The Hollower (2007) by Mary SanGiovanni

The Hollower (2007) by Mary SanGiovanni:  Gary Braunbeck, Brian Keene, and James A. Moore all give rave blurbs to this first novel from Mary SanGiovanni. And it's a fairly solid piece of supernatural horror. But it also transformed from novel to first part of a trilogy somewhere in the publication and/or sales process, making for yet another ending in which nothing, really, is resolved. I hate that shit. 

Steve Ditko's The Question

The eponymous monster, a supernatural creature created by SanGiovanni, becomes a bit of a Swiss Army Knife by the conclusion of the novel, able to work with both hallucinations and real-world violence, and with a weakness that seems awfully contrived. If you've read comic books, it probably doesn't help that the Hollower's basic form when it's stalking someone is the spitting image of Steve Ditko's The Question. Only in shape-changing monster form. 

SanGiovanni does give the reader an interesting cast of characters, very Stephen-King-like in their weaknesses and (growing) strengths. A climax that goes on and on for about 1/3 of the novel needed trimming and tightening. Lightly recommended.

Darkness at the Edge of Town by Brian Keene (2010)

Darkness at the Edge of Town by Brian Keene (2010): Enjoyable but slighter and less juicily pulpy novel from the reliable Keene, who's made a fascinating career out of combining cosmic horror with splatterpunky, visceral violence. 

Walden, Virginia wakes up one morning to find itself surrounded on all sides by an almost solid darkness. Some people drive to work. Some stay home. Landlines and cellphones won't connect to anything. All the utilities are out. And when you walk up to the darkness, you start to hear voices and see visions of your loved ones. This is only the beginning.

While not part of one of Keene's acknowledged series, Darkness at the Edge of Town nonetheless fits into the larger schemata of most of Keene's novels, which deal with one or more cosmic threats to life on Earth. Well, life on Earths: each Earth is part of a larger multiverse. While one novel may depict the destruction of all life on one Earth by, say, giant earthworms, another novel may depict the salvation of another Earth by a recurring character such as Keene's Amish magician, Levi. And Levi, too, is duplicated across countless Earths.

Mysterious symbols drawn at points along Walden's town boundary coincide with the line where the darkness stopped. A mysterious homeless man -- Walden's only homeless man -- may have something to do with the symbols. Or did he summon the darkness? Our narrator, an underemployed pizza delivery guy in his 20's, will try to find out. Because the darkness very rapidly starts to make people more and more violent and crazy.

There are elements of metatext here -- a character notes at one point that our narrator's plan to explore the darkness comes right out of Stephen King's The Mist and should thus be avoided because of the dire results of the tactic in both novella and movie. The title comes from a Springsteen song. Many of the group dynamics are reminiscent of both The Mist and King's Under the Dome, though any resemblances to the latter would simply be a case of shared sub-genre, as the two novels came out within a handful of months of one another. 

The dire violence and madness that quickly infect the town are solidly depicted, with several stand-out moments of gross-out horror. The cosmic elements don't work so well, in part because Keene's narrator simply isn't written as a character capable of describing dread or terror. Dez, the homeless madman, manages to Basil Exposition us for several pages near the end, but this seems both too little and much too late. We've seen towns disintegrate under crisis in horror novels before. What makes this narrative different?

Well, utter helplessness, a well Keene goes to repeatedly in his novels, though it's usually leavened with a group of characters doing their best to stave off the apocalypse, even if they fail utterly. Here, though, our narrator and his friends just aren't up to taking on the darkness. And they seem to miss one glaringly obvious thing that a competent person might at least try, given that we're stuck inside the bottle of this narrative for what the narrator estimates is at least a month. I don't need a Heinlein hero in my horror, but the readerly frustration that attends the nihilistic helplessness and pettiness and dim-bulbedness of our heroes leaves one longing for death after awhile. Their death, that is. Go darkness!

Now, this frustration seems to me to perhaps be the point. Keene has given us a novel with an even less bright, less competent, less heroic cast than usual, and has set them against an unbeatable foe. But it's all too much. As T.E.D. Klein noted, himself quoting another critic, I don't see what the point of the point is. Lightly recommended.

Worm-Rise

The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene (2005): Brian Keene enjoys ending the world. A lot. And while he's a very specifically American horror writer, many of his novels fall more comfortably into the disaster-horror sub-genre perfected by writers like Brit James Herbert, with his apocalyptic rats and fogs and crawling dark. Keene's scenarios tend to involve the supernatural far more than Herbert's, but their love of squishy, brutal scenes of ultraviolence -- and the occasional sex scene -- cause me to link them, if only in my own mind.

Keene's fictional multiverse contains many of his novels, along with a multiplicity of Earths, many of them under siege by the forces of darkness, all of them apparently working for one of several demon-kings exiled from the physical universe(s) eons ago by, I guess, God. Or gods.

It's a Lovecraftian set-up that touches at points upon real-world mythologies. Earth is under siege, anyway. A lot. And the cause in many of the novels (though not all) is generally hopeless. What the horror novels explore is grace, and the lack thereof, under supernatural pressure: the human heart in conflict with giant monsters, if you will.

In The Conqueror Worms, a seemingly supernatural rain devastates the planet. And it won't stop. Coastal cities fall to tsunamis; humanity flees to the hills. And then the mountains. And then, entire houses start disappearing into what look like sinkholes, but are not. While land-based humanity comes under siege by increasingly giant, carnivorous worms, sea-based humanity faces sea monsters that seem to have swum right out of mythology.

Keene keeps our sympathy throughout with his narrators -- an 80-year-old man whose West Virginia mountain residence has endured 41 days of rain when the novel opens, and a much-younger man and woman who endured the terrrors of flooded Baltimore for several weeks. Along the way, the reader can piece together the probable cause of the apocalypse, but there's never a moment of epiphanic exposition. This is a worm's eye view of the end of the world, not one from from the heights (or narrative centre) of understanding.

There's brutality here, and grandeur, and a lot of WTF? Boy, those worms are cranky. Recommended.

Nixonomicon

The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas (2011): It's been a hell of a year for H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos with a Cthulhu three-part South Park arc, an appearance on Supernatural, Alan Moore's Neonomicon miniseries, and what now seems to be a self-sustaining Cthulhu-based publishing industry. Oh, and there's going to be a Cthulhu Mythos app for your iPhone. Ai! Lovecraft, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

OK, you'd be 121 now, but that's young for some of HPL's less human protagonists.

So I guess it was only a matter of time until someone collided the worlds of eccentric outcast Lovecraft and eccentric outcast Hunter S. Thompson, as Keene and Mamatas do here with a "previously unpublished" section from Thompson's coverage of the 1972 American presidential campaign, Fear and Loathing: The Campaign Trail '72.

Having discovered that ancient deity/alien Cthulhu backs Nixon for president in 1972, Thompson heads out from his Colorado cabin to cover the story. Or stop Nixon. Whichever comes first. Keene and Mamatas do a lovely job replicating Thompson's gonzo journalism and gonzo prose style while also working in enough references and allusions to the Cthulhu Mythos and its foundational stories and incidents that an annotated edition might actually prove helpful to the uninitiated.

Thompson's tolerance for drugs and alcohol serve him well as he tracks Cthulhu's influence across America, with stops in demon-haunted Arkham, decayed fishing-town Innsmouth, and squamous, leprous Washington, DC. The Republican Party serves Cthulhu. Whom do the Democrats serve? And can the world be saved? Does it deserve to be?

And what happened to the American Dream, depicted here as being as damned and monstrous and horribly malformed and mutated as any Lovecraft protagonist damned by fate or heredity or an accidental brush with the world-devouring Great Old Ones.

Keene and Mamatas weave together fact and fiction in rewarding, hilarious and surprisingly moving ways as they take their narrator straight into the heart of Hell...or at least some version of Hell. Events major (from J. Edgar Hoover's death to 9/11) and minor (Democratic hopeful Edmund Muskie's bizarre mispronunciation of 'Canuck' as 'Cannock' spins off into an entire sub-plot) butt up against Thompson's idiosyncratic personality and style, as well as Lovecraft's equally idiosyncratic personality and style. "We are all Cthulhu," Nixon tells Thompson at one point. Well, I hope not. I really hope not. Highly recommended.

Ghost Walk by Brian Keene (2008)

Ghost Walk by Brian Keene (2008): Our world continues to exist because stones with the right sigils and signs on them sit in the right places, keeping evil out. It's amazing how often this trope repeats itself in fantasy and horror fiction -- it's even a key component of the final season of Lost. To some extent, this all derives from Stonehenge and other standing stones, filtered through the sensibilities of writers that include H.P. Lovecraft. Dangerous holes in reality lurk everywhere, behind which terrible things wait to erupt into our reality. Everything you know is wrong! Don't touch that rock!

I really like Brian Keene. He's one of the very, very few practitioners of ultraviolent horror who doesn't make me either vomitous or bored (or vomitous with boredom). He's a terrific synthesizer of the mundane and the fantastic, and his cosmogony really is an interesting piece of work. Maybe Ghost Walk delivers too much exposition when it comes to explaining the supernatural order of things in this particular fictional universe, but that exposition is pretty fascinating. Lovecraft would have approved.

A grieving, small-town Pennsylvania widower decides to honour his wife's memory by doing something charitable. He hits upon the idea of creating a Ghost Walk, a horrifying (for fun) stroll through the woods, with the dark forest's own after-nightfall fearsomeness augmented by various man-made scares along the way. Proceeds will go to charity. What could possibly go worng?

Well, the woods the widower uses for the Ghost Walk border on LeHorn's Hollow, a creepy place burned out by a recent forest fire, a creepy place where murders and disappearances have taken place over hundreds of years, including a recent slew of murders attributed to a cult. Now, if any town really had a place with this bad a documented reputation, I'm pretty sure someone would cough up the bucks to fence it off. But the bad place, no matter how bad, is never fenced off in a horror novel. It is there to fuck you up! Maybe we'll even build a golf course on it!

Almost needless to say, soon a small, disparate group of people will have to come together to stop an ancient evil from breaking into our universe. I like what Keene does with his cast of characters, as he's shown here and elsewhere that he's not interested in giving us the same cast of heterosexual Caucasians so many genre writers do. Here, a lapsed Muslim reporter and a lapsed Amish magician (!) carry a heavy burden of responsibility for saving the world.

The supernatural menace is sublime in its ambitions and powers, and deftly sketched by Keene with the smaller, sad horrors it inflicts on people (and animals) in pursuit of its own world-destroying pleasures. To make universe-annihilating evil truly disturbing, it helps a lot to clearly define the small awfulnesses it enjoys -- such things are viscerally graspable in a way that 'it's going to eat the world' aren't.

I'd have liked a longer novel, but the relative brevity certainly keeps things rollicking along. The (real) spell-book The Long-Lost Friend puts in an appearance here, making readers of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer series smile. The moral is, if you come across a mysterious grouping of rocks somewhere, don't move them. Or, frankly, go anywhere near them. Recommended.

Run run away

City of the Dead by Brian Keene (2005): Keene's sequel to his first novel, The Rising, is every bit as visceral, gonzo and thoughtful as that outing. Zombies have risen, but their lineage is of the Return of the Living Dead/ Evil Dead 2 variety. They talk, they think, they plan, and they use weapons. And they're not limited to human form: everything above the level of insects rises once it dies unless its brain is sufficiently destroyed. They're the first wave of body-possessing demons released by a particle accelerator experiment gone horribly awary, and there are trillions of them.

We follow the ragtag handful of survivors from the first novel as they try to find shelter. Or at least a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Humanity's last redoubt is a high-security New York highrise run by someone a lot like Donald Trump. A second wave of demons that can possess plants and insects is on its way. Things are bad.

Keene's novels have the audacious scale and pacing of pulp apocalypses, but it's the care taken with sympathetic (or at least empathetic) characterization that really drives the engine, making us care about characters who are doomed. There's a greater whiff of Stephen King's The Stand in City of the Dead than there was in The Rising -- supernatural good exists and makes its presence (or at least its reasons) felt. Be warned, though: the violence is graphic and unrelenting, and there are no easy outs from the seemingly unwinnable situation Keene puts his dwindling cast of characters in. As they say in Preacher, "All hell's a coming." Highly recommended.