Some Mini-Recommendations

I already had a backlog of books I wanted to write recommendations for; and then I went on a short holiday and read 'quite a few' more, and realised I was never going to catch up. So here are a few books I thoroughly recommend, with the briefest of notes why. Hopefully my terseness will not put you off trying any of them.

Beneath - Kristi DeMeester
I kinda guessed that the debut novel from Kristi DeMeester would be brilliant, and I wasn't wrong. It's a quasi-Lovecraftian horror story set in fundamentalist Christian Appalachia. This is a book that oozes atmosphere, with the author's skilful prose describing a world that feels sickly, feverish, on the brink of delirium and apocalypse.

Body In The Woods - Sarah Lotz
A splendid psychological thriller, this, about things that don't stay buried, both physical and emotional. A story about friendship, debts, and when you might end up paying back too much. It's also the type of book about which it doesn't do to say too much, so I won't. A hugely enjoyable read.

Stranger Companies - Linda Angel
A collection of short stories and prose pieces, Stranger Companies' success lies in its authorial voice. Linda Angel's style has echoes of writers like Brautigan, Amis and Zadie Smith, but also seems wholly her own: wise-cracking, playful and dark. She can do plot too, particularly in the longer piece that ends the collection, 'Deathsmell'.

I Am The New God - Nicole Cushing
Nicole Cushing's novella has a brilliant premise: a man known as 'the hierophant' exchanges letters with an ordinary seeming young man whom he believes to be 'the new god', a diety who will replace the current incumbent. And the young man starts to believe the letters might be right... Starting, brutal, compelling.

Mutator - Gary Fry
Another slice of Yorkshire horror from Gary Fry, taking what might seem a well-worn premise and making it new. For while Mutator borrows tropes from both classic horror literature and creature-feature cinema, Fry also muses on modern scientific notions of evolution & adaptability... and creates the original monster of the title in the process.

High-Rise - J.G. Ballard
Ballard is not a writer I'm as familiar with as I should be, having only previously read Super-Cannes and The Atrocity Exhibition. High-Rise is a novel with a well known central premise, set in a building as distinctive as any haunted house. This is not so much a realistic book as one that takes a realistic premise (that external environment affects both our psychology and social structures) and single-mindedly extrapolates it into something grotesque. It's clever, mordant and revolting; I loved it.

Best Short Stories of 2013 (Somewhat Biased & Woefully Uncomprehensive)

This year, I've been keeping a log of the best short stories I read; I was initially going to only record those that were actually published this year, but I got slightly confusing with reprints and the like, so this list includes some stories pre-2013, but they're all comparatively recent.

To be eligible, the stories had to be ones I read for the first time at some point in 2013, and ones that impressed me enough to make a note of them. Then I reviewed the list prior to writing this blog post; any I couldn't really remember and that hadn't stuck with me were discarded.

In general, I've tried to avoid listing any author more than once, but I weakened a few times.

Nina Allen: The Phoeny War (NewCon Press Sampler)
Simon Bestwick: Lex Draconis (Tales Of The Nun & Dragon, Fox Spirit)
Simon Bestwick & Gary McMahon: Thin Men With Yellow Faces (This Is Horror chapbook)
Keith Brooke: Beside The Sea (Memesis, Infinity Plus)
Ramsey Campbell: Holes For Faces (Holes For Faces, Dark Regions Press)
Ramsey Campbell: The Long Way (Holes For Faces, Dark Regions Press)
Mark Chadbourn: Whisper Lane (The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration)
Ted Chiang: Story Of Your Life (Stories Of Your Life And Others)
MR Cosby: Unit 6 (Darker Times)
MR Cosby: In Transit (Darker Times)
Nicole Cushing: The Peculiar Salesgirl (Polluto #10)
Christian A. Dumais: Leave Me The Way I Was Found (Shock Totem #2)
Cate Gardner: Pretty Little Ghouls (Shock Totem #2)
Jessica George: New Town (Impossible Spaces, Hic Dragones)
John Greenwood: Puppyberries (No Monsters Allowed, Dog Horn Publishing)
Shaun Hamilton: The Shuttle (Ill At Ease II, PenMan Press)
Lauren James: Fences (The Side Effects Of The Medication)
Lauren James: The Side Effects Of The Medication (The Side Effects Of The Medication)
Hannah Kate: Great Rates, Central Location (Impossible Spaces, Hic Dragones)

Gary Kilworth: Filming The Making Of The Film Of The Making Of Fitzcarraldo (Infinity Plus Quintet)

BV Larson: Beside Still Waters (For When The Veil Drops, West Pigeon Press)
Amelia Mangan: Some Girls Wander By Mistake (No Monsters Allowed, Dog Horn Publishing)
Gary McMahon: Just Another Job (Urban Occult, Anachron Press)
Gary McMahon: The Grotto (NewCon Press Sampler)
Mark Mellon: Asshole Factory (Polluto #10)
Steve Mosby: Fruits (author's website)
Tony Rabig: The Other Iron River (The Other Iron River & Other Stories)
Iain Rowan: The Singing (Supernatural Tales #23)
Christina Scholz: The Lost City Of Emory Winters (The Big Click)
Steve Rasnic Tem: Wheatfield With Crows (Dark World, Tartarus Press)
Lisa Tuttle: Flying To Byzantium (Infinity Plus Quintet)
Stephen Volk: The Arselicker (Anatomy Of Death, Hersham Horror)
Mark West: The Bureau Of Lost Children (Ill At Ease II, PenMan Press)
Leslianne Wilder: Sweepers (Shock Totem #2)
Conrad Williams: The Fox (This Is Horror chapbook)
Jennifer Williams: Spider Daughter Spider (Urban Occult, Anachron Press)

Reviews: A Horror Novella Special

Because I’m writing a horror novella at the moment, I've deliberately been reading a lot of horror fiction at that length recently (and, uh, Crime And Punishment). I've read far too many to review, so I was going to do a blog post on my five favourites. But then SP Miskowski had the nerve to release another brilliant book, so it's now my favourite six. 

I've not applied any strict criteria on what word length is a novella, I've just loosely applied it to anything in that grey-area between a short story and a novel. As I've already given away the name of one of the authors, I may as well start with:

Astoria - SP Miskowski
Astoria is a book in SP Miskowski's Skillute Cycle, which started with the impressive novel Knock Knock (Astoria works as a standalone tale though.) It takes as its starting point one of the incidents of Knock Knock, when Ethel Sanders flees her home town after her daughter's funeral, and is never mentioned again in that book - Astoria tells what happened to Ethel afterwards, and it might just be Miskowski's best work to date. It's a hauntingly ambiguous story of doubles and dream-like imagery - dreams as in what we wish for, as well as what wakes us at night. The ending immediately made me want to reread it all over again. I can't recommend this one highly enough, folks.

The Kill Crew – Joseph D’Lacey

Books about survivors of a zombe-esque apocalypse have, I know, been done to death. This, though, was really well crafted and went off in a different direction than you might expect. To give an example of how it stands out from its crowded sub-genre, the ‘zombies’ in this book are described like this: They stare at you and their eyes plead. They can't speak but they can wail. They can sob.... If you let them touch you they'll drag you away... and you'll come back mute save for your tears. There's a similar originality throughout this impressive novella, not just of plot but of tone.  I've not read any Joseph D’Lacey before, but on this showing I’ll be reading some more.

Sea Change – Iain Rowan

Genre-chameleon Iain Rowan turns his hand to a YA horror novella here, and in doing so produces yet another book that puts the rest of us to shame. A young boy arrives in a village on the Yorkshire coast, fleeing from a tragedy  at his school… and encounters something darker in the misty streets and caves there. The location and characters are beautifully detailed in Rowan’s readable yet evocative prose, and despite being ostensibly a YA book there’s a real sense of mounting tension, another Rowan trademark. Superb.

The Respectable Face Of Tyranny – Gary Fry

By coincidence, the title story of this collection of three novellas takes place on the same coastline as the Iain Rowan book above. It concerns a man ruined by the global recession, living in a caravan park on the Yorkshire coast with his teenage daughter, who starts to see strange things out the corner of his eye... There’s a distinctly Ramsey Campbell flavour here (no bad thing) and an ambitious attempt to juggle themes of economic and biological collapse. The other two novellas in this collection are equally impressive.

Children Of No One – Nicole Cushing

‘Dark fiction’ – it’s a term that’s casually chucked around nowadays, but this novella from Dark Fuse really deserves the term. Both literally – it concerns children living in a maze which is completely dark – and thematically. It’s an original concept too, with an original bad guy (part James Bond villain, part Samuel Beckett’s even stranger brother). There’s nothing supernatural here, and the story seemed to me to be about the crazy justifications people make for doing something evil. (Not sure about the phonetic English accent of one character though!) 

Let’s Drink To The Dead – Simon Bestwick

Three stories linked to Bestwick’s wonderful novel The Faceless, which regular readers will know was one of my favourites of last year. If you haven’t read The Faceless, start there. If you have, then this is a wonderful opportunity to revisit Bestwick’s grim, twisted world of haunted military hospitals, ‘spindly-men’, and real-world evil. Utterly compelling. I tried to pick a favourite of the three, and failed; damn you, Bestwick.