book review – Page 4

Book Review: Dark Gold by David Angsten

September 27, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

I named David Angsten’s thriller Dark Gold one of my favorite reads of 2016, but I wanted to tell you why in more detail.

Dark Gold is a timeless, multi-layered thriller that transcends the genre, a novel that’s as relevant today as it was when it was published in 2006 because it focuses on themes that we can all relate to: friendship, family, betrayal, and greed. Told in first person by Jack Duran, a somewhat directionless, untried young man who’s just graduated college, it describes his quest to find his missing brother Dan, and the terrible things Jack uncovers along the way.

It’s very much a hero’s journey that takes the reader to Mexico and beyond, filled with cocaine pinatas, bizarre rituals, shocking violence, sunken treasure, and El Diablo Blanco, a creature as disturbing as anything you would see outside the mind of H.P. Lovecraft. From the details of drug culture and deep-sea diving to characters that don’t just leap off the page, but get into your face and demand you never forget them, Dark Gold is the fastest-reading novel for its length I’ve ever encountered.

Danger, sex, untold riches, and horrific cults: what’s not to like? Escapism doesn’t get much better than Dark Gold.

Book Review: The Space Vampires

September 7, 2017 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Horror fans mourned the passing of legendary director Tobe Hooper, who directed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, and other films. I never much cared for the TCM movies; they mostly consist of running, brutality, blood, and tears. And Poltergeist spawned a terrible sequel, not to mention a wholly unnecessary remake. Despite my quibbles about his most famous franchises, Hooper did direct one of my favorite movies of all time: Lifeforce.

A novel-length book could be written about the departure that the film Lifeforce took from its source material, Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, but I won’t do that here. Wilson himself loathed the movie, with good reason. So the two cannot be compared.

The Space Vampires, written in 1976, posits a bizarre first-contact scenario: in the 22nd Century, the Space Research Institute’s spacecraft Hermes, captained by Olof Carlsen, finds a gigantic, derelict space ship floating in space. They take some of the human-looking, though apparently dead aliens back to Earth with them, and as it turns out, the aliens are actually body-switching vampires that eat life-energy (life force, if you will). This presents a significant problem, particularly because there are plans to haul the gigantic space ship back to Earth for deeper study.

This is a very talky sort of novel, where the characters discuss the science of life energy and how it can be manipulated at great length. In this respect it’s almost like a police procedural, as Carlsen, once he returns to Earth, joins famous scientist Hans Fallada on a Europe-spanning quest to learn more about these aliens and how to stop them. What’s clear is that the author, an occultist himself, was using this novel as a vehicle to advance this idea of manipulable life energy: how some people just seem to suck the life out of a room, the energy-exchanging relationship of masochists to sadists, and mental illness as it relates to life force. As a firm believer in the scientific method, I didn’t find Wilson’s ideas to be credible, though they were fascinating to read.

Parts of the novel read like a Sherlock Holmes mystery in that there’s great emphasis on brandy, whiskey, and sandwiches. I rather liked that part; it set the book very firmly in England, with English people as the good guys. Because it was written in the mid-1970’s, the future Wilson describes is both less sophisticated and more advanced. They have flying cars called Grasshoppers, but no Internet. Video phones but no handheld computers. And everyone smokes. As the wise man said, the future ain’t what it used to be.

There’s a good bit of sex in the novel, but it’s described with discretion. This drawing and giving of life energy often has an intimate component to it, which translates to Olof Carlsen making a number of, ahem, lady friends, despite being a married man. It’s the life energy thing, man: he can’t help it.

Things move quickly at the end, when the aliens describe their true nature, where they came from, and what they plan to do. This is where Lovecraft’s influence makes itself known. What struck me is the use of the name Ubbo-Sathla, which is an outer god created by Clark Ashton Smith. Wilson, having been published by Arkham House himself, cannot have chosen this name by accident. Does that make the aliens in the novel Cthulhoid in some fashion? Hard to say.

Wilson’s adept at making the unbelievable credible, and he includes details in description and conversation that draw you into the story despite yourself. With a name like The Space Vampires, the novel should be more pulpy than it comes across. It still holds up, even after more than 40 years in print.

Book Review: My Tired Shadow

August 29, 2017 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

There’s little to like about Ritchie “Redrum” Abruzzi, the protagonist of Joseph Hirsch’s My Tired Shadow. A former pro boxer, Ritchie’s also a bully, a thief, and a shit who makes his money by doing the only thing he’s half-way good at: beating people to a bloody smear with his fists. So no, I don’t like him at all.

But damn it, I do love him. How can I not? He’s me. Or, rather, he’s the part of me who yearns for greatness but gets in his own way every time. He’s smart enough to know what he’s capable of, but not strong enough to overcome his own weaknesses. His needs. His anger. Forged in the blood and sweat and spit of the boxing ring, Ritchie’s both the gold and the dross, and that’s what makes him such an unforgettable figure in a fast-reading novel that’ll leave you gasping like a fighter who’s just taken a shot to the liver.

Set in the seedy, dirty, crime-ridden Los Angeles the limp-wristed Hollywood types glorify but never condescend to really capture, My Tired Shadow chronicles the tail end of Ritchie’s descent as a failed pugilist eking out a living as a street fighter to the upswing, when a wealthy B-movie producer picks him to star in his new straight-to-video flick Zombie Boxer.

If you didn’t know much about boxing before reading it, you’ll definitely learn enough to get your nose broken by the end of the book. Full of both physical and emotional violence, it’s a brutal, pathos-filled tale told well, with vulnerable characters who come up against the ugliness that is Ritchie’s temper, and often pay a terrible price.

An exchange with a British journalist fan who’s seen Ritchie’s fights on YouTube and wants to spend time with him sums up Ritchie’s character well:

Ritchie cut the wheel. “You don’t got to drink, but you’ve got to drink if you hang with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you studying me like a bug under a microscope all night. Just get hammered with me, be my paisan for the next couple hours, then you can wake up in the morning and hammer out whatever you want on your typewriter.” Ritchie gunned it again.

That’s Ritchie: hammers and hammers and guns.

As a writer, Hirsch doesn’t let up even if you begged him to, and My Tired Shadow is over way too quickly, which is the highest praise I can give it. Reading fiction’s an escape, right? That’s what they say. But how do you escape Ritchie Abruzzi once he’s got his hooks in you?

You don’t. Once you’ve read about him, he’s always with you, like him or not.

Touch No One by Joseph Hirsch

August 10, 2017 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

I was honored to write a blurb for Joseph Hirsch’s science fiction/horror novel Touch No One:

Joseph Hirsch’s Touch No One is a disquieting blend of near-future science fiction, gritty detective tale, and grotesque horror story. Tightly written, it lifts up the rock covering our post-modern society’s deepest fears, where body modification and digital communication have replaced personal advancement and the intimacy of human contact. From the surgically-altered milk-women to weaponized, genetically-tailored parasites, Touch No One presents a disturbing vision of humanity’s future.

Despite being an indie fiction writer myself, I’d be the first to tell you that, like traditionally-published fiction, indie novels are very much a mixed bag. For every book you don’t want to put down, there are at least fifty that you can tell aren’t worth your time from the advertising copy alone. Touch No One is that one book you want to read all in one sitting, even as you cringe at the world it depicts. Hirsch knows what makes people tick, and can show you their deepest ugliness while making you care about what happens to them. The best books stay with you: Touch No One takes up residence in your guts and won’t leave for love or money.

Book Review: Whispering Corridors by Ambrose Ibsen

April 13, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Whispering Corridors is a short novel by Ambrose Ibsen that tells the tale of a derelict house haunted by a ghost called the Upside-Down Man, and what happens when two college students try to film a documentary about both house and ghost.

Unfortunately, the premise was better than the execution.

Told in first person, the main character is Eric, a frat boy who has a healthy skepticism of all things supernatural. He’s dragged into this documentary project by his friend Lydia. I use the term “friend” loosely, because at no point in the novel does either character say anything remotely nice to the other. Every exchange is weighted with insult, hostility, or general smartassery, which makes their relationship puzzling. Lydia comes off as mean and unpleasant, with Eric as her punching bag. Literally, at one point:

“I guess so,” I replied, though apparently it wasn’t convincing, because she socked me in the gut. Lydia was pretty tiny, but she could throw a punch with the best of them.

Why does he hang out with her? She hits him and says nasty things to him all the time. Not only are they not having sex, but the subject isn’t even hinted at. So there’s not even any sexual tension to keep their connection interesting.

Eric is himself a strange character, and belongs to the only fraternity in the country that isn’t throwing a Halloween party on Halloween night. He also doesn’t like clubbing. Or hanging out with the other members of the frat. Or meeting co-eds. Or doing any of the things one might expect from a person who goes through the rigmarole of joining a college fraternity. His above-it-all attitude to college life didn’t sit right.

The writing needed work and included a lot of unnecessary verbiage:

Kenwood House looked to me every bit as dismal and uninviting as it had the day before, in the rain. (The whole book is told from your perspective, Eric, so everything looks to you like something. –ed)

It was a wallpapered kitchen; I could tell because the paper was peeling in several places.

…but from up close it was clear to see that she was in some trouble.

You get the picture. It’s not a big deal, but between that, the dialogue tags (“I urged,” “I warned,” etc), and some strange phrasing like, “There appeared to be four rooms on this level, none of them possessed of doors,” the writing took me out of the story.

We don’t learn a lot about the Upside-Down Man, nor do we see much of him at all, so the doom that creeps toward Eric and Lydia is rather toothless. Also, I found it hard to care about what happened to either character. Lydia’s big reveal did nothing to advance the plot or affect events in any meaningful way.

The book just didn’t do it for me. At the time of this writing, Whispering Corridors is available on Amazon Unlimited. Give it a try and tell me what I missed.

Book Review: Agents of Dreamland

March 16, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Caitlin R Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland is as fun a novella as you’re likely to read about a Lovecraftian apocalypse, especially if you don’t mind the lack of plot or anything actually happening throughout the story.

Much of the novella happens in conversations, reminiscences, and stream-of-consciousness musings from a very unreliable narrator. There’s no action in it to speak of, and the characters are all pretty mysterious. There’s the Signalman, a government agent-type who investigates the kind of bizarre occurrences that trigger the coming apocalypse. There’s also Chloe, a member of a bizarre cult. And there’s Immacolata Sexton, the most enigmatic character of all, who knows what’s going on but tells us little of it.

Part of the fun of the novel involves identifying the various references the author places throughout the text: brain-excised cadavers, strangely-worked cylinders, steps to Deeper Slumber, Slaughterhouse-Five, and more. It helps to know and love Lovecraft’s body of work to understand what’s going on, except when Kiernan goes off-script, like with the character of Immacolata Sexton.

The narrative is stuffed to the gills with description, which is what turns a short story like this into a novella. Some of it’s disturbing, some simply there. There’s no beginning, middle, or end to it, a fact that the author herself mentions near the last chapter of the book. So if you’re looking for a linear, meat-and-potatoes story, you will be disappointed.

Overall, I liked it. Lacking expectations, I had little to be disappointed by, and the writing was clear when it wanted to be and opaque when it served the narrative.