URBAN GOTHIC By Brian Keene – Reviewed

Does this book represent horror? Probably not present day horror as the book is now nearly ten years old. It certainly feels of a time, although is that because it feels so familiar? There’s nothing in the book to date it, no trademarks or brands that are now defunct. No historic attitude or clothes. Cellphones, that most telling of recent items, are present.

So what are we looking at here? A haunted house story… Essentially. But one with a twisted sense of realism. The house is only haunted by hideously deformed human beings, cannibals, rabid and misshapen.

A group of teenagers enter the house, having been chased through a bad neighbourhood by a gang of not-so-ruthless “thugs”, little knowing the rumours and stories about it. Then they find themselves trapped inside, the prey of dangerous, mutated cannibals in a desperate struggle to survive.

Keene gives us familiar tropes and twists them, much in the same way Edward Lee does, so keeping a realism that is shocking and nasty, in the same way Ketchum managed with Off Season. The horror here is the brutality of humanity rather than actual monsters.

Back to my original question, does this book represent horror? To a certain extent, yes, it does. There isn’t anything new here. The entire problem with the genre is that it’s stuck with a single and simple premise, the evocation of an emotion: fear. Sure, it’s actually pretty difficult to achieve. And it’s the same things that make us scared, like haunted houses, crazy killers, and this book plays on those stereotypes. The failure of the book, as the failure with most horror novels, and the failure of the genre, is that in order for us to feel fear, to be scared, to be horrified, is that we need to feel.

Keene does a good job, this is by no means a bad horror novel. But it failed to make me feel. SF often does a similar job of not making me feel anything for the main characters, but SF is about ideas. If I’m not emotionally involved in the characters in an SF novel it doesn’t mean the book fails. For me, now, horror fails if I don’t feel. If the main characters are brutally tortured and killed and I don’t care, then they might as well not have been killed and I might as well not have bothered.

I’ve read far too many books in my forty odd years for everything to touch me. I’m jaded. I’m cynical. I don’t care about real people most of the time, why would I care about some words on a page. But that’s what good horror makes me do. It doesn’t have to be a whole novel, sometimes it’s a scene in a fantasy. The torture scene in an Andy Remic fantasy novel had me cringing for several pages, because I cared about the characters. Without that engagement horror is dead.

That is the main reason Stephen King is successful, he draws you into the story, gets you involved with the characters and then he hurts them, and by extension, he hurts you too.

For all his stereotype twisting and all his brutality (which I did enjoy), Keene failed to make me feel anything. This isn’t a bad book by any means, and like the genre itself, I feel I’ve grown out of it a little. Not by choice, I wish I jumped at the scary parts of films, I wish I loved every character I read about, but I don’t. The novelty has worn off.

May be horror is not my genre any more.

COLDHEART CANYON By Clive Barker (Audiobook) Read by Frank Fuller – Reviewed

This is huge, it’s epic. The novel is 751 pages, and the audiobook is 1360 minutes! Which is long, really long. What we have here would make an excellent and fairly brutal short novel, stretched out beyond all necessity into a massive, sprawling tale of Hollywood excess. A ghost story at its heart.

Actor and superstar Todd Pickett’s career is on the wane. On the advice of a studio executive he goes to see the premier plastic surgeon, who promptly botches his face-lift, leaving Todd a mass of scar tissue and wounds. As the tabloid frenzy around his disappearance begins, Todd needs to find a nice hideaway so that he can relax and recuperate. But unfortunately he finds himself in Coldheart Canyon, home to many a ghost from Hollywood’s past, and Katya Lupi, a near hundred-year-old former movie star who has managed to retain her looks for the past eighty years.

Intermixed with this is a stalker fan, a portrait of the dirty-nasty underbelly of Hollywood, Satan’s wife and son, an ancient curse, and all manner of other stuff.

Despite an excellent reading, it even feels like Frank has had enough about three quarters of the way through. He ploughs on, giving us a nice change of voice for each of the characters, although it does get a bit confusing towards the end when all the characters are together. The problem with the audiobook, is the same problem the novel has. It’s just too long, too long-winded, like Barker is being paid by the word. Of course, in book form it’s probably not quite so evident, but the audiobook version becomes like water torture as it continually continues, seemingly without end. Just when you think it’s all done and dusted, I won’t spoil it for you, but it could well have been the end, you’re forced to endure another several hours of what could have been summed up quite well in a ten-page epilogue.

This is a shame, because the reading is good. For my first professional venture into audiobooks (I usually download for free from librivox), I was delighted. To begin with anyway. A shame it was wasted on this overlong rubbish.

HEART-SHAPED BOX By Joe Hill Reviewed

HEART-SHAPED BOX By Joe Hill

Debut novels are often not judged on their merit, but rather, on their author’s potential. First novels are often more heart-felt, simpler, more personal and direct than the books that follow.

While the Heart-Shaped Box contains all the goodness of a debut, it feels much more accomplished, more experienced and complex than most first novels.

At the book’s heart it an emotional integrity you rarely find with veteran authors, let alone newbies. Judas Coyne is a semi-retired rock star in the vein of Ozzy Osbourne, a Satanic-ish rocker in his mid-fifties, and a collector of strange items. When his assistant finds a ghost for sale on an auction website Coyne buys it, little knowing that the ghost in question is the stepfather of his ex-girlfriend – who killed herself after Coyne threw her out – and is out for vengeance against the man who ruined his daughter.

What follows is a chase across the US as Coyne and his current girlfriend attempt to outrun the ghost and destroy it, while the ghost plays havoc with their minds, trying to punish Coyne and getting him to kill his girlfriend and then himself.

There is no black and white here, only shades of grey, as the ghost uses the bad in Coyne to create the horrific scenarios.

This is tense stuff, brutally realistic and heart wrenching, despite the ghostly aspect. Besides that there’s far too much child-abuse, in all its varied forms, for this to be just entertainment.

What Hill has produced is a book that makes you uncomfortable and nervous, makes you enjoy some of the pain, and produces a character in Coyne at once unlike able and loveable.

Much more complex and daring than a young novelist normally allows themselves to be, Heart-Shaped Box is an extremely accomplished novel. It’s one of those books it hurts to put down, but in some ways it also hurts to pick up. Hill writes with a skill that makes this writer want to give up. Every single word drags you deeper into the story, wanting to find out more as the mystery unravels.

Heart-Shaped Box is one of those rare treats, a first novel that astounds in its brilliance and leaves you begging for more. Give me more Joe Hill!