...the Soul of Wit

I guess we're all happy to leave the old year behind, so here's to a new year and hopefully a better one too! I hope you had a tolerable festive season despite all the new restrictions. As for me, I took the work-free time to read an awful lot of books and think it best to tick off the shorties as quickly as possible – because their number is raising almost by the day, incredible what even more lockdown can do- and to get to the more interesting ones that I’ll be discussing longer and in detail.

Last week I already announced the 2021 plan of the Final Girls Berlin to split their popular horror film festival into two parts - the first being next month virtually and the second in October, hopefully in person. Another happy announcement for 2021 is that I will be monthly reviewing the “Rewind or Die” series for the Otherland Newsletter this year – a sum total of 21 retro-horror paperbacks which are inspired by 80s and 90s horror fiction. I can’t tell how excited I am for this task, since I have been eyeing these colorful little books forever (Their covert art, every single one of them, is amazing! It is purposefully kept in a somewhat pulpy-amateurish 80s style and I love it!) and now have the actual opportunity to read and review all of them – a dream come true!

Then there are a myriad of vague and not-so-concrete little projects in my head and things I’ve been meaning to do but never got around, like reviewing the “winner” of my little personal horror film fest from the fall (I basically stayed home and watched a bunch of movies) plus there will be a post where I want to review the trailers for my upcoming winter festival.

First things first though, here are the new short reviews for my last reads. There are a few more than usual, as I already said but the more the merrier I guess. Enjoy!

Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, ed. By Christopher Golden

Only a few weeks ago did I write right here that a collection of short stories is bound to be a mixed bag and does not really stand a chance to be completely good or completely bad. Well, I was wrong. Christopher Golden’s Christmas horror anthology Hark! The Herald Angels Scream is completely great. Nothing to add, this anthology is great.

I never ever read season's horror. Never. Every year when Christmas or Halloween come around, legions of horror fans lunge at masses of special story collections and anthologies written for that specific time of the year. I used to think that it is Halloween all year around for me and I don't really believe in Christmas, so why get caught up in it? The boredom of the lockdown Christmas has proven me wrong though, and if all Christmas anthologies are as fun as Golden's I see no reason not to get used to this kind of tradition.

Hark! features 18 stories, each better than the next. Here and there a story may have teething troubles, but always eventually finds its pace to make an imposing point. I was grabbed and glued to my reader by these winter frights: the creepy tradition of the "mummers" who, dressed in masks (NOT Corona-masks but hardcore gruesome pillow cases with melting faces painted on) visit homes during Christmas eve and do spooky things such as knocking on windows and asking for food or drink; the hidden dangers of spending Christmas in Spain; a man who writes a Christmas song about his generosity towards an orphan realizing that his song has rather unwanted effects; a Dickensian tale of a street urchin tasked to cleanse a haunted chimney; a dangerous and rather rude London Christmas cult which grabs unsuspecting tourists - it's all here, every type of horror fan will find something to their liking. But Christmas is over, you say? Well I say come on, it barely started snowing. Get into the winter mood and grab Hark! to prolong the Christmas scares! 

Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep #1) by Mira Grant

This 2017 novel is one of those "cryptids in eco horror" books - a niche that has been speedily trending within the genre in recent years (we had talked about that tendency in an interview with Scott R. Jones a few months ago) and usually features Bigfoot, some lake monster or Chupacabra trying to survive in a polluted, dying environment, making the readers question who the real monster is (it's humans). In Into the Drowning Deep, Mira Grant aka. Seannan McGuire follows this tradition, yet introduces a breath of fresh air by bringing sirens/mermaids into the game, which, by the time the book was published were still kind of uncharted territory.

The Atargatis sets off to the Mariana Trench carrying the crew for a mockumentary about sirens but is lost at sea and no survivors were found in the aftermath. Seven years later a group of people mostly related to the victims of the Atargatis disaster, but also of marine hunters and scientists follows its path in order to unveil whatever happened to them.

Grant is grand, there's no way around it - I love how she so succeeds in creating a world where mermaids would be possible and back that with plausible speculative science. On the other hand, I felt very frustrated by the sheer amount of point-of-view-switching and of characters, which mostly felt all the same and interchangeable to me. So I started not to really care about them after a while. I don't know, maybe I am the problem, but I can't fully love this book. Still a somewhat interesting read, though.

 

Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell

Just take a moment to internalize that cover – and now imagine a story that is just as striking, if not more. The revenge story of slum queen Black Lena, the leader of an all-female ring of criminals who controls prostitution, opium dens, casinos and backroom abortions in Manhattan, on Judge Stallworth who is determined to finish her reign, is outrageous and diabolic to say the least. What a story! Filled with remarkable characters, vivid descriptions of poverty and misery, and a storyline soaked in cruelty and ruthlessness, Gilded Needles wasted no time at all and captured me from page one. Maybe because McDowell was a screenwriter as well as an author (he wrote the screenplay for "Beetlejuice"!) I find his books very visual and I can imagine this story would make a breathtaking movie. But I had a lot of fun reading it too.

Midnight Exhibit Vol. 1 ed. by Eddie Generous

Midnight Exhibit Vol. 1 is the book equivalent of 70s and 80s horror anthology movies, usually comprising a frame story, (mostly) three or four thematically connected creepy short movies and a frame story-related epilogue that will give you the shocks. I adore those! "The Vault of Horror", "Tales from the Crypt", "Body Bags", "Creepshow", "Freakshow", or "The Trilogy of Terror" are all shows and films I could watch forever. So of course it was predetermined that I also adore Midnight Exhibit Volume 1 – “a throwback anthology for a new decade” which is also the inaugural work to the "Rewind or Die" series.

In the frame story a middle-aged, upper-crust couple, Eleonore and Tobias, are involved in a car crash on their way home from a party and are offered a ride by the tow truck driver, who looks like the trucker baby of Frankenstein’s monster and Donald Trump (For better visualization: it’s his portrait on the cover.) Too entangled in their marital conflicts, Eleonore and Tobias don’t really realize there’s something not quite right about the situation they’re in and keep on fighting throughout the ride, only interrupted by the driver who every now and then grabs the chance to cut in on their quarrels when hearing certain tag words and starts telling a story revolving around that word. So we get three short stories that gradually augment in intensity and weirdness; the story of a malevolent giant chatterbox by Stephen Graham Jones, a veritable macho dystopia by Renée Miller and finally a very freaky story by Philip Fracassi about a woman who starts an affair with a man who seems to develop a face on the backside of her husband's head and eventually materializes on his backside. I loved all of them but this last story seriously takes the cake, it is so genuinely revolting I can’t even think about knowing where to start on how to describe it. Best is, of course, you read it yourself. I was smitten and honestly find that its only flaw is that it's very short and I could have read on and on and on... 

House of Windows by John Langan

Honestly, I feel a little underwhelmed by House of Windows. And that comes out of the mouth of someone who considers herself one of the biggest John Langan fans. The pleasure I had reading The Fisherman was so great that it physically hurts me thinking about it and Sefira and Other Betrayals, similarly, I have read breathlessly. I admit that in every Ellen Datlow anthology I skip the pages to read the featured John Langan story first. So reading House of Windows may have been a hopeless endevour from the start, since it could never live up to what I think of Langan - the world.

House of Windows is the story of a young grad student, Veronica, who first has a whirlwind romance with her married, aging professor, Roger, and eventually marries him. In a very ugly fight about the whole situation, Roger renounces his own son who then joins the army and dies in Afghanistan. Subsequently unsettling things start to happen, including supernatural "attacks" which gradually gain on intensity and force and finally lead to the disappearance of Roger. Don't worry I didn't spoil the story for you; the main events of House of Windows are told as a story within story whereas the frame story consists of an author meeting Veronica and her offering to tell him the story of how she experienced her husband's disappearance. In addition, it's not the plot that this book should be read for, it's the "journey" itself, so to say.

First of all, and I guess that is my main problem with this book, I could not really like Veronica. I think she's intentionally unlikeable to a certain point but it's still a mystery to me why Langan chose the black sheep of the story as narrator. I especially felt uncomfortable about her trying to justify her life choices by putting the whole blame of a blotched marriage on her predecessor and I have to admit that I had more sympathy with the ex-wife and the son. I understand the need to build up a background for a main character, but since I didn't warm up to Veronica at all, I didn't care about her relationship to her parents or the extensive takeout dinners she has with her husband and many other similar details which started to annoy me after a while. I also have to admit that to a certain degree I even relished the attacks on her. Was that Langan's intention? To bring out the worst of me? I will never know.

Secondly, and that's nothing new to loyal readers of Langan, he makes excessive use of the so-called slow-burning narration and takes it a little too far for my taste.

I genuinely think Langan has a hand for terrifying, dreadful scenes and here too, he doesn't disappoint. There are some rougher scenes that will seriously curdle your blood and more scenes, especially the ones taking place between Roger and his son Ted, that will get under your skin. Also the sheer amount of allusions and references comprised in this work is really neat - Dickens, Lovecraft, Shakespeare, Peter Straub… It is a feast for the lover of literature and literary horror. Unfortunately, those did not outweigh the overall sluggish pacing and by the time I reached them I already had kind of lost interest. If you enjoy extreme slow pacing, have a fondness for Dickens and can click with the narrator though, this could still be YOUR book.

The Crows (Pagham on Sea #1) by C. M. Rosens

After a breakup Carrie Rickard scratches her money together to buy and renovate a ruined house and tries a new start in a new town, Pagham on Sea. But this town is no ordinary town and the house not an ordinary house and she soon finds herself in the middle of an unbelievable, action-packed adventure.

This is all I will say about the plot of The Crows, because there are many moments of surprise that can be spoiled here. Let it just be said that years ago a child has been murdered in this house and as Carrie starts to pursue this case, she is dragged into a genuinely crazy world where the supernatural (soothsayers, werewolves, blood magic...) is indeed very natural.

Author C.M. Rosens describes The Crows as "a Gothic Weird Paranormal novel for adults" and the book itself is as entertaining and fun as that description. Once I got around of what was happening I devoured this book and will be eagerly waiting for other adventures set in the Pagham universe.

Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout

Ghost Radio is a super intriguing and eerie novel about a call-in radio show on encounters with ghosts, intertwined with the background story of host Joaquin, his girlfriend Alondra and his sound engineer Watts. What begins as a small underground broadcast show soon turns mainstream after joining a big conglomerate and attracts even more listeners who are not always genuine or sympathetic. While Joaquin gets more and more carried away by the stories he hears, his life also becomes more and more blurred, incoherent and even threatening. The search for answers will bring about an astonishing realization!

Same thing here as with House of Windows; great concept, great prose, an interesting plot - but the characters suck, here it's even all of them. Joaquin and Alondra are actually so unlikeable, being assholes and making fun of people around them, that quite early into the story I stopped caring about what will happen to them - a pity! There were some astonishingly imposing, sensorial moments in this book, like a Dead Kennedys song echoing in Joaquin's head in the wake of a car accident, an encounter and ensuing fight with an enigmatic priest and the final scene of the book that would make gorgeous in a movie and I definitely think it would impress more as a movie than as a book.