................................ ................................................................................ 2 SILENT VOICES By Gary McMahon................................................................................................ DON’T PET THE SWEATY THINGS By K. J. Hannah Greenberg ................................................................ ................................................................. 2 HUNTER’S MOON: VISCERAL TALES OF TERROR By B R Scott McCoy ................................................................ ................................................... 3 DARK NORTH By Paul Finch ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ........................................................... 3 ORC STAIN ................................................................ ................................................................................................................................ ........................................................ 4 THE DEVIL’S NEBULA By Eric Brown ................................................................................................ ................................ .......................................................................... 4 A JAR OF WASPS By Luis Villazon ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ................................................. 5 Horror’s New Chopping Block By Alan Spencer ................................................................................................ ............................................................... 7 SINFUL By Yolanda Sfetsos ................................................................................................................................ ................................ .............................................................. 8 TOXICITY By Andy Remic ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ............................................................. 10 SAUCER COUNTRY ................................................................ ................................................................................................ ....................................................................... 10 THE LEGEND OF RACHEL PETERSEN By J.T. Baroni ................................................................ .............................................................................. 11 How to Write a Book at Gunpoint By Luis Villazon ................................................................................................ ........................................................ 12 REVELATION: CREATURES RULE THE NIGHT By Nathaniel Connors ................................................................ .................................................. 14 Ramblings of a Tattooed Head By Simon Marshall-Jones Marshall ................................................................................................ ................................................ 16 NAZI ZOMBIES ................................................................ ................................................................................................................................ ............................................... 17 PAX OMEGA By Al Ewing ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ............................................................. 18 STRANGENESS AND CHARM By Mike Shevdon ................................................................................................ ........................................................ 20 GHOST WRITER (Kindle edition) By Tom C. Underhill ................................................................................................ ................................................ 20 RASL ................................................................ ................................................................................................................................ ................................................................ 20 RAILSEA By China Mieville ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ........................................................... 21 DARK ECLIPSE #9 (the Dark Moon e-zine) ................................................................................................ ................................................................... 21 EDGE OF DARK WATER By Joe R. Lansdale ................................................................................................ ............................................................... 22 vN By Madeline Ashby ................................................................ ................................................................................................ ..................................................................... 22 DEADLINE: THE HORRIFYING ADVENTURES OF HARVEY BANKS, TABLOID REPORTER By Jochem Van der Steen ................................................................................................ ................................................................................................ ........................................................................... 23 THE HE HAMMER AND THE BLADE By Paul S. Kemp ................................................................................................ ................................................... 23 THE RESPECTABLE FACE OF TYRANNY By Gary Fry ................................................................ ............................................................................ 25 SUSTENANCE By Nate D. Burleigh ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ............................................... 25 From the Catacombs: Graphic Lovecraft By Jim Lesniak ................................................................................................ ................................................ 27 BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON By Larry C. Kerr ................................................................................................ ....................................................... 30 HUNTER’S MOON By Charlotte Bond ................................................................................................ ................................ ........................................................................... 30 THE LAST REEF AND OTHER STORIES By Gareth L. Powell................................................................ ................................................................... 30 Matt Leyshon Interview ................................................................ ................................................................................................ .................................................................... 31 NEW YORK BLUES By Eric Brown ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ............................................... 33 EVA – A GHOST STORY TORY By Mike Emmett ................................................................................................ ................................................................... 34 Shaun Jeffrey Interview ................................................................ ................................................................................................ .................................................................... 36 Nicole Kruex Interview ................................................................ ................................................................................................ ..................................................................... 41
Edited By Stanley Riiks, Written By Adrian Brady, Brady Fred R. Kane, Jim Lesniak, Simon Marshall-Jones, Marshall Ryan David Muirhead, Stanley Riiks, Charles D. Romans, C.M. Saunders, Alan Spencer, Brett Taylor, Luis Villazon, J. S. Watts. Proof-read By Sheri White, Samuel Diamond. © Morpheus Tales July 2012
www.morpheustales.com Things is a brutal and twisted vision of genius that is in my top ten books of all time. But that means expectations are high, and that can be a double-edged sword. I look for failures and weaknesses in everything, and usually have no problem finding many, but Silent Voices is good. Really good. Bloody good. McMahon has done it again; he’s impressed the hell out of me. He’s written an extremely accomplished, intelligent and insightful novel that goes far beyond the genre boundaries. All horror writers should read McMahon; he shows them how it’s really done. Silent Voices is a disturbing tale of friendship and sacrifice, and McMahon is a master craftsman. By Stanley Riiks
SILENT VOICES By Gary McMahon www.solarisbooks.com Wow! It’s very rare for me to be this impressed by a book. McMahon has produced a fantastic novel, a book of friendship, loss, heartache, and sacrifice. If you have not read McMahon before, then this is the perfect book to start with. The second book in the Concrete Grove Trilogy (but a stand-alone novel that works just as well if you haven’t read the first book in the set, although I would recommend it as the first book really sets the changes and starts things off with a bang), sees the reuniting of a group of childhood friends, who twenty years ago went into the abandoned tower block known as the Needle and lost a weekend, only to be found abused and bloodied with no memory of what happened. Finally back together, they head back to where their lives changed, the Needle, to fight whatever demons are there and try to remember what happened that fateful weekend. The Grove is a hellish place, and if you grew up on a council estate it may ring a little too true, and feel a little too close to home. The unease McMahon creates with his setting is perfectly and sadly authentic. McMahon’s novel is so well put together, the sense of foreboding, the creeping unease, and the disturbed atmosphere McMahon gradually builds, grow through the novel towards a heartwrenching climax that leaves you torn and wounded. The characters here are real, you know them. This is not just a horror novel, this is an intelligent and insightful social commentary; a literary, character-driven novel that delves deeper into our hopes and fears, our shame, guilt and pain, than many other writers dare look. I always come to a McMahon book with high hopes; his Pretty Little Dead
DON’T PET THE SWEATY THINGS By K. J. Hannah Greenberg www.bardsandsages.com If you are unfamiliar with Greenberg’s work, then this collection of her short (very short) stories will provide a delightful introduction to her fantastical world. There are a lot of stories in this collection, around forty, many of them very short at only a few pages long, but the diversity and imagination held within these gems of fiction is outstanding. Fantasy, SF and horror mix and twist and blend in a cornucopia of fictions. Part myth, part fairy tale, part wizardly narrative, this collection is a sensation. Not only is it impossible to pick a favourite of so many stories, many of which leave you with a confused smile on your face, or an image that you know is impossible to remove, you’ll also feel a little warmer inside for having discovered that there is still magic within words. Greenberg has created a unique and fabulously entertaining collection, which smacks of Gaiman, the Brothers Grimm, C. 2
www.morpheustales.com S. Lewis, and Beatrix Potter. will find something to enjoy. piece of work, all the better two stories that originally Morpheus Tales Magazine. By Adrian Brady
Young to old A remarkable for including appeared in
Leningrad. “Moon Shadow” is a grizzly alien invasion survival story. “Season Opener” is a clever and frightening piece about a father and son indulging in a popular outdoor sport, only to find themselves with a on-field view of a totally different game! “The Find” is easily the goriest and most unsettling tale in the book: a Bigfoot tale that ain’t no Harry and the Hendersons! “Bitch queen” is my favourite tale for so many reasons, but I don’t want to elaborate for fear of spoiling the fun. Let’s just say, if Raymond Chandler had taken acid, and lived long enough to have seen a David Cronenberg flick, he might’ve written something like this! “The Regular” is a horrid take on an old joke that begins: “So, this guy walks into a titty bar... ” There’s also some well-written science fiction horror in Hunter’s Moon, namely “The Last Line,” and “Playtime.” Those who are no strangers to the genre can tell that McCoy is a close friend of it. “Playtime” is an excellent nanotech horror piece that could’ve easily found its place on the 1990’s Outer Limits. “The Last Line” has one thinking of Soylent Green, and the writer has no problems with critically tearing down that Heston flick. Visceral as advertised, it is also intelligent, with moments of horror and humour. From “Frostbite” to “A Dish Best Served Cold,” Hunter’s Moon is way cool! By Fred R. Kane
HUNTER’S MOON: VISCERAL TALES OF TERROR By R Scott McCoy http://blog.omniumgatherumedia.com/main Hunter’s Moon: Visceral Tales of Terror contains a wide variety of subject matter: stories of shape shifters, cannibals, ghosts, children’s nightmares, children who are nightmares, Bigfoot, the horrors of war, a middle-class suburban radical who’s hellbent on his own holy war, a vengeful spider. None of the tales are cliché. All are clever, and reveal the author to be one of high literary intellect. The only difficulty I have in reviewing Hunter’s Moon is trying to avoid spoilers! Take the story, “Stream Scream.” I thought it was going to be a werewolf vs. zombie tale, but the ending insinuates that it could be the beginning of a werewolf or a zombie tale. In Hunter’s Moon, McCoy answers questions that we must’ve thought about, but blew off, and questions we didn’t even think to ask. Questions like: “Why are there so many mouse traps at the local hardware store, when the oldest and crudest is still the most effective?” And: “How did that TV detective just happen to be around to solve all those murders, and get the suspects to confess their crimes?” And: “Do you really wanna know what happens when you mess with Sasquatch?” You like blood and gore? McCoy supplies a righteous amount of it, but it’s never gratuitous violence. “Frostbite,” the first story in the collection, sets the pace with a gut-wrenching, and heart-wrenching tale about the horrors of the siege of
DARK NORTH By Paul Finch www.abaddonbooks.com Malory’s Knights of Albion is one of Abaddon Book’s best series, set in the time of King Arthur. Finch is one of the publisher’s best writers. What more could one ask for? The Roman Empire is out to kill King Arthur, raising an army against him. Arthur rallies his own troops including the 3
www.morpheustales.com tainted Sir Lucan, who is only too willing to help as his wife ran off with a Roman officer. Finch throws in treachery and wizardry to add to the drama in this riproaring tale of adventure and battle. Finch’s tight prose never fails to deliver, and this lengthy (for Adabbon) novel at nearly four hundred pages doesn’t have a single dull moment. Indeed Finch dials up the tension with every one of the thirty-seven chapters, resulting in a terrific and terrifying climax. Worthy of the original tales of King Arthur, Finch has done our Majesty proud. A unique and insightful actioner, Finch pulls out all the stops. By Adrian Brady
Flintstones. The series portrays the orcs’ factious society from the monocular perspective of One-Eye, a slight orc with the power to sense the weak spot in any object. He uses this gift to disintegrate almost anything with just a tap from his claw-hammer, an ability that aids him well in looting. A standout supporting character is the maniacal nymph Bowie, a femme fatale adept at the black art of poison concoction. The series holds little in common with the revisionism en vogue in fantasy literature this past while. While social fantasist works such as Kirill Eskov’s The Last Ringbearer have recast those bastards of Tolkien’s imagination as noble savages forced to struggle against human imperialism to protect their way of life, Stokoe makes no such apologies for his orcs. One-Eye excepted, they are all just brutes, happy to castrate for currency, enslave nymphs for sex, and wipe out civilizations for kicks. As a matter of course, the book satirizes militarism, as orcs have always caricatured chauvinists, but does so for laughs rather than to make any serious point. When One-Eye thinks back to the campaign that soured him on warfare, and the narrative flashes back to a fantasy pastiche of Vietnam, the response is a chuckle at the sight gag rather than a furrowed brow at the social commentary. Although this flippancy detracts from the intellectual worth of the series, the raw entertainment value remains high. By Ryan David Muirhead
ORC STAIN At bottom, Orc Stain reads like dad fantasy ripped straight from the classic Heavy Metal numbers, but creator James Stokoe heaps on so much eccentricity with such flair that the formula reads fresh for the first time since the 1980s. While this series rejuvenates lowbrow fantasy in comics, Orc Stain has so far — seven issues in — missed its chance to grow up. Stokoe’s cartooning crosses the styles of Jamie Hewlett and Jhonen Vasquez. His line work suits the frenzied world of Orc Stain just fine, but the more striking visual element is the unique pallet, which breaks every rule of colour theory, but still pleases the eye. While Orc Stain’s focus on the titular race of green-skinned barbarians might seem restrictive, the variety Stokoe teases from his orcs adds richness to the series. On top of that, Orc Stain’s bestiary would make Dr. Seuss blush, with creatures both cute and foul employed in biopunk animals-as-appliances routines that the censors would never have let slip on The
THE DEVIL’S NEBULA By Eric Brown www.abaddonbooks.com Surprisingly I do want to find out what happens in the next book in the series, despite an underwhelming “climax” to this simple, middle-of-the-road SF novel that 4
www.morpheustales.com feels slightly like a modern pulp novel (which is not a bad thing). We have a fascist and expansionist human race, psychics, an underspace called the void, and dangerous aliens and mutinous humans. No, this isn’t Warhammer 40K, although it smacks of that totalitarian space opera. Ed Carew and his piratical crew escape with their lives after an encounter with the troublesome and dangerous Vetch on their edge of the alien’s territory, only to be caught by Expansion police and given two options after their speedily put together trial: death (their punishment), or go on a potential suicide mission through Vetch space to the far off Devil’s Nebula where a radical religious group escaped to a hundred years ago. The reason? The Expansion has received a distress signal. That covers the first hundred pages of the book. All well and good, nothing particularly exciting, no great ideas, middleof-the-road fare. But then things start to get pulpy as the band travel off to the Nebula, accompanied by their judge (an Expansionist Commander and his crew of soldiers). The descendants of their first five thousand travellers are a group of just over a thousand, living under the beneficent watch, and control, of a strange alien race known only as the Weird. Do the powerful creatures known as the Weird, who provide everything from food to religious sustenance, seek nothing in return? How did the people know that the ship was going to arrive on their world, and how did they know that some of those in the ship’s six crew members will be good and some will be bad? Unfortunately the denouement fails to live up to expectations; it has a dampsquib of an ending, but is definitely not a stand-out novel. However, Brown moves the action plenty fast enough so the book never
gets boring. Unfortunately the characters fail to capture the imagination, despite attempts to give them a little back history to avoid stereotypes. There is nothing new here, and the cover image has nothing at all to do with the content of the book, but there is still a decent enough book if you haven’t got anything better to read. Anything better like the Robert J. Sawyer book I read just before this, Rollback, which has better ideas, better characters, is better written, and is a much better book in every possible way. The Devil’s Nebula is not a bad book, but it fails to be anything more than decent. It may be a six out of ten, yet it still grabbed me enough to wonder what happens next. By Stanley Riiks A JAR OF WASPS By Luis Villazon www.anarchy-books.com Andy Remic’s Anarchy Books is rapidly carving out a niche for itself as an ebook publisher to be reckoned with. Villazon’s debut novel finds itself rubbing shoulders with some heavyweight SF and Fantasy books, and manages to hold its own. Graham is a geologist framed for murder, pursued by Secret Agents, holding onto an alien artifact, trying to discover the truth before the end of the world is unleashed. Fast-paced, action-oriented fiction is what Remic is known for, and here he has found a kindred spirit. Villazon’s novel reads like a geo-version of The DaVinci Code, in a good way, a thrilling chase and race against time. A thrill ride of a novel, Villazon’s debut novel is astoundingly good. By Adrian Brady
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www.morpheustales.com not a direct victim, I can’t truly testify to any of those happenings). Publishers today have even gone as a far as changing what could be considered horror into thrillers just so they can find a place on the bookstore shelves. And don’t forget the paranormal romance books. They’re smoking hot as far as sales go, but come on, these titles aren’t the red-meat-loving horror tales I’ve grown to adore. Learning about Leisure’s troubles was heartbreaking, because what was going to happen to those authors I’ve read and sworn by? Who was going to publish them? Thanks to a mix of small and medium publishers, the presses haven’t stopped rolling. Deadite Press has re-issued books from Brian Keene, Edward Lee, Bryan Smith, Wrath James White, and many other fan favourites, and thrown in a completely new breed of batshitcrazy books, including Genital Grinder, Armadillo Fists, and Just Like Hell. Another cool publisher is ChiZine Publications; one of their books I found incredibly interesting is by David Nickle called Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism. Angry Robot releases deliciously dark fiction, featuring books from Kaaron Warren, Gary McMahon, and Tim Waggoner. I’d also throw in Severed
Horror’s New Chopping Block By Alan Spencer I recently had a friend give me a bunch of old horror paperbacks. Mixed in were authors such as Robert R. McCammon, Brian Lumley, and T.M. Wright. It’s funny to look at books from the 1980s and 90s as vintage. The bygone days. Sifting through them, I enjoyed the myriad of covers with haunted houses, jack-olanterns, scary children standing in doorways or at playgrounds with curious smiles, or my favourite, the Lumley ones with an up-close shot of a hideous monster face. They evoke some serious nostalgia for me. A lot of people would consider these books to be from horror’s heyday. Sure, the titles weren’t all bestsellers necessarily, but there was a place for them at the bookstores. Then somewhere down the line the market’s demand changed, leaving horror in the dust. From the 90s and into the next century, book sales in general suffered, horror being no exception. A popular straight horror publisher, Leisure Books, started to have financial problems to the point they ended their book club (and I won’t get into all the author stuff; since I’m 7
www.morpheustales.com Press, Permuted Press, and Damnation Books, who keep throwing out a mix of zombie and horror titles. I’m sure I’m leaving out a ton of publishers, but that’s the point. There are so many to choose from these days, giving fans many reasons to rejoice, indeed, but there’s one new publisher who deserves special mention. Recently, a new horror publisher called Samhain has started publishing novels on a regular basis. I really like the direction they’re going in. Go ahead and accuse me of being biased, because Samhain is putting out two of my novels in 2012, B-Movie Reels and B-Movie Attack. What I’m about to say really has to do with my support of the authors. Fraiser Lee’s The Lamplighters is one of my favourites so far, but I think it’s in a tie with Elena Hearty’s vampire novel Donor. For the first time in my horror history, I got to read a book where an angel is the antagonist in Kristopher Rufty’s Angel Board. Hunter Shea’s Forest of Shadows exudes fun and creepiness in the same breath. There’s some crazy cannibalism in Brian Moreland’s Dead of Winter. Samhain’s a nice mix of straight horror and forward thinking horror. They’re not afraid to do something different, and with Don D’Auria in charge, you can’t go wrong. Maybe I’m getting carried away in my endorsement, but if you take all the publishers I’ve mentioned in this article, you’ve got plenty of high-quality books to choose from. The bygone days will remain the bygone days, but that’s not completely a bad thing. Unlike ten or twenty years ago, horror has stripped away its rules and limitations and is really thinking outside of the box. Nothing is off limits, and for the reader, this is a wonderful gift to receive. What I’m trying to say is that after all this time horror’s been struggling, I’m starting to see some real signs of recovery, especially in the creative department. So know this terror fans: horror’s got a new chopping
block, and these new publishers are each holding a cleaver. SINFUL By Yolanda Sfetsos http://www.yolandasfetsos.com/ Nobody else on the scene at the moment writes quite like Yolanda Sfetsos. Often treading the line between erotica and horror, she deals primarily with the human condition. The needs, wants, and desires that affect us all. She invents glorious alternate worlds for her characters to play in, where demons and magic are the norm, never failing to inject a hearty dose of humour into proceedings. With Sinful, the first book of the Sinner series, Sfetsos takes Sebastian, a character from her Alyce Kerr celebrity faith-healer books, and introduces him to Abigail, a sultry funeral director with an uncanny relationship with the dead. Sebastian works as a Sin Eater, a onceprevalent breed in rural communities all over Britain and beyond, who were essentially individuals believed to have the power to absolve the recently departed of their sins so they could progress to the afterlife with an unblemished record. When one of Abe’s step twins goes missing she enlists Sebastian’s help, but in the immortal words of Aretha Franklin, who’s zooming who? Full credit should go to anyone capable of dreaming up a story involving a forbidden love affair between a sexy funeral director and a renegade Sin Eater. There is a lot of depth to Sinful, but all the emotional entanglement does tend to bog the story down somewhat when a little more oldfashioned action is called for. Still, rollicking good fun! By C.M. Saunders
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www.morpheustales.com well-known for his fast-paced narratives, his no-holds-barred action and adventure, but because he develops his characters at breakneck speed as well, it actually matters what happens to them. How the author manages to create a wet-wipe like Svool, a cowardly, selfish poet, and then slowly turn you from dislike to having a soft-spot for the man is quite incredible. Svool and his adventures provide the light entertainment; the banter with his sex-slave and popbot, and a robotic horse alleviate the darker side of the novel. Overall this is an Andy Remic novel, and Remic always delivers. The ending, without giving too much away, feels a little forced, but has the trademark explosiveness fans of Remic have come to expect. Toxicity is funny, brutal, scarilynasty, exciting and great fun. Ok, so it’s not my favourite of Remic’s books, but will the twisted genius of Kell’s Legend ever be matched? If you like your fiction fast and furious, and you should, then you cannot go wrong with an Andy Remic novel. Toxicity is massively entertaining. No one quite writes like Andy Remic; he is the total package, and he seems, literally, unstoppable. By Stanley Riiks
TOXICITY By Andy Remic www.solarisbooks.com Set in the same universe as Remic’s thrill-athon rollercoaster epic Theme Planet, but a completely stand-alone story, this new novel explores the world of Amaranth, a planet so filled with pollutants and refuse it’s called Toxicity. The Company, Greenstar Recycling, is responsible, dumping and polluting every inch of the planet, and creating a massive store of lirridium instead of recycling it. Jenni Xi is an eco-terrorist; she works with her cell to destroy the cheating, lying, polluting, capitalist bastards intent on destroying her world. Svoolzard is a poet, a genius, a beauty; he’s also a cowardly pain in the arse, and when his ship crashes into the planet of Toxicity he has no inkling how to survive without his assorted slaves, lovers and sycophants. When his sex slave appears to have survived the crash as well, he’s more than surprised when she isn’t interested in helping him and he’s left to fend for himself in a cannibal-filled polluted forest. Horace is The Dentist, an assassin who enjoys torturing his victims. Horace works for the company and is given another assignment, this time to rid Greenstar of an insider who is helping the terrorists. There are definitely two sides to this book: the serious, and quite disturbing ecoterrorists and their plotting and battles against the Company; and Svoolzard’s more light-hearted adventure through dangerous territory providing the comedic interludes. Despite the light entertain of Svoolzard’s misdeeds and misadventures, a lot of this book is hardcore, filled with torture and brutality that is not for the faint-hearted. Remic actually creates pretty good characters, so their pain is the reader’s pain. When our protagonist is tortured it hurts, and that’s the beauty of Remic’s books. He’s
SAUCER COUNTRY Saucer Country, an ongoing comic book series from DC’s Vertigo imprint, is a political thriller wrapped in the mythology of UFOs, aliens, and men-in-black conspiracies. Such pop culture phenomena say a lot about the societies that produce them, so it makes sense that writer Paul Cornell uses this largely made-in-America corner of the paranormal milieu as an allegory for the immigration debate that now rages along the United States’ border with Mexico. The series’ New Mexico setting is appropriate, since the focal point of that 10
www.morpheustales.com controversy, the Southwest, is also the mecca of UFO lore, being home to Area 51 and Roswell. The protagonist of Saucer Country is Arcadia Alvarado, a fictional governor of New Mexico set to declare her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. A consummate underdog, she stands to become the first female Hispanic divorcee in the White House. On the eve of announcing her run, Alvarado and her ex-husband, Michael, suffer a blackout while driving through the desert, and both soon come to suspect that their lost time represents an alien abduction. Alvarado’s inner circle receives her claims with mixed reactions. Her campaign staff runs the gamut from the skeptic Chloe Saunders, a petulant Republican political strategist reminiscent of Ann Coulter, to the believer Professor Kidd, a disgraced Harvard lecturer visited by mysterious entities who assume the form of the couple from the Pioneer 10 plaque. Alvarado plans to keep her abduction a secret, and to use her presidency to investigate and combat the alien menace. Of course, things might not be as they appear. Extraterrestrials have often represented real-world outsiders, but which outsiders varies with historical circumstance. The foo-fighters of World War II expressed Allied aircrews’ fear of the enemy, and the flying saucer craze of the 1950s likewise sublimated Cold War xenophobia. The conspiracy theories that went mainstream in the 1990s expressed populist distrust of the ruling class. So when Cornell uses aliens to represent the role socalled illegal aliens play in the political discourse of the border states, he updates the UFO phenomenon to place it not just in the context of current events, but also within the United States’ national mythos as a country built by immigrants that, at the same time, holds itself apart from all other countries.
Cornell, himself British, offers an outsider’s perspective on American politics that adds a fine point to his satire. His characters’ dialogue is snappy, and the scenes have a brisk pace. Artist Ryan Kelly keeps up through bold compositions and flowing panels, with a style grounded in a sketchy realism that makes occasional excursions into the abstract, which complements Saucer Country’s narrative shifts well. Although his characters’ facial expressions are sometimes too stoic, Kelly’s drawings are otherwise impeccable. Giulia Brusco’s vibrant colours infuse the images with a certain eeriness, especially in the more outlandish sequences, where green under-lighting has never been more appropriate. Overall, Saucer Country is a solid read for anyone interested in the ways otherworldly beliefs and real-world politics intersect. By Ryan David Muirhead THE LEGEND OF RACHEL PETERSEN By J.T. Baroni www.damnationbooks.com/index.php A gifted but jaded sports writer is fired by the newspaper he works for so he moves out to the country to write fiction. One day, he stumbles across a forgotten grave deep in the woods and writes a story about it. The book is a huge success and brings the gifted but jaded sports writer much fame and wealth. However, it also succeeds in luring back the inhabitant of the original grave, the Rachel Petersen of the title. And she wants her, erm, cut... So goes the premise of the first published novel by American writer J.T. Baroni. As debut novels go, apart from a few slightly jarring POV switches, this is a valiant attempt. The entire middle section is given over to a telling of the story written by the main character, making The Legend of 11
www.morpheustales.com Rachel Petersen two-stories-in-one. An inventive approach. The lengthy detour leads the reader away from the main plot somewhat, but the story rallies in the latter stages and builds toward a rip-roaring climax that ties up all the loose ends nicely. Not to be missed. By C.M. Saunders
when the gun came out. One of them talked and the other one didn’t and the one that talked took the gun from the outside pocket of his jacket and put it on the table. It was black and scratched and had some numbers crudely engraved on the side of the barrel. It looked like an automatic but I couldn’t tell if it was real or a replica or an air pistol. Maybe I should have asked. There was a moment when I could have. But the guy took it out of his pocket and put it on the table, looked directly at me and said “Is that all right?” I was already freaked out by the atmosphere of gentle menace before the gun came out, so I wasn’t concentrating properly on the conversation. When he said “Is that all right?” I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the gun or something he had just said. So I said “Yeah, sure.” I didn’t know what I meant by that, but at the time it felt really important that I didn’t explicitly acknowledge the intimidation in the room. So far, they were both still smiling and I desperately didn’t want to do anything to change that. So we sat at that kitchen table and the talkative one chatted away, asking how long I had lived there and was I a student and whether my exgirlfriend had been “filthy” or not, and I tried to answer without sounding white, middle-class or terrified. And the whole time I was looking at this guy’s face and trying not to let my gaze flick down to the gun too often. It felt
How to Write a Book at Gunpoint By Luis Villazon In 1989 I was held at gunpoint. Actually, that’s not completely true: I was held and there was a gun, but it was never actually pointed at me. It just sat on the table between us. Somehow that didn’t make it less scary. I was living in a shared student house in Oxford in the summer after my degree. My girlfriend’s name was on the letting agreement, but we had split up and she had moved back home. There were three weeks left on the tenancy and I was using them to drink right up to the limit of my overdraft before I thought about finding a job. One afternoon, two guys knocked on the door and when I opened it, they breezed in. They smiled a lot, but they were the smiles of men who knew they didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission. They were looking for Gary, who wasn’t in, and they invited me to sit at the kitchen table and wait with them, until he came back. That’s 12
www.morpheustales.com like a challenge - a taunt, even. The gun was on the table, between us. If I went for it, I could probably grab it before he could stop me. But then what? I wasn’t going to shoot him with it. I wasn’t even sure that I knew how to shoot him with it. Did it have a safety catch? Did I need to cock it first? Picking up the gun would end the game we were playing, of pretending that this was just an ordinary chat while we waited for a mutual friend. But leaving it there - and just as importantly, not mentioning it - gave these guys permission to stay here and hold me hostage. In effect I was holding myself hostage; trapped by my own unwillingness to risk escalating the situation. Twenty years later, when I wrote A Jar of Wasps, I wanted the main character Graham to see what this felt like for himself. Author insertion is obviously very common in novels and to some degree inevitable. “Write what you know,” and all that. But sometimes the motivation is not just cannibalism but revenge. I wanted Graham to be weak; a twig in the torrent. He isn’t exspecial forces, he isn’t calm under pressure. Graham has his version of my kitchen table hostage situation at the beginning of the book, because that’s an exciting scene to open with. But it’s also because I wanted to see what he would do. I had planned A Jar of Wasps as a science-fiction story and I had a complicated plot all worked out. It incorporated lots of ideas I’d had over the years and drew on months of research into volcanoes, plate tectonics and meteors. I had pages of notes and a detailed timeline for what was supposed to be happening around the planet. But in Graham’s kitchen I was surprised by what happened next. Writing a novel is the worst possible kind of endeavour. It’s difficult, it takes a very long time, and no one believes that you are doing anything productive the entire time. An unfinished novel is indistinguishable from no novel at all. Even
a finished novel barely counts as an achievement until thousands and thousands of people have paid money for it and read it and liked it and told their friends that they did. Those novelists that manage to make a career out of it are the ones that go to their study every morning and don’t come out until they have written a thousand words. This lets them write a new book every year, which is about how long it takes to spend their advance. The rest of us fret miserably about how we are never going to get our book finished as we sit on the bus on the way home from the job that we do to pay the mortgage while we wait for the energy and the inspiration and the enthusiasm and the time to finish the book. Back in 1989, I didn’t have a job so I had plenty of time, even on a Thursday afternoon, and we sat at that kitchen table for a lot of it. It was a hot, midgey, thinly overcast July day, but the kitchen was in a sort of half-basement on the shady side of the house and I was uncomfortably cold in just a tee-shirt and jeans. The talkative one had a sort of uneven leer and spoke with a rough, Swindon accent that he overcompensated for with exaggeratedly clipped pronunciation. As if he was at a job interview and was trying to seem more professional. A lot of the things he said made me wonder if he assumed some prior conversational context existed between us. He would ask “You know what Gary’s been up to, then.” And he said it like that, with no question mark at the end. And I found myself spluttering to deny it but at the same time wondering what I was denying and whether just denying it didn’t implicate me in some way. It was all incredibly unsettling and ambiguous. The other guy was younger and said literally not a single word the whole time he was there. He was leaning against the closed kitchen door. I was trying to think of something plausible that would let me leave the room and all I could think of was 13
www.morpheustales.com to ask if I could go to the toilet. I actually asked to go to the toilet, as if I was in detention after school; that’s how intimidating the whole situation felt. The silent guy just looked up at the chatty one and levered himself up off the door by his shoulder blades to move aside for me. I went out into the hall and I considered running out of the front door. But I was too cowardly even to do that - it seemed so confrontational. So I just went upstairs for a wee, took as long as I dared washing my hands and then meekly came back downstairs to resume my vigil. Gary never came back that day. I found out later that he had been in London visiting friends or something. I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps that sounds weird. That such a stressful and traumatic afternoon should have such an anticlimactic ending. I don’t know whether he owed those guys money or if it was a drugs thing or if he just kept very weird company. After a long, long wait, those weird scary guys just gave up and went away, taking their was-it-orwasn’t-it gun with them. I moved back to my parents’ quite soon after that and I didn’t see them again. But they came back eventually, when I wrote my book. To exaggerate my hero’s dilemma, I made sure that the bad guys had a real gun this time, and threatened Graham much more directly. Being a fictional character ought to have made Graham slightly braver than me, but I still didn’t think he would be brave enough to grab the gun, much less pull the trigger. It made me realise that the value of freedom has been greatly overstated. Freedom doesn’t mean that you can do anything. It means that you have unlimited choice. Choice is confusing, stressful, paralysing. The people who act are the ones who have the fewest choices. The cornered animal, the desperate fugitive, the starving artist. The unfinished novel is abandoned, not because we can’t decide how to end the story but
because we keep changing our minds how to begin. Finishing a novel is the easiest thing in the world. By the time you get to the final chapter, the story has so much momentum that the endpoint is inevitable. Starting a novel is much harder because it is all about possibility. Which is why it is generally best done at gunpoint. A Jar of Wasps is a geological thriller, published by Anarchy Books £3.99 ($4.99) for Kindle and £8.99 paperback Available from Amazon www.anarchy-books.com REVELATION: CREATURES RULE THE NIGHT By Nathaniel Connors www.damnationbooks.com One can only assume that Connors is a wellread genre fan, as his novel is on an epic scale, part apocalypse, part SF Mars battle, part internal dissection. The book mixes genres, blending them together to create a demon that won’t let you go. Every page creates images and story that sweep you along. The blurb on the back of the book does little justice to the sheer scale of the book. It tells of Jonathan Armand and his battle to best his family’s curse through his own private hell, but the book is much more than that. Tightly written and fast-paced, the plot moves along at a swift gallop; the characters are pretty good and Connors manages to pack in a lot of detail in this relatively short novel, which feels more epic than it is because of the size of the story. Connor’s novel promises much and manages to deliver in style. This novel is in a class of its own. Imaginative, daring and utterly thrilling. I’ll be first in line for the sequel! By Adrian Brady
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www.morpheustales.com story in print, but also their name in the table of contents. It’s something that every writer desires and treasures when it happens. Then, after having forked out money to buy copies from the publisher (why?), they’re delivered and the writer can’t wait to see what their story looks like in print. When they do, they flip to the table of contents only to find their name spelt wrong, plus there’s a typo in the story’s title too, which is further compounded when they turn to the tale itself and the publisher gets the title wrong there too. If that wasn’t bad enough, the story has been edited in a way that no editor should even consider doing: changed the story completely by adding bits, naming characters and introducing new (somewhat dubious) elements into the narrative. What’s worse, this had all been done without consulting the author. In essence the story bore very little resemblance to the one the author had submitted. To add further insult to considerable injury, when the writer emailed the editor about this he essentially said that she should be grateful for the work he’d performed upon it, hinting that it had been unuseable as it had been submitted. There are several aspects to consider out of this woeful tale. First, that the ‘editor’ has no clue about what editing actually involves. When exercised properly, editing is a joint effort between the writer and the person who is doing the editing. Any changes necessary to a story are suggestions, not diktats handed down from a supreme authority, and the author should be free to go through them and say yea or nay as he/she sees fit (bearing in mind that they know the story better than anyone else). Discussion is absolutely vital in the editing process. Between the two, what should emerge is a fully formed story, polished and honed to perfection. An editor adding paragraphs or whole sections themselves is an absolute nono: again, it should be suggested that maybe
Ramblings of a Tattooed Head By Simon Marshall-Jones I get asked what exactly an editor does (and that’s apart from those people who express surprise that books require editing in the first place – many believe that an author writes the books and then it’s simply published as is). It makes sense to most that a film requires an editor’s hand to polish it into what audiences see at cinemas or on their TV screens, but intellectually some find it difficult to envisage the same happening to a writer’s manuscript. Using the metaphor of a film, what a film editor does with scenes shot by a director, a book editor does with words – helping the narrative flow effectively, making sure that there are no discrepancies or continuity errors and then giving the whole that final polish. That’s what a good editor does but, just like in all walks of life, there are also bad editors. A particular instance recently highlighted this only too well. Many of you keeping your finger on the pulse of publishing cannot have failed to notice the furore surrounding one young writer’s experiences after having had her story accepted for an anthology published by a US small-press. For those of you just returning from mining the icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, this is how it goes in general terms, but without naming names, simply because I want this story to emphasise the editing process side of things and to look at it from that angle, rather from the morals of what happened (although you’ll no doubt realise where I stand on things from the following). Imagine, if you will, this scenario: A writer submits a story to a publisher – and it’s accepted within a couple of days of her submittal. This is especially sweet as the story is the author’s first such acceptance, and they are extremely excited about the prospect of seeing not just their 16
www.morpheustales.com a certain part of the narrative could be beefed up with the inclusion of extra material, or that perhaps the author could introduce a new facet of the story here or there to add extra layers and dimensions. However, doing so is at the author’s discretion, if he/she deems the idea good enough and that it will help the story along. The individual editor in the above case pushed the boundaries of his remit much too far in thinking that, by the very act of submitting a story, it gave him carte blanche to mess as much as he wanted with a contributor’s submission. Admittedly, from what I understand anyway, it is somewhat complicated by a contractual clause that allowed said editor to do just that. Even so, I would say that that could also be construed as taking advantage of a newbie writer who has yet to become aware of how things are done in the publishing industry. The worst transgression of all is not to have involved the writer in any of these changes. No editor, however talented they may be, can know what the writer was thinking when they penned the story. The meaning of a piece of literature is often open to personal interpretation (as you all should know from studying English Literature at school) and that can apply just as much to an editor as it does to a reader. The most sensible course of action (and the right one) is to ask the writer in question what they were aiming for with the story and then work along those lines (unless, of course, the story is completely unambiguous from the start). Adding bits, recasting others, renaming characters or effecting major revisions without consultation is not only unprofessional, but it’s highly disrespectful of the author in question, and telegraphs the editor’s absolute disdain. Like I’ve said elsewhere, part of the art of the editor is to bring the voice of the writer to the fore without leaving any trace of themselves. It’s much like a painting – it
may be good to start with, but by adding certain subtle details and carefully placed highlights, the whole really comes to life. Editing is much the same, in some senses. The touch of the editor must be as light as much as possible, and always with the full knowledge of the writer concerned. After all, it’s the writer’s vision the editor is enhancing, not their own. And unlucky is the editor who doesn’t abide by these rules, as the flurry of internet indignation following in the wake of the above case is testament to - bad news travels fast in these electronic times. NAZI ZOMBIES Zombie aficionados sometimes forget that comic books played a key role in establishing the genre. George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead drew most of its inspiration from the late-1940s and early-1950s horror comics, rather than from its cinematic predecessors. Inspired by folklore, these Golden Age strips formulated most of the tropes now associated with the genre. The proliferation of living corpses in comics over the past decade is thus more of a homecoming than an invasion from the silver screen. An interesting case is Joe Wight’s Nazi Zombies, an ongoing series from Antarctic Press. Although reminiscent of the Norwegian zombie-comedy film Dead Snow, Nazi Zombies more likely derives its impetus from the popular video game of the same name, featured in the Call of Duty franchise. You could dismiss Nazi Zombies as a cash-in on some ghouls-in-stahlhelm trend, but this comic offers at least a few ideas to chew on. Undead Hitlerites have long been a staple of zombie fiction. The hook of the idea is its anachronism. Zombies as we know them today are children of the Cold War, defined in American comics at the 17
www.morpheustales.com height of the Red Scare, representing both communism and nuclear warfare. In particular, the Korean War is where Americans first encountered human wave tactics, and coined the term brainwashing to describe the forced conversion of captured GIs to the enemy cause, both of which ghouls embody as metaphor. And so the living dead seem amusingly out of place when projected back in time to World War II. In some ways, though, they resonate just as strongly with that period. Much of the imagery of zombie fiction is derived from WWII, whether the radiation victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the famine-born cannibals of the Eastern Front, or the masses of starved death camp inmates. Much like communism, Nazism was a totalitarian ideology that relied on intensive propaganda and indoctrination to spread, and so to transfer the zombie metaphor from the Eastern Bloc to the Third Reich is no great ordeal. All that aside, an undead goosestepper just makes for a great visual. I mean, just how evil can you get? Fresh off his science fiction outing Planet of the Living Dead, creator Joe Wight is no stranger to zombies. Each issue of Nazi Zombies is divided into an ongoing strip written and illustrated by Wight, with a related backup strip, usually drawn by a guest artist. Wight’s narration and dialogue sound authentic, and the tales he spins are solid weird war stories with a secret history vibe. While his characters’ faces are a bit of a weak point, overall Wight’s artwork is serviceable, and has a keen eye toward historical detail. The inkwash shading feels appropriate for the period, suggestive of black-and-white photographs, even though actual wartime comics had a vivid pallet. The best part about the series is the covers, which use striking images in brilliant colours. Readers seeking surprises should look elsewhere, but, for what it is, this series
is a decent read. By Ryan David Muirhead PAX OMEGA By Al Ewing www.abaddonbooks.com Confused was what I found myself through the read of most of this book. There were the odd moments of lucidity, and those I enjoyed, but confusion reigned for too long. This appears to be an experimental novel in the form of interlinked short stories of about forty pages each, set in different times: the first in the far future, then cowboy times, then the thirties where everything becomes pulp-style, then forties and fifties where the story feels like the bastard-child of an eighties action thriller (The A-Team), a pulp story, and an alternative history graphic novel. Which isn’t a bad thing. What the book does right is the weird story, the settings and the action. This has superheroes, robots, immortals, cowboys, Nazis, and a whole lot more. The problem is that is doesn’t have enough of a direction to pull it all together. The story is all over the place. The chapters work much better as individual stories, and the thin thread holding them together is at times virtually non-existent. Frustratingly inept plotting and the experimental style of the narrative are likely to drive some readers to distraction, as they did with this reviewer. But there are good bits that you are not likely to find elsewhere hidden within, and it would be a shame to miss out on those. Any fans of superheroes or robots should definitely seek this out, and for those looking for something different, you won’t find much that is more different from this novel. Intriguing and frustrating in equal measure, I still might give one of Ewing’s other books a try. By Stanley Riiks
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www.morpheustales.com yet all too brief journey. The blacksmith’s son comes into possession of a quill of immense supernatural power, and uses it to craft dark nuggets of fiction that capture the interests of a publisher. Everything is going swimmingly for the young man until he comes home one night to find his entire family decapitated... By C.M. Saunders
STRANGENESS AND CHARM By Mike Shevdon www.angryrobotbooks.com The third of the Courts of the Feyre series, the story of Niall Petersen and his daughter Alex continues. Naill now works for the Courts of the Feyre and must round up the prisoners he released when he rescued his daughter from Bedlam prison, using his newly-found magical powers. If you haven’t read the first two books in the series you may struggle a little to keep up as this book follows on directly from the second book in the series, and puts everything in context. Shevdon’s writing is fast and pacey, nicely giving the story an edge, and making it all very easy to read. The characters are good, and the plotting is clever. The atmosphere set-up and the world are brilliantly realised, and the book ends with a marvellous climax that makes you want more. A magical book, intelligent, heartfelt and well-written, Shevdon has created a series that deserves your attention. By Adrian Brady
RASL Talk about a tough act to follow. Back in the 1990s and 2000s, cartoonist Jeff Smith had one of the biggest indie comic hits ever with his comedic fantasy series Bone, which cleaned up on Eisner and Harvey awards, and flooded the coffers of Cartoon Books, Smith’s self-publishing company. His follow-up is RASL, a noirish science fiction series about a dimension-hopping art thief on the run from the government. Intended for mature readers, this title is about as different from the family-friendly Bone as you can get. Put out since 2008, RASL has almost finished its run, with just a handful of issues to go. For a series infamous for its haphazard release schedule, now is the best time to get on board with RASL. The main character is Robert Johnson, a physicist with a speciality in electromagnetism, who quits his job with the American military over fears that his bosses will weaponize his life’s work. Rob sabotages his own project beyond repair and makes off with a pair of shoulder-mounted engines that enable him to jump the dimensional barriers between parallel universes. To make a living, Rob now travels to alternate earths, stealing priceless paintings and hiding out from the government agents hot on his trail. Amusingly, he snatches multiple versions of Picasso’s "The Old Guitarist", an appropriate choice, since cubism informs RASL’s depiction of the
GHOST WRITER (Kindle edition) By Tom C. Underhill http://www.wix.com/tomunderhill/home This is a short story first published in Allegory magazine back in 2008, and now made available in its own right. “Ghost Writer” starts with a bang, hooks you immediately, and doesn’t let up until the final word. It is written in such a way as to grip the reader immediately — something many writers try their damnedest to achieve, but few accomplish. Here, Underhill makes it seem effortless. From the well-crafted opening, this story about a simple blacksmith’s son with aspirations of becoming a writer takes you on a bewitching 20
www.morpheustales.com strange intersections of space and time generated by Rob’s technology. Regardless of the dimensional shifts, the action stays in the same region across worlds, mostly around Tucson, Arizona. The historical differences among the various universes Rob visits are insignificant compared to what they could have been. In one world, for example, the most obvious deviation is that Robert Zimmerman never took the stage name Bob Dylan. Some might view this triviality as wasted potential, but RASL is a human-scale story, and the more personal divergences, while minor in the great scheme of things, are important for the character. For example, in one universe a doppelganger of Rob’s dead lover is still alive. Given this narrow focus on Rob, the main fault of the series is that he is not the most sympathetic of protagonists. The weakest part of his characterization is the stilted presentation of his relationship with his best friend and colleague, Miles. Rob sleeps with Miles’ wife, Maya, and, in his grief over her death, pursues a seedy lifestyle full of strippers, prostitutes, and booze. One of the better aspects of RASL is the way Smith fuses the science fiction elements into real, albeit embellished, historical events such as the Tunguska explosion, the Philadelphia experiment, and the life of Nikola Tesla. These flashbacks slow the narrative, but add a much-needed richness, and the comic always keeps these sequences entertaining in their own right. Smith is a master cartoonist, although his artwork in RASL could have used a more naturalistic edge to better match the grittiness of the story. All in all, RASL is a world worth visiting. By Ryan David Muirhead
RAILSEA By China Mieville www.panmacmillan.com Mieville has been writing urban fantasy for years. His last couple of books have been massive successes, The City & The City released in 2009 launching him onto the best-seller lists after years of critical acclaim. Not content with critical and commercial success, Mieville’s 2011 novel Embassytown saw his exploration of SF themes. Now, with Railsea, Mieville tries his hand at teen fiction, and as usual he raises the bar for all who follow. Sham is an orphan who lives on the railsea, hunting a mole. The railsea is a dangerous network of train lines, with islands, and just off the rails in the darkness danger lies. This is a fantastic adventure novel with a more complex plot than can easily be described. The book works on a number of levels, and although it seems to be aimed at Young Adults, anyone familiar with Mieville’s work will find this as equally exciting and fascinating as his previous novels. Like Gaiman, Mieville produces modern fairy-tales, brilliant genre-blending treats that draw you in and sweep you up in their incredible stories. Railsea is an incredible story from an incredible writer. By Adrian Brady DARK ECLIPSE #9 (the Dark Moon ezine) www.darkmoonbooks.com/Dark_Moon_Dig est_Home.htm I love horror e-zines. In my mind they have taken the place of the horror comics I used to read as a kid. There are many out there — some would say too many — and as a result 21
www.morpheustales.com the quality varies wildly. When I say ‘quality’, I mean a combination of production, price, and of course, worthwhile content. A common mistake of many contemporary horror e-zines is that they over-invest in one area at the expense of others, but this offering from wellestablished publisher Dark Moon Press excels in virtually every aspect, boasting a refreshing mash-up of flash fiction, short stories, dark poetry and reviews. First out of the blocks is a little shocker with a surprise ending by Gerry Griffiths that serves as a little taster as to what you are in for. But the best story here, in my opinion, is “The Schoolhouse” by Darren Flaherty, a genuinely unsettling tale of loss and a haunted doll’s house that ultimately highlights the extreme dark side of human nature. The prize for the most confusing story goes to “The Cellar Door”, because it isn’t actually about a cellar door and reads more like a botany entry taken from Wikipedia. All in all, Dark Eclipse offers far better value for money than the vast majority of e-zines on the market, and if you love your fiction in easy to digest, bite-sized chunks, this could be just the thing for you. By C.M. Saunders
the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Lansdale is a true storyteller, much like Stephen King at his best, and The Edge of Dark Water sees him in top form. Fans of Lansdale normally seek out his every book, and those who are not fans simply haven’t discovered him yet. Everyone should read a Lansdale novel, and this is one of the best. By Adrian Brady vN By Madeline Ashby www.angryrobotbooks.com Amy is a Von Neumann, a self-replicating, sentient human-like robot, as is her mother. They are both on a special diet, her mother to stop her iterating (having a baby), and Amy so that she grows up slowly like a normal child, just as her human father prefers. The vNs live a peaceful existence with the humans of this future world, unable to kill or hurt humans because of a failsafe built into them. But when Amy’s long-lost grandmother shows up at Amy’s Kindergarten graduation and starts killing, Amy saves her mother by devouring her grandmother, not knowing that she will become host to her twisted ancestor. This book would have made an excellent novella; the first hundred pages of the book are the heart of the story. It has some good ideas and plenty of action, but the book continues for another couple hundred pages and kind of loses its way. It becomes a social commentary on the uses of vNs, as they are used and abused by humanity, and then a kind of utopia of vNs with the introduction of Mecha, the city where they live peacefully without humans. The book in the latter stages becomes overblown, trying to do too much without much of a direction. The first part of
EDGE OF DARK WATER By Joe R. Lansdale www.mulhollandbooks.com Lansdale’s trademark East Texan drawl makes his book read like you are in front of a master storyteller sitting around a campfire telling tall tales. This one sees Sue Ellen and her ragtag crew heading down river with her friend’s ashes in a can of lard, determined to reach Hollywood to scatter the ashes. It is the journey, the adventures and the people they meet that makes the story what it is: tense, funny, and brutally realistic. Lansdale’s humour and horror comes from 22
www.morpheustales.com the book has chases and escapes as Amy first becomes a murderer and then a fugitive, but later it becomes a study in relationships, and an exploration of the effects the failsafe has on the vN’s lives. It doesn’t quite work. This is an interesting book that is perhaps too long for its own good. The first hundred pages are really good, then, fade for a while until it reaches an epic climax. Perhaps the second book in the series will put right some of the wrongs, but until then this is for die-hard robot fans only. By Stanley Riiks
watching NYPD Blue re-runs. However, Deadline is not a bad way to kill a couple of hours. It doesn’t require much effort on the part of the reader, and due credit must be given for the climax of “The Bloody Kiss of Death”, for what must surely rank as the most novel way of killing a vampire ever! By C.M. Saunders THE HAMMER AND THE BLADE By Paul S. Kemp www.angryrobotbooks.com Well-known for his Star Wars and other tiein novels, Kemp is seeking to maintain his best-seller status with a new novel set in his own world. And what a world it is! This novel of sword and sorcery introduces us to Egil and Nix, a priest and a thief, respectively, who plan to rob one final tomb and then retire with their loot. But plans have to change when the pair kill a demon, and are drawn into an adventure that may cost them their lives. Rip-roaring fantasy adventure as its best, this is sword and sorcery at its finest. The book manages to capture the true spirit of sword and sorcery like The Lord of the Rings or the original Conan, but puts enough of a modern spin on it to keep the reader tearing through the pages to find out what happens next. Kemp has created a pair of characters who sparkle, and a plot that streaks along at pace. A grand start to what is likely to be an excellent fantasy series. Recommended wholeheartedly. By Adrian Brady
DEADLINE: THE HORRIFYING ADVENTURES OF HARVEY BANKS, TABLOID REPORTER By Jochem Van der Steen http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/jvdsteen This collection by Dutch crime writer Van der Steen is comprised of a number of short stories all of which feature the same lead character, tabloid reporter Harvey Banks. Some stories can best be described as suspense, while some boast more blood and gore, but all contain some supernatural element or other to keep us horror hounds happy. On the face of it there are similarities between this collection and that classic ‘70s TV show Kolchak: The Night Stalker starring Darren McGavin, which is probably what sparked my interest in the first place. Overall the standard of writing is pretty decent but could perhaps benefit from the input of a good editor. There are a few of those telltale signs, namely grammatical nuances and clumsy sentences, that suggest the author is not a native English speaker. And despite every story featuring the same lead character, not much flesh is added to the bare bones apart from repeated allusions to his love of cigarettes and strong alcohol. Common stereotypes abound, and you get the distinct impression that the writer did most of his research in a comfy armchair 23
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THE RESPECTABLE FACE OF TYRANNY By Gary Fry www.spectralpress.wordpress.com
SUSTENANCE By Nate D. Burleigh www.RainstormPress.com
Spectral Press is one of those fine smallpresses that delight, that is professional and polished, and provide you with a certain type of entertainment and quality that you will not find elsewhere. So, it was with some concern that I picked up their first venture into novellas territory after their impressive collection of short story chapbooks. I need not have worried. Alongside MarshallJones’ expert editorial hand we have a rare delight in Gary Fry. His fiction is never anything less than impressive. His short fiction, and this novella in particular, are like diamonds, finely crafted and beautiful. The recession has impacted on Josh terribly; he is suffering from divorce and living with his daughter in a caravan. And if that doesn’t sound like a particularly chilly basis for a horror story, then you have obviously not read a Fry story. Try his story in 13: Tales of Dark Fiction for more atmospheric horror than you can handle. Dripping with atmosphere and darkness, this book also features social commentary and satire, rising it above your average horror tale. Spectral Press is expanding, and this can only be a good thing. Their first venture into longer stories is a spark of genius. Fry’s work is of the highest quality, as is the whole book. This book drips quality, as does everything Spectral Press and Gary Fry touch.
This is Nate D. Burleigh’s debut novel, published by Rainstorm Press. The book centres on Coert, the archetypal teen with all the prototypical teen problems: graduation, girls, cars, bullies. But when strange things begin happening to people in the small town where he lives, he instinctively knows he is somehow involved. As the death toll mounts, Coert reluctantly begins to accept that he is different from others of his ilk. Very different. Sustenance has already been generating a lot of press, most of it positive. In some circles it has been touted as an instant YA horror classic, but even though the protagonist and most of the supporting cast are teenagers this genrefication isn’t necessarily accurate. Sustenance is the kind of smooth, well-crafted tale that can be enjoyed just as much by adults and seasoned horror fiends as its perceived ‘target audience’. The references to ‘80s popular culture (Molly Ringwald in movies, Paula Abdul on the radio) give this book a warm retro feel, and there is more than enough substance, through re-tellings of Greek tragedies and the obligatory dream sequences, to give it some extra weight in layers of metaphor. This is altogether more complex than your average vampire or werewolf story. At times it transcends horror, crossing over into fantastical superhero territory, and all-in-all is a very accomplished and well-woven tale. By C.M. Saunders 25
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www.morpheustales.com page graphic tale by Mr. Rudolph. Some alterations are made to details of the story (i.e., removal of the German U-boat and capture of the sailors) that serve to focus the narrative upon the nameless, doomed sailor. The removal of superfluous plot points allows the focus to remain upon our poor narrator’s descent into desperation and madness. The illustration is interspersed, sparingly, with snippets of the original text when emotionally powerful. Rudolph uses a thick line to enhance the nightmare of the narration; starkly defined desperation and terror with some grey tones for depth. At times, the worst thing an artist can attempt is to bring a Lovecraftian creature into the light and delineate the horror of the unknown. This misstep is avoided here by keeping the totem and the creatures murky and shadowencased – perhaps a delusion of a sunstroked mind? The thick inks do not obscure the details of our narrator’s desperation and madness – facial expressions are well done and complement the flow of the story. This soft cover edition with a dust jacket was originally a Kickstarter project, limited to a print run of 200 for the “Necro” edition. It is more of an art project than a mass-market graphic novel, as it is pricey for a digest-sized paperback. Recommended for fans of graphic narrative for the art, as long as you are aware that it is a very quick read – more so than the source material! Overall, it is a nice curio to add to the HPL graphic novel collection lurking on your shelf, but not essential.
From the Catacombs: Graphic Lovecraft By Jim Lesniak “Graphic Lovecraft” sounds like something that could get ye olde reviewer in trouble or cause problems with customs, doesn’t it? I am sure regular readers of this column (there are some, I hope) know exactly what they are in for with that title: another instalment of H.P. Lovecraft graphic novel reviews!1 Some of the titles within this group are adaptations, while a couple take our esteemed gentleman from Providence as a starting point or meme for your entertainment. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Let me add to that “the greatest horror of a reviewer is that an artist will attempt to delineate the indescribable horrors of HPL”. I have seen some dreadful attempts to show the terrors in sharp relief over the years; luckily we do not have any egregious examples of overestimation of artistic ability on display here2. Another fear is attempting to review anything published contemporarily by Alan Moore, therefore I am not endeavoring to review the Neonomicon graphic novel; that can and will be done by those with a keener sense of what the Shoggoth he is trying to say! H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon Adapted by Mark Rudolph CV Comics (http://www.cvcomics.com) HPL’s tale of isolation, discovery and madness is expanded into a seventy-eight
At The Mountains of Madness Adapted by I.N.J. Culbard Sterling Publishing (www.sterlingpublishing.com)
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Once again, I apologize to the unfortunate proofreader who must attempt to spell check this column. Ten columns in, yet not one reprimand – the assassins have failed again. 2 I’ll admit, honestly, that the worst published drawing of Lovecraftian horror is infinitely better than what I could produce. Even stick figures are beyond my meager artistic abilities.
Alas, it looks like we shall never see Guillermo Del Toro’s vision of this tale, so we must comfort ourselves with an able 27
www.morpheustales.com church-burning foreign-exchange student from Norway and you get a somewhat bizarre slice of Howard’s life. There is little in the way of continuing narratives, so starting in Volume Two will not leave you at a disadvantage. Young Lovecraft is a fun, mythos-filled diversion provided in digest size. It is somewhat pricy in comparison to other graphic novels/collections in the bang for your buck category, but a fun take on Lovecraftian horror.
adaptation. HPL’s novella is condensed into a concise 124-page romp through accursed, arctic wastes. The expressive artwork feels like a cross between Darwin Cooke’s New Frontier and Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One; very easy on the eyes with clean lines and colors. Thankfully, the horrendous creatures are rendered in shadow, precluding one of my usual complaints. This interpretation is more accessible to the neophyte due to the preponderance of dialog and the rendering of the emotional strain on the faces of the arctic team. One can get to the meat of the tale and engage with our protagonists quickly; this can be a gateway drug to the original prose. The primary narrative gripe, which is present in the source material, is the apparent speed in which the history of the extraterrestrial entities is deciphered by our “heroes” – I must presume Miskatonic University has some great programs for alien cuneiform interpretation. This, however, is a speed bump in the enjoyment, not a stop sign. At the Mountain of Madness is a well-produced, full-color graphic novel available at a very reasonable price. Culbard has taken the eldritch gentleman’s work and adapted with a cinematic eye and enhanced the mood with effective and effusive dialogue. Well worth the purchase.
Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom By Bruce Brown, Dwight L. MacPherson and Thomas Boatwright Arcana (http://www.arcana.com) My hopes for this series have held true – when ye olde reviewer tackled the first installment (Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom), it felt stilted with the potential for greatness. With this volume, the creative team hits the road with all cylinders firing with an entertaining all-ages adventure to Yoggoth. This is not “all-ages” in the lowest common denominator, middle of the road, written for a five-year-old’s sense, but as in accessible to everyone. This adventure series follows our young friend Howard and his buddy Spot, aka Cthulhu, as they fend off various nasties looking for that hideous book, the Necronomicon. Across time and space, Howard and Spot race to save Howard’s family from being turned into Innsmouthstyle fish men. With the aid of his father, once extracted from the asylum (of course), Abdul must be confronted to save the family. The artwork is expressive and effective – several of the creatures and effects are shrouded in shadow unless being exaggerated for anthropomorphic effect. The range of emotions on young Howard’s face,
Young Lovecraft Volume 2 By Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres KettleDrummer Books (http://kettledrummerbooks.com) http://younglovecraft.blogspot.com You do not need Volume One to enjoy this, but it does not hurt! The adventures of a preteen Howard and his hell hound Glen, told in old-school strip format and translated from the Spanish. Think of a continental Calvin and Hobbes on absinthe and you’ll get a feel for how his dream world persists. Throw in visits to Poe (in his tomb) and a 28
www.morpheustales.com as well as the madness in Winfred’s eyes, amplifies the tale. The panel arrangement is also fun in conveying the action – no ninepanel pages here! An improvement on the first volume that also sets itself up for a third, presumably to be available in a year’s time, this is a good all-ages volume. It is helpful to have read the first volume for the exposition, but is not fatal to enjoying this volume if you have not. It is well worth the time.
purchase – the sheer value of what you receive for US$24.95 is immense. Add to that the fact you can read these adaptations in their entirety online, and you’ll know exactly what you’re getting with the addition of sketch pages and the endpaper map of the dream worlds. Get it and join me as a “journeyman dreamer!” As per usual, this column has been written with a musical soundtrack percolating in the background. The main offender was the debut EP from Chewing With Gusto3, which is a collaboration project between Chewing Magnetic Tape and Gusto Extermination Fluid. It is an electronic/experimental project that, unlike many “experimental” albums, still uses familiar musical structure rather than abrasion and abstraction (looking at you, Merzbow). Check their website for the bandcamp link for free streaming or be bold and order the limited edition CD4. Some of the album is a quieter ambient with an overt, modern Einsturzende Neubauten influence. We are currently seeing a large quantity of Lovecraft-inspired comics and graphic novels hitting the market, both in physical format and electronic. Besides the obvious titles that are adaptations or that name-check our good friend, there is the Nightmare World series curated by Dirk Manning5, Strange Aeons Magazine (continuing the format and series from Planet Lovecraft)6, and Lovecraft Is Missing7, among innumerable others. Of course, with the barriers to publication so low as to be nearly nonexistent these days, there is a preponderance of crap that will waste one’s time. I’ll keep searching for the
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories Adapted by Jason Bradley Thompson Mockman Press (www.mockmanpress.com) Thompson’s adaptations of HPL’s “dream cycle” stories have been years in the making. Originally partially published as stand-alone comics in the mid-1990s, then slowly unveiled at the Mockman website, this oversized hardcover finally collects “The White Ship”, “Celephais”, “The Strange High House in the Mist”, and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. The size of the hardcover is comparable to the easily-damaged issues that took forever to track down all those endless years past. The intricately detailed fine line work is phenomenal in all the small items stowed away in the panels. Befitting our friend’s prose, the panels are not laid out in conventional grids, but allowed to morph and flow organically, with the waxing and waning of the dream worlds. Fear not, dear reader, that the fact these are not “hardcore” Mythos stories preclude hideous, horrifying creatures, for there are ghouls and nightgaunts and Nyarlathotep – oh my! (Couldn’t resist, my apologies.) You can breeze through the stories or get caught up in examining individual pages. An essential HPL graphic novel
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http://chewingwithgusto.com I have #9/200!
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http://www.shadowlineonline.com/webcomics/night mare-world Free online and available in a trio of collections. 6 http://strange-aeons.com/ 7 http://lovecraftismissing.com/ 29
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slightly bloated and, in my humble opinion, could have benefited from a little more editor’s red ink. I get the impression Kerr brings a lot of his personal experiences to the table, although I also get the impression he is writing more from the point of view of the journalist he wanted to be, rather than the journalist he actually was. I sincerely hope for the good of his career and for the sakes of his editors and colleagues, that he wasn’t as abrasive or obnoxious as the lead character he depicts here! By C.M. Saunders
The next instalment of this column, Cthulhu-willing, shall be covering smallpress magazines of the horror genre. If you have any suggestions or are involved with one, please get word to me through Morpheus Tales or on Facebook. I have a couple in mind (and tentacle) already, but I want to hear about any magazine that’s out there that might have merit. As always, please support Morpheus Tales Magazine – without it, there is no free supplement available every quarter! This is being produced more regularly than Cemetery Dance Magazine with more editorial content each issue than most periodicals manage in a year. Check the website to find how to buy the magazine in print and digital formats and help support the small press!
HUNTER’S MOON By Charlotte Bond www.screamingdreams.com The cover of his book hides a traditional horror story with fantasy overtones as four friends embark on a pleasant holiday in the French countryside. But strange things begin to happen, and Jenny (a psychic) and Recce seem to be the only ones who can see what’s happening. When they find out that the local castle ruins were owned by a cruel lord who tortured his servants, the strange occurrences and experiences they are having only get worse. Despite the standard horror plot, Bond manages to create realistic characters and a great setting. The ramping up of the strange atmosphere and the tension between the four friends creates a compelling story. Bond’s first novella, this is worthy of seeking out. A nice twist on a traditional horror theme. By Adrian Brady
BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON By Larry C. Kerr www.larrykerrauthor.com In his other life Larry C. Kerr is, or was, a journalist, and his technical experience shines through in By The Light of the Moon, his first novel. The writing is smooth and polished, which only makes his habit of putting chapter breaks slap-bang in the middle of conversations even more difficult to fathom. It is an interesting fact that most trade journalists who digress to fiction end up writing about journalism in one form or another. In this case the narrative follows a John Reynolds, a journalist on a small-town newspaper dreaming of bigger things. Nothing much happens in Blacksville... until the morning a young baseball player literally stumbles over a collection of body parts. And there begins a decent enough werewolf tale which, although solid and certainly capable of pleasing both casual readers and more rabid fans of the genre, doesn’t really offer anything new. It is
THE LAST REEF AND OTHER STORIES By Gareth L. Powell www.anarchy-books.com I liked this book, I really liked it. It’s not often that you come across a book by an author you’ve never heard of and you discover something amazing, but this is one 30
www.morpheustales.com of those rare books. It sparkles. This is a collection of SF stories, but these are stories of humanity, of emotion, set in futuristic worlds. They could easily be set anywhere, they are individual, personal tales of growth, or love and loss. These are stories with feeling, with a heart. It’s always difficult to pick a favourite story in a collection, but that’s normally because all the stories blend into one another and by the end of the book you can’t remember which one is which, this time that’s not the case. Each and every story in here is memorable, and they’re all good, but in different ways. It’s a great collection, one that you read and as soon as you finish a story you think that’s one your favourite, and then you read the next one and think that’s one my favourite. “The Last Reef” is a great story set on Mars about lost love that pulls at the heart-strings. “Six Lights off Green Scar” is an exciting tale of dangerous roulette space travel. “Distant Galaxies Colliding” is a sad tale. “Hot Rain” is an SF twist to a noir detective story. “The Long Walk Aft” is flash fiction at its best, and funny too. (Ok, I have a sick sense of humour!) “Arches” is a great story of space travel, which reminded my of Dan Simmon’s Hyperion novels. There’s just not a bad story in here, which is virtually a miracle in itself. If there is anything to complain about it’s that this book need a big final novellas to finish it off properly. Powell and Anarchy Books have managed to pull together one of the finest collections of SF short stories I’ve had the privilege of reading. A damn fine read. By Stanley Riiks
book – The Function Room: The Kollection, began with an idea to extend the story of Hassan-i Sabbāh into modern times, to imagine that he is still hidden away in the mountains with his secret assassins, exerting his control not just over Persia now, but over the whole world. As the idea developed, the mountains of Iran were replaced by the countryside of Dorset, Hassan-i Sabbāh became more of a concept than a man, and then the concept became The Function Room, a New World Order that wasn’t made of prime ministers and presidents and multinational CEOs, but of something ancient, dark, and ever-changing. The Function Room became a vehicle, an ark if you will, for gods of the Chthulhu mythos, various deities of the ancient world, as well as rats, crows, blood, shit, butchers, and hermaphrodite prison wardens. Then The Function Room began influencing more and more of my stories, and that’s how the collection came about. The idea for the machinery inside The Function Room being made of body parts is rooted in the theological argument that postulates that God must exist as there is evidence in the world of His, or Her, design; how the seasons change like clockwork each year, for example, or how humans might be perceived to be like complex machines. It would have been boring and too easy to simply create a godless world, so I turned this on its head by making the reader part of an impossibly intricate machine that manipulates Leddenton and everyone in it, just as a god might. In Leddenton at least,
Matt Leyshon Interview Tell us about The Function Room. The title story, and so ultimately the whole 31
www.morpheustales.com The Function Room is both the Big Bang and Higgs boson. It is the prime mover and that which mysteriously binds the world together; it is everything and it is as scary as Hell. The Function Room is, in fact, a real building and it can be found on Queen Street in Gillingham, Dorset. I have even been inside it, many years ago, and I’ve not been to another church jumble sale since. Also, you may be interested to know that Gillingham is named Leddenton by Thomas Hardy in his novel Jude the Obscure.
reader’s responses vary. It made sense to me that writing about Joe Meek was never going to be straightforward, so it felt right that readers would interpret the story in their own way. When I added quantum physics and multiple universes to the narrative, this belief was consolidated further. Even when I did some work with the anthology editor Adam Bradley to focus the end section, I was determined not to sacrifice any of the ambiguities that formed the rather crooked crux to the story. There is a quantum theory of multiple universes in which one can play Russian roulette forever. In this theory one would only ever be aware of the universe in which the hammer clicks upon an empty round; this is called quantum immortality. When Joe shoots himself in the head he hears the perfect sound of lead shot careering around the curve of his skull and somehow retains this aural memory, even though he has entered a universe where his shotgun has malfunctioned or he has somehow survived. His quest to hear the sound again leads him to experiment with sound manipulation and to develop a suicide habit; Russian roulette becomes Joe’s hobby. The story ends when he inadvertently invokes a seething black entity by playing a looped gun shot sample in an empty club, whereupon he is sucked into a universe of pure sound; a happy ending for Joe Meek, no less. But does it make sense?
Your story “To Hear a New World” appeared in 13: Tales of Dark Fiction, and received some rave reviews. What is the story about? In 1967 the record producer Joe Meek shot his landlady dead and then turned the gun upon himself. “To Hear a New World” is a largely fictional account of his final day. Joe Meek had issues; he was paranoid and obsessed with the occult, he left tape recorders in graveyards to capture the voice of Buddy Holly, but his drive to record the ‘right sound’ rather than catchy tunes resulted in some pioneering studio work. He is perhaps best known for the instrumental hit Telstar by The Tornados which he both wrote and produced. To Hear a New World is the name of his electronic album and several references to songs from this appear in the story. When asked about “To Hear a New World,” I’m still surprised, but pleased, by how 32
www.morpheustales.com What book are you reading now? I’ve just finished The Fighter by Craig Davidson. I took the book out of the library on Friday and by Sunday it was finished; it’s one of those books that reads like a James M. Cain or a Jim Thompson novel, it has a punchy narrative, mostly short and simple sentences, and action from start to finish. I would recommend it to anyone interested in writing good fight scenes. I have Arguably by Christopher Hitchens on my bedside table, and I’m about to start The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. I also plan to read some Philip K. Dick as a reviewer has recently referenced one of his novels in relation to a story of mine.
Although I feel as though I am still very much mastering the craft of the short story I can’t deny being tempted by the prospect of writing a novel. I do have an idea for something longer that I intend to work on soon. However, I recognise that writing a novel takes a lot of hard work which is a problem for me as I’m inherently lazy.
What is your proudest moment as a writer? There are often lines, and occasionally paragraphs, in my stories that I’m proud of, but rarely an entire piece. I was very happy though when Morpheus Tales proposed publishing a collection of my work, and I will of course feel proud when The Function Room: The Kollection hits the shelves.
I picked up New York Blues, a novel by the writer Eric Brown, not realising that it is the second book in a series called The Virex Trilogy. Needless to say, I hadn’t read the first book in the series, but it turns out it doesn’t matter. Whilst there are allusions and references to what, I assume, are events in the first book, New York Blues works well as a stand-alone SF-noir detective story. Think of a combination of Mickey Spillane, Blade Runner, and Chinatown and you’ll have a feel for the atmosphere of New York Blues. Our protagonist is Halliday, a hardboiled and emotionally damaged ex-cop turned P.I. with a slowly revealed soft centre, who lives and works in an overheated New York City in 2040. The city is crumbling where it stands and is filled with refugees from an apparent nuclear disaster which has killed off all the trees. Halliday’s home and office, which he shares with a feral but vulnerable street kid called Casey, is based in the Chinese district and he exists on a diet of Chinese take-aways (or takeouts, as this is an American story) and videos of the arboreal beauty the world has lost. Into Halliday’s down-at-heel
The Function Room: The Kollection By Matt Leyshon will launch on 31st of October 2012. Morpheus Tales #16, and #17 (Out Now!) feature stories from The Function Room: The Kollection. NEW YORK BLUES By Eric Brown
What are you working on now? You are well known for your short stories. Do you plan to write a novel? I’ve just finished what at the moment I’m considering to be the final draft of a ghost story set in Jamaica called “The Blood Clot”. I’m not sure where or by whom it will be published, and it may well get a further rewrite, but I’m currently enjoying what will surely be a brief period of thinking that it is rather good.
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www.morpheustales.com existence sashays the glamorous Virtual Reality star Vanessa Artois. Initially looking to hire someone to find her missing younger sister, she is instrumental in the drama quotient rising when she becomes the target for a murder attempt in Halliday’s office. Now Halliday has a would-be murderer to track down and a beautiful damsel-indistress to protect, as well as a missing teenage girl to find and hopefully rescue. As Halliday pounds the mean streets and sleazy dives of New York trying to solve these multiplying complexities, Brown shows us a decaying world that is collectively seeking to escape its own drab condition via the latest drug of choice, Virtual Reality. Cyber-space allows anybody to be whoever they want to be and do whatever they want to do, but it is not just the impoverished masses who are seeking to escape the stresses of everyday reality. Even the wealthy, especially the very wealthy, see VR as an opportunity to create life as they want it to be, not as it is or was. In a world where it is possible to change physical appearances via technology, images are deceptive and illusion and reality are not as clear-cut as they once were. This becomes more and more evident as Halliday becomes immersed in a world of glamorous entertainers, cops on the make, freedom-fighting computer hackers and ruthless multi-millionaires, not to mention the gooey gel tanks of VR, and it doesn’t take long before the body count starts to mount. Eric Brown has written a pacy, SF detective thriller set in a convincing future world that, alarmingly, isn’t so different from our own. Indeed, if I’m honest, I found the SF elements stronger than the actual detective story, but both are entertaining and mutually supportive. I recommend New York Blues to anyone who likes their traditional private eye stories seasoned with new technology and visions of a future dystopia
that is already almost upon us. By J.S.Watts EVA – A GHOST STORY By Mike Emmett www.mikemmett.com Eva was a normal, happy little girl who had her whole life ahead of her. The problem was she was born to cruel and abusive parents who mistreated her and saw to it that she never reached adulthood. They murdered her, hid the body, staged an abduction, then sold the newspaper they owned and fled the city. The buyers of the self-contained newspaper are Mary and Hank Schultz, a young couple who have grown weary of big city life and yearn for a fresh start. They attempt to make a go of the newspaper and settle into their new lives, only to suffer a series of inexplicable and frightening experiences. After interviewing past employees and associates of the newspaper they begin to realize that there can be only one explanation. Eva is back from beyond the grave. And now she is getting angry... Eva – A Ghost Story is a well-told tale, even if it does tread through largely familiar territory and sags a little in the middle. The author also has a slightly annoying tendency to repeat himself on occasion — not just with the information he imparts, but also by using the same phrases time and time again. You get the impression he is more accustomed to writing for B2B publications or something similar and is just cutting his teeth in the fiction game. On the plus side, the story is told in such a way as to be at turns shocking, heart-wrenching, atmospheric and, in places, downright scary. There is definite potential here. By C.M. Saunders 34
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www.morpheustales.com Shaun Jeffrey Interview What inspired you to start writing? I guess I just always enjoyed making stuff up. If reading is a form of escapism, like a cerebral film show, writing is being the director. It’s making dreams a sort of reality, at least in the imagination. Through writing I can do or be whatever or whoever I want. I find it very liberating, at least more so than running naked down the high street because the last time I did that I was arrested. How did you go about first getting your work published? I tried blackmailing editors with incriminating photographs. Then when that didn’t work I submitted my short stories to the plethora of small press magazines of the time. I built up a hefty pile of rejections before receiving my first acceptance, the receipt of which caused me to jump up and down and run around the room as though someone had set fire to my backside.
wanted to get the book back out there so that if the film was ever released, people could read the book too. But now that I am releasing the books myself, I like the control I have over every aspect of the process, from the editing to the covers. The new ‘indie’ wave has really taken off, and selfpublishing now doesn’t seem to carry the stigma that it used to. Of course, a lot of the stuff that’s released is rubbish, but that’s only to be expected when it’s so easy to release it. I personally have my stuff edited and it’s read by a number of beta readers before I release it, but of course there will be a number of people who still think it’s rubbish.
Where do you get your inspiration? Inspiration is a strange beast. I can be reading/watching/listening to something and an imaginary light bulb will go off and I think, ‘What if... ’ Sometimes inspiration will strike in the most unusual of places, and at other times I can’t think of anything to write about at all. Actually the second scenario is the most common one. So if inspiration does strike, I have to milk it for all it’s worth as I don’t know when it will strike again. Your work has been picked up by several small-press publishers, but you now seem to be going the self-publishing route with some of your books. Can you tell us why you’re going the direct route? I guess it started when the publisher of my novels The Kult and Deadfall went bankrupt. As The Kult had been filmed, I
What is your writing day like? I don’t have a typical writing day, mainly because I don’t always have the time to write. Having a full-time job that involves working shifts, a family and hobbies besides writing means that I don’t have as much time as I’d like, so I fit in writing when and 36
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www.morpheustales.com if I’m able. It helps because it’s only a hobby. I mean if I relied on it to live, well, I’d be in my grave by now through starvation or locked up for committing robbery while trying to make ends meet.
tell us your reason for reusing the characters and a bit about the series? The Prosper Snow series is currently comprised of The Kult and Killers, which are my personal favourites of my work. I guess this is because the characters have so much of me in them that I feel that I know them like friends, or at least like I know myself. The second book came about because I had one of those rare moments of inspiration concerning a story about human experimentation, and I knew I wanted to write something with a police officer in it, so in a eureka moment I thought, well, I already have a fully formed character in Prosper Snow. The hardest part was writing it without giving too much away about what had happened in the first book, while supplying enough to show that Prosper isn’t exactly without sin — I mean, he helped kill someone!
Do you have any rituals or routines when you write? I like to sacrifice a couple of chickens before I write, and if it’s something really big and complex, like a novel, a couple of virgins too. Seriously though, no, as the reply above hints, I’m lucky to find the time to write, never mind complicating it with rituals. I’m writing this on my laptop, while sat on the settee with my son while he watches a Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon on the television! How do you put a book together? Do you just sit down and write or do you plan chapter by chapter? Like Guy Fawkes, I have plotted before, but I find that I prefer to make it up as I go along. I mean Guy Fawkes plotted and failed, so perhaps it’s not always the best way to work anyway. Besides, I like to be as surprised as the reader when something happens in the story. I start with the seed of an idea and then see what grows. Hopefully it won’t be weeds.
If you could go back in time to when you started writing and give yourself one piece of advice what would it be? Don’t do it. Do you read reviews of your work? How do you deal with criticism? I used to read them, now I’m not so bothered. Reviews are important because they let prospective readers know what other people thought, but I’m not going to spend
You’re written a series of horror/detective thrillers featuring Prosper Snow. Can you 38
www.morpheustales.com my time searching them out. As for criticism, if it’s constructive, that’s great. Not everyone is going to like the same things and you can learn what works and what doesn’t from a good review. But you just have to expect to receive bad reviews too, which I’m cool with. To be honest, if something has all good reviews, I think it looks a little fake. I mean, no book’s that good, is it?
What's the best piece of feedback that you've had from your audience? For the love of God, stop writing. Do you write for a particular audience, for yourself? I write for myself. If I don’t enjoy what I write, why should anyone else? I think if I tried to write for an audience, I’d find it too restrictive.
What is your proudest moment as a writer? I guess when The Kult was optioned for film. But a number of books are optioned without ever being made, so when the option was exercised and the film was made it took it to another level. I was pleased that someone liked it enough to commit it to film. Of course now I just want to see the finished result. I don’t care if it’s the biggest turkey ever (though of course I hope it isn’t) because at the end of the day, I’ve had a film of my book made, and how many people can say that?
Do you get writer’s block? How do you cope with it? Writer’s block is just an excuse to put off writing, so I get it all the time. I call it laziness though. I don’t really cope with it other than telling myself whatever I’m working on won’t write itself, so get your arse in gear and stop procrastinating.
Are you disappointed with any of your work when you look back on it? Sure. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t think it was all crap.
You got your start in the small press, how would you say that affected your writing? I don’t know really. I guess I just got used to submitting to small press magazines that
What do you like to do when you’re not writing? When not writing, I like to spend time with my family. I do Tae Kwon Do with my son, go jogging and go to the gym, so I keep fairly busy.
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www.morpheustales.com were either ‘for the love’ or they paid a pittance or in copies, so in some ways it made me think it was all I was capable of submitting to. That comes from a lack of confidence in my own work too. I still can’t believe it when someone actually likes what I write and I secretly think my fans (hi Mum and Deb) read the wrong books by mistake and only think they’re written by me. Which do you prefer writing/reading, short stories or novels? I prefer the novel in both instances. You get more involved with the characters and the story and if it’s well written, you’re invited on a very intimate, personal journey with them. What are you working on now? I’m currently working on something different than my other stuff in that it’s more of a mainstream piece. I can’t say much about it because I feel that if I talk about a work in progress then it loses its magic. Do you have any advice for other writers? There’s a saying that goes something like, “If you want peace, prepare for war”. In the case of writing it should read, “If you want success, prepare for failure”. What makes a good story? Engaging plot, believable characters. Where can people find out more about you and your work? Crimewatch. Also there’s my website: www.shaunjeffrey.com Thank you for taking the time to interview me. Can I take the handcuffs off now?
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www.morpheustales.com Nicole Kruex Interview Growing up, were you a fan of horror movies? And if so, which ones were your favourites? Yes!! To a degree. I loved watching them but was scared to death of them at the same time. The ones I most remember are Pet Sematary, The Shining, Cat’s Eye, Gremlins, Halloween 4, and Nightmare on Elm Street. My mother was a huge Stephen King fan so I saw quite a few of his movie adaptations. When did you know you wanted to be an actress (i.e., work in the industry)? I’ve always been a “centre of attention” extrovert type. I wrote and directed my own basement plays when I was little. As I grew up I did quite a bit of stage work, dance, and that eventually led into modelling commercials and film jobs! It seems you’ve held every position on a movie set that there is to hold. With all of your expertise, which do you find to be the most rewarding? I love producing and acting the most. It’s amazing to be a part of all the chaos of putting together a project. I equally love being able to sit back and breathe in a character... when I have to do both though? One of the two suffers and it definitely upsets me.
Dark when I can and every so often swing through podcasts I’m asked to join. It’s a blast to do! What’s your favourite movie (already filmed) that you’ve been in? Why? Right now that would be Next Door and Discursion. Next Door was a blast to shoot, the cast/crew was incredible, and I was flown to NH! Discursion equals that because it’s a completely different film and the first full feature we’ve produced. It was a labor of love to some degree.
Do you consider yourself to be an actress first above any of your other job titles or would you like to be remembered as something other? Yes, I produce mainly because we have to eat and acting in Minnesota isn’t exactly a lucrative career. Acting is what I want to be remembered for and producer is something I want to be able to do well. How did your two companies, Triwar Films and Deadtime Productions come about? How many films have been released under their banners? TRIWAR Pictures is really the only serious entity of the two. Deadtime was at one point going to be the horror side of the company but after joining with Chasing Autumn Films? Deadtime became no more. We’ve released (or are releasing) four projects over the last year.
What’s your least favourite? And what problems can you cite which led to the project becoming an unenjoyable work experience or less-than-stellar end product? Well... I’ve loved all the sets I’ve been on!! Do you see yourself continuing to work in horror films or would you like to predominately do other genres? I love horror, but I also love action!! Most people are unaware that I’m an avid martial arts fan!! I love Hong Kong Kung Fu movies. I’d love to do a Death Race or a Mad Max style film. Me with guns and action equals winning!!
I first heard you on a weekly horror podcast show a couple of years ago. The guy who did most of the interviewing was less than stellar, but you were amazing! Very personable and outgoing. Are you still podcasting? On occasion, yes! I try to make it on Insanity After 41
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Moody’s anthology called H1Nx which is a tenminute piece staring Shane McCaffrey and myself as victims of a gone-wrong experiment. Keep your eyes out for it!
What do you think is the current state of horror both mainstream and independent? Saturated. To some degree I wish digital recording had never been invented because it’s created both a positive and negative flux of material. It’s helped many amazing filmmakers get seen... but it’s also become the catalyst to many films that should never be made. Though I support anyone that wants to breathe life into an idea? There are some that should remain hobbyists and they tend to hurt the serious market by upsetting investors and distribution processes. We’re practically done with the torture porn craze. We’re hopefully getting away from remakes. Any predictions on the next big thing in horror? It’s going to be the low budget indie believe it or not? The economy has steered many large studios into the low-budget bucket... they are looking for incredible returns like that of Saw, Blair Witch, or Paranormal Activity. I think we’ll start to see a trend of low-budget, slapped-together films with heavy marketing schemes. If you could be in any movie already made, what would it be? And whom would you play? A revision of Mad Max staring a female, and I would be Max!! =D What exciting projects are in store for Nicole Kruex? We are gearing up to shoot a piece for Jonathan
This magazine does a lot of interviews with horror authors and publishes a lot of horror fiction. Do you have a favourite horror author and/or book? 42
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Yeah, it’s called The Secret Life of Lazlo Count Dracula by Roderick Anscombe. It’s sort of a neat retelling of the classic Dracula story told by his son. I’ve read it dozens of times and hope to one day turn it into a movie!
And last?! Check out Discursion by Director Mitchel A. Jones, coming this Fall 2011!!
More Scream Queen Interviews are available in Scream Queens: The Final Chapter, free to read and download here:
What do you look for in choosing future roles? Something I can see myself playing honestly. I’m not the blonde-haired, large-breasted girl that falls in the woods. I can’t play stupid very well and don’t make a convincing college sorority girl.. I get offers for lots of things I have to turn down because I know I’m not right for the role. I like things that challenge me emotionally or that really push me to be something more.
http://issuu.com/morpheustales/docs/screamqueenst hefinalchapterfull Or buy the printer version here: www.lulu.com/spotlight/morpheustales
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How do you unwind after a long day on set? Call of Duty with my amazing boy... I love it.
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Where can your fans go to learn more about you? Check me out at NicoleKruex.com (formerly nikkihomicidek.ws); the new site will be up shortly!!
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Anything else you’d like to add? Thank you so much for this opportunity!! To all the aspiring actresses out there? Always stand your ground, be the very best you can be, remain humble, and be good to your crew. To the people I’m honoured to have as friends and fans? I sincerely appreciate you and all you’ve done to support me!
Morpheus Tales #17 Review Supplement, July 2012. © COPYRIGHT July 2012 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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