Week 181 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Rawlik, Saki, Masterton, and Nevill

Welcome to Week 181 of my horror short fiction review project! This is the first week of The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, so looking forward to seeing how these stories turn out because there are a lot of big names collected in that. Lots and lots of good stories to review this week, but my favorite was the classic and oft-reprinted “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki, which I first encountered here. This one was good enough that it made me want to seek out a collection of Saki’s stories. I hope people are still reading him because he’s a master of his craft.

Tales of Jack the Ripper, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Word Horde, 2013)

“Villains by Necessity” by Peter Rawlik

Wacky, but fun. The disgraced police inspector Thomas Newcomen (who appears in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a classic that I am embarrassed to say I haven’t yet read) has been discharged from Scotland Yard and is hooked on opium. He is abducted by Moriarty and Fu Manchu, who have apparently allied in order to put an end to the threat posed by Jack the Ripper. They force Newcomen to go cold turkey, and plan to send him out after Jack. But get this: Jack isn’t Jack; the murders are being done by the twelve monstrous offspring of Mr. Hyde. Yes, they’re only four or five years old, but are apparently capable of the murders and driven by a homicidal rage, like dear ol’ Dad. Newcomen is afflicted by bloodlust himself, having enjoyed massacring a horde of children during his military service in Afghanistan. Some brief mentions of Sherlock Holmes, Arsene Lupin, Phileas Fogg, and Dr. Loveless (from Wild, Wild West). What a set up for a story! Sadly, we just have this brief bit setting up the premise—this needs a full-length novel. I’d definitely read that. If you’re into Wold Newton-esque stuff, I think you’d likely enjoy this story immensely.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

[previously reviewed] “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood

“Sredni Vashtar” by Saki

A ten-year-old boy named Conradin is in the care of his cousin, Mrs. De Ropp, whom he detests. Conradin secretly keeps a hen and a ferret in a toolshed on the estate; Conradin has come to believe that the ferret is the avatar or physical form of a deity, and begins worshipping it. After Mrs. De Ropp gets rid of his hen, Conradin begins conducting rituals of his own devising to appeal to the ferret, which he calls Sredni Vashtar. When De Ropp later enters the shed with plans to get rid of the ferret, well, it doesn’t go as she has planned. Saki is a wonderful writer. This story is truly diabolical in its simplicity. I loved this and have realized that I sorely need to read more of Saki’s work.

The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Robinson, 2012)

“Dog Days” by Graham Masterton

A bit of a Boxing Helena vibe in this story (and I mean that as a compliment). Three physicians are in a love triangle: the narrator Bob, his Australian girlfriend Kylie, and his gorgeous friend Jack. As soon as Kylie meets Jack, she falls for him and promptly drops Bob like a hot potato, though, of course, he still pines after her. A while later, Bob encounters the duo in Jack’s convertible, and pulls up behind them at a traffic light. He is overcome by rage and pushes their car into traffic. Jack is okay but Kylie is apparently killed. Despite Jack and other witnesses seeing the incident, Bob is never charged, which I don’t understand—that was a plot hole I couldn’t quite get past. In any case, Bob eventually learns that Jack has successfully transplanted Kylie’s head onto his Great Dane’s body. She tells Bob that she wants to die, after living as a dog for a few months, and he reluctantly assists. Despite some silly elements, this is a dark story.

The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Aaron J. French (JournalStone, 2015)

“Call the Name” by Adam LG Nevill

Cleo is a 75-year-old woman, supposedly suffering from dementia, but I’m not quite sure that that’s what’s going on with her—she seems remarkably lucid. In any case, the year is 2055 and global warming has caused massive animal die-offs and conflicts through much of the developing world. The West, including Britain, where Cleo lives, is best by a rise in mass suicides and cult activities, in part because of the call of some otherworldly being, with the sound of its name driving many mad (fans of Lovecraft will understand exactly what is going on here). Cleo is descended from a long line of female scientists who have seemingly been able to piece together—via archaeological and other scientific investigations—the ancient arrival of Cthulhu on Earth and his periodic uses of climate to destroy much of life on Earth. It seems that human activities have altered the planet’s climate sufficiently that Cthulhu is awakening and will soon manipulate Earth’s environment to wipe out human civilization. Far too long of a novella, but the end is worth holding out for, as it ties everything together very nicely.

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Book Review: The Death of an Author by S.L. Edwards

The Death of an Author

S. L. Edwards

JournalStone (2021)

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

I didn’t know S. L. Edwards’ work prior to reading his newest collection of horror stories but after reading The Death of an Author, I’m a fan.

This is quite an eclectic collection of (by my count) sixteen stories, ranging from a couple of flash fiction pieces to much longer works, with something to whet the appetite of almost any horror fan. I would also note that some of the stories are not simply horror, but, as Edwards describes it, “weird fantasy.” Let me give you a sample of some of my favorites from the collection.

We’ve got “A Slower Way of Starving,” which is about a teenage girl who has to grow up way too fast as a pizza deliveryperson in the midst of a full-on zombie apocalypse(!). How about “She Never Killed Spiders,” which manages to combine “Beauty and the Beast” with Clark Ashton Smith’s medieval French Averoigne setting? Then we’ve got “Bestia,” in which a young woman named Khari, who lives in a small tourist trap of a town on Texas’ Gulf Coast, struggles to survive in a situation that I might suggest loosely combines Jaws with It. (By the way, I loved the character of Khari Lopez and very much want to see her reappear in a future story.) We’ve also got “With All Her Troubles Behind Her,” which manages to bring one of my very favorite stories from Greek mythology into the Old West. There was also the wonderfully evocative “Allister’s Garden,” about a man who has become the servant, lover, and captive of a powerful vampire. Perhaps my favorite story in the collection, and the one that left the most long-lasting impression, was the eponymous “The Death of an Author.” Here, we have an elderly pulp fiction writer on his deathbed in a hospice surrounded by those who have loved him best. Extremely poignant without being even remotely saccharin. There are many more stories I could highlight here, but those stand out especially prominently in the collection, which covers a breathtaking array of genres and themes.

I would be extremely remiss if I didn’t make special note of Edwards’ five Cthulhu Mythos stories, all of which blend political satire, contemporary American politics, and the Mythos. Three of the stories revolve around the political ascension of Congressman Robert Marsh (of the Innsmouth Marshes). Edwards notes that the first story (“The Cthulhu Candidate”), in which Marsh drives many of his viewers insane in the course of a television interview, was originally intended as a one-off, but over the course of the last few years Edwards wrote several more. The Marsh saga culminates in “The Ambassador in Yellow,” which shows a negotiation between the Marsh administration—our least favorite congressman is now president—negotiating with the Carcosan ambassador, which has entered our world and maintains an embassy. Edwards’ other Cthulhu Mythos tales revolve around that venerable institute of higher learning, good ol’ Miskatonic University, which is always one of my favorite settings in Lovecraft country. I enjoyed all of Edwards’ Cthulhu stories immensely and appreciated the blending of political satire with a warning about the power of dangerous demagogues.

As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, I very much appreciate it when authors include notes for each story, and we have those here in abundance. It’s always a fun opportunity to read the author’s reflections and influences immediately following a story. These are well done.

Highly recommended. No matter what your dark fantasy/horror predilections are, there’s something for you to enjoy in The Death of an Author.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 180 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Pulver, Crawford, Henderson, and Hodgson

Welcome to Week 180 of my horror short fiction review project! This week marks our last William Hope Hodgson Carnacki story; next week that collection will be replaced with The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Aaron French. I liked most of this week’s stories a lot, but my favorite was “The Screaming Skull” by F. Marion Crawford, a classic, old-school horror tale that I had oddly never previously encountered. There’s a retired sea captain, a horrific murder, and a spectral skull that does literally scream. Some classic elements there!

Tales of Jack the Ripper, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Word Horde, 2013)

“Juliette’s New Toy” by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

I don’t quite know what to make of this one to be honest. It’s one of Joe’s more experimental, stream of consciousness, impressionistic pieces, and those are very hit or miss for me. We have the eponymous Juliette, who seems to be channeling Jack the Ripper, or who at least has modeled herself/her desires on Jack, and she’s getting ready to go on the prowl to find her next victim. That’s mostly all I can say about this one. Unsatisfying to me, though other readers may find it more rewarding.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“The Screaming Skull” by F. Marion Crawford

Very good. Long, at least a novelette if not a short novella. Charles Braddock is a retired sea captain is recounting the death of his cousin (Luke Pratt), a physician, and Pratt’s wife. Braddock has inherited the Pratts’ home after their deaths. The story is told entirely through Braddock’s side of a conversation with an unnamed friend who is visiting Braddock in the home. Braddock had told the Pratts about a gruesome tale of a man killing by poring a small bit of lead in his sleeping victim’s ear. Given the strange occurrences at the house, Braddock clearly fears that Pratt killed his wife in exactly this manner after hearing the story. There are terrible screams heard in the night and a skull of mysterious origins that keeps reappearing, even after it is discarded. Oh and there’s something rattling around—a small piece of no-longer-molten lead, perhaps?—inside the skull. It’s a fascinating story as Braddock, who is very much in denial about the haunting, tries to convince his friend that nothing is wrong and he’s not being haunted by the dead wife out of revenge for inadvertently giving her husband the idea for how to kill her and get away with the murder. I liked this one a lot.

The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Robinson, 2012)

“Residue” by Alice Henderson

A really nice piece of body horror. The scientist Galen works with his friend Jason at a university laboratory analyzing archaeological discoveries. It all begins with an Anasazi pot that seems to depict a comet or meteor and humans running in terror. I think we know where this is leading. A residue in the pot gets on Galen’s skin and he becomes infected with a truly horrifying wormlike alien with hooks and claws that comes to take over his whole body, eventually forcing him to uncover the alien’s crashed spacecraft that, of course, contains thousands of other alien parasites still in stasis. Really nice use of dreams and nightmares in the story, which usually aren’t done all that well in my experience. Good stuff.

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, by William Hope Hodgson (Wordsworth, 2006)

“The Hog”

The final (and longest) of the canonical Carnacki tales. This one seems especially important because it introduces a potentially much larger cosmology with Earth as part of a natural world that extends not just into (physical) outer space but also a psychic realm that cannot be perceived with ordinary senses but exists nevertheless. In this psychic realm, there are natural predatory creatures that inhabit it, in the same way that sharks and tigers inhabit the oceans and jungles. I rather like that idea. Carnacki is brought in to help a man named Bains, who can no longer sleep because whenever he does, he sinks into a kind of hell-like dimension that seems to be inhabited by a monstrous or demonic entity that takes the form of a vast hog. This hog-like entity seems to be trying to claim Bains as its own, and perhaps even transform him into one of the swine that surround/serve/accompany the hog. Carnacki tries very hard to fight off the hog and save Bains, but essentially cannot manage it because of the hog’s sheer power. At the last second, a being arrives from heaven, or at least is a servant of good that inhabits a “higher” dimension in the same way that the hog inhabits a “lower” dimension, intervenes and prevents the hog from entering our world, which it almost did. That great pallid snout that Hodgson writes about here is especially menacing. Long, and there’s certainly plenty of mumbo jumbo to plow through, but well worth the effort.

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Book Review: His Own Devices by Douglas Wynne

His Own Devices

Douglas Wynne

Promethean (2021)

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

Jessica Ritter has her hands full caring for her ten-year-old son Gavin while her husband Matt is deployed to Afghanistan. Gavin’s a good kid, and is certainly technologically savvy, though like a lot of parents, Jessica worries about balancing Gavin’s screen time, his isolation during the summer months, and his passion for a new game (Rainblocks) developed by Gavin’s favorite YouTube influencer, Rainbow Dave. Dave is a pretty wholesome figure in Gavin’s life: his multi-colored Mohawk and cheery, kid-friendly persona have won him millions of fans. But Jessica grows concerned that Gavin is hiding something about his new game, and worries that maybe Rainbow Dave is not quite the innocent, dorky game developer he appears. It soon becomes apparent that Dave himself is the pawn of sinister, shadowy forces seeking to cause havoc, with truly existential implications for Gavin and Jessica.

I came to Wynne’s work having read just a single novella in his SPECTRA Files series, which blends real-world occultism with Lovecraftian horror, and was hoping for more of the same. I wasn’t disappointed. While I would describe His Own Devices as a technothriller, it has clear horror elements, and an ambiguous element that could be supernatural (I think that ambiguity is one of the novel’s strengths). Wynne seamlessly blends postmodern technology with real-world occultism. There’s just enough here about John Dee, Edward Kelley, Enochian, and the demon Choronzon (with ties to Crowley and other esoteric elements) to whet your appetite without getting bogged down in minutia. While the story of His Own Devices wraps up satisfyingly, there are enough unresolved elements here that I’d very much like to see developed further.

Wynne is a marvelously naturalistic writer who has crafted a set of characters that seems fully realized, with perspectives from Rainbow Dave, Jessica, Gavin, and Gavin’s computer teacher, Mr. Strauss. These are all eminently relatable characters (including Dave, whose mental health spirals down precipitously during the course of the novel). It’s clear that Wynne writes from experience, especially with regard to parenting children today and worrying about how they interact with technology. Wynne managed to draw me into these characters’ lives, their hopes, their fears, their day-to-day stresses in a way that few other authors are able. It may be trite to say, but Wynne’s characters genuinely seem to “come alive,” and that’s probably his clearest strength as a writer.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Wynne has written a prequel novella to His Own Devices entitled Random Access that is available free from his website. It was written after His Own Devices, and Wynne suggests reading it after the novel; having read Random Access—an excellent read in its own right—I agree that it’s probably best to read that second. It does a great job of providing the backstory for Rainbow Dave, more on the Black Flock, and generally enriches the story, but I don’t think you should read it prior to His Own Devices. Highly recommended. If you’re already familiar with Wynne’s previous work, you already understand his strengths as a writer. If, like me, you’re newer to Wynne’s work, you’ll definitely want to check this one out. I’m putting Douglas Wynne on my (short) list of must-read writers.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 179 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Morris, Kubin, Fowler, and Hodgson

Welcome to Week 179 of my horror short fiction review project! We’ve got a truly eclectic set of stories this week, all good, though my favorite was “The Look” by Christopher Fowler. Deals with some truly extreme body modification-turned-horrorshow, all in the quest for fame in a culture of pop fads and mass consumerism gone mad. Now that’s all right up my alley!

Tales of Jack the Ripper, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Word Horde, 2013)

“Where Have You Been All My Life?” by Edward R. Morris

A man who is clearly Jack the Ripper awakens in a cheap hotel room with a prostitute. The man has amnesia and a period of missing time. The woman believes he is an ordinary sailor, while he believes he is a hospital orderly. He finds out that he is no longer in London, but is in Oregon, and the year is 1892, not 1888 as he had imagined. He will, presumably, resume his work as Jack in Oregon. Not much to this one unfortunately.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“The Other Side” (excerpt) by Alfred Kubin

The narrator is living in a dreamlike city that has been apparently transported whole cloth from Europe to Central Asia as some sort of magical realism utopian experiment (I gleaned this from a little research into the novel from which this excerpt is drawn). A variety of calamities ensue. First, the city’s inhabitants fall prey to a disease that makes them suddenly fall asleep for six days, unable to awaken. Then, animals of all kinds invade the city and start mating everywhere. Then the buildings and other physical objects in the city start decaying and crumbling at a highly accelerated rate. Surreal, but amusing. Some interesting ideas here. Fun, but nothing profound in this excerpt, and a bit of an odd way to start the collection.

The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Robinson, 2012)

“The Look” by Christopher Fowler

What a truly horrifying story! Excellent. The narrator is a young woman who desperately wants to be a supermodel who is discovered by the world-famous fashion designer Kit Marlowe. She and her friend Ann-Marie stalk Marlowe and engineer a meeting with him at a hotel. Instead of picking the narrator, he “discovers” Ann-Marie. One of Marlowe’s current models secretly shows her the extensive (and horrific) body modifications done to Marlowe’s models to perfect them and mold them into the perfect beings that Marlowe seeks. Perhaps even worse, as it turns out Marlowe is just an actor, not even a fashion designer; he is hired and controlled by a coterie of corporate sponsors who use him to push each year’s new fads to an unsuspecting populace. Quite a commentary on our own obsessions with youth and conspicuous consumption. A wonderful tale, and exactly the sort of story I was hoping for from this collection.

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, by William Hope Hodgson (Wordsworth, 2006)

“The Find”

An interesting, though brief, story about a con artist who claims to have found a second copy of a valuable book that was believed to have existed in just a single copy. The greatest book evaluators in Britain all agree that the man’s book is authentic, but yet…it can’t be. An interesting investigation and description of how this came about, but there are no occult elements or even remotely strange happenings. Why did they even consult with Carnacki in the first place? Definitely not the typical Carnacki story, so disappointing in that respect.

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Book Review: Zeroland by Ryan Winters

Zeroland
Ryan Winters
Trepidatio Publishing (May 28, 2021)
Reviewed by Andrew Byers

About ten years from now, the United States splinters politically, with the Southern states seceding, and Texas forming its own independent republic (now apparently allied with Russia). Fast forward to 2070. Mechs patrol the border between the remnants of the Reformed United States and the secessionist states. Climate change has caused massive disruptions, with wildfires and other environmental catastrophes having killed hundreds of thousands. What is left of the United States has become a dystopian nightmare, ruled by a politically oppressive regime that is nominally involved in a vast environmental remediation project called the Reformation, but in reality uses ubiquitous surveillance technologies and secret police to enforce capricious and intrusive laws.

Injected into this setting is a series of strange happenings at a research station site near the Arctic Circle. The staff of that station is killed off, one by one, by a dangerous alien creature that has escaped from a government containment unit. Two domestic security agents—divorced spouses, one of whom is clued in to what’s going on and the other deemed expendable by the government—are sent to the station during the storm of the century, to investigate and recapture the creature before it can escape.

We’re left with a pretty interesting series of narratives that come together in the present at the Arctic research station: the story of how this dystopian world came to be; the lives and backgrounds of those trapped at the station; and the story of the unscrupulous government officials who know exactly what is going on and just want to contain the damage before the escaped alien can cause more problems. All of these storylines are set in Alaska, either beyond the very fringes of human civilization, or in the rough-and-tumble cities of southern Alaska where the inhabitants face a hardscrabble life on what remains the American frontier. I was not surprised to learn that Winters himself used to work construction at the Arctic Circle, because I suspect that only someone with his background could have brought this setting and characters to life.

Comparisons with The Thing, especially John Carpenter’s version, or perhaps even the blue-collar workers vs. alien monstrosities of Alien, are probably inevitable, but there’s plenty here that is original. The alien of Zeroland is by no means a knock-off of either The Thing or Alien, and is plenty interesting on its own. The various characters—many ultimately doomed—are where Winters’ strength lies: Big Dave Okafor, a genuinely nice guy with a terrible past; Ursula Cantwell, Dave’s pregnant stripper girlfriend, who dreams of escape and happiness; Laine Arkady, the sad, troubled government operative willing to commit monstrous acts for her masters; Jesse Walsh, Laine’s ex-husband who gets roped into accompanying her on what may be his last mission. All have troubled pasts, many with secrets and situations they’re trying to escape, and difficult lives on the frontier of a society that seems to be in slow-motion collapse. Zeroland’s setting is intriguing, and I want to know much more about it, but it’s really in these characters, and many more, who find themselves caught up in it, where Winters and Zeroland shine.

Definitely recommended, especially if you’re intrigued by the incorporation of environmental devastation into your horror, or the idea of a murder mystery set within a future dystopia, or simply want to see blue-collar heroes pit against seemingly unstoppable forces.

Review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 178 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Kurtz, Lumley, Herbert, and Hodgson

Welcome to Week 178 of my horror short fiction review project! Today marks the review of the final story in Brian Lumley’s Haggopian and Other Stories; starting next week, we will be replacing that with the very long The Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. Some good stories this week but my favorite was probably the lengthy “Hell Broke Loose” by Ed Kurtz that tries to link the Servant Girl Annihilator murders (if you don’t already know about these killings, look them up because they are as bizarre as they are horrifying) to our old friend Jack the Ripper.

Tales of Jack the Ripper, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Word Horde, 2013)

“Hell Broke Loose” by Ed Kurtz

A long, interesting story that links the Servant Girl Annihilator (unknown American serial killer in Austin, Texas, who killed in 1884-85) to the Jack the Ripper killings that took place three years later. Here, Blake Prentiss is obsessed with a married woman named Eula—it eventually becomes clear that she is a not a lover who spurned him, they’ve never actually spoken—and ends up killing prostitutes and others after being driven to madness and alcoholism. As with several other stories in this collection, Kurtz takes us deep inside the mind of a madman, and it’s a highly successful journey. Very good stuff.

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“The Sorcerer’s Dream”

A tale of the Primal Land. The sorcerer Teh Atht (from “Mylakhrion the Immortal”) makes a return appearance here. This time, he induces several dreams in himself via sorcerous means to learn the history of Cthulhu’s arrival on Earth, something of his life on Earth, and his awakening once the Stars Are Right. Wizards usually would be better off not meddling in things like this, because Cthulhu becomes aware of his dream surveillance and haunts his dreams forevermore. Not a lot here that we didn’t already know about Cthulhu—that was the biggest missed opportunity here—but evocative enough, I suppose.

The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Robinson, 2012)

“Others” by James Herbert

A fascinating and evocative vignette. I just wish that there was a whole story here. Dismas, Mary, and Joseph are imprisoned and mutated in a dungeon, along with others who are even more malformed and deranged than they are. A few names of these individuals are referenced, and there’s a fleeting reference to telepathy, but no sense of why they are here or what has been done to them, or by whom (the names, of course, are suggestive). Disappointing, because this one feels like the lead-up to a great story that never arrives. (I am aware that the author has published a novel by the same title, but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know what if any connection this story has with that novel. Perhaps this story formed the basis for a later novel?)

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, by William Hope Hodgson (Wordsworth, 2006)

“The Haunted Jarvee”

I was a bit disappointed in this one. Carnacki has taken a month-long sea voyage on an old-fashioned sailing ship and learns that the ship not only has a bad reputation, but seems to be cursed. Periodically, strange shadows appear in the water at the cardinal points, traveling rapidly toward the ship. These shadows seems to come aboard sometimes and frighten or otherwise induce sailors in the rigging to fall to their doom. So far, so good. But Carnacki’s encounters with these shadowy things are vague at best—no real detail is provided—and not only are his usual methods ineffective, he fails badly, with the ship ultimately sinking. All he can theorize is that the ship has somehow picked up some sort of vibrational frequency that causes problems, which, he believes, can sometimes happen to places or things for inexplicable reasons. Not very satisfying across the board. It’s not really even a true “haunting,” in the sense that there’s no indication these shadows are specters or demons or any other kind of entity. They exist in some way, and can affect the physical world, but that’s all we know.

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Book Review: A Dark Genesis by Cheryl Lawson

A Dark Genesis

Cheryl Lawson

Self-published

2021

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

The colonists and crew of the Vega Four were sent into space a century ago, along with a small fleet of other slower-than-light generation ships, to seed humanity in other solar systems. For now though, the inhabitants of the Vega Four are lonely and isolated in interstellar space when disaster—a serious asteroid strike and its aftermath—places them in mortal danger.

I must provide a few plot spoilers if I’m to say anything about the plot at all. The asteroid that crashed into Vega Four contained some sort of crystalline alien life. That would be intriguing enough, but then the protagonists discover that this lifeform is aggressively expanding and, as an intelligent crystalline parasite, is more than capable of defending itself. Plus, the unchecked growth of this lifeform will soon compromise the integrity and life support of the ship, dooming them all to a quick death in the deep void of space unless they can figure out how to stop it.

I was intrigued by the ship’s culture that seems to have emerged during the last century of its isolation from Earth: there seems to be a fairly sharp divide between the civilian colonists—who are awake and not in any kind of suspended animation—and the crew, who have come to regard the passengers as nuisances as much as anything else, and paternalistically surveil and discipline every aspect of the passengers’ lives. They have gone so far as to have an A.I. that listens to conversations and issues demerits every time it detects a curse word. Some among the passengers suspect that they’re being drugged into docility. Lots of tensions between the two groups, which significantly contributed to the difficulty of finding a solution to the existential threat the ship faces. It’s clear that resentment is building and I doubt that this will produce a stable society once they reach their destination.

I would have liked to learn more about the backstories of the major characters. For example, at the outset of the novel, one of the characters, Sage, has discovered some important information about the alien lifeform and tries to share this with the ship’s officers. They dismiss her out of hand, regarding her as little more than a hysterical crackpot; there’s clearly history here between the characters, and I’d have liked to see more explanation of that. This short novel is fast-paced and a quick read. Characterization wasn’t deep, but it’s a fun science fiction horror-thriller set in space with a rapid pace that relies on quick thinking and some basic scientific knowledge to resolve rather than laser guns and action heroes. Recommended especially for those who enjoy some light horror mixed into their science fiction.

Review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 177 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Grey, Lumley, Gaiman, and Hodgson

Welcome to Week 177 of my horror short fiction review project! Some okay stories mixed in with some good ones this week. Let me give an honorable mention to Gaiman’s “Changes” about pharmaceutically-induced gender fluidity that he wrote in 1998 (wonder how it would change if he wrote it today). My favorite story of the week was the wonderfully creepy and atmospheric “The Horse of the Invisible,” one of the Carnacki the Ghost-Finder occult detective tales.

Tales of Jack the Ripper, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Word Horde, 2013)

“Ripperology” by Orrin Grey

Okay, but not great. The narrator is a true crime writer who befriends a fellow writer, Derek Midwinter, who is a lonely man and murder memorabilia collector. Midwinter has written several books about Jack the Ripper, and the narrator and he spent many evenings discussing the case, and other infamous crimes. After Midwinter’s death, the narrator receives a bloodstained opera glove—implied strongly to be one that had been worn by Jack the Ripper—and sees a figure that is dressed like a Victorian gentleman heading out to the opera. The narrator becomes terrified by all this—such fragile minds some authors seem to have—and is kind of haunted by the idea of Jack the Ripper. While the story is well-written as far as it goes, and is vaguely unsettling, it just doesn’t go anywhere. If this one had stuck the landing, it could have been a really interesting story.

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“The Black Recalled”

A sequel to “The Caller of the Black,” but set much later in Titus Crow’s career after he has died/disappeared and his house destroyed. (Crow himself doesn’t even make an appearance.) Two evil magicians meet at the remains of Crow’s home; they were the apprentices of Gedney, the evil sorcerer Crow defeated in the previous story. They double-cross each other, one summons “the Black,” the amorphous entity that suffocates its prey,” and end up both dying at the tendrils of the entity. Not bad, not great either.

The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (Robinson, 2012)

“Changes” by Neil Gaiman

A man named Rajit invents a drug called Reboot that cures most cancers. When someone takes it, one of the drug’s unanticipated side effects is that it switches the person’s gender. This drug, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes to be used recreationally and comes to have profound effects on human culture and society. The story is told through a series of vignettes across the decades as the drug comes to be adopted globally. Good stuff, and probably even more interesting now, in an age of increased gender fluidity, than when Gaiman wrote it in 1998.

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, by William Hope Hodgson (Wordsworth, 2006)

“The Horse of the Invisible”

Carnacki is called in to investigate a case in which a young woman (Miss Hisgins) and her fiancé are being menaced by a demonic horse, or horse-like entity. There is a family curse involved: if the eldest child in a given generation is female, she will meet a terrible end, and it looks like that might be the situation here. The story has a wonderfully creepy atmosphere throughout, and a genuine sense of menace as the entity seems to manifest at random intervals, injuring the fiancé several times. All is not as it appears, however: a male cousin, Parsket, is apparently in love with the woman and has been engineering the manifestations. However, there is a final intimation that while most of what we saw happening was the product of the nefarious cousin’s schemes, there was in fact, some kind of supernatural explanation for some of it. I do like that unlike most occult detectives, Carnacki encounters some purely human-caused incidents, along with a mix of supernatural happenings and ambiguity; I find that far superior to occult detectives who always encounter ghosts and demons—sometimes it’s nice to run into a villain wearing a rubber mask.

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon

Buy the book on Amazon