Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
The scariest thing about Underdown’s gripping novel isn’t that it’s based on the historical record of one Mathew Hopkins or that his crusade against witches is (in Underdown’s fictionalized version of his early life) possibly motivated by trauma he suffered as an infant, but that the disempowerment and silencing of those considered to be inferior beings feels so familiar today.
The year is 1644, in Essex, England, a time of political and religious upheaval. Alice Hopkins, the narrator, is a widow who seeks shelter with her brother Mathew, a preacher’s son bent on ridding the countryside of women suspected of witchcraft.
The world Alice was born into has trained her to be meek and subservient toward men. As Mathew’s unwilling assistent, she faces a daunting task: bear witness to the horrors of the interrogations while still trying to help the women escape their fate. Her efforts do not go as hoped. When we meet her, Alice is locked in an attic, keeping a journal which opens with, “Nine months ago my brother Mathew set himself to killing women.”
Those hanged for witchcraft are invariably unmarried or widowed old women, often of an eccentric bent. To prove their wickedness, almost anything will do. Some have odd birthmarks, others dabble in folk remedies, or have had the ill luck to quarrel with a farmer just before his horse died. Some are simply mentally ill. One scene, in particular, is haunting: a teenaged girl who is clearly delusional insists that Mathew must ‘swim’ her to determine if she’s possessed by the devil, “swimming’ being a form of torture in which the victim is bound hands to feet and tossed in the water. Those who float are guilty; those who sink, drown as innocents.
Underdown skillfully interweaves the mores and mindset of 1644 England with Alice’s sometimes quite modern insights. Reflecting on her brother’s obsession with women, sin, and sex, she observes, “It was the thinnest of tricks: if a thing frightens you, to call it something else.”
Of course not all the men Alice encounters are focused on persecuting witches. Some merely patronize and demean her while holding out the carrot of marriage like some great prize and fretting over the state of her “delicate” health.
Reading THE WITCHFINDER’S SISTER hundreds of years after the real Mathew Hopkins did his evil work, one would wish to find scapegoating, misogyny, and projection a thing of the past. Sadly, as anyone following current events well knows, this is not the case.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
“I want you to kill my stepdad” begins Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw’s masterful combination of gritty noir detective story and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The startling request comes from a young boy named Abel, who slams his piggy bank down on the desk of Detective John Persons to prove he can pay for the hit.
Turns out Abel’s problem is an abusive stepfather, and Persons is the only one he feels he can turn to. Persons helpfully suggests Abel might “tell his mum to call child services,” but the kid, older than his years, is fully aware his stepdad, McKinsey, is much worse than just your average social deviant. He is, in fact, a bonafide monster. Abel also knows why Persons is the only one with a shot at taking him down.
Added to this mix is a younger brother who’s at even higher risk from McKinsey’s abominable intent and Sasha, a pretty waitress who’s been tainted by the vile McKinsey herself.
Persons, a hardboiled London gumshoe, turns out to have a soft spot for kids and ‘skirts’ and finally takes on the case. In a quietly harrowing scene, he interviews McKinsey’s indifferent boss, who acknowledges the man is a menace but shrugs it off, saying “I’ve met worse than him.” After staking out McKinsey’s house (while Downton Abbey plays on t.v. and McKinsey’s wife and children cower in another room), Persons discovers the stepfather poses a threat far greater than he imagined, one that could endanger all London. He has to pull out all his tricks, including shedding his own human form, in order to fight him on anything like equal terms.
Hammers on Bone is a stunning descent into a nightmare unfolding against a backdrop of a diverse, working class London. Khaw throws in a dash of humor, too, as Persons, although living in modern times, likes to flavor his speech with lingo from another era that at times renders him both comical and quaint.
With superb writing and a gripping plot, Hammers on Bone is an occult thriller not to be missed.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
The night before my mother walked into the New Sea carrying my six-week-old brother, I heard her and Papi arguing. Even with the wind screaming past our tiny squatter’s house on the ciff, the rage in her voice slashed through the thin wall.”
So begins my story “Sweetlings”, a science fiction/horror novelette about a young woman named Mir, her father, and Mir’s friend Jersey, all strugglng to survive in a world reshaped by catastrophic floods. Mir wasn’t yet born when the Great Inundation took place, but Papi lived through the floods that wiped out much of the east coast of the United States. Now he studies the new forms of crustaceans emerging out of this New Sea and concludes the Great Inundation was just the beginning – there is much worse to come.
Like most of the people in their small settlement, Jersey wants to take his chances going inland. He tries to convince Mir to go with him, but she won’t abandon her father, who suffers from Blister Rot and is confined to a wheelchair. Papi also has strange lapses in memory; at times he looks at Mir as though she’s “nothing he’s ever seen before, but something fabulous and faintly unclean, a bizarre species of spider fish or toad that just wriggled its way into creation.”
Find out what fate awaits Mir, Papi, and Jersey – and what terrible surprises this New Sea may have in store!
Visit www.Tor.com and click on fiction. “Sweetlings” is free to read!
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin R. Kiernan is that rare work of fiction so gripping, complex, and disturbing that it begs to be read a second time, both to savor the exquisite writing and to look for subtleties, clues, and references that may have been overlooked the first time.
When the novella begins, the agent known only as the Signalman, a cynical hard-drinking operative on the trail of a cult leader, is arriving in Winslow, Arizona. There he meets with the enigmatic Immacolata Sexton, a woman whose cryptic, hard-as-nails exterior is later belied by small future acts of compassion toward the suffering denizens of a doomed Los Angeles. Sexton is a time traveler; we follow her from Vermont in 1927, where she examines evidence of an alien spacecraft, to the American southwest and a desperate, present-day race to stop a horrific plague, then to a future Los Angeles where alien ships rule the sky and the few human inhabitants eke out a pitiable existence.
All Kiernan’s characters are memorable; for me, the most vivid was a confused, lost young woman named Chloe, who’s been goomed by cult leader Drew Standish to become a key member of the Children of the Next Level. Chloe’s lurid, drug-addled past makes her a perfect, if tragic, foil for indoctrination by madman Standish.
To be fair, Agents of Dreamland is not for everyone (but what great fiction is?). Some may find it too pervasively dark or too graphic in its depiction of body horror. Some may wish for a more traditional, less unsettling ending, especially at a time in history when the idea of ecological disaster, alien or otherwise, seems all too likely.
As Kiernan writes, “The haunted human psyche craves resolution…humans, inherent problem solvers that we are, chafe at problems that cannot be solved, questions that cannot ever, once and for all, saisfactorily be put to rest.”
With no glimmer of hope at the ending and no promise of a resolution to come, Agents of Dreamland defies conventional expectations and raises the spector of a future we may not want to imagine.
In short, this is great writing that is likely to stick with the reader for a very long time. Definitely not to be missed.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
“Why isn’t the short story more popular?” That’s the question that Kelly Abbott, CEO of Great Jones Street, asked himself a few years ago.
Kelly had grown up watching his father labor over short fiction, so he knew the difficulties writers face. He wanted to find a way to offer high quality short fiction to a wide audience and came up with a theory – that mobile phones, our culture’s generally short attention span, and the desire for high quality entertainment could lead to a resurgence for the much neglected short story.
With the goal of bringing short fiction back to popular culture, Abbott and his partner Ken Truesdale, came up with the idea for Great Jones Street, an app where readers can access virtually any type of short fiction. They reached out to writers who, in turn, recommended other writers. In its first year, Great Jones Street acquired over a thousand short stories, a number Abbott says they’re on track to publish every year.
To flesh out the catalogue, Abbott and Truesdale also contacted editors like John Joseph Adams (for s/f, fantasy), Suzie bright (erotica), and Nick Mamatas (mystery/crime).
The GJS app not only gives a synopsis of each story, but the approximate time it will take to read it. Waiting in a doctor’s office? In line at the DMV? Just found out your flight’s been delayed? With GJS you can find everything from longer works to exquisite little gems of five minutes or less to fill the time.
As a writer, GJS is absolutely my favorite app, because it allows me to explore genres I generally don’t read. It expands my reading universe and gives me dozens of new, favorite writers whose work I now look for.
For now, GJS is free (up until the first ten thousand readers), but it won’t stay that way. For lovers of short fiction, it’s the best deal in town.
https://www.greatjonesstreet.press/
And P.S. If you’re a horror reader on GJS, look for my stories: Nikishi, Blessed Be the Bound, Wingless Beasts, Choke Hold, and Lust in the Days of Demons
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
No script, no money, and soon no escape pretty much sums up the plight of the actors filming “Jungle Bloodbath” in Kea Wilson’s tightly plotted and beautifully written “We Eat Our Own”. Eccentric and possibly insane director Ugo Velluto lures desperate wannabe actor Adrian White (whose real name we don’t learn until the end of the book) to be his unlucky and unlikely leading man after the first actor to be cast in the part flees in terror. To prevent this happening again, once White shows up, Ugo has his passport confiscated and informs him there is no script.
The naive and increasingly desperate White finds himself immersed in a hotbed of international drug dealers, M-19 guerillas, and cannibalism scenes that may or may not be entirely simulated. It doesn’t take long for him to realize he’s in way over his head and that his success as an actor isn’t up for debate so much as his survival.
Wilson is being compared to Cormac McCarthy and with good reason; her prose is taut, her action thrilling, and her characters veer toward extremes – guilt-ridden kidnapers, ruthless Lolitas, a director who thinks setting the jungle on fire is a great way to get action footage of extras fleeing the flames. Movie buffs will find the story especially compelling since Wilson loosely bases it on the controversial 1970’s Italian horror film “Cannibal Holocaust”.
If all this sounds a bit over the top, make no mistake – “We Eat Our Own” is an expertly paced, rivetting novel with characters that may not be likeable, but are often unforgettable. Perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea – there’s graphic violence, White’s character of ‘Richard’ is portrayed entirely in the second person, and dialogue is written without quotation marks, so you have to pay attention to know who is speaking. All of this may take some getting used to, but don’t be deterred. “We Eat Our Own” is a harrowing and mesmerizing novel you won’t want to put down.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Readers of hardcore horror fiction were first introduced to Painfreak in a collection of short stories by author Gerard Houarner in 1996. Now Houarner is both a contributor to and editor of the new anthology INTO PAINFREAK, published by Necro Publications, Bedlam Press & Weird West Books.
INTO PAINFREAK features all new stories from some of horror’s top authors, including a new novelette by Edward Lee. Contributors include Monica O’Roarke, Wrath James White, K. Trap Jones, Linda Addison, Charlee Jacobs, and many others. I’m delighted that my own story “He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life” is part of the line-up – in my version of this Land of Erotic Enchantment, the entrance to Painfreak is a casita near Gallup, New Mexcio, guarded by a hybrid dog who administers the coveted ‘mark’ with its teeth.
For those not already familiar with the terrible delights of Painfreak, this entry from the blog of David G. Barnett, publisher, will give you an idea: “Welcome to Painfreak, the traveling club that arises out of the dark and calls to those seeking the ultimate in pleasure and pain. Many come to experience the ultimate in decadence and debauchery. And many get lost in a labyrinth filled with depraved sex, beautiful death, and wonderfully horrible sights. You’ve been given the mark, now step into the heart of…PAINFREAK.”
INTO PAINFREAK will be available on 12÷12÷16. Look for it at http://necropublications.com/products/into-the-heart-of-painfreak-trade-paperback– and become lost in its seductive monstrosities.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT was first published in Japan in 1986 and is considered among Mariko Koike’s best novels. With the English translation recently made available, she will surely find a wider audience for the horror and detective fiction for which she is known.
Readers looking for mayhem and a plot twist on every page may find the events in THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT unfold too gradually for their taste, but those willing to immerse themselves in the tale of a family trapped in an apparently haunted apartment building will find much to admire in this sleekly crafted novel of psychological horror.
Misao, her husband Teppei, and their daughter Tomao are a young family newly moved into an apartment whose sole drawback appears to be that it faces a graveyard. The fact that Tomao’s pet finch dies on the day of the move-in – and that Tomao claims she and the bird still converse – is just the beginning of a series of ominous goings-on, including an elevator apparently under the sway of malevolent forces.
The sense of dread is augmented by a guilty secret the couple shares, a tragedy that they’ve presumably put behind them. Or perhaps not, and it’s suppressed guilt blurring their judgement, because really, would a young couple with a child move into a building where smoke from a crematorium occasionally wafts toward the windows and gradually, all the other tenants are moving out? If you’re willing to accept that premise, however, the horror of an apartment building surrounded by the dead can gradually seep under one’s skin.
That said, however, THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT follows a well-trodden path, with obviously creepy occurances that escalate inevitably to the novel’s genuinely unnerving conclusion. Not a book to be savored alone at night or for apartment dwellers who dread a trip down to the basement.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
The horror the human mind can invent for the purpose of inflicting suffering on our fellows is on full display at this macabre and disturbing museum in the Old City of Carcassonne, France. The focus isn’t on the Spanish Inquisition, which lasted longer and is more widely known, but an earlier one – the Medieval Inquisition that followed a crusade by the Catholic Church against the so-called heretic Cathars. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Carcassonne and other medieval towns like Bezier and Albi were strongholds of Cathar beliefs, and the Museum showcases some of the nastier ways the Cathars were forced to confess to devil worship before, more often than not, being burned at the stake.
Among the devices on display are the iron maiden, the stretcher, the head crusher and the pulley device in which a victim whose wrists were bound behind her was hoisted into the air and then dropped down, often with weights attached to maximize the damage. To add to the grotesquerie, before being used, these instruments were often blessed with holy water.
Women accused of witchcraft seem to have made up a large number of the victims, but even an ‘overly talkative’ wife could be silenced behind an iron mask crafted with demon-like animal ears. One ghastly device was a sharp-ponted cone the woman was forced to straddle while weights fastened to her arms inexorably pulled her lower, for a slow, excruciating impalement.
Even musicians were at risk for torture – one sinister-looking device was, according to the description, used to punish “bad musicians”.
Would I recommend the Museum to anyone visiting the south of France? Well, on the one hand, to see these monstrous but carefully crafted instruments and realize they were actually used for their vile purpose, is depressing in the extreme. The sense of relief, however, upon walking back into the cobbled streets lined with bistros, boutiques, and stores selling fake swords and daggers, feels infinitely sweet!
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
A brilliant and mesmerizing novel by John Langan, THE FISHERMAN begins as a tale of two widowers and their attempts to come to terms with unimaginable grief. The narrator, Abe, lost his wife to cancer some years earlier; his friend Dan’s loss is more recent and, arguably, more brutal. Next to friendship, fishing is the greatest gift Abe has to offer Dan. In the search for new places to try their luck, Dan comes up with Dutchman’s Creek, which ominously enough, seems not to exist on any map and figures prominently in local lore.
Here Langan diverges from his original plot and goes into a lengthy, sometimes meandering story told by the owner of a diner where Dan and Abe stop on their way to Dutchman’s Creek; it’s a dark tale of sorcery and the fate of a man named Rainer and sets the background for what is to come.
With the history of Dutchman’s Creek established, Langan returns to Dan and Abe, their battle against the Fisherman, and the cosmic forces in league against them. Here Langan sweeps the reader into a mythic realm of monstrous sea creatures, surreal seascapes, and shapeshifters capable of changing from hideous denizens of the deep into that for which the men might sell their very souls.
Even with its fantastic imagery of a creek flowing through hell itself, THE FISHERMAN transcends genre. Above all, it remains a very human story of loss, friendship, and redemption that is sure to captivate a wide variety of readers.