—Washington Post
Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- 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.
- 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 Amazon.com.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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
—Washington Post
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Horror fans are well-acquainted with the work of acclaimed artist Glenn Chadbourne, of Newcastle, Maine. Widely known in the horror and fantasy genres Chadbourne has created covers and illustrated books and magazines for Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, and Earthling Publications.
Recently Chadbourne illustrated The Secretary of Dreams: Volume 1, a graphic collection of Stephen King stories pubished by CD Publications in three limited editions. He has also illustrated the work of Joe R. Lansdale, Dave Lowell, Jack Ketchum, Bev Vincent, and many others.
Needless to say, I’m thrilled that Glenn is creating the illustrations for the new, illustrated edition of my novel The Safety of Unknown Cities, due out at Halloween 2015 from The Overlook Connection Press. Overlook editor and publisher Dave Hinchberger shared a couple of the illos with me recently, one of which was briefly banned on facebook for its (shudder) depiction of breasts.
For anyone who loves hardcore horror and dynamite graphic artwork, keep an eye out for the late 2015 release of this illustrated edition.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Before taking out his knife, he said, “After studying the client’s file, you must submit a brief note on how you propose to kill your first client and how you will display his body in the city. But that doesn’t mean that what you propose in your note will be approved…”
So begins the title story, a surreal and harrowing tale of murders carefully crafted and artfully displayed to evoke maximum horror. The narrator of the tale is interviewing for the position of assassin, with the caveat that his victims must be positioned in eye-catching and memorable ways. Failure to live up to the job description can only end in a grisly demise.
Blasim is a writer and filmmaker who fled persecution under Saddam Hussein in 1998 and now lives in Finland. The Corpse Exhibition is a graphic and Kafkaesque look at a nightmare world of feral young men groomed to be gangsters and killers, doomed families, desperate survivors, and death at its most gruesome and meaningless.
In “The Song of Goats”, the narrator finds himself competing with other would-be contestants to see who can tell the most horrific story and win a place on a radio game show. Shock follows absurdity as the hapless narrator vies to come up with the most appalling tale, while another contestant grumbles, “That’s a story? If I told my story to a rock, it would break its heart.”
“The Madman of Freedom Square” chronicles the miracle of two young blond men who appear in the wretched Darkness District and rejuvinate the squalid neighborhood. After their disappearance, a bloody battle ensues between the government and the locals over the fate of the statues erected to honor them.
The collection concludes with “The Nightmare of Carlos Fuentes”, in which an Iraqui escapes to Holland and does his best to embrace his new life and good fortune, but ponders the stark differences between his life then and now. “Why can’t we be peaceful like them?…Why do they respect dogs as much as humans? Why do we masturbate twenty-four hours a day?” There is, however, no refuge from the nightmares and Carlos Fuentes soon learns that there’s more to escaping one’s past than just geography.
The Corpse Exhibition is by no means an easy read. Blasim piles horror upon horror. But clearly the author writes with the authority of experience. Beneath the often fantastical narrative is a vivid and sobering look into a world most of us know only from the headlines and the evening news.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Overlook Connection Press publisher Dave Hinchberger is giving away two copies of the limited edition of Fatal Journeys! To be in the running just post a review of the book on Fatal Journeys’ Facebook and Amazon pages. You will authomatically be entered in a lottery to win one of the two limited editions being given away.
The limited edition includes:
*“Wingless Beasts”, a bonus story, never-before-pubished and making its first appearance in this signed limited edition
*Original cover foil-stamped design by noted horror and dark fantasy artist Glenn Chadbourne, who created new art for the front and back of this edition
*Signatures by Lucy Taylor, Jack Ketchum, and Glenn Chadbourne
*Frontispiece by Bill Munster
*Bound-in silk bookmark
There are only two hundred copies of the limited edition available, so write a review and get one for free!