This is the second part of a lengthy reading post for October – I had to break it up because of the length of the original posting. (What can I say? I did a lot of horror reading for the month.) You can find the first half here.
I don’t really blame John Darnielle for the fact that Universal Harvester was marketed as a horror novel; in the end, if you’re a publisher, you hate to label things as unclassifiable, and there are undeniably elements of Harvester that work as horror. When an Iowan video clerk starts finding tapes returned with unusual scenes spliced into the videos, you can’t help but think of The Ring (even though the tapes remind me of far starker fare), and there’s a definite air of unease and uncertainty around these strange images and where they’re coming from. But Darnielle, as you might imagine from his other books, isn’t that interested in a conventional story here, and if you’re waiting for clear answers about any of it, you’re going to leave disappointed. Universal Harvester is more of a mood piece, one that evokes loss throughout – it is undeniably a book about mothers, but it’s also a book about losing people and what happens to us afterward – and that theme blends with the unease to make something fairly unique. It’s also, if I’m being honest, frustrating; Darnielle has a habit here of building up to plot revelations and then cutting away from them, keeping the book from revealing anything, and by the end, so much of what happened is up to interpretation that I ended the book a little frustrated and disappointed. I think, though, that the book is exactly the book Darnielle set out to make, and I think it’s oddly haunting and beautiful, thanks in no small part to Darnielle’s beautiful prose, where his songwriter abilities serve him well in the crafting of perfect phrases to capture a moment. There’s also a genuine sense of small town life here, anchored by one who knows it and has not just understanding but empathy for these places, and it gives the book a heart it might not otherwise have. It’s a frustrating book and not entirely satisfying, and it’s definitely not a horror novel. But it’s beautifully told and evocative, and that kept me going even when the plot did not. Rating: *** ½
The Amulet was the first book published by Michael McDowell, and there’s always the risk, when you find someone’s earliest work, that it will lack the polish and character that made you fall in love with the author in the first place. I needn’t have worried; while I don’t think The Amulet is as scary as The Elementals or as wild and imaginative as Blackwater, what it has is a pitch-black comic tone and a willingness to go over the top that makes it an absolute delight to read, even if it’s a little loose in terms of plotting. The story here is simple: a cursed amulet is given to a family as an act of revenge, and then keeps making its way across town, causing havoc wherever it goes. What this results in, mainly, is horrific acts of violence followed by catastrophic coincidences out of Final Destination – and gore and destruction are the results. That makes The Amulet essentially a death-delivery device, but McDowell knows that, setting up all of the elements and then waiting to pull the trigger, letting us see the pieces come into play but unable to do anything about it. But then, just to make it all better, it’s all filtered through the lens of a small Southern town, as McDowell fills in the details of every death with the gossip train version of events (which are often laugh-out-loud funny), the quietly resigned and confused reactions of the police and the undertakers, and the efforts of a couple of women to try to make sense of it all. The Amulet is unabashedly a B-movie gorefest, but it knows exactly what it is and delivers the goods, doing so with a sense of humor and fun that’s impossible to ignore. Is it up there with the best things that McDowell has done? Absolutely not. But did I have a ton of fun with it? Oh, hell yes. Rating: **** ½
There’s no way that anything could possibly live up to people’s hopes when you’re talking about Bill Watterson’s first published work since the end of Calvin and Hobbes 28 years ago, but even by those standards, The Mysteries is a bit of a curveball – and yet, it’s one where the expectations are overshadowing how interesting of a book it is. A collaboration between Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht, The Mysteries is an allegorical fable for adults; for all of its picture book trappings, this is undeniably a strange work at times, with unusual composition (my daughter was quite unsettled by the unnatural faces being up close to the frame in one image) and a haunting, odd style that leaves far behind the rich, colorful imagination of Calvin. Instead, you get a stark, gothic black and white, one filled with a sense of the grotesque – but just as Calvin would sometimes set you up in one kind of frame or style only to shift into another, The Mysteries changes into a whole different book as it progresses, changing from a story about a kingdom haunted by mysterious entities into…well, it feels weird to say that I don’t want to spoil something you can read in a few minutes, but I still don’t want to. Suffice to say that The Mysteries feels spiritually like a follow-up to Calvin – a story about the importance of seeing the wonder in the world, a cynical tale about what humans are doing to society and our planet, and a story that still finds beauty in its own way. It’s an odd little tale, with haunting and unsettling art and a take that’s undeniably downbeat…and yet, I think all of that makes it all the more interesting and compelling. Expectations are a difficult thing, but The Mysteries deserves to be judged on its own merits, not on what people wanted – and on its own merits, it’s quite wonderful. Rating: *****
Ken Greenhall’s Elizabeth (subtitle: A Novel of the Unnatural) isn’t a book for all tastes – and it’s not just because it’s not a conventional horror novel in any real sense of the word (although it’s quite unsettling and strange). No, it’s the subject matter here that’s going to be tough on some people – after all, this is a book written by an unabashedly sexual young girl (14!) who may or may not be the vessel for a witch. This is an unreliable and pitch-black narrator – a girl unconcerned with the death of her parents, who enjoys manipulating her uncle using his sexual attraction to her, who is willing to use the powers she has inherited for her own gain, and who has nothing but scorn for the adults around her and their pathetic needs and wants. Indeed, she can come across as borderline sociopathic – which, to be sure, is part of what Greenhall uses so well to make the book all the more discomfiting and unsettling. Elizabeth, as I mentioned, isn’t a “traditional” horror novel; that subtitle calling it “a book of the unnatural” feels right, both in terms of the eerie and slightly unreal mood of the book (and the magics that Elizabeth is, in theory, conjuring up) and in terms of Elizabeth herself, who never quite feels…normal – not in her interactions with people, not in her nonchalant attitude towards an affair with a relative, not in terms of her age, not in terms of just a person, period. (She might find some things in common with Black Ambrosia‘s Angelica, honestly.) The result is hard to shake and gets under your skin in a way that’s not normal, but undeniably succeeds at its goals. The subject matter itself can make it a hard recommendation for some, but those open to its ideas will find a strange, haunting little tale. Rating: ****
Kathe Koja’s The Cipher is one of my great underrated horror novels of all time – an intense, unclassifiable nightmare that I still think of to this day. And so I went into Strange Angels blind, hoping for a similar experience – and I shouldn’t have, because Strange Angels is a whole other kind of book, one that’s more personal drama and far less of a horror novel, even though it’s still told in Koja’s unusual, poetic style and still filled with big, intense emotions and a similar questioning of reality. But whereas The Cipher found that in inexplicable and nightmarish phenomenon, Strange Angels finds it through mental illness – specifically, schizophrenia, which is what afflicts the young artist who finds himself taken under the wing of a photographer for admittedly somewhat selfish reasons. Strange Angels becomes an account of what it’s like to care for someone with deep mental illness, and how those issues can almost “spread” and affect those nearby; it’s also, though, a story about the realities of such illness – about how they can truly destroy someone, about how they’re not just romanticized ways into artistic expression but deeply damaging and difficult, about the toll they take on both the person themselves and those who do their best to care for them. The result can be a bit grueling, both emotionally and psychically, as our narrator finds himself drawn into this unreliable world and doing his best to be both a friend and a caretaker. My unmet expectations didn’t help with Strange Angels, admittedly, but I also never quite fell in love with the book, which I respected more than enjoyed. I think Koja does a great job of plunging you into this world, and in creating a narrator who’s both selfish and empathetic simultaneously, and in giving you this reality of what it’s like to live in this situation – but I just kept waiting for there to be something more to the book than just the day to day experiences, and never quite got there. And when combined with the prose’s tendency to elide time and blur it all into one long experience, I just was kind of glad to be done with it. Do I think it’s a “good” book? Yes – but did I enjoy it, or would I recommend it? Not really. Rating: ***
Philip Fracassi’s A Child Alone with Strangers is the story of a young boy who, after a tragic accident, awakens from a coma to find that he has the ability to sense the thoughts of other people, both in the abstract and in the very specific. And it’s the story of that child being kidnapped by an opportunistic group of criminals hoping to cash in on the insurance payout the family received. And it’s the story of the…thing…that’s living in the old house where they’re hiding out. And by the time you factor in some of the backstories of other characters you get along the way (including an eccentric law enforcement officer, an incestuous couple, not one but two sociopaths), you can’t help but feel like A Child Alone with Strangers is full of interesting ideas, but they all keep elbowing each other out of the way to take center stage, keeping any of them from entirely developing as much as I wanted them to. That being said, A Child Alone with Strangers absolutely entertains and moves along at a good clip, delivering a yarn that is willing to take its time to set all of its pieces into place carefully before unleashing chaos and violence. Fracassi has undeniably read a lot of King (there are many echoes of both King’s style and his structure here), and he’s learned how to deliver an entertaining, vicious, nasty little story that delivers the goods if you’re looking for them. But it also ultimately feels like about three or four books mashed into one, and I wish that it was leaner and more focused, allowing some of the elements to breathe more than they did. As it is, you’ll have a fun enough time, and it does lots of things decently, but no one thing fantastically. Rating: ****
A Different Darkness and Other Abominations is a compilation of stories by Italian horror author Luigi Musolino; they’re stories from across a few of Musolino’s Italian books, compiled into one English language volume, and so I guess there’s a chance that this is the “all killer, no filler” selection – the “best of” anthology – and that I’m getting a slightly biased sense of Musolino’s work. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t make me any less floored, unsettled, thrilled, disquieted, and just plain caught up in Musolino’s blend of “weird” fiction and cosmic horror, which orbit so often around a simple Italian town and end up in…other…places. Children screaming about stomachs full of eyeballs; dogs returning from the dead for revenge against the ones who killed them; shortcuts into towns that shouldn’t exist; a town only whispered of among truck drivers and feared by all – Musolino has, to steal from another horror icon, “such sights to show you,” and they are universally nightmarish ones. When “Lactic Acid,” the story of a jogger whose brief diversion from his usual path finds him very far afield and in a dark and unfriendly world, is your least unsettling story, you know you’re in for a hell of a ride, and A Different Darkness never really lets up, from the absolute wild ending of “Les Abominations des Altitudes” to the twisted revisiting of a classic Twilight Zone story in “Black Hills of Torment” to the blend of loss and horror that is the title story, Musolino gives everything a bit of an Italian folk horror feel while also plunging you into cosmic nightmares and worlds that simply feel wrong. If it’s not obvious, I loved every moment of this one; it’s unflinching nightmare fuel that feels like a blend of lots of familiar elements – eldritch horrors, Clive Barker’s early work, classic ghost stories and fairy tales – but ends up becoming something wholly unique that feels like nothing else out there, but absolutely delivers the horror goods. If you’re a horror fan, this is essential reading, full stop. Rating: *****
I quite enjoyed Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, the story of a slasher-obsessed high schooler who becomes convinced that the new rich girl in town is the Final Girl of an upcoming real-life attack, but even so, it’s taken me longer than I planned to get to Don’t Fear the Reaper, Jones’s followup, which returns to Indian Lake four years later alongside Jade, who is not the same person (indeed, she’s even going by Jennifer to show that change), and yet finds herself in the midst of pure horror as an escaped serial killer starts making his way through town during a blizzard for the ages. Don’t Fear the Reaper moves much faster than Chainsaw; the first kills are almost instantaneous, as you’d expect for any slasher film, but the mayhem starts much quicker here, and the body count feels higher and the kills more horrifying. That all fits with the “sequel” bits, but as with Chainsaw, the slasher film motif is really just a way of masquerading a pretty compelling piece of character work, as we see Jade dealing with the trauma of discovering the disconnect between the fun of a slasher movie and the reality of living through one, as well as the current state of all of the survivors, who all bear their scars, both internal and external. That idea is borne out from the way that Jones expands the point of view here beyond Jade, giving us narration by a number of characters, including one that seems at first to be revisiting the role of Jade’s essays from the first book before gradually revealing itself as something more. The book sometimes leans a little too hard into the meta nature of slasher films (which, to be fair, Jones lampshades by having Jade ruefully wonder if she was ever this annoying), and Jones has an odd tendency to make dialogue and plotting elliptical, leaving out realizations and details to the point where clarity is sometimes impeded. But those are minor marks against the book, which largely succeeds as one hell of a slasher story – better than the first on that front, I’d say – while also exploring the damage done by previous events and letting us see an underlying story of trauma and growth. A great followup, and it’s upped my enthusiasm for the promise of a third book soon to come. Rating: **** ½
I’ve not read anything Fritz Leiber wrote beyond the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books, so I wasn’t quite sure what I would be getting in Smoke Ghost and Other Apparitions, a collection of Leiber’s supernatural and horror(-tinged) short fiction. But from the first story – the titular “Smoke Ghost” – I knew I was in good hands. That story is a tale of the modern world’s unease and malevolence, one that’s infused with a dread specific to the leadup to World War II but feels equally at home today, to where the ghost feels like an inevitable product of the changes in the world around us. There’s a wide variety of tales here, from a truly wild story about puppets with a wholly unexpected reveal to a shaggy dog story with a punchline that made me laugh out loud. Portraits of madness that find emerge from automatic writing babble, surreal tales of hell and temptation, glimpses of a post-apocalyptic world, sweet vignettes of Edgar Allan Poe and lost friends – there’s a wide range here, and it’s all done with Leiber’s trademark mix of imagination, awe, unease, and humor. There are a few weak entries here, including a story of twins that’s too focused on Jungian archetypes to ever come to life, but they’re the minority; mostly, what you’re getting is a varied sprawl of pulpy stories ranging from the deeply unsettling (“Smoke Ghost,” “The Hill and the Hole”) to the funny (“The House of Mrs. Delgato”) to the surprisingly heartfelt (I’m thinking especially here of “The Button Molder,” which feels more autobiographical than you might expect, but also “Replacement for Wilmer: A Ghost Story” which delivers the goods in a wholly unexpected way). Thoroughly enjoyable work from Leiber, who has become an author who almost always brings me joy (with a few exceptions). Rating: ****
I was really hoping the second time would be the charm for Tony Scott’s cult vampire flick The Hunger, which stars Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as ancient vampires and Susan Sarandon as the age-studying scientist who falls into their orbit. And to be fair, the film opens at its best, delivering style in excess and letting Deneuve and Bowie’s iconic beauties carry the weight of their vampiric thrall, as well as introducing a genuinely interesting question into a vampire film: what would happen if you did begin to age, even in your immortality? It’s all a promising start, but The Hunger turns out to have basically no interest in any of the novel ideas it brings up. Instead, the film becomes turgid and drawn-out, stretching what little plot it has to tedious length before concluding with a finale that makes little sense even before the studio-mandated epilogue. It’s all stylish as anything, of course, and that cast is incapable of being anything less than compulsively watchable. But it ends up being the kind of movie that would be better on mute on the screens of a club than it is to watch. Rating: **
Speaking of rewatches: I had honestly forgotten that I had already seen (and 
Finally, it’a going to be hard to give a truly objective review to Evilspeak, a Z-level 80s horror film starring Clint Howard as a picked-on kid at a military school who turns to the writings of a Satanic monk to get his revenge. (As one does.) Evilspeak is a mess and a half, feeling less like a script and more like a collection of scenes on note cards shuffled into a deck and thrown onto the screen just to get to the ending of the film. And Clint Howard is, well, Clint Howard; no matter how many pratfalls he makes, no matter how much he’s bullied, you can’t help but think, well, I don’t even bully people and I kind of want to bully this kid. And yet, somewhere along the way I embraced the insanity (Stockholm Syndrome, maybe?) and just found myself in awe of what I was watching, from Satanic messages on monochrome computer screens to glorious Latin chanting of Spanish monk names to actors who could be said to be chewing the scenery if you wanted to undersell it all. But then Evilspeak gets to its climax, in which a Satan-possessed Clint Howard flies around a room with a sword and an army of feral hogs, slaughtering everyone in sight. It’s a genuinely spectacular climax in its commitment to the bit, and while it’s not really “scary” in any sense, it sure is entertaining as hell. (And admittedly, the climax does feature one genuinely unnerving effect involving a crucifix.) I certainly wouldn’t recommend watching Evilspeak in any traditional sense of the word “recommend”, but it’s a pretty wonderful piece of trashy 80s horror, one that knows what it is and what it can do and just delivers to the best of its ability. And honestly, if “hovering Clint Howard slaughtering his foes with the support of vicious pigs” doesn’t sell you on it, I don’t know what to tell you. Rating: *** (which represents my best effort at averaging the movie’s entertainment value with its quality)
One of my maxims of moviegoing is that I would always rather see an interesting failure than a boring success – in other words, I would rather see a film that experiments and pushes the envelope than something that plays it safe but does nothing new. It’s a rule that undeniably comes into play in Cemetery Man, which feels like one of those movies in which the filmmakers tossed in every single idea they had just in case they never got to make anything else, and yet is so entertaining and fun that it’s hard to complain too much.
That being said, despite its fame, Black Sunday may not have been the one to start with. Make no mistake: Black Sunday is beautifully shot, embracing the gothic nature of its story (which involves the resurrection of a medieval witch who wants vengeance on the family that killed her originally) and then some, using its black and white cinematography to incredible effect, and giving out some beautiful framing that I was in awe of. Yes, Black Sunday undeniably showed me the style that Bava brought to bear, and gave me a sense of what he would do once he threw color into his palette of tools. But as a horror film, Black Sunday moves at a snail’s pace, feeling far longer than its 87-minute running time might suggest. There are some incredible moments, and a (somewhat) surprising amount of gore, all done with style to spare and a gloriously gothic mood that you know I’m up for (I am, 
Umney's Alley 