By Douglas Clegg

Background: First published in 1991, this creepy book was one of Clegg’s earlier published works. I, for one, am looking forward to checking out all of Clegg’s other work after speeding through this one.

What it’s about: A family summer vacation on a peninsula off the Georgia coast turns deadly when a young boy, Beau, starts hanging out with his cousin, Sumpter. See, his cousin likes to play in this creepy, rundown shack he calls Neverland, and there he keeps a crate with something mysterious inside.

Sumpter gets Beau and his older sisters to join in on his “games,” which involve praying to the terrible, merciless god, Lucy, who demands that they steal, write swear words on the walls, and give blood sacrifices. Inside of Neverland is a nightmarish world where the children hallucinate and feed on each other’s blood.

Meanwhile, the adults pay little attention to the children, as they are too busy having their own drunken arguments and dysfunction. But Grammy Weenie, who is old and severe and confined to a wheelchair, reveals to Beau that there is something not quite right about the shack, and that he should stay away from his cousin Sumpter… that he should not “let it out to play.”

The dark and brutal history of Neverland unravels as ghosts are dredged up from watery graves and Sumpter turns on Beau in order to get his final sacrifice, which will raise Lucy and the other god, the dark god: The Devourer of All.

Why it will keep you up at night: Clegg’s narrative is captivating; you are instantly transported to this old-fashioned Southern world where the kids run around barefoot in the swamp and the carnival sits half-dead with the rusting husks of out-of-service rides. Slowly, insidiously, the creepiness begins, and by the time you get to the climax you are going head-to-head with all manner of supernatural grotesqueries.

Both the descriptions and the characters pull you into this story, which is ultimately about childhood and the loss of innocence. Though the narrator is a child, this is not a book for children. Definitely not a novel to pass up.

Watch the book trailer here:

Think of it as a strange mash-up of LOST, Supernatural, and Paranormal Activity.

Does it measure up to its predecessors? It’s only been on for three weeks, but in my opinion, the answer is no. It straddles that line where it’s got so much potential to be awesome, and it has those cool moments of creepiness that made the first season of Supernatural so entertaining… but something about it just feels off.

Maybe it’s the characters. I really don’t care about any of them… maybe because they don’t seem to care much about each other, willing to sacrifice others for the sake of the mission. Also, they’re a bit one-dimensional: the disloyal wife, the disaffected son, the guy who just cares about making a TV show, the mysterious traitor with an agenda of his own, and, of course, the weird girl who speaks only Spanish and whose sole purpose is to warn the others about impending danger thanks to her bizarrely huge knowledge of, and belief in, local legend.

Also, a requisite dead body or two.

The one episode that really came together for me was the second part of the 2-hour premier, where they stumble onto a place similar to the Island of the Dolls in Mexico. It’s pretty hard to screw up a bunch of creepy-ass dolls hanging morbidly in various stages of decay around a remote section of jungle.

There are some great moments in this episode where the cameras are rolling while everyone sleeps, and subtle things happem: a doll’s head turns; someone is slid from his tent. Here the Paranormal Activity-esque camerawork is in their favor, as they speed up time in that creepy way where everything moves very quickly. This episode had a satisfying resolution as they solved the mystery of the haunting.

"Come play with us..."

Unfortunately, the rest of the episodes fail to live up to this one. At this point, the most interesting part of the show is the legends they encounter, so I feel they should really focus on those. They try, but a lot of it gets lost due to shoddy exposition that fails to fully explain what’s going on, leaving the viewer a little confused and wishing she knew more about all the weird shit that’s happening to them.

This leaves me torn on the show. It could be awesome, but it just fails to live up to that potential, so I keep watching to see if it will succeed again like the doll episode did. I don’t have a whole lot of hope for that, but my curiosity about what happened to Emmett and what bit of legend they’ll encounter next might just keep me watching as long as I’ve got free time on Tuesday nights.

But that’s just one person’s opinion. Has anyone else been watching this? What do you think so far?

COLD-BLOODED GENESIS

From out the barren wasteland crawled a lone and broken figure, skin sizzling against gridiron ground, cracked and smoldering in the bloated red sun’s infernal glare.

How he had survived the bombs and blistered earth escaped him. He was alone. Blood boiling. Dying slowly in Hell-on-Earth.

Until the haze of smoky air parted around a green reptilian form, scaled and sharp-tailed. The female skittered closer on the deadland.

The immensity of their aloneness in this broken world flattened him.

“We’ll start a new one,” hissed the female lizard. “What’s your name?”

“Adam,” he said to his new companion. “You?”

“Eve.”

By Stephen King

Background: Published in 1986, this leviathan novel is over 1,000 pages. But, unlike The Stand (in my opinion), every one of those pages is well-earned. If you are interested in the story, don’t just watch the mini-series with Tim Curry; it pales in comparison.

What it’s about: Two narratives drive the story of a group of seven outcasts, one in the ’50s when they were kids, and one in the ’80s when they return to their hometown of Derry, Maine, all grown up, to face their childhood fears.

In the ’50s, they were terrorized by a shapeshifting monster that most often appeared as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. They dub the monster “It,” as it is so foreign a thing, and slowly their worst nightmares come to life. Of course, the adults don’t believe them, so the children are forced to contend with the beast on their own.

Meanwhile, in the ’80s, one of their number has committed suicide, and they are all asked to return home by the one who stayed in Derry. They converge, their memories of childhood fuzzy. Apparently, adulthood makes you forget about the psycho clown you once fought. But sure enough, Pennywise insinuates himself into their lives once again, and they are forced into the realization that they did not, in fact, best the creature back when they were kids.

The two narratives are woven together so that the climax of each of the timelines happens at the same time, doubling the tension as you scramble through the pages. The monster leads them down into its home, the sewers, for each final confrontation.

Why it will keep you up at night: Yes, the mini-series scared you when you were 5, but now it’s sort of silly, even (especially) the part where he turns into a giant spider. You are left thinking that Pennywise is a weird clown/spider, and that’s it.

Wrong.

Pennywise is a creature of Lovecraftian proportions and is much, much scarier in the book than in the movie. The creature’s real form cannot be perceived by our puny eyes, as the creature comes from a void outside of our universe. Its true form, which exists outside of our matter, is called the deadlights and appears to us as a swirling mass of orange light (and if you see it, you’ll promptly go insane).

In the book, the group must perform the Ritual of Chüd (which is a complicated way of metally biting on the creature’s tongue) to destroy it, and the climax is so surreal and outside of our perception that it is no wonder they didn’t try to render it visually in the movie, but instead left it as a silly face-off with a giant spider.

The book is so much more nuanced and complex than the movie, which is not surprising, as it is a long-ass book. It’s also creepy as hell. If you had nightmares about Tim Curry as Pennywise, just wait til you see all the horrifying stuff in the book that they left out. This one gets five stars from me, as it is my favorite Stephen King book.

Avenged Sevenfold warms your cold corpse with their tale of undying love in “A Little Piece of Heaven” (though that might be the heater he got for your thighs). Unfortunately, the video prohibits embedding, so just follow the link to YouTube to watch it there. It’ll be better than any romantic comedy you pop into the DVD player today, trust me.

Ah, true love.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

By Richard Matheson

Background: First published in 1971 by the author of I Am Legend, this book is known as the quintissential haunted house novel. Matheson, a well-known name in the horror genre, wrote many short stories and novels, as well as the screenplays for film adaptations and episodes of The Twilight Zone.

What it’s about: Hell House is an infamous house of horrors built on a remote, foggy piece of land beside a tarn. A wealthy but ill man, Deutsch, sends four people into the house to determine if there is an afterlife as he nears his own demise, including Dr. Barrett, a scientist; his wife, Edith; Florence Tanner, a spiritualist and mental medium; and Benjamin Fischer, a medium who was the only survivor of a previous journey into Hell House.

While Tanner becomes entangled with the sex-crazed ghosts, Dr. Barrett works on a machine that he believes will reverse the electromagnetic energy that is making the house appear haunted. As the danger increases, Edith comes to believe that there is more than science at play here, and Fischer must open himself up to the horrors that he once escaped many years ago.

The four different people all come together to try and learn the mystery of Hell House… but overpowering the deadly house is more than any of them bargained for.

Why it will keep you up at night: I admit, for the majority of the book I wasn’t terribly impressed. There were great moments of violence and creepiness, but the overemphasis on sexual debauchery, the point-of-view changes, and the one-dimensional characters fell a little flat for me.

However, the ending brought together these wandering elements and finally introduced some real horror into what was otherwise a rather lackluster haunted house. There is some great imagery and real mystery at the end, answering questions that were lost, or even unasked, in the first 200-some pages.

While a killer ending (no pun intended) can never make up for a meandering middle, I was entertained by the classic book nonetheless. The legend of Hell House lives on…

You can go to the site here to read my winning entry, “12.21.12“: perhaps the world is not what we think it is…

I find their contests to be a fun monthly writing exercise, and if you don’t feel you got it right the first time around, you are welcome to submit multiple entries every month. The winners of each month are also compiled at the end of the year into a flash fiction anthology, which is pretty cool.

It’s not easy to write a 100-word story, but it’s truly an exercise in brevity and the mark of a good writer who can accomplish such a feat. If you’ve ever thought of dabbling in flash, you should check out the contest.

For February they’re doing something a little different, though: horror haikus! Should be interesting. I’m not really a fan of the haiku but I’ll probably try my hand at it anyway. The rules for each month’s prompt are posted below last month’s winners, so scroll down to check it out.

At last! The long-awaited gothic ghost story starring none other than Harry Potter (er, I mean Daniel Radcliffe). Many wanted to see the classic story put to screen. Many wanted to see a decent horror movie for once. And many others just wanted to see Harry Potter all grown up.

We open on a scene with three creepy little girls in Victorian dress, playing with dolls. Creepily they all look to the left, and they all stand in creepy unison. And as the creepy music plays, they simultaneously open a window and creepily step off, side-by-side, to their doom.

The movie takes place in a remote village painted in washed-out hues, on the outskirts of which is a deadly marsh. A winding road cuts through the foggy wasteland, often submerged when the tide rolls in, to get to a secluded estate that is frightening in all its rotting glory, haunted or not.

How could you go there and NOT expect to see a ghost or two?

Enter Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe), father of a four-year-old whose mother died in childbirth. Still grieving, he is sent to the estate as a solicitor to make sure all the paperwork is in order after the owner dies. But eerie occurences lead him to discover the town’s curse.

Whenever somebody sees the spectral form of the Woman in Black, their resident ghost, a child in the town dies. The townspeople tell Arthur to leave but he resists, staying in the house and witnessing the ghost himself.

Atmospheric tension abounds as Arthur explores every dust-covered nook and cranny of the house, and it rachets up when the haunting makes its presence known. Upstairs, a screech and banging sound echoes and echoes in the silence until Arthur finally gets into the locked room to find a rocking chair moving of its own accord. Never have I ever felt more dreadful suspense at listening to a rocking chair. The consistent pounding mimics your own beating heart as you venture with Arthur through the house, searching for the source of the noise.

Such is the beauty of The Woman in Black: simple sights and sounds are twisted into horror in ways more subtle than your average modern slasher. The story itself is simple, revealed slowly as more sinister clues are dropped about the nature of the woman in black. The movie is light on the dialogue, which only adds to the eerie silence of the location and forces you to note all the creepy little sounds. A dark hallway manages to have a personality of its own, and windup toys turn childish things sinister.

For his part, Daniel Radcliffe does a good job portraying the grief-stricken solicitor. As he is rather manic and nervous in real life, I was impressed by how he pulled off the deeply somber disposition of his character, and it was refreshing to see him in a role that isn’t Harry Potter. Unfortunately, he still sort of resembles a teenager playing dress-up in adult clothes, thanks mainly to his boyish features and short stature, but by the end I felt almost convinced that he could be a young, lost father.

An excellently satisfying gothic movie, The Woman in Black succeeds precisely because it rejects the modern standard of gore-filled, shock-exploited horror. This movie is subtle and slyly eerie, and in the end you feel as though you, too, have endured a journey straight into the heart of the macabre. Whether you come out the other side in the train station, however, is up to you.

FINAL VERDICT

Story: 9 out of 10 haunted rocking chairs

Acting: 9 out of 10 haunted rocking chairs

Cinematography and visuals: 10 out of 10 haunted rocking chairs

Music and atmospheric sound effects: 10 out of 10 haunted rocking chairs

Scare factor: 9 out of 10 haunted rocking chairs

Overall: 9.5 out of 10 haunted rocking chairs

By Drew Magary

Background: Freshly published in August 2011, this novel explores the dystopian future of a world that discovers the cure for aging.

What it’s about: The framwork for the book is what works of realism have done for centures: the discovery of a document that contains someone’s personal narrative. In this case, John Farrell’s narrative is found, and we are subsequently immersed in it.

Covering 60 years, John chronicles the discovery of the cure for aging, getting the cure himself, and the politics surrounding it. The cure for aging basically stops you in your tracks at whatever age you currently are. You can still die of disease and starvation, but if you live well, you can live indefinitely. Of course, it has its detractors: pro-death groups bomb doctors performing the cure, and people that John cares about get caught up in this, leaving him alone.

At first, the cure seems wonderful. Everyone is excited at the prospect of eternal youth and throws elaborate cure parties at Las Vegas. But as years pass and resources become scarcer and scarcer for the ever-growing population, we find ourselves thrust completely into a bleak view of the future.

John ends up working as an end specialist: someone who basically murders those who no longer want eternal life, but want a legal way out that isn’t suicide. The journey culminates in total anarchy as nuclear war begins as a form of population control.

Why it will keep you up at night: The frightening possibilities presented in this book are made all the more so by its realism. Yes, Magary glosses over the details of how the cure actually works, making it seem a silly concept to us, but everything else is very much grounded in a possible near future. Everyone has a tablet, a WEPS (wireless-enabled projected-screening device), a screen name, and a personal feed. The internet has become synonymous with actual life and is used as a database for pretty much all information on everyone. Cars are also called plug-ins.

Clearly Magary thought carefully about what our worled will look like twenty, fifty, eighty years from now, and used that to draw us into this almost-familiar world… and then knock us off our feet with the horrifying implications of where our world will head. You’ll be left wondering about life and death, and what lies before us.

I had a few qualms with the book, one of them being the framing device. It was a good prologue of sorts, a way to introduce us to the world of John and provide some foreshadowing, but at the end of John’s narrative, so ends the book. It’s not a problem, really, but I like symmetry in writing and framing devices that are not simply used and forgotten. But maybe I’m just picky about conclusions. I also wasn’t sure how I felt about the time jumps. While necessary to convey the whole story, I always feel like I lose touch with the characters when we skip ahead, and on the whole, I felt a little distant from John. But these are relatively minor quibbles.

There’s a lot going on in this book, and I would recommend it. There are a lot of moments of dark comedy, but make no mistake, this is not a lighthearted book. It takes some very dark turns especially near the end that rather negate the humor.

What you may not realize is that Dracula was a real person: not a vampire, but something perhaps even more terrifying.

His name? Vlad the Impaler.

AKA the World's Biggest Douche

Vlad III (1431-1476) was the Prince of Wallachia. Born in Transylvania, he was a member of the Order of the Dragon, which is where he got the nickname Dracula (dracul = dragon; ulea = the son of). His father, Vlad II, was “the dragon” in this scenario, making Vlad III the Son of the Dragon.

Vlad Tepes, as he was later called, was a terrifying ruler. He enjoyed torturing his enemies, and even his own countrymen, through a variety of methods, but his favorite, notoriously, was impalement.

Let me give you the low-down on what that entails: a blunt wooden pike is inserted into your nether regions so that it can slowly make its way up through your body without you dying immediately from shock. Eventually, the stake will emerge through your mouth, and you will die slowly, horribly, and painfully while suspended in the air amid your rotting companions.

To give you a hint about how gruesome this was, here’s a quote from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Paranormal by Nathan Robert Brown:

An invading Turkish army actually turned around and went home after they spotted the mass amounts of bodies impaled upon wooden stakes along the Danube River, and Mohammed II, the “Conqueror of Constantinople,” upon seeing a forest of 20,000 impaled victims, also brought his army back home and never again went near Wallachia.

Vlad the Impaler was such a horrifying human being that the freaking Conqueror of Constantinople turned around and went home after seeing the atrocities he had committed.

While Vlad may not have actually drunk blood, he did clearly get a perverse pleasure from these acts of torture, which to me is far creepier than a seductive vampire poking holes in your neck. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by the most terrifying person in history? Clearly, Stoker was. Though we don’t know how much Stoker actually knew about Vlad Dracula, there are definite parallels between him and the fictional vampire.

Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote called “Finding the Missing Link in Literature” about Victorian literature’s response to Darwin’s theory of evolution (i.e. our genetic connection to animals, and what that meant for a society centered on creationist religion):

Perhaps the most renowned literary response to Darwinism is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which effectively engenders fear of the half-breed character while simultaneously promoting religion as the primary antidote to the worrisome implications of evolution. The religious themes within the novel itself can be traced back to the historical roots of vampire origins through the real-life figure of Vlad Tepes, known also as Vlad the Impaler and Vlad Dracula. Vlad Tepes was the Prince of Wallachia, a region of what is currently Romania, from 1456 to 1462 and enforced a bloody and brutal reign. At war with the Turks, he was notorious for impaling his enemies, as well as his own people, on sharp stakes and positioning the rotting corpses around the city as warnings to others. Therefore, driving a stake through the chest of a vampire in order to kill it correlates directly with Vlad’s preferred method of execution. Vlad’s nickname, Dracula, originated from the Romanian word “dracul,” which later came to be associated with the word “devil.” The ending “ulea” in Romanian means “the son of,” so Dracula is sometimes translated to “Son of the Devil”, a fitting moniker for someone whose infamy is centered around his merciless torture of thousands of people, and a hint at his position as a force of religious evil. During his life Vlad renounced the Orthodox Church; like Stoker’s Dracula, he was a force against the accepted religion.

 

Other details of Vlad’s life and death can also be seen in the characters and vampire lore used in Stoker’s Dracula. Vlad Tepes had three wives, which are represented in Stoker’s creation in the form of the three female vampires who live in his castle in Transylvania. At the end of his reign, the Turks forced Vlad to flee, after which he went to the king of Hungary for help and was imprisoned in a tower. Russian narratives, which usually depict Vlad Tepes in a more positive light, relate that during his captivity, he would capture and torture small animals such as birds and mice. There is a strong connection here with Renfield, who, while imprisoned in the mental institution, captures flies, spiders, and birds and eats them in order to gain eternal life like Dracula. When Vlad finally escaped his imprisonment, he was killed in a battle against the Turks in 1476. Details of his death are uncertain, but in the end he was decapitated and his head displayed on a pike in Constantinople. Just as his use of stakes for impalement was replicated in vampire lore, the details of his death likewise translated into a method for killing vampires, which must take a stake to the heart and be decapitated to be truly destroyed. All of these details tie Stoker’s novel into history by connecting the character of Dracula with Vlad Tepes. This generated even greater terror, as the connection to actual historical figures suggests the possibility that such horror can truly exist in our world.

Stoker’s Dracula is alluded to as an antichrist figure: baptising his victims in blood and being warded off by crucifixes. And it’s pretty safe to say that Vlad the Impaler was the fucking antichrist.

Abandon all hope, ye who try to get anywhere near this crazy son-of-a-bitch

I could go on and on (and on and on) but you probably get the gist of it. Vlad Dracula is a fascinating person, and for a few years now I’ve had the desire to write something about him but couldn’t figure out what. Historical fiction isn’t really my bag because of a constant worry of getting details wrong, so that was out. I recently came up with a solution and was struck with a pretty exciting idea: what if Vlad the Impaler actually had been a vampire? That means he would be immortal, and he would proceed to spend the next 500 years invading European countries and amassing more and more land for himself, until almost the entirety of Europe was under his reign of blood and terror. Thus the Wallachian Empire was born.

I’m working out all the details of this book idea and writing a short story to complement it. The whole thing came from a simple prompt at Dark Moon Digest involving alternate histories; if I can get the short story up to snuff, my fingers are crossed that it’ll be accepted there. But in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of stuff to play with in this new world I’ve created, including an alternate map of Europe and the inner workings of a medieval-punk society. (Also, please don’t steal my idea. I usually don’t tell people about my ideas until they are fully fleshed out into manuscripts, so I’m breaking my own rules by posting this, and trusting all my lovely readers).

Maybe someday you’ll be reading about an alternate universe in which the Blood Prince of Wallachia becomes the sadistic Emperor of Europe, but in the meantime, you’ll have to satiate yourselves with popping open Stoker’s Dracula and reveling in the cleverly nuanced horror within each of its brittle, yellowing pages.