Tag Archives: genre: horror/terror

The Gunslinger

fiction July 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Two of my friends and my mother have read ‘The Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King and loved it, and since I needed a break between ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ books, I started The Gunslinger, the first book of the series.

Now, I was in a beach house for four days about two weeks ago, and I have to say I blew through The Gunslinger in record time. Even for me. I don’t know how I got through it so fast, although it’s not very long.

The one thing everyone did tell me about The Gunslinger is that I should be patient. It doesn’t make a ton of sense in the beginning. There are more questions than answers, but what is made very clear is that there is one guy, the Gunslinger, chasing another guy, the Man in Black, who seems always to be one step ahead.

We get some of the Gunslinger’s history, as well as some of the history between him and The Man in Black. I found the whole thing very compelling, particularly his relationship Jake (and how he ultimately betrays Jake to catch the Man in Black).

You begin to realize that the Gunslinger is in a universe other than our own. It’s similar, but not exactly the same, and that there are other universes out there that can be traveled between (and dying in one doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve died in all of them).

How to travel between said universes isn’t made clear, but that’s part of why the Gunslinger is chasing the Man in Black and has something to do with The Dark Tower, which seems to be the point at which all the universes are connected.

Right now, the genre of the series seems unclear. It seems a dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror series, and I can’t wait to see how the series continues. Since King considers ‘The Dark Tower’ series his magnum opus, I expect big things.

So far, beyond this book, I’ve read It and some short stories by King, and my mom says a lot of his books borrow from this series. I don’t consider King an incredible writer, per se. His writing is average in terms of expression and beauty of prose; however, he’s a hell of a storyteller. I got sucked into The Gunslinger within the first few pages and read the whole thing in three days. I would have finished It much faster, but that book involved my two biggest fears – spiders and clowns – so I had to keep putting it down and kept having nightmares about a clown with pointed teeth that was out to kill me.

I’ve bought the next book, called The Drawing of the Three, which is supposedly more like a regular book than like reading a comic book, at least according to my friend.

But The Drawing of the Three will have to wait, at least until I’m done with one of the two books I started. I’m currently in the middle of both A Storm of Swords (the next book in the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) and Blue Magic, the sequel to Indigo Springs, by A.M. Dellamonica.

The Newsflesh Trilogy

fiction April 29, 2013 1 Comment

I read the ‘Newsflesh’ trilogy by Mira Grant (a pen name for Seanan McGuire) on the recommendation of a friend. The three books are Feed, Deadline, and Blackout.

The basic premise of the series is that the human race has cured cancer and the common cold, but in doing so, accidentally created a virus – called Kellis-Amberlee – that turns people who die into flesh eating zombies. 15 years after ‘The Rising,’ the name of the era when the zombies first appeared and nearly wiped out the human race, Georgia and Shaun Mason run a news website and are selected to cover the United States presidential campaign of Senator Peter Ryman.

I liked this trilogy. A lot. It’s sci-fi and horror and a political thriller all wrapped into one delicious ball of page-turning goodness. But the author lost me a bit towards the last 150 pages of the third book. I’ll get to it. Hold on.

This post contains some spoilers – nothing too major, but spoilers none-the-less, so consider this your heads up!

Feed, the first book, was by far the best book in the series, although the latter two weren’t bad. Feed was narrated by Georgia, who is much more interesting and insightful than her twin brother, Shaun, who narrates the second and part of the third.

The larger mystery about the Kellis-Amberlee virus is captivating. The virus itself is captivating. McGuire really knows her stuff about pathology and sociology and history. The world building in this series is also incredible. I liked all the imagined tech and dystopia, and the continual shooting of zombies was also fun.

I liked the way McGuire used blog entries (written by the characters) to expose the characters innermost thoughts, particularly of the characters we didn’t get inside the heads of…so anyone who wasn’t Georgia and Shaun.

And I loved the way McGuire used Georgia to critique the current day news media. Georgia herself is a character to love: she is tough – rough around the edges – smart, and obsessed with the truth. In fact, it is Georgia who has given me a real motto to live by, especially when I write:

“Tell the truth as you see it and let everyone else decide if they believe it or not.”

…or at least that’s the gist of it. I can’t find the bloody quote now that I’m actually looking for it.

Anyway, I enjoyed just about everything about this series except for a few things: the end of the story happened too abruptly. Blackout was like, 600 pages, and the wrap up was maybe 10? Not what I wanted.

Second, and this is where the story kind of lost me: the relationship between Georgia and Shaun was too convenient. It gave Georgia something that had never been published, yes, but this relationship had been going on for how long? Nearly ten years? So this relationship had been going on as long as they said, and we’ve been inside their heads for 1000+ pages, and they’ve never acknowledged this relationship? Not even in their own thoughts? Come on.

Plus, even though they’re only adopted twins and not actually related, I found this more incestuous than I like to get in my stories. I really hate incest as a plot point.

Finally, the last 150 pages or so of Blackout feature a bizarre scene at the home of a male computer genius who seems to keep emotionally damaged girls to do his bidding. He’s clearly emotionally abusive and manipulative, and the girls he’s got with him are both clearly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, but the whole series of events at the house is confusing. I had to read the episode three times and I’m still not sure I fully understand what happened.

The editor really could have cut this “mad scientist’s mad apprentices gone extra mad” scene and nobody would have been sorrier for it. It felt like a very contrived way to get the good guys into a confrontation with the bad guys.

Anyway, yes, the last 150 or so pages of Blackout were not up to par with the rest of the series, but the series itself was still good.  I think the last dystopian future alternate universe novel I read was Mockingjay (the conclusion of ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy) by Suzanne Collins, and that book paled in comparison to Blackout. Plus, Georgia Mason’s character at the end of Blackout was much better than what Katniss had become by the end of Mockingjay.

Overall, I highly recommend the Newsflesh trilogy. It’s smarter than a lot of books featuring supernatural creatures, but the beauty of it is that it’s so much more than a zombie book. Most zombie books are 200 pages tops, but this is a thriller trilogy that goes on for 1000+ pages. The science is obviously pseudo-science, but it’s very convincing pseudo-science, and there is clearly a lot of background research that has gone into this story. It’s not just virus pathology science either, there’s tech research in there, research about government agencies and how they operate, etc…

It all becomes a very well built alternate universe that features all the action you’d expect in the post zombie apocalypse, but what makes it a page turner is the mystery and political intrigue. It’s also the sheer drive of Georgia Mason and her tireless quest for the truth that really makes this series so worthwhile.

She’s really the great triumph of the trilogy because she reveals the human condition: at the end of the day, the truth really does set us free.

The Haunting of Hill House

fiction January 23, 2012 Comments: 2

Shirley Jackson’s thriller is one of the scarier books I’ve ever read. I read it back in October, as a Halloween “I should read something scary” book.

Originally, I was leaning towards something Stephen King, or rereading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (which scared me like no other book ever), but I wanted to read something new. My mom had recommended this one to me ages ago, and I happened to find it in our library.

 I was hooked after one paragraph.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I also like the book’s tagline (as stated on Amazon):

The four visitors at Hill House– some there for knowledge, others for adventure– are unaware that the old mansion will soon choose one of them to make its own.

This one was so good that I’m going to my absolute best not to spoil it.

The Haunting of Hill House tells the story of a woman named Eleanor, who is living a very claustrophobic  life. She answers the ad of a Dr. Montague, who studying paranormal phenomena and is looking for companions/test subjects to stay in the haunted “Hill House” with him. Those who end up in the house are Dr. Montague, Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke (the nephew of the house’s owner, who doesn’t live in or near the house).

Nobody in the village where Hill House is located will go near the house, except for the caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley, who make sure to clear out well before dark.

Almost immediately, the group starts experiencing supernatural happenings within the house, which intensify and grow over the following few days.

Jackson relies on terror, rather than horror, to elicit reaction from the reader. Terror is fear what you don’t see, and horror is fear of what you do see. There’s lots of terror going on in this book – the main character, Eleanor, rarely actually sees anything going awry in the house.

There is one episode where Eleanor and Theodora are being chased, and Theodora looks back and screams for Eleanor to run, but the book never explains what Theodora saw. In fact, at the end of the book, the reader is left wondering if the house is actually haunted or if everything that actually occurred was in the imaginations of its occupants. Each explanation is reasonable – while Eleanor, Theodora, Dr. Montague, and Luke all experience supernatural phenomena, Mrs. Montague and Arthur (her…butler? Friend? Assistant?) come into the house and don’t experience anything even close to supernatural.

I can’t get hugely into this book without spoiling it, but I really don’t want to spoil it because it was just so good. If you have read it, I recommend reading this bit commentary on it, which provides some good insight. There are spoilers.

The best part about this book is that it leaves you with more questions than answers. Was the haunting of Hill House real, or was it all inside the occupants’ heads?

Of all the books I’ve read/reviewed/not reviewed on this blog, this is the one I’d recommend most highly. It’s pretty short, guys, seriously, read it.

Harvest Home

fiction June 22, 2011 Leave a comment

I bought this book by Thomas Tryon at around the same time I bought his another of his books, called The Other. While the other book was more suspense, this one was horror. Flat out, gory horror.

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This book doesn’t even have details on Amazon. It was originally published in 1973 and I think is out of print. I got it on half.com.

…spoilers ahead.

I skimmed this book, because I had read the synopsis on Wikipedia before deciding to buy it, but I have to say, this is far and away one of the scarier books I’ve read. It reminded me of a season one episode of Supernatural, called ‘Scarecrow’ which scared the crap out of me. In that episode, the residents of of a rural town are sacrificing one unfortunate man and woman that come through town to some pagan spirit for a good crop every year. The episode scared the crap out of me when I first saw it. I was about 17 or 18 when the episode first aired.

Some things never stop scaring you.

In this book, a man from New York City brings his wife and daughter to the little New England town of Cornwall Coombe. At first, Ned thinks they’re living the ideal “small town” life. People in the town are very “set in their ways” and their customs, and the family thinks they’re weird, but overlooks the weirdness in the effort to fit in and enjoy their lives and make friends.

Well, odd things start happening. At first Ned doesn’t think much of them, but as things get weirder and weirder, he begins to realize something is going on, and a lot of it has to do with a woman who was buried on unconsecrated ground.

While the town practices some form of Christianity openly, it turns out there all these pagan rituals the women of the town conduct in order to ensure a good harvest. Anyone who speaks out against the ritual is maimed or killed, as well as men who witness the major ritual, where the corn maiden and the harvest lord have sex and then when they’re done the corn maiden slashes the harvest lord’s throat.  Yeah, it’s lovely.

The original corn maiden chosen commits suicide so she won’t have to slash the harvest lord’s throat, who is her new husband. Ned is determined to solve the mysteries in the town, goes out to see the ritual, but gets caught. They let him watch. It turns out his wife is now corn maiden, and she has sex with the guy, and then kills him.

As the book ends, Ned realizes that the people in Cornwall Coombe only allowed his family to move in to gain the new blood of his wife (who is now pregnant – it was one of their “settled” marital problems that Ned was shooting blanks and they couldn’t have more kids) and his daughter, whose relationship with one of the prominent local boys leads to speculation she’ll be the next corn maiden. Ned has been blinded by the women, and his tongue had been cut out.

Still scares me. The book was a little slow to start, but you have the sense from the beginning that something is off, even though Ned is completely blind to it. Once it got going though, it was great. Like an old horror movie in book form. Unlike Tryon’s other book, The Other, I didn’t guess the ending. I had a sneaky suspicion about the pagan rituals, but I’d had faith that the family would somehow get out of the situation in one piece. I suppose they kind of do, but it just leaves you feeling eerie. This is the kind of book that should be adapted into a film.

Like I said, I enjoyed the mystery here. I didn’t guess the end but I did have the feeling that something was wrong the whole time, even when nothing seemed wrong, which I really enjoyed.

Tryon’s writing style can sometimes be overbearingly descriptive, which I found true in both The Other and Harvest Home. While I do love rich prose, some times you don’t have to describe every detail of the rundown house. The story more than makes up for this though. It’s one gory surprise after the next, and I really enjoyed it.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes a nice terror & horror/suspense mystery. It was published in the 1970s and is a bit dated, but that somehow adds to the atmosphere of the book. No computers, no cell phones, it just makes the fictional town that much more isolated from the outside world, and that much more scary. The “no one can hear you scream” scary.