But the aspects that annoyed me outweighed those that intrigued me. Even as worry for a character quickened my pulse, I felt manipulated by the specifics of the threat. The main protagonist, Nicholas Close, repeatedly makes choices of such tooth-gnashing stupidity that it was difficult to maintain sympathy for him. The reader learns early on that Close sees ghosts. People-who-see-the-dead is such a well-explored device that there are “I see dead pixels” t-shirts parodying it; Irwin approaches it with a heavy-handed thoroughness, as if it were so fresh that it demanded a great deal of exposition.

The recurring motif of large quantities of large spiders at first just seemed lazy — an automatic gross-out for many people, with no subtlety — but eventually I got desensitized to it. Meanwhile, the repeated juxtaposition of arachnoid imagery with aged female sexuality suggests that they’re intended to be viewed as parallel scopes of horror, which I find unpleasantly close to misogyny.

needs more demons? well, not literally

The first thing I noticed was the vividness of the prose. In the service of these stories Beach deploys striking metaphors and similes, crisp and believable dialogue, and rich and evocative adjectives and verbs. It frankly astounds me that this is his first published fiction.

WIthin the first few pages I was also struck by the formidable range of Beach’s stories. They’re all over the map, both literally, and in terms of tone, setting, even genre and theme.

It’s also impressive how complete many of the stories are. Some not only establish character, setting, mood, but also establish a narrative conflict or even suggest its resolution. A few beg for continuation, to be seen as an excerpt from a longer work — and at least a couple of them are explicitly connected — but most of them don’t. They’re self-contained little nuggets. One of them is almost like a distillation of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle into, well, 420 characters.

I’m tempted to include a handful here, but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop. I almost want to retype the whole book, which would clearly exceed the boundary of fair use. And there’s a generous sampling at 420characters.com; if it’s not quite the set I would have curated, I think it’s fairly representative.

Lest I seem too gushy — I do think it’s far easier to make a great string of 420 characters than to make great strings of 420 characters that tie into a cohesive whole the size of a book, or even the size of a more typical short story. Last paragraphs are much harder to write than first paragraphs, and most of these stories are more like beginnings than like endings. Beach hasn’t proven to me that he can sustain the level of creativity he displays here throughout a work that’s judged by more conventional standards, less dependent on elision. But I really, really, want to see him try.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

needs more demons? perhaps, but not as many as before.

(I owe Joe Hill’s short story “Best New Horror” for obliquely introducing me to Gallagher by mentioning him in the same sentence as Kelly Link.)

needs more demons? no.

• 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 albino’s eyelash. What light there was came from the stars, or the ineffectual blocks of orange in the pub windows,” and “A layer of slate-colored cloud had slide across the sky. Only the thinnest edge of light trembled above the staggered horizon, like hope receding.”
• Sometimes he approaches the apotheosis of horror with subtlety and occlusion, in phrases that left me sure something grotesque and horrible had happened but not always sure exactly what.
• Then again, sometimes he opts for stomach-wrenching clarity or the well-worn use of metaphor and simile to project characters’ unease onto innocuous settings, like, “the exposed bones of more demolished houses on our dwindling street.”
• Williams’s sense of place is often extraordinary. The protagonist’s search for a mysterious London street in “Nest of Salt” left me feeling almost as if I’d traipsed some of the same blocks. (On the other hand, I found the Venice travelogue of “City in Aspic,” less convincing, as if Williams were laying out his tale with a city map at his side.)
• Williams’ characters, with few exceptions, are either unhappily alone or on the cusp of realizing they’d be less unhappy if they were alone. He’s eerily good at portraying guttering relationships:
  

  Crumbling farmhouses; fields freshly opened by the tractors, the soil dark and dense, brown as wet leather; long gray roads. They turned on to one now, flanked by elm trees, an object lesson in perspective.
  “Now there’s pretty for you, Molly said.
  “There are moves to pull trees like that down,” Ian said, and then mentally kicked himself for once again putting a downer on things. Why couldn’t he just agree occasionally? It was what she wanted to hear.

  (supernatural elements enter only at the end of several of these stories — if at all — as tensions between the characters reach a climax, which heightens my overall impression that Williams is very consciously using literal, physical horror as an externalization of his characters’ internal, emotional horror.

• Scattered through the volume are a handful of supernatural entities or tropes that one might name, or have encountered previously. “You could arguably describe that one as a ‘ghost story,’” one might say, or “the twist of that one was a bit like a certain Twilight Zone episode.” And there’s at least one bona fide “serial killer” within these pages. But even the relatively comfortable, recognizable sources of horror are transmuted in Williams hands. Overall, this is one of the most original and surprising works of dark fantasy I’ve read in some time.

Despite its many strong qualities, I found this a difficult book to finish. Partly it’s the familiar problem of the single-author short story collection: it perhaps over-emphasizes the extent to which an author revisits certain themes or uses certain literary devices.

But the problem here is substantially mine: I prefer my horror to have more likable characters and/or a little more potential for redemption. Not every story in this collection is relentlessly grim, but many are, and I found the cumulative effect oppressive.

For what it’s worth: Williams seems so quintessentially British that I found the (US-based) publisher’s use of American spellings for words like “color” almost distracting.

needs more demons I may have to go with “needs fewer demons” for once.

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 was so ill — wet-eyed and weak –that he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.
But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept.

I love this setup — how it establishes the narrative perspective is at least somewhat unreliable — Ig only clearly recalls those “terrible things” as the novel approaches its dénouement — without making it clear exactly how unreliable it is. And I love how the story unfolds. Ig soon discovers that other people react oddly to his horns as well. The reader soon discovers a lot of backstory — like that a year ago Ig’s girlfriend dumped him, then turned up dead after he spent the night in a blackout drunk.

I didn’t think it was perfect — there are multiple plot revelations in the “now you have to re-evaluate what you thought you knew” category; and I had a credibility gap with at least one: I can kinda maybe almost sorta see how that course of action would’ve made sense to that character in that situation? Well, no, not really. I’m also a little iffy on the shifts of tone. Horns is unsettling throughout, but mostly I’d classify it as “dark fantasy” more than “horror.” A few notably grisly sequences are thematically appropriate and clearly required by the plot, but I might have preferred to have them described with a touch more subtlety.

But these are really minor quibbles. Mostly I thought this was terrific — strong characters, vivid and flavorful prose, and startling and fresh takes on some classic horror/fantasy thematic elements.

This novel and the first of Hill’s Locke and Key graphic novels have converted me into a Hill completist.

needs more demons? negatory.

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta

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 story are predominantly human, and despite some gore and emotional trauma, the central horror of both novels is what happens to humanity as a consequence of the zombie plague. Perhaps it’s reading into it too much to suppose that the zombies and the repressive, fear-ruled societies they engender could metaphorically represent terrorists and reduced civil liberties in response to terrorism — but perhaps not.

Despite my general fondness for Ryan’s world-building (or un-building, if you prefer), it took me a while to warm to The Dead-Tossed Waves. Narrator Gabry spends a lot of energy second-guessing her every move. I’m not so old that I can’t remember how, as a teenager, just about everything seemed like a matter of life and death, and of course, a lot of Gabry’s decisions are literally matters of life and death. But I still found some of Gabry’s “I must! But I can’t! But I must!” vacillations a bit wearying, if not melodramatic nearly to the point of parody. That, coupled with a triangular love situation, reminded me not-in-a-good-way of Meyer’s Twilight books. And even after The Dead-Tossed Waves won me over, there was still some heavy-handed life-lesson-larnin’ to plow through. On the whole, I think The Dead-Tossed Waves would be stronger if it were leaner and a bit more subtle.

But I’m glad I stuck with the book, because it does eventually veer in directions it doesn’t initially telegraph. It’s frequently vivid and consistently creepy. And if it revisits some of the territory of the first novel, it does so with a bit of a spin and some interesting twists.

The Dead-Tossed Waves doesn’t — quite — end with a literal cliffhanger, but it does leave a lot of plot elements unresolved. I’d be disappointed if the story skipped another generation before the third act (or screeched to a halt) and my impatience for the next volume might be the best measure of this novel’s success.

needs more demons? Needs just a smidge less of Gabry’s personal demons, actually.

Initially I found The Séance a bit too similar to its predecessor, but it eventually reveals itself to be significantly different. Without wanting to spoil it too much, it pays homage to a different set of earlier works than The Ghost Writer, and it introduces a handful of genuinely surprising notions into the maybe-ghost trope. One particular device seems so appropriate — and so creepy — I can’t believe dozens of other writers haven’t exploited it. Maybe they have, but I’ve never read a work using quite the same trick.

Unfortunately, although the climax proper is appropriately hair-raising, the novel finishes rather weakly, with a hard-to-digest expository lump.

Despite my reservations, I recommend the book unhesitatingly to fans of a good old-fashioned spook show.

* Séance is actually set in the latter part of the Victorian era, and Harwood evokes the milieu far more successfully and convincingly than a great many writers who set fiction in the time period.

needs more demons? no.

In the role of those who stand between us and the crawling horrors of other-dimensional space, Wong casts a pair of potty-mouthed chronic underachievers who could almost have slouched over from the nearest (good) Kevin Smith movie.

Wong has excellent control of narrative tone, and the book is often really funny in a slightly sophomoric way. The protagonist encounters an unusual monster in the prologue, and his response was the first thing in this book that made me chuckle, snort, or laugh outright:

The man-shaped arrangement of meat rose up, as if functioning as one body. It pushed itself up on two arms made of game hens and country bacon, planting two hands with sausage-link fingers on the floor. The phrase “sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist suddenly flew through my mind.”

I also like how Wong makes no bones about his musical taste:

I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit – [an acquaintance's] favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy-metal guitar.

Another of John Dies at the End’s substantial pleasures is that it’s clearly not meant to be taken at face value. The novel is narrated in the first person by David Wong, the pseudonym employed by author Jason Pargin — but even in the context of the novel, “David Wong” is not the character’s “real” name; he adopted “Wong,” simply because it is the world’s most common surname. Likewise the titular “John” is not really named John but is referred to by it because it’s (allegedly) the world’s most common first name. Much of John Dies at the End uses a framing device of David telling his story to a reporter, who wonders, logically enough, how much of what David says is true, and whether David is really a serial killer with an involved paranoid delusional system. David’s narrative reliability is further called into question by David himself — he glibly glosses over inconsistencies in his story with comments like ” I can’t remember exactly how [she] pulled that off.” When David recounts John’s experiences, he is even more explicit about the integrity of the narrative, liberally sprinkling asides like, “according to John, of course” into the story.

The novel’s “what’s real and what’s not” games go both ways: the jacket copy starts out, “Stop. You should not have touched this book with your bare hands. NO, don’t put it down. It’s too late. They’re watching you.” And on Wong’s website JohnDiesAtTheEnd.com, commenters join in by contributing alleged mysterious happenings resulting from exposure to the book.

It all adds up to a very interestingly multi-layered reading experience.

In the mildly minus column for me, the book consistently employs gross-out imagery. (Skimming an early sequence made me decide this was a library book not a purchase book; it seemed a little cheap and easy. If Wong had led with the bratwurst poltergeist I might have made a different call.) This is not a novel for anyone with a serious objection to authors slopping assorted bodily fluids around by the bucketful.

I also thought it flagged a tiny bit in the last quarter. Wong has to make some choices about how much he wants to tie his wild ride into a coherent narrative, and he also has to choose between emotionally satisfying and thematically appropriate outcomes. I don’t think he always picks the option that would make for the strongest possible book. But this is a teensy quibble — it still makes for a very enjoyable book, and I’m delighted to learn that a sequel is likely to materialize at some point, and intrigued by the one-third complete novella on the author’s website. Basically I’m afraid that I’ll stay up half the night reading it, and then really, really, really want to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!?

So, uh, so much for critical distance and reserve.

* as Warren Zevon once sang

needs more demons? not at all.