Blood and Other Cravings

Edited by Ellen Datlow
Published by Tor

“Each of us needs something - food, liquor, pot, whatever - to help us survive. Dracula needs blood.” Frank Langella (Playboy Magazine, 1979)

Anytime you sample a collection edited by veteran anthologist Ellen Datlow (Snow White, Blood Red; Teeth; Supernatural Noir), you know that you are in for a treat. Blood and Other Cravings is no exception. This top-notch collection takes vampirism as its theme, but each story veers far and away from the now-worn tropes of the genre. The creatures (some human, some decidedly not) featured in these tales feed not only upon blood but hope, emotion, and life itself. They are beings of insatiable hunger and predation, stalking us from the shadows of 1970s New York, from behind the blinds of suburban homes, and from our parents’ bedrooms.

While there is not a bad story in the bunch, some are worthy of special mention. “Keeping Corky” by Melanie Tem is a sublimely disturbing piece involving a mentally-challenged young mother whose indomitable will affects those that would stand between her and her son. Fledgling talesmith Nicole J. LeBoeuf’s piece, “First Breath”, is a beautiful exploration of identity and point-of-view involving the lifecycle of a family of ethereal beings. The anthology closes with Laird Barron’s “The Siphon”, where an evil man encounters creatures of blood and nightmare that lie in the shadows thrown across time and myth.

Blood and Other Cravings reminds us of why we should fear those that stalk the night.

Buy it here.

Visit Ellen Datlow's site here.

Reviewed by Shedrick Pittman-Hassett

Shedrick Pittman-Hassett is a full-time librarian and part-time writer trying to do that the other way around. He has written reviews for Library Journal and has also had two articles published in the award-winning Knights of the Dinner Table magazine. Shedrick currently resides in Denton, Texas ("The Home of Happiness") with his lovely wife and the obligatory demon-spawn cats. When not writing, gaming, or watching cheezy kung-fu flicks, he can be found in a pub enjoying a fine brew.

Thunderstorm Books Trifecta, Part 3: For Emma, by Mary SanGiovanni

**Premiering at Horrorfind Weekend, 2011, and at Thunderstorm Books, after September 4th, 2011.

"…..I want a reason for babies born with cancer, for the endless supply of thoughtless cruelties both little and large we inflict on one another on an everyday basis, for old folks who are abandoned to die alone and unwanted and unloved.

I want an explanation, please, for all of the soul-sick, broken-hearted people who become so hollowed by their aloneness that they turn on the gas, eat the business end of shotgun, or find a ceiling beam that can take their weight. I want sense made of this. I want to know the reason why...and since none is forthcoming, either from above or those around me, I've decided to try and find an answer on my own. So far, the best - the only - way for me to work toward this is through writing horror stories."

• Gary Braunbeck, To Each Their Darkness (Apex Publications)

Apologies for the long quote, but it's the first thing that comes to mind after reading Mary Sangiovanni's latest offering, a novella from Thunderstorm Books. Not only is For Emmy chilling, heartbreaking, and quietly terrifying, it works at something behind the scenes, reaching for explanations for the thousands of little tragedies that occur around us every single day, explanations that all too often can never be reached . It's this – and Sangiovanni's flawless prose – that makes her genre fiction more; insightful and chilling commentaries into the human experience, a musing about our possible experiences with something Other than human.

When Dana's McClusky's four year old sister Emmy disappears from her father's bookstore, she does so without a trace. With no evidence of foul play. No ransom note, no clues. For months, Dana and her widower father grapple with their shattered lives, wondering what happened to Emmy, where she's gone, how she got there, and if they'll ever see her again.

Wondering if, perhaps, it would be better not to know.

And then one day Emmy returns. To the same exact spot she disappeared from in her father's bookstore. Disheveled, muddied, slightly wounded and malnourished...and different, somehow. See, not all of Emmy came back. Wherever she went, something happened to her, draining her youth and vitality and spark, leaving behind a traumatized, emotionally-stunted, empty husk. A “not quite Emmy.” And even worse?

The thing that took Emmy away wants more. As usual, Sangiovanni's handle of her prose and story is flawless. And, like precious few other horror writers – Ramsey Campbell comes to mind - she's able to harness the essence of Lovecraftian horror: fear of the unknown, the alien, the unsolvable, and harness it for her own uses, rather than creating homages or pastiches. And this isn't just a spooky, ghostly tale for fun and frights: there's a serious wondering here, about all the unexplained, tragic phenomena that occurs every day, a wondering if perhaps it would be better for us never to know the answers.

Visit Mary SanGiovanni. Buy it after September 4th.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

Thunderstorm Books Trifecta, Part 2: The Neighborhood, by Kelli Owen

**Premiering at Horrorfind Weekend, 2011, and at Thunderstorm Books, after September 4th, 2011.

So.

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Not just a fun little song from Sesame Street, but an important question. Especially if you live in one of those small little towns where everyone knows everyone else. The kind of town with only one school, church, police department, where parents do triple duty on the school, church and Town Boards. The kind of place where everyone has heard every little thing about everyone else. Where the men all meet at the general hardware store to shoot the bull, and the women meet twice a month for their bridge or book or wine of the month club. Where there are no secrets...

Except the ones everyone willfully turns a blind eye towards, and keeps from themselves.

Thus forms the basis of Kelli Owen's creepy new novella The Neighborhood, out from Thunderstorm Books, September 2^nd. In perhaps her most understated, restrained work yet, Owen builds her story and its suspense slowly, brick by brick, using even, smooth brushstrokes to paint a chilling portrait of a small little town where everyone is happy.

At peace.

Going about their business. And even though rumors spread like in any small town and everyone seems to know the tick and click of everyone else's social affairs, certain things are not discussed. Some thoughts not entertained. The only shadows here in Neillsville hide in the corners. Ones townspeople are too willing to shy away from and ignore. Until the blood comes spilling out into their lives. But even then, the adults “circle their wagons.”

Keep their own counsel. Don't talk to the kids. And by all means, don't LISTEN to the kids, when they tell strange tales too fantastic and dreadful to be true. Because they're only kids, after all. With wild imaginations too prone to carry them away. This is Neillsville, where everyone takes care of their own. And minds their own, too.

So. Who are the people in your neighborhood? Do you know them?

Really? Because Kelli Owen's The Neighborhood may very well cause you to doubt what you think you know...

Visit Kelli Owen. Buy it after September 4th.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

Thunderstorm Books Trifecta, Part 1: Samson and Denial, by Robert Ford

**Premiering at Horrorfind Weekend, 2011, and at Thunderstorm Books, after September 4th, 2011.

Samson and Denial (Thunderstorm Books) is a powerful debut from author Robert Ford, a story reeling at a break-neck pace that demands a reading in one sitting. This is Robert E. Howard, Norman Partridge and Bryan Smith, all rolled into one explosive package that doesn't mince words, but also doesn't sacrifice its craft. It's a story of substance as well as fast-paced thrills.

Things have taken a nasty turn for pawnbroker and small-time drug-dealer Samson Gallows. His brother and drug-dealing partner Marky tortured and murdered in ruthless fashion by merciless Russian gangsters, his wife Tia abducted and in mortal danger, Samson finds himself barreling towards the kind of fight he's never wanted: one with no good outcome, no victory possible, but one he must embrace regardless. His dear brother, mutilated beyond recognition; beloved wife possibly facing the same, maybe even already dead. What else can he do?

But perhaps not all is lost. For Samson has in his possession a grisly artifact pawned to him earlier by one of his usual junkie customers. With this artifact comes a strange and horrifying legacy. And awful powers. When it saves Samson from the same men who killed Marky – in bloody fashion – a small chance for survival offers itself to him...if he can also survive the artifact's rightful owners, who fear neither death nor hell in their service to it, and would sooner gut him like a fish, rather than let it slip from their grasp again.

Ford's even-handed voice never loses control of his narrative. The prose flows, nice and tight and powerful, each word precisely chosen for maximum punch. And the story itself tears up the track like a dragster burning high octane nitrous oxide. Along the way, Ford paints poignant, bitter-sweet portraits of life in the city, infusing his tale with a thundering heart that refuses to quit, right to the last page.

Visit Bob Ford. Buy it after September 4th.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He's currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he's currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

Last Days

By Brian Evenson
Published by Underland Press

Here is everything you need to know about Last Days: This short novel is brilliant enough live up to the eleven-page fawning introduction penned by Peter Straub—though, fair warning, the Ghost Story author festoons his effusions with so many delicious twists and snatches of plot you’d be crazy to read it before diving into the tale beyond.

Of course, if that’s not enough to pique your interest, we can toss in a dismemberment-obsessed cult that makes the axe-wielding psychos Sly Stallone tangled with in Cobra look like extras in a particularly feisty episode of Toddlers & Tiaras, a jaded one-handed cop through whose eyes we experience the faction’s absurd depravities, and a narrative that somehow balances pitch-black satire against harrowing blood-and-guts corporeal believability.

Still on the fence? Didn’t think so.

Much like Jonathan Lethem’s literary fraternal twins Motherless Brooklyn and Gun, with Occasional Music, Last Days mashes noir archetypes atop bizarro contrivances to summon forth a fantastical world only a degree or two off from our own, then sets the beguiling creation barreling off down the rabbit hole, improbably managing to up the stakes over and over again, right up until the last line of the disquieting finale. Evenson—an incontestably superior talent since his opening 2002 salvo, Altmann’s Tongue—herein further establishes himself as a writer utterly allergic to the (too) well-defined boundaries of horror fiction, and, consequently, raises the genre up in his clenched jaw and carries it forward, a literary feline nimbly prowling toward fresher killing fields.

Reviewed by Shawn Macomber

Shawn Macomber is a Miami based writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, Radar, Yankee, The Weekly Standard,the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Decibel, among many other fine and middling publications. He has reported from five continents covering everything from combat in Iraq, riots in the Baltics, and two presidential elections to designer cat shows at Madison Square Garden, the cross Carrot Top bears, and the Carcass “Exhumed to Consume” reunion tour. His story "Demon Envy" will appear in Shroud #12. More info at www.shawnmacomber.net

Descent

by Sandy DeLuca
Published by Uninvited Books

Back in the seventies young Julia developed a thirst for bad boys so lusty it could not be quenched by any run of the mill rebel-without-a-cause biker. And so, ignoring the cryptic warnings of her Wiccan aunt and dead brother, she made a play for a disciple of Satan whose idea of a weekend getaway was a multi-state killing spree.

Alas, Julia learns too late the most important relationship law The Rules failed to cover: A man with a taste for a homemade blood/semen cocktail is likely not boyfriend material. The union, needless to say, does not have a storybook ending, unless you’re into fairytales stocked with Deliverance sexcapades and motel room crucifixions.

Descent opens a few decades later. Broken by a past she cannot put behind her, Julia appears determined to self-sabotage any prospect of happiness, perhaps as an act of penance, perhaps because as a painter she cannot afford the necessary therapy. “Loneliness is a bitch,” she muses. “But memories can be even worse.” Trouble is, Julia’s memories aren’t content to remain locked in her mind anymore—they seep out into the real world, possess friends and acquaintances, make sudden appearances like quick cuts in horror flick. Around this mystery of what is and what is not real, Sandy DeLuca constructs a trippy, altered state narrative. Is Julia truly being haunted by demons bound and determined to prove Faulkner’s oft-quoted maxim, “The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past”? Or is she suffering hallucinogenic reverberations from the trauma that withered the flower of her youth?

“Sanity visits me now and then, but never stays long,” Julia says, appearing to make the case for the former.

“How do you make them see that the monsters are real—that the dead really do come back?” she later asks, suggesting the latter.

It is a testament to DeLuca’s authorial prowess that both explanations feel plausible throughout the book. When the final wave at long last breaks, the dénouement is richly imagined enough to leave you wishing DeLuca was not so brief in her exploration of it. I would have liked to see her delve a little more deeply into the transcendent implications of the specters that emerge from Julia’s paintings as well. These are, however, minor quibbles. DeLuca’s taunt, fast-paced yarn draws you in and screws with your equilibrium, much like those demons Julia glimpses out of the corner of her eye.

Buy it here.

Reviewed by Shawn Macomber

Shawn Macomber is a Miami based writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, Radar, Yankee, The Weekly Standard,the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Decibel, among many other fine and middling publications. He has reported from five continents covering everything from combat in Iraq, riots in the Baltics, and two presidential elections to designer cat shows at Madison Square Garden, the cross Carrot Top bears, and the Carcass “Exhumed to Consume” reunion tour. His story "Demon Envy" will appear in Shroud #12. More info at www.shawnmacomber.net

Deadline book 2 of the Newsflesh Trilogy

By Mira Grant
Published by Orbit


*Warning, this review contains spoilers for FEED, the preceding book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy read the review here, then read that book first.*

It sucks to be the second part of a trilogy. The first part is young and impetuous, the vibrant child introducing us to new worlds and people while establishing the broad conflict. The last one is older, more mature, bringing it all together and providing us with a sense of closure. All the middle kids does is get everyone into as much trouble as possible.

Boy, howdy does DEADLINE do that.

Picking up scant months after the events of FEED, we're plopped into the head of Shaun Mason as he barely holds the crew of After the End Times together. The ghost of his dead sister is in his head, an officially deceased CDC researcher is in his apartment and his city is overrun with the hungry amplified. This new addition to the group has information that someone is willing to firebomb the entirety of Oakland to keep secret. It would appear that the conspiracy behind his sister's death is alive and Shaun will stop at nothing to get at the heart of the matter.

Everything that made FEED my favorite novel of last year, as well as my second favorite zombie novel of all time, is still here: political intrigue, in-depth and honest characters that work their way into your heart and life, spot on social commentary on the way we live under the threat of a terror state and some damn fine “hold onto your britches while you fill them with poo” action. Of course, Mira continues to ratchet up the tension with the increasingly tightening noose around the necks of our intrepid newsies. Her previously proven Whedonesque willingness to kill off any character, no matter how important they may seem, certainly kept me on my toes in that regard.

I specifically enjoyed the change in POV from FEED's supremely self-assured and driven Georgia to the increasingly apathetic and uncertain Shaun. His feelings of inadequacy and mental breakdown (he doesn't just talk to his dead sis, she argues back) provide the heavy emotional impact this go round. The world around and within him is collapsing into chaos and you'll feel every moment.

Sure, it will leave you hanging in the air once the last page is turned, but that is what middle children do. Also, there's a revelation near the end that I want to call cheap but it does fit with the information we are provided earlier and I'm curious to see how it will play out in BLACKOUT. Overall, it's a hell of a worthy followup to FEED that had me tearing through the pages and left me salivating more. What else can you ask for?

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.