Category Archives: Book releases

Tales to Terrify Call for Submissions

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Horror podcast Tales to Terrify (now up to its 41st episode starring work from Tim Lebbon, and still going strong, with its first print volume forthcoming) is open to submissions. If you want to be part of this stellar show, read the submission guidelines at the site.

Previous shows have featured HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, Margo Lanagan, Kaaron Warren, and a truckload of other talent, so you would truly be aiming to keep good company with your submission. Good luck!

(On a personal note, this is my favourite horror podcast. Period.)

Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig – review

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Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Publisher: Angry Robot Books

UK – ISBN 9780857662293

US/CAN – ISBN 9780857662309

eBook – ePub ISBN 9780857662316

Blackbirds is a novel by notorious internet pottymouth, Chuck Wendig. Chuck’s online writing advice and sheer volume of bloggery is quite impressive and I was slightly dubious about wading into his actual fiction for the first time. I really wanted to like it, but wasn’t sure if I would. I needn’t have worried.

The story follows ballsy, attitude-ridden, hardass, Miriam Black, who has the power to know, from a single skin-on-skin touch, when a person will die. She’ll see in graphic detail, just once, the first time she touches a person, exactly how that person will shuffle off. She’s never wrong and she can’t change anything that happens. What she can do is make notes about the people who are going to cark it and be sure she’s nearby at the time to loot the corpse. That’s how she makes a living. Pretty dark stuff.

But when Miriam hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days Louis will be murdered just as he seems to spot her behind the killer. Miriam knows from experience she can’t save him, but if she’s there as he’s murdered, she’d better try, in order to save herself if nothing else.

Wendig delivers this story like shotgun blast after shotgun blast of action and smartmouthed dialogue. The characters, for the most part, are excellent. Miriam is a very well-conceived invention, a real basketcase, and Wendig manages her well. There are occasions when she becomes something of a parody of herself, which is unfortunate, but it happens rarely. The bad guys on the trail are quite delicious, a nice set of villains, but I would have liked to see them a little more explained. A bit more about their stories would be good. We get a solid backstory on one of them, but very little on the others.

Sadly, though, I felt that Louis’s character was a bit underdone. He’s a dishrag, a walk-over, and that makes him a bit two-dimensional. He’s also incredibly forgiving, especially right near the end, but I won’t give things away here. This, however, is a small gripe.

The deaths Miriam sees are many and varied, with some truly inspired concepts delivered by Wendig. It would seem to me that there would be more mundane deaths of people simply lying unconscious in bed, then the breathing stops. Wendig shows us more variety – an old woman who falls on the ice and has a last cigarette while hypothermia takes her away, for example, or a woman who narrowly avoids crashing her car only to be wiped out by a speeding truck. It’s terribly black and grim, but it is highly entertaining stuff. Wendig’s humour suffuses everything and he collects absurdity and indignity along with very real thoughts on life and existence.

I consumed this book in two short sittings. The writing is simply top-notch, fast and clever and real. Wendig is a master of the metaphor and simile, with some truly great lines in this that’ll keep coming back to you. On a couple of occasions he used the same metaphor twice and that’s a shame, because that always kills a great turn of phrase, but this book is littered with them, so we can forgive him.

I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this book. Dark, thoroughly gory in places, but also thoughtful and complete. The only thing missing was the end of Miriam’s story about her genesis and that really bugs me. I can only assume we’ll learn more in future books. (Or it’s entirely possible I missed it!) Mockingbird is the sequel, and that’s out now, so I’ll be sure to read it soon.

Blackbirds is the kind of book that draws out all those old, cliched pulp adjectives – noirish, raw, gritty, bold, hard-boiled, visceral. It deserves all those medals. This is punchy, powerful, high-octane stuff built around great humour and sardonic observations of life. Balls-out, razor-sharp storytelling – I thoroughly recommend it.

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Book Review – The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

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Bloomsbury, 2012

I’ve not previously come across anything by The Uninvited’s author, London-based writer Liz Jensen (www.lizjensen.com). She is by all accounts an accomplished professional, with a list of achievements that includes seven best-selling novels, three Orange prize for fiction nominations, and publication in more than twenty countries.

Marketed as “part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare”, The Uninvited focuses on Hesketh Lock, a talented anthropologist with Asperger’s Syndrome, as he tries to piece together the meaning of a global pandemic of murders commited by children and seemingly unconnected acts of business sabotage commited by adults, whilst also grappling with the fallout from a messy relationship breakdown, and struggling to reconnect with his young stepson.

The writing in The Uninvited is coldly rational, yet there’s a thread of frustrated and misunderstood emotion woven through every sentence. This is a very effective tool for inserting the reader straight into the brain of Hesketh Lock and truly telling the story from his point of view, as well as achieving the difficult task of converting what might have been an unsympathetic protagonist into a sympathetic one. The novel itself has many moments of keen insight, both from an intellectual and philosophical standpoint. What begins as a fairly gratuitous tale of blood and woe very quickly morphs into something completely different and far more intelligent, and there’s no denying that the topics addressed are extremely relevant to our world today – namely, our greedy and foolhardy abuse of our planet and its finite resources, and the tragic future we’re creating for our children should we continue down the road we’re on. I very much appreciated the crucial issues explored and the thought-provoking and disturbing hypothetical future invoked. I also enjoyed the various cultural mores and myths explored throughout the story – this is a book that educates and enlightens.

However, I felt let down by The Uninvited’s denouement. It was a little vague and some things were left unexplained, or explained so scantly that they were done injustice.  In thematic context once the novel’s resolution is reached, the “need” for pre-pubescent children to murder adults (usually their loved ones) starts to appear tenebrous and confusing the more one contemplates it in hindsight, and it did feel like that was perhaps injected to give the novel its grisly oomph rather than as a true integral part of the novel’s purpose, which is something quite different to the evil children hook, really.

That said, overall The Uninvited is a well-written, clever, important novel. The amount of flawless research that clearly went into the story is mind-blowing. I read it in one day, so it’s certainly a page-turner (although I was confined to a hospital bed at the time, so it may have had an unfair advantage!). Despite the final dissonance I personally felt between the murderous children and the climax, I would definitely recommend The Uninvited. It’s unsettling, it’s brutal, and it’s a welcome twist on the much-loved apolocalyptic fable. The Uninvited is a Book With a Message (or, actually, many different messages, all equally valuable), and we as a species need to heed its warning. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of Jensen’s work.

Rope by Martin Livings – review

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“Rope” by Martin Livings
eNovella Published by Dark Prints Press
CATEGORY: Historical Drama / Horror
eISBN:9780987197658

Dark Prints Press have begun a new line of eNovellas and if this offering from Martin Livings is anything to go by, it’s a line worth watching. Rope is the story of Freemantle Prison’s hangman and the rope he made as a fifteen year old rope-maker’s apprentice. After fashioning the new hanging rope for the prison, the young apprentice is engaged as the executioner and so begins an unnaturally long life, punctuated by 44 hangings. With every hanging, the rope grows a little darker, as if it’s becoming engorged with the souls of the damned.

The story begins and ends in 1984, narrated by the well-over-100-year-old executioner himself.

But who is more foolish, the fool who kills or the fool who kills a fool?

This short novella, more novelette really, is an excellent piece of historical storytelling. In truth, there’s not much story as such, in the traditional beginning/middle/end formula, with all the ups and downs of action-packed fiction. The strength of this story lies in the detailed and rich exploration of the character of the executioner himself.

He’s, at first, an incredibly unpleasant man. I had a lot of trouble sympathising with any aspect of his character early on in the piece. Livings explores well the nature of culture and time within a person’s make-up. He plumbs the depths of duty and ignorance. As the tale goes on and the protagonist begins to develop more self-awareness, along with a greater awareness of a maturing society, he becomes more likeable and we’re able to associate with him a lot more. I wondered if the executioner would be a despicable character throughout, but found myself much more attached to him as the story moved along.

I thought I had the end picked early on, then I got thrown a bit of curveball in the closing chapter, only to be proven right after all. Rope is a dark and compelling tale, excellently written, as we would expect from someone with the talent and experience of Martin Livings.

This is well worth a read and I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes out from the Dark Prints novella range.

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A Pad in the Straw by Christopher Woodforde – review by Mario Guslandi

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A Pad in the Straw by Christopher Woodforde

Publisher:  The Sundial Press 2012

ISBN 978-1-908274-09-0 (Hardcover)

First published in 1952 , “A Pad in the Straw” collects twenty ghost and supernatural tales originally told by Christopher Woodforde (1907-1962)  as bedtimes stories  to a group of boys at New College Choir School in Oxford. Thus, strictly speaking, this should be a YA collection , where, indeed, young boys are the main characters in most of the stories. Actually, this volume by Woodworde (a cleric and antiquarian mainly known for his non-fiction books about ecclesiastical stained glass)  has been compared , in terms of plots and atmospheres, to the work of the great MR James. The distinct antiquarian flavor and the frequent use of East Anglia as the setting for his eerie tales certainly may suggest such a comparison, although, of course, the quality of Woodforde’s  fiction is  inferior. On the other hand, to label his stories as an anemic version of James’ work would be simply unfair.

On average, Woodforde’s tales are elegant, enjoyable examples of supernatural  fiction, albeit sometimes a bit weak.  “Malcom” revolves around a cursed tree exerting its evil power long after it has been destroyed; “The Old Tithe Barn” and “Michael” are delightful traditional ghost stories; “The Mirror of Man’s Damnation” is a moral fable in the tradition of the deal with the Devil;  “Cushi” a classical yarn where a sexton takes his revenge from beyond the grave; “Lost and Found” a real tale of antiquarian horror.

Some tales, however, do stand up as fine, skillfully crafted pieces of dark fiction.

The title story, “A Pad in the Straw” is a gentle, Jamesian story where the events surrounding the unpleasant encounter of two boys with the  supernatural are painstakingly retraced by a group of scholars.

In the creepy “The Chalk Pit” inhuman, evil creatures haunt a country road, while in the sinister  “Colin, Peter and Philip” the uncanny reason for a young boy’s disappearance becomes clear only twenty years later.

“The Doom Window at Brechkam” is an excellent specimen of “antiquarian” story revolving around a glass window of an English church.

The enticing “Ex libris” describes the finding of an old book ,the unusual binding of which belongs to a rather vindictive subject.

Reprinted in a limited edition by Sundial Press for the joy of  any lover of classy, gracefully told supernatural fiction, the volume will provide many, pleasantly frightful hours of  good reading.

- review by Mario Guslandi

 

Bloodstones ToC announced

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Ticonderoga Publications has teamed up with award-winning editor, Amanda Pillar, to produce an anthology of myth inspired dark urban fantasy called Bloodstones.  The anthology is loaded with seventeen fantastic tales of monsters, gods, magic and so much more.

Bloodstones will be published in October 2012, in time for Halloween, and will be available in trade paperback and ebook formats.

Ticonderoga today released the full Table of Contents. The 17 stories are:

  • Joanne Anderton, “Sanaa’s Army”
  • Alan Baxter, “Cephalopoda Obsessia”
  • Jenny Blackford, “A Moveable Feast”
  • Vivian Caethe, “Skin”
  • MD Curelas, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”
  • Thoraiya Dyer, “Surviving Film”
  • Dirk Flinthart, “The Bull in Winter”
  • Stephanie Gunn, “The Skin of the World”
  • Richard Harland, “A Mother’s Love”
  • Pete Kempshall, “Dead Inside”
  • Penny Love, “A Small Bad Thing”
  • Karen Maric, “Embracing the Invisible”
  • Christine Morgan, “Ferreau’s Curse”
  • Nicole Murphy, “Euryale”
  • Jessica Otis, “And the Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible”
  • Dan Rabarts, “The Bone Plate”
  • Erin Underwood, “The Foam Born”

 

Bread & Circuses by Felicity Dowker – review by Greg Chapman

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DISCLAIMER: Thirteen O’Clock is managed by Alan Baxter, Felicity Dowker and Andrew McKiernan as Contributing Editors. While the Contributing Editors’ roles at Thirteen O’Clock are editorial and critique, all three are primarily writers. It is inevitable that their own work will form part of the Australian and international dark fiction publications which are Thirteen O’Clock’s focus, and as such it is also inevitable that their work will be reviewed at Thirteen O’Clock (to prohibit this would not only be unfortunate for Baxter, Dowker and McKiernan themselves, but for their hardworking editors and publishers).

Thirteen O’Clock will always have a third party contributor review the Contributing Editors’ work. Such reviews will be unedited (aside from standard corrections to typos and grammar), posted in full (be they negative or positive), and will always be accompanied by full disclosure of Baxter, Dowker and McKiernan’s place at Thirteen O’Clock. At no point will Baxter, Dowker or McKiernan review their own work.

Bread and Circuses by Felicity Dowker.

Ticonderoga Publications June 2012, ISBN 978-1-921857-08-9 (Paperback)

I’ve always maintained that horror is one of the most powerful emotions us human beings can experience, but when combined with love, hate and revenge, as is the case with many of the tales in Felicity Dowker’s collection Bread & Circuses, horror can also reveal our souls.

Bread & Circuses is rich with themes, motifs and mythology and of course Dowker’s lyrical prose. Having only ever read one of her short stories before (and I won’t be making that mistake again), I went into the collection completely blind – and I’m glad I did because the journey is one I won’t forget anytime soon.

One of the major themes in Dowker’s collection – and she freely admits this fact many times after each tale – is revenge. The characters in her stories are either seeking it or succumbing to it, sometimes in very real or fantastical situations. But I think underneath all the revenge there is an equally strong element of love too.

The title story “Bread & Circuses”, is a zombie tale about two women forced to live in a cemetery commune. To survive, members of the commune are rounded up to take on the zombies in a battle royale. Inevitably this couple is torn apart by a wave of violence and the reader can’t help but feel their pain, but love wins out in the end, in a gruesome, yet touching way.

“Jesse’s Gift” is another tale with love and friendship at its core. Girl meets boy; boy and girl meet demonic ice-cream man. Again there’s a finely-tuned interplay between dark and light, love and despair and Dowker uses horror to expose all our other traits with incredible skill. In fact her willingness to talk about her past in each of the afterwords only serves to heighten the impact intended with each story.

Dowker also reveals a lot about herself in her stories and even uses her own personal memories as inspiration. There are several tales revolving around a child that has either been subjected to physical violence or witnessed it. Dowker describes it with considerable courage and heart and still manages to craft unforgettable stories with “Us, After the House Came Back”, being one of the stand outs.

The power of Dowker’s writing shines in “Berries and Incense”, a wonderful dark fantasy piece which flows like a slow-burning hallucination. Animals associated with the dark arts are given human qualities and we see that they too can fall in love, suffer and die.

Other favourites were the deliciously dark “Phantasy Moste Grotesk” and its companion tale “The Blind Man”. Both tales would make the likes of Clive Barker proud and again the themes of revenge, love and their dark sides are on display.

I could say much more, but Bread & Circuses speaks for itself. Dowker was named Best New Talent at the 2009 Ditmar Awards and rightly so. She has a striking imagination and is not afraid to exploit human emotions through horror. Put simply, we need more writers like her.

Do yourself a favour and get a copy of Bread & Circuses now.

- review by Greg Chapman