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As a book blogger, there are many different ways that bloggers write about books. There are those that write a subjective review, will mention story and what they think the book is about, so on and so forth. Then there are the other types. Those that write about their interactions with the book or the story, how it makes them feel, what they like, didn't like etc etc. Me? I flit between the two. I try to do the former kind of review every now and again, but primarily, I fall into the second camp, as a reader that is trying to convey their own interactions with the book they are reading. Now, this becomes more apparent when I like a book because you get all those things (I don't bother if I don't like it! Generally, I won't even finish a book that I don't like because if it's not working for me, it's not working and I don't see the point of writing an endless diatribe of negativity just because I didn't like it).


So with that, let's get on to Verum Malum.


I have to say,  I am a little conflicted about this book. On the one hand there was some good horror in there, but on the other, there was a major plot point that I kind of had difficulty getting past. And whilst I enjoyed the book, I couldn't wrap my head around this main point.


So the story revolves around Ben and Noah. Ben is currently in remission from cancer and we start the book with Noah using alcohol to manage the shock news that Ben's cancer has returned. However, it soon transpires that this is actually a ploy from Ben's former satanic cult to get him to return.


Not only do they want him to return but they want him to return to raise a special demon - the Verum Malum which is a different dimension from hell and is worse than Satan.


The story floats along. We meet the Statanic cult that Ben was involved with and they are nasty bunch to say the least. In addition to that we get to see how Ben has evolved from his angry youthful days to the current iteration of his loving relationship with his husband Noah. We learn that Ben has had cancer in the past and that he is now in remission. The story brings us up to speed  when their mutual friend, Jackie, brings along Marius, one of Ben's cult members to dinner. This shocks Ben out of his comfortable reverie with Noah and brings everything from his past back into sharp clarity and the fact that it is not going away and that he has to deal with it.


Now, the bit that was a bit problematic for me was that whilst it's lovely to be in a warm and nurturing relationship, which Ben and Noah have, I was thrown by the scene in which Ben tells Noah that he was a bit of a bad 'un and that he was involved in the ritual sacrifice of an individual in order to raise a demon. I expected shock and all that stuff, but what threw me was that everyone kinda went 'Don't worry about it, we've all done some stuff we aren't proud of!'


Now this unconditional acceptance of quite a heinous act did cause me some problems. I know it hasn't for other people that have read the book, but this was my experience and I took away different stuff from the story.


Like I said, I liked book! The horror aspects of the story gave me a definite Clive Barker feel which ran through the story as it is all about pleasure and pain. We get all the usual themes from the bad guys. They want power and dominion etc etc. However, what is interesting is that the Verum Malum isn't really all that interested. It's not that the main bad guy has to do a series of tests, each more despicable than the last - The Demon Lord/dimension doesn't really care what these people who all want to be punished do. It's a strange attitude as the Verum Malum (who is more than a demon, but is also the dimension) has no actual care for anything and instead sees the 'demons' and 'sinnners' as more of an encroachment on it and its dimension.


The book itself is a decent piece of occult horror that in parts is viscerally good, but in other parts has some incongruous character decisions. At times some of the characters were one dimensional, and I felt bordering on the pastiche, especially the Death Metal band. But, putting this aside I enjoyed it.


About The Author


Michael R. Collins was born at a very young age in the wilds of southern Idaho. After a few decades, he finally got his fill of all the sagebrush and rattlesnakes he could eat so he struck out into the world. After a long stop in Austin, Texas, he currently lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Mel. His horror stories are scaring the pants off of people. He has published four books, scores of short tales, and a few alibis. (Just in case)


He is also an activist for the bisexual+ community. As a member of the Bi+plus Podcast, he tries to fight the good fight.

The title says it all – this is the life of Guy Fawkes, but reimagined! Bar a brief moment in the present day, used as a framing device, this is set in 1500s England and focuses on the early life of Guy Fawkes.

I was expecting a fun, irreverent read, changing Guy Fawkes into a misunderstood hero, something similar to Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter but this is definitely not that. Langley has woven fact into fiction here – key events from Fawkes’ life are looked at through a horror lens and changed.

As a young boy, Fawkes sees a floating skull that talks to him and tells him he has a calling as he can see things normal people can’t. He seems to accept this a bit more readily than I would, but then he is very young when this happens.

When he starts school, he’s punished immediately for not paying attention and meets his first friend Kit Wright. They get into the usual scrapes for school kids, get beaten by their teachers and the prefects. As someone with an overactive imagination, plus an insight into the ‘other’ world, Fawkes begins to suspect one of the prefect is not what he appears….

I won’t spoil how things unravel from there. The pace is high through most of the novel, with many set pieces. A highlight is a demon attack on a farmhouse which is full of icky details and actually makes you worry about the fate of the supporting cast. Obviously Fawkes will survive, but what about the rest? If you know a lot about the real-life Fawkes then some of these passages may not work for you, but for me, I knew very little and so I was invested in seeing his friends survive.

Grim ideas abound in this novel, which push it past its pulpy title. My favourite was the Hand of Glory: cut the hand off a criminal as they hang and turn it into a candle. Bad things happen (which is a massive understatement). Fawkes endures a hard time throughout the novel, but he still makes for a likeable and engaging protagonist.
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The early part of the novel does suffer from some info dumps and long passages of exposition which made it initially difficult to get into, but once the demon blood starts flowing, it rattles along and is bloody good fun. There are two more novels proposed in this series, and I’m already looking forward to reading them.

A gruesome curse. A city in upheaval. A monster with unquenchable appetites.

I’m not sure what I was expecting going into this gothic retelling of the Grimm’s The Juniper Tree. I’m not familiar with the original story, so you may get more (or less!) out of this if you are. I’ll cut to the chase: regardless of my ignorance of the source material, I adored this book and couldn’t get enough of it.

The story itself concerns Marlinchen, the youngest of the last three witches living with their wizard father in the city of Oblya. There is an eastern European feel to the place, and the world-building is superb. Industrialisation has crept into this part of the world and removed the magic, leaving behind poverty, cramped living conditions and desperation.

Marlinchen and her sisters still have customers who come to them when new medicine and doctors fail them, which means their once grand existence is crumbling even though people treat them with a mixture of wonder and fear.

Their father, cursed long ago by a witch to always be tired and hungry, is an overbearing thug of a man, using his magic to keep his daughters locked away. They find ways to escape into the city, however, and it is on one of these jaunts that the plot of the novel kicks in. Marlinchen goes to the ballet and is immediately captivated by the young principal dancer, Sevas.

Things soon unravel for the family from there, but you’ll have to read the novel to discover how. There is a monster loose in the city, forbidden love in both expected and unexpected places, lots of magic and wonderful set-pieces. An early stand out is when Marlinchen has to leave home to heal a previously hypochondriac customer. Her father goes with her to chaperone and things don’t go to plan. Not only does this section further the plot, it highlights the world Reid has built.

The pace slows in the middle of the book, but the prose is so wonderfully evocative that you keep reading anyway. Reid has a superb way of building atmosphere, where you can feel the cold and the creep of industrialisation affecting these complex characters.

A final word of caution however: there are many triggers in this book. We have eating disorders, abuse – both sexual and physical, violence (sparing, but graphic when it comes), paedophilia, alcoholism, etc, etc. This is a dark, grim world and Reid doesn’t shy away from any of the ugliness within it. Furthermore, it’s a gothic tale, so if you like your horror blood spattered or extreme, stay away. For everyone else, dig in and I hope you enjoy this outstanding novel as much as I did.

I’ll start with a disclaimer; I know Johnny Mains personally and consider him a friend.  That said, my usual rule of reviewing applies; I don’t review anything that I don’t a) finish and b) enjoy, regardless of how well I like someone, and that policy applies to this book.


A Man At War’s subtitle is a novel in three novellas, and sure enough, the book is a three-part story, taking in The Cut (1957 - 59) Choke (1986), and A Man At War (1941 - 42). All three tales follow Russell Stickles, an English World War II veteran turned author, who, for the first two novellas, lives in Main’s fictional English town of Effingham-on-the-Stour.


I found Stickles to be a compelling character from the off; he initially struck me as cold, with a buttoned-down English quality that evoked such archetypes as George Smiley or even Holmes, and yet Mains swiftly undercuts that perception, or at least complicates it, by some of his early actions and scenes, which quickly make clear we’re in darker and more personal territory. The Cut really comes out swinging, with tough emotional content that’s also sewing seeds that’ll pay off in the third tale. There’s a confidence to the storytelling that, combined with the clarity of the voice, I found compelling.


The structure itself is interesting; as the dates imply, The Cut places us in the middle of Stickles life, as he is trying to make the pivot from his war service to becoming a full-time author, while wrestling with difficult relationships and personal loss, followed by Choke, which feels to be taking place near the end of his life (and has a brilliant ‘one last job’ quality to it), before Man At War takes us back to his origins, in the process shedding light on the proceeding stories. It’s a bold, imaginative narrative choice - start in the middle, skip to the end, end with the beginning - and Mains executes it with real flare and skill; it’s not flashy, but I was incredibly impressed by the end how neatly the piece as a whole tied together, within such an unusual structure.


I was also impressed by the range of genre influences and ideas in play; there’s a strong strain of ‘is-it-supernatural-or-psycological-horror’ that Mains deploys with real skill, alongside some grim, gritty crime/espionage threads and even moments and themes that touch on splatterpunk; and yet it never felt tonally incongruous, to me, in large part because of the power of the voice that Mains establishes in the first novella and then develops throughout the piece as a whole. He even manages to slide in some fascinating commentary on some of the pulp writers of the post-war period, without ever letting it slip into diversion; though there is a lot going on in the first novella in particular, the narrative drive kept me eagerly turning pages.


I also found Mains did an exceptional job in creating a sense of time-as-place; each novella contained enough detail and background colour that I felt the ghost of the relevant era being invoked as part of the storytelling, and this combined with the powerful narrative voice to make each part drip with atmosphere; indeed, at times the era of the story's setting felt almost like a character itself, especially in the first and third parts.


As you can probably tell, I had a really enjoyable time with this book. It manages to combine an intimidating range of genre styles and ideas whilst feeling utterly coherent and whole as a narrative. It pulls no punches and is in places challenging and very, very dark, and it offers no easy answers or cheap payoffs. And in the weeks since I finished reading it, I’ve found my mind returning to the character and voice of Stickles, and his extraordinary, chilling life story. There’s a hell of a lot going on, in other words, and it’s a tribute to Mains talent as a writer that it manages to do all this while remaining not merely readable but deeply compelling. Overall, I found A Man At War to be a very impressive piece of work indeed, and one that really got under my skin.


KP
21/8/22

Hallowe’en likes to turn things upside down: the dead walk, the living turn into monsters and ghosts, nice girls are urged to dress up in “slutty” outfits and children threaten adults with mayhem. So it’s fitting that this anthology inverts the usual order of things, at least where the art is concerned. Normally a book’s stories give birth to its illustrations, but in this case the work of renowned artist Lynne Hansen is what inspired editors Gaby Triana and John Palisano to create the book. The endearing cover began life as a piece of art for a HWA event benefiting an animal shelter, and encapsulates all the traditional fun of trick-or-treating while rewarding the more careful observer with a soft touch of enigma.

In the circumstances it’s no surprise that this anthology contains quite a few stories at the gentler, chattier end of the spectrum, where the aim is to inspire a wry smile or two and offer (relatively) light-hearted, spooky, nostalgic fun. I’m not usually a fan of this stuff (maybe because I was only invited to two Hallowe’en parties in my entire life, and no, of course I’m not bitter, how dare you!) so for this review I’ll be mainly focussing on tales that are more up my street.

For me, ‘The Crawlers in the Corn’ by Shadows and Tall Trees veteran David Surface is where things really get going. You can’t have Hallowe’en without corn, but the real value here lies in the examination of two boys whose childhood friendship is crumbling for the usual reasons (the “too old for that shit now” factor), but has also been damaged by a traumatic event. Carl and Danny lacerate each other with words as sharp as any corn leaf, and it’s a great depiction of the swingeing guilt a victim of trauma can feel when they realize they’ve allowed the darkness that assailed them to seep into the world of their loved ones.

And guilt is built right into Hallowe’en. The way it’s celebrated in America seems designed to generate parental guilt – are we right to let our kids out after dark to cavort among strangers? If we don’t, are we ruining their fun? Have we disappointed them with that cheap supermarket costume, when we should be making them one with our loving hands? And what if we give out the wrong candy? Steve Rasnic Tem’s “When They Fall” gives this theme a great workout, full of beautiful but eerie autumn imagery, with those falling leaves and bad memories messing up what seems at first glance to be a typical suburban garden.

Of course, throbbing away underneath all the anxieties of trick-or-treating is something a lot older: good old survivor’s guilt. Hallowe’en exists to address the fact that we are alive while a bunch of other people are dead, and I’m glad to report that several of the stories here deal with this, and do it well. ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead Across Your Dreams in Pale Battalions Go’, by Jonathan Maberry, is particularly powerful. It has a broad focus, covering the effects of the Vietnam war on the American working-class neighbourhoods that were milked most vigorously for young recruits,  the way psychic wounds fester in families and the power of ritual. A lesser author could lose their way in all that, but the story hits impressively hard in a manner reminiscent of Peter Straub’s classic post-Vietnam War horror novel Koko.

But my personal favourite of the anthology was ‘A Scavenger Hunt When The Veil is Thin’ by Gwendolyne Kiste. Kiste, like Maberry, has decided to go large with the guilt, as the heroine – who has unwisely returned to the godawful community she grew up in -  has to pick her way through a house still jangling with the culpability of the whole damn town, whose inhabitants once sacrificed an innocent young woman on the altar of misogyny. But what really makes this special is the elegance of the writing. Kiste deftly handles a colour palette worthy of The Masque of the Red Death, proving once and for all that all colours are Goth colours, and she does very well with the second-person singular. This form seems to be having a moment right now – possibly because writers and readers are nostalgic for all those Choose Your Own Adventure books that told you what to do – and while it’s good for immediacy it’s not the best for providing information about events that have occurred prior to the beginning of the story (plus all those instructions can seem rather bald.) But Kiste leaps over all these barriers: the way she works background information, character development and eerie atmosphere into a series of scavenger hunt instructions is seriously impressive.  And there’s some very nasty business with a pumpkin.

Finally I enjoyed ‘Soul Cakes’ by Catherine McCarthy, a rare British-set story with the little rituals of home and hearth as its focus, and drawing on the emotional ambiguity of the festival. The quiet accumulation of well-observed domestic details makes the final revelation especially poignant, and a reminder of the real comfort Hallowe’en can provide to the bereaved, however fleeting, melancholy or just plain scary it may be. This theme is certainly at home in Literally Dead, an anthology with a lot of heart but enough darkness to keep the temperature of your spine well below the seasonal average.