Blog: Book Review: Paperbacks from Hell

While browsing through a bookstore a year and a half ago I had the delight of discovering author Grady Hendrix, who's book My Best Friend's Exorcism was both a delightful look at high school in the eighties and a really effective horror novel focusing on demonic possession. Last year I read his earlier work Horrorstör which, although not quite as good as exorcism was still a fun read and had some really great moments of tension as his characters worked their way through a haunted IKEA-style store. In some ways it reminded me of China Mieville's 2005 short story "The Ball Room", both in subject matter and high tension.

Then last year I found Hendrix's nonfiction work Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction and was simply blown away. The book covers the boom of Horror paperbacks that started in the late sixties with Rosemary's Baby and ended in 1988 with Silence of the Lambs (which re branded Horror as Thriller).

The book includes everything from monsters and Satan through to V.C. Andrews and apocalypses, and although Stephen King and Anne Rice (who dominate the Horror section in any bookstore), the book is a treasure trove of the crazy stories that were published over these two decades and as a long-time horror fan I wasn't sure if I was more delighted when Hendrix examined books I loved or introduced me to titles (and series) I had never heard of before.

A really fascinating read and the cover art of these stories is well displayed and makes for a great book to dig into or just browse through.

The 2016 Bram Stoker Award winner for best novel was John Langan's The Fisherman; a really neat take on traditional cosmic horror.

The novel focuses on two widowers, Dan and Abe, and their shared hobby of fishing, but then quickly moves into their back stories, and the story of a fateful fishing trip. On the way to a spot called Dutchman's Creek, they stop for breakfast and briefly chat with the cook about their plans. When he hears where they plan to go he tells them his own story about the creek, which, like many of the best stories travels backwards and deeper into stories involving some truly dark and horrific goings on at the creek.

I've never read Langan before, but found the book to be a compelling read, initially harmless looking and then moving into something much scarier than I expected, and something that has me feeling a little nervous about those out of the way places I liked to explore as a kid.

Book Review: The 37th Mandala

For years now I've been reading my way through two separate horror lists - The Bram Stoker Awards for best novel and the titles in Kim Newman's Horror: The 100 Best Books.  Both of these have been a great way to read books I may not have heard of before and introduce me to all sorts of new authors.  Then last year I came across an entirely new one - The International Horror Guild Award, which ran for fourteen years from 1995 - 2008.  Although I had read a few books off the best novel list There were more than ten I had never heard of, which lead me to today's book The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw.

The book is really great - starting with a terrifying incident in Cambodia and then quickly moving on to a new age author named Derek Crowe at an author signing.  A big part of what I liked about the book was the slow build up to the reveals - the story and characters get laid out first before anything really awful happens and then the narrative begins building momentum like a snowball to an avalanche, which a payoff that actually hit Lovecraft levels for me.

A fantastic read about the dangers of blind faith and importance of responsibility to others.

Strongly Recommended.

Following Fantasy Series

Over the years I've read a lot of Fantasy, whether part of a shared world (DragonLance), or of the stand-alone variety.  The problem is that very few fantasy books stop at just one title.  Case in point - I've just finished up reading Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker series, which is comprised of six books, but does hold out the promise of a seventh.  Following taht I'm currently going for my first run through Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber - which is such fun I'm likely to revisit it again in a few years.

Every month I try to make sure I read at least one book from each of my favourite genres; Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction (SF), but although Horror and SF both have plenty of series, Fantasy seems to be almost nothing but series.

On the positive side I can invest a lot more in the characters in a Fantasy series than I can those who only appear in a single novel, but at the same time, while I'm trying out a large number of different Horror and SF authors, I find that over the course of a year I'm reading as few as two or three Fantasy authors, as it takes me months and months to get through their series.

I don't really have a solution to the problem, because I love reading these series, but sometimes I wish I could just find a nice collection of Fantasy short stories, and that would be enough.

Catching up on the genre classics: Necroscope

I've been seeing them since I started getting into horror fiction back in Junior High, while looking through the horror section at bookstore for the newest Stephen King or Clive Barker, they've always been patiently sitting on the shelf, knowing that at some point I would inevitably get around to trying them out.  Well, today is that day (or yesterday, to be more precise).  I've finally started reading Brian Lumley's horror series, Necroscope.

I'll happily admit that a big part of what has kept me away but interested all these years is the bizarre cover art by George Underwood (see left), which shows both a skull with tendrils moving through it and a man lit in blue in the background with his eyes closed.  As a kid, the cover images for the series (almost twenty titles), were both fascinating and horrifying, so much so that I could never quite give the series a chance, even while I was picking my way back and froth through some other pretty horrific stuff as the mood took me.

Last year while on a used-bookstore trip with my BFF Mike I finally picked up the first book as a trade for some titles I was getting rid of, and it's sat on my "to be read" shelf ever since.  Until yesterday when I decided to finally give the book a shot.

So I'm now about 200 pages into the title and it's pretty great - the whole thing is a strange Cold War era battle between agencies in Britain and the USSR between psychics - kind of a proto-Nightwatch if you will, and follows two psychics with some pretty disturbing abilities as they make their way through life.

Oh yeah and those skull tendrils on the cover the unnerved me so much as a kid?  Yup, that's actually a pretty good representation of something one of the psychics in the book can do - Yikes!

I'm not finished book one yet, but so far it's a pretty fast and fun read, so there you go.