Book Review: F4 by Larissa Glasser

Upon first learning about this book, I saw it described as something along the lines of (and pardon my paraphrasing) “Kaiju trans porn.” And, well, that should give you a good idea of what you’re getting into here. However, let that be just a starting point to the madness that lies within this very brief 142 pages.

Carol is a trans woman who is bartending on a cruise ship that also happens to be a Kaiju, one of a handful that has managed to destroy a good chunk of the world. In fact, there are many trans chicas working upon this sleeping giant, and a few are also involved in some deviant side gigs. Something within the Kaiju causes some of the crew and passengers to transform into inhuman creatures, and really all you need to know for now is that you’re in for some bizarro body horror (though not solely that). Anyone who reads my reviews knows I don’t like to get into the plot too much, but rather some other elements.

Despite of the strangeness that takes up the bookends of this novella, I think the strongest moments are in the middle, when we get to go back in time a bit and find out about Carol’s life before the current events of the story, from being a reluctant “band mother” to a witness in court who also happens to be lambasted by the media. Here we really get to know her character a bit more, and I began to care about the internal turmoil she dwells on throughout the book, usually via sarcastic remarks.

Which brings me to my favorite element of the book: Glasser’s penchant for sarcasm. She’s never afraid to let it fly, and it makes up a large amount of Carol’s personality, which feels true to form considering the pain she feels. Sarcasm is a common deflection method. Seriously, though, the writing is quite humorous at times, and there were several lines that made me laugh out loud. (When describing a pair of eyebrows—“They were really grey and bushy, as if he’d grown them with the pride-maintenance of a ZZ Top beard.”)

F4 is not going to be for everybody, this is certain. And that’s okay. In fact, that’s great. Any art that is created with the intent of pleasing everyone is sure to be trite, forgettable trash. Instead, you get something disgustingly adventurous, unabashedly unique, and wholly fearless. Prudes and TERFs need not apply.

Teaser Art for Hag Comic Series

Here's a little teaser from my debut comic series Hag, coming in early 2019 from American Gothic Press. Illustration by Jon Clark. 
"It's the biggest flood Texas has seen in years...and Carl Simmons is caught in the dead center of it.
Unfortunately, he's not alone."

For the rest of the tease, go here: https://americangothicpress.com/comics/hag/

Book Review: Night's Harbor by W.J. Renehan

Sometimes I forget how enjoyable straight-up old-school horror can be. You know, the stuff I grew up on? When it’s done well, as is the case with W.J. Renehan’s novella Night’s Harbor, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

At first I was a little worried since this is a vampire story, and we certainly don’t need any more romantic fang-whores littering up our literary world. No thank you. Luckily, Renehan has opted for vamps of the vicious variety. I mean, no joke, these bastards are fugly inside and out, and they do some extremely nasty things to some of the characters that even shocked me a little. Yup, Renehan is not afraid to go to some dark, dark places many authors will not explore, which I can appreciate. I mean, this is horror, right? Not a happy-go-lucky skip through Candyland while holding hands with Santa Claus.

The setup to this story is very basic. Vamps taking over a town, slaughtering or turning its denizens one by one, seeking something that could allow them to essentially take over the world, and the town (most notably a former sheriff and an old vampire hunter) must fight to protect humanity, both their own and as a whole. What makes this novel work well and stand out is Renehan’s superior command of prose. Not only is it very tight, but he allows enough flourishes of language to solidifies him as a solid all-around writer.

If I were to complain about anything, it’s that I wish this were a novel rather than a novella, mostly because I would have liked a little more breathing room to further develop some of the minor characters. The main players are developed well, considering the space constraints, but I would have loved a few more chapters with some of the other characters, specifically those who fall victim to the vampires and have some seriously horrible fates. It would have made the already strong impact even stronger.

All in all, I was impressed and look forward to reading more of Renehan’s work, especially when I get the hankering for a primo modern take on classic horror.

Book Review: The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

I know it’s a total cliché to say you just can’t put a book down, but screw it. Tremblay’s latest novel is the epitome of such a claim. Problem is, I was reading it during breaks at work, so I HAD to put it down. Gah!

I’ve been a huge fan of Tremblay since A Head Full of Ghosts (easily one of my favorite horror novels of the last ten years or so), and have been meaning to get to his back catalogue eventually, despite it not being of the same genre (I’m of the belief that authors this good generally excel at whatever genre they attempt to tackle. See Joe R. Lansdale for another example of incredible writing trumping genre). But in the meantime I’ve been moving forward. Despite it being a very different beast from AHFOG, I loved Disappearance at Devil’s Rock quite a bit, so I was rip-roaring ready for some more Tremblay to consume. Gimme gimme gimme.

I wasn’t ready for The Cabin at the End of the World.

Holy macanoli.

Allow me to give you just a quick setup, a taste if you will. A gay couple (Andrew and Eric) and their adopted Chinese daughter Wen set off to a cabin in northern New Hampshire to enjoy some alone time. Since this alone would not make for a very interesting book, naturally something has to foil their plans. And that something comes in the form of Leonard, Sabrina, Redmond, and Adriane, a group of intruders who show up feigning friendship but harboring something much darker. All signs point to cult, but something’s off. You see, these four individuals (who allegedly have never met before that morning) have all foreseen the impending apocalypse, and the only way to stop it is from coming (and it’s coming, like, really goddamned soon!) is for the happy family to choose to do something unspeakable. To share anything more would be spoiling, so I’ll leave it at that.

Tremblay employs a breakneck pacing I’ve not seen in his previous efforts, only taking a few brief breaths for reflective flashbacks, and it works well for this book. I was sufficiently stressed from the moment things turned bad until they grew much, much worse. And if you’re familiar with Tremblay’s love of ambiguity (which I also love, love, love), The Cabin at the End of the World is no different in the sense that you may think you have a handle on what happens by the time you hit the last page, but you can’t really be sure. One thing you can be sure of: this is a dark, dark book.

As is to be expected, the prose shines in a way that perfectly sates my appetite for language. To manage this while maintaining such manic energy throughout is no small feat. A brutal story, beautifully worded. As long as Tremblay keeps pumping out novels of this quality, I’ll keep shelling out my hard-earned dough.

P.S. Paul, you need to promise to come back to San Diego one day. I regret to inform you that, though you managed to personalize my book and leave a message, you never technically signed it! Haha!

Deleted Scenes from Secrets of the Weird

In honor of the one-year anniversary of the release of Secrets of the Weird, I thought it might be fun to post a couple of brief deleted scenes from the book. Enjoy...

Deleted Scene #1:

This would have taken place right at the beginning of Chapter Fourteen, just before Civilized Cannibals played their show at Club Club. In this brief exchange between Mace Akers and Steve London, there's some fun dialogue and setting description, but ultimately it was just slowing down the chapter as a whole, so away it went.

     Steve London inched his way toward Club Club’s infamously grotesque restroom. He looked like an animated skeleton doing the graveyard boogie. Frail old stickers and flyers on the Wheat Paste Wall attempted to escape from their positions. The pathway leading from the main hall of the club to the restroom was stickier than a rug weaved with freshly chewed gum. A few thoughtful and inspirational graffiti statements tattooed the restroom’s outer door:

FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL 1-800-YOUR-MOM

VIV & THE VACCUUMS SUCK

LIBERACE IS GAY

JOANIE BLEW CHACHI CHARLES TOSSED BUDDY’S SALAD

      A strident flush roared behind the door, as if the whole city was about to be sucked into the Earth’s toilet. Moments later, Mace Akers burst through the door like a firefighter on the way to save a kitten. He lifted each arm and sniffed at his pits, confirmed they were acceptable for public interaction. A devious grin was smeared across his cinderblock face.

     “Is it safe to go in there?” Steve asked. Worry haunted his eyes.

     “Well,” Mace said, “it’s not my finest work, but I think you’ll still be impressed.”

     Steve froze, weighing out his options. He puffed on the remains of a clove cigarette as if it were providing him with oxygen. His pupils bounced around inside his eye sockets.

     “I used the last of the TP, too,” Mace said, already halfway across the club before Steve had a chance to make up his mind.

     “I think I can hold it just a little longer.”

Deleted Scene #2:

A very tiny cut from the fanzine interview with Civilized Cannibals. There's some funny stuff here, but I also realized Mace and Steve had already given Christopher a lot of grief about his previous relationship with Cypress, so it would have been a little redundant.

S.S.: What’s this I hear about one of you guys dating some chick from the Sweetville Hitlerjugend? Is that true?

M: Well, all I’m saying is that it wasn’t me. Not saying that I wouldn’t partake, just that I didn’t.

S: Not it.

M: Posi swazi.

C: Shut up. Okay...shit. That’s done and done, all right?

M: Sure it is.

C: Come on...can’t a guy make one stupid mistake in his life? Let’s just get this clear: I don’t agree in any shape or form with her politics. Never did and never will. I thought she had a couple of good qualities—

M: I bet I know just what those two wonderful qualities are. Tune in Tokyo!

C: Shut it. Basically, I was hoping she’d grow out of it. Didn’t happen. The past is just that. Let’s move on.

Short Story Coming Soon in a New Anthology

My short story "The Fabulous and Tormented Life of a Serial Extra" will be released this August in an awesome anthology from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. You can pre-order the book here:

http://perpetualpublishing.com/product/lost-films/

Living Writers Series Reading at SDSU

I'm very excited to announce I've been invited to appear as part of the SDSU Living Writers series this semester. I'll be reading from Secrets of the Weird, and there will be copies of the book available for sale, as well as copies of the limited Civilized Cannibals tape (starting to run low on these tapes, and when they're gone they're gone). 

As a bonus, this event falls on the evening of my birthday! All the info is in the flyer. Come check it out if you can.

Book Review: Lovebites & Razorlines by J. Daniel Stone

On some level, I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit in J. Daniel Stone. I’d previously only read his (awesome) story in I Can Taste the Blood, which offered hints of Barker without resorting to pastiche, and now I’m finally getting around to reading more of his work. Thankfully, Stone is no one-hit wonder.

At the risk of making this seem like the All About Me Show, allow me to begin this review by touching on why I relate to Stone’s approach to dark fiction before I dive in and speak a little more specifically about his work. We clearly have at least a few of the same literary influences (especially the aforementioned Barker, as well as Poppy Z. Brite), and we both cannot resist incorporating the music we love into the fiction we give birth to. However, we use these influences in such distinct and different ways that the similarities are only enough to make a personal connection (which is cool in my book).

Oh, and get this—Stone has a character named Dorian Wilde. I have a character named Dorian Wylde. Methinks we are officially two sides of the same subversive coin. Either that or we share a very unhealthy brain.

Stone’s short stories reek of the streets of New York (though not always) as well as what goes on beneath those streets and in the cracks between, and they frequently (again, not always) delve into queer themes and/or use queer characters. And these characters, whether they are gay, straight, or somewhere in the void, are more or less all outsiders. The sorts of people who are attracted to the underground not because they are “cool” or attempting to be, but because they have no choice but to be there. They simply don’t belong anywhere else. The true misfits and freaks of the universe. Many of the stories in this collection reuse characters from his novels Blood Kiss and The Absence of Light and are intended to be companion stories to those books. I can’t help but feel that, though all of these particular stories were well written and interesting, they would have resonated with me a bit more had I been familiar with the novels. That said, one of my favorite stories in the book fell into the appendage story category (“The Tunnel Record”). Really awesome stuff that is essentially Stone’s personal stamp on C.H.U.D.s. I mean, really, how much more New York can you get than that?

The title story is definitely one of the standouts, a somewhat disgusting tale about a disturbed young man with a Frankenstein complex whose idea to make his own undead patchwork monster does not go quite as planned. My favorite, however, would probably be the closing story, “Ecdysis,” which involves a transformation that goes far beyond the limits of mere gender. But I feel the favorites might become fluid over time. This is the type of collection that if you like one story, chances are you’ll dig the rest. They maintain a fairly consistent tone, with a lyrical command of language that rarely wavers. Often sad, frequently strange, always so, so dark.