Recent Reads From HELL Part IV

 Here's a quick rundown on a few books I recently read.

Spawn of Hell by William Schoell

What can I say about this one? Not much, unfortunately. Kind of an interesting premise...kind of. Plagued by uninteresting characters, more typos than you typically see in mass market paperbacks, and just kind of typical in every way. I read this one a few weeks ago and I can't really remember much about it. It just wasn't all that remarkable. Creatures living under an abandoned building in a small town, devouring those unfortunate enough to get in their way. They get a taste for human flesh and become more bold. This was Schoell's debut. It's not a bad book, but it's not very good at all. I will try another of his novels some day. I know I'd hate to be judged by my first two books. They're not very good either.

The Silent Enemy by Ernest T. Jahn

This book had a fascinating premise, and being set in Hawaii was a plus, considering I've only read a few books set in the Aloha State. Unfortunately that where's anything good ends. It was readable, but in a pulp sort of way. The back cover copy promises mutated seaweed, and though there are hints of that, I felt it was a missed opportunity. Most of the story is bad character development and terrible dialogue. It felt like the book was written by whoever wrote old episodes of Scooby Doo Where Are You? That's not a knock on Scooby Doo (I'm a fan), but I expect more out of a novel. A lot more. A quick read, there are a few things to like, but I felt like this story could have been so much more.

Fright Night by John Skipp and Craig Spector

This is officially the first movie novelization I've ever read, and it didn't disappoint! I've seen the film several times, but not in a while. The book brought it all back in vivid detail. It was well written, as you would expect from Skipp and Spector, but clearly it wasn't their own original work. It has their fingerprints all over it, but I felt it was far more stripped down than their other books. I'm very interested in reading novelizations of movies I'm even more familiar with just to see the differences. This one was a hell of a lot of fun.

Toplin by Michael McDowell

Despite my adoration of McDowell's work, this one just didn't do it for me. I DNF'd it (to those in the back, that means Did Not Finish). The writing was solid, and very unlike McDowell's southern gothic style prose that I'm used to. I wanted to like the story, but I just didn't find it very engaging. It was almost dream-like, which made it very confusing. What turned out to be the final straw was when the narrator continued to detail the six or seven suits he has in his closet. I'm sure his obsession with those suits was indicative of some kind of
mental illness he was dealing with, but I just couldn't take it any more. This book was originally published around '85 in a special limited edition, but wasn't published in a mass market edition until the 90's when the Dell Abyss line picked it up. Dell Abyss published some amazing books, and also some that were a bit too experimental for me. Toplin fits in the latter category.

That's all for now. I'm currently working through the wonderful stories in Ronald Kelly's collection The Essential Sick Stuff, Prophecy by David Seltzer, and...I really want to read One For the Road by Wesley Southard,
but I can't remember where I put the book!!!

Double Barrel Vol. 3 COMING SOON!

The cover for the third installment of the Pint Bottle Press Double Barrel series has been released. There is a fantastic round of authors in this one, including myself. Just look at that cover art!

Double Barrel means double the stories. My contributions to this fine anthology of horror are called "From Unclean Spells" and "Fuel For the King of Death". I won't give anything away, but one story could be classified as a creature feature, and the other is set in the world of my novel Death Obsessed.

Coming soon!

In Black is Now Available!

In Black, my latest novel of horror from Eldritch Press, is now available in ebook and trade paperback.

Chase Little thought he’d been hired to do some painting, but when the paint dried, it created a black void that leads to a dungeon. Appalled yet fascinated, he flees, burning down the house and stealing the inky liquid. Fearing that he will be arrested for arson, Chase and his girlfriend Leah flee to the rundown town of Needles in the Mojave Desert.

Leah soon disappears, leaving him alone, learning too late of the true nature of the black paint and the evil that lies beyond the veil of darkness it creates. He was warned about the black paint, but didn’t listen. Now he has to find and destroy it before more innocent lives succumb to its unfathomable darkness.

Here are a few links to buy the book, only $2.99 for an ebook or $9.99 for print: Amazon & Nook: Barnes and Noble.

Is It Horror? Dark Fantasy? Urban Fantasy?

Seems that some stories cannot be labeled with a simple tag as clearly cut as other stories. What I call horror someone else will call dark fantasy, but where is the dividing line? I suppose a horrific story without supernatural elements could be classified as straight horror, whereas the same story with an element of the supernatural could be classified as dark fantasy. Some people use those very classifications (I recall someone referring to Stephen King's non-supernatural stories as his only horror stories--everything else being labeled Dark fantasy--which is ridiculous), but that doesn't sit well with me. Not at all. King's Pet Sematary is a horror story. Bentley Little's The House is horror. To label dark supernatural stories as dark fantasy would be to put all ghost stories under that label,
which would pretty much be a crime by my standards.

I've been wary of labels, however, to a certain degree, I like them. My issue is that micro-labeling the genres becomes confusing. This is something seen heavily in music. You have rap, hip-hop, gangsta rap, crunk, freestyle, yadda yadda. On the other hand you have heavy metal, groove metal, grindcore, nu metal, black metal, death metal, yadda yadda yabba dabba doo. It's just too goddamned much, and I wonder if the world of speculative fiction is on its way to having so many ridiculous labels. In trying to find out exactly what slipstream is, I ran across a website that defines a number of spec-fic labels, one of which was "paranormal". I've heard of paranormal romance (a label I'm perfectly comfortable with considering that I have absolutely no interest in that type of fiction), but I had never considered that a "paranormal" story was worthy of a category all its own. For me, that's cutting the deck to thin.

So that brings me to my own books. I've always called them horror, though in a blurb for my novel THROUGH THE IN BETWEEN, HELL AWAITS, Daniel I. Russel calls the novel "...a fat slice of urban horror." When I read that I thought, "Yeah, that sounds about right. I kinda like that." And the more I thought about it the more I realized that HELL AWAITS could be just as easily classified a dark fantasy as it could a horror story, perhaps even an urban fantasy, though a considerable hunk of the story takes place in an unearthly realm. It certainly starts out as an urban fantasy. Or perhaps a dark urban fantasy.

Take my second novel PEOPLE OF THE ETHEREAL REALM. It's a horror story, maybe even a ghost story, or perhaps it could be classified as a paranormal story. Well now, let's hold on a second. Let's think this through. It's a very urban story, much more so that HELL AWAITS, so maybe it could be labeled a dark paranormal urban horror story.

I have a love-hate relationship with labels. They're necessary, but can be over examined. I certainly
wish my local Barnes & Noble would do a little more categorizing, maybe bring back the damn horror section. Buuuut, that's another rant for another blog.

On a final note, the two novels above can be purchased from all major online retailers. I've noticed quite a jump in visitors to this blog from all around the world, so, in addition to the amazon links embedded above, here is a link to my books on smashwords, where you can find formats for a variety of e-readers including kobo and Sony. Why not give them a read and let me know how you would categorize 'em.

-- Robert

Flashback to B-Movies and Rotten Corpses - Review of Horror Show by Greg Kihn

A young horror fan has a burning question for aging b-movie filmmaker Landis Woodley, a question that has been rumored for over thirty years: Were actual corpses used in the film CADAVER?

In a nutshell, this is the premise surrounding the meat of Greg Kihn's HORROR SHOW, a book that takes the reader back to 1957 and into the lives of a ragtag group of misfits who were involved with Landis Woodley, b-movie filmmaker and Hollywood pariah, and the events that led to the making of Woodley's greatest achievement, CADAVER, as well as the horrific aftermath.

HORROR SHOW is one hell of a book, particularly for those who have a vested interest in old horror films, though I would argue than anyone who digs a good horror yarn will have a good time with this one. There are obvious and unabashed parallels with Ed Wood and his legacy (my guess is that Kihn gleaned a lot off of Tim Burton's excellent movie ED WOOD), but this isn't some kind of wannabe or ripoff. HORROR SHOW is an homage to those wonderfully awful drive-in movies from the fifties and sixties as well as the behind the scenes madness that went into filming those inglorious gems. I happen to be a huge fan of old horror films, so this book was absolutely enthralling. My only complaint would be that I was scratching my head at the end. Seems to me that Kihn left it open for a sequel. I'm not a fan of that sort of ending. Then again, the book was so damn cool that I found myself forgiving the weak ending and immediately ordering the next book Kihn had published at the time, BIG ROCK BEAT. Arrived in the mail the other day. I'm looking forward to reading it.