It Follows (2015): written and directed by David Robert Mitchell; starring Maika Monroe (Jay), Lili Sepe (Kelly), Keir Gilchrist (Paul), Olivia Luccardi (Yara), Jake Weary (Hugh/ Jeff), and Daniel Zovatto (Greg) (2015): It Follows is a terrific horror movie with surprising depth, especially for a film written and directed by a newcomer, David Robert Mitchell. It knows when to be subtle. It knows when to be gross. And it knows the iconic, John-Carpenter-related value of a synth-heavy score.
The film takes a horror-movie staple -- the apparent violent punishment of teenagers in slasher movies for having sex -- and makes it the central conceit. Have sex with the wrong person and something terrible will follow you and try to kill you. Escape death by sleeping with someone else and 'passing it on.' Return to a state of danger if the person you 'infected' dies before passing it on. Really, it's a lot like sex in the 1980's.
But the movie works because of its pacing, the fine performances by the young and unknown cast, and some of the finest 'sudden-shock' moments I've got from a horror movie in a long time. The movie looks great as well. It juxtaposes its locations in ways which open up further discussion about just what the movie may be about under the surface: suburbia and the beach play off against deserted, ruined areas in and around Detroit.
There are other things that enrich the subtextual eddies of the film: the voyeurism of our female protagonist's pre-pubescent male neighbour; a visual reference to self-cutting that ties into the protagonist's problems with body image and possible depression; the almost complete absence of parents except as represented visually by the It of the title.
Ah, It. The film gives us a Something while wisely withholding exposition from anyone with authoritative knowledge of what that Something is or does. Everything we learn of It comes from the observations of people whom it follows. It appears to be slow. Is it really? Or is it playing with its victims? It can appear as almost anything human (we think!). Some of the forms it chooses horrify those it pursues because they're the forms of loved ones. But sometimes its appearances are less personal, though sometimes even more horrifying. Is it a ghost? Is it a monster?
One of the fascinating things about the movie is how its protagonists, stuck between high school and college on one hand and adulthood on the other, almost exclusively talk only of the past. "Remember when..." is a constant refrain. Draw your own conclusions as to what this motif means in the broader context of the movie.
This may be a fairly serious, often melancholy horror movie, but it deploys that melancholy with wit and verve, with surprising moments of comedy and empathy. It also stands up to rewatching. I've now seen it five times and found new things to think about with each viewing. Highly recommended.
The Dulwich Horror and Others (2015) by David Hambling, containing the following stories: "The Dulwich Horror of 1927," Two Fingers," "The Thing in the Vault," "The Monsters in the Park," "The Devils in the Deep Blue Sea," "The Norwood Builder," and "Shadows of the Witch House."
Excellent collection of innovative yet Old School tales in the Mighty H.P. Lovecraft Manner by way of August Derleth. Hambling sets many of his stories in and around Dulwich, a real suburb of London, England whose name resembles that of Lovecraft's fictional Dunwich, Massachusetts. The most Old School thing, I suppose, is Hambling's homage-oriented titling of his stories, as many play on HPL stories either specifically or in general syntax. Well, and a nod to Sherlock Holmes with "The Norwood Builder."
The stories range from the late 19th century (""The Devils in the Deep Blue Sea," a nod to William Hope Hodgson as well as HPL) to today (the bleakly satiric "Two Fingers," a story about the rich getting what they want regardless of the consequences for everyone else). Several stories share the idea of a secret society working against the Great Old Ones, while three stories form a connected narrative occurring over 11 years ("The Monsters in the Park," "The Dulwich Horror of 1927," and "Shadows of the Witch House"). The last of these also nods to Arthur Machen's seminal, pre-Lovecraftian work of cosmic horror, "The Great God Pan," incidentally one of Stephen King's favourites.
Hambling often spices up his speculations on cosmic horror with contemporary science and physics unavailable to Lovecraft in the 1920's and 1930's. Genetics, epigenetics, stem-cell therapy, quantum entanglement, and astrophysics rub shoulders with Deep Ones, shambling shoggoths, the rugose cones of the Great Race, the mysterious Others, and those lovable, space-faring, brain-collecting fungoid crustaceans the Mi-Go.
While there are deliberate invocations of specific Lovecraft stories in the titles and in the stories themselves (one story ends with a paraphrase of the ending of "The Dunwich Horror," for instance), these are very much Hambling's stories. They use the quasi-documentary narrative approach favoured by Lovecraft while expanding upon it in interesting ways, including a story which criticizes an earlier story in the volume for a lack of truthfulness at certain points.
There aren't any true misfires here. Hambling's greatest strengths lie in his creation of a malevolent, historically specific, British past. That simply means that the present-day stories ("Two Fingers" and "The Norwood Builder") are good but not as engaging as the historical tales. "The Thing In the Vault," playing with literary tropes associated with American hard-boiled detective fiction, also lacks the truthful sense of time and place of the other Britocentric historical stories, though it remains a fun piece of work.
The scientific explanations for certain events in certain stories sometimes gets in the way of the horror. The mysterious Others of HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time" are literalized into pesky sci-fi aliens in "The Monsters In the Park." The Mi-Go in "The Thing In the Vault" come across as a little too dumb to be cosmically menacing. These are minor points really, but they are more reminiscent of August Derleth's attempts to organize and codify Lovecraft's malign cosmos after HPL's death. To quote Ramsey Campbell, sometimes "explanation is the death of horror." But in all, highly recommended.
The Last Witch-Hunter (2015): written by Cory Goodman, Matt Sazama, and Burk Sharpless; directed by Breck Eisner; starring Vin Diesel (Kaulder), Rose Leslie (Chloe), Elijah Wood (Dolan 37), Michael Caine (Dolan 36), Olafur Darri Olafsson (Belial), and Julie Engelbrecht (Witch Queen):
Vin Diesel sports an unconvincing beard-and-wig combo for the medieval flashback sequences in this somewhat ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. He's Kaulder, killer of the Witch Queen some time in the 1200's in Europe, cursed by her with immortality. He works for the Axe and Cross, a secret society of witch-fighters and, um, witch-regulators.
Assorted shenanigans convince Caulder, now in present-day New York and looking like the clean-shaven Vin Diesel we all know and love, that some bad witches strive now to bring the Witch Queen back to life. As the Witch Queen caused the Black Plague with magical Plague Flies, this could be bad. But not bad enough for anyone to notify the Centres for Disease Control!
The Last Witch-Hunter took a critical and box-office beating when it came out in 2015. It's not actually that bad. For example, it's much better than Solo, Warcraft, Alien: Covenant, and Tom Cruise's The Mummy. What praise, you say! What praise! It's about on par with the Netflix Will Smith movie Bright, also an ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. Hey, at least they're trying for something other than another superhero movie.
Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel, and looks and acts pretty much like Vin Diesel once we get him out of all that fake hair. Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) is fine as an unconvincing love interest, or maybe they're just going to be friends because nothing romantic happens in the movie. Michael Caine plays Michael Caine as a mentor figure. Elijah Wood is under-used and misused as a magical priest sidekick to Diesel. Someone named Julie Engelbrecht plays the Witch Queen under so much make-up and CGI than it did make sense not to cast a name actress as the main villain because she would be unrecognizable.
The direction of Breck Eisner is programmatic in the manner of a video-game adaptation. Or maybe a video-game cutscene. There are a few monster designs and production design moments that suggest real imagination in some of the visual effects houses that worked on the movie -- the spider-transformer-robot-thingie Jailer of the Witch-Prison is the best of these. In all, an adequate time-waster with enough goofy moments to keep it afloat. Lightly recommended.
Bone Tomahawk (2015): written and directed by S. Craig Zahler; starring Kurt Russell (Sheriff Hunt), Patrick Wilson (Arthur O'Dwyer), Matthew Fox (Brooder), Richard Jenkins (Chicory), Lili Simmons (Dr. Samantha O'Dwyer), Evan Jonigkeit (Deputy Nick), and David Arquette (The Fugitive): Made for just about $2 million, Bone Tomahawk is a fine movie by first-time director and writer S. Craig Zahler, who had previously made his Hollywood living by selling over 20 screenplays that never got produced.
Which is how the vast majority of writers in Hollywood make their money -- selling screenplays that never become movies. Zehler and his manager finally got fed up and decided to do a movie themselves, selling the project to pros like Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins with the sharpness of the writing and the chance to be in a Western.
And Bone Tomahawk is a fine Western, and a fine horror-Western, and an interesting blend of the realistic, the grotesque, and the idealistic. It's a movie that has heroes, flawed, and flawed men who try to be heroes, and awful men, and a plot that never becomes formulaic or cliched.
A tribe of... something... kills one citizen of Western town Bright Hope and kidnaps two others. A Native American scholar identifies them as a cave-dwelling, cannibalistic clan to whom normal Native Americans give wide berth -- as he notes, they don't even look Native American, in part because their cave-dwelling has made them really pale. All that cave-dwelling allows Bone Tomahawk to set a record for most uses of the word "troglodyte" in a Western.
In having the Native American distinguish the troglodytes from all other Native Americans, Zahler also defangs the sting of genocide that might accompany the film. Well, with that and the unspeakable cruelty of the cave-dwellers to both outsiders and their own women.They're an American version of the story of Sawney Bean, only worse.
Sheriff Kurt Russell puts together a rescue party comprising town dandy and legendary Indian Killer Matthew Fox, acting deputy Richard Jenkins, husband of the kidnapped doctor Patrick Wilson (on a crutch with a broken leg!), and himself. Their journey to the region of the troglodytes will take nearly a week, covering an hour in film time as they encounter various obstacles and hardships. And then the final confrontation.
The acting is sharp, the dialogue flavourful and pithy, the cinematography top-notch (I especially like the bleached-out night scenes), and the action both realistic and horrifying when it comes. It's not for the squeamish, but the violence isn't exploitative. It's actually hard to look at. And it's a Western! And better than most major releases in any given year! Highly recommended.
Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows:
Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.
Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds.
For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.
Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.
The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.
All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!
The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths.
But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).
William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!
Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.
One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.
To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out!
As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.
Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.
Skin (2009) (Jack Caffery #4) by Mo Hayder: Skin pretty much picks up where the previous DCI Jack Caffery novel ended, with the disappearance of a minor celebrity still unsolved and underwater recovery unit detective Flea Marley knowing way more about that disappearance than anyone at work knows.
This thread will continue until the beginning of Wolf (Caffery#7), leading to a certain amount of acrimony and misunderstanding between Caffery and Marley. That the two are both great detectives with screwed-up personal lives makes them seemingly perfect for each other, but theirs is a slow-burn (or perhaps no-burn) relationship.
Mo Hayder mixes things up here with a couple of investigations and a serial killer who isn't exactly a serial killer. Caffery remains an engaging, anti-social, brooding character. Another plot thread from the previous Caffery/Marley novel continues here in unexpected ways with occasional supernatural undertones. And the titular case offers Hayder's near-patented blend of horror-procedural.
Caffery even gets trapped in an empty septic tank by the killer at one point. This never happened to Philip Marlowe! Recommended.
Wolf (2015) (Jack Caffery #7) by Mo Hayder: A plot thread that started way back in Caffery#3 (Ritual) finally ends in the opening pages of Wolf. And a plot thread that began in Mo Hayder's first Caffery novel will also approach its conclusion.
Wolf is a clever procedural in which Caffery, operating alone, has to find hostages with only a partial note reading 'Please help us,' a dog with neither a microchip nor a helpful phone number on its collar-tag, and a wedding ring attached to that dog's collar.
The third-person narrative POV moves among Caffery, the hostages, and the hostage-takers. An old murder plays a part, as does Caffery's own unanswered grief about his brother who disappeared and was never found when Caffery was a boy. The oracular, often irritating Walking Man plays a part. So, too, that dog. Flea Marley doesn't appear, but she's in Caffery's thoughts.
We go into some unexpected places along the way, including a sort of closure for Caffery, and into the realm of corporate espionage and secret weapons development. All this and serial killers, Goths, and Caffery's endearing blend of misanthropy and overwhelming concern for the safety of others -- and for justice when that safety has been fatally breached. Highly recommended.
Black Wings [of Cthulhu] Volume 4 (2015) edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories:
Artifact by Fred Chappell
Half Lost in Shadow by W. H. Pugmire
The Rasping Absence by Richard Gavin
Black Ships Seen South of Heaven by CaitlÃn R. Kiernan
The Dark Sea Within by Jason V Brock
Sealed by the Moon by Gary Fry
Broken Sleep by Cody Goodfellow
A Prism of Darkness by Darrell Schweitzer
Night of the Piper by Ann K. Schwader
We Are Made of Stars by Jonathan Thomas
Trophy by Melanie Tem
Revival by Stephen Woodworth
Contact by John Pelan and Stephen Mark Rainey
Cult of the Dead by Lois H. Gresh
Dark Redeemer by Will Murray
In the Event of Death by Simon Strantzas
The Wall of Asshur-sin by Donald Tyson
Fear Lurks Atop Tempest Mount by Charles Lovecraft
Maybe not quite as good as previous installments in the Black Wings series ('of Cthulhu' is added in each case for the paperback publication; 'Black Wings' comes from a Lovecraft quotation about cosmic horror, a quotation that doesn't contain 'of Cthulhu,' whose wings I've always figured as being a dark, weird green, in case you were wondering).
Or maybe I read too many new Cthulhu anthologies in too short a time.
There are stand-outs here from Kiernan, Brock, and Schweitzer. The latter's story features the real John Dee on the last day of his life, and it's a solid piece of cosmic quasi-history. The stories range from just this side of Lovecraftian pastiche to more elusive, allusive pieces of cosmic horror.
One thing I'll note again and again is that Lovecraft's literary children tend to be a lot more depressing than their progenitor. Several stories here feature the return of the Great Old Ones and the destruction of humanity, something Lovecraft never went through with. The depiction of these apocalypses never seems to equal what I imagine in my mind, leaving me a bit cold when it comes to the depiction of The Return of the Great Old Ones. Oh, well. Recommended.
Man Vs. (2015): written by Adam Massey and Thomas Michael; directed by Adam Massey; starring Chris Diamantopoulos: Filmed north of Guelph, Ontario, Man Vs. pits Doug Woods, a minor reality show star, against Something. Woods is filming an episode of his show in the Northern Ontario woods. It's a wilderness survival show in the tradition of so many shows on television. But then something happens, and someone or something starts stalking him.
Man Vs. is a fairly enjoyable, straight-to-cable movie with an affable protagonist in Chris Diamantopoulos (a recurring bit on Silicon Valley as a the guy who 'invented' Internet Radio definitely shows that he has acting range). The revelation of the menace is a bit of a letdown, as these things go, though the climax manages to throw in a gratifying extra twist. But the movie does do a nice job of slow-burning the tension in its first 70 minutes or so. Recommended.
Sinister 2 (2015): written and created by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Ciaran Foy; starring James Ransone (The Deputy), Shannyn Sossamon (Courtney Collins), Robert Sloan (Dylan Collins), and Dartanian Sloan (Zach Collins): Any and all name actors having been eradicated in the first movie (or in between the first and second movie in the case of Vincent D'Onofrio's literally phoned-in professor in Sinister), Sinister 2 comes across as comfortably anonymous.
That's a good thing for some horror movies, this one included. Bughul the demon still remains regrettably visualized from the neck down, the scary face of the early scenes of Sinister burdened with a blazer-and-pants combo that suggest the Sumerian boogeyman just got off his yacht and is about to offer the viewer a gin-and-tonic. But the performances by the kids are pretty good, Shannyn Sossamon has a sweet desperation to her character, and James Ransone brings a goofy charm to the hero of this one.
Yet another stupid 'stinger' ending ruins some of my good feelings towards this movie. Stop it, horror movies. Stop it right now. In a demonstration of 'less is more' in horror, the scariest scene in the movie involves a ham radio's creepy broadcast. Recommended.
It Follows (2015): written and directed by David Robert Mitchell; starring Maika Monroe (Jay), Lili Sepe (Kelly), Keir Gilchrist (Paul), Olivia Luccardi (Yara), Jake Weary (Hugh/ Jeff), and Daniel Zovatto (Greg) (2015): It Follows is a terrific horror movie with surprising depth, especially for a film written and directed by a newcomer, David Robert Mitchell. It knows when to be subtle. It knows when to be gross. And it knows the iconic, John-Carpenter-related value of a synth-heavy score.
The film takes a horror-movie staple -- the apparent violent punishment of teenagers in slasher movies for having sex -- and makes it the central conceit. Have sex with the wrong person and something terrible will follow you and try to kill you. Escape death by sleeping with someone else and 'passing it on.' Return to a state of danger if the person you 'infected' dies before passing it on. Really, it's a lot like sex in the 1980's.
But the movie works because of its pacing, the fine performances by the young and unknown cast, and some of the finest 'sudden-shock' moments I've got from a horror movie in a long time. The movie looks great as well. It juxtaposes its locations in ways which open up further discussion about just what the movie may be about under the surface: suburbia and the beach play off against deserted, ruined areas in and around Detroit.
There are other things that enrich the subtextual eddies of the film: the voyeurism of our female protagonist's pre-pubescent male neighbour; a visual reference to self-cutting that ties into the protagonist's problems with body image and possible depression; the almost complete absence of parents except as represented visually by the It of the title.
Ah, It. The film gives us a Something while wisely withholding exposition from anyone with authoritative knowledge of what that Something is or does. Everything we learn of It comes from the observations of people whom it follows. It appears to be slow. Is it really? Or is it playing with its victims? It can appear as almost anything human (we think!). Some of the forms it chooses horrify those it pursues because they're the forms of loved ones. But sometimes its appearances are less personal, though sometimes even more horrifying. Is it a ghost? Is it a monster?
This may be a fairly serious, often melancholy horror movie, but it deploys that melancholy with wit and verve, with surprising moments of comedy and empathy. And boy, It is a dick. Highly recommended.
Unfriended (2015): written by Nelson Greaves; directed by Leo Gabriadze; starring Heather Sossaman (Laura), Matthew Bohrer (Matt), Courtney Halverson (Val), Shelley Hennig (Blaire), Moses Storm (Mitch), Will Peltz (Adam), Renee Olstead (Jess), and Jacob Wysocki (Ken): Shockingly good horror movie from the more-miss-than-hit low-budget horror studio Blumhouse. Be warned, though, that you should watch this on your computer screen. It's eye-strainy business on even a large TV.
Why? Because the entire narrative unfolds on a computer screen. We watch a group of high-school friends interact on-line through various social media platforms and programs one Saturday night. But then someone uninvited appears within their group webcam chat. And then things go very, very wrong.
Aside from the eyestrain, the conceit works very well. The moments of violence come and go quickly, sometimes disturbingly unclear as to what exactly just happened (did that guy just stick his hand in a blender? what did she just stick in her mouth?). The plot is boiler-plate revenge-horror reimagined for the Age of Social Media, a repugnant act of online bullying. Sympathies shift as the movie progresses. But boy, this is one angry, tech-savvy ghost! Recommended.
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955): written by George Worthing Yates and Hal Smith; directed by Robert Gordon and Ray Harryhausen; starring Kenneth Tobey (Commander Pete Mathews), Faith Domergue (Professor Lesley Joyce), and Donald Curtis (Dr. John Carter): Atomic tests rouse a really, really gigantic octopus from the abysmal depths of the Pacific and send it on a death rampage up and down the U.S. West Coast. There's a solid attention to suspense and believable detail in between the stop-motion octopus appearances, as well as a surprisingly feminist female scientist.
But it's stop-motion giant Ray Harryhausen's octopus that owns the movie, especially once it gets to San Francisco and starts tearing up the town. Yes, a few brief flashes of the entire octopus reveal that it only has five arms for the sake of keeping the animation time and expense down. So I guess it's a quintopus. Believably integrating the live-action and stop-motion footage in 1955 was almost impossible, but Harryhausen manages some terrific juxtapositions, never moreso than when a group of soldiers repeatedly wields a flame-thrower against one of the monster's giant tentacles. Kill it with fire! Recommended.
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015) by Stephen King, containing the following short stories:
Mile 81 (2011): Jaunty, fairly basic horror collaboration between the King of 2011 and the college student King of the late 1960's. Kids, cars, and a monster.
Premium Harmony (2009): Rueful, comic slice of life.
Batman and Robin Have an Altercation (2012): Rueful, comic slice of life.
The Dune (2011): Minor dark fantasy piece... with a twist!
Bad Little Kid (2015 first English publication here): Great horror story is also quintessential King in the way it puts an almost homey, American 'pop' spin on a long-standing horror trope while also making a completely innocuous object into a source of gradually earned terror.
A Death (2015): Mildly ironic bit of Old West existentialism.
The Bone Church (2009): Interesting, not entirely successful poem.
Morality (2009): King's much creepier take on the premise of something like Indecent Proposal.
Afterlife (2013) : There's a sinister underlier to this post-mortem fantasy that makes it work. More in the vein of Charles Beaumont than Ray Bradbury.
Ur (2009): A good modern riff on an old fantasy chestnut gets derailed about 2/3's of the way through by the introduction of another chestnut that makes the whole thing seem like King's 11/22/63 writ very small.
Herman Wouk Is Still Alive (2011): Another slice of life with a horrifying conclusion.
Under the Weather (2011): Return of the Unreliable Narrator.
Blockade Billy (2010): King's 1950's novella about baseball and madness is a mostly understated gem.
Mister Yummy (2015 first publication here): One of those later King stories that seems as if it should be about half as long. An interesting idea drags on and on.
Tommy (2010): Another interesting, not entirely successful poem, this time meditating on the 1960's and loss.
The Little Green God of Agony (2011): Supernatural 'gotcha' story ends several paragraphs too early for me.
That Bus is Another World (2014): It's the set-up to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novel 4:50 from Paddington...on a bus! But without an ending!
Obits (2015 first publication here): Interesting, overlong horror-fantasy sort of trickles out at the end.
Drunken Fireworks (2015): Intermittently funny piece seems like a sort of Stephen Leacock Mariposa piece for a much more scatological millennium.
Summer Thunder (2013) : Rueful, dire end-of-the-world story seems like a much lesser book-end to King's 1974 gem "Night Surf" -- and the book-ending includes the use of men in their sixties in this story as opposed to the teenagers of "Night Surf." Will the circle remain unbroken?
Overall grade: Recommended. It's not up to the quality of King's first two collections (Night Shift and Skeleton Crew and very few horror collections by anyone are), though it may almost be as good as Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and seems to me to be superior to Everything's Eventual and far, far superior to King's previous short-story collection, the mostly skippable Just After Sunset.
The best story (and best horror story King's written in a very long time) is "Bad Little Kid," which is a deft and very much quintessentially Kingian reimagining of a horror trope that's been seen in such all-time classics as Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea" and "The Familiar" or M.R. James "Casting the Runes" and "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook," among so many others.
I suppose the difference between the King of 1975 and 2015 could be explained thusly: had he written "Bad Little Kid" in 1975, it could still have been a great horror story. However, it would have been half the length. And odds are that a relatively stereotypical supernatural ritual might have been tried by a character or characters to deal with the supernatural menace. Instead, there's a sorrowful, almost elegaic tone to the story as something terrible torments somebody again and again over the years. It's a terrific, terrific story: the old man can still bring it.
Finders Keepers by Stephen King (2015): The year is 2014 and the mismatched detectives of last year's Mr. Mercedes are back in a new mystery set three years after the conclusion of that novel -- and, as a sub-plot, there's also an odd continuation of the events of the previous novel that seems to be setting up the events of the third novel.
Our protagonist, retired police detective Bill Hodges, continues to run his private detective agency with the help of hyper-intelligent, socially challenged Holly Gibney, with an occasional assist from now-college-student Jerome Robinson. But the scene of carnage that began Mr. Mercedes has helped deliver another case. I'll let you find out how. Suffice it to say that injury and the economic collapse of 2008 will soon put a young man on a collision course with an unusual treasure buried near his house since the late 1970's. And one collision will set off many others.
This is really an odd novel, at least for King. We spend a lot of time with that kid -- Pete Saubers -- and his economically wounded family. And we spend a lot of time learning about that treasure and the terrible man who buried it. But the money in that treasure -- about $30,000 in cash -- is the smallest portion of the booty.
See, back in the late 1970's, a lousy guy in his early 20's was obsessed with a novelist named John Rothstein, who in King's world combines the attributes of John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and Philip Roth. In the 1950's and 1960's, Rothstein wrote a trilogy of novels subsequently dubbed The Runner Trilogy. Those novels featured a protagonist who seems to combine the personality traits of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Salinger's Holden Caulfield.
One day in the 1960's, Rothstein stopped publishing and essentially became a hermit overnight on a farm outside a small New England town. Years later, a young reader (and aspiring writer) named Morris Bellamy went looking for Rothstein. He told his two accomplices that they were looking for money. But Bellamy was really looking for Rothstein's unpublished work. And he found it. And, while fleeing from the police, buried it. Arrested and jailed for more than 30 years for a crime unconnected to the Rothstein home invasion, Bellamy finally gets out and goes looking for that unpublished work. But it isn't there -- Pete Saubers dug it up.
Morris Bellamy is one of King's more interesting antagonists, a self-pitying fan who believes he has more right to his favourite author's work than that author. The characterizations of the other characters are all solid, especially of the slowly blossoming Holly Gibney and the intelligent, thoughtful Pete Saubers, whose love of reading is ignited by the contents of that box of treasure. There's not a huge amount of detection in this second Bill Hodges volume, but the material on Rothstein, and on the used book trade (seriously), is highly enjoyable. Recommended, though keep in mind this is a mystery-thriller (mostly) and not a horror novel.
