David’s Haunted Library: Kind Nepenthe and The Lucky Ones Died First

 

Deep in the wilderness of Humboldt County in Northern California lies a pot farm where a young woman named Rebecca wants to teach her five-year old daughter how to live off the land. Along with her boyfriend Calendula, they are helping a man named Coyote who is growing marijuana and is in need of help harvesting it. Calendula and Rebecca are hoping to live the hippie lifestyle and get enough money together from the harvest to buy their own farm.

It won’t be an easy task, living close by is Diesel Dan who helped start the farm and Coyote owes money to. Dan lost everything due to drugs and a stint in prison, but now he looks to make amends for his past and set an example for his soon to be born granddaughter. Coyote is strung out on pills and barely keeping his head above water and he wonders if he can come up with the money to pay everyone. To make matters more complicated the farm is home to an old legend and the ghost of a boy who is looking for a playmate.

Kind Nepenthe by Matthew Brockmeyer is a story about what happens when you dream big and reality slaps you in the face. All of the characters in this story make decisions that they hope will make their lives better but each decision comes with drastic consequences. For instance, we have Rebecca and Calendula who are working hard to get the money together for a farm but they have to deal with things like Coyote disappearing and threatening not to pay them and several other problems. They both get to the point where they wonder if all of this is worth it and their personalities start to change with Rebecca wondering if she ever cared for Calendula in the first place.

Another interesting character is Coyote who is regularly thinking of the wife and kids he left and you see how the drug lifestyle he has led has ruined him. I also enjoyed the relationship between Diesel Dan and his son. Dan is hoping he doesn’t follow in his footsteps as a drug dealer but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree even though Dan is trying hard to change. My favorite part of this book was watching all of the characters deal with the pressure of their lives falling apart.

Whether you like Kind Nepenthe depends on what you are looking for in a story. As a human drama, this book is excellent, I loved all the characters including the ones that do bad things such as Diesel Dan’s son. The book is sold as a ghost story though and it felt like that was an unnecessary part of the book. While there is a ghost and some elements of horror here it didn’t add anything to the plot and I felt that if you took out the supernatural parts it would have been better. All in all, though this was a really good read and I’m looking forward to more from Matthew Brockmeyer in the future.

In the English countryside lies the small town of Hambleton where tourists come to get away from the big city. Life changes for the village when an earthquake awakens a hungry and horny cryptid from a 60+ year hibernation. Now the monster is killing everyone in its path and the only ones who may be able to stop it are a group of potheads, a former Nazi, and a bigfoot hunter.

The story in The Lucky Ones Died First by Jack Bantry is a pretty simple one, a creature is on the loose and no one seems to be able to stop it. The descriptions I read this book called it splatterpunk and compared it to the work of Richard Laymon, who was one of my favorites. Going into it I thought that the whole point of this story was to be as gross and offensive as possible. The problem is that the book isn’t descriptive enough to be that offensive. The story has several characters and a monster that aren’t described in much detail. The plot moves along at the speed of a freight train and it’s over before you know it. It felt more like a detailed outline than a real story.

I’m not saying that The Lucky Ones Died First is a bad book, I’m just saying that it could have been a lot better if the characters were given more description. I didn’t know enough about anyone in this story to feel emotion for them. It kind of felt like the author was embarrassed and didn’t want to go into a lot of detail, so the sex and death scenes suffered for it. There was a lot of potential in this story and if it had another 100 pages or so it could have been a great horror tale.

The Lucky Ones Died First does have some fun moments though, for instance, the two closing scenes put a huge smile on my face. This book has the feel of a cheesy blood-soaked monster movie. If it was a movie I would have loved it but as a book, I wanted more. All this being said there were enough good ideas in this book to make me want to read whatever novel Jack Bantry comes up with next.

Review: Axes Of Evil edited by Alex S. Johnson

What’s better than a big book full of horror fiction? The answer is a big book of horror stories that are about Heavy Metal music. Axes Of Evil is a heavy metal anthology for people who are passionate about metal music and horror fiction. There are 34 stories in this collection that go from supernatural horror to comedy to splatterpunk. Axes of Evil is edited by music journalist and horror writer Alex S. Johnson and it includes stories from Sephera Giron, Terry M. West and Charie D. La Marr.

There are so many good stories in Axes Of Evil that its hard to pick just a couple to talk about but one of my favorite story in this collection was The Plaster Casters Rise Again by Charie D. La Marr. Since I love stories that combine horror, humor and smut this one really appealed to me. It’s about a woman who makes molds of Rock Stars privates and goes to a metal show to get a mold from a rock star named Thor. Thor always talks in the third person and considers himself to be the viking god of thunder. I thought it was hilarious the way Thor talks about the women he has been with and the situation that makes Thor loose his temper towards the end was funny.  There is another good story by Charie D. La. Marr in this book called Once Bitten, Twice Shy. This is a more serious story and deals with a night club fire that killed almost 100 people in Rhode Island back in 2003.

Another story I liked was All the Rage by Lindsey Beth Goddard. This story was told by a rock god who has been living disguised as a singer in a boy band. The rock god gets tired of hiding his true self and decides to give his fans a surprise. I liked the concept here of rock gods that don’t like music that isn’t heavy.  The editor of the book Alex S. Johnson has a great story here also called Die, Clown, Die! This one shows the diversity of stories in this book. It’s about a guy dressed as a clown that goes to a clown metal show. He goes to the wrong place and the band that is playing is called Bozokill and they don’t like clowns.

Battle Of The Bands by Joel Kaplan is another one of my favorites in this book. This is a futuristic story where the competition between the bands isn’t just about having the best songs, they also have to kill the other bands and try to be the most shocking. This story was gruesome but entertaining at the same time. These bands torture their audience and  and use their instruments as weapons to slice through their competition. This story is an original idea and has to be read to be believed.

At 572 pages, Axes Of Evil is one massive anthology. For fans of horror and heavy metal this is a must have. Both metal and horror have a lot in common, they both look at the dark side of life yet in my opinion have a positive energy to them. Reading horror and listening to metal is like a socially acceptable way to get your aggression out, so its great to see an anthology that merges the two.

Puzzleman

Puzzleman by Christopher Alan Broadstone is one ambitious novel. When you first start reading it you think its going to be a gruesome horror novel meant to shock people. That’s exactly what it is, but as you start reading you find there is a lot of depth to the story and characters. The story begins with a woman named Amanda buying an earring that looks like a ball of metal wires. Amanda is recently divorced and her infant child has died leaving her bitter and wondering where her life went wrong.

Little does she know that the earring will soon lead her to some answers she doesn’t want. Amanda isn’t the only one searching for answers in Puzzleman. We soon meet a legless heroin addict named Erik who wants vengeance, a professor named John who feels his life has passed him by, a French vintner named Jeannette who wants to revisit a lost love and a former detective named Ben who wants to get back into the game. All of the characters are searching for something and all of their destinies are intertwined in the Puzzleman’s maze like pipeworld.

The pipeworld is a place where life is eternal but is also a place of suffering. It’s a place of living nightmares crawling with grumemonsters but also a place where the five people in the story can find what they are missing. The Pipeworld is like a giant macabre puzzle with the puzzleman as the master and the people as the pieces. The question is, can the pieces find the answers they seek and escape with their sanity?

My Favorite character in Puzzleman was Amanda, this is a woman who has questioned god and everything else around her since she was a child. It almost seems like god is punishing her for her questions with the death of her young child and her abusive husband. She shows how tough she is in the pipeworld though by not giving up even when things are at their worst. I loved how towards the end she makes a comment to the Puzzleman that shows that her viewpoints on god have not changed and I enjoyed the Puzzleman’s reaction to the comment. Another thing I liked in the story was finding out why her husband was the way he was.  My only problem with the story was that there was a long section on the mythology behind the Puzzleman.  I felt the section was to long and took the reader out of the story and would have been better if it was divided  into segments within the story and not just one big chunk.

There is a lot going on in this book, it starts as a horror novel then turns into a text-book on world mythology and then goes back to being a horror novel. This isn’t just any horror novel though, it asks some important questions such as What are you willing to do for the ones you love? What would you do for eternal life? and Why does god allow so much misery? This is a thinking man’s horror novel. It delivers the scares and the gore but it also makes you think. In fact you might have to read it twice to understand everything that Christopher Alan Broadstone is trying to say. Puzzleman is Mr. Broadstone’s first novel and it will be interesting to see what he has in store for future novels.