Thoughts on The Specimen by Pete Kahle

Right off the bat I've got to say that for a debut novel, Pete Kahle has shown us that he knows what the hell he's doing. I haven't read a debut this strong in years. It's astonishing what he managed to do in this tome with character development and a plot that is told in a nonlinear format that most authors take years of novel writing to develop. Bravo, Pete!

So, The Specimen is a story about parasitic entities called Riders that, throughout human history, have been latching onto various people, living within them, and causing a great deal of bloodshed. There is a secret agency out to destroy the alien race of Riders, and have been doing so for many years, but their collective has corruption of its own. There's so much in this story that I can't even begin a good synopsis without spoilers, so I'll leave it at that.

The character development in this story is as rich and detailed as a Stephen King or Robert McCammon novel with visceral violence and gore that leans to the extreme in its vivid detail. Blood and body fluids abound! I found it interesting early in the story when a couple of guys were called "your typical goon", which I thought was a bad descriptor, until I realized that was a way of saying, hey, there are so many richly detailed characters in this book that these guys, who are only in the story for a few pages, are just a couple of red shirts. believe me, there's no lack of detail concerning the characters who matter to the story. They live. They breathe.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of massive tomes. They tend to feel padded and under-edited. I think this book could have been dialed down just a bit. There are a ton of sub-plots going on and the time-line jumps around a lot. It all makes sense and wasn't confusing at all, but I found the present day material to be the most interesting, and really the heart of the story. I think a lot of the story that was told through reports from the Graylock Institute (I may have flubbed the name there) could have been weaved into the narrative and completely eliminated, but that's just probably just me trying to slim down a novel that gives a great pleasure to people who like to sit down with that huge six-hundred-pager and commit for a while. I also think the intermissions (read the book to find out what I'm talking about), which gives the story nice historical context, were ultimately unnecessary. In fact, during the climax it is all summarized in a few paragraphs. The intermission chapters were well written, but I think they could have been pulled from the manuscript and used as promotional tools on a website or Patreon page or something. But who am I to suggest such a thing? Pete Kahle has done very well with this book, getting a shout-out recently from Brian Keene and earning almost 200 reviews on Amazon (that's fucking astonishing for both a debut novel and a small press author).

lastly, I listened to the audiobook version of the book, so I would be remiss to not mention a bit about that experience. First off, the narrator did a fantastic job. There were a number of accents that he nailed with convincing accuracy, which is so important. That gives the narrative movement and theater. No one wants to slog through an otherwise good book that feels like a sluggish monologue. Also, there were sound effects here and there that really added to the experience. They were used sparingly and were quite effective, making for a fun and entertaining experience.

Look, I know what Pete is doing with Bloodshot Books is important, but he needs to get another novel out there. I absolutely love reading new authors that are the real deal, and Kahle has got the goods. I highly recommend reading The Specimen, or better yet, listening to the audiobook (yes, the highlighted words are links).

Next up is Catacombs by Andrew Laurance, originally published under the title The Hiss. See ya then!

Thoughts on American Gothic by Robert Bloch

I'm a huge fan of Robert Bloch. He was one of the absolute best writers of short stories ever. King of the twist ending and able to develop a character in a paragraph or less. I read a ton of his short fiction before I ever read one of his novels. My first was Lori, and it's a good one. Lori is one of those reads that even someone like me who is a dreadfully slow reader can get through in one day. The man just knew how to structure sentences for maximum readability, something that was probably spawned from the economy of words in his short fiction. I've since read a number of Bloch's novels and the latest was American Gothic. These are a few of my thoughts.

First off, it was clear from the first page or two that this was a story based in part on the notorious serial killer H. H. Holmes. The villain's name is G. Gordon Gregg and we quickly discover that he has built a castle in Chicago with quite a number of rooms as well as staircases that lead to secret passage ways and doors that blend into walls. H. H. Holmes hired several contractors to build portions of his mansion using separate plans so no one but himself would know about the secret passages and whatnot. Fascinating stuff, so it's no surprise that Bloch decided to render a fictional account of the infamous H. H. Holmes and wrap it up in a mystery. There's an afterward entitled Post Mortem in which Bloch explains a bit about Homes and the inspiration for American Gothic.

The story itself was very much a mystery like the early Bloch material such as The Scarf, The Couch and Psycho, only this one was a historical piece. The characters were well drawn and he certainly didn't beat the reader over the head with the fact that is was the late eighteen hundreds, which is something that often happens with period pieces. I do have to say that when reading Robert W. Chambers, who was alive and writing close to the time this story took place, his work in many of the stories in The King in Yellow are so fully drenched in the stagnant alleyways and unpaved avenues of New York that you can't help but feel like you are right there in another time. Though you don't ever forget the time period in which American Gothic takes place, I felt that the presence of time could have been a little richer.

I like the protagonist, Crystal, a go-get-'em journalist who risks life and limb to break a story no one has faith in. She has to take seriously desperate measures and essentially she's working on a hunch. I can't help but see in her a character I wrote a in an unpublished novella and an unpublished novel. My investigative journalist, Veronica Hensley, is Crystal reincarnated, only she deals with modern menaces both human and inhuman.

There's no real motive for why G. Gordon Gregg does what he does (some kind of absurd romanticism as shown in his collection at the end of the story?), but who cares? Do we always have to have a reason? It's not like he was going to make some confession in the last chapter when he's getting doused with his own flesh dissolving chemicals and stabbed with his own knife. Just accept that G. Gordon Gregg is a goddamned vicious psychopath (a specialty of Robert Bloch), and enjoy the ride.

Thoughts on Gone South

My second read of 2017 was Gone South by Robert McCammon. Initial thought on finishing it . . . I loved it! I've read a few of his books and this was the best by far. Better than . . . wait for it . . . Boy's Life. Yep, I said it. I actually didn't even finish Boy's Life. I had consumed far too many southern coming of age stories at the time (Fear by Ronald Kelly, Midnight Rain by James Newman, etc.), so I was admittedly burnt out on that trope. I'll finish Boy's Life one day, but for now Gone South takes the cake.

Every character was complex and interesting from our Vietnam vet protagonist who finds himself on hard times and makes a life changing mistake that throws him into a downward spiral of twists and turns through the American South, to the bounty hunters who crisscross the same path looking for him. I mean, you got one guy who is a consummate professional and part time gambler who has an arm and partial face of a twin brother connected to his chest. Team him up with a greenhorn Elvis impersonator who goes by the name of Pelvis, and you have a misfit duo that can't help but get in each other's way. Both of these characters are revealed through the story and far more complex than your run of the mill antagonists. You get to liking Pelvis and even the professional bounty hunter, especially when they make it to a podunk bayou town that runs by its own set of laws, which is to say no law at all.

I'm not going to get into all of the characters, but they were well fleshed out and could have climbed out of the pages. Their motivations were justified by their varied pasts and the actions that set the whole shebang in motion. Every action has a reaction, that's for sure. As crazy as some of this book gets, it's plausible. Not once did I lose my suspension of disbelief.

Gone South is character driven fiction at its very best. This isn't horror, this is a southern fried crime thriller. The cherry on top is a fulfilling ending that brings the plot to completion with a bit of a twist that had me thinking about fate long after I was finished with the book.

Highly recommended especially if you like the twisty, turny plotting of Laymon and the oddball charm of Lansdale's Hap and Leonard books. I know my thoughts don;t get too deep, but I'm hoping that these posts will act as a sort of exercise in the way I consume and analyze fiction. Up next are my thoughts on Andrew Neiderman's Pin. See you soon!

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