THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #14: A review of "The Place of Pain" by M.P. Shiel

Best known for THE PURPLE CLOUD, Shiel is mostly forgotten by modern audiences. He doesn’t deserve that, and it’s good to see Pelan bringing back one of Shiel’s tales from the dead.



The story is set in the middle of nowhere, a town called Small Forks in British Columbia, and it concerns a gentleman by the name of Rev. Thomas Podd. The narrator sees him as a pious man, eager to help his flock and to convert others to Christianity. However, one day the nature-loving Podd goes out camping to commune with the planet. When he comes back, he’s an absolute wreck of a man. Dressed as sloppily as a man can, he addresses his flock without his collar and denounces them all as fools. From this moment on, he becomes homeless, a joke to everyone else. This rouses the narrator’s curiosity, so he interrogates the good reverend.


Podd refuses to tell him what happened out there in the woods. However, he says that if the narrator will give him three dollars a week, he will, upon his deathbed, let the narrator in on the secret. After learning Podd has tuberculosis and won’t be around for much longer, the narrator talks him down to a dollar.


A bit later, the government wants to put an electric company out in the woods, and Podd flips out. He starts blowing up their construction sites. Though he’s never caught, the townsfolk know it is his fault, and they try to lynch him. The narrator saves his life, and Podd decides to tell him the truth about what he’d seen.


This tale is a wonderfully sculpted suspense story. Shiel tantalizes the reader with very few details, demanding complete attention and devotion. What could possibly change this God-fearing man into the trainwreck we see before us? Why does he keep saying that he’s seen Hell? And what does it have to do with the moon?


SPOILER ALERT: The only flaw in Shiel’s story is the ending. Podd leads the narrator out to the falls, where he claims that if he takes a certain rock and puts it in a particular position in the river, the frothy waves will change into a glass surface, through which they’ll be able to see this Hell he keeps talking about. But he won’t do it in front of the narrator, because he doesn’t want the narrator to be able to duplicate the process. He tells the narrator to go down to a cave and watch from there while Podd does the thing with the rock.


Unfortunately, this is the moment when the tuberculosis kicks in. Podd lives only long enough to pick up the rock. Even though the narrator tries to position the rock in the river at various places, he just can’t do it. All the suspense is built up for nothing. We never get to find out if Podd’s story is true.


It’s not a complete loss. Perhaps Shiel is implying that Podd is a nut. Or maybe he’s suggesting that the powers that be saved the narrator’s sanity by letting Podd die at that moment. Podd certainly thinks that he got TB because he discovered the truth about the falls. This open-endedness lets the reader come to his/her own conclusion, but it’s maddeningly unsatisfactory, just like real life. END OF SPOILERS.


If you can stomach the vague nature of the ending, you’ll be fine. If you demand answers from your fiction, you might want to steer clear. Still, it’s a fine tale where the journey is a lot more interesting than the destination.

[This story first appeared in the May '14 issue of RED MAGAZINE and cannot be found online at this time.]

OH NO, MS. SPRAIN. I HAVE WEASEL DICKS! A review of GROSS, GRANDPA! #2

Words simply cannot describe the obscene masterpiece that is the GROSS, GRANDPA series, and somehow, by some miracle of Satan, Osama bin Laden, and Carrot Top combined, the second issue is more over-the-top, batshit crazy than the first.



It’s barely worth mentioning the story that’s just there to act as a structure to hold up the genital madness held within these two covers, but here’s an attempt. In the first issue, Miah Guy fell out of the sky outside a treehouse where Bones and his two female roommates live. They try to help him until Ms. Sprain and her dick-snip crabs show up, attacking them all with her prehensile tits and flopping labia.


Issue two picks up with Miah Guy remembering everything, including the fact that he has two dicks that shoot out cum bullets. This leads to an aerial battle the likes of which you have never, in all of your life, seen. Guaranteed. Miah Guy’s two dicks elongate, and his scrotum enlarges. The two combine to form a giant helicopter made from his genitals, which he flies in. Yes. You read that right.

This doesn’t stop Ms. Sprain, who converts her vagina into a rocket, a Turbo-Queef, if you will. Suffice it to say, not even Clint Eastwood in FIREFOX saw an air battle like this.


There’s more, including a couple of young girls who, upon contact with water, grow enormously fat (at least until they take their diuretics). Throw in a bunch of guys who like to shower naked together (and insist that their group nudity isn’t gay), a bout of racist roleplaying, and the return of Bones, the man whose hands are bandaged because they grew too many bones after a cereal mishap, and you get the flavor of the sheer lunacy of this book.


The Grandpa from the title? We get to meet him briefly (he’s actually an aged Miah Guy) when his grandchildren are trying to bury him before he’s dead. You see, the dick-copters and turbo-queefs were in a story he was telling them at his own graveside. And now, he’s trying to save himself by telling them the story of how he’d met their grandmother (perhaps one of the diuretic twins?).


This story is just so off-the-wall, one has to wonder where the fuck it came from. Josh Filer, who writes and illustrates the book, is the perpetrator of this . . . this . . . there are no words to describe this book. The adjectives so far in this piece just don’t seem to cover it.


The artwork is the perfect compliment to the story. Filer’s style is just so ugly all of these insane images seem right at home. The only flaw is the lettering. It has the perfect frantic appearance, but sometimes it’s so jumbled it takes a moment to figure out what he’s trying to say.


On the back of this book, Filer has three blurbs, all from Nate Willkomm, an “asshole from my fictional writing class,” and all of them are just talking shit about GROSS, GRANDPA!. “I lack the capacity to comment in words my revulsion,” he says. “If I was not required to read this I would burn it right now.” If you are weak of stomach and mind, heed these words carefully. This book is most definitely not for everyone. You need a wicked, ugly, nasty sense of humor to enjoy this.


At the same time, you will never read anything like this book in your entire life. The Marquis de Sade would have been aghast at GROSS, GRANDPA!. So . . . you know . . . buy it immediately!


GROSS, GRANDPA! #2
Written and illustrated by Josh Filer
20 pages
$5.00

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #13: A review of "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" by Aleister Crowley

And now we come to the most notorious of our authors so far. Just as those who know nothing of torture and porn are familiar with the name of the Marquis de Sade, those who don’t know much about horror know the name of this gentleman. Shockingly, though, this tale is so far the scariest of the entire volume. He takes on a lot of topics in this one that scare most people, notably among them life after death. He also does it with a remarkable amount of flair. People generally consider splatterpunk a product of the ‘Eighties, but this story might be proof that Crowley had a hand in creating the subgenre.



This is the tale of Magdalen Blair, a young schoolgirl who can read people’s minds. Her classmates and professor find out about this, and they run a bunch of tests on her. Sure enough, she’s the real deal. She becomes the focus of her professor’s experiments, and before long, they fall in love with each other. After they are married, the professor, Arthur, develops Bright’s disease and starts deteriorating. She has no control over her powers, so she’s forced to listen to his inner turmoil as he dies inch by inch in a very unflattering way. Eventually, he finally croaks, but much to her dismay, he doesn’t stop broadcasting from his mind. She discovers tobacco products help kill the sound, and she starts smoking like a fiend, but nothing can keep silent the horrors of her husband’s life after death.


Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of talk of religion in this story, considering the source. However, there is a huge lack of Crowley’s usual claptrap. There is no talk of beasts, Satan’s name isn’t mentioned once, and as far as mysticism goes, the only supernatural thing is Magdalen’s telepathy.


His mastery of this tale is so profound, though, that he knows exactly what buttons to push on people. The fear of death is one of the biggest weapons he uses against his readers, but there’s an even scarier thing than that: the fear of what comes after. It’s so terrifying that as Magdalen tells us her story, she says she’s going to kill herself afterward, and not in a very nice fashion. She intends to light a stick of dynamite like it was a cigar and smoke that fucker till it blows her head off. Killing the brain is key.


Naturally, Crowley can’t tell his story from the point of view of someone who has died, so he gives us the next best thing, something that seems a lot more plausible: telling the story of the afterlife from the perspective of a mind-reader who saw it all happen to her husband.


It’s an ugly picture she depicts. Dante’s Inferno couldn’t hold up to the gruesome things Crowley gives us. SPOILER ALERT: Arthur’s consciousness is trapped inside the deteriorating wreckage of his brain. As it starts to rot, Arthur sees all of these horrible, hellish scenes that keep getting worse as he rots more. Magdalen comes to the conclusion that it will keep getting worse just so long as there is matter left of his brain, hence her desire to completely destroy hers. This surmise is confirmed when she has him cremated, and the transmission from his dead brain finally stops. However, in the notes concluding the story, we learn that she was not successful at offing herself. Instead, she was committed, even though the doctor seems to believe she’s a mind reader. END OF SPOILERS.


Undoubtedly, this story scared the bejabbers out of readers back in 1913. Crowley uses language in a way very few people did back then. Perhaps the story was even banned shortly after its introduction to the world. Regardless, if you haven’t read this story, and it’s not on your reading list, maybe you don’t like horror as much as you think.

[This story was first published in THE EQUINOX and can be read here.]

MISDIRECTION IN A WORLD OF MAGIC: A review of SMOKE AND MIRRORS #1 and 2

Perhaps the most interesting character to pop out of recent comics is Mr. Ward, who is rather a curiosity in the new book from IDW, SMOKE AND MIRRORS. You see, he’s a magician, the kind who does card and coin tricks. Cups and balls. You know, the classics.



Here’s the thing, though: SMOKE AND MIRRORS doesn’t happen in our world. It takes place in an adjacent universe, where magic is very, very real. Instead of electricity, magic runs all of the technology, from automobiles to thermostats. When we first enter this world, we see a Steve Jobs-ish kind of presentation of a new product called Gesture. In order to get all the world’s devices to work, you have to speak incantations to them. However, that can be pretty cumbersome, especially if you’re doing other things, like talking to friends. Here’s a new voice-free magic technology that depends on hand gestures instead. (By the way, instead of Apple, we have the Trade Circle, a coven who comes up with innovative new ways to use magic.)


In the crowd is young Ethan, a rebellious student who claims to have already seen someone doing magic using hand gestures, a guy doing tricks on the street. Enter Mr. Ward, who apparently comes from another world, a world where magic doesn’t exist, only magic TRICKS.


Ethan, curious as to how something like that could work, barges his way into Ward’s life and demands to be taught all of these skills. So goes the first couple of issues of SMOKE AND MIRRORS.


Writer Mike Costa doesn’t waste time coming out and saying that Ward comes from a world like ours. Like any good magician, he uses hints and clues. For example, Ethan finds a handgun in Ward’s trunk and has absolutely no idea what it is. Also, when Ethan sneaks up on Ward, Ward gives out a shocked exclamation: “Jesus!” Well, guess who doesn’t exist in the world of SMOKE AND MIRRORS. Oh yeah.


Not content just to tell a story, Costa enlists the aid of magician Jon Armstrong to put a few tricks into the books themselves. In one very notable scene, they depict Ward fanning out five cards, asking the reader (YES, YOU!) to think of one of these cards. In the next panel, he removes one of the cards, fans out the rest, and says, “Your card is gone.” Surely enough, IT IS! Magic? Well . . . maybe not. Maybe just psychology. Because legerdemain doesn’t exist in the world of the story, nobody knows what it means to force a card.


In enlisting the aid of artist Ryan Browne, whose old fashioned style actually makes Ward look like a magician from the times of Houdini, they have gotten the perfect crew together to do this book. Buy a copy, and you’ll be wowed. Even if you don’t enjoy the story, you’ll at least have a magic trick to try out on your friends. It might even get you free drinks in a bar, if you use it right.


SMOKE AND MIRRORS #1 and 2
Written by Mike Costa (with Jon Armstrong)
Illustrated by Ryan Browne
Published by IDW
22 pages
$3.99

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #12: A review of "Caterpillars" by E.F. Benson

This is so far the most chilling tale in this volume, because Benson does something that no one else has (so far). Rather than rely on spirits and vampires and mysterious monsters, he uses something far more sinister: actual disease.



This is the story of a nameless narrator who takes up residence in an old Italian mansion. (He never wanted to tell this story, but he has just heard that the building is being torn down, so now he feels safe.) On one nocturnal wandering, he encounters a bed full of foot long luminescent caterpillars with strange, crab-like arms. He convinces himself it was just a dream, but the next day, his companion, Arthur Inglis, presents to him a matchbox, which contains a strange caterpillar he’d come across. It looks exactly like the ones the narrator had found the previous evening. They note the weird legs, and it reminds Inglis of crabs, so he mentions that the Latin for crab is cancer. This creature freaks the narrator out so badly he throws it out the window. Later, Inglis finds it again, but this time he steps on it. That very night, the narrator discovers the ghostly caterpillars once again . . . .


Here we have an excellent example of using creepy crawlies as a means to horrify a reader. So far, the only other writer in this book who has done this is Wells (with spiders). However, caterpillars seem so much more . . . creepy. Think about all of those legs, all shaped like crab pinchers. Pretty intense, right?


And the best part: Benson doesn’t fully explain the caterpillars. Are they ghosts? Their luminescence seems to suggest that. However, maybe they don’t need explaining. SPOILER ALERT: Just after the narrator sees the caterpillars a second time, he witnesses them heading to Inglis’s bedroom, presumably to get revenge on him for killing their brother. Yet he’s still alive at the end of the narrator’s stay at the house. And then, we get the kinda-sorta epilogue, in which we learn that Inglis died shortly after his residence in Italy. He was apparently riddled with, you guessed it, cancer. So the caterpillars got their revenge after all. END SPOILERS.


Benson has certainly upped the ante for the genre with this little tale. Read it for yourself and find out why.

[This story first appeared in THE ROOM IN THE TOWER, AND OTHER STORIES and can be read here.]

WAIT A MINUTE! A review of THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS VS. A MUMMY

Chris Lukeman has done it again, this time with a horror comedy about . . . well, you saw the title. That’s exactly what it’s about.

A mummy is delivered (for some unfathomable reason) to the University of Illinois at the beginning of the movie. No one signs for it, so the driver just leaves the fucking thing and drives off. Shortly thereafter, the mummy wakes up and starts causing mayhem.


Meet Casey and his friend, Bill Williams. They have a plan to trick a couple of girls into going out with them, which involves Casey pretending to be knocked over by a mad bicycler (Bill) in front of them. This works out when Sarah and Jo Ann see this display and feel sorry for him. Luckily, they don’t recognize Bill later.


Perhaps all black guys look alike to them. And yes, true to the usual formula, Bill is the first to die. His death is treated like kind of a bummer by Casey, who was really looking forward to getting laid that night.


Now that they know a mummy is on the loose on campus, they go to an archaeology professor with an English accent (naturally) named Rudolphe, and they begin to formulate a plan to stop the monster. In the meantime, the rest of the college students have embraced the mummy. They’re sick of the discrimination being shown against it, and they are rallying together to protest the campus’s attempt at killing the bastard.


Throw in a campus officer who thinks he’s a hard-bitten cop, a guy wearing a shirt that says RED SHIRT before dying in a very cannon fodder-ish way, a lot of blood, and a musical number, and you get the flavor of this movie. What’s that? Yes. There is a MUSICAL NUMBER.


This is an indie flick, so there are a few problems. For one, the sound quality is pretty bad. The dialogue is hard to hear, so you turn it up. However, the music is spot on, so when it starts playing, you have to turn the volume down. Also, the pacing is bad due to a lot of bad edits. The acting is off because everything seems so staged. It’s like the actors all know they’re acting, rather than successfully pretending to be someone else. Also, because of the staginess of this, there is a bad scene in which a group of characters are talking, and the camera pans back and forth between each one who speaks . . . but they wait until the camera is on them before they say anything. Ugh.

The music is really good, though. Sometimes, it sounds like it belongs in an Ed Wood movie, and at other moments, it’s very reminiscent of silent movie soundtracks.

The effects are pretty good, for an indie flick. But where the movie really shines is in the humor. There are a lot of really good bits here. The scene where Rudolphe gets parking ticket after parking ticket after parking ticket is priceless. He also has an amazing fight scene with the mummy, which concludes in him dying in a very Obi-Wan-ish way. Yes, his body disappears from under a blanket he was covered with. Pay close attention to the note in his hand immediately after he kicks the mummy in the balls.


In another scene, the characters are talking about hunting down the mummy, and Casey holds up his hand and says, “Wait a minute!” Just like he’s about to object or offer a nugget of wisdom. He then pauses. Watch the timer on your DVD player. A full minute of absolute silence then ensues before he agrees to their plan.


In a scene where one person is murdered so badly that blood completely covers a wall, another person who was standing in front of the wall, moves away, showing a human-shaped clean spot on the wall. That same character later decides to touch up her make-up, despite the fact that she’s still covered in blood.

The best, though, comes when the group of characters that kind of act like a Greek play’s chorus encounters the mummy, they’re ready for battle. They then remember they have a test tomorrow and decide to run instead. They inadvertently lead the mummy into a trap (weighed by a fucking BOOM BOX!), and when they have the creature subdued, they decide to play it like the Scooby gang. They decide to find out who’s really behind that mask. Instead of taking it off, though, they accidentally take off its head, spraying blood all over everyone.

This film is flawed, and it is very noticeable. However, it’s just so damned funny that you’ll forgive a lot of transgressions. You’ll also see a very unusual death: one of the characters gets stabbed by a phone. No, not a cell phone, a PAY PHONE. Where the fuck else are you going to see something like that?


THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS VS. A MUMMY
Directed by Chris Lukeman
Produced by Illini Film and Video
2006
89 minutes $11.99

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #11: A review of "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James

Here we have another powerhouse of horror fiction, and this one has very much deserved its place in the history of the genre. Like its predecessors so far, it has a very British and proper tone to it; perhaps it has more of a stiff upper lip than the others so far. Yet James delivers something timeless to us, which makes it a much easier read than, say, Machen or Blackwood. More on that in a moment.



This is the story of a misanthrope by the name of Karswell. He definitely thinks he’s better than others, and when something happens to incur his wrath, he is very ready to step in and get his vengeance in a very mysterious way. For example, when the local children trespassed on his property, he went in to their school to give a presentation on fairy tales with a slide projector. While he told the most gruesome versions of these stories, he showed them realistic and horrifying images of monsters ripping apart children on land that looks suspiciously like his own.


This time, a man named Edward Dunning has offended him by not allowing a paper of his to be published. After going behind several backs, Karswell learns Dunning’s identity and sets his revenge in action. You see, he goes after his enemies by “casting the runes,” or passing them a magical piece of paper that will bring them terrible fortune and death. (And yes, James is clever enough to call it “the black spot” at one point, an excellent reference to TREASURE ISLAND.) Karswell has cast the runes on Dunning, but Dunning, a resourceful man himself, suspects that something is amiss when very strange things start happening to him. He looks into Karswell’s history and discovers that another of the sorcerer’s rivals, John Harrington, died shortly after critically panning Karswell’s alchemy book. After a lengthy discussion on the subject with Harrington’s brother, they both come to the conclusion that Dunning has been cursed, too, and he will die very soon if they don’t reverse the curse by handing the “black spot” back to Karswell.


What James does so well is to give us a really interesting villain. Let’s face it, who among us doesn’t know a Karswell? He’s a creep, and he overreacts to slights against him. And he delights in fucking with kids. Every town’s got one (but hopefully, they don’t know the arcane spells Karswell does), and as a result, James has given us something we can all identify with, even though his story is just over 100 years old (1911, if you’re keeping track).


There is just one small problem: the beginning. At first, it begins in an epistolary fashion, which was the style of the day. It’s an interesting bait-and-switch to pull on a reader familiar with other stories of the time. However, it leads in with a prologue between two characters, Mr. and Mrs. Secretary, who don’t really have much to do with the rest of the story. They do serve to introduce Karswell in an amusing fashion, and without Mr. Secretary, Dunning would have never read Karswell’s paper and thus earn his ire, but the story wouldn’t suffer from having this lengthy prologue removed and starting with Dunning instead, perhaps with a quick flashback as to why he is in this predicament.


A trifling matter. This story will always be remembered, and deservedly so. If you haven’t given it a try, what are you waiting for?

[This story first appeared in MORE GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY and can be read here.]