Christopher Conlon: THE OBLIVION ROOM--Remarkable Stories, Remarkable Story-telling

The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation

Christopher Conlon

Evil Jester Press, June 2013

Trade paperback, $14.95 

I discovered the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe quite early in my teens and read them voraciously. I’ve re-read most many times over the course of the intervening fifty years or so, but I still vividly remember my essentially visceral reaction to my first encounter with several of them: the fantastic gorgeousness of “The Masque of the Red Death,” which I recently cribbed from (only slightly) for a Lovecraftian novella; the calm, rational madness of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado”; and—perhaps most dramatically of all—the smothering darkness and ultimate meaninglessness, as it seemed to me, of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Over the years I have not encountered a story that touched me, that horrified me, in quite the same way as that one did.

Until I was asked to review Christopher Conlon’s impressive collection, The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation.

As is my wont with a new book, I took it with me a nearby fast-food restaurant, where I could enjoy it in the relative silence (mostly silence from my internal noises). And, as is completely understandable, I began with the first story, the eponymous “The Oblivion Room.”

And suddenly, it seemed as if I were in the world of “The Pit and the Pendulum” again…for the first time. Even though the stories are, on the surface, different.

Conlon’s character—and indeed, one could almost say that there is only one character in the story—is a woman, a wife and a mother. She is an average person in all respects, except that she is imprisoned in an utterly lightless cell, circular, with no perceivable openings. She receives food, of a sort, but only when she is asleep. She is naked. She has no matrix by which to judge time. All she can do is remember…and structure her memories into a mental journal—the story—so that whatever happens, she will never forget who she is and what is happening to her.

Then, incredibly, she discovers a single flaw in her cell: a barely discernible crack, only inches long and scarcely deeper than her smallest fingernail.

Not much, but it gives her life and hope.

To tell more would be to lessen the shock and surprise that Conlon so adroitly builds over the twenty-plus pages of the story. He so orchestrates her memories and her struggles to maintain them that the simple act of recall becomes both heroic and manic…rather as it would be with one of Poe’s characters. 

The second story, On Tuesday the Stars All Fell From the Sky,” is in its own way entirely unlike the first…and identical to it.

Another bit of reminiscence.

As a graduate student, I worked with Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. Most of the stories I have (unfortunately) forgotten, but one remains, vivid in atmosphere, tone, and extraordinary control. The main character of “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick Adams, embarks on a fishing trip. That is the entire plot. The story is composed of Adam’s meticulous attention to every detail around him, with several paragraphs devoted to the mundane act of making coffee over a campfire. Toward the end, he stands on a bridge of the Big Two-Heart River and watches several fish swimming against the current, making no progress but not getting swept backward either.

Shell-shocked, returning from the horrors of World War I, Adams is himself struggling to maintain. His ritualized descriptions and painstakingly controlled actions are the only recourse he has to a world that is insane…and deadly. Like the fish, he makes no headway, but neither does he dissolve into madness.

Conlon’s story gave me the same sense of overt restraint over underlying madness, but here, we know precisely how mad Terrence Stillwater actually is (ah! If I were still in graduate school, I would make much of the symbolism of his last name!). When he awakens one morning, he knows, without knowing how or why, that there is a thing to so.

He does it.

And goes through the day alternatively half-remembering it and half-denying, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that it happened.

As with Hemingway’s story, Conlon’s draws its strength—and its horror—from juxtaposing two sides of Stillwater’s personality and his attempts to create a “normal” life, even though he ultimately knows that any pretense at normality is merely that…a pretense. 

The next three stories each deserve full discussion, but for the sake of conciseness, I can only suggest their power and effectiveness. In “Skating the Shattered Glass Sea,” a twin visits his sister for the first time in half a century…in her cramped, dark room in a mental institution; only there can the old man he has become truly comprehend the tragedy of what her instability and their separation has cost them both. “The Long Light of Sunday Afternoon” (a bit of a Hemingwayesque title) is a gentle ghost story, in which an old man—a recurring theme in several of the stories—is given a choice…or perhaps only a vision. “Grace” is an eerie tale of an empty house, about to be torn down in the wake of new construction, that contains a terrible secret for Abby Winter, as well as the possibility of restoration if she has the courage to open the closet door.

Each is memorable in its own right, told with clarity and directness that nonetheless combine to create a moment of horror. 

The capstone and highlight of the collection, however, is the novella, “Welcome Jeanne Krupa, World’s Greatest Girl Drummer!” Set in the midst of World War II, it tells of a jazz ensemble, the Skye High Five, through the eyes of a young man fresh from the plains of Nebraska (and from a town perfectly named ‘Lonestone’). The first pages concentrate on background, particularly his, and depicting a world in which the only young men are “4-Fers” rejected by the military, and the old men—including three of the ensemble—are decades older. Into the closed world of the Five comes something new and fresh: Jeanette Crupiti, a phenomenal autodidact on the drums, lying about her age and secretive about her backgrounds but capable of playing at the level of the great Gene Krupa himself.

The story unwinds at what seems a leisurely pace as the band works, improves, and steadily moves toward greatness.

Then, enter the villain, Jeanette’s cousin, Boone Branson. There is no secret about his villainy; Conlon makes that clear on the first page. But there are other secrets that gradually, inexorably emerge, and in doing so threaten Jeanette, the narrator, and the band.

Underlying the story, however, are two consistent themes. The first is spoken by Jeanette when she asks “Who do you think people love each other?” Once asked, the question reverberates through what we know of her life, and what we learn of the narrator’s. The second comes from the narrator, Lester: 

 

I took a walk down to the ocean—we were playing a club on the beach, our hotel was attached to it—and I breathed the heady salt air for a while, trying to clear my head. Understand, no one used words like stalker or dysfunctional or codependent back them. I’d never heard of such things. 

 

But it doesn’t require words for a thing to exist—look at the terrors faced by the nameless woman in “The Oblivion Room”, or the dreadful sense of things unnamable and unforgivable going out of control in “On Tuesday the Stars All Fell From the Sky”; or the soul-killing loss in “Skating the Shattered Glass Sea.” And even without the words, even intuiting what is to come, readers are invited into Lester’s world to understand the irrevocable mark one person can make…for good or for evil. 

 

The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation is a perfect title for the collection. Throughout there is violation: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. The stories provide little ground for hope; at best, perhaps, there is only endurance and remembrance. They might seem rather cold, impersonal, dispassionate, almost dissociated, as if the horror implicit in the story-telling were too much for the narrators. Readers eager for “slash-and-burn” horror might be disappointed in them—not for their lack of blood and violence, which occur, but for Conlon’s detachment and refusal to glory in them for their own sake. Suffering happens; and we must struggle to endure. But those seeking the deeper realms of fear and terror, found primarily in suggestion and indirection and obliqueness, The Oblivion Room is a must. 

Highly recommended.

Patricia Santos Marcantonio, THE WEEPING WOMAN--When Reality Intersects with Legend

The Weeping Woman

Patricia Santos Marcantonio

Sunbury Press, September 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1620061091, $16.95, trade paperback; $4.99, eBook 

I seem to be spending a fair amount of (fictional) time in San Antonio recently—and in the sometimes great, sometimes horrifying state of Texas in general. Over the past year, I’ve read a number of Joe McKinney’s exceptional zombie novels, most of them featuring a San Antonio over-run and quarantined. And  now I’m emerging from another visit, this time focusing on a legend-come-true, Patricia Santos Marcantonio’s The Weeping Woman.

I appreciate horror as a genre. I love monsters. But what makes horror such a flexible mode of storytelling is that is doesn’t actually require zombies or werewolves or vampires to be effective. Some of the most frightening monsters are…human. People turning their backs on humanity in order to pursue their own private heavens, or hells.

In Marcantonio’s tale, the city of San Antonio is beset by two separate monsters. One is a pyromaniac, staining the evening skies crimson with his series of arson fires. No one has a clue as to who he is or why me sets fires, but his actions are draining the city of its life and putting a strain on the police department’s ability not only to cope with their normal problems but to control this one.

And there is the other monster. Children are disappearing. Young children. No one sees anything suspicious, no one notices anyone unusual…yet, in almost the blink of an eye or the turn of a mother’s back, children disappear. When one of them is discovered dead, his body carefully arranged on an elaborate tombstone in the nearby cemetery, things take an eerie turn. There is more here than a simple, garden-variety pervert; indeed, events suggest that the kidnapper is somehow enacting an ancient Mexican legend, “La Llorona,” or “The Weeping Woman.”

This is where San Antonio detective Blue Rodriguez, and her F.B.I. partner Daniel Ryan, begin looking for more than the obvious. Rodriguez is not only a tough-as-nails cop; she is also something of a ‘monster’ herself in that she has a special talent, one that destroyed her mother and threatens to destroy her. She can see victims. If she touches a body, she sees how the person died. If she enters a room defiled by violence, she sees the victim. The one thing she cannot see—the thing that frustrates and maddens her—is the perpetrator.

Temporarily transferred from Robbery to Homicide, Blue must follow the sparse clues the kidnapper has left and keep her secret from her new (and highly attractive) partner, while using all of her talents—natural and supernatural—to find the monsters before it is too late. 

While horror of a specific sort, The Weeping Woman is also an entirely human—and humane—novel about rescue and redemption. Nearly everyone in the story is injured in some key way, either physically or psychically. The kidnapper has been traumatized in the past, although that fact does not alleviate the horror of the kidnappings. Blue, her mother, her sister, and her aunt—all have suffered and are deeply scarred, although they deal with their problems in far different ways. Even the clean-cut, Kennedy-looking Ryan conceals a secret, one that tinges his growing relationship with Blue.

But Blue is the true center of the story. While the overt narrative concentrates on her desperate attempts to balance her wounds with her need to solve the kidnappings, the underlying story—and perhaps the more important one—follows Blue’s conscious and unconscious attempts at punishing and ultimately forgiving herself for her own sins. Her path is dangerous and dark, regardless of which story we follow, but it is her only possibility of redemption.

Recommended.

Joe R. Lansdale, DEADMAN'S ROAD--A Wilder, Wierder West

Deadman’s Road

Joe R. Lansdale

Tachyon, August 2013

ISBN-10: 161696104X, ISBN-13: 978-1616961046, $14.95, trade paperback

Joe R. Lansdale is an original. No one—but no one—tells a story with quite the same dark energy and wanton verve. Whether it be something like the sublimated sophistication of Edge of Dark Water, the celebratory redneckedness of the Hap and Leonard novels, the outré sense of the bizarre-made-real in shorter works like Bubba Ho-Tep, or an improbability treated as perfectly straight-forward fact in the Drive-In novels, Lansdale has mastered such a distinctive tone and approach that a page—even a paragraph—is almost as individual as a fingerprint.

Deadman’s Road is no exception. I can think of no one but Lansdale who could so successfully have perpetrated such a rollicking, rugged, and raw series of tales without a single lapse. The volume collects one previously published novella, “Dead in the West,” and four additional tales of a Wild West even wilder, weirder, and more outlandish than anyone might reasonably expect: “Deadman’s Road,” “The Gentleman’s Hotel,” “The Crawling Sky,” and “The Dark Down There.”  The book was originally published in 2010 (Subterranean Press), but this edition contains Lansdale’s definitive statement on all of the (to this point, at least) adventures of the Reverend Jedidiah Mercer, man of God who trusts God no more than he trusts the Devil.

Mercer’s appointed task is to find and destroy Evil—not the evil perpetrated by men alone, but the greater Evil stemming directly from the Father of Evil,,,and occasionally from forces beyond that. Sometimes he finds support from fellow humans, but throughout the tales he mostly relies on his own armaments: two six-shooters (and it helps that he is an almost supernaturally gifted shootist) and a Bible capable of its own fiery punishments.

Sin appears in the stories but is rarely the focus of the action. Mercer’s own career began with incest (for which he seeks some kind of clearly-defined but ultimately elusive expiation), but as he travels from one terror-haunted town to another he confronts a host of additional sins. Murder, rape, bigotry, treachery, each exacerbating the others until toward the end of the collection, one must agree with Mercer’s caustic assessment, “Never underestimate the curiosity and stupidity and greed of man….” Or woman.

In the world of Deadman’s Road, the presence of sin is itself accentuated by that fact that, with a few notable exceptions, there are few true innocents to be found in settlements such as Mud Creek, Gimet, and Wood Tick, or in the cemeteries and ghost towns Mercer encounters. And those few innocents are as vulnerable to the Evil Mercer battles as are the guilty.

His enemies may wear human flesh, but at the core they are fiends. During the course of 278 pages, he must defeat demons, zombies, something at least superficially vampiric, haints and ghosts, familiars, spiders that may or may not be true arachnids, werewolves, shapeshifters, goblins, and kobolds—the latter a particularly nasty import from German mythology, with a more than unnatural attachment to their queen. Then there are the entities that move even further outward, the cosmically oriented older gods that ultimately harken back to Lovecraft. Although Lansdale does not mention any of the Great Old Ones by name, the requisite books of occult, eldritch knowledge, including the dreaded Necronomicon and The Book of Doches.

Frequently including wonderfully cadenced stories-within-stories, the tales in Deadman’s Road provide Lansdale with a perfect canvas for his particular kind of humor/horror. Everything is serious, yet nothing is taken too seriously. And the central figure of a preacher-man in black who resolves issues with his six-shooters and his Bible is ideal as a way of connecting the tales.  

Recommended.

Joanne Pence, ANCIENT ECHOES--Unraveling Ancient Secrets...in Idaho

Ancient Echoes

Joanne Pence

Quail Hill Publishing

April, 2013, $17.99 trade paperback, $4.99 eBook

The Idaho Batholith is a gigantic granite intrusion covering thousands of square miles in the center of the state, formed at a time when dinosaurs still roamed the lowlands of nearby Montana. In spite of the age of its constituent rocks, it is rough, raw, with sharp peaks and stunningly steep valleys, cut in part by the Salmon River—locally known as the “River of No Return.” No major thoroughfares transect the wilderness; there are no major cities or towns located in its rugged landscapes. Few people are even familiar with how utterly empty the region is.

I’ve driven some of the highways on its periphery and have been mightily impressed with the loneliness the area, the sense of nature overwhelming petty human efforts to encroach on its isolation. Everything about the region speaks of remoteness, solitude, reclusiveness. Even its earliest American explorers, Lewis and Clark, found it impossible to travel on its wild waters…hence its local name.

It is almost as if something—something unknown and unknowable—has restrained incursions into the emptiness. As if…. 

Joanne Pence’s highly enjoyable paranormal novel looks into that as if and narrates a story of occult secrets centuries old and mortally dangerous to explore, all focusing on the granite wildness of central Idaho. Her characters range from a middle-aged university professor guiding archeology students on a field trip; to Indiana Jones-style action-adventure types; to hard-muscled, well-armed mercenaries packing the most sophisticated firepower; to old-West style lawmen; to generations of psychically wounded men and women confronting the coldest of all mysteries—Death itself.

Her landscapes include not only the Idaho wilderness but places both exotic and familiar: the deserts of Mongolia, the crowded streets of Jerusalem, the stuffy museums of Paris, the inextricable complexities—both physical and psychological—of Washington, D.C., and the rarified reaches of “Big Pharm” in New York. With each change in locale, Pence brings sufficient details to create believable situations, although she is at her best in limning the virtually untouched world of the great Batholith.

Her plot is both convoluted and direct. It hinges on a single “what if”: What if, centuries ago, an alchemical adept had hidden in the heart of Idaho a now-forgotten book, a treatise dating back to the beginnings of the Christian era, that contained the key to transmutation—to the ancient study devoted not simply to creating gold from base metals but also to transforming frail, time-bound man into an immortal…a god?

As odd as this might sound—central Idaho? Really?—Pence crosses her Ts and dots her Is in constructing a web of events that make it plausible. Does she depend on coincidence in bringing together her wide cast of subjects? Yes, but ultimately, in the world of Ancient Echoes, there are no coincidences; there are only the manipulations and machinations by proto-chemists who unraveled the greatest mystery of all and must now live with the blessing—and the curse—of immortality.

Along the way from outer Mongolia to central Idaho, readers will confront the unanticipated, the unbelievable: a centuries-old corpse, flawlessly preserved, that triggers the final round of events; two perfect columns of living granite, topped with, of all things, Egyptian hieroglyphs, that might or might not be portals to another world; and—perhaps most fascinating of all—hideous, death-dealing creatures unknown to science, unidentifiable, horrific, and entirely other-worldly.

An intriguing blend of history, action-adventure, religious speculation, alchemy (theoretical, philosophical, and practical), and horror, with occasional touches of psychological thriller and romance, Ancient Echoes is a well-crafted tale designed to entertain and perhaps even enlighten.

Highly recommended.

Peter Giglio, STEALING NIGHT--Sunfall Revisited

Stealing Night

Peter Giglio

Nightscape Press

April 2013, $12.99 trade paperback, $3.99 eBook 

 One thing I much appreciate about horror as a ‘genre’ is its limitlessness. To be sure, there

are usually creatures or monsters or things both gruesome and terrifying…but not always and not exclusively. Sometimes the horror is overt, but sometimes it is subtle, incremental, and entirely human.

Welcome (again, to those of you that have read Sunfall Manor) to Sunfall, Nebraska. It is an archetypal small-small town in an America stunned by economic downturn and stagnation. Nothing much ever changes in Sunfall; a few faces depart, a few new faces arrive, but on the whole everyone know everyone…and everything about everyone.

Except for the deepest, darkest secrets.

At the beginning of Stealing Night, Jack’s few secrets are fairly obvious to everyone. He wants out of Sunfall, and he wants to take his niece, Nora, and his drug-addicted sister, Lily, with him. He wants to escape a thankless, make-work, two-days-a-week job polishing cars at the local used-car lot. He wants more for himself and his new ward than existing in a $200-a-month fleabag apartment. He wants a life.

When a former friend from high school suddenly appears, Jack’s life takes a decidedly—and deadly—new direction. Lee persuades him, indeed almost forces him, to “take a ride.” As the two careen down a rural roadway, Jack sees a set of headlights coming their way and, casting back to memories of accompanying his father on business trips, panics. Even as he recalls his father’s words—“Don’t be afraid…. They’re just stealing night, messing with the way you see things. Trust me, they’re not coming for us”—he understands that these lights are a threat.

These lights are coming for Jack. The lights, the oncoming car, a deer suddenly leaping onto the roadway, Lee’s mercurial temperament, and Jack’s own terror…all of them meet in an instant, and Jack’s life changes.

 Now he truly has a secret, deeper and darker than any he could ever have imagined, and it threatens him, Nora, Lily, and everything he hoped to change. 

Readers of Peter Giglio’s Sunfall Manor already know that terrible things happen in Sunfall. For those who have not yet visited the old house on the plains, the first few pages of Stealing Night demonstrate that truth clearly, through tone and atmosphere. Giglio has mastered a kind of world-weariness in his central character, something akin to the noir tone of gritty, grungy detective stories, and he manipulates it expertly in guiding Jack through crisis after crisis, forcing him to acknowledge to himself and to others the weight of the past. Having accepted responsibility for Nora, he must overcome his reluctance to be part of a family, his hatred of his father and his father’s fatal secret, his despair, and his ambivalence toward life in general and Sunfall in particular.

Giglio show us each stage in Jack’s development as he confronts obstacles and, ultimately, defeats them…although not without pain and torment both physical and mental. He has taken on not only a ward, but a burden of guilt that he must somehow accept and accommodate.

Fortunately, Jack is not alone. As Stealing Night, he discovers strength in placed he has not anticipated, in people he has virtually discarded as useless or helpless, and with their support, he moves toward a climax that surprises and satisfies.

Where is the horror?  In the meticulously crafted landscape, in the details that bring Sunfall to life and demonstrate how it is, ultimately, inimical to everything Jack strives for. To defeat the darkness, he must also defeat his world.

Eric J. Guignard's AFTER DEATH--Excursions Beyond the Undiscovered Bourne

After Death

Eric J. Guignard, ed.

Dark Moon

April 2013, $15.95 trade paperback, $3.99 eBook 

The idea of an anthology of stories devoted to visions of an after-life is inherently intriguing. After Death: An Anthology of Dark and Speculative Fiction Stories Examining What May Occur After We Die, it is an article of faith.

To some degree or another, each of us has a sense—an intimation—of what we expect will happen after death. For some, it is clear, precise, highly detailed; for others, it is amorphous, vague, a presentiment only; for others still, it is merely a window onto emptiness, nothingness. For all, however, as Eric Guignard notes in his introduction to After Death: An Anthology of Dark and Speculative Fiction Stories Examining What May Occur After We Die, it is an article of faith.

Even for those of us who share a particular perspective based on religion, philosophy, or reasoned conclusions, the specifics of what we might expect will vary widely. I suspect that if a group of thirty or so like-minded ‘believers’—regardless of the source of those beliefs—were brought together in a room and questioned directly about heaven, the after-life, whatever it might be called, no two of them would agree in every detail. Even among religions that overtly preach a world beyond this, details are sketchy and, usually, left up to the individuals’ imaginations.

That is why a book like After Death appeals. Its point, as Guignard also states, is not to “deliver affirmations but to offer suggestions. Anything is possible when the mysteries of the afterlife are concerned.” It is not a compilation of theological treatises, philosophical tracts, or anything of that sort—it is an anthology of stories, overt fictions, each set in a universe designed, implemented, and controlled by a writer’s unique, unrestrained imagination.

And in those universes, anything might happen.

The thirty-four tales present an extraordinary range of possibilities, from something approximating a ‘traditional’ view, as in Alvaro Rodriguez’s simultaneously horrific and comforting “Boy, 7” or Jamie Lackey’s sweetly satisfying “Robot Heaven,’ to situations as outré as that in Simon Clark’s “Hammerhead” or Benjamin Kane Ethridge’s “The death of E. Coli.” Some are stunning in their simplicity, as with Josh Strnad’s “Hellevator,” in which the single phrase “Well, what next?” takes on the weight of eternal damnation. Others are complex, capable of almost novelistic effects, as in Joe McKinney’s excellent “Acclimation Package,” a complex tale of life, death, and resurrection…sort of.

I find myself wanting to comment at least briefly on every story, since each brought an entirely different sensibility to the theme. Just flipping through the anthology’s 300+ pages—noting titles, authors’ names, and the remarkably evocative and apt illustrations by Audra Phillips—reminds me of thoughts, images, mental explorations of my own stimulated by the stories. There are favorites; there are a few that I found I could not resonate as completely with…no surprise, since no anthology can hope to provide everything for everyone. But taken as a whole After Death is a strong collections, well-constructed, beautifully illustrated, and certainly worth reading.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs, THE LOST CONTINENT--A Glimpse at the Future from the Past

The Lost Continent (orig: Beyond Thirty)

Edgar Rice Burroughs

As Beyond Thirty, 1916; as eBook, 2012

Project Gutenberg 

I am fairly familiar with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’ve read and enjoyed pretty much all of the Tarzan novels, the tales of Barsoom, the adventures of Pellucidar, and a handful of others. But I’d never run across The Lost Continent until the other night when I was searching for something entirely different on the Project Gutenberg list of titles.

I downloaded it almost immediately, largely because it sounded like it might have some connections to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which I also enjoyed mightily.

It did not.

Instead, The Lost Continent is a fascinating, unexpected disquisition on war and its horrors, set in the year 2137. Twenty-year-old Pan-American naval lieutenant Jefferson Turck is patrolling the 30^th meridian east when his flying submarine becomes disables. Strict laws forbid transgressing the thirty (as it is called in the story, hence the original title, Beyond Thirty) or the 175^th meridian west, the two official boundaries of Pan-America. Beyond them lies…well, no one knows, since for two centuries no one had passed beyond the two lines and returned to tell about it. No word has been received from either Europe or Asia since 1937, at the height of the Great War

Lieutenant Turck realizes that his crippled ship cannot reach Pan-America safely, so he steers for England. Along the way, he and a handful of crew are abandoned when they set out in a smaller boat to fish. Now, Turck and his men have no choice but to continue onward and face…whatever is there to find.

What they discover, and Turck’s various adventures, constitute the bulk of The Lost Continent. Suffice it to say as a teaser that England—called by its natives “Grubitten” or “Grubritten,” has been entirely devastated by the Great War, and then by an unnamed plague. Only a few small camps remain. Turck is taken captive but escapes, accompanied by a beautiful young woman—no wonder, since Burroughs is also the inventor of the incomparable Dejah Thoris.

In this future world, mainland Europe lies under the control of the Abyssinian Empire, its grasp extending as far as the ruins of Berlin; against the Abyssinians, the “yellow men from the east and north” contend for mastery. As Turck moves across the face of Europe and into Asia, he sees firsthand the consequences of unbridled warfare.

In truth, The Lost Continent is a bit thin. There are several action-adventure scenes that keep the story moving, but the latter chapters seem rushed (the book is quite thin itself) and more summarized than explored. Still, it goes far to suggest what Burroughs conceived as a possible outcome to the war waging on the Continent at the time he was writing, and to warfare in general. He presents an optimistic picture of the peaceful Pan-America, in which almost all of the (then) contemporary issues had been resolved, war made a matter of intellectual study only, and life essentially perfect (if a bit boring).

The novel is a piece of its time. It feels more than a bit like H.G. Wells’ 1910 novel When the Sleeper Wakes and his1936 film, Things to Come. There is more than a touch of Jonathan Swift’s The Gulliver’s Travels, with the representative of Burroughs’s world struggling to make sense of the curiosities he encounters. And, of course, there is the constant bravado of Tarzan himself, of John Carter of Mars (about who Burroughs wrote several stories at the same time as he was writing The Lost Continent), and David Innes of Pellucidar.

 As a look at the future from the past, it is entertaining and enlightening.

Rick Hautala, THE MOUNTAIN KING--Grisly Horror for Its Own Sake

The Mountain King

Rick Hautala

Leisure Books, 2001; Cemetery Dance, 2011 (eBook) 

Rick Hautala’s The Mountain King is a solid horror story, well told.

It is not narrative overlaid with or supporting philosophy, religion, or sociology. It does not grapple with the vast un-solvables of pollution, global climate change, equality of the sexes, marriage equality, or gun control (although a certain amount of gun control would have made things extremely difficult for Hautala’s characters). In fact, it leaves such concerns at the base of the mountain that is the story’s eponymous landscape.

Instead, it is a story of a man. And a monstrum. And the battle for life or death between them.

Mark Newman and his closest friend, Phil Sawyer, are hiking a trail on one of Maine’s highest peaks, Mount Agiochook, when a sudden blizzard forces them to move down-mountain as fast as possible. When Phil falls from a narrow, icy ledge, Mark must watch in impotent terror as something—a huge, hairy, man-like creature—sweeps down on Phil’s body and carries it away.

When Mark returns to town, no one believes his story that Phil slipped. Worse, he comes under suspicion of complicity in Phil’s death. And worst yet, while he is absent, hunting for Phil—or Phil’s body—his wife’s lover is brutally murdered. There is no clear evidence that Mark had anything to do with the killing, but when the local authorities begin a sweep through the forests for Phil, at least a few of them are looking for Mark as well…as a murderer.

In the meantime, he is also being pursued by the creature…or creatures.

If you are looking for a deep, ‘relevant’ tale of man versus society or of a society gone wrong and making life intolerable for the hero, The Mountain King is not for you.

If you are looking for a horror novel that takes as its premise that monsters can be as vengeful and bloodthirsty as those that hunt them; or for a novel that sets events in motion then rings as many changes on those events as possible; or simply a novel that has as its primary purpose to entertain through thrills and chills, and occasionally through outright physical grossness and bloodiness, then The Mountain King is well worth a read. 

--Reviewed by Michael R. Collings

Matthew Costello, GARDEN--Wurms, More Wurms, and....

Garden

Matthew Costello

NeoCon Classic Horror #33

January 2013, $4.99, eBook 

I’ve enjoyed reading Matthew Costello’s fiction since I met him at HorrorCon ’89, a celebration of all things horror held at the Stanley Hotel in Estes CO, the birthplace, as it were, of Stephen King’s The Shining. I purchased Beneath Still Waters there, completed it long before the return plane ride home, and made a mental note to watch for his name on books in the future. I haven’t read everything of his, not by a far stretch, but everything I have read has been interesting, engaging, and satisfying…including perhaps my favorite of his things to date, Wurm (1991).

I somehow missed the sequel to that remarkable novel when it first appeared in 1993, however; but now I’ve had the opportunity to make up for that loss by reading the Kindle edition of Garden, published this year by NeoCon E-books.

At the end of Wurm—as F. Paul Wilson points out in his introduction to Garden, itself an enormously evocative title—the eponymous worms, deep-sea creatures inhabiting essentially uninhabitable areas near ocean vents, threatened to take over earth’s waterways, but hadn’t…yet.

In Garden, they have. Water has become a frighteningly dangerous element; even to approach a beach is a prima facie justification for immediate execution by vigilant air patrols. New York has been cordoned off and substantially given over to the invading worms and their hosts; the few uninfected human remaining live in constant fear of a horrible death. Even inland cities along waterways have become infected, to the point that the possibility of human annihilation is terrifyingly real.

Jo Cross, her father Michael, Father Farrand, and other survivors from Wurm return in Garden, set five years after the initial outbreak. They are still battling against incursions by the voracious creatures, still turning to science for answers that will save humanity…and not finding them. Approach after approach, test after test has failed to offer any hope.

And then, at the height of the crisis, several people—including Jo, Michael, and Father Farrand—notice something that has gone unremarked for half a decade; and in that discovery, they are convinced, lies the key to everything. Michael agrees to enter New York to search for more information; Father Farrand begins to realize that science is not going to be sufficient for humanity’s survival; and Jo…, well, Jo experiences a horrific dream that provides her with all of the knowledge she needs to go in search of her father and try to save him.

Garden certainly has its share of monsters: the worms themselves and their gaping, red-tined maws; the infected humans spurred by a devastating hunger to feed on their fellows, and more; and something else, something new. Wurm rested in part on a neo-Lovecraftian sense that the worms were simultaneously terrestrial and much, much more. In Garden, that sense becomes overt.

As it does, the novel touches upon, then embraces, one of my favorite elements of horror fiction, one frequently ignored in quests for more blood and more guts: If there is great evil, there must also be great good. This realization alters everything in Garden and allows it to rise above typical Lovecraftian Great Old Ones-trying-to-take-over-the-Earth and deal with underlying, more fundamental issues. It is to Costello’s credit that he manages to make the full actualization of that premise jibe perfectly with the storyline. Those who have survived the initial attacks have done so for a reason, and understanding that reason leads to a final resolution.

The novel is taut, suspenseful, with frequently intercut passages following several characters, all bent upon the same thing: survival, for themselves and for those they love.

Recommended.

McKinney and McCarty, LOST GIRL OF THE LAKE--A Piece of Perfection

Lost Girl of the Lake

Joe McKinney and Michael McCarty

Bad Moon Books and Evil Jester Press

2012 (print), 2013 (eBook)

$18.95 (print), $3.79 (eBook) 

Lost Girl of the Lake is an almost perfectly textured book.

Generally, I try not to point overtly to technique in reviewing, since the purpose of a story is not to showcase an author’s skill (or in this case the two authors’ skill) but rather to tell a story. If admiration of technique distracts too strongly from the underlying narrative, then perhaps the writer(s) choose to concentrate on the wrong thing.

In the case of Lost Girl of the Lake, however, the texture—the language, the characterization through that language, the arrangement of words on the page to complete the authors’ vision of the story—is so integral to the story that to alter one of the two elements would be to destroy the other.

From the first page, McKinney and McCarty create an ideal tone for a coming-of-age story that attempts—and ultimately produces—something much more. They masterfully manipulate the world-weary, experienced voice of a seventy-five-year-old man struggling to recapture, in his own memory if nowhere else, a seminal moment in his life, understanding as he does so how much that moment helped determine who he has become; and the naïve, wide-eyed voice of his fifteen-year-old self in the throes of discovery…discovery of sex and female beauty, of his unity with and simultaneously increasing isolation from his parents, of the encroaching hand of the past upon the present.

 The story itself is deceptively simple. In August, 1961, young Mark Gaitlin is on vacation with his parents and his sister, spending two weeks at an exclusive resort to celebrate—along with most of Houston’s upper-crust—the annual arrival of the Great Southern White butterfly (a not incidental metaphor for Mark’s increasing awareness of his own privileged status as a scion of a wealthy white attorney). As they travel toward Lake Livingston, they pass the blackened, crumbled remains of a long-deserted village, which Mark’s father identifies as Gaitlinville, founded by Mark’s family generations before.

At the lake, bored out of his mind at the first official event, a formal dance, Mark leaves the clubhouse, walks out to the dock, and sees a girl about his own age swimming in the lake…naked. Stunned, speechless, but drawn irrevocably to the sight, he approaches, speaks to her, and, at her invitation, joins her in a bit of skinny-dipping. When he becomes too forward, she abruptly leaves.

Oh, and as he stumbles back to the family’s cabin, he nearly steps on a four-foot-long copperhead.

The rest of the story—at the level of basic plot—concerns Marks increasing obsession with the girl, his burgeoning sense of self (including his attempts at keeping secrets from his parents), and his growing involvement, first in dreams and then in life, with the ruins of Gaitlinville. Twining through his experiences are recurrent images of nascent sexuality, fleeting glimpses of the girl in the lake, and serpents…long, thick, ugly, deadly copperheads.

Even though Lost Girl of the Lake reads quickly and easily—fluidly—by the end it has become much more than just another coming-of-age story. It resonates on multiple levels, not only because so much of it is outright supernatural horror but also because much of it is precisely, honestly human. Mark’s experiences and his decisions concerning them remain unbelievable on one hand and eminently acceptable on the other. Metaphor and symbol (sometimes obvious, sometimes not) shift seamlessly with reality, so that by the end, the story has created an almost ephemeral, not quite tangible vision of a life wholly lived superimposed over a life just begun…which, I think, is the essence of the narrative.

There are so many more elements of the story that might be discussed, but….

In my college speech course, the professor took an outline for the next week’s speech from a student, put it under the opaque projector for a couple of minutes, then pulled it out and literally threw it back at the student. “I need another one,” she said. “I can’t teach from perfection. Someone give me one that has mistakes.”

 That’s rather how I feel about Lost Girl of the Lake; the more I write, the more convinced I become that I am doing it a disservice. So instead of adding to my verbiage, let me just suggest…Read it. It won’t disappoint.