Halloween Reviews: Tales From the Underground by G. Elmer Munson

I picked this book up a few years ago from a harvest/craft/art festival as I was just starting to get into reading other local, indie authors. Many of the tales are set in Connecticut, which is pretty neat since I can readily picture the locals described.

Munson’s tales are reminiscent of old EC comics like Tales from the Crypt, or of anthology horror shows from the 70s, 80s and 90s like Tales from the Darkside, Night Gallery, Monsters, Dark Room and, well, Tales from the Crypt.

While Munson’s regular horror tales are alright, his skill really shows in his “undead plague” stories- Lovely Lea, Screamer, The Last Tower, Gaming, The Doomed Man and From the Bottom of Mirror Lake. By this point, our pop culture has been so saturated with fetid, wormy zombie-juices that we hardly even see them anymore. Yet Munson’s zombie tales add enough of a tweak on the trope to make them interesting.

At the end of the book, the author provides an appendix that explains the genesis of each story, an addition that I greatly appreciate. I love reading about the creative process that goes into a tale.

On to the stories themselves.

Blank White

A tale of severe writer’s block with a grisly ending straight out of those horror comics I mentioned.

Jackson and the Nothing

A man is chased through New Haven alleys by an angry cloud of darkness. But does the monster have a good reason for its anger?

Thunder

A simple tale about a cat being an even bigger asshole than normal.

It’s A Trap

I see what you did there...

This story is flash fiction only a paragraph long, so to say anything would give away the whole thing.

Bad Cop

A sadistic cop terrorizes a young couple pulled over on the side of the road. I’ll be honest, this story nearly soured me on the book. There’s a gratuitous rape scene at the end that seems designed only to shock- which feels like a cheap, unnecessary trick to me. It’s especially uncomfortable in the wake of all the police brutality scandals that have come to light in recent years (though, to be fair, this story was written in 2012, before police abuse became more widely discussed in American media.)

 Luckily the subsequent stories brought my interest back.

Through the Window

A creepy, effective variant on the classic “the monster in the child’s closet is real” tale. I don’t think that’s really a spoiler since the very first line is “you told me there were no monsters”, which of course means that there clearly are.

Sarge

Young brothers Robbie and Zeke share a room with a forest of toys scattered on the floor between their beds. As the story opens, Robbie has begun hearing strange skittering sounds coming from the pile. You probably have an idea where the story is going- especially after seeing the little illustration at the start of the beginning- but it gets weird near the end in a good, creepy way.

Lovely Lea

Okay, technically this isn’t a “zombie apocalypse” tale. It IS a story about an apocalypse though. And a growing contagion.

Hanging with Jack

Another flash fiction story. Not much else to say here.

Bimini Underground

My favorite story. Kwami and Jada have swum through a tunnel in the coral reef that leads to a strange, air-filled cave. Why does it seem like the walls are moving? And why is the water starting to burn their skin as if it were acid?

Screamer

You don’t often get to see what the zombie transformation looks like from the perspective of the afflicted.

The Last Tower

Brandon and Rogers are the last two living people at an island prison overrun by the undead. They’re trapped in a guard tower trying to keep the hordes at bay. When their ammo finally runs out, they decide “fuck it”- they’re getting out any way they can.

In his accompanying notes, Munson says he sometimes uses this “fuck it” rule to advance his stories when they get stuck. What is this rule, exactly? To quote the author directly, it’s “nothing more than to have a character say ‘fuck it’ and do the opposite of what they were doing.”

Works for me.

Gaming

If you’ve ever walked through a casino, you’ve probably seen those people sitting at the slot machines dropping in coin after coin, looking almost dead. What if sometimes there’s more truth in that image than you realize?

The Doomed Man

Another flash story. This one with a zombie theme to go along with the others in the latter half of the anthology.

From the Bottom of Mirror Lake

The waters of Mirror Lake have been turned into a biohazard sludge by the big factory on the shore.

As Connie and her boyfriend Greg sit on the old pier under the No Trespassing sign, they can see the factory brazenly dumping crates of toxic filth into the lake. Weird, large crates longer than they are wide...

You can get a copy of Tales From Underground on Amazon. 

Yet more scarecrows

Here's a new entry in my living scarecrows blog! To read more, go here.

The final illustration

In cities all over the world, you’ll often find at least one back alley that has walls completely plastered with blobs of hardened chewing gum. These “gum walls” seem to spring up spontaneously like a multihued fungus as more and more people add their expended mastications to the spreading horde. These curious works of collective urban artwork are sometimes highlighted with extra leavings, such as coins or seeds stuck into the sticky gum. It is from these little donations that tonight’s scarecrow, Chicle, arose.

Chicle’s (pronounced “Chee-klay”, not “Chick-el”) genesis came from two pumpkin seeds impressed into the sticky dots of a gum wall deep within the labyrinth of the city’s alleyways. It’s not clear exactly what made the seeds sprout and grow. Perhaps there was enough grime and dirt built up on the wall to provide rudimentary soil. Perhaps it was the Autumnal Powers themselves- those strange forces that breathe life into all scarecrows- nourishing and invigorating the seeds on strange dusts brought in by the chill fall winds.

The original doodle that I made for my son during a particularly slow day at work.

Whatever the cause may have been, the pumpkin seeds began to grow and sink their roots wherever they could find purchase in the cracked mortar of the brick wall or in the moist, grimy spaces beneath the gum dots. Eventually, they reached the stagnant, grease-slicked puddles and miniature dunes of blown dust at the base of the wall. The plants were small and wizened but clung tenaciously to life. Soon the city vermin- rats, roaches, fruit flies, pseudoscorpions and others- brought other nourishments to the gourds in the form of food scraps, decaying leaves, grease scrapped from discarded food boxes, and even their own droppings. Like many things about Chicle’s existence, the precise reason for this unexpected charity is not known, though it is thought to have been a primitive kind of worship. Perhaps the rats and roaches are more attuned to the presence of the Unseen world than humans realize.

 As the pumpkins grew, the vermin also took their own small rewards, nibbling away bits of flesh from the gourds for sustenance. When the pumpkin that would become Chicle’s head was ripe, the rats gnawed eye-holes into it and devoured the fibrous interior mush to create a hollow for the scarecrow’s spirit to reside.

When the time was right, the rats also brought together bits of trash to form the scarecrow’s body. Old, rusty pipes and scrap lumber became his arms while scraggly urban weeds became his fingers, and the pumpkins’ own dried vines twisted together to form legs. The Autumnal Powers even used the diluted essences within the gum of the wall to give Chicle a ruff of leaves and fruits from the Manilkara- the Central American tree from which the scarecrow’s namesake resin is drawn to create chewing gum.

Chicle now guards the gum wall, though from what exactly is, once again, not known. Patient observers have seen him cultivating more dwarf pumpkins from the seeds the rats extracted from his head. Is he raising an army to defend against some unknown foe? Chicle and his vermin companions do seem to display an odd fear and aversion to the crescent moon and will go into hiding behind the dumpsters and trash bags of the alleyway whenever the lunar orb is in that phase. Recently coins have begun appearing in the gum alley that have been bitten into sickle shapes by teeth much harder than an ordinary rodent's. Chicle displays a distinct fear of these tokens and will pace in agitation until the coin is removed by one of his companions.

If you're curious, you can read more about gum walls here.

Halloween Reviews: The Box Under the Bed by Eileen Albrizio

Here's a short entry for a short tome.

This is a book about being haunted. But these are not jumpscare phantoms or Creepypasta wraiths. Within this slim book, there are many ghosts of the more conventional sort- translucent shades of people passed from this world. But then again, maybe they are just conjurations of a brooding mind. For there is also a different strain of revenant here- formed from painful memories, regrets, mental illness- growing like phosphorescent gray fungi among the classic haunted-house wraiths. These other ghosts are the hollows formed by loved ones lost, and the dreads that lurk in the dark corner of every mind. This is horror in the vein of Poe.

The title is most appropriate, for the fears and memories are the kinds that are often shut up and locked away, pushed out of sight. Yet they continue to linger there quietly in the dark amid the cobwebs and dust piles, lying just below your sleeping head. Seeping up into your brain in the dead quiet at 3am.

The Box Under the Bed is primarily poetry, but there are a few prose tales sprinkled in the mix, including a section of flash horror stories that deliver quick little shocks of encounters with the undead. Like a lot of poetry, it merits reading a second time to fully absorb all the nuances and see the shapes etched out by the words like roots from a centuried oak in graveyard soil.

You can get a copy here.

Halloween Reviews- The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fiction by Jeffrey Thomas

Jefferey Thomas is pretty famous in the realm of Weird fiction. Among his most popular creations is Punktown, a city on a distant planet where hundreds of extraterrestrial races try to survive amid class struggles, social alienation and gruesome body horror. The stories in The Endless Fall are not part of the Punktown Universe, though they all share many stylistic themes with that grim, starry city.

 Thomas’  tales are a parade of phantasmogoria. There are whispers all along the edges, hints of what’s really going on. But the story leaves it to the reader to piece together the truth behind the skein. There are strong veins of Lovecraft throughout these works, but also the dream-like mysteries of Richard Lupoff or Clark Ashton Smith.

 Thomas’ protagonists are lost souls. Whether pushed to the edge of society, alienated form loved ones, or simply choosing to live alone and aloof, they are oarless boats slowly drifting into strange seas lit by the corpse-lights of alien dreams.

The stories in this collection are:

Jar of Mists

A quiet tale about a bereaved father trying to understand why his estranged daughter killed herself. Was it to escape this world? Or to find another?

Jar of Mists is set near the otherworldly Sesqua Valley of fellow horror author, W. H. Pugmire. the Valley is a place somewhere on the West Coast of North America, but not quite in the same time and space as the rest of our world.

The Dogs

A recurring theme of Thomas’ works is a character remotely viewing a nightmarish future Earth destroyed by unfathomable alien horrors. In this tale a man uses magical formulae to see the unsettling evolution of humanity’s canine companions in a world where their masters and mistresses have long ago died off.

Ghosts in Amber

My personal favorite story. A haunting, beautifully weird tale of cobwebs, ballooning spiderlings, abandoned factory and fossil tree resin (or maybe it’s something more). As I said, Thomas’ stories are often dream-like and give only a few hints as to what is actually happening. This story is an especially good example. There’s much more going on than the reader sees, but the full nature of that larger reality is left to the mind’s invention.

The Prosthesis

Thomas (that’s the name of the protagonist, not the book’s author) works in a factory that manufactures medical prosthetics- including prosthetic fetuses for women who have suffered a loss. Thomas himself lost someone himself when he was just an infant- his twin brother Mason. And lately Thomas has been smuggling supplies home from work.

The Dark Cell

In the 1890s a young woman named Rose is sent to prison in Yuma, Arizona for killing her abusive husband. While there, she gets into a fight with an angry, bitter girl. As punishment for causing trouble, both of them are sent to a small, cramped cell in a lightless cave beneath the prison. The pit is meant to be a place to cool off, but the darkness brings out ancient, savage things that have been held down by the light of day.

Snake Wine

A former boxer from Australia runs a bar and brothel in Vietnam. One day a young woman brings him a bottle of snake wine-a classic Vietnamese liquor for virility. But the creature pickled inside the bottle is like no serpent he’s ever seen. It’s pale and pink with little vestigial limbs like an amphisbaena lizard or, so he jokes, a baby dragon.

The Spectator

They just appeared one day. Mannequins colored black as empty space. They appeared in seemingly random places in people’s homes all across the world. Immobile, unresponsive. Watching. What are they here for? And why has one suddenly appeared in the nursery of the narrator’s long-dead daughter?

Bad Reception

Another tale of a lonely man getting a glimpse of the cosmic horrors of the far future. A Korean war vet starts seeing strange visions on his TV, possibly a result of the weird frequencies he’s been picking up from the plate in his head.

Sunset in Megalopolis

A bit of an odd duck in this anthology. A superhero from the Golden Age of Comics has been trapped by his arch-nemesis in a stasis field for thousands of years. When he is at last released, he finds himself in a bizarre Paradise inhabited by creatures that maybe, possibly, were once human long ago- though they have been modified to the point of being unrecognizable as such.  Falling back into old habits, the time-displaced protagonist tries to be a hero to these beings. But their minds are so alien to his that he may be doing more harm than good.

Portents of Past Futures

The nude body of a young woman is found in a vacant city lot next to a series of weird street-art murals. Detective Sloane has to figure out who she was and also why she’s soaking wet when there’s no water anywhere nearby. And what does that old woman who lives across the street know?

Those Above

It’s been a long time since Those Above erupted from another dimension and enveloped the world in a dull gray sky of interwoven intestine-like tentacles. Hind is a worker in a factory that processes and renders bits of Those Above that fall to Earth. He makes blocks of gelatin that mortals stick their heads into at night to keep the monsters out of their dreams. He does a good job, but something about the company just doesn’t feel right.

The Individual In Question

The Individual in Question has endured...something. Some sort of massive supernatural event. He cannot remember what it was exactly. Only vague impressions. But the event has left him physically altered in a most unsettling way.

The Red Machine

Leslie is a frustrated artist working in a boring job where she gets no respect. To keep her sanity, she needs to create. At first it’s just sardonic, grisly cartoons that she hangs on the company bulletin board. But something dark is pushing around inside her. Compelling her to collect old junk- cardboard sheets, picture frames, old televisions, skulls. Compelling her to assemble them into a contraption that will give her frightening powers.

The Endless Fall

In the titular story an astronaut awakens in his space capsule to find he has crash-landed on a planet in the midst of deepest autumn. He can’t remember who he is or why he was even in space, let alone where he is now. Nor does he know the nature of those huge black pyramids coasting through the sky overhead.

You can get a copy of The Endless Fall here

Halloween Reviews- Walking After Midnight: Tales For Halloween by Evan Camby

For the Halloween season this year, I wanted to do a book review series. There's quite a range of works here. Some are short, spooky campfire tales, others are longer, slower gothic horror. Some are Lovecraftian. Some are old folktales. There's even a bit of creepy poetry.

For the most part I tried to stick to horror anthologies, but there one or two full novels did end up in the mix.

I'm going to try to post a new review every week until Halloween, and maybe keep going through November. Depends on how quickly I can read through them. Here's my first review of the season.

The stories in Walking After Midnight are short and simple in a good way. They feel like tales you might tell a friend to pass the time while you’re driving down a lonely lightless road at 1am. They also reminded of the classic creepy books from my childhood. Books like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark or, well, Scary Stories For Sleep-Overs.

The book is a quick read and while the stories won’t necessarily frighten you, they will certainly get you in that eerie autumn mood.

Hat Man

The first story is actually the weakest of the bunch on its own. It borrows too much imagery from Slenderman, Freddy Kreuger and Shadow People mythology without adding anything new. Even so, an anthology often works best as the sum of its parts and The Hat Man, when viewed as part of the book as a whole, adds that essential “boogeyman” element to the Halloween season.

Hayride

Who doesn’t love a fall hayride? It’s an integral part of any trip to an orchard or harvest festival. Just make sure that the ride is actually supposed to be part of the attractions.

A Good Samaritan

Everyone knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who has met a person in apparent need on a lonely road and felt that creeping anxiety that something wasn’t right...

Walking After Midnight

In the titular story, a man returns to the small rural town he left many years ago. While reminiscing with an old friend, he gets an idea to visit an old forgotten graveyard the two of them used to explore when they were kids. As they tromp through the cracked, eroded tombstones, they soon realize they are not alone in the dark. But it’s just the old sheriff giving them a hard time, isn’t it?

Into the Abyss

Ouija boards are just a goofy toy invented in the 1890s as a parlor game. Despite all the moral panic, a piece of cardboard with numbers on it and a little wooden planchette can’t actually summon spirits, can it? No points for guessing.

Trick & Treat

Shelley loves Halloween (don’t we all?) Unfortunately she and her husband live way, way out in the middle of nowhere. Despite all her spooky decorations, no trick-or-treaters ever come. Until tonight.

Walking After Midnight is an eerie, quick read. An appetizer to get you ready for more as the days grow short and the wind starts to smell of autumn leaves.

You can get a Kindle copy here

More scarecrows

Here's another entry from my scarecrow blog. Check out the whole thing here!

WINNOWINGS

The autumnal forces that give scarecrows life infuse every piece of their body. So much so that even sloughed-off scraps-- bits of burlap, rotten straw, shriveled gourds, and more- possess their own living essence. These remnants often form miniature bodies for themselves from whatever further fragments they can gather, creating tiny creatures called winnowings.

Like their larger cousins, each winnowing is unique. Unlike scarecrows, however, these smaller creatures usually have no desire or compulsion to guard a field and will often wander off to find their own purpose. Winnowings often gather together in small groups for companionship. There are even rumors of entire cities of these beings hidden in the remote places of the world.

Here is just one example of these groups.  From left to right, the winnowings are:

Routinier- His body is formed from an old wooden skeleton toy with dry roots for feet and neck, an old gourd for head, and a thin fabric strip from an old scarf for arms. Routinier has a fondness for sneaking up to hide under open window  to listen to the tunes played on old gramophones and these new radio receivers that are becoming so popular. He often sways his scarf-arms to the music, practicing for the day when he can make his own music, once he figures out just what produces those sounds he loves so much.  

Inglenook-  A couple of napkins stuffed with old straw, Inglenook was once a teru teru bozu (a small rural Japanese charm to bring good weather). He hung from the rafters for a few months before being blown under the porch in a fierce storm. Carried deeper under the house by wind and curious rodents, he eventually settled into a snug corner just under the big pot-bellied stove in the kitchen, a spot that remained warm even in the coldest winters. The house was abandoned and torn down decades ago, and now Inglenook wanders with his companions to find a new home. Preferably with some place warm and snug to sleep.

Farceuse- Formed from a small pumpkin that was forgotten in the patch after the larger gourds were harvested. She possesses a strong gift for acting and imitating voices thanks to months of listening to the workers at the farm. Farceuse often puts on short comical plays for the enjoyment of her companions, and any other fellow travelers they might be spending the night with.

Melorrhea- Another runt pumpkin with the added mobility of twig arms and legs and a few scraps of cloth that she sewed into a dress. She is a lover of music like Routinier. But where he wishes to conduct, Melorrhea is far more interested in composition. One might even say to an excessive degree. Several of her pieces, if played in full, last over six hours. She writes her compositions on old scraps of cloth, bits of wood, slips of paper, anything she can find. Melorrhea does not save her compositions, preferring to leave them wherever the group stops for the night as a little “gift” for the fans she is sure she will one day have.  This is not a problem as Melorrhea possesses an eidetic memory and can write down the entirety of her song at will.

Scarecrows I Have Known

So here's a new thing I'm doing. Scarecrow drawings!

Last year my son was finally old enough (four, to be exact) to really started enjoying Halloween almost as much as I do. As part of our spooky autumn festivities, I took him to a bunch of farms and orchards. Among all the corn mazes, pumpkin patches and hay rides, by far his favorite things were the scarecrows.

Since then he’s pretty much been on a non-stop scarecrow kick. Sure it fades from time to time as his obsession turns towards mummies, skeletons or pirates (naturally). But scarecrows are always there in the background.

A few months ago I started doodling scarecrows for him during slow periods at my job. As I drew, I made up little stories for each scarecrow, building up a pretty detailed lore.  Eventually I decided to develop a book. Two books actually. One will be a picture book for my son at his current age (also for my daughter who is herself a voracious book lover even at only one and a half years). The other will be a sort of “field guide” in the vein of Brian Froud’s Goblin and Fairy books, made for when my kids both get a little older.

I thought I’d share some of my scarecrow drawings with you guys, along with the background stories I created for them. I’ll be posting the original doodles, usually made on notebook paper or the backs of my daily schedules, along with more refined redraws.

Original sketch

The Redraw

HASPENALD

As a consequence of their habit of standing in one place in the field all day, many scarecrows develop an almost obsessive interest in studying a particular thing in their local environment. Some will learn the calls of every bird, insect and animal that wanders through near.  Some will catalog the size, shape and color of every single  rock in their field down to the smallest pebble. Some will identify and name every single spider they can find. And so on.

Haspenald’s obsession is the night sky. As the sun goes down, one can always find him in the middle of his cornfield gazing up at the stars. He has memorized the placement and  movement of hundreds of them. He knows the seasons of meteor showers and can even recognize the difference between planets and stars. Though he has never read a book on astronomy- and indeed, cannot read at all- he has learned a great deal about the nature of stars and planets from the Traveler Crows that visit his field. More on them later.

I'll be posting more entries on a new blog here.