This review originally appeared on Goodreads on February 6, 2019.

The Burrowers Beneath

By Brian Lumley – Grafton Books – January 1, 1974

Review by Robin Marx

This was a fun but not earthshaking (oh-ho-ho) addition to the Cthulhu Mythos.

The book has a lot of fun ideas. The subterranean squid-like Chthonian creatures themselves are great. The Wilmarth Foundation, a secret organization of like-minded individuals working against the Mythos, is also an interesting addition to the canon. The execution of the book is a bit less than ideal, however.

The book is structured as an epistolary novel, composed of both letters and diary entries from a variety of characters. Some of the letters are very atmospheric and engrossing. The stories about about a mine inspector who encounters extraterrene eggs and a coastal rig that strikes more than oil stand out in particular. The result is a bit uneven, with mostly self-contained vignettes that are actually more entertaining than the primary narrative. And although he's positioned as the protagonist, Titus Crow is a passive figure for much of the book, either being directed by or receiving exposition from helpful supporting characters that seek him out.

While apparently set in the modern day (the early 1970s, when the book was published), Lumley's obvious affection for Lovecraft and old-fashioned gentleman's club occult detective yarns leads to a story that seems strangely untethered in time. Lumley's master occultist character Titus Crow seems like he'd be more at home in one of William Hope Hodgson's Edwardian Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder stories and Crow's Watson-style sidekick Henri-Laurent de Marigny also seems like a similar throwback to an earlier era. It felt a bit off reading about these smoking jacket / brandy snifter types discussing atomic testing.

There are some creepy moments as the Chthonians' capabilities are gradually revealed, but they don't get as much time in the spotlight as I would have liked. For ageless, godlike beings they turn out to be pushovers once the humans in the story figure out what's going on and get their act together. Apart from one fascinating scene detailing an attack on a massive captive Chthonian, the expulsion of the Chthonians from the British Isles is mostly glossed over. The book's conclusion feels like “Yeah, we lost some guys along the way but things mostly went according to plan.”

It's also interesting to note that the Chthonians only start acting directly against humans when their eggs are stolen or tampered with. They don't seem like much of a menace to humanity otherwise, apart from worshipping unappealing alien gods. In this aspect they brought to mind the misunderstood Horta from the original Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark.”

Some readers describe Lumley's Cthulhu Mythos output as Lovecraft fanfic. While that feels a bit uncharitable, it's not wrong, either. Lumley also borrows heavily from August Derleth's reinterpretation of the Mythos, where human beings have a certain level of Elder God support in the war against the “evil” Great Old Ones. Star-Signs of Mnar are wielded like crucifixes in the face of “CCDs” (Cthulhu Cycle Deities). While this sort of thing can be fun—I personally believe the Cthulhu Mythos is a sort of “big tent” that can accommodate everything from The Dunwich Horror to Bride of Re-Animator—readers hoping for actual cosmic horror are likely to be disappointed.

I enjoyed this book, but Lovecraft purists are better off reading something closer to the original source.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on November 3, 2020.

The Scarlet Gospels

By Clive Barker – St. Martin's Press – May 19, 2015

Review by Robin Marx

While this book was a page-turner and a nice return to form for Clive Barker, it’s a little light on plot and characterization.

The story brings together Barker’s occult detective character Harry D’Amour (probably most famous in his film incarnation, played by Scott Bakula in Lord of Illusions) and the demonic Hell Priest Pinhead, who was briefly introduced in the novella The Hellbound Heart and made famous in the Hellraiser movies. More interested in the human world than his colleagues, Pinhead arranges things so that Harry has no choice but to serve as Pinhead’s “witness” as the Cenobite enacts his master plan for Hell.

It was a bit of a disappointment seeing Pinhead reduced to a demon of middling influence in the Judeo-Christian Hell rather than a more dominating figure from the more enigmatic realm in the original novella and films. That being said, Pinhead is every bit as imposing as fans of the character would hope. The geography and politics of Hell are also intriguing and mysterious, if a bit under-explained.

It was nice seeing Harry again, but the friends that join him on his journey into the underworld could have been fleshed out a bit more. Their banter and flirtations could’ve had a bit more weight if they had a bit more development beyond “tall gay tattoo artist,” “heavily tattooed aggressive woman,” etc.

I enjoyed Barker’s gruesome prose. A lot of his more recent work has been in the Young Adult genre or straying towards lightly supernatural lit flick, but there’s plenty of old-fashioned Barker blood-letting in this story. There’s also a lot of beautiful and evocative scenes, another Barker specialty.

This book could have been much more—apparently the manuscript was edited down quite a bit—but it was still nice glimpsing Barker returning to his beloved characters.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on June 22, 2011.

The Ghost Pirates

By William Hope Hodgson – Stanley Paul – 1909

Review by Robin Marx

As with The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', William Hope Hodgson makes excellent use of his experience as a sailor, serving up an atmospheric ghost story. Apart from the nautical theme, however, The Ghost Pirates is a very different book from The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', and in some ways an inferior one.

The highlights of this book are without a doubt the dialogue and the atmosphere. The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' lacked any spoken dialogue, so its inclusion here is a nice change. The jargon-sprinkled sea salt conversations are at times hard to follow, but they feel authentic and flavorful. Some reviewers bemoan the lack of a glossary of nautical terms—Hodgson doesn't go to any effort to explain capstans and binnacles to the reader—but I didn't feel as if missing out on a word here or there impacted my enjoyment of the overall story.

While the plot itself is quite sleight (a characteristic shared by all of the Hodgson novels I've read to date), its execution is well done. Hodgson was a master of atmosphere, setting up a number of strange occurrences that gradually build into a tense, unnerving scenario.

I enjoyed The Ghost Pirates, but I think I would've liked it better had I read it before The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', rather than immediately afterward. 'Glen Carrig' is filled with such bizarre fever dream imagery that the spirits of the dead, however spooky, seem rather conventional by comparison. That being said, The Ghost Pirates is an interesting traditional ghost story, and well told.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 3, 2014.

Bait

Edited by J. Kent Messum – Plume – August 27, 2013

Review by Robin Marx

Short and nasty, this little book was sort of a combination between The Most Dangerous Game and Saw. The premise was simple but effective: shadowy figures maroon six junkies on a remote archipelago in the Florida Keys, then place a package of heroin and supplies on a neighboring island. The addicts are forced to deal with aggressive sharks and their murderous audience, who watch from an offshore yacht. The heroin acts as bait for the addicts, and the addicts are bait for the sharks. Exciting stuff!

While the author kept things moving fast, the first half of the book was still hindered by the presence of six unnecessary and redundant flashbacks. The characters' backgrounds were all pretty similar (“I used to be X, then got hooked on heroin. Yesterday I was stalked and rendered unconscious by beefy guys.”), and they end up verbally explaining their circumstances to the other characters anyway. The flashbacks are mercifully brief, but they distract from the characters' more exciting present and end up feeling like filler. The book could have shed this bit of fat and become an even better, punchier novella.

While the characters were a little thin—the non-shark antagonists seemed a bit like comic book baddies—the story's pace was brisk and action-packed. While the term “pulp” is often used by snobs to dismiss stories that emphasize action and excitement over characterization and deep reflection, Bait is a good, modern embodiment of the best qualities of the pulp adventure tale. If the premise intrigues you, by all means give this book a read.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on October 23, 2021.

We Are All Completely Fine

By Daryl Gregory – Tachyon Publications – July 21, 2014

Review by Robin Marx

This brief novel (novella?) is about a group therapy circle where all the participants are sole survivors of supernaturally-tinged massacres. One patient was partially consumed by cannibals, another escaped from a cult that inscribed every inch of her flesh with occult scars, another was held captive by a deranged otherworldly killer that carved macabre artwork into her bones. They meet on a weekly basis, each searching for solace and companionship, but their fragile steps towards peace are halted when the past catches up to one of their members.

This is a fast, fun story with an interesting premise. However, I felt like it selected and followed up on the least interesting plot thread. I found Greta’s story the least compelling of any of the survivors’, and the book suffered in the second half when it made that the central focus. There was so much good stuff hinted at in the other characters’ pasts, and I would have rather liked to learn more about pretty much any of the other characters than Greta.

This story is still worth reading, but it felt like a great premise squandered.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on June 25, 2022.

Junkyard Leopard

By Oliver Brackenbury – Brackenbooks – November 26, 2018

Review by Robin Marx

This violent tale tells the story of Mary, an awkward and lonely girl who works scrapping cars at a junkyard. By night she dresses in a faceless leopard print costume, murdering the corrupt and venal capitalists of the city’s financial district by the dozens. Where Mary is insecure and shy, her alter ego The Figure is driven and fearless. While Mary navigates daily life as a member of the working poor, even falling in love along the way, The Figure works to hunt down Gerald Byrne, a ruthless financier who barely survived a previous attack.

Despite the Amazon categorization, there’s nothing particularly comedic about the book. It felt like splatterpunk-lite to me; there’s moments of extremely graphic violence, but it always felt like the author took a step back before going full splatterpunk and really reveling in the gore. The tech level seemed about five years or so more advanced than our own, adding some subtle cyberpunk overtones, but urban horror seems the most natural home for the novel.

Tonally, the book reminded me a bit of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but the book feels borne out of an Elder Millennial author’s tremendous frustration and disappointment with the current state of the world. The social contract has been broken. Working hard is no longer a guarantee of a comfortable and secure life, and traditional paths to success like university education and full-time careers are increasingly unattainable. The middle class is shrinking, and everyday we suffer a constant media barrage of suffering and fear. Late stage capitalism is abusive and unsustainable.

And rather than just attributing it to some vague societal malaise, it’s often quite easy to identify the specific companies, executives, and politicians that are taking an active hand in increasing the misery of the world so as to enrich themselves to ever more obscene levels. We know who these people are. And this book offers the cathartic fantasy of being able to take direct action and strike back at our tormentors. To make them feel the same desperation and insecurity they inflict on so many. To fuck up some billionaires with a customized claw hammer.

This is a brisk read. The sympathetic characters are well-rendered, and Mary’s romance subplot is handled in a charming and relatable way. The antagonists, on the other hand, tend towards caricature. They’re irredeemable comic book villains. Certain sections of the book are written from their perspectives, but they’re not leavened with any kind of sympathetic traits. I chalked this up to them being more symbols than characters. Elsewhere in the book Brackenbury demonstrates he can handle nuance, with the antagonists he chooses not to.

Recommended for fans of Fight Club and The Punisher.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on January 28, 2020.

Before You Sleep: Three Horrors

By Adam L.G. Nevill – RITUAL LIMITED – August 23, 2016

Review by Robin Marx

This free sampler contains three short horror stories from Adam Nevill's first collection, Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors. I enjoyed Nevill's novel The Ritual (recently adapted as a Netflix movie), and the stories collected here have a similar ominous feel.

The first story, “Where Angels Come In,” is very effectively creepy. It involves two boys exploring an abandoned building, only to find it occupied by a variety of terrifying creatures. The ghostly inhabitants are very imaginatively described, and the impressionistic touch given the violence in the story makes it even more disturbing. I was impressed by how well executed this story was despite the somewhat well-worn premise.

The second installment, “Ancestors,” was well done, but not quite as engaging. In this story, a young girl finds herself living in an old home secretly inhabited by animated toys and a snuggly girl of a similar age who is, to the reader, blatantly a ghost. While the premise is intriguing, there were a few storytelling choices made that ended up hurting the story in my opinion. One was the vague touch with description. While the blurry lens worked in the first story, it obscured events just a little too much this time. I also felt the decision to make the family Japanese was a little baffling. The setting of the story didn't seem tied to a particular locale; the way the house was described (e.g., with several fireplaces) didn't sound particularly Japanese in terms of architecture, and no specific folklore appeared to be drawn on apart from the fairly familiar Sadako/Kayako-style ghost girl. I'm not saying all stories about Japanese people have to go all-in on cultural references, but this story would have been much the same had it been about an English family in Nevill's native England.

The third and final story, “Florrie,” was the weakest one in the bunch for me. A young man buys a house that an elderly woman had died in, and finds himself increasingly influenced by her ghost. The writing was fine, but it happened to be the third haunted house story in a row, and the effects of said ghost struck me as more comical than creepy.

While it felt like the book ended off on a bit of a weak note, it fulfilled its purpose of introducing me to the short fiction of Adam Nevill. I liked what I saw, and I plan to read more by this author.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on August 8, 2022.

Clown in a Cornfield

By Adam Cesare – HarperCollins – August 25, 2020

Review by Robin Marx

Uprooted from Philadelphia after the death of her mother, Quinn Maybrook and her father move to the rural town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, for a change of scenery. She attempts to befriend her high school classmates, but quickly realizes that the personal relationships surrounding her are more complicated than they appear, and the town as a whole harbors a collective trauma simmering just under the surface. Looming over it all is Frendo, an ominous clown mascot emblazoned on the town's burned-out corn processing plant.

This fast-paced book is a throwback to the lurid spinner-rack paperbacks and 80-minute straight-to-VHS horror flicks of the 80s. The title is a good example of truth in advertising. You want a murderous clown in a cornfield? Here you go.

While I enjoyed the book, I couldn't help thinking that it was also a victim of its own pacing. The violence ramps up pretty quickly and remains pretty constant through the end of the book. The results are action-packed, but the horror side could have benefited from more page count devoted to setting up a menacing atmosphere, hinting more at the wrongness of Kettle Springs, and building some more audience affection for the teenagers before slaughtering them.

Published by HarperTeen, this is apparently a Young Adult book. The violence is pretty graphic, and apart from the focus on teenaged characters there don't appear to be many concessions to the younger audience. It reminded me a bit of the old Christopher Pike YA horror novels, which could be similarly gory.

While it appears that a follow-up volume, Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, is forthcoming, I'm not sure I'm in a rush to read it. I feel like my cornfield clown needs have been satisfied. The itch has been scratched. That being said, I'd happily read other work by author Adam Cesare.

Recommended for killer clown fans and readers who don't mind a heavier emphasis on the action- part of action-horror.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on June 22, 2015.

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

By Laird Barron – Night Shade Books – July 1, 2007

Review by Robin Marx

This anthology collects more unsettling weird tales by Laird Barron. The overall quality is high, but a couple of the stories suffer from being too obscure (“Procession of the Black Sloth,” which has a great atmosphere otherwise) or a little slight plot-wise (“The Royal Zoo is Closed”). “Old Virginia,” “Parallax,” and the title story are particularly strong and creepy. I continue to enjoy Laird Barron's brand of thoroughly modern Lovecraftian fiction that doesn't rely on Lovecraft's monsters.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on May 29, 2012.

Meg: Origins

By Steve Alten – Gere Donovan Press – August 16, 2011

Review by Robin Marx

Many people would characterize the Meg series as a guilty pleasure. I think it's silly to get apologetic about one's choice in entertainment, but I'd certainly admit that Alten's books are goofy. The subject matter (giant prehistoric sharks!) is so appealing, however, that I have no trouble ignoring the creaky bits and enjoying the ride.

I've always liked sharks, and Alten focuses on one of the most interesting of all: Carcharodon megalodon, ancestor to the great white shark. Through some REALLY flimsy science and frantic “ignore the man behind the curtain” hand-waving Alten brings the megalodon up from the Mariana Trench to where it can snack on people for four books, with a fifth on the way.

Meg: Origins is an e-book prequel novella to his first story, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. The events in this prequel are referred to a number of times throughout the series, making this prequel fairly redundant and unnecessary. Still, I was lured in by the premise (giant prehistoric sharks!) and the $0.99 price tag. The story had all the familiar issues—stilted prose, paper-thin characters, chunks of scientific exposition that still manages to seem hinky—but as with the other books, the giant prehistoric shark action makes up for the weak spots. Did I mention this book has giant prehistoric sharks(!) in it?

Steve Alten is not an especially technically skilled author, but he is a very enthusiastic one. It's easy to imagine him at his computer thinking “Oh man, wouldn't it be cool if THIS happened?!” and then tapping away frantically. The 12-year-old inside me agrees: yes, it would be totally cool. Radical, in fact.

I doubt I'll pick up his non-Meg stories, but as long as he keeps writing more books about giant prehistoric sharks(!), he's got a customer in me.

★★★☆☆

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