Review: Legacy by Wilde Blue Sky

First, a little warning. I didn’t want this review to turn into a political rant, and I have refrained from soap-boxing or calling names. But Legacy is a socially- and politically-charged novella with many chilling parallels to recent developments in the world (I’m writing this in January 2017). At several points the neo-Nazi protagonist, Peter, even says “I will make Germany great again!”; This novel was written in 2012, by the way, so the similarity to a certain right-wing rallying cry is coincidental but frightening. Legacy is primarily an alternate history story, but I believe it would be disingenuous to pretend that it is not also a social commentary in the vein of 1984 or The Grapes of Wrath.

The events move swiftly, painting a grand panorama of the life of Peter, the secret son of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, as he rides a wave of neo-Nazi nationalism towards possible control of a post World War II Germany. The four co-conspirators who set the novel in motion are bitter and vindictive. Germany’s defeat by the Allies is a wound that has never closed up for any of them. They believe that that genetic “right” of the pure-blooded Aryan people to lead Germany has been stolen from them. Thus they turn to Peter, manipulating his fears of alienation and worthlessness to push him into becoming the charismatic figurehead for their movement. 

There is little subtlety to the dialogue. But then, there is little subtlety to the anger and fear that drives the sort of xenophobic nationalism this story warns of. The story reminds me, in style if not content, of the works of Fyodr Dostoyevsky such as White Nights or Notes From Underground. Like those works, the characters of Legacy broadcast their thoughts front and center through dialogue and private musings

I was struck by the few hints at Peter’s particular disgust for homosexuality. In general, the characters are painted in fairly broad strokes. They are mouthpieces for the plot. Thus this little glimpse into Peter’s psyche stood out to me, even though it was a relatively minor component to the overall story. There is a particularly poignant scene where a young grieving man reaches out to Peter for support, only to be rebuffed by his apparent discomfort with expressing compassion. I wonder if this is meant as a jab at the fragile hypermasculinity and homophobia that often accompanies hard-line nationalist movements, both right and left. This is particularly tragic in Peter’s case because one can see his own need for companionship- as well as a desperate need to feel like his life is worth something- glaring through the cracks of his hard shell. 

In the end, Legacy is a fast-paced and straightforward alternate history tale. But its clear warnings against nationalism and fear-mongering are potent and disturbing. You can get from Amazon.

Horror Book Review: The Cat-Dogs, edited by A. Finnis

Way back around Halloween 2016 I’d planned on doing a whole month of reviews on my favorite scary story collections that I’d read as a kid. Life got busy and I only got to one, so I figured I’d just continue on into November (autumn’s a pretty spooky season in general, so it’d still somewhat fit, right?) Welp, life got in the way some more and I only got to one other anthology. At this point I could just wait until next Halloween and try again... but heck, I like reading scary story anthologies. So I’ll just plow ahead with some more reviews and find something else for Halloween 2017 (because you know it’s going to be something big, considering how much I love the holiday).

The Cat-Dogs is one of the more unusual, dream-like anthologies I’ve read. The horrors in these stories aren’t clear-cut ghosts, werewolves, vampires or other conventional monsters. Each story in the anthology is written by a different author, and thus each has a slightly different tone. Based on the majority of the settings, it seems like this anthology originally came from the U.K.

The Cat-Dogs

by Susan Price

The titular story is about a girl, Liz, who finds an abandoned litter of odd baby animals and brings them home to her parent’s farm on an old English estate. The animals are something like felines and something like canines- hybrids, somehow. Biologically impossible, of course, but this is horror, so who’s paying attention? As the cat-dogs get older, they get more and more vicious and eventually murderous. The story climaxes with a slow, suspenseful chase through the dark woods as Liz and her father try to hunt down the creatures before they can cause any more death. And of course they’re being stalked themselves. A very simple- indeed, one of THE most basic horror plots- but done very effectively.

The Piano

by Diane Hoh

This one feels like a dark fairy tale. A teenage girl, Laura, is forced by her cruel stepmother to practice the piano for hours so that she can win a contest that will allow said evil stepmom to live in luxury. As Laura sits at the bench complaining to herself, the piano actually responds. It communicates through snippets of songs: “Black-hearted Woman”, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, “Let It Be” and so on. Laura is surprisingly unfazed by this, which adds even more the fairytale logic of the story, and quickly develops a close bond with the supernatural instrument.  Then people that Laura hates start dying in bizarre accidents, which the story implies is being orchestrated (ha!) by the piano... somehow. 

 I’m pretty impressed that the author was able to create entire dialogues between Laura and the piano with the instrument only using the titles of songs. I like the fact that there is no explanation for what the thing actually is. Maybe it’s haunted? Maybe it’s alive? Maybe it’s like the car from Stephen King’s “From aBuick 8”- it only looks like a piano, but is actually something completely alien.

The Devil’s Footprints

by Malcolm Rose

A story set in the future world of 2004 (the book came out in 1994) where a rich kid named Darren throws a huge Halloween party at his technologically-advanced house while his parents are out of town. Seeing as how this is a horror anthology, you know someone is going to show up to kill all those dumb, unsupervised teenagers. And seeing as how the story is called “the Devil’s Footprints” you can probably guess who.

The interesting thing about the story is that it’s inspired by a real supernatural phenomenon that occurred in England around East and South Devon. Residents of the area awoke one cold February in 1855 to find eerie horseshoe-shaped prints running everywhere through the new fallen snow. In many places the prints seemed to defy normal physics. They would go right up to high stone walls, over the top, then continue on the other side. Other prints would go up to the walls of two-story houses, and immediately continue on the roof.

The future setting is a weird addition, though it seems that it was done so that the house could have an intelligent A.I. program that can’t record the Devil on any of its cameras to heighten the supernatural nature of the part-crasher.

Softies

by Stan Nicholls

One of the most bizarre stories in the anthology. The main premise is that everyone on Earth has a human-sized, sentient stuffed animal as a permanent Companion that follows them everywhere and always keeps them company. Problem is, despite being clearly intelligent beings with their own individual personalities and wants, Companions are treated as little more than slaves and property. And they’re not very happy about that...

So yeah, it’s a horror version of “Ted”

The premise sounds goofy, but there is something weirdly sinister and creepy about the tale. Maybe it’s the imagery of giant, sentient stuffed toys having dark thoughts of revenge. Like The Piano, it creates a grim, very fairy tale feeling.

The House That Jack Built

by Garry Kilworth

This one was my favorite of the bunch. The story that stayed with me all these years and got me to pick up a used copy of the book for a second look.

The story features another living inanimate object with malevolent intentions. This time it’s a living house that captures a lone drifter, Caleb,  and forces him to spend several years constantly repairing and maintaining its wooden facade by cutting and preparing boards from a nearby copse of trees.  Every time Caleb attempts to escape, he is dragged back by tough white roots- part of the house itself- that burst out of the ground. Like The Piano, the exact nature of the sentient dwelling is never explained, though it is clearly more than just a haunted house.

You actually get a good sense of the loneliness and desperation Caleb feels as he’s forced to work all day, every day, for over two years just to keep the house in good condition. The house won’t allow any furniture to touch its floors, so he has no bed or chairs. No comforts or distractions, which is in itself pretty nightmarish.

The Station With No Name

by Colin Greenland

Considering how surreal the majority of the stories in this anthology have been, the last tale is surprisingly conventional horror. A graffiti artist named Mark finds an old, forgotten train station and breaks in to cover it with his tags. While exploring, he runs into odd, possibly delusional people wandering around the station in rotting, ancient clothes. It’s briefly implied that they’ve been inhabiting the place since the onset of World War II, though it’s ambiguous as to whether they’re ghosts or people who have somehow survived in the darkness for decades, hiding from the war they still believe is going on around them.

As I’ve said before, The Cat-Dogs is a weird, dream-like anthology. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re lying half-awake on the couch at 2am and some obscure horror movie from the 80s comes on the TV and you half-watch it, drifting in and out of consciousness, so that your dreams start to meld with the snippets of plot. Yeah, just like that

Although The Cat-Dogs is out of print, you can still find plenty of copies on Amazon.

Book Review: Silas of Erithia

The world of Elyonia (at least the portion the reader sees) is divided into two races.  Dartarians who can wield the powers of the four elements. And Alineans who, well, cannot. Though these people have periods of co-existence, xenophobia and fear leads to frequent warfare between them, with both sides rising to power at various times in history. When Silas of Erithia opens, the Dartarian King Eldon has led his people to completely dominate the Alineans, turning them into second-class citizens who can be executed for the merest slight. Silas himself is a young Alinean man just trying to survive along with his family when a minor theft he committed years ago leads to him being drawn into the bigger battle that is quickly tearing his land to pieces.

The chapters are told from multiple perspectives from both Alinean and Dartarian characters. Even the villain, King Eldon, gets a few chapters, and while I can’t say they make him any more sympathetic- he still comes off as an arrogant and cruel genocidal tyrant- it is actually interesting to see that his convictions about his people’s superiority seem to have squeezed out any drop of kindness in him.

The titular Silas is a rather passive protagonist, particularly when contrasted with the merchant Jervis, or Sabina, a “celebrity” of sorts among the people of Elyonia. Things generally happen to Silas rather than him taking any direct action to his fate beyond a self-sacrifice he makes late in the book. However, revelations near the end of the novel indicate that there is much more to Silas than we have realized, and he will become a more active force in the shaping of his world in future books.

The story of Jervis the merchant is gripping, though. He immediately comes off as a pretty decent guy (primarily because his introduction shows him buying slaves from an underground market to rescue them from their fate). You very much want to see him escape the thugs pursuing him through the underground ruins of the old Elyonian capital.

Sabina the young Dartarian champion is also interesting. Like Jervis she has a kind heart, and is horrified when she sees the atrocities being committed against the Alineans. She does come off as a bit naive at times, though this may be due to her sheltered upbringing among the higher classes of Dartarians. After all, how many well-off people in our own modern culture would be shocked and mortified at the severity with which their seemingly benevolent culture mistreats those who are branded Other.

Like many epic fantasies, Silas of Erithia opens with a detailed description of the world and how it differs from our own. While these sorts of deep background exposition- what are sometimes pejoratively call “info dumps”- may be off-putting to some readers, I rather enjoyed it. It helped me get a deeper sense of the world that Silas and his friends inhabit.

The narration has a distinct “high fantasy” flavor to it reminiscent of E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros or the stylized tone used by Fritz Leiber for his tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or even Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Some might find that this tone makes it tougher to engage with the characters, particularly in action scenes. Nevertheless, once you get used to the style it does add to the feeling that you are reading about another world.

The one major critique I have is that book drops a number of exotic animal names without any description or clue as to what these creatures look like. What is a darilla? Or a krag? Or a menalpo, a tarpuk, a vlarn, a brym and so on? t may be a minor complaint, but I cannot help feeling like I am missing part of the world-building by not being able to picture these strange beasts. Assuming, of course, that these aren’t just the Elyonian names for familiar Earth beasts.

Overall, though, Silas of Erithia is an engaging fantasy read, particularly if you’re a fan of classic adventure fantasy like the Sword of Shannara or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles.

You can get Silas of Erithia here.

Cryptid Culture article

Cryptid Culture is a magazine about, well, cryptids. Unknown animals and beings of all sorts. Their stated goal is to celebrate the world of mysterious and folkloric creatures without bias towards skeptics or believers (though the majority of the articles so far are very much on the believer side).

The latest issue came out last month and features an article by me about the enigmatic deep sea organism Paleodictyon. This critter builds hexagonal structures in the sea floor constructed out of numerous interconnected burrows. While these burrows are well-documented, the animal that actually made them is still unknown. Some researchers think it might be a giant amoeba called a xenophyophore. Others think the builder is some sort of burrowing sponge.

You can get an issue an read the full article here.

Post-Halloween Book Review: Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters

So the review-a-week during October thing didn't really work out so well. Life got in the way a lot, and last month was just a huge Sucktober. But I still enjoy reading and reviewing these kid's horror anthologies, so I'm going to post a few more.

Anyway...

BRUCE COVILLE’S BOOK OF MONSTERS

 Bruce Coville was a huge influence on me growing up.  Even today I can still vividly remember his strange worlds and unusual characters. And I’m pleased to find that rereading his stories as an adult does not diminish my love for them, as sometimes happens when I read other writers without the nostalgia glasses on.

I first got into Coville through My Teacher is An Alien, and its three sequels. The series started off as a simple plot about a girl finding out that, as you might possibly have guessed, her jerkass teacher is actually an extraterrestrial leading an invasion of Earth. The sequels revealed a deeper complexity as the scope of the plot expanded into a space opera about the potential danger of humanity to the wider universe, and what the other alien races were going do about it. A fairly common plotline in adult sci-fi, but this was my first introduction to it.

Around the same time as My Teacher is an Alien, Coville also came out with a series of anthologies themed around various fantasy/horror tropes. The collection started with the Book of Monsters, which featured corporeal, Earth-bound boogeymen. The next two in the series were the Book of Aliens and Book of Ghosts. You can probably guess what their subjects were. The fourth volume was a Book of Magic which featured fantasy-oriented stories.  Book of Nightmares, the fifth in the series, showcased more surreal and, well, nightmarish horrors that didn’t really fit into any of the other books. A sixth collection, the Book of Spine Tinglers, is a bit harder to pin down thematically. The stories are similar to the Creepypasta feel of the Book of Nightmares, but Coville’s Introduction indicates the book is specifically about fear- about that sense of creeping fright that overcomes you as you read a story. He even admits that this sensation is entirely objective; a story can fill one person with crawling dread and have absolutely no effect on another person.

This review focuses on the first work in the series Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters. I may eventually review the other books too, perhaps as a Halloween theme next year.

Starting off, I have to say I’m impressed that the cover illustrator, Steve Fastener, was able to replicate the cover design, text and all, on the book the kid with the flashlight is reading. I’m guessing Fastener must have left the cover of the little book in the illustration blank and painted it in after he saw a proof of the finished design with the titles laid out. And yes, that tiny cover is painted in, not just a pasted-in photograph.

I also love John Pierard’s interior illustrations done entirely in pencil. It’s not a style you see very often, and gives each drawing a very lively feel.

On to the stories themselves.

My Little Brother is a Monster by Bruce Coville

As I said before, I love Coville’s world-building. Just the very name of the monster world: the Land of Always October. Immediately I get visions of a misty, swampy world lit by hovering will ’o wisps and smelling of autumn leaves.

The story itself is a classic tale of a kid from the mundane world entering the Otherworld that parallels our own, a world created from our dreams and nightmares, populated by monsters who are the inverse of beings in our world. The set-up feels like it could be the start of an entire YA novel, though as far as I know this was Coville’s only foray into the Land of Always October.

Momster in the Closet by Jane Yolen

A short, simple story about a kid afraid of the bogeyman in his closet. Has one of those out-of-nowhere Goosebumps-style twists (and if you’re reading this review, you hopefully remember the Goosebumps series), but the brevity of this story makes it work.

Merlin’s Knight School by Michael Markiewicz

The first in a series of short stories about young King Arthur and his adopted older brother Cai- probably known best by most modern readers from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, where he’s a jerk and a bully. This Cai’s a little nicer, at least.

I like that the monster in this tale was specifically summoned by Merlin (Merlyn in this tale) to serve a beneficial purpose.

Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald

A strange story with more going on than a young reader may realize. The story’s narrator isn’t so much unreliable as he is unfamiliar with what he is actually seeing.

This is the only story in the anthology that isn’t illustrated, since an actual depiction of the Grooglemen would immediately give away what they are, as well as the truth about what’s really going on in the story.

Friendly Persuasion by Bruce Coville

A short, goofy story about a sprite trying to explain to the horrible Ba-Grumpus all the reasons that it shouldn’t eat her.

Kokolimalayas, the Bone Man by Laura Simms

A retelling of a traditional story of the Madoc people of Oregon and Northern California. It's neat seeing a "classic monster" story from a non-European culture.

The Thing That Goes Burp in the Night by Sharon Webb

This is one of those stories where you could easily say that everything is taking place inside the main character’s head. But I like to think the kid really DID summon a chocolate-eating basement monster by reading random medical words out of the Merck Manual, Thirteenth Edition.

Personality Problem by Joe R. Landsdale

Poor Frankenstein’s monster can’t ever catch a break. Not even from his therapist.

Duffy’s Jacket by Bruce Coville

A story with a kind “campfire tale” vibe. Lots of slow build-up to a surprise ending, though this one is more goofy than “it’s right behind you!” jump-scare. 

The Bogeyman by Jack Prelutsky

I’ll admit I’m not really big on poetry. But I like the “folksong” feel of this one.

Bloody Mary by Patrick Bone

No, no no! Repeating “Bloody Mary” into the mirror makes her ghost jump out at you. It does not turn you into a hairy, clawed monster! Geez!

The Beast With A Thousand Teeth by Terry Jones

Written by THE Terry Jones of Monty Python fame (and writer for one of my favorite books, the Golbin Companion). According to the biography at the end, this story came from a collection of fairy tales Jones wrote for his young daughter and it definitely shows through the young baker protagonist who figures out a clever way to defeat the titular beast with way too many pointy- and cavity-prone- teeth.

Timor and the Furnace Troll by John Barnes

My favorite story in the bunch. I might even like it more than Coville’s own tales. Poor Timor is terrible at being an elf and constantly gets bullied because of it. When he gets a class assignment to do a report on trolls, he goes to meet the one who lives in the (continent-sized) school’s furnace room and finally finds someone who understands him. Someone who is admittedly an elf-eating 12-foot tall troll.

I like the setting of this story. The way elfland seems like a distorted mirror of contemporary (at least early 90s) society. A sort of “suburban fantasy” taking place among the fresh-mown lawns and flat-roofed, sprawling elementary schools of a middle-class fantasy world. It reminds me of a less dark version of Michael Swanwick’s “The Iron Dragon’s Daughter”.

Anthologies are usually very uneven in quality. Some stories shine. Some fall flat. Some can even be painful to read. Coville’s Book of Monsters maintains pretty high quality overall, though. Even the weakest story- which for me was the very “meh” Bloody Mary- isn’t terrible. It’s quite clear Coville put a lot of careful thought into selecting the tales for his book.

Although Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters is long out of print, you can find lots of decent copies on Amazon.

Halloween Book Reviews: Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs

I didn’t realize until recently, but a lot of my childhood was defined by scary stories. Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark, Tales From the Crypt (the edited version that aired on basic cable, anyway), TNT’s Monstervision (I can’t be the only one who remembers that, right?), Puppet Master and other Full Moon movies.  And of course that classic of “illustrations that scare-the-absolute-crap-out-of-kids”: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

My own son is already starting to follow in my footsteps. He’s only four, but he loves graveyards, skeletons and ghosts (though I’m not entirely sure he knows that they’re the souls of the deceased trapped in the mortal plane, doomed to a purgatory of undeath until they can gain restitution for the wrongs done to them. I, er, probably should wait a while before I tell him about that part...)  He’s already watched Nightmare Before Christmas at least a dozen times. It’s only a matter of time until he starts getting into the spooky stories. And luckily I happen to have plenty on hand.

So with that spirit (heh), I’m going to do a series of reviews throughout the Halloween season on some of the scary story anthologies that were such a big part of my life growing up. I’d been hoping to start at the beginning of October, but things got busy for a while. Let’s see how many reviews I can get through before Halloween. Maybe I’ll even go over into November a little. It would be a nice way to fill up that autumn limbo until Thanksgiving

.

Anyway, today’s entry is Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs, written by R.C. Welch .

The first cool thing I’d like to point out is that the interior illustrations were done by Ricardo Delgado, writer and illustrator of the amazing Age of Reptiles comic books- a series of wordless tales about the (admittedly somewhat anthropomorphasized) drama and adventures of a group of dinosaurs. Delgado’s drawings in Scary Stories are more subdued and less detailed than his AoR work. But they still have a creepy atmosphere that carries the book well.

The thing that really struck me about these stories as a kid- and even now as an adult- is how nightmarish they are. These are no light, spooky haunted house scares where everyone just runs home and hides under the covers until morning. There’s real dread and danger in these tales. And children are explicitly NOT safe. Most stories end with a nasty fate for the kid protagonists.

Here’s a run-down of the stories

The Hermit of Collins’ Peak

A strange old man who lives in a shack on the edge of town has become the “boogeyman” for the local kids. Every time anyone gets near his home, he runs out screaming and chases them away. But one day the hermit gets sick and has to be rushed to the hospital, leaving his shack unguarded. So of course a group of kids decide to see what’s inside. The story itself is fairly typical fair, but the twist ending is ambiguous and creepy enough to make it memorable.

Dead Giveaway

One of the less memorable tales, I find. A kid discovers that every time he wishes something nasty on people, they end up getting killed in gruesome ways. The school bully even gets dismembered by lions when he falls into their pit at the zoo after something frightens him. The ultimate cause of their deaths is at least a satisfying twist.

The Gift

This one is a dark take on the “boy learns a lesson about being cruel to animals” tale. The animals, in this case, being the ants in a little farm that he got as an unwanted birthday present.  By far one of the best scenes in the whole book is when the insects, fed up with this kid’s shit, build their tunnels to spell out HATE. Pretty goofy reading it as an adult, but a seriously disturbing image when you’re a kid.

A Camping Trip

This one’s the weakest story in the anthology. Sort of a Kid’s Lite version of an 80s slasher film. A bunch of boys go camping. They meet a friendly, forgettable park ranger who disappears right away (foreshadowing!). Their counselor tells them a story about some kids getting killed by a Native American mummy. Someone goes missing in the night and they start a search and, er, that’s basically it.

Oh, also, it’s implied that someone killed the kid. I’ll let you guess who.

Anyway.

Mummy’s Little Helper

Anne keeps hearing a little girl crying for help in the middle of the night. No one else hears it, so she has her friend Robin stay over to help her solve the mystery. Like The Hermit of Collins’ Peak, this one is a classic story with an ending that seriously creeped out second-grade me.

Shadow Play

This story is by far the most frightening one for me, and the main reason this anthology got etched so deeply into my memories.

Like many of the stories, it’s a familiar premise: a young boy is being haunted by living (or maybe not-so-living) shadows that appear in his room every night when the lights go out. Just the mere idea is frightening enough. But the slow, mounting dread really gets to you. That feeling of helplessness against the dark and the things hiding there as they come closer and closer each night. Even as an adult, reading this at 3am in a darkened house (yes, I totally did that to set the mood), it got me spooked.

The Dollhouse

Karen likes to collect miniatures- tiny animals, doll furniture, figurines, etc. While trying to make friends with the shy new girl, Jenny, Karen discovers that she likes miniature things too. Jenny even has a dollhouse at her home with tons of furniture rendered in perfect tiny details, which she offers to show Karen. The ending to this story always reminded me of the “It’s A Good Life” segment from the Twilight Zone movie. The one about the boy with god-like powers. Kids with powers are always freaky in my mind.  Because kids can be mean little assholes without even trying, so the last thing you want them to have is control over the fundamental laws of the universe.

Frankenkid

Another mostly forgettable story. A kid builds a robot and (SPOILER) it kills him in the last sentence.

 This story is actually memorable for the huge amount of detail the writer puts into describing just how the kid goes about builds his mini-Terminator. Most of the story is about him building the limbs out of an Erector set, making the body out of a breadbox, splicing some wires together, then using a dead lizard as the “battery” or “brain” or something.

So I guess it was the zombie-lizard that killed him? Why you have to be such a jerk, zombie-lizard? The kid made you a freaking mech-suit to tool around in! What are you even going to do with it now? Probably just lie around on a warm rock looking bored until another lizard gets too close, at which point you’ll try to do one of those little push-up things to intimidate them. Except you’re in an awkward robot body, so you’ll probably just tip over and flail around on your metal back like a dumbass.

The Girl of Their Dreams

Two kids keep dreaming about a mysterious girl. Then one day a dad and his daughter move into the house in the old field at the end of the block that’s been abandoned for years. And yeah, the daughter is totally the girl they keep seeing in their dreams. And she invites them to come in, which they accept because they do not know they are in a horror anthology and clearly nothing bad could happen here.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Somebody is killing people in town. Jack says it’s a monster, but Craig thinks that’s stupid, so they end up getting into a fight and being mad at each other because kids will fight over dumb shit. Hence why they should not have god-like powers (see The Dollhouse above).

Craig actually gets an interesting bit of characterization in that he’s unhappy because his parents are always too busy to pay much attention to him. So busy that they can’t even be arsed to pick him up from school when there’s- holy shit! there's a goddamn serial killer on the loose! Assbutts.

Oh, also, Craig’s the stupid one. It’s totally a monster.

The Thrill-Seekers’ Club

A kid needs to go to a cemetery in the middle of the night to steal a flowerpot from a grave so he can get into the titular club. Another spin on a classic ghost story. Especially in the way the undead WAY overreact to someone trespassing in their graveyard at night. Lighten up, guys.

As much as I joke, I really do love this anthology. Like I said- it left quite the impression on young me. Even though the stories are pretty predictable, I realize now that they introduced me to a number of classic horror tropes like the Hermit with a Dark Secret; the Karmic Death from Mistreating Animals; Creepy Supernatural Children, etc.

And those living shadows. Brr.....   

Although Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs is long out of print, you can still find plenty of copies on Amazon.

My Favorite Book

Every author gets asked at some point “what’s your favorite book?” And I feel like there’s a lot of pressure behind that. I feel like I need to point to something epic and deep. A tale that resonated with me at the core and changed me on a fundamental level. A classic. Something from Robert Heinlein or John Steinbeck. Edgar Allen Poe or John Irving.  Andre Norton or Octavia Butler. Maybe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Frank Herbert’s Dune.  At the very least, maybe it’s one of Lovecraft’s Weird Tales. Or China Mieville’s.

But it’s not. My favorite book is nothing so grandiose. It didn’t change my life. It’s not a milestone in any genre. It’s just a little book that gives me the good feelings when I read it.

It’s The Goblin Companion: A Field Guide to Goblins. Illustrated by the immortal Brian Froud, with Englishly-silly text by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame.

This book is actually a collection of sketches and character designs Froud created for the movie Labyrinth-every fantasy-loving 80s kid’s major nostalgia button. The drawings feel a bit messy at times. There are little sketches and doodles everywhere. It literally looks like Froud took pages from his sketchbook and published them. But that actually adds to the charm of the book. It’s clear he was having fun while he was doing all those illustraions.

The binding of the book is "puffy" like one of those plastic books kids bring into the bath, and thus wouldn't open flat all the way so I could get some proper pictures with my scanner.

So why is this my absolute favorite book? A couple reasons.

First, a little background about how I came across it. It was the first week at my new middle school- about twenty years ago now- right after moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan from my old town. I’m sure a lot of you can relate to being the new kid at school. Feeling out of place and uncomfortable. Having left your old friends and familiar things behind. Plus new, insecure kids are the natural prey of assbutt bullies. So, naturally, I wasn’t feeling so great by the end of the week. To cheer myself up, I took a walk down to the local Barnes and Nobles and browsed that Sale section they’ve always got at the front. That’s where I found The Goblin Companion. The fun drawings and humorous writing- not to mention the nostalgia for Labyrinth- really helped me through the adjustment period.

Beyond that, The Goblin Companion was also one of the books that inspired my interest in field guides as literature- I subject I’ll discuss in more depth in a future post. The biologist in me adores field guides. I love the way they bring order to nature, and in so doing actually enhance one’s understanding and appreciation of the world. Not to mention the way they integrate art and writing. As my own writing continues to evolve, I’m finding more and more that my interests lie in that synthesis of drawing and text. In the details of ecology and natural history. The Goblin Companion, of course, isn’t an in-depth, Petersen-esque handbook to Labyrinth ecology. It’s just a series of silly anecdotes about the weird critters that inhabit the place. But the categorizing (and Jones’ frequent footnotes) give the goblin world a sense of place, rather than just being a series of flat sketches.

So there you have it. My favorite book. Nothing grand, but it works for me.

Although The Goblin Companion is out of print, you can still find plenty of good copies on Amazon.