Chad Lutzke is a guy who simultaneously gets a lot of love from the horror community, and deserves more. I kept seeing his name pop up as someone I needed to read, so I picked up Of Foster Homes and Flies and Night As A Catalyst, and started on the latter. The revised and expanded edition includes 23 pieces made up of short flash fiction, longer stories, and even a piece written by Chad's son. Many of them pulled from the early beginning of his writing career, some even from his first attempts at story composition from the 1990's.

Lutzke is known as an author who makes his reader feel and there are plenty of stories here that meet that criteria. They Die Easy is about a boy striving to find acceptance with a bit of a dark twist. Splitting Pairs takes a swing at boys-will-be-boys culture and is one of the best stories in the collection. One for the Road makes us a fly on the wall while a young boy copes with his grandfather's transition into, and captivity as, a zombie. Self-Immolation takes on the none-too-easy task of getting the reader to feel pity for a vampire.

Included in the back of the book are some pretty extensive author's notes, which not only give you a bit of background on the stories, but provide some insight into Lutzke's writing style. I was surprised how many examples there were in the collection that stemmed from Lutzke finding a photograph and challenging himself to come up with a piece of short fiction to go with it. Some of the most interesting examples are Deprivation, Feeling Blue, The Damned Thing, and Coming Undone.

There is such a variety represented in this collection, and while all the stories fit generally into horror, we never really visit a trope more than once. We've got monsters, zombies, aliens, vampires, the unknown, body horror, genies, serial killers, you name it. Some stories are gruesome, some are more subtle. Some contain dense prose, others are more simple, or rely on dialogue between children.

It's easy to recommend this collection because it seems like there's a bit for anyone and everyone. I'm settling at 4 stars because there are a few stories that I would skip on a reread, but still such a solid collection, and I can't wait to dive into Lutzke's novels and novellas.

At this point, people are either going to buy The Institute or they’re not. Most probably had their mind made up as soon as they knew a new book by Uncle Stevie was on its way. Personally, I pre-order anything by SK months in advance and hope it will get here on release day.

This is a good one. Not great, but good. The plot is interesting and pulls you in quick. There are some fairly one dimensional characters, including one of the main protagonists, but King drops them into exciting enough situations to hold our attention thoroughly. The sum of the dastardly plan is greater than its’ antagonists, which is a bit disappointing coming from the man who has dreamed up some of the best villains of the last 50 years.

King’s magic, which is very much on display here, lies in his ability to tell a story with some flat characters and some drags in the action, and still turn in a page-turner. Speaking mainly for myself, the reader feels a compulsion to barrel through and find out what’s going to happen before we run out of pages. Also, anytime King writes kids, I’m there for it.

For all the King-can’t-write-an-ending proponents (and this was one of the better meta/running gags in It 2) the end of this satisfies. It mainly wraps itself up leaving just enough of an opening to make the reader wonder what the morally right thing to do would be. The characters make a decision based on some very concrete reasoning, but there is certainly still room for ambiguity and what-if-ism.

All the same, I enjoyed the week I spent in the woods of Maine (not my first trip, not my last) and DuPray, SC. I enjoyed seeing some new faces and finding what they might do in an extraordinary situation. Until next time constant reader.

Not very long ago, I asked Horror Twitter to help me expand my collection of haunted house stories. I got such great responses and added an unreasonable number of titles to my wishlist. One of the titles that kept coming up from all kinds of different people was The Siren and the Specter by Jonathan Janz, so I put it right at the top of my list. My friends, this is the haunted house book I've been looking for.

The first third or so reads as more gothic horror, creating an atmosphere of both dread and doubt combined with tragedy and accompanying drama. In other words, the book sets the stage for us with a little bit of everything, but leaves us unsure of where we are going.

Twists aside, I assumed we might be in for more of a character study with hints of the supernatural. As it stands, we do get to know David Caine well, and even though Janz writes him as almost a Robert Langdon-type, we get to decide whether he is the hero of our story. We get to decide if he does indeed find, or earn, redemption.

The third act of the story throws everything, including the kitchen sink, at the reader. I could imagine some people being turned off by the step away from subtlety, but I loved every page of it. These pages are gruesome, extreme, vile, and genuinely terrifying. The goings-on at the Alexander house, to me, are right up there with Hill House, and even though Judson Alexander, the antagonist, really only gets a proper introduction halfway through the story, he is a scary dude. Alexander manifests in such a way that people who don't lose sleep over a traditional ghost story are going to wind up with a case of the creeps.

Besides conjuring some pretty unwholesome imagery, this story consistently manages to tug on the heartstrings and direct our sympathy toward a number of characters. It's easy to see how Janz took situations that could have gone the way of the soap opera, and managed to craft them to perfection.

This is my first foray in the land of Janz, but you can sure as hell bet, it won't be the last. If you're a sucker for ghost stories, haunted house, or just well-written human interaction, make time for this book in your life.

This is my third book by Josh Malerman, and already he’s become a can’t-miss author. Unbury Carol is very unique and original. You can lump it in with the horror sub(sub?)genre of weird western, but it still manages to stand on its’ own two legs.

Malerman does an excellent job of taking a concept that I thought might make for a good short story and making it work as an engrossing 362 page novel. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the world built in this story. It has a lot of similarities to the old west, but contains a sense of isolation on the trail that makes the reader understand that this is not part of our world. One nice touch here is the way the suits in a deck of cards are different. A small difference, but it managed to set the stage.

Smoke is a fantastic villain and spends a lot of time doing the literary equivalent of chewing the scenery. I couldn’t help but picture him as Daniel Day Lewis harking back to There Will Be Blood. He is menacing and cruel, and is unquestionably a large part of why this story works on the scale it does.

The one issue I had was with the chapter set up towards the end. Malerman has described the chapters in this book as vignettes. Each one works as a complete scene and gives us glimpses of what is happening with certain characters or in certain locations. When the action comes to a head, Malerman opts for an extended chapter containing only a paragraph or two at a time before it jumps to somewhere else. This was clearly done to build tension, but the way the book moved for 95% of its run time worked so well, it was a shame to leave it.

All in all, a minor issue and I would recommend this to anyone looking for their next Malerman. If you’re looking to start this author, I believe Bird Box is the best point to jump in, but Unbury Carol gives us a great story with characters we enjoy spending time with, a villain whose next POV chapter we can’t wait to get to, and a setting in the Trail, that holds it all together.

Without a doubt, my favorite literary mantra comes from Neil Gaiman. I’m paraphrasing here, but Gaiman says that a good story should constantly leave the reader wondering “what happens next?” A good story leaves the reader unable to walk away until there’s a resolution of some sort because they are invested in characters and because it would be indecent to leave them in their current predicament.

Cold in July is my first Lansdale book, and it checks every box in regards to why I pick up a book. We’ve got a main character/narrator in Richard Dane who is an average person and unfolds the story in a manner that makes you feel like you’re having a drink with a friend who’s laying their (extremely) bad week on you. Dane is very likable and you want to see everything come out all right for him, but his wife, Ann, keeps him grounded, and gives us a reason to continue caring about his outcome. Lansdale also gives us a fantastic side character in Jim Bob Luke, who I would love to see pop up in another work.

The dialogue in the story, and I would imagine other Lansdale pieces, is arguably the thing that makes this work the best. While I was reading, I was deeply immersed, but I also spent a fair bit of time making mental notes on how to effectively write dialogue and keep the reader in the story. At any given time there are multiple page conversations between anywhere from 2 to 4 characters that eschew traditional he said, she said dialogue tags, and don’t lose you at all. Besides set up, Lansdale makes great use of local color and gets the reader to feel like they are part of this Texas culture, even if it is only for about 200 pages.

The action also gets a shout out here. Lansdale doesn’t mess around, and drops us right into the act that ignites the rest of the story by page 3. We follow this thread with great anticipation, and when it looks like it’s going to wrap up neatly, albeit prematurely, we are sent in a totally new, but thrilling direction. As I mentioned before, there wasn’t a paragraph or chapter break, where it was easy to put the book down. I perpetually needed to find out what happened next with all of these characters.

At this point, I don’t really know whether I am reviewing Cold in July, or whether I’m reviewing Joe Lansdale. I guess I’m going to have to pick up a few more stories by this guy and check them out. Oh well. Five well-deserved stars.

I picked this collection up at the beginning of this summer, looking to read a few stories from modern horror voices I knew and hoping to discover some new authors. Like a lot of collections this size and this diverse, there are stories that stand out and stay with you, stories that are fine but you likely won’t revisit, and stories that don’t quite hold your attention. The good ones, and the big names, are spread out enough to carry a reader through the entire book.

I’d like to start by highlighting a few authors I wasn’t familiar with before. The opening story, The Boggle Hole by Alison Littlewood was one of my favorites in the book. It’s a spin-on a creature story that features significantly more characterization than creature and put Littlewood on my radar. Departures by A.K. Benedict was another terrific read, and mixes horror with something like fantasy. It’s much easier to recommend than to describe. The Embarrassment of Dead Grandmothers by Sarah Lotz offers us something different, an excellent black humor story. The Abduction Door by Christopher Golden is one of those stories that gives us some new every day object to fear, elevators here, and a surprisingly poignant ending.

The big names also have some excellent stories sprinkled throughout. Josh Malerman’s House of the Head, which is now getting rave reviews on the return of creepshow, was originally written for this anthology and is every bit as good as you hope. It’s a great spin on haunted house fiction. Brian Keene delivers Sheltered in Place, a pretty engaging story with a fantastic ending. Adam Nevill’s Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies) goes to the kind of deep, dark place we might expect from this author, but we’re here for the ride as per usual.

Being relatively new to the not-featured-at-Barnes & Noble horror community, this collection served as a nice introduction to some of these authors. If it peaks your interest, Mark Morris has also edited and released a second volume. It currently resides on my bookshelf and is waiting to introduce me to some new voices.

I have now had the privilege of checking out three titles in Demain Publishing's Short Sharp Shocks series, and, above all, I love what this is doing within the genre. The stories I have had the pleasure of so far are a little bit longer than the average fare one might find in an anthology. As such, you don't end up shorted on story(See what I did there? I'll be here all week.). These things are very well self contained.

Calvin Demmer's The Town That Feared Dusk is no exception. The reader joins journalist Sylvia Bernstein in traveling to a small town to investigate a bridge that's been the site of an inordinate number suicides. We follow along as Sylvia unsuccessfully tries to interview locals, and we're left with that oh so familiar sense that something in this town is amiss, and everyone but our main character knows what it is. One thing that strikes Sylvia is that the residents are nowhere to be found during the hours of dusk. Sylvia's attempt to visit, and explore, the bridge finds her having an experience that just might explain the rash of suicides. After that, she teams up with a reclusive older woman to try and save the town.

It might feel like I've given a lot away in my synopsis, but not even close. From where I left off to the end of the story, we've got twists, we've got turns, and some serious surprises. I love it when a story leads me to believe that I'm heading in one direction, and then pulls the rug out from under my feet. At least I love it when it's well done, which Demmer does.

My one issue with The Town That Feared Dusk, is that even at 32 pages, the final act feels a little bit rushed. The amount that gets packed into the story could have made for a terrific 60-ish page novella. i've read stories that feel rushed at the ending, and give the reader the feeling like the author didn't quite know how to wrap things up. Not this one. This one reads more like the author knew exactly what they wanted to do, but felt a bit constrained by the form of the short story.

Regardless of pacing, this is another entry into the Short Sharp Shocks series that is well worth the 25 minutes it takes to read.


Slash marks my first trip into the malevolent mind of Mr. Hunter Shea. I picked up Creature based on a lot of recommendations, as well as the fact that it would hit me squarely in the feels, but simply hadn't gotten to it yet. When Flame Tree Press sent me this beauty right before October, I knew it had to jump to the top of the list.

What this novel does well, it does extremely well. The first thing that comes to mind is set up. The events in the first two chapters set the story in motion and leave us needing to know where the narrative is headed. The cast of characters, who are fantastically crafted, is lead by primary protagonist Todd who is out to avenge/find out the full story about the death of his girlfriend, Ashley. All the characters have a connection to Ashley, who was the final girl from the Wraith's previous reign of terror and we get a well-rounded group that is just large enough (6 people) that we understand some of them will be cannon fodder, but who is not glaringly obvious. In other words, we are not stuck with any one dimensional characters who are only there to be stabbed.

Perhaps the biggest strength of Slash is in its' cinematic quality. Hunter Shea does some of the heavy lifting for our overworked imaginations and crafts such vivid pictures of the abandoned Hayden Resort where much of the story takes place, as well as the action. Whether it's a chase scene, an escape from a collapsing building, or gruesome violence inflicted by the antagonist, we never lose track of what is happening or, more importantly in an action-oriented story, who it's happening to. I can't tell you how many times I've read a book with action scenes and had to reread parts because a character had been killed or injured and I didn't catch it the first time, as it had been lost in the fluff.

Speaking of the antagonist, Shea has crafted a serious winner here. The synopsis doesn't tell us anything but bare bones about the Wraith, which is ideal, because the less you know, the better it suits the story. Suffice it to say, the Wraith is terrifying in every conceivable way, and menaces his victims in the most grisly ways imaginable.

My only issue with the book was a small one, and a personal one. I would have liked to see the angle of Todd following the clues left behind by Ashley explored a little more fully. This is the incendiary device that gets Todd and company to the Hayden Resort and even gets them on the track of figuring out exactly who/what the wraith is. I would've have liked to see the group uncover a couple more puzzle pieces while dodging the Wraith's awful advances. This thread was present enough to become a plot device rather than just a way to kickstart the action, but it does feel like the thread just runs out halfway through.

As I mentioned, the detective piece was not nearly enough to derail Slash for me. Because of the overall cinematic feel, I can certainly see myself revisiting from time to time. That might mean rereading Slash every once in a while. It might mean hoping that Hunter Shea had so much fun writing this book, that he feels compelled to revisit this world.

I’d still consider myself a relative newcomer to Jonathan Janz’s work. I loved the Siren and the Specter, and had a few more on the shelf. When I asked the horror community what Janz book I should include with my October reading, I got a fantastic, and varied, response. Then, the man himself suggested Children of the Dark, and having backed myself into that particular corner, I acquiesced. I mean, the author would be the expert in this situation, right?

Children of the Dark starts up as a coming-of-age story, and checks all the boxes reminding us what it was like to be 15. Trying to figure out where life is going, dealing with drama between friends, and believing that talking to a girl just may be the most difficult task you’re ever going to face.

Will Burgess has had a tougher go of it than your average 15 year old, with a barely there mom, and a sweet, younger sister that he is essentially responsible for. Part one revolves around drama with Will’s group of friends, the neighborhood bullies, and, of course, teenage love. When we find out a notorious child murderer is now on the loose and may be headed towards Shadeland, we think we’ve found the crux of our story. Holy shit, are we ever wrong.

Janz strings enough plot threads through here to make up approximately three novels, and sometimes that’s not a good thing. Here, it works nicely. While professional murderer Carl Padgett probably could have held down the story, the supernatural element, which feels random when introduced, winds up tying everything together nicely. It also justifies the large scale mayhem in a way that a single killer could not have pulled off.

Janz was clearly not afraid to put his main character through the ringer, air him out, then run him through again. As a result, our remaining characters are in unique predicaments and states of mind when the story ends. This goes a long way toward setting up a sequel that Janz has announced is in progress.

The action and brutality in the story are top notch, and I found myself having a lot of fun reading it. The chapters can be pretty long, but the narrative flows at such a pace that you don’t notice. I typically enjoy books with relatively short chapters, but this really worked for me. One of the only parts that took me out of the story, was how inept, and borderline corrupt, the local police department came across.  In a story packed with relatable small-town characters, it was very close to being cartoonish.

If you haven’t gotten around to reading this one yet, procrastinate no more. There are fantastic characters, great scares, well-done tragedies, and some terrific mythology if, like me, you’re into that sort of thing.