Horror and War

Books:Nailed by the Heart by Simon Clark (1995): I'm pretty sure this is the prolific and gifted Clark's first novel. As debuts go, it's a dandy. Clark's strength as an idea man in all his novels is, basically, what I think of as the ability to 'turn left.' What one thinks is going on isn't what's actually going on, and Clark isn't afraid to go with wild and wooly explanations for the supernatural events in his novels. That he's a deft hand at characterization on the fly doesn't hurt either -- like Stephen King, Clark gives the reader sympathetic, flawed characters trapped in extraordinary circumstances.

Here, a young family purchases an old sea fort on the east coast of England with the hopes of turning it into a hotel. The view is spectacular, as is the fort itself. The residents of the adjacent small town are friendly enough, though no one's all that happy about the fort being occupied again. And then, of course, things start to happen. In ancient times, the site of the fort was a pagan holy place. Now, something seems about to visit. More than one something.

There are monsters here, though not all the supernatural forces are monstrous. Old and new human evil drives the plot, while terrible and pitiful things come out of the sea. Clark's later novel Darkness Demands forms a companion piece to this one, as both are concerned with the sorts of sacrifices old gods demanded of their followers. There are a few rough patches of prose here, but overall Clark produced a really admirable first novel. Recommended.



Books:
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 (2008) edited by Stephen Jones (2009): The sad, early death of American writer and anthologist Karl Edward Wagner in 1995 ended Wagner's superlative series of DAW Books Year's Best Horror anthologies. Jones's series has picked up the slack in recent years. With a larger, longer format, the Mammoth series can include more story pages than DAW ever could, and supplement them with detailed 'Year in...' sections and an exhaustive necrology for the year in question.

This all leads to the old 'If you buy one horror anthology this year...' chestnut. This year is no exception. Entries from big names that include Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell sit alongside excellent stories by lesser known writers (to me, anyway). Horror today seems perpetually on the cusp of being drowned by lame series novels about vampires, werewolves and zombies; the Mammoth anthology is one antidote to this feeling. Cleverly imagined new horrors and cleverly retrofitted old horrors abound. Also one sinister Hobby Horse, a Cthulhu by way of Robert Service piece, and a disturbing reverse werewolf. Highly recommended.


Comic:



The Losers, written and pencilled by Jack Kirby, inked by Mike Royer and D. Bruce Berry (1974-75; collected 2009): Among the many oddities of Jack Kirby's early 1970's tenure at DC Comics was his 12-issue run on Our Fighting Forces, a WWII book starring four C-List DC war comics heroes (Captain Storm, Johnny Cloud, Gunner and Sarge) collectively called The Losers (the name would later be used for the ex-CIA team comic adapted into the 2010 movie).

Kirby served in Europe in WWII, so there's a certain amount of verisimilitude herein, but it's Kirby's wild imagination applied to the traditional war comic that yields most of the pleasure here, whether in big two-page action spreads or in a series of fascinating supporting characters and odd but vaguely plausible stories that touch on everything from the 1936 Berlin Olympics to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" to a science-fiction fan PFC with a science-fiction plan to destroy a massive piece of Nazi artillery. The stories boom along, thrilling and over too soon. Highly recommended.

Balls

Books:

Blockade Billy by Stephen King (2010): We get the titular novella and another novella, "Morality", which recently appeared in Esquire, all in a nice little hardcover package meant to suggest the children's sports novels of King's youth. Given that this just came out, I'd hazard a guess that Scribner's is aiming at the Father's Day crowd with this baseball-centric package.

King's chameleon voice hums along quite nicely in the title novella, a first-person narrative of a forgotten rookie baseball player of the 1950's. "Blockade" Billy was a rookie phenom of a catcher for the (fictional) New Jersey Titans in the 1950's, and the then-third-base coach of the Titans tells the story of Billy's magical month in the majors to, unh, Stephen King, who's really been showing up a lot in his own fiction lately.

The coach thinks and speaks a lot in archaic cliches -- this is entirely appropriate and, sometimes, appropriately annoying. But one gets a nice feel for baseball back in the 1950's, especially the whims and vagaries of how the farm system worked back then. I enjoyed "Blockade Billy" a lot, though the thriller aspects of it could just as easily have been cut: the 'twist' is really the weakest thing about an otherwise enjoyable piece.

The novella "Morality" operates in its own sub-genre of What Would You Do For Money? It's minor King, though in many ways it's superior to A Simple Plan, a novel and movie it resembles in its concerns, though not its plot or characters. Recommended.


Darker by Simon Clark (1996): This enjoyable, early-career Clark horror/thriller almost seems like it was written on a dare. Why? Because the basic premise -- and the engine that drives the plot -- involves a family being chased across the English countryside by what amounts to a giant, malevolent, invisible ball. The ball can crush anything. A mysterious stranger who goes along with the family may know how to stop the ball -- or he, too, may be malevolent. In the meantime, there's that ball, inexorably catching up with the family again and again and doing a whole lot of crushing. And you know, it works, it really works -- and would make an equally rivetting movie in the right hands. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball! Highly recommended.


The Rising by Brian Keene (2004): The sub-sub-genre of talking zombies is well-represented by Keene's post-zombie-apocalyptic novel in which a father desperate to save his son has to travel several hundred miles through hordes of annoying, talking, gun-wielding zombies. Oh, and all wildlife above the level of insects also becomes zombiefied immediately after dying.

The zombies in this case have a quasi-scientific/supernatural explanation -- basically, they're demons who escaped from hell after a military supercollider experiment went horribly awry and ripped a hole in the side of the universe. And it's pretty much a rule of thumb that no experiment that ever ripped a hole in the universe ever ripped that hole through to someplace good, like the magical land of snuggle-elves or what-have-you. It's pretty much always monsters and demons. Keene's one of a handful of contemporary horror writers who can lay on the sex and violence (and sexual violence) without making things cheap or sordid. In a weird way, his novel is much like The Road, only the apocalypse makes a lot more sense (relatively speaking). Highly recommended.

Dead boys, Demons, Darkness

Comics:

The Sandman Presents The Dead Boy Detectives by Ed Brubaker, Bryan Talbot and Steve Leialoha: A slight delight almost entirely populated by characters created by Neil Gaiman during his Sandman days (hence 'The Sandman Presents'), including the two boarding-school ghost-friends from A Season of Mists and immortal Morpheus-pal Hob Gadling. The boys, who elected not to go with Death back in A Season of Mists, have been goofing off around London ever since, and have now opened a detective agency with its office in a treehouse in the yard of a haunted house. Street kids are disappearing and the turning up dead and extremely desiccated. So the dead boys take the case -- luckily, while most adults can't see them, kids and teenagers can. Various hijinks ensue. Recommended.


Books:

Darkness Demands by Simon Clark (2001): There's a sub-genre of horror in which a town is imperilled repeatedly by a horror which returns cyclically. In Stephen King's It, the creature has been terrorizing the town of Derry, Maine every 28 years or so since before there was even a town there; in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show travelling carnival returns to the twons on its schedule at about the same frequency. In Darkness Demands, something that 'lives' beneath the massive English cemetery known locally as the Necropolis returns every 70 years or so to request things from randomly selected townspeople. The requests are minor -- bars of chocolate and pints of porter are to be left in the cemetery prior to a certain date. Failure to do so results in extremely bad luck for the person who refuses to do so, and for the entire town if enough people refuse to honour the request. What's doing it and why? Well, you'll have to read the novel. This is a very tightly plotted, suspenseful novel with a climax you may not see coming. Recommended.


A Lower Deep by Tom Piccirilli (2004): The narrator (referred to only as The Necromancer or The Master Summoner) and his demonic familiar Self find themselves pulled back into the machinations of the Necromancer's old coven leader, whose previous major feat of magic destroyed his previous coven with the exception of the narrator and a couple of others. Piccirilli draws on Christian, gnostic and kabbalist sources to portray the magic used by his characters, with a bit of Marvel's Dr. Strange thrown in for good measure (spells crackle and arc before being released). What seems like a pissing match between two former friends turns out to be something much larger, as a version of the Christian apocalypse begins to seem pretty much certain. Piccirilli plays fair with the implications of an apocalypse right out of the Book of Revelation -- would it be such a bad thing if one was on the side of the saved? -- while sketching in enough of the rules of magic so that the novel remains 'fair', even in its surprising final pages. Recommended.

When Adults Attack

Book:


Blood Crazy by Simon Clark: This novel is a dandy apocalyptic thriller, equal parts Stephen King and John Wyndham with a little New Agey cuckoobanana psychology thrown in. One fine day, everyone everywhere over the age of 18 starts trying to kill everyone 18 and younger. Yikes! The narrative follows protagonist Nick Aten as he first tries just to survive, and then tries to figure out what's going on and why.

The problems of organizing teenagers into viable survival groups allow for some Lord of the Flies-style shenanigans, while the travails of various survival groups in combatting the increasingly organized but ant-like adults also allows for much angst and action. The explanation for the situation reminds me a lot of group and mass psychology tropes from 60's science fiction, especially Dune, Quatermass and the Pit, and a Doctor Who serial called "The Daemons." All in all, a dandy, compulsively readable novel from Clark, whom I grow more fond of with each new novel.


Comics Collection:


Essential Doctor Strange Volume 4 by Roger Stern, Chris Claremont, Gene Colan, Marshall Rogers and several other writers and artists (c.1976-1981, Collected 2009): The relatively brief Stern/Rogers run on Doctor Strange was one of the good Doctor's career highlights. Well, actually anything written by Stern is a career highlight -- he's Doc's second-best writer after Stan Lee. Claremont (long-time X-Men writer) takes Doc a bit too far into the realms of self-pity, but Stern gets him back again.

My only real complaint about the volume (other than the non-ending to the year-long Dweller in Darkness story, caused, I assume, by Stern being replaced by Claremont for a couple of years) is that it features the semi-famous Marvel House Ad from 1981 that promised us Frank Miller taking over the art chores on the book. Now there's a fascinating 'What if?' scenario, as Miller never did make it over to Dr. Strange.