The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Reviews

  • John Hornor Jacobs’s Fierce as the Grave (Book Review)

    12372484I first read John Hornor Jacobs after seeing him at ConQuest last year in Kansas City. After listening to him talk about writing in a panel, I had a feeling that I would enjoy his work. The way he spoke about writing, and about the horror genre, made me think he would be a force to be reckoned with for some time to come. It didn’t hurt that he was a cool guy and said very supportive things about my own writing. As far as first novels go, Southern Gods is hard to beat. It’s a great blend of classical literary writing and horror.

    Jacobs’s Fierce as the Grave: A Quartet of Horror Stories continues the sort of writing that made me love Southern Gods. The regional flavor permeates everything. This is a guy that knows his setting. The South and the rural world, in general, flows through the work.

    The plots are all simple. If you were to name them off, they wouldn’t come as much of a surprise. There is a story about vampires, another about zombies, a couple about ghosts. They are the same basic tropes that we have been writing about since the late 19th century. However, Jacobs tackles them with a style and flavor that make them his own.

    The magic of John Hornor Jacobs is that he is able to see past the trappings of our genre to find the universal themes that transcend horror. The stories of the characters themselves become more interesting than the fact that there are monsters of any kind. In fact, life might just be the worst of the monstrosities described in these stories. Concepts like sanity, guilt, and identity are themes addressed throughout literature. Unfortunately, we can sometimes get so hung up on writing what is scary that we forget to write about the larger things. It is possible to do both.

    I saw a Reddit interview with Peter Straub recently in which he said that while putting together his spectacular collection American Fantastic Tales, he was struck by how little the modern genre stories differed from modern literary writing. He saw this as a very good thing, as do I. It’s the thing that allows writing to transcend genre expectations, and allows our genre to infect every other aisle of the bookstore.

    John Hornor Jacobs’s horror writing falls into the genre of modern literary horror, and provides good evidence of our genre’s potential for solid writing, great characters, and universal themes. His writing has a nostalgic feel and takes its time establishing the norms of the story world. Only when those norms have been established can we transgress against them. Only then can we truly have horror.

    Overall, the collection was a very fast read and confirmed to me that Jacobs is the type of writer that the horror genre should be proud to have. For .99 cents as an e-book, it is a definite bargain. I am glad to have read it.

  • Stephen Graham Jones’s The Least of My Scars (Book Review)

    51FEhkZbqNL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_The horror genre has a lot of good lyrical writers and a lot of good visceral writers. Most of the time, those traits are exclusive. I don’t know why. Perhaps those who write with a more visceral style use conversational tone in order to maximize the effect. Brian Keene and Jack Ketchum are two examples. Their books are well-written, but so linguistically relaxed that the words disappear. On the other end of the spectrum, writers like Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub write lyrically and specialize in so-called “quiet horror.” Much like the artist who works with negative space, these writers use what isn’t on the page as much as they do the written words.

    There are several writers who are exceptions to the rule, and one of the best among them is Stephen Graham Jones. His novel The Least of My Scars serves as an example of what can be done when lyrical writing meets visceral imagery. It is an exceptional example of that grey area between horror and noir fiction.

    William Colton Hughes is a serial killer. He lives in an apartment complex, supported by a mob boss. His job is simple. When the boss sends someone to the door, Hughes kills them and disposes of the body in a methodical way that has to be read to be believed. The apartment exists as Hughes’s little chunk of paradise, an island where he settles in to a homicidal dream-come-true. That dream crumbles, along with Hughes’s sanity, as the story progresses.

    The novel is told from Hughes’s perspective. Using an unreliable, unsympathetic narrator is tricky, but Jones pulls it off masterfully. Another reviewer/writer, Caleb J. Ross jokingly called the book “Native American Psycho.” Certainly, The Least of My Scars reminds you of Bret Easton Ellis’s book, as well as Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie. You feel no empathy for Hughes. It doesn’t matter. All the other characters are just as rotten as he is, but without the excuse of insanity. (more…)

  • The Kick-Ass Writer (Book Review)

    Every word smith needs, from time to time, a reference, a remedy for writer’s block, or a fresh perspective. The Kick-Ass Writer can do all of these things and does it in a way that is unique to its author, Chuck Wendig.

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  • Appreciation: Welcome to Night Vale

    Joseph Fink's wonderfully odd, off-kilter creation is a piece of art that's irresistible.
    Joseph Fink’s wonderfully odd, off-kilter creation is a piece of art that’s irresistible.

    I’d heard about this podcast called Welcome to Night Vale from several friends over the last few months. As is usual for me, I came to the party later than everyone else but that’s kind of the beauty of podcasts. Try one and there are more and more to download and check out.

    After I listened to the first one, I scratched my head and thought about what I’d just heard. It was strange and beautiful and reminded of — I didn’t know what. So I cued up the next one. And the one after that.

    Are you familiar with Welcome to Night Vale? If not, dear readers, it’s presented as a community radio broadcast with the sonorous voice of Cecil telling you what’s happening in the desert town of Night Vale. There’s sports reports, traffic reports and weather. We’ll get to those in a bit.

    The first thing I thought was that Night Vale was a town a lot like David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. It’s peopled with interesting, mysterious characters like Hiram McDonald, the Faceless Old Woman Who Lives In Your House, interns who mysteriously die or disappear and organizations like the Sheriff’s Secret Police. It’s the organizations that make Night Vale even weirder than Twin Peaks.

    It took me about four episodes to decide that Welcome to Night Vale also had a distant relationship with The Twilight Zone with jets disappearing and reappearing inside the school gymnasium, pterodactyls menacing the town via a rip in the fabric of space/time and any number of other incidents that draw the scientist Carlos to town to investigate.

    Ah, Carlos. Cecil tells us how perfect he is, how melodious the man’s voice is. Quickly, Cecil tells us he’s in love with Carlos and the courtship is on.

    But that didn’t tell me what the missing element was for me. And then I was struck as if by thunder: Welcome to Night Vale recalled to mind the bizarre and wonderful Mister X comic created by Dean Motter. Almost to a ’T’. You probably aren’t familiar with Mister X.

    Go ahead, look up that comic. It’s absolutely worth your time to seek it out and read if you already listen to Welcome to Night Vale.

    Okay. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that there are places in Night Vale that are off-limits, more mysterious characters lurking in the background and lots more unusual events occurring than anywhere else in the U.S. This makes the UFO conspiracy location of Area 51 look like  a kindergarten playground. The other comparison that needs to be put in play here is that the podcast is presented seriously and the laughs come from uncomfortable truths, ala the Mama’s Family sketches from the old Carol Burnett Show. It’s all tempered by the normality of all the strange things.

    Night Vale would be an interesting, terrifying place to live.

    But the weather would always be interesting. On the broadcast it’s a song by an artist I’ve never heard of. Usually it’s more than just curious music, too.

    Finally, and I have to wrap up here, I want to tell you that if you like the weird, the mysterious, the off-beat, you will probably like the podcast. Best of all – it’s free! Download and listen at your leisure.

    Listen closely though, so you can identify which surveillance helicopter is which. Your life may depend on it.

  • Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, The Milk (Book Review)

    fortunatelyI have loads of respect for Neil Gaiman. When I first started writing, I read Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury’s attitude and enthusiasm sent me straight to the keyboard stuffed full of dreams. Ray is gone, but Gaiman has positioned himself as an inspirational figure to a new generation of writers. I think most writers have read his many social media postings or have heard his “make good art” speeches. Sometimes, I wish he would spend more time writing and less time inspiring, but I appreciate what his enthusiasm has done for the art form.

    I’m not exactly the most unbiased reviewer when it comes to Gaiman. I loved The Sandman and American Gods. I adore his short fiction. He ranks among my favorite living writers. In Fortunately, The Milk, Gaiman gave me the opportunity to share his work with my six year-old son. It sounds like a simple thing. A lot of people read to their children, but it’s special to be able to share a favorite writer with my child. I can’t read Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction with my son, or Jack Ketchum’s splatterpunk, or Clive Barker’s–whatever. He wouldn’t understand Nick Hornby’s crises of male identity, and Irvine Welsh would raise a lot of questions that I hope never to answer. But a book featuring a hot air balloon piloted by a dinosaur scientist? That, we can handle. (more…)

  • Review: Arrow Season 1

    http://www.cwtv.com/shows/arrow
    Ollie and his crew. If you like fantastic fiction you might like this one. It’s worth looking at and spending time with.

    It’s no secret I’m a comic book fan. That said, I never watched Smallville when it was on TV. I was interested early on, but then for some reason it never really appealed to me. I love Superman, and the idea of the show should have grabbed me. Lois & Clark did, but for some reason I just never tuned in to Smallville. Even when they started introducing heroes like the Legion or Doctor Fate or Hawkman.

    A couple of my friends have been talking about the CW’s Arrow on Facebook and Twitter. This year I’m set up to stream Netflix so when I got curious I flipped on the first season of the show. There’s a lot to like about this program and what I enjoy the most is being able to watch an episode without commercials. I suppose that this was my video equivalent of trade-waiting the comics. Regardless, I watched the pilot with some trepidation, as I do any comic book adaptation. Fair warning, there may be spoilers ahead here. I don’t believe they’ll ruin your overall enjoyment of the series if you’re familiar with the characters in play here so here we go. SPOILER WARNING. (more…)

  • Review: Long Live the Queen

    Long Live the Queen (LLtQ) is a darkly cute, somewhat macabre strategy/simulation game. You are Crown Princess Elodie, fourteen and heir to the throne after the sudden death of your mother. You’ve returned home from boarding school to be trained in the ways of court before your coronation on your 15th birthday.

    Assuming, that is, you live that long. There are many others who would love to take the throne for themselves. Assassins, rebels, usurpers, monsters and other dangers abound and it’s up to you to navigate the morass and survive to coronation.

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  • Review: Doctor Who 50th

    In just over a week, we will arrive at the annual End-of-December holiday, one we have been building up to for weeks maybe even months. I refer, of course, to The Doctor Who Christmas Special. With his special event nearly upon us, I thought I would take a look back at the most recent episode to air, the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special.
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  • Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited (Book Review)

    71UxQ8v6SQLI don’t think it would be a stretch to call Cormac McCarthy one of our era’s greatest American writers. He has certainly carried the torch of a variety of writers that came before him, from Hemingway to O’Connor. McCarthy is known for his stripped down prose, and The Sunset Limited takes it even a step further.

    If you have read The Road, Child of God, or any of his other books, then you know that McCarthy works as a mechanical minimalist. He uses only the sparsest punctuation and avoids dialogue tags whenever possible. His style is gritty, realistic, and grotesque in a wonderful Southern Gothic sense.

    The Sunset Limited has the usual bleak McCarthy tone, but is written entirely in dramatic form. This is essentially a play script. However, its stage directions are more sparse than most plays. Really, the format seems to be McCarthy challenging himself. Whereas a lot of his novels force him to write so tight that there is no doubt who is speaking, regardless of notation, this seems to be an experiment in stripping a novel down to dialogue only.

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  • Frozen (Review)

    I judge books by their covers and movies by their previews.

    Going in to see Frozen, I was leery. Where was there room for a talking snowman in my beloved fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson? Why was a boy saving the day in my girl power tale? Based on the previews, I expected nothing more from the film than a comedic snowman and a boy saves the princess and they live happily ever after love story that only Disney can achieve.

    I wasn’t sure if I was going to actually see the movie in the theaters.

    But then it released and everywhere I turned I heard nothing but rave reviews. People whose opinions I trusted lauded the movie.

    So I gave it a chance.

    If you haven’t see Frozen yet, what are you waiting for? Go. Shoo. Stop reading this immediately and get to the theater. I’ll be here when you come back. (more…)