Rasputin's Bastards (Chizine), by David Nickle

Rasputin's Bastards by David Nickle is first and foremost a spy novel; and reader take note, this is a book that expects its reader to be a clever as the spies whom the story revolves around.

David Nickle describes an intricate plot with a baker's dozen of multifaceted characters, and it's a challenge to keep up with each individual and their separate motivations – in some cases, the characters themselves are not self-aware enough to understand their circumstances, and circumstances are subject to change. The reader must contend with the real world and juggle complicated metaphysical ideas involved behind the “sleeper” agents who, to reduce the idea to its basic concept, are “possessing” the bodies of other characters to carry out their goals. Add to the mix a gathering of psychic children and a telepathic infant and the complexity of Rasputin's Bastards multiplies.

The writing is good but this isn't a place for the beach-read pulp fiction crowd, and having an understanding of past spy novels (The Marathon Man by William Goldman comes to mind) is essential to appreciate what David Nickle is building, and the style he chooses to do it in.

A reader will either love it or hate it; one must keep note of the characters and their subplots while tracking the greater plot unfolding and it's not an easy job to jack-hop from one character's psychological state to another. Nickle gives nothing away to the reader for free, which lends the benefit of surprise when characters end up in unexpected places and are revealed to be different people than they started out as.

All in all, this is a read more suited to specific audience who has an interest in the genre of spy thrillers, with a dash of the supernatural.

buy it directly from Chizine.

Reviewed by Martin Rose.

Look for Martin Rose's work in the anthologies Fear of the Dark from Horror Bound publications and Art From Art from Modernist Press. More details are available here.

Every Shallow Cut

by Tom Piccirilli
Published by ChiZine Publications (March 29, 2011)


Overtly socially conscious fiction tends to bug me. The second I become aware that I am being taught a lesson, I start to tune it out or get pulled from the story. It tends to draw more attention to the artifice than to the feelings that should be created by the art itself. Often the best and most effective lessons are those we learn when we don't realize we are being taught, like falling off a bike or walking in the front door at the wrong time of day to find someone else with your someone else. What does that have to do with the new novella by Tom Picirilli? Read on...

Picture your life turned into a walking medley of the most stereotypical country music you can think of: your career has collapsed, your house has been foreclosed and your wife done run off on you. At least you still have your dog, your car and a shiny new gun, even if that is it. Maybe now might be a good time for a trip back to the old hometown, to beg at the foot of a brother much more successful than yourself or collapse on the doorstep of your first love. Maybe the manager who hasn't been keeping his promises could use a visit, too.

That is precisely where Mr. Piccirilli places you, with no easy separation of a 3rd person narrator or even a name to distinguish the main character from yourself and the experience is not a kind one. Sure, the man's work has never been among the cheeriest, but he reaches a whole new depth of bleak here. Few people could have made this man's desperation and hopelessness into the reader's like Tom has, with prose that dances between poetry and bluntness, a hammer and chisel wielded with purpose and power. The beauty here is a somber, dark beauty, of a kind that wounds, but it is a beauty nonetheless. However, for some it may hit a bit too close to home. This isn't a doomed quest for revenge or an ill-fated push for redemption, but the steady collapse of a man losing everything he had been told would matter in his life. If you are looking for an analogous work, Hemingway's “A Clean, Well Lighted Place”, with more rage and less apathy, wouldn't be far off.

Looking back to that initial statement, we can see the immensity of what Tom has done here. Anyone can rant about the disparity in lifestyles in this country or the problems of the promises too many of us were sold over our lives. Anyone can scream that there is a problem. But within these pages, we have no choice but to live it, to breathe it in and make it a part of ourselves. It isn't so easy to ignore then.

This isn't art to raise you above your problems, or to rub in a soothing salve. Instead, it shoves our faces into it, scratching and tearing all the way. Still, the wounding bears a minor relief, if only in the knowledge that someone out there understands.

Buy it here.

Reviewed by Anton Cancre

Anton Cancre is one of those rotting, pus-filled thingies on the underside of humanity that your mother always warned you about. He has oozed symbolic word-farms onto the pages of Shroud, Sex and Murder and Horrorbound magazines as well as The Terror at Miskatonic Falls, an upcoming poetry anthology by Shroud Publishing and continues to vomit his oh-so-astute literary opinions, random thoughts and nonsense at antoncancre.blogspot.com. No, he won't babysit you pet shoggoth this weekend. Stop asking.