Dark & Twisty

Christopher Moore is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.  I cannot get enough of his absurdist humor.  The latest book I've read of his is Bloodsucking Fiends.  It is the prequel to a book I've previously reviewed on this blog called You Suck! 

The story deals with a recently turned vampire and her lover who are trying to stop the evil vampire who turned her into the living dead.  The story has murder, sex, intrique, and a lot of stoner humor.  There is a mentally ill man, the Emperor, who discovers the vampire and sets out to vanquish him.  The cops get involved and people really start to believe in vampires.

The story mixes true horror with a good dose of humor.  It takes Jody (the new vamp) and Flood (her lover) and shows the thrust into the unbelievable situation.  They try to figure out how much of vampire lore is true and how much is fiction. Turning into mist truth, into a bat fiction.  It is easy to see how a typical woman and man would deal with such an outrageous situation.

I laughed out loud many times, as the characters do the most outrageous things.  This story is the perfect blind of satire, tragedy, horror, and humor.  If you read it, you'll want more Moore without a doubt.

Posted by Jared at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I cannot read ever book that I come across.  I just don't have the time. I do, however, have a lot of time in my car.  This gives me the chance to listen to those books I can't get to on CD.  I usually try and deal with classics or whatever the bookstore has cheap.  Thus, I got my hands on Candide by Voltaire.

I read Gulliver's Travels a few years ago.  It is the oldest novel I have read, and some of the oldest work I read except for Shakespeare and the Bible.  Candide reminded me alot of this tale.  It was pure satire.  The whole book deals with Candide, a naive German, wandering around the world and ending up in a variety of misfortunes and fortunes.  He meets lots of people and learns many life lessons just to make the same mistakes again. 

The story becomes very typical after the first few chapters.  You realize that Candide is going to befall tragedy and then success.  He then chalks everything up to the better good like what his teacher Dr. Pangloss says to do. 

In the end, the moral is to just not think too much.  What a brillant idea.  I think I thought too much of Voltaire before this book.  I suggest Gulliver's Travels.  It was more enjoyable and a whole lot sexier, plus the ridiculous names for the characters makes more since because Gulliver travels to fictional locations, whereas Candide stays in real places, except for El Dorado, which is a paradise he leaves because of his naivite.

Gulliver over Candide 21-0

Posted by Jared at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently finished three books within two days.  This is a record for me.  Dark Mountain by Richard Laymon was one of these books. 

This is the first book I've read by Laymon, and it was a potboiler for me.  I couldn't put it down.  I'm not a person who reads a book in one day.  Even small volumes like Eli Weisel's Dawn and Day, I split in two days.  Laymon's work didn't get read in a day but in three, which is excellent for me.

I picked the book because I was amazed my local bookstore (which is closing soon) had Leisure Books.  The other reason was the story was about two families being attacked in the mountains, and I thought hillbillies and horror I need to read and compare.

I was surprised.  The evil characters in the story were devil worshipping witches more than hillbillies.  They did a job on some folks too.  The thing is the story involved many angles of horror not just the idea of satanism.  Satanism isn't ever directly mentioned.  The master is mentioned but it is hard to tell if it is God or the Devil.  I air on the side of the Devil because of the whole witchcraft thing.  God in the bible says we shouldn't suffer a witch to live, so I figure he's against it.

Like Ghost Story, that takes many horror tropes and bends them around, Laymon uses a variety of horror tropes here.  He doesn't bend them that much but gives a surprise in the end that I, a cynical horror reader, was completely taken by. The horror of this story involves the creepiness of the deep woods, Satanic murders, possible untreated mental illness with homocidal ideations, religiosity, and paranoia, rape, urban life and the fear of violence, fetishism, black magic, witches, rabid animals, and zombies. There was a lot at work in this book, and it worked pretty well.

The end was the best part.  It was so horror movie wonderful.  You think that the disemboweled witch is dead, and she turns into a zombie along with her dead son and two of their victims. Wonderul twist to take away. 

The problems with the story was that some of the things the characters do is stupid in that horror movie way.  After Karen is raped, they all go back to sleep except for two.  If a creepy man just attacked a fellow camper, I'm not going back to sleep. The rape victim is too nonchalant about it.  She tells her roommate about it almost as an after thought.  "Oh yeah, some creepy hillbilly like guy raped me while I was on vacation.  Ladeda." Then even with a curse in place on the main characters, so of the situations of peril seemed contrived.  Julie and Nick are on a date.  They end up with thier tires slashed and have to call for help from a local's home.  This local ends up being a homocidal maniac.  That was too convient even with magic at play.  Duex es mechina anyone?

Despite these glaring issues, I have to say that I was pressed to complete this book.  I had to know what was going to happen next.  Unlike several authors I've read since starting this blog, I'm going to check out more of Laymon as time permits.  It's a worthwhile gesture.

Posted by Jared at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Things you should know about this horror writer.

1. I've never seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre  or any of the Romero Dead movies beyond the original Night of the Living Dead.

1.5 I have a severe phobia of chainsaws and all power saws, which is why I've never seen the TCM.  It is also the reason I won't go to spook houses on Halloween.

2. Beyond, my fear of power saws.  I am afraid of heights, but not really anything else.

3. I don't believe in ghosts, aliens, vampires, werewolves, mummies, monsters, and most zoocrypts.

4. I wrote my first master thesis on perception of humor.  I consider myself an expert on how humor is used as a coping skills.

5. Marionette puppets and vantriliquist dolls bother me (I suppose that is uncanny).

6. I only started seriously reading horror literature about 5 years ago.  Until then, I almost exclusively read classics.

7. My first published story was about a therapist who doesn't believe that his client was bitten by a zombie.

8. I write horror as a cathatric release.  I work on a psych unit.  I can't kill them, but I would sure like to some time.

9. My grandmother is terrified that I'm going to snap one day.

10. My favorite movie is Casablanca, my favorite book is The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Elton John is my favorite musical artist (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is the best album), none of which are horror stories.

The strange thing is that I don't have a lot of association of horror outside the study of it and my personal writing.  No horror novel or movie has become my favorite.  I don't look like I would write horror (scifi but not horror maybe fantasy).  I hate fantasy and most sci fi.

So there we go.

Posted by Jared at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Colorado Kid may be the worst Stephen King book ever.  Why?  Because it is an entire book that tells a story, but doesn't tell the story. The mystery of this novel is told from through the second person. The story and mystery isn't even that interesting.

I think that this book does show that the publicshing world would print anything Stephen King puts his name on.  I've noticed that the quality of King's work has gone down over time, but this really seemed to be calling it in. 

This book is several years old now, and I picked it up at the Dollar General for $1.25.  I know why.  The publishing company had a great idea: get famous authors to write old pulp style mystery's.  If The Colorado Kid is any indication of the quality of those old pulp fictions, I know why they went out of style.

Next year from Simon and Schuster, The Grocery List, by Stephen King.

Posted by Jared at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, I finished reading Towing Jehovah.  The book is a satire, and a thought provoking one.  It deals with the concept of God dying.  A sullied oil tanker captain is signed up by the Vatican to tow the giant corpse of God from Sao Tome and Principe off the coast of Africa to his arctic tomb.

The story investigates what would happen to mankind if the concept that God is watching us went away.  In the story, it's called the problem of the corpse.  What happened was that people went crazy.  They became carnally focused, but only those who knew that God was dead. 

The story ends in a pleasant way.  God is buried, after an absurd attempt by a WWII reinactement group tried to sink him, and everyone of the story comes to realize that God chose to die so that mankind could move on.  He sacrificed himself for mankind again.   The people of the Earth ended up being good, just for the sake of being good, not because God was watching them.

All in all, the story was good.  I enjoyed it and would recommend it to others.  I even found that some of the atheistic ideas in it seemed to come out good in the end.

Posted by Jared at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)