Steven Hopstaken’s debut Stoker’s Wilde (2019) and sequel Stoker’s Wilde West (2020) were warmly received upon release and his third novel A Man Among Ghosts is a clever change of pace, abandoning the adventurous historical world of Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde for contemporary America, featuring a seriously weird, haunted house.


There are a lot of ghosts featured in A Man Among Ghosts, so many in fact that they fail to have much in the way of a scare factor, even if some are aggressive, unpredictable or dismissive. This is partly because the ghosts have their own agenda and motives, which is integral to the main longer arc of the novel which is revealed nice and slowly. Ultimately this makes A Man Among Ghosts a very unorthodox, haunted house novel, as it does not include many of the usual type of “Boo!” moments or fear factor style atmosphere. However, it is far from predictable and where the plot ends up is a million miles from where it begins, so much so I would avoid spoilers in other reviews. Much is crammed into its 240 unpredictable pages and it was an entertaining read.


The novel begins with David buying a dilapidated Victorian house after becoming tired of renting. Working in computer programming, he feels that it is time to settle down and live a more adult lifestyle. However, he is also slightly depressed as his best friend Gary (and girlfriend Shannon) will soon be moving out of the area and he hopes to make new friends but feels his best years might be behind him. Disaster then strikes and a brain tumour diagnosis means he only has three months to live and around this time he starts to see ghosts in his new house.


Mentally David finds himself in a very fragile state and calls of his old friend Gary to help, who is a successful magician/illusionist, but does not believe in ghosts and is sure he can prove what Gary is seeing is not real. It is difficult to say much more about A Man Among Ghosts without heading into spoiler territory, but I found myself seriously invested in figuring out what was going on. David makes friends with Gus, his next-door neighbour, and even finds a new girlfriend, but can’t shake off the sense of paranoia that somebody is messing with him, but why? Strangely, many of the characters accepted very easily the fact that David saw ghosts and there are even a couple of exorcisms thrown into the mix courtesy of David’s estranged evangelical Christian father. Even more surprising, he soon learns that some of the spirits he sees are of people who are not yet dead and so somewhat tricky to exorcise! When he sees ghosts (or whatever they are) in locations other than the house things get even wackier.


The advance blurbs namechecked the film Jacob’s Ladder, Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Comparing it to the all-time Jackson classic is probably overreaching slightly, but I could see snatches of Jacob’s Ladder and more significantly The Dead Zone which the book owes a larger debt to. It must also be said that there was also a very cool (unnamed) cat in this novel which made me smile. Even though the book was built around David I did not find him to be particularly likable, but not did I dislike him and just found him rather bland. It might have been a stronger read if he been a slightly deeper character.


A Man Among Ghosts was a solid horror thriller which what it lacked in scares more than made up with a clever, unpredictable, and well developed plot. It was also a very easy to read novel and I had fun speeding through it in no time at all.


Tony Jones

Let’s begin with some unusual facts about human anatomy:

- Some women can lactate through the skin of their armpit after giving birth.

- A condition called hyperdontia causes people to be born with an excessive amount of teeth.

- Body odor originates from bacteria eating sweat on the skin’s surface.

- Approximately one in one-thousand people are born with extra digits on their hands or feet.

- The average person produces enough saliva during their lifetime to fill two swimming pools.

There’s something inherently mystifying about the body. It is, in and of itself, contradictory: so strong,  yet ultimately so fragile. The quirky enigmas of our physicality are enough to send even the stoutest among us into obsessive-compulsive hypochondria—the notion that millions of microscopic organisms are crawling in and out and over our every square inch right now can be an unsettling one. When our bodies rebel against us, too, through disease or inherited disorders, it can seem as if we’re sudden spectators to organic functions over which we have—and never have had—control.

In fictional terms, it’s that loss of biological autonomy that serves as the foundation of what’s popularly known as ‘body horror’. With a literary lineage extending as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’, body horror was brought to its greatest public prominence through the work of Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, whose queasifying set pieces highlighted such films as Shivers, Rabid, Videodrome, The Fly and ExistenZ.

Modern practitioners of body horror need not look far for inspiration. In a post-pandemic world the whole of humanity’s collective unconscious has been influenced by the very real concept of viral/bacteriological contamination, and while some may argue it’s too soon to explore such a narrative track, Vancouver Island resident Lor Gislason boldly disregards those concerns with the release of the DarkLit Press novel, Inside Out.

Beginning quietly with an accident deep in a British Columbia mine, a previously undocumented pathogen is released into the environment that causes those exposed to physically degenerate into viscous, semi-sentient globs of flesh. These ‘Outers’, as they become known (short for ‘Inside-Outers’), cease to exist as individuals; their newly liquefied state allows them to join into a collective mass (referred to by both scientists and soldiers as ‘The Pile’), with other infected people. Prolonged exposure isn’t required to contract the illness, either—a simple scratch will transform you into a ravenous, jelly-like blob in a matter of mortifying minutes, and as the plague rapidly spreads, the ramifications upon society are ever-present and, perhaps fittingly, ever-evolving.

Gislason’s skill with Inside Out lies not in its setting; the viral Armageddon scenario, already tired before Covid-19, is wearier now than ever. No, the strength here is the manner in which the story unfolds. Overall, the book has the feel of a short story collection rather than a novel, and even plot, in the conventional sense, is non-existent: the situation advances instead through sixteen small character-portrait vignettes (dubbed ‘Segments’) that describe the plague’s effect on the lives of a variety of unrelated protagonists across North America. On the surface such an approach shouldn’t work, but leaving careful narrative gaps allows readers to fill in the empty spaces regarding the outbreak’s wider consequences by themselves. The segments, too, are masterfully rendered with realistic, three-dimensional characters in scenarios infused with tongue-in-cheek humor: the landlord who continues making the rounds to his various properties to check on his molten tenants; the anxious teenage virgin whose friend is devoured during a botched attempt to get laid; the tattooist determined to carry on with his daily routine until it’s far too late.
​
If the litmus test for any creative work is how much it impacts an audience, Inside Out matches—and even exceeds—the seat-squirming squeamishness induced by any of Croneneberg’s flicks. Every segment revels in hyper-detailed descriptions of bodily disintegration more potent than the grossest of hack ‘n slash gorefests. Every orifice that can squirt, ooze, dribble or drip is explored, stretched, strained and rearranged with a relish rarely seen on the written page. Gislason’s grisly passion for the subject shows in every paragraph, and it’s that unabashedly demented spirit that earns Inside Out a 4.5 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. Not recommended for anyone easily nauseated by reruns of House, M.D. For everyone else: get in the pile!

In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene fiction book that has been published (and is still available in print), and then producing an essay on it. With the exception of Girl On The Glider, these essays will be based upon a first read of the books concerned. The article will assume you’ve read the book, and you should expect MASSIVE spoilers.


I hope you enjoy my voyage of discovery.


20: Terminal - Authors Preferred Text


So. Breaking format a bit with this one. I originally covered Terminal in the third essay of this  series, as that’s when the book was originally released. In the postscript for that essay, I noted that the book had been significantly altered by the editorial process, cutting a bunch of material around the child hostage, Benji; in particular, the revelation that Benji had been immaculately conceived and was in point of fact the second coming of Christ. Keene’s been on the record as saying the changes came about because of fears of a religious backlash by the publishers, and were effectively imposed on the book. He’d also been public about the fact that he didn’t hold the rights and hoped one day to regain them, in order to be able to publish the definitive version of the text.


Well, that day has come. So while, strictly speaking, I should cover this text at the end, I figured I’d take the opportunity to celebrate hitting twenty essays by revisiting one of my favourites in the Keene canon, and see how the new material sits.


And I guess we should start with how the story grew in my estimation following that initial essay. Revisiting what I had to say then, I can see that while I clearly had a good time, I was also clearly a little down on the second half of the novel, and in particular the siege situation.  And yet when I’ve come to talk to other people about this essay project, at cons or in interviews, I found myself name dropping Terminal as one of my favourites, even before the preferred text announcement had been made. Part of the reason I decided to read a book ahead for this project - that’s to say, I finish reading the next book in the canon before I write the review of the previous one (meaning, yes, I just finished Clickers III) - is because I recognize that initial impressions can often deviate significantly from longer term appreciation. For me, the process of ‘mulching down’ - getting a little distance, letting the work sit, digest, even grow a little dim around the edges, I guess - often brings a greater clarity than the sit-down-right-now-and-tell-you-what-I-think approach. Your mileage may and probably does vary, of course; this isn’t meant as implied criticism of other approaches or self aggrandisement - I’m just talking about what I’ve found works best for me.


All that said, maybe I didn’t leave enough space before writing the Terminal piece. Because while, having reread that essay in prep for this, I understand what I had to say, and could remember feeling it at the time, Terminal has absolutely gown in stature, for me; enough that, when the preferred text edition came out, I snapped it up eagerly, and was excited enough to read it that I was willing to break the format of this series in order to cover it reasonably close to initial release.


And I’m very, very glad I did so.


The gap was big enough that I couldn’t put my finger on where most of the additional 6,000 words landed. That said, I felt like Tommy and his crew were even more vividly realised; the dialogue and chemistry between them (a quality I remarked on in the previous essay) is an enormous strength of the piece, and it was a real joy to revisit. Similarly, Tommy’s own voice as the first person narrator crackles with energy. In the previous essay I spent some time wondering if Keene was conscious of the class dimensions to Tommy’s rage and situation, especially in the scene where his better-paid, better-insured boss discloses his own recent brush with cancer, and having read this version (and much more Keene in between) I feel like I owe him and you an apology for that - it’s clear Keene knew exactly what he was about in that part of the story. Similarly, Tommys speech in the church is still a highlight for me - of the novel, and of Keene’s writing in general. This time out, I could really picture it as a scene from a movie, the kind of monologue you’d get in a Mike Flannigan piece, if Mike Flannigan was monumentally pissed off with the world and done taking shit.


I do still prefer the first half of the book to the back half; I suspect primarily if not entirely due to matters of taste (I still want that pure crime thriller from Keene, damnit). While the swerve into hostage drama obviously wasn’t a surprise this time, it does still feel abrupt and jarring; though with the benefit of a second read through I can see how it’s supposed to be that way. Similarly, I found the sense of building dread even more acute, this time out, thanks to having a clear sense of what Sherm was capable of (and indeed one of the pleasures of revisiting the story was in getting to track how Sherm’s nature was carefully seeded through the setup).


That said, this is also where I noticed the biggest changes, at least in terms of impact on my enjoyment of the narrative.


I’d had memories of not really enjoying the dialogue in the second half, the first time out; feeling like it was… well, a bit like it was a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome, my basic problem with that being that Stockholm syndrome has since been debunked as total bullshit.


But now, of course, it turns out Benji isn’t just some mysterious kid with healing powers; he’s actually The Second Coming. And suddenly it all makes sense; how his very presence brings a sense of calm, encourages people to open up. It makes sense of Tommy’s openness, and even the old lady’s unpleasantness and Sherm’s escalation; it’s clear the presence of this kid draws people out, surfaces their true natures.


One of the things I’ve found admirable about Keenes’ work is his willingness to take on perspectives other than his own, and really try and feel his way through them. Take The Long Way Home has a Jewish man living through the born-again rapture, Dead Sea stars a black gay man facing an old school zombie apocalypse; here, he really commits to the premise of the idea of the second coming; a being both fully divine and fully human. And then, this being a Keene novel, he has that being killed.


I’m a strong enough Agnostic most would mistake it for Atheism, and I’m fine with that, but I have to say that these changes to Terminal really did give the climax and denouement of the novel a significant extra wallop I hadn’t been expecting. Because, now, it’s not just the end for Tommy, and the other people Benji cured; it’s clear that we’re in yet another Keene apocalypse, our doom as certain as it will be when the dead walk the earth or it starts raining one day and doesn’t stop. It gives extra weight to an already-heavy ending; not only are all the cured going to fall sick again, you get the impression that, absent Benji’s influence, the whole world may well have become terminal.


It’s easy to see why Keene was so frustrated by the original release of the novel, and why he’s worked so hard for so many years to get the rights back. And as an early tentpole release for his new publishing company, Manhattan On Mars, it’s a pretty powerful statement of intent.


But most importantly, it’s simply the best version of one of Keenes best novels, and I had a brilliant time with it. Again.


KP
7/1/23


Next up - Clickers III

For over two decades, fans of Brian Keene’s cult-classic novel Terminal have heard rumors of an uncut version that was never published. Now, for the first time anywhere, here is that version, as the author originally intended.

Tommy O’Brien once hoped to leave his run-down industrial hometown. But marriage and fatherhood have kept him running in place, working a job that doesn’t even pay the bills. And now he seems fated to stay for the rest of his life. Tommy has just learned he’s going to die young — and soon. But he refuses to leave his family with less than nothing–especially now that he has nothing to lose. Over a couple of beers with his best friends, John and Sherm, Tommy launches a bold scheme to provide for his family’s future. And though his plan will spin shockingly out of control, it will throw him together with a child whose touch can heal — and whose ultimate lesson is that there are far worse things than dying. Now, one man’s war with God may impact us all.

“A powerful, unique novel with a fascinating plot and characters, and echoes of Stephen King’s working-class voice.” — Ed Gorman

““If Brian Keene’s books were music, they would occupy a working class, hard-earned space between Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, and Johnny Cash.” — John Skipp