The Bedlam Detective (2012) by Stephen Gallagher: The second of Stephen Gallagher's Sebastian Becker series, in which Becker investigates whether mentally unstable nobles in Edwardian England should be committed. That's for the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy. Seriously. That was a thing.
In The Bedlam Detective, Becker has been sent to the coastal English countryside to investigate and fill a report on the sanity of Sir Owain Lancaster. Lancaster led a disastrous expedition into the Amazon Basin several years previous and then emerged claiming that nearly the entire party was killed by giant monsters. He's a pariah now, but is he crazy?
But as Becker arrives, two girls go missing. Becker, a former Pinkerton, gets involved in the search for the girls right off the train. And then, having proven himself useful to investigating detective Stephen Reed, Becker gets more and more involved in the mystery of the girls, the mystery of Owain Lancaster, the mystery of the monsters... well, a lot of mystery!
Gallagher spikes his novel with lots of intriguing historical details without overloading the reader or getting too far away from the mystery. There's a lot of modern psychology involved -- among other things, Becker's 18-year-old son is a high-functioning autistic savant in a world where the term 'autism' does not exist.
But the mystery of Lancaster is also probed from a psychological POV, often ranging into the possibility of a serial killer and his motivations though the term wouldn't be coined for another 60 years. Gallagher also touches upon Great Britain's Suffragette movement through another major character.
Telling details also include the utterly botched collection of evidence at a crime scene, infuriating Becker, and a marvelous sequence in London with a thick fog having rolled in. Becker's son is sensitively and believably drawn -- autism hasn't given him "super-powers" as is often portrayed in current TV and cinema, but it does allow him to help out on the case because of his intense powers of close analysis and organization.
Everything will dovetail together by the end. An early version of the personal movie camera will play a part. So, too, South American caterpillars and an odd early example of the automobile. There will be tragedy. And maybe even a pay raise for Becker, who desperately needs a new suit and whose office at Bethlehem Hospital is so squalid that he takes all his messages at a meat-pie stand. Highly recommended.
Last Days (2012) by Adam Nevill: Impoverished English 'guerilla' documentarian Kyle Freeman makes critically regarded documentaries with the help of Dan, his cameraman, and Finger Mouse, his film editor. But when the wealthy producer of a line of successful, New Agey books and movies offers a $100,000 advance to make a film about an odd, early 1970's Doomsday Cult known as The Temple of the Last Days, Kyle jumps at the chance to get out of debt.
The only problem from a creative standpoint for Kyle is that the entire shooting schedule has already been set, the interviewees paid to appear. But he can work around that.
The supernatural stuff may be a bit harder to deal with.
Last Days is probably Nevill's most purely enjoyable horror novel. There's a lot less focus on physical suffering here than in Nevill's other long-form works. Oh, there's suffering. But much of it is psychological. And a lot of Kyle's psychological suffering comes from the tension between his mounting terror at the supernatural events swirling around him and his occasionally selfish, stubborn drive to make the film, gets the shots, tell the story.
The details of Kyle's film-making have been well-researched and deployed -- Last Days is almost a guide to making documentaries on a budget. Kyle, for his faults, is an engaging protagonist. And as the details of the Temple of the Last Days emerge, the reader becomes more and more unnerved.
The Temple resembles a number of 1960's and 1970's cults, quite intentionally -- as per usual, Nevill details his research in his Acknowledgements section. Even a glancing familiarity with the subject yields up Charles Manson and Jim Jones as influences; so, too, Est and Scientology.
The leader of this cult, Sister Katherine, led her followers on a six-year odyssey from London to rural France to Los Angeles to Arizona. In Arizona, the Temple seemingly met its end in some sort of murder-suicide outburst that left Sister Katherine dead as well. But now, 40 years later, the remaining members of the Temple are dying under mysterious circumstances even as Kyle and Dan pursue the story.
Nevill maintains a rapid pace throughout, globe-trotting to a wide variety of places no one would want to visit. The supernatural elements build. The excitement of Kyle at having possibly filmed a ghost (or something) at their first location soon gives way to fear as the supernatural incidents and the traces they leave behind become more and more disturbing and potentially dangerous.
Things get a little bonkers at the climax, but Nevill mostly sticks a landing that's both horrific and bleakly humourous. Kyle's trip to Amsterdam to learn the origin of the evils of the Temple is a high point of the latter stages of the novel, a detailed revelation of something that doesn't eliminate the mystery of where that something, that SOMETHING, came from. There's also a clever bit of universe-building related to Nevill's previous novels that occurs early in the novel; I'll leave you to figure it out. Highly recommended.
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): written by Christopher Landon and Chad Feehan; directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman; starring Kathryn Newton (Alex), Katie Featherston (Katie), Matt Shively (Ben), Aiden Lovekamp (Wyatt), and Brady Allen (Robbie): Jesus, there are two more Paranormal Activity movies after this one. The Law of Diminishing Returns will not stop this franchise!
If you're scoring at home, the linear chronology of the Paranormal Activity movies goes 3, 2, 1, 4, 5, and 6.
There are a couple of good moments in Paranormal Activity 4. There might have been more had the movie been made five years later, when smart-phone video technology was better. Why do I say this? Because teenaged girl protagonist (Supernatural's Kathryn Newton, aka the angry, monster-fighting daughter of Castiel's human host) spends about a third of the movie carrying a goddamned laptop around so she can talk to her boyfriend and film supernatural incidents at the same time. Yeah, that isn't... awkward.
Anyway, the demons and ghosts are now nigh-omnipotent, which means that the movie soporifically muddles towards pretty much the same ending as the first three. Newton does what she can, but she's adrift in a sea of nihilistic found-footage nonsense. Not recommended, and really no fun at all.
The Darkness (2016): written by Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong, and Shane Krause; directed by Greg McLean; starring Kevin Bacon (Peter Taylor), Radha Mitchell (Bronny Taylor), David Mazouz (Michael Taylor), Lucy Fry (Stephanie Taylor), Paul Reiser (Peter's Boss), Ilza Ponko (Gloria Ortega), and Alma Martinez (Teresa Morales): The Darkness isn't a good movie, but it's at least a better remake of Poltergeist (1982) than Poltergeist (2015).
The Taylor family (Mom Radha Mitchell, Dad Kevin Bacon, bulimic teenaged daughter Lucy Fry and autistic son David 'Bruce Wayne' Mazouz) vacations at the Grand Canyon. However, autistic son Mikey walks off with five stones from a secret Anasazi chamber. Removing the stones from the chamber frees five demons from imprisonment in the Phantom Zone. Well, whatever.
As it apparently takes months for these demons to power up, the Taylor family gets bedevilled at an ever-increasing rate by water taps that turn themselves on, bulimia, potential marital infidelity, and loud bumps in the night. Mikey now has an imaginary friend he calls 'Jenny.'
So a bunch of stuff happens that's a lot like Poltergeist, only with nods to the mysterious Anasazi civilization rather than Indian burial grounds. Mikey is enamored of his demonic friends. No one else is. Thankfully, the Internet is quite authoritative on the subject of Anasazi demons! Though based on the screenshots we see, Mom and Pop get all their information from the same web page.
Director Greg McLean made his name with Wolf Creek and also directed the underwhelming Belko Experiment. He achieves some nice horror effects here. He also seems to forget what establishing shots are at key moments. Oh, well. There's a wise Hispanic psychic and her wise psychic grand-daughter to help straighten things out with the help of some sort of demonic diving rod made out of coat-hangers.
The portrayal of autism in The Darkness isn't exactly offensive. It just seems... undercooked. Mikey is either robotically gormless or suddenly HUMAN. David Mazouz does what he can with the character, but you really start to hate Mikey, which I don't think was the intention. Lucy Fry is much better than she needs to be in the role of bulimic sister/demonic punching bag. Radha Mitchell is also fine in a somewhat underwritten part.
And Kevin Bacon! He's quite convincing as a sleazy, affair-prone, distracted white-collar (he's an architect) Dad and somewhat less convincing as Good, Self-Sacrificing Dad. His hair is crazy, though not unjustified -- he looks like a 50-year-old guy trying to look young and failing miserably when he remembers his pomade and failing really, really miserably when he forgets his pomade and his hair looks like a toupee made of badly-dyed straw.
I mean, it's really a bad movie, but it's an enjoyable bad movie. Recommended.
The Color Over Occam (2012) by Jonathan Thomas: Set in and around the New England town of Occam, The Color Over Occam is narrated by Occam city clerk Jeffrey Slater. Slater and his friend Wil run a public access cable show involving their investigations of the supernatural. As the novel begins, they're paddling around the city reservoir -- once farmland but flooded since the 1920's -- investigating claims of "ghost lights" on the waters at night. And they find them. But they're not ghosts.
You see, Occam was renamed from its original 'Arkham' a couple of decades back. And readers of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal horror story "The Color Out of Space" will quickly recognize that demon-haunted reservoir...
Thomas' first novel is a witty, cynical, often satiric addition to the Cthulhu Mythos. The problems of civic politics (and politicians covering their own asses) make for a welcome new spin on cosmic horror. There are points at which The Color Over Occam is quite funny, and not always bleakly (though Thomas does bleak too!).
I think one can read The Color Over Occam without having read "The Color Out of Space." Or perhaps preferably, read or re-read Lovecraft's story AFTER reading The Color Over Occam. Thomas deftly weaves the original into his novel without imitating Lovecraft's prose or narrative emphases.
While there's drollery and a bit of comic over-emphasis at points in the narrative, the text maintains a sense of verisimilitude throughout. How would a small-town government deal with cosmic horror building in its town? How would an amateur ghost-finder deal with potentially world-shattering events? How will Slater deal with his low alcohol tolerance? Why does office work suck so much?
The Color Over Occam compares favourably with several novels I can think of. Its occasionally hapless protagonist and the cosmic but town-centric events he's trapped within remind me of Ramsey Campbell's Creatures of the Pool and The Last Revelation of Gla'aki. The office- and civic-based comedy repeatedly reminded me of William Browning Spencer's hilarious Resumé with Monsters. And the subject matter recalls Michael Shea's fun, pulpy sequel to Lovecraft's original, The Color Out of Time.
But this novel is also its own self with an unusual mix of wit, satire, cosmic horror, and body horror that pay suitable homage to Lovecraft's great original without attempting to mimic "The Color Out of Space" in form, style, or mood. Highly recommended.
Where Furnaces Burn (2012) by Joel Lane, containing the following stories:
A Cup of Blood (2004), A Mouth to Feed by (2008), Beth's Law (2009), Black Country (2010), Blind Circles (2004), Blue Smoke (2012), Dreams of Children (2012), Even the Pawn (2012), Facing the Wall (2004), Incry (2011), Morning's Echo (2010), My Stone Desire (2007), Point of Departure (2012), Quarantine (2012), Slow Burn (2012), Stiff as Toys (1998), Still Water (2007),The Hostess (2010), The Last Witness (2010), The Receivers (2002), The Sunken City (2012), The Victim Card (2004), Waiting for the Thaw (2012), Wake Up in Moloch (2012), Winter Journey (2008), and Without a Mind (2012).
Winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award for best collection, Where Furnaces Burn is a story cycle from the late and much lamented Joel Lane, England's horror-poet of the industrial, rusting North where much of this book is set. Where Furnaces Burn follows the police career of its first-person narrator in and around the Manchester area.
Lane tended to avoid long short stories, preferring to write short, dense works that nonetheless generally worked as stories and not as fragments of vignettes. That's true here -- though the stories form a larger pattern, they also for the most part stand on their own.
Here we deal again and again with horrors rising out of industrial decay, poverty, and modern alienation (and the protagonist may be the most alienated of them all). Lane's prose is superbly suited to his interests -- poetic at points, grim, and pragmatically matter-of-fact even in the most poetic moments.
These are supernatural stories, mind you, not simply hardboiled excursions into Northern English crime. Ancient horrors adapt to the modern world; new horrors are born. Lane's spiritual forebears include American Fritz Leiber, whose 1940 short story "Smoke Ghost" invented a new way of evoking the horrors of the industrialized world. They also include Ramsey Campbell and his groundbreaking 'kitchen-sink' horror that began in the late 1960's.
It's all disturbing, sad, and often strangely moving. But Lane also conjures up some fearsome horrors, whether newly minted or ancient and adapting to the Brave New Decaying World. It's brilliant stuff, and a fitting coda to a great writing career. Highly recommended.
The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell (2012): Campbell's newest novel comes with what initially appears to be a fairly innocuous cover -- until you realize that it's impossible to duplicate what the person on the cover is doing with his hands. Unless, maybe, you're double-jointed. I didn't check on that.
At the taping of a British talk show much like The Jerry Springer Show, soon-to-be-30 Luke discovers that his father isn't really his father, and his mother isn't really his mother, thanks to DNA tests. His uncle seems to know something about this, but he dies of a heart attack before he can tell Luke much of anything. As Luke starts to delve into what his uncle knew, using that uncle's strange journal as a guide, more deaths and disappearances follow.
Luke's expecting his first child with his partner Sophie, a classical guitarist. Luke himself is a rising comedian who specializes in an act that's an odd combination of mimicry and commentary on the foibles and failings of people. Luke's always been a terrific mimic, and was incredibly precocious in a way that seems like a sly homage to the precocious, early-reading H.P. Lovecraft, whom Campbell emulated early in his own precocious writing career.
And Luke was plagued by nightmares as a child about vaguely human-shaped things creeping into his bedroom to watch him at night. Now the nightmares have returned. Soon, they're no longer nightmares: they're what Luke sees in the daytime.
In what is Campbell's shortest novel in decades, a fabulous blending occurs of some of his own mythologies (references to other Campbell works span almost his entire writing career, from "The Franklyn Paragraphs" of the 1960's through The Doll Who Ate His Mother of the 1970's to The Grin of the Dark from 2004) and an assortment of myths and legends about fairies in the British Isles. "The Kind Folk" is just one of the terms used by fearful people to curry favour with fairy, who were not traditionally known for their kindness.
Luke's quest is extremely personal, though there are potentially apocalyptic ramifications to his quest to understand his origins. His uncle mapped out hot spots throughout the British Isles where another world seemed to be leaking through into this one -- and when Luke visits these places, very odd things start to happen. And people other than himself start to see the figures from his childhood, and not simply in dreams.
It's a solid, understated effort from Campbell, one whose chills are often existential, and whether or not the myths and legends of Fairyland herein are 'real' or invented by Campbell, they possess the haunting quality of real legend. Highly recommended.
