Although I'm all busy trying to finally finish my Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adam, which I won't review here, I'm also back at reading lots of horror this month. Enjoy the reviews!
The Nightmare Man by J.H. Markert
Horror literature's shooting star Ben Bookman has a problem - he wrote his insanely succesfull novel, The Scarecrow, during a frenzied weekend at the old and creepy Blackwood mansion, a house in the small town of New Haven which he inherited. His problem starts where brutal murders start occurring in town, which are factually perfectly described in Bookman's new book. While Ben becomes the prime suspect he isn't much of help himself since he can’t even remember writing the novel. He tries looking into his ancestral history and finds out that he might have released something evil.
The Nightmare Man is nearly the perfect classic horror novel – a successful horror author whose stories are more than mere fiction, an eerie small town where children have been going missing for years, a serial killer who wraps his victims in a disgusting cocoon, an original take on folk horror and a grumpy detective who is, in fact, more than a mere detective. It is an absolutely enthralling, many-faceted story that kept me nicely entertained for a few hours - despite the somewhat flat characters, not very original title and names as well as the confusing time jumps.I’d say it’s on par with Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs or Kill Creek by Scott Thomas.
City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun
I wish I were infected. Then I wouldn't be knocking my brains out with worry over getting infected.
The
nameless character we're following, a hygiene manager, i.e. rat
exterminator, is transferred by his company to country C for a special
assignment. Only, there is no such assignment and having landed in a
country completely perturbed by pandemic, pollution and administrative
chaos, he ends up homeless in this place he barely speaks the language
of and his life is turning more and more into a filthy nightmare from
which there is no way out.
I really wasn't ready to find so much
present in a book written ten years ago. I wasn't prepared for the
brutal amounts of rats and monkeys dying, lucky no animals are being
harmed during the writing of a book. I didn't expect to ever hate and
feel for a main character both at the same time. So it's safe to say
this book took me by surprise. I don't really know how to rate it, but I needed to read something fun after this, so I turned to Douglas Adams.
The Fall: Tales From the Gulp 2 by Alan Baxter
If you have read the first book good for you, because many loose ends are being tied here, even those you may not have realized were indeed loose ends – the town's problem with fungi, the ulterior motives and quests of the town's mafia (I told you it's dangerous), the ever present and sinister rock band Blind Eye Moon and whatever the Fall (a time when all inhabitants of the Gulp fell from the sky – everybody still dreams about it but nobody remembers it) is all about. While there are plenty new characters, especially the ones who get stuck or are being held captive and can't leave, there's a ton of familiar faces and fun to discover Easter eggs too. Make no mistake, though – you really need to have read the first book because this is definitely a sequel.
A very minor point of criticism would be that the mini glossary for Australian English is in the back of the book and gets overlooked easily, I was very surprised to discover it even exists. Good thing I read lots of Baxter and became a kind of expert by now, so I don't even need to look those words up anymore. Still, it would have been nice to have that in the front.
Thrilling was the afterword in which the author announces there will be more stories set in the Gulp in the future, and by the sound of it this whole thing is expanding into a full blown universe and that's just a very exciting concept for me which makes me happy. Can't wait for even more stories from Gulpepper, the weirdest town Down Under.The Venue by T.J. Payne
The Venue is about Amy, her girlfriend and her parents, who receive an invitation to Amy's former best friend Caleb's high-end wedding reception in the Alps. Attracted mainly by the null expense Euro-trip, the clueless guests arrive at the venue, but it's a trap! Caleb and his bride Lilith are mad and angry at everybody who has ever done them wrong in the past and on their special day they want to do something about it. And they are having massive amounts of fun while doing something about it.
I really wanted to read something super fast-paced which would require minimum mental effort and this was the perfect book for that. Yes it is very very far-fetched, there are lots of plot holes and the characters as flat as can be but that's what I wanted. And I got it. Bonus points for the bridal couple which was as off the charts as can be.
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