Book Review: The Rising and City of the Dead by Brian Keene

Before these two novels, I had read Keene's novels Gathering of Crows and Darkness on the Edge of Town. Both were enjoyable and made it obvious that Keen had a thing for mass havoc and the destroying the world. It's no surprise that his first novel was a zombie apocalypse novel. Quick disclaimers: The version of The Rising that I read is the original version from the now-defunct Dorchester Publishing. The version currently imprint from Deadite Press has a lot of extra material. Also, one of Deadite's editors sent me a review copy of City of the Dead. Now that that's out of the way...

The Rising

Jim Thurmond has managed to stave off the zombies that have taken over the Earth and hole himself up in a shelter. What he misses most is his son Danny, who is several states away with his ex-wife. When he gets a call from Danny and realizes he's still alive, he sets off to save his son. Along the way, he meets a preacher struggling to keep the faith, an ex-prostitute and junkie,a guilt-ridden scientist who had a hand in bringing the zombies to life, and a demented military officer.

The Rising is just a fun read. It's not hard to see why it won a Bram Stoker award for first novel. This is the kind first novel that signals the beginning of a long and fruitful career in horror writing.

In addition to being fun to read, Keene has a unique take on zombies. As well as being fast, the zombies are also intelligent enough to speak, use weapons, and organize. It's not just humans that come back as zombies either. Birds, dogs, bats, rats, and cats all come back from the dead as well. To make things worse for the human race, a body doesn't have to be bitten to become a zombie. Any corpse that dies comes back as a zombie. With all of these advantages on the zombies' side, it's very easy to believe they would quickly overwhelm humanity and cause societal collapse.

One of the stronger parts of The Rising is how well he balances the world at large with the lives of the individual characters. Given the unique zombies it would have been easy to get lost in the complexities of them and lose the human element altogether. Keene doesn't do that. There's enough back story to most of the characters to make them feel like more than pawns in the grand scheme of things. From the preacher Martin's attempts to figure out how zombies fit in with his concept of the divine, to Frankie the ex-whore kicking her heroin addiction, and of course Jim's determination to reach his son, The Rising is driven just as much by its characters. This said, one of the biggest flaws of the book (or at least the version I read) is that there are enough characters that they could have stood to be fleshed out a little a more. The sadistic Colonel Schow is almost kind of cartoony in how evil he acts.

The plot is actually fairly simple. In fact, the way Jim and the companions he meets on his journey go about, it feels rather episodic. This isn't a bad thing really. It gives us a chance to see this world of Keene's zombies from different perspectives, and it still manages to culminate in a fun climax. A lot of people were pissed off by the ending (which I won't spoil) when this first came out, but I personally think it was a ballsy move on Keene's part to give us this kind of ending. Either way, there was enough demand for a sequel that he eventually wrote one.

Buy The Rising Here

City of the Dead
(Warning: Spoilers for The Rising ahead)


Built to withstand almost anything, Ramsey Tower in the heart of New York City is humanity's last stronghold against the zombie forces. Ramsey, the corporate executive who owns the tower, is doing everything he can to round up survivors and bring them into the tower. Among one of the several rescued is Jim Thurmond, his son Danny, Danny's neighbor Don, and Frankie. Reunited with this son and his story of traveling across the zombie infested country to save him an inspiration to the other survivors, it seems like we've got our happy Hollywood ending. That is, until the zombies start to become more and more organized and double their efforts on attacking the Tower.

Like The Rising, City of the Dead is a fun page turner. In contrast to the previous book which had Jim and his friends running all over the ravaged countrysides and small towns of the east coast, this book takes place almost entirely in New York City. Specifically in the Ramsey tower. The atmosphere here is incredibly claustrophobic as a result. This doesn't make the book feel any smaller though. Keene gives enough detail to how the rest of the world is falling down to remind us we're in the middle of an apocalypse.

Like with The Rising, Keene introduces so many characters, he doesn't get a chance to properly flesh them all out. Don, the new member of Jim's crew, feels especially generic and like he doesn't get much to do. Also, while the moments between the reunited Jim and Danny are usually touching, there are a few times where it slips into bathos.

None of this detracts from the book too much. City of the Dead manages to continue Keene's zombie apocalypse story without succumbing to simply repeating the first book. In fact, City of the Dead could very well be read on its own.

I would highly recommend both The Rising and City of the Dead to fans of zombies and to fans of horror in general.

Buy City of the Dead here.

Book Review: Apeshit by Carlton Mellick III

Desdemona is the only girl on the cheerleading squad with a mohawk.

How can a novel with that opening line not be worth reading?

As Mellick himself says in the introduction, Apeshit is a love letter to B-grade horror films, especially slashers. The plot of the book self-consciously uses the extremely cliché set up of six teenagers going out to party in the woods. Bad shit happens. This being a Carlton Mellick novel, it's not the kind of bad shit you'd expect. 

It's kind of hard to talk about the plot in detail without going into too many spoilers. Mellick takes all of the tropes of slasher films and turns them on their heads. For one thing, the killer in Apeshit isn't even the one that draws first blood. That honor goes to one of the teenagers attempting suicide. In fact, most of the book is more about the teens dealing with their bizarre problems than with a killer after them. Problems like vagina dentana, abortion fetishism, AIDS, and sexually confused three-ways. 

Stephanie is in the van brushing her teeth. She always brushes her teeth whenever she's nervous. She has brushed her teeth five times today already. White foam is drooling out of her mouth onto her knees her mind is in another place.

Mellick's simple and straightforward prose makes this read almost like a script (appropriate given the main influences) and adds a layer of dead pan humor through the whole affair. As fucked up and gorey as the proceedings get, Apeshit never takes itself too seriously. The result is a great balance of humor, gore, melodrama, and even a little bit of pathos.

Jason's father wasn't afraid of anything. Not a single thing. It was his goal in life to make sure Jason was not afraid of anything, either. Whenever he learned of something Jason was afraid of, he would make him face that fear.

The biggest flaw I see in this is that people going in expecting a plot driven horror story are going to be disappointed. The plot is dead simple with all of the entertainment value coming from the characters and the fucked up shit that happens to them. And that they do. 

Apeshit is just a bloody good read and hard to put down even as gross and over the top as it gets. I'd highly recommend this to fans of horror fiction and to anyone wanting to dive head first into the Bizarro genre. Personally, I'm also looking forward to reading its just released sequel Clusterfuck.

Buy Apeshit here.

Book Review: Son of a Bitch by Andre Duza and Wrath James White

It's October! Time to read some horror books.

First up, let's take a look at a brief but fun collaboration from Deadite Press. (Disclaimer: One of Deadite's editors sent me a review copy of this.)

Andre Duza and Wrath James White have so much common, both in their style (horror that tends towards the extreme and bizarre, often with elements of urban fiction) and in their personal lives (both are family men and have a background in martial arts), that a collaboration between the two seems almost too obvious. It's actually kind of surprising how short and straight-forward the end result turned out.

Demetrius is an underground breeder who breeds attack and fighting dogs. After he finds out one of his dogs is being used in Voodoo sex rituals, his conscience gets the better of him.

As soon as he heard what they were up to, he knew he had to get her back. He’d have never sold them the dog in the first place, no matter how much money they offered, if he’d known they were going to gang rape the damned thing.

When he gets the bitch back, he finds that she's pregnant. Soon, she gives birth to what is clearly not a normal puppy. The fact it tears apart and eats its mother being a pretty clear sign.

“Man, this shit can’t be happening. This mutherfucker can’t be real. I must have smoked some bad shit. Shit like this ain’t supposed to be!” His mind kept screaming at him. Yet there it sat, splashing around in the blood and entrails of its mother, purring and cooing contentedly.  

To make matters even worse, the dog demon ends up eating the heart of a sadistic hitman named Warlock. This causes Warlock's soul to be bound into the demon's body. Demetrius and Warlock set out to find a way to free his soul from the creature's body, but everything seems to go wrong along the way.

Son of a Bitch proves to be a real page turner. It's a sex and violence filled thrill ride with some very funny moments.

“I’m nasty? Yo, have you looked in the mirror lately? Your face looks like a Sloppy Joe.”

“That’s it. I’m killing your ass right now. I don’t care if I have to drive this mutherfucker with my damn paws!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll chill. Damn, don’t be so sensitive.”

Other than that, there's not much to say about it. It's a brief (less than 90 pages) but fun and satisfying read, but given what I had read from both authors before, I expected a little more. I feel like Duza and White could come up with something really brilliant if they did another collaboration and really aimed high. My other complaint with this book is the editing (though this just may be my review copy). While not egregiously bad, there is still a high ratio of errors to the length.

Still, if you want an entertaining book that reads like an urban Dead Alive-esque horror comedy, you should definitely pick up Son of a Bitch.

Buy Son of a Bitch here.   

Book Review: The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, edited by Davis Schneiderman

I really have mixed feelings on this one. Any anthology is inevitably going to be uneven (even if it's just due to subjective taste), especially when the category is as broad as "experimental" writing. So it is with The &Now Awards 2.

Just a couple disclaimers. I haven't read the first &Now Awards and this was sent to me as a review copy (thanks Lori!).

So let's start off with what I didn't like. One was pretty much all of the concrete poems in the book. Some, like Jack Collum's work, were okay. But the rest were just flat out uninteresting to me. Most of the ones in this book especially are more about art made from letters than poems with unusual typography. None even really worth a second glance.

Then there are the pieces in the work that were frankly just boring. For example, Joe Atkin's "BOXXY FOAR 4DD1@!!!!1!!" is nothing more than a transcript of a vlog by the internet celebrity Boxxy. The reasons behind the piece don't make it any better. Yes, I think we were all aware that Boxxy's appeal came from the fact that she was cute and energetic than from having anything of substance to say. We didn't need this pointless experiment to show how vapid internet culture can be.

Another is example is Gretchen E. Henderson's "Prelude from On Marvellous Things Heard". I can't really name anything immediately "wrong" with it. It just does nothing for me.

Henderson's piece also falls into the categories of pieces I simply didn't "get". Pieces like that one, the contribution of a group of writers called the Black Took Collective, and works based on math and computer programming like Nick Montfort's Letterformed Terrain? Just over my head. Were I less charitable reader, I'd be inclined to label them as academic masturbation.

Okay, I've bashed this book enough. Time to talk about the stuff I liked.

My favorite pieces in this book were Brian Evenson's two contributions. "Windeye" is a short but straight forward horror tale about two children discovering a mysterious window on the outside of their house that doesn't seem to be anywhere inside. "A History of the Human Voice" is a humorous story in which a scientist discovers the connection between the human voice and bees.

Indeed, as recently as the 1860s, certain elite circles on the continent are said to have augmented their speech with bees. 

Another favorite of mine was Roxane Gay's "I'm Going to Cook Our Dinner in My Easy Bake Oven and You're Going to Like It". This funny yet romantic piece is a breath of fresh air in an anthology which has too many writers that take themselves too seriously.

That's right. I'm going to cook dinner for us in my Easy Bake Oven. It's going to be delicious and fucking romantic. You're going to eat my Easy Bake Oven dinner and you're going to say it's the most amazing thing you've ever put in your mouth other than, perhaps, me.

A piece that surprised me in it's effectiveness was Kate Durdin's "Anna Nicole Show". Like Atkin's piece, this is also a transcript of a video. Specifically, the Anna Nicole Smith "clown" video. Each of the people in the video has their parts broken into their own page, removing the context of the exchange. This forces the reader to imagine the exchange on their own. The effect makes a disturbing video seem all the more disturbing.

MECHANICAL BABY: Mama. Mama. Waaah. Waaah. Waaah. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama

Chilling.

The flash fiction pieces by some of the more recognizable names in the book (Alissa Nutting, Amelia Gray) also work very well. Jennifer Karmin's aaaaaaaaaaalice is a fascinating libretto/score that I would love to see performed. The sample chapter of Elizabeth Gentry's forthcoming Housebound has me wanting to read the rest. JA Tyler's "The Gone Children They Said Tell Us a Story" is a sharp series of mini-fables. 

Given what I liked and didn't like about this book, I guess I'm more of a traditionalist than I thought. 

Overall, while I didn't like this collection as much as I thought I would the good stuff is still good enough to give this a recommendation. Just beware, you will come across work in this book you will not like. Even if you're the most adventurous reader out there.  

Buy The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing here.

Book Review: eyeballs growing all over me ...again by Tony Rauch

The experience of reading the stories in Rauch's eyeballs growing all over me ...again is a lot like watching a "lighter" episode of The Twilight Zone. That's not to say they're all fluff. The stories play with a lot of science fiction tropes. Robots, time travel, things shrinking or growing by various means, and so forth are some of the fixations throughout the book. But almost all of them make an attempt at using these tropes to examine the human condition. Throughout these stories, there is a sense of longing, alienation, and being overwhelmed by the weight of the world.

For example, in "send krupac through the portal", the titular Krupac finds himself dumped by the woman he's in love with. When he can't win her back and he can't get over her, he turns to extreme means. With the help of some friends at a local science lab, he plans to send himself into an alternate dimension where he can still be with her.

I try everything in the book, and for the most part Margo puts up with it politely, telling me that maybe in another time, another place, we were meant to be together, but she just doesn’t feel it in the here and now. Not now. She just needs time, she says. Maybe in a little while. Maybe in the future. Maybe.

A sad story that combines both a child-like sense of wonder reminiscent of early science fiction works and the feelings of longing and heartache that are unfortunately far more familiar to many people.

Rauch seems to enjoy having children as his protagonists. Some stories, like "the sandbox", read almost like whimsical bedtime stories. Though not the strongest story in the collection, this isn't a bad thing. Rauch isn't afraid to put the children through some profound pain as well, such as in "the procedure". A young boy is woken up and informed by his mother that his sister had to be rushed to the hospital. They bring her home, and the boy discovers that she's had her head replaced with a goat's head. This seems to have robbed the girl of most of her humanity.

He leans in and tries to see into one of those little black garble eyes, but there is nothing behind them. There is nothing there at all. He only finds his dim little reflection floating as if lost in there, as if some tiny little someone is trapped way deep down inside there, trapped and struggling to get out.

Like many other Bizarro writers, Rauch is not without a sense of humor. "giant chicken menacing me from above" is exactly what the title says it is. A man finds himself being stalked by a giant chicken, never finding out where and when it came from or what it wants with him. He soon comes to believe the chicken is a manifestation of all his fears and anxiety. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about all the missed opportunities adding up, about being afraid to act, unable or unwilling to move forward, about hiding in my own life, about hiding it all away, about creeping low in the shadows. I’ve been thinking of stepping from the safety of the shadows of doubt and indecision, into the enlightenment of action and response. But instead of drawing me out of the shadows, all that thought and consternation only seems to bring a giant chicken, fierce and mean.

Rauch also has a knack for coming up with some very short but excellent dream-like vignettes such as "the run," where a man is woken up by tiny stampeding elephants in his house. Another example is "welcome home," a second-person story wherein "you" meet some interesting people while out on a camping trip.

There are, however, some stories which felt pointless and meandering. "activate the mathias (when in doubt)" is a story about a man with device that can slow down time. It's so heavy on technobabble explanations that it drowned out the point the story was trying make. While most of the stories benefit from their brevity, "little giants (behind the barn)" just seems to end far too soon. A boy meets a very tiny man who makes him all sorts of promises. Then it just ends  It reads like the first chapter of an unfinished novel.

eyeballs growing all over me ...again is overall a pretty good collection of short stories and flash fiction. It would be one I would especially recommend to science fiction fans or to people who want to read a lighter kind of Bizarro fiction.

Buy eyeballs growing all over me ...again here.

Updates

I've had three poems accepted for publication at Twenty Something Press and I've also had two poems accepted for publication in the anthology Radical Dislocations from Chupa Cabra House. I thank the editors of both for accepting these.

Also, for those you not in the Des Moines area, the first volume of Spoilage is online. It contains my story "The Country Musician", and I'm very flattered to have had my story be the one to kick off this local zine.

Book Review: The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1

The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1 collects Noah Cicero's first three books The Human War, The Condemned, and Burning Babies as well as some other short stories. The first book review I did for this blog was The Human War, so it seems appropriate I cover this as well.

The first story in the book, "I Clean in Silence", stands out in that it's one of only two pieces in the book that's written in traditional paragraphs, rather than in the style of each sentence as a paragraph like most of the book. It certainly has all the other markings of a Noah Cicero story with its crude humor, its neurotic narrator, and its existential pondering that is never pretentious. As the title suggests, the story is about a woman's thoughts as she quietly cleans the house. She thinks about her boyfriend, her body, her self-loathing, and how hopeless everything seems.

I want the beauty of the west, the mountains, rocky coasts, sea urchins, long strips of highway, endless fields and clear rivers. But all I have are these dishes. Dirty dishes that must be cleaned. Everything must be cleaned.

"Bedroom Scene" is the other story in the book that uses traditional paragraphs. A story about pillow talk between two people with no feelings for each other. This story could be a play with very little re-writing. Not that that's a bad thing.

"No one does anything for themselves. People do it for their parents, to make other people think they're great, to get laid or make money, but they don't do anything for themselves. I don't have anyone to impress and there's nothing I want. I don't care if I'm happy.  People can go fuck themselves. And that includes you and me."

"That's a good attitude. You'll get far in life acting like total bitch."

Speaking of sex, there's a lot in this book. The story "Gratutious Kink" from The Condemned is the stand out in this area. The narrator recounts his sexual encounters from losing his virginity in a church, sleeping with a shemale hooker, sucking dick in an adult theater, to pissing on his girlfriend and watching her fuck other men.

The impact of an orgasm on the human body and mind is the only experience that can remotely relieve the existence of all the bleak shittiness of human reality.

Wise words. And believe me Noah Cicero is full of them. Take this aphorism from my favorite part of this book Burning Babies.

There is no reason to care what people think about you. Because seeing how this world is, it is obvious humans are not good thinkers

Noah Cicero knows how to boil a sentence down to its bare essence for maximum impact. His stories are funny, cruel, insightful, and just a joy to read. I highly recommend you pick up Collected Works. It is well worth a read.

Buy The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1 here.