William Hall
This is an excellent book for those who want some dark creature horror reading material with nice twists for the holiday season. The main character, Mina, lives in Galway, Ireland. She is a young artist, without a steady job, making enough money selling a few commissioned paintings and occasionally making a killing gambling at cards in order to afford her rent and keep her in booze and cigarettes. Her passion is sitting at public places drawing in her sketchbook the faces of people she finds interesting in the passing crowds. When a boozy friend, Peter, hits her up at the local pub to sell an expensive golden conure parrot to a friend and split the take, Mina sees a chance to make some extra holiday cash and agrees, using Tim's hastily drawn map, to drive the parrot to the friend who lives in a desolate part of the Connemarre countryside. After getting helplessly lost, her car then stalls just outside a dense, dark winter forest. With night falling, one horrific shriek comes from the forest, and Mina, locking the doors, beds down in the car until morning. The next day Mina with the caged parrot traverses the cold, dark forest looking for help. As the short winter day begins to wane Mina sees a tall thin woman standing in an open lit doorway of a compound wildly gesturing for her to hurry. As she runs into the lit room and the woman slams and locks the door behind her, Mina will soon realize she has entered into the nightmare world of the watchers, underground monstrous forest creatures who come out at night looking for prey. She joins a ragtag group of two women and a young man all trapped in a compound that keeps them safely behind a lighted, glass partition away from the roaming packs of creatures outside. At night in the glaring room light the glass reflects their image back to them, but the creatures on the other side can see and watch them. Mina and the others have to now try to survive on what little food and water they can gather from the almost impenetrable forest during the day. But they must be back in the compound before the light comes on at night or meet a horrible fate outside. Answers to questions remain to be discovered about the origins of the compound and the underground creatures. And, can Mina and the others ever hope to escape the dark forest? Taking Irish folklore to a very dark place, A. M. Shine has written a horrifically creepy, fast paced, suspenseful tale that also includes some twists that catch the reader off-guard and leave a lasting impression.
Searching for another book in the horror genre I came across The Rust Maidens which seemed like it would be a unique and strange tale. Though very unique, the book turned out to be nothing like I expected. I guess it does fall into the genre of modern gothic horror, but I found the story only mildly interesting. I would say unlike creepy horror this story is more like a modern dark fantasy fairy tale. After twenty eight years the main character, Phoebe Shaw, comes back to visit her mother at the place she grew up, on Denton Street in Cleveland, Ohio. She left soon after her graduation in 1980 and after the strange events that occurred there that summer. Her best friend and cousin Jacqueline, along with four other neighborhood girls, began to metamorphose; their flesh withering and falling away to reveal rusted metal instead of bones, gray water pouring out of the wounds and finger nails turning to shards of glass. What happens to these girls is symbolic of the Cleveland environment they are living in. The main employment for the fathers on Denton Street is the local steel mill. The summer of 1980 sees an impending strike about to take place; a strike that will lead to the closing of the mill and a foreshadowing of Cleveland becoming another rust belt city. The eighteen-year-old Phoebe is an angst filled wild hair that longs to escape with her best friend Jacqueline a desolate Cleveland future. Their plans are foiled when Jacqueline begins to change and Phoebe tries desperately to find a way to stop the metamorphosis, even though the adult inhabitants of the street seem to have little empathy for the girls, including the girls' parents. After the story of the Rust Maidens is published by the reporter sister of one of the girls, government agents arrive and gawking tourists flock to the street. It will take the now forty-six-year-old Phoebe to unwind the full story and fate of the Rust Maidens as all the houses on Denton Street are methodically being demolished to make way for new condos. And, when she meets an eighteen-year-old girl, Quinn, still living along the barren and decaying Denton Street she will be confronted with the fact that what occurred twenty eight years ago is happening again.
Rebecca was a surprising read and not the type of story I'm usually drawn to. At this time I've been reading a lot of horror and looking for something with more substance; classics with a pedigree. Rebecca is not a scary supernatural story. There are no literal ghosts or hauntings that take place in the book. The story is hard to pin down, since it contains aspects of a gothic English manor romance, mystery, thriller and ultimate tragedy. No, though the haunting is not literal, the dominant presence of the dead first wife of Maxim de Winter, Rebecca, lingers and saturates everything within and without the Manderley estate. Told from a future period looking back, Maxim's, at the time of their marriage, unnamed new wife, and narrator of the story, is half the age of the forty-two-year-old widower. Rescued from the life as a paid companion to a disgusting, social-climbing, American matron in a Monte Carlo whirlwind romance, the young Mrs. de Winter is the complete opposite of Rebecca. She finds that trying to fill the shoes of the deceased Rebecca as lady of the manor is an intimidating task and her new secretive husband is often cold and aloof and not the husband and lover she had hoped for. And then there is the head servant, Mrs. Danvers, like the grim reaper, dressed in black, with a skull-like face who had been an intimate friend and companion to Rebecca growing up. She will be a frightening enemy to the mousy and impressionable new Mrs. De Winter. It is through the young Mrs. De Winter's constant internal, daydreamed scenarios that a haunting portrait of Rebecca is fleshed out. But such imaginative wool gathering can never be relied upon to paint a truly accurate picture of such an overpowering figure gone and never met. And, even in death, the young bride will find that Rebecca can reach out from the grave to stir up trouble for the newlywed couple.
This was a horror story with a soap opera plot. It reminded me a lot of the many horror B movies where a group of snarky yuppies gather somewhere for a weekend and are picked off one by one by the flavor-of-the-week monster. Do real people constantly chew their bottom lip or the inside of their cheek to relieve stress? Well these fairly unlikable characters do, a lot. From wealthy roots, twins Ryan and Jane, Jane's friend Lauren and Ryan's dog Oona have traveled to the twin's divorced father's large, luxurious cabin in Colorado's San Juan mountains for some winter snowboarding. This is to be one last get together before Ryan leaves for his new business and life in the Swiss Alps. Ryan has invited his best friend Sawyer to join them at the cabin and he is bringing along his soon-to-be bride April. Tension arises from the fact that Jane and Sawyer had been together through most of high school and even though both have lived separate lives since, they never really stopped loving each other. April is not into snowboarding and jealousy soon arises as she becomes the fifth wheel of the group and can see the obvious lingering attraction between Jane and Sawyer. But what about the horror? Oh yeah, there are horrible packs of humanoid creatures with beady eyes and huge claws and teeth running around the surrounding forest killing and eating anything with a pulse. Of course after the small group is snowed in by a freak winter blizzard they become fair game for the hungry humanoids. I found this story to be a stale, generic monster tale that included too much of the soap opera for my taste. The characters are unlikable to the point that I was rooting for the monsters to make short work of them. And, the reader is never given any real origin background for where these creatures came from. I am surprised this book often comes up on the to-be-read horror list of books.
This is a tale both beautiful and terrifying as related by one of the main protagonists and narrator, Michael Simmons. Set mainly near the townland of Allihies, located at the western tip of Ireland's Beara Peninsula, the story, told in three parts and a final epilogue, centers around Mike and three women, Maggie, Alison and Liz, and the one dangerously fateful decision they make at Maggie's weekend housewarming get together. All four come from the Art world. Mike and Alison have successful careers as art dealers, he in London and she in Dublin. Liz, is a poet and personal friend of Maggie. Maggie, like a younger sister to Mike, is a talented artist who was Mike's discovery and has proved her talent over the years Mike has known her. However, Maggie has poor taste in men and her last abusive boyfriend beat her so badly that she had to be hospitalized. With her art career in a slump and making the final recovery from her beating, Maggie decides to take time for herself and wander the Irish countryside. It is during this time that she spies an isolated run down oceanside stone cottage sitting below a slope near Allihies. She immediately falls in love with the cottage and surrounding costal vistas and contacts a real estate agent in order to purchase and and repair the cottage. A word of warning from the agent is the first note of unease in this tale of haunting terror - “This place has been empty a long time. Too long to be natural, really. And people talk. It's lonely out here, the kind of place where it'd be too easy to glimpse things.” But Maggie seeing artistic inspiration in the area and a chance to be alone to make a recovery from her recent bout with violence, borrows money from Mike to buy and refurbish the cottage. With the repairs complete and during a warm summer weekend, Maggie invites Mike, Alison and Liz to come for a housewarming party. She also has plans as matchmaker to bring Alison and Mike together; a plan that is actually successful in that romance does bloom and Mike and Alison will eventually marry and have a little girl years later. After a wonderful weekend together traveling the countryside, it is on the last candlelit evening, with liquid spirits flowing, that the four, with Liz's urging, take part in something that will open them all up to things best left alone. Though never boring, O'Callaghan takes his time, using beautiful, descriptive prose to unwind this unsettling ghostly tale that also manages to include a love story.
This book will give you the chills even if you're reading it in the middle of the hottest day in summer. Set in the middle of a Siberian winter along the twelve hundred mile long R504 Kolyma Highway, two men are traveling to a small isolated community in Siberia to film a documentary about the supernatural in this sparsely populated area of the world. The Kolyma Highway is known as the Road of Bones because it is built atop the frozen bodies of the hundreds of thousands of Stalin era gulag victims that died helping build the road that then became their grave. Teig is the idea man behind the project who is trying to jump start his failing career as a producer of documentary films. He owes his one last loyal friend, companion and cameraman, Prentiss, eight thousand dollars. If successful, the earnings from the documentary will more than settle his debt. They've made arrangements to meet a guide who speaks the local language and will take them the final leg of their journey to their destination. Traveling the highway in the middle of the long deadly cold Siberian night they find and rescue a girl, Nari, whose car has broken down. When the now four travelers reach the small village destination they soon find that it has been deserted; signs that all the people abandoned their warm homes and walked through the snow into the surrounding forest, some even barefoot. But one small girl, Una, the niece of their guide, is found in a catatonic condition huddling in her home. Why she was spared is unknown but the group soon realizes that something mysterious and dangerous is lurking in the surrounding forest. Nari calls it the parnee, a thing of nature; an antlered spirit with an army of animalistic wolf-like beings that can shift from the physical to shadow. With the little girl in tow, the four travelers now find they must flee for their lives back down the frozen highway pursued in the deadly cold night by powerful supernatural forces. The terror has just begun. A fast read that somewhat reminded me of the classic Algernon Blackwood horror story, The Wendigo.
This book follows an established horror trope where an old, wealthy man, wanting to know if life really continues after death, offers to pay a large sum to a small group to spend a week in a extremely dangerous haunted house. The small group is made up of four people - a somewhat crippled by polio physicist, his mousy wife and two mediums. Two former expeditions into the house, one in the early 1930s and another in the early 1940s had both ended in insanity or death. It is now 1970 and the one, now older, surviving member of the 1940s group is one of the mediums willing to enter the house to overcome his fear and defeat the evil that permeates the house. The physicist, not believing in ghosts, has invented a machine to clear the house of what he believes is residual noxious energy from past horrendous behavior that occurred there. His wife, though warned about the dangers, is more afraid of being away from her husband and will not leave his side. The other medium is a beautiful redhead who is the leader of a spiritualist church and has her own plans to clear the house of the ghosts that linger there. But whoever or whatever exists in the house has other plans and considers any of the living who enter toys to be played with and eventually destroyed. The story is filled with supernatural occurrences and violence, including sexual violence.
The story of The Troop is not for the squeamish. It hearkens back to several story themes rolled into one ghastly tale. One theme that is very pertinent to today's headlines is the escape from a biolab of a very transmissible and deadly organism and the horrific outcome for those who become infected. Could sociopathic scientists and the military possibly be involved, wink, wink? Another storyline hearkens back to the creepy “Bad Seed” theme and then elements of the story also remind the reader of the book The Lord of the Flies. But of all the horrible things that occur in the book, what bothered me the most was the sea turtle incident. Those who dare to read this stomach turning story will understand what I mean by that off-hand reference.
Can overwhelming dark power be imparted onto the trapped, restless spirit of one unexpectedly killed after committing acts of passionate murder? Such is the case in this slow unwinding of a ghostly tale set in an idyllic location. Hidden secrets surround the deaths of Englishman David Warwick's twin brother Colin and his wife Helen at their beautiful cottage and gardens within the English countryside. Receiving a dark premonition, David has travelled from his home in New York to see his brother, only to find that Colin and his wife Helen have both recently died under tragic circumstances near their beautiful cottage home. As David picks away at the suspicious unknowns surrounding the deaths and learns more about the tragic history surrounding the cottage he now has inherited, he will be slowly trapped like a fly in a spiders web by a ghostly evil. But will he have enough strength to protect his loving fiancé Shelagh from the evil when she travels from America to be with him? The tension builds and builds toward a final horror-filled, unforgettable conclusion.
This is one of those books you don't want to put down until the end. But, before you read this book I suggest, if you haven't already, read the classic horror story The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. This story, that definitely falls under cosmic horror, is an excellent homage to Blackwood's story. Like many such tales it poses the idea that there are other dimensions or worlds separated from our world by a thin veil and that sometimes openings may be torn in that veil allowing bleed through. In this case an object brought into a quirky museum, made up of strange objects and various preserved animals through the taxidermic arts, holds the power to punch a hole through the wall of the museum and into another world of cement bunkers, flowing water, misty white light and massive amounts of foreboding willow trees. While newly divorced Kara is looking after her uncle Earl's museum, she and her friend Simon, from the coffee shop next door, find and enlarge an opening in the wall of the museum and discover a cement bunker and tunnel that leads them to the dangerous Willow world. What follows is an edge-of-the-seat, unforgettable horror adventure into the unknown.
This is a period piece set in a small rural town of the 1930s. While on the surface it may appear as a “bad seed” story about two pre-pubescent teen boys, much like several of Stephen King's novels, it weaves horror with nostalgic memories of what it was like to be young in a final summer before the reality of adulthood intervenes. Horrible things are done, but the reader is left with the impression that something more, perhaps supernatural, has also taken place. It's these sorts of lingering questions that make such stories so memorable.
The Fisherman wraps a horror tale within a horror tale. What occurred in the past comes full circle to intrude into the present day. This story is definitely within the Lovecraftian horror genre where horrible monstrous things in another realm are separated from this realm by only the thinnest of veils and those with forbidden knowledge may seek to open a doorway into that other realm. In the past such a doorway was opened in a village work camp that was covered over and buried long ago under a reservoir of water formed from the work camp's dam project. It's a place where horrors occurred after a visiting stranger moved into the valley near the work camp and began doing strange things with ropes along the soon to be dammed river. In present day the path to the other side can be found by following a hard-to-find obscure stream in the Catskill mountains sourced from the reservoir. Fishermen who seek out this hidden stream are liable to find more than fish and possibly a fate worse than death. But the story doesn't just deal with horror but with the heartbreak of personal loss and how the main characters attempt to cope with that loss. Langan spins an intricate, well-told creepy tale.
A quick read and a fairly standard creepy story similar to something from Dean Koontz. A curse from the past takes over when the decision for a school to become a charter school is rammed through by the principal. As new strict and strange charter “rules” are put into place, many teacher and student personalities begin to change for the worse and those unaffected among the students, staff and student parents may soon become the school's victims.
Like the past few novels by Blake Crouch, I finished Upgrade in record time. Crouch is best at making speculative science readable for the layman while rolling it into an exciting action-packed novel that unfolds at breakneck speed. However, I only gave this book three stars because it seems like Crouch has bought into the Greta Thunberg cult of belief in the near future total collapse of Earth's environment with flooded coasts and mass human die off leading to the subsequent future extinction of humankind. I was really rolling my eyes when I found he actually included a quote from the insane ramblings of Israeli troll Yuval Noah Harari. At this point in time the people of the world are being threatened from all sides. But are these crises created by the world's population or are they synthetic creations of a power-mad elite (like the World Economic Forum) with their hooks in compromised politicians and control over fiat currencies, corporations and commodities? Messing with human DNA will not create supermen, but can only lead to human suffering and death like the experimental MRNA injections are now causing among those who bought into the propaganda around a so-called “pandemic.”
I will give credit to the author for a very complex plot; however, I can't say I really enjoyed this book. This is a long confusing book in which the main characters are all suffering with mental disorders of one type or another. Due to this, the character narrations and time flow can never be trusted. Through these narrations plot points are doled out in confusing dribs and drabs and it is not until almost the very ending that the true story is revealed. Though many consider this book to be part of the horror genre, and while it at first has the feeling of horror, the book deals mainly with child abuse that occurs every day in the real world and the often unforeseen and lasting consequences from such trauma. I would say that the book falls more within the mystery genre and has absolutely nothing to do with supernatural horror.
According to the author, Peter Clines, he's hanging up the Threshold universe for now with the conclusion of Terminus. That's probably a good idea. Though I still enjoyed the read, of the four books in the Threshold series, I think this is the weakest. I read 14, the first book, some time ago and Terminus references that book a lot and in fact uses one of the main characters from that book in the story. My memory is hazy about the details of 14 so I always was left thinking I should reread the book to clear up a lot of what was taking place in Terminus, but nah. This time the boundary between perceived reality and a Lovecraftian nightmare reality is centered on a small uncharted island about a thousand miles from Madagascar. Like the apartment building/machine in 14 there is another such building on the island, but the machine is beginning to fail and the boundary between worlds is weakening, allowing creatures from the nightmare world to cross over. What's even worse, a cult of semi-mutated people, touched by “The Great Old Ones” and led by a beautiful but deadly zealot, is heading to the island to destroy the machine and make sure the boundary comes completely down, giving “The Great Old Ones” they worship free rain to destroy. With all the action taking place inside and outside the building, as I got nearer the big finish I found the story became confusing trying to distinguish between which reality the characters were actually in. I guess it was the Albuquerque Door effect, a reference to the second book, The Fold. And, on top of all that cloning plays a part in the story as it relates to a particular character. IMHO it didn't need to be in this story and it and the character could have been jettisoned for something more satisfying. Oh, and why do we never learn if the bright green cockroaches do anything but hang around the Threshold boundary areas?
Peter Clines' Threshold universe reminds me of the filmic Cloverfield universe. It's strangely Lovecraftian and sits lurking just on the other side of perceived reality waiting to grab with its tentacles the unsuspecting and pull them to their doom. This third journey into that universe is set at a future time when permanent manned bases have been built on the moon and spacecraft are routinely launched from and return to hookups on Earth's space elevators. In a time of future Earth's overpopulation one of the main uses for the moon is to preserve and bury Earth's dead. It is the main job of Caretakers at various graveyard outposts to bury and mark the graves of the deceased who are constantly being shuttled to the moon for internment. Of course there are also tourist and mining industries on the moon with the main city/base being Luna City. When an ancient Lovecraftian “something” crashes into a graveyard near one of the Caretaker bases a horror is unleashed and the continuing story merges elements from tales of zombies, hostile aliens and space action-hero adventures (think Alien II combined with World War Z and The Thing). And, it mainly comes down to one of the novice Caretakers and her veteran and former Marine Caretaker partner to try and save as many lunar lives as possible and keep the menace from reaching Earth. Somehow Peter Clines manages to pull together all these elements to create an edge-of-your-seat, page-turning, Sci-Fi/Horror tale.
Science Fiction/Horror writers can never go wrong writing about time travel, faster-than-the speed-of-light space travel, worm-holes, multi-verses or teleportation, as long as they are able to give a bit of a unique twist or a fresh take on one or more of these subjects. Peter Clines has managed to do just that in this novel which also references subject matter from his other exciting novel “14.” Mike Erikson is a true genius with an eidetic memory that continues to catalog everything he has ever experienced with his five senses his entire life. A friend from DARPA has been trying to get him on special projects without luck for many years, but Mike prefers to live a simpler life as a high school English teacher. Finally his friend is able to persuade Mike to act as a simple observer on the Albuquerque Door project to solve a mystery and find out if it is worth continuing to fund the secretive project. The project's technology appears to be successful in opening a fold or doorway in space and the group behind the project have successfully traversed through the doorway rings and back again several times between the two building sites containing the doorway ring sets. But something feels wrong about the project and the project group keep delaying releasing the technology to DARPA on the grounds that more testing is needed. The project staff see Mike as a spy and the enemy and so he has his work cut out for him acting as an impartial observer and cataloging in his memory everything he observes as testing of the project continues. Things begin to go south when one of the staff is killed in a horrific way during another routine test of the doorway. Mike begins to unravel what the misunderstood nature of the doorway is and the secrets the staff has been keeping from everyone about the technology. It isn't long before the project group starts losing control of the technology and as the body count rises Lovecraftian horror is unleashed and Mike and the remaining staff must race against time to divert a disaster that could literally end life on Earth.
A fairly good follow-up to Wyndham's original “Day of the Triffids” that started out well but went a bit over-the-top at the end. Years after the ending of the original book that left the main character Bill Masen, his partner Josella and a group of survivors taking up residence on the Isle of Wight, Bill Masen's grown son and pilot, David Masen, begins an adventure of his own after a passing cosmic dust cloud blocks out most of the sunlight, throwing the world into darkness. When David is forced to make a crash landing on a floating mass of debris, weed and triffids during a reconnaissance flight, he finds a young feral girl survivor who appears to be immune to the triffids' stings. Eventually he and the girl are picked up by a passing steamer and the story moves to America and into what appears to be a restored and thriving New York City. But the city holds a dark secret and David will eventually find out that the fanatical leader of the city is an old enemy from his father's past. After becoming romantically involved with the beautiful daughter of the city leader, David is shanghaied and taken by submarine to a settlement in the Southern region of America. There he soon falls in with a group of rebels called Foresters trying to stop the evil plans of New York City's leader. All the while the main story unfolds the triffids are continuing to mount greater threats against humanity and David and the Foresters soon find out that the triffids are rapidly mutating, creating different and more dangerous versions of the menacing plant.
John Wyndham's writing, though somewhat dated, is every bit as important and unique as that produced by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and other great Science Fiction writers of his time. I know of two of his classic novels that were reproduced in film, The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos (Village of the Damned), but the original written material is definitely superior. The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos are alien invasion tales that each take on this theme in as an unique, inventive a way as H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. The Chrysalids is a post apocalyptic tale with themes every bit as compelling as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and a couple of Wyndham's short stories could be additions to Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. In Trouble with Lichen Wyndham poses the questions and problems that would arise if a relatively rare natural substance was found that could radically increase life expectancy (years before Frank Herbert created the spice melange in Dune). John Wyndham's writings should be on every Science Fiction reader's reading list.
Ray Bradbury's writing style is truly unique among writers of Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror/Dramatic Fiction. I think of him as the Norman Rockwell of story writing. Even when writing about adventures in space, life on other planets or the diabolical deeds of aliens and humans, there is a kind of Americana homespun feeling to the stories. While keeping the reader riveted with a story's subject matter, at the end a story often leaves the reader with a melancholy ache for times and places lost and pondering one's own brief existence in this thing called a human lifetime.
I can see why Arthur Conan Doyle's characters of Sherlock Holmes and his friend and sidekick Dr. Watson have been favorites for readers over the years. I finally broke down and began reading these stories and found them very well written and enjoyable. I was pleasantly surprised to see in many cases, while the mystery takes place in England, there was often a connection to America. Story connections included the early Mormons, the early KKK and mention of the American gold fields and coal mining communities. And, I was surprised to learn of Sherlock's brother Mycroft, who was a genius in his own right.