Lovecraft, now that's a whole can of worms, in recent years this author has fallen from grace, and rightly so his views on race etc., re way beyond the pale, however, you cannot deny his place in genre history. With the exception of Stoker and Shelly, there probably isn't an author whose works have stood the test of time with regards to both sales and inspiration for other authors. The Cthulhu mythology still has ripples that reach out to all corners of the genre, hell my daughter goes by the name of Cthella, and one of our cats is called H.P. Lovecat, does that mean I support his awful world views, no it doesn't, all it means is I respect his contributions to the genre that I love.  

I have to admit when I first heard of Lex Jones' idea to write a children's book using both the mythos and Lovecraft himself as the protagonist, I was a little concerned; it just felt wrong, and even now I still swither over my thoughts on it. Having said that, leaving this to one side for the review The Old One and The Sea is a truly delightful book.  ​

Ormeshadow is a novella suffused with the harshness of rural life, and the claustrophobia of village life. As someone who spent most of his childhood in such places, I found myself affected  powerfully by the evocation of that landscape, both geographically and socially. The story begins with Gideon, a boy of 10, being relocated from a city life with his mother and  father to the family farm his dad abandoned to his brother, but has now through circumstance been forced to return to.
 
Archetypes abound, both character and narratively speaking; the relationship between the two brothers, Gideon’s father the intellectual, but also with deep emotional intelligence (albeit also with quite staggering blind spots), his brother Thomas surface-stoic, man of the earth, but with seething resentments and simmering rage just under the surface. Sharma takes these archetypes and breathes incredible life into them, rendering them vividly. One of the many many brilliant things the novella does is allow dialogue and descriptions of tone, facial expressions and body language to convey often deep and conflicting character emotions,painting for the reader exquisite character portraits of often deeply troubled people.
 
Sharma also manages to pull of the incredible trick of allowing the narrative arc to follow the contours of plotlines that date back to antiquity, whilst still delivering shocks and surprises within that framework. A palpable sense of doom and crushing inevitability hung over me from the opening scene, and part of the strange pleasure of the novella was feeling that dread settle over my mind as the story unfolded.
 
Sharma’s use of language is breathtaking; she is utterly surefooted, allowing the simplicity of Gideons point of view to set the tone, and yet, through his wide open eyes, showing us things he sees and hears but doesn’t yet have the capacity to understand. In fact, one of the principal sources of dread becomes the awful knowledge that Gidion will eventually have to share in the revelations the reader has been privy to.
 
Ormeshadow is a tightly woven tale about the darkness that can lurk and fester so easily inside people who’s horizons have been brutally shortened by circumstance. It is a powerful and deeply moving coming of age story. It is exquisitely written. It is haunting in both its sense of place and people shaped by place.
 
It is masterful, and if your spirit is strong, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
 
KP
21/10/19

Anyway, Joe and Danny land a sweet gig house-sitting for the weird Mrs. Snowden. She pays them well and lets them have full run of the place as long as they're respectful. SO of course, the moment she's in her limo and off the premises their heads start reeling with promises of Risky Business style parties rife with babes and booze.  With the lady of the manor gone, the boys start planning their shindig. But they aren't alone in the manor.  An entity swims behind the old walls, a conglomerate specter that is witch/ghost/succubus and human.  As the super moon rises so does her power and she needs these boys to help her with her work, a fuse lit and ready to blow on Halloween.

When the guys invite their ladies to the party and one of the boy's younger brother arrives, things get complicated and people start to disappear. Horrors begin to unveil themselves and where the hell did that dog come from?

The Long Shadows Of October is a full bore riot. As much fun as an 80's vhs movie, you know the Linnea Quigley ones. It's smart and funny and scary.  It's destined to be a Halloween classic.
The Long Shadows Of October is available from Grindhouse Press

There are few UK horror authors as versatile and inventive as Dave Jeffery who effortlessly shimmies from Himalayan killer yetis (Frost Bite) to marauding werewolves (Tooth and Claw) via an entertaining dose of Beatrice Beecham with his welcome forays into YA fiction. This latest novella, A Quiet Apocalypse, may well be his darkest work yet; the tongue in cheek humour of his trashy werewolf and yeti romps is entirely absent in this excursion into the well-trodden world of post-apocalyptic fiction. It might be a familiar path, but Jeffery’s take is refreshingly original and entirely non-sensational, taking in disability as a major thread in his apocalyptic vision. It is ever so slightly reminiscent of Richard Farren-Barber’s excellent Perfect Darkness, Perfect Silence, which also featured a very ‘quiet’ type of character-driven apocalypse. Do not expect any post-apocalyptic Mad Max stereotypes in either of these gritty novellas which have tight microcosm focuses of the disaster as hand. 
 
The story is set sometime after a mutant strain of meningitis (MNG-U) has wiped out most of mankind, the majority died horribly with symptoms which began with pneumonia before developing into bacterial meningitis and eventual death with catastrophic brain damage. The few who survived the epidemic were left deaf, an even smaller percentage retained their hearing and the focus of the book concerns the horrible relationship which develops between those with hearing and those deprived of it. A Quiet Apocalypse opens with a downbeat paragraph which perfectly sets the tone for the brutality for what lies ahead:
 
“Someone once said that the world would end, not with a bang, but a whimper. Yet when the time came, the world could have died screaming until its lungs bled, and most would not have been able to hear anything at all. That was the nature of the virus that silenced mankind.”
 
It is worth pointing out that A Quiet Apocalypse is an incredibly bleak book and I did wonder about the extremes those who were left deaf went to in order to enslave those who still had the ability to hear. Sure, I appreciate it is a story, but if mankind sinks this low and if this is a true reflection of what lies ahead we are truly finished. However, if we look at the current state of the planet, and the politicians calling the shots, then it is no wonder Jeffery’s vision is so dark and offering little, or no hope.
 
The novel is told, in the first person, by ex-schoolteacher Chris, who has been enslaved by a deaf man called Crowley who uses Chris to be his ears and part of his early-warning-system, as unknown and unheard threats may come suddenly and without warning. Crowley uses a ‘Tell-Pad’ computer to communicate with Chris on which they exchange abbreviated messages similar to texts in which Chris informs him of any sounds and disturbances. A while earlier Chris had tried to escape and Crowley smashed his knee beyond repair who now walks in great pain, with a very rudimentary leg brace to help him hirple along.
 
I did wonder how the story would have played out if it had been told in the third person. The first-person narrative restricts us to the point of view of Chris and although it does fill in some of the blanks from what went before the disaster, a narrative from one of the deaf characters might have expanded the story into other directions and perhaps from a novella into a longer work.  Crowley’s main fear is losing his number one commodity, Chris, to a large and powerful gang called the ‘Samaritans’ who hunt for the last remaining people who can hear and take them back to their base ‘Cathedral’ which we are told is the remnants of the major English city Birmingham. Chris is an even more important ‘find’ as he is able to understand sign language from his previous job in education.
 
Before long the Samaritans appear, but before their arrival Chris plays around with an old beat-up radio, listening to the static, hoping to pick up a signal or voice which might signify there is a base of other survivors who can still hear and the possibility of escaping there. The story picks up legs when Chris eventually meets another guy who can hear called Paul, but can he trust him? In this world everyone is either a wolf, a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a victim (the proverbial lamb).
 
The novella easily had enough material to be expanded into a full novel, particularly if the points of view were expanded, and I would have like to have seen ‘Cathedral’ for example, instead the entire story is played out in the surrounding rural areas. The flashbacks helped flesh out the story, although do not reveal every detail of which went on before, including the death of his daughter Poppy and wife Evie. Interestingly, the story suggests that deaf people who had no hearing before the outbreak carried MNG-U and were seen as scapegoats and were blamed. Although A Quiet Apocalypse never comes across as preachy or worthy it also has a lot of say about the struggle of minority groups such as the deaf.    
 
The drama picks up intensity as it heads into the second half spiralling towards an incredibly dark and uncompromising ending which will have you wincing. A Quiet Apocalypse was entertaining company for a couple of hours and if you’ve never read Dave Jeffery before this is good place to start. But if you fancy something lighter Tooth and Nail or Frost Bite are also fine selections.
 
4/5
 
Tony Jones

There has been considerable buzz surrounding John F.D. Taff’s The Fearing, which is currently being dropped in five parts, a few months between each, the second of which has recently hit the shelves. It is often the case that hyped books fail to meet expectations, but on this occasion there is no let-down and at the time of writing I’m waiting with interest the arrival of the third instalment.
 
If you’re a stranger to Taff, who has one of the coolest nicknames in horror; “The King of Pain” I recommend you check out a couple of podcasts over at the excellent Ink Heist site run by Shane Douglas Keene and Rich Duncan. Episode 101 covers Taff’s career in general, The Fearing and where that outstanding nickname originates. Episode 104 is a discussion which focuses specifically on The Fearing, but don’t worry, it’s spoiler free and is well worth listening to for an intelligent discussion on the book, its origins and development. 
 
Keene and Duncan’s podcast chew over a lot of ground detail with Taff; but what I found particularly fascinating listening was the complex journey The Fearing had making it into print. Taff had originally shopped his 500+ page epic to several publishers, who although they were positive about it, did not believe he was a big enough name in the industry to sell a book of that size. When it was eventually bought by Grey Matter Press it was editor Anthony Rivera who suggested releasing the book in four bite size chunks. The story remains the same, but it went through some major restructuring to make it a better fit for this new format.
 
I bought Fire and Blood (book 1) on the strength of the Ink Heist review and upon completion tracked Rivera down for an ARC of Water and Wind (book 2) as the first finished on an almighty cliff-hanger and I was desperate to see how the story developed. For a book which is being released in parts, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, sucked this reader in for the second part. This review will briefly take in both parts one and two and will follow the example of Shane and Rich by being light on spoilers. 
 
Loaded with cryptically cool chapter titles, The Fearing is a highly enjoyable apocalyptic horror novel with the central theme of fear running through a series of survival sub-plots which will inevitably link up somewhere further down the line. It opens with a young man, who drifts in and out of the story, Adam Sigel, who is both fearful and isolated, but seems also able to sense individual fears within other people, and more crucially, be able to do something very dangerous with this fear. This guy might just be the most dangerous human alive and whilst other cataclysmic events are happening Adam and his taxi-driver sidekick Jelnik leave New York behind, and with good reason. 
 
In all the best apocalyptic novels we have a host of characters battling for survival and The Fearing is no different. Whilst Adam is abandoning New York crazy stuff is happening all over America and parts one and two develop stories around several small groups of characters. In Missouri there is a massive tornado which destroys a town and we follow three very different teenage survivors Sarah Langford, Kyle DeMarco and Carli Robinson who struggle to relate to what has just happened and fight amongst themselves. Bridging the age gap, the next group of survivors are elderly travellers on a bus heading to Phoenix when a huge earthquake forces Marcia and Glen Schlimpert and Charles and Wanda Trammel to put their lives in the hands of a bus driver who tries to find an alternative route, but instead finds destruction everywhere. They might be aged, but this group of versatile and quick-witted old-timers quickly band together into a tough group of survivors and are very good company. Earthquakes, tornadoes and all sorts of crazy stuff are only the beginning of their problems and Taff blends it all nicely in a well-judged and paced story.
 
As Fire and Blood bleeds into Wind and Water with a mouth-watering ending Taff expertly expands upon his ripple effect of diverse apocalyptic events into something more coherent which is interconnected through fear and begins to slowly layer in more details beyond the isolated incidents. Make sure you do not read part two before reading its predecessor as there is nothing in the way of introduction and the characters begin to have deeper inklings that what they are experiencing is something more than localised disasters.
 
As well as continuing with the original characters Wind and Water also introduces a few new faces including Reverend Mark Hubert who refuses to abandon his Baptist church when a massive hurricane batters the coastline and questions his sanity when he sees creatures flying through the sky, as well as people who have been sucked up into the atmosphere by the wind. Afterwards a teenage girl named ‘Monday’ is introduced along with Jennifer Cho, and John and Cynthia Martinez.
 
There is much to digest in Wind and Water and by the conclusion the reader is more than ready for Air and Dust (book 3) and I am intrigued to see where the story is heading. In the Ink Heist podcast the author Taff insists nobody will be able to predict where its ultimate direction! Thus far it has a solid mix of engaging characters, action, and an apocalypse with a very strong supernatural feel. In the Ink Heist podcast there was some discussion about comments made, here and there, about similarities with Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, which Taff disputed and was slightly prickly about. Ultimately every supernatural apocalyptic horror worth its salt is compared to these two gold-standards of the genre, whether the plot is similar or not, and thus far The Fearing is very much its own beast and stands on its own two feet and it is not something the author should take to heart. But only time will tell whether it has the juice to mix with the King and McCammon masterworks. It certainly deserves to pick up momentum (and hopefully readers) as new parts hit the shops, with section three next up in October. Bring it on!
 
4.5/5
 
Tony Jones

The town under siege from mysterious forces is a well-worn trope in horror fiction, from The Mist  and  Under the  Dome by Stephen King, to Chasm by Stephen Laws, and many more, it is a motif that runs the risk of becoming boring and staid.  

In Soon by Lois Murphy, Nebulah, a small town in the Australian outback is in the final throes of its existence thanks to a mysterious mist that has laid siege to the town.  A mist that arrives every night after sundown, and spells certain death to anyone foolish enough to have been caught outside.  Nobody knows  where the mist came from, what it is, and if it will ever leave.  Leaving the few remaining residents to band together in an uneasy alliance to ensure each others safety and survival.  However, as their numbers dwindle and long stand feuds boil to the surface, the last few residents of Nebulah must fight for their way of life.  

While this may sound like we have heard it all before, Soon  has enough going for it to set it apart from the rest of the pack.  Initial comparisons will always point to King's masterpiece The Mist, which is fair enough as there are several similarities between the two stories.  However, the most significant difference between the two stories is perhaps the biggest saving grace for Soon.  

In The Mist, the Mist takes centre stage where it is a constant backdrop to the events of the book; it is a continual threat on every page.  Soon takes a different approach, the mist and  its horrors takes a sideways step out of the spotlight and, for the most part, remains on the periphery of the story, thereby focusing the emphasis  onto the few remaining townsfolk. It's a bold move, one that creates more of an overbearing foreshadowing of horror, rather than the outright horror of King's story.  And even when the mist takes centre stage, Murphy keeps the blood and guts to a bare minimum.  While this may not appeal to the more hardened of horror fans, the ominous supernatural tone of the novel is handled exceptionally well. Murphy's use of apprehension and dread to ramp up the terror, is more than enough to keep the readers' interest as the events in Nebulah unfold.  

Her characterisation and the interplay between the small cast is also another strong point of the novel.  There is a real sense of camaraderie between them, with the friendships and rivalries forming the backbone of the narrative.  She expertly captures the feel of a small town in the final death throes of its existence.  There is a painful, bittersweet undercurrent to their lives, one that would still be present even if they weren't under siege.  For the most part, these are characters who are here because they have nowhere else to go, which goes some way to explaining why they remain there despite the horrors they must face every night.  

There is a real sense of melancholy that permeates both the town and its residents, they both broken, and on their last legs, it is almost as if the town and the townsfolk need each other to survive, in some sort of weird toxic symbiotic relationship, and maybe that is one of the themes of the book, that we each levitate or sink to the place in the world where we  can exists without really existing.  

Which brings to me one of my issues with the book, unlike say The Mist or Under the Dome the residents of   Nebulah aren't physically trapped there, yes their whole lives are cemented to the town.  Why on earth they decide not to up sticks and move out is never fully justified.  I get that they have no money and no family to lean on.  I find it hard to accept that anyone would stay in a place with a killer mist that appears without fail every night. Sadly this brings the believability of the narrative crashing down somewhat. Yes the story in itself is fantastical, but the motives and drive of the characters require a certain degree of grounding in reality and logic, and by not having a force or reason to keep them trapped robs the story of some of its power and potential.  

My second major issue with the book is with the ending, I won't say much about it, except it is one of my most hated ways of ending a story, especially when there is either no signalling to it in the rest of the narrative.  Or when there is no explanation or reason for it to exist after the big reveal.  It's been done a fair few times, and in my humble opinion, it has only been successfully pulled off in a minimal number of cases.

However, and this is a big, however, despite these two major issues with the book, I would recommend reading it, it is exceptionally well written, with a painter's eye for the finer details of pacing plot and characterisation.  Murphey turns what could have been another haunted house novel, into a spooky, personal and ambiguous tale.  In many cases, when an author fails to explain what is going on fully, the story feels flat and empty.  Murphey's assured writing prevents this from happening, and the ambiguity of what, where, and the significance of the mist adds to the overall enjoyment of the book.  

Soon may have several flaws that hold it back from becoming an instant classic in my eyes, but it is nevertheless a book worthy of your attention.  Just don't say I didn't warn you about that ending.  

​Sam Richard knows a thing or two about putting together literary tributes. As owner of Weirdpunk Books, he’s edited and published such anthologies as Blood for You: A Literary Tribute to GG Allin, Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to the Misfits, and The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg.

Now he’s released his own debut short story collection, To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows (published by NihilismRevised). And though not formally marketed as such, this book is in many ways a tribute to Richard’s biggest influence of all: his wife.

In his introduction, the author is upfront about the circumstances that led to this book’s creation. In 2017, Richard’s wife Mo died suddenly and without warning. Nevertheless, her presence is felt on every page here, every sentence and every word, every drop of blank ink and every empty white space. The book is dedicated to her and virtually every story selected for inclusion here has some connection to her, either by virtue of being a piece she herself enjoyed in life or, more often, being directly inspired by her loss.

Knowing all that makes To Wallow in Ash a difficult book to read, and an even more difficult one to review. One can only imagine what it must have been like to write.

To wit, the opening title story reads more like a confessional than a piece of fiction. Told from the first-person POV in a conversational style, the tale’s unnamed narrator finds himself a widower in a situation that is essentially a retelling of events from Richard’s own life.

After cremating his spouse, the narrator returns home with an urn full of ashes and a determination to find some way of holding onto his lost love. The method he chooses is stomach-churning, and his spiraling descent into grief, desperation, and self-destruction is heart-wrenching. That the early half of the narrative sticks so closely to Richard’s own admitted experiences, to the point where the piece initially appears to be a non-fiction essay rather than a made-up story, makes the latter half all the more vivid and harrowing.

Though the next tale is much more blatantly fictional it proves no less soul-crushing. “Love Like Blood” focuses on another widower, this one a man who searches fruitlessly for solace at the bottom of a bottle. One drunken night at a local bar leads to a surreal encounter with a woman who seems in every way his late wife’s double. When the man wakes up in bed the next morning, the doppelganger is gone, leaving the poor guy with nothing but a wicked hangover and an even wickeder VHS tape. “Love Like Blood” goes in a very different direction than one might first assume, and ultimately climaxes in a finale that is shocking, yes, but also disturbingly relatable.

In any other book, “The Prince of Mars” would be solid piece of entertainment, but here it is more: A welcome mercy. A drink of water. A much-needed gasp of air following the suffocating blackness of “To Wallow in Ash” and “Love Like Blood.”

Trading the intimately personal for something more high-concept, “The Prince of Mars” is an inspired mash-up of literature’s two great Burroughs, Edgar Rice and William S. Richard deftly evokes the voice of the latter as he drops the notorious beat author (or at least his thinly veiled alter ego “Bill Lee”) into a fairly straightforward retelling of the former’s first Barsoom novel. Much star-crossed romance, hot man-on-Thark action, and excessive drug use ensues. The juxtaposition of E.R.’s innocent swashbuckling pulp with W.S.’s debauched appetites and hallucinogenic language is riotous. It is also, somehow, surprisingly touching.
Surprising in its own way is “I Know Not the Names of the Gods to Whom I Pray.” One of Richard’s shorter tales, this one nevertheless packs a lot of oomph into a small package with its sensual, lyrical, and grisly account of a pair of lovers locked in an endless cycle, killing one another only to resurrect and do it all over again, over and over for all eternity. It’s serves as a gory, gothic meditation on love and loss, on need and suffering.

Following that is “The Verdant Holocaust,” the second of To Wallow in Ash’s two pieces written prior to the passing of Richard’s wife, alongside “The Prince of Mars.” However where “The Prince of Mars” sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to the rest of the collection’s material (in truth, that is part of its appeal), “The Verdant Holocaust” feels very much at home.

With a plot concerning a pair of punk rockers struggling to revive their friendship after the suicide of a bandmate, it more overtly shares the same themes of death, mourning, fatalism, and attempted (though not necessarily successful) reconstruction that run throughout the collection. That said punk rockers soon run afoul of an apocalyptic backwoods cannibal cult does nothing to lessen the potency of those themes, but it does lighten the mood (in a sense) via a veritable blood-orgy of grisly b-movie splatter.

Another cult is at the center of “Those Undone.” Instead of relishing in the excesses of the trope like “The Verdant Holocaust,” though, “Those Undone” soberly explores the emotional and psychological toll of a child growing up in such an environment. Little by little, piece by piece, the youthful narrator is orphaned, first from his parents, then from his faith, later from sister, and finally from himself. It’s a haunting reflection on survivor’s guilt, and on the directionless that comes when everything you knew disappears overnight.

Guilt of a different kind features heavily in “We Feed This Muddy Creek,” a story about a member of a gang of serial killers who tries to leave the bloodshed behind when he meets a woman who fulfills a need in him that no body-count ever could. This tragic romance tastes bittersweet before it even begins, with an agonizing sense of inevitability looming large from the first line all the way to the fittingly cruel but strangely serene end.

The final two stories in To Wallow in Ash somewhat mirror the first two, being among the most transparently autobiographical pieces in Richard’s oeuvre. In the alternately melancholy and absurd “Nature Unveiled” a married couple engrosses themselves in ancient magick and occult practices. When the wife dies her husband returns her ashes to nature. Soon enough, nature itself becomes a weapon against the living, with even the most unassuming woodland critter suddenly turning vicious and hungry, as if intent to spread the woman’s death to the rest of the world.

Finally, in “Deathlike Love,” a grieving widower left alone in the morgue with his wife’s body seeks the comfort of carnal intimacy with his deceased lover one last time. What in another writer’s hands might come off as mere sleaze or shock value is instead imbued with sincere understanding and emotional intensity, and is all the more raw and corrosive because of it. Though it’s not hard to see where this tale is going, that doesn’t make the journey there any less brutal. Indeed, “Deathlike Love” might be the most upsetting piece in To Wallow in Ash since its titular opener.

Knowing the truth behind them, even Richard’s most outrageous fictions become unforgivingly real. This collection is not the kind of book one should read all in one sitting, despite the modest page-count. This is a collection best digested in chunks, a story at a time. Anything more is almost unbearable. Nearly every page surges with confrontational energy, a kind of blunt honesty that rarely leaves room for reassurance in its single-minded pursuit of total, aching, human vulnerability.
​
In that way, however, the book does offer one subtle comfort, though it’s one that’s easy to miss. For all its heartbreak, pessimism, doom, and despair, that this collections exists at all is a testament not simply to death, but to survival as well.
Simply put, as much as To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows stands as a tribute to a Richard’s late wife Mo, it is equally a tribute to Richard himself.