Author Archive
Poppy Z Brite photo by J.K. Potter; Creative Commons license
As a writer Poppy Z Brite took the lost and the depraved, the vicious, the misguided, the outsider, the deviant and the freak by the hand, she lead some home, some to the sadistic salvation they would discover in the extreme ecstasy and pain to be had from “violating the sanctity of a dead boys ass”, abandoned baby vampires into violent pansexualized father/son fuckfests and even others towards the relative safety found in the “transubstantiation of culinary delights” and I loved every fucking word.
As a 16 year old boy, growing up gay in a small backwater her novels became a beacon of hope – or despair, depending on whatever disposition you favoured – breaking through the psychotic monotony of my teenage years – each of her books were connected by one fundamental thread – her characters where for the most part lithe young boys who wanted to be girls, avenging resurrected photographers, dirt poor chartreuse soaked teenagers, gentle mystics, grunge musicians, vampires and necrophiliac cannibals in love. She effortlessly, exquisitely took the mantle of the masculine – Brite identifies as a non-operative transsexual – and offered a uniquely feminine fetishism of the gay male - beautiful descriptions of hard-core gay sex, lurid descriptions of violence and prose as elegant as anything Shirley Jackson or Oliver Onions ever put on paper overlapped seamlessly.
Her wordplay was pictorial in its depravity, think B-movies or quasi-horror cum skin flicks with an intellectual bent and you’re not even halfway there. Her oeuvre connotates the absurd, the sexual, the glorious Grand Guignol in a bracingly intelligent, sometimes serious and sometimes even light-hearted fashion. She had an ear for macabre whipsmart dialogue, extraordinarily vivid characters; her fiction had me delight in the weirdness and inherent brutality of existence beneath the dark miasma that hung over most of her characters’ lives. What can I say, I’m a sadist. She worked me like an addiction I never wanted to break. Her frames of reference incorporated everything from The Church of The Subgenius to the cyber-punk/avant Goth subcultures which populated the seamy seedy French Quarter in New Orleans, Trent Reznor, AIDS terrorism, filicide and filleting boys.
Because this is Women in Horror Recognition month I’ve decided that the focal point of this piece is going to be on Brite’s earlier body of work – in her later novels Brite’s moved away from – though not completely out of – the horror genre: The Value of X, Liquor, and D.U.C.K are more akin to the writing of Faulkner, Flannery O’ Connor and Harry Crews; I’ve also chosen to omit her commercial projects (the unauthorized Courtney Love biography) and her “franchise fiction” (The Lazarus Heart – which is a tie-in of The Crow).
In her debut novel Lost Souls (Dell bought it in 1991 and a few months later she was signed to a six-figure three-book contract) I was introduced to a triumvirate of psychotic vampires called Zillah, Molochai and Twig – creatures I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck, or flee from. After subjecting a young woman to a night of alcohol-fuelled crazed lust – they disappear. An unfortunate side-effect of humans mating with vampires is that said young woman won’t survive the pregnancy, therefore forcing another of their kind to leave the orphaned vampire baby on a doorstep in grim suburbia; the baby, who grows up to become a reclusive teenager and goes by the name of Nothing, rejects the dull normies and the stifling small-town he was forced to grow up in and leaves it all behind in search of his true heritage. The Lost Souls of the title are the heartbroken musician Steve and the fey psychic Ghost, residents of Brite’s fictitious Missing Mile (apparently inspired by Athens in Georgia, where Brite resided before making New Orleans her permanent home). Eventually Nothing hooks up with his real family and embarks on an incestuous affair with Zillah – the leader of the pack and his own father. At first Nothing is easily seduced by the lure of these creatures’ hyperreality. Nothing finds his own way into the damnation – that is the easy part - however, he soon realises that after witnessing some of his new family’s more unsavoury antics he might need to find a way back to the light. The morally conflicted little vamp finds allies when he finally encounters Steve and Ghost, but the pack isn’t prepared to give up one of their own without a ferocious fight.
Lost Souls was listed by Fangoria as one of the best vampire novels ever written and Brite was crowned as the reigning Queen of the Macabre – dethroning even Anne Rice. The contract with Dell left Brite free to write full-time – up until this, she had been making ends meet as a stripper, artist’s model, mouse-caretaker (she cleaned up after them at a cancer research lab) and short order cook.
It took only another nine months for Brite to produce her second baby, Drawing Blood. The setting may have been the same (being almost exclusively based in Missing Mile) but although this novel had supernatural overtones, it was a very different book in tone and subject-matter than her previous one. In the opening chapters a father brutally kills every member of his family, sparing only his young son Trevor. Years later - much like his predecessor Nothing - Trevor returns to the place of his birth, now a stoic young illustrator, and the house where his family perished. In New Orleans the cyber-hacking, slutty Edward Scissorhands lookalike Zach needs to get out of dodge post-haste when a shadowy government agency begin tailing him. He is aided and abetted by the sultry exotic dancer Eddy Chung (perhaps the only female I remember as a mainstay throughout the novel, though in Brite’s earlier work, gender, pretty much like everything else was debateable). Trevor returns to his home and meeting Zach offers him sanctuary. The boys fall in love but soon the malevolent force that runs through the house starts to assert itself. The ultimate solution for Trevor is to find his way through and out of a mysterious liminal dimension known as Birdland. Brite’s conjuration of Birdland took my breath away – her allusions to the insane architecture of such a place can be traced as far back as the now-defunct 1920’s fantasy/horror publication Weird Tales which had lurid, garish covers of archetypal monsters and other assorted ghouls. One sequence in a cinema had me leaving the lamp burning for three whole nights – it was as if Todd Bronwyn had cast the characters that lived there.
Drawing Blood was perhaps the most gentle and tame of her Gothic Line. It was around the same time that Brite had her first short story collection Swamp Foetus (or Wormwood in the UK) published and saw her cover similar if no less unsettling terrain and even had cameo appearances from some of the characters of her earlier novels.
This brings me to Brite’s most controversial novel to date Exquisite Corpse. A novel which took me to the shocking, acid-skin-stripping, viscera full frontiers of psychosexual obsession and corpse-revelry and I fell in love. A tour-de-force with a taunting, teasing, thrilling and tortuous narrative trajectory that undoubtedly had maniacs salivating on the frontlines of the lunatic fringe. So extreme in content was this that her publisher Dell refused to publish it – her UK publishers also declined. Eventually it was picked up by Simon and Schuster in the US and Orion in the UK. This was so much more though than just another “extreme” novel; even with Lost Souls and Drawing Blood Brite took incredible risks and happily gave the V to any of her detractors. She wrote a novel that dragged you into the darkest realms of humanity – but her characters weren’t “monsters.” Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote in the afterword of Self-Made Man:
“At the root of all the anxiety and alarm seems to be Poppy’s decision to portray the novel’s two cannibalistic serial killers as human beings instead of reducing them to one-dimensional monsters who could then easily be dismissed by readers as Not One of Us. That Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne are shown as men with passions and fears, strengths and weaknesses, that they are humanized rather than demonized, putting the reader at risk of gaining some insight into appetites so alien to their own, and so taboo to their society. And, I suspect, a fear that even the most disgusted reader may find a spark of empathy.”
This novel wiped the floor with the Brett Easton Ellis pussy-hating, chainsaw cub-scout Patrick Bateman. Delving deep into the psyche of the most damaged “monsters” and indeed, as Kiernan pointed out, giving us an insight into another world. Brite was a braver writer than another so-called-subversive enfant terrible, A.M Holmes, who took an intellectual and infuriatingly moral stance in her exploration of paedophilia in The End of Alice. The tabloid detachment of Holmes’ style sickened me while the intimacy of Brite’s full-blown love affair with the “monsters” or the “freaks” offered me a better understanding of the depth of things – however depraved and vile those acts may be I never felt the urge to scald my skin after reading. She led me to other subversive writers like Dennis Cooper (Frisk) Matthew Stokoe (High Life) Laura Albert (the writer formerly known as JT Leroy) and the divine former pro dominatrix Christa Faust (who collaborated with Brite on Triads and is the author of Money Shot) and many other writers who weren’t afraid to grab life by the dick and suck it (or in Andrew Compton’s case, bite it off).
With Exquisite Corpse she really raised the stakes - this was before Eli Roth could shave the hairs on his balls or Takashi Miike and The French New Wave got behind a camera. Before the gang-rape and violent retribution of Virgenie Despentes’ Baise Moi or the small-press deciding Charles Manson is worth publishing. Not that I’m diminishing any of these people and their endeavours, I’m just pointing out that Poppy Z. Brite was writing material at a time – the early nineties – that you probably wouldn’t get away with doing today. This is why I felt honoured when Joseph D’Lacey (who runs this site) asked me to write a piece on one of my favourite writers; his own novel Meat is one seriously fucked up, intelligent, though like Exquisite Corpse, a significant piece of work with staying power and violence and grace. And something which actually tells us, rather than dictates something very real about humanity – even if we might not yet know what that is.
I’m also going to mention a few more female writers you might want to look up which are: Caitlan R Kiernan, Laura Hird, Joyce Carol Oates, Helen Zahavi, Darcey Steinke, Val McDiermud, Joolz Denby, Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, Cathi Unsworth, Rhodi Hawk, Gabrielle Faust, Christa Faust, Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, Lydia Lunch, and Alexandra Sokoloff.
And if you fancy finding out more about Women in Horror Recognition Month, you can always visit these places:
February 26th, 2010
There’s something afoot this side of Christmas: dark skies over real-world book retailing, and a black vein of change for UK genre magazines.
Maybe this change can be referred to as evolution, or as some might say, a devolution. But would anyone go so far as to think of the developing situation as an opportunity?
The future of the Borders book chain is looking less than rosy. This affects me on both a professional and a personal level. I for one will miss that particular quirky retail experience. There was always the possibility of finding something new and interesting on the genre shelves, and the magazine section, well, I’d regularly hotfoot it down to pick up the latest issues of HorrorHound, Fangoria, The Darkside, Rue Morgue and Death Ray, have a flick through Interzone (as I’m a horror boy and subscribe to Black Static), and generally nose about the imported titles until I sniffed out something new. That small high street pleasure is denied to me now, (and I’m sure there are others out there like me).
Will Waterstones start stocking imported magazines? I think not. Although, in some stores that I’ve visited, (Exeter and Kingston), there are encouraging stocks of imported genre books.
How will we obtain copies of Canada’s excellent Rue Morgue now? There’s the subscription option, which is actually great value, but the delivery has always been plagued by delays in my experience, with some titles arriving three months late. Maybe that has changed now. I hope so as I need my RM fix on a monthly basis.
HorrorHound is another favourite, a fanboygeek collector’s magazine of all things horror merchandise, plus some great articles on the 80s video invasion, classic films, and the like - a thoroughly modern magazine with a nostalgic editorial bent. No delivery issues here at all as far as I remember.
I stopped subscribing to these magazines a year or so ago - not because I had lost faith in them, far from it - but because I wanted to pop into a shop to buy them, (despite the high import prices). I enjoy that experience and Borders could pretty much guarantee they’d be there, all in one place.
There are other options for us paper-collecting genre geeks, at least in London. Forbidden Planet stocks all these titles, but not consistently as far as I can tell, and you can’t purchase magazines on their website. The Cinema Store stocks these titles and loads of others too. Outside London? Fab Press’ website stocks issues of Rue Morgue, but again it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pick up the latest RM there, as they have to wait to receive them, just like the rest of us. Although looking at their website today, they’re up to date with the November 2009 issue.
I think it might be time to return to the subscription option. But, will there be any (UK) magazines left for us to subscribe to?
Shivers died a year or so ago, and the inevitable demise of Borders has coincided with what are most likely to be the final death-throes of several magazines: The Darkside has not been seen since September. A wiki entry states it might return. Let’s hope so. A thread on the Frightfest Forum has a little more information. Although maligned by some, the magazine appealed to the pulp in me. In its lastest editorial Gorezone rather tastelessly claims some credit for the end of The Darkside, but as the discussion on Monster Kids Classic Horror Forum shows, other non-genre titles are dropping like flies too.
Black Fish, the publisher of Death Ray and newly-launched sister title, Filmstar, appears to be in trouble as both titles are on hold by the looks of things:
As some of you may have heard, and others who popped along the shops to pick up the latest issue of Filmstar may have feared, Blackfish’s two magazines, Filmstar and Death Ray, are currently ‘on hold’. What this means is that there will not be another issue of either of them along for a number of weeks – or, likely, months. Indeed, whether there will ever be another issue of either is a moot point, and at this moment in time impossible to answer. But we hope so.
Quite what the future holds for Filmstar, Death Ray – and, indeed, Blackfish – remains unclear, but we hope to have more definite news over the next week or so. Keep watching this space, because as of now quite literally anything (or nothing) could happen.
Who’s to say what the future holds for genre magazines in the UK, but I think there’s always been an element of uncertainty hovering around such titles, as finding the niche audience on the high street can be challenging regardless of which shop you can get yourself in.
What reassures me about this situation, and the worlds of genre in general, is that the brains behind these magazines have it in their blood, they must give life to their visions, and I genuinely hope they are able to resurrect their titles in one form or another in 2010.
And as John Gilbert’s comment on The Great White Space states, there might well be life in an old dog yet…
December 1st, 2009
You’ll no doubt have encountered the furore this movie has generated over the past few months and while I’m loath to add to the noise, I don’t think it’s possible to not have a debate over a film of this nature. Although divided into several chapters with titles including Grief, Pain and Despair, for me, Antichrist is a film of two parts: the first two-thirds and the final third; this latter segment no doubt being responsible for its seeming adoption or alignment by and with the horror genre.
Antichrist commences with an extended scene, shot in black and white, and set to a classical soundtrack. No dialogue, just detailed slow-motion shots of the flat in which the Man and the Woman (the characters are unnamed and I’ll not mention the actor and actresses names either) are making love, and (ooh how controversial) a single second scene of penetration. During this activity their young son walks down the stairs, climbs onto a desk and falls out of the window. It’s a memorable, simple and stylish way to begin a film that soon loses itself in analysis, atmosphere and ambiguity.
The Man is a therapist who feels he knows more about his wife’s bereavement and guilt issues than the staff at the hospital, so he discharges her, taking care of her at home; a move which soon comes across as selfish, as the woman increasingly feels like an experimental subject. Perhaps in response she demands increasingly physical sex and self-harms as the influence of nature gradually manifests itself and her guilt grows. The Man decides they should spend time at their utterly remote cabin in the woods, Eden, where the Woman spent time writing her dissertation on medieval misogyny and where, we find out, she fell into believing what she was writing about, rather than critiquing it.
Von Trier dedicates the film to Andrei Tarkovsky, the famed Russian Director of Andrei Rublev, Stalker and Solaris among others, and it’s with these last two films that Antichrist resonates the most as von Trier utilises several of Tarkovsky’s filmic techniques such as long, uninterrupted scenes, and the black and white dialogue free passages. Like Tarkvosky, Von Trier in Antichrist has given the earth, nature, the elements and the animal kingdom, an alien and ambiguous intelligence that seeps into the minds of the Man and the Woman so that their time sent in Eden becomes a wildly surging series of experiences and emotions: as the cabin’s tin roof is constantly bombarded with acorns from the huge trees it sits beneath; in harsh, visceral and surreal encounters with crows and a talking fox (which I found extremely powerful and perfect within that segment of the film, as opposed to many who have simply laughed).
As the Woman experiences the highs and lows of self-realisation it is the Man, the therapist, who appears most-affected as the landscape becomes an immense primal force that overwhelms them both; as he works with her to overcome her fear of the grass that swirls around the cabin, he is seeing visions that warn him of impending chaos. It is here where Antichrist veers away from what I took, (wanted?), to be an intriguing, ambitious exploration into the nature of nature and its influence on our relationships, towards a graphic depiction of torture and survival rooted in the deep mental illness resulting from a child’s death. Driven on by their surroundings, unable to cope with the sheer size of the environment and their emotions, their physical relationship intensifies into matrimonial violence: genital mutilations being the worst of many outrages inflicted upon and by each other.
The furore surrounding Antichrist has been mostly about its easy to criticise elements: the sex, the violence, its so-called pretentiousness, von Trier’s reputation and even his supposed attitude towards women. I bet even von Trier isn’t sure what he’s trying to say some of the time but, for me, Antichrist is an extremely brave film; as with Tarkovsky’s works, its attempts to depict this unknowable and unquantifiable world we live in and the unpredictable and unfathomable ways we humans relate to it and to each other, are absolutely open to debate and interpretation, and that’s the point. Two-thirds wonderful.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
November 7th, 2009
A new independent British zombie film following in the footsteps of the adequate The Zombie Diaries, and the more polished, if unseen to date, The Dead Outside (will someone please give these guys a DVD deal? In fact, put all three movies into a cool little box-set please), Colin has been touted around with the story of a £45 budget spent on tea and biscuits. If that’s true then all well and good, but the film itself certainly stands up to geek analysis without the aid of a gimmicky marketing campaign, and will receive a deserved short run and DVD release in October.
Colin is the eponymous central character whom we meet returning home one afternoon. It soon becomes apparent there’s anarchy in the streets of Wandsworth, South London as gunshots and explosions fill the City air and he washes his blood-soaked hands and knife. Colin has been bitten and after fighting off his flatmate we witness his inevitable un-birth. The film then follows our hero around the streets of London as he slowly descends into a state of fully-fledged zombie. For a zed geek like me this is one of the most interesting aspects of the film as, initially, Colin appears to have a certain amount of intelligence to his actions, maybe considering whether or not to tuck into some easily available flesh as the more developed around him flood the streets and chase down the unfortunate survivors.
Colin wanders around, occasionally chowing down, mostly on the already dead, possibly learning from the actions of the others. There are some interesting victims, notably the man who is being eaten alive while he listens to his MP3 player, a gadget which attracts Colin’s attention for a while. There are a couple of episodes where our hero disappears amongst the whole zombie horde, such as the time when he stumbles into a townhouse where four students are fending off a whole front room of the undead. As sheer weight of numbers overwhelms them the scene does actually become fairly harrowing and only one girl escapes. We follow her as she breaks into a seemingly disused garage where a sleazy bloke seems to be torturing zombies by removing their eyes. Again, it’s an intense scene, but its effect is somewhat dampened by the fact you can’t see what’s going on most of the time, and it’s so unexpected and jarring when set against the carnage in the streets. Director Marc Price should be commended for trying something a little different with these interludes, and with Colin being almost totally from an undead perspective.
Price also succeeds with his decision to introduce a sub-plot wherein his sister realises he’s a zombie, and with some mates captures him in an effort to see if he can remember who he is was/is. These poignant scenes are well balanced by her mates’ dislike for Colin in his current state, and the decision they must make when it becomes obvious he cannot be ‘returned’. (Another geek note of interest – apparently, immersing a zed’s head in a bath of water will calm it down temporarily).
Colin is surprisingly well-acted given the majority of its cast were recruited via Facebook and MySpace, although it helps that the majority of the film is without dialogue, and where there is speech it is mostly experienced from Colin’s point-of-view. Being sympathetic to a central character is a prerequisite of most films; the viewer’s interaction with Colin is no different as we know just enough about him to care and as the story unfolds and he descends into a new form of life this sympathy only increases.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
October 25th, 2009
Red Sands is Alex Turner’s follow-up to the undeniably eerie Dead Birds, an American civil war period piece, involving a squad of soldiers coming across a terrifying house situated in a field of corn, haunted by vaguely Lovecraftian horrors. In Red Sands Turner takes the same set-up and updates it to Afghanistan, placing a unit of American soldiers in an isolated location and spooking them out with a series of strange phenomena and bloody deaths; except, this time it doesn’t work.
Charged with seizing and then monitoring an important road the soldiers get lost due to some random artillery fire, come across some ruins and out of boredom (regardless of the fact they’ve just been attacked) set about shooting up the statues carved in the sides of the red sandstone hills. This act of ignorance unleashes a Djinn which then takes its revenge on the soldiers. We know it’s a Djinn because there’s a plaque in the stone that says so.
The problem with Red Sands is that at the very beginning of the film you are shown who survives, and because you also know what’s shape-shifting and taking on the appearance of those it kills, causing hallucinations and generally making their stay in a strangely abandoned stone house uncomfortable (especially as the radio is unusable and the jeep’s engine is mysteriously ripped out) there’s absolutely no intrigue, suspense or surprise to the experience.
The shallow and clichéd characters of the soldiers are played by the numbers (why does every radio operator have glasses, and be literately nerdy?) The shadowy interior setting of the house is way too dark to see any detail; and there is a tired re-use of ideas from Dead Birds – a lot of the decent effects are dark, hollow eyes and wide gaping mouths of those victims sucked dry by the Djinn; admittedly they are scary the first time around, but if you’ve seen them once…
Ultimately, and unfortunately because I really wanted to like it, Red Sands is a disappointing and predictable film.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[This review was originally published in the Spring 09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]
September 3rd, 2009
The 200 numbered hard copies of Horror Reanimated I: Echoes are gone.
Bill, Mathew and I had mixed emotions about where they went. Some of them did find their way into the hands of horror enthusiasts, collectors and those few lost souls who count themselves among our fans. I suspect more of them, however, ended up in the bin unread. We handed copies to anyone who talked to us on the Horror Reanimated UK tour – those were the rules.
Some of those folks took the chapbook and bought copies of either Bill’s or my novels. Others just took the chapbook and walked away delighted, knowing they’d got something for free. A terrifying number hadn’t mastered spoken English, let alone the written kind. Beings who had no place in a bookshop. Men with missing teeth and unwashed hair barely contained by black baseball caps. Yeah, see me? Yeah? I fucking love horror, me. Saw. Hostel. Fucking love it. Then these dirt encrusted individuals would about face with our rare, precious volume and leave the shop without another word. And you just knew they were taking it home to use as a crossbow target in the backyard because all the local cats were already dead.
So, if you managed to get one, great. And if you didn’t, well, all is not lost. We’re now making the chapbook available as a pdf download. Right here. Right now. And we sincerely hope you enjoy it for things other than target practice.
Let us know!
Click on the title to download the chapbook: Horror Reanimated 1: Echoes
August 27th, 2009
Seeing this on the shelves was a joy to behold, not only because it’s the latest in Abaddon’s Tomes of the Dead imprint, (the previous tome I read, Al Ewing’s I, Zombie was a successful if somewhat quirky amalgam of sf (alien invasion), noir crime (private investigator), horror (bucket loads of the gory stuff) and the undead (the private investigator)), but also because Simon Bestwick’s name adorned the rather day-glo cover that rather cheapens this powerful and decidedly different take on the zombie-trope.
To this reader, Bestwick is amongst the frontrunners of the niche world of the macabre ghost story; his A Hazy Shade of Winter was the first Ash Tree Press title I bought. Not only did his tales of contemporary hauntings, both in the mind and of the land, take a frim hold on me, they also alerted me to that publisher’s high quality catalogue. His latest collection, All the Pictures of the Dark is available from Grayfriar Press - I’m three stories in and have no hesitation recommending it on the strength of those alone. Plus Bestwick’s up for a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella with The Narrows in September at the Fantasycon in Nottingham. Now he’s been given the chance to write a mass-market paperback and the tantalising possibility of him lending his powers of atmospheric suggestion to a full-blown zombie apocalypse was one I could not deny mself, and I applaud Abbadon for adding him to their roster.
Tide of Souls is first and foremost an environmental apocalypse, of which zombies are an integral element. The seas rise and engulf the United Kingdom, (and most likely the rest of the world), but the action is set in Northern England where Bestwick lives. The book is cleverly divided into three parts, each told by a different narrator, each narrator linked to each other by circumstance. Katja Wencewska is a Polish immigrant who has been tricked into a hideous world of sex slavery, her passport taken and all her money gone.
We first encounter her locked in a top-floor room in the brothel where she ‘works’ as the waters devour Manchester. Making it to the roof Katja watches as groups of survivors huddle on other rooftops as the rain continues to fall, and group-by-group they’re picked off as drowned and now mysteriously reanimated corpses with green-glowing eyes emerge from the depths to feed. Fighting desperately, Katja is encouraged by the memories and words of her deceased father, a member of the Special Forces, who taught her to look after herself - weapons, martial arts, that sort of looking after yourself.
The middle section of the book follows Robert McTarn, a former Sergeant, who’s been forced to re-enlist due to the rapidly deteriorating situation. At Fullwood Army Base in Lancashire his team are briefed as they watch footage of an SAS squad being ripped apart by green-eyed monsters. McTarn’s been recruited to find maverick scientist, Dr. Benjamin Stiles a specialist in marine biology who’s retired due to ill-health, and the insistent voices in his head, the voices of the dead. On his last diving trip he’d suffered the bends in a rapid and panicked ascent. Stiles’ last know location is a small village in North East lancashire: Barley. As Katja’s fight for survival and McTarn’s mission puts them on a course towards each other, Bestwick forces them to traverse a submerged and deadly landscape: Katja in an old narrowboat more used to sedate canal journeys than the storms battering the waters that swirl with the swimming dead; and McTarn and his squad as they fly across the county, unable to stop and help the survivors on high-ground - survivors who will have much more to deal with than rising waters…
The last section revolves around Stiles, explaining the circumstances behind his accident and why he might just be the reason for, and have the solution, to the chaos. It’s here that Bestwick excels, giving Tide of Souls a unique place in the zombie sub-genre. Bestwick has clearly thought long and hard about the genesis of his zombies and their raison d’etre is explained in satisfying detail - something of a rarity in this sub-genre. Unique biological, behavioural and entirely logical traits are exhibited by the ‘nightmares’ (as they’re referred to, and truth be told they’re not strictly zombies in the Romero tradition) but Bestwick manages to keep that degree of separation at exactly the right distance from us; when a zombie evolves it usually turns towards the human once again. Not so in Tide of Souls, as Bestwick’s grounding in the classic supernatural and weird tale ensures the nightmares recall the eery dripping ghosts of John Carpenter’s The Fog, and the relentless, gnarled Nazi zombies from Shockwaves, rather than the running athletes of the Dawn of the Deadremake.
We were about ten yards up from the farmhouse when Akinbode pointed down the slope and shouted.
They stood in the shallows below the farmhouse. It lapped around the knees of the two adults and the waists of the the two older children. The toddler clung to its mother. They stared at us with their slack, empty faces and glowing eyes, but they didn’t move.
SPOILER ALERT: As mentioned, this tale is primarily a global environmental apocalypse. The rising waters are a result of climate change, but the undead are urged on by an elemental force, (similar in its collective consciousness to the yrr in Frank Schätzing’s sf-eco classic, The Swarm), evolved from the emotional and physical pollution of human activity across the world’s oceans. This force gradually develops a degree of awareness as it seeks to regain something it has lost. Bestwick’s nightmares are its eyes and ears, its collective learning, and its ravenous undead aquatic army. END OF SPOILER ALERT.
As this awareness grows Tide of Souls flows into something else, something entirely unexpected and relatively unexplored within zombie literature: a hauntingly atmospheric love story set amongst scenes of breathless battle, heroism, self-sacrifice and Lovelockian speculation.
Tide of Souls is recommended without reservation.
Mathew F. Riley
August 13th, 2009
A small budget movie with relatively big aspirations, Dead Wood was given a highly-rated review in DVD World recently - the same magazine that recommended Dead Birds a couple of years ago. I picked up Dead Wood hoping to repeat the satisfying experience of discovering a little known horror gem. Alas, ‘twas not to be.
There’s a strong if fairly unoriginal plot forming the foundations of Dead Wood. A brief prologue shows us a man running through the woods, pursued by something unseen, the woods alive with movement. He comes to a small river and hesitates and that proves his undoing. His girlfriend is left shouting his name as the woods darken around her. We then jump to a couple playing matchmakers for a weekend, taking their shy but mutually attracted friends camping. On the way they run over a deer and as it lays there in convulsions, they make what they consider to be the correct and humane decision, and finish it off.
Dead Wood, an independent UK production, mixes up a little Blair Witch, a possessed Asian girl with yep, long-dark hair and staring eyes, and some spliff-induced hallucinations. The atmosphere grows heavy as the four lose themselves in the woods, stumble across a rotting tent and welcome a complete stranger, (the girlfriend from the prologue) into their midst rather too naively.
I was reminded of the scenes in Evil Dead as something rushes through the trees bearing down on the campers and… and, to be honest, there are far too many references to influential horror films crammed in here, so that Dead Wood loses itself amongst the trees, as does the average acting, and the panoramic ( and possibly) stock footage of vast forests into which the group definitely did not drive. This is a shame, because when it finally gets going (40 minutes into its total running time of 82) there are some interesting and spooky manifestations of a green environment with a lust for the red stuff.
Frustratingly the reasons behind the woods going after the campers are never explained; maybe it’s a Long Weekend nature’s revenge scenario due to the deer fatality, or possibly just because the woods themselves are bad, or haunted, or polluted, or…
Regardless of some effective tree transformations á la The Guardian, Dead Wood is a trying and tedious experience for such a short trip.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[This review was originally published in the Spring 09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]
July 22nd, 2009
My world stops for a John Connolly book.
Everything else is put aside as the latest developments in the dark world of Charlie Parker unfold in beautifully plotted suspense. The Lovers is the seventh Charlie Parker book in what can be called a series to date, and the ninth to feature him; so that’s about sixteen waking days of my life given over to this man, and he’s worth every damned minute of my time.
Charlie Parker is a Maine-based private investigator who seems to attract evil. That evil may be a curse that Parker is destined to combat throughout his life, possibly in retribution for things he has done in the past - for Parker is a man who thrives on his own guilt. His veiled background influences everything that occurs in this tight, sad story, and it’s almost impossible to review The Lovers without paying courtesy to preceeding events.
Parker’s a man haunted. Haunted by his wife and child who were brutally murdered by a serial killer known as The Travelling Man. (I am in awe of the serial killers Connolly consistently creates). Haunted by those he’s crossed and those he’s killed, deserving and undeserving. In The Lovers, he’s haunted by his father’s apparent suicide after killing two seemingly innocent teenagers, and the absence of his girlfriend, Rachel and her young daughter, Sam, who have relocated to Vermont, unable to put up with his unsavoury lifestyle and the characters it brings with it.
Recovering from the events of the previous novel, The Unquiet, Parker is working in a bar, deprived of his badge and unable to take on any cases. Intrigued by the teasing words of the mysterious Collector (again from The Unquiet) he decides to look into his father’s last days, and in the process discovers facts about himself and his parentage that most people would be unable to handle, so fantastic are the implications. But, this is Charlie Parker, and he knows how to handle destructive self-revelation more than most. If there’s one thing that can be said of Parker, it’s that he has an open mind.
Parker’s investigations lead him to cross paths with a girl, Emily Kindler, who is seemingly on the run from her own past, rather than racing to confront it head on Parker-style; and a hack-biographer, Mickey Wallace, who has had his eye on Parker for a while, unable to understand how he ends up in so much trouble, so regularly, and getting away with it. As Parker traces his father’s now retired work colleagues, Mickey dogs him every step of the way, opening up other paths of inquiry and letting other darker and deadlier memories leech through into the daylight… the eponymous lovers.
In the latest Black Static, Peter Tennant speculates on the current state of the Horror fiction market, some pundits declaring that ‘it has gone underground, insinuated itself into other genres…’ Since the first Parker title, Every Dead Thing, was published back in 1999, Connolly has been delivering what this reviewer considers to be the absolute pinnacle in atmospheric detective fiction with a difference - the very difference, or esssence, that Tennant has spotted slyly manifesting on the bookshelves: ‘…there are times when I stand in the Crime/Thriller section of a big bookshop and scan all these portentous titles with their minatory cover art, read back cover blurbs that tell of serial killers and their atrocities, it seems to me as if, while eschewing the H word, this younger, hipper genre has reinvented and repackaged itself with all the trappings of its older more illustrious predecessor’.
Tennant is actually writing the introduction to a review of Bad Things by Michael Marshall, quite justifiably referring to the author as a ‘master of ’stealth fiction’, of mixing and matching genres, constantly blurring the boundaries, presenting the reader with one thing that eventually turns out to be another…’ And it’s to this currently small band of stealth fiction writers that Connolly belongs, if not leads, as over the last ten years or so he has fearlessly and increasingly introduced hints and suggestions of another world that surrounds this one, and that of Parker. Whilst previous titles may have left such phenomena and cirumstance open to intepretation (although certainly not in my eyes), in The Lovers, Connolly removes the ambiguity once and for all, and the book is stronger, kindlier and more poignant as a result.
The Charlie Parker stories have laid down their shadow-strata over each other across the years since Every Dead Thing, marking each tale that’s gone before with ghosts, memories and emotions, with all that it is to be a father, husband, lover and killer. Connolly’s prose seeps with Maine’s atmosphere, with threat and with empathy. Parker knows the dead do not forget, and so he does not forget.
Never have I read a series of books that so depend on the past of one man to determine his future and that of those around him, both friend and foe. Parker has a fascinating and terrible history that I am confident will continue to unravel seamlessly, just as his unsettled present and unpredictable future will play out in one way or another. (The next Parker novel, The Whisperers is due next year).
Readers new to John Connolly beware: before sitting down with The Lovers, you must go back into Parker’s past yourself, starting with Every Dead Thing.
As Rachel and Sam have discovered, living with Charlie Parker is not easy. For the reader, however, living with him, killing with him, loving with him is a monstrously dark, horrific (with a capital ‘H’), sad and wonderful experience.
Mathew F. Riley
July 11th, 2009
Welcome to the Dark Playground, part two…
Onto the second issue of Fear, dated September/October 1988, this time with 84 pages, eight more than the launch issue. A bright pink marbled background supports a wonderful portrait of James Herbert and his rats by Oliver Fry.
A stellar list of names enticed us helpless disciples of darkness to part with our cash: Stephen King, Dean R Koontz and Clive Barker. And towards the bottom of the cover, a keyword from the end of the alphabet that today, pretty much guarantees I would purchase said item without a second thought - ZOMBIES! But 21 years ago this sub-genre didn’t hold as much interest or excitement for me, as my exposure to and knowledge of the flesh eating apocalypse was naively under-nourished; and these zombies were certainly not Romero’s gut-munchers anyway…
In his lengthy editorial, Dark Playground, John Gilbert discussed the lack of funding within the British film industry and the lack of entrepeneurial flair in the film-makers themselves. He wonders if there are people out there who can take advantage of the perceived new opportunities for the horror genre in film, and in fiction, ‘as several of Britain’s larger publishers are desperate to sign-up horror writers this year, ready to exploit another bubble in the genre which they believe has started to - yet again - expand and can only grow bigger during next year’.
Gilbert then discussed the ‘advice’ he received when he set out to publish Fear. You just know what’s coming: don’t bother, it’ll never sell. Putting hindsight to one side, I firmly believe that if you can develop quality content, present it professionally in terms of copy and imagery, and find a distributor that believes in you, people will find it and follow. This is especially the case today when only a few minutes research can put the inquirer in touch with the creators, provide an overview of the product and enable a purchase. So different to the trek to the newsagents, or the bus ride to the next town, all in search of a paltry magazine - absolutely unheard of today! And I miss that search, for if I hadn’t religiously sought out each issue of Fear I feel I would be less of a fan, less of an obsessive, (aka collector), than I am today. And Fear is where my bug began.
Gilbert responds to fan letters telling him to encourage new writing talent: ‘The truth is this: I will publish at least one piece of fiction from a “newcomer” in every issue of Fear - that’s been the plan from the start. Hand on overburdened heart, I can say that I’ve had more than 40 short stories from readers since the magazine first appeared…’ Submission length was 1,500 to 4,500 words - not a bad end length at all methinks. And this approach resulted in first sales for several household names of today, whom I’ll mention in future Fear articles.
In the final section of his editorial Gilbert looks at the current trends in the US film industry - sequels, prequels and remakes. How times haven’t changed - money motivates. His thoughts echo my own, and those of most of us I expect: ‘Sequels and remakes may be money-spinners, but they should only be made if Part II or III carries on the plot of the first movie forward - like Hellbound - Hellraiser II - or the remake adds something to the original - like Evil Dead II or The Blob… Just a few years ago film-makers were crying over falling box-office receipts and closing cinemas. Now the moguls responsible for churning out sequels past the trilogy stage could be responsible for a renewed decline when viewers get tired of the same old movie cliches. Let’s hope the movie producers see that the popularity of Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees is no excuse for lack of invention’.
Oh well, as news of the Alien remake/prequel begins to leak out; as we see the first shots of the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street; and as Hellraiser’s remake gathers momentum we can only hope these classic and memorable experiences are injected with vigorous and convincing creativity and a humble repsect for their original visions; and I guess, we must appreciate that the majority of these ‘re-inventions and revisits’ are not for us, but for our children. And that they will forget them pretty quickly if they’re no good. One wonders if today’s teenagers will have the same sense of nostalgia, given today’s fast-paced society. (However, I do hold out great hopes for the Hellraiser remake, seeing as it’s gone to the director of Martyrs, Pascal Laugier). But it’s nice to be able to comment upon them knowing what’s gone before.
My memory is grainy, but the second issue of Fear was possibly my first relatively comprehensive introduction to the zombie film genre in the form of Philip Nutman’s excellent and timely overview, Dead or Alive? Nutman concentrated on the voodoo side of zombie lore, as it was around this time that The Believers, the second Return of the Living Dead, and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow were out and about in British cinemas, possibly inspired, or given new life by Alan Parker’s Angel Heart.
John Gilbert followed up his article on film-making from the first issue with Tales of a Lonely Scriptwriter: “No director is going to thank you for a description of a massive bedroom if all he can afford is a plywood shack.” Paddy McKillop traces the development of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger and the planned series, which at the time were a bit of a gamble: “King feared his mass-market readers might be disappointed with a story of sorcerers, magic and other worlds.” Time has certainly proven otherwise.
This issue’s Fear Factor featured the one and only Jonathan Ross gushing about his comic books and love of horror fiction. Remember his series Incredibly Strange Films? “I’ve been an HP Lovecraft fan for years, which is why I like Ramsey Campbell’s stuff so much; there’s a real Lovecraft feel to them. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood are very enjoyable… Shaun Hutson’s a lot of fun; his books are great tongue-in-cheek stuff.”
A new feature was the introduction of The Spook, a diary column from an anonymous lady possibly working within the world of genre publishing - or completely made up. She was also referred to as Lady Ligger, the Mistress of Gatecrashers. “Maggots, beetles, members of the living dead, parasites and the dregs of society. No, I’m not talking about John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, I’m talking about the party at London’s Limelight Club which promoted it.” In this issue she attends the opening of Forbidden Planet’s new London Megastore where she bumped into Willie Rushton - oh what a grand place that was - remember the weirdly round comic room at the back? And does anyone know who this quaintly titled Dame was/is?
Fear Fiction:
- Uzzi, by Brian Lumley - ‘cuddly pets won’t be the same’
- A Quarter to Three, by Kim Newman - ‘late at night in a sleazy bar’
- Guilty Party, by Stephen Laws - ‘whose birthday is it anyway?’
Interviews and features were in the Pro-Files and Location Reports sections:
- James Herbert talks about the origins of Haunted, the film versions of Rats and Survivor, and if he is seen as a corrupting influence: “I’d always liked horror. I was not a fanatic about it but I’d always liked it, and it seemed to fit like a glove.”
- In the first of a two-parter, a very young Clive Barker discuss childhood influences, the Books of Blood and his imagination: “Somebody at Gollancz sent the first set of short stories back saying they were the most disgusting things she had ever read.”
- Dean R Koontz on how he became a bestselling author, whilst avoiding falling into the ‘genre trap’: “Of the first three books I had on the bestseller list, two of them were under pen names.”
- Ramsey Campbell’s two-parter comes to a conclusion: “I wouldn’t ever go back to pre-plotting.”
- A very serious suited and booted Christopher Fowler (image below) discusses the City as inspiration: “I’ve always lived in town - countryside has an agrophobic effect on me. It’s horrible. It’s full of cows and things.”
- Fantasy author Sheri Tepper believes pessimism within fantasy and horror can lead to dire consequences for the young: “I come from an age which wanted the human spirit to be triumphant, and I still want that.”
- Shaun Hutson discusses his works: “I don’t write horror I write comedy… I do sit down, obviously, with the intention of scaring the shit out of people.”
Fan-File featured the relatively new fanzine Skeleton Crew that dealt with one author or subject per issue. There’s a plug for the awesome Midnight Graffitti which includes journalism from Rick Kleffel who currently runs The Agony Column. Ghosts and Scholars, an MR James newsletter is given a mention - this is still published today. Shock Xpress, a magazine that focused on the sleazier side of horror is detailed. Years later I would write alongside editor Stefan Jaworzyn on the industrial music magainze, Music From the Empty Quarter. Dave Carson’s Haunter of the Dark portfolio is featured, published via Dagon Press, who appropriately enough published Dagon magazine.
Here’s an advert for James Herbert’s Haunted from Hodder and Stoughton. It’d be fantastic to see something like this on a billboard today.
Being a second issue there were 2 pages set aside for letters, under the heading Raising the Dead. Stephen Volk is a name I recognize and his letter is an interesting response to the article on censorship from the prevous issue. Another reader complains about the lack of Fantasy and SF in issue one - something that is put right in this second issue with the Tepper interview, the Gunslinger article and a higher percentage of Fantasy and SF book reviews.
Genre reviews were within the Revenants section, with a place for all media…
Film reviews were in the Movie Mainline section:
- Phantasm II, directed by Don Coscarelli …not sure if they’d seen this as there’s no critique, rather a simple synopsis and a comment from the fx man, Mark Shoestrom.
- Poltergeist III, directed by Gary Sherman …The most frightening factor about Poltergeist III is that nothing happens!
- The Running Man, directed by Paul Michael Glaser …Admirers of Stephen King would do well to stay clear…
- Return of the Living Dead Part II, directed by Ken Wiederhorn …the audience remained fairly titterless, as did I.
- Dead Heat, directed by Mark Goldblatt …First-time director Goldblatt keeps the mayhem thick and fast, making the most of Terry Black’s wacked-out script.
- 976-Evil, directed by Robert Englund …some pictures and synopsis of the forthcoming and uncompleted film.
- Maniac Cop, directed by William Lustig …at once uneven and disappointing. It doesn’t live up to its potential. I’m still looking for a new twist of the knife.
Video reviews in Video Vibes:
- The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher …despit the criticism I’m liable to get for saying it, the movie was one of my favourites last year.
- Prison, directed by Renny Marlin …The atmosphere is claustrophobic, the special effects are over the top…and the acting is efficient.
- Maximum Overdrive, directed by Stephen King …don’t expect a tour de force by the man who still remains the master of modern horror.
- HP Lovecraft’s The Unnamable, directed by Jean-Paul Ouellette …If special effects ever swung a movie from bad to mediocre these are they.
- The 13th Floor, directed by Chris Roach …I’m not against lifts, mind you, but when you’ve seen one disgusting thing in a lift, or splatty lift accident, you’ve seen them all.
- The Witches of Eastwick, directed by George Miller …The object I mourned the loss of most in the translation from the book was the Jacuzzi…
- Close Your Eyes and Pray, directed by Skip Schoolnick …Close your eyes and pray the silly end doesn’t really mean a sequel.
Off the Shelf covered book reviews, divided by format:
- Haunted, by James Herbert; Hodder & Stoughton HB …glows softly, but consistently, with menace rather than a curb on ghoulish happenings - there are plenty of those.
- The Player of Games, by Iain M Banks; Macmillan HB …a book to be savoured… a book I’ll be reading again, and soon.
- Why Not You and I?, by Karl Edward Wagner; Dark Harvest HB …shows what pyschological horror really involves… a zest and finesse which make all his contributions to the genre essential reading, and this collection is no exception.
- Interzone - Second Anthology, edited by David Pringle, John Clute and Simon Ousley; New English Library PB …full of surprises, and no matter what sort of fiction you read it will provide some chilling, humorous, and ironic tastes for you to savour.
- Swords and Sorceress II, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley; Headline PB …It’s difficult to express which are the best stories in this wonderful collection.
- Lords of the Middle Dark, by Jack L Chalker; New English Library PB …The scene is set for one blockbuster of a fantasy series.
- The Mask of Cthulhu/The Trail of Cthulhu, by August Derleth; Grafton PB …There stories still - literally - give me nightmares and I hope they’ll do the same for you.
- The Zenda Vendetta, by Simon Hawke; Headline PB …apparently targeted at easy-to-please teenagers with a couple of hours to kill and nothing better to do with them.
- Weaveworld, by Clive Barker; Collins PB …a remarkable combination of fantasy, horror and a bit of Clive Barker erotica. It hits hard and draws deep.
- A Malady of Magicks, by Craig Shaw Gardner; Headline PB …Mythological beasts, Cuthbert the magic sword who can’t abide bloodshed, plus the 500 ferrets.
- Space Rangers/Pirates of the Asteroids, by Isaac Asimov; Lightning PB …Methinks they’re meant for children and teenagers, but adults will equally get a quick, exciting, read from them.
- Swamp Thing Volume Six, by Alan Moore; Titan Books Large Softcover …Dark side; light side; the book is like one of those yams, full of Moore’s familiar touches of contrast…
- Wildwood, by John Farris; New English Library PB …sensual and sentimental… brutal and fascinating reading…
- Alfred Hitchock’s Book of Horror Stories Number 8, by Various; New English Library PB …A book of horror stories? Who are New English Library kidding? … contains only one piece of closet horror fiction…
- The Deluge Drivers, by Alan Dean Foster; New English Library PB …reeks of Star Wars technology…Excellent science fiction.
So that was issue two of Fear. Stan Nicholls who interviewed Christopher Fowler in this issue, and now a best-selling author himself, says of Fear: “It was a good magazine with decent content and quality production values, and its demise certainly left a hole in the horror market. It’s a real pity it went down when and as it did.”
And from that issue? Well, I became a devout fan of the Phantasm films, sourced The Unnamable in my local video store and enjoyed it immensly; eventually I tracked down The Believers (wonderful) and put The Serpent and The Rainbow on my list of films to see, and it’s now one of my all-time favourites. I chased down the August Derleth re-issues, and comsumed Wildwood by John Farris, and Barker’s Weaveworld. I read Haunted years later, and I think I’ve missed Prison somehow, so will have to get to that in due course - only 21 years too late!
Mathew F. Riley
[This article originally appeared on mathewfriley.com in June 2009]
July 4th, 2009
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In her debut novel Lost Souls (Dell bought it in 1991 and a few months later she was signed to a six-figure three-book contract) I was introduced to a triumvirate of psychotic vampires called Zillah, Molochai and Twig – creatures I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck, or flee from. After subjecting a young woman to a night of alcohol-fuelled crazed lust – they disappear. An unfortunate side-effect of humans mating with vampires is that said young woman won’t survive the pregnancy, therefore forcing another of their kind to leave the orphaned vampire baby on a doorstep in grim suburbia; the baby, who grows up to become a reclusive teenager and goes by the name of Nothing, rejects the dull normies and the stifling small-town he was forced to grow up in and leaves it all behind in search of his true heritage. The Lost Souls of the title are the heartbroken musician Steve and the fey psychic Ghost, residents of Brite’s fictitious Missing Mile (apparently inspired by Athens in Georgia, where Brite resided before making New Orleans her permanent home). Eventually Nothing hooks up with his real family and embarks on an incestuous affair with Zillah – the leader of the pack and his own father. At first Nothing is easily seduced by the lure of these creatures’ hyperreality. Nothing finds his own way into the damnation – that is the easy part - however, he soon realises that after witnessing some of his new family’s more unsavoury antics he might need to find a way back to the light. The morally conflicted little vamp finds allies when he finally encounters Steve and Ghost, but the pack isn’t prepared to give up one of their own without a ferocious fight.
This brings me to Brite’s most controversial novel to date Exquisite Corpse. A novel which took me to the shocking, acid-skin-stripping, viscera full frontiers of psychosexual obsession and corpse-revelry and I fell in love. A tour-de-force with a taunting, teasing, thrilling and tortuous narrative trajectory that undoubtedly had maniacs salivating on the frontlines of the lunatic fringe. So extreme in content was this that her publisher Dell refused to publish it – her UK publishers also declined. Eventually it was picked up by Simon and Schuster in the US and Orion in the UK. This was so much more though than just another “extreme” novel; even with Lost Souls and Drawing Blood Brite took incredible risks and happily gave the V to any of her detractors. She wrote a novel that dragged you into the darkest realms of humanity – but her characters weren’t “monsters.” Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote in the afterword of Self-Made Man:
