Tag: Book Review

Cannibal Nuns from Outer Space by Duncan P Bradshaw – Book Review

Duncan P. Bradshaw’s Cannibal Nuns from Outer Space is exactly what the title suggests and so much more. Yes, it’s a pastiche of both the demonic possession and nunsploitation genres, but it’s also unlike anything you’ve ever found in book form in the past.

As he did with the charmingly cheeky killer vacuum novella Mr. Sucky, Bradshaw takes his love of speculative fiction and fringe cinema to a hitherto unexplored place. ‘Cannibal Nuns’ opens like you’re watching a DVD, replete with a piracy warning, featuring a fistful of faux “trailers” for other stories whose general plots are almost as mental as the plot of the novel itself.

It’s hard to discuss this book without giving up the ghost and I’ve never been one to spoil endearingly cheap thrills for the freaks who read our rag. So, with that in mind, I’ll summarize the experience of digesting this jubilant jaunt through myriad hells thusly: The web-fingered Bolo-Bolo is drawn so brilliantly and abominably that it emerges as a creature even more hideous to imagine than the nuns with “chest-mouths.”

To put it another way, Duncan P. Bradshaw is a writer afflicted with a particularly acute illness of the mind and we’re all the richer for it. Catch the infection here and develop a bad habit here.

by Silent Motorist Media

Zebra Summer—Item #5: Rip Tide by Donald D. Cheatham

Book Review by Zakary McGaha

In Zebra Summer, Zakary McGaha (author of Locker Arms and Soothing the Savage Swamp Beast) chronicles a very specific portion of his summer reading schedule: horror novels published by Zebra Books.

To my knowledge, Rip Tide is the only shark attack book published by Zebra. It’s a blatant rip-off of Jaws, which doesn’t bother me considering there wouldn’t be a shark attack sub-genre if everyone was uptight about that sort of thing, but it’s funny when you consider the details: the tiger shark in Rip Tide is said to be 26 feet long…a whole inch longer than the Great White in Jaws (the movie version) is said to be.

A labrador retriever dies and the main character is a cop at the beach who also happens to be attempting to escape the stress that comes with being a city cop. There are probably some other not-so-subtle things I missed, but the “inspiration” Jaws had on this book is apparent. Even the overall book design is similar, from the cover to the plain-white back and spine. Oh, and this one also doesn’t sport the “Horror” distinction on the spine, instead opting for “Fiction.” I’m guessing Zebra wanted this to be their big, summer blockbuster.

To say that Rip Tide is a mess would be the understatement of the year. There are so many odd details I picked up while reading this book that I found myself wondering if it was all intentional. My final summation is: no, it wasn’t. Judging from the acknowledgements and stuff, it seems as if this was Cheatham’s first novel, so, yeah…he probably didn’t know what he was doing.

This review is probably going to be longer than the other ones, but that’s because there’s so much shit to cover. Also, there WILL be spoilers, so if you were lucky enough to find this book for below $80 (I snagged mine before it was rare) and are planning on reading it, go ahead and do so. Okay, now on to the strangeness…

First off, this is the only book I’ve ever read in which there is a recurring fixation/obsession with Holiday Inn. Cheatham even THANKS them for putting up with him or something in his acknowledgements section, which leads one to assume that he wrote Rip Tide in one, but who knows. I believe this fixation/obsession started long before he wrote this novel.

Characters are always meeting up at the Holiday Inn, having drinks at the Holiday Inn, and at one point near the end of the novel—when a massive hurricane has destroyed big sections of Florida—the Holiday Inn is described as standing tall while there are several other hotels that didn’t make it!

In addition to the Holiday Inn fixation, this book forgets that it’s a shark book near the end. Recall the hurricane I just mentioned. Okay, so after the shark has already eaten a lot of people and the local authorities have commissioned an all-out shark hunt—like in Jaws—this hurricane that Cheatham has been hyping up for a bit finally hits, and from then on the hurricane is the focus of the novel. Sure, the shark pops up time and again in the hurricane, but not as much as you’d think.

Normally, I wouldn’t mind this. I don’t like stories that simply go through the motions; I like new things being added. But, in this case, it’s odd because the novel just drops what’s been its main focus throughout its entirety. The shark goes from being front and center to being in the background in a split second. HOWEVER, it’s during the hurricane part of the book that Cheatham shows he can actually write. It’s full of gory imagery, fast-paced writing, and actual suspense. Too bad it took him an entire novel’s length to figure out how to do that.

The bulk of the book, before the hurricane shit happens, is rather dull and odd. As mentioned above, Holiday Inn is popping up nonstop, plus there’s tons of cheesiness that comes off awkward as opposed to 80s-ish.

Our main character’s name is Michael Stark…which pisses me off for some reason. And he’s a Vietnam vet/small-town cop who has flashbacks of, not Vietnam, but St. Louis.

Yes.

St. Louis.

Oh, every now and then he’ll say something like, “I’ve seen worse than this back in ‘Nam,” in regards to the shark attacks (I’m not going to find the actual passage because I actually have a life…as in I have other books to read), but most of the time St. Louis is on his mind.
The St. Louis thing also made him famous.

Basically, one of his fellow soldiers went crazy after the war and started gunning people down. Stark, being a cop, made it his personal mission to track the crazy sumbitch down and put him out of his misery. Traumatized afterward, he decided to move to Florida where things are quieter…except for the SHARKS! Well, scratch that…except for the hurricanes.

The weirdest part about the St. Louis incident is that its flashback reads as if it were an abandoned novel. There’s no way to know, for sure, but it’s not written in brief snippets. No, this St. Louis thing derails the story for a second, and all of a sudden you’re following a slightly younger Michael Stark as he figures out what’s up with this crazy mass-shooter. To say that it’s cheesy would be redundant, because the whole novel’s cheesy.

As a main character, Michael Stark is annoying. He’s constantly saying more un-PC things than your drunk granddad, and he’s described as being so mature that ladies can’t get enough of him. One thing that happens several times, thus competing with the Holiday Inn motif, is that Stark will meet a female peer (be it a fellow cop or coroner who works with the cops) and be surprised that she’s a female, then said woman will flirtatiously put him in his place concerning his old-fashioned ways, and then she won’t be able to stop flirting with him. Literally every woman in this Florida tourist trap can’t get enough of Stark, despite the fact that several of them, if I remember correctly, lament about how he’s old enough to be their dad.

The main problem with Michael Stark is that he’s the male counterpart of a Mary Sue. He’s too perfect…except for the end when he gets scared by the hurricane, then gets drunk, then pisses his pants.

The constant stream of flirtation Rip Tide provides is enough to keep you entertained, because it’s all so bad. I’m not going to paraphrase what was written in one of the sex scenes, but damn: it’s so corny, it comes on the cob! (yeah, that was bad; I know)

There’s also a section in which the three main cops of the small town’s PD, Stark included, go “undercover” to investigate a rape at a nude beach, and by “undercover,” I mean they go naked. It contains some of the cheesiest writing I’ve ever witnessed. Here’s an example, taken from one of the rare instances in which the main characters come into contact with the shark.

Page 228: “Screams started down the beach like an echo in a canyon. They began at the north end of the beach and traveled faintly down toward the hotels. Liza started giving CPR—cardiopulmonary resuscitation—to a man in his fifties who had a heart attack.”

That’s a perfect example of how AWFUL Cheatham’s writing is. He doesn’t know when to get to the point of what he’s wanting to say, nor does he have the skill to make his endless fluff sound good. Like, who was he kidding? Did he really think he should include “cardiopulmonary resuscitation” in the text? CPR would’ve sufficed. Also, it’s pretty anticlimactic to have time be spent on a random old dude who wasn’t even in the water at the time of the shark attack when there’s plenty of mayhem going on in the water.

Let me reiterate the main points and conclude this beast: the majority of Rip Tide is spent NOT on cool stuff but on Michael Stark getting acquainted with his new town. And by that, I mean meeting peers at hotels—yes, mostly the Holiday Inn—and telling them he’ll buy them a drink later.

If I had a dollar for every time someone said, “Let me by you a drink,” or, “I’ll take you up on that drink later,” I’d be able to buy at least a better novel in hardback. Time is also spent, as mentioned, on Stark being flirted with by damn near every female character.

Time is ALSO spent on Stark spying on nudists from his condo’s balcony with the assistance of a telescope (SIDE NOTE: at one point, a nudist woman is apparently psychically aware of Stark watching her—I know, it doesn’t make sense—so she starts pleasuring herself, in public, for his benefit). Oh yeah, and there’s a hurricane that destroys everything, but SPOILER: Stark, and the largely forgotten shark, both survive.

I actually give this novel 3/5…which surprises me more than anyone…because I was able to stay into it. I didn’t dread finishing it like I do some of the horrible shit Zebra put out. Cheatham, while being a fucking awful writer, was at least able to entertain me for a couple hours.

What the hell my ratings mean: 1 star = I didn’t enjoy it, and I’m fairly certain I can objectively say the book sucks ass. 2 stars = I didn’t enjoy it at all, but I can’t in good conscience say it was an objectively bad book (in other words, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else loved it). 3 stars = a book I enjoyed quite a bit, but it had several flaws that made me unable to honestly say it was a great book. 4 stars = a great book without any serious flaws. 5 stars = made my soul feel tingly and changed my worldview (usually reserved for classics like Siddhartha and The Magic Mountain).

by Silent Motorist Media

Zebra Summer Item #4: Bloody Valentine by Stephen George

Book Review by Zakary McGaha

In Zebra Summer, Zakary McGaha (author of Locker Arms and Soothing the Savage Swamp Beast), chronicles a very specific portion of his summer reading-schedule: horror novels published by Zebra Books.

Whew…I took a little break from reading Zebra books. I’m glad I did. I read some awesome things like Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, The Pumpkin House by Chad Brown and The Manse by Lisa Cantrell, amongst others. Life is too short to just read bad books because you’re writing a series on a blog site for fun.

However, I ended up feeling like the time was right to get back to my old commitment, and a friend of mine had let me borrow some books, several of which were Zebra novels, so I decided to go for it.

Boy, did I regret it.

Stephen George is, by all accounts (even mine), a fine writer. His Zebra novel, Bloody Valentine, has so many good ingredients, but, for whatever reason, **cough cough Zebra overlords cough cough** wound up less than readable.

The novel’s main flaw is that it presents itself as a sort of bad ass whodunnit/slasher with supernatural undertones, but it’s apparent from very early on EXACTLY who did it! Now, to be fair, not every little detail about the supernatural slasher is known, but yes, the identity of the killer is clear.

To explain this flaw, I’ll need to explain the plot. Basically, a group of college kids participated in an experiment spearheaded by the FBI back when the profiling of serial killers was in its infancy. The experiment involved creating a false murderer from scratch in order to explain his motives and, thus, understand real serial killers. Soon afterward, real people start dying, and all of the deaths fit the fictional killer’s modus operandi.

It is then revealed that your first guess is actually the right one: yes, the college kids somehow willed this killer into being, and now he’s on the loose. Granted, there is a slight twist in this near the end, but this basic premise is the right one. In fact, early on the killer is shown in “ghost” form or something, so there’s no guessing…

…which leads one to wonder why every character is trying to figure out who the killer is throughout the whole novel. Like, one minute everyone’s accepting the reality of the situation, then there’s denial, then there’s a supernatural occurrence, then “Oh, no! We were just imagining things,” then there’s another supernatural occurrence, and so on and so forth.

Throughout the bulk of the novel, the characters are running around in circles while in the dark whilst ignoring the glowing answer icon that’s screaming, “I’m here! I’m here!” Even when they finish second guessing themselves and accept that they’re dealing with something science can’t explain, which happens pretty late in the novel, they don’t do anything different. They run around in the same circles.

This novel went from awesome to flat-out boring QUICK. And the boringness stretched itself out til the very end.

The writing was awesome, and the characters themselves were interesting and well-drawn, but the boredom factor got in the way of everything. Literally everything the characters did was pointless, repetitive, and just flat-out stupid. At the very end, the main character actually does something useful, which leads one to wonder: why did Stephen George have all the characters do nothing important throughout the majority of the novel?

Let’s elaborate on this aspect: think of Bloody Valentine’s plot as a long hallway. At the very end of said hallway is the right door, which represents the obvious outcome (meaning that it has a bulls eye painted on it), but before said door there are countless other doors that lead to nowhere (and that much is posted on each door like an eviction notice). Well, instead of going to the door with the bulls eye, Stephen George opens every door along the way and fucks around for…oh, about the length of a 413-page novel, before finally getting to the right one.

I normally don’t like being harsh on books, and I’m sure Stephen George is a fine writer; his atmosphere, character development and all-around writing style are actually ABOVE typical Zebra standards, in my opinion…but the pointless fluff that filled the bulk of this 413-page novel simply made it way less than enjoyable.

2/5 stars.

What the hell my ratings mean: 1 star = I didn’t enjoy it, and I’m fairly certain I can objectively say the book sucks ass. 2 stars = I didn’t enjoy it at all, but I can’t , in good conscience, say it was an objectively bad book (in other words, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else loved it). 3 stars = a book I enjoyed quite a bit, but it had several flaws that made me unable to honestly say it was a great book. 4 stars = a great book without any serious flaws. 5 stars = made my soul feel tingly and changed my worldview (usually reserved for classics like Siddhartha and The Magic Mountain).

by Silent Motorist Media

S. L. Edwards’ Whiskey and Other Unusual Ghosts: A Review by Justin A. Burnett

There is no true end to becoming. The future winks in the distance like a promise that the past whispered from the shadows. Bridging these ends is the present, an epiphenomenon resulting from the narrativization lent by consciousness to the messy business of being. Although depression might be characterized as the sense of letting the narrative strand go–the sudden dissolution of the past and future elevates the present horribly into naked meaninglessness–the narrative can’t truly disappear. The human enterprise is always teleological, and as such the story must go on. Undoubtedly, the strand may twist: turgid personal histories tug painfully against futures, limiting their range of potentiality; unhappy childhoods lubricate the atmosphere for fierce storms in later life; acts of extreme violence inject the circular causality of trauma into entire cultures, but the narrative never vanishes. More than anything, Whiskey and Other Unusual Ghosts is an account of narratives that feel broken but live on despite themselves.

Another way do articulate this might be to compare S. L. Edwards’ debut collection to The Shining. There’s a certain lack of artifice that inhabits Whiskey, a willingness to forgo the trappings and rhetorical nuances of the kind of writing that thinks of itself as “literary” in favor of a steady gaze towards life at its most repulsive. Stephen King famously opposed Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, which, in my opinion, appeared to obscure Jack Torrence’s struggle against alcohol under a distorted lens that prioritized mystification over character motivation. Kubrick’s tendency towards obscurity is actually a groping towards something similar to what Frederic Jameson calls “formal contradiction” in his discussion of Mahler, that unanswerable question that “secures the work’s position in history” (loc 1325). Kubrick, in other words, aspires to reach beyond King’s novel into the realm of high art. While much has been said online about King’s reaction to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, one observation stands out as particularly relevant to Edwards’ work. While I can no longer remember or locate the source, the formulation went something like this: “while Kubrick approaches The Shining as an artist, King’s first concern is always man.”

In the context of this opposition, readers can expect much more of King than Kubrick in Edwards. That isn’t to say that Edwards wields the stripped stylistics of Brian Evenson or Cormac McCarthy, but that Edwards deploys every narrative device in utter deference to the human concern he wishes to explore. “I’ve Been Here a Very Long Time” isn’t about a monster in the closet; it’s about abuse and the hideous scar it leaves on a life. It’s about dreaming into existence a different life, that omnipotence childhood pretends to in its most painful moments; it’s about disappointment and reluctant acceptance, things that many of us have somehow lived through. It’s never truly about Edwards’ “simple premise” to which he admits in the author’s note following the story: “the monster in the closet loves you” (30). We can dismiss that with a chuckle, since the “monster” never seduced us–it slithered into the light to perform its mechanical duty and vanished, moving the plot to the next plateau of despair. The horror here is the impotence of the child amidst the violence of its parents. Edwards concern is always with the repulsively human rather than the supernatural.

There’s something deeply admirable in Edwards empathetic concerns, despite the fact that art can never be life (it arises from life, certainly, and nuances our life perspectives without a doubt–it is never, however, being in and of itself, and shouldn’t aspire to be). Nevertheless, the strongly human locus has led to brief moments of narrative weakness. The lower functions that devices of “horror” play throughout Whiskey do, at times, come with a price–the darkly supernatural Golden King in “Golden Girl” supports a depiction of the rather pedestrian anxiety of physical attraction. Here, without the backdrop of a historical or strongly-felt personal trauma, the narrative pressure is intensely focused on the supernatural aspect. Every writer has an Achilles’ Heel, and, in this collection, the supernatural isn’t Edwards’ strong suit. “Movie Magic” is a unique point in Whiskey that, lacking a deeply-felt human struggle, relies entirely on truly effective horror and spends a lot of time covering very little ground. What’s missing in these stories is what could be termed  “The Call of the Void.”

I would be tempted to advocate the use of l’appel du vide to represent the central attraction of weird fiction if the term weren’t associated now (rather indelicately) with mere “suicidal impulse.” I associate it with the strange magic of immense spaces, the soft conjurings that truly immense weirdness makes when we stumble across it. In this sense, weird fiction is characterized by the reader’s seduction by the otherworld, or, as in Ann and Jeff Vandameer state it in their introduction to The Weird, “the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane” (loc 211). Although this seduction does surface in Whiskey–slowly in “Cabras,” and fiercely in the beautiful “We Will Take Half,” a story that still fascinates me–readers shouldn’t go into Whiskey expecting pure weird fiction.

What readers would do better to expect is a solid debut that owes more to the author’s reading of humane authors like Tolstoy rather than the cold but brilliant Ligotti. While I’ve noted the places where Edwards’ focus extracts a fee, we should by no means consider his focus a weakness. Writing–particularly in the short story form–is always a matter of sacrifice, and often Edwards does so to strike a magnificent balance that forces the otherworldly to enhance the gritty concerns of life. I’ve already mentioned “Cabras” and “We Will Take Half,” two effective stories about war; “Volver Al Monte,” “When the Trees Sing,” and “The Case of Yuri Zaystev” neatly complete this category, and it should be noted that Edwards deeply empathetic perspective makes him admirably suited to engage in themes of universal import.

It takes a certain boldness in a writer to put war to paper; it’s a theme much larger than God, and that Edwards can successfully evoke it without cheapening it is an event worth celebration. In “When the Trees Sing,” a man comes back from Vietnam to infect a loving family with the destruction the war wrought on him. When supernatural voices call him sweetly to the void (l’appel du vide again, literally this time), one can still tie the narrative strand back to the primal trauma a continent away. Nothing is subtracted from the human horror in the manufacturing of the otherworldly; in fact, it heightens the weirdness of the war itself, locating both on a plane beyond the immediate, where they rightfully belong. Despite the terrors the soldier has committed, we feel his loss is fated by the blind mechanisms of violence rather than deserved.

The “stories of war” uniformly follow suit, combining the blind force of the supernatural almost allegorically with the senseless cruelty of war. The others are (with only a few exceptions), “stories of growing up.” Although war and maturation seem thematically distinct, Edwards’ strength is his ability to underscore the universal aspects of both. In lieu of the division between “war” and “maturation,” we could posit the “communal” and “individual”–nothing would be lost, and we could still note with astonishment that Edwards is at home in either affective realm.

In “Whiskey and Memory,” a father towers ferociously over a young man’s life. The young man, true to trauma’s circularity, learns to replicate the transgressions for future generations, creating a dark stain that descends through time with the persistence of an inheritance. A cursed bottle of whiskey is the supernatural mechanism here that revives the father in all his terrible majesty, allowing him to loom in the flesh as the bloody idol that suffering and memory built to withstand like a sphinx the ages. The father is like war in Whiskey; both swell monstrously with the individuals they swallow; both are beyond hope, and carry with them the chiming doom of the inevitable.

Whiskey and Other Unusual Ghosts admirably aspires to be one of those immortal debut collections of dark fiction, such as Michael Wehunt’s Greener Pastures and Nadia Bulkin’s She Said Destroy. Only time can tell if Edwards succeeds in this. What can be said is that Edwards’ efforts are well worth experiencing, so long as we appreciate the deeply empathetic soul of this collection. Given the current rift in political and socioeconomic perspectives, something should be said about fiction’s empathetic responsibility; no better case could be made for this collection than the stories themselves. Do not plan for escape. Prepare, instead, to engage.

–Justin A. Burnett

by Silent Motorist Media

Impossible James by Danger Slater – Book Review

Impossible James

By Danger Slater

Fungasm Press, 2019

Reviewed by Gordon B. White

Impossible James, Danger Slater’s latest novel, is a book about the tensions of finding meaning in an absurd world, about tensions that rupture into paradoxes. It’s about growing larger, but also becoming smaller. It’s about fighting a system, but surrendering to it. It’s about creating a legacy and destroying history in the process. It’s also funny, gross, bizarre, and even a little touching. It’s a trip.

What is Impossible James about? The plot is simplicity itself: James Watson (soon to be James Watson, “Sr.”) is diagnosed with a malignant “black spot” in his brain that will kill him … in fifty years or so. Driven to despair, he loses his job at the multinational conglomerate Motherlove, burns his belongings, and gets a screwdriver through the brain which both pins the black spot in place and sparks his creativity such that he can clone himself through a very disgusting process and, eventually, cure death.

As James Sr. grows less and less human, his first clone, James Watson Jr., narrates the story from the end of the world, alternating between his father’s history and the imminent collapse of the universe beneath a plague known as the Gray Tide. Got it? Good.

While the above description should make it clear this is a fine and pulpy story, Slater has a way of writing that belies the danger of his underlying ideas. The plot careens forward and the writing is almost always conversational and, sometimes, willing to derail its own narrative and draw attention to the mechanics of the novelistic structure. The cumulative effect is a story told by a friend, holding on to your arm and shaking you at the good parts. To focus on just the presentation, though, hides the real heart of Impossible James.

Impossible James bears the subtitle “A book about death,” and this is no joke. At every moment, the specter of futility and the void hangs over the proceedings. It has thematic overlays of capitalism, climate catastrophe, existential dread and more. None of them fit completely, but they do so in a way that evokes the unease that all of them do. It’s about setting up Impossible Goals and Impossible Defenses, but being unable to escape the Impossible End. It’s about giving oneself to the world, but also the sheer egotism that doing so takes.

It’s a very strange book about self-centered sacrifice and catastrophes, and the human moments in the face of both, which are by turns poignant and useless. It’s a book about frustration and how as one’s goals explode, one becomes smaller and smaller. It’s about the selfishness of creating a life filled with doubt, but also the catastrophe of abandoning that doubt — and how that doubt which may be the only thing keeping us in check, or at least placated.

Because it’s that sense of doubt — that question of “What’s it all for?” — that might be keeping us from turning into unrestrained sociopaths. In fact, by abandoning that doubt, James Sr. becomes both a society and a pathology in himself. What’s that mean? Well, you’ll have to read it to see.

But all of this is the paradox of Impossible James: a way to balance these warring impulses of the insignificant and the psychotically grand; the crippling doubt against the destructive untethering. And in the end … well, James Watson Jr. has to make a decision. It’s a decision we all have to make, although it isn’t easy to make and even harder to tell if the decision is the one that’s “right.”

With Impossible James, Danger Slater continues slipping his readers existential poison pills beneath a shiny, gleefully gruesome candy coating. By turns humorous, horrifying, and even heartbreaking, Impossible James struggles to make sense of a modern world collapsing under its own bloat and the human but absurd drive to create — be it meaning, purpose, art — in the face of that catastrophe. Is it impossible? No, but it’s Impossible James.

by Silent Motorist Media