Book Review: Ararat

Having read my way through all the Bram Stoker Award winners for Best Novel a few years ago, I look forward to the new winner each year as a way to see what's going on with the Horror genre lately, and the 2018 winner; Christopher Golden's Ararat was a pretty intense story of survival and mountain climbing, mixed with some aspects of both The Exorcist and The Thing.

The novel follows two adventurers Adam and Meryam, who together have made a business of archeological discoveries and adventure tourism over the years on what might be their greatest discovery yet, the discovery of an ancient ship entombed in Mount Ararat in Turkey, the biblical end point of the story of Noah's Ark.

Without going into too many spoilers, the novel nicely mixes aspects of mountain climbing with sheer survivalist horror tropes as the adventurers and their guides end up exploring the ruins with two other teams and end up finding more than they had bargained for.

Although I felt the story was a little too long and had a much bigger cast of characters than was necessary for my tastes, it was a thrilling story that seemed to care about the secondary characters and didn't rely too much on jump scares.

A fun read!

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: A Head Full of Ghosts

Earlier this year Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts won the Bram Stoker award for Best Novel, a fact that added it immediately to my reading list. Having just finished it, I'm happy to say this continues the trend of excellent horror novels I've read this year, following works by Stephen King, Joe Hill, Justin Cronin and Grady Hendrix.

Like Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism, Tremblay's work deals with the possession of a young girl, but then moves into a Rashomon-like narrative, following the story of 14-year-old Marjorie Barrett, told from the point of view of her sister Meredith at age twenty-three (talking with an investigator), age eight (when the possession occurred), and from the point of view of a young blogger obsessed with Possessed, a reality show that ran for six episodes and focused on the events at the time.

The novel looks deeply at the life of a troubled family, how reality TV (and fame associated with it) is not a solution but instead something worse for the family, and how in many ways these two young girls are forced to perform to the camera, making better TV, but at an incredibly steep cost.

As horror the book worked incredibly well, comparing it to Hendrix's work, which in many ways is a love-letter to childhood friendships, A Head Full of Ghosts ends up leading you to some very dark places, places that move from a sense of investigation to one of exploitation and eventually horror. In the end I was incredibly impressed with the novel and will likely add it to my own collection.

A really good read.

Book Review: Blood Kin

I picked up Steve Rasnic Tem's Blood Kin last month as it won the 2014 Bram Stoker Award for best novel, and I've been reading the winners of that list for years now.

My familiarity with the horror sub-genre of southern gothic is a little light to be fair; I loved Robert R. McCammon's Gone South, William Hjortsberg's Fallen Angel, and (although not a novel) Stan Winston's 1988 film Pumpkinhead all work well to show just how nicely horror can be used in the setting.

Blood Kin is a multi-generational story, taking place both in modern day and in the 1930s, using both a male and a female protagonist, and really focuses on the ideas of the sins of the father being visited upon the sons (or grandsons) and moves deftly between straight horror and dark fantasy elements.

A word to the wise, some of the horrific scenes in the book made me quite uncomfortable (and I read horror monthly, so that's saying something), so it may not be the best thing to read before bed, but I strongly recommend it if your interested in giving it a try.

Turns out I may be more a Science Fiction Fan

So here's the thing - as a long-time fan of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction reading I have a sort of internal measurement in which I can say which genre has more sway on my reading habits at any given time.

I like to think of it as my "Zombie Robot Unicorn" meter.  Basically I liken my current reading habits to an internal image of a Zombie Robot Unicorn and use it to describe my current thoughts about whatever I'm reading.

In practice the image shifts to a much more "zombie-fied" robot unicorn in October and perhaps a bit more "Unicorn-ed" Zombie Robot during the winter.

Over the weekend however I went through my book award and top 100 lists I've been reading my way through over the last decade and realized that I'm actually steadily reading more Science Fiction than either of the other two and have been for some time...

I guess my Zombie Unicorn is much more robotic that I've previously though.

IMAGE CREDIT

http://schlogger.de/wordpress/zombie-robot-unicorn/

Genre Character of the Week: Eddie Hudson

Although the majority of my October horror experience was involved in the Saw franchise, I did get to enjoy a few other horror films and books.  Case in point - Dead City by Joe McKinney.  I actually picked up this book because I read the Bram Stoker winner of best horror novel each year, and McKinney's The Flesh Eaters won this year - but as it is the third in the series, I went back to book one, Dead City, and found my genre character of the week, Eddie Hudson.

Eddie is a patrolman in San Antonio, Texas, who spends an average day worrying about a fight he's having with his wife when the dead begin to rise.

From that point on we are treated to Eddie's harrowing escape from a city quickly overrun by the undead and get a good look at how quickly things might fall apart as the people who show up at emergencies (police, fire and ambulance workers) become the first to fall and change.

McKinney, a police officer in San Antonio himself, gives Eddie a great, ground-floor view of a zombie rising from the point of view of the police, and I actually found a lot the technical detail to be really interesting and compelling throughout.

Like my personal favourite zombie-fighting police officer, Eddie comes across as a regular guy in terrible circumstances and although the events of the novel only follow the course of a day, I would definitely be interested in checking out further books featuring the character.

Book Review: Book of the Dead

One of my favourite things about reading any kind of story is the fact that it came from somewhere, and not just the mind of the author, but often something the author read, saw or experienced led to the creation of the story.

In zombie apocalypse literature, that story is Night of the Living Dead (1968), the George Romero black and white classic that really changed popular cultures perception of zombies from people under a voodoo curse to the reanimated corpses risen from the grave we all know now.

In 1989 Editors John Skipp and Craig Spector put together The Book of the Dead, a collection of zombie apocalypse stories inspired by the classic George Romero film.  Contributors included Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Richard Laymon and more.  In terms of zombie apocalypse literature, this short story collection is really where it all started.

It is important to say that these stories are incredibly graphic, stomach-turning and filled with sex and violence.  Honestly a large number of these stories were incredibly hard for me to get through and I'm a big fan of zombie stories - without going into too much detail, lets just say there are more than a few zombies that do stuff you'd rather not think about in these stories.

The stand out for me, and the reason I'm glad my wife got me the book (It had been sitting on my used-bookstore watch-list for five years before I gave up the hope of finding it and asked for her help) is the Robert R. McCammon story Eat Me.  It won the 1989 Bram Stoker award for best short fiction and honestly, after reading a number of nihilistic stories about the undead taking over the earth, it was a surprisingly beautiful tale that really blew me away.

The book (again not for the faint of heart) is really something anyone who likes to claim loves zombie stories should read - I know from personal experience that it's hard to find, but trust me, it is totally worth the effort.

Book Review: Hide and Seek

Jack Ketchum has been a horror writer on my radar for some time now - actually for almost a decade, his novel The Lost went up against Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the Bram Stoker award for Best Novel back in 2001 and from that point on I thought I picked up a couple of his books here and there during used-bookstore runs over the years, waiting until I have a few in publication order to check them out.


A few months ago I read his first novel, Off Season, which was both quite good and really graphically horrific.  Let's just say I wouldn't recommend it to someone new to the genre, it was a modern (well, 1981) retelling of the legend of Sawney Bean (which you can read about here!) The book was both acclaimed by horror writers and censored like crazy.


Unfortunately, that kind of attention for a first novel meant that his second, Hide and Seek, was much harder for me to find during my expeditions to used-bookstores and eventually I simply broke down and ordered myself a copy.


Hide and Seek is a coming of age story that builds a surprising level of character development into 165 pages and ends with a grown up version of the children's game that goes horribly, horribly wrong.


The story follows a young man in a small town who has a summer romance with a girl who is both captivating and clearly emotionally damaged almost from the start.  Throughout the whole book there is a building atmosphere of horror as you know something just terrible is going to happen to this couple, and when it hits, it's really bad.


The thing that really struck me about this book was just how great the character development was, there were all these quiet moments and shocking moments and in a lot of ways it was really easy to fall into this whirlwind romance, increadibly intense and really real feeling.


If you can get your hands on it, this is a really engrossing read, but I will warn you, it gets pretty hard to read towards the end.

Book Review: A Dark Matter

The 2010 winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best novel was A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub. Having been a huge fan of the author from my first exposure to his works (The Talisman, which he co-authored with Stephen King in 1984) I can’t promise you an unbiased review, but hopefully a good one.

The book is kind of a mix of Rashamon (a Japanese film where an event was told and re-told from various points of view) and a faustian tale where someone makes a deal and ends up getting much more than they initially hoped.

The narrator is a novelist named Lee Hayward, who has been affected by an event he didn’t participate in from his childhood that involved each of his best friends (including the girl who would end up being his wife). The novel follows Lee as he attempts to put together exactly what happened on a day in 1966 when four of his friends accompanied some college kids and a sort of cult leader-type to try and perform some sort of ritual which ended up causing the death of one of the college kids and the disappearance of another.

The story works by describing the events from the point of views of each of the people involved and although they all describe the same event, there are some significantly telling differences between the versions we read. In the end the novel definitely spooked me, gave me some chills and then actually left me with a strange sense of hope. Totally worth the read.

Book Reivew: Creepers

A while back I decided to read all the winners of the Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel from the beginning (1987) to now (2009). Two years and twenty-three books later I have read a lot of really good books, a few really great books, one average book, and two books that really surprised me with how good they were. This week I'll be looking at the first of those two; Creepers by David Morrell.

Lets begin with the fact that this book is actually a little different than the horror I usually read: no monsters, no supernatural, and no end of days scenario to be seen. Actually this book takes place in the (previously unknown to me) world of urban exploring. Basically, this pastime involves exploring closed or condemned buildings in cities, and involves a lot of climbing, personal danger, and comfort with dirt.

Creepers is actually the popular nickname for these urban explorers and they are definitely a real thing, check out one of their Canadian websites at http://www.uer.ca/

The author, David Morrell (pictured right) is actually most famous for having written First Blood (The novel that the first of the Rambo films was based on), which by the way is an excellent book in its own right, ends differently that the movie, and took me over a year to find in various used-book stores before I could read it.

The story itself leans more towards Thriller than Horror; basically it follows a group of Creepers as they explore an abandoned hotel while some very nasty thieves are up to the same thing, so it involves the adventure of exploring an old building with a treasure hunt and a lethal game of hide and seek.

I really, really dug this book and I have to say that although I wasn't expecting much at all from it initially, it was by far one of my favourite Horror books of the last 10 years. (Suck it, The Ruins.)

You owe it to yourself #3: Award Winners

All my life I've watched movies - tons of them. So when I got a job at a video store at the age of 20 I got to watch eight hours of them a night, five nights a week, for almost a year.If you asked my twenty-year-old self if I was a movie buff, the answer would definitely have been yes. But unfortunately, I had a secret shame; even though I had seen hundreds of movies, there were some large gaps in my repertoire.

I had never seen Rocky - Rocky II, III, IV, yes, but never the original.

I had never seen Cassablanca.

And yes, to my incredible shame as a young man in Canada, I had never seen Porky's (which by the way was the top grossing Canadian film from 1982 to 2006). For those of you in the States, this is like saying I had never seen Revenge of the Nerds, which as we all know, for a guy who grew up in the '80s, is entirely unacceptable.

So one day I went online and found a list of all the movies that had ever won a Best Picture Oscar, and over the course of 2 years, watched them all. (It actually was my wife who ensured that I watched Porky's - thanks Hon). And you know what - in addition to seeing a lot of really great movies, I started getting a LOT more of the jokes in episodes of The Simpsons.

Inspired by my success, I then decided to try the same thing with my reading, and found genre books have awards too!

For Fantasy books - The World Fantasy Awards (since 1975)

For Horror - The Bram Stoker Awards (since 1987)

For Science Fiction - The Hugo Awards (since 1955)

Although I'm completely up-to-date with the Bram Stoker awards, I'm still working my way through the Hugo's and the World Fantasy's, and let me tell you this - these books let you check out the classics, the innovative, and the current best books in these three genres. And for those of you who aren't into any of these, there are awards for westerns, romances, and even literature out there as well, just waiting for you to check them out.

If you visit these award websites you are going to find one of three things. 1) You've already read all the winners, and deserve to treat yourself to some cake! 2) You've read a bunch of the winners and now have a list of other books to check out, or 3) You've read none of these books, and believe me, an awards list is a great place to start.

Take the time to read the award winners, even if they are just a popularity contest, you owe it to yourself to be familiar with the big books in the genres you love.