Posts filed under 'Reviews'
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
Paul Kane’s an author I’ve kept my eye on ever since his short fiction began appearing regularly in the genre small press in the late 1990s. Over the last few years his output has been unnaturally prolific and of a very high standard. This is evidenced by a strong showing on the Long List of the British Fantasy Society’s latest Awards: Kane’s first novel The Afterblight Chronicles: Arrowhead is up for Best Novel; two titles, Reunion, and Red are up for Best Novella, and no less than four of his short stories are up for that particular Award: A Chaos Demon is for Life, Lifelike, The Suicide Room, and Wind Chimes, (which I thought was the outstanding story in the third Bloody Books’ Read by Dawn anthology from last year).
Red is a contemporary take on the classic fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Far removed from the quaint childhood we imagine for the little girl in the original tale Rachael Daniels, an aspiring actress, lives in a grey urban environment, just about making a living as a careworker whilst enduring the frustrations she understands will come her way at the onset of her chosen career. Already a little jaded, she’s recently broken up with her boyfriend, and dreads walking the streets after dark as the city is a threatening place wit its hoodies and vast concrete estates, such as the Greenham Estate which is where her favourite client lives, the 80 year old Miss Tilly Brindle.Rachael’s right to be cautious there’s a serial killer stalking the streets of the city. Not your average stalk’n’slash weirdo, this character has a long, long history and a grudge to match. Kane subtly provides insights into his thinking, his geneaology, whilst evoking the years of killings as he sits and observes the hussle and bustle of the city, choosing his next victim:
Sitting on a bench, he surveyed the shoppers on this busy Friday afternoon. In the old country, he could have just picked one off as they walked by, but populations had dwindled where he used to operate so very long ago, mainly due to his antics - it had to be said. And trackers wishing to make a name for themselves had come looking for him back in those days. For their insolence (there was no greater hunter than him, he was the king), he’d sent them away with their tales between their legs - if indeed he’d left them with any tail at all. But all good things came to an end, and when he was forced to move on, he found it was actually a blessing in disguise. It was a big, wide world out there. And who was going to notice what he was up to when mankind took such a great joy in doing the very same thing to itself, time and time again? The perfect playground. The perfect hunting ground.
It’s during this scene that the beast notices Rachael as she walks past. Lost in the sea of shoppers, it uses its one instinct that still remains effective in today’s ambiently-deafening society: it smells her, and her blood reveals itself to have a particularly personal and shared history…
Kane cleverly uses the various characters and victims as visceral pathways and bridges for the beast. He plays with both the reader and Rachael, lulling us as it engineers its course towards her, circling her literally through the flesh and blood of those she encounters in her daily life. As it shapeshifts it takes on their personas as best it can, convincingly over short time spans (which is normally all the time it needs) it charms and confuses, until ultimately it is unable to hide its true nature as its century-spanning hunger and lust for revenge explodes from behind the thin facades it creates in scenes of bone-crunching ferocity.
As with the beast, so with the book: over 70 impactful pages, and without wasting a word, Paul Kane has enriched the werewolf mythos with a seamless re-imagining of a hypnotically suggestive fairy tale, embellishing it with the harsh, alluring scent of an ages-old psychosexual predator who easily rivals that other undead villain from Eastern European folklore, the vampire.
A relentless and grisly fairy tale for dark times, Red is filled with the blackest blood from the deepest parts of our bodies, and is thoroughly recommended.
Red is published by America’s Skullvines Press so might be a little difficult to obtain over here, but go directly to their website or get in touch with the author, and I guarantee your efforts will be rewarded.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
June 28th, 2009
Six month’s after his brother Tom’s disappearance, Matthew Ryan is released from the care home his father placed him in to recover. But life is no easier for Matthew now he’s back in the family council flat on a grey South London estate. His father, Jake, silently seethes, a violent man staying just this side of violence, blaming his oldest so for the loss of his youngest. Matthew was partying whilst his brother wandered off. The local paper’s reporter is trying to dig up some dirt on the unsolved case; the social worker and local vicar are putting in the tuppence-worth, and all Matthew wants to do is to be left alone to do… well, what does one do when you don’t know if your brother’s alive or dead, and you know you were to blame?
The Disappeared captures the grim reality that, for some, is life on a London council estate, with its peer pressures, gangs and neighbours too close for comfort, stained concrete and shadowed passageways, killing time and hope for all but the most determined. And Matthew is determined. Harry Treadaway’s portrayal of a guilt-ridden, scared and lonely teenager, but one with a backbone of decency and sympathy is outstanding and vital. His relationship with Jake, his dad, verges on the unbearable as the viewer just wants them to communicate with each other, just talk why don’t you? But Jake is in a far darker place than his son, a place for adults only. The filmmakers’ collective vision of the Ryans’ flat is soul-destroying in itself, a set of bleak, stained rooms with paper-thin walls, effectively dampening the trapped emotions of father and son.
Matthew watches recorded television coverage of the news conferences and his dad’s desperate appeals on the old VHS. On one of these old tapes Matthew hears his name being whispered. Tom’s voice, he’s sure. It happens again. Circumstances contrive to prevent him playing the tape to his sceptical best mate, the refreshingly raw and begrudgingly loyal Simon, (played by Tom Felton, most famous for his role as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films). His off-hand comment sets Matthew off down the route of reluctant and self-questioning amateur paranormal investigator as he sets up an old cassette recorder to capture a bit of the old Electronic Voice Phenemona. The voice is there again, this time with a new message. Matthew starts to see his brother around the estate, and when Simon’s sister goes missing, he feels he has no choice but to follow his instinct, and the voices, whatever the consequences.
The Disappeared is a contemporary urban ghost story. It’s been likened toThe Omen and The Sixth Sense in some of the press I’ve read, but to my mind, it’s also possible to trace influences way back to the good old, and very British days, of Hammer and Amicus, and that’s not a bad thing at all, but to say more would be to give the plot away. There are a couple of hokey effects designed to show the true nature of the abductor, but on the whole, these don’t detract from Matthew’s ghostly, and carefully placed, encounters.
It’s a haunted area, this part of London, says one of the characters. Director Johnny Kevorkian and cinematographer Diego Rodriguez draw a satanic map around a particular area of South London, from the concrete gothic of Matthew’s estate, to the wind-swept docks, and surrounding woods hiding decaying secret tunnels and their ancient contents. These places aren’t only haunted by spectres from the distant and not so distant past, as certain of today’s disaffected youth would no doubt tell you.
In The Disappeared, every shadow’s a hoodie, every alcove a chance to hide, or to pounce, and it’s in these shadows that Kevorkian, Murphy and Rodriguez revel, imbuing the 70s architecture with teasing messages, relayed by very modern ghosts.
The Disappeared is an adept depiction of sharp and honest dysfunctional dynamics, clammy-palm scares, occult secrets, brooding emotions and environments, escalating into a subterranean fight for life and justice for those beyond physical help.
Go and see The Disappeared at the ICA from June 19th onwards. June 22nd has a special showing with the Director and stars, hosted by Alan Jones of Frightfest.
The Disappeared, 2008
Director: Johnny Kevorkian
June 20th, 2009
Based on the Imperium comic book series and including a nice little colour mini-comic of its own, Trailer Park of Terror’s redneck horrors have sneaked into the UK shops unannounced much like The Dark Hour, albeit less successfully, and with a completely different vibe.
Initially Trailer Park of Terror follows a bog-standard template: a bus load of delinquent teens with attitudinal problems and their group leader are stranded as said bus crashes in a massive rainstorm. The argumentative bunch find themselves in Trucker’s Triangle, a haunted patch of dusty land that the Devil himself (in a suitably black Cowboy outfit) has frequented, doing all manner of deals with the locals over the years, especially pretty lil’ Norma, the cursed, and now very dead owner of the abandoned Trailer Park.
The kids argue, muck around and are just plain irritating (thus allowing us to dislike them enormously and increase our hopes for swift and bloody retribution) and inevitably attract the attention of the luscious make-up coated Norma and other returned resident rednecks who made Norma’s life a misery all those years ago, until the aforementioned Devil gave her a big gun and she took appropriate revenge. These white-trash characters include a colourful guitar-wielding ghoul, a monstrously fat cannibal, and a jerky obsessed butcher (and it’s not beef), all of whom take great glee in torturing and killing the deserving teens in fashions relevant to their previous lives, whilst cracking tasteless jokes of questionable redneck wisdom as the gore flows.
Via convincing fx and EC-inspired creatures, decent directing and a fun spiky country soundtrack Trailer Park of Terror almost manages to tap into the same vein of humour as can be found in The Evil Dead, and Roach the rockabilly ghoul is as strong and fun a demon as Ash was a flawed hero. But it cannot be denied that Trailer Park of Terror is a very basic story trying too hard to be truly scary through gruesome set-pieces. There are no surprises and not much inventiveness, but then it never promised any I guess, so it sits uneasily on my DVD shelves, possibly never to be watched again.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[This review was originally published in the Easter 09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]
June 15th, 2009
I picked the claustrophobic The Dark Hour up from a bargain bin in HMV, based on user comments on the Quiet Earth website - a wonderful source of all things apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic - comments suggesting it was an undiscovered gem from Spain, a country that’s been at the forefront of fantastic films over the last few years. How right those comments are.
Nine survivors of what might have been a biological and/or nuclear holocaust are locked up inside the ruined planet. Their lives run like clockwork, ruled by restricted movement, rationing of food, power, and hope. Hazardous missions to forage for new supplies of food and medication form part of the survivalist routine. Outside the sealed sanctuary toxic ghouls (possibly zombies and referred to as Strangers) roam myriad corridors dripping in filth and disease. But there’s more to the subterranean inhabitants than slow decaying remnants of society – for one hour every day, ‘the cold hour’, the Invisibles roam the shadowy environment. Freezing air, wood and metal as they travel the length and breadth of the sanctuary, the survivors lock themselves into their rooms for fear of encountering these ethereal predators.
Terrorised by two types of evil and imprisoned beneath the surface by the fallout, the nine survivors convincingly play out strained relationships, their quirks and bigotries manifesting in treachery and a desperate fight for survival. The youngest survivor, a boy named Jesus records a video diary showing us a child’s fears of this awful world he has been born into, and through this young voice, debut director Quiroga manages to successfully create, maintain and manipulate a tense atmosphere of dread and anticipation, of love and hate, innocence and strength that is gripping from the first minute to the last.
And that last scene! A truly surprise ending, and you can’t say that of many a film. Maybe you’ll love it or hate it. I thought it was perfect. Either way, this single awesome scene provides answers to what’s gone before and takes the story into new realms even as it ends. An emotional, savage, and wholly original sf/horror hybrid, The Dark Hour is recommended without reservation.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[This review was originally published in the Winter 08/09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]
June 6th, 2009
C.J. Lines returns us to those gloriously gory days of the 1980s in tone and in setting with his debut novel, Filth Kiss, via the independent Hadesgate Publications.
A brutal 190 page-turner readable in a couple of hours, Lines wastes no time immersing the reader in the lives of his main characters, the Davies brothers. Jeff is coming to terms with the news that his father, Guy, has died. Taking time off from his job in London he mulls over the realisation that he never had much to do with his father whilst he was growing up, and neither did his brother Peter, always the younger, quieter of the two.
Peter is a convicted paedophile, (for a relativly minor offence, he insists), and his relationship with Jeff and his sister Jennifer has deteriorated completely. Out of prison on parole with a job in a fish and chip shop, Peter is trying to rebuild his life and resist urges which have never truly gone away. The scene is set for the brothers’ return for their father’s funeral, and an uneasy reunion with Jennifer who still lives in the Gloucestershire village of Broadoak where they grew up.Not all is as it seems with the Davies family, and the villagers of Broadoak. The brothers learn that Guy Davies drowned in the River Severn and was with a young girl from the village who has not been seen since that night. A disenchanted schoolgirl, Sarah Hobson, finds a severed hand on the banks of the Severn, and in a morose moment, removes a strange ring, detailed with two intertwined serpents, from one of the frozen fingers.
Filth Kiss could stand upon uneasy ground with elements and characters of its plot as Peter and Sarah move closer together, much of it at the youngster’s insistence. But Lines shows us a convincing portrayal of a paedophile as a weak-willed and somewhat desperate individual, and crucially, one that makes no excuses for himself or his actions. He knows what he feels is wrong. This must be one of the most difficult tasks a writer could set themselves, but I think Lines succeeds as the reader is left feeling sympathetic towards both parties in different ways, and with a full appreciation of the motivations involved.
The loss of their father is relatively simple to handle compared with the struggle to manage their relationships with each other and the attitude of the locals towards Peter, an attitude which Jennifer is only too happy to encourage. The 1980s Broadoak is brilliantly evoked through the eyes of its bored, disenfranchised youth, naturally railing against the mundanity of everyday village life, the pottering of the elderly, the lack of diversity of its shops, and the apparent refusal to adopt change that the Davies brothers witness on their return, justifying their distate for the place. But behind this rather stereotypical front of closeted rural calm is a system of heirarchy designed to feed the darkness that lurks within all of us for a higher and utterly Devilish end.
In Broadoak the villagers keep one eye on their post, for when a black envelope containing a tulip pops through your letterbox the time is near for the next sacrifice. In the hills above the village, on Symonds Yat there is a sacred place where something is growing… Think Hot Fuzz without the humour, swirling in a bowl of virgin’s blood, mixed with Dennis Wheatley’s black magic rituals, the disquiet of youth and several scenes of graphic, very imaginative demonic sex, and you have Filth Kiss.
First released in 2007, Filth Kiss has seen a reprinting since that date, proving that there is an appetite for a solid and thrilling story with horrific content from readers. Possibly a crucial factor in the book’s endurance has been its availability throughout Waterstones stores, and a round of applause should go to them for taking the chance on the title and supporting an independent publisher’s endeavours. More of this open-minded approach from booksellers when stocking the shelves would be welcome.
Highly recommended for fans of Shaun Hutson, Guy N. Smith, Richard Kelly, Rex Miller (remember him anyone?) and Clive Barker’s hypnotically and viscerally sexy Books of Blood volumes, C.J. Lines‘ Filth Kiss is a little gift of dark perverse power.
And keep a careful eye on your post…
Mathew F. Riley
April 30th, 2009
Update - these reviews have now been posted at Amazon UK, here and here. In other news: following a swift re-printing Through A Glass, Darkly has now been re-stocked at all online stores!
Kevin Lucia has just reviewed both The Absence and Through A Glass, Darkly for the really rather brilliant Shroud Magazine. The full reviews will be published in a future issue of Shroud and should be on the blog shortly, but here are a few snippets:
Through A Glass, Darkly -
‘Bill Hussey’s debut is a work of startling imagination… he writes with a literary sensibility that elevates horror to an art form.’
The Absence -
‘Bill Hussey crafts another winner… [his] prose is lyrical and flowing.’
April 14th, 2009
This is the film that has caused a media-frenzy over the last few months. It was virtually banned in France, as the powers that be slapped an 18+ classification on it – although an appeal saw that reduced to a 16. Last year’s August Frighfest gave it a UK premiere, (which is where I saw it and originally reviewed it for Quiet Earth), and it’s about to receive a straight-to-DVD release in the US, having been picked up by the Weinstein company.
In the 1970s Lucie was abducted and held captive for a year in an abandoned slaughterhouse. The doctors could find no evidence of sexual abuse, suggesting something other than the instant gratification usually associated with abduction cases. After her escape Lucie lives in a care home, where she meets Anna, herself a victim of abuse, who becomes her best friend and confidant. But Lucie is haunted by guilt that violently manifests as the emaciated woman whom she left behind in order to save herself.
Fifteen years later, and Lucie has managed to trace those she believes abducted her. Alone, she visits the couple, who now have a family, and exacts graphic, unmerciful shotgun revenge. Anna arrives to help Lucie hide the bodies, harbouring doubts that these are the people who abused her best friend, but beneath the house she discovers a series of hi-tech rooms and whitewashed corridors, adorned with back-lit images of women, young and old, dying in various different circumstances.
Who do you go to build something like that? This set-up is a pretty specific piece of subterranean engineering with an obviously unwholesome intent. It soon becomes clear that the people Lucie has murdered were part of a larger circle; a secret society who have enough money to guarantee silence, and it’s in these pristine purpose-built surroundings that Martyrs sets off on a grim journey through extremely dark places to eventual enlightenment, as Anna becomes their next victim.
Martyrs will most likely be compared to the Hostel films, and those other French fancies: Switchblade Romance, Frontiers and Inside, but for all the wrong reasons. Yes, there’s a secret society that abducts, tortures and ultimately murders innocents, but the elderly patrons of this particular group have very specific reasons for targeting women only; and it’s via this shared and secret obsession that Martyrs transforms into a brutal quest for knowledge that, in the view of this particular sect, or cult, can only be gained through disciplined abuse and torture. The inference is that there is a close network of members and locations dotted throughout France, each with their own subjects, each subject being forced to go through the same unspeakable regime, towards the same end.
Martyrs delivers true hopelessness as Anna is subjected to an unrelenting programme of suffering. This fifteen minute sequence is astonishing and painful to watch. I just wanted it to end, and quickly, but for Anna, it lasts months and only leads to other levels of preparation for what she must face. This sequence is not meant to be enjoyed, on any level.
The sect’s quasi-religious thirst for the unknowable ultimately saves Martyrs from falling victim to its own gory excesses, which in the first two-thirds of the film are considerable, and on a par with the bloody events seen in the aforementioned films. But Martyrs isn’t a torture-porn film in the Hostel sense of the term, far from it. Those films, and Hostel especially, are about killing for the sake of killing. Martyrs has a reason for every piece of its protagonists’ pain.
You may love it or absolutely hate it; and almost without exception, Martyrs has divided the opinions of critics and genre fans. It’s not a film that you can or should enjoy on certain levels, but it is there to be experienced. Immediately upon leaving the cinema I sat not knowing what to write as I couldn’t get the taste of that prolonged scene out of my mouth, out of my head, it affected me that much, and I had to delay writing the review for a couple of days in order to gain a considered, rather than reactionary, perspective.
So, several months after viewing the film my opinion has not changed, but other scenes have come to the fore as I’ve thought about it: the violent haunting of Lucie brings to mind the desperate struggles for survival in The Descent, but played out in her irretrievably damaged mind; the unquestioning, uncompromising and ultimately brutal friendship that Anna and Lucie share is at once touching and bewildering; the oft-criticised raison d’etre behind the cult can make or break the film for the viewer; it made it for me.
And now, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m ready to watch it again, this time as a fan of horror cinema, this time for a purely horrific, white-knuckled experience.
Pascal Laugier should be commended for giving us a film that is well-written, stylish and technically brilliant, thought-provoking and stomach-churning. Martyrs will become a genre classic, but as with The Last House on the Left, it’ll be a long, hard and unforgiving road to transcendence.
Laugier’s now at the helm of the remake/re-imagining of Hellraiser, and, well, that seems like a good fit indeed.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[Mathew's book reviews can also be found at Bookgeeks]
April 12th, 2009
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