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.”

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.

Read more …

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.

Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

Char­lotte Wood’s new novel, a tale of bru­tal misog­yny set in the Aus­tralian out­back, is both riv­et­ting and, at times, almost painfully intense. Ten young women are drugged, impris­oned, and forced to toil at back­break­ing labor under the super­vi­sion of two men, one a not-​too-​bright yoga prac­ti­tioner (when he isn’t play­ing at prison guard), the other a sadist obsessed with which of the women he’d rape should his mys­te­ri­ous ‘boss’ give him the go-​ahead.

The reader soon learns that each of the cap­tives has some­how trans­gressed the soci­etal rules gov­ern­ing the proper con­duct for women, espe­cially in mat­ters sex­ual. One slept with a priest, another took part in an orgy, yet another had the mis­for­tune to be gang­banged. Wood focuses on two of the women, the brainy Verna, who tries to believe she is ‘dif­fer­ent’ and that her lover Andrew will even­tu­ally res­cue her, and the wily, phys­i­cally pow­er­ful Yolanda, who knows full well no one com­ing to save her and, over time, returns to a feral state, hunt­ing rab­bits and dream­ing of “push­ing her sharp teeth through the soft belly flesh of a zebra”.

Wood’s writ­ing is vivid and often lyri­cal, as when she describes a mag­i­cal inva­sion of hun­dreds of kan­ga­roos, who bound across the camp in ‘thump­ing syn­co­pa­tion” or a flock of cock­a­toos that resem­ble “white laun­dry on a line.” Even in scenes involv­ing great suf­fer­ing, both human and ani­mal, her prose often cap­tures a kind of tran­scen­dent beauty.

As pow­er­ful and dis­turb­ing as this novel is, how­ever, I must admit I found the end­ing dis­ap­point­ing. The image of the women swoon­ing over designer bags and lav­ish make-​up prod­ucts, items that were tro­phy pos­ses­sions in their old lives, rang false to me. On the other hand, given the soci­ety in which we live, I can see how oth­ers might find Wood’s end­ing not only shock­ing but utterly satisfying.

Def­i­nitely a book that needs to be read and dis­cussed by women and men alike.

Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

HEX is the first of Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s five nov­els to be trans­lated into Eng­lish, a pow­er­ful and riv­et­ing tale of witch­craft and a town’s slow and ghastly descent into madness.

In 1664 Kather­ine van Wyler was forced to kill her own child and then sen­tenced to death for witch­craft in the Hud­son Val­ley town of Black Spring – a crime the towns­peo­ple have been pay­ing for ever since. Katherine’s ghost pops up every­where, in the midst of a town fes­ti­val, at the bed­side of a child, in plain view on Main Street. She makes for a pathetic fig­ure, bound in iron chains, her mouth and eyes sewn shut to pre­vent her from caus­ing more havoc.

Yet havoc she does cause. Res­i­dents of Black Spring may leave the town for short dura­tions, but for those that linger too long in the out­side world, the urge for sui­cide becomes over­pow­er­ing. You buy a house in Black Spring, as one newly arrived cou­ple learns, you never get to leave.

Teenager Tyler Grant finds the lim­i­ta­tions of life in Black Spring intol­er­a­ble. He recruits some friends, includ­ing one bud­ding sociopath, to help him post videos of the witch on the inter­net, thus vio­lat­ing Black Spring’s most pow­er­ful taboo – thou shalt not let the out­side world know about the witch. What begins as lit­tle more than a prank unleashes an ever-​widening cir­cle of hell, one that sweeps Tyler and his fam­ily up in a hor­rific chain of events.

Heuvelt rewrote the Dutch ver­sion of HEX for an Amer­i­can audi­ence, chang­ing the set­ting to the Hud­son Val­ley and, accord­ing to the author, writ­ing a new and even more shock­ing end­ing. What­ever the lan­guage, it’s a chill­ing novel on many lev­els – from cruel sev­en­teenth cen­tury cus­toms to a har­row­ing and deeply dis­turb­ing vision of human nature.

Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

There are many ways a nov­el­ist can write about the unrav­el­ing of civ­i­lized impulses, but for sheer hor­ror, noth­ing rivals the LORD OF THE FLIES-​style bar­barism of the young and ‘inno­cent’, who we may naively imgaine have not yet attained their full capac­ity for sadism.

In James Newman’s riv­et­ing ODD MAN OUT, the degen­er­a­tion into sav­agery takes place at the Black Moun­tain Camp for Boys, where Den­nis Munce, the fifteen-​year-​old nar­ra­tor, has been deposited by his globe-​trotting par­ents. His one friend is the shy and effem­i­nate Wes­ley West­more, who becomes the tar­get of relent­less bul­ly­ing. At first Munce tells him­self the name-​calling and crude homo­pho­bic jokes are not seri­ous: after all “it was all in fun. Just words.” But as the abuse esca­lates, he’s torn between his own inher­ent decency and the urge for self-​preservation.

With two camp coun­selors side­lined due to a car acci­dent, the boys are basi­cally unsu­per­vised. Munce fan­ta­sizes about tak­ing a heroic stand against the psy­cho­pathic pack leader, but when his own safety is on the line, the choice is clear: “Stand­ing up to a bully in defense of a friend meant sign­ing your own death warrant.”

Years after the week at Black Moun­tain Camp, Munce still strug­gles with what hap­pened and tries in small ways to make up for his com­plic­ity in the tragedy. But can he ever really atone?

ODD MAN OUT is cer­tainly a page-​turner, but make no mis­take: it’s not only engross­ing, but deeply disturbing.

Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

Is the same man who risked his life to save a friend dur­ing the Viet­nam War also capa­ble of rap­ing and mur­der­ing a fourteen-​year-​old girl? Does one act of herosim make impos­si­ble the one of sav­agery? Or is char­ac­ter so fluid and per­son­al­ity so elas­tic that any­one may be capa­ble of anything?

These are some of the ques­tions col­lege stu­dent Joe Tal­bert finds him­self deal­ing with when he opts to ful­fill an Eng­lish assign­ment by inter­view­ing and writ­ing a biog­ra­phy about Carl Iver­son, con­victed mur­derer, now an old man dying of can­cer in a nurs­ing home. Joe’s bur­dens extend far beyond the aca­d­e­mic ones: his alco­holic mother spins in and out of his life like a recur­ring car crash, leav­ing Joe to take care of his autis­tic brother Jeremy.

At first, much of Joe’s inter­est in Iver­son lies in the fact that a pretty neigh­bor, Lila Nash, finds the case fas­ci­nat­ing, but lit­tle by lit­tle, he comes to ques­tion Iverson’s guilt. With his mother in a down­ward spi­ral, Joe also has to decide just how much he’s will­ing to sac­ri­fice for his brother. Eskens’ nar­ra­tive is grip­ping, his char­ac­ters endowed with all the frail­i­ties and con­tra­dic­tions of human nature. By the end, I found myself root­ing for a happy out­come for both Joe and Jeremy, who despite his men­tal chal­lenges, helps Joe and Lila uncode a diary that’s vital to Iverson’s case.

By the final chap­ters of the book, the plot twists ratchet up the sus­pense as Joe makes a har­row­ing escape from the clutches of a reli­gious zealot and Lila faces an even dead­lier threat from an unex­pected source. The end­ing may strike some read­ers as a bit too ‘sto­ry­book’, but after every­thing Joe, Lila, and Jeremy have been through, I found it satisfying.

Although THE LIFE WE BURY was pub­lished in 2014, I dis­cov­ered it only recently. Hav­ing read it, now I’m eager to begin read­ing Eskens’ other novels.