When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. With limited experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn’t possibly get any worse. But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artifacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the dry floors. The residue of old rites and pagan sacrifice for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. As the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees . . .

As I begin writing this review, two things immediately stand out. First, I will be repeating myself a lot because I can’t, for the life of me, figure out a way to get around pointing out which part of the book I am talking about. Second, there is no way I am getting out the other side of this review without sounding harshly negative at one point or another. The first part of the book, titled Beneath the Remains, is a fantastic piece of fiction that works well on its own and even provides a satisfying ending. The problem is the second part, South of Heaven, which just takes everything good about that first part and pisses all over it. The tone and quality is so drastically different that it doesn’t feel like the same story, but rather something scavenged from the corpse of some other novel and bolted on.

 And on the second day things did not get better. The rain fell hard and cold, the white sun never broke through the low grey cloud, and they were lost. But it was the dead thing they found hanging from a tree that changed the trip beyond recognition. All four of them saw it at the same time.

This is what I like about the first part. Adam Nevill wastes no time at all. He digs into the story, develops the atmosphere of his ancient forest, and introduces his characters to a grim new world for them to struggle through on their way toward personal growth and probable death. From those first few lines of the story, the reader is dragged in and dragged along as Nevill pushes his story and characters along with ruthless haste. A moment’s respite is rare and almost always paired with some piece of personal history or conflict. The misery and tension is palpable and the feeling never really diminishes. Rather, it evolves into something altogether stronger as the story progresses and the sinister weirdness hidden and scattered throughout the forest is slowly revealed. Tension builds further as the weight of the situation and worries and crumbling lives eats away at the men and they begin to turn their frustrations toward one another. And then… well, and then the obvious. Death, pain, confusion, and fear–a swirling nightmare miasma that clings to the characters as they struggle to survive and escape the forest despite being horribly lost and toyed with by something unseen and inhuman.

The second part is the opposite of that. Less attention is paid to developing atmosphere, perhaps because there is little point when the majority of the story takes place in one room, and the tension from before has been stripped away. The inhuman thing that taunts and hunts our characters through the first part is replaced, for the moment, by all too human antagonists who are, frankly, ridiculous. The hurried rush that accompanied the characters’ relentless push forward toward potential survival is replaced by a cycle of waiting and violence that perpetuates until the story is ready to move predictably forward. The saving grace of this part of the book is the underlying weirdness of it, the dreams and impossible things and creatures that step in to break up the monotonous turn the book has taken. The ending… is an ending and very much the sort you’d expect from a horror film.

The four main characters–Luke, Hutch, Phil, and Dom–are fairly well written characters. They aren’t the strongest and there isn’t that much development to be found on a camping trip plagued by some supernatural thing stalking and attempting to kill you, but each character takes a significant step forward from where they were at the beginning of the book. The characterization of the women is a problem. There are only two to be met in the story and they are evil and psychotic, respectively. The others, the wives of our main characters, are only heard of, but sure enough they bring ruin to their husbands’ lives. One has suffered a mental breakdown and the other is the cliched gold-digger attempting to siphon off what is left of her husband’s assets. The one remaining wife we hear next to nothing about, but perhaps that is because:

“Maybe Hutch got it right. He kept it simple. Kept it real. Didn’t overextend himself. Picked a low-maintenance woman.”

It is a bit much.

The good news is that the majority of The Ritual is given over to the Beneath the Remains and it is more than strong enough on its own that it can carry the book through the disappointing mess of South of Heaven. That second part may not be weak on its own, but it suffers greatly in comparison to the first and that diminishes the book as a whole. The Ritual is a good book, but it could have been better and had it ended at the end of the first part it would have been great. I’d recommend the book, but it would be a mighty struggle to restrain myself from suggesting that one stop reading after chapter forty-five.

And on the second day things did not get better. The rain fell hard and cold, the white sun never broke through the low grey cloud, and they were lost. But it was the dead thing they found hanging from a tree that changed the trip beyond recognition. All four of them saw it at the same time.

{The Ritual, Adam Nevill}

The first chapter of the book robs the prologue, especially this opening paragraph, of some of its strength, but those first lines are more than capable of drawing the reader in and giving the impression that the author doesn’t fuck around. Though the first chapter flashes back to four hours previous to explore the path that brought our characters to the quoted point, Nevill deftly avoids the type of meandering introductory bullshit that bogs down and stalls a story. The characters are revealed in bits and pieces as the story progresses. And relentlessly does it progress–pushing reader and character alike ever forward.

The chapters are short and I am only twelve deep, but damn. It is a difficult book to put down.

The more time that passes, the more uncomfortable I grow with all these terms. New Weird, Weird, Bizarro, Dark Fantasy… to me, they are simply Horror. I don’t mean HORROR, the industry label, but “horror”, the age old genre. As I mentioned previously, I see the genre as a wide field, one that stretches forever outward. Travel far enough in one direction and it might become science fiction, or in other direction a thriller. Take a turn, and you may end up in a fable, or a romantic adventure. Anywhere the unreal, the unusual, the unexplained can happen, horror is there. Genres like horror, like fantasy, are all-encompassing. Each is a sub-genre of the other, each can define every written word in relation to itself. And, yet, each are trapped by their marketing buzzword, shrunk and stuffed into tiny boxes and sold over the counter as pale imitations of what they really are.

{Weird Fiction Review, August 2012 - Interview: Simon Strantzas and the Weird}

Given my habit of spending time on blogs and forums instead of doing something, anything productive, I often find myself in the company of people who expend a great deal of effort to shrink SFF’s boundaries until it finally fits into their comfort zones. Encountering views that step outside and away from the exclusionary norm is a relief. Check out the rest of the interview and then do yourself a favor and get your hands on some of Strantzas’ fiction.

I just finished reading Livia Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors and am letting it digest a bit before I attempt to review it. In the mean time, you can read “Her Deepness”, the last and perhaps best story of the collection, over at Subterranean Press.

If you resisted the urge to click away to more interesting things, you might notice that there is a lot of men up there. I’m on the look out for women in horror, but I haven’t been able turn up much. If you have suggestions, I want to hear them.

My interest swung back around to horror this past week, prompting me to hit up the e-book stores to see what I could turn up. There are problems with this method (see my review of Sara Gran’s Come Closer), but it sent me stumbling into Cold to the Touch by Simon Strantzas. As inexperienced as I am with the genre (major childhood fan before inexplicably abandoning it for over a decade), I had never heard of the story or its author.

Late to the party, as always.

Cold to the Touch has all the issues that I would usually complain about: the prose is plain, the story is fairly simple, and the characters have about as much depth as a mud puddle. I might have complained had I not lost myself in the story with welcome ease. It is Strantzas’ considerable skill and talent for atmosphere that provides that considerable lure. The world that both the reader and the main character, Andrew, suddenly find themselves inhabiting is bleak, beautiful, and terrifying before we even delve into the horrific aspects of it.

The story is simple, but interesting nonetheless. Andrew is tasked with examining a strange rock formation in an area experience weather anomalies with the aid of a cantankerous local. There are weird sounds to be heard in the middle of the night–or day, since the sun doesn’t go down in this arctic wonderland–bad weather aplenty, and a bit of insanity to ensure things go from bad to worse. Well developed atmosphere, which  have a hard time not going on and on about, keeps things on solid footing on approach toward an ending that goes big and doesn’t disappoint.

Definitely a recommended story. I already have Simon Strantzas’ latest collection, Nightingale Songs, loaded and ready to read, so this won’t be the last you hear of him.

]]> http://epbth.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/march-short-fiction-cold-to-the-touch-simon-strantzas/feed/ 0 James http://epbth.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/short-review-come-closer-sara-gran/ http://epbth.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/short-review-come-closer-sara-gran/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2014 03:27:24 +0000 http://epbth.wordpress.com/?p=902 ]]>

A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that’s replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she’s doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.

The new voice in Amanda’s head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child. Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right, or see it destroyed.

Come Closer is an intensely mediocre novel that seems to skirt by with the least amount of effort. It sports a story that might have been fresh when it was published a decade or so ago, might have even had an impact, but the years since saw the release of a glut of films covering the same ground so thoroughly that there is little left but a mass of tracks blending into one another. The impact is diminished, the freshness given over to rot. The mediocrity thrives. The story is short, simple, and lacks much substance–it is a quick race with no twists, no turns, and a gentle downward slope toward the finish line. You don’t even have to worry about getting tangled up in the prose along the way because it is a transparent meh.

The characterization is perhaps the best part of the book and since it revolves around the transformation of Amanda, our narrator, it damn well should be. As a narrator, Amanda isn’t to be trusted. She often attempts to paint herself as a good employee, a good wife, and a good person, but she contradicts that immediately by calling her boss a “cocksucking faggot” who “eats shit and likes it” and further by giving in to every dark impulse the demon sends her way. There are times when she is distraught about what is happening to her, but her attempts to cleanse herself of the demon are half-hearted and quickly abandoned. As the book goes on the situation looks less and less like a transformation and more like an acceptance. Unfortunately, the strength of the characterization does not extend beyond Amanda. Ed, Amanda’s husband and the only other character that matters, exists solely to nag, argue, and be submissive.

There is a scene at some point, perhaps toward the middle of the novel, where the tapping that Amanda has been hearing nightly grows and begins to transform into a pitter-patter of feet and claws against floor that comes closer and closer and closer to where she is sitting. This scene stands out to me because there is so much potential here, but it ultimately falls flat because there is no trace of atmosphere to be found, the prose offers nothing, and well, it is cheap. The majority of the scene is dull, a replay of Amanda chasing the tapping around the apartment. It is only after she gives up and the tapping escalates to a pitter-patter that the scene blossoms. The escalation brings tension and that tension builds and builds and builds until we get what amounts to a loud noise for a jump scare. And that scene is the best this book has to offer for horror.

I did not enjoy Come Closer and have little doubt that the only reason I finished it was because it was so short. I will point out that the book was well received when it was released and apparently has enough good will backing it to ensure that it landed in my reading pile. My opinion is surely in the minority. You might have better luck.

Read More Books by Women

• I have set this goal for several years now, but did not make any significant effort to achieve it until last year. It sometimes takes being frustrated by your own bullshit to get the ball rolling. While I don’t plan on taking such drastic measures to ensure that I achieve the goal this year, at least fifty percent of the total books I read each year going forward will be written by women.

Read More Short Fiction

• If we ignore the handful of collections (and I do, for some reason), I only read three pieces of short fiction last year. That is not good enough. Going forward, I will be reading at least four pieces of short fiction each month. Two of those must have been published in the current year.

Read Older Fiction

• I was introduced to SFF in my late teens by authors whose work only stretched back to the late eighties. Since then, I haven’t made much of an effort to read older works. In fact, I can probably count the number on one hand. I will admit that I would not be bothered by this at all if I was just a reader. However, as a blogger and half-assed, occasional reviewer… it does seem like I should have at some experience with what came before. I do not have a specific plan to achieve this goal, but it will play a part in another.

Read More Translated Fiction

• Another goal that I have been setting for years. Another goal that I failed last year. While I have no specific plan to achieve this goal, it will pay a part in another.

Not Quite A Goal – Explore Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

• Why? Because I’m interested. I will be making a concentrated effort to read post-apocalyptic fiction over the next year, which will allow me to work on several of the above goals and indulge my habit of seeking out books that exist between genres. I will be working on a list of books in the coming days and recommendations are, of course, welcome.

Not Quite A Goal – Give In To The Hype

• The problem with not enjoying what most bloggers are covering is that you start to feel a tad lonely after a while. It isn’t much fun sitting outside the circle watching everyone else having fun, but I suppose I’ve exiled myself there. I used to be a big fan of epic and traditional fantasy. It introduced me to the genre and I loved it for so long, but changing tastes don’t really give a damn about that. These days, I rarely read the stuff and have mastered resisting the occasional urge to do so. Which is all fine and good if you don’t mind feeling irrelevant most of the time. This year, I will make an effort to read and discuss some of the books making waves in the community.

Not Quite A Goal – Larry’s List

• Larry posted a list of books he wished other reviewers would review a few years ago and I made a half-assed attempt at it (and failed, of course) before forgetting all about it. I stumbled over the list again earlier this evening and figured it was about time to give it another go. This will also help with a few of my other goals.

I may need to read more books, but let’s not make that a goal or I will end up not reading anything this  year.

{Part One, Part Two}

When We Were Heroes by Daniel Abraham (Tor.com)

Daniel Abraham’s “When We Were Heroes” is an affecting examination of celebrity, privacy, and the different ways people deal with notoriety and fame—problems not made easier when what you’re famous for are superpowers that even you don’t fully understand.

This is the perfect opportunity for another waffling, terrible review because I like Daniel Abraham but prefer him paired with Ty Franck and I am familiar with Wild Cards but read the first volume ages ago and have no idea whether it was any good. In general, I have no real interest in folks with superpowers outside of film and the occasional television series. I don’t do comics and I haven’t been impressed by the books covering this ground. Can you see where this is going?

I do admire that the story is fairly mundane and could be stripped of any reference to superpowers and still work, but that isn’t enough to make me like the story. The problem is that I just don’t care. Wild Cards is as old as I am and spans over twenty volumes, of which I have read only the slightest fraction. I can appreciate that the story doesn’t lean on action or make a spectacle of its characters’ superpowers, but I am not invested in the series or the setting and that bleeds into everything else until all that’s left is a humdrum story and my apathy toward it.

When We Were Heroes is not for me, but I expect that fans of the series or fans of the series will take to it.

Eligible For: Best Novelette

Misbegotten by Raphael Ordoñez (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

I’ll be honest with you, folks, I have no idea what was going on in this story. There is a cross-dressing lead character and action and adventure and a vaguely weird setting. I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, Misbegotten is so enshrouded in a thick fog of whatthefuckery that my enjoyment was swamped by questions.

Read it and see if you can make something out of it. I hope you have better luck than me.

Eligible For: Best Short Story

Jinki and the Paradox by Sathya Stone (Strange Horizons)

Jinki and the Paradox reads like a fraction of a longer work. It pumps an overdose of vital exposition into the reader to familiarize them with the setting and offers a brief glimpse at one small, but important moment in history and then, instead of moving on to the main story, just fizzles. The story is interesting and it is written well enough that it had my attention even though I am not all that fond of the genre (that being the harder side of science fiction) and even less fond of exposition. I was willing to stick around because there was a lot of potential, but there was nowhere to go. The story ended, toppled over in a heap because there is only so long such a thin story can struggle against the weight of that much exposition before finally succumbing to the inevitable.

If it was a prologue, I’d be hooked. Instead, I am underwhelmed.

Eligible For: Best Short Story

Town’s End by Yukimi Ogawa (Strange Horizons)

In Town’s End, Yukimi Ogawa digs into Japanese folklore to tell a story about a small-town marriage agency with some eccentric clients. I need to get back to my goal of reading more Japanese fiction because I need to know whether being stoic in the face of weird shit is just coincidental to my limited experience or if this is a common theme. Throughout the story our narrator, who is four months into the job and packing not a bit of experience, meets with and helps an odd bunch of characters with peculiar and specific needs. If she pauses to consider how strange this all is, she doesn’t do it for long.

It makes for a story that is charming, weird, and, for a few moments, a little sinister. Town’s End is a simple story, but it is a hell of a lot of fun and I greatly enjoyed it.

Eligible For: Best Short Story

Yeah, this is late, but you should never expect me to keep on schedule.

{Part One}

Last Train to Jubilee Bay by Kali Wallace (Tor.com)

Sickness and quarantine brought the city to ruin. The traders came later, crawling up out of the sea to peddle their serum to the survivors. A memory in exchange for a few hours of bliss, a respite from the bleak world they’ve been left to inhabit. The serum is addicting, abuse is widespread, and memories are a finite currency. It is a rough life and a rough trade and it’s been more than five days since the traders last showed up. Lucy, a go-between for the exchange, sets out to discover why.

The characters weren’t particularly interesting or developed, the story was the same sort of straightforward that had me yawning at Angel Season, and the prose was just… there. Yet, despite being underwhelmed, I rather liked The Last Train to Jubilee Bay because the atmosphere paints a vivid picture of a ruined, decaying city being picked apart by its scavenging survivors in the slightest hope that they will linger just a while longer. Small details flesh out the setting, breathes life into it, and prevents the picture from being just another dull gray smudge. And this continues, somewhat, as Lucy leaves the city in search of the traders. The bleak dead zone she traverses on her way toward the sea has little to offer, but there is a sense of exploration and mystery that almost makes it exciting to read. People don’t come back from where Lucy is going, but she willingly, perhaps defiantly chooses that path to take.

And that feeling, well that makes it worth reading even if I am underwhelmed by most everything else.

Eligible For: Best Short Story

Selkie Stories Are for Losers by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons)

Selkie Stories Are for Losers is a story that works in circles, returning time and time again to the moment that the narrator’s life so hinges on: the Selkie, a long-hidden item dug out from dust in an attic, a woman leaving. The narrator worries at the memory of her mother’s departure, makes it her own Selkie story (whether or not it is an actual Selkie story doesn’t matter and shouldn’t, the genre elements may as well be decoration here), though one she’s intent on keeping to herself. No matter how her life progresses or her plans, the past follows and lingers at the back of her mind and even bleeds into future possibilities: what if her friend, Mona, leaves… what if she is the one who runs away?

When I read this a few days ago, I thought it was good, but didn’t have any strong feelings toward it. Skimming it now, for this, I’m kind of loving it. That last paragraph might just knock you on your ass or, at the very least, send chills up your spine.

Eligible For: Best Short Story