Babbling Into The Void

 Twenty years ago, 18-year-old Joanne Neilson, local celebrity for her feats on the swim team, left the house to take the family dog on a walk through the woods. The dog came home; Joanne did not. Now, the remaining Neilson siblings - loner Aggie, family man Alex, and Bailey - estranged from the others due to his plans for a true crime docuseries about the disappearance - are led back to those same woods by a videotape showing an impossible recording of the day their family was broken apart. Keating imbues this novella with a fantastic sense of place. This is a region Keating knows well, and she blends that knowledge with a clear love of nature and an inventive streak. The weird woods of Cannon Park - so named for the regular booming of the tide in the caverns beneath - are realised with enough grounding and clarity that the emergence of clearly unnatural phenomena becomes truly unsettling. Mixing in real-world strange landmarks, like magnetic hills, is inspired, blurring the disti...

 I want to preface this by saying that I don't live in the US, and am not under constant threat of gun violence. My partner does and is, and I am  constantly scared for her, but I understand that a US reader will be coming to this with a context that I don't have, and I'm trying to be aware of that. What would you do if you knew that your actions truly had no consequences? If you knew that, no matter what you did, you would wake up tomorrow and everything would be back to normal? Carson Winter's The Guts of Myth  (part of Split Scream Volume 1 , reviewed here) was a blend of gravel-crunching pulp and shimmering obsidian cosmic horror, a darkly majestic, savagely cool novelette. And while his name was the first thing to grab my attention with this novella, the concept cemented this as something I needed to read. Here it is: two office drones find that certain days are less 'real' than others. On these 'low tide' days, the abnormal is slightly more normal,...

If you read my review of Tell Me I'm Worthless  you won't be surprised that I had to read Rumfitt's latest novel as soon as I could. But what is Brainwyrms  compared to the previous novel? More of the same? If that means 'something more or less along the lines of Tell Me I'm Worthless ' then, well, no. If it means 'something just as powerful, unique, mind-breaking and transgressive' then an emphatic yes. This is an intense one. There are warnings at the start and before relevant sections about the content and imagery, and, well, take those seriously. There is some truly sickening stuff in here - scenes that I find hard to shake weeks after reading it. I honestly think this book is a must-read if you can handle that, but don't say you weren't warned. After the shock of the imagery, what will jump out at you is Rumfitt's insight and her sheer skill. Once again,Rumfitt doesn’t so much have her finger on the pulse of British society as she is rip...

Lately I've been worrying a lot about time; what I'm doing with my life, what I've done in my life so far. Whether or not I've left it too late to learn anything useful, get good at anything, do anything worthwhile. These thoughts brought me to Vivi. For those unaware, Vivi is (in addition to being my precious perfect son) a character from Final Fantasy IX, a Black Mage. Vivi appears as a typical Black Mage character - he has the big floppy pointy hat obscuring a black circle for a head, he has the blue robe, he has powerful damage-dealing spells. But Vivi does not fit the stereotype of a wizard. When we meet him, he is in town to see a play - the start of a wish to see the world and learn, as he is thus far very sheltered. In fact, he seems very naive and childlike, completely at sea in a new environment and easily tricked. Rather than wise, he is credulous; while he wields destructive powers, he is immediately warm, earnest and eager to help. Vivi joins our party and ...

I've been on a bit of a fantasy kick lately, and I'm always on the hunt for new horror, so the premise of a collection of horror-meets-sword-and-sorcery stories leapt out at me. Despite what seems a straightforward setup, there is a huge variety of story in Swords in the Shadows -  in tone, setting, genre, and quality. I love short story collections for just this reason - the diversity, the sense of turning over the page to something completely new. So let's jump in to some of these stories. It shouldn't be any surprise that Hailey Piper's story, Wolfen Divine , is a standout. This is writing on another level. These few pages are crammed full of evocative worldbuilding, compelling action, a masterful character sketch, explorations of predation, survival, and love in desperate circumstances - suffused with tension and culminating in an anguishing emotional climax. Stephen Graham Jones is a writer that (shamefully) I've not read for all that I've heard about h...

Split Scream Volume 3 is here and Dread Stone are going from strength to strength with these double-feature, bite-size horror tales. This time, we have Patrick Barb's So Quiet, So White , and Imago Expulsio (The Red Animal of Our Blood)  by J.A.W. McCarthy. In Barb's story, following family relations in the aftermath of a terrible event, he truly puts the lie to the old saw that good prose should be unnoticeable. His writing is thick, writhing in the reader's hands. On occasion it can trip over itself, choke on itself, but at its best it is reminiscent of Laird Barron, stylised and punchy and surly. Some writing flows, but this oozes , slick and ominous. Who wants a pane of glass when you can have this glorious dark vista? Atmosphere and tone are Barb's weapons of choice, but he still manages to work in a vicious twist - more analogous to a twist of a knife in the gut than a twist in the tale. McCarthy's piece is a darkly romantic story of passion, trauma, and the t...