I am considerably late to the party on this, it being touted and praised for well over a year by this point.  Upon completion, I was quite ashamed of that fact. It's a wonderfully and wildly weird book.  the blurb from Jack Ketchum says it all "Novels don't come much more transgressive than this one."

It is the story of a troubled young boy (at the opening anyway) who grows to a troubled man.  He has bad thoughts and does terrible things. While most children would plot out games and adventures, he wants to murder his mother.  We see the entire world through his warped view and it just gets, well, warpier... I will admit, I was basically expecting a modern riff on The Bad Seed and my God, was I wrong.

Once grown and trying not to follow the urges of his sort-of imaginary acquaintance, Mr. Suicide, he runs away.  But not before his equally fucked-up brother gives him a key to salvation, a bible of sorts. It's a magazine called Perfect Monsters and it sets this ride on an entirely different set of tracks as we careen and swerve into so much darkness and brutal crushing despair that you almost need to gulp for air.

The closest thing I can liken this novel to is the feeling I got when I read The Cipher by Kathe Koja, all those years ago.   My brain whizzing and screaming as it tries to put together what it's visualizing from the prose.  What started as just another troubled kid story morphs and evolves into a swaggering and sneering monstrosity of anger and seething rage, painted in blood and bile while still trying and some how succeeding in being human.

Brilliant.  And terrifying.
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Mr. Suicide is available from the fine folks at Word Horde.

 
After decades of drifting, Martin wants to settle down. he's taken on a development project for a small town, and has designs on one of the homes being his own.  He spends his evenings talking with his neighbor, an old woodsman who knows more than a thing or two about a thing or two.  Then, Martin has the run in the fox...and the bear. And then things start to make a change for the odd.

Scratch is a creature of local legend. A bear-beast shape-shifting being, older than time and more apt to play games and orchestrate events than to slaughter and devour folks.  After Scratch has his way with Martin, a chain of events are set in motion, a chain that will snag and trip up nearly every character we meet.

I can't really say much more without giving too much away, hopefully I haven't done so already. Scratch is a cracking good book. Himmer's prose and vision are richly detailed and as veined as a clenching fist.  The language is easy and never threatens top smother the story.  It was a wonderful rendered novel and I look forward to reading more by Mr. Himmer.
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Scratch is available from Dark House Press, or at least it will be when released in October.  Mark your calendars!!

I had never heard of this second novel by Adrian J Walker until it was featured on Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio 2 Book Club and highly recommended. Being a big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, this novel sounded like it had a quirky development on the sub-genre and so I quickly picked it up. The UK paperback was published by Delreyuk in June earlier this year, interestingly, it had been previously self-published by the author in 2014. I’ve read more than my fair share of self-published nonsense, however, this wasn’t one of them and was easily as good as the cream of self-published novels, comfortably matching Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ and Hugh Howey’s ‘Wool’. I have no idea whether the self-published version made any kind of impact, or whether it went through a further edit, but this paperback version has already made a splash and has picked up lots of great reviews.

I recently saw a critics’ poll that stated that Mulholland Drive by David Lynch was one of, if not the greatest films of the 21st century and whilst attempting to get my head around what the hell that film is about, I’m reminded somewhat of the book that currently sits in front of me, “Marked” by Stuart Park. This, for want of better words is an absolute head fuck of a book that will tie your brain up in Gordian knots trying to decipher what it is all about. I first became aware of Stuart Park’s writing after reading “Oranges are Orange” in the second volume of the Black Room Manuscripts and was blown away by his ability to create a layered story that revealed more of itself at each reading. So, when I saw this novella on sale at Edge Lit 5 I just had to have it and to be honest, I’m not disappointed.