by Shock Totem
Ex-Patriots may not be a perfect book—the most interesting reveal in the first book, the start of the plague and its progenitor, is pretty much ignored, and the mournful loss of Gorgon, their friend and fellow hero, falls somewhat stale—but it does what a story like this is meant to do...
It entertains, and entertains fully. Which is really all you can ask for.
–Robert J. Duperre
Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes, Edited by Charles Prepolec and Jeff Campbell; EDGE SFF Publishing, 2011; 280 pgs.
There are many classic fictional characters in literature, but Sherlock Holmes is by far one of the most iconic. Even if you’ve never read one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories (and shame on you if you haven’t), you know something of Holmes.
From the Meerschaum pipe and Deerstalker cap to the catchphrases such as “The game is afoot” and “Elementary, my dear Watson,” few figures cast as long and recognizable a shadow.
So taking on a parody of such a character, let alone writing new tales with a figure such as Sherlock Holmes, is a dicey proposition. In clumsy hands, it can be an utter shambles, but devotees of the famous consulting detective will almost certainly flock to anything of quality.
Gaslight Arcanum delivers quality.
It’s not perfect by any means. Some stories were not to my taste, and none of them manage to rise to the level of intricate ratiocination that Doyle exhibited in his stories featuring the famous detective, but after all, these are not his stories, are they?
They are the individual authors’ stories, and they display a great deal of variety without straying too far from Doyle’s blueprint.
The variety was particularly enjoyable to me as a confirmed Sherlock Holmes fan, because while some tales portray Holmes as we are used to seeing him, many others took a different tack, showing us Holmes as a young man, an old man, and everything in between, and put him in the company of a dizzying variety of supporting characters, both fictional and nonfictional.
While not every story was a home run, most were at least solid doubles, and the “what is coming next?” factor had me turning the page even when the last story was not as strong as it could have been simply because I thought that the next one would be the one to deliver.
Many did. Highly recommended.
–Nick Contor
The Hungry, by Steven W. Booth and Harry Shannon; Genius Publishing, 2011; 224 pgs.
It’s a good thing I was handed a copy of The Hungry, by Steven W. Booth and Harry Shannon, when I was. You see, I too was hungry—ravenous, even. But when all the Hot Pockets in my house failed to quell my hunger, I knew...
I’m getting ahead of myself. First, the facts.
The Hungry follows the story of police officer Penny Miller as she navigates her way through a zombie apocalypse. She makes friends along the way, and enemies. There are zombies. There are bikers. There are super zombies (complete with heaving bosoms). There’s literary nudity. And there’s lots of love put into the whole thing.
That’s the thing I liked most about The Hungry. These guys obviously have a great love for the zombie genre. It oozes from every action-packed scene as the plot frolics along gleefully, describing the inherent gore a zombie apocalypse would yield. In other words, there’s a great deal the zombie-obsessed members of geekdom will find to enjoy, here.
Unfortunately, a lot of The Hungry dances along the line of cliché, and it doesn’t bring much new to the table as far as zombie horror is concerned, but that’s not the point.
So what is the point?
Well, it satisfied my hunger...for similes.
Where else will you find a line like “Sanchez grinned, posing like an oiled-up, shrunken-balled, steroid-dicked gym rat in a room full of polished mirrors”?
Or how about: “His chubby vanished like a politician’s promise.”
Yeah. That just happened.
I love similes. I mean, I love similes like my father loves reminding me of my questionable lineage. See what I did there? I used a simile to describe my feelings for similes, like a teacher using an example to...wait, I just did it again. Literacy!
The similes in The Hungry are so classic that I keep it in my pocket AT ALL TIMES. Mostly so I always have a comeback when that stupid kid who lives at the end of my street makes fun of me.
Stupid Kid at the End of the Street: “Hey! My dad says you don’t take baths!”
Ryan: “Leave me alone! Or I’ll stick you and...uh...”
(takes out his copy of The Hungry)
“Ah-ha! ‘The blood will come out of you quick as a double-dicked bull pissing on a flat rock!’”
Stupid Kid at the End of the Street: “What does that even mean?”
Ryan: “‘I’ll split you open...”
(flips a few pages)
“Like a grape in kinky leather!”
(runs back home victorious)
See what I mean? Pure gold.
–Ryan Bridger
Cannibal Holocaust: 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, by Rugerro Deodato (director) and Gianfranco Clerici (writer); starring Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, and Perry Pirkanen; 1980; Unrated; 95 min.
Found-footage movies are all the rage right now, especially in the horror world. And small wonder, too, with reality TV showing us the “real life” of celebrities and other assorted freaks, the sheeple are clamoring for something real, even though very little of what is passed off as reality programming really is. Some love them, some hate them, but there's no denying that when they are done right, they can offer the suspension of disbelief better than any other genre.
The Blair Witch Project kicked off the current craze, but it was far from the first movie to milk the idea. The now lost 1930 exploitation film Ingagi is generally considered to be the first of its kind, and movies which present film that is supposed to show actual events have appeared sporadically before Blair Witch.
One of the most effective is the 1980 Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust.
The movie starts out with the familiar “based on actual events” trope and warns the viewers that what we are about to see will be shocking. It's a promise that director Ruggero Deodato delivers on, where so many others have failed.
The movie starts out in New York City, following Harold Monroe, an anthropologist out to rescue a group of young filmmakers who traveled to the Amazon rainforest to try to document cannibalistic practices among the indigenous peoples. He finds the filmmakers’ remains along with canisters containing the film that they shot, and returns to assemble a documentary based around their footage.
The first half of the movie is a bit slow, but once we get to the showing of the “lost” footage, things get pretty intense. This is not one for the squeamish, as it shows the real deaths of a number of animals (the DVD allows you to skip those if you prefer) and the staged violence is no less effective. I've seen a number of horrific filmed images, and I was cringing quite a bit.
Deodato makes good use of the now familiar shaky-cam technique to show us glimpses of the on screen deaths and enhance the sense of realism, but he does not abuse the technique to the point of weariness, as so many who followed him did.
He was also a marketing visionary. Deodato hired unknown Italian and American actors and stipulated in their contracts that they not appear in any other media for a year to enhance the illusion that the deaths shown in Cannibal Holocaust were genuine.
The ruse was so successful that the film was confiscated ten days after it premiered in Milan, Italy, and he was arrested and charged with obscenity and murder. Deodata was forced to void the contacts and produce his actors in order to avoid life in prison. Now that's some good special effects.
The bonus disc has scads of extras and interviews, including one of the stars that is quite critical of the film and repudiates his involvement in it. It's not often that a decades old horror film can still inspire anything beyond laughter. Whatever your reaction to Cannibal Holocaust, I promise you won't be laug
hing.
–Nick Contor
Southern Gods, by John Hornor Jacobs; Night Shade Books, 2011; 270 pgs.
I love Southern Noir. I love Lovecraftian demonesque horror. I love the blues. So, needless to say, when I stumbled upon John Hornor Jacobs’s Southern Gods and read the back cover synopsis, my mouth went dry. “Dear Sweet Lord, don’t let this suck,” I prayed, then ordered it.
It does not suck.
Southern Gods concerns the plight of Bull Ingram, a monstrous brute of a man, a war veteran turned thug for hire. He lives a lonely existence on the periphery of society, until he is hired by a Memphis DJ who wants him to track down a missing employee as well as a mysterious bluesman.
Ramblin’ John Hastur plays dark blues, blues that wraps its skeletal fingers around your throat and squeezes until the madness arises—vile blues that chains your morals and frees your demons. Hastur’s songs are played on a mysterious radio broadcast and they drive men insane and raise the dead.
Bull follows his leads and gets mixed up in dark deeds and things he cannot easily explain. Events that leave him battered and bruised and left for dead along the river. It is at this juncture that he enters the life of a young woman, freshly split from her abusive husband, and holed up at her childhood estate with her young daughter and ailing mother. These and other characters become embroiled in a dark plot aimed at ushering in Old Gods and an eternity of suffering and pain.
This is Jacobs’s debut novel and it is a wowzer! Richly detailed in character and setting, lyrical prose and rich visuals. If I had to pick any negative, it would be the ending. It seemed quite abrupt. We spend so much time getting to know these fantastic characters and their setting and all these events leading up to a climax that...well, can’t help but seem a little lackluster.
That is just this fellow’s opinion, and it didn’t ruin the book for me, at all. Southern Gods is a fun, fast read. Engaging and well-executed. I cannot wait to see what Jacobs offers next.
–John Boden
Welcome to Moon Hill, by Anthony J. Rapino; Moon Hill Books, 2012; 134 pgs.
Anthony J. Rapino’s Welcome to Moon Hill is a creepy, deftly-written collection steeped in atmosphere. The reader is introduced to the wooded area of Moon Hill and its bizarre occupants as they quietly live (or don’t) through their day.
At times humorous, at times moody, but always threatening, Welcome to Moon Hill is fast-paced with clean writing. I read through it very quickly, and was pleased that it easily kept my attention. The characters are varied, from a quirky dog named Stanley to a plumber who flushes a very specific type of clog from the pipes. Each one has a unique, sinister skill set and it was intriguing to see how the characters fit like a cog into the town’s machinery.
While their situations and results are often horrifying, the hearts of their tales are strangely relatable. Fathers don’t know how to handle their daughters, people are forced to compete for the same job, and a man’s obsession with his work tears his relationships apart. Bones are broken, lives are taken, and childlike adults chase fireflies...
Now garnish with would-be rapists, tragic dark powers, and carnivorous plants, and you have a clear idea of this book and the very unnerving town that is Moon Hill.
Solid as its own entity, Welcome to Moon Hill is the introduction for a novel soon to come. I’d suggest it to anybody that likes their fiction dark and mysterious, but not gory simply for gore’s sake.
–Mercedes M. Yardley
Super 8, by J.J. Abrams (director, writer); starring Elle Fanning, Joel Cortney and Kyle Chandler; 2011; PG 13; 112 min.
JJ Abrams is a genius or a bum, depending on who you talk to, with not a lot of room in the middle. Is he a big-budget special-effects hack, like Michael Bay, or a serious filmmaker, like Steven Spielberg? I’m not going to try to settle those questions definitively here, but with Super 8, Abrams makes a serious stab at filmmaker.
In the summer of 1979, a group of kids are witnesses to a train wreck while making a super 8 movie. The wreck is accompanied by strange phenomena, including the death of a teacher and a mysterious cube, and is immediately quarantined by the military. As the kids await the development of their footage, the strange events continue, and the father of one of the kids, a Sheriff’s deputy, is detained by the government for investigating the wreck.
The main story revolves around a developing relationship between two of the kids, Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) and Joe Lamb (Joel Cortney). The friendship/romance (at 14, those lines are pretty blurry) is complicated by the death of Lamb’s mother, which his deputy father blames on Dainard’s father.
Super 8 is a period piece of sorts, designed to pay homage the classic films of the late seventies and early eighties, like E.T. and The Goonies, with the king of eighties films, Stephen Spielberg’s blessing and involvement as an executive producer. Like those films, there is a heavier emphasis on story and character development than we see in most modern creature films, and an admirable restraint in special effects wizardry. In the seventies, they didn’t show us too much of the monster because of the effects limitations of the time. Abrams doesn’t show us the monster to remind us that good filmmaking trumps big budget CGI every time.
It’s not that there is no CGI, or modern-style action sequences. The train wreck is gripping and fast-paced, and the ending sequences with the reveal of the creature behind the mysterious events are as modern as it gets. In between, however, Abrams intersperses just enough glimpses to keep the kids interested while he tells a far better story than I’ve seen in an action/creature film in a long time.
Music is used to great effect, never dominating, but evoking the time period quite effectively.
Abrams also gets great performances out of his cast, particularly the most inexperienced and unknown children. While the bulk of the emotional weight is carried by the more experienced Fanning, all of the kids are given room to showcase their acting skills, and none of them disappoint or devolve into the one-liner wisecracking that is too often offered as a substitute for acting skills.
It’s the kind of movie I didn’t think Hollywood could make any more. I suppose that was the point of making it.
–Nick Contor
The Beast of Boggy Creek: The True Story of the Fouke Monster, by Lyle Blackburn; Anomalist Books, 2012; 239 pgs.
I have long been a fan of all things cryptozoological—along with UFOs, treasure hunting, archeology, and just about every other “nerdist” pursuit one could think of in the realm of mystery. But cryptozoology, the study of “hidden animals,” is the one I find most interesting, as it refers to the search for undiscovered—though quite possibly nonexistent—animals, such as Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Champ, and the chupacabra.
Animals that could very well be—and indeed in some cases likely are—lurking in our own backyards.
Around my hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts, we have the Bridgewater Triangle, an area of about 200 square miles that encompasses the Hockomock Swamp (Hockomock meaning the “place where spirits dwell”). For centuries it has been the location of UFO and Bigfoot sightings, as well as giant birds and mysterious lights. There have been reports of ghosts, of Satanic rituals being performed. Though I’ve not witnessed anything out of the norm in the triangle—and I’ve looked—it has nonetheless fascinated me since childhood.
The small town of Fouke, Arkansas, has been that place of fascination and mystery for many people, as well, specifically musician and author Lyle Blackburn. And his first book, The Beast of Boggy Creek: The True Story of the Fouke Monster, is a testament to this.
Lyle Blackburn is probably best known as Count Lyle, lead singer/guitarist for the gothabilly horror-punk band Ghoultown. But he’s also a damn good writer, and The Beast of Boggy Creek showcases this.
The book attempts to compile the complete history behind the legendary cryptid known as the Fouke Monster, from possible sightings in centuries past to more modern-day sightings, specifically the 1971 sightings that sparked the backwoods legen
d we now know as the Fouke Monster. Obviously it covers the classic horror film, The Legend of Boggy Creek, in depth, as would be expected, but it goes beyond that.
Peppered throughout The Beast of Boggy Creek are detailed eye-witness accounts, collected theories, a chronicle of sightings of “hairy bipedal man-ape creatures within 50 miles of Fouke” (though not a comprehensive list of all sightings, as that alone would take up an entire book, if not more). There are also personal anecdotes from the author, maps, illustrations, photos, and an exhaustive bibliography for the would-be crypto-geek.
The Beast of Boggy Creek is a detailed and engrossing history lesson, one that could only have been written by someone with a passion for the subject matter and the inherent mysteries that surround cryptozoology. Perhaps the best thing about this book, however, is not that it is such a comprehensive look at the Fouke Monster, but that it is presented as a compelling, personal story. Lyle Blackburn doesn’t just give you the details in a stale, here-are-the-facts manner, as is often the case with similar works of nonfiction; he presents it all as if he were on stage with Ghoultown—it’s a show, it’s entertainment, and for all intents and purposes, it’s real.
Whether you’re a hardened believer, a skeptic, or something in between, The Beast of Boggy Creek is a highly recommended and entertaining read.
–K. Allen Wood
The Quarry, by Mark Allan Gunnells; Evil Jester Press, 2012; 226 pgs.
