Tag: Reviews

Review: Keeping Score: Angry Tanka by Susan Burch

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Cover of Keeping Score: Angry TankaKeeping Score: Angry Tanka by Susan Burch
Velvet Dusk Publishing (December 2019)
46 pages, $8.99 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Susan Burch is a prominent composer of English Language Tanka.  She began writing tanka in April 2013 after reading winning contest poems on the Tanka Society of America website. She loved the brevity of the form and submitted to Ribbons, which published her first tanka and encouraged her to keep writing. Since then she has placed in Mandy’s Page’s tanka contest, the World Tanka Competition, Diogen contests, the Haiku Poets of Northern California contests, the British Haiku and Tanka Awards, the TSA’s Sanford Goldstein tanka contest, and most recently, the Fleeting Words tanka contest. Her most recent collection is keeping score: Angry Tanka.Continue Reading

Review: The Night Doctor and Other Tales by Steve Rasnic Tem

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The Night Doctor and Other Tales by Steve Rasnic Tem
Centipede Press (December 2019)
336 pages; $20 unsigned limited edition (700 copies) hardcover
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

I first encountered Steve Rasnic Tem’s work in the inaugural edition of the Greystone Bay series. “In a Guest House” was a startlingly quiet piece, humming with the same undercurrent of unease that can be found in the best Twilight Zone episodes. After that, I continued to encounter Tem’s work here and there, especially as I collected classic horror anthologies from the eighties and nineties. I loved the quiet restraint I found in his work, so when I happened upon a review copy for The Night Doctor and Other Tales, his most recent short fiction collection, I dived right in.Continue Reading

Review: The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson

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The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson
MCDxFSG Originals (February 11, 2020)
416 pages; $10.99 paperback; $9.99 e-book
Reviewed by Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann

Last year, if I talked about highly anticipated novels in 2020, The Boatman’s Daughter was at the top of my list. This is Bram Stoker Award finalist Andy Davidson’s second novel. His debut, In the Valley of the Sun (2017) was one of the best books I read last year. Continue Reading

Review: To The Bones by Valerie Nieman

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To the Bones by Valerie Nieman
West Virginia University Press (April 2019)
204 pages; $19.99 paperback; $11.49 e-book
Reviewed by R.B. Payne

At the core of every person, there is a twisted black seam which offsets the good that we might do. Some call it original sin. Others recognize it as karma. It is a swirling darkness of the soul from which no light escapes.

In West Virginia, it’s called coal.

The exploitation of lignite, sub-bituminous, bituminous, and anthracite coal is as addictive as heroin to those who have no conscience about the subjugation of their fellow man and the natural world. This is true, at least in Redbird, a struggling community on a backroad in Appalachia, where the Kavanagh clan has built a mining empire atop death, black lung disease, cave-ins, suffocation, and the occasional gas explosion.Continue Reading

Review: Doll Crimes by Karen Runge

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Doll Crimes by Karen Runge
Crystal Lake Publishing (November 2019)
222 pages; $11.66 paperback; $3.99 e-book
Reviewed by Dave Simms

We could be looking at the next Jack Ketchum here. Actually, Karen Runge is quite her own identity, her own voice that simply delves into the deep, dark places which Ketchum mined so well. Doll Crimes is a novel that will likely disturb while it also examines the human soul, the good, the bad, and the downright evil in a manner that digs so deep, readers will have a tough time forgetting the characters long after the final page is turned.Continue Reading

Review: The Chill by Scott Carson

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The Chill by Scott Carson
Atria (February 11, 2020)
448 pages; $24.30 hardcover; $12.99 e-book
Reviewed by Dave Simms

What is The Chill?  Answer: the first great novel of 2020 that sets a high bar for the rest of the genre with a story that both mines familiar territory but digs deeper than most.Continue Reading

Review: Bloody Walls – A Collection from a Fractured Mind by Thomas Scopel

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Bloody Walls: A Collection from a Fractured Mind by Thomas Scopel
Independently Published (July 2019)
236 pages; $7.99 paperback; $0.99 e-book
Reviewed by R.B. Payne

A corpus is technically defined as a collection of a single writer’s work or grouped writings about a particular subject—in this case, Thomas Scopel and his horror scrivenings. Given there are eleven tales of terror in this volume and about an equal number of speculative dark fiction shorts, there is certainly something here for everyone.Continue Reading

Review: Grim Harvest by Patrick Greene

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Grim Harvest by Patrick Greene
Lyrical Underground (September 2019)
197 pages; $7.85 paperback; $4.99 e-book
Reviewed by R.B. Payne

Grim Harvest by Patrick C. Greene is the second novel of “The Haunted Hollow Chronicles,” a planned series centering on Ember Hollow, an isolated community in the American heartland where cell phones and the internet simply don’t work. When, at the annual Halloween Harvest, events take a nasty supernatural turn, they have only themselves to count on. 

And that may not be enough.Continue Reading

Review: Every Foul Spirit by William Gorman

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Every Foul Spirit by William Gorman
Crystal Lake Publishing (October 2019)
112 pages; $9.99 paperback; $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by R.B. Payne

In horror fiction, there are often remote towns and villages such as Oxrun Station (Charles L. Grant), Cedar Hill (Gary Braunbeck) and even Ulthar (H. P. Lovecraft). In these wicked places on the backroads of fear, dark forces gather and do evil upon the innocent and not-so-innocent. These are off-the-main highway places where malignant entities rise and make a bloody and horrifying mess by ravaging pets, murdering children, compromising priests and virgins, befouling police officers, and corrupting any responsible adult who doesn’t have the sense to get the hell out of town when the first flesh-stripped beheaded corpse appears. Continue Reading

Review: Spungunion by John Boden

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Spungunion by John Boden
Fungasm Press (January 15, 2020)
106 pages: $9.95 paperback
Reviewed by Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann

Once every blue moon, a reader will encounter an author who possesses a storytelling style that works for them every damn time. I have a few of these authors. Let’s call them the “Do-No-Wrongs.”

John Boden is a “Do-No-Wrong.”Continue Reading

Bev Vincent reviews The Outsider (HBO)

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Stephen King News From the Dead Zone

“There’s Always a Reasonable Explanation”

This Sunday, January 12th, HBO premieres the first two episodes of their 10-episode adaptation of The Outsider. Is it good? Absolutely. One of the best. Before I get into that, let me take a little step back.Continue Reading

Review: The Sky Done Ripped by Joe R. Lansdale

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The Sky Done Ripped by Joe R. Lansdale
Subterranean Press (December 2019)
296 pages; $95 signed limited edition hardcover; $40 trade edition hardcover; $6.99 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

I think that, sometimes, in the midst of all the discussion about craft and theme and structure, we—meaning writers and readers and reviewers—forget that this stuff is supposed to be fun. It’s so refreshing, then, when an author like Joe R. Lansdale comes along, manuscript in hand and shit-eating grin on his face, to remind us of that very fact.Continue Reading

Review: The Last Ghost and Other Stories by Marie O’Regan

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The Last Ghost and Other Stories by Marie O’Regan
Luna Press Publishing (April 2019)
148 pages; $11.99 paperback; $5.99 e-book
Reviewed by R.B. Payne

O, modern reader, do you think you are too sophisticated to fear a wistful Gaussian blur hovering above your bed in the dead of night? You tell yourself it doesn’t exist. It can’t. Surely just a retinal trick in dim light.

Then why pay attention to the rustling beneath the bed? Or the persistent scratch at the door? (Look! The cat is sleeping soundly at your feet.) Too late, perhaps, an unseen hand coldly brushes your cheek or grasps your throat. Continue Reading

Review: Trouble at Camp Still Waters by Eddie Generous

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Trouble at Camp Still Waters by Eddie Generous
Severed Press (July 2019)
134 pages: $9.99 paperback; $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann

Ben Ray Collins is a serial killer fanboy who gets caught trying to execute a copycat murder. By some stroke of luck, he manages to escape prison and finds himself at Camp Still Waters, but the waters are anything but still. Some kind of natural phenomenon is happening there and a team of scientists head out to learn more.Continue Reading

Review: The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson

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The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson
Crossroads Press (September 2019)
370 pages; $25.94 hardcover; $18.06 paperback; $4.99 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

It can be a dicey thing when an author brings back one of their beloved series characters after closing off that character’s series with such a satisfying conclusion. In the back of your head, as a reader, you’re thinking, “I just want one more adventure with one of my favorite literary characters.” And yet, when that does happen…there’s enough anxiety to give you pause. Maybe the story just won’t read the same as the others. Maybe it won’t have that same snap the other installments had, or, if the author is creating a new adventure in the middle of an already completed series, maybe the story will cause too many continuity errors to be thoroughly enjoyable. Continue Reading