REVIEW: “West of Matamoros, North of Hell” by Brian Hodge

Review of Brian Hodge, “West of Matamoros, North of Hell”, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, 2018): 189—230. Purchase Here. Originally published in Dark Screams Volume Seven, edited by Brian James Freeman (Cemetery Dance/Hydra). Purchase Here. Reviewed by Rob Francis.

Well, now. Where to start with this one? Brian Hodge has produced some excellent short fiction over the last few years in particular, and his contributions to The Best Horror of the Year Volume Nine (2017) were both the best two stories in the book, and the best two I’d read all year. West of Matamoros, North of Hell is of a similar quality, though it falls more on the side of terror (fascinated revulsion) than horror (thrilling dread); it is a fantastic story, though hard to read in places. Not for the faint hearted. Trigger warnings: knives, dismemberment, sledgehammers, scythes. More knives.

The story is narrated by Enrique, musician and creative lead in the Mexican band Los Hijos del Infierno. The band (Enrique, Sebastián and Sofia), accompanied by a small PR team (Olaf, Morgan and Crispin) have come to take some photos for their new album at a site of some spiritually-significant cartel atrocities; a stunt that Enrique thinks is a bad idea. Turns out he’s right! Things go awry, and we’re catapulted into cartel torture territory super quick – and Santa Muerte stands over all.

The story is an excellent blend of Mexican gangster and Mythos; yet the story is so much more than this, touching on the horror associated with tainted places, and how they can bleed through the centuries. I was relieved that the end, though gruesome, was more positive than I had feared.

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REVIEW: “Endoskeletal” by Sarah Read

Review of Sarah Read, “Endoskeletal”, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, 2018): 173—187. Purchase Here. Originally published in Black Static #59. Purchase Here. Reviewed by Rob Francis.

I read Endoskeletal when it was first published in Black Static and thought it was excellent, so was pleased to see it included in this Best Horror of the Year anthology. The story centres on Ashley and her inadvertent discovery of Palaeolithic remains in a Swiss alpine cave; human bones broken in odd ways, skulls with strange canopic jars between their teeth. Ashley quickly becomes fascinated by these remains and the significance they might hold, particularly given the portrayal of a many-eyed shadow creature carved into the cave walls. As her obsession grows we begin to understand more about the creature, the remains and the nature of sacrifice.

It’s a great story with an adventurous feel to it, and the archaeological elements are extra seasoning for a fan of such tales (as I am). There are some interesting elements explored, including Ashley’s struggle against the power-holding males in charge of the site and access permissions. I was a bit unsure of Ashley’s background, as her reason for being at the cave initially is to study bears (I’m assuming palaeoecologically) so her knowledge of and enthusiasm for anthropology/palaeoanthropology seemed a bit of a jump. I was also slightly sceptical that the (male, Swiss) field assistant was unwilling to stop Ashley (a visiting and ultimately disempowered researcher) from essentially looting a pristine archaeological site, though perhaps in Swiss academia academic rank and authority are more hierarchical than in my experience! But minor questions aside, it’s an excellent and original story and a stand-out of the volume for me. More please.

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REVIEW: “The Stories We Tell About Ghosts” by A.C. Wise

Review of A.C. Wise, “The Stories We Tell About Ghosts”, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, 2018): 155—172. Purchase Here. Originally published in Looming Low: Volume One, edited by Justin Steele and Sam Cowan (Dim Shores, 2017). Purchase Here. Reviewed by Rob Francis.

I loved the idea behind this story. Our protagonist and his friends download an augmented reality app to hunt ‘ghosts’, sort of like a spooky version of Pokémon Go (so I’m led to believe, as I know SFA about all things Pokémon). He is resentful of his younger, sickly brother Gen, who always tags along with him and plays along with ‘Ghost Hunt!’ despite being more than a little afraid. The competition between the kids to find ghosts and ghost lore in their little town of Dieu-le-Sauveur heats up, but it quickly becomes apparent that the app is detecting more than it should, and that little Gen seems far too in-tune with the captured ‘ghosts’.

It’s a nice and highly original story, with a focus on the characters and their dynamics rather than twists in the plot — we are essentially told how it ends right at the start and the sense of dread that builds comes from knowing this. The idea of how and why we perpetuate the myths of ghosts, in various forms, is thought-provoking and I found myself reflecting on this story for some time after finishing it.

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REVIEW: “Choo-Choo” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “Choo-Choo”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 118-127 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Gore.

Brief summary: Two teenage boys cut curfew and wander around at night, doing drugs and trespassing on the grounds of a newly built train yard. Things end badly.

Overall, I found this story more banal than horrible.

(Originally published in Polar Borealis Magazine, 2017).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Auteur” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “The Auteur”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 98-115 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Simon, Cate, and Edwin all work in a movie rental place, and Cate — self-described “in-house horror specialist” (p. 99) — spends a lot of time rehearsing the merits and demerits of various horror movies to her co-worker Simon. None of them are what he really wants to watch: What he wants access to are the movies Cate, “world-changing auteur of pure horror” (also self-described, p. 101), makes.

It’s difficult to describe a movie in words, and even more difficult with a movie that relies so much on timing, pacing, angles, and sounds, as horror movies do. But that’s what we get in this story when Simon finally gets a chance to see one of Cate’s movies, alternating description of the movie, recounting of dialogue in the movie, and Simon’s reactions to it. In the end, this story felt much more like a clinical description of horror than actually horror itself.

(Originally published in Turn to Ash, 2016).

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REVIEW: “Mired” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “Mired”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 82-96 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Unlike some of the other stories in this collection, which go more for the grisly and the gory, this story opens with a nightmare scenario so parody-like it’s more amusing than horrifying: A researcher confronts a neon green blob in his closet, while the blob eats his research. (What kind of research? you might ask. Apparently Randolph is the type of pretentious guy who reads Derrida, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He is also the type of guy who when confronted with a neon green blob panics and calls a woman (whose name he doesn’t even remember correctly) to come and sort things out for him — but he’s not even got enough courage to go through with that!)

I sort of feel like I should’ve come away from this story with some great weighty reflections about man’s relationship to his work, and the weight of ideas that are never read or grappled with, or even some sort of sense of kinship to Randolph, an academic philosopher like myself; but he was never really sympathetic enough for me to be all that bothered by what ended up happening to him.

(Originally published in Double Feature Magazine 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Party Time” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “Party Time”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 68-79 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Gory violence

This is the story of Steve. Steve is a drunken asshole with a tendency to violence, and an overdeveloped sense of possession when it comes to women. Steve is not a likeable person — this is made utterly clear from the very first paragraph. The question that kept me reading was: Does Steve have any redeeming qualities? Does he have any redemption at all?

Unfortunately, no, not really. He gets a comeuppance, but it’s not in any sort of poetic-justic way. Instead, it’s just a successively violent stream of gore.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson

Review of Kelly Robson, “A Human Stain”, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, 2018): 129—154. Purchase Here. Originally published at Tor.com on January 4th 2017. Read Here. Reviewed by Rob Francis.

A ‘family with a secret’ story that is well executed and unlike any I’ve come across before.

Helen is a penniless bohemian, brought to the Lambrecht family house at Meresee Lake in the Bavarian Alps by her friend Bärchen, with the intention that she can tutor Bärchen’s orphaned nephew Peter for the summer. Straight away it’s clear that things are amiss, with the servants uncommunicative and unhelpful, Peter vanishing every five minutes and the nursemaid Mimi, whom Helen immediately resolves to seduce, silent and frightened (and what the hell’s happened to her teeth?). The mystery builds to a chilling end through some very disturbing moments and lovely signposting.

Helen is an interesting, tough and level-headed protagonist so we’re rooting for her from the start. I also found it refreshing that Helen and Bärchen are both gay, so there’s no romantic element to their relationship, a simplicity that stands at odds with the mystery of the situation Helen finds herself in. All the half-truths and misdirection in the story work really well (especially on a re-read) and the ominous atmosphere created is excellent. I had quite a few questions at the end that I couldn’t satisfactorily resolve, and I really wanted to know more about the — without giving too much away — natural history of the family Helen has found herself among. Some readers will love the unknown and unknowable elements of the story but I found I wanted more, because there was such potential for mining the idea further. It’s a gripping read.

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REVIEW: “Whatever Comes After Calcutta” by David Erik Nelson

Review of David Erik Nelson, “Whatever Comes After Calcutta”, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, 2018): 107—127. Purchase Here. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November/December 2017. Purchase Here. Reviewed by Rob Francis.

You know when you come home from work early and your wife’s in bed with a cop, and then said wife shoots you in the face with your own gun? Yeah, this is one of those stories. And it’s great. The three short opening paragraphs alone are a textbook example of how to start a short story to get maximum impact – we have action (sighting of a hanged woman, narrow escape from a car accident), location (somewhere in the sticks near Calcutta, Ohio), context (the protagonist — Lyle —isn’t thinking straight) and mystery (he doesn’t want to think about his ear, his wife, the detective or the gun he’s carrying, though we don’t yet know why). What I at first thought was going to be a simple revenge story (once we find out what happened with the detective and Lyle’s wife) then takes a sharp left into something else when he sees the ‘hanged’ woman, and all the parts roll together into a pleasingly twisted ending.

Nelson also plays with our expectations and perceptions. For example, the section with the hanging seems believable because of the community involved and the way they are characterised, yet they are validated in the end — making the story more horrific. I enjoyed the way the tale played with the idea of being hagridden, and who is doing the riding and why. My only slight disappointment was that I was rather hoping that the lack of emotion on Lyle’s part, whether through shock or a more profound mental imbalance, would allow him to change the ending, which felt a bit inevitable. But then, this is a horror story. And a thoroughly enjoyable one.

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REVIEW: “The Wolf Behind the Sun” by Johann Carlisle

Review of Johann Carlisle’s, “The Wolf Behind the Sun”, The Future Fire Volume 1, 2005: Read online. Reviewed by Elliott Baye.

In this story, two camps of opposing armies are ravaged by unexpected violence when a sorcerer hunts and enchants a wolf. There’s a lot to this story, and it remains ambitious right up until the very end. Unfortunately, shifting between four perspectives is a bit too ambitious in a story this short, and I had to reread some of the passages to fully understand what was going on. It’s clear the author had a very visual and thought-out idea for this work, but by trying to include so much detail, it was a bit overwhelming.

Despite that, the writing itself was quite vivid. The wolf’s bloodlust, and the humans’ as well, was encapsulated by the gory descriptions. Though it switched too often for my personal taste, each perspective’s tone shifted appropriately. The pride of the wolf, the cockiness of the young spy, the determination of the enemy, and the destructive nature of the werewolf all felt real, and kept me on my toes. It was clear anyone was capable of anything, and I was never sure what to expect next.

Unfortunately, the descriptive nature of this story made me a little uncomfortable when the sorcerer “enchanted” the wolf. Mainly because it was sexual in nature. Upon rereading, it does suit the story, but it was definitely a shock when I first read the tale. I have to caution anyone who reads this one: if sexual content bothers you, tread carefully. Actually, the same goes for violence and gore.

I do recommend this story to those who love dark werewolf myths, worldbuilding, and characters getting their just desserts. The writing itself is worth the read; I just can’t recommend this one to the more sensitive readers.

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