needs more demons?

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Entries Tagged as 'horror'

Stephen M. Irwin: The Dead Path

08 Jan 2012 · No Comments

I can’t say The Dead Path didn’t get its hooks into me: I finished the final hundred pages at a single sitting, anxious for one of its characters, in particular, to escape the morass. There are some clever aspects to how it works an old religion into a modern tale; Irwin’ prose is reliably serviceable [...]

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Tags: d-title · fantasy · horror · i-author

Lou Beach: 420 Characters

12 Dec 2011 · No Comments

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions.
The first thing I noticed [...]

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Tags: #-title · b-author · fantasy · historical · horror · mystery · romance · satire · science fiction · short stories · suspense · thriller · young adult

George Mann: The Immorality Engine

28 Nov 2011 · No Comments

I read The Immorality Engine even though I didn’t think much of the first two novels in Mann’s “Newbury and Hobbes Investigations” series, of which this is the third. Somewhat to my surprise, I liked it better than the other two.
I still found the prose a bit repetitive and the plot low on surprises, but [...]

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Tags: fantasy · historical · horror · i-title · m-author · mystery · science fiction

Stephen Gallagher: Plots and Misadventures

08 Apr 2011 · No Comments

The twelve stories comprising Plots and Misadventures span nearly twenty years of Gallagher’s career and encompass horror, dark fantasy, noirish suspense, and dark science fiction. The newer material generally stuck me as among the strongest, a circumstance I’m always happy to report. The collection opens audaciously: the story “Little Dead Girl Singing,” which certainly sounds [...]

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Tags: fantasy · g-author · horror · p-title · science fiction · short stories · suspense

Conrad Williams: Use Once, Then Destroy

27 Mar 2011 · No Comments

Williams brings a number of good, and often slightly contradictory, tricks to bear in this collection of 17 stories spanning a dozen years of his career:

His prose juxtaposes lyrical, even pastoral imagery with the ugliness of urban decay. The book is full of description like, “There was a moon low in the sky, like an [...]

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Tags: fantasy · horror · short stories · u-title · w-author

Joe Hill: Horns

17 Nov 2010 · No Comments

I started reading Horns with one of those ebook free sample chapters. Hill hooked me with his first four sentences:
Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He [...]

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Tags: fantasy · h-author · h-title · horror

Beard, Donihe, Duza, et al: The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange)

15 Nov 2010 · No Comments

I hoped The Bizarro Starter Kit would help me figure out if I’d like bizarro fiction, a genre self-defined by a loose collective of writers with a shared love of cult/trash cinema. It didn’t. The Bizarro Starter Kit makes the case that there’s too much going on for me to dismiss it, and too much [...]

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Tags: b-author · b-title · d-author · fantasy · horror · j-author · l-author · m-author · r-author · s-author · satire · science fiction · t-author

Carrie Ryan: The Dead-Tossed Waves

11 Apr 2010 · No Comments

The Dead-Tossed Waves shares some characters and a post-zombie-apocalypse setting with The Forest of Hands and Teeth, but it’s set a generation later.
Ryan’s zombies — which come in both the old-school slow shambling and the newer fast-moving varieties — are certainly horrific, but Ryan treats them almost as an elemental force. The antagonists in the [...]

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Tags: d-title · horror · r-author · young adult

John Harwood: The Seance

26 Jan 2010 · No Comments

I liked Harwood’s previous novel The Ghost Writer very much. The Séance shares several of The Ghost Writer’s hallmarks: reserved, chilly, almost 19th-century flavored prose*; dark, complex and secret-spiked family histories; an elaborate, almost meta-textual, structure with multiple layers of nested stories; a brooding, slow-growing aura of menace; and lingering questions about which — if [...]

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Tags: h-author · historical · horror · s-title · suspense

David Wong: John Dies at the End

18 Nov 2009 · No Comments

If you take its core plot at face-value, John Dies at the End is at least superficially a xenophobic horror story in the Cthulhu mythos mode. Wong gives his Big Nasties different names from Cthulhu and his crowd, but he specifically borrows a key concept from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” — if you do something special [...]

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Tags: horror · j-title · p-author · w-author