Quincy Rhoads

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
by Thomas Ligotti
Penguin Classics, 2015
464 pages / $13.60 Buy from Amazon

There’s a certain thrill in loving out-of-print authors. There’s the feeling of being in on a great secret, plus the hunt for their books in used bookstores is intoxicating. But it sure is nice to be able to easily get what you want, too. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Penguin Classics has reprinted Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe in one easy-to-obtain paperback.

Ligotti’s prose is wonderfully byzantine, like Lovecraft or Poe, but his work has a contemporary, postmodern feel, too. His stories “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” and “The Library of Byzantium” are absolutely fantastic in their stimulating intellectuality, on top of being creepy, and now easy-to-locate can be added to his stories’ descriptors, too.

In the endnotes, mangaka Junji Ito discusses his (10-year) hiatus from horror comics and tentatively asserts that he’s “got [his] sense for horror back”. Sorry to disagree, Ito-san, but this collection of horror shorts falls, well, short of surreal masterpieces like Uzumaki and Gyo. (For Ito at his ontological best, try the one-shot short “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”) Readers of his entire ouevre will find more in common with his juvenilia (Tomie was first published in the author’s early twenties), particularly in their urban legend/folktale structure and obsessive reliance on the femme fatale as ultimate source of evil. (There’s even a callback to the author’s roots in Tomio, a recurring male character whose repeated flings with gorgeous witches have predictably dire results.)

It’s not all bad, just disappointing for those of us who’ve seen his best. The climax of “Wooden Spirit” (a bizarre tale about a woman who’s sexually obsessed with a historic house) and “Red Turtleneck” (unfaithful Tomio struggles to keep his severed head attached to his body) show that Ito is still a master of grotesquerie when he puts his mind to it, while the standouts of the collection prove to be the quiet, melancholy tales like “Gentle Goodbye” (a family whose fervent prayers preserve the slowly fading “echoes” of deceased loved ones) and “Whispering Woman” (tracking the increasingly reciprocal link of dependence between a girl who’s unable to make decisions for herself and her governess, a woman trapped in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship). As for the rest, “Blackbird” is nightmarish and byzantine, “Magami Nanasuke” is absurd but ineffectively translated, and “Futon” and “Dissection-chan” are good ideas inexpertly executed.

–Reviewed by Byron Campbell

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

 Byron Alexander Campbell is an aspiring human living in Southern California. He is interested in games, story, and the surprising ways they intersect.

The Supernatural Enhancements
by Edgar Cantero
Anchor, 2015
368 pages / $12.58 Buy from Amazon

Judging from the strength of Edgar Cantero’s English-language debut, I’m hoping for news that translations from Catalan of his first two novels, Dormir amb Winona Ryder and Vallvi, are forthcoming. A weird, transgenre metaphysical horror mystery novel that embraces in equal measures mysticism, cryptology, and the 20-something narrator’s creepily endearing relationship with a mute 15-year-old Irish punk, The Supernatural Enhancements is the most refreshingly idiosyncratic genre book I’ve read all year.

Told in various documentary forms including epistles, transcriptions of audio and video recordings, and scraps of written conversation between European transplant “A.” and his protege Niamh, a young girl rendered mute by an unspecified trauma who communicates entirely via gesture, whistles of various pitches, and pen and paper, The Supernatural Enhancements is the story of A.’s unexpected inheritance from a distant, hitherto unknown American relative, Ambrose Wells, of a comfortable fortune and the entire contents of Axton House, an old Virginian manor known to be haunted both literally and figuratively. Protip: do some research into traditional Irish names before you start reading and save yourself the embarrassment of mispronouncing a major character’s name for 350 pages.

–Reviewed by Byron Campbell

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

 Byron Alexander Campbell is an aspiring human living in Southern California. He is interested in games, story, and the surprising ways they intersect.

Black Candies: Surveillance
edited by Ryan Bradford
So Say We all, 2015
94 pages / $15 Buy from Amazon

If you were to ask me what my top five literary magazines are right now, Black Candies would definitely be on that list, and Ryan Bradford’s editorship is a huge part of that. A journal of literary horror needs someone at the helm with a pedigree in the spooky, and Bradford is no slouch. He wrote an accomplished horror novel, Horror Business, that’s steeped in the tropes of the genre. To call something a love letter to the horror genre feels a bit tired, but, nonetheless, Bradford’s work is a love letter to all things horror.

Lit journals tend to be inconsistent. They either have great art but their fiction is weak, or they have a superb cover but their interior art is lacking. Black Candies has that wonderful sort of alchemy where the art and the stories are in perfect concert with one another, and the fiction is top notch to boot. It takes a truly skilled editor to curate such a consistently quality publication.

And perhaps the best part of Black Candies is the gamut that “literary horror” covers. There are stories about men turning into deer and stories about suicidal selfies in this issue. There are all types of speculative fiction–from cynical splatter to magical realism—leaving something for everyone’s tastes.

Black Candies: Surveillance is the newest volume, but the previous volumes are worth tracking down, too. It’s that great of a journal, and Bradford’s a big part of that.

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix, illus. by Michael Rogalski
Quirk Books, 2014
256 pages / $11.46 Buy from Amazon

Here’s a book that’s a lot better in theory than in practice. Written by somebody who clearly knows the horror of working retail, Horrorstör transplants the usual “ghosts with a grudge” story into a novel setting: Orsk, a faux-Scandinavian furniture superstore somewhat spoiled by the fact that it exists in the same universe as the real IKEA, which Grady is obviously parodying. (The conceit that Orsk is an IKEA “me-too” run by a WalMart-like American conglomerate instantly rings false, as do the out-of-place Britishisms embedded in the store’s punny product names and corporate slogans.)

The book is at its best when it is skewering retail culture and the vast gulf that exists between corporate think tanks and the actual people forced to carry out their inane policies. Hendrix attempts to enhance this satire by leveraging a rather uninspired horror trope: as it turns out, the store was built on the site of a Puritanical prison/torture dungeon, and the ghosts of both prisoners and warden walk the showroom floor after dark. His message gets a little muddled in the process, but while the ghost story that dominates the second half of the book is nothing new, it’s at least entertainingly written in a Stephen King meets Christopher Moore kind of way.

–Reviewed by Byron Campbell

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

 Byron Alexander Campbell is an aspiring human living in Southern California. He is interested in games, story, and the surprising ways they intersect.

The Art of Horrible People
by John Skipp
Lazy Fascist Press, 2015
176 pages / $12.95 Buy from Amazon

John Skipp’s The Art of Horrible People functions as an anti-pretension manifesto. The snobs in his stories, be they from Hollywood or the art scene, are savaged brutally in his bare-bones prose. These are plot-driven, blood-drenched stories where women pack heat, Eldritch worms run the film business, and everyone is clambering to make sacrifices to The Devil. True, there are some more philosophical moments, as in “Worm Central Tonite!” as our worm narrator contemplates human existence as he feeds on optical nerves, but Skipp seems far more focused on depicting new kills and premises each more gory than the last over more substantive commentary. As much as I love smart, deconstructive horror and reading fiction experimenting with innovative forms, it’s refreshing to read a throwback to a bygone splatterpunk era like The Art of Horrible People. It may not be performing any literary acrobatics,but nihilistic gore can be just as satisfying at times.

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Harper Perennial, 2015
416 pages / $11.99 buy from Amazon

Good news! The Welcome to Night Vale novel is just like the podcast. Bad news: The Welcome to Night Vale novel is just like the podcast. The podcast is amazing, absurdist fun, but what makes it work is that it’s broken up into digestible, thirty-minute chunks. The novel still maintains the same fun, absurd charm as the show, but the sort of repetitious jokes which would be funny in audio format are turgid when presented in prose. The novel is still worth reading if you’re a fan of the podcast, though. I found the plotline involving Diane and her teenage son, Josh, a shapeshifter who spends an affecting driving lesson scene as a wolf spider, especially poignant. The 1-2 punch of pathos followed by a joke works well enough, but I’m unconvinced that that’s enough to really draw in and hold a reader that’s never heard or enjoyed the podcast before. Thus, I don’t think this book will function as anything more than ephemera for an already cultish audience.

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

The Incoming Tide by Cameron Pierce
Broken River Books, 2015
88 pages / $7.95 Buy from Amazon

Could the pocket-sized volume of poetry be the most important political statement in the debate for art’s universal appeal? Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—and the rest of “The Pocket Poets Series,” really—certainly vied for the necessity of a teensy book of verse to accompany lunch. Cameron Pierce’s newest book, The Incoming Tide, is a slim volume of poetry and lyrical essays about Pierce’s fishing adventures, his life in Astoria, and his transition into domestic life and fatherhood, and it’s an excellent lunchtime companion, too.

Pierce has been publishing a slew of fish-themed books this year, but The Incoming Tide marks a high point in his writing career. The collection maintains the sincere weirdness of his excellent story collection Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon while distancing itself from the bizarro moniker so firmly branded across his previous books. And, sure, there’s an essay about an experience with a haunted lawnmower, poems referring to “the skeleton hands of aliens,” and there’s a firm skull motif throughout, but, for the most part, reality is a far more constant feature in this collection than in Pierce’s previous work. “Up [on XXX Creek] there exists a futuristic world where trout outnumber people,” Pierce writes. “That’s my kind of science fiction.”

The reverence he holds for fish and fishermen alike, the reverence for “the personal narratives that develop” while a fisherman goes about his job and how fishing is “about… how a fish fights—and just as importantly, how you fight the fish,” is contagious. I’ve never been a fan of fishing, and yet, I yearn to fish after reading Pierce’s collection, I long to go with him and his friends to dig clams, and, most of all, I wish he and his wife really would open up a Richard Brautigan-themed restaurant. But I suppose taking The Incoming Tide, with its faux-distressed cover—as if begging to be dog-eared and shoved in a back pocket or, more appropriately, a tackle box—along with me and reading it over and over will just have to do for now.

The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found by Jarod Roseló
Publishing Genius Press, 2015
214 pages / $14.95 Buy from PGP

Publishing Genius Press is finally putting out a new comic book, and it’s amazing. The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found by Jarod Roseló is about a bear that can’t finish reading Italo Calvino for all of the wrong numbers ringing in on his landline telephone. As the calls progress, demanding to speak with Jonathan, what begins as a cute comics premise unmoors itself as Roseló explores what it means to define and defend your own identity in demanding, but otherwise uncaring world.

The Well-Dressed Bear… hits that perfect timbre of literary surrealism while still feeling like a funny book. This is a feat that’s rarely pulled off in the medium, but Roseló’s art—like Roman Dirge weighed down with existential dread—and story accomplish a sophistication that feels more literary and less comix biff-pow. Please check it out. We need more books that inhabit the liminal space between literature and comix.

Dörfler by Jeremy Baum
Fantagraphics, 2015
96 pages / $22.99 Buy from Fantagraphics

Cable television in the mid-nineties was a cornucopia of bonkers genre faire, and for a nine-year-old with minimal parental intervention it played a huge influence on me growing up. Sci-Fi, USA Network, TNT, and other channels provided me with a fairly reliable stream of schlocky horror, science fiction, and fantasy movies which have since left me with a taste for the bizarre.

I tended to venture way from “age appropriate” programming, like Nickelodeon, and surf these channels only when my mom was busy or out on errands, so I never actually watched all of the majority of the films I caught, but it was this habit of indiscriminately watching snippets of movies that introduced me to such visually evocative films as Terminator 2, The Hidden, Mosquito, Phantasm II, They Live, Iria Zeiram the Animation, Akira, Krull, Roujin Z, and so many more ridiculously wonderful bits of gorgeous SFF.

Jeremy Baum’s debut graphic novel captures this experience of channel surfing amongst genre films better than any other comic I’ve come across. With imagery that evokes Akira by way of a geometrically obsessed David A. Trampier, the book tells the story of three gifted youngsters stolen from their verdant homes and harnessed as weapons for a totalitarian force through a surreal ouroboros of dreams and genre mashups. Nola is an elf-girl seeking to stop the militarized government through magic, or is she an amnesiac niece of one of the project’s head scientists, or is she both?!?

Comics, like film, are a wonderful medium for forcing their audience into new and unfamiliar territory. Jeremy Baum’s art skillfully riffs off of the tropes of adolescent fandom to create a stunning, evocative comic. Dörfler is equal parts fantasy, science fiction, Heavy Metal pin-up erotica, and every trope from all of the above wrapped into a gorgeous hardcover, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Last Mountain 2 by Dakota McFadzean
Birdcage Bottom Books, 2015
36 pages / $7 buy from Birdcage Bottom Books

Remember Napoleon Dynamite? I really connected with that movie when it came out. It’s a film all about the nerd winning acceptance from his peers and finding love, or so my seventeen-year-old self thought until a friend pointed out how much of an asshole the eponymous character is in that movie.

Take the infamous liger scene, for example. This girl is actually trying to forge a genuine connection with ND and he shuts her down with his air of superiority. Of course this is a defense mechanism. I know it all too well as I’ve been on both sides of exchanges like this one. Napoleon is misunderstood, so he’s built up this air of superiority as a defensive coping mechanism. He’s rejecting others to avoid the sting of others rejecting him. He does it throughout the entire movie, too.

Dakota McFadzean’s Last Mountain 2 takes this concept of nerd superiority qua defense mechanism and develops it further with the issue’s main short story, “Buzzy.” McFadzean uses a clean, rounded pencil style printed in teal and black risograph on cream-colored paper creating an esthetic that’s reminiscent of Daniel Clowes by way of Nancy to depict his take on the new kid at school narrative. Danny is the newest fifth grader and he oscillates between sympathetic and combative, as he plays by himself in the schoolyard then kicks rocks and tells the other boys in the class to “FUCK OFF!” His classmate Jennifer notices him and tries to reach out to him, but Danny relies so heavily upon his sense of superiority that he just pushes her further away.

Feature image via The Abdominal Stretch

I have been transfixed by professional wrestling twice in my life. The first time was on a night left to my own devices watching WWF Monday Night Raw as Yokozuna, the sumo-themed wrestler, continuously dropped atop his opponent. I was swept up in disbelief as this heel violated all of my childhood beliefs in right and wrong and in the superiority of Americans.

Feature image by Christian Ward

I’m inundated in books. I have stacks everywhere. It takes me months to get through my “to-read” pile. I borrowed my friend’s copy of Ody-C #1 weeks ago and I finally sat down to read it tonight. It’s a gender-bent SF retelling of The Odyssey. There’s a fold-out timeline of the fictional SFF war and the art is trippy and the pages are swirling cosmic goodness that hearken back to the boundless glory of Jack Kirby, but did I enjoy it?

No. And I feel bad about that, too. It’s good on a conceptual level. I like the idea of Fraction deconstructing the notions of gender and playing with the literary canon, and, as mentioned above, the art is beautiful, but I don’t enjoy it.

I felt the same way when I finally got around to reading Ales Kot’s Wild Children which took me a whopping three years to pull from my shelf and read. The book’s concept was amazing when I read about it: a group of students take over a school by putting LSD in the faculty’s coffee…or did they?!? But, again, the final product was greatly underwhelming.

Image by Riley Rossmo, Gregory Wright, and Clayton Cowles

Hey. It’s Sunday. You have to go to work tomorrow. Don’t think about it too much. Listen to this mix I made you instead.

I really enjoy Adventure Time, especially the more freestanding episodes. Unfortunately, the show has been leaning a lot more heavily on continuity lately, and I haven’t had as much time to follow the show closely, but when I do watch it I’m absolutely floored by the writing. Take this snippet of dialogue from the recent episode “The Pajama Wars”:

Princess Bubblegum: I have been trying to be more chill about [ruling] … like being more sort of OK with everyone making mistakes around me. Like mind my own stuff more. You know what I mean?

Finn: Yeah, kind of like how I’ve been thinking about my dad and how I want him to act more like daddy, but maybe acting like daddy just isn’t what he does. Maybe my dad’s not a dad, but a kid stuck in a dad’s body.

Damn! That strikes to an emotional core that a bunch of great novels can’t get to!