Multiplex Fandango

by Weston Ochse
Published by Dark Regions Press

Multiplex Fandango is a sixteen-story, 283-page collection of fiction spanning over a decade of Weston Ochse's career. The stories, six of which were written specifically for this book, are each preceded by a movie-style introduction of the main characters (or elements of the story) and a quote, generally from a movie or book.

Weston Ochse is the real deal: a military veteran and former intelligence officer whose resume is no doubt peppered with events he can't talk about, who travels to exotic locales on government business to this day and lives with his wife in the American desert Southwest. So when he writes about places like China, Japan, the Mexican desert, the streets of Los Angeles and New Orleans during Mardi Gras, there's a sense of authenticity that you'd typically only find in an anthology featuring several authors from different walks of life. Ochse's work has received high praise from genre stalwarts like Joe Lansdale, Ed Lee, Brian Keene and the late Richard Laymon, and Ochse himself cites Cormac McCarthy as an influence. In fact, Ochse's short stories channel McCarthy's enviable skill at painting pictures and setting scenes with mere human language.

“Tarzan Doesn't Live Here Anymore,” Fandango's opening story; “High Desert Come to Jesus,” about a man involuntarily seeking penance from his victims; “Hiroshma Falling,” about a melted man's struggle to find his family in the aftermath of America's nuclear strike on Japan and “City of Joy,” a heart-wrenching science-fiction story, are personal favorites and are all worth the cover price individually, but only comprise a quarter of the book's material. Even the one story that missed the mark in this humble reviewer's opinion, “The Crossing of Aldo Rey,” was unique and tense and didn't quite resonate simply because it was written from a perspective that is sometimes hard to digest. The short notes from Ochse at the end of each story, detailing their origins and inspirations, are a welcome addition and all part of the Multiplex Fandango experience.

Multiplex Fandango is available for pre-order now through Dark Regions Press.

Reviewed by by Lincoln Crisler

Lincoln Crisler's debut novella, WILD, is due in March from Damnation Books. He has also authored a pair of short story collections, Magick & Misery (2009, Black Bed Sheet) and Despairs & Delights (2008, Arctic Wolf). A United States Army combat veteran and non-commissioned officer, Lincoln lives in Augusta, Georgia with his wife and two of his three children. You can visit his website at www.lincolncrisler.info.

HOUSE OF FALLEN TREES

By Gina Ranalli
Published by Grindhouse Press

If you find yourself despairing of the condition of literature today and if you sorely miss Shirley Jackson and M.R. James, you're in luck, dear readers.

We now have Gina Ranalli.

Ranalli's House of Fallen Trees begins with the enigmatic sentence, "Two men have the carcass."

How can you not immediately love a book that begins like that?

The story is about Karen Lewis, a young reclusive writer who inherits half a Bed & Breakfast in Fallen Trees, Washington when her brother, Sean, missing from that same town and is presumed dead. The other half is owned by Rory, Sean's openly hostile partner.

Karen flies across the country to visit this B & B, only to find that she must hike in to get to the place--there is no passable road.

For a Bed & Breakfast?

And that is only the beginning of the strangeness. In this book, peopled with beautifully drawn three-dimensional characters and rich description, there are beasties, ghosties, and some downright freaky happenings--all of which Ranalli handles so deftly that reading her words is to the mind what fresh chocolate fudge is to the palate. I never wanted it to end, and read many paragraphs multiple times, just to enjoy their dark beauty repeatedly.

Creepiness abounds, incidents escalate, and Lewis begins to feel that she's losing her sanity. She very well could be. Ranalli keeps the reader from knowing without seeming to withhold and so we are all as on edge and as off balance as the main character. Delicious! She packs so much story into such a brief book that it is nothing short of amazing.

The characters are voluntarily isolated by visiting the house. But when they try to leave, isolation becomes enforced and they must find a way out.

Will they?

I'll never tell.

Haunted house stories abound. Good ones are hard to find. Brilliant ones are as scarce as Spock ears at a romance novelists' convention. Aren't we all fortunate that House of Fallen Trees adds one more to the megaclassics of the genre--Ghost Story, The Haunting of Hill House, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You My Lad," and The Shining.

This is one you'll want to add to your "favorite books" shelf--I promise you.

Rating: 5 stars out of 5

Buy it here:

Reviewed by Carson Buckingham

Carson Buckingham is a writer living in the great American Southwest and she reviews horror/paranormal suspense novels.

Waiting Out Winter

by Kelli Owen
Published by Thunderstorm Books; 1ST edition (2011)

WAITING OUT WINTER, a small, slender volume from Thunderstorm Books' Elemental chapbook series is Kelli Owen's newest release. It packs a huge punch that belies its size, however, and is more deserving of your time than some books three times its size and two-thirds the price.

Nick and his hunting buddies come home from a couple weeks in the woods to find themselves immediately neck-deep in an apocalyptic situation created by the local government's inept and little-too-late response to a pest problem. The result is a town, and possibly greater surrounding area, under siege from a most-unexpected front.

WINTER's length makes it difficult to discuss in-depth without giving too much away, but two things definitely worthy of mention are Owen's skill at toying with reader expectations and the unyielding tension throughout the story from the first sentence to the very last. This one's a limited edition (I believe the hardcover is already sold-out), so don't wait.

Buy it here.

Review by Lincoln Crisler

Lincoln Crisler's debut novella, WILD, is due in March from Damnation Books. He has also authored a pair of short story collections, Magick & Misery (2009, Black Bed Sheet) and Despairs & Delights (2008, Arctic Wolf). A United States Army combat veteran and non-commissioned officer, Lincoln lives in Augusta, Georgia with his wife and two of his three children. You can visit his website at www.lincolncrisler.info.

Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney
Published by Pinnacle Books

Like the two violent hurricanes that pound and swamp the city of Houston in the opening chapters, Flesh Eaters reads like a swirling wall of wind, debris, and water that knocks you to the ground and traps you there. Unable to escape, just pray that you’re safe. As the storms ultimately clear, something unnatural has spawned in the cesspool of sewage and pollution that is now a mostly submerged city. And that something wants to kill and eat you.

Run.

But how can you, when hundreds of square miles of your city are underwater -- neck-deep in water moccasins, bloated corpses, unrecognizable poisonous goo, and cannibalistic undead?

Flesh Eaters is Joe McKinney’s latest entry in his zombie series that began with Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead. This volume is a prequel, and it tells the interwoven tale of two families struggling to survive in the deteriorating societal breakdown that exists after every mega-disaster weather event. Add to this mix one undead filovirus, and this world becomes a living (or not so living) hell.

The principal story follows Eleanor Norton’s fight to save her family while also fulfilling her duty as an officer of Houston’s Emergency Operations Command. Eleanor is a strong-willed, well-rounded character and her personal challenges mirror the greater disaster that overwhelms her. She is a complex character that will have to dig deeper into her personal values and survival skills than she ever thought possible if she and her family are to survive.

Her boss, Captain Mark Shaw is also trying to save his family while dealing with eighty thousand survivors trapped on high ground - an island of temporary safety in the middle of what is to become a war zone. Supposedly, help is coming, but like so many other disasters in recent history -- it’s too little, and much, much too late. Faced with an imminent catastrophe, Captain Shaw has to make life-and-death choices that directly affect his family and the thousands of civilians under his charge.

Mr. McKinney brings his vast experience in Disaster Planning and Police Operations to flesh out this story and give it a truly haunting sense of reality. His writing is crisp, fast, and he seldom lets the characters (or readers) come up for air.

The tension in Flesh Eaters builds naturally, and under Mr. McKinney’s firm authorial hand, there is plenty of gut-wrenching and ‘blow-their-heads-off’ horror as the outbreak happens. He turns the screw slowly, and we see how normal people must come to grips with world-shattering destruction. Ultimately, this is an apocalyptic story about families... one functional, one dysfunctional, and the choices that they make when the chips are down.

Needless to say, not everyone makes it out alive.

Flesh Eaters is an action-packed must-read. And without a spoiler alert, let’s just hope that Mr. McKinney has a sequel in mind for one of the survivors. Of course, that’s assuming there is one.

Buy it here.

Reviewed by R. B. Payne

R. B. Payne is a dark fiction writer. His stories have appeared in Doorways, Dark Discoveries, Necrotic Tissue, and the recent Stoker-nominated Midnight Walk anthology. He is insanely enthusiastic about writing book reviews for Shroud magazine. But rather than continuing to blurb himself by pretending that someone else wrote this bio, he would prefer you seek out his stories and read them late at night. For the record, he lives in Los Angeles and lurks at www.rbpayne.com. He would love to hear from you as long as it’s not a beating heart delivered in a cardboard box.

Transubstantiate

by Richard Thomas
Published by Otherworld Publications LLC (April 1, 2010)

As the thriving business at Permuted press can attest, apocalyptic fiction is always in vogue. Every generation seems to feel that population growth, advances in weaponry, pollution and other ills have gotten as bad as they possibly can, leaving no option but the end of it all. Yet we're still here. That's why I'm much more fascinated with stories about the days after and end that was quite, focusing on the need to survive and, more importantly, rebuild.

That places us squarely into the world of Richard Thomas' Transubstantiate where we follow seven physically and psychologically damaged characters in the aftermath of a population control experiment gone awry. With 97% of the population dead and much of the remainder turned to violent and insane blisterheads, a small island community holds the only chance of rebirth. But, as this society also begins to collapse, a question must be asked: is the island more of a prison than a new Eden?

The first paragraph had my brains by the balls (yep, I'm so manly even my brain has balls). Lyric and enigmatic, it set the tone for the strain between the inevitability of nihilism and the possibility of hope. Then Mr. Thomas immediately proceeded to slam both brains and balls against the nearest wall by tossing me directly into a situation that had already gone to hell with no explanation whatsoever. To further cement my confusion, he presents the story in first person, from each of the seven main characters' points of view, and not always in chronological order. This Rashomon-ish experience is akin to being given the pieces of a puzzle and the places they fit but having to wait until you've got it all together before you get to see the big picture. Or you can think of it as a mystery where the mystery itself is revealed slowly through the process of the solving.

Either way, it messed with me. And I enjoyed every second of it.

Transubstantiate, when all the pieces fall into place, is an intricate and layered look at action and consequence, the struggle between mislaid control and frustrated effort of self-proclaimed gods of men and the people caught up in the maelstrom, told in a way that will make your head spin. Occasionally, it looses focus and keeping track of the characters and motivations can be a bit frustrating at times, not to mention the large amount of simple typos that overrun the printing, but I found the whole to be well worth the extra effort and vastly rewarding. If only they had done better than the uninspired and rather dull cover art.

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.

Willy

by Robert Dunbar.
Published by Uninvited Books.

Adolescence is often described as a journey of discovery, a journey in which we attempt to define ourselves. We collect the traits impressed upon us by others and then stretch and test those impressions in order to forge the adult we will become. In Willy, the latest novel by Robert Dunbar (The Pines, Martyrs & Monsters), we witness the coming of age of a troubled young man who must make this journey in relative isolation and under the tutelage of one who may not be the savior he appears to be.

Our unnamed narrator is sent to an obscure private school, the apparent end-of-the-line for both the disturbed boys that are deposited there and for the disaffected and cynical adults that maintain the crumbling facility. The narrator is a sensitive and introverted youth who has apparently had behavioral problems in other schools as well as thoughts of suicide. He is encouraged to keep a journal of his thoughts by his former psychologist—it is this journal that forms the narrative of the novel. Soon he meets his new roommate, Willy, a brilliant and charismatic young man who takes the narrator under his wing and forces him out of his self-imposed exile. Through the journal we witness the narrator’s blossoming as both a writer and as a person. Willy challenges him to reach beyond the “reality” of the isolated and warped school community. As Willy and the protagonist grow closer, the narrator begins to believe that Willy may be leading him toward a reality far darker than he is prepared to experience.

Dunbar’s characterization and prose brilliantly capture the internal world of the narrator. The world that we view through his eyes is stark, sinister, and secretive. Dunbar fully immerses the reader in the narrator’s point of view. There are no false notes, no instances in which the reader is taken out of the mind of the protagonist. However, this limited point of view makes portions of the book extremely cryptic. Many plot questions are left unanswered—or, if answers are available, they are hidden by a narrator who often lacks the capacity to report the full import of what he is witnessing. For some readers these questions will inspire multiple readings and spirited discussion. For others it may invoke frustration and confusion.

Nevertheless, Dunbar’s prose is lyrical, suspenseful, and immersive. Willy is a tour-de-force of style, character, and atmosphere and is definitely an example of an author attempting to stretch the boundaries of the genre.

Buy it here.

Or Visit Robert Dunbar.

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.

The Skin Map

By Stephen R. Lawhead
Published by Thomas Nelson

Kit Livingstone is a normal enough man living in London. Everything changes quite quickly when he gets sucked into an adventure involving ley lines that are spread throughout England. Kit is torn from his mundane life by none other than his great-grandfather Cosimo, and the two set off to solve the mystery of the ley lines by finding the Skin Map, a document tattooed to a man’s body which contains all of the necessary secrets of traveling the leys.

Kit’s story is only one of several that are told in The Skin Map. One character who really starts to steal the spotlight is Kit’s girlfriend Wilhelmina. She winds up getting involved with the ley line travel (separated from her boyfriend quite unexpectedly) and is lost far in the past in an alternate-reality Prague. She meets a baker and sets up shop with him. Business doesn’t go well until she comes up with the brilliant idea of introducing coffee as a new and amazing product to the people of Prague.

Another character whose story is followed in The Skin Map is the man who wears the map on his very flesh. Arthur Flinders-Petrie is a man with secrets to keep and his own adventure adds another dimension to the novel. Instead of just hearing about the Skin Map through other characters, Lawhead lets the reader find out what the man himself was like.

At the beginning of the novel, it seems obvious that Kit is supposed to be the main character. However, as the book continues he seems to be shoved further and further away from the spotlight. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the ensemble cast certainly propels the story forward. The villain in The Skin Map also doesn’t get nearly enough pages devoted to him. This villain, Burleigh, is some kind of master of the ley lines (as evidenced by the fact that he winds up causing problems in the multiple realities Kit, Wilhemina, Arthur, and Cosimo find themselves in), but his story must be waiting to be fleshed out in the next book in this five-novel cycle.

One thing to put in the positive column about The Skin Map is the distinctive British flavor that Lawhead brings to his work. The opening parts about Kit and his run-of-the-mill existence in London were highly entertaining. The fact that the invention/introduction of coffee to a general populace served as such an important part of the plot also came across as a deliberate stroke of humor.

Things in the negative column are fairly minor. As mentioned before, Kit’s story comes dangerously close to being drowned out by the other stories, and the pace quickens probably a little too much in the last 75 pages.

Overall, Stephen R. Lawhead’s Bright Empires series is off to an exciting start.

Buy it here.

Reviewed by Christopher Larochelle

Christopher Larochelle is a University of New Hampshire student coming close to being launched into the professional world in which he hopes to become a distinguished Writer of Stuff. He is an intern with New Hampshire Magazine, where some of his Stuff has begun to fill pages. He’s the guy with the comic book in front of his face, or the bass guitar or camera strapped around his neck, or maybe he’s at the computer typing something up for his shiny new blog here.