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.

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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.

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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.

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

This remark­able, even mes­mer­iz­ing, novel was first pub­lished in South Korea nearly a decade ago, where it became an inter­na­tional best­seller. Only recently has the book gained wide acclaim in this coun­try, after being trans­lated by British trans­la­tor Deb­o­rah Smith.

While not hor­ror in the tra­di­tional sense, THE VEG­E­TAR­IAN con­tains plenty of sur­real images and graphic, often dis­turb­ing vio­lence and sex. Yeong-​hye is a melan­choly and sub­mis­sive house­wife whose bland life is upended when dread­ful dreams of butchered ani­mals drive her to throw out all the meat in the freezer and announce that she is hence­forth veg­e­tar­ian. This seem­ingly innocu­ous deci­sion sends her rigidly tra­di­tional fam­ily into a tailspin.

Clearly the social mores of Yeong-hye’s world con­strain females to a lesser sta­tus. Her author­i­tar­ian father, in a fit of rage, tries to force pork into her mouth. Tellingly, when Yeong-​hye snatches up a knife, it’s not to fend off his brutish attack, but to slash her own wrists.

The book is told in three sec­tions, the first nar­rated by Yeong-hye’s clue­less and indif­fer­ent hus­band, the sec­ond by her smit­ten brother-​in-​law, the third by her sis­ter, who strug­gles to save Yeong-​hye and keep the fam­ily together. Yeong-hye’s own voice is sel­dom heard, as she retreats more deeply into a delu­sional world of silence and self-​starvation.

Tube-​fed in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal, Yeong-​hye fan­cies she can turn her­self into a tree. As her fran­tic sis­ter offers her one favorite food after another, each of which is rejected, Yeong-​hye asks, “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”

Why indeed? In one poignant pas­sage, doubt is cast as to who is the pris­oner and who isn’t, as Yeong-hye’s sis­ter admits she is unable to for­give Yeong-​hye for “soar­ing alone over a bound­ary she her­self could never bring her­self to cross, unable to for­give that mag­nif­i­cent irre­spon­si­bil­ity that had enabled Yeong-​hye to shuck off social con­straints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.”

The reader is left with a haunt­ing image of Yeong-​hye, still cling­ing to life, being rushed to yet another hos­pi­tal. Her bizarre obses­sion with becom­ing a tree has destroyed her body. Whether or not it has also freed her from some­thing even worse appears to be still in question.

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

Michael Griffin’s THE LURE of DEVOUR­ING LIGHT is the short story col­lec­tion of an excep­tional writer, whose evoca­tive, lyri­cal tales are impos­si­ble to for­get. Griffin’s work has been described as “quiet hor­ror”, a sub­genre of Weird Fic­tion. Con­sid­er­ing that Griffin’s prose is both bold and often graphic, the descrip­tion may be some­what misleading.

Nature – seduc­tive, tan­ta­liz­ing, and ulti­mately unknow­able – is fre­quently the set­ting of these sto­ries. In “Far From Streets”, city dwellers Dane and Car­olyn seek renewal by spend­ing week­ends at a cabin Dane built by hand. Sin­is­ter omens abound – from the bird that beats itself to death try­ing to escape the newly fin­ished cabin to the starv­ing young man who seems to be keep­ing watch on them. In the mid­dle of this daunt­ing land­scape, Dane and Car­olyn become lost in more ways than one. As Grif­fin writes of the belea­gered Dane, “Noth­ing had pre­pared him for the pos­si­bil­ity of mean­ings deeper than office toil, with short breaks for television.”

In “Dream­ing Awake In the Tree of the World”, the enig­matic Nomia appears to be a tree-​dwelling nature sprite, a kinswoman per­haps to Rima in GREEN MAN­SIONS. She has res­cued the ill-​fated Tomas and nursed him back to health high in the tree­tops. But in Griffin’s work, real­ity is rarely what it seems. Is Tomas safe in the heart of lush, wild nature or is he fac­ing some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent and more deadly?

In “The Acci­dent of Sur­vival”, a ter­ri­fy­ing near-​miss on the high­way leaves two peo­ple badly shaken. As they con­tinue to their des­ti­na­tion, how­ever, it becomes increas­ingly unclear who’s sur­vived and who per­haps hasn’t, and how peo­ple “shaken loose from life” can strug­gle to reclaim reality.

Griffin’s prose sings, but his for­mi­da­ble power resides in his abil­ity to make us doubt our own senses, his abil­ity to explore the deeply unsta­ble and shapeshift­ing nature of what we blithely con­sider ‘reality’.

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

The story of James Edward Deeds, Jr., who cre­ated this col­lec­tion of haunt­ing sketches while locked inside a men­tal insti­tu­tion, is both inspir­ing and tremen­dously sad, an extreme case of cre­ativ­ity melded with men­tal illness.

Born in Nevada, Mis­souri, in 1907, James Edward Deeds was a shy boy abused by an author­i­tar­ian father. At age twenty-​eight, after con­fronting his brother Clay with a hatchet (whether seri­ously or in jest is unclear), he was taken to State Hos­pi­tal #3, where he would spend the next thirty-​seven years, under­go­ing drug ther­apy and elec­tro­con­vlul­sive shock ther­apy. His poignant draw­ings dur­ing that time – drawn on Hos­pi­tal ledger paper – came to light only recently, after hav­ing been lost to the world for over three decades.

Look­ing at Deeds’ draw­ings is a jour­ney to another world, not the one that Deeds actu­ally inhab­ited, but a quaint, gen­tle era of long-​haired women in plumed hats, grace­ful arbors, and stately pad­dle­boats. Despite their benign charm, the draw­ings seem infused with a quiet under­cur­rent of hor­ror. Deeds’ peo­ple stare out at the viewer with round, stunned eyes and pose stiffly, like peo­ple trau­ma­tized by some­thing so hor­rific that, once seen, can never be forgotten.

Some draw­ings seem to con­tain cryp­tic mes­sages. A par­tic­u­larly dis­turb­ing one, #33, shows a small, hat­ted man with the cap­tion WHY.DOCTOR. Daw­ings #94 and #95 con­tain the ini­tials ECT, a ref­er­ence to the ther­apy Deeds was forced to endure.

The book’s title comes from draw­ing #197, a metic­u­lous por­trait of a woman point­ing to a bou­quet of posies in her other hand. Deeds cap­tioned the draw­ing ECTLEC­TRC, a ‘mis­spelling’ of the word ‘elec­tric’ in which the ini­tials ECT occur twice and which some have inter­preted as another ref­er­ence to shock treatments.

Deeds story is a heart­break­ing one, and I found the 282 draw­ings both fas­ci­nat­ing and dif­fi­cult to look at. For all the sweet nos­tal­gia for some bygone era the artist never actu­ally knew, they are pow­er­ful and some­times wrench­ing to behold. His draw­ings are surely a tes­ti­mony to the spirit of some human beings to cre­ate art under the worst pos­si­ble circumstances.

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

It’s Feb­ru­ary again, and we all know what that means – Women in Hor­ror Month! This year, we’ve got the debut of Bil­lie Sue Mosiman’s FRIGHT MARE: WOMEN WRITE HOR­ROR, an anthol­ogy of twenty sto­ries by top-​notch female authors that puts to rest once and for all the notion that men some­how writer hor­ror ‘better.’

As author and anthol­o­gist Mosi­man points out, “Women have been writ­ing great hor­ror since Mary Shel­ley came out with Franken­stein,” yet there are still a few who think only male authors can deliver when it comes to the gory, the grue­some, and the grotesque. Not so! Girls kill, too (and some­times do a lot worse).

Among the ter­ri­fy­ing tales in FRIGHT MARE, you’ll find “Sakura Time” by Loren Rhoads, a won­der­fully creepy story of a man under the spell of a dead woman’s dolls; in Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “The Whole of the Wide­ness of Night”, you’ll meet a tor­mented girl who pays a ter­ri­ble price for tak­ing revenge on her broth­ers; and in “Snow Angel;” by Amy Grech, a father strug­gles with an unthink­able decision.

My story “Dead Mes­sen­gers” fea­tures an Anglo who goes by the name of Raimundo and falls under the sway of some inter­est­ing New Age beliefs, includ­ing those of “a crazy preacher-​lady who thinks you can fuck your way to God.” Maybe he can, maybe he can’t, but Raimundo’s sure going to try. Check out FRIGHT MARE to see how it all works out for him.

Look for FRIGHT MARE in Kin­dle and paper­back ver­sions at Ama​zon​.com.

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

Edited by Danel Olson and pub­lished by Cen­tipede Press, Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing: Stud­ies in the Hor­ror Film is an enor­mous tome packed with inside infor­ma­tion from cast and crew, includ­ing Jack Nichol­son, Shel­ley Duvall, Scat­man Crothers, the Shin­ing Twins, and even Lia Bel­dam, the actress who played the ghost of the woman in room 237.

This metic­u­lously researched vol­ume also includes illu­mi­nat­ing, some­times sur­pris­ing, essays by many of those who know the film best. In Tony Magistrale’s “Sutured Time: His­tory and Kubrick’s The Shin­ing”, we get a detailed look at Jack Torrance’s descent into insan­ity, includ­ing Stephen King’s thoughts on how Kubrick han­dled the col­lapse of the character’s emo­tional state and the speed with which Jack’s men­tal unrav­el­ing took place.

In “They Ate Each Other Up?”, Ber­nice M. Mur­phy looks at The Shin­ing as a tale with roots in the windigo of Native Amer­i­can leg­end, a the­sis she claims is rein­forced by the fre­quent ref­er­ences to can­ni­bal­ism in the film. Bev Vincent’s “The Genius Fal­lacy” analy­ses attempts to uncover mes­sages hid­den in The Shin­ing and how the search for this secret sub­text has even given us a new word – crypto-​kubrology. And in Danel Olson’s “Shin­ing Through the Labyrinth”, we’re treated to an intrigu­ing and thought-​provoking com­par­i­son between Kubrick’s work and that of Guillermo del Toro.

To com­plete this defin­i­tive vol­ume, there are dozens of pho­tographs of cast, crew, and set, as well as a detailed analy­sis of the film’s music and lit­tle known facts about scenes that were filmed but that never made it to the final cut.

In short, the book is a visual and lit­er­ary feast that can only enhance what Lee Unkrich calls “our dread for and per­verse inter­est in the Overlook.”

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

Luis Alberto Urrea’s short story col­lec­tion, The Water Museum, is an ode to the south­west­ern U.S., its con­tra­dic­tions and multi-​culturalism as well as its humor and tragedies. Urrea’s prose sings, often imbu­ing even the most mun­dane details with an unex­pected poignancy. Many of these sto­ries pack a wal­lop, some­times through sud­den vio­lence, other times through the grad­ual rev­e­la­tion of a character’s true nature.

The title story “The Water Museum”, is a pow­er­ful, apoc­a­lyp­tic piece in which chil­dren who have never known rain expe­ri­ence a sim­u­lated thun­der­storm while the adults grieve the loss of the world they once knew. “Amap­ola” is a tale of young lovers told from the view­point of a besot­ted teenaged Romeo who falls for the hot lit­tle sis­ter of his Mex­i­can friend. What begins as a saga of ado­les­cent long­ing changes dra­mat­i­cally when the story reaches its stun­ning conclusion.

Urrea pop­u­lates his fic­tion with a won­der­ful melt­ing pot of grin­gos, Chi­canos, and Indi­ans – some­times with hilar­i­ous results, as in “The Sous Chefs of Iogua”, in which an elderly farmer finds him­self in the mid­dle of a restau­rant war among com­pet­ing Mex­i­can chefs. Then there is the lovely and heart­break­ing story “Farewell to Her Many Horses”, where we meet Don, a Sioux deal­ing with the death of his sis­ter and the arrival on the reser­va­tion of her guilt-​ridden anglo hus­band. Don reap­pears in “Taped to the Sky”, a lighter story that has him lend­ing his rifle to a jilted hus­band bent on shoot­ing his car.

The col­lec­tion is also a show­case for Urrea’s love of music. The musi­cal ref­er­ences are numer­ous, every­thing from two bud­dies who bond over Lou Reed to a nod to Nine Inch Nails and Alice Cooper.

For lovers of beau­ti­fully crafted fic­tion as well as those with a deep inter­est in the south­west, The Water Museum is a col­lec­tion not to be missed.

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Cat­e­gory: Dark Fan­tasy Blog

I’m delighted to announce that my story “Wing­less Beasts” was selected by editor/​anthologist Ellen Dat­low for Best Hor­ror of the Year #7! This is a huge honor as you’ll see from the TOC of authors listed below.

The fol­low­ing is taken from Dark Wolf’s Fan­tasy Review:

Table of con­tents — “The Best Hor­ror of the Year, Vol­ume 7″ edited by Ellen Datlow

For the past sev­eral years one of my high­lights of each read­ing cal­en­dar is Ellen Dat­low’s series of antholo­gies, “The Best Hor­ror of the Year”. Each year, since 2009, “The Best Hor­ror of the Year” not only rewarded me with some excel­lent short sto­ries, but it also offered me the pos­si­bil­ity to dis­cover plenty of oth­ers through the list of hon­or­able men­tions pub­lished by Ellen Dat­low in every vol­ume. This year “The Best Hor­ror of the Year” sees the pub­li­ca­tion of its 7^th vol­ume and yet again Ellen Datlow’s anthol­ogy comes with a very inter­est­ing list of short sto­ries and a catchy, sug­ges­tive cover artwork.

“[Hor­ror fic­tion] shows us that the con­trol we believe we have is purely illu­sory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and obliv­ion.” —Clive Barker

For over three decades, Ellen Dat­low has been at the cen­ter of hor­ror. Bring­ing you the most fright­en­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing sto­ries, Dat­low always has her fin­ger on the pulse of what hor­ror read­ers crave. Now, with the sev­enth vol­ume of this series, Dat­low is back again to bring you the sto­ries that will keep you up at night.

With each pass­ing year, sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, and the march of time shine light into the craggy cor­ners of the uni­verse, mak­ing the fears of an ear­lier gen­er­a­tion seem quaint. But this “light” cre­ates its own shad­ows.The Best Hor­ror of the Yearchron­i­cles these shift­ing shad­ows. It is a cat­a­log of ter­ror, fear, and unpleas­ant­ness, as artic­u­lated by today’s most chal­leng­ing and excit­ing writers.

“As usual, Dat­low deliv­ers what she promises, ‘the best hor­ror of the year,’ whether it’s writ­ten by the famous (Neil Gaiman) or the should-​be famous (Laird Bar­ron and many oth­ers).”
—Wash­ing­ton Post

“The Atlas of Hell” by Nathan Ballingrud (Fear­ful Sym­me­tries, edited by Ellen Dat­low, ChiZine Publications)

“Win­ter Chil­dren” by Angela Slat­ter (Post­scripts #32/​33 Far Voy­ager, edited by Nick Gev­ers, PS Publishing)

“A Dweller in Amenty” by Genevieve Valen­tine (Night­mare Mag­a­zine, March 2014)

“Out­side Heav­enly” by Rio Youers (The Spec­tral Book of Hor­ror Sto­ries, edited by Mark Mor­ris, Spec­tral Press)

“Shay Cor­sham Worsted” by Garth Nix (Fear­ful Sym­me­tries, edited by Ellen Dat­low, ChiZine Publications)

“Alloc­thon” by Livia Llewellyn (Let­ters to Love­craft, edited by Jesse Bulling­ton, Stone Skin Press)

“Chap­ter Six” by Stephen Gra­ham Jones (Tor​.com, June 2014)

“This is Not for You” by Gemma Files (Night­mare Mag­a­zine, Sep­tem­ber 2014)

“Inter­state Love Song (Mur­der Bal­lad No. 8)” by Caitlín R. Kier­nan (Sire­nia Digest #100, May 2014)

“The Cul­vert” by Dale Bai­ley (The Mag­a­zine of Fan­tasy & Sci­ence Fic­tion, September/​October 2014)

“Past Reno” by Brian Even­son (Let­ters to Love­craft, edited by Jesse Bulling­ton, Stone Skin Press)

“The Coat Off His Back” by Keris McDon­ald (Ter­ror Tales of York­shire, edited by Paul Finch, Gray Friar Press)

“the worms crawl in” by Laird Bar­ron (Fear­ful Sym­me­tries, edited by Ellen Dat­low, ChiZine Publications)

“The Dog’s Home” by Ali­son Lit­tle­wood (The Spec­tral Book of Hor­ror Sto­ries, edited by Mark Mor­ris, Spec­tral Press)

“Tread Upon the Brit­tle Shell” by Rhoads Bra­zos (SQ Mag­a­zine, Edi­tion 14, May 2014)

“Per­sis­tence of Vision” by Orrin Grey (Frac­tured: Tales of the Cana­dian Post-​Apocalypse, edited by Sil­via Moreno-​Garcia, Exile Editions)

“It Flows From the Mouth” by Robert Shear­man (Shad­ows & Tall Trees, Vol­ume 6)

“Wing­less Beasts” by Lucy Tay­lor (Fatal Jour­neys, Over­look Con­nec­tion Press)

“Depar­tures” by Car­ole John­stone (The Bright Day is Done, Gray Friar Press)

“Ymir” by John Lan­gan (The Chil­dren of the Old Leech, edited by Ross E. Lock­hart & Justin Steele, Word Horde)

“Plink” by Kurt Dinan (Post­scripts #32/​33 Far Voy­ager, edited by Nick Gev­ers, PS Publishing)

“Nigredo” by Cody Good­fel­low (In the Court of the Yel­low King, edited by Glynn Owen Bar­ras, Celaeno Press)

Posted by Mihai A. at 1:40 PM

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