Review: "The New Hunger" by Isaac Marion

While it is a bit of an immature series that has not aged well in the few years since the first book was published, there is something very uncynical and heartwarming about the Warm Bodies series. Its tale of a zombie becoming sentient through the power of love has its silly moments and I don’t blame people who do not totally buy into it, but there is something sweet about it all and something hopeful as well. The first book was really good, and the second, the much larger book The Burning World felt like more of the same. This little 170-page novella, The New Hunger, taking place before the events of the Warm Bodies and acting as a bridge of sorts between the two books, maintains the spirit of both books, and at times, was a rather brutal and bleak prelude to what was to come. It focuses on three backstories to important characters in the book. We first meet R, the zombie with a heart of gold, finding himself dead and unable to satiate his hunger even though he is feasting on a dead deer. There is Julie, his future love interest, traveling across the country and being taught in his cynical and brutal ways of survival. And finally, there is Nora and her younger brother Addis, who are abandoned by their parents in the midst of the zombie outbreak and struggle to find meaning and hope for survival. Nora’s story can’t help but overshadow that of R’s and Julie’s, which I found to be rather boring. Listening to Nora explain to her much younger brother the ways of this new world, a topic she herself is not very well-versed in, is entertaining, like the meal they have in the Seattle Space Needle and ultimately tragic. This is a good, smaller entry in an ongoing series whose power may have diminished, but somehow still has a firm hold over my attention.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Throat Sprockets" by Tim Lucas

Throat Sprockets, to date the only original novel from famed film critic Tim Lucas, is a horror novel that seemingly has no equals, at least within its genre. It feels like a story of “quiet horror” from A Ramsey Campbell or Charles L. Grant, but it is too clinical in its structure (while still being filled with dread). It feels like a form of erotica, but the eroticism at the heart of this book is anything but that. It is within this struggle to try and define it (and the book’s resistance to definition) that the book achieves monumental levels of greatness. It feels refreshing and original even though it is nearly 20 years old. So refreshing and original it that it is almost offense and threatens to turn off readers who do not submit to its nightmarish worldview and dive headfirst into this strange and deeply metaphorical novel of obsession and the horror of loneliness. The book is a dense read even at the relatively slim length of 232 pages, but it is packed to the gills with every minute detail, every turn of phrase being important and integral to the book’s theme and quality. It is a book that is obsessed with film, with Lucas’s main claim to fame being the gargantuan biography on Italian filmmaker Mario Bava (which, if you want to get now would cost as much as a house mortgage). So for a book obsessed with cinema, it is no surprise that it opens in a movie theater. But not just any movie theater, you see.  Our unnamed protagonist and jaded ad executive finds himself at the beginning frequenting a local porno theater in his hometown, ironically named Friendship, Ohio. It is in this theater that he discovers the film of the books’ title: a fetish film where the point of eroticism is a woman’s neck (the bridge between the head and the heart, if you will). This experience with this film, the details of which are kept appropriately vague throughout the book, becomes an obsession for the unnamed narrator, an obsession that destroys his marriage but revitalizes his career. But as his career grows and takes him across the country, the influence of the film grows beyond his own private perversions and into the world at large. A few books have tried, but this is the one of even fewer books that I feel accurately describes a waking nightmare, and in its dreariness reminded me a little bit of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness. It works as a good metaphor for the kind of obsession, one that really comes with any creative endeavor, that always tends to separate one from the rest of their life: it gives them a higher sense of meaning, but like the narrator of this book, it takes them away, characterized by a startling scene near the end taking place in a hospital and the perfect final page. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. I guarantee that you have not read anything quite like this.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Dark Net" by Benjamin Percy

I am really glad I read Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort last year, because it informs and makes me appreciate Benjamin Percy’s most recent novel The Dark Net more than I would have if I had not read it beforehand. I am not a mind reader, but a lot of the narrative beats in this slim novel (in comparison to Simmons’ near 800-page epic) reminded me of the narrative beats in Carrion Comfort, easily one of the most perfect horror novels ever published, and once I came to this conclusion early on, I was able to enjoy this book more than I thought I would have. I have not been too big a fan of Percy’s brand of genre fiction. With a few slim exceptions (his title story from the collection Refresh, Refresh being a killer short story), I have found his tales of horror to be a tad bit overwritten and beneath that a little generic. Last year, I read his book of essays on writing Thrill Me, which did exactly as the title suggested, and with his new novel he does more of the same, blending elements of the technological and the biblically evil in fascinating and heart stopping ways and turning the city of Portland, OR into a haven of madness, violence and the epicenter for the very possible end of the world. It should also be noted that this novel at 253 pages is his shortest since his debut novel The Wilding, and in being so, is more compact than the bloated Red Moon, but still is able to color the three main characters as sympathetic and worth your emotional investment. We first meet Hannah, a girl with a degenerative disease that will eventually cause her to lose her sight being fitted with a type of eyeglasses that help her to see, but also heightens her unknown psychic abilities. Her Aunt, Lela, a sort of techno-phobic journalist and social wastrel, uncovers in the ruins of a famous murder site a skull with links to true evil. And finally there is Mike Juniper, whose story and character arc is the most fascinating, runs a homeless shelter and has ties to the mystical underworld of the city, and whose backstory gives him history with the evil that is brewing in the city and the technology of its citizens. While reading like a Dan Simmons’ novel, it has other genre elements too; most notable to me were a few modern horror movies, one being one of John Carpenter’s forgotten gems Prince of Darkness, another story that tried to explain ancient evil in a modern way and a 2006 anthology film called The Signal, whose chaotic structure mirrors what happens when the evil plan at the heart of this book comes to life. I enjoyed this book a lot. From its little scenes of horror (the scene with a young Mike in a hotel room being the best and most effective) to its fearlessness (more than one death will shock the reader) to it’s perfect melding of new and old evil without devolving into a tired social screed, this is a serious horror novel from a writer I have misunderstood for too long.

Rating: 5/5

Rating: "Sweetbitter" by Stephanie Danler

It is hard not to think of the work of Jay McInerney while reading Stephanie Danler’s first novel Sweetbitter (and impossible really, since he provides the first blurb on the back of the hardcover edition) and how dated his work, and sadly, this book is. Bright Lights, Big City was surely a revelation in its time, using second person narration to make it stand out from other similar works from the era. But looking back it has not aged well, and you see that in a lot of the qualities this book lacks. While its prose is sumptuous and reading it does feel like you are sweating your ass off in the kitchen of a high class Manhattan restaurant, it is sorely lacking in any kind of substance beyond the insular world of Tess, the book’s protagonist. It starts off with a really strong scene that starts from her escape from a cloistered small town she has grown up in to the big city of Manhattan, only to be stopped at a tollbooth where she does not have any change for a fare. It is a pretty big clue as to the pedantic nature of success and failure in the world Tess will find herself in when she becomes a waiter at an upscale New York restaurant. Danler’s attempts to give emotional weight to Tess’s growth, to her erotic obsession with both Simone, a poorly rendered ice queen and Jake, the hot tattooed bartender who is only a few measly notches above Christian Gray, to her friendship with Will, whose too nice of a guy to overshadow her obsession with Jake and to her downward spiral feel overwhelmingly cheap and predictable. From it’s good opening to its ending with a penultimate scene being rather tawdry and sad instead of provocative, this story of a woman on the brink feels hopelessly stale. But at least it is pretty to look at.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "A Head Full of Ghosts" by Paul Tremblay

When and if genre writer Paul Tremblay puts out a collection of stories, I will pick it up immediately, since I am sure it will be good and I am even surer that it will be better than his novels. They aren’t bad at all, far from it really, but in the two books of his I have read, his most recent novel (with one coming out later this year) Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, and this one, his breakout hit A Head Full of Ghosts, he seems to be unable to maintain a long lasting quality or grip on the reader’s attention that do exist in his books, but exists in parts: scenes, chapters or even something as slim as a mere paragraph. If you take any one scene from this book or Disappearance at Devil’s Rock it offers something profound and usually truly creepy, but together, there is just something rather rudimentary about his ongoing narratives, more so with this book than his last one. Told in flashback, it recounts the horrible story of the Barrett family and the possible possession of the oldest daughter Marjorie. It is told by Marjorie’s younger sister Merry, whom we learn as the story goes on knows more about what happened to her fractured family then what was shown to the public on the popular reality show they agreed to be on for financial gain. It really isn’t that scary of a book, I am disappointed to inform you, with many of the book’s turns being more sad and melancholic than frightening, even when we are not so sure that Marjorie’s behavior is a symptom of a demon, psychosis, or something brought on by her unemployed father’s headfirst dive into religion. But then those final thirty pages somehow change almost everything, and the book’s true heart and the true horror are shown in an immensely powerful way. Tremblay knows his stuff, and even though this book won’t shake you to your core, it is still a fun and exciting read with a few surprises.

Rating: 4/5