Horror Movie Freak
Don Sumner
Krause Publications
255 pgs, $19.99
Review by Brian M. Sammons

This book is a bit hard to describe accurately. It’s sort of like a coffee table book, but it’s not as large or showy as those books. It’s sort of a reference book, although it’s kind of light and breezy to be a “serious” book. What is certain about this book is that it collects a very wide variety of over 130 horror movies from the classics to the surprisingly very modern. Each entry has lots of nice photographs, most in color, and a one or two page write up by the author on why the movie is a “must see” for horror fans. However, it is in this last regard that I did some head-scratching.

If you are a diehard, big time horrorhead, like I am, then this book will offer nothing new to you. Not once did the author ever surprise me with a “wow, that’s a new one,” or a “hmm, I haven’t thought of that flick in years,” or even a “neat, that was an unexpected addition to the book.” Now that could just be because I’m an overly obsessive horror fan from way back, but if this book wasn’t made for obsessive horror fans, I’ve got to wonder who it was written for? Perhaps the uninitiated? If that’s the case then neophytes to the horror genre are sure to find tons of great titles here that upon watching are sure to give them a passing grade in Horror Movies 101. But being as I am a big time horror nerd, did that mean I didn’t like this book or was bored by it?

Hell no, I loved it.

True, there was nothing new in Horror Movie Freak for me, but you know what else isn’t new? Old friends, and that’s exactly what this book was like, a nice, fun visit with old, bloody, axe wielding, goo-dripping friends. Each entry is well written in a style that mixes the informative and the entertaining. Further, while the old standbys and classics are covered, it was nice to see some attention paid to some of the lesser known modern films like Slither, Frailty, Splinter, and Dead Silence. Although there were a few movies that I thought for sure would be in the book and wasn’t. The amazing Session 9 jumps quickly to mind.

The book is arranged in an easy to follow way, with chapters like Classics, Ghost Stories, Homicidal Slashers, Zombies, Foreign Horrors, and even a chapter for every horror fan’s favorite punching bag: Remakes. Further, to spice things up, there are chapters focusing of Scream Queens, a list for those new to horror and may want to “ease into” the genre, and a 10 Days to Halloween list of films to watch as the big day approaches to help get you in the mood.

As said at the start, this book is light and breezy, but it is also fun and very enjoyable. Horror fans of all stripes, be it newbie or veteran, will have a good time with this book, and when it is all said and done, that’s all that matters.

Let Me In
John Ajvide Lindqvist
St. Martin’s Griffin
Trade Paper, 496 pages, $15.99
Review by Sheila Merritt

Love. Horror. Connection. Repulsion. No, this isn’t about the Twilight series: far from it. Let Me In is a look at various kinds of relationships; rife with kinky complications. The novel is laden with adult situations, often seen through the eyes of young people. Author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, here is reprinted and retitled to coincide with the American movie adaptation. The Scandinavian film bearing the original title was a critical and popular success; the story of a lonely bullied boy who finds meaning in his life through his vampire companion. There is a definite narrative disparity between the oddly magical cinematic fairy tale and the viscerally visual text version. In the book, vague disturbing celluloid implications dissolve into startling graphic descriptions.

To read, for example, the poetic words of an obsessed pedophile: “Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another, and that’s what people today are incapable of,” could indeed be deemed romantic if said by someone other than a sexual predator. In the universe of Let Me In, however, nothing is simplistic: Fragmented families; children wiser (and more jaundiced) than their parents; physical attraction that is unique and deeply personal. A scene, in which the sanguinary and manipulative Eli is reduced to appearing in true form, depicts the creature thus: “–there was something in her, something that was … Pure horror.” Yet, when the androgynous vampire is at its most seductive, there are comparisons to spring time. Monstrosity and gender get lost in rapture.

Regarding the book/film titles: Both the earlier and the slightly altered version are invoked in the book. A female victim of Eli, paraphrases one while contemplating the limitations of intimacy: “Don’t let them in. Once they’re inside they have more potential to hurt you. Comfort yourself. You can live with the anguish as long as it only involves yourself. As long as there is no hope.” This kind of passionate pessimism/fatalism is also reflected in the song lyrics of “Let the Right One Slip In” by Morrissey, as quoted in the novel:

Let the right one in

Let the old dreams die

Let the wrong ones go

They cannot do

What you want them to do

John Ajvide Lindqvist unflinchingly addresses finding compatibility and comfort in unfamiliar and uncanny places. His prose is excellent, his subject matter is unusual; he defies expectations. As with the characters he creates, the readers of his novel will find themselves facing something appalling yet appealing. Being open to such feelings can be disastrous or joyful. Illusions will be shattered; being open is dangerous. It’s hard to know if, and when, to let the right one in.

Unpleasant Tales
Brendan Connell
Eibonvale Press, UK
Trade Paperback, 324 pages, £ 8.99
Review by Mario Guslandi

Brendan Connell is an eclectic, talented writer whose stories range from sheer horror to soft SF, from historical pastiches to fairy tales for grown-ups. The common ground for Connell’s stories is the dark, unsettling nature of his excellent narrative craftsmanship.

Unpleasant Tales collects twenty-two tales which confirm both quality and variety of the author’s fiction.

Some stories are extremely nasty and overtly horrific such as the gruesome “The Maker of Fine Instruments” where a musical nut ends up making a musical instrument of his own mutilated body, the extreme, grandguignolesque “The Cruelties of Him” featuring a crazy doctor who endeavors to modify the very anatomy of the human body and the decadent “The Putrimanic” in which a man gets fond of anything repulsive.

The irresistible “The Nanny Goat” portrays an old, virgin spinster who, having acquired a desirable young body by means of witchcraft, devotes herself to the pleasures of sex until the final disaster, and the very dark “The Skin Collector,” although a bit predictable, manages to give the shivers to the engrossed reader.

Connell’s “fairy tales” are equally enjoyable, such as the strange, compelling “The Last of the Burrowars,” told in a very captivating narrative style, and the colorful “The Girl of Wax” where the waxen statue of a beautiful plebeian girl becomes the closest companion of a posh prince.

If you like historical pieces here we have the delightful “The Last Mermaid” revolving around the life of Carlo II, King of Spain and “The Flatterer” a vivid tableau describing a nosh-up in antique Rome.

If you prefer black comedy you will certainly enjoy the semi-serious “The Nasty Truth About Dentists,” the excellent “Sirens,” depicting the revenge of a woman on the plants which make her beloved neglect her advances, and the outstanding, offbeat “Virgin Hearts” featuring a rejuvenated, naughty, wealthy old man, his nephew and his greedy daughter-in-law, and a cruel Russian beauty.

Not satisfied yet? Then read on and you’ll find a fascinating tale of sea adventures “We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars.”

You can hardly ask more from a single book by a single author.

Horror Library, Volume 3
R. J. Cavender, Editor
Cutting Block Press
Trade Paper, 254 pages, $16.95
Review by Sheila Merritt

Tortured souls inhabit the stories in Horror Library, Volume 3. They commit violent acts; see their worlds hideously transformed; face fearsome facts; descend into madness; and reflect on mortality. But wait… there’s more: The 30 tales in the anthology explore eruptions that run the emotional gamut from the slow and sinister simmer, to the bravura boiling point. Set in locales as disparate as Tokyo and an American town with a population of 57, there is plenty of variety in the volume. The writers included do an excellent job conveying angst, anger, and antagonistic feelings.

In “Clover” by Gina Ranalli, a dying pedophile reflects on his vices; smoking and children: “Goddamn, he was a sucker for the kids. Boys, girls, didn’t matter. As long as they were young and pretty and looked up to him with those big innocent eyes, smiled at him with genuine liking. And when they laughed! Oh, God help him, when they laughed, it was all over for him.” As a janitor in a school, Danny Clover had ample opportunities to victimize those who he referred to as “vices.” The kids come back to torment him before he dies: “He did indeed have screams left inside him and the first one escaped when he felt someone kick his ankles apart, felt little hands with razor-sharp claws digging into the tender flesh of his calves as they held his legs open. And then something unbearably huge, hard and cold forced itself between his buttocks.” Brutal in her images and clarity of feeling, Ranalli creates a retroactive retribution that pulverizes with its power.

Another older man is scrutinized in “The River Child.” Based on the Japanese folklore of Kappa, a malign river entity, R. Michael Burns uses an elderly homeless person as the conveyor of the narrative. With a tenuous grasp on reality, the societal outcast watches as Kappa does what comes (super)naturally: “Not two meters away, a roughly human form lay twitching and spasming, inky liquid splashed and pooled all around. The thing that crouched over the dying man looked at first like a badly disfigured child – hands and feet splayed and webbed like the appendages of a toad, facial features scrunched and simian, absurdly punctuated by an almost duck-like bill. Hair as thick and bedraggled as kelp surrounded a circular hollow in the top of its elongated skull, a thick, phlegmy liquid sloshing around inside. A knotty, chitinous shell covered the creature’s humped back like some grotesque parody of a samurai’s armor.” The exotic setting of the work is noteworthy, but Burns primarily deserves praise for descriptions so precise and palatable.

Guilt: The crux of much anguish. Gary A. Braunbeck and Matthew Warner examine culpability with compassion and remorseful responsibility in “Under the Bridge Downtown.” A father resents his young daughter who has cerebral palsy. After she is killed when a bridge collapses on their car, he is regretfully relieved. His paternal regard for her was tempered by her unalterable, deteriorating physical state; she became an abhorrent burden to him. Going back to the scene of the accident, he wallows: “He didn’t know why he called her name. Of course he’d imagined the sound of her voice calling for him. Of course. She was nothing more than a memory-ghost now, like him – hell, they’d both been ghosts for so long, haunting what should have been happier lives. Still, he called her name again, as if it were some act of penance. It clouded in the cold air, chill as the grave, then wisped away.”

In Horror Library, Volume 3, editor R. J. Cavender collects an exceedingly admirable array of works that zeroes in on follies, frailties, and fears. What is encountered is not always human, but perhaps once was. The dynamic between cause and effect, and liability and loss, is poignantly probed.

Dark Echo
F. G. Cottam
Thomas Dunne Books
Trade Paper, 368 pages, $25.99
Review by Sheila Merritt

The gender of a boat/ship is designated as female. It is described as a “she,” and seduces accordingly. In his novel Dark Echo, author F. G. Cottam plays upon this notion. The title of the book refers to a vessel that thrums with fatal attraction. The magnetism is malevolent; the come-on, cautionary. Temptation tantalizes and torments. Care to sign on for a cruise? If thinking twice, consider the appeal: “It was the lines of her that did it. Even out of the water, she had this sweep of imperious elegance. The timbers of her hull were stained but sound-looking, apparently intact. Her deck, with its brass rail, was a low-sung hymn to grace. She was so beautifully proportioned that, even as a wreck, she seemed somehow poised and dignified.” Cottam barges in on the dream with a nightmare of a narrative. He launches a tale of ghosts, diabolic deals, and historical resonances. His work is a successful blend of horror with history; World War I and Michael Collins combine with ritual sacrifice and murder. The “‘roaring twenties” meld with devil worship. There’s a Dennis Wheatley vibe to the story line, but the writing is much better.

Like the sea craft, so effectively depicted in feminine terms, two women are instrumental in steering the plot. One, a freelance researcher, is digging up information to try to save her lover from evil enslavement. She turns to the writings of a liberated lady from decades past for illumination, and finds a revealing impression of a suspect character: “He is extraordinarily muscular and, in the harsh sunshine, his dark body reminded me with a shudder of the carapace of some large and deadly creature. There is something of the crab or the praying mantis about him.”

The emphasis of characterization, however, is on a father and son relationship. The father, who is wealthy and self indulgent, buys Dark Echo; despite its reputation as being cursed. His son longs for approbation and love; and also feels the tug of the ship’s thrall. Together they embark on a journey that will bring them closer to each other, and nearer to impending doom.

Past and present entwine to combat corruption of souls. There is a tenderness in the interaction of eras; a trying to bridge damage done while attempting to thwart contemporary catastrophe.

The vessel’s hull isn’t hell. The vehicle is merely a terrifying transport for trace terrors. The alluring Dark Echo charters stygian waters, and unveils unholy pacts that traverse time. Writer F. G. Cottam focuses on familial/generational interplay in his novel; never forgetting the important involvement of the pivotal females. His bewitching barge is indeed unforgettable.