Week 255 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Leiber, Chapman, Silverberg, and Matheson

On December 30, 2022December 11, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 255 of my horror short fiction review project! Another week with several good stories, but my favorite this time around was “Graduation” by Richard Christian Matheson. Very, very chilling. Also, I’m a sucker for epistolary stories.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“Cry Witch!” by Fritz Leiber

A man back in the old country begins seeing a woman he sees around town and becomes infatuated with her. It’s a small enough town that he becomes suspicious when no one ever says anything about her. As it turns out, she is the town harlot and she’s making time with every man in town (pretty much literally), none of which the man knows about because she’s been enchanting him to fall into a deep slumber every night so that he doesn’t awaken when she slips out of the house. Pretty good tale.

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

“The Stiff and the Stile” by Stepan Chapman

A very brief tale set after an apocalypse has mutated and transformed what little life is left on Earth. Fascinating and clever.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Call Me Titan” by Robert Silverberg

The last of the titans (of Greek myth), Typhoeus, is freed from his prison under Mount Etna by a volcanic eruption and emerges into the modern world to find all (or almost all) of the Greek gods to have disappeared. He seeks revenge on Zeus but he’s nowhere to be found. Typhoeus eventually finds Aphrodite, who offers a few explanations but not much; he mostly just falls in lust with her and they have sex. I’d have really liked to see him engage more with the Greek gods being supplanted by other deities and objects of worship. Not a bad story, though there’s some missed potential here, and I have no idea why this story would have been included in an ostensible collection about superheroes and horror, since there’s none of either here.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“Graduation” by Richard Christian Matheson

This one was very chilling. It’s a series of letters home from a college transfer student who seems very verbally precocious who has just moved into a dorm. He introduces his dorm mates, his professors, a girl he’s interested, etc., along with all the usual adventures regarding cafeteria food, classes, and the like. He keeps things very light and breezy but it soon becomes clear that very bad things happen to pretty much everyone around him. Good stuff.

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Book Review: Yuletide Frights 2, edited by William P. Simmons

On December 25, 2022December 23, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Yuletide Frights 2: More Victorian Ghost Stories for Christmas

Edited by William P. Simmons

Shadow House Publishing (November 10, 2022)

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

As most of us probably know, the Victorians had a tradition of telling each other spooky stories, many involving ghostly encounters, at Christmas time. Some of these stories were actually set during the holidays, others were just generally scary tales. While we’ve fallen away from this tradition, sadly, a small fraction of published stories in this tradition have been made available in recent years. While I missed the first Yuletide Frights collection when it was published, I’m very please to say that William P. Simmons has brought us another fifteen Victorian spooky stories in Yuletide Frights 2.

Simmons has done an excellent job of selecting Victorian ghost stories that can resonate with and be enjoyed by modern readers. I’ve read many of them over the years, and some just don’t work well in the twenty-first century, but I’m pleased to report that all of these do. Simmons has also provided very good biographies and historical contexts for each of the authors and their work. I would note that a surprising number of the authors were women, despite their frequent use of male pseudonyms.

Because this collection is so chock-full of good stories, I’ll only be able to touch on a few of my favorites.

Most of these stories are relatively straight-forward ghost stories, or stories involving human spirits remaining present on Earth and sometimes terrifying the living. But not all! A small number are what I’d call a kind of cosmic horror, and that includes “The Tower” by Barry Pain, which concerns a “haunted” tower, a quarry with a bad reputation, and some monstrous and unearthly beast(s). What more could one ask for? We’ve also got some sort of…oh I don’t know, a demonic shapeshifter in “What Was He?” by Theo Gift. He seems to like murdering newlywed brides.

While the majority of the collected tales take place during the Christmas season, which makes sense given that these stories would have been especially popular at Christmas time. One of the exceptions to that general rule was “On the Leads” by Sabine Baring-Gould. Like several of these stories, this one involves a creepy rented house that has a long, dark history of being haunted. Here we have some terrifically terrifying imagery about a ghost that appears on the roof every night. Sometimes you’ve really just got to burn the place down to get rid of the ghost. Nicely done.

Most but not all of the stories here involve the supernatural. One of my favorites that does not is “A Christmas Tale” by Margaret Oliphant. In a local country squire’s family, the offspring of each generation is a single son, and each generation takes a vow. When the son comes of age and is ready to inherit the family’s estate, the father, well, does himself in. Generation after generation. Pretty grim, isn’t it? Another was “Jerry Bundler” by W.W. Jacobs. If Jacobs’ name sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve read his most famous story, probably many times: “The Monkey’s Paw.” In this one, winter travelers are scaring each other with ghost stories while staying at an inn, and one of the travelers decides to play a prank on the others. That turns out to have been a very bad idea.

Most of the stories are set in traditional English settings: manor houses, country villages, or even London itself, but one of my favorites is set outside those traditional locales, though it’s still set in a quintessentially Victorian location: India. In “The Dak Bungalow at Dakor” by B.M. Croker, two young British women are traveling to meet their husbands for Christmas when they are forced to stay in traveler’s lodging in a remote area. There they witness a horrific but ghostly murder, which helps solve the disappearance of a British official years previously. Very nice suspense.

And some of the stories are simply wonderfully atmospheric, and creepy, traditional ghost stories. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention an understated one, “Bone to His Bone” by E.G. Swain, which involved a bibliophilic ghost and a wonderfully described library in a country vicar’s home. While the title of “The Dead Man’s Story” by James Hain Friswell is a bit on the nose, I salute Friswell’s willingness to experiment. We’ve got a man who dies, and Satan promises to return him to life so that he can be the woman of his dreams. Satan, it seems, is a bit of a romantic and just wants these two to be together. But of course, it being Satan, things don’t turn out as planned. I would also note “The Ghost of Charlotte Cray” by Florence Marryat, which was fascinating, fun, creepy, and also kind of absurdly hilarious. A man gets married but one of his old girlfriends (Charlotte Cray) keeps coming around to his office and pestering him that she won’t go away until she meets his new wife. He doesn’t want that for obvious reasons, but then Charlotte dies, so he thinks he’s in the clear. As it turns out, even death doesn’t prevent Charlotte from continuing to show up and demand to meet his new wife. If you’re in the mood for some tales of ghosts and goblins this holiday season, Yuletide Frights 2 would be an excellent choice to add to your seasonal reading. I had a lot of fun with these stories. Recommended.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 254 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Le Guin, Padawer, Haber, and Etchison

On December 23, 2022December 11, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 254 of my horror short fiction review project! There were several stories I really liked this week, but my favorite was “April in Paris” by Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t normally like feel-good stories (I’m much more of a downbeat ending kind of guy), but this one is very well-crafted, as with most of Le Guin’s work.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“April in Paris” by Ursula K. Le Guin

A lonely American professor of French is summoned to fifteenth-century Paris by a scholar who has accidentally discovered a summoning ritual that works. They become fast friends and end up summoning two women, with whom they fall in love, one from the distant past and one from the far future, as well as a nice little dog. It seems that the ritual can summon beings present in the same location who are outsiders in their own times. A very nice little feel-good story; I rarely like those, but this one really struck me.

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

“The Meat Garden” by Craig Padawer

A fascinating vision of a (future?) Vietnam-esque war as waged by transhumanists. The solidres wage war using all manner of strange technologies, including some that use extremely fast-growing seeds, music, and even language as weapons. I was fascinated by it; it’s utterly terrifying in its depiction of this kind of war. Excellent body horror. Very provocative.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Just Another Day by the Potomac” by Karen Haber

Not good. This was supposed to be a fun political satire that spoofs both parties, but I just didn’t care for it. A Hillary Clinton-type is president and she meets with a Dick Cheney analogue. Cheney, and Bill Clinton, and a lot of other politicians are all possessed by demons that make them behave the way they do.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“White Moon Rising” by Dennis Etchison

This one alternated narratives between a college girl staying on a mostly deserted college campus in a sorority house in the midst of a serial killer targeting women in the area with a campus security guard’s perspective. This should have been very tense, like the film Black Christmas, and it did start off that way, but it let me down about a third of the way through and never picked back up. Could have been really strong, but I just found it meandering and uninteresting.

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Book Review: In the Devil’s Cradle by S.L. Edwards

On December 20, 2022December 3, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

In the Devil’s Cradle

S. L. Edwards

Word Horde (November 8, 2022)

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

I previously reviewed S. L. Edwards’ short story collection The Death of an Author, and enjoyed it immensely, so I was very much looking forward to Edwards’ debut novel, In the Devil’s Cradle. Many fine horror writers have already blurbed In the Devil’s Cradle, and several described it as a kind of “political horror,” an evocative sub-genre that I don’t think I had ever before encountered. The book was also described as “a captivating haunted house story where the house is an entire country.” Needless to say, I was intrigued.

In the nation of Antioch, Senator William Esquival has brought his wife and children to the town of Rio Rojo because of rising tensions in the capital and a growing Marxist insurgency in the countryside. Rio Rojo is the hometown of Esquival’s ancestor, who also happens to be the founder of the nation and its greatest hero. The family moves into the ancestral family home, but they soon find themselves under siege literally and figuratively as the children realize that the grounds are inhabited by legions of spirits and the forces of revolution come to Rio Rojo. Tragedy, of course, ensues, and the Esquival family is put to the test by their many enemies, both living and dead.

Because of the importance of geography and nationhood to the story, I should say a bit more about the time and place in which In the Devil’s Cradle is set. The book is set somewhere in the middle part of the twentieth century, and is intended to be timeless, or at least a tale that could have happened at any point between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War. Edwards is careful to note in his afterword that Antioch is not simply Columbia, a country he has spent a great deal of time in, with the serial numbers filed off, nor is it just a generic stand-in for any Latin American banana republic. Rather, Antioch is intended to be any country suffering the kind of political upheaval he’s describing. I suppose that’s true, but Antioch’s culture and society do seem decidedly grounded in Latin American traditions and cultural norms, and its history is one of colonization by Europeans and successfully liberating itself first from the Spanish and then the British. The nation’s history and mythmaking is very much all about breaking free of those chains and charting a new, independent course into the future. Conflict emerges over who gets to chart that course on behalf of the nation.

The characters are well-illustrated, and they do feel like a true family. The weight of their shared past, and their interconnections, are felt throughout the novel and feel genuine. Pacing and atmosphere are excellent; this feels like a doom-laden Gothic novel in many ways, with a kind of terrible inevitability that builds momentum and speed as the story advances. In looking back on In the Devil’s Cradle, I think I’d have liked to see the supernatural horror elements enlarged to play a more important role in the novel. They are present, to be sure, but they’re very much minor elements compared with the horrors of a country thrown into political turmoil and suffering a revolution (or two simultaneous revolutions as is the case here). I’d be very curious to see Edwards (and other authors, perhaps with radically different takes on the genre) return to other iterations of this kind of political horror, and the idea of an entire nation being haunted. This was a fascinating ride. Recommended.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 253 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Jackson, Carter, Bloch, and Cave

On December 16, 2022December 11, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 253 of my horror short fiction review project! Some good stories this week, but my clear favorite was “The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson. I don’t know that there’s anything actually supernatural going on here, and it’s almost certainly not actually a “horror” story, but it sure is sad.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson

This one is apparently based on an old Scottish ballad about a woman who encounters an ex-lover, the Devil, though that doesn’t come up here at all in the story. In fact, there are no apparent supernatural elements in the story, though it’s utterly heartbreaking. A lonely woman is waiting for her fiancé, James Harris, to pick her up at her apartment so they can get married. He never shows up. She grows increasingly desperate for him and can never track him down. It seems he was just playing some kind of extraordinarily cruel game with her. Sad, and very good.

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

“The Snow Pavilion” by Angela Carter

A young cad (a poet, of course) is having an affair with an older, married woman and driving her car when it gets stuck in the snow. On his miserable walk back to her mansion, he comes across another mansion that he thinks is inhabited but, well, it’s not exactly. The place is mostly deserted, though it’s filled with creepy dolls. Then he encounters an old woman who he thinks might have used to be the children’s nurse, though of course the old crone is far more than she appears. Good atmosphere and a very effective premise.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Stuporman” by Robert Bloch

Apparently one of the Lefty Feep stories (I had to look this up because I was entirely unfamiliar with the character). This story was written in 1943 and it shows. It’s filled with that kind of snappy, all-too-clever rhyming dialogue throughout. That really grates on my nerves, personally. A nebbish reporter is given the ability to make his dreams come true, and, of course, he dreams about becoming a super-hero. Some fun bits in this one, but just not for me.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“Ladies in Waiting” by Hugh B. Cave

A couple return to stay in a vacant house that is for sale that they once stayed in after getting snowed in there for the night. The wife has become obsessed with the place, despite its creepiness. The house, or the extremely horrific beings that live there seem to want them there inn the house. I loved that final reveal, I just wish the story itself had been more coherent—these things come in to late in the tale to make this a really compelling story.

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Book Review: The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World by Mark Miller

On December 13, 2022December 3, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World: A Romance Hotter Than a Thousand Suns

Mark Miller

Montag Press (December 12, 2022)

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

Mark Miller is an author who’s new to me, and as I began reading The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World (TTHLATEOTW) I will confess that I didn’t initially know what to make of it. Now having finished the book, I’m happy to say that this is a delightful, absurdist comedy novel about twin sisters conjoined into a single body, a pair of soldiers placed in a nuclear bunker and then forgotten about for decades, a cyborg assassin, a bunch of Yugos (you remember those cars, right?), and an artificial intelligence in control of America’s nuclear arsenal that becomes sentient and falls in love with a fax machine at the Pentagon that wants nothing to do with him. Does that sound like the kind of thing you’d find entertaining to read about? If so, continue on, TTHLATEOTW may be right up your alley.

The story really begins with a set of interwoven threads that drive the remainder of the plot, which takes place over three decades or so (from the 1980s to the near-present). We’ve got a couple soldiers placed in an underground bunker, ostensibly monitoring the United States for evidence of a Soviet nuclear attack, but then the Pentagon promptly forgets about them and there they remain for the next thirty years. Then we’ve got an artificial intelligence, also created by the Defense Department, that achieves sentience, falls in (unrequited) love, and eventually decides that humanity is too flawed to be allowed to continue to live. And then we’ve got our primary protagonists, twin girls who experience a reality-warping event in which they become conjoined twins, sharing what is essentially a single body with two heads. The twins must then navigate life and love over the course of their lives, from high school into middle age. They have radically different personalities and aspirations, and must also figure out how to share a single body. Oh, and they, and a handful of friends and former lovers, must also save the world from nuclear annihilation. This is a highly character-driven novel, and Miller has assembled an intriguing and colorful cast to carry the plot forward.

TTHLATEOTW is a fairly long novel, and like a lot of absurdist novels, it struggles periodically with maintaining its (wacky, but smart) tone throughout. There are some sections that (I think) are more or less played straight, and while I think we need that for pacing and as a palate cleanser between the crazier sections, it does mean that tone is not always consistent throughout the novel. This is a love story, a thriller, a comedy, and a science fiction epic, and that’s a tough genre combination to manage, but I think Miller does a good job of it.

Miller has an entertaining sense of humor (and sense of the absurd that sometimes metamorphoses into the surreal) and displays a deft hand with dark subjects. We could treat the imminent end of the world as a tragedy or as a comedy, and Miller comes down firmly—appropriately, in my view—on the side of the latter. This is heady and clever stuff. If you enjoyed Dr. Strangelove and would like to see that one updated for the twenty-first century, this one is probably for you. Recommended if you’re interested in absurdist science fiction thrillers and character studies.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 252 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Derleth, King, Krueger, and Nolan

On December 9, 2022December 4, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 252 of my horror short fiction review project! Some interesting stories this week, though I can’t say that any truly knocked my socks off. The best was “The Man in the Black Suit” by Stephen King, which is a nice showcase of King’s talent for characterization and generally amazing wordsmithing. That’s very much in evidence here.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“Witches’ Hollow” by August Derleth [as by H. P. Lovecraft]

A schoolmaster in a one-room schoolhouse west of Arkham gets suspicious of the home life of one of his students, Andrew Potter. The teacher consults with the librarian and a professor at Miskatonic University as well as the Necronomicon itself, and is given elder signs to free Potter and his family who seem to be possessed/controlled by some malign alien intelligence. The teacher uses the elder signs to free the Potters, one by one, then burns down their house, finally forcing the being out of the Potter boy’s morbidly obese mother—it then flies off into space in a kind of quasi-gaseous form. This was not a bad story by any means—I did have fun with it—but this is all Derleth, there’s almost no recognizable HPL in it. Either you’re okay with that or you’re not.

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

“The Man in the Black Suit” by Stephen King

An old man recounting his encounter with the Devil when he was nine years old. The man’s older brother had died of an allergic reaction to a beesting the previous year, which sets him up for the encounter when he goes fishing alone in a remote area near his rural home. It’s a Stephen King story, so it’s well-written almost by definition and the characterization is rich beyond measure. The Devil himself is creepy, and scary, and I appreciated it, though on some level we have to take a step back and acknowledge that in this story, as with many others, we have a depiction of the Devil simply as a jerk who takes a few minutes to scare the bejeezus out of a small boy for no particular reason. That’s certainly a valid interpretation of the Devil, I don’t dispute that, but would a fallen angel second only to God in power really want to be this stupidly petty? It’s just plain pointless; the Devil even acknowledges this when he says that he plans to kill the boy, and because he will be a murder victim he will immediately go to Heaven, which will only serve God’s interests. So he really just wants to scare the kid and chase him through the woods for a bit. Why? I don’t mean to complain too much, it’s a well-written story that I enjoyed reading.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Proof of Bullets” by Jim Krueger

A Lex Luthor-type villain has built a gun that can kill any super-being, and uses it to kill his equivalent of Superman. Supes ends up possessing the villain and can now move from the villain’s body into any other body any time he likes. Superman uses this ability to continue making the world a better place. Creepy story, but an intriguing concept here.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“Dark Winner” by William F. Nolan

A man goes back to his childhood home, accompanied by his wife, and is abducted or dragged back in time or possibly killed by his childhood self, a real miscreant, who is not pleased with the man he became in adulthood. Okay. We really needed more about his rottenness as a child to really sell this one.

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Book Review: Stranger Sins by Michaelbrent Collings

On December 6, 2022December 3, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Stranger Sins

Michaelbrent Collings

Written Insomnia Press (November 25, 2022)

Reviewed by Andrew Byers

Stranger Sins is the latest stand-alone entry in the Michaelbrent Collings’ horror thriller series “I Am Legion.” I reviewed the first book in the series, Strangers, way back in 2013, as well as books two (Stranger Still) and three (Stranger Danger).

In this latest entry of the series, itinerant serial killer-turned-vigilante Legion is nursing his wounds and finds himself in Las Vegas (the seedy parts of the city that tourists don’t venture into). He comes to the aid of a mother and daughter clearly on the run from professionals. Legion can’t help but intervene, and finds himself embroiled not just in the personal drama of these two strangers but the family and associates of a couple of the monstrous killers Legion did away with in Stranger Still. You see, in the course of his career as a monstrous righter-of-wrongs Legion has crossed paths with some very bad people—the unspeakably evil kind, not just run-of-the-mill crime bosses—who are now very interested in finding him and taking their revenge. Some of these very same people are the ones after this mother and her daughter that fate, or some higher power, have brought into contact with Legion. Legion thus finds himself the target of revenge while also trying very hard to save two innocents.

Over time, Legion’s personality has become much richer; he’s no longer the implacable and unstoppable slasher killer of the first novel, nor is he some sort of Dexter clone struggling to fit in with normal society. These developments are very much welcome. His dead brothers’ personalities still inhabit his mind, though he begins to question if they’re really just figments of his imagination or parts of his own personality in conflict with itself. While those brothers (“Fire” and “Ice”) have not always been my favorite parts of the series, their banter here is interesting rather than that of two younger brothers who can’t stop arguing with each other. In our journey into Legion’s psyche, we also see the addition of Father, the monstrous paternal figure who raised Legion and his brothers and made them the twisted killers that they became.

As with previous entries in the series, Stranger Sins’spacing remains tight and I found the action, horror, and violence satisfying. This is a book about bad people—very, very bad people (and a couple very, very good ones)—and Collings doesn’t shy away from showing his villains at their worst. There was a very nice set-up for a sequel to this one at the end (recurring villains are always fun in horror thrillers), so I am looking forward to seeing where Collings takes Legion next. As with the first three novels in the series, I very much enjoyed Stranger Sins and recommend it to fans of serial killer-based horror thrillers. Collings is at his best when he’s at his most unhinged and really unleashes the bizarre characters that populate his novels to do their worst. We’ve got plenty of that here, and I’m looking forward to more of these delightfully over-the-top villains in the next Legion novel.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

Week 251 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Shiel, Ford, Doran, and Bloch

On December 2, 2022November 20, 2022 By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 251 of my horror short fiction review project! Some odd little stories this week, each imperfect in their own ways; my favorite was “The Delicate” by Jeffrey Ford, which I would almost liken to a kind of magical realism tale, which as you probably know by now, I don’t typically care for. This one about a strange kind of vampiric being operating in the cold wastes on the fringes of civilization was my kind of weird though.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“The Primate of the Rose” by M. P. Shiel

Crooks and Smythe begin the story with a tantalizing conversation about secret societies in London and then…nothing much happens. Another disappointment from a collection that seems to include far more misses than hits. I can now see why this collection has fallen into such obscurity.

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

“The Delicate” by Jeffrey Ford

A strange little story about a kind of demonic vampire—“The Delicate,” who also goes by Harding Jarvis—preying upon the inhabitants of a small town perched at the edge of civilization. It’s very magical realism in tone in that it can’t possibly be taking place on our Earth, nor does it really pretend to, and it’s full of magic and terror and wonder presented matter-of-factly. I liked it, and will be the first to admit that I don’t typically like tales like this.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“The Omnivore” by Colleen Doran

A kind of Legion of Super-Heroes setting (far future with a team of young super heroes). The Omnivore can eat anything but he doesn’t eat meat, and why that is becomes clear by the end of the story. Ultimate is a time traveler who uses an element that animates dead bodies. The action takes place at one of those body farm-type places where they do experiments to see how flesh decays under certain conditions, only this one is for the bodies of supervillains’ victims. Omnivore has to start eating the zombies and, well, loves it. Gross story and pretty silly, though I do recall meeting Doran at a comic book convention in Virginia Beach in the late 1980s and she was very sweet and a lovely person.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“The Closer of the Way” by Robert Bloch

Very meta. This is a story about the author Robert Bloch, who has been admitted to a psychiatric ward. His psychiatrist thinks he is secretly deeply disturbed, and uses Bloch’s fiction as a rationale for that analysis. As it turns out, the shrink is correct and Bloch beheads him before escaping.

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Tales from the Bookworm's Lair

Month: December 2022

Top 10 Best Reads of 2022

Week 255 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Leiber, Chapman, Silverberg, and Matheson

Book Review: Yuletide Frights 2, edited by William P. Simmons

Week 254 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Le Guin, Padawer, Haber, and Etchison

Book Review: In the Devil’s Cradle by S.L. Edwards

Week 253 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Jackson, Carter, Bloch, and Cave

Book Review: The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World by Mark Miller

Week 252 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Derleth, King, Krueger, and Nolan

Book Review: Stranger Sins by Michaelbrent Collings

Week 251 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Shiel, Ford, Doran, and Bloch