Have You Read This? August's Eyes by Glenn Rolfe

 Ghosts can haunt us, but so do memories. These ghosts of memory haunt us with the joys we can never again know as well as the regrets that make us second-guess ourselves. Sometimes, these memories can be patient. They can wait a long time, emerging years later, clawing their way out of our psyches where we buried them. Such is the fate of the protagonist in Glenn Rolfe’s supernatural thriller August’s Eyes.

When John Colby was a boy, he saw something he shouldn’t have. He saw a young friend get kidnapped by a killer the press called the Ghoul of Wisconsin. John buried this event deep in his mind until years later, when an adult John, now married and a social worker, is tormented by dreams where he is a boy and trapped in a place called Graveyard Land, and there is a Ghoul in that graveyard that he doesn’t want to find him. John thought that it was just a dream but that dream is intruding on the waking world, terrorizing his family and friends. The Ghoul is also very real, and he wants little Johnny to come with him to Graveyard Land and stay there forever.

Rolfe’s work is very reminiscent of Stephen King with its developed characters, slow-building tension, and epic, otherworldly confrontations. However, there’s a little bit of Jack Ketchum creeping in, or at least an extreme sensibility that shows Rolfe doesn’t mind exploring the subject of child abduction and assault. The book does indeed get dark, but it never feels exploitative. Rolfe does this by populating his book with characters that are more than one-dimensional hostages, characters that the reader can get to know, love, and cheer for as they fight their way through the story’s darkness. From wife Sarah, who is supportive of her husband while having her own interests, to Patrick, a hard-working teenager who gets a chance to put his true crime knowledge to use. Finally, there’s John Colby himself, who has his flaws, but he is still a likable protagonist and ultimately demonstrates the strength of character needed to fight back against the Ghoul and his minions. The book left a few gaps in the overall mythology, placing the main villain too deeply into the shadows at times, while the plot also moved too quickly, zipping quickly between chapters and storylines, but August’s Eyes  is still a great read for people who wish Stephen King would really cut loose. The book was still an enjoyable stroll through Graveyard Land even with some serious darkness always nipping at my heels.

Screen to Scream: Lake Mungo to Come With Me

 Perhaps the biggest idea that humanity fears is its ultimate end, specifically the physical death of the individual. The question of what happens to one’s consciousness when the body dies doesn’t generate as much emotion as what happens to those friends and family a departed person leaves behind. Death, by its very nature, creates an absence, an absence that many who are still among the living struggle to fill. Many ghost stories are not just about the ghosts that haunt them; rather, they follow those who are looking for a purpose that will help fill the absence that haunts them. Two examples of this kind of ghost story are the movie Lake Mungo and Ronald Malfi’s latest Come With Me.

Lake Mungo is a movie that uses a documentary format to tell the spine-tingling tale of Alice Palmer, a teenager who drowns in Lake Mungo and her family, who believe she is haunting them. It seems odd that this movie came out in 2009 because it accurately captures the feel of a Netflix documentary, including the testimonials of family members as they notice strange images in recordings set up to capture the ghostly phenomenon. Lake Mungo is the kind of movie that forces you to pay attention, even as its story peels back layer after layer, revealing more about Alice Palmer that even her family didn’t know. Ultimately, what haunts the Palmer family is how much they don’t know about their daughter, and their journey to find the truth is a harrowing one that leaves them with little closure and very few answers.

Come With Me, Malfi’s latest and his best so far, tells a similar story of only discovering who someone is after they’ve died. The story follows Aaron Decker, a young man who had just lost his wife Allison in a senseless shooting. As he tries to process his grief over losing the love of his life, Aaron discovers that his wife had been keeping secrets. Aaron’s journey begins with the discovery of a receipt from a motel hundreds of miles away. He soon discovers what Allison had been working on prior to her death, a project that becomes Aaron’s and one that threatens to destroy him. Malfi shows his skills at crafting mysteries, leaving an assortment of clues interspersed with red herrings, all while Aaron tries to discover not just the monster she’s been chasing but the past she’s been outrunning all her life. Malfi proves that his skills at storytelling are as precise as a watchmaker’s. One cog is Aaron, the grieving husband, who tells this story in a sort of confessional to his wife, opening a window into his emotional pain. Other smaller cogs include Malfi’s teasing of the supernatural with a level of restraint that bursts like a damn during the book’s ending. Fans of Lake Mungo will love the slow burn and harrowed protagonist of Come With Me and both movies should be taught in classes that teach writers how to create an unsettling miasma that consumes the reader.

Graphic Content: Home Sick Pilots, Vol. 1: Teenage Haunts by Dan Watters and Caspar Wijngaard

 

Some might be aware that while I do love horror, I also love the superhero genre. I have written about superhero horror, but there are other books out there that show how seamlessly these two genres can combine to create something truly unique. There are a lot of examples of this blending of superheroes and the supernatural in the graphic novel/comic book format. One such example is Home Sick Pilots, Vol. 1: Teenage Haunts by author Dan Watters and illustrator Caspar Winjgaard, a book that has ghosts that turn its teenage characters into something akin to superheroes.

The book takes place in 1994 and features the band, the Home Sick Pilots, a band that is searching for acceptance in the LA rock scene as well as a few paying gigs. Looking for a truly unique place to play, they stumble upon an old house that turns out to not only be haunted but hungry. Bandmember Ami disappears within the house, but she ends up being recruited by the spirits within to recover other haunted items that hold mysterious powers.

Fans of young adult literature will find a lot to love in the interaction of the kids that make up the Home Sick Pilots, especially in the full-page minimalist trips into Ami’s thoughts as she tries to navigate her new state of being. The book isn’t scary, per se, despite having some very gory moments where the house attacks flesh and blood humans. The story instead focuses on the relationships among these kids, from rival band the Nuclear Bastards to a shady government agency that is trying to collect its own ghosts. The book is a great teen read, but there are great superhero moments where the possessed items within the house transform the user into something roaring straight out of an anime, and that’s not even mentioning the walking house. People might be disappointed if they were looking for a straight-up haunted house horror, but those who like manga, evil government agencies, and the Marvel universe should fly along with Home Sick Pilots.

New Arrival: My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

 Critics of horror love to call the genre sensationalist or lowbrow, but the horror subgenre that earns the most and the most severe critical barbs is the slasher. Focusing on physically attractive yet mentally unobservant characters who are merely there to die in horrible and creative ways, the plot in these tales are often seen as just a way to get the victims in front of the killer. But horror is also great at subverting expectations and Stephen Graham Jones has greatly subverted the expectations of slasher critics with his latest book My Heart is a Chainsaw. Not only does this book give a beating, feeling heart to the slasher genre, it may also be Jones’s most poignant and emotional work.

The book follows Jennifer “Jade” Daniels, a young girl who just graduated high school, but she doesn’t have much to look forward to in life in small-town Idaho by scenic Indian Lake. With her mother abandoning the family and her father being the town drunk, no one really expects much of Jade. But Jade knows that a killer as evil as Freddy Krueger and as unstoppable as Jason Voorhees is coming to her small town to lay waste to it, just as a cadre of billionaires are ready to spend massive amounts of money to build their vacation homes here. But money won’t stop the terror that’s coming. It falls to Jade and her encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies to find a final girl to stop this evil and save everyone, if the town even deserves saving.

If there is one thing one can expect from Stephen Graham Jones is his ability to take a reader’s expectations and turn them on their head. Yes, he demonstrates his love and knowledge of the slasher genre, especially in the chapters displaying Jade’s extra credit assignments, but there is more to this book than blood and body counts. This is a heartfelt, tragic, and soaring story that showcases all of Jones’s talent as a writer along with his love of horror. Jade is put through the emotional wringer in this story, but so is the reader. The ending of this book is one of the most powerful I have ever experienced. Yes, there will be blood and death and destruction, but its emotional core is what makes this book so powerful. This book is indeed like a chainsaw and the heart of the reader will be cut through like a block of wood.

Have You Read This? Dismal Dreams by Red Lagoe

 

Short story collections can be like a buffet with each tasty story representing different flavors of an overall author’s work. Does the author write stories that are creepy or emotionally crushing? Do they generate fear or excitement? Do they flavor their tales with just a smidge of gore or do they like to drown their readers in it, pretty much the same way I drown my french fries in ketchup. If you haven’t noticed, I do like the analogy of short stories as entrées, but that analogy also may be reductive, ignoring the potential of quality among a large quantity of tales. Short stories, as a reminder, are not necessarily novels compacted but their own art form, a quick bite but still immensely satisfying. Such fine morsels of fiction are just waiting to be discovered in Red Lagoe’s story smorgasbord Dismal Dreams.

Fans of short fiction are sure to find ones that are true showcases of Lagoe's talent. For example, there’s “Creation of Man,” for those who like to see stories from a different and provocative point of view. Fans of ratcheting tension in their fiction will love “Never Have I Ever,” which explores an app that, once downloaded to a woman’s phone, forces her and her friends to confess their sins or face some painful consequences. Lagoe’s really disturbing stories, though, look at how love can go wrong and be twisted into obsession and even hatred. Such stories include “One Year Anniversary,” concerning a woman who goes for a very unique kind of revenge on an abusive spouse while “A Cold Day in Hell” recalls a very unique ghost story where the ghost may very well be the protagonist of the story. “The Terminator Line” is a revenge story that thoroughly surprised me, which is something that doesn’t often happen in a genre that many argue can rely too much on formula.

To conclude the food metaphor, Lagoe has served up some scrumptious stories that make me want to try some of her other creations, which include her other collection Lucid Screams. Dismal Dreams wasn’t completely full of fiction that wowed me, but I also know that, as of this review, Lagoe may be just beginning her writing journey as far as publications. I hope there are more novels and stories in her future because there are a few stories here that have definitely whetted my appetite.