New Arrival: The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters

The coming of age novel is a timeless trope because it is a guaranteed universal experience. Everyone has had that experience where they realize that the adult world is far different and far more complicated than that of a child. This transition often includes a loss of innocence, but in a horror coming of age tale, that loss of innocence is practically guaranteed, once the protagonist realizes that there are many things out there in the adult world with very sharp teeth. Heather, the protagonist in Damien Angelica Walter’s The Dead Girls Club, must deal with a loss of innocence that haunts her well into adulthood.

The story has two narratives. The first has Heather at 12, who enjoys hanging out with her friends, especially her best friend Becca, about serial killers and the Red Lady, a ghost story that develops an unlife of its own. The other has Heather as a child psychologist who receives a heart-shaped pendant in the mail that once belonged to Becca before she died. What follows is a descent into paranoia for Heather as she realizes someone knows of her involvement in Becca’s death and a mystery as to whether or not she is being haunted by the Red Lady. By looking at Heather’s past and her friendship with the members of the Dead Girls Club, readers are pulled along as the book teases us with what happened to Becca, along with a breakneck conclusion that tantalizingly leaves the reality of the Red Lady. Is she still fiction or is she much more?

This ambiguity of supernatural forces, a prime example of this being Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, may confuse some readers but it ultimately adds to the story’s power. A cold spot in a house can be explained away by drafts and the creaking in an old house could just be the structure settling, but when the protagonist hears a house groan in almost human tones or feels a chill where there are no windows, their mind starts to race as they search for an explanation. When none is satisfactory, the only options left are for the protagonist to feed the ghost by giving it a reality in his or her head or to accept the ambiguity. Tremblay and Walters understand that supernatural malevolence, whether in a house or a spooky story, is given power by the people who experience it and retell it.

Screen to Scream: Wounds

Information is readily available at our fingertips anytime we want. With my trusty phone, I can find out everything from what Stephen King’s mother’s name (which is Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. Thanks, Wikipedia) is to how to change a fuse in a car (thanks, Youtube). That unparalleled access to knowledge was bound to run into the notion of forbidden knowledge that has rendered many Lovecraft protagonists mad. In universes where forbidden texts or spoken spells can open portals and summon demons, there was bound to be someone in that universe who would upload this information on their blog.  How long can secret, forbidden knowledge stay secret when any and all information is just a link away? Nathan Ballingrud’s short story “The Visible Filth” has explored this idea, and the movie based on the story, Wounds, remains surprisingly faithful to the story’s moral about how curiosity not only kills but can drive you insane.

Will is a good guy, a bartender coasting through life. His bartending job and his girlfriend Carrie’s university schedule make sure he has plenty of free time to drink with his friend Alicia, who he harmlessly flirts with (one can debate whether flirting can ever be done harmlessly, particularly after reading this story). All seems well until he discovers a cell phone left by some very young-looking bar patrons. On that phone are images that not only disturb Will but fundamentally alter how he views the universe and his place in it. Much like someone finding a sore in their mouth and who constantly pokes at it with their tongue, the people in this story who come across this phone are constantly drawn back to it and its promise of a peek behind the veil of reality. Will doesn’t do the smart thing: give the phone to the Police, chuck it in the garbage, or set the phone and the room it’s in on fire. He lets the secrets the phone contains slowly erode his relationship and his relatively carefree existence until he not only discovers his life to be empty but goes to some otherworldly measures to fill that void.

The movie surprisingly follows the general plot of the story, something that doesn’t happen often in movie adaptations. It was fairly refreshing to see this faithful an adaption, almost like watching an audiobook coming to life. Armie Hammer portrays Will as older but not necessarily wiser, someone who’s at an age where many other have figured out their place in life. Dakota Johnson displays more range than she typically does in the Fifty Shades movies, going from loving to exasperated to suspicious to disturbed. The director also takes advantage of the visual medium by showcasing snippets of terrifying images as well as the use of cockroaches, which in this narrative, signals the presence of the supernatural as well as the steady decay of the character’s relative safety and security in the real world. The movie serves, all in all, as a great companion piece to the story, meaning that the book can serve as a gateway for Wounds: Six Stories from the Borders of Hell, not only for “The Visible Filth,” but also the many great stories in the collection.

Have You Read This? Full Throttle by Joe Hill

It is a story trope that the son must, if not outdo the parent, at least find their voice and identity outside of the parent’s influence. This is possibly because, like many tropes, it’s something both parents and children experience is subtle and not-so-subtle ways every day. Children can rebel to escape the parent’s shadow or simply accept that parental influences are forever stamped on their consciousness and attitudes. Some manage to do both, like Joe Hillstrom King, who writes under the pseudonym Joe Hill and is the son of horror icon Stephen King. Hill’s newest collection Full Throttle features some stories that demonstrate his dad’s influence while also reveling in Hill’s own unique voice.

The collection features many stories that are found in other anthologies, as well as two collaborations with Stephen King. The first is “Throttle,” an homage to Richard Matheson’s novella “Duel” that has a biker gang tangle with a truck driver who uses his massive vehicle both to pursue and to destroy. The second is “In the Tall Grass,” already a movie from Netflix, this is a deliciously disturbing tale of two young people isolated and hunted within a seemingly benign field of grass. However, there are also tales that show Hill as a distinct writer that has exceeded his father in his detailing the fantastic clashing with the familiar. “Mums” showcases a militia family that holds some dark family secrets, secrets which cannot stay buried. “All I Care about Is You” is a heartwarming and heartbreaking tale of friendship in a bleak future where friendship only costs a few tokens. “By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain” showcases childhood friendship, and the fragility of life, as two kids discover a dead dinosaur in their lake. Hill has expanded beyond King’s own talent for down-to-earth characterization in this new era of smartphones and not-quite-nuclear families while also showing a genuine love of the past, including his father’s work, ultimately creating his own unique voice that finds horror not just in nuclear war or wolf men but by how we as human beings foster connections that can go from solid to tenuous in the space of seconds.

Stephen King got me interested in horror, but Joe Hill is one writer that always keeps me coming back. The lessons from both father and son are that horror doesn’t have to be soaked in blood or steeped in anger. The ultimate lesson of horror, as taught by King and Hill, is that there is joy in life that can be stolen away, so enjoy the good things, and that for me includes books by Joe Hill. This means I will be disposed to give many Joe Hill books, and his much fresher voice, good reviews, so be warned.

Fearsome Five: Five Stories with Writing Advice from Stephen King

In November, many people are preoccupied with either cooking or consuming as many calories as possible while also wondering whether they can enjoy, tolerate, or survive encounters with their family members. For many writers, especially those looking for a boost in motivation, they think of NaNoWriMo, that month where writers try to write a novel or curse themselves for being unable to write one.  Rather than simply using this month to stuff one’s face and ignore their keyboards, we should look to Stephen King, the patron saint of scary writing, for inspiration. He wrote a book called On Writing, of course, but he also has a great many stories that feature writers (he does seem to know the psychology of writers rather well). Here are five Stephen King stories that, in their own way, offer some advice about writing.

5) Bag of Bones: What is basically a ghost story done by Stephen King is also an exploration into one of the more fearsome specters that can plague writers: writer’s block. Mike Noonan is trying to process the sudden death of his wife. Retreating to a cabin in the main woods, he finds an entire town that is haunted by a vengeful spirit. That spirit haunts Mike by giving him messages from beyond the grave through fridge magnets and other unexplained phenomenon, but he also has seemingly rediscovered the ability to write. Writer’s block can derail any would-be novelist’s agenda and writers can find Mike’s experiences of trying to produce anything relatable. Mike might be dealing with a ghost but that ghost is getting help from Mike’s own failures and doubts.

4) Lisey’s Story: Writers, especially horror writers, know that it can be hard to explain to other people why you write. The pay’s not good starting out, there’s potential for all kinds of rejections (which is compounded by social media), and as Mike Noonan demonstrated, there’s plenty of personal demons looking to thwart your efforts. Lisey Landon, wife of a famous novelist and the protagonist of this book, discovers to her horror what has been inspiring her husband. When husband Scott’s life is taken away violently, Lisey must finally begin to clean out his workspace, wherein she discovers a reality Scott tapped into called Boo'ya Moon. The problem for Lisey, as she discovers more and more about this world, is that the exit signs in this world aren’t clearly marked.  Like Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story looks not only at dealing with the loss of a loved one but it also explores trying to learn about them from what they left behind. The ultimate lesson for writers in this work might be that what’s inspiring them might be just as wild and unpredictable as Boo'ya Moon. The question writers must ask themselves is how tightly they want to hold on to the real world when the inner world is so seductive.

3) Misery: People who haven’t read the book may remember the movie featuring Kathy Bates showing a truly horrific bedside manner (Her character Annie Wilkes also uses the words Cockadoodie and Cocksucker).  But this feature looks at the very peculiar relationship between the writer and the reader. The reader interprets the writer’s view of the world as it is filtered through the written word. Paul Sheldon wrote the Misery books to make some money and hated them. To Annie Wilkes, Misery, the protagonist in these novels, lived and thrived in her imagination. This story has been read as another fan that takes their obsession too far, something that might make writers nervous about being accosted in public or, worse, in private, but it also looks at the passion and fervent belief a writer can potentially evoke in a reader, for better or worse. Sure, it’s a novel about physical and psychological torture, but a positive spin on that book is that Annie Wilkes believed in the character of Misery so much that Annie couldn’t let Misery cockadoodie die.

2) “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” (found here): This novella from King focuses on magazine editor Henry and his descent into madness. One day, Henry discovers a story from author Reg Thorpe and soon after Henry begins to share in Thorpe’s paranoid fantasies, including tales of the Fornits, little people that live in his typewriter, and of course the omnipresent They. Horror is full of slow descents into madness, and a few fast ones, but Ballad is a King story that shows a unique struggle creatives endure, particularly the writer: the need to create in isolation and the detrimental effects isolation can have. Writing, or any creative endeavor, often gets associated with insanity, the need to create and express beautiful and terrible truths about the human condition leading to a kind of forbidden, even corrosive, knowledge, or a gateway into Boo'ya Moon. The advice to take from this? Simply to have a break once in a while, at least to let friends and family know that your work hasn’t swallowed you whole.

1) The Shining: Yeah, it’s a book about a boy who has the Shine. There’s also a haunted hotel that wants to absorb that Shine as well as the boy and his family into its cursed menagerie of malevolence. But The Shining wouldn’t be the book it is, or the Stanley Kubrick movie it is, without the father and diabolical instrument of the hotel Jack Torrance. The man who says Here’s Johnny through a hole he himself chopped into a door is a very complex man and his descent into madness begins simply as a man trying to do right by his family. Out of a job, he becomes the caretaker of the Overlook so that he can have an income for him and his family, but he was a writer that was waiting for that masterpiece. That masterpiece Torrance chased down in the dark halls of the Overlook always eluded him, so the hotel just had to wait for Torrance’s frustration at his current situation to reach critical mass before it could use him. Jack Torrance isn’t your typical axe-wielding (or mallet-wielding in the novel) villain; he’s pushed to his breaking point when all the opportunities to improve his life, including his play, have been decimated. Simply put, to pin your hopes on one writing, no matter its perceived level of genius, is insanity. My wife actually said to just write, to not worry about making Stephen King levels of money and notoriety and just writer, create because you want to create. She’s not a writer, but it’s the best writing advice I ever got.

Have You Read This? Everybody Lies in Hell by Dave Zeltserman

We can all picture Hell, or at least what stories and paintings have told us hell is. Asked to picture it, most of us come up with the same image: blackened caverns filled with lakes of fire populated by red, pitchfork-wielding devils that may or may not belong on a box of Red Hots candy. However, there are some that imagine Hell to be a different place. While still a place for the damned, there are some stories that offer a more original and surprisingly fun version, considering that it is a realm that is literally designed for eternal punishment. Dave Zeltserman’s novel Everybody Lies in Hell has conceived a hell that is literally created by those who inhabit it.

Detective Mike Stone’s version of Hell, for example, is a sparsely inhabited New York, but he is able to travel to other hells where he is able to continue what he did in life: work as a private detective. Typically, his afterlife is spent looking into the lives of people who have enough awareness to hold onto who they were when they died to determine how they died, who killed them, and even what they did that got them sent down here. He also tries to avoid religious zealots and brutal warlords whose deeds got them sent to Hell but who are still able to make Mike’s hell truly awful. Mike soon gets a case which forces him to question how he’s been spending his eternal damnation and ultimately raises the question of if anyone, even those eternally damned, are capable of saving themselves.

Zeltserman is obviously adept at writing down-to-earth crime novels like Small Crimes. That talent also comes into play here. Other than taking place in Hell, this feels like a straight up crime noir with a hard-boiled protagonist who has a quick-witted secretary, a femme fatale, the chasing down of various leads, and the eventual feeling like all the walls are closing in. Mike Stone may be a damned soul who earned his spot in the afterlife, but readers can still root for the guy. And the Hell he inhabits, as well as other hells of more “aware” people, are all richly detailed, based on the individuals that created them. The mechanics of Hell, whether some souls create their own hells, are absorbed into others, or simply left to mindlessly torture themselves for all eternity, is revealed in a great example of top-notch world building. For people who like the crime noir of James Ellroy as well as fantasies with plenty of world-building, Everybody Lies In Hell is one trip to Hell that they should put on their travel itinerary.