Babbling Into The Void

Camp Resolution is a brutal and degrading conversion camp for parents to turn their LGBTQ teens into the cishet kids they want them to be. But in the summer of 1996, a group of teens at the camp begin to suspect that it hides something even darker. This is the latest by Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of the excellent Manhunt, and much like that book it is a harrowing, frenzied masterpiece. I'll just tell you at the top: this book is exceptional, and you should read it. But if you want more convincing than just 'I said so', here we go: The first thing that truly stands out is Felker-Martin's skill at character, at psychology. We saw this in Manhunt , and once again Felker-Martin demonstrates an incredible talent for getting inside the heads of her characters. Even the character we follow for the prologue, a mother suppressing her concerns about sending her daughter to Camp Resolution, is a fully-fleshed person, a scathing and disturbing portrait of a woman simult...

 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...

 Here's an interesting - and somewhat daunting - thing: in her preface to this volume, Magen Cubed describes these stories as training for her later work. I can assuredly say that if this was the caliber of my writing in 'training', I would be more than satisfied. I'm being slightly specious here - most of these stories have been previously published in anthologies or magazines, it's not like we're seeing unedited, raw drafts here - but these pieces are not simply a prelude to what came later, they are evidence of a true talent. What's true, though, is that these pieces are in the main explorations of specific ideas, for better or worse. Some of them do seem fragmentary, evocative scenes that just about have a narrative. This can be unsatisfying, but for every story with a sudden, perfunctory ending, there is a beautifully crafted gem of imagination like 'A Fresh, Clean Soul', a work of emotional weight like 'Ain't No Grave', a fun little...

Another Split Scream , another double-feature - and what a double-feature it is. This time our novelettes (the handy little explainer intro is also repeated in this volume) are The Shivering World  by Cynthia Gómez and What Ate the Angels  by M Lopes da Silva. The first follows a young woman's struggles with poverty, identity and patriarchy, and the sacrifices required to escape the position she is in, as manifested both figuratively and literally by the story of La Llarona. The second is a razor-sharp exploration of toxicity - within ourselves, within our relationships, and in the foundations and history of its setting, Los Angeles. There is an acute sense of embedding in both these stories; a feeling that we are really seeing into a character's life, a real tangle of relationships and emotions, daily struggles and internal experiences. Though both writers have unique voices, they are united in their ability to ground the uncanny in affectingly real worlds. In that vein, the...

 I've not been reading as much horror as I'd like, so I needed a short sharp burst of nightmares. For that,  Split Scream Volume 1  was the perfect package. The book consists of two novelettes by different authors, preceded by a (frankly welcome) editorial note explaining just what a novelette is, exactly. Then we're into it - two unique and compelling stories, each with their own dread atmosphere. The first novelette, Carson Winter's The Guts of Myth , grabs from the off. Just look at this opening: I always thought I looked a little like Roger Moore. I wore the same suits and I had the same chestnut hair. We were both English, even though I only got in on a technicality. The real difference between us was that he was a movie star and I was a crook. But that was fine. I doubted either of us were keeping score. Can there be any doubt that we're in the hands of a master? This is a punchy blend of noir and cosmic horror that calls to mind classic Laird Barron while mai...

 One thing I love is a themed horror collection. An array of different takes on the same theme, commonalities spiraling off into individual and idiosyncratic concepts. Make that theme something as deeply personal as a trans perspective on body horror, and you have the makings of something not only exciting and inventive, but insightful, painful, powerful. The variety on display here is dazzling and every story offers something unique; even some that explore similar territory on the surface do so through deeply personal lenses. Some are acutely, painfully in the present moment; others draw us to the distant past, imagined futures or other worlds. There are stories that invoke mundanity, the gothic, schlock, religious horror, science fiction, all spun around the anchor of the human body and its transformations. Speaking as someone who rarely feels grounded in his own body, these stories made me deathly aware of my chest tightening, my stomach churning, my skin crawling. None of these...

Three years ago, three friends broke into an abandoned house. A house haunted by fascism, a house that was fascism. What happened inside has transformed them all. Alice, a trans woman, is incessantly visited by ghosts as she drifts dissociated through a hollow life. Ila, once Alice's best friend, has become a minor celebrity among TERFs, but is uncomfortably aware of the way her new community tokenizes her Jewish and Pakistani identities. Hannah, the third of them, never came out at all. And always the House is there, waiting, looming, reassuring, threatening, promising, hating. There are words I want to attach to the experience of reading this book. Gruelling. Harrowing. Not because it is a slog - rather, the prose flies - but because of its subject matter and, perhaps more importantly, Rumfitt's skill in manifesting an atmosphere of oppression, in inhabiting the minds and bodies of the protagonists as they exist within that atmosphere, in pushing the reader on through misery ...

 Ambiguity is everywhere in Prince of Darkness . The thing that the religious and scientific characters can agree on is that there are places where the common-sense, intuitive rules do not apply, whether that's the level of quantum physics, or within the human heart. While Carpenter does juxtapose the scientific and religious viewpoints, they are not at odds with one another. Victor Wong's physicist and Donald Pleasance's priest are friends, not opponents, trying to work together to puzzle out the mystery. There is debate between the two positions, but, crucially, both recognise that they don't hold all the answers, that there are points where their certainties break down. Instead, they are both attempts to explain the universe from a human perspective - attempts that, it is increasingly clear, fall woefully short. This is cosmic horror, expressed not through the vast, but the minuscule. Just as humanity is humbled when looking outwards, into the boundless universe, so ...

 The two novellas and one short story that make up this collection are simultaneously very different in theme, and yet unified. The eponymous novella tells the story, through emails and IM chat logs, of two women who meet on a LGBT forum and begin an online relationship that - as we are informed from the off, these records apparently being considered as evidence relating to the death of one of the women - careers towards something very dark. The second novella, The Enchantment , follows two people grieving in a world in which the afterlife has apparently been scientifically disproved. The final story is about a man who, worried about impropriety and social norms, is pressured into making increasingly strange bets with a neighbour. So: as LaRocca themself discusses in the afterword, these works deal with themes like the need for human connection, even when it is unhealthy or destructive; the search for meaning in religion and outside it; the ways that social expectations contort our...

A teenage girl is forced into marriage. The director of a weapons project tries desperately to prepare a bioweapon that may defeat the wave of mass insanity spreading across the globe under a strange Yellow Sign. And an entity begins to hatch, to develop, and to prepare for battle. Three storylines, reverberating with one another through time and through realities, entwine to form this masterful novella from Joe Koch. This was one I was excited to read even before I realised it fit into the 'mythos' originating with Robert Chambers' King in Yellow stories, one I've always found evocative and fascinating. But rest assured that this novella doesn't just retread familiar ground - instead taking the familiar imagery of the Yellow Sign, the King (or sometimes Queen) in Yellow, and Carcosa as inspiration for something as unique as it is powerful. The strength of Koch's work is in recognising that a horror based on dreams and nightmares is at its strongest when manifes...

 At the start of July, Boris Johnson was revealed to be looking into a policy to create 50-year mortgages intended to be paid back by the applicants' children. So that's what came to mind as I began reading Andrew J. Stone's All Hail the House Gods , a novella in which the inhabitants of a tent city are forced to constantly produce children to sacrifice to hungry houses. From the off this concept is both inventive and timely (somehow even more the latter than it was four years ago) and it's one that allows the author to blend moral drama with some truly memorable imagery. Yet this firm foundation doesn't mean the structure proper is without cracks. The narrative follows two strands. Punctuated by glimpses into a scene in which our protagonist stands on the bridge sacrifices must cross to be consumed by the House Gods, the main story follows the steps that led him to that point. As both he and his wife, Katie, begin to seek ways to break out of the cycle of endless r...

"What we're doing to them... It's the same shit men did to us before" "They are men" "No. They're not, and I think you know it" I know, as a cis man, I'm not exactly the person that Manhunt  is for. Still, I want to get my thoughts on it out here because, well, I have a lot of them, and I've also seen the brigading this book has faced from people who haven't read it and I want to add a voice to the chorus of people talking about how incredible it is. Gretchen-Felker Martin's Manhunt  was one of my most anticipated reads in recent times and my only regret is that I didn't get to it sooner. Let's set the stage: in the near future, a virus nicknamed 't-rex' (and not, as I frequently had to remind myself, 'the t-virus') has ripped across the world, turning anyone with a sufficient level of testosterone into a slavering monster. Trans women, like our heroines Beth and Fran, are able to survive this post-apocal...

 An army is a horror. It's a horrible thing. They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.  Cisco wastes no time in getting to the punch with this novel, and this searing and clear-eyed voice drives the reader like a vengeful officer on a harrowing march through a landscape of nightmare, brutality and absurdity. Low, our protagonist - and (perhaps) the eponymous figure - is a student in a fantastical, dreamlike realm, called up to serve both as soldier and narrator in a convoluted war. Low's position as a 'military narrator' doesn't just serve as an introduction to the alien culture of its world - this is from the off a story about stories, about who gets to tell them and which we hear, and how they shape reality. This theme manifests in many forms, both more direct - such as Low's encounter with an enemy narrator later in the novel, or th...

     A few weeks ago my partner and I finished playing Parasite Eve , a game close to her heart but one I'd never tried. I had a vague idea of what it was like - a survival horror game with RPG elements - and the basics of the plot - an outbreak of 'intelligent' mitochondria taking over the humans that carry them. I admit that the latter was a thing that had put me off the game previously; 'but that's just not how mitochondria work', I had scoffed, essentially. But that simplistic dismissal of the game had kept me from a horror experience that I'm still thinking about now.     Parasite Eve  is the story of Aya, a NYPD officer who, in the game's dramatic opening sequence, is attending the opera on a date. At the crescendo of the performance, a singer who calls herself 'Eve' - a reference to the famed mitochondrial Eve that the game later makes explicit - causes the spontaneous combustion first of the rest of the cast, and then nearly the entire au...

It is inside me now. The seed has burrowed deep and I feel it beginning to sprout. My transformation cannot be far away. I tremble, though I know not if it is in fear or anticipation .  As soon as I heard about this collection I knew I had to read it. As a lifelong cosmic horror fan, a collection which focuses on the element of the sublime in horror - the sense of encountering something vast, unknowable, alien - was an easy sell. The wondrous can be much more chilling than the base or more overtly grotesque, exposing as it does the absurdity of existence and the irrelevance of the human, of humanity, in a vast and limitless universe. This collection takes that idea as a focus, and it's a fantastic theme. Too easily did I allow myself to be led on that path. For so long had I searched for something more, something greater, than this existence, and it was so tantalisingly close. The first thing that stands out to the reader is Mamatas' confident and nuanced understanding of the t...