MARAUDER By Gary Gibson........................................................................................................................................................... 2 THE LORDS OF SALEM .................................................................................................................................................................. 2 SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY By Mary Robinette Kowal ........................................................................................................ 4 JOYLAND By Stephen King.............................................................................................................................................................. 4 Ramblings of a Tattooed Head By Simon Marshall-Jones ................................................................................................................. 6 MEAT By Joseph D’Lacey ................................................................................................................................................................. 8 A BRIEF GUIDE TO GHOST HUNTING By Dr Leo Ruickbie ....................................................................................................... 8 DREAM LONDON By Tony Ballantyne ......................................................................................................................................... 10 THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR 24 Edited By Stephen Jones ...................................................................... 10 SHAME THE DEVIL By Michael Lejeune ..................................................................................................................................... 12 SPLATTERLANDS: REAWAKENING THE SPLATTERPUNK REVOLUTION By Various .................................................... 12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN VS ZOMBIES (2012)................................................................................................................................ 12 GARBAGE MAN By Joseph D’Lacey............................................................................................................................................. 13 World War Z (2013) ......................................................................................................................................................................... 14 DEEP STORM By Lincoln Child ..................................................................................................................................................... 14 Matt Leyshon Mini Interview ........................................................................................................................................................... 16 KNIGHT OF SHADOWS By Toby Venables.................................................................................................................................. 17 The Most-Visited Grave in Swan Point Cemetery By Hunter Welles .............................................................................................. 17 FROM THE FATHERLAND, WITH LOVE By Ryu Marakami .................................................................................................... 20 THE EIDOLON By Libby McGugan ............................................................................................................................................... 20 THE CONJURING (2013) ............................................................................................................................................................... 20 DRAKENFELD By Mark Charon Newton ...................................................................................................................................... 21 DARK SKIES (2013) ....................................................................................................................................................................... 21 THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER By Paula Brackston .......................................................................................................................... 23 THE WINTER WITCH By Paula Brackston.................................................................................................................................... 23 BOUNTY KILLER (2014) ............................................................................................................................................................... 23 From the Catacombs By Jim Lesniak ............................................................................................................................................... 23 TIGER’S CLAW By Dale Brown .................................................................................................................................................... 27 PLASTIC JESUS By Wayne Simmons ............................................................................................................................................ 29 THE EMPEROR’S BLADES By Brian Staveley ............................................................................................................................. 29 THE IRON WOLVES By Andy Remic............................................................................................................................................ 29 A Vampire’s Guide To New Orleans By Steven P. Unger ............................................................................................................... 30 Andy Remic Interview ...................................................................................................................................................................... 35 Edited By Stanley Riiks. Written By Adrian Brady, Jim Lesniak, Simon Marshall-Jones, Stanley Riiks, C.M. Saunders, Brett Taylor, Steve P. Unger, and Hunter Welles. Proof-read By Sheri White. © Morpheus Tales January 2014. Morpheus Tales Back Issues and Special Issues are available exclusively through lulu.com: http://stores.lulu.com/morpheustales For more information, free previews and free magazines visit our website: www.morpheustales.com Morpheus Tales #23 Review Supplement, January 2014. COPYRIGHT January 2014 Morpheus Tales Publishing, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Review can be used, in full or in part, for publicity purposes as long as Morpheus Tales Magazine is quoted as the source.
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gets in the way of the forward thrust of the book. Because of the structure and the lack of good characters there is disappointingly little tension, and no dramatic build-up. Until right at the end when things ramp up. This book is okay, slightly disappointing and certain not one to seek out. I’d rather go for a Neal Asher or Peter F. Hamilton, or even one of the Horus Heresy books, but if you’ve read all of those then this is mildly entertaining. By Stanley Riiks
MARAUDER By Gary Gibson www.panmacmillan.com I was looking forward to reading this; I’ve been meaning to grab a Gary Gibson novel for a while. This stand-alone novel is set in the same universe as The Shoal Trilogy, and features one of the characters from there, but is set at a different time. Megan Jacinth is kidnapped by Gregor Tarrant and Sifra (freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on whose side you are on) for the second time. This time they plan to take her back to the Marauder, a sentient alien ship that they used Megan to communicate with once before. The last time they destroyed the mind of her best friend Bash and, now a vegetable, he is still their prisoner. Gabrielle is the head of the Demarchy, the ruling clan on Redstone. On her birthday she will be taken to an alien ship to communicate with it and will then “ascend,” becoming one with the ship. Except that “ascending” is a euphemism for being killed, and she’s been told the truth by her bodyguard, and plans to escape with him before she is murdered. These two strong female characters power through the novel, but never really capture your heart. Perhaps it’s because one of them features in Gibson’s other novels, so there seems to be a distinct lack of characterisation. Ok, so this is a SF book and they are usually not about the characters, but essentially this one is. I don’t read as much SF as I would like, but Neal Asher and Peter F. Hamilton manage to produce great stories filled with colourful and powerful characters that linger long after the book is finished. OK, so SF is more about ideas, but here there’s nothing riveting. There are a few nice ideas, and actually the world that Gibson has created is intelligent and well developed. The structure of the novel, as it dashes back to the past to fill in details, feels a little off-putting and repetitive. And
THE LORDS OF SALEM 2012, Anchor Bay DVD The previously increasingly excruciating film career of rocker-turned-auteur Rob Zombie takes a surprising turn down Competency Avenue with this latest witchfest. Oh, it still has its music video moments, but overall the pace is slow, the lighting low key. The slow pace will surely bore Zombie’s remaining young fans. Rather than montages set to the redneck rock standbys of Rush and Lynyrd Skynyrd, we get time to appreciate two of The Velvet Underground’s most languorous and insinuating cuts. Oh sure, we get a little bit of Rush, and a little bit of the quick cut music video stuff, but by Zombie standards the tone has become comparatively highbrow. Too bad Rob didn’t bring a script. Beset by the auteur disease, he obviously trusts his own screenwriting abilities, when he’d have been better off hiring a real horror writer. There’s plenty of them, you know, and some of them work cheap. T.E.D. Klein could have done it. A writer might have come up with something better than the same old plot about the witch’s curse passing on to the descendants of the witch’s executioners. Aren’t there any other witch plots? Surely somebody could come up with something. Rest assured that Rob brings back his stripper wife Sheri Moon to play the lead, and rest assured 2
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but sadly not completed by the late Richard Lynch. Worse yet, the DVD doesn’t have any deleted scenes, nor even a trailer, thus consigning the last role of an unforgettable character actor to the dustbin of history, for now at least. I’d expect more from Anchor Bay. Udo Kier’s part has been cut as well, though I doubt he had much more to do than Berryman and Haig. But the most rewarding role is given to Bruce Davison, which is kind of a shame because Davison’s worked steadily for decades in prestigious dramas like Short Eyes, Longtime Companion, and Short Cuts, even as Zombie’s usual character actor types have slid into exploitation fare. I assume Zombie got the idea to cast Davison from seeing him in The Crucible, but I’ll bet Zombie’s favourite Davison performance is his sole horror lead, Willard. It’s a foregone conclusion that the witches will return to take vengeance on the descendants of their oppressors, and that Mrs. Moon Zombie will fall prey to their evil plot, so it’s hard to care what happens. In the absence of a welldeveloped script or interesting characters, cinematographer Brandon Trost becomes the star of the show, his unfailingly eerie lighting being the one reliably impressive aspect of an otherwise underbaked effort. If nothing else, Trost proves that goats remain fine and impressive subjects for photography. With the plot being so thin, Zombie throws out hallucinations and dream sequences at us, endless trick nightmares with jump endings, like watching a loop of outtakes from An American Werewolf in London, to fill the time until we get to the final gruesome massacre. Faceless demons sport furry long-armed costumes that appear to be modelled on Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. Rats scurry in the hallway. Zombie doctors with melty faces, a creepy doll. It’s like watching a remake of a David Lynch movie by a teenager with a banal imagination. The title itself is kind of banal, a conflation by the movie nerd Zombie of Maid Of Salem,
that he wastes no time showing off her ass again. You can tell she’s playing a serious role here, she has glasses and everything. Hell, she’s practically playing Jennifer Jason Leigh. She’s good at being likeably chipper, a wholesome tattoo chick, a metalhead’s dream of a hardcore chick with a heart of gold. Too bad she can’t act so convincingly. Moon is a disc jockey at a New England radio station, in order that Zombie might pay vague homage to The Fog, a middling John Carpenter effort that might otherwise be forgotten. Her concerned boyfriend is also a DJ, a bushybearded guy who looks like a cleaned up Rob Zombie. Meg Foster hisses away as the leader of a blasphemous coven of six witches. Now unrecognizably wrinkled, Foster is actually less spooky than her days of playing the heroine, when her eerie eyes gave her an unmistakably otherworldly aura. Here she’s just a serviceable hag. Dee Wallace is an overenthusiastic selfhelp guru, a palm reader, joined by fellow long-away-from the screen actresses Maria Conchita Alonso and Judy Geeson. Is it nice of Zombie to bring back these former starlets to essay the roles of creepy old crones, or is it simply a sad reminder of how young actresses are tossed to wayside when they pass forty, or thirty for that matter; a reminder that little has changed in the movies since over the hill likes of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were only allowed back in film if they played demented ghouls? As usual Zombie’s best quality, which he shares with Quentin Tarantino, is his proclivity for bringing back previously neglected horror actors, but here the results are even more varied than usual. Ken Foree is a welcome presence, once again proving himself a more capable actor than he is often allowed to be. At the other end of the demonic spectrum, Sid Haig and Michael Berryman are little more than extras, barely visible as witches’ henchmen in long hair puritan wigs. Appearing in flashbacks, Andrew Prine takes on the role of a dedicated witchhunter, a role begun 3
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which predated the play The Crucible, and was about the same historical events, and The Lords Of Flatbush, which had nothing to do with horror, other than the horror of Sylvester Stallone trying to act, but did date from Zombie’s favourite decade, the seventies. Even the cameo by none other than “The Dragon, Lord Satan” turns out to be pretty underwhelming. (He’s a big baby, literally.) It devolves into cartoons that are like a Monty Python parody of Ken Russell. And in case you were hoping for an Exorcist homage, here it is: the first use of the lovely and rather English modifier “cunting” in an American movie in forty years. Next time, bring a cunting script, Rob. By Brett Taylor
JOYLAND By Stephen King www.stephenking.co.uk The gaudy cover art screams pulp fiction, and the low-key release of this short novel suggests it is not to be taken too seriously, and is probably meant as little more than a stopgap between In the Tall Grass and the long-awaited Doctor Sleep. But don’t let that fool you. This is another little gem from the Master that shouldn’t be missed. The prose is so vividly written and full of colour that you wonder whether he ever had a summer job at an amusement park in his formative years. Or maybe that’s a sign not just of a good writer, but a great one. King aficionados will revel in the feel of this book, which calls to mind classics like It and Salem’s Lot. And like those books, Joyland sucks you right in and doesn’t spit you back out until it’s good and ready. Devin Jones, a college kid recovering from his first broken heart, takes a summer job at an amusement park, where a real-life ghost is said to haunt the Horror House. During the summer he finds his independence, falls in love again, learns about death and sacrifice, and uncovers the truth about the murder. So is this a horror novel? A murder mystery? A coming-of-age drama? It’s all of the above, and more. But the truth is that books like this defy genre classification. Critics would perhaps point at one too many cliches, but there are enough supporting characters here to carry Joyland through the slower passages. Perhaps it isn’t up there with King’s finest work, but still utterly absorbing. Proof, if needed, that the Master in cruise control can still blow away 99% of the competition, even when they are firing on all cylinders. By C.M. Saunders
SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY By Mary Robinette Kowal www.constablerobinson.com “The sort of novel we would expect from Jane Austen… if she had lived in a world of magic,” says the blurb. That immediately peaked my interest. Set in Regency England, Jane Ellsworth has all the problems that we are familiar with from Pride and Prejudice and other Austen novels, except that Jane is a manipulator of glamour. Plain Jane is all but forgotten in the marriage stakes when compared with her beautiful sister Melody, but she attracts the attentions of Mr Vincent when she is forces to defend her family. Kowal manages to bring the Regency period to life with a skill Austen would have appreciated; her characters and the fussy and delicate intricacies of the time are brought to life with her words. This is a glorious historical novel with a magical twist that works well. With an expertly crafted world and characters, this will appeal to anyone interested in fantastic literature. By Adrian Brady
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knocked me for six, even though he’d been hospitalised and we had been forewarned that it would be his last trip). But, it’s totally different when people are affected through an act of crime. This has happened to me three times within the last six years, and each time it saddens me enormously that we live in such a world filled with sorrows and tears. It also leaves me incredibly baffled: yes, for every single one of us there’s a trigger somewhere that will fire us off in explosive directions, throw us into paroxysms of almost uncontrollable anger, which make us feel the urge to lash out. Most of us know that to do so will have grave consequences, so we divert that high-emotion into something inanimate, like a piece of virtual paper on the monitor screen or a punch-bag hanging in the garage. Goodness knows how many times in the past I’ve felt anger coursing through my very fibres, inspiring me to kick walls or throw objects with malign intent against through very same immovable fortifications. However, I know instinctively that to hurt someone is wrong. Sadly, there are some out there whose emotions and urges have bypassed these cultural and societal constraints, and who then go on to visit crimes on the innocent. Those norms we abide by, and the consequences of breaking them, are missing somehow. And you know what? As much horror as I have read or watched, it still hits me hard when it affects me on a personal level. Many years ago, a short time after I moved to where I’m living now to get married to the woman who is now my wife, a work colleague of hers was brutally murdered by an ex-boyfriend. I only encountered that colleague of hers the once, but my wife told me she was a bubbly girl who had a large social circle, gave of her time freely to those friends and to worthy causes, and attended church. Her ex was consumed by a combination of anger, frustration, and jealousy, and struck out at her, in a way that I won’t describe
Ramblings of a Tattooed Head By Simon Marshall-Jones As readers of horror fiction, we look upon it as a means of release from the cares and troubles of the everyday world, a means to be taken away to another existence and live a precarious situation through the imagination of the author. But that’s all it is: fiction, the product of someone’s imagination. As writers, authors seek to perhaps exorcise their own demons, or vent their anger at the injustices that abound in the news daily. In the best such fiction the horror itself acts a metaphor for these demons of the mind and all those injustices or whatever. The bottom line, however, is that both readers and writers know that it’s fiction and therefore not real, meaning they’re not inclined in the least to go out and emulate. I’ve been reading such literature for decades and, while I may be an ‘alternative’ type in some people’s eyes, the last thing I am is violent, in fact quite the opposite. However, I am not naïve enough to believe that such things don’t affect a miniscule minority of already unbalanced individuals, but the emphasis here is on that phrase ‘miniscule minority,’ whatever our self-appointed moral guardians may think. Once in a while, though, I am reminded very sharply that real-life horrors are far more affecting than either books or films will ever be. Most of us will, at some point in our lives, be affected by a real-life situation which leaves us feeling shock, grief, horror, or bewilderment. Situations that go beyond the normal such as the death of a family member or friend, or someone we know developing cancer or other terminal illness. Those situations at least give us time to prepare, internalise the inevitable outcome, and allow us to make some room for it when it happens (this doesn’t diminish the shock any the less when it does happen – when my father died as a result of complications arising from angina thirty years ago it still 6
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wont of these things, I slowly formed a picture of the guy, sitting opposite me in my local, on a table near the real fire and the front window. It all came flooding back to me then. The name still didn’t seem right, but as soon as I was reminded by the ex-landlady of the establishment, it all clicked into place. And that was a double-whammy of surprise and shock. He’s standing accused of some foul crimes: torture and rape, of not just women, but men and, in one case, an animal. The idea that I had not only sat in the same room as this man, but also had talked with him and had most likely bought him a pint or two, sent shivers down my spine. Moreover, someone I had considered a friend – not close by any means, so maybe more of an acquaintance, but nevertheless a person I would quite happily share a drink with in my local of a Friday evening. Yes, as I’ve said, I thought he was a mite peculiar, but that was all. The fact that his charge sheet details such horrific crimes is testament to the fact that whatever troubles he had, they went far deeper than anyone had suspected. I was not the only one who was left very perturbed. It is too easy to use the benefit of hindsight to say “I always knew something like this would happen – he was very odd, so it was bound to occur.” It never is bound to occur – these crimes all happened within the last few years, so I would wager that some trigger set him off. What that trigger was we don’t know at present, and we might never get to find out. Only he knows why he committed such heinous acts. This is true horror, hands down. I’ve seen and read some pretty horrible material over the years, but it is these instances of real-life horror that really get to me and sicken me. Knowing something is fictional means that I can adjust my mindset, engage with the world of the book or film and, when it’s finished, disengage entirely and return to the real world. In other words, there’s a distinct
here. A young life (she was only in her early twenties) snuffed out because one man couldn’t handle his own emotions. Earlier this year another friend, out on the town with his new wife, was set upon by a group of men and hospitalised, where he subsequently died some days later. I actually knew this man, having talked many a time to him. He, too, was in his twenties—another young life taken away because he dared to defend his wife. He had a great deal of talent as a tattooist, had set up his own studio with some friends, and was doing well. The men responsible have been jailed, but they still have their lives. However shocking those incidents were, the most recent one really pretty much rocked me to my core. I haven’t always lived in Milton Keynes, having spent fifteen years in a university town in the southwest of the UK. During my time there, I spent many hours with my friends in my local, drinking, socialising, conversing, or just listening to whatever band playing was there that weekend. One particular individual used to come in quite regularly, an odd person certainly but generally just regarded as harmless and certainly not a danger to anyone. I never felt particularly uncomfortable in his presence, but I admit to sometimes having trouble understanding some of his comments – again, they weren’t of a twisted nature, just bizarre. I know he was active on the protest scene, and that he sometimes talked over a pint about the issues that mattered to him. There was no indication that he was anything other than a man who was passionate about his causes, if a little eccentric at times. Perusing my Facebook newsfeed one midweek morning, I happened to come across a picture of someone I vaguely recognised but, not having lived in my previous place of residence for quite a number of years, I failed to place the name initially. Reading the accompanying article, the name quoted didn’t seem to match with any memories. But, as is the 7
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pretty nice distraction! Richard Shanti works at Magnus Meat Processing, a huge slaughterhouse that provides all the meat, and through methane processing, the power for the town of Abryne. He’s known as The Ice Pick and he’s MMP’s top stunner, the man who puts the bolt into the brain of the cattle. But Richard starts to think that something is wrong at MMP, something very wrong. There are various other strands to the plot, including a mad, half-starved prophet intent on ruining MMP whatever the costs, someone trying to find out the truth about the Ice Pick, Magnus himself protecting his monopoly at any cost. This is so much more than a horror novel, although it contains one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve ever read, and I’m a veteran of the splatterpunk era and video nasties. It’s all at once, a horror, science fiction, and morality tale. Brutal and tender at the same time, MEAT is a highly accomplished first novel from an author who shows a lot of promise. By Stanley Riiks
demarcation between the two. In cases like this, however, because it intersects with my own life, the outcome is different, and elicits a completely different reaction. And, more to the point, it emphasises just how fragile the boundary between the normal and the psychotic really is. When it does affect you so closely, it’s bound to make you wonder about the person sitting next to you, in the pub, on the bus, or in work. I may be doing a lot of that in the future, despite knowing the odds against it. It certainly makes you think. MEAT By Joseph D’Lacey www.oaktreepress.co.uk I originally read MEAT in 2008; it was the first novel by an unknown writer named D’Lacey. I was actually shocked, shocked, by one scene. I’d never been shocked before, and having read horror for twentyodd years I didn’t expect to be shocked. I was surprised to be shocked (of course since then I’ve read Gary McMahon and Andy Remic!). I enjoyed MEAT immensely, and have been a fan of D’Lacey ever since; he is a storyteller with an agenda, but he never lets that get in the way of a good story. MEAT is being re-released by Oak Tree Press and it’s about damn time. If you want to read a scary book then you need to read this one, its sheer brutality is a joy to behold. It’s shocking in a way that very few books can ever be. This is D’Lacey at his brutal best, my original review and I stand by it. Read this book people, read it now: It’s very difficult to review a book without giving away the basic premise, but I’m going to have to try because it’s such a good surprise that I really don’t want to spoil it for you. But you should read this book, and you should find out what the surprise is for yourself. I devoured it in three days, and had to chuck my girlfriend out of the flat so that she would not distract me. And she’s a
A BRIEF GUIDE TO GHOST HUNTING By Dr Leo Ruickbie www.constablerobinson.com Believe in ghosts? Unsure? Suspect it’s just the imagination of a few “special” people? Read this book. This brief guide is 350 pages of insightful, intelligent advice about ghosts, about hunting them, what you’ll need, what to look for, and what to do if you find them. This is like living out Paranormal Activity, it is fascinating and chilling. Ruickbie writes with an intelligent and engaging style, and obviously has a vast amount of experience in the area. Intelligent, engaging, chilling, this is the book for anyone interested in spooks and bumps in the night. Fascinating reading. By Adrian Brady 8
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shame as a lot of the book hangs on him. He may be a fine character, but being surrounded by others far nicer and more entertaining makes him fade a little into the background. More exploration of the strange city would have been nice too, and it should have been more relatable to real places in the big city. As a Londoner myself I found the lack of details about real locations rather weak. The cover of the book is fantastic. Overall an absolutely unique and inventive vision, but not one that was wholly satisfying. A surrealist fantasy of epic proportions. By Stanley Riiks
DREAM LONDON By Tony Ballantyne www.solarisbooks.com I have high expectations for the urban fantasies I read; this comes from China Meiville and Neil Gaiman and the high standards they have set with their novels. It’s difficult for a book to find that unique balance of realism and fantasy that sets these novels apart, but mostly Ballantyne’s Dream London manages it. Dream London is a world unlike our own, where buildings stretch into the sky further than the eye can see, where the city changes every night, where pimps are heroes, women are prostitutes, secretaries, or wives, where ants rule the city, and numbers are not numbers at all. This strange, slightly misogynistic world is home to Captain James Wedderburn, a handsome young man who runs a lot of whores in Dream London. But he finds himself the pawn of The Cartel and another group that includes a beautiful American spy, who want him to infiltrate Angel Tower, where the changes happen, and find out what’s going on. Can either of the groups pulling James in different directions get him to do their bidding, will the changes to the city stop before it crumbles in on itself, and will the frog man Mr Monagan ever become a real human being? Surreal is a certainly a term I don’t use often, but it so applies here. This is indeed a strange, dream-like vision of London, and I only wish we’d had more time to explore the irregularities of the city. The book gets stranger the further you follow the story, and you can’t help but be swept along. The plot is weird, original, and slightly frustrating. Is it too weird? Perhaps, but then that’s part of its inventiveness. This is a novel difficult to judge on standard normal terms because it doesn’t quite conform; it is skewed in a way that makes it very dream-like. Some of the supporting characters are more memorable than the Captain, which is a
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR 24 Edited By Stephen Jones www.constablerobinson.com This is the bible of horror short stories. There are several “Best Of” horror annuals, but this is the best. There is a slightly Britain slant to most editions, although there is a good healthy worldwide perspective, and those familiar with previous volumes will no doubt be delighted to see some familiar faces within these pages. Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Alison Littlewood, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Joel Lane, and more provide high class chills, and Neil Gaiman produces a short poem to start off the collection. If you have never read a horror short story then this is the best place to start. If you enjoy short stories then this is the definitive horror collection of the year. If you don’t like horror short stories then you really should pick up this book, and be converted to the dark side. Jones has honed his craft over many many years, and churns out the yearly masterpiece that is The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Genius every year. By Adrian Brady
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maligned genre is to push boundaries, if not smash them down with a sturdy axe. And this collection endeavours to do just that, exploring such controversial themes as religious fanaticism, physical and mental abuse, societal corruption, and good old-fashioned serial killers, and kicking off in style with a nasty little shocker called “Heirloom,” by Michael Laimo. Two of my favourites in this impressively gory set of 13 are “Housesitting” by Ray Garton, which warns of the danger of snooping, and “Party Guests” by Chad Stroup, which takes us into the mind of a very disturbed individual. The story that lives longest in the memory, however, is “The Defiled” by Christine Morgan, a twisted account of Viking rape and pillage that comes to a satisfyingly vengeful end. As you would expect in a collection of this size, there is a small amount of filler; i.e., some stories are stronger than others. But even the weaker stories serve a purpose here as they make the jewels in the crown shine even brighter. Grey Matter is quickly becoming one of the leading independent publishing houses. Unlike some of their competitors, everything they do is of the highest quality. This is well worth a punt, and look out for the upcoming Dark Visions 1 and 2, which promise to be even better. Look out, fly-by-night publishing houses, there is a new kid on the block. They have your number, a sharp knife, and they are creeping up your stairs right now. By C.M. Saunders
SHAME THE DEVIL By Michael Lejeune A killer is stalking the children in a small town, and Wyatt Brody must investigate and find the elusive thing that is committing the murders. Part crime thriller, part horror novel, this is an intelligent and swift read. It starts with a first chapter that is brutal and compelling, and continues in the same vein. A very accomplished first novel from Lejeune, I was surprised at the quality of the writing. Compelling reading, and certainly worth seeking out. By Adrian Brady SPLATTERLANDS: REAWAKENING THE SPLATTERPUNK REVOLUTION By Various http://greymatterpress.com/books/ By definition, splatterpunk first emerged in the mid 1980s as a reaction to the more traditional, suggestive horror story, and was characterised by bloody, visceral, inyour-face horror depicting the true effects, physical and psychological, of extreme violence. This new anthology from Grey Matter Press aims to breathe life (or death) back into the ailing genre by lining up new up-and-comers with more established writers. Dubbed ‘a collection of personal, intelligent and subversive horror,’ Splatterlands certainly delivers. Editor Sharon Lawson explains, “In Splatterlands, we have assembled a collection of stories whose themes intend to show that horror can, indeed, be considered literature. True horror is not just about uncontrolled violence, excessive blood, or sexual degradation of women, or men for that matter. And because we believe that, we’ve created Splatterlands, a collection that we call ‘Horror with a Point.’” A growing band of horror fans believe that the purpose of this much-
ABRAHAM LINCOLN VS ZOMBIES (2012) Director: Richard Schenkman Huh? Who versus what? My first thought was that this can’t be right. Lincoln didn’t fight zombies. Then I remembered that no other U.S. president did, either. We’re still waiting for the zombie apocalypse. With a title like this, it’s hard to take a film seriously. But as this is no comedy (not in 12
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the traditional sense of the word, anyway), I’ll try. I mean, we are all aware of the reverence the American populace holds for 16th president of the USA, but this is ridiculous. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, the Great Man commands a small team of embryonic special forces soldiers on a mission to eradicate the country of the zombie menace. Conveniently enough, most of the zombies are Confederates, which gives our hero ample means, motive, and opportunity to run around chopping people’s heads off with a massive scythe, whilst at the same time teaching a young Teddy Roosevelt the ins-and-outs of zombie slaying. This latest straight-to-DVD mockbuster from The Asylum is a shameless send up of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which in itself is another film that requires a little more suspension of disbelief from the audience than most. As bad movies go, this is pretty awful. It’s the kind of film that you keep thinking you’ve seen before. Until you realize you haven’t seen it before, you’ve just seen about a million like it. There is, however, a neat history rewriting twist at the end that almost made the whole thing worthwhile. Almost. By C.M. Saunders
realism to draw us into his world, and then slamming us face first into the dark, depraved heart of his brutal, unforgiving, twisted reality. Well, he’s back! Shreve is a small mid-England town, a normal enough town with a normal enough set of individuals populating it. Shreve is also home to one of the largest landfill sites in the UK. The residents of the town are a varied bunch. There are the Smithfields, their son Donald, a young paperboy having sex with one of his married neighbours, and Aggie, the wannabe model and teenage temptress. There’s Miss Ahern the nosey neighbour and religious nut. There are Kevin and Tamsin, the married couple on the verge of breaking up. Ray and Jenny, two students whose relationship has run its course and who may find happiness in the arms of that married couple. And then there’s Delilah, an earthy goth chick. And Mason Brand, former star photographer and now caretaker of one of the strangest creatures to ever grace the printed page. In a superbly Frankenstein-esque moment during a lightning storm, several piles of rubbish from the landfill awaken into creatures. But only one of the creatures survives as Mason finds it and starts feeding it with his own blood. The creature, made of rubbish, feeds and grows. This truly gives a new meaning to recycling, as the creature consumes everything given to it, or it can take, and uses it to heal itself, to upgrade itself. It’s like a Transformer made of rubbish and when it eventually feeds on an entire human it starts to get the taste. It realises that it shouldn’t be alone, it should be the commander of a massive army of other garbage creatures, and so it sets its army on a path of destruction that will change Shreve and the world forever. This really shouldn’t work. It’s too ridiculous, except that it’s not. This does work, and it works well. The town of Shreve is set up very realistically, and the
GARBAGE MAN By Joseph D’Lacey www.oaktreepress.co.uk A year after the miracle of horror that was MEAT, D’Lacey was back with a new novel and I had to read it. Garbage Man was a very different book, but it had that same raw intensity, that same passion and an underlining ecological theme. For his second book D’Lacey goes all B-Movie on us and brings us a powerful vision of a future corrupted by humanity and the toxic results. My original review is below: This book is absurd. It’s ridiculous. And it’s bloody marvellous! In D’Lacey’s debut novel MEAT, he teased us in, providing a stark, gritty 13
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characters and their bad habits are all presented to us well before the actual horror starts. And when the horror does kick in it’s hard and fast and furious. Not only does D’Lacey provide his knack for brutal realism, he creates a creature you care about almost as much as the other characters. The Garbage Man, although certainly a villain, is also something of a hero, and at the end you can’t help but feel a certain empathy with him in an almost King Kong moment. The final ending is even harsher and more brutal than the attack of the garbage men and deserves mention as one of the spookiest endings I’ve read in a long time, one that will not only leave you pondering the sheer wretchedness of it all, but leaving you aching for more. The last few chapters show us the true power that D’Lacey can unleash. It’s not a perfect package by any means, our ensemble cast provides little in the way of emotional involvement. The best character is Delilah and she doesn’t appear until the book is halfway through. And Aggie’s adventures in London are cut far too short, and probably could have been quite a decent book on their own. D’Lacey’s tendency to use pertinent socio-political themes doesn’t detract from the entertainment, it enhances it. You cannot help but smile at the clear message, whilst enjoying the bloodlust and nastiness that D’Lacey uses to such great effect. A bloodlust and nastiness that is akin to Jack Ketchum’s brutality and is highly entertaining for the horror connoisseur. Garbage Man is ridiculous, but in a good way. It is the skill and subtlety with which D’Lacey tells the story that raises this so far above beyond the ridiculous. This is what horror should be like, no-holds-barred brutality, nastiness in an action-packed package. By Stanley Riiks
Brad Pitt is probably the last person you would expect to see in a big-budget Hollywood zombie flick. But here he is! The premise is nothing remarkable. How much can you do with zombies? A viral outbreak strikes every major city in the world, and our hero first has to fight his way back out, and then back in at the behest of the US government to find a cure. Because obviously, he’s the only man for the job. It’s anyone’s guess how he ends up in Wales. Despite not bristling with originality, World War Z has some good action scenes, and throws up some interesting conundrums. If there ever is a zombie apocalypse, how would you protect your wife and family? Of course, Brad’s answer is to find a cure and save mankind in the process. Loosely based on the Max Brooks novel, the film garnered mixed reviews. It’s not perfect, but at its core lies a stylish, fast-moving, multi-layered action flick. The recently-released Blu-ray and DVD adds seven minutes more gore. Spurred on by its commercial success, Paramount has already announced plans for the sequel. By C.M. Saunders DEEP STORM By Lincoln Child www.constablerobinson.com Excitement is overabundant in this underwater thriller with SF overtones. An illness has broken out on a secret military facility under the Atlantic Ocean, searching a site that may be Atlantis. Peter Crane is called in to attend those falling to the mysterious illness, and must discover the truth about it before it’s too late. Amazingly exciting, this is a nonstop thriller that throws you straight in and doesn’t let up. Instant page-turner, absolutely stunning read. Characters are slightly underwhelming, but no matter, it’s the action and the plot that keep you reading. Hollywood action thriller in book form. By Adrian Brady
World War Z (2013) Director: Marc Forster 14
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Horror of the Year, Ellen Datlow – Night Shade Books) 2. Reverbstorm by David Britton (Savoy) 3. Written by Daylight by John Howard (Swan River Press) 4. Elegies & Requiems by Colin Insole (Side Real Press) 5. The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday) 6. Sorcery & Sanctity: A Homage to Arthur Machen (Hieroglyphic Press) 7. Getting out of There by M. John Harrison (Nightjar Press) 8. Something Like Happy by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape) 9. Shades of Nothingness by Gary Fry (PS Publishing) 10. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Picador)
Matt Leyshon Mini Interview You are currently editing the Morpheus Tales Rural Horror Special Issue. How did that come about and why rural horror? Some of my favourite horror stories are set in the countryside and so I felt that rural horror should be recognised in the same way that urban horror is. Also I have noticed that in the last few years there has been a resurgence in popular nature writing (Jean Sprackland and Kathleen Jamie, for example) and I liked the idea of this type of prose and observational style being applied to horror fiction. Your book The Function Room: The Kollection featured in The Guardian’s top ten horror books, and Bizarre Magazine’s top five horror books this Halloween. How did that happen, and how does it feel to have your work compared to that of Stephen King, James Herbert, and Adam Nevill? Both features were written by Joseph D’Lacey who felt that The Function Room: The Kollection deserved more recognition. The book was published with minimal publicity and so, I think, it fell under a lot of radars. I think the comparisons with King, Herbert, and Nevill probably begin and end with those features though. They’re not writers I feel I have much in common with.
What do you like about writing short fiction? For me it is a particularly effective medium for horror as I don’t find fear to be especially enduring. But the fact that short stories sit somewhere between poetry, which can be too dense, and novels, which often aren’t dense enough, probably has more to do with it when it comes to my own writing. You recently got married and your wife is pregnant. Congratulations! How does your personal life affect your writing and the stories you write? Will you be starting on some children’s stories soon? Children quite often feature in my stories already. The Function Room: The Kollection has dead child skull-rape, foetus pate, and infanticide aplenty. But none of these things actually occur in my personal life, so hopefully fatherhood shouldn’t have too much impact on my writing either.
What would be your top ten horror books? I don’t really enjoy reading typical horror novels, so perhaps I could list 10 of my favourite reads of 2013 instead – they all have at least some element of horror in them? 1. Mantis Wives by Kij Johnson (Best 16
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Some of the characters and themes in The Function Room: The Kollection have continued to grow and have a life of their own, such as the interview that appeared in the MT Supplement #20 with Gormo and Annie Gloom. Do you have plans to continue the series? Those characters and themes have acquired a life of their own and as such they have been easy and fun to return to. That said, I’ve no plans for them to continue unless I am asked to revisit them.
Philip. Magnificent, action-packed fantasy. This is a fast-paced book that never lets up from the opening pages. The historical world is rich and chaos-filled, and the brutal sword-fighting and action are an integral part of the story as Guy struggles across to Marseilles and back. Exceptional story, great characters, rich and varied settings, and simply irresistible writing. What more can you ask for from a historical fantasy? Pure genius. By Adrian Brady
What next for Matt Leyshon? Recently I’ve been using cut up techniques alongside some OuLiPo practices to create some quite avant-garde horror pieces. The first to be published is called “Evil Dreams on a Green Baize Table,” and it will appear in a forthcoming anthology called Cut Up! The story was created using Arthur Machen’s The Novel of the Black Seal and Edward Lucas White’s The House of the Nightmare.
The Most-Visited Grave in Swan Point Cemetery By Hunter Welles (Originally published in Innsmouth Free Press. December 2, 2013)
I’ve always had mixed feelings about H.P. Lovecraft, the pulp horror writer, whose grave I visited recently. He was a racist and his prose is sometimes as scary as his imagination. But talking to the security guard at Swan Point Cemetery helped me clarify my thoughts about the great pulp horror writer. We heard the guard before we saw him. “No pictures,” he called to Lizzy and me from further down the hill. I’d been walking toward the modest headstone, phone in hand. The red-haired guard walked toward us with a quick, wide gait and explained that the cemetery was private and didn’t allow photographs of the monuments. I put my phone back in my pocket. I’m ambivalent about images anyway, so I didn’t feel robbed. There was a strange mix of objects on the grave—seashells, small stones, hand-written poems, and a key. “Once the plot is clean it stays clean for weeks,” the guard said. “And then someone puts something new on it and stuff starts to pile up.” “Why is there a key?” Lizzy asks. “I don’t know why people leave keys,” he said. “One person left a key and
And of course there’s the Morpheus Tales Rural Horror Special that I am editing. I’ve accepted some fantastic stories so far, from both new and established writers, but I need still need more. I’m interested in writers who pay close attention to nature and the countryside in their stories, but of course not at the expense of any horror elements. I would be especially interested to receive submissions with non-white protagonists as they’ve been rather lacking so far. I’m also particularly open to experimental writing styles and narratives, but less conventional stories still need to be dark and rustic. KNIGHT OF SHADOWS By Toby Venables www.abaddonbooks.com Historical fantasy has never been so much fun! This novel, set during the Robin Hood era of Prince John’s rule, Guy of Gisburne is a knight enlisted to capture the skull of John the Baptist from the French King 17
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his fidelity to some vague artistic ideal completely separate from the market, his cosmic worldview, and his dogged desire to live as much as possible in his head. But obviously not everyone visits his grave for the same reason I did. I think part of it is his posthumous popularity—a common nerd fantasy. His fanbase is made up of writers, artists, horror aficionados, and misanthropes— ”losers, no offense,” as the guard termed us. We are people who feel some disconnect with the world, but still dream of adulation. Not that Lovecraft’s fans are a cohesive mass. There’s something incredible about a writer who can appeal equally to black-clad metalheads, potheads, English majors, Stephen King, the French writer Michel Huoellebecq, and a mysterious German man—described by the guard—who flew in on Lovecraft’s birthday and stood by the grave in a threepiece suit for half an hour before flying straight back. Lovecraft’s all-things-to-all-men quality is due, in part, to the grand, cosmic scale of his stories and, in part, to the way he shied from society. Reading Lovecraft’s letters I was reminded of Adam Gopnik’s essay, “Van Gogh’s Ear,” which describes Van Gogh’s final months in an asylum and connects this to the incredible prices which Van Gogh’s paintings now fetch. That essay concludes by contrasting the difference between art collectors who bet huge sums of money on paintings they hope will appreciate, and the artist who “bets his life.” That’s my answer to why his grave is still visited. Lovecraft bet his life. The security guard told us that the time you consider cat food as a viable food source is the time you put down your pen and get a job at a factory. That’s the way most of us think. Certainly all the governors and generals buried in Swan Point would have been so practical. But not Lovecraft.
now everyone leaves keys.” “What are those notes?” “I don’t know. You can read them if you want.” Lizzy leaned over and looked at the crumpled paper held in place by a stone. “That’s a strange thing to be carrying.” The guard nodded at Lizzy’s left hand, which, curled nonchalantly under her right hand, held a can of green beans. Years ago, while I was reading systematically through all of Lovecraft’s stories, I also read the final volume of his Selected Letters. At the end of his life, Lovecraft was very poor and virtually every meal he mentioned eating came out of a can. In many cultures it’s common to leave food on a grave and I thought a can of food would be most appropriate. “We were going to leave it,” Lizzy said. “That’s fine,” he said. “But it’ll just be cleaned off later.” He said this as if he expected us to be disappointed that Lovecraft wouldn’t wake up that night and chow down. Lizzy set the can on the grass next to one of the hand-written notes. The guard said the can was a fitting offering for a man who had contemplated cat food as a viable food source. There were people who left baggies of marijuana, he said, people who obviously knew nothing about how Lovecraft felt about intoxicants. And there were people who left heavy metal CDs, which he doubted very much that Lovecraft would have liked. We spoke for a while longer and he told us more about his job and the visitors to the gravesite. Lovecraft’s grave was the most visited grave in all of beautiful Swan Point Cemetery, where governors and Civil War generals were buried. On our walk back to downtown Providence, I wondered why that was. I personally don’t look up to him as I do some writers. I look back on him as I look back on my younger self, admiring 18
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is pulled from under you and it feels like a whole other book. Strange and slightly disconcerting, this is nonetheless an interesting and intelligent novel that takes a real-world premise and completely messes with it. Strangely entertaining. By Stanley Riiks
FROM THE FATHERLAND, WITH LOVE By Ryu Marakami www.pushkinpress.com This is like watching your first anime after growing up with Disney and Looney Tunes; it is a bit of a shock. Japan is reeling from ecomonic collapse and a group of North Korean special forces invade and take control of the city of Fukuoka. The Japanese government is unable to do anything about it, as the residents of the city are taken hostage. Who can possibly save the day? What follows is a high-octane, slightly crazy, and wholly enjoyable mayhem-induced romp. Like nothing else out there, Marakami is like a Japanese Tarantino. Like anime, this is highly addictive. By Adrian Brady
THE CONJURING (2013) Director: James Wan It’s been a long time since the release of a horror movie has been met with such fanfare. Viral campaigns, expensive trailers, you name it, Warner Bros pulled out all the stops to stamp The Conjuring all over the public consciousness. The film stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life paranormal investigators and writers best known for their work on the cases that eventually spawned previous Hollywood blockbusters Amityville Horror and The Haunting in Connecticut. The Conjuring continues in that ‘based on a true story’ vein but of course, whether these stories really are true or not is a matter of conjecture. The main story arc of The Conjuring begins in predictable enough fashion. It’s the early seventies, and a family moves into a new house where strange things soon begin to happen. The temperature plummets, the clocks stop, the dog gets killed, you know the score. Out of desperation the matriarch, Carolyn Perron, seeks out the Warrens at one of their paranormal lectures and asks for their help. They oblige, and set about investigating the house with their team. And that’s where the frights really begin, as the unnatural events escalate until one of the family falls victim to demonic possession. Although there is very little original fare for the seasoned horror buff, there are some genuinely terrifying moments in The Conjuring, and the special effects are electrifying. The exorcism scenes near the end will leave you gasping. Did it really
THE EIDOLON By Libby McGugan www.solarisbooks.com Hmm, this is a strange one. What starts off as a highly-charged espionage-fueled thriller, where physicist Robert Strong is enlisted in saving the world by disrupting the CERN Large Hadron Collider by planting a virus within their mainframe. That’s the first two thirds of the book. The final third reveals the truth behind the secret project, the death of Strong’s father, involves kidnapping, murder, invisibility, and flying. I was getting into the book by the time the change comes, and it kind of messed up my concentration a little. There’s no indication that anything “magical” is going on at all, so it came as a bit of a shock in this SF thriller. And then everything, literally, gets turned upside down. This is an entertaining and intelligent book; it’s a little slow, the characters are not particularly engaging or memorable, but for the most part you get swept up in the story, and then the carpet 20
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happen? Who knows. But it certainly makes for a gripping story. The story goes that development of the film version of The Conjuring began over two decades ago when the Warrens played a tape of their original interview with Carolyn Perron to movie producer Tony DeRosa-Grund. Why the project took so long to get off the ground is a mystery, but when it eventually transpired, made on a budget of $20 million, within two months it had grossed more than ten times that amount. The Warrens attracted a lot of criticism during their careers, and many of their alleged findings have been questioned. But that is only to be expected working in a field so often shunned by mainstream science and as open to interpretation as the paranormal. Perhaps the most unique, and downright spooky thing about them is that they maintained a ‘museum’ of haunted and cursed objects that they took from their cases and stored for safekeeping. One thing is certain, following the success of The Conjuring, Lorraine (Ed died in 2006) will be able to live out her twilight years in relative luxury, and rest easy in the knowledge that her tale has been told. By C.M. Saunders
are blended with a brilliant, fast-paced action-packed murder mystery to create a novel that is difficult to put down. Page-turner and edge-of-the-seat are just two of the clichés that apply to this book. Brilliantly historical fantasy, epic murder mystery, and one of the finest books of the year. By Adrian Brady DARK SKIES (2013) Director: Stewart
Scott
The new offering from Jason Blum, producer of Insidious, Purge, and Paranormal Activity, is a creepy sci-fi horror about a young family, headed by Daniel Barrett. Daniel has been out of work for a while, putting a serious strain on his marriage, but that turns out to be the least of his worries. His youngest son, played unnervingly well, is being plagued by nightmares about ‘the Sandman’ and draws spooky pictures. Then, a succession of strange poltergeistythings begin happening around the house. Events come to a head when hundreds of birds fly into the house en masse, leaving experts stumped as to what the cause could be. In a bid to find answers, Daniel hooks up a system of cameras around the house, and it slowly becomes apparent that the family are the victims of some otherworldly visitations. Who or what do the visitors want? And why? This slick, well-scripted tale, one part Poltergeist and two parts Close encounters of the Third Kind, will live long in the memory, and may cause a few sleepless nights of its own. By C.M. Saunders
DRAKENFELD By Mark Charon Newton www.panmacmillan.com Epic historical crime thrillers don’t get more fast-paced than this! Newton has created a complex and entertainingly engaging world, and put a murder mystery right as its heart. The story is set in a Roman world of peace, a world kept stable by the Sun Chamber on behalf of the monarchies. Our hero, the eponymous Drakenfeld, is called home after his father dies. But then he finds out that the King’s sister has been brutally murdered and Drakenfeld must investigate, no matter how hard the answers he finds are to believe. Fascinating world and characters 21
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So, what’s it all about? Massive corporations eventually took over Earth and then destroyed it in a war, so when the dust settled the Council of 9 took over, issuing death warrants for any surviving corporates and sending the bounty killers after them. Part hero, part superstar, all killer, the bounty killers are bringing justice to the world one corpse at a time. Christian Pitre is stunningly beautiful and sexy as hell as Mary Death, Mathew Marsden is pretty good, too as Drifter, and it’s fun watching the pair vie to be the best and get the biggest payday as they are chased by the nomadic and mad gypsies, and a group wearing yellow ties. Much bloodshed, violence, and action ensures. Think Death Race with more killing, great action sequences, and a whole lot of fun. This doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s all guns blazing, blood by the bucket-load, great vehicles, with a few laughs and a sexy woman thrown in for good measure! Appearances by Beverly D’Angelo, Gary Busey, Eve, and Kristanna Loken spice things up a bit, and Barak Hardly is excellent as the side-kick gun caddy and comic relief. Pitre is the real star; she is gorgeous, too good looking to take your eyes off if there weren’t so much violence and brutal action going on around her. Definitely worth an hour and a half of anyone’s time. Great fun! By Stanley Riiks
THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER By Paula Brackston www.constablerobinson.com Elizabeth Hawksmith is a witch’s daughter; she saw her mother killed centuries ago and lives a quiet and peaceful life. Until she befriends Tegan, a young teenager, who Elizabeth shows her secrets. But a Warlock is after the witch and will stop at nothing to get to her, including through the young girl. A quiet magical book, literally. The friendship that develops between the main characters is the heart of the story. Gripping, dramatic and heartwrenching, this is a must-read novel. By Adrian Brady THE WINTER WITCH By Paula Brackston www.constablerobinson.com The second book in Brackston’s history witch trilogy, this book sees a young Welsh girl called Morgana, who is mute and cursed with a magic that she cannot control, married and sent off to live with her new husband. But it rapidly becomes clear that her new home is in a town filled with danger and darkness. Can Morgana manage her magic and learn to control it before it is too late? Another entertaining novel from Brackston, who manages to really capture the Welsh countryside, the dangers and fears of small towns, and the wonder and tension of using magic. Brackston has produced two stunning novels that tug at the heartstrings. Looking forward to the third book in the trilogy. By Adrian Brady
From the Catacombs By Jim Lesniak Welcome back into the dungeon! Ye Olde Reviewer has many things running through his head, so we’ll let them out before jumping into the reviews. It’s safer that way, trust me. Horror conventions would be the best place to murder someone in public and escape unscathed. Honestly, you could stab someone in full view of a crowd, be
BOUNTY KILLER (2014) Oh yeah! This film has immediately gone into my top ten post-apocalyptic films of all time, right up there beside Doomsday! 23
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“annual” book club they took to numbering it (i.e. Book Club 3.0)1. Dark Regions Press is far enough behind; I’ll be lucky to get half of my number of books, much less the actual ones advertised, within three years. Approach these “clubs” carefully, or, better yet, go to publishers that can produce! 2 Surprisingly enough, the best new horror comic Ye Olde Reviewer has gotten his hands on this year is Afterlife With Archie! Yes, the Riverdale gang is overrun with the walking dead in the first Archie title ever not designed for an all-ages audience. This is a book that gets it right, from the tone of the writing to the presentation of the art. Horror references abound as well: the first issue makes use of the Necronomicon and quotes Pet Sematary. Somehow, Archie has become one of the more progressive and innovative comic book publishers over the last several years and they are putting out quality content even in the horror genre. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up; issues one and two are out now and I cannot wait to see how it continues.
covered in their blood, and calmly walk away. And all the crowd would think is how realistic the effects and makeup were and take pictures with the corpse. Not that I am planning this, but it’s a thought that floats through the dealer area at horror conventions from time to time, especially when it’s close to the end of the day. Maybe I have set up at too many of these things in the last year… and now I’ll wonder why no one comes to my booth. Having been a dealer at several horror conventions also gives a bit more insight to what the general public, who might not normally read comics, finds interesting when they come across it. The big winners are H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe adaptations from ANY publisher – I cannot keep these in stock, especially the Corben books. Beyond that, there is a constant demand for Clive Barker, Warren magazines (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella) and Tales From the Crypt reprints. The commonality among all of this would be great storytelling. There is an expectation of quality to the STORY that allows them to take a risk on an adaptation or a random magazine from the past. There is a market for great storytelling, a hunger for reading material. The funny thing about this observation is that several years back, I was speaking to a major dealer in the horror convention world to feel out the market for comics at these things. He (who shall remain unnamed) claimed that the horror crowd was “not a reading group,” and comics or reading material of any sort would probably fall flat. WRONG. Never insult the horror crowd or underestimate what they are capable of doing. Speaking of reading material (great segue, right?), some of the small press have royally ticked me off in the past year. If you can’t produce, don’t offer a “book club” and don’t take pre-orders. I ordered the complete Vampyricon from Lonely Roads Books before my son was born. He will be four soon. Even the venerable Cemetery Dance fell so behind on their
R.E.M. By Ryan Colucci and Zsombor Huszka Spoke Lane Entertainment, LLC http://www.remc hair.com Michael Letto is obsessed with unlocking the 1
They offered their new book club in December, 2013 – two exclusive books to the club plus you get a coupon code good for anything on the site (up to $40.00) every month. I’ll pass, since it took two years to get everything from the last book club. 2 I highly recommend both Dark Fuse (https://www.darkfuse.com/) and Spectral Press (http://spectralpress.wordpress.com/) for quality titles and prompt publishing. 24
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mystery of sleep in the aftermath of his girlfriend’s suicide, to the point of shutting everyone out. His obsession leads to the attempted development of the Soma Chair, a device that will give the benefit of a full night’s sleep in a mere thirty minutes. Michael’s paranoia finds flesh in the multitude of organizations looking to acquire the device for enlightenment and weaponization. All he wants is to enter a state that will allow him to see his lost love, but he must perfect the chair before it is discovered. R.E.M. is a handsomely illustrated black and white graphic novel that was a successful Kickstarter project in mid-2013. The art style modifies as the novel progresses to help differentiate between dreams and reality, as well as lucidity and madness. Huszka makes excellent use of negative space to imply figures and background, which serves the story quite well. It is obvious he could render everything in rich detail; however, the story would get lost. Part of Michael’s paranoia and obsession is his narrow focus on certain details with everything else a superfluous blur. Although there are moments where it’s hard to follow the action, in the grand scheme of things it fits with the story to be told. There is no neat ending wrapped in a bow for the reader – the ambiguity allows for a variety of interpretations.
each chapter with a brief overview of the year being chronicled, but otherwise lets the art do the talking. The price reflects the quality in the self-published edition. I have paid similar prices for McFarland books that have a fraction of the illustrations herein. The sheer amount of work it took to simply find the posters to photograph must have been enormous – much like his Children of the Night book. They’re Here Already is an essential reference for fans of Sci Fi movies and poster art. Meat.Puppets Dir. Roger Scholz, Screenplay by Todd DeGroot and Roger Scholz https://www.facebook.com/illustrator.scho lz?fref=ts
They’re Here Already!: A Comprehensive Guide to 1950’s Science Fiction Movie Posters By: James A. Gresham http://theyreherealreadybook
Meat.Puppets is a short film that follows the stereotypical backwoods lunatic into his desolate cabin where he has captured three young women and chained them to the wall. What will their fate be? The basement is littered with many implements of torture and destruction. More of a summary would ruin the film, which runs a tight 13 minutes, and I do not want to be the guy who spoils the
This is the companion book to the same author’s Children of the Night edition from a few years ago. Not much of a surprise from the title, this is a full colour hardcover collection of Sci Fi movie posters and lobby cards from the 1950s. Not limited to U.S. release posters, notable international editions, including British Quads, get equal time. Mr Gresham begins 25
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twist. I do not even want to allude to what happens (good, bad, or ugly) because I enjoyed it so much I want people to go into it blind. Small budget productions live and die on the ability of the cast and crew
http://strangehousebooks.com The Humans Under the Bed begins 500 years after the great war wiped out the human race, allowing the monster world to live in peace. Humans are relegated to scary stories for children until one fateful night they return from hiding to reclaim the surface world. The monster children must warn their (hopefully) surviving mother after they witness the humans do the unthinkable: kill their father. Can they stop the biomechanical human scourge from overtaking their world? This novelette fits squarely and proudly in the “bizarro” genre of fiction. Where this succeeds in being accessible to a wider audience is how Kevin grounds the perspective in the children. They are monster children, but still kids who have a deliriously difficult, if not impossible, task ahead of them. No matter how outré the story gets, it’s with the perspective of sympathetic protagonists. And trust me, it starts out weird, then veers into bizarre at the climax. You will want the humans to pay for what they did to Dexantheon.
to produce – see The Edison Death Machine as an example3. The cinematography is creative in avoiding both the static camera of a stagebound production and the jackhammer editing that hides lack of ideas in retina rape. For screening or DVD information, contact the director at his Facebook page (given above). Roger is a regular at horror conventions across the Midwestern United States and usually has copies of the movie for sale – I do not know if it shall be available internationally. Meat.Puppets is a stylish film debut with a surprise ending, which is a rare thing indeed in this era of the remake.
Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black By Karl Bollers, Rick Leonardi and Larry Stroman New Paradigm Studios http://newparadignmstudios.com
The Humans Under the Bed By Kevin Strange StrangeHouse Books 3
I’ve reviewed this movie previously – a fantastic idea that was crippled by terrible filming. Just try to watch 90 minutes of close-ups and keep track of a dynamic movie. I did it once and nearly had a migraine.
A Study in Black is fantastic. It is the first story arc of a re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes, set in modern-day Harlem. The 26
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protagonists are now African-American and, much like the most recent BBC series, Watson is a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict. The antagonists are gang bangers and drug dealers in the urban New York setting with fast-paced (sometimes bloody) action that still balances the need to show Holmes as the deductive genius he is. There is a seemingly throwaway reference to Moriarty, leaving the possibility of Holmes’ classic adversary to make an appearance in the future, unless it is a red herring. The New Paradigm Studios version of the venerable Doyle characters is a well-realized package. The characters ring true with their historical interpretations, yet are not anachronistic to their modern surroundings. We start with the archetypes and dress them in urban clothes to good effect herein. After a great debut story, there is a world of potential for this variation of the Holmes mileau.
barely. In this realm of movie magazine, I would recommend Weng’s Chop well ahead of this. It feels like a wayward home for lost articles that could not find placement in any other magazine. Interesting but non-essential – I doubt I shall purchase issue #3. Signing off for the duration, I’ll make mention of this column’s soundtrack. A couple of releases from Bellyache Records (http://bellyacherecords.com) have been on repeat: Voyag3r “Victory in the Battle Chamber,” The Amino Acids “Theme From the Slack Hole,” and Octopus “Evil is Real.” All are 7” singles with MP3 download codes for when you’re away from the turntable – free samples are available from their site. Wow, I got through an entire column without mentioning Cthulhu or Nyalathotep! Oops.
Grindhouse Purgatory #2 Createspace print on demand (Amazon)
Having never heard of Dale Brown it was a surprise to realise this is his 23rd novel, and for those familiar with his technothrillers, it is more of the same. The Chinese army is making advances in war technologies, and the US, after budget cuts in defence, must find a way to stop the Asians aggression. In steps retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, who will use whatever inventive methods necessary to stop the Chinese. This reads like one of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels, an updated version of James Bond, and just as exciting. There is a whole wealth of technical details that adds to the realism of this world-altering scenario. Fast-paced action thriller set in the near future. What more could you possibly want? By Adrian Brady
TIGER’S CLAW By Dale Brown www.constablerobinson.com
The second sleazy issue of this ‘zine from the fevered mind of 42nd Street Pete covers the dirty end of the exploitation movie era of the late 70s and early 80s. Personally, I am a fan of Pete’s outspokenness and his appreciation of the wild side of films. Unfortunately, I am not as big a fan of the magazine. For every great article on oddball Spaghetti Westerns, there is a three-page rant, in fake interview form, against a peripheral personality in the horror world4 or a reminiscence of brothels of New York in the early 80s. One was a waste of space and the other more sad than prurient or informative. The editing is also suspect in some of the articles, which may endear some from the ‘zine underground as “authentic;” I found it annoying. The good outweighs the bad in this issue of Grindhouse Purgatory, but just 4
The producers of the magazine have a major hatred for Jim O’Rear. I’ve never paid much heed to him myself. 27
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speed and relentless pace of Remic’s and Lawrence’s stories, it does have the depth of Brett’s work. More intrigue and drama than some of the more action-filled fantasy novels currently available, this still has a fascinating world and characters to keep you interested. By Adrian Brady
PLASTIC JESUS By Wayne Simmons www.saltpublishing.com Wayne Simmons, the author of Flu, is back. This time he foregoes the zombies in favour of a SF thriller set in the future world of Lark City. Code Guy Johnny Lyon is programming Jesus VR for social networking, after a holy war has changed the face of the planet. But when the Jesus programme becomes corrupted, all hell will literally break loose. Simmons writes fast fiction; his writing flows with a conciseness and nononsense approach that leaves you a little breathless. Managing to create believable characters and an intricate world within this short book is nothing short of miraculous. Intelligent SF, dealing with a myriad of issues, and yet still retaining the thrill-a-minute speed we’ve come to expect. Plastic Jesus is an inventive and original title from a writer at the top of his game. By Adrian Brady
THE IRON WOLVES By Andy Remic www.angryrobotbooks.com That man Andy Remic has done it again! He’s written a marvellously entertaining fantasy novel and ends it on a huge, I mean HUGE, cliff-hanger! You have to read the second book in the series; it’s not possible to put this book down at the end without growling in frustration, and ready to beg, steal or borrow the next installment of The Rage of Kings series. Twenty-odd years ago the Iron Wolves saved Vagandrak from a mysterious sorcerer and his mud-orc army. Now they are splintered, fractured, mere shadows of their former heroic selves. But General Dalgoran is given a gift that doesn’t seem as harmless as it was first thought. A seer is brought to his house and she foresees danger, war, and mud-orcs, news that sours his party, until a savage hybrid (part human, part horse, and all monster) arrives to kill the seer. Can Dalgoran bring the hateful former soldiers together and stop them from killing each other for long enough to reach Desekra? Will the mad king send the army needed to the fort, and will they reach it before Orlana the Changer and her swiftly growing army? Better read the book to find out. For those of you who haven’t yet discovered Andy Remic yet, where the hell have you been? This man writes heroic fantasy with an axe in one hand and a jug of ale in the other. I first discovered Remic’s Kell’s Legend a few years ago, and fell immediately in love with his smash and grab, full-on, balls-out, actionpacked thriller ride fantasy. The Iron
THE EMPEROR’S BLADES By Brian Staveley www.panmacmillan.com Yes, another fantasy series starts in earnest. Will this one demand my attention against the likes of Peter V. Brett, Andy Remic, Mark Lawrence, et al? Well, actually yes. This first book in the series offers another magical world of heroic fantasy to explore. The emperor has been murdered, and his children must find out who is behind it. Behind that seemingly simple sentence lies the whole of the story contained in the first book of the Unhewn Throne series. As you might expect there are a slew of interesting characters, lots of mystery and intrigue, and a host of exciting fighting and machination. Although the book doesn’t have the 29
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Wolves is more of the same, although more of an ensemble-piece than Kell’s Trilogy. It’s not often a book excites me, but Remic does it again. Like Peter V. Brett and Mark Lawrence, Remic is at the forefront of heroic fantasy, treading new paths with a brutal reality, inspirational characters, places wild and wonderful, and stories that keep you on the edge of your seat. I could throw so many clichés at a book like this: thrill-ride, seat-of-yourpants fiction, characters that jump off the page, rollercoaster-ride of fantasy-- all of them true. But what Remic really does is wrap you up in intelligent and well-fleshed characters, and a compelling story that you just want to read. Fantasy genius, Remic has proved again that he is at the top of his game at the top-flight of fantasy. By Stanley Riiks
text is a compendium of others’ words and research. With apologies to anyone I may have inadvertently left out, my online research for this chapter led me to articles from hubpages.com; Kalila K. Smith (whose Vampire Tour I can recommend from personal experience—see http://www.zoominfo.com/p/KalilaSmith/178024410); New Orleans Ghosts.com; GO NOLA; Brian Harrison; Haunted Shreveport Bossier.com; and Frommers.com. I’ve borrowed freely from all of these sources and recommend them highly to those who would like to delve more deeply into the secrets of this unique city.
A Vampire’s Guide To New Orleans By Steven P. Unger If you have ever walked the dark, rainy streets of the French Quarter at night, you have seen the voodoo shops selling their gris-gris and John-theConqueror Root. You’ve seen the old woman in the French Market whose pointing finger foretells your death. And if you know the right person to ask and you ask in the right way, you’ll be shown to the vampire clubs. I’ve been in those clubs and seen people who believe with their heart, body, and soul that they are real, live vampires. And some of the people in those clubs are scared to death of a select group of vampires who have only appeared there a few times, and always in the darkest of night. By day, of course, the vampire clubs are closed and locked or
St. Louis Cathedral I wrote this article on New Orleans as an homage to one of my favourite cities, one still fresh in my mind and heart after a long-postponed revisit there as an invitee to the Vampire Film Festival’s Midsummer Nightmare last year. All of the photos in this article are my own, except for the portrait of the Compte de St. Germain and the two pictures otherwise credited. Most of the 30
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from sitting up; stuff the mouth with garlic and sew it closed; or mutilate the body, usually by decapitating the head and placing it at the bottom of the feet. But the most common remedy for impending vampirism is to drive a stake into the corpse, decapitate it, then burn the body to ashes. This method is still believed to be the only sure way to truly destroy the undead.
turned back into regular tourist bars. -Crazy Horse’s Ghost
St. Louis Cemetery (Photo Courtesy of David Yeagley) Like the Spanish Moss that drapes the trees of the nearby bayous, mystery and the occult have shrouded New Orleans since its birth. For hundreds of years, families there have practiced a custom called “sitting up with the dead.” When a family member dies, a relative or close family friend stays with the body until it is placed into one of New Orleans’ aboveground tombs or is buried. The body is never left unattended. There are many reasons given for this practice today—the Old Families will tell you it’s simply respect for the dead— but this tradition actually dates back to the vampire folklore of medieval Eastern Europe. First, the mirrors are covered and the clocks are stopped. While sitting up with the deceased, the friend or family member is really watching for signs of paranormal activity; e.g., if a cat is seen to jump over, walk across, or stand on top of the coffin, if a dog barks or growls at the coffin, or if a horse shies from it; these are all signs of impending vampirism. Likewise, if a shadow falls over the corpse. At that point, steps are taken to prevent the corpse from returning from the dead. Ways to stop a corpse—especially a suicide—from becoming a vampire include burying it face down at a crossroads. Often family members place a sickle around the neck to keep the corpse
THE CASKET GIRLS Ask any member of the Old Families who the first vampires to come to New Orleans were, and they’ll tell you the same: it was the Casket Girls. Much of the population that found their way to New Orleans in the early 1700s were unwelcome anywhere else: deported galley slaves and felons, trappers, gold-hunters, and petty criminals. People who wouldn’t be noticed if they went missing. Sources vary on the specifics, but the basic story is that the city’s founders asked French officials to send over prospective wives for the colonists. They obliged and after months at sea these young girls showed up on the docks, pale and gaunt, bearing only as many belongings as would fit inside a wooden chest or “casquette,” which appears to have been the 18th Century equivalent of an overnight bag. They were taken to the
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Ursuline Convent5, which still stands today, where the girls were said to have resided until the nuns could arrange for marriages. Some accounts say they were fine young women, virgins brought up in church-run orphanages; some say they were prostitutes. But there are many who swear they were vampires, vampires who continue to rise from their “casquettes” on the third floor to break through the windows and hurricane shutters—windows and shutters that always seem to need repairing after the calmest of nights—to feed upon the transient crowds that for centuries have filled the darkened alleys of the Quarter. Finally in 1978, after centuries of rumors and stories, two amateur reporters demanded to see these coffins. The archbishop, of course, denied them entrance. Undaunted, the next night the two men climbed over the convent wall with their recording equipment and set up their workstation below. The next morning, the reporters’ equipment was found strewn about the lawn. And on the front porch steps of the convent were found the almost decapitated bodies of these two men. Eighty percent of their blood was gone. To this day, no one has ever solved the murders.
Le Compte de St. Germain and the Balcony at Ursuline and Royal If there is one person who encapsulates the lure and the danger of the vampire, it is the Compte de Saint Germain. Making his first appearance in the court of Louis XV of France, the Compte de Saint Germain endeared himself to the aristocrats by regaling them with events from his past. An alchemist by trade, he claimed to be in possession of the “elixir of life,” and to be more than 6,000 years old. At other times the Count claimed to be a son of Francis II Rakoczi, the Prince of Transylvania, born in 1712, possibly legitimate, possibly by Duchess Violante Beatrice of Bavaria. This would account for his wealth and fine education. It also explains why kings would accept him as one of their own. Contemporary accounts from the time record that despite being in the midst of many banquets and invited to the finest homes, he never ate at any of them. He would, however, sip at a glass of red wine. After a few years, he left the French court and moved to Germany, where he was reported to have died. However, people continued to spot him throughout Europe even after his death. In 1903, a handsome and charismatic young Frenchman named Jacques Saint Germain, claiming to be a descendant of the Compte, arrived in New Orleans, taking residence in a house at the corner of Royal and Ursuline streets. Possessing an eye for beauty, Jacques was seen on the streets of the French Quarter with a different young woman on his arm every evening. His excursions came to an
LE COMPTE DE ST. GERMAIN 5
http://www.neworleansonline.com/directory/locati on.php?locationID=1278
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abrupt end one cold December night, when a woman’s piercing scream was heard coming from Jacques’ French Quarter home. The scream was quickly followed by a woman who flung herself from the second story window to land on the street below. As bystanders rushed to her aid, she told them how Saint Germain attacked and bit her, and that she jumped out of the window to escape. She died later that evening at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. By the time the New Orleans police kicked in the door of Saint Germain’s home, he had escaped. However, what they did find was disturbing enough. The stench of death greeted the nostrils of the policemen, who found not only large bloodstains in the wooden flooring, but even wine bottles filled with human blood. The house was declared a crime scene and sealed off. From that evil night to the present day, no one has lived in that home in the French Quarter. It is private property and all taxes have been paid to date, but no one has been able to contact the present owner or owners. The only barriers between the valuable French Quarter property and the outside world are the boarded-up balcony windows and a small lock on the door. Whispers of Jacques sightings are prevalent, and people still report seeing him in the French Quarter. Could it be the enigmatic Compte checking up on his property?
Phil Orgeron) There is no one who has done more to bring the vampire into the New Age than Anne Rice, born and bred in New Orleans, with her novel Interview with the Vampire and the films and books that followed. Those who have profited mightily from the popularity of True Blood and Twilight owe her a great debt. The ultra-retro St. Charles Avenue Streetcar will take you close to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, the gravesite of Louis de Pointe du Lac’s (Lestat’s companion and fellow vampire in Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles) wife and child and where Louis was turned into a vampire by Lestat. The Styrofoam tomb from the film Interview with the Vampire is gone now, but you can easily find the site where it stood, the wide empty space in the cemetery nearest the corner of Coliseum and Sixth Street. During the filming of Interview with the Vampire, the blocks between 700 and 900 Royal Street in the French Quarter were used for exterior shots of the home of the vampires Louis, Lestat, and Claudia, trapped through time with an adult mind in the body of a six-year-old girl. In fact, the streets there and around Jackson Square were covered in mud for the movie as they had been in the 1860s when the scenes took place. The perfectly preserved Gallier House at 1132 Royal Street was Anne Rice’s inspiration for the vampires’ house, and very close to that is the Lalaurie House, at 1140 Royal Street. Delphine Lalaurie, portrayed by Kathy Bates in American Horror Story: Coven, was a real person who lived in that house and was indeed said to have tortured and bathed in the blood of her slaves—even the blood of a slave girl’s newborn baby—to preserve her youth. She was never seen again in New Orleans after an angry mob partially destroyed her home on April 10, 1834. There is a scene in American Horror Story where Delphine escapes from the coven’s mansion and sits dejectedly on the curb in
ANNE RICE AND THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES
Lafayette Cemetery (Photo Courtesy of 33
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front of her old home. A private residence now, some locals still swear that the Lalaurie House is haunted, and that the clanking of chains can be heard through the night. Built in 1789, Madame John’s Legacy (632 Dumaine Street) is the oldest surviving residence in the Mississippi Valley. In Interview with the Vampire, caskets are shown being carried out of the house as Louis’ (Brad Pitt) voice-over describes the handiwork of his housemates Claudia and Lestat: “An infant prodigy with a lust for killing that matched his own. Together, they finished off whole families.”
founding members of NOVA have taken food out on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas to those who are hungry and homeless.” (See http://www.neworleansvampireassociation .org/index.html.) FANGTASIA, named with permission from HBO after the club featured in True Blood, is an affiliation of New Orleans-based musicians and film and TV producers who for three years have presented a multi-day vampirecentric event of the same name, the first two years at 1135 Decatur and last year at the Howlin’ Wolf. You can follow their plans and exploits via their blog at http://www.fangtasiaevent.com/fangtasiablog/. Next year FANGTASIA hopes to create “the South by Southwest of Global Vampire Culture” at an as yet undisclosed location in Greater New Orleans. As they describe it: Moving beyond this third consecutive year, FANGTASIA is building a broader international draw that will bring fans to not only party at club nights, but also attend conferences, elegant fashion shows, film & TV screenings, celebrity events as well as an international Halloween/party gear buyers’ market. Participants will experience gourmet sensations, explore our sensuous city and haunted bayous… as well as epically celebrate the Global Vampire Culture in all its sultry, seductive, diverse and darkly divine incarnations. Additionally, FANGTASIA is strategically poised months prior to Halloween to provide corporate
RESOURCES FOR VAMPIRES
As a service to this most vampirefriendly city (http://www.vampirewebsite.net/vampirefr iendlycities.html), the New Orleans Vampire Association describes itself as a “non-profit organization comprised of selfidentifying vampires representing an alliance between Houses within the Community in the Greater New Orleans Area. Founded in 2005, NOVA was established to provide support and structure for the vampire and other-kin subcultures and to provide educational and charitable outreach to those in need.” Their website also points out that “every year since Hurricane Katrina, the 34
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sponsors and vendors a perfect window to connect with their core demographic. This also allows FANGTASIA to actively support and promote existing major Halloween events in New Orleans and beyond.
Finally, no visit to the Crescent City would be complete, for Vampire and Mortal alike, without a taste of absinthe (http://www.piratesalleycafe.com/absinthe. html), or even more than a taste. There is a ritual to the preparation and serving of absinthe that should not be missed; one of the sites that does this authentically is the Pirates Alley Café and Absinthe House at 622 Pirates Alley.
On the subject of vampiric Halloween events, for 25 years the Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Fan Club (http://arvlfc.com/index.html) has presented the annual Vampire Ball (http://arvlfc.com/ball.html), now as part of the four-day UndeadCon (http://arvlfc.com/undeadcon.html) at the end of October; and on the weekend nearest Halloween Night (for example, November 1, 2014) the Endless Night Festival and New Orleans Vampire Ball takes place at the House of Blues (http://www.endlessnight.com/venue/).
Andy Remic Interview Your latest book is The Iron Wolves (reviewed earlier in this issue!-Ed), the first in the Rage of Kings series. Tell us about the book and the series. We have a group of heroes, The Iron Wolves, who held the Pass of Splintered Bones against a war-host of drooling mudorcs, and saw the psychotic sorcerer Morkagoth slain. Then, twenty years later, a new threat emerges from the depths of The Furnace – a witch-queen from Hell called Orlana, the Changer, who begins building an army and gathering evil to her cause. She has the ability to shape-change horses into snorting bulky monsters, hence her other name – The Horse Lady. Realising the threat, the aged and noble General Dalgoran seeks to reunite his elite soldiers of old, his Iron Wolves; but they are no longer the heroes he remembers. Kiki, leader of the Wolves, is a honey-leaf drug peddler and addicted to her own foul narcotic; Narnok is a violent whoremaster with a razor-sliced face, Prince Zastarte a gambler who burns people alive, Dek a nasty, thug-like pit fighter; and Trista, originally a woman of wealth, nobility and religion, has devolved into an assassin who kills married couples on their wedding night – so that their love can never die.
The Boutique du Vampyre (http://feelthebite.com/boutique2013.html) is a moveable (literally—they’re known to change locations on short notice) feast of vampire and Goth-related odds and ends, many of them locally made. There are books as well—you may even find a copy of In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide if they’re not sold out. Their website itself holds a surprise treat: a link to a free video cast of the first two seasons of Vampire Mob (http://vampiremob.com/Vampire_Mob/V ampire_Mob.html), which is just what the title implies.
United in hate, the Iron Wolves travel to the Pass of Splintered Bones and the Dakrath Fortress; and as half a million mud-orcs gather, General Dalgoran realises his grave error. Together, the Iron 35
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monster, King Kong style, being attacked by fighter jets. My teacher thought it was cool, and I carried on writing from that point. My first serious novel attempt, for the benefit of my friends in the pub when I was 17 (*cough*) was called SILKWORM, a comedy fantasy about Moronik the Barbarian, Pipkin the Wizard, and Spud the Gnome. It kind of snowballed from that point…. That’s what happens when you’re doing A levels.
Wolves hold a terrible secret which has tortured them for three decades. They do not wish to save the world – they wish only to be human again.
You are well known for your SF novels, particularly the Combat K series, can you tell us about the series? Well, there’s four Combat K books – War Machine, Biohell, Hardcore and Cloneworld. War Machine is the serious one, about a combat squad on a mission across various alien planets. Biohell the SF zombie thriller based around vanity upgrades gone wrong, Hardcore is about a twisted race of creatures evolved from medical rejects and medical technology – a kind of medical zombie book with zombie nurses and babies, and Cloneworld is an out and out SF thriller with cyborgs called Orgs, and clones called Gangers which are bred in vats (And yes, I did do the Gangers before Doctor Who)!!. :-)
Why have you decided to go back to writing fantasy after the Books of Anarchy, and will there be any more in the Anarchy series? To be honest, it just depends how the contracts come in. Solaris didn’t want to commission another “Book of the Anarchy” but I will return to this universe one day, probably releasing under by own Anarchy Books banner. Then, Angry Robot stepped forward with a decent offer, and I pitched several ideas to Marc Gascoigne... thus The Iron Wolves were born.
Here’s the War Machine blurb: War Machine is a hardcore sizzling rollercoaster of a novel with a gratuitous excess of violence, sex, dark humour and exotic aliens all wrapped up in a highoctane cling-film plot concerning an elite military unit illegally reformed who must battle across alien planets to discover justice, truth and revenge. Initially, the story begins with a quest to find an artefact which will reveal to Keenan the person who killed his wife and children… through the mean streets of the bustling, lawless dystopian planet known as The City – because the city has consumed the planet to the humid jungles of Ket and the technologically advanced savages who
You’ve been writing for a while now. What inspired you to start writing? When I was a child I read Enid Blyton, then progressed to Tolkien, Gemmell, Pratchett etc. I just loved reading and I wrote my first book when I was about 7. It was called The Four Headed Monster, and had a picture on the front of a four headed 36
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inhabit the City of Bone, Combat K, through adventure and action and many bullets, arrive at their destination to find the hunted artefact holds a terrible secret… which in turn spins the story on its head, and has the unholy Combat K trio sent to Teller’s World, a dead planet, and home to the extinct GodRace Leviathan. There, Keenan must find answers to his deepest nightmares... and face a terror more ancient than anything before witnessed across The Four Galaxies!!
However, the more I wrote about Kell, the more he (as all characters will do) pulled away in his own discrete direction until by the end of Vampire Warlords, the third book in the Clockwork Vampire Trilogy, you are very much in no doubt that Kell is not Druss; he is his own man, his own dark soul, and a fantasy character in his own right.
Biohell and Hardcore are my favourites in the CK universe. I even wrote a ZX Spectrum adventure game to go alongside Biohell! It’s available on the internet somewhere, free. :-) What other writers have influenced you? Banks, Gemmell, Tolkien, Hemingway, Orwell, I could go on for a very, very long time, but I won’t. I did a BA (Hons) degree in English Literature which probably helped. What are your other influences? Movies, dreams, whiskey, conversations with friends, nightmares (had a freaky one the other night about a demon trying to push through into our reality through my mouth...). It all goes into the pot. Your first venture into fantasy was Kell’s Legend, part of the Clockwork Vampires trilogy. Tell us how the grumpy old bastard with an axe came about. I began writing Kell’s Legend as a homage not just to Druss the Legend, but to David Gemmell the author, a man I very much respected and admired after mountain biking on the Pennine Moors and having a recurring image of an old axeman living in a lighthouse. I still remember finding out that David had died, and like many other fans across the globe, it was a blow to the heart. The writing of Kell’s Legend was meant as a kind of repayment. I wanted to say thank you. I wanted the spirit of Druss, and Dave, to live on a little longer.
Kell’s Legend revolves around an invasion of Clockwork Vampires, or vachine, who have bled their country dry and seek fresh blood. However, unlike traditional vampires, these are based in a society where technology has advanced the art of watchmaking – merging clockwork with human – to produce a creature which needs refined blood, bloodoil, in order to survive. Bloodoil has become the vachine narcotic, and they cannot help themselves in their hunt, devastation and genocide. Bring into the mix Kell, a grizzled old warrior – very much a traditional fantasy stereotype – teamed with foppish womanising dandy Saark (who is also a lethal swordsman and disgraced sword 37
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give you a bad review. Take it on the chin. As long as you’re getting some good reviews as well, it all evens out. Bad reviews used to drive me mad; now I’m more chilled out and take the rough with the smooth, ‘cos it’s all part of the game, yeah? :-)
champion of the king), and Kell’s granddaughter, who can see no evil in the old man despite his shadowy past, and you have a fast-paced action-orientated fantasy novel with battles galore, vast rolling landscapes and some devilish bad guys all following their own twisted paths. It’s a mad mix which I believe puts a fresh spin on the fantasy genre.
You also write and direct films, including Impurity. Tell us about that. I’ve just finished my first super-low budget feature, Impurity. Cast and crewed by a group of friends, we filmed over two years in HD and it’s pretty much ready to go. It was the most fun I’ve ever had, ever. Smashing that JagXJ6 up with a tractor!! Whoot! We’d have a film shoot every month or so, then a party afterwards; the shoots became excuses for a good ol’ time. Anyway, I think the end product is great considering our budget was under $1000US. The aim is to try and get it into some festivals this year – in fact, I’m just about to send it to Cannes, but reckon I’ve only got a 0.00000001% chance of it being accepted. Still, it was all about the process. There’s a trailer on the website, www.impuritythemovie.com , and it stars Frazer Hines, who played Jamie in Doctor Who. The blurb runs thus:
Kell is one of your most popular characters. Are there any plans to continue the stories of Kell? I have another trilogy planned with Kell and Saark. When I have time to write them is another thing!! It will happen, one day; but it might take a few years yet. Their banter, and Mary the donkey, are too good not to revisit. Do you have any rituals or routines when you write? I like to have a glass of wine, just to relax and get me going. I certainly loosely plan every novel, there’s nothing as bad as staring at an empty page with a flashing cursor. I always desk-tidy at the end of a book, and then during the writing of the next one, it gets gradually worse and worse... ha ha. Some of your novels are part of a larger series, why is that? I love “extended” projects, I suppose in my heart I want to write The Lord of the Rings-length books, but publishers are loathe to print such a huge book as one volume (initially, at least). So, they get split into a trilogy.
Impurity: Shotgun Jimmy is a nasty piece of work. Ripping off drug dealers, killing policemen, he’d decapitate his own grandmother for a sack full of loot. Schizophrenic, psychopathic, his only friend is Mary the Shotgun – his trusty, reliable pump-action. But during a violent road-rage incident, something goes horribly wrong and Jimmy finds himself chained in shackles in a dark, grimy dungeon where he ponders over a deeply buried secret past…
If you could go back in time to when you started writing and give yourself one piece of advice what would it be? God, that’s a good question. Let me see. I know: Don’t slag off critics when they 38
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All three characters awake, chained and shackled in a cellar dungeon. At first they squabble like children, but soon realise their abductor is far from sane. However, Chemical Man doesn’t want to kill them. Not yet. First, he wants to purify them. He sees their souls as stained by the impurity of their dark deeds… and this cleansing process promises to be a lot more painful…
Tomas Sorescu’s been a bad man. He likes his whiskey. And brandy. Vodka, rum or gin? Hell, he’ll drink petrol if it isn’t nailed down. Only now he’s done a rather silly thing. He’s crashed his car – and killed his wife and little girl in the process. Tomas feels pretty bad about the situation. So bad, in fact, he needs another drink. But then it gets worse as a tall, powerful, gasmask wearing figure pulls Tomas from the wreckage and introduces him to a special place…
IMPURITY is a dark, brooding, powerful feature film in the tradition of SAW, HOSTEL, DEAD MAN’S SHOES and SHALLOW GRAVE, from novelist and debut filmmaker ANDY REMIC. Do you read reviews of your work? How do you deal with criticism? Yep, some of them – at the beginning, at least. I don’t mind criticism, you get used to it after five or six books. I think if I was getting all negative reviews I’d go and do something else, but 95% of reviews are positive and some are very highly praising – and it’s for those people who love your work that you keep writing for. What book are you reading now? I’ve just started reading Doctor Sleep. I’m a big King fan, and some fellow authors (such as Gary McMahon) have been raving about it.
Sophie Scott is a successful career journalist in the sleepy village of Ramsbottom. Happy and confident, she now hides a secret… For a few weeks earlier, she killed her husband. Stabbed him in the guts and buried his body in the woods. Now, his restless spirit haunts her, and she hears his mockery at every street corner. Sophie starts to believe she’s going mad. Then, whilst following up a murder story in the woods, she visits an old witch called Alice – and within minutes, meets the gas-masked figure known as Chemical Man. Meets him, and ends up in the boot of his car.
What is your proudest moment as a writer? Going to Piccadilly train station in Manchester with my wife and young son, and seeing a massive ten foot poster for Spiral in the station, followed by copies of the book on the shelf in W. H. Smiths. That’s pretty hard to beat, seeing your first novel on a bookshop shelf. Oh yes, and Spiral then selling 10,000 copies in its first week of release. Are you disappointed with any of your work when you look back on it? AR: One of my favourites is Biohell, but the Americans, specifically, don’t like it. I 39
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think it was marketed wrong – as Military Sci Fi, when it is, in fact, an SF thriller with lots of black comedy. They didn’t like the comedy. Bah.
wine, riding motorbikes, reading, watching movies, making movies... I used to love games (Half Life 2 is my favourite) but just don’t have the time anymore.
Apart from being a writer and film maker, you also run Anarchy Books, an ebook publisher. Why ebook publishing and how have you found being a publisher? Ebooks “only” takes the headache out of printing costs, storage, mailing etc. I’d love to run Anarchy Books as a paperback publisher, but I just haven’t got the time. I usually see my writer mate Ian Whates (author, publisher) at various cons with his head in his hands and a hassled look on his face. I’m busy enough, thank you!! I’m enjoying Anarchy Books, just wish I had more time to invest in finding new authors and publishing them!!
Do you get writers block? How do you cope with it? No, sorry. I got it earlier this year after I broke some ribs, and was on Codeine and rum for a few weeks. I simply read lots of Iain M. Banks books instead (yes, I’m a big fan – and gutted about what happened this year). If you could meet anyone, fictional or real, dead or alive, who would it be? I’d meet my mum and dad again; and I’d have a night out with David Gemmell, James Herbert and Iain Banks. Which do you prefer writing/reading, short stories or novels? I only read and write novels. I simply like the longer immersive experience; I like to really get to know the characters.
What's the best piece of feedback that you've had from your audience? I loved being compared favourably to David Gemmell and Quentin Tarantino. Those moments are just amazing; and I thank you kindly, ladies and gentlemen.
What are you working on now? I’ve just finished The White Towers for Angry Robot, the follow up to The Iron Wolves, and submitted it to Lee Harris for his Red Pen of Death. Then I’ve got my next movie, After the War, to script, plus a few other ideas in the pipeline.
What is the most important thing when becoming a writer? Self discipline. Set yourself weekly targets and stick to them (yeah, right) and be persistent. Most published authors take years to get there. You have to believe in yourself.
Do you have any advice for other writers? Work hard, play hard, persevere, believe in yourself.
Do you write for a particular audience, or for yourself? I write for myself. I started veering towards writing for audience mid-career, but then I realised I wasn’t being true to myself. Kell’s Legend and The Iron Wolves – that’s being true to myself. Those books were written for me.
What scares you? Death, loneliness, betrayal. What makes a good story? Vivid characters, realistic dialogue, a (gag) unique selling point, fast pace, clarity of description, clever plot.... but then everybody has a different idea about this, right?
What do you like to do when you’re not writing? Mountain biking (with and without my family), a spot of gentle mountain climbing, eating good food, drinking fine
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