UNIVERSAL HARVESTER makes one understand prey animals that stand absolutely still as their doom descends — yet all the while as you are experiencing that slow sense of mounting dread and menace you cannot identify, there is still that all pervading wise and reassuring voice.
The pleasure of watching both a stylistic and an intellectual force emerge and take shape provides its own enjoyment. However the jouissance one derives from reading Barlow’s later tales, where he mastered the alchemical marriage of fascination and dread in such exquisite proportions that a single tale keeps his name alive…
“Calls for Submission” is more than a collection of short stories. It is the showcase of a writer with a deliberate and considered world view, intensely honed craft, and a calculated message.
The value of a book such as The Weird and The Eerie is that it endows us with new eyes with which to view those works we are already familiar, offers us fresh avenues of approach and simultaneously points us towards new treasures we have yet to excavate.
I’m sure you can call to mind dozens of times within horror fiction the protagonist reacting “with dawning realization”. Padgett has managed to capture that feeling and evoke it in such a way that you the reader, not one of the characters within a fictional story, experiences this dawning realization.
Respected as one of today’s leading figures of weird fiction for his striking imagination, versatility, and deeply emotional stories, Jeffrey Thomas here offers up fourteen searing tales.
Baader is elegant in evoking the strange in simple, unadorned lines. It’s this simplicity that disarms. His characters are instantly believable with just enough detail provided for the reader to identify with yet not so overloaded it hampers the imagination. He trusts his reader’s intelligence instead of pandering to them.
“To evoke a demon is a sordid, dangerous affair. Call loudly over the dense cathode with offers of bleating lambs, and sometimes a fiend scratches back against your tar-paper reality.”
“almost insentient, almost divine” is a collection that will be treasured by readers for decades to come, and doubtlessly recommended to those looking for an introduction as to what makes this genre special.
“Canadian author Richard Gavin has established himself as a leading contemporary writer of weird fiction. His richly nuanced prose style, his imaginative range, and his shrewdness in the portrayal of character and domestic conflict make his tales far more than mere shudder-coining.”
This adventure concerns the legend of a witch who lives deep within the forest, deep within every forest. Known as The Pale Lady or The Flower Mistress, there’s just one catch. She’s not a witch at all.
THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI is an upcoming anthology inspired by the 1920 silent horror film THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. Stories by Ramsey Campbell, John Langan, Paul Tremblay, Michael Cisco, and others.
I’ve lost my mind over writers that experiment with surrealistic forms, books filled with stunning art, pages of heavyweight expensive paper, and sewn in book ribbons. Yet DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND charmed the hell out of me by stripping everything back to concentrate on what matters most.
Our beloved cosmic horror is at work, more accurately perhaps in its guise as existential horror. I wish you could see my hand tremble with excitement as I write these words, for THE LONEY by Andrew Michael Hurley is a truly captivating novel.
The very last thing I expected within a book of African Horror was a scene that transported me immediately to the mid-eighties, reading SALEM’S LOT in my Aunt’s summer house, the hackles on the back of my neck rising, yet there it was.
