Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
A simple question that sets in motion a hellish evil and a code word an unhappy wife hoped never to see precipitate the action in this impossible-to-put-down mix of occult horror and espionage thriller.
A clandestine operative named Lewis watches a terrifying video where a captive is forced to torture himself to death. The man in the video asks the fatal question “Who is Mr. White?” and Lewis, not understanding the danger, later poses the same question to a fellow agent. Not a good idea, for merely by questioning Mr. White’s identity the speak has summoned a malevolent force into her or his life – which will probably not last much longer at that point.
In one brief, significant excahange, a puzzzled operative is asked what tactic his mother used to frighten him as a boy — why, she invoked the bogeyman, of course, ready to punish even a small transgression in unspeakable ways. Mr. White is the real life version of that monster under the bed, except now he’s no fairy tale, but a malignant entity equipped with a diabolically sadistic bent along with a penchant for creative impalements.
Suffice it to say, you do not want to snag Mr. White’s attention.
Foster begins the novel with graphic horror and only ratchets it up from there, using multiple viewpoints and settings in Europe and the US, including a harrowing scene where Lewis rides the Berlin Night Express in a desperate bid to reach his family. Two major plotlines intertwine – while Lewis is fighting his way across Europe, his wife Cat and daughter Hedde face horrors of their own. In an attempt to escape Mr. White’s relentless pursuit, they seek refuge with their Uncle Gerard, a Christmas tree farmer in the moribund town of Flintlock, New Hampshire, and a man who harbors secrets of his own.
Outstanding among a host of memorable characters is teenaged Hedde, who learns about self-sufficiency and survival from her gritty uncle and secretly dabbles in the occult behind the red door in the attic.
MR. WHITE is so good I found myself reading more slowly as I neared the end. Foster’s writing is superb, and I wanted to savor every sentence. Truly a stand-out novel not to be missed!
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADELE BEDEAU, a dark and elegantly written literaray crime novel, is set in a small Alsatian town as drab as the book’s protagonist. Here Manfred Baumann plods through his never-varying daily routine: lunch at the Restaurant de la Cloche, bridge game with the boys on Thursdays, a surreptitious visit to a brothel once a week, where he manages to accomplish his mission fully clothed while his ‘partner’ remains almost motionless.
Burnet’s attention to detail and the precision with which he builds the character of Manfred and his nemesis, Detective Gorski, make for a fascinating and compelling read. Skillfully, Burnet pits them against each other, the unstable loner Manfred and the dogged Gorski, still tormented by the murder case he was unable to solve years ago.
The novel is also a cautionary tale about the perils of spending too much time immersed in one’s own dark thoughts, and Baumann’s mind is clearly a dangerous place to dwell. Adrift in an ocean of beer, wine, and paranoia, he fancies the world is watching. Should he deviate from even the smallest detail of his routine – say, ordering a different dish on the day he habitually orders something else – he frets that this will elicit gasps of amazement from the restaurant’s other patrons and soon become town-wide gossip. Comical at first, it becomes more sinister as we learn more about Baumann’s early life, his controlling and contemptuous grandfather, and the dreadful secret he carries with him.
Where the novel falls short is in the lack of attention paid to its female characters. Alhough Adele Bedeau’s disappearance provides the catalyst for all that follows, in her brief appearance in the book, she’s a cipher, a sullen young woman who apparently dislikes her job and has a secret boyfriend, but little else. Even Baumann, who obsessively observes her, acknowledges he’s never given any thought to what her life is like or who she is. There’s also a brief and rather puzzling love interest for Baumann that, given his personality, goes about where you’d expect it to, and a look at Gorski’s snobbish and unpleasant wife who regrets her marriage to a lowly law enforcement officer.
Although once the mystery is solved, some readers may be tempted to skip the Afterward, don’t do this, for Burnet isn’t done with us yet. He provides an entire history of the novel’s supposed author, one ‘Raymond Brunet” who had a life oddly similar to Manfred’s.
Altogether a gripping little mystery, both stylish and macabre!
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Travels to the lands of the living, the dead and the damned describes the stories in Fatal Journeys. The Butsudan, included in the new signed Limited Edition, is a story about sex, death and the ghosts of Japanese ancestors. Here is The Butsudan for your enjoyment:
Hiroshi-san died at the start of the New Year. Now, nine months later, it is the beginning of Obon, the festival of the dead in Japan, and he is due to come home for a visit.
As I trudge back from the market, I can sense the happy excitement and anticipation of the people around me, many of them already wearing yukatas, lightweight summer kimonos, in preparation for the dancing that will start tonight, but all I feel is a profound, stomach-turning dread.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
MY ABSOLUTE DARLING, Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel, is the gripping, often shocking tale of Turtle, a fourteen-year-old girl attempting to survive in two worlds: that of her school, where she struggles over vocabulary words and treats female peers with a casual misogyny and that of her home, where her father’s tutelage in firearms, survivalist training, and the kind of mental and physical toughness that would do credit to a hardened commando, has come at a terrible price.
Turtle’s love/hate for her father Martin has evolved in a climate of physical abuse, casual camaraderie, and constant indoctrination in his toxic world view. Martin is a fascinating, yet terrifying character, a man so damaged that he nicknames his daughter ‘kibble’, like the food fed to dogs, and prepares for an end of the world that one senses he’s more than a little eager to see.
Turtle is not, however, without allies. An alcoholic grandfather in the trailer nearby attempts to help her, a perceptive teacher offers sanctuary, and a schoolmate named Rilke, herself the victim of Turtle’s bullying, makes overtures of friendship. Each is foiled by Turtle’s fierce insistence that nothing is wrong at her home.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
I’m a latecomer to Malerman’s gripping novel, BIRD BOX, which was published in 2014, but perhaps some other fans of horror and post-apocalyptic fiction have missed out on it, too.
BIRD BOX, which gets its name from the caged birds whose cooing is supposed to warn of approaching intruders, is a fast-paced, intensely creepy tale that starts with an ambitious premise – the world is suddenly populated with creatures that, once looked upon, drive humans into a suicidal rage.
We meet Malorie, a young woman on a twenty mile boat trip upriver with her two children, the unnamed Boy and Girl. All are blindfolded. Malorie relies on the children’s preternaturally keen sense of hearing to tell her when danger is near. Malerman does a fine job of ratcheting up the suspense as the trio approach potential threats. Is that rustling in the bushes a human being? Is that musky smell a prowling wolf or dog? Malorie and the kids are never sure, but to give in to temptation and remove the blindfolds could mean a swift and violent death.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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