#52Books - 2013, End

And the final score is:

31

Um, yeah, pretty weak really.

It’s even worse when I think of all the words of stupid clickbait articles from newspapers like The Guardian I read instead.  Sigh.

I’m not disheartened as the aim was to read more books and the kindle (and Amazon) has been brilliant for this.  I’ll go for it again next year but I won’t bother with the blog posts and reviews.  They don’t get a lot of hits in relation to the other posts.  As I’m aiming to improve my writing productivity it’s better for me to spend my time writing 1,000 words on the latest story/chapter than scratching around on a two paragraph review of a fifty-year-old book.  I might throw up the occasional round-up, but they won’t be as detailed.

With that out of the way, here’s the last of the books I read in 2013.  Overall my favourite was Brian Keene’s Earthworm Gods and I also really enjoyed Shane McKenzie’s novellas.

#25: Shane McKenzie – Fat Off Sex and Violence

Another slice of fun’n’gruesome from McKenzie.  When I read the synopsis I wondered if this might be McKenzie’s version of a succubus story.  It’s not, although the feedlings are inventive and interesting demons.  As the title states, they feed off sex and violence and are very adept at causing both.

The protagonist, Gary, is indeed a real fucking loser—the start of the book has him caught masturbating in the toilet of the comic store he works.  He’s every negative geek/nerd/gamer/comic fan stereotype wrapped up in a soft, blubbery human shell.  It works because most people will know a Gary or three, or even been one themselves at some point.  It’s easy to feel pity for him for the first half of the book, but there are also plenty of hints that a lot of his problems are self inflicted or at least made a lot worse through his weakness of character (I liked the scene where a young fanboy gives him money so they can both have lunch and Gary unthinkingly orders a burger so expensive there isn’t enough money left for the other boy – sums the character up perfectly in a couple of lines).

The inevitable demon-fuelled roaring rampage of revenge, when it arrives, is satisfying (and gory!), even though you know it’s going to go horribly wrong for poor Gary (which it does).

26: Brian Keene – The Cage

Another short novella from Brian Keene packaged with some additional short stories.  It’s a good concept and gives the story a lot of pace as you want to read on to see what the not-quite-so-randomly-psychopathic antagonist is up to.  Unfortunately the ending is a little anti-climatic as the protagonists don’t really protag all that much.  Maybe Keene will come back to this one day and round it out with additional novellas in a similar way to what he did (to brilliant effect) with Earthworm Gods.  Disappointingly, the kickstarter to make this into a movie fell through.

#27: Lee Thomas – Ash Street

After the other high-octane offerings from Sinister Grin Press, this was a little bit of a surprise—a slower, multi-viewpoint tale of ghosts haunting a small town in the aftermath of a serial-killing atrocity.  Solid overall, but unspectacular.

#28:  Joyce Carol Oates – The Corn Maiden and other Nightmares

First time reading Oates.  Wow, the prose is good.  I wish I could write like this.  It’s not all style over substance either as, a few iffy endings aside, the stories are mostly solid.  The title story is the classic small town meltdown over a missing child and ends with some interesting questions as to who pulled whose strings.  It’s a shame the horrors are all of the mundane (non-supernatural, non-weird) kind, but I think I’ll pick up some more collections of hers for the prose alone.

#29: Edgar Rice Burroughs – The People That Time Forgot

The follow-up to The Land That Time Forgot is a bit too light on the dinosaurs and too heavy on the overly-simplistic politics between the various cavemen tribes.  An okay adventure story, but misses the tension the uneasy alliance with the Germans provided in the first book.

#30: Thomas Ligotti – My Work Is Not Yet Done

My first exposure to Ligotti, another name spoken highly of in horror circles.  For the first half of the book I was wondering if the blurb had been telling porkies as it looked like a simple revenge tale about a “good” man getting the shaft in a corporate environment and then going off the rails.  Then the supernatural elements kicked in and were followed by some highly imaginative and (mostly) deserved deaths.  The revenge fantasy is also cleverly subverted—karma is not in play here and the whole story is riddled through with cosmic darkness.

#31: Rick Hautala – Bedbugs

A solid collection of horror tales from the other horror writer from Maine.  Yes, it’s predictable in places, but I’ll take that every day of the week over a lot of the plotless, style-over-substance nonsense that abounds nowadays.

#52Books - May

Time for some more booky-wooky stuff (Just in case the midweek rant explosion hasn't already drove everyone away - I'll try and make it up by getting back to some good ole-fashioned succubus smut next weekend).  This is my #52Books (let's be realistic - #30Books) project caught up to May.

#9: Brian Keene - Earthworm Gods

My favourite book of the year so far.  Then I am a sucker for old-fashioned monster stories and Earthworm Gods is a big brash monster story with the possible end of the world (Again, Mr Keene?  How many Earths is that now?) as a backdrop.  It’s been raining constantly for the past forty days, the world is flooding and monstrous worms are coming to the surface to pick off survivors.  What’s not to love?

The book is broken into three sections.  The first concerns Teddy, an old man living up in the mountains, and sets the scene with first the unnatural rain and then racks up the tension as the predatory worms appear.  Teddy is joined by some survivors and the second part is their account of escaping a drowned city haunted by other monstrous threats.  The third part returns to Teddy’s house and an epic stand against a threat even worse than the eponymous killers worms.

I really enjoyed this.  Teddy is based on Keene’s grandfather and is an interesting and well-drawn protagonist.  With some of Keene’s other books I felt the focus drifted near the end, but here he’s on brilliant form, with some superbly executed set pieces.

Plus...monsters.

Stuff ‘realistic’ horror with serial killers and other dullness.  Nothing beats some good old-fashioned monster scares.

#10: Brian Keene – Earthworm Gods: Selected Scenes from the End of the World

This is a collection of short stories set in the same universe as Earthworm Gods.  The characters are all real people who paid for the privilege of Keene writing them into a story and killing them off in imaginative ways (an interesting concept—anyone fancy being made into succubus fodder?)

It does impose some restrictions on the stories—Keene shows no qualms in sending his sponsors down the maws of various hungry worms, but is obviously not going to depict any of the characters in too bad of a light.  After reading the first few stories I had some doubts.  They’re a little too short and follow a similar pattern of potted character history, setup, and then the fade out as the character meets an untimely end.  However, the collection does settle into a kind of rhythm and while the stories are short, in accumulation they do a good job of describing the doomed, drowning world.  Overall I enjoyed the collection, but wished the stories weren’t quite as short as they were.

#11: Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw – Jam

Yahtzee Croshaw is probably more familiar as that dude who speaks really fast on the Zero Punctuation videos.  Aside from reviewing games and creating point-and-click adventure games he also writes books.  Jam is his second.

This is the point where I could rant about useless legacy publishing is and how the only way someone born after the mid-seventies can get a horror book out is through spending a decade becoming famous at something else first, but that would feel like leaping onto a mammoth to attack it with a chainsaw when the mammoth is already sinking beneath the surface of a tar pit.

I picked this up because of the interesting premise—An apocalypse (or jampocalypse) where Brisbane gets buried beneath three feet of carnivorous jam.  The ‘jam’ is a voracious blob-like monster that absorbs all organic matter on contact.  The narrator sees his flatmate get slurped up on page two and the book maintains the same pace throughout.

The book is a parody and leans more towards Bizarro than outright horror (You might have already guessed this from the whole ‘carnivorous jam’ thing).  It follows the British comic tradition of characters trying their best, but getting distracted by trifling concerns (such as the narrator’s insistence in carrying around a Goliath birdeater spider) and continually undermining their efforts with sheer incompetence.  Think Shaun of the Dead or Red Dwarf.  Croshaw’s Jam isn’t quite as sharp as those, but it’s a fun read that might make a decent TV mini-serial (6 episodes, obviously).


#12: Dante Aligheiri – Divine Comedy I: Inferno

It’s time to get all classical with one of the most famous depictions of hell—Dante’s Inferno.  I picked this one up from the Gutenberg project, although I thought it contained all three parts of the Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) rather than just Inferno.  It did, however, contain copious notes for which I’m grateful as following classics without the historical context is really hard.

I knew about the structure of hell as Dante created it—the nine circles each punishing different sins—but this is the first time I’d read the source (okay translation of the source).  It’s pretty much Dante dissing everyone he’d ever disliked and imagining various scabrous torments to be inflicted on them in hell.  Drown in rivers of boiling blood!  Be submerged in pitch while demons stick forks in you!  Great fun.

“...and he had made a trumpet of his ass.”

Lovely stuff.

#52Books - March (sort of...)

Yeah, that #52Books thing of reading 52 books in a year.  I posted about it in January and then approached it with my usual chaos.  I'm currently on #13 (and also #14, #15, #16 and maybe a #17, because...chaos), but for some reason got tangled up in putting reviews together.  The book reviews get the lowest hits here of everything, but I feel obligated to review them because I write 'em myself.  Here's what was on my Kindle around Feb/Mar.

#5. F. Paul Wilson – The Keep

So that’s what the film’s about.

I remembered seeing the film of this back in the late eighties/early nineties as part of Alex Cox’s late night Moviedrome series.  The film is a bit of a cult classic, but largely incomprehensible after executive meddling hacked it down to a far-too-slim ninety minutes.

German soldiers are stationed at a creepy Romanian keep in WWII and are picked off one by one by a malign presence.  A Jewish professor and his daughter are brought in to try and explain the mystery, which deepens as a powerful stranger arrives to resume an aeons-old conflict.

The book is a clever mix of influences, including an extremely unexpected one that lies at the heart of the whole story.  It’s a little baggy in the middle while it develops a romance between the leads and layers on the misdirection as to the true nature of the evil entity, Molasar, but not enough to sink a thrilling tale.  It’s a shame loopy epics like this have given way to endless serial killer/police procedurals on the horror shelves.

After reading the book it’s fairly obvious film never had a prayer of doing the book justice.

#6: Brian Keene – Jack’s Magic Beans

Not a novel but a novella with some extra short stories added to bulk it out to an appropriate length.  If I wanted to be especially harsh I’d describe it as the leavings off Brian Keene’s writing desk packaged together.

The novella details a typical day at a shopping mall gone horribly wrong as everyone suddenly goes homicidally insane.  The title comes from the reason why the few survivors are immune, but then that immunity starts to wear off...

Gory fun, but it reads like the opening chapters of a book Keene never got around to finishing.  The short stories are fairly solid with “’The King’, In: YELLOW”, Keene’s gory riff on Robert W Chamber’s The King in Yellow being the highlight.

It might be scraps and leavings, but they’re fairly tasty scraps and leavings.

#7: David Wong – John Dies at the End

David Wong is the pseudonym of Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin.  It is also the name of the narrator of John Dies at the End, used as a device to play it up as a faux ‘true story’.  John Dies at the End recounts David and John’s fictitious adventures in the town of Undisclosed, where after being injected with a strange drug, Soy Sauce, they gain the ability to see the things humans shouldn’t see and become embroiled in a sinister plot involving alternate dimensions, weird artificially-engineered life forms and a whole heap of craziness.

The book is broken up into three vaguely linked adventures and veers wildly between crazy gross-out humour (such as trying to get a dog to shit out some plastic explosives it had swallowed) and darker moments designed to make the reader pause and think, including a deftly understated moment from Wong’s past that involves no extra-dimensional weirdness at all, which makes it all the more horrifying.  There are plenty of twists, including an absolute gut-puncher in the middle that reveals why that innocuous little philosophical question about an axe with a replaced blade and handle was asked at the beginning of the book.

Overall the book is probably a little too madcap zany for its own good, but is packed full of imagination and never dull.

#8: David Wong – This Book is Full of Spiders

The follow-up to John Dies At The End, this continues the adventures of John and David in Undisclosed.  At the start Wong is attacked by a extra-dimensional arachnid parasite only he and John can see (because of the Soy Sauce from the previous book).  Other parasites escape Wong’s house until a full-fledged outbreak threatens Undisclosed and maybe the whole country.

The sequel has tighter focus than John Dies At The End and is better for it.  Wong (Pargin-Wong, not Wong the character) takes some well-aimed swipes at cozy zombie apocalypses and the exploitation of fear by authority.  It’s only near the end, with the introduction of a reality-warping fur gun, where things start to get a little too silly and some inconsistencies creep into the story.

Recently, I Have Been Reading... #1

One of the most important pieces of advice they give to writers is to read lots. This was something I used to do. In my teens and early twenties I was a voracious devourer of books. Then I fell out of the habit. Juggling a full-time job with writing and other hobbies doesn’t leave a lot of time left over. Plus, I tend to think time spent reading is time I should be spending writing, especially when self-imposed deadlines start looming. Sometimes it’s good to eat a few books to blast the cobwebs away though. This is what I’ve munched through on my kindle lately:

Christopher Fowler – Hell Train
One of my favourite horror writers from back when I used to read more voraciously. This is an enjoyable romp featuring Brits abroad being ghastly and clueless, and meeting imaginative and bloody ends on a train bound for Hell. Well, sort of. It’s a story within a story of a writer pitching a script to Hammer at a time when the studio was falling out of favour (They’re better now). Part of the fun is trying to guess which famous Hammer actor Fowler has in mind for each character.

Carlton Mellick III – The Morbidly Obese Ninja
I’ve been meaning to check out the Bizarro (sub-?)genre for a while. Mellick is the granddaddy when it comes to fucked-up weirdness. This is a manga-esque tale of a 700-pound corporate ninja. Short, but it zips along and Mellick does a great job of providing a rational underpinning to his very weird world.

J.F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams – Clickers
Entertaining pulp horror. Crab things with scorpion tails and venom that makes limbs burst like overripe bananas emerge from the sea and threaten a New England town. Ultimately, the clickers are fairly dumb critters and it’s easy enough for the (well-armed) townsfolk to keep them under control once the initial surprise has worn off. The things that follow the clickers out of the sea, not so much…

Wrath James White – Like Porno for Psychos
Whoa, this is some good shit. A collection of some really nasty short stories. If you like my work, but want something even darker, this might be up your street. It’s definitely more on the horrifying rather than the arousing side, but I found it encouraging (for me anyway) that’s it’s possible to fling around the cocks and pussies and not be stuck in the porn ghetto. Faves for me were “Feeding Time” and “Nothing Better To Do”.

Brian Keene – Kill Whitey
A dock worker rescues a stripper from a seemingly unkillable Russian mob boss. A fast-paced page-turner that reminded me of the early Koontz thrillers-with-a-supernatural-twist I used to enjoy reading.

Cameron Pierce – Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island
Another Bizarro piece and…um…yeah. A group of teens borrow a yacht, get attacked by pirates and end up on an island where the girls look like centrefolds by day and turn into rapacious, raping, vagina monsters by night. It’s short and starts right in the action, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Part of me thought it was too silly, with characters more suited to a cartoon, and another part of me thought it was fucking hilarious. Probably best to think of it as a horror comedy—like an XXX version of one of Peter Jackson’s early splatter movies—to fully appreciate it. I suspect Bizarro might be beyond the comprehension of my simple little brain.

Curse you, Cameron Pierce! You made me feel old.

This gets a sex scene. It's the woman.

Edward Lee – The House
Lee is the master of hardcore fucked-up gross-out porno-horror. This is two novellas, “The Pig” and “The House”, in one. “The Pig” is the better of the two, a disgusting yet blackly hilarious tale of a luckless filmmaker falling foul of the mob and forced into making “speciality” porno’s. Nearly every taboo is gleefully transgressed in some style and the ending is satisfying.

“The House” isn’t quite as strong. While it also has moments of memorable grossness (Shake-a-Puddin’, blergh), Lee never escapes the straitjacket of Haunted House conventions.

Ah, that was good to blast out some cobwebs. If anyone has any similar suggestions for things to read, feel free to pop them in the comments.

(Oh, and don't worry I'm about to try and outdo Lee, WJW and others in nastiness. I know my niche and what I'm good at :) )