Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
This premier collection by Dino Parenti, published by Crystal Lake Publishing, showcases sixteen beautifully written stories that delve into the darker aspects of American life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The stories are grouped by theme and time period, from the seventies to present day and into a post-apocalyptic future and include a number of different genres, science fiction, horror, mystery and western, to name a few.
Among the stories that stood out for me is “On the Fickle Nature of Germination,” which chronicles the journey of a deadly virus from the ice fields of Patagonia to the far corners of the world when two scientists discover the frozen remains of a couple who died in each other’s arms. Ironically the narrator and her husband were trying to start a family when they misguidedly thawed out the dead lovers, dubbed Lady and Gentleman. What begins as a touching, almost romantic tale turns into something very different when Lady and Gentleman are found to have succumbed to a virulent plague now unleashed upon the planet.
Outstanding even in a collection of so many superb stories is “Stratum,” whose protagonist plans to exit the International Space Station for a close up ‘look’ at the impactor meteor Perses, now on a collision course with earth. His mission is to launch a group of Remembrance Spheres that will offer insight to future space travelers about what life on earth was like before being extinguished by Perses, but his personal quest may interfere.
“The Mother-of-Pearl Way,” a quietly harrowing story of a post-apocalypse earth, begins with an almost fairytale quality. A young girl witnessing the aftermath of a ritual fight-to-the-death asks her wise grandfather, “Why do we keep doing this?” and then risks her life to create a better future for her people.
Finally, the title story “Dead Reckoning” depicts a brutal battle of wills between a suicidal priest and a vigilante cop driven to murder by a flaccid legal system. Parenti skillfully unspools their conflicted pasts as the two men endure a torturous trek through Death Valley.
To sum up: DEAD RECKONING AND OTHER STORIES is speculative fiction at its finest, a brilliant collection that deserves to be savored, contemplated, and read again.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
The title of award-winning author Eric J. Guignard’s debut collection of short stories hints at things unruly and disruptive, environments possibly dangerous and certainly beyond human control. Among them: an inhospitable desert where a desperate woman hopes footprints will lead her to safety and a beach where a tsunami that wiped out a young woman’s family leaves behind a mysterious doll. Guignard’s ability to uses expertly drawn locales to evoke feelings make these sixteen tales all the more memorable and haunting.
Some of the stories straddle the line between genres, as in “The Last Days of Gunslinger John Amos,” a story which combines elements of westerns, horror, and science fiction in a tale about a good-hearted gunslinger struggling to save the lives of five kids not his own. In “Dreams of a Little Suicide” an offer of a chance to play a munchkin in the Wizard of Oz evokes the tone of a romance until events take a darker turn.
Many of Guignard’s stories involve ordinary people forced to try to adapt to the surreal and the weird. In “Certain Sights of an Afflicted Woman,” a woman’s infected eye enables her to see beyond the dusty, windswept prairie town now populated only by corpses, including that of her sister, who was gifted with a different kind of “sight.” And in “Whispers of the Earth,” he looks at grief through the eyes of a widower in a town where people are disappearing into sinkholes that appear on the ten-year anniversary of a tragedy.
The intriguingly titled “A Case Study in Natural Selection and How It Applies to Love” posits a super-heated world where watching a friend spontaneously combust is nothing out of the ordinary and winning your dream girl comes down to staying alive longer than the rest of her suitors.
Guignard brings to his writing a gift for vivid, sometimes luminous imagery, as when he describes the unraveling of a woman’s mental state as “…Margie’s imagination, previously a mouse slumbering in some dark crevice of her brain, began to wake and scurry about, gnawing on common sense…”
That Which Grows Wild cements Guignard’s already considerable reputation as an adept and masterful storyteller. Readers who relish dark fiction rich with compelling characters and forbidding landscapes won’ be disappointed.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
This is not your average horror anthology. In addition to offering twenty stories (full disclosure: mine is one of them) that incorporate one of the five senses, it also offers a wealth of scientific information about the brain and just how we process sensory input.
The book is divided into five sections of four stories each devoted to the five senses. Among the contributors: authors John Farris, Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, Darrell Schweitzer, and Richard Christian Matheson.
An engrossing Introduction by Jessica Bayliss, PhD looks at “Why Do Horror Stories Work? The Psychobiology of Horror,” in which she explores how the brain, particularly the amygdala, triggers our emotions and how mirror neurons aid in creating experiences. And how do these psychological mechanisms get their data to begin with? Through the senses, of course – which is what nightmares in real life and in horror fiction are made of!
Bayliss opens each of the sections with a discussion of how that particular sense relates to fiction, so that readers may experience fear or revulsion vicariously through the brain’s receptors. This means, in other words, that we experience shivers not just when we watch a centipede crawl across the floor, but when we read about a character in a horror story who watches one.
In addition to Bayliess’s comments, the anthology includes a fascinating essay by Eric J. Guignard “Understanding and Incorporating the Five Human Senses into Modern Horror Short Fiction” that will intrigue anyone who writes horror or aspires to do so.
And in the Afterword, “Sensation and Perception,” K.H.Vaughan PhD raises some thought-provoking questions:
How different are my perceptions from yours?
Does a reality exist independently of our perceptions?
Can perceptions be trusted at all? (And what happens if the answer is no?)
In short, The Five Senses of Horror offers an illuminating look at how modern horror fiction manages to evoke fear through each of the senses – a must read for horror writers, readers, and students alike.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Paul Tremblay’s terrifying new novel THE CABIN ATTHE END OF THE WORLD plays on the fear of the danger that shows up out of the blue– brutal and overwhelming, but also inscrutable. Are the bad guys an assortment of psychos who found each other online or are they basically decent people trying to save humanity from annihilation?
And if your life and the lives of your loved ones are at stake, how much does the distinction really matter?
Married couple Eric and Andrew are faced with that question when they and their adopted daughter Wen are spending what was intended to be an idyllic weekend at a remote cabin. Wen catches grasshoppers. Andrew and Eric relax on the porch. A man walks up the road and talks to Wen. He seems amiable and harmless, but he also makes promises to the little girl that, as the reader will soon find out, he is powerless to keep.
Using a masterful take on the horror of home invasion, Tremblay keeps the reader guessing right to the last paragraph, as Andrew, Eric, and Wen struggle to outwit captors who are by turns, politely apologetic for the inconvenience and stunningly violent. Are they insane? Or are they four selfless heroes forced into an unthinkable situation? Or is the whole nightmare an act of vengeance instigated by a violent homophobe, as Andrew theorizes?
As the ordeal progresses, each man forms his own ideas about how to deal with their situation. Do they placate their captors? Fight back? Try to make them see reason?
Or, most frightening of all, do they consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, these people aren’t crazy at all and what they’re claiming is actually true?
Therein lies not just the road to madness, but also a helluva good novel.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Lovers Mike and Verity play a game fraught with danger. They call it “The Crave” and it hinges on Verity’s ability to attract would-be suitors and muscular Mike’s skill at fending them off. In a nightclub, Verity hangs out alone at the bar until a man approaches. She teases and flirts until, upon a signal from her, Mike storms over and intervenes. “I love seeing how scared they are of you,” says Verity, as they find a dark corner where they can have sex.
Writing from the point of view of Mike, author Araminta Hall depicts a man whose wretched childhood has left him so damaged he is powerless to recognize the depth of his delusions. After the pair split up and Verity rashly invites Mike to her wedding to Angus Metcalf (“London’s most eligible bachelor”), Mike convinces himself the marriage itself is part of an elaborate “Crave” meant to punish him for a brief infidelity.
Of course Mike’s creepy obsession with Verity and his inability to believe she really does love her new husband can lead to nothing good. When the novel opens, Mike is telling his story from prison where he’s being held for murder. Whose murder, we find out later.
OUR KIND OF CRUELTY is a page-turner I read almost at one sitting. My only quibble with the novel is that at times characters behave so foolishly that their actions defy all reason except as a plot device. Instead, a tragedy that could have been averted by simply involving the police or hiring a private security team is allowed to run its violent course.
Still, in every other respect the novel is far too compelling and well-done to pass up.
In her afterword, Hall points out what many women sadly already know, that we live in a world where “women must be perfect, men are allowed to get away with murder.”
OUR KIND OF CRUELTY does a stellar job of illustrating that point.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
TIDE OF STONE, Kaaron Warren’s spellbinding dark fantasy novel, raises questions about morality, justice, and the nature of compassion – who deserves it, and is there anyone who doesn’t? What about the living husks inside the Time Ball Tower, some of the worst criminals in history who are, by turns, manipulative and child-like, cunning and vicious?
Narrator Phillipa Muskett has grown up in the town of Tempuston, Australia, within sight of the Time Ball Tower off shore. Each day at precisely 1:05 p.m. a large ball drops, perhaps a reminder to the men and women imprisoned there that they have stepped outside time as most of us know it. Given the choice between death and eternal life, they chose the latter and now have nothing but time to experience the enormity of their mistake.
Citizens of Tempuston serve as Keepers in the Tower for one year. When Phillipa gets a chance to become a Keeper, she sees it as an unpleasant but necessary way to redirect the path of her life. She’s right, of course, but in ways she could never foresee. The previous Keepers have left written reports, some cryptic, others detailed, of their stay in the Tower, and these provide Phillipa with an understanding of the prison’s history and of the Keepers who preceded her here.
By its end, TIDE OF STONE becomes even more deeply unsettling as we realize, along with Phillipa that the Tower holds secrets even more terrible than the disintegrating human wrecks inhabiting it.
A book that begs to be read more than once, TIDE OF STONE combines genuinely creepy horror with the tangled psychological games played between Phillipa and the people she watches over – and sometimes torments and is tormented by.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Usually I write about horror fiction. This time I’m writing about real-world horror and how author and self-termed “violence expert” Tim Larkin would have us prepare for it.
“Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it’s the only answer.”
Thus begins this fascinating self-defense book, in which Larkin discusses two types of violence: social aggression and asocial violence. Both are best avoided, but are far different in terms of lethal intent. Social aggression, as Larkin defines it, involves showy, chest-beating behavior (usually between males) and is basically a jockeying for position in the social hierarchy. Larkin stresses there’s only one intelligent way to deal with it. You back down, apologize for whatever the guy thinks you did, and buy him a drink. Better than a lawsuit for involuntary manslaughter or a lengthy hospital stay for yourself. In short, when it comes to these displays of male dominence, fighting is rarely worth it.
With asocial violence, on the other hand, there’s no talking your way out of it. It comes at you from behind at an ATM or in a dark parking garage, with a bigger, stronger, faster assailant who has no qualms about maiming or killing you. In fact, maiming and killing may be the goal.
For this kind of kill-or-be-killed situation, Larkin presents a wealth of anecdotes: the kind where the good gal or guy triumphs in a terrifying situation and the kind where, tragically, the opposite occurs and the wrong person ends up in a puddle of blood.
So how does the average Jane or Joe disable a much stronger attacker?
Larkin goes into great detail, with diagrams for good measure, about how all human bodies, nomatter how formidable-looking, are vulnerable to certain devastating injuries if the other person knows how to inflict those injuries and is able and willing to do so (a crushed trachea and gouged-out eyeball being two examples.)
In his classes, Larkin reports that seventy percent of the people who sign up only do so AFTER surviving a violent attack. The proactive student just wanting to be prepared is rare in his experience, and Larkin wants to change that. Aside from detailed explanations of how to crush, snap, and generally destroy various parts of an attacker’s body, he also offers some obvious but important tips: ditch the earbuds and put down the phone in public, listen to your intuition, and avoid the ATM after dark. Like jungle animals, we need our senses on high alert; the distracted are easy targets.
At the same time, Larkin himself comes across as a fundamentally non-violent sort who reminds the reader over and over that violence is the last resort, no matter how highly trained you may be.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Take four of the world’s top horror writers, add an ambitious media mogul and his tech-savvy girlfriend, mix in a creepy old house where two savage murders took place and a dash of spookery in the form of two deceased sisters, and you’ve got the ingredients for KILL CREEK, Scott Thomas’s terrific debut novel.
Thomas’s premise is both straightforward and intriguing: media tycoon Wainwright invites extreme horror writer T.C. Moore, Christian YA novelist Daniel Slaughter, legendary horror writer Sebastian Cole, and famous but faltering gothic horror writer Sam McGarver to spend Halloween night in the notorious Finch House. No one is any too keen about the idea, but each can use the publicity, not to mention the cash.
The fateful night in the haunted Finch mansion proves disturbing enough, with a few genuinely scary moments as well as a mean-spirited on-air interview by their host, but the next day all four writers leave the house, shaken but apparently unscathed.
The Finch House has let them off easy. Or so it would appear.
The real horror begins later, first foreshadowed by a tragedy that strikes Daniel Slaughter on the day they depart the house. After that, all four experience a period of writing so obsesssive there’s barely time to eat or sleep as each creates their own version of a novel based upon the Finch House. Soon it becomes apparent the Finch House was only toying with them that first night, letting them leave in order to lure them all back for a final, deadly battle with the supernatural.
Thomas’s writing is vivid, even at times lyrical, despite a plot that doesn’t shy away from violence and gore. His characters reflect the reality behind their work and the urgent creativity that’s sometimes rooted in trauma, loss, and physical abuse. To a person, they cover their scars carefully, and the Finch House is all too ready to expose each painful truth.
KILL CREEK is Thomas’s debut novel and a finalist for Best First Novel for the 2017 Bram Stoker Awards. It’s a brilliant beginning that left me already looking forward to his next book.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Leila Slimani’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel delves into the tormented mind of Louise, the ultimate nanny, who doubles as housekeeper, gourmet chef, and organizer of childrens’ parties and outings, without extra pay. She’s also a working parent’s worse nightmare: a woman whose doll-like, Mary Poppins exterior conceals a damaged psyche rife with resentment, obsession, and rage.
THE PERFECT NANNY chronicles the relationship between Paul and Myriam, two ambitious professionals in Paris’s tony 10th arrondissement, and Louise, the nanny too good to be true who does the unthinkable.
“She’s our employee, not our friend,” Paul reminds his wife, but because Louise has become so invaluable, it’s a point they both keep conveniently overlooking.
There’s no mystery here as far as the crime. On the first page, we’re told, “The baby is dead.” The question, of course, is not who murdered baby Adam and his older sister Mila, but what demons drove Louise to kill them. To that end, Slimani takes us into her stark and lonely world, the sparse apartment where she spends as little time as possible, the abusive husband who left her with crushing debts, the landlord who hounds her for money.
Her days spent in her employers’ chic apartment mean freedom to Louise, and she makes the most of them. With the older child at school and the parents working, she luxuriates in a long, hot shower, then glides nude around the apartment, her skin pearlescent with Miryam’s expensive creams.
Only occasionally does the unseemly surface, as when Paul comes home to find Louise has tarted up his daughter in full glamour make-up. Disgusted, he pulls away from Louise after that, but by then the unequal relationship has progressed too far, making Louise almost impossible to dislodge. While Louise obsesses over whether Myriam is pregnant again, the parents ponder ways to gracefully let her go. It’s that terrible disparity – the nanny’s fantasies of being part of a family when she is, in fact, hired help – that brings the novel back full circle to its devastating opening lines.
Although the ending disappoints, leaving the reader to the observations of the police detective going over the scene, as a whole I found the novel engrossing on many levels – as a crime thriller and as a social commentary on class distinction, economic disparity, and motherhood.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
The paperback edition of THE BEAUTY OF DEATH – DEATH BY WATER, edited by Alessandro Manzanetti and Jodi Renee Lester for Independent Legions Press, is now available through Amazon.
This gargantuan anthology includes thirty-nine stories by “some of the greatest writers of horror and dark fiction,” in which water plays the role of both accomplice and executioner. With accidental drownings, irresistile calls of sirens from the deep, strange whispering from household plumbing, faces of the dead in droplets of water, rabid fish, leviathan monsters, and more, these stories will make you think twice about taking that long-awaited cruise, going for a midnight swim, or taking your next shower.
Take a look at the Table of Contents:
HIPPOCAMPUS by Adam Nevill
YOU WILL COME TO NO HARM IN WATER by Lucy Taylor
ANTUMBRA by Lucy Snyder
TO TAKE THE WATER DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP by Frazer Lee
THE DROWNING OF COLIN HENDERSON by Stephen Gregory
THE OLD WOMAN AND THE SEA by Marge Simon
THE EVERLASTING by Anthony Watson
THE BALLAD OF BALLARD AND SANDRINE by Peter Straub
THE DEEPEST PART OF THE OCEAN by Joanna Parypinski
WALKING ON WATER by Dona Fox
A SONG ONLY PARTIALLY HEARD by John Langan
THE WASH by Lisa Morton
WET SEASON by Dennis Etchison
THE TARN by Simon Bestwick
WINGS MADE FROM WATER by John Palisano
RAISED BY THE MOON by Ramsey Campbell
EVEN THE STARS FALL by Nicola Lombardi
COME UP by Brian Evenson
UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL by Michael Bailey
RIVER WATCH by Bruce Boston
PERISCOPE OF THE DEAD by Paolo Di Orazio
GILLS by David J. Schow
ORI by Adam Millard
BY THE SEA by Alessandro Manzetti
DROWNING by Gregory L. Norris
SEA SLUG by Edward Lee
THE HIKER by Jeremy Megargee
EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH by Time Waggoner
SCAPE-GOAT by Clive Barker
THE FOURTH BELL by Daniel Braum
SIREN by Jonah Buck
THE DOUBLE LENS by Lisa Mannetti
JUST WATCH ME NOW by Jodi Renee Lester
BORN OF DARK WATERS by Michael H. Hanson
THE GORGE OF CHILDREN by Daniele Bonfanti
FRESH CATCH by Michael Arnzen
A JOURNEY OF GREAT WAVES by Eric J. Guignard
IN THE DREAMTIME OF LADY RESURRECTION by Caitlin R. Kiernan