Book Review: Strip by John Bruni

I’ve always loved novels and films about heists. They always include a fun cast of various losers, misfits, and thugs who embark on an audacious get-rich-quick scheme that never quite turns out the way they expect. If it’s a light-hearted kind of farce, like OCEAN’S ELEVEN, then everything mostly turns out fine in the end. STRIP isn’t that kind of happy-go-lucky tale, and John Bruni has not given us a fairly tale ending where the heist team strolls off into the sunset rich and happy. Quite the opposite.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

Any good heist tale starts with a cast of miscreants, their scheme to get rich beyond their wildest dreams, and complications. Lots and lots of complications. STRIP is no different. Here we have a mafia-owned strip club as setting and target for the heist. The members of the heist team are memorable, including: the not-so-lovable strip club DJ who despite being such an odious loser manages to sleep with a shockingly large number of women in the novel; a loose cannon bodybuilder who has taken a few too many steroids for his own good; a brutally efficient mastermind and planner who doesn’t seem nearly as capable as his reputation might suggest; and a meth head getaway driver with a fetish for samurai swords. Of course we understand from the start that things are going to go horribly, violently wrong. Complications include a healthy dose of Murphy’s Law – everything that can go wrong truly does here, even before the heist officially begins – and an undercover cop posing as a stripper to take down the local mob operation.

There are lots of minor characters to flesh the whole thing out, nearly all of whom are as entertaining as the protagonists. This is a truly fast-paced novel that was a lot of fun to read. It’s filled with relatively graphic violence and sex throughout, so don’t give this one to your grandmother who would probably prefer to read a cozy mystery set in a knitting shop. There are a few chapters in the middle of STRIP, during the siege of the strip club when the remaining members of the heist team are holed up inside and not really sure how to proceed, where the action bogs down. I suppose that’s probably almost inevitable in a novel about a hostage situation, but STRIP would have benefited with some trimming there. With a little tweaking, I think this could even be filmed as a break-out cult classic kind of indy film that casts Steve Buscemi somewhere in the mix.

STRIP is, unabashedly, a heist novel in the noir tradition. It has all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, as one would expect. It is a story about losers, with big dreams, who are willing to go to great lengths and commit acts of tremendous violence to achieve those dreams. Those involved are willing to do almost anything except get a regular job to make it big. Indeed, it’s almost a running joke that Will, the strip club DJ, could have averted the whole mess by simply being willing to pick up a part-time job when his hours at the club were cut. But we know from the opening pages that nothing good will come of these dreams. There will be no happy endings for the characters of STRIP.

If you like modern-day noir, especially heist novels, I would highly recommend STRIP. Sure, the ending is a bit over-the-top – maybe unbelievable is a better term – but the sleazy characters who populate STRIP are a great bunch of lowlifes and the action is mostly non-stop. To fully appreciate STRIP, I think you have to accept a story about bad people doing bad things, mostly to other bad people, but also one in which innocent people get caught up in terrible events and suffer the consequences. If you like the idea of a noir-ish heist, you’re going to enjoy STRIP.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers

Book Review: Darkbound by Michaelbrent Collings

I haven’t read a splatterpunk novel in a good while. I used to read splatterpunk all the time in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, stuff from Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite especially. The sub-genre didn’t end in the 1990s, of course, and there’s undoubtedly plenty of great “splatterpunk” fiction that’s still being produced today. I personally just haven’t read any in a long while. Until I read DARKBOUND.

It’s my understanding that David Schow coined the term, possibly as a joke, to describe the kind of ultra-violent, ultra-gory horror fiction that he and others were writing. No haunted houses, delicate explorations of the human psyche, or mere hints of the supernatural here. Splatterpunk is visceral and in your face (as the “-punk”) would imply, and as a literary sub-genre I don’t think it ever got the respect it deserved. It became, I think, one of the primary inspirations for what eventually came to be called “body horror,” about graphic destruction and monstrous transformations of the human body. Sure, it’s scary to think about someone being frightened or psychologically scarred, or witnessing some terrible event, but in a lot of ways that really matter, isn’t it even worse when terrible things are inflicted not on one’s mind but on one’s body? That’s a deeply personal kind of violation I think we can all sympathize with, and let’s be honest: it certainly provides great fodder for horror fiction. Michaelbrent Collings has provided a great example of contemporary splatterpunk in DARKBOUND.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

DARKBOUND opens with six strangers on a New York City subway platform. They each seem to be something other than ordinary passengers as they board the same subway car of a train. Jim, the viewpoint character, seems to be an ordinary husband and father who just wants to get home to his family, but it’s clear that we don’t know everything there is to know about him from the start. His traveling companions are an old Latina grandmother; a creepy guy who looks like a prototypical child molester; an attractive, well-dressed female lawyer or Wall Street executive; a gangbanger; and a giant of a man from Eastern Europe. All strangers to each other, all trapped in a nightmarish subway ride. I don’t want to ruin the story, or its twists and turns, so I’ll refrain from being too specific about the characters or plot. Suffice it to say that this is a subway ride none of them will ever forget.

I should also note that this is a case of a classic unreliable narrator, and, reading between the lines, that should be clear from the outset of the novel. I hesitate to reveal anything substantive about the backgrounds of the main characters, as that is an important set of revelations throughout the novel. I will only say that, while generally effectively presented, I wasn’t shocked by what we saw of the characters; it was all telegraphed pretty clearly. That didn’t diminish the horror of what I was reading, but it meant that some of the plot twists weren’t as shocking, per se, as they might have been.

DARKBOUND is fast-paced, brutal, and gruesome. Collings never shies away from clearly depicting horrible events in detail. This is not a horror novel for shrinking violets. Ultimately it is also not a novel that depicts blood and gore for its own sake, though that only becomes apparent later in the novel. The things that happen to these characters…well, they aren’t exactly unwarranted.

I certainly recommend DARKBOUND as a fun, fast-moving horror/thriller novel. It’s a very quick read that I devoured in just a couple sittings. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you appreciate the value of some gore in your horror fiction, you should check out DARKBOUND.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers

Book Review: The Cornerstone by Anne C. Perry

We’re probably all familiar with the character Faust from classical German folklore, who is a scholar who trades his soul for vast knowledge and earthly pleasures. The tale has been told and retold countless times over the centuries, perhaps most popularly by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe. The concept of a man willing to sell his own soul is a wonderful premise that Anne C. Perry has revisited, crafting a story that offers a retelling of the final chapters of Marlowe’s own life and blending it with the plot of Marlowe’s play, “Doctor Faustus.”

Mild plot spoilers follow.

THE CORNERSTONE opens in Elizabethan England, with the historical occultist John Dee and playwright Christopher Marlowe making a bargain with a witch to trap a banshee in a rock to function as a source of magical power. Fast forward several centuries to modern-day Atlanta as a local community theater troupe prepares to put on a production of Marlowe’s play, “The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus,” about a man who has sold his soul to the devil.

As you probably know, Marlowe was a real historical figure with a genuinely mysterious life who died tragically under unexplained circumstances. I don’t want to totally wreck Perry’s story here, so I will only say that, as one might surmise, Marlowe did not die in the universe of THE CORNERSTONE. Instead, he lives on. The mysterious disappearance of the lead actor in the theater troupe invites an investigation by Claire, an EMT by day and theater crewperson by night. Where would we be without amateur plucky sleuths to ferret out all the mysteries that the police don’t care to investigate? Claire enlists the aid of a few of her fellow thespians; they soon discover that there’s a great deal of nefarious goings-on in the archetypical old theater basement.

My review of THE CORNERSTONE is mixed. There were significant elements I enjoyed – the essential premise is very good after all – but there were a number of other elements I didn’t care for or thought there was room for considerable improvement. For example, I liked the premise initially when it seemed that it simply involved an individual who had made a Faustian bargain and a banshee trapped in a rock. But the resolution of the novel came out of nowhere and seemed muddled, so I was left somewhat disappointed. I actually think that there was too much going on here: the supernatural elements simply piled on to too great a degree, with John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, demons, a witch, a banshee, time travel, and immortals all thrown into the mix. I should also note that THE CORNERSTONE emphasizes plot over characterization and, especially setting. The story is nominally set in Atlanta, but no appreciable sense of place ever develops; THE CORNERSTONE could just as easily have been set in London, for example. I had to keep reminding myself that the present-day portions of the novel were taking place in Atlanta, but it didn’t seem to matter much. And while I liked the protagonist, Claire the EMT, I must admit that she was bland. Her backstory was interesting, but she herself was a bit of a cipher. A relatively weak protagonist was simply overwhelmed by the plot and the character of Marlowe.

Recommended, though with some reservations. It’s not at all a bad novel, it’s just not a great one. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about THE CORNERSTONE because it does contain some nifty elements, but the whole feels much more lackluster than the sum of its parts.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers

Obituary: Andrew J. Offutt

Sadly, another one of the greats died this past week: Andrew J. Offutt passed away on April 30. He was 78. Here’s a more complete obituary for him, and here’s his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction that lists much of his bibliography. If you haven’t heard of him, he was a surprisingly prolific author and editor of fantasy, SF, and erotica, oddly enough, many of which were published under an array of pseudonyms. If you enjoyed swords and sorcery stories in the 1970s or 1980s, you undoubtedly came across some of Offutt’s work. How can we forget the five Swords Against Darkness anthologies, or his character Hanse Shadowspawn from Thieves’ World?

I never knew what he looked like until last week. Here he is in the middle:

When I first heard about Offutt’s death, I looked through my collection to see what I owned of his. Quite a lot as it turns out, more than I had thought actually. I’ve got the complete run of the 19-volume Spaceways comedic, erotic SF novels that never quite grabbed me; I think most but probably not quite all of the stories he wrote in the Thieves’ World shared fantasy series; and a handful of his other fantasy novels, including one of the Conan pastiches he wrote, and several of his Cormac Mac Art books further developing the heroic Celt character originally created by Robert E. Howard. In fact, I had forgotten that Offutt ended up writing six entire Cormac Mac Art novels (the last two with Keith Taylor), far more words about Cormac than Howard himself did. Here’s the complete listing (to my knowledge) of Cormac Mac Art tales, written by a number of different authors.

Cormac Mac Art stories and novels:

• “The Night of the Wolf” (first published in Mak Morn, 1969; also published in Tigers of the Sea, 1974) [Robert E. Howard]
• “Tigers of the Sea” (first published in Tigers of the Sea, 1974) [Robert E. Howard fragment; completed by Richard L. Tierney]
• “Swords of the Northern Sea” (first published in Tigers of the Sea, 1974) [Robert E. Howard]
• “The Temple of Abomination” (first published in Tigers of the Sea, 1974) [Robert E. Howard fragment; completed by Richard L. Tierney]
• Sword of the Gael (1975) [Andrew J. Offutt]
• The Undying Wizard (1976) [Andrew J. Offutt]
• The Sign of the Moonbow (1977) [Andrew J. Offutt]
• The Mists of Doom (1977) [Andrew J. Offutt]
• When Death Birds Fly (1980) [Andrew J. Offutt and Keith Taylor]
• The Tower of Death (1982) [Andrew J. Offutt and Keith Taylor]
• “The Land Toward Sunset” (1995) [first published in Baen Books’ Cormac Mac Art; David Drake]

Rest in peace, Andrew J. Offutt. I enjoyed your work.

Book Review: The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, Vol. 2: 2000-2010 by Peter Dendle

Horror films frequently come in waves. Over the course of the twentieth century we saw the emergence of the classics, the creature features, atomic horror, haunted houses and ghost stories, alien invasions, werewolves, vampires (reemerging in several waves), slasher flicks, torture porn and body horror, etc. For the last decade or so, zombies have been one of the biggest things in horror films, possibly the most prevalent kind of horror in 2000s. I’m not sure if they will maintain their staying power – I noticed the prevalence of zombie films starting to dwindle in this year’s horror film festival circuit – but their influence and near omnipresence is undeniable.

This is actually Dendle’s second zombie film encyclopedia. The first volume covers the zombie film genre from its infancy in the 1930s through 1999. That a second volume was needed to cover just the first decade of the twenty-first century is a testament to the veritable explosion of zombie-related films in the new millennium. The encyclopedia obviously contains all the major zombie films of the decade: LAND OF THE DEAD, DIARY OF THE DEAD, and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD by Romero; 28 DAYS LATER and 28 WEEKS LATER; SHAUN OF THE DEAD; ZOMBIELAND, etc., as well as a host of smaller, low-budget, and direct-to-video films, along with a bunch I suspect most of us would be hard pressed to ever locate. This is a truly comprehensive guide. I cannot claim that it literally contains EVERY zombie film made anywhere in the world during the 2000s, and neither does Dendle. I will say this though: I couldn’t think of a single zombie film Dendle overlooked and I’m a big fan of the genre who sees quite a lot of indie films at film festivals and the like. If this collection is actually missing any relevant films, I didn’t notice the omission. There’s even a meaty appendix that provides brief descriptions and analysis of all the zombie shorts (i.e., non-feature films) for the period.

As with any good movie encyclopedia, I was inspired to seek out a number of films I had not yet run across, including both PONTYPOOL, a Canadian film with an odd name about survivors of a zombie apocalypse trapped in a radio station, and [REC], a Spanish film about a group of apartment dwellers trapped inside an apartment building with a bunch of zombies as filmed by one of those trapped. Dendle actually profiled a large number of films I plan to check out, so the encyclopedia was certainly useful from that perspective.

There were a couple points in the text where I thought I could have done with fewer political interjections and criticisms, but I suppose given that the period covered was the first decade of the twenty-first century, I should have expected as much. I did come to enjoy Dendle’s analysis of the films as well as his wry cynicism. At times though, it’s clear that Dendle is almost weary of his subject. I suspect the poor man has simply seen far too many crappy zombie flicks in too rapid a succession.

If you are a fan of recent zombie films – and there are still good ones being made, despite the saturation of the market with all things zombie – then this will serve as an excellent guide. Production values are very high with this volume, and it’s both attractively laid out and very sturdy. For a reference guide like this one, a hardcover format is almost required, as I have far too many similar reference works in flimsy paperback format. More movie stills would have been nice – and color ones especially so – but I understand that their inclusion would have exploded the cost of the book. Dendle’s second volume does exactly what it says it will do: it examines all the zombie films (in detail) from the last decade. If you’re looking for a reference work that does that, you can’t go wrong here.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers

Book Review: The Dead Sheriff: Zombie Damnation by Mark Justice

I don’t typically read westerns. Heck, I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually read an entire western novel. But I could tell from the title – THE DEAD SHERIFF: ZOMBIE DAMNATION – that Mark Justice’s new novel was no ordinary western, so I gave it a try. I’m glad I did.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

There’s a new lawman roaming the Wild West and he’s not your typical sheriff. In fact, he’s a reanimated corpse wearing what seems to be a magical talisman. He’s also merciless killer: the Dead Sheriff’s idea of justice is for evil-doers to pay for their crimes with their lives. He’s not just a rotting corpse, he also seems to be mostly invulnerable to bullets and other damage. Sure, you can shoot him and knock him down, but he’ll get back up and finish the job in short order. The eponymous “Dead Sheriff” is accompanied by a mysterious young Indian named Cheveyo. I’m not going to give away one of the main surprises in the novel – it comes about a third of the way through – but suffice it to say that there’s a good deal more going on with the eponymous Dead Sheriff and his companion than initially meets the eye. The sheriff and his companion are accompanied by the novel’s viewpoint character, Richard O’Malley, a Boston reporter who – intrigued by wire reports about a dead man killing criminals – has traveled out west to see what’s really going on. O’Malley is a bit of a hapless cipher, and while he doesn’t detract from the novel, he doesn’t add much either. Oddly enough, he’s probably the weakest character in the novel. Corrupt televangelists apparently weren’t just a problem during the 1980s; here we also have a disreputable preacher, Reverend Ludlow Skaggs (what a great name!) as the primary villain of the piece. Skaggs is backed by an army of brutal thugs who have helped him take over a town called Damnation. Like all good westerns, there’s a climactic and highly satisfying showdown between the Dead Sheriff and the villain, as well as a number of great action sequences and gun battles throughout the novel.

I was especially intrigued by the future volumes to the series that the author promises in an Afterword. There he briefly mentions crazed cannibal brothers, a traveling vampire bordello, a posse made of other masked vigilantes, a time traveler, and the talisman’s original owner and his demonic sidekick – how can you go wrong with any of those? There are a number of mysteries remaining unresolved in DEAD SHERIFF, and the basic premise still has a great deal of potential. I had not previously come across any of Mark Justice’s work, but on further examination, he’s a relatively prolific author, so I’m looking forward to checking out his other work. Justice has definitely got a way with words, and is able to infuse action with just the right mix of dark humor.

Strongly recommended, especially for fans of the “Weird West” who enjoy some supernatural elements mixed in with their westerns, and those looking for a highly atypical zombie novel. This is a fast-paced, highly cinematic, pulpy supernatural western with a great premise. I look forward to more from Mark Justice.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers

Book Review: Cthulhu Unbound 3, eds. David Conyers and Brian M. Sammons

Cthulhu Unbound 3
Cody Goodfellow, D.L. Snell, Tim Curran, David Conyers, and Brian M. Sammons
Permuted Press
eBook $4.99
277pp. 2012
Review by Andrew Byers

Do we really need another anthology of Cthulhu mythos stories? Haven’t we seen all the possible permutations of Lovecraft’s ideas? The four authors of the novellas included in this new anthology would argue that there’s still room for more great stories about the Cthulhu mythos, and I would agree. Like the first two CTHULHU UNBOUND collections from Permuted Press, this third volume features “cross-genre” stories in which Lovecraftian horror is mixed with other genres to produce entirely new amalgams. In the case of the four novellas included here, we have Lovecraft mixed with a western, present-day psychological weirdness, a gritty prison drama, and a technothriller.

The four novellas included in this collection are:
* UNSEEN EMPIRE by Cody Goodfellow
* MIRRORRORRIM by D.L. Snell
* NEMESIS THEORY by Tim Curran
* THE R’LYEH SINGULARITY by David Conyers and Brian M. Sammons (who also serve as the collection’s editors)

Mild plot spoilers for each of the stories follow.

UNSEEN EMPIRE: Cody Goodfellow has blended the Cthulhu Mythos with a classic Western in this tale of a half-Commanche bounty hunter (who also appears in the chapbook “Black Wind” by Perilous Press) who runs afoul of something terrible as he searches for some people missing from an Indian reservation. It’s got monsters, a lost underground city from an ancient civilization, and the Oklahoma badlands. What more could you want? Goodfellow does such a good job with that one that I enjoyed it immensely, despite not even particularly liking some Western tropes.

MIRRORRORRIM: Snell has given us a story about the only male member of a therapy group for self-mutilators who soon realizes that the other members of the group – and perhaps even himself – are far more than they initially appear. The story is reminiscent of both the New Weird fiction and an old David Cronenberg movie, especially since it focuses heavily on body horror. I personally found MIRRORRORRIM to be the least successful of the four novellas – though I did enjoy it and found it satisfyingly creepy in a number of places – because I tend not to prefer stories that rely on horrifying weirdness where it’s not entirely clear exactly what’s going on. Deliberate obfuscation by an author can work, it’s just not my preferred mode of storytelling. Your mileage may vary.

NEMESIS THEORY: Tim Curran has pulled off a masterstroke with this Lovecraftian tale set inside a maximum security prison. One of the inmates, a former leader of a Jonestown-like suicide cult, manages to unsettle even these hardened criminals, then all hell truly breaks loose. Curran provides a great look at what might happen when “the stars are right.” Hint: it’s horrifying almost beyond imagination. I was initially a little skeptical of the premise of NEMESIS THEORY because I was unsure that the panoptical setting of a maximum-security prison would allow enough room for an author to tell a satisfying horror story. But then again, any tale involving something living beyond the outer reaches of our solar system described as the “Million Malignant Minds” has GOT to be good, doesn’t it? This was easily my favorite story in the collection.

THE R’LYEH SINGULARITY: Two international men of mystery who routinely deal with supernatural- and espionage-related matters for a variety of intelligence services fight to stop a global catastrophe in the making: a multinational corporation has begun a deep-sea drilling expedition that appears to be waking the sleeping dreamer Cthulhu in R’lyeh. Massive earthquakes and tsunamis affecting the entire Pacific basin have already started and things are only getting worse. One of the two men is Hamilton Peel, a former Australian military intelligence officer who also appears in the collection “The Spiraling Worm” and the chapbook “The Eye of Infinity” by David Conyers. I should note that, just as with the previous Peel tales, THE R’LYEH SINGULARITY is a tie-in with the Delta Green series of novels, stories, and role-playing game books put out by Pagan Press about confrontations between government agencies and Cthulhu set in the modern day. If you like Charles Stross’ “A Colder War” and series beginning with THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES, you’ll already have a sense of what Cthulhu mixed with modern-day techno-thrillers looks like.

All in all, I highly recommend CTHULHU UNBOUND 3: it’s a great collection of recent novellas that blend traditional Lovecraftian themes with other genres. I think that if you’re not already a fan of the larger Cthulhu mythos you wouldn’t get quite as much out of most of these stories (MIRRORRORRIM is one exception to that, it isn’t closely tied in with Lovecraft’s work). If you like the Cthulhu Mythos – unless you’re staunchly opposed to Lovecraft’s ideas being blended with other genres – I think you’ll find a lot to like in this collection.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers