horror

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.