BEHOLD THE VOID BY PHILIP FRACASSI

Review by  John Boden 

Philip Fracassi painted his name on the wall last year with a fistful of wonderfully horrific novellas, Mother,  Altar and Fragile Dreams.  He lets no moss grow under his feet, or fingers I guess we should say as he now graces us with his debut collection, Behold The Void.

There are 9 stories contained here.  Some are more in the weird/cosmic horror end of the pool while others have an almost pulpy tone to them. All are wonderful. And I mean, really, if you can get Laird Barron to write your introduction, you must certainly have the goods, no?

On to the stories, We open with "Soft Construction Of A Sunset"  a wildly bizarre Dali-esque tale of a lover scorned and the brutal and surreal revenge he exacts with his newly  gained yet bizarre powers.  This is followed by "Altar," where a simple afternoon trip to the community swimming pool turns into something monstrous and vicious. "The Horse Thief" is a razor-gash of a tale concerning a thief and his fight with the Yakuza over control of a horse god's soul.

"The Baby Farmer" is a hauntingly creepy tale about a priest who is researching the local history of a serial killer and opens up a very dark and damning chapter to the story.  This one if superb.  "Mother" gives us a heart-breaking tale of a marriage dying, slowly bloating and decaying into something horrible.  Something that skitters and spins silk.  The collection ends with "Mandala" a harrowing story of boys playing on the beach when the harmless game they play becomes anything but and the circumstances escalate into a custody battle that goes beyond death and the grave.

I skipped touching on a few of these, not because they are bad in any way, but I have to leave some surprises, right?  Fracassi works in film and his style shows it. It's a lean prose but not simple. He gives you so much to pay attention to, rich and realistic characters, expansive settings and set-ups and plots that are as twisty as John Merrick's skeleton (I'm a terrible man...)  He's definitely one to place your bets on. 
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Behold The Void is available from Journalstone.

BEHOLD THE VOID is nine stories of terror that huddle in the dark space between cosmic horror and the modern weird, between old-school hard-edged horror of the 1980’s and the stylistic prose of today’s literary giants.

Revenge takes a monstrous form when a scorned lover acquires bizarre, telekinetic powers; a community swimming pool on a bright summer day becomes the setting for a ghastly nightmare of sacrifice and loss; a thief does bloody battle with a Yakuza for the soul of a horse god; a priest must solve the mystery of a century-old serial killer or risk the apocalypse; a newly-married couple discover that relationships-gone-bad can be poisonous, and deadly; a child is forced to make an ultimate choice between letting his parents die or living with the monsters they may become; and when a boy is trapped on a beach at low tide, he must face death in many forms – that of the rising water coming to consume him and the ghost of his dead mother who wants him back, reaching for him with dark, longing arms…

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