RITUALISTIC HUMAN SACRIFICE (Grindhouse), by CV Hunt

So, there’s this guy. Nick Graves. Nick is a bit of a jerk. He hates his wife, but when her surprise pregnancy derails his plan to divorce her, he decides to move them both far from friends, family and anything they know. That’ll show her. Too bad he didn’t look into the neighbors a bit closer as everyone he meets seems to act very strange and they have their own plans for him.

 

Let’s be straight here: this is not a book for most of you. It’s chock full of violent sexuality and more than a fair bit of dead fetus. Normally, I’d call that a spoiler, but the cover has a wire hanger worked into the pentagram and little fetuses line the edges. You knew what you were walking into the moment you picked it up.

 

For those that have been longing for a bit of the old Hardcore in their horror in a time that seems overrun with tentacles and sighs, Hunt will prove a gift. Purple putrescent people pieces abound within these pages. There’s violence and dismemberment and sex galore. Sometimes, the three slide across each other.

 

Hunt’s prose is lean and mean and aims straight for the gut. There isn’t much poetry to it, but I don’t think that was what she was going for here. I felt some kinship to Bentley Little (one of the authors she dedicates the book to) at times, especially with her ability to have me tearing pages at such a rapid pace while absolutely despising the person I was reading about.

 

As an interesting departure from typical hardcore horror, the violence is not so much sexualized as the sex is violenc-ized (that’s a word, right?). There’s nothing sexy about any of the sex presented here. It’s ugly and harsh and a bit grotesque at times. This is the sex of power politics, not pleasure. The violence seems more of an extension of that ethos that an end of its own. It’s also worth noting that this violence is perpetrated by women and upon men, instead of the far too often used other way around.

 

However, there isn’t much more than that to this yarn. The only character we really get to know, Nick Graves, is a one-note douche. I felt pulverized with the intensity of his asshole for pretty much the whole thing. He never changes, nor does anyone else. The Satanists are evil Satanist women and the guys are horny. Oh, there is that one girl who is just kinda bitchy. I would have preferred a bit more meat with all the flesh on display. I think I’ve also reached a point where cartoony rape doesn’t even offend me anymore. I just find it boring.

 

Where you sit with it at this point is on you.

 

Cover Art: On first glance, it seems like just the simplicity one would expect from a grimoire, with that basic block writing and simple pentagram against a plain black field. A closer gaze nets you the realization of the hanger in the pentagram and an even closer look reveals the slightly less black fetuses curled in upon themselves along the edging*. Nice touches by Brandon Duncan.

*Admittedly, those fetuses show up very well on the picture here, but they are a bit more discrete on the actual cover of the physical book.

 

PAPER TIGERS (dark house), by Damien Angelica Walters

If you’ve read my review of Damien’s collection (Sing Me Your Scars), you know I’m a bit of a fan. If you haven’t, then it’s worth noting that I was underscoring the point a bit there. Just a smidge. Unsurprisingly, I was hugely excited when I found out she had a novel coming out. Giddy may have been the word I used when I found it on my doorstep. Of course, those that read the previous review know why that can come across a bit off.

 

Anyways, Paper Tigers follows Allison, a survivor of a fire whose body was badly burnt. So badly burnt that she feels shunned by society. Alone in her house, save for visits from her mother, she lives primarily through old photo albums of others. However, the new one purchased seems to hold something different in store for her. A promise of a potential return to her old life and her old self. The question, as it always is in these cases, is whether or not it is worth the price demanded of her.

 

Superficially, we have a ghost story. Or maybe a haunted item story. Or a modified Monkey’s Paw. Look, whatever we are dealing with is not as clear cut as it initially seems, which is great. Besides, like in all really good ghost stories, the ghosts carried within the character are the truly interesting ones anyways.  Here, we have the ghosts of a former life and the dreams of the future that were scorched as badly as Allison’s flesh. Possibly more so.

 

It is the anchoring in the human, in the humane, that makes Walters’ work stand out. Much of this tale is spent in the mundane details of her life, everyday actions that have become tense, horrifying ordeals. The physical and emotional pain that have overrun this woman’s life become as intimate as our own heartbeat and that is before the man waiting between the pages begins to unravel what little she has remaining to herself.

 

As a straight up ghost story, this moves well, punches in all the sweetspots and settles into a comfortable spot beside the personal, quiet horror of Matheson’s better works. If that is all (and not a small meal, to be sure) you want, then feel free to stop here and buy the damn thing. You’ll be happy. However, if you want fast action, gore and screaming sex, then you came to the wrong house in the first place.

 

However, I feel like there is more than that broiling beneath the surface. I’ll try my best to avoid getting too spoilery from here on out, but take this as your warning.

 

Beneath the gauzy film of plastic, amid the chemical reactions and collected molecules of silver oxide that clump together to form the larger picture, is a story of addiction. Not just the Selby-ian tragedy of addiction, but the whys and the hows and the wheretofors of it from the inside out. What the hope of a return to mythical normality can do to a person trapped in their own mind, nothing more than a ghost themselves. That alone would make this pretty fucking cool, but Walters doesn’t stop there.

 

What makes her fiction so powerful, to me, is not just the light she shines on the horrors that surround us in everyday life, the consistent peacemeal removal of our humanity, but also in the hope for a way out that sings quietly in the corner of each tale. Where the aforementioned Selby showed us the pits we dig for ourselves, she throws down a rope to pull ourselves out. We see this same journey with Allison and, with her, can see a potential light for so many who find themselves mired in the depths of their own pits. The climb is not easy, and it includes several slides back down through the muck, but it is possible.

 

That said, I have an issue with the very end. To me, it ends up undermining much that was built before it and devolving into a lame endcredits spook. I wanted more than that and she seemed to be building to something that could have been abjectly skull shatteringly genius. While it is still very good, I was left a little disappointed.

 

All told, Paper Tigers is a damn good yarn centered around a solidly developed character with plenty of meat and bone to dig through beneath the skin. I just have a tough time not looking at what I wanted it to be.

 

Cover art:

The cover is a bit of a mess to muddle through and comes across very confusing from the outset.  Upon reading, it becomes clear that this is the face of our dear protagonist, hidden behind hair that removes her completely. I’m not sure about the flowers and vines that wrap around her. Either way, it feels like a bit too much to give a solid feel for the story held behind it.

 

There is an interior piece, though, that intrigues me much more. An old grandfather clock, its face cracked and broken, licked by flames and wispy tendrils of smoke and crowned with three animal skulls. It bears just the right balance of gothic and menace with a direct connection tot eh events of the story that doesn’t spell it all out for you. I think I would have liked that better for the cover.

Familiar Spirits (Orphyte), ed. Donald J. Bingle

It seems like, when you mention ghost stories these days, most people picture old, drafty Victorian manses echoing with the soft calls of lost souls who mostly seem to cry out for revenge. While those have their place, they aren’t the kind I grew up with. The ones I learned, mostly at the foot of my mother tended to work more as a gateway to the history of the place and, most importantly, the people who lived there. Any rattling chains or slamming doors or even that one with the stones being chucked at anyone on the balcony came secondary to that.

I only bring it up because that is the type of ghost stories we are dealing with in Familiar Spirits. Yes, the vengeful dead do make some appearances and there are plenty of drafty old houses within these pages. Still, no matter how many skeletal hands creep along spines, they come back to the stories of the people that were and the ways in which their lost past brushes up against our present. Such things are more than all right by me.

Take, for instance, opener “The Cold Earth”, by Sarah Hans. It could very easily be taken as a simple tale of gravebound revenge but, instead of focusing on exacting payment for wrongs of the past, shows a victim of that past working to prevent it from happening to others in the future. Lynne Handy’s “Green Lady”, quite similarly, presents a situation where the ghostly apparition and the shrouded history it represents points the narrator towards a more hopeful life for herself. Also, kudos must be given for how well Lynne pulls off the stiff, unflappable air of old British while presenting a clearly modern sensibility of character.

It was Wren Roberts, though, who really stuck a knife in me a twisted that bastard. “What Happened at the Lake” is more nihilistic and cold than I have been preferring my fiction lately. However, it presents a painfully honest picture of the slow, constant edging in of depression, like a tide inching its way up the shore until it has covered you completely. The sense of grief, guilt and inability to find a way to continue is overwhelming. Yep, I wept openly while reading this one.

Admittedly, the first half is much stronger than the second half. Kate Johnson’s “The New Girl” feels like romance for the vast majority of the story before taking what feels like an abrupt and cheap jump into horror. The ghastly ghostly aspect of the “Legend of the Sea Captain,” by Ric Waters, is left unexplained and unaddressed in any manner, robbing it of any real sense of import or effect. Finally, while I loved how Jean Rabe used the dialect in closer “Cold-nosed and Cold-Hearted” to give it a comforting, folksy feel and the bit about the boy with his burden just about did me in, the whole seemed a bit too rambling and lacking in focus for my taste.

If what you are looking for are traditional lace-strewn gothic ghost stories, you likely will not be happy here. On the other hand, if you want short, powerful tales that delve into that ephemeral linking of the dead past to the living present, there are some damn good tales for you.

Cover Art: Taken on its own, the grainy image of the iris-less girl at the gate is a haunting one that evokes a solid sense of the eerie. However, the traditional Gothic aesthetic does not fit the feel of most of the stories within the anthology.

 

 

Flex (Angry Robot), by Ferrett Steinmetz

For the first 90 pages of Flex, I couldn’t help but think:  It’s like someone took breaking bad and turned it into a magical fantasy story.  I kept waiting to see the sympathetic protagonist turn into the antagonist, for sad, lonely Valentine to suddenly realize she was trapped within the web of a psychopath narcissist, and for poor, burned, super sassy daughter Aliyah to tell her daddy she hated him.  That kept not happening, although Gunza continued to remind me quite a bit of Tuco Salamanca.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Have you ever encountered something new and then your brain jumps in so fast, associating a mile a minute, finding similarities until all you can see are the similarities?  I had to stop about a 100 pages in and start again.

Paul Tsabo, an ex-cop and current insurance investigator whose job it is to find ‘mancers so they can be stopped (killed, or pulled into the army for brainwashing, to become a unimancer), discovers he, himself, is a bureaucromancer (a magic of forms and files, of orderliness and documentation which binds society).  Paul finds himself set against a paleomancer named Anathema, who is bent on destroying civilization via Flex:  a drug that gives, however temporarily, ‘mancers magic to mundanes.

Imagine a world where magic grows from intense love and obsession with a thing, where that obsession can change the world around him to fit his desires, but at a cost.  Such magic violates the basic laws of physics and reality demands a balance. For every magical change effected, some other, opposite change will befall the ‘mancer.  Think Harry Potter conjuring a Patronus to protect him from Dementors, but to balance out that conjuring a real stag with sharp, pointy antlers comes down out of the forbidden forest and chases him until he falls and sprains his ankle.  Oh, and while Harry is laying there in the grass with his sprained ankle, trying to ward off the descending dementors AND keep an eye on that stag, some asshole calls the cops because there are no real stags in the forbidden forest, which means someone must be using magic, and Harry, having survived the dementors, is hauled off to the army for brainwashing, because being a ‘mancer is illegal.

Such a cool concept.  The magic and rules at play make sense and the author doesn’t cheat just to get the characters out of a difficult situation.  The idea of there being consequences to the magic – a balance that must be maintained—that’s very, very cool stuff.

There were some issues in my mind with Paul’s early relationship with his teacher, Valentine; specifically, his belief that she is Anathema. He treats this as though it is an “oh, well” sort of thing, not with the fiery “I’m-gonna-kill-you-bitch” attitude one would expect meeting the person he thinks burned his daughter nearly to death.  When he introduced her to his burned daughter in the hospital, while believing her to be this monster, made no sense to me and pushed me right out of the fantasy.

Aside from that, and especially as he comes to realize Valentine can’t be Anathema, the characters all seem very real, and well-rounded, progressing toward what they each will become.  I’d like to see this story spawn a series – it would be interesting to see what use others might try to make of Paul and Velentine. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a well-crafted world and especially new and previously-unexplored magics.

Cover art:   The cover is stark, but designed well.  It gives an interesting tidbit of anticipation to the story, and…unlike so many covers…actually has something to do with the story therein.

buy it  here.

Reviewed by Laura Langford.

It Waits Below (Samhain), by Eric Red

I’m a big fan of Eric Red’s films. When I found out he was writing novels, I got excited. When I saw what looked to be a giant monster under the sea novel, I practically wet myself in anticipation. Then, I read it.

Or, more honestly, I read about half of it. IT WAITS BELOW is the tale of a salvage team whose attempt to bring the find of the century (a treasure chest full of Spanish gold, I kid you not) up from the depths of the Mariana trench meets complications. Specifically, a hivemind parasitic alien that crashed into the ship back in the 1800’s. And Pirates. Russian gangster pirates, which are universally known to be the worst kind. I think we can safely assume that things won’t go well.

From the start, I was thrown by some pretty glaring factual inaccuracies. I don’t normally harp on those things in fiction, but I couldn’t help it here. The submarine is described at one point as having a two meter diameter bubble for the three-man crew and equipment. The action is consistently listed as occurring in the Indian Ocean, while the Mariana trench is located in the Pacific Ocean. Lastly, there is a mention of them being in Japanese waters, though the Mariana trench is located well out into international waters. I took less than five minutes to verify this, so, no, I will not excuse it.

Then I was struck with how empty the characters seem to be. There were the brothers and the woman and the Russian guy who was good and the Russian guy who was bad; the tough guy and the wild guy and the play-it-safe guy and the mean guy who is willing to do anything to get what he wants. And a lady, who is just trying to make it in the man’s world of underwater salvage. My sister used to play with paper dolls that possessed more dimension.

And I was pummeled constantly with lame duck description, often depending on a type of simile I did not know existed until reading this book: Literal similes. “His body twitched and jerked as he moved like he was powered by an alien force unaccustomed to how the human body worked” might function as a non-horrible description of someone’s movement, if it was not describing the movements of someone who was indeed powered by an alien force unaccustomed to how the human body worked. This was, by no means, an isolated incident.

Despite these issues and the far too numerous fake-out cliffhangers with no payoff and the pointless “mile under club” scene and that the giant monster on the cover is a bunch of tiny Puppetmasters, I flew through this book. It was actually kinda fun, in a SyFy channel movie of the week sort of way. There is something to be said for consistent entertainment.

Until one of the pirates, a Somali (who could have a pirate party without inviting Somalis?), is referred to as a negro. Not by another character or by a racist first person narrator, but by the clearly 3^rd person omniscient narrator who is clearly the author. In a book that was written in 2014, not 1914 or even splitting the difference at 1964, where the term had already become viewed as pretty damn racist.

I stopped there.

Cover art: The image speaks to my inner giant monster-movie fetishist in the most joyous of fashions. All teeth and gaping maw and writing tentacles with that tiny sub in the scene for perspective. Yep, it’s cheesy, but it fits very well for the type of audience this style of book is aimed at. It is also incredibly misleading, as I mentioned before. Just like the Syfy movies the story seems to so clearly emulate.

Reviewed by Anton Cancre

Symbiont (Orbit), by Mira Grant

So… second book in a series that did pretty well. From an author whose previous series was ridiculously good, in my opinion. The point is that you probably already have this book, are planning on buying it, or the first one just didn’t reel you in. If you are one of those sad individuals who did not read the first in the series, Parasite, I implore you to go to that one first. All of the basic world and character building is there, so you would be a tad lost starting off here. Also, I am about to drop serious spoilers on the first book, so stop reading this review and go to my review of that book instead.

***SPOILER WARNING***

I guess.

So, our intrepid worm-human, Sal, finally figured out that she is a meat puppet controlled by a worm taking advantage of her higher brain functions to achieve sapience. The biological father of her human suit knew this all along and was just watching her for USAMRIID. Her best friend at Symbogen revealed himself to be a sleeper Chimera plotting the destruction of the human race. And Sleepwalkers are starting to overrun the populace, while chewing on them. Yep, kiddies, we are in full-out apocalypse mode here.

Which is fine with me, given that Grant has proven herself perfectly capable in that genre. Besides, like all stories, the real story isn’t in the end of the world as much as it is in how people deal with huge sweeping changes in the way the world works. As I have mentioned before, this comes in particularly clear with the limited POV that keeps us locked inside Sal’s head (excluding one incredibly jarring moment from another character’s POV, but I’ll get into that later). We see it all from behind the eyes of an unwilling agent and participant in La Revolucion. That’s the hook that grabbed me, not the scientific exploration of action and consequence (though it is there), but the human conflict between our desire for things to stay comfortable and stable and the continued push for change.

It’s brought to life by Mira’s characters, who all feel completely fleshed out and honest, with very different motivations and perspectives that each make complete sense, given their own personal history and make up. Even the fairly rote characters of Sherman’s “burn it all down because I want existence to be all about me” and Dr. Banks’ dry lack of humanity and self-centered greed feel whole and like real people. Hell, I didn’t even realize that I was reading Hard Sci-fi (which I usually despise) until someone pointed it out to me. Yep, the nitty-gritty, fine detailed science is there, but the depth of character and story overwhelm my usual boredom with such things.

This book is the part of the series where it becomes more about exploring the questions of what makes a person, as compared to a human being (an important distinction that is made), and whether or not there are times when doing the morally contemptible thing is sometimes the only right thing to do. As was so clearly established with Parasite, there are no clear answers and the con sequences cannot be pretty no matter what choices are made. There will be no happy endings here, that much is clear. It is also clear that, given several recent events and arguments that have overtaken our culture, that this book and the questions it raises, could not be more timely.

On the downside, Symbiont, is much dryer and took longer for me to get through than any of Grant’s work I have read previously. Also, Sal spends much of the time as a limp noodle in events, which isn’t quite what I want from my protagonists. However, I think that the point was to show her transition from passive to active participant, to see her choose her own path for once and begin to blaze that path. Take that for what you will, but I’ll definitely be in line for the final chapter of Sal’s Fantastic Voyage.

Cover Art: It makes me sad when cover artists are not credited. I like the stark simplicity, though it gives off a more sterile feel than the book itself conveys. Also, while I like the concept of the mitosis images and how it works with the concept of how ideas split and multiply, it is a bit confusing to have the last image the same as the first, as if all of the replicated cells have recombined. Plus, the over-exaggerated heads of the tapeworms, along with the color choice, make some of them look like severed penises. That’s not getting into the scientific inaccuracy of tapeworms generating inside of a zygote.

Review by Anton Cancre

22 More Quick Shivers (Cosmonomic), ed by James and Janice Leach

Horror in 100 words.  Can a story saying so little come to so much?

This second collection of 100 word stories, based on the posted nightmares from Dailynightmare.com, hopes to do just that.  Their goal:  enhance in story form any of the posted nightmares on the website with a focus on any one of the five narrative “pentacles” – Mood, character, plot, setting, or theme.

Why Short Story Anthologies Deserve Your Attention and Why a Miraculous Book of 100-Word Stories Deserves it Doubly So in less than 100 words:  Because this one pretty much kicks ass, and because we just don’t seem to have much of an attention span anymore. And because there are some real gems in this collection – although, I’ll say up front, it’s more prose-poetry than short stories, and some of the stories fall well short of the mark of the five narrative “pentacles”.  But that’s not why we read.  We read because the stories are good.

The Good, the Bad, The Utterly Banal as I understand it.

My taste in books is vastly different from that of my good friend, the stand-up dude behind this website:  he veers toward the Lee/Pelan/Goon  “eating the corn” gross-out where I prefer not reading about that, ever.  Ever.  So when said stand-up dude hands me a book to read I have a tendency to sigh, read the first few pages and go back to whatever else I was reading.  This one, however, grabbed me immediately.  The compilers of said publication ask, “Had any good nightmares?”  Well, if you haven’t, someone else has done it for you, and some far more talented people have explored those nightmares for stories that are truly chilling.

The Good as per any decent review, and here is why you should pony up the pittance being asked to procure this volume.  The poetic beauty of creating a truly complete story in so few words.  Prose poetry in all its glory, children.  Take Agreement for instance; a beautiful piece of poetry disguised as fine print—the sort of thing you click through and never read when you agree to the latest Google app bent on stealing your identity and taking over the known world and such.  Or Birth Ritual, a poetic esoteric that drips with fear, as the perfect new birth so pink and fresh and defenseless is born, a boon for the maggot offspring of these insectile celebrants.  Or my personal favorite, RIP ellipses, a story in utter pause, with not an ellipsis to be found.  And about the typography—Glenn Mielke, self-styled “Canadian Art-Snob” does one hell of a job picking font and design that compliments the content of each story, though in some cases the artistic bent becomes somewhat heavy-handed, rendering the text difficult to read.

The cover art feeds the overall sense of darkness and nightmare.  Photographed by James Frederick Leach, it is an improvement on the cover for the original collection (13 Quick Shivers) which seemed somewhat amateurish in its composition. It’s the same distinctive Jeremy Haney gargoyle sculpture but the placement of the title is better effected here with the image, creating an overall more complete and artistic work.

The Bad in my opinion hardly outweighs the good, but it is there, and must be noted for fairness.  As I already noted, some of the more artistic fonts make for difficult reading.  For instance, Tornado Girl is beautiful to behold, with all the swirls and eddies of the serifs indicating the wind-work of little tornadoes, but it makes the story more of a challenge to read.  Additionally, there are a few stories that just won’t make any sense to you unless you peruse the website.   As a stand-alone volume, I can’t help but think the stories should…you know…stand alone.  Most do, but there are others that absolutely require finding the referenced nightmare on Dailynightmare.com.  Good luck with that search.  They don’t make it easy.

And…The Banal and horribly obvious, I liked this book, and here’s where I try to get you to like it too.  It kicks ass.  There are writers in this work that are worth knowing.  There are stories in this book that will rob you of sleep.  Baby Candle, my God and Goddess, did more to freak me out than most horror movies.   The visuals I got from the text alone affected me more deeply than the visual horror in movies.  READ this book!  Do it.

All in all, an awesome return for very little cost and a quick, enjoyable read.  Out of a six pack of decent stout, I’d give this one 4 of the 6, though you can read the volume in the time it takes to drink 2.

buy it here.

Reviewed by Laura Langford

Manufacturer of Sorrow (Eldritch), by Michelle Scalise

I love poetry and I love horror. Unsurprisingly, I have a soft spot for horror poetry. Unfortunately, like many expressions of horror, the amount of subpar work by cheap, gimmicky hacks makes the entire genre I adore look like shit. Because of that, I tend to be pretty damn harsh on poetry. Unless I like it, then I glow like a worm on Christmas eve and spew my joy all over you (yes, the pathetic imagery was intentional). It’s worth keeping that in mind while I talk about Michelle Scalise’s The Manufacturer of Horror.

After reading the first few poems, I set the book aside. There was some solid imagery and I was getting a sense of a strong emotional core, but that was buried under language that was too self-conscious and clunky with little to no sense of rhythm. Those problems tend to kill poetry for me, drawing my attention to the individual words instead of losing myself in the connections between them.

Luckily for me, I picked it up again and “Cat”, which deals with the loss of a child via mythology, hit me right where it needed to. The flow pulled me along effortlessly, the images were sharp and the heart was laid bare. The same goes with the immediate followup, “Blue Rose Tattoo”.

From that point, the reading got much better. There are still several moments where Michelle lets the words get away from her, but the work becomes much stronger from that point onward. By the last third of the book, every single poem just goddam nails it. “Close the Door” is a deft dance of fear and desire intertwined, “Posthumous Voices” winds and wraps and tickles its way into the worst parts inside and “Her Little Blue Pills” just plain kicked my ass.

There are quite a few damn fine poems here that straddle that razor line of taking nightmarishly specific horrors and translating them into a universal experience in a way that breathes naturally and many of the others simply have a line or two that throw the experience for me. The good definitely outweighs the bad and the great is some serious shit, especially for the price (currently $4.84 from the publisher). It just makes me sad that I was almost completely put off by the placement of some of the worst poems available here right at the start of the book. Skip to “Cat” and you’ll do well by yourself.

Cover art: Picture covers usually don’t do anything for me, but I have to admit to something evocative of the image. Designer Eleanor Bennett uses an image that distinctly feminine sense of loss and disquiet with a slight touch of rage that pervades the work within. However, as tends to be a common problem with picture covers, the title and byline look disconnected from the artwork. The effect is like something done in MSpaint and makes the whole appear less professional.

Buy it directly from Eldritch Press here.

Reviewed by Anton Cancre

Everyone Hates a Hero (Stygian) by Gregory L. Hall

You probably know Greg Hall. He’s the Friday night piggy-petter and grand poobah of the no-pants zone who gives out 80’s headshots with the, ahem, personalized inscription stating that you are indeed his favorite writer. He gets some of the biggest names in horror on his podcast, the Funky Werepig, but never forgets to leave room for those writers struggling to get noticed. Also, he’s torn up the floor at  the big boy dance off every time I’ve seen him do it. But did you know he’s a writer, too? Yep, and Johnny Midnight ain’t his first time at the table, kiddies.

We have here a tale of a certain celebrity paranormal investigator, Johnny Midnight. A lude, crude and reckless individual whose antics draw ratings and groupies galore. But the song and dance routine lays a thin sheet over a world where the vamps and ghouls and things that go yippee-ki-yay in the night are all too real. It’s a world he has found a bit of comfort in, if not quite happiness. Until his ex-wife shows up on his doorstep with a demon on her heels that wants to crunch-n-munch on the daughter she never told him they had. This time, it’s personal…

Put aside, for the moment, that we are inundated with stories of paranormal investigators and a world full of paranormal creatures that are hidden from public view by a shady shadow cartel that is trying to run the world. Put aside, for the moment, that the “fighting evil is all good until they come after my family” routine has been done a million times. Or that the regular guy standing up and spitting at the huge organization that is trying to control him thing is even more played out. Put it aside because I really meant that cheesy “personal” comment.

That’s what makes this story, in my mind. First, Hall’s giddy dork-and-dick joke personality, which positivly glows every Friday night, is saturated in every word on the page. This is an old story told in a way only Greg Hall could tell it and that voice makes a huge difference for me. Further, it isn’t all “Not my Dickie!” and cracks about furries peppered with demons and chupacabras and blood. You’ll find plenty of that here, but he doesn’t stop there. This is, at its heart, a very personal tail of coming to terms with past sins and the harm we cause to other people with our own selfishness and how that regret never truly leaves us. There were some points, wrapped in grief and regret, that hit me square in my ouchy spots.

Special points are awarded for a particular pair of scenes, which flit back and forth between each other. Juxtaposing giddy sensual pleasure with abject agony and horror. It serves to underline the fundamental differences between the lives of the two characters, the fallout of that difference and subtly gives the reader everything they need to grasp the eventual twist of the knife that comes at the end.

In all truthiness, if you get turned off by rote plots you’ve seen far too many times before, you probably won’t make it past the blurb on the back. But then you’d miss a quick, breezy read full of more one-liners than you can shake your bacon at with a solid sense of personal honesty and heart at its center. That, my friends, is what completely sold me. Not that the gratuitous sex, blood and big-ass mobster zombie hurt.

Cover art:

I’m not a big fan of digitized photo covers. To me, they feel lazy and remind me too much of Instagram pinups instead of true cover art. That’s what we get here and it completely lacks the personality of the material between the pages.