While Garton and Lansdale bring lighthearted EC-style chills to their Halloween tales, Stewart O’Nan takes it to a deeper and darker place in his coming-of-age tale, Monsters. O’Nan gives us some meat to chew on in this short tale—the lost of innocence, the power of guilt, the purpose and function of religion and prayer, and… Continue reading Monsters: A Halloween Short Story by Stewart O’Nan
Will Castleton is US Marshall with psychic abilities, and David Bain is the community college English professor who created him. Both seem like interesting characters; Castleton with his sometimes-too-late “visions” of crime victims, and Bain with his ability to carve out a niche for himself in the self-pubbed crime fiction genre. Island Ghosts is a… Continue reading Island Ghosts: A Will Castleton Adventure by David Bain
Like Joe Lansdale’s A Little Halloween Talk, Ray Garton’s Invitation Only is a fun little screamer that feels like a racier version of an EC comics tale. A creepy cemetery on Halloween night, murderous drug pushers, the walking dead, and …an orgy! Ray Garton knows how to throw a Halloween party!
‘Tis the season for Halloween tales, and Cemetery Dance Publications has got you covered with its 13 Days of Halloween: Halloween singles collection. CD will release a different $.99 short story each day until Halloween. Joe Lansdale’s A Little Halloween Talk is a short tale told in the first person, present tense. Lansdale’s prose goes down as… Continue reading A Little Halloween Talk by Joe Lansdale
Brian Keene fans have seen these characters and situations before—a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of a monstrous supernatural presence. Those elements, combined with Keene’s patented action-packed pacing, and B horror movie thrills, blend pleasantly in Scratch. This is a brief but engaging novella, similar in style and theme to Keene’s The Conqueror… Continue reading Scratch by Brian Keene
I love Edward Lee’s work. His extreme horror fiction is a little “wet” for some readers, but when Lee gets too “dry” and academic that’s when the trouble starts. Unfortunately the first tale in The Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality, “The Goddess of the New Dark Age ,” falls into Lee’s bone dry category.… Continue reading The Quest For Sex, Truth & Reality by Edward Lee
I’m always the last one at the party when it comes to hot trends. I don’t jump on the bandwagon—I follow well worn ruts down a deserted highway. So when I found a battered copy of Stieg Larrson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on vacation this summer, I decided to see what all the… Continue reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson
Throttle is two master storytellers (King 2 and King 1) cutting loose and going balls-out, the way the father and son motorcycle team do in the story. Available as a Kindle single for $.99, Throttle is inspired by Richard Matheson’s classic screenplay, “Duel,” but its style owes a lot to Elmore Leonard’s fast-paced westerns. The… Continue reading Throttle by Joe Hill & Stephen King