by Shock Totem
“Dad, we need to talk.”
“Get off the stage!” a few in the crowd shouted, but others shut them up.
The big dyke in Dad’s chair showed through for a second, but then she killed a beer and threw it into the crowd and the angry red-faced man stood up and said, “We’re in the middle of an exercise, Tim.” Dad looked around like he could see the words coming out of his mouth. “Scout has an audition tomorrow. If you want to come back and join the group—”
“No, I don’t want to join the group.” The kid dropped his duffel bag on the table. Something fell out of it. Moldy clothes and comic books and somebody in the crowd screamed because they saw something else. “I wanted to join a family, but you won’t let us be one. I’m tired of living for your dream, Dad.”
“Tim, sit down,” Mother mumbled. She was busy underlining Trudy’s lines for her commercial audition tomorrow.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Dad said. His eyes rolled in his head, trying to see the script, trying to figure out where his lines were coming from. No longer the star of the scene, he stared at this angry little live wire who came around the table to get in his face.
“Nobody here wants to be an actor, Dad. That was your dream...”
“And nobody handed it to me, I had to earn it! And I made it...How many situation comedies did you star in before you were ten? And my parents didn’t...”
“They didn’t push you like you push us! When your time ended, you moved out to the middle of nowhere and started a child star farm.”
“Well, maybe I made a mistake, trying to help you, I admit that. Some people just don’t have it. Kids, take note, your brother is trying to teach you something, in his own way. Giving up is pretty ugly, isn’t it?”
Nobody said anything.
“We’re not your puppets any more, Dad. I’m not an actor. I’m a human fucking being! I’m going to go out and find a regular loser job and marry a nobody wife and raise some nobody kids, and we’re never going to be famous and we’re never going to be rich, and we’re going to go to bed at night happy.”
“So GO! Don’t let me stop you!” Dad came around the table and shoved him, but he had a steak knife in his other hand and when he shoved the kid into the wall, his hand whipped out with the knife. Randy felt it and he looked around but he couldn’t see the crowd but he could feel them like a hundred-eyed invisible, loving God telling him, No, don’t give up!
And he knows how the scene goes, the real scene ends with Jake dying at the hands of his failed child star Dad, but the crowd says NO, GET UP.
Randy caught his Dad’s hand and pried it off the knife and socked Dad in the eye, sending him tumbling back into the table. Jake pulled the knife out of his side and raised it over his father, but then dropped it. He picked up his duffel bag and pushed his clothes back into it, and nobody could see the other thing, the tumble of black, moldy bones, now.
“Come with me! We can still be a family!”
Mother and his sisters looked down at the table, shrinking with shame as the spotlight contracted down to a pinpoint on him as he marched off the stage into the crowd. The family didn’t stir, but the audience was swept up in it, they were all Jake when he crossed the room and threw open the front door and leapt off the porch that hung over the northbound lanes of the 101. One after another, they charged out the door after him, into the blinding lights and blaring horns and screeching tires of the world beyond broken dreams.
Cody Goodfellow has written four novels—Radiant Dawn, Ravenous Dusk, Perfect Union and Repo Shark—and co-wrote Jake’s Wake, Spore and The Last Goddam Hollywood Movie with John Skipp. His short fiction has been collected in All-Monster Action and Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, both of which received the Wonderland Book Award. As co-founder and editor of Perilous Press, he has presided over new Mythos releases by Brian Stableford, David Conyers and Michael Shea. He lives in Burbank.
WHISPERINGS SUNG THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF STILTED SORROWS
by WC Roberts
1. Shadows
The wet nurse quit. Who could stand living
under that roof with hobgoblins climbing in
through the windows on moonless nights
and stealing down the hall
to whisper from behind closed bedroom doors,
trying to vaccinate the poor child
against schizophrenia? A hydra
with so many mouths to feed
and teeth like dirty needles...
they prick and set her breasts on fire
the shadow feeds, then
it sniffs at the breeze and rides on the night
to another broken soul beside the road
whirling beneath stars of Astor
and decay
2. Nativity
She goes out that door and down the road
with a carpet bag under her arm, its handle broken,
no longer wondering which way to go
but away—away, and awake. Not to sleep again.
A green flare goes up in the distance,
marking the changes in her
hour by hour as they go on adoring him,
his body in a knotty pine wood box.
Mourners of wax and bone
framed by rows of metal folding chairs,
their tears pooling on the floor in the parlor
swirls concentric and caressing
they have come
to sip angst from the delectable pool
and go on (unmoved and unaware)
3. Apprehension
A reliquary to be roasted,
this heart to be consumed. The organ does
what it was always supposed to do:
produce milk.
Everyone from the neighborhood comes
to suck, and find succor in her arms,
her gaping wounds.
They drip serum, nightly.
entering an open window, invisible on
the breeze it feasts upon
yet another darkened heart.
Nearly sated
4. Timewatching
He waits—as he always does—twitching
at each movement in the darkness,
the ticking of all his clocks
fails to sooth him.
He doesn't know if they'll come to him
but he believes they will,
seeking to drink from his veins—
veins throbbing, pulsing with liquid time.
He'll be ready when they come,
he thinks. Hopes. Dreaming
it rides to another pool of despair,
savoring the flavors of hopelessness
and resignation...
Going wherever the wind
5. Engravements
"T&R" marred the wood, deeply cut
into the trunk of the ancient oak at dusk
the orange bolding the engravement
as pitted, shadow letters off-centered
in this crudely drawn heart.
She was the "R" he remembers, but...
had he been the "T"? He comes to the oak
at the end of the day again and again
to see if the memory will return. It hasn't.
He wonders if the "X" carved into his temple
keeps the memories from coming back,
if someone told him it all before
and he just doesn't remember.
How could he? He
takes it, to dip in the sweetness
of night, resting in ancient oak leaves'
moist, black palimpsestuous layers
on the floor of the wood lot,
strangers locked up inside their houses
until the hunger again and again returns.
WC Roberts bought his first television in 2010, after selling his first 100 poems. He can’t get Mystery Theater or Happy Days reruns on his rabbit ears, not way out where he is, so he Rarebit Dreams of riding in the sidecar with motorcycle-tough Miss Marple as she jumps the shark. Or t
ries to. Night after night. Desperate for a satellite dish, he applies his imagination to works of fiction.
STRANGE GOODS
& OTHER ODDITIES
Ex-Communication, by Peter Clines; Broadway Books, 2013; 346 pgs.
Ah, how much I love Peter Clines. His Ex- series has had me since the opening chapter of Ex-Patriots, when we were first introduced to the stable of new superheroes that populate his zombie-filled, post-apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles.
So much has changed since that first innovative book. The heroes’ home, The Mount, has grown from a small compound where the survivors of the ex-virus struggle from day to day into a bustling city-within-a-city, complete with churches, marketplaces, and an actual police force. Legion, that offbeat master of the undead, still lingers outside their walls, trying occasionally to force his way inside and make life miserable for our heroes, but for the most part he’s contained. His presence becomes a relative nuisance more than an actual threat, which is an interesting turn for this third novel to take. Whereas once Legion was the menace that seemed destined to bring about the final downfall of humanity as we know it, his existence has become simply another fact of life.
In the place of that baddest of baddies, the survivors of Los Angeles have seemingly mundane problems to deal with such as crime, religion, and political disagreement, all of which have been building for three books now. I thought it was brilliant to focus on these aspects of life within The Mount, as what is a new problem for the survivors is actually quite an old problem in the world that’s now gone. It reads like the tail end of a loop before it whirls back around and starts on the cycle all over again. Is humanity doomed to repeat the failings of the past? Are ignorance, faith, and a fear of the unknown going to drive this new society into the same frenzied mess as the one that came before it? Will the heroes, who possess great abilities regular folk just can’t aspire to, going to continue to be benevolent, or will they act upon their strength and become dictators rather than protectors? These are all powerful questions Ex-Communication asks, though since this is an ongoing series, they aren’t answered just yet.
And into the midst of this, a new danger emerges, one that threatens to undo everything. In truth, this new threat—which encompasses the last third of the novel—is the weakest aspect of the story. Yes, it’s tense and over-the-top and filled with action (as befitting any of the Ex- books), but there was something disappointing about it, as well. Maybe it’s because the intriguing storyline of a certain character ends, one that I’ve been waiting to be resolved since the end of the first book, and that ending was less than satisfying.
Despite that, this last part of the story does tie into the feel of the rest of the book (not to mention the series as a whole). We finally get to meet Max Hale, a hero who is seen only as the reanimated demon Cairax in the first installment, and we see inside the mind of the powerful wizard and understand what makes him tick. And what is that, you ask? Ego, greed, ambition, selfishness, hubris. All the aspects of humanity that, in small doses, help to drive our race forward and yet, when applied to the extreme, threaten to destroy not just the individual, but all of those around them. In that way, Max represents all the new troubles brewing within their new city, which is a very, very clever maneuver by Clines. If only he’d come up a different way to bring about this end without sacrificing the most powerful and enigmatic of all the heroes in the process.
In all, this is a really fun read. Clines does some very interesting things with his mythology, including introducing a quirky undead girl whose mind regenerates each morning, wiping out her memory, which makes her the most innocent human of anyone in The Mount—aka a perfect counter to Max Hale’s subterfuge. The book is filled with fantastic fight scenes and feats of super-powered fancy. Even including that one issue I had with the story, I think it’s the best in the trilogy so far. A fresh perspective on zombie literature, which is a great thing since the genre has taken a definite turn for the dull worst. It’s definitely on my short list of best books read in 2013, and it should be on yours too.
–Robert J. Duperre
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, by Patton Oswalt; Simon & Schuster, 2011; 265 pgs.
I’m going to come out of the gate here and admit that I bent the parameters of the “horror” tie-in to review this book. I say that because aside from Oswalt’s wonderfully nostalgic references to horror playing a part in his childhood and teenage years (both in film and literature), there is next to nil of the scary stuff in here. But that doesn’t make it rock any less.
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is a pseudo-memoir, all handed to us in that self-deprecating, sneaky snarky way that Oswalt has. His childhood and teen years in Virginia, working at a movie theater and playing Dungeons & Dragons, devouring volumes of fantasy and horror books—we start the ride there and go through to the early years of his comedy career. all peppered with hilarious anecdotes and darkly funny scenarios.
To break up the monotony, he throws in chapters of utterly strange things like “Chamomile Kitten Greeting Cards,” all presented with little explanation, but they appear to be a line of greeting cards with ideas and historical rhetoric penned by Patton. Wryly hysterical to say the least.
The chapter on old Hobo songs made me laugh so loud, my wife told me to put the book away as I was keeping her awake. There is a bittersweet chapter wherein his grandmother explains her increasingly bizarre gifts over the years.
The book is tied off with “Appendix A: Erik Blevins,” which is an alter ego Oswalt created to pass time and break monotony when he was working in the script writing biz. Wild and off-kilter workups of ridiculous films that never were, such as Cancer Pond, Slade Ripfire: Punch to Kill, and what would be the best of the franchise, Slade Ripfire: Deadly Blood-Kick to Oblivion.
Not to snuff the flame he lights with “Appendix A,” he delivers a second featuring the underground reviews of another persona, Neill Cumpston. We get to read his brutally honest and heartfelt reviews such as “Blade Fuckin’ II, Fuck Yeah!” and “X2: X-Men Kicking You In the Balls So Hard That You Puke On Your Balls and Also Your Ass!” Just ridiculous.
I must admit, it probably helps if you’re a fan of Oswalt’s brand of humor, as this book reads like an extension of his routines. In fact, those familiar with his bits will no doubt recognize some constant themes as they show themselves in this book. But I found it quite fun and funny.
–John Boden
Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, by Mercedes M. Yardley; Ragnarok Publications, 2013; 126 pgs.
When I read the title of the new novella by Mercedes M. Yardley, I itched to begin reading and find out what the two names meant and how the characters would find each other. “A tale of atomic love,” the cover promised, and that drew me in ever further.
Having read Yardley’s short story collection, Beautiful Sorrows, I thought Apocalyptic Montessa would be rich and sweet, like dense chocolate cake with a bitter, poisonous frosting. The opening was touching, a mother walking in a graveyard, naming her special child after a headstone that struck her—“Montessa.” Then the unborn baby grew up, and became a stripper named Ruby.
You’d think that’s where the sweetness stops, and to an extent, you’d be right. The beginning of this novella is heart-wrenching to read, although the pacing is so fast and engrossing that I had to force myself to put down my Kindle to do things like eat or sleep. Yardley’s use of language and imagery is unparalleled, and Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu brings that in spades, as well as a rhythm to the prose that kept me enraptured.
The characters of Montessa and Lulu are lovely, broken demons that both drew me in and repelled me at times. It takes true skill to make characters that do such terrible things sympathetic, and I tip my hat to that deft hand. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more tension, the sweetness returns, and as a reader, I felt a bit guilty at the joy I felt for the two star-crossed lovers. Every second of that conflict is delicious.
�
��Catherine Grant
The Savage Dead, by Joe McKinney; Pinnacle, 2013; 368 pgs.
Did you ever read a book by a mainstream publisher and wonder how in the world that book ever got published? That was my thought as I read through Joe McKinney’s failed attempt to bring a fresh perspective to the tired zombie genre.
Instead of focusing on the survivors of a world already gone to pot, or a core group just as the plague begins, McKinney decides to camouflage his zombie epic as a Clancyesque action-mystery tale of drug cartels and the men and women who fight against them, using the zombies only for the climax. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, and could have been a pioneering effort, but the author just couldn’t pull it off.
The story revolves around Juan Perez, a superman undercover agent whose duty is to protect Senator Sutton, a woman who’s pissed off the cartels with harsh legislation. Accompanying our perfect hero is Tess Compton, his super-sexy partner, and fighting against him is a cartel assassin named Pilar, also a super-sexy vixen who does her boss’s bidding without question. Yes, everyone of importance in this book is a supermodel.
The first half of the novel is intrigue and deception as the good guys try to figure out which bad guys attempted to assassinate Senator Sutton. The bulk of the rest of the book takes place on a cruise liner, which Senator Sutton has decided to take to the coast of Mexico with only her husband, her assistant, and the super-sexy Tess Compton for protection. (Not exactly the best decision by a woman whose life is constantly in danger, but then again, if she hadn’t made this decision, McKinney wouldn’t have a book.) It seems one of the cartels has created a mutated flesh-eating bacteria that turns people into zombies, and it’s super-sexy Pilar’s job to release that virus on the cruise ship because…um…why not?
