I realized, quite early on in Ray Cluley’s “The Final Girl’s Daughter”, that it was something more than just another slasher exploration. It was the second-to-last story from his 2022 collection All That’s Lost, but the first one I read. I thought the title spelled the story out, and that I could skim through some easy slasher carnage to learn Cluley’s style. I thought I knew what path the story would take, even the left turns that a clever author would use to subvert expectations. I mean, I do know the Final Girl tropes. I’m also familiar with how those tropes have been inverted, exploded, and expanded by horror writers since the curveball of Scream. I thought I’d be reading a story about masked violence, trauma, and grief. I thought it would be a story that would inevitably twist as it ended, because these stories always do.

And that kind of happened. But it also didn’t, which was when I really began to enjoy myself.

Cluley’s story concerns the long aftermath of a massacre, which is familiar territory for avid horror fans these days. It centers on two adults who bear hideous scars both physical and mental. Asides from brief respites, their lives have mostly been car crashes since their fateful night. The story begins as Sally stops in at the garage where fellow survivor Richard works to inform him that she’s going back to the farm where it all happened. And what comes next certainly deals with trauma and grief. It re-tells the events in all the grisly details. And it involves a showdown close to the end.

However, there’s more to the story, and not just because of the daughter’s presence. Richard and Sally are not pawns. They are not there to contrive a ‘gotcha’ moment or a sick meta-twist. There’s respect and admiration and love for these characters that shines through the writing because Cluley convinces us that they deserve it:

“…He started wiping his hands and arms with the rag from his back pocket, saw how it cleaned up his scars, and stopped. He limped towards her. She met him halfway to save him the bother.”

They have agency throughout the story, actions that come from places other than grief, reactions and thoughts that aren’t a result of the corn-fed boogeyman that irrevocably changed their lives and killed their friends. The conclusion is grisly, sad, tender, and even a little kind. The whole story is completely unexpected despite feeling familiar. It’s scary in a way that makes so much sense.

I hoped that the other stories would offer similar surprises and was not disappointed. Each of these seventeen stories, going back all to 2016, easily justify their existence. Each one is its own world. There are monsters galore, human and otherwise, but also mental breaks, seismic shifts in reality, random violence, folkloric fulfillment, and horrific revenge, all brought to the page through characters who don’t know what kind of story they’re trying to live through.

Cluley’s style is at once precise and lyrical. It easily lures you in even as he builds up the dread. The characters are centered in the stories and thankfully get time to breathe. He’s almost indulgent with his dialogue, but I appreciate that. Characters talk and explain and whine and complain and tease and laugh throughout. They say the wrong thing, they excuse themselves, they speak their truths. Backstories and history are there to increase the force of the narrative instead of simply providing context. You’re going to get to know these characters and feel along with them.

An additional strength is that Cluley does the necessary work to set scenes so there’s no confusion or questioning. His sense of place, the importance of location—I’m guessing thanks to first-hand experience coupled with diligent research—provides each story with its own reality. The African wildlife reserve in “Painted Wolves”, a cinderblock cattle shed in the found-footage horror “6/6”, an Indian ship-breaking yard in “Steel Bodies”, and even Martha’s Vineyard both during and after the filming of JAWS in “The Wrong Shark” are places of nightmare, but they’re also vital to the stories. The details and descriptions make you want to spend time in these places before the characters even do anything.
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Finally, these stories don’t cheat. There’s no weird-for-weird sake — though there’s plenty of strangeness on display. There’s no hallucinatory fever-dreams that introduce dues ex machina endings or left-field reveals that torpedo the whole story. The strangeness, the horror, the absolute delicious dread that builds through each story is earned from the first perfect sentence and carried through to the conclusion. It’s such an enjoyable experience that, once I finished my first reading of “The Final Girl’s Daughter”, I went and started at the beginning of the collection just so I knew I wouldn’t miss anything.

​"There's a tiny gap between the stories we tell ourselves and those we tell others and that's where you'll find the truth."



All That's Lost is the second collection from award-winning horror writer Ray Cluley, bringing together 17 stories exploring the haunted, the strange, and the uncanny.



Lose yourself in the darkness here, and find yourself changed...

Melinda West: Monster Gunslinger by KC Grifant

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BNWR19WN
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brigids Gate Press, LLC (2 Feb. 2023)
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A Horror Book Review by  Tasha Schiedel 

In an Old West overrun by monsters, a stoic gunslinger must embark on a dangerous quest to save her friends and stop a supernatural war.

Sharpshooter Melinda West, 29, has encountered more than her share of supernatural creatures after a monster infection killed her mother. Now, Melinda and her charismatic partner, Lance, offer their exterminating services to desperate towns, fighting everything from giant flying scorpions to psychic bugs. But when they accidentally release a demon, they must track a dangerous outlaw across treacherous lands and battle a menagerie of creatures—all before an army of soul-devouring monsters descend on Earth.

The Witcher meets Bonnie and Clyde in a re-imagined Old West full of diverse characters, desolate landscapes, and fast-paced adventure.

​

Dreams, their content, meaning, interpretation and influence upon our waking lives, have fascinated humankind for thousands of years. Our ancient ancestors in Sumer, Egypt and Babylon believed Divine agents routinely communicated with us during those nightly journeys through slumberland, yet over a century's worth of data collection by Oneirologists (dream studiers) has failed to uncover precisely where dreams originate, if a single or multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what evolutionary purpose dreaming serves for either mind or body.

The mercurial, metamorphic, often unsettling nature of dreams has been both the springboard for religious, philosophical, artistic and even inventive thought (Google, the Periodic Table and the sewing machine were all dream-stimulated innovations) as well as an unrivaled mirror into our own individual personal subconscious. Dreams weave our hopes, desires, anxieties, past actions and daily routines together in vivid, often grotesquely distorted, ways; it's little wonder then that innumerable paintings, plays, poems, operas, novels and films have utilized those visions as their narrative centerpiece, and from A Midsummer's Night Dream to Inception, H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle to the Elm Street nightmares inflicted by Freddy Krueger, they provide a bottomless inspirational well.

Valhalla Books' release of author Mark Allan Gunnells' horror-thriller, Lucid, is the latest creative effort in that fevered lineage. By definition, a lucid dream is any in which the dreamer obtains awareness of their dream state while dreaming. Results from scientific studies over the last fifty years have shown that while roughly 55% of people experience lucid dreams at least once in their lifetime, a significantly smaller fraction have the uncommon ability to actively control the content of their dreams, and it's this rare facility that Lucid's protagonist, Jimmy Mullinax, possesses. After enduring traumatic childhood abuse from his hateful, hard-drinking mom, Jimmy discovers his talent at an early age, using it to construct an elaborate, escapist fantasy domain where he retains godlike control of every minute detail. Jimmy's lusterless day-to-day existence is bland and disappointing; he routinely shuns beneficial human contact in favor of the make-believe he's fostered in his dreamworld, where he's designed idealized versions of his mother, his boyfriends and even a deceased teenage crush. Once he suffers an automobile accident at the novel's onset and lapses into a coma, however, there's no escaping the realm he's crafted, and when he alarmingly realizes that some of those he's drawn into his never-ending dream are independently sentient of his influence and plotting his demise in the real world, a conflict erupts that threatens to destroy them all.

True to its subject, the narrative structure in Lucid shares the same chimerical, stream-of-consciousness quality as actual dreams, flowing from the starting point of Jimmy's accident, back into his past and sliding effortlessly into the dreamworld before the cycle begins anew. Though a very different work than Gunnells' previous novel, the campus slice-of-life exercise The Advantaged, there exists common thematic threads about identity, responsibility, self-acceptance and, ultimately, forgiveness. Gunnells takes a risk in showing the audience just how Jimmy came to be where he is; as a protagonist, he's often unsympathetic, selfish, egocentric, controlling, manipulative, cowardly, lazy--at times verging on megalomania. In his dreamscape Jimmy exerts a deity's dominion in a way he wishes he had in the waking world--that he could have, if only he set aside his fretful anxieties. In a lesser writer such a gamble would arouse antipathy in an audience, yet Gunnells consistently displays a supreme capacity for layering his characters with a depth that defies stereotyping. Jimmy's mother, for instance, portrayed initially as simple lowlife white trash, is progressively shown as more than the sum of her flawed parts, a thoroughly human figure who, like all of us, has made her share of bad decisions and must live with the consequences. Jimmy, too, has to face his own fears and imperfections to realize that he's squandering his potential, and on this level his obsessive need for the dream kingdom can be seen as an allegory for addiction: like an opium fiend, he's allowed his nighttime excursions to become his sole preoccupation, and he willingly throws away real-world relationships in favor of their faultless dream counterparts.

There's much more to Lucid than a character study, however. As sheer entertainment value, it's a difficult book to put down; once Gunnells has an audience in his clutches, there's no letting go until the roller coaster ride is over. Fun, rapid-fire dialogue and clever pop cultural nods to The Cure, Clive Barker and The Crow liven even the darkest of scenes with wit, heart and humor. To anyone familiar with Neil Gaiman's bravura graphic novel series, The Sandman, the unreal setting of Lucid is similar to The Dreaming, and the climactic battle between Jimmy and his primary adversary, Brent--a youth whose spirit Jimmy inadvertently trapped by continually bringing him into the dreamworld post mortem--defines the word epic. In the limitless realm of Jimmy's subconscious, their struggle is a clash of two titans; mountains shatter, tectonic plates crumble, oceans rise--and pages flip by with such pulse-pounding speed it leaves readers breathless. In the end, though, the question of whether Jimmy triumphs over his enemy is oddly unimportant; the central issue of this novel is the hopeful notion that no matter who we are or how much we may have failed, redemption can always be found if we work towards it.

Pushing the boundaries of possibility, overflowing with ideas, surreal imagery and laced with emotion, this bold, exciting and supremely imaginative novel will leave any reader longing, like Jimmy himself, that the dream will never end, and it's for that reason that I give Lucid the full 5 (out of 5) on my Fang Scale. This would make a spectacular big-budget Hollywood extravaganza. Highly recommended.

"With Lucid, Mark Allan Gunnells has delivered a powerful and original novel that I read in one sitting, because I was too captured by the story to stop. This will easily be one of my favorite books this year."

John R. Little, Bram Stoker Award winning author of The Memory Tree and Miranda

Jimmy Mullinax has the perfect life ... as long as he is asleep.

Jimmy discovered at a young age that he was a lucid dreamer, able to control his dreams and create an ideal world for himself. No matter how rough things got in his waking life, he always had the dream world into which he could escape. Until the accident.

After getting hit by a car, Jimmy finds himself in a coma, which traps him in his dream world. At first this seems wonderful, but then he realizes that the people in his dream have more autonomy than he thought. And some of them want him dead.

Can Jimmy wrestle control of his dream back from those that want to turn it into a nightmare?

Over the last few years Flame Tree Press has undoubtedly become the new home-from-home for horror legend Ramsey Campbell, who have released a number of both new novels and repackaged a number of his older works, including Ancient Images, which was first published back in 1989. As a reader I have particularly enjoyed Campbell’s association with Flame Tree Press as the blend of the old and the new fiction is nicely pitched due to the fact that this author’s current output is so strong he does not need to rely upon past glories. However, mining one of the most outstanding back-catalogues in 20th century horror fiction for rereleases such as Ancient Images, The Influence (1988) and the much more recent Three Births of Daoloth trilogy is a smart move, hopefully bringing this unique author to a younger generation of readers.


I have been reading Campbell since I was a teenager, which was around the time Ancient Images was first published, but for whatever reason this was not a book I came across during my formative years, or any time since. The plot concerns a woman researching an obscure horror film, and since it was written in 1988 this makes it incredibly different to how one might conduct similar research in 2023. Back then there was no internet, instead there were telephone books, and in the case of this novel also hunting down telephone boxes, getting change for telephone calls, endless calls chasing down leads, hotel rooms with no telephones, and convoluted searches for contacts in address books or time-consuming dead ends. To younger readers this method of ‘research’ might come across as dated or quaint, but I found it both nostalgic and exhilarating. My favourite novel of 2022 was undoubtedly Paul F. Olson’s Alexander’s Song, which was similar to Ancient Images in that it included a long and complex search for a dead author. Olson’s book was also written in the late eighties (and largely dismissed or ignored at the time) before recently being revived by the publishers Cemetery Dance. If Ramsey Campbell has not read Alexander’s Song, I have a feeling he would enjoy it tremendously.


In the thirty odd years since Ancient Images was first published the cinematic landscape in the UK has had a major shift in that all of the films which were once labelled ‘Video Nasties’ in the early 1980s and were unavailable or banned are now legal and can even pop up on television. Ancient Images has an element of social commentary from this period, which has long since past into history and there is a funny scene where the researcher visits the home of the editor of a gory horror film fanzine which is vehemently against censorship. It was undoubtedly inspired by magazines I enjoyed in my youth, ‘Deep Red,’ ‘GoreZone,’ or ‘Fangoria’ with other more explicit examples springing to mind.


I am also old enough to remember the fact that in those days viewers had to put considerable effort into finding banned or films which were refused BBFC certificates. Imagine the excitement when I finally tracked down a bootleg VHS copy of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and sneakily imported it into the UK, this type of ‘hunt’ shapes the core of Ancient Images as Sandy Allan attempts to track down a horror film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, made in England in 1938 and which was immediately suppressed. I absolutely loved being a back-seat passenger on Sandy’s journey, which turns into an obsession, to find a copy of the long-lost film ‘Tower of Fear.’ In the eighties there were a lot of genuine people just like Sandy trying to track down films which seemed forever out of reach, albeit from the seventies and eighties rather than the thirties.


Anybody with more than a passing interest in the work of Ramsey Campbell will undoubtedly know he is incredibly knowledgeable about film and his excellent collection Certainly: A Collection of Essays more than proves the point, as many of these pieces are cinematic in nature. In some ways Ancient Images is a horror film buff’s dream, as it is a fascinating take on the ‘cursed film’ trope, which throws in a lot of true facts, ideas about censorship and it even had me wondering whether Lugosi and Karloff actually did make a film together in the UK.


It was interesting that Campbell decided to build his ‘cursed’ film around actors more associated with the golden period of Hollywood, but this allowed him to build a fascinating backstory around the near-mythical Tower of Fear, the accidents which happened on set and the fact that so many of the actors and crew (including the director) had died prematurely. Screen legends Lugosi and Karloff might be from too far back in cinematic history for younger readers, but even now there never seems to be any shortage of books featuring them. Just in the last year I have reviewed two novels Julian David Stone’s It’s Alive and Kim Newman’s Something More Than Night which fictionalise both men in some form or another.


After Sandy witnesses the strange death of a media colleague, who had tracked down a copy of Tower of Fear which was then stolen, she sets out to recover the film and prove its existence. Along the way she falls foul of a newspaper film critic and the book illustrates the incredible power such print film reviewers had in the days before the internet. I enjoyed the numerous interviews Sandy has with those connected to the film, whilst she is seemingly stalked by bizarre creatures that sometimes look like dogs and other times like scarecrows. In the end the conclusion nicely fans out beyond the cursed film and has a strange Folk Horror vibe to proceedings. Interestingly, some years later Campbell was to have another stab at the idea of the cursed film with The Grin in the Dark, which ranks as one of my absolute favourites of his.


Although Ancient Images is a terrific book it is not one I would particularly recommend to a Ramsey Campbell beginner, try The Grin in the Dark instead for a significantly more contemporary story. But if, like I, this is a title you have previously overlooked it is highly recommended and is an unsettling read, where things often happen at the far edge of vision. Even though it is slightly dated, Ancient Images still holds up well as an entertaining supernatural mystery as the young woman digs deeper into the origins of the film and the bad luck which seemed to follow those involved in its making. As Sandy traipses around Britain looking for the film you will be transported back to Thatcher’s decaying Britain, enhanced by Campbell’s stellar grimy descriptions, and will be thankful you never need to ask a pub landlord for chance for the payphone again!


Tony Jones