Late last year, Wonder Entertainment released a special collector’s edition of Thomas Ligotti’s short story “The Frolic” in a book that comes bundled with a DVD — a 24 minute adaptation of that story directed by Jacob Cooney. Get it soon, because this product is limited to 1000 copies, and there are signed editions available. Remarkably, this is the very first cinematic adaptation of Ligotti’s work — and I must say, it’s an excellent treatment, co-scripted by Ligotti himself, intensely directed, and well-acted.

In my Goreletter reviews, I try to shine light on (mostly independent) “print” books because I feel that other media already get plenty of press and attention. At first I didn’t want to review The Frolic here because it is a new film, but the truth is this edition is more of a multimedia “story event” than your usual DVD release. Here you’ll get a full-blown celebration of the short story in a perfect-bound paperback which features not only a “newly revised version” of “The Frolic” (which originally appeared in Ligotti’s first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer), but also an eyebrow-raising introduction by the author, the complete screenplay for the adaptation by Ligotti and his screenwriting partner Brandon Trenz, and also enlightening interviews with everyone involved with the production of the film. Indeed, the book is everything that would normally appear on a “special features” section of an ordinary DVD, but here the printed word is so well-respected that it truly celebrates Ligotti’s mastery as a storyteller above all.

In a nutshell, the short story itself is about the chilling effect a child killer named “John Doe” has had on his prison house psychologist, David Munck. The killer, who justifies his actions by claiming he steals children away to some unearthly place so they can “frolic” together, disturbs Munck at the core, chipping away at his “objective” scientific worldview and replacing it with the supernatural. This foments into sheer terror when Doe refers to a “Colleen” during an interview — a name that sounds a lot like his own daughter’s, “Noreen,” a name Doe couldn’t possibly know. Ligotti does a masterful job of fracturing Munck’s world, from his faith in science and his career to his family relations, and much of the horror of the story comes from its inevitable, unstoppable conclusion.

The story artfully juxtaposes the doctor’s job in the adult world against the killer’s “work” in the world of children — and the characters lives intersect in artfully frightening ways. The film version does a great job capturing the creepy tension between the doctor and the killer by focusing on their parallels, without ever directly depicting any violence or gore, and the film changes the storyline just enough to make it stand strongly on its own two feet as a distinctive tale. The film, like the story, is dialogue-heavy, but it puts more focus on John Doe than it does the doctor and his family. However, the acting is so good (especially by John Doe played by Maury Sterling) that the tension between the characters mounts in a way that is highly reminiscent of the scenes in Silence of the Lambs, where Clarice Starling interviews Hannibal Lector: we can feel the prisoner’s great power despite his physical restraint, and we recognize his potential for evil in the glint of his knowing smile.

The bundled book gives excellent insight into Ligotti’s process. In his introduction, the author discusses the history of the story in a way that makes him sound almost embarrassed about its creation in 1982, yet proud of this cinematic treatment of it twenty five years later. He writes about his aversion to using “normal characters” as protagonists, which is the stock approach of contemporary domestic horror. Horror cinema, he argues, is inherently told from the viewpoint of normalcy, under some kind of threat by the abnormal, and this is how it engenders chills in the “normal” audience who are forced by films to confront it — but from a safe distance. In his fiction, Ligotti prefers to distort reality and present an abnormal worldview, tapping into the Weird with a capital W. But, in the 80s, Ligotti wanted to try his hand at one of these “normal” kinds of horror stories, just to see what it would happen if he sifted his proclivity for the aberrant through his abnormal lens. “The Frolic” was the result…and, he implies, the fact that he wrote a moderately “normal” horror story is precisely what makes it more adaptable to cinema than his other work.

In other words, “The Frolic” is Ligotti at his most conventional, if not accessible. It’s a great choice for the first adaptation of his work — but the story is no less disturbing because of it. Ligotti is very much a literary horror writer, if only in that he writes stories that are meant to be read and thought about in a way that cinema — which imagines the visual FOR us — does not allow. His stories are very much psychodramas of the dark fantastic, and since much the “psychodrama” is in the reader’s mind, the gaps and limits of language are imperative to staging it. The film version of The Frolic succeeds because it keeps the camera movement and other direction relatively low key, letting the dialogue of the actors and the written script drive the story. Anyone expecting the rapid editing and riotous gore of films like Hostel will be let down by this story, which is very “talky” — but since most of the story is a conversation between a mystified psychologist and an imprisoned child murderer, its tension and intrigue are high strung.

The film version differs just enough from the fiction version to make the set worth your while. Read the story first. Then watch the movie. Then read the screenplay and watch the special features. While the interview with Ligotti appears in the book, you won’t get any special appearances in the shape of cameos or interviews from the man (who seems to be so reclusive that he might well be the Thomas Pynchon of horror). If you like to see Ligotti’s imagination transformed into a visual medium, you might also be interested in the wonderful comic anthology from Fox Atomic, The Nightmare Factory; the first volume is excellent (and a second volume is coming soon).
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I didn’t intend to review the book here, but it’s such a singularly funny read that I just have to. Sure, I’m biased. But don’t let that stop you from buying it.

Comedy by the Numbers is a mock “how to be popular” book — a technical guide to being the class clown or life of the party — with a catalog of 169 tried-and-true comedy “secrets” that are applicable to any stand-up routine, comedic screenplay, or water cooler conversation. The book parodies itself with mock authority, and as it enumerates all the clich

We don’t see books by Thomas Wiloch very often, but his latest book, Screaming in Code, is a great introduction to what he’s all about, enhanced with whimsical photocollages generously contributed by the author himself on virtually every page. It’s a slim chapbook, 58 pages perfect bound, printed nicely with a glossy color cover (whose only flaw, perhaps, is the thin paper stock used for the book cover). If you’re a fan of flash fiction, short-shorts, or prose poems, you’ll like what Wiloch is screaming (though often with a tongue in cheek or with a gentle whisper).

Screaming in Code assembles 35 new pieces by Wiloch, launching off with the clever instructional guide, “How to Read this Book” — a brief and comedic introduction which parodies the label commonly found on those little brown medicine bottles. Its warning (”Do not exceed 8 prose poems in 24 hours or read for more than 10 days”) suggests that these capsules of fiction are not to be popped like pills, but savored like everlasting hard candies. If not, Wiloch writes, then “In case of accidental overdose, take a warm TV show to induce vomiting.” Writers often take easy jabs at television, but this playful short parody (whose ending I’ve unfortunately given away) makes a poignant meta-comment about how Wiloch sees his art, pulling in big topics like education, mass culture and media literacy along the way, all in less than seventy-five words. This clever opener both acknowledges and dispenses with any notion that these stories are designed for “short attention span” reading; they are deceptively easy to consume, and sadly, we do need to be taught how to read work like this because they’ve become so unfamiliar to today’s media saturated audiences.

If I’m reading too much into this one piece, it’s because many of the stories in Screaming in Code seem only to be whimsically humorous musings upon first read, but upon re-reading, their deeper existential messages and subversive literary meanings creep up on you. In my favorite in the book, “Tell Me I’m Wrong,” we listen to a narrator making an argument that gets more and more disturbing (and yet funny) as it develops, beginning with a very scientific hypothesis (that the human body is not composed mostly of water, but of atoms and orbiting particles…in other words, mostly nothing)…and then precedes to use this logic to plead his innocence in a crime. I don’t want to say more, because I’d give the whole thing away, but it’s a brilliant twist of logic and language that made me laugh, made me nod, and made me wish I’d written such an ingenious little story. Most of the stories in Screaming in Code got the same reaction out of me. And the ideas stuck with me for so long after I’d read them that days later I’d return to the book and read them again, encountering nuances I hadn’t realized were there lurking in the writing all along.

In “The Performers,” we’re told about all the strange plans a performance artist has for a bowl of blood, only to learn about another artist’s even darker intentions. In “The Corpse Who Went for a Walk,” we get a little anecdote about a dead body who cavalierly pays a visit to a convenience store to get “some air freshener…maybe a couple of magazines” only to have the tables turned on him. In “Tiny White Skulls” we’re given a catalog of all the fun uses that human bone can be put to. These are horror stories as much as they are absurdist parables. All of them are no longer than they need to be. All of them are brilliant.

The title, Screaming in Code, suggests that the book might be a work of cyberpunk, but it’s probably more accurate to say this book is about existential horror: the title is a statement about the limits of language, and how we struggle to connect and communicate in a world where, really, the only thing that passes between us is letters, digits, symbols, and code. Writers like Wiloch don’t just scream in code — they bathe in it like a performance artist with a peculiar bowl of blood — and if they seem to be screaming, it’s no so much in caution as it is so that you’ll pay more attention to the meanings it harbors and the mysteries it holds.

Maybe we should be paying more attention to Thomas Wiloch, too. Because he is certainly paying attention to us.

Screaming in Code is a mere $8 from Naked Snake Press or Shocklines Bookstore. If you enjoyed 100 Jolts, you’ll dig it immensely.

First up is John Edward Lawson’s new poetry collection, The Troublesome Amputee. I wrote the introduction to this book, which I have to say is one of the weirdest and goriest collections of literary poetry I’ve ever read. Lawson, a writer at the forefront of the “bizarro” movement, really comes of age as a poet in this collection, which features topics ranging from the most successful scatological poem I’ve ever read (a piece about zombies tongues that travel in the sewers (”Will Work for Food”)) to an ingenious catalog of the ugly side of famous comic book super heroes (”Marvels of Horror”). At turns audacious, at others hilarious — and always surprisingly inventive — this book really disturbed and disgusted me in that creepy way that I like so much. And that’s saying a lot. The Troublesome Amputee is a generous collection of Lawson’s work, clocking in at 96 pages, and revealing a wide range of poetic talent. If you’re truly looking for something different, get this trade paperback book for $8.95 from Raw Dog Screaming Press.

I love fast-paced, well-plotted psychological thrillers, but nothing prepared me for the one-two punch of Jeff Strand’s remarkably tight new novel, Pressure. This book goes places I wish more thrillers would go: into the dark and twisted pathways of the mind, exploring the boundaries of what we take for consensus reality. Strand — known primarily as a humorist — here takes off the funny gloves to deliver a fatal body blow with all seriousness. Pressure is essentially about the tension between two childhood friends, as one of them turns increasingly, morbidly…different. And yet the bond remains, even as Strand ratchets up the dread and things seriously take a turn for the worse. You can’t help but identify with the very human protagonist and his escalating trouble with his old friend in this story. It’s a great example of the “edgy” thriller, one in which the lines between the moral and the taboo, the innocent and the guilty, are always palpably felt in the emotional rollercoaster ride of the story. The writing is as sharp — surgical sharp — and the pace is pitch perfect. I loved it. Get your quality hardcover edition right away from Earthling Publications .

Finally, I want to recommend an offbeat book that’s a year old, and probably a flash in the pan of the literary scene, but one that in my opinion should not be overlooked. A lot of people I know enjoy Tom Robbins‘ quirky novels (like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, or Jitterbug Perfume) for their wild play with language and humorous, whimsical approach to the universe they create. In this book, Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins, you get what you love about Robbins but in an unusual presentation, along with many welcome and refreshing surprises. The book is really just a collection of ephemera, featuring batches of travel essays, tributes to celebrities, critiques, short-shorts, poems, song lyrics and interview responses — mostly reprints culled from a wide variety of magazine publications that you might not have read before or cared about. I didn’t expect to really give a darn about Robbins’ opinion of, say, Jennifer Jason Leigh, or, say, his musings during a visit to an antiques shop in Montana, but after the first sentence of each piece in this book I couldn’t stop reading. His love of language perpetually won me over — it’s contagious and fascinating — and even when I found myself disagreeing with his politics or his treatment of women, I still found myself laughing or subscribing to his idealism. It’s as though he realizes that these short essays are not as heavy with significance as his (already rather “light”) novels, so he simply enjoys the wordplay and the whimsical musing for its own sake. Although there is very little horror in this book, some of the pieces do have a dark side, and I think it’s fair to claim that Robbins is a fantasist. There’s plenty of dark stuff to be found in the lyrics of “Honky Tonk Astronaut” or the poem, “Triplets” (with lines like, “I went to Satan’s house./It was supposed to be an Amway party./I wanted one of those hard as hell steak knives.”) And if you enjoy my “Blather” department in The Goreletter, I have a strong feeling you’ll be entertained by this book (I mean, one entry in Wild Ducks is simply dedicated to Robbins’ love of the letter Z, for crying out loud). Wild Ducks Flying Backward was published by Bantam in Sept 2005 to a mild reaction by mainstream critics, but even though there is some unevenness to it, I think it’s a pretty solid book, thick with think pieces, loaded with laughs. You can still find it on amazon.com for under $10.

Dog Killer — his latest collection of comics — is rife with wry political commentary and subversive play, but it’s also an appealing work of dark surrealism. In Bob’s world, the sky hails eyeballs and the local furniture store sells chairs made of human skulls. Bob follows his shadow underground, only to discover a Starbucks at the end of the cavernous journey. Bob slays ghosts with a samurai sword, and begs to know why they are haunting him (”Stop…killing…us!” is their answer!). Notley’s sly approach has got a knock-out underground power to it: Notley plays freely with form, experiments with structure, and just takes no prisoners in his attack on conventional truth and habitual ways of seeing. In this book’s introduction, Ted Rall describes “Notley’s rageful ranting” as revealing a “tragic honesty” about the American universe through some “pretty scary allegory” that’s “grim” even when it’s optimistic. “This brutal appraisal of the human condition,” Rall writes, is “never crueler than when it’s turned inward, [and this] bugs the hell out of people.” It’s courageous alternative art. Sounds a lot like what I enjoy about horror fiction.

So who is Bob? Why is he angry? Why floral? Hard to say, but he’s one of the more original characters you’ll find in the genre. Bob is, well, a sunflower embodying the morphed personality of Sam Kinison and Denis Leary, hopped up on some strange mixture of Starbucks, psychedelics, and anabolic steroids. He reminds me of a poster I once saw, called “Defiance,” which featured a tiny mouse snarling and flipping a middle finger at the eagle descending upon it from above with its dangerous talons. That’s Bob: defiance, personified. Which might explain why you haven’t met him before — Notley’s character goes against the grain of most cartoons on the comix page. So thank goodness for books like Dog Killer, the fifth collection of BTAF in print.

Bob often has a message, but I can imagine that he often puzzles readers who don’t quite understand just how deep this defiance goes. Take the title strip, for example, Dog Killer.” [viewable online] All that happens here is that Bob shows up at the doorstep of a white man in a suit, collar opened, head heavy, eyes evasive, saying “Thanks for coming.” Bob shoulders his shotgun and says, “I understand. You need your dog put down and your not man enough to do it.” Bob goes in the back yard, pets the sick dog for four panels, soothing it with “good boys” … and then blows its head open (the extreme closeup on the furry skull bursting is so excessive, you can only make out the fanged upper palate in the carnage). Then Bob blows on his finger in the end panel: “Ooh, I burnt my finger!”

Most people, I imagine, might call this gratuitous violence. A juvenile thrill, akin to pulling the wings off a fly. But as most savvy readers realize, there’s more to such a spectacle of guts than first meets the eye. For one thing, there’s drama in the suspenseful soothing of the dog. This one page is worth a thousand Old Yellers. Then there’s the ugly truth exposed by the blast. It’s everything Old Yeller never had the guts to do. This is accented by Bob’s exposure of the pettiness of human pain (”I burnt my finger!”). And an attack on the lack of backbone in much of the middle class, refusing to both soothe those who are failing and to get their hands dirty when there’s an uncomfortable problem that needs to be solved.

In the back of the book, Notley gives excellent annotations which read like an insightful and witty “director’s commentary” track on a DVD. Notley’s discussion of “Dog Killer” reveals that it’s based on a true story from childhood. He also manages to unveil his general approach to the comic as a whole: “Just as [Bob]’s holding the dog’s head down and coaxing it, I’m holding the reader’s head down until that moment I make them look at a dog’s head getting pulped. Sometimes you have to take cherished notions into the back yard and blow their heads off, and you can’t look away when you do it.” I couldn’t agree more.

Such thematic depth can be found in even the most silly or bizarre entries in the book — all of them force you to look at something in a new light, from a skewed angle. There’s a lot of meat and grizzle to chew on here, in 158 pages of high energy drawing. I think this book will appeal to horror fans very much. But Bob the Angry Flower eludes genre, ranging from direct political commentary (a number of the pieces in Dog Killer refer explicitly to the 2004 Presidential Election) to surrealism (in one entry, Bob awakens as a bug and cursing Kafka and then transplanting his floral head onto a clone in a gory, pitiless act of decapitation) to science-fiction (Bob makes killer robots) and the gross-out (Bob sticks his fingers in the squirming maggots of a dead bird over and over again in one strip — and that’s the whole bit). I am hardly an expert on the graphic fiction genre, but I think it’s safe to say that Notley’s approach to sequential art is incomparable. The manic and raw drawing style, the play with titles and captions, and the sheer audacity of the premises all reminded me a little bit of the expressionist flourishes of Jhonen Vasquez’s brilliantly sick comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, but without the Goth sensibility. Skewed, dark, twisted, smart, sick, scary, witty…even these words don’t do it justice. That’s why it’s art. And why it’s angry.

You gotta see it for yourself. Dog Killer is Stephen Notley’s fifth compilation of BTAF cartoons, but the first American collection (his work originates in Canada). It’s bound to be a hit. The trade paperback is hitting stores this June from Tachyon Publications, for $12.95. Get it while it’s hot-headed.

Visit the publisher: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Preorder on: amazon.com
Bob also has his very own website, chock full of sample strips, at: http://www.angryflower.com

Edited by Julia and RJ Sevin, Corpse Blossoms will immediately strike you as a different kind of horror anthology the second you hold it in your hands. If an anthology is a flower-gathering, then the editors have arranged these twisted clippings into a very distinctive bouquet. First off, there’s something inherently gentle about the package — from the charcoal image of the funeral flower on its gray front cover to the high quality green bindings and pastel cover with a copper foil stamp. Usually I don’t judge a book by its cover, but when I examine a new publisher’s first offering, I am interested in the investment they put into the quality and I can’t help but judge whether or not they really know what they’re doing based on the book’s production value, in addition to its general aesthetic unity. This book sends a message: the stories you’re about to read are high quality. And the book has a distinctive character. Corpse Blossoms evinces a soft horror mood that’s really somewhat eerie — like a thing found abandoned in a mortuary, yet quivering with a life all its own.

So do the stories match the quality and character of the book? Are they, in the publisher’s words, “tales of quiet terror and screaming fear by some of the finest authors in the field”? Indeed, for the most part, they are, and though there were many fine horror anthologies published this past year (indeed, we may be experiencing a horror anthology renaissance), Corpse Blossoms holds its own as one of the finest horror anthologies to come out this season.

One of the most interesting elements of the book is the dictum in the foreword, which begs the reader to “read these exceptional stories in the order that they appear for full effect…this is no lottery.” Corpse Blossoms has twenty-four stories, many by longstanding and reputable writers in the horror genre (Gary Braunbeck, Tom Piccirilli, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Steve Rasnic Tem) and many by writers who have made a noticeably significant splash in the horror scene since the turn of the Millennium (Kealan Patrick Burke, Scott Nicholson, Darren Speegle, Bev Vincent, Nick Mamatas, Steve Vernon, Brian Freeman). The fiction is generally harder in tone than you might expect, given the gentility of the packaging. In the stories themselves, the “quiet terror” usually stems from a character whose reality has started splitting apart at the seams, and the writers ratchet up the creep-outs until everything erupts in a moment of “screaming fear” — and for some, explosive gore — in an emotionally powerful way.

I can’t talk about all of the tales, but let me share my thoughts about three that really stuck with me, to give you a sense of the book’s range.

One of the weirdest pieces in this is collection is “The Last Few Curls of Gut Rope” by Steve Vernon. The title is a tad bit misleading, because Vernon’s tale is really a surrealist piece rather than a gorefest (though you won’t be entirely disappointed in the climax if a little gut-wrenching splat is what you’re seeking when you read this one). What makes “Gut Rope” surreal? Well, if you’ve ever read my short-short story, “Domestic Fowl,” then this is “Domestic Fowl” to the 20th power. It’s about a guy who orders eggs at a restaurant and is served a live squawking chicken (”You asked for eggs,” the waitress says, “but the chicken comes first.”) And then it just gets weirder and weirder, playing off the familiar chicken-and-egg formula by “dishing out” many absurdist moments and encounters, until it reaches its bizarrely-feathered conclusion. Vernon is gaining a reputation for his humorous voice, and though this story does not disappoint in that regard, it also reveals a layer of psychological depth underpinning his fiction that is getting deeper and more profound than in the past. It’s one of his best tales yet.

Another wildly-imagined contribution to the collection comes from Bentley Little, whose opening paragraph is probably the most creatively hilarious of the book:

He found it in a shack in the desert, a horrible thing of jellyfish and claws, scales and squid, bound into shape by strands of dark kelpy seaweed. It was sitting in the center of the rotted wood floor, and under his gaze it shifted, moved, tried to slink away beneath a sandy bench, all the while making a hideous squeaking squelching sound.

‘Dad?’ he said.

This is from Little’s “Finding Father,” a quirky and emotionally disturbing tale about a trucker who is hunting down his father, who, it seems, is leaving a trail for him to follow in the form of bathroom stall graffiti. The premise of this one is a little hard to swallow, but that’s almost universally true of Bentley Little’s short stories. Little always ambitiously pushes the envelope of horror fiction and writes horror with a contagious sense of frenetic glee that inevitably takes you on such a ride that you not only forgive the absurdity behind his stories, but also gladly join him in his playground of the unreal. This story had me at “jellyfish and claws.” They latched onto me and I went along for an outrageous descent into terror.

I love stories like these; tales that go over the top in a quest for unconscious thrills. Their unsettling humor pushes you over the edge and into some psychic state of disbelief akin to madness. Corpse Blossoms is at its best when it delves into the psychological — rather than supernatural — side of horror. And it doesn’t just go for the outr

I’m not suggesting that this book is only so much traditional horror fiction repackaged to placate perceived trends in the market. It’s actually very contemporary and boundary-blurring. But there is a way in which the horror genre is the unnameable creature lurking beneath it all. Not outside, but in. And I like that. It’s subversive. I think it’s kind of neat that this book is virtually a horror compilation camouflaged as a collection of “edge” fiction. The best horror often subversively lurks in the clean and carpeted bookstores of America, waiting to surprise its reader when he or she cracks open the covers and the jack springs from its box. It’s when what’s outside one’s expectations crashes in that the horror erupts.

And maybe horror fiction ought to have been called “outsider” fiction all along, anyway: stories that explore unreality and the secret truths one can discover only by rejecting the mainstream realities that are handed to us, whether through the occult means of the supernatural story or the psychosis of the serial killer. Of course, “fantasy” is itself an alternate reality, so “dark fantasy” would be just as good a term. But fifty years ago, Colin Wilson wrote one of the defining books on such “existentialist” issues in fiction, called The Outsider, which deepens a reading of the Holder and Kilpatrick collection. The Outsider, Wilson argues, is a type of thinker akin to the doomed hero in H.G. Wells’ story, “The Country of the Blind”: he is the one man able to see the truth. As Wilson puts it: “To the objection that he is unhealthy and neurotic, [the Outsider] replies: ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ His case, in fact, is that he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick…even further…it is human nature that is sick, and the Outsider is the man who faces this unpleasant fact…a negative position which the Outsider declares to be the essence of the world as he sees it.” The revelation of this truth is the moment of horror. And this, I think, is what Robert Bloch meant when he proclaimed that “horror is the removal of masks.” Good dark fiction unmasks conventional reality to show another layer lurking beneath the surface, one often initially perceived as “sick” or “diseased.”

What was great about horror in its heyday was that it could take this status of “outsiderness” for granted, and cut a layer deeper. I’m not so sure that today’s fiction can go there, because the reader’s unreality, in some ways, has become so conventionalized under the onus of the unrealities of today’s media culture. The unreal is as close to us as our TV sets and computer monitors. And perhaps that’s what makes this collection so interesting to me. I suggested earlier that Outsiders could just have well have been published twenty years ago and that it’s exploring themes that are at least fifty — if not a hundred — years old. I’m tempted to say that horror fiction always points back to the old and the universal realities lurking under the surface of the new. But that isn’t quite fair because there is certainly a twenty-first century sense of alienation that is being explored here.

Take David J. Schow’s excellent contribution, “Expanding Your Capabilities Using Frame/Shift Mode” — a story about a DVD pirate who discovers a particularly bizarre effect on the “Frame/Shift” button on his remote control. The button allows him to manipulate objects on screen so that he can, for example, peel off layers of the actors clothing with it. It explores the assumption we have that “you just have to know the code; which buttons to push” in order to control our universe. And, if you know your Schow, you know that he will explore the fetishism of media technology by “pushing the buttons” all the way to the extreme. Inevitably, the character with his remote is not only voyeuristically getting off on undressing actresses on the screen, but also removing their skin. Literally, Schow is “removing the mask” of not only the screen image but also our relation to such things; and the protagonist of this story not only excessively gets off on watching, say, skeletons having sex, he explores home movies and considers starting a variation on the porn business…until things take a surprising turn. This is a horror story in the traditional sense. About a lonely outsider. And yet it is also about today’s fantasies, today’s social relations, today’s media technology fetishism. It reminded me of Nicholson Baker’s novel, The Fermata, in its representation of a “control fantasy.” And it’s one of my favorites in the collection.

Also excellent is Steve Rasnic Tem’s opening story, “The Company You Keep” (which is as surrealist in its method as a painting by Magritte) about a “nowhere man” so lonely, he somehow finds himself surrounded by a pack of others who are exactly like him, all of them making the same exact gestures and expressions. This “legion” of mirror-image figures becomes almost a herd, and soon we uncover Tem’s wry comment on our culture: that we are all so utterly alone, and yet ironically bonded by our alienation. In that, we find community as “outsiders.” But Tem takes a horrifying turn when he reveals that this alienation can coldly lead to our self-destruction. It’s one of Tem’s best stories ever, and a perfect “opener” to this book — which raises the issue regarding the human condition today in a stunning manner. It’s quite a brilliant allegory.

And there’s much more. While a few of the stories in Outsiders don’t quite match the caliber of Tem’s brilliance or the level of Schow’s darkness, the book as a whole is definitely a work of excellence and an example of the best horror fiction being written today, even if it doesn’t call itself such. The stories by Kathe Koja, Michael Marano, Bentley Little, Brian Hodge, Elizabeth Engstrom, Eliabeth Massie and Joe Lansdale are all outstanding because they are intelligent and sophisticated — and offering up comments on what it means to be alienated in today’s unreal wold. This collection is worthy of acclaim.

Also worth acclaim: half of the contributors to Outsiders are women and the book is edited by two women. That’s remarkable, I think. And perhaps even a retroactively ironic statement on what the “insiders” of the horror trade may have neglected and marginalized in the heyday of the genre at their own peril: inclusiveness.

Outsiders is a $14.95 trade paperback available from Roc Books. A must read. (So is H.G. Wells’ story, which you can find in a book that would make a good compliment to this one, Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, edited by Italo Calvino).

Tim Powers is a powerhouse fantasy novelist. He’s probably known best for his historical fantasy, and books like The Anubis Gates and Declare have won him a huge following. I think my favorite is Last Call, a book about the inspiration behind playing cards come to life, which was one of the handful of card-related stories I read as I was working on my novel, Play Dead. It taught me more about writing than it did about cards, per se. An accomplished writer of what you might call “fabulism,” Tim Powers talent is bringing the mythic and the marvelous to life while at the same time retaining a strict psychological realism, dramatizing the way characters think and feel in deeply penetrating ways, regardless of whether they’re magicians or monsters or men. The world in a Tim Powers book is marvelously unique, yet at the same time his settings are very concrete and keenly detailed and the people are undeniably just like you and me. But being “psychologically” realistic does not make Tim Powers a “realist” by any means — indeed, his mission seems to be to bend reality, and Strange Itineraries succeeds at unhinging it at every stop along the way as he takes us on a tour of some exceptionally weird landscapes and frightfully uncanny mental vistas.

Strange Itineraries collects nine fantastic tales by Tim Powers, culled from anthologies (like the mega-horror book, 999), collectible chapbooks, and familiar serials like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s SF Magazine. It’s a great sampling of Powers’ talent (as well as that of James P. Blaylock, his collaborator on one third of the stories included here — almost enough to make me think he deserves to share the book’s byline). The stories range from peculiar fantasy to disturbing (but subtle) psychological horror and twisted alternate reality. Powers is not a horror writer in the strictest sense, but he can be very dark and mind-bending (and often, funny), but what really floors me is his sheer imagination. He takes risks and always pulls it off.

In his introduction, Paul di Filippo refers to this collection as a book of “haunted” stories. This is an excellent way to think of Strange Itineraries — though it is not so much a collection of “ghost stories” as it is a tour of diverse settings where things are not as they seem. In the title piece, “Itinerary,” a character steps into a short circuit in space and time and Powers’ effectively loops the plot structure of this story in a way that really gets you at the end. (You’ll also learn why this book has a porcelain duck on its cover). One of the darkest tales in the collection, “Through and Through,” visits a priest with a ghost in his confessional, a specter who looks him “through and through” with surprising results. “Pat Moore” is the doppleganger story to end all doppleganger stories, where the title character encounters more Pat Moores than even Pat Moore can imagine. In “The Better Boy” — perhaps the best “magical garden” tale I’ve ever read — Powers shows what happens when a man’s “inventor’s pants” go missing and throw off his plans for the tomatoes…and so much more. The closing story, “Night Moves,” invokes the specter of death in a mind bending and sophisticated way, rife with irony. I really can’t describe these stories without either relying on gross overgeneralizations or spoiling things by giving everything away. So I’ll just stop now and say that if you’re looking for an escape, climb aboard Strange Itineraries and prepare to launch on a very bizarre tour hosted by one of the most brilliant imaginations of our day.

Strange Itineraries is available in trade paperback for $15.95 (US) from Tachyon Publications. (And congratulations to Tachyon on their tenth anniversary!)

Published by the quirky book division of UK outfit Virgin Entertainment, this 4×6″ title manages to collect “a thousand gruesome and gory facts” culled from world history by none other than a former Beefeater at the Tower of London. In his introduction to the book — which is essentially a compendium of bizarre historical factoids revolving around torture, mutilation, and capital punishment — Abbot explains that in his work at the Tower of London, he would most often get lurid questions from tourists who would want to know more about the execution chambers than the Crown Jewels…and so he began to research the answers, which led to a lifelong obsession. The book is divided into chapters with titles like “What a Way to Go!” and “Bones, Brains and Body Parts” which catalog the extreme lengths that “civilized” cultures have gone to in order to exact punishment, cruelty and revenge. The book is filled with “little known facts” that would make for delightful dinner conversation. Here’s a typical entry (and one of the tamer ones, I might add):

“Before severed heads were displayed in public on London Bridge, they were preserved by being parboiled in salt water and cumin seed to deter the sea birds from eating the flesh.”

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine more where that came from. Reading this book I learned about virtually every execution method tried by man (I particularly like the “Brazen Bull” (which boiled victims inside a golden calf) and the ancient Chinese punishment of sawing a man in half, vertically, starting at the head); bizarre medical experiments (like the time a dog’s head was sewn onto a freshly guillotined corpse…and momentarily brought to life!), and numerous freakish delights (like the story of Peter Kuren, the “Monster of Dusseldorf,” whose blood fetish was so neurotic that even at the guillotine he expressed regret, “not for his crimes, but because he would not be able to hear his own blood pumping out after the blade had fallen”). I learned how long it takes a body to be cremated and when the last beheading was performed in Germany. Abbott’s talent for digging up history’s horrors — from the banal to the absurd — greatly impressed me.

If you like true crime, you’ll get a kick out of this book. The old clich

Tightening its thematic bond is the supremely talented artwork, ALL of which is not only monster-centric, but also aesthetically centered on the traditional pen-and-ink craftsmanship of the illustrious editor, Allen K. himself. You don’t have to read a lot of horror magazines to recognize his style: prolifically appearing all over the scene since 1973, Allen Koszowski has been virtually everywhere in the genre press, from Cemetery Dance to Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine to Weird Tales. I see his signature style in any number of collectable horror books I’ve got on my shelves, and even in many of the underground magazines I myself appeared in long ago. You can recognize his craftsmanship the instant you see the ominous stippling, the brash lines, the cinematic realism bent into surreal extremities. No one conjures creatures from a bottle of india ink like Allen K. and rare is the artist who can pull off a magazine like this, featuring entirely his own artwork alone. But Allen K. makes it not only look easy, but natural. Inhuman reads like an illuminated art portfolio without the trappings of an artist’s narcissism; paging through it to see what he’s exploring through his art nowadays is half the joy of reading the magazine. And the synergy between the stories and his illustrations is nothing short of brilliant. For you see, he’s not only a master of horrifying pen-and-ink drawings of monsters…backed by years of experience, he’s a master of capturing a story’s mood and essence by illustrating a key object, character, or scene from the story world. He brings to life a lot of the monsters that are lurking inside the stories themselves.

And the stories Allen K. is publishing are all wonderful. You can tell how well-read this artist and his assistant editors are in the genre; the authors they choose are excellent examples of the best working in horror today (and in year’s past). I already mentioned the magazine’s nostalgic longing for classic monster stories, and Inhuman actually reprints vintage tales in the genre — often contemporary classics that deserve another look. In issue #2, Joe R. Lansdale’s “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” is presented alongside a simply awesome art piece by Allen K. that brings Lansdale’s post-nuclear “flowers” to life in an uncanny way. The story definitely stands the test of time and like many of Lansdale’s pieces it is a must-read. Also reprinted in this issue are wonderful stories by Ramsey Campbell, Thomas F. Monteleone, and Brain Lumley — a few of which I’d missed and was very happy to have had the chance to read. The illustration for Lumley’s “The Spider in the Bathtub” is so striking that I would love to have a blown-up giant poster made out of it and put up on my bathroom wall. The original monster fiction in the magazine is also superb, and I was particularly struck by Elizabeth Massie’s masterfully bizarre doppelganger story, “Donald Meets Arnold,” which does an expert job of making the protagonist’s hilarious eccentricity completely unlikable so we’ll root for the justice to come when his uncanny and monstrous “alterego” comes to life. Allen K’s accompanying art for this story is surrealistically gruesome — and pulls you right into the story so you’ll want to understand it. Also appearing in this issue with new tales involving everything from alien aberrations to tentacled terrors are Shikhar Dixit, Michael Laimo, Tim Curran, Don D’Ammassa and C.J. Henderson. All of them are entertaining and, well, scary! The magazine is rounded out nicely with film reviews, poetry, and essays on the genre.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Inhuman attempts to do what is virtually impossible in today’s horror genre: keep the content friendly for young readers, without lowering the psychological and literary depth of the stories. While the violence factor is high, sexuality is kept to a minimum and offensive language is virtually absent. This is a conscious choice, as Allen K makes clear in his introduction to issue #2, since the Lansdale story made him contemplate the matter of what’s worth censoring and what’s not. I applaud Allen K’s integrity on this issue; monster stories are naturally appealing to the youth, and it just makes good sense to appease parents in order to show the next generation just how good horror can be. I know that a lot of my early love of the genre came from reading magazines that teetered somewhere between a PG and R rating when I was young. I only wish there had been a magazine like Inhuman around. Thankfully, there is now. And it’s no kiddie mag. Inhuman is highly recommended to anyone, young and old, who enjoys monsters, dark art, and the best fiction in the genre.

Allen K’s Inhuman is a digest-sized, perfect bound magazine, with full color cover and b/w interiors. Nothing short of a bargain at $6.95 a copy. Pick up a copy through shocklines.com or browse around on the publisher’s website at Die Monster Die Publishing.

http://www.allenk.com
http://www.diemonsterdie.com/DMD_books_inhuman.htm
http://store.yahoo.com/shocklines/diemonsterdie.html

If you’ve got a taste for over-the-top gross-out stories in the campy mode of the Evil Dead movies, this is definitely a book you should look into. “Long Horn, Big Shaggy” is a quick read, coming in at about 100 pages. For ordering details, visit the publisher’s website. For a photo of the goofy stuffed buffalo Vernon made, visit his.

The first is Tom Piccirilli’s Waiting My Turn to Go Under the Knife, a limited hardbound book from Fairwood Press’ new book line, Darkwood Press. This collection of verse by the author of the notable novel, A Choir of Ill Children, is a great example of just how good horror poetry can speak to the human condition. I dare say this is a “literary” book because Piccirilli investigates death and pain in a way that cuts close to the heart. You feel sorry for his narrators, who are universally traumatized by their very real pasts or suffering deeply from the existential horrors of everyday life. There’s a lot of twisted humor in this book, too — as is always evident in Pic’s flair for long titles which are virtually whole poems in and of themselves (consider “When the Proper Spelling of Nietzsche Becomes a Metaphor for Age, Love, Loss, Mercy, and the Rage That Wants Out (with Pigeons)”). I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that this is one of Piccirilli’s most creatively playful and deeply dark poetry books, and if you call yourself a lover of poetry it’s the must-read of the year.

An equally accomplished book in every way is Charlee Jacob’s The Desert (Dark Regions Press), which also features 100 pages of excellent verse by a poet whose work always strikes me with dread. Like Piccirilli, Jacob is one of few writers in the genre who has a voice so distinctive that you can recognize it without a byline. She writes the way a spellcaster conjures evil and she’s one of the few who can utterly creep me out in ways I can’t quite explain. Things sneak up on you when you read a Charlee Jacob poem — it’s as though there’s something truly horrible roiling beneath the language and wriggling between the lines as she wrings the words for every drop of darkness they’re worth. She isn’t afraid to go over the top. She’s so good at terror that there’s no other way to put it: Jacob disturbs. The Desert features both new work and familiar reprints, but it’s got more range and maturity than her other poetry books and this is surely the best body of dark fantasy she’s produced. Definitely one of the top poetry books of 2004. Dark Regions has been quietly publishing some of the best poetry books for the past two years, in fact, so I recommend you take a gander at their website.

And finally, if you’re not afraid of extremes or are looking for something akin to punk rock, I recommend taking a look at Kurt Newton’s new chapbook, PerVERSEities II. You don’t need to read the first edition; it’s not like there’s a PerVERSEity saga or anything. This is just a companion volume to the first collection released by Naked Snake Press much earlier in the year (and also recommended). Which is another way of saying that Kurt is up to no good again. This book features the same outrageous ingenuity from the mind of Kurt Newton that we got in the first volume. PerVERSEities II is an excellent collection, revealing Newton’s mastery of balancing extreme gore against social issues and psychological traumas. It isn’t sexually perverse — well, maybe a little — but it’s mostly a perversion of verse itself, pushing the boundaries of poetic convention to generate some truly grizzly images and freaky frissons. I like Kurt Newton because he uses a simple style, one that always manages to catch me off guard. In the PerVERSEities collections, Newton goes for the throat and you get the sense that these are some of his more disgusting poems. But even when he’s waxing poetic about roadkill or probes the erotics of wounds, he is on a never-ending quest for originality, and there are a number of unique concept pieces in this volume, from the silly “Mad Cow Patty” to wholly twisted love letter, “Letterhead.” Illustrated by the very disturbing pen drawings of Chris Friend, this book deserves to be an underground hit.

For ordering details, visit the publisher’s websites:
Waiting My Turn to Go Under the Knife
The Desert
PerVERSEities II

I hope my plot description hasn’t lost you. The story is clever, but complicated, and it takes a lot of exposition — albeit humorous — for O’Brien to build to his world of living commodity fetishes. At the center is GenieCorp — a 31st century corporation that has taken control of the world — which manufactures strange devices out of biomass, servicing all human desires with freakish living creatures. For example, “Snakelights” are literally snakes with lights in their bodies rather than the Black & Decker tools we know so well, and “VolksvaagenBugs” are insectoid carriers with seats embedded in the thorax. There are plenty of these puns on commercial culture throughout the book — indeed, encountering ServAnts and AlarmCocks and other animated commodities is half the fun of the book. They make Eve at once unique, witty, and a lot of fun to read. It’s almost cartoony in its outrageous humor — something like Futurama or The Jetsons as told by a mutation between David Cronenberg and Aldous Huxley. His writing is not composed as artfully as a Mark Leyner or a Philip K. Dick, but O’Brien’s postmodern science fiction is deftly imagined and he manages to generate one hell of an entertaining satire on consumer culture with Eve.

The book has some weaknesses: Eve gets off to a slow start because O’Brien’s 31st century world is so intricately designed. The use of an emotionless robot narrator generates some droll humor at times (”Upon returning home, Eve made a beeline for the bathroom and sealed herself in. She sat in there for 00:56:02 and cried.”) At times, the punning goes over-the-top so much that it wears thin. But the silliness of the world makes it all the more fascinating to a reader like me, who loves mutants. However, the book’s major weakness is a reliance on the shopworn “Adam & Eve” conceit (that the title makes explicit), considered by many to be one of the biggest cliches of the science fiction genre. Couple that with the Pygmalion plot and you might start to think that the narrative could use a little more cleverness to match the book’s imaginative universe. But O’Brien — whose background, incidentally, is in animation — is careful not to give plot itself much dramatic weight. He’s really just borrowing the structure to play out his imagination and generate a never-ending series of witty barbs at modern culture. And the creativity that’s evident everywhere in O’Brien’s hilarious satire of consumer culture makes it a terrific read.

Visit evethenovel.com for a battery of animated illustrations of the best of his Creature Comforts and a far better description of the plot than I can muster. (Be sure to click on the “Lick-n-Span” image — it’s what won me over when I first encountered the website). If you’re looking for a good laugh, and you enjoy light SF, I think you’ll really like this book. It’s a wonderful critique of the suburbanite’s American dream, shot through the lens of its most hedonistic desires. Available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book editions from the author’s website, AuthorHouse.com, or amazon.com.

http://evethenovel.com
http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?q3=jYmNivsu1mM=

That’s how I felt after savoring the various vintages of The Devil’s Wine — a fine trade hardcover poetry collection from Cemetery Dance edited by Tom Piccirilli and illustrated copiously by the notoriously talented artist, Caniglia. Once I opened the cover, I couldn’t stop sipping from its pages. This is a book to be treasured and the attention to production quality that CD Publications put into this hardcover is well worth collecting and showing off to friends. In sum, this book treats dark poetry with the respect it deserves, exhibiting the musing (and occasionally softer and playful) side of bestselling and award-winning horror novelists, including such luminaries as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, Jack Ketchum, Tamara Thorne, Edward Lee, and thirteen others. It’s a substantial collection, featuring anywhere from 6 to 10 poems by each contributor, introduced by Piccirilli (the Bram Stoker Award winner in Poetry who also contributes). Each author-poet’s contribution is framed by excellent charcoal drawings and chatty introductory remarks, giving the book the feel of about twenty poetry chapbooks in one. For the price — listed around forty dollars — this rarity is a steal and it certainly belongs on the bookshelf of any serious horror enthusiast reading today.

Reading the collection, one can’t help but sense that this is an important and influential volume. While the poetry itself is something of a mixed bag, the sheer novelty of the collection — and it’s respectful treatment of each poet — makes you feel like you are holding something very special, to be treasured, because you’re getting to see a more personal side of the writers you respect. And in many ways, the book is also a reminder of just how talented these writers really are when it comes to manipulating the English language. The contributions by King alone — many culled from the days before he was a known author — are well worth the price of the book, revealing his innate ability to terrify. His lead poem, “The Dark Man,” depicts the sheer saturation of evil in everything around us, with hard-hitting supernatural foreboding: “i have…heard the suck of shadows/where a gutted columned house/leeched with vines/speaks to an overhung mushroom sky…i am a dark man.” This poem launches the book in a very powerful way because I suspect most readers who haven’t read King’s poetry before (you can find snippets of it in most of his short fiction collections) will have an eye-opening revelation about this self-professed “balogna fiction” writer’s literary side. I see this as a metaphorical response to all critics who might say that horror is artless gutter literature. Throughout the collection, we get to see the genre’s most successful wordsmiths reminding us how good they really are, freed from the bindings of conventional narrative to work their literary muscle on poetry, which is perhaps the most difficult craft of writing to master.

The Devil’s Wine holds many more revelations than simply disclosing unique facets of the talent of a King or a Straub. Chief among the surprises in this book — in my view — are the softer poems penned by horror’s most hardcore writers. Edward Lee — one of the genre’s most notoriously disturbing writers who is never afraid to go into the gorezone bearing a machete — contributes several strong poems exhibiting a range of talent, leaping from what might be called “love poems” to thought experiments on par with what you’d find in today’s most profoundly difficult literary journals. Along with some rock solid poems that probe unflinchingly into tough philosophical territories, Brian Hodge contributes lyrics from songs he’s put together, revealing the complexity of his musical side. Elizabeth Massie even offers a little comedic verse and a few poems with a YA flair that make you grin devilishly. I was thrilled to study these poems by authors whom I’ve read and admired for a long time, and there is a LOT to chew on with over 350 pages of poetry between this book’s covers.

I suspect most who pick up The Devil’s Wine will jump right to the Stephen King section and swallow it whole, before paging to have a little Jack Ketchum as an after-dinner mint. I recommend savoring them all. If you aren’t touched by the contributions of Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem or Charles DeLint, you’re just not human. The contributions by Peter Crowther and Graham Masterson confirmed my respect for these great writers of dark supernatural fiction. Piccirilli’s own poetry in the back of the book attests to why he won the Bram Stoker Award for it in 2000 and why he deserves to edit this massive collection. (And with titles like “Nunzio, Sixty Years Dead, Lying at my Side, Staring” or “How to Perform Heart Surgery with Someone Else’s Gaze” you know he’s giving us a treat). Nearly all of the poems in the book are satisfying. But I think the greatest thrill I had when reading The Devil’s Wine was discovering dark suspense writer Jay Bonansinga’s talent for poetry. I’ve read his short stories and novels (like Oblivion and Sick) before and always thought he was a decent novelist, but Bonansinga’s contributions to The Devil’s Wine are knockout poems that stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the greatest poets working the dark trenches today. Who knew! I credit Piccirilli with making something of a discovery here — and I want more, because this author is not only a very capable fiction writer, but someone who deserves his own poetry collection right away.

If you’ve already read this book and this is your first taste of The Devil’s Wine, I hope you’ll develop a drinking problem, and cultivate a lifelong weakness for the poetic grape and the more artful side of horror’s creative personalities. Not just in poetry, but other artforms. Look for Peter Straub’s early poetry collections. Or Brian Hodge’s music. Or Elizabeth Massie’s art. Celebrate the art of the darkness — for there is far more than just six-dollar paperback novels out there in the field, if you know where to look. The joy of reading this book isn’t just peering into the hidden personalities of the famous writers, it lies in exploring the dark side without relying on the familiar maps of popular fiction or the safety nets handed to us by the mass media marketplace. Poems are always thought experiments that don’t follow the predictable rules of prose writing, and that only adds to the scariness they can produce.

If there’s a flaw to this book, it’s that the selections privilege mass market writers to the exclusion of other well-established poets and experimental writers who have been working on the fringes for decades. This collection doesn’t bother to toss a few grapes from various countrysides that are out there harvesting the dark provinces already. These, perhaps, are a more rarefied vintage, but worthy of a taste nonetheless. The collection pretends at diversity but doesn’t quite provide it. While The Devil’s Wine contains well-established science fiction/fantasy poets like Joe Haldeman and Michael Bishop, it almost entirely neglects professional poets who have been writing this stuff successfully for decades. While contributors like Steve Rasnic Tem and Jack Cady in the book represent the more “literary” side of horror writing, the book could have only benefited, I think, from including a few underground, “outlaw,” or simply lesser-known poetry writers whose craft is all the more mature and sharpened with practice than some of those who are in this book. Bram Stoker Award-winners in poetry — like the amazingly deft and well-schooled Bruce Boston or the important African American female voice of Linda Addison — probably should have been included in the stomping barrel. Where are the graphic surrealist shockers by a Charlee Jacob or the psychological creepers of a John Grey? They’re speciously absent and anyone who is already an aficionado of horror poetry will simply have to wonder why. (Would the power of their experienced poetry writing outshine those of these brand names? Would the inclusion of small press writers somehow ostensibly lower the clout of the book? To what degree did commerce and art compete in the editorial decisions at play here?)

The book manages to enormously succeed despite this weakness in variety, and overall, it’s okay, I think, that The Devil’s Wine pretends to be nothing more than a respectful and charming novelty that gives us a glimpse into the more lyrical side of today’s best novelists. I do think this collection could have sacrificed some of its more silly contributions by name writers (there are definitely a few self-indulgent clunkers in here — mostly bad inside jokes or pun poems that fail miserably) for the sake of giving some very deserving wine-makers a little more attention. An opportunity was also missed here, to help educate the book’s audience about the relatively unknown contemporary horror poetry genre and its long history, one that reaches all the way back to Poe, if not even as far back as Beowulf. Even a bibliography of related works or a brief essay about the history of horror poetry would have been a minor step in the right the direction.

Nevertheless, this shouldn’t stop anyone from buying this book right away. I hope readers everywhere will not only chug deeply from this generous jug of darkness, but will also be inspired to grab another bottle elsewhere (and another collection of Tom Piccirilli’s own poetry would be a great place to start). I also hope that this book — which is a MUST READ for anyone with a taste for terror — is such a success that it produces a sequel that will offer more variety to today’s most discriminating connoisseurs of the devil’s wine.

A full contents listing and ordering information for The Devil’s Wine is available at Cemetery Dance Publications. If you’re hunting for more rarefied vintages, a similar title worth considering is Cemetery Poets, which is offered at a discount this month to Goreletter e-mail subscribers only.

cemeterydance.com

Shocklines Bookstore

Welcomingly, half of this book contains the work of female horror writers, and there's a good mix of international authors represented, as well. The horror genre still seems dominated by male voices writing about male preoccupations, and Wicked Little Girls stands as a small press corrective to this hegemony. It dramatizes, in many of its pieces, a turning of the tables and a revolt of the "little girl" against patriarchy and male power. Some stories, like Jamie Rosen's allegory, "Alis Bender's Life Lesson #36," deliver that revolt with humor, with a direct kick to the groin. Others are more literary, exploring the role of storytelling in disempowering the "little girl." Marsheila Rockwell's excellent poem, "Gretel" -- reminiscent of Angela Carter's feminist work in fairy tales -- retells the famous tale of gingerbread house kidnapping in a monologue by Hansel's sister by turning the finger of blame away from the wicked witch and pointing it squarely at Hansel himself: "no wonder father wanted/him gone/it was >his< ungodly hunger/that beggared us...his voracious appetite/that brought the witch's wrath upon us." I also enjoyed Simon Bestwick's sf/horror piece -- "Emily's Song: A Life Cycle in Three Parts" -- which may be the best story in the anthology. It's about a little monster named Emily who takes over the body of the president in a parasitic fashion, leading to grotesque and genuinely surprising ends. Bestwick manages to balance gross-out humor against the story's political allegory in an expert fashion. Jonathan William Hodges' excellent contribution, "Deep in the Gloom of Lights from Rescue Squads" is an extended prose-poem, written in a hypnotic weave of prose that moves in and out of reality in quite a bizarre but eloquent fashion. Indeed, poetry sneaks into the prose where you least expect it in many of the stories in this collection. For example, when I first read Robyn A. Hay's "Scrapbook" I almost read right past the rhyme that recurs in paragraphs like this one -- "'How's the knee, Bea?' Rodney asked his wife quietly" -- even though the over-reliance on adverbs in the dialogue tags made the creative writing teacher in me writhe.

Because the collection's premise is about "wicked little girls" almost every story's ending was telegraphed to some degree: I always already assumed that the little girls of the stories were going to do something wicked or horrible. Perhaps this is why a few of the stories didn't work for me. One might think that this premise is the book's limitation, but with characters ranging from daughters to dollies, and settings from Africa to alien worlds, Wicked Little Girls has enough variety to make it an enjoyable read all the way through, regardless. If you're looking for something on the alternative side, get your copy direct from Allegra Press -- or through the small press distributor Project Pulp -- for about $6 postpaid.

http://www.allegrapress.com/anthos.htm
http://projectpulp.com/frontpage.asp