Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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’.
- 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.