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
The Grave Raver is our scariest Halloween decoration. After this column was published in October 2010, I received an email from the president of Gemmy Industries Corp. Even though I crapped on his products a bit, he said he “liked my style,” and offered to send me a free inflatable Christmas decoration. Damn my journalistic… Continue reading Dirty Dancing Ghost Makes For a Truly Scary Halloween
You won’t find any vampires, werewolves or other traditional monsters in Hirshberg’s horror fiction. You’ll barely even find horror in The Two Sams. What you will find are five stories laden with human sorrow and a palpable atmosphere of dread. These stories are not so much written as they are crafted. You can practically see… Continue reading The Two Sams by Glen Hirshberg
Brian Keene’s novella Alone reads like a long lost Twilight Zone episode. You can almost hear Rod Serling’s narration; “Submitted for your approval, Mr. Dan Miller, who wakes up one day and finds that everyone he knows and loves–in fact, everyone on earth–has disappeared…” Keene gets this strange tale up and running quickly, and continues… Continue reading Alone by Briane Keene
We’ve all read gritty, NYC crime dramas and police procedurals before, but Joseph M. Monks’ Torn to Pieces, hits harder and cuts deeper than most. The chemistry between Detectives Jack Whelan and Burton Carver is similar to Joe R. Lansdale’s brilliant Hap Collins and Leonard Pine novels; I hope Monks has more Whelan/Carver tales to… Continue reading Torn to Pieces by Joseph M. Monks
