READ THIS: Horror Library: The Best of Volumes 1-5

Horror Library: The Best of Volumes 1-5

 

Equal parts weird and creepy

This book opens with a story that stabs you in the soul, and each successive piece twists the knife a little more. Collected from previous Horror Library volumes, this is an anthology of tales ranging from the darkly fantastic to the utterly terrifying.

Several of the stories are what I consider subtle horror: creepy and unnerving, low-key and readable, but the kind of material that will haunt you for weeks after you read it. All stay within the boundaries of good taste, even those containing the most violence. If you’re looking for splatter and gore, you’ll want to look elsewhere. If you’re looking for contemporary horror, the kind that evolves out of the complex and conflicted world of the 21st century, you’ll love this book. 

There are some weird stories, a few wicked ones, and some that will send parents to their child’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, just to check, you know. The stories are arranged in an up and down of pace and tension, so reading the whole anthology through in one sitting is like riding a roller coaster on a replay loop that lasts for 300 pages. 

One Caveat: As a novice horror writer, I found the work in this book to be slightly demoralizing. Usually in an anthology this size there are a few truly noteworthy stories, some good ones, and a few that are unremarkable. This book, however, is literary gold from page one. The elements of craft are so well-polished, the writing techniques so varied, the stories themselves so unique and fresh that aspiring writers might be tempted to chuck it all and take up gardening instead. My advice: treat this book like a textbook on horror writing. Analyze what the authors did and how they did it. Read the book a few times for pleasure, then read it again with an eye on structure, character, dialogue, setting, plot. Then go forth and write scary.

Let Play Books With Friends!

It was a crazy end-of-year here, but 2014 proved remarkably productive. The first fruits of my last year's labors should be hitting the shelves this spring. Here's hoping everyone had a great holiday season, and in case you still have leftover Christmas money, why not give these up and coming releases by my friends and colleagues a try:

A Dark and Winding Road by Matthew Weber
Amazon Link
11 weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting tales by my very talented critique partner. Although when he launched this book, he packaged it in a barf bag, the stories aren't splatter-punk gore. This book satisfies my desire for justice to be served. In Weber's world, if you're a jerk, you get what you deserve. I like that world, and I like his work.

Tales of a Goth Librarian II by Kimberly Richardson
Amazon link
A second volume of disturbingly beautiful short stories by the author of The Decembrists. Richardson has an intriguing "literary" style that makes reading her work something like drinking a very fine wine in very expensive crystal. (Although she would prefer absinthe to a cabernet.) I liked the first volume of her work so much I bought copies for Christmas presents. (If you received a copy of that book from me, then THIS is the woman I was telling you about!)

Just in time for Halloween: 22 More Quick Shivers

 

Amazon Link

So Yay!


My flash piece, "RIP ellipses," a 100-word story about an inept necromancer, has made it to print.

Here's the 411 on this project:

22 Quick Shivers from DailyNightmare.com is a different kind of graphic literature. This second annual anthology presents a collection of 22 horror tales, each 100 words in length, that each re-tells a nightmare posted on DailyNightmare.com. The twist is that each story is graphically typeset to enhance the mood and invite the reader to slow down and experience the sensations of a nightmare.

It's a beautiful book, and I'm excited to share a table of contents with some pretty heavy hitters in the horror community.

READ THIS: The Three by Sarah Lotz

 Four simultaneous plane crashes.  

Three child survivors.  

A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse.  

What if he's right?

I’m a sucker for a good epistolary novel, especially when it’s done well, and Sarah Lotz did it very well.

Structured as a book within a book with multiple voices and viewpoints, this collection of “real world documents” details the aftermath of four mysterious plane crashes and the three (or is it four?) children who survive them. Rumors of that fourth survivor fuel a growing religious movement convinced the children are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Absurd, right?

Except the children who survived the ill-fated flights aren't the same children who boarded them.

Despite the creepy-as-hell premise, this book is less about the three survivors and more about the public perception of children lauded at first as miracles, then harassed as harbingers of the world’s end. I won’t bore you with all the characters and storylines because it’s too easy for a review of that sort to lead to spoilers. You can check out the plot synopsis over on her website: I’d prefer to talk about what you, the reader, will get out of your time spent with this book.

If there’s an underlying theme in this novel that stood out to me, it’s one of “searching.” While the rest of the world searches for an explanation--a mechanical or religious reason for the simultaneous crashes—the book’s characters search for their own meanings and their own places in the mysterious post-disaster reality they’re thrown into.  Ultimately the reader is also left to search for his or her own meaning of both “The Three” and the book The Three. I like this kind of indeterminacy. I like open endings. I like books where there are no answers at the end, and where the conclusion isn’t wrapped up neatly with a bow and gift card. I like books that demand a second reading. If you don’t, this is probably not the book for you.

I think of this book as more of a “literary” horror novel, rather than the plot-driven kind of thriller that calls to mind a 90-minute movie.  There’s an eerie “found footage” feel to the book-inside-a-book, and the story itself is fast-paced and engaging. There are some incredibly visual scenes in the beautifully tragic “suicide forest” in Japan, a repeated motif of people unable to speak their own thoughts without going through intermediaries, a wonderful buildup of tension as the family members discover who the returned children turn out to be, the overall mystery of both the nature and existence of the “fourth” child, and an open ending that allows equally for both questions and closure. 

Although this was a summer read for me, it’s exactly the kind of book that these rainy and chilly October evenings demand. Grab a cup of steaming coffee, settle into your favorite chair, arrange the blanket around your legs and enjoy.

Available now from your favorite bookseller.