re trying to save your brother from a succubus, what’s the worst that could happen? If you get bit while defending your children from a zombie and, as a result, turn into a zombie yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? If you think your neighbor might have been replaced by an alien doppelganger, what’s the worst that could happen? The truth is, you don’t want to know! Or, if you enjoy horror: You do want to know, and here you will be amply rewarded.
Creepy Factor: 5 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5
Martyrs & Monsters made the final Horror Writers Association 2009 Stoker Awards ballot for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection, and it’s clear that it belongs there. The writing is imaginative, the atmosphere is haunting, and the sexy witch really does have a collection of – of – uh maybe you don’t want to know. Or maybe you do. What’s the worst that could happen?
Martyrs and Monsters by Robert Dunbar – 2009 – DarkHart Press
Buy Martyrs & Monsters by Robert Dunbar on Amazon
Many thanks to the author for sending me a review copy of this book. See you next time!
Fhtagn Spoken Here.
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