Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

Today I'm looking at a full-length novel by Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes. After listening to The Martian Chronicles and remembering how good Fahrenheit 451 was, I decided finding something else by Bradbury was worth listening to. This book follows the adventures of two boys, James Nightshade and William Halloway, neighbors who were born a mere two minutes apart. Will was born a minute to midnight on October 30th and Jim was born a minute after midnight on October 31st, and the boys have been an inseparable team since then. Naturally when a carnival arrives well out of the normal season a mere week before Halloween in their Illinois town, Jim and Will decide to investigate. However, something far more sinister than poorly maintained rides and rigged games is going on at this carnival and Jim and Will have to rely on each other and Will's dad, Charles Halloway, to survive.

There is a lot going on in this book and while personally I really, really liked this book I'm willing to admit it feels a bit rough around the edges. I think the biggest redeeming quality is Bradbury's writing which I think is particularly excellent in this book and manages to keep the story interesting despite him trying to shoehorn multiple things into the book and not really getting to develop all of them. It feels kind of like a Phillip K. Dick novel where he had a ton of ideas and wanted to include them all in the book, but didn't really have the time to develop any of them to their full potential. Of course, this being Bradbury the book feels a lot more put-together than some of Dick's amphetamine-fueled writings, but there are still issues.

Probably the biggest plotline in the book is the topic of aging, which comes across in both subtle and incredibly direct ways through the book. Will and Jim are almost fourteen, leaving childhood but still not quite on the brink of manhood in that frustrating stage of adolescence. We definitely get a sense of that with the ''theater'' that Jim and Will visit, the bedroom window of a house in town where it's all but explicitly stated the boys can view people having sex. Jim finds the theater appealing while it makes Will uncomfortable, which further matches the boys' personalities. Jim is eager to grow older and fully jump into manhood, while Will isn't sure he's ready for that yet. However both boys are aware the best parts of their futures are ahead of them.

This is in direct contrast to Charles Halloway, who's already fifty-four years old. Charles didn't marry until thirty-nine so he feels incredibly old compared to his wife and especially to his son. Charles is still active and healthy, he's not a dottering old man, but the age gap between him and his son feels all the more extreme. An additional side effect of this is Charles has never felt particularly close to his son, because he feels so distantly removed from when he was a boy himself. When the boys find out a carousel at the carnival is capable of altering a person's age the possibilities are tempting not only for them, but for Charles and other people in town as well.

The other main plotline is the sinister elements of the carnival itself, how it feeds on people and twists their hopes and aspirations into empty promises and choices they regret. I feel like this plotline wasn't as well developed and part of that simply was because we don't really see the motivations of the carnival proprietors. I felt a distinct contrast with Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, which contains another evil carnival. In this case we know Cabal's goal is to get a hundred souls by the end of a year in exchange for his own, so we know why the carnival is evil. But in Something Wicked This Way Comes, it's more there's something not quite right about this carnival therefore it is evil. I think Bradbury was trying to develop a deep and complex moral philosophical argument in this book but the opportunity wasn't utilized to its full potential. There is an explanation for the motivations of the carnival shysters but it feels rather vague and nebulous. I honestly feel like Bradbury could have done either the aging plotline or the good vs. evil plotline, but attempting to do both results in both of them being kind of muddied.

And yet, in spite of all this I thought of this book as really good. I don't know if I can quantify it to specific things. Part of it is Bradbury's writing, which manages to create tension throughout the novel and made me interested in what was going to happen next. Part of it is the connection between Will and Charles, a father and son finally getting to bond in spite of the years separating them, which I felt was rather well done. As much of a mess as this book was, I found myself not minding it so much as other books and I'm finding it incredibly difficult to put it into words.

Simply put, I liked this book. It's sinister, it's creepy, it's funny, it's heartwarming, at the end it runs a whole gamut of human emotions. It's a mess, but in some ways it's a good mess. Maybe it just hit me the right way at the right time and I'll always have a fondness for this book as a result. But I definitely think it's worth taking the time to check out on your own.

- Kalpar

Odd Adventures with Your Other Father, by Norman Prentiss

Today I'm looking at a book I picked up on sale on Amazon, Odd Adventures with Your Other Father. This book contains two stories that complement each other. The first starts out as a framing story but eventually evolves into its own story. The second is a collection of stories, the titular odd adventures, which provides character background and provides the eerie, otherworldly feel to the book. Overall I though this was a pretty good book, and I'm not a huge fan of horror in the first place. It's not strictly a horror novel but it definitely feels like it shares certain elements with that genre, in addition to being a little science-fictiony.

This book is about a girl named Celia who gradually learns of the adventures her two fathers had in the 1980's after graduating from college. These stories are told to her by her Dad Shawn, to help her get to know her Dad Jack after he died of cancer when she was only four years old.

Jack and Shawn met in college and fell in love and after Jack won an award they took a year-long road trip across the United States, investigating little out of the way places an mysterious spots. Along the way, Jack and Shawn ran into a number of things that any sane person would dismiss as impossible. Vampires, werewolves, demons, succubi, all manner of horror story monsters. Most mysterious of all of these is Jack's ability to project a glamour.

Jack is capable of creating incredibly detailed images utilizing the power of his imagination and projecting them onto real-life objects. Unfortunately, Jack's ability comes with two significant drawbacks. First, the only person capable of seeing Jack's glamours is Shawn. Why this should be they're not sure, but they suspect it's something to do with the deep bond of love they share. Secondly, Jack's only capable of making things look worse. Jack can only make things look scarier, creepier, or more terrifying than they are in reality. Fortunately Jack and Shawn manage to find ways to utilize this ability despite its drawbacks and it actually saves their lives more than a few times.

The other story is Celia discovering more about her fathers and their past, doing research on her own and making plans to find out bits that Shawn chose to redact or omit. Eventually it becomes Celia's own story of discovery and growth, as well as healing wounds left by Jack's death.

As I said, I thought this book was pretty good. It's creepy, but I feel like it manages to not be too creepy. Some of Jack's earliest experiments with his glamour utilize a healthy dose of blood, guts, and gore but thankfully that doesn't come up too much in the rest of the stories. Granted, I say that because I'm not a huge fan of gore myself, usually I find it quite distasteful, but I think Prentiss did a really good job with his writing.

I also feel like Prentiss did a really good job of portraying the love between Shawn and Jack and that special tie that they shared. It especially comes across when we find out about the different misadventures they had and some of what Shawn had to go through for Jack's sake, and vice versa. Celia has a little bit of awkwardness in explaining her family, but as someone who lost a parent in childhood myself I can understand it being awkward and it feels genuine, compounded with the still ''unusual'' status of same-sex couples in the United States. Perhaps this portrayal will become dated with age, but I think it fits very well with the current era.

If you like horror, I think this is definitely worth your time to check out. And even if you're not a horror fan like me, I think there's still a lot about this book to enjoy and a lot to learn. Because if nothing else, there's a lot of love in this book, and that's definitely something the world could use more of.

- Kalpar

The Last American Vampire, by Seth Grahame-Smith

Some years ago I read the very popular novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which got its own film adaptation. This novel purported to reveal the secret life of the Great Emancipator as a highly skilled and courageous vampire-slayer and the secret that the Civil War was secretly a proxy war between two different ideologies of vampires. When I read it I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. Sure it was downright silly and maybe Grahame-Smith didn't get the actual details of Lincoln's life he incorporated in the book quite right, but overall I thought it was a pretty fun read. When I found the sequel available at the library I decided it was worth a look.

This book talks about the life of Henry Sturges, the vampire who trained Lincoln to become a vampire hunter and helped Lincoln considerably through his career. The novel is not done in strict chronological order and jumps around through Henry's life as both a human and then as a vampire after he gets turned by another vampire living in Roanoke colony. The novel ends with Sturges in semi-retirement, having been worn out by some four hundred years of life before a cliff-hanger ending implying that Sturges will join the fray once more.

Unfortunately, I have to say I don't think this book was very good because it suffers very badly from what I frequently call the ''Forrest Gump Effect. As I've said in my reviews of books like the Sharpe series, one of the weaknesses of historical fiction is it tends to get tied up into important events and main characters, such as Richard Sharpe, find themselves at pivotal events in history. This is partly to give the characters something to do and partly because research materials about famous people and events are simply much more available than ordinary day-to-day life. To an extent I'm willing to tolerate this. Sharpe after all has no business being at the Battle of Trafalgar, being an infantryman. But I feel that The Last American Vampire goes beyond an acceptable level and starts getting into downright crazy territory. For example, here's a list of things Henry Sturges does in the novel:

1. Carves the mysterious ''CRO'' message found at Roanoke colony.
2. Gets adopted by Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh), paramount chief of the Tsenacommacah, becomes a foster uncle to Pocahontas, and meets the original Jamestown settlers. 
3. Solves the Jack the Ripper murders with the help of Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle.
4. Becomes best friends with real-life best friends Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla.
5. Gets involved in the assassination of Rasputin, who is also a vampire, and brings Tesla along so he can use his microwave death ray to kill Rasputin.
6. Teams up with Elliot Ness in Chicago during the 20's and becomes the origin of the name ''Untouchables''.
7. Is sent by FDR in 1937 to assassinate Hitler, not a vampire, and fails. Also, blows up the Hindenburg on the way home.
8. Is involved in the hunt for the real people responsible for JFK's assassination.

And this is just stuff that's explicitly laid out in the book. There are references to his activities during the American Revolution and during both World Wars, as well as his involvement in the 1919 Paris peace conference, but we do not see those explicitly and they'd probably make the book considerably longer if we did. But it leaves the impression Henry Sturges is basically responsible for running America behind the scenes.

Another issue I have is that there's an attempt to have a vampire super-villain who is trying to bring America down throughout all of its history. Except the way they go about it doesn't make terribly much sense. This cabal is involved in a significant number of Presidential deaths, such as the assassinations of James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, as well as the early death of Zachary Taylor in 1850. Which seems a frightfully inefficient way of destroying America, especially in the case of McKinley because it placed a far more dynamic and reform-minded individual (my hero Theodore Roosevelt) in the presidency. I just can't see how bumping off a president every other decade or so really accomplishes the goal of taking down America.

It's also implied that this enemy is behind both World Wars and at least part of the Cold War but World War I, which the enemy is explicitly behind more than the other two, had no guarantee of getting the United States involved at all. And I'm not exactly sure what the enemy is trying to accomplish. Sure, villainous monologues explaining their detailed plans are hackneyed and trite, but it at least tells me what the villain's trying to accomplish and why. Even if it's 1. conquer the world because 2. I'll show you, I'll show all of you . With Last American Vampire I never really understand what the villain is trying to accomplish, much less why they are either. I can kind of guess, but it just seems insufficient.

Overall I'd say this book is kind of a disappointing sequel. In many ways it's a very safe sequel providing more of the same stuff we enjoyed before. And while I'm sure there are people who like that a lot, I was kind of was hoping for something a little different. There are some good parts, but between the presence of Henry Sturges at many important historical events and the rather weak villain I can't really recommend this book.

- Kalpar

Bible Stories for Secular Humanists, by S.P. Somtow

Today I'm looking at another book by the Thai author, S.P. Somtow. Some of you may remember when I looked at his Chronicles of the High Inquest series some time ago and my conclusion was, ''These are kind of weird.'' Interestingly enough, I can't remember how exactly Bible Stories for Secular Humanists  got on my list of things to read because it was definitely before I knew who Somtow was. (This is a continual problem for me where interesting books get put on a to-read list and then I come back to them years later.) I'm willing to quibble a little over the title because some of these aren't retellings of  bible stories with Somtow's distinctive twist, but horror stories with religious themes. But I feel like it's an interesting selection of Somtow's writing and I feel like I'm getting a better read on his personality. I don't know if I can say I enjoyed this book, but that's more because horror isn't really my cup of tea.

As Somtow states in the introduction to this book, these short stories are ultimately about sex and death, which he sees as the two main driving forces behind humanity. Also lots of zombies. Somtow also admits he really likes zombies and he uses a lot of opportunities to put them in stories, whether in Roman times or a sci-fi future. But I feel like Somtow manages an interesting range with his stories. Some are just kind of silly, like his story about a hard-boiled detective in Roman times dealing with zombies. But some are deeply emotional and show Somtow's thoughts on humanity's place in the universe, even with all the zombies shuffling about. The Inquest definitely had its own flavor and I'm still having trouble digesting all of it, but these stories helped show me Somtow has a good range as a writer.

I don't normally mention formatting or typos because it's usually not an issue with the books or so rare it barely merits commenting upon. I will say with the kindle edition of this book there were a couple of stories where, for no reason I could discern anyway, the text was ridiculously large. I even messed with the text settings on my kindle and compared it to other chapters and it seems to be something specifically within the file itself rather than anything I did. In the end it wasn't a big issue, but it meant I had just a couple of sentences per page because of the font. I also recall at least one story having several typos which actually made it difficult for me to figure out what the sentence meant. This wasn't just a they're/their/there problem, it was a completely different word that makes no sense within the context of the sentence and is clearly an error. Of course, Somtow does enjoy using archaic words or archaic definitions of words so I had to use my dictionary a couple of times, but even then there were some typos where I just couldn't parse the sentence.

So I think I can say from a writing perspective that this book is very good and Somtow has some interesting stories. However, almost all of them involve vampires, zombies, or some other horror aspect and Somtow definitely enjoys the horror genre. Unfortunately it's not my favorite thing in the world so I think some of the appeal of the book is lost on me. But it's definitely different and interesting and if you like horror it may be worth your time to check out.

The Quick, by Lauren Owen

Today I'm talking about The Quick, a novel by Lauren Owen that if I was being entirely honest kind of falls out of the normal sort of thing I would read and/or listen to. To be entirely honest I didn't really enjoy this novel and I think it's mostly because I'm not the target audience for this story. I think for the sort of story that Owen is trying to do she manages to do it very well, but I'm just simply not the sort of person who goes in for that. So what sort of story is she telling? Well, The Quick is a book about vampires. Well, to be more accurate it's a book set in Victorian London in 1892 that happens to have vampires in it eventually.

The first part of the book feels a lot more like Victorian literary fiction because it deals with Charlotte and James Norbury, two children who grow up in a crumbling estate while their father spends all his time away on business. James eventually is sent away to school and heads to London to become a poet, where he falls into forbidden love with his male aristocratic roommate. This is all before any vampires show up whatsoever in the book, mind you. Aside from one or two vague foreshadowings of something unusual occurring later in the book, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled across a modern version of a mundane Victorian novel. I was actually beginning to wonder myself if I had read the short description incorrectly but eventually the vampires do show up and we get thrown into a dangerous underworld of London.

The thing that I noticed the most about this book was that it feels very much like a Victorian novel. It seemed to engage in a verbosity favored by writers such as Charles Dickens where ten words will be put in where one would do just as well. On the one hand, I can appreciate it because it's accurate to the literature of the time period and Owen does a good job of making it feel like a Victorian novel. On the other hand, this very verbosity is what drives me away from writers such as Dickens in the first place. As I said, I don't think I'm really the target audience for this sort of thing so I'm not really enjoying the book. That doesn't mean it has its own merits or is necessarily bad, but I just cannot stand Victorian style literature that engages in endless tangents and parentheticals just to pad the length out. Well, Dickens did it, Owen may just be imitating the style.

A thing which I found really weird though was that Owen kind of avoids using the word vampire as much as possible. The characters conscientiously avoid using the word and although vampire is actually used at a couple of points, it's remarkable how reluctant everyone is to actually use that word in a book ostensibly about vampires. And I'm not really sure about the reasoning behind it. I suppose on the one hand it could be because the characters are reluctant to admit that such things exist, even though they're struggling with them. This is sort of explored and most of the characters are reluctant to actually use the word. But at the same time it feels like Owen is almost embarrassed to be writing a book about vampires. As I sort of said earlier the first portion of the book is utterly mundane and deals with James's childhood and then his young adulthood in London after graduation and eventual relationship. The book starts off as, and throughout the rest of it, feels very much like literary fiction. It almost feels like the author is apologizing that vampires are in this book. I guess it could also be a stylistic choice but it feels really weird to me.

Ultimately the biggest problem I had with this book was it seemed dreadfully boring to me. It takes something as unusual and paranormal as vampires and manages to make it seem almost mundane to the point of tediousness. I just found myself wishing this book would be over more often than not. There are some plot threads left dangling which again, could be stylistic or could be deliberate sequel bait. In either case I didn't find myself caring enough to really be interested in those remaining threads. And I think ultimately I'm just not the target audience for this book. I'm not a huge fan of vampires or Victorian fiction so this book has got a lot going against it in my case before I've even taken a look inside. I'm sure there are people who like that sort of thing and probably enjoyed this book, but it just wasn't for me.

- Kalpar

Death Troopers, by Joe Schreiber

This week I'm taking a look at Death Troopers, which when I first saw it come out years ago I remember it being billed as ''Star Wars, but with zombies!'' And while I'm not terribly big on zombies as a monster or genre (zombies count as a genre, right?) I am happy to read or in this case listen to things in the Star Wars universe that take a slightly different approach than some of the more traditional Expanded Universe stories. In this case the book was pretty good, although the ending had some problems as far as I was concerned, but more about that later.

As some of you might remember, earlier this year I reviewed another audio book within the Star Wars EU, Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. One of the things I liked most about Allegiance and which holds true for Death Troopers as well, is the high production quality which is put into the audio books. I haven't been mentioning it much in my reviews and partly that's because I've been listening to non-fiction books that don't really require sound effects or musical accompaniment, or even multiple voices for characters. However, in some of the fiction books that I've listened to, Dune especially, I've found myself questioning some of the decisions regarding voice actors and use of music which seems haphazard at best. Death Troopers however, has distinct voices for numerous characters, incorporates music from the film franchise, and makes good use of sound effects to flesh out the narrative. So from a production quality standpoint alone these books have so far been an absolute delight.

Another thing that was really good about this book was it set the atmosphere very well. The plot involves an imperial prison barge which comes across an Imperial Star Destroyer floating adrift in deep space. A team goes across to scavenge spare parts but when they come back almost all of the boarding party appears to be afflicted by a mysterious illness which soon sweeps through the ship. Schreiber does a really good job with the pacing and expressing just how creepy finding a derelict ship, especially one as big as a Star Destroyer, can be. The one thing that I think really undermined the creepiness factor was at every chapter the narrator would state the chapter title and then another voice would sort of whisper-scream it. Like you know those creepy voices that show up on tape in horror movies? Sort of like that. I felt like it was just trying too hard at that point and came across as kind of silly. Otherwise, it did a very good job at being creepy.

The issues I had with the book really came towards the end. I didn't really mind Han Solo and Chewbacca showing up towards the middle of the book, even if it didn't make terribly much sense from a plot perspective. I'm sure it was like a requirement or something that characters from the movie be included in some capacity. But, I think the book could have stood fine on its own without Han and Chewie. There was one character who's supposed to be an unabashed psychopath but he actually came across as less so than some ''heroic'' characters I've encountered in the past. Plus he goes through a whole redemption arc which I felt undermined his being a psychopath because psychopaths don't feel remorse, but that's just me. There were also some deus ex machina bits towards the end that wrapped the plot up neatly which probably explains why there isn't a zombie-infested Star Destroyer mentioned anywhere else in the universe.

Overall I think the book was okay. As an audio book it's pretty enjoyable and the tension is very well done. I just had some issues with how it was wrapped up.

- Kalpar

The Gemini Effect, by Chuck Grossart

This week I'm talking about a science-fiction/horror book titled The Gemini Effect, which apparently was really popular on Amazon and there were a lot of people who liked it. I can start this review off by saying that I really need to stop reading horror stories because they're just not quite my cup of tea. Obviously there's a huge market for it and it's very popular, but as I read more and more titles in the genre I'm left with the impression it's just something I'm not terribly interested in. Which is fine, but it's obviously going to color my review of the book a little.

I'll start off by saying that this book feels very much like the plot of a B movie or a Sci-Fi Original work. There initially is a problem, claiming to be the result of science gone awry and man meddling with things we were not meant to know. The world is placed in inevitable danger, and it's up to a band of heroes, or perhaps the entire American military, to find a way to save the day.

In this particular instance the threat is a biological warfare agent created during the dark days of the Cold War which was released from a United States research facility by accident in the 1960's. What was left was placed in the trunk of a car and taken to a Kansas City, Missouri scrapyard, where hopefully the car would be melted and the entire incident could be forgotten. Unfortunately for humanity the car was not melted and the result is a nasty biological agent that makes its escape some fifty years later. Soon large portions of Kansas City's population have disappeared overnight, attacked by something, and it's up to the military to try and figure out what's going on.  And the book makes it very clear in the beginning that humanity is not going to survive this intact, which gives the book a very dark tone throughout.

I will say that the author gives off a very distinct impression of being a military buff in the book. The majority of characters are or were military officers in the past and the author goes to great lengths describing some of the military vehicles and equipment used, including mentioning unofficial nicknames that have accumulated over the years. To be perfectly honest it almost comes off as an almost Michael Bay-esque fetishization and worship of the American military which definitely adds to the B Movie feeling of the novel. And perhaps I've grown a little soft in my old age, but such glorification and adoration makes me more than a little uncomfortable. Which isn't to diminish the sacrifices of our citizens in uniform or the work that they do, but I've found the people who most glorify the military are the ones who know the least about the true horrors of warfare.

There's also a secondary plot that may have been foreshadowed earlier in the book but it comes to the fore about halfway in the book and to me it felt like it just sort of came out of nowhere. Basically it turns out there's also a Soviet plot to infiltrate the highest levels of foreign governments and bring about nuclear armageddon so that Marx and Lenin's dream of a new utopia can be achieved. Personally it felt kind of weird and shoe-horned in like the author had two separate ideas and decided to put them into one book instead of creating two separate stories. I guess the two plots kind of work together and it would make sense for extremists to take advantage of an unstable situation, but it just feels kind of forced to include a second plot, in my opinion.

Overall I didn't care for this book, but as I said it's probably mostly a sci-fi/horror B movie in book form. Obviously there's a market for this sort of thing and if you like it I encourage you to read it, but for me it's just not really my sort of story.

- Kalpar

Lovecraft's Monsters, edited by Ellen Datlow

This week I'm going with a little more creepy feel and reviewing a Lovecraft anthology. This however isn't an anthology of stories written by Lovecraft himself, rather it's a collection of stories written by a variety of authors which utilizes Lovecraft's mythos and universe. Which is apparently fairly common as much of the popularity of the Lovecraft mythos isn't necessarily because of the writings of the man himself so much as the writings of other people who utilize his ideas. And it's always interesting to see ideas of one author get used by other people to create a larger and more complex universe.

As I mentioned this is an anthology and those always seem to give me a little bit of trouble from a reviewing standpoint. Anthologies are fun because you get to have tastes of different authors and get exposed to things you might not normally run across, but at the same time they can be frustrating. Sometimes I personally run into the problem that either the stories are too short, and leave me wishing for more from the author, or the stories are too long and I'm flipping through the anthology to see how much longer this story is going to take. Very occasionally you get a story that feels just the right length and feels perfect, but those aren't as common.

As I mentioned in my review of actual Lovecraft, I have some issues with reading Lovecraft and I think it might just not be my cup of tea. Definitely part of it is stylistic as Lovecraft and Lovecraft-inspired works seem to go pretty heavy with the purple prose. And that's certainly an aspect of the literature but more often than not for me, personally, it becomes more than a little too much. In addition, the stories where the lesson is more or less humans are tiny dust motes in a vast and uncaring universe and ultimately nothing we do really matters on a cosmic scale, I find that weirdly comforting rather than terrifying. I mean, yes, it's intimidating to be confronted with the vastness of the universe, but it certainly takes quite a lot of pressure off of me to be completely honest. I think the stories I like better are the ones where there are actually malevolent entities, completely beyond our control, who like to mess with humans for fun. And there certainly seem to be more of those in the more modern fiction. It's downright terrifying to have an enemy you can't fight, much less understand, and it wants to eat your soul. Very chilling.

My usual problem with anthologies is it's always a mixed bag. Some stories are good, some stories aren't, it all usually evens out towards the end. Personally I'm left with the feeling that Lovecraft fiction isn't really my thing and I'm better off with my pulp science-fiction novels of space adventure, but if you like Lovecraft it may be worth checking out.

- Kalpar

Horrorstor, by Grady Hendrix

This week I'm actually reaching back a bit and talking about an audiobook I listened to quite a while ago in October, Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. As regular readers are probably aware, horror is not my usual bailiwick but the concept as described in the blurb was intriguing enough for me to want to give it a chance. The edition I listened to was narrated by Tai Sammons and Bronson Pinchot.

The Plot of Horrorstor is set in an Orsk store on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. Orsk is a big box retail assemble-it-yourself furniture store and deliberate American knock-off of Swedish immigrant Ikea, from the labyrinth of its store showroom to the cafeteria with its meatballs to the phony pseudo-Swedish names given to every piece of furniture. However the Cleveland Orsk store has lately been suffering a rash of vandalism, made all the more curious because it seems to be happening during the night and the security cameras have been unable to provide any useful information about who, or what, might be causing the damage. As a last resort, Basil, one of the store managers, recruits Amy and Ruth-Anne, two of the staff members, to stay with him in the store through the night to see if they can catch the perpetrators before corporate is forced to step in. However the night ends up not being quite what they expected in the least.

A lot of Horrorstor's humor comes from Hendrix's ruthless satirizing of corporate culture and the experience of working retail in specific, something I'm sure almost anyone can sympathize with and understand. Bronson Pinchot reads a variety of inserts included within the story, such as official Orsk literature and memos, and every chapter is started with an advertisement for a piece of Orsk furniture, complete with a narmy description of how this piece of Orsk furniture will fit into your lifestyle. Pinchot does an excellent job of capturing the mild, bland, inoffensive, and absolutely stupidity behind Orsk (and most other) company culture with his tone of voice and some of the inserts are downright hilarious. I can only think that this may have been made better in the paperback edition which is described as similar to a glossy furniture catalog in its design. Alas, this was something I was deprived of with the audio version.

Tai Sammons does most of the heavy lifting, so to speak, by following our protagonist of Amy as she tries to survive the soul-crushing monotony of Orsk. And while I can understand and sympathize with Amy's frustration, having worked in retail myself, Amy isn't exactly the best protagonist. As it's pointed out in the book she's kind of shiftless, gives up when things get too hard, and doesn't follow through on things despite wanting to escape from the trap of working retail. It may just be because it falls too close to my own personal experiences, but I feel like Amy brings most of her problems onto herself and looks to blame other people for them rather than taking responsibility. The result is I end up with very little sympathy for Amy as a character. Fortunately she does go through some development, but it's kind of a long time coming in the book.

I will also say I don't know if I really like the pacing of the book terribly much. It's very reasonable to guess from the title and the genre that something creepy is going down. It's why you picked the book up after all, anyway. For the first half, though, things in the book seemed fairly mundane. A little odd perhaps, but not necessarily creepy. Once you get to the second half, things go from zero to straight up terrifying in a matter of minutes and I felt kind of like I was scrambling to catch up. There's also sort of the drawback of knowing exactly what the danger is, which makes it far less scary than knowing there's something dangerous out there but not knowing what exactly it is. I felt like the book could have benefitted greatly from a little better pacing and working to weave the creepiness throughout, in addition to the theme of soul-crushing monotony.

The other thing I noticed was that the book ended rather abruptly and on a cliff hanger, which felt vaguely unsatisfying. Granted, there was the much-needed character development, but we're left with a bit, "what happens next question?" This is of course a means of ending books which has been done before, Heinlein being an example of an author who enjoyed doing this, but at the same time it could also be a setup for a sequel. In either case I was kind of disappointed because in the case of the former, this being the final word and us being left to imagine further adventures, the conflict within the book isn't really resolved, just delayed until its inevitable return. In the case of the latter, I'm not sure if I really care quite enough about the characters, in spite of their development to sit through a sequel. Or for that matter if there's really enough material still there to flesh it out into a full book on its own. So given those two options, it feels like an unsatisfying conclusion.

I am of course aware that I'm not exactly an aficionado of the horror genre so don't have a lot of experience and this may be perfectly normal for the book. In fact my opinions on what makes a good horror novel may be entirely at odds with what everyone else thinks makes a good horror novel. But in my opinion, at least, this book had some serious issues and left me feeling rather unsatisfied. It wasn't throw-against-the wall bad, but I didn't think it was terribly good either.

-Kalpar

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

A couple of months ago I wandered into a Barnes and Noble and walked out with yet another handful of books because I have a very strange and dangerous compulsion. While I was there I picked up a book published by Barnes and Noble that contains (at least according to the book) the entire collection of every fiction story written by H.P. Lovecraft that still exists. For my uninitiated readers, H.P. Lovecraft was a horror and supernatural fiction writer in the 1920's and 30's who wrote a number of short stories and novellas, a few of which have been lost because they were mostly published in pulp magazines. What Lovecraft is remembered for is his groundbreaking exploration into the then-new idea that the world was several billion years old and the possibility that other intelligent races had preceded humanity as the dominant lifeform on earth, and numerous other species would follow humanity in the future. The more memorable of his ideas which were adopted by and expanded upon by other writers include C'thulu, the concept of the Outer Gods, and that terrible tome, the Necronomicon. Lovecraft is definitely influential and has practically defined his own genre of literature. Despite his contributions to the body of American literature and its groundbreaking nature, I feel like most of Lovecraft's stories have become terribly dated and don't hold up as well to a modern reader. There were stories I enjoyed within this body of work but I found myself struggling with the vast majority of them.

Some of the stories that I really liked in Lovecraft's collection were the much shorter stories which reminded me a lot of episodes of the Twilight Zone where a situation is set up, possibly with strange rules, and at the end of the story there's a sudden twist that changes the situation dramatically. As an experienced Twilight Zone watcher and predictor of plots I saw quite a few of these plot twists a long way off, but it was still enjoyable and I had a certain amount of fun in guessing how the plot was going to end.

Really I think that Lovecraft's shorter stories are much better because he remains concise and there isn't as much of a build-up to his rather characteristic twists which prevents the story from getting boring. In some of the longer stories I saw the ending coming so far ahead that I just wanted the story to end, or I felt so frustrated with the slow pacing of the story that I didn't even care about the twist at the end, I was just glad that it was over. A particular example is At the Mountains of Madness. Many other readers consider it to be one of Lovecraft's greatest works and is certainly among his longest but I found myself utterly frustrated with the almost plodding pace of the story and the rather sudden end. I think a lot of this is just the older writing style which is something I struggle with in a lot of the older books I read. Lovecraft especially enjoys his purple prose and being rather verbose, which adds to the challenge of reading an already old-fashioned writing style. In longer stretches it became really hard to stick with Lovecraft, but I found him rather enjoyable in small doses.

Probably the most frustrating thing for me is the fact that in a number of these stories the horror is that intelligent species other than humanity have inhabited the planet, currently inhabit it, or will inhabit it in the future. Personally my response to this statement is "... and?" And really I think that's a result of me being a reader after generations of science-fiction writing. Aliens are now almost commonplace and it's not new or shocking to say that there were ancient aliens. Heck, Stargate ran off of the entire premise that many mythologies are based off of aliens visiting earth. To be fair the idea was probably groundbreaking at the time and was shocking to many readers at the time, much like contemporary advances in science had shaken long-standing assumptions about the world. Unfortunately, to a twenty-first century audience his once-groundbreaking stories are now commonplace and don't stand out except for the name of the author.

Overall I personally would recommend reading some of his short stories, generally the stuff shorter than thirty pages. I found that if the story ran longer than thirty pages the writing style made the story drag considerably and I had trouble staying focused on the book. If you like the short stories you can definitely try the longer ones, and there are plenty of places where you can read them.

- Kalpar