The Overnight (2004) by Ramsey Campbell

The Overnight (2004) by Ramsey Campbell: Earth's greatest horror writer takes us into the first English franchise in the Texts big-box bookstore chain. There's friction between the go-get-'em American manager sent to show the English how it's done and the staff, many of whom have issues of their own with one another.

Located between Liverpool and Manchester, Texts and the surrounding strip mall have been constructed on long-unused ground in a place known as Fenny Meadows. Seemingly peaceful grassland while the mall was built, Fenny Meadows has started generating the pervasive fog and rising damp that it's infamous for. These are harbingers of what's to come.

The Overnight pleasingly combines satire with ancient horror and work-place dramedy. Campbell deftly weaves just enough exposition into the narrative to satisfy one's questions about just what is happening, all without having to drop a Basil Exposition-style figure into things. Indeed, the novel brings in what seems to be an Exposition Mouthpiece but then has him refuse to divulge more than a few snippets to one of the characters.

Instead, the most useful exposition both for the reader and for the characters comes from the fact that the Thing plaguing Fenny Meadows apparently enjoys taping over pre-recorded videocassettes. Or something does, perhaps as a warning.

Campbell divvies up The Overnight into third-person-limited chapters focused on one character. This ties into the novel's concerns with human empathy and social ties as the essence of civilization (indeed, being 'civil') -- the Thing of Fenny Meadows seeks to divide to conquer. What wakes in Fenny Meadows is the opposite of civility and fellow feeling  -- and the opposite of language itself as represented in all those doomed texts, and Texts. Winner of Best Novel of 2004 from the International Horror Guild. Highly recommended.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1969/1980) by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces (1969/1980) by John Kennedy Toole: If nothing else, A Confederacy of Dunces possesses one of the saddest origin stories in American publishing history. New Orleans writer and academic John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 in his early 30's. 

His mother persistently kept trying to get editors to read this novel for the next decade. As detailed in the introduction to this edition by Walker Percy, she finally got Percy to look at it in the late 1970's. Percy was suitably impressed. A Confederacy of Dunces would be published in 1980, to nigh-universal critical acclaim and tremendous sales.

The focus of the novel is one of the most comically grotesque of literary comic-grotesques, Ignatius J. Reilly. Morbidly obese, possessed of awesomely bad fashion sense, possessed of horrifyingly deficient personal hygiene... these are just a few of the 30ish man-child's attributes. 

He hates the modern world with a passion and longs for the reinstatement of medieval values. He masturbates while thinking of idyllic childhood days with his (now) dead dog. He gets violently ill while travelling in public transportation. He pontificates, prevaricates, and fantasizes about lashing his female enemies about the genitalia. He's homophobic, heterophobic, bigoted, and lazy almost beyond belief. He's a Mama's Boy who despises his mother.

One of the truly odd things about the novel is that while Reilly is a parody of certain academic "types" (his dissertation stalled out despite his averaging a paragraph a month), he's now weirdly appropriate for our Internet Outrage Era. He's immensely judgmental of everyone other than himself. His rage is never far from the surface. He's a coward and a bully. He even loves Batman. Jesus, would he have been a hoot while Game of Thrones was ending.

Reilly supplies much of the comic horror of the novel, though certainly not all of it. Major characters and minor struggle through a comically infernal New Orleans. Reilly's mother forces him to finally get a job after an auto-related disaster at the beginning of the novel. Reilly's voyage through the workplace supplies the plot thread; Reilly's desire to one-up his long-distance female nemesis/soul-mate Myrna Minkoff in sparking various political "revolutions" lays comic waste to everything around him. 

Set-pieces involving Reilly's time at a dilapidated clothing factory, his adventures at a run-down bar, his speaking engagement at a gay party, and his adventures selling hot dogs from a cart while dressed as some sort of pirate really need to be experienced rather than synopsized.

A Confederacy of Dunces has famously resisted movie adaptation for decades -- John Belushi and John Candy are only two of the notables attached to failed projects. I'm not sure if a faithful adaptation is possible. Covers for various editions generally try to make Reilly look cute or even cartoony. 

But while his appearance is indeed comical, it's also grotesque to the point that it would defeat audience sympathy to, for instance, depict Reilly sucking down hot dogs and then slurping his own face with his enormous tongue, all in the context of someone who does not seem to bathe, or believe in bathing. So Reilly would be turned into a wacky but lovable fat man, and the sharp edges of the novel sanded off. Reilly and his true nemesis, a kicky pyloric valve, should probably be left to the printed page, in all his ragged and horrible glory. Highly recommended.

Don't Go Back to Dunnville, Waste Another Year

Touch of the Past (1988) by Jon L. Breen: Pleasant, short mystery sees California bookstore owner and amateur sleuth Rachel Hennings try to solve the mystery of a murdered mystery writer who was obsessed with the year 1937. Red herrings abound, characterization is thin but tolerable, and more inside secrets of the used book trade would have been nice. Lightly recommended.

Crimson (2002) by Gord Rollo: Things start off promisingly in Canadian horror writer Gord Rollo's Crimson. Four boys in a small town (Dunnville, Ontario, to be exact) stumble across an ancient evil. Things get bad, fast. The novel jumps from 1977 to 1986 to the mid-2000's. The increasingly 'and-the-kitchen-sink' approach to the supernatural involves a certain number of homages to such superior 'children vs. ancient evil' novels as Stephen King's It (giant spider! kid wants to be a writer!), Dan Simmons' Summer of Night (evil scarecrow! kid wants to be a writer!), and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (the evil returns periodically!).

Rollo's time-jumps move the novel away from It and company and unfortunately into the realm of 'Why research anything when you can just fake it?'.  This is a novel set in small-town Canada in its first two sections, though there's nothing particularly Canadian about anything. Alas, section two involves a police investigation that starts off laughable and rapidly becomes ridiculous. 

Poor old Dunnville is left to fend for itself, except for the loan of eight officers from other towns, as a serial killer racks up a double-digit murder total in a couple of weeks. Really? It's 1986. Are there no TV stations, no newspapers that aren't local? Given the small size of Dunnville, one might think the province -- and the Ontario Provincial Police -- would be sent in to help. One would be wrong. Hoo boy. 

Then we jump to the mid-2000's, and an absurd prison sequence. Someone gets sent to a Toronto penitentiary for murders he didn't commit. And what a penitentiary! Not only is it worse than Shawshank Prison and the Turkish prison in Midnight Express put together, it's got an overall prisoner death rate that clocks in at about ten times the national average for that time period. Possibly 100X. Alas. Hey, there's an attempted prison break that involves a sewer pipe! There's an electric chair scene! Yes, Canada has brought back the death penalty because I'm not going to spoil how and why that happened! Rita Hayworth is on the Green Mile with It!

Section three also gives us a lengthy Basil Exposition sequence in which the terrible monster explains its entire life history and its cunning plan to its victim. Then, as the monster's supernatural powers consist of Whatever the Novel Needs Right Now, it hangs around to intermittently taunt our death-row prisoner for several years. It floats. Not down there, but up by the ceiling, invisible and inaudible and, given its decayed condition, presumably unsmellable to all but our hero. As its pointless electric chair plot moves to its climax, it's just hanging around laughing and laughing. It even steals our protagonist's last meal! Quel horreur! This is the worst monster in human history!

The novel climaxes with a twist that doesn't make much sense even when it's explained a chapter after that twist. Prior to that, we also get a explanation of What Hell is Really Like that reads like something Todd Macfarlane rejected for his Spawn comic, and which destroys all remaining shreds of the suspension of disbelief the novel has left. 

Some of the loopier supernatural elements might work in a novel that paid much, much more attention to the verisimilitude of its police and prison sequences. Though the villain, a centuries-old being who talks like an annoying bully in an episode of Buffy, becomes less and less interesting the more he talks. And talks. And talks. 

There's even a point at which the monster notes that it was known as Baron Bloodshed. This would make a lot more sense if it weren't known as Baron Bloodshed in Eastern Europe in the 14th century. If nothing else, the protagonist misses a chance for a real zinger by not asking if Baron Bloodshed is alliterative in whatever non-English tongue the monster was speaking at the time. 

Not all the problems are the writer's. A good editor should have suggested changes, especially to the second and third parts. And presumably suggested that a monster that never stops talking isn't a monster, it's just a bad room-mate. Not recommended.

Two Crappy Horror Novels I Wish I Had Not Read

The aura is the wrong colour!

The Strangers (1984) by Mort Castle: Depressing, nihilistic, pointless, nauseating, and a tad rapey horror novel that ends where it should have begun. Technically, Mort Castle isn't a bad writer. Indeed, just from this brief exposure I'd rate him above beloved horror writers that include Richard Laymon and Douglas Clegg. But this is one of those horror novels that some people might confuse with splatterpunk given the violence. It isn't -- sociologically, it's about as reactionary a thing as one can find in the horror genre. 

Bad things happen because a small percentage of people are Strangers -- bloodthirsty psychopaths who pretend to be normal people as they await The Time of the Strangers. While waiting, they account for pretty much all human atrocity in the world. Luckily, you can spot them by their Auras! Well, not luckily, because no one's going to do much of anything productive in this novel who isn't a Stranger. If you enjoy a pointless catalogue of atrocities and boring characters who are either monsters or victims, this is the novel for you. Not recommended.

Under the Lake (1987) by Stuart Woods: Jesus, what did Stuart Woods have on Stephen King, Pat Conroy, and Andrew Greeley to get the glowing back-cover quotes this novel received? Woods still writes, so far as I can tell, in the thriller genre. That's probably a good idea. Ostensibly a Southern Gothic ghost story, Under the Lake wanders off into ill-advised thriller territory when it should be developing its more gothic elements. Why pay off on atmosphere when you can have a couple of pitched gun battles and an exploding plane? Why indeed. 

There are brief moments of interest here, but the horrific revelation towards the end lands with a dull thud. After all the perfunctory murders, seances, incest, and mopey drunk writers, this is all there is? An unpleasant bit in which a 12-year-old girl is presented as a sexual predator really, really, really doesn't help things. Not at all. Not recommended.

Arthur Machen in the Hands of an Angry God

The Vanishing (2007) by Bentley Little: This is either a terrible novel by the usually reliable Bentley Little or a terrific parody of a horror novel. The weirdness starts on the cover, where Stephen King proclaims Little "the poet laureate" of modern horror. Really? Because Little's prose is about as anti-poetic as it gets -- sometimes it's barely prose.

Little's strengths have been in his strange ideas and sudden plot twists. And those are certainly in evidence here. This is a novel that twists right at the title, which doesn't seem to have any major relevance to the novel it's the title of. So it goes. Is this too some sort of joke about Little's preference for one and two word titles for his novels?

Rich white men start going crazy and killing people. Children with the heads of animals are being found in various West Coast cities. A flashback narrative follows an early 19th-century wagon train into an American West found on no map. It all seems sort of intriguing.

Buckets of blood will be thrown about. Even vaguely alternate sexual practices will be linked to Evil. Some evil monsters will show up. But those monsters are also, and I quote, "sexy"! People will bang monsters. People will be banged by monsters. An elite force of mercenaries will suddenly show up to help set things right. They will be tempted to bang those monsters, but they will resist!

To summon these monsters people want to bang, one has to go to certain places and yell out at least slightly obscene rhymes. Or as one of the rhymes goes in the novel, "Engine Engine Number Nine, Take me quickly from behind." I'm not making this up. One of the sexy things these monsters do is a sexy dance consisting primarily of stripper-like gyrations. The monsters look like giant hybrids of lizards, people, and other animals, with Giant-Size sexual organs that everyone keeps staring at with lust. I told you they were sexy, and sexy means Big!

At one point, a character thinks the New York skyline at night looks like a bunch of rectangular Christmas trees, while the cars below look like glowing ants. I'm not making that up, either.

The monsters are a sort of quasi-mystical holdover, in a tradition going back in horror to Arthur Machen's malign little people. They live with their human sex-buddies in a magical land hidden in the Pacific Northwest in which a giant mountain of sewage and offal looms over the landscape. Sex and shit. Get it? Cloachal?

A trio of ten-year-old girls get raped by the monsters in a flashback. Women are kept as milking animals by one of the monster's half-human offspring.  Besides reciting some obscene rhyme, people who want to attract the monsters also rub themselves in their own urine and possible feces. Get it? Cloachal! Thank god for that mercenary group. They really come in handy for our protagonists, a reporter haunted by childhood trauma and a socially retarded social worker.

Did I mention that a priest gets raped to death in his church by monsters? Oh, yeah! If nothing else, The Vanishing makes Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex" look like "The Turn of the Screw" by comparison. Not recommended, or recommended a lot.

Southern California Dick

L.A. Requiem (Elvis Cole #8) (1999) by Robert Crais: The Southern California-set Elvis Cole hard-boiled detective series (well, soft-boiled -- Elvis is an emotional softy) always pays off in terms of tightly plotted, minutely detailed detective fiction, almost always with a large side portion of the procedural. There's a lot of procedural in this one, as the police and Cole investigate a murder together thanks to the power and influence of the victim's father. 

As was the case for several Cole novels, the only real drag is Lisa Chenier, Cole's love interest who sucks all the joy and energy out of the novel whenever she appears. It doesn't help that Cole suddenly inspires romantic obsession in a female L.A. cop in this one. Crais is at his best when delineating complicated investigations or dropping the occasional witticism. His romantic writing stinks.

L.A. Requiem stylistically  opened up the Cole series when it came out in 1999, mixing as it does the traditional first-person detective narration with third-person flashbacks involving Cole's hyper-competent detective pal Joe Pike and a number of other characters (including the killer) and third-person narration for events Cole is not present for. 

Overall, the novel's greatest strength lies in its depiction of the course of an investigation. The Los Angeles police are depicted sympathetically, for the most part, with a lot of nuts-and-bolts descriptions of just how a murder case is investigated. Good stuff. Recommended.

The Forgotten Man (Elvis Cole #10) (2005) by Robert Crais: Robert Crais explores L.A. private-eye Elvis Cole's tortured childhood in this novel, in which a man claiming to be Cole's long-vanished father is found murdered in an alley. As always, Crais's depiction of the details of an investigation is top-notch. The flashbacks are also fascinating, as are many of the supporting characters.

Crais also brings in a character from a non-Cole novel, Detective Starkey from Demolition Angel. She's a former bomb-squad officer forced into other police work after getting blown up. She's a fun counterpoint to Cole until she becomes romantically obsessed with him, a sub-plot that Crais used with another female cop in the earlier L.A. Requiem. And it's annoying here too. And while Cole is estranged from gal-pal/wet-blanket Lisa Chenier in this novel, she shows up just enough to put a damper on a number of scenes.

The novel is otherwise solid and twisty and thoroughly enjoyable. The indomitable Joe Pike appears, as does Cole's diffident pet cat. Crais opens up the narrative to third-person material not witnessed by Cole, who otherwise traditionally (for the hard-boiled detective) narrates in first person. The climax is thrilling, though it repeats certain plot elements from the earlier Cole novel L.A. Requiem. And the killer is fascinatingly depicted, though he shares a lot of similarities with the killer in L.A. Requiem. Maybe I shouldn't have read these books back to back. Recommended.

Demons and Ghost-dogs

The Deceased (1999) by Tom Piccirilli:  The late and much-lamented Tom Piccirilli's early horror novels were uniquely strange. Strange events, strange creatures, strange protagonists. The simplest of plot-lines could suddenly stop dead for disturbingly violent and/or sexual set-pieces. Characters might spend pages immersed in their own poetic maladjustment. The prose would push the limits of the purple and the florid, sometimes going way, way beyond the red-line. And it all worked as the expression of someone who wanted more out of the horror novel than simply plain prose and A-Z plotting.

The Deceased embodies Piccirilli's approach to horror. Indeed, there's almost no point describing it in all its pulpy, poetic, weird glory. It's about a young horror writer wrestling with the demons of his terrible past. Some of those demons are deceased members of his own family. There's pathetic fallacy and incest and tips on writing (seriously). There are strange things in the forest surrounding the ancestral home. There's that ancestral home with its weird construction and hideous facade. There are ghosts and monsters and voices from the past.

To borrow a phrase from somebody, it's all a bravura frenzy. It's also the sort of writing that seems to drive a certain type of reader, one looking for the straightforward and the plain style, completely nuts. You're watching a gifted writer assemble and disassemble himself simultaneously. It may not always be pretty, coherent, or even 'good' in a traditional sense, but it's compelling and very human. Recommended.

The Midnight Road (2007) by Tom Piccirilli:  40ish Flynn is a case-worker for New York City's Child Protective Services.  He's a broken soul due to childhood tragedy. But he's also dogged and committed to child welfare. And a huge fan of film noir. So of course he gets involved in a noirish case with hints of (possible) supernatural horror.

The late Tom Piccirilli wrote a string of noirish thrillers beginning in the early oughts. This is one of them. It lacks the exuberant stylistic flourishes of some of his earlier horror works, but it's plotted beautifully, with twists that are difficult to see coming.

Flynn is very much the damaged would-be knight of noir and hard-boiled detective stories, emotionally stunted but heroically struggling against demons inside and outside. The character's own investment in noir makes for a sort of running meta-commentary on the action, as Flynn notes ways in which his own story does or does not resemble the noir films he loves so much.

Piccirilli tamps down his stylistic flourishes for, I assume, reasons of commercial viability: a person has to eat. But they also suit the noir and hard-boiled genres he's working with. Stylistic outliers like James Ellroy exist, but for the most part the hard-boiled heroes and anti-heroes and straight-out villains of Piccirilli's genre antecedents work within a world of flavourful but not wildly experimental or impressionistic prose. 

The result is that old chestnut, a page-turner, one which doesn't end until Flynn has dealt with his internal demons. The identities of the antagonists come as a shock, but a fair one. Flynn, sympathetic and self-lacerating, makes for a fine protagonist. And touches of the absurd -- Flynn finds himself haunted by the talking ghost of a French bulldog, probably the result of slight brain damage incurred early in the novel. In all, a very satisfying ride on The Midnight Road. Recommended.

The Scar (2002) by China Mieville

The Scar (2002) by China Mieville: China Mieville's second novel about the steampunky, science-fantasy world of Bas-Lag marks a dramatic jump in his strengths as a story-teller. The first Bas-Lag novel was Perdido Street Station. It was a fine, dark, thrilling piece of work. But it also had pacing issues involving an exhausting, seemingly never-ending climax that occupies almost half the book's 500+ pages.

This time around, the pace ebbs and flows in a fairly expert manner. This suits the novel's tricky plot, which often resembles that of a John Le Carre novel more than it does any fantasy novel that comes to mind.

Magic and science co-exist on Bas-Lag. There are humans there, but also an awful lot of fantastic species intelligent and otherwise. We begin in the immediate aftermath of the events of Perdido Street Station, as our co-protagonist Bellis Coldwine flees the sprawling city-state of New Crobuzon by sea. However, she and the other passengers and crew of the ship she's sailing on are captured by pirates from the floating pirate-city of Armada. And it's not just a regular pirate attack: they were after someone on the ship.

Armada, a city of hundreds of thousands of people comprising thousands of ships bound together, is after something. Luckily enough for Coldwine, Armada is also quite liberal with those whom it captures: she soon has a job in the great library of Armada as befits her bibliographic and translation skills. 

Things are even better for the prisoners in the hold of the captured ship: 'Remade' with terrible biological or mechanical modifications as punishment for various crimes, they too are now free. Tanner Sack comes from this group of prisoners, and becomes our other co-protagonist (or other prime narrative focalizer, if you prefer). 

And then things start to pop. Armada seeks something deep in the sea. But the politics of Armada are complicated. Coldwine's translation skills will soon come into play, as will Sack's Remade underwater abilities. We'll meet a host of other characters with radically different agendas. We'll get a mysterious mercenary swordsman, a pragmatic vampire king, and a horrifying race of human mosquitoes. And that's just in the first half of the novel.

Mieville's characterization is top-notch throughout. The plot is twisty and clever with reversals and mistaken assumptions. The city of Armada is fascinating, as are the goals of its nominal leaders, known only as The Lovers. There's thrilling, horrifying action involving naval battles. There are monsters whose goals are not as obvious as they seem. And there's a left-wing social consciousness at work throughout, an evaluation of the cost that the plans of the mighty have on those below them on the Class Pyramid. 

There's also a slight modulation of Mieville's often dazzlingly weird diction at work, a few less moments when one worries that Mieville may choke on that thesaurus. The result is something much more organic in its diction than Perdido Street Station. In all, this is quite a performance by Mieville, a witty work of epic science-fantasy with a moving emotional quality to it. Highly recommended.

Secret Movie

Ancient Images (1989) by Ramsey Campbell: Probably the sleekest, most thriller-like novel in the prolific Ramsey Campbell's catalogue, Ancient Images is a story of detection with occult elements that begin to dominate as the novel progresses. 

It's 1988 in London, England. Metropolitan TV film editor Sandy Allan witnesses the baffling, apparent suicide of her friend and mentor, a film historian who had just announced that he'd secured a copy of a long-lost 1938 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi British horror film. But the film isn't in Sandy's mentor's ransacked apartment. 

In order to help deal with her trauma, Sandy uses the mentor's notebook to reconstruct a list of people to contact about the film. She takes holiday time and with the help of an American film writer sets out to see if she can track down another copy of the film.

Her quest takes her across much of England. Many of the actors and production staff remain alive 50 years later. Not so much the director, who died in a car crash mere days after the completion of filming.  

Campbell does such a fine job of describing the fictional film that one starts to wish it were real -- if so, it would be one of Karloff and Lugosi's finest on-screen team-ups. Along the way, Campbell deals with anti-horror, censorship crazes in Great Britain in both the 1930's and 1980's. The English peer responsible for the initial quashing of the film invoked the good of the British people back in 1938 as to why this horror film -- and horror films in general -- shouldn't be allowed in Great Britain. In 1988, the 'Video Nasties' censorship hysteria is in full-blown inferno.

But Sandy won't be dissuaded, despite increasingly weird goings-on, the mysterious death of her cats Bogart and Bacall, and a growing sense of being followed. Campbell has noted that Sandy is perhaps his least tortured, most 'normal' protagonist. This aids in the generation of suspense -- she's not the sort of Campbell character who would believe in even the possibility of the supernatural. All those times she thinks she sees something at the edge of vision -- well, they can be explained away. Can't they?

Its likable, uncomplicated protagonist and its detective-thriller architecture make Ancient Images Campbell's most accessible book to non-horror readers, in my humble opinion. It's a terrific ride with a tense climax. Highly recommended.

Incarnate (1983) by Ramsey Campbell

Incarnate (1983) by Ramsey Campbell: Structurally, Incarnate most resembles early Stephen King novels that include Salem's Lot and The Stand insofar as it follows multiple third-person POVs that gradually dovetail as the novel moves to its climax. And this structure works beautifully, suspense being generated from both the narratives and the moments in which we leave one POV for another.

Superficially, Incarnate also falls into the sub-genre of horror novels in which events are set in motion by an ill-advised experiment that unleashes either telepathic or supernatural powers in those who were experimented upon. But it's not really much like Firestarter or any of a dozen other 'wild-talent' novels of the 1960's, 70's, and 80's. 

This time around, an Oxford study of several people who seem to have prophetic dreams disintegrates as the subjects seemingly start to go collectively insane. Eleven years later, one of the scientists in charge of the experiment writes to the subjects to enquire if any of them have suffered long-term problems as a result of the study. Well, maybe they have. Or maybe they simply drew the attention of Something to themselves and our little world. The next 450 pages of the novel will be spent examining what happened, what continues to happen, and what may happen next.

Campbell's strength at creating horrors that are always just a bit undefined even when they take center stage is in full evidence throughout the novel. There are glimpses of odd things that suddenly disappear. There are flashes of vaguely remembered cityscapes. There's a loathsome, terrible, needy thing sleeping in someone's bed. There are stairways that go on forever and crucifixes that move and leer. Through it all, Campbell's command of characterization is first-rate. We may not like all the characters, but even for the worst of them is aroused a fearful pity for what broke them, and why. 

Incarnate gradually builds towards a Sublime and mysterious climax. There's a refreshing ruthlessness at points when it comes to the fate of some of the characters, though that ruthlessness works in concert with mystery: we don't really know what happens once certain people wander out of the light. It's a grand novel, minutely observed and gigantic in its revelations. Highly recommended.

Blog Thing

Think Yourself Lucky (2014) by Ramsey Campbell: One could see this as the third novel in Ramsey Campbell's Internet Trilogy, though no such thing has ever been codified. The uber-veteran Liverpudlian horror writer understands the New Media better than a lot of young punks a third his age, possibly because he always connects what can happen on the Internet with what has always happened in the unmediated real world.

There's an occasionally melancholy, occasionally slapsticky, and always observant feel to this novel. Travel agency grunt David Botham has a job made recently more difficult because of the end of his relationship with his boss. His current girlfriend, a cook, is having boss problems of her own at work. And Botham's recent verbal outburst has attracted the attention of the leader of a local Liverpudlian writers' group who thinks Botham's verbal talents suggest untapped potential as a writer.

Like the amiable, almost-accidental serial killer of Campbell's The Count of Eleven, David is something of a repressed soul. Various factors involving his (still living) parents and assorted childhood experiences have led him to keep pretty much everything in, all the time. And the writers' group guy seems to be right -- indeed, David's near-hysteria at someone suggesting he try writing and publishing confirms this fact very early in the novel.

But it's the Internet Trilogy, isn't it? While The Grin of the Dark explored the conspiracy theories and strange online feuds of the Web and Seven Days of Cain explored online dreams of wish fulfillment erupting into the real world, Think Yourself Lucky examines the ways in which the anonymity of the online world can encourage a person to say and electronically do things far too vile for the real world.

David discovers there's a blog with a name seemingly plucked from a phrase he uttered during his verbal rant. And the blogger has begun to recount terrible acts of revenge on people for even the slightest of slights or accidents. For instance, the blogger describes severely crippling a man who had inadvertently caused him to scratch his car. That man is David's neighbour.

Think Yourself Lucky works as a character study of someone who's almost morbidly withdrawn when it comes to honestly expressing his emotions. It bears some resemblance to Stephen King's The Dark Half. However, Campbell's characters are both more finely drawn and a whole lot funnier than King's. And the relationship between the mysterious blogger and David is a more complex one than that between the writer and his doppelganger in The Dark Half. 

The blogger has a certain amount of right on his side, though not when it comes to his apparently injurious and homicidal acts he says he commits. If there actually are injuries and murders committed by this blogger. This is very satisfying fare that rings changes on the long-standing horror trope of the Doppelganger or the Other. Recommended.

It Hides in the Light

Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015): As brilliant a new novel Canadian or otherwise as I've read in a long time, Experimental Film is also a dandy horror novel. It's an almost perfect expression of the sort of documentary approach to horror that H.P. Lovecraft codified. It's also a moving character study of its narrator and her troubled relationships with pretty much everyone in her life, but most notably her young, autistic son.

Lois Cairns has lost her regular jobs as both a film journalist and as a teacher of film at a Toronto diploma factory dedicated to film. But a freelance assignment to review the latest experimental offering from a pretentious, obnoxious film-maker ends up revealing to Lois what appears to be footage from an unknown, early 20th-century Canadian director that the pompous contemporary film-maker has interpolated into his own work. And so the detective work begins -- and the eternal quest for grant money!

Cairns' investigation soon suggests that the mysterious footage was filmed by the even more mysterious Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb. Whitcomb was the wife of an early 20th-century Canadian businessman. She vanished without a trace from a sealed train compartment in the 1920's, leaving behind only a film projector. Decades earlier, her only son had also vanished somewhere in or around the Whitcombs' house in Ontario's cottage country. 

And we're off. Experimental Film does many things very, very well. Files' narrator earns our sympathy despite (and also because of) her bouts of self-pity, self-loathing, and nastiness. This sympathy comes in part because the narrator is intensely self-aware, and aware of her many moments of nastiness. She's also surrounded by keenly observed and rendered supporting characters, most notably a brilliant former student whom Cairns hires to work on the movie about the search for the movie and Cairns' autistic son.

The accumulation of documentary detail, and the details of the search for the lost movie or movies, all work very much in long-standing horror traditions. More importantly, they're expertly done in this novel. Files creates a convincing alternate history of Canadian film. And she does so in a gradually building horror narrative in which both sudden, almost epiphanic shocks and the creeping terror of the slow build are both given their moments. 

Perhaps most rarely for a horror novel, Experimental Film is

genuinely funny throughout. And it's not the tiresome horror humour of the Crypt-keeper and his ilk, nor the deadly jolité of many an omniscient serial killer or Joker knock-off. It's just funny -- sardonic at certain points, cynical about the art scene.

In all, this is a fine novel, and one that will hopefully win readers and appear on courses of study for years to come. It's also a hell of a travelogue for certain portions of Toronto. It even has a scene set in Sneaky Dee's. The only thing it's really lacking is a climactic appearance by the helpful ghost of Al Waxman. Highly recommended.

Even Monsters Need Health Care

Deep in the Darkness by Michael Laimo (2004): Solid and enjoyable horror-thriller walks in the footsteps of Arthur Machen and some H.P. Lovecraft (specifically "The Lurking Fear" in the latter case). A Manhattan doctor gets an offer he can't refuse: take over the rural New England practice of a recently deceased M.D. and get out of the city with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. What a deal!

Ha! The only place more dangerous than the city in a horror novel is the country (and paradoxically, vice versa). It might be more accurate to say that wherever you go, you should have stayed away. 

Laimo chose to tell this story within a frame narrative that establishes that something really terrible has happened from the beginning of the novel. I"m not sure it's a great choice -- it primarily explains 'where' the first-person narration comes from without adding much in the way of suspense. 

The antagonists of the novel straddle a line between 'natural' cryptid and supernatural boogeyman until very late in Deep in the Darkness. All is (sort of) revealed in a mostly satisfying manner. And Laimo has his sometimes muddle-headed protagonist of an M.D. realize that muddle-headedness, and ponder the source, as the novel progresses. People do some oddly stupid things in the course of the narrative, but there's actually an explanation for that, one that makes sense. And one that the narrator realizes, perhaps too late.

Laimo describes both the antagonists and their woodland haunts viscerally and grotesquely. The novel seems especially oriented to the smells of horror. It also gradually orients itself towards sexualized body horror as it progresses, leading to a couple of extremely graphic and disturbing scenes as the novel moves to a climax. And is a child in danger throughout the novel? Well, yeah. That never gets old.

Deep in the Darkness would probably work better if it were shorter. There's a dragginess to the middle section, a need to get on with it already given what we've seen so far.  And while the first-person narration allows for both unreliability and a refreshing dose of unlikeability in the narrator, it also makes the late-novel objectification of the female body more problematic than third-person would. Characters other than the narrator never really achieve any depth, making what happens to them, especially the wife, verge on gruesome exploitation rather than carefully constructed body horror. 

That there's a sequel to the novel makes a certain amount of sense -- Deep in the Darkness throws a twist in towards the end that allows for further expansion of the narrative while also recontextualizing everything we've read to that point. Though given that this is a first-person narrative recorded 'after' the fact, the revelation may unsuspend the disbelief of a certain portion of readers. Would a narrator lead with the revelation and explain things in terms of it? It certainly could be argued that this would be more believable, especially as the narrative is also framed as a warning to whoever finds it.  Lightly recommended.

Under The Water And Through The Woods

The Deep by Nick Cutter [Craig Davidson] (2015): Nick Cutter, the horror-writing pseudonym of mainstream Canadian writer Craig Davidson, became a James-Herbert-Award-winning nom-de-plume with the horror novel The Troop (2013). The Deep is the follow-up, with a jacket design that mimics that of The Troop despite their lack of similarities. Well, they're both mainly set on, under, or near water. So there you go.

A new disease nicknamed "The 'Gets'" (from "Forget") is ravaging humanity. Victims go from being forgetful to forgetting how to breathe in a matter of months. But through a series of events I'm not going to summarize, scientists discover that the cure for The Gets may exist at the deepest part of the ocean floor, in the Marianas Trench. So about a gazillion dollars goes into building an underwater science lab and an above-water support base. Three scientists go down. Things get weird. Communications fail. Underwater disturbances make it impossible to get back down to the station to investigate. One scientist comes up, dead and horribly mutilated.

So the authorities, at the request of a cryptic radio message from one of the two surviving scientists, round up his estranged brother, a divorced veterinarian whose only son disappeared without a trace a few years earlier. The vet doesn't know why his brother would have summoned him -- they haven't spoken in eight years and were never close to begin with. The brother down below is a super-genius (and a bit of a sociopath). Has their relationship changed? Are all great scientists in horror novels sociopaths?

Only one way to find out -- so down we go, eight miles down, to the Trieste underwater laboratory and the mysteries within and without.

As in The Troop, The Deep's strengths lie in fast-twitch plotting and an exuberantly hyper-caffeinated approach to the synthesis of its horror influences. Cutter doesn't invent new horrors, but he does throw so many old ones at the reader in sometimes strikingly odd combinations that the effect is often one of horror born of a startling novelty of contrast. 

To cite one example, The Deep presents scenes of horrified claustrophobia that riff on antecedents such as John Carpenter's version of The Thing, Alien, and a host of other works that present isolated people under siege by Terrible Things. But in the midst of this, scenes reminiscent of Stephen King's "The Boogeyman" suddenly break out. And then we're plunged into a backstory of the abused childhoods of the vet and his brother. And then back to a new supernatural or science-fictional horror. And for the bulk of the novel, this sort of on-going juxtaposition of science-fictional, supernatural, and psychological horror actually works.

Unfortunately, the engine blows up with about 100 pages to go. The novel seems to lose sight of its above-water McGuffin, The Gets, which have never been fully developed as a threat to humanity. Indeed, the novel could have functioned quite well without The Gets, given how under-developed and under-shown this plague is. Cutter's synthetic horror cavalcade begins to replicate the content of his influences too closely, with a scene lifted almost verbatim from Carpenter's The Thing being just one example. There's also a lengthy bit involving mutated honeybees that's a weak riff on George R.R. Martin's "Sandkings." And a riff on a bit from Stephen King's "The Raft" that gets used once too often. A lovable dog also wears out its welcome.

These failures might have been survivable had the last fifty pages not degenerated into Basil Exposition's Nude House of Wacky Body Horror. We finally learn the secrets of what has really been going on. Well, sort of. But we learn these things from anthropomorphized antagonists who cackle and snark like the bitchiest of Joss Whedon's bitchy Big Bads. We get a very, very old science-fictional and horror trope as an explanation for the horror's existence in the Marianas Trench. We get about 40 pages of Cutter doing a bad imitation of Laird Barron, one with neither menace nor wit but only a gushy, goopy tide of bodily atrocities. We get a damp squib of an ending. We get characters behaving as stupidly and helplessly as characters can act. The end. 

Oh, for a couple of flame-throwers or a convenient nuclear bomb. They too would be borrowings, but they'd be welcome borrowings. Nuke the sight from orbit. Absolutely goddamned right.

Oh, well. The Deep really is a page-turner for 80% of its not-inconsiderable length. However, if you're one of those people who get annoyed by tiny, short little chapters in the manner of The Da Vinci Code or a novel meant for fourth-graders, steer clear. These are some of the shortest chapters you're ever going to encounter in a novel aimed at adults. Lightly recommended.

The Blair Witch Project Dossier by D.A. Stern and others (1999): As with the In Search of... style 'documentary' that promoted The Blair Witch Project on the SciFi and Space Channels when the movie came out in 1999, this book is better than the movie it promotes. The Blair Witch Project Dossier comprises fake newspaper articles, interview transcripts, historical records, photos, period illustrations, and hand-written letters and journals. It's old-school documentary horror of which Poe or Lovecraft might have approved. 

There's real wit here, whether in a name-check of one of Lovecraft's creepy backwoods characters or in subtle and fascinating implications dotted throughout the historical portions of the text. These things suggest a horror much larger and older than that which we see in the movie. They also offer a context for the scenes in the house that makes the events of the movie seem even worse. However, no explanation is offered for why those two bozos are fishing in two inches of water. Recommended.

Toad in a Hole

The Abyss by Jere Cunningham (1981): Cover-blurbed by Stephen King as "almost great," The Abyss presents a Christian apocalypse along the lines of King's own The Stand, only with more flying demons and coal mining. 

Our male protagonist, Seth, returns home to Bethel, Tennessee in the Appalachians after 20 years to get a job in the coal mine that's been re-opened after six decades. Seth didn't return for this express purpose -- he just needed a job. And the coal mine, believed by children for decades to be haunted, supplied that job.

Do things start to go wrong? Yes. Yes, they do. And you know that if you read any of the paperback versions of The Abyss because the jacket copy reveals a pretty major plot point. Suffice to say that Hell is Real. And it's apparently located several thousand feet below Tennessee.

Cunningham's and-the-kitchen-sink tendency to throw stuff into the narrative doesn't increase whatever terror or dis-ease the novel seeks to generate. There are surprisingly few scenes down the mine, and these quickly shift away from claustrophobia and darkness to increasingly dire and goopy supernatural shenanigans. Cunningham does nice work in depicting life in a dead-end, one-industry town isolated from the mainstream, though. His evil characters tend to the banal, but the sympathetic characters really are finely drawn at points. 

Plot-wise, Cunningham keeps a lot of pots boiling (and one of his minor characters keep a pot of water eternally boiling on her stove to throw at unwanted trespassers!). The female protagonist, Bethel's only medical practitioner, confronts various health-related issues that suddenly arise from the mine's re-opening. She also deals with nightmares about her childhood as the daughter of a stern, self-denying, violent, fundamentalist preacher. 

And a traveling revival show appears in town under its own tent near the mine. And some people start looking and acting like zombies. And a science whiz from Boston shows up because some really sketchy scientific stuff seems to centre on Bethel. People get blowed up with dynamite. Giant thorns menace everybody. An old woman direly prophesies what's coming. A fat woman is mean and evil and eats a lot of junk food and takes three plates at the church picnic. Everyone with a beehive hairdo gets turned into a demon. Dogs and cats turn into monsters. The statue of the Madonna starts disintegrating, as does everything in town. We check in with a Soviet spy satellite.

Well, you get the idea. There's so much stuff here that it suggests a longer draft that's been hacked at by an editor trying to fit the novel into a too-low page count. At twice the length, this might actually be a great horror novel of dark Christianity. At its published length, it's still fun and jumpy and, as the end draws near, surprisingly true to its core principles: it goes all the way, and everyone has to get off the boat. 

That the ending seems to riff on Tolkien's Sauron as much as any religious representation of evil isn't a bad thing at all, though some are also going to find strong echoes of a scene in King's The Stand. But boy, does it all end in a rush. Anyone want to fund a Director's Cut of this thing? Recommended.

Extinction is Extinction

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (1965): It's 1980. Earth has been under siege for nearly eight years by giant, fast-growing plants. The cities have fallen. The environment is collapsing as the plants destroy all other plant species and the animals that rely upon them as a result. Basically, humanity has become a rat hiding in fields of 600-foot-tall corn. And now whoever or whatever sent the plants has sent out the exterminators.

To say that Thomas Disch's first novel is an astonishingly bleak end-of-the-world novel is an understatement. We begin in terrible shape. Things don't get better. The plot focuses on a small Minnesota farming community on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, not so much shores. The plants have been relentlessly draining the Great Lakes for years.

So the town of Tassel, much of its original location overrun, has moved to the newly draining bottom of Lake Superior. There, Anderson, the Christian fundamentalist patriarch of the town, attempts to push back the plants and feed his town by growing corn. Just keeping the corn going requires a maximum effort by the village. Anderson believes they are being tested by God. But if they are, then God has gone silent. Or his answer is simply 'No.'

Disch invests this short, terse novel with effectively chosen moments of Biblical imagery and language and the occasional quote. But The Genocides is about the failure of all of humanity's institutions in the face of a sublime and indifferent menace, not a world in which a Christian God actually exists. Or any other gods. 

The occasional scene of terror gives way to scenes of fumbling, racing panic. Our protagonists can only flee or die. Or flee and die. It's a rich, full life. Their numbers dwindle. Winter comes. Internal tensions begin to destroy Tassel almost as effectively as the invasion. Will whatever is behind all this ever show its face? Good question. 

Even at this young age, Disch was a skilled stylist and an occasionally sardonic chronicler of human frailties. Some of Anderson's choices as a leader are understandable yet almost unspeakably grotesque, none moreso than a sort of Uber-Calvinist imitation of communion. We may become invested in whether or not some of the other characters survive, but it's an investment kept at a remove: it's doom alone that ultimately counts.

Disch was never known as a technically inclined science fiction writer, but the science of The Genocides still seems ruthlessly pragmatic and sound. The plants, devoid of personality and agency, nonetheless become an extraordinarily effective foil for humanity's own inhumanity, and for humanity's world-reshaping mistakes. The Earth is at the mercy of the ultimate invasive species. The crops must grow. The weeds and the vermin must go. Highly recommended.

Evolution and Extinction

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953/This revised edition 1990): Arthur C. Clarke's most famous novel still seems impressive more than 60 years after its initial publication. It's a novel about guided evolution, and evolution as a 'progressive' system, that yields a conclusion that's simultaneously depressing as all Hell and lyrically triumphant.

It's an early image in the novel that stays with people, and has been intentionally or unintentionally copied in such TV and movie works as the original V miniseries, Independence Day, and Skyline. Absolutely enormous alien spacecraft show up one day over the major cities of the Earth. And then the aliens start to talk to us, though they refuse to show themselves to anyone.

The aliens are soon known as the Overlords. With their guidance and technological expertise, Earth soon enters a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, though there are a few growing pains. The first section of the book explores these early stages through the person of the United Nations President who becomes the only liaison with the Overlords allowed to enter their ships. But even he doesn't know what an Overlord looks like. When he finds out, he keeps the secret. But even that secret will turn out not to be what it seems.

Once the Overlords finally start mingling with humanity, 50 years after their arrival, they continue to help run the Earth. And while they're at it, they keep humanity from pursuing anything like a space program. Why? Are the stars really not meant for Man, as one character opines? And why are the Overlords so curious about tales of psychic phenomena?

Well, eventually we'll learn. Some very cold winds begin to blow as the novel approaches its end. One of the oddities of the original publication, Clarke notes in his afterword to this revised 1990 version, was that Clarke put a disclaimer at the front to note that he didn't agree with one of the book's central tenets (The stars are not meant for man). And he also notes that by 1990 he no longer really believed that evolution would feature some of the paranormal powers shown here. Clarke had been hoaxed by that great hoaxing spoon-bender Uri Geller in the interim, and subsequently learned how he had been hoaxed.

When people talk of cosmic science fiction, this novel would be one of those things they'd be talking about. It's a novel about the fate of humanity and the fate of the Earth. It's also a novel about evolution and extinction -- including the extinction of the individual consciousness. And watching over it all, those enigmatic Overlords, who have become by the end peculiarly sympathetic and perhaps even heroic in the face of their own insignificance. Highly recommended.

Return of the Monster with the Orange Afro

The Return by Bentley Little (2002): So far as I can tell, this is the prolific Little's worst-reviewed novel. I thought it was great, though the gonzo, cuckoobanana stuff that I like probably turned a lot of people off. There haven't been a lot of supernatural beings in the history of literature who spend a fair amount of time turning people into porcelain-statue versions of themselves, or a lot of horror novels in which people get attacked by animated Anasazi mortar-and-pestles, fetishes, shards of pottery and assorted knicknacks.

Actually, none that I can think of. This is the only mainstream horror novel I've ever read which could realistically be described in a cover blurb as "Stephen King meets The Flaming Carrot."

Western writer Zane Grey (yes, the real Zane Grey) shows up early to be terrified by some crazy-ass something-or-other in Arizona back in the early 20th century. Then we jump to the present. Various Southwest-Native-American artifacts are starting to come to life across the Southwest. A mysterious monster kills a Boy Scout counselor. Dogs and cats are living together. Scary, non-human skeletons with still-growing orange afros have been excavated or found in various places. Denver is burning. Boulder is burning. Entire towns vanish from the map, never to return.

What eliminated the Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, Anasazi, Olmecs and every other civilization ever, including perhaps the Hittites and Saxons? A race of superbeings with orange afros. And they are back with a vengeance!

Crazy shit happens. A plucky group of plucky people assemble to save humanity from these civilization-destroying creatures. Things get so rushed at the end that I'm going to assume editorial interference occurred. I'm not sure really how good this novel is, but it kept me reading quickly, and it was never boring. Recommended.