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  • Endless Joke
    Endless Joke
    by David Antrobus

    Here's that writers' manual you were reaching and scrambling for. You know the one: filled with juicy writing tidbits and dripping with pop cultural snark and smartassery. Ew. Not an attractive look. But effective. And by the end, you'll either want to kiss me or kill me. With extreme prejudice. Go on. You know you want to.

  • Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    by David Antrobus

    Please click on the above thumbnail to buy my short, intense nonfiction book featuring 9/11 and trauma. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee... and contains fewer calories. Although, unlike most caffeine boosts, it might make you cry.

  • Music Speaks
    Music Speaks
    by LB Clark

    My story "Solo" appears in this excellent music charity anthology, Music Speaks. It is an odd hybrid of the darkly comic and the eerily apocalyptic... with a musical theme. Aw, rather than me explain it, just read it. Okay, uh, please?

  • First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    by Sybil Wilen, P. J. Ruce, Jeffrey McDonald, John Page, Susan Burdorf, Christina Gavi, David Alexander, Joanna Parypinski, Jack Flynn, Graeme Edwardson, David Antrobus, Jason Bailey, Xavier Axelson

    My story "Unquiet Slumbers" appears in the zombie anthology First Time Dead, Volume 3. It spills blood, gore and genuine tears of sorrow. Anyway, buy this stellar anthology and judge for yourself.

  • Seasons
    Seasons
    by David Antrobus, Edward Lorn, JD Mader, Jo-Anne Teal

    Four stories, four writers, four seasons. Characters broken by life, although not necessarily beaten. Are the seasons reminders of our growth or a glimpse of our slow decay?

  • Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited

    I have two stories in this delightful compendium of every 2012 winner of their Flash Fiction Challenge—one a nasty little horror short, the other an amusing misadventure of Og the caveman, his first appearance.

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Entries in John Claude Smith (3)

Thursday
Sep062012

Drink for the Thirst to Come

I finished a book last night that I'm going to need to expound upon. A collection of short horror stories by Lawrence Santoro, it's intriguingly and even poetically titled Drink for the Thirst to Come. This is a book that jumped out at me from the endless conveyor belt of social network promotions we are subjected to at every turn, for two reasons: the aforementioned lyrical title, and a cover picture for which "creepy" is an altogether inadequate adjective. There is something about the face on that cover—suggestive of a mutant, broken Christ-figure hounded to the world's last margins—which dredges up long-forgotten nightmares and something closer to existential disquiet and an awful pity than out-and-out horror.

And for the most part, the stories themselves operate in a similar vein.

But let me rewind. For far too long, certainly since reading John Claude Smith's The Dark is Light Enough for Me, I've been looking for a collection that might scratch a certain maddening itch: it would need to be dark, very dark, but written by someone fully in control of their narrative and characters, adept in the language of unease. Outright gore is fine, even familiar tropes of the horror genre, but I want to get below the surface, take a peek at the stuff that fills me with a disturbance that won't dissipate. I suppose I've been foraging for sickening, shuddering nightmares to prove to me I'm not alone in my own. A twisted kindred impulse. So I downloaded Santoro's collection to my Kindle and left it there a while, savouring the anticipation.

Until one day, the urge to open it finally arrived.

And I began to read...

...and was hit with the most profound sense of disappointment. This wasn't the sobbing monstrosity I was expecting. For starters, the font/typeface was beyond ugly, bordering on the unreadable. And I was immediately disoriented by the opening story for which the volume is named. The tone of the narrative was like nothing I've read in a long while. Phrases seemed strange, hyphen-heavy (oh, enough, David!) and awkward: "the green-forever", "just-up corn", "down-rushing mud." Already, from this vantage point, I can see I was reacting to my own shattered expectations and allowing the admittedly awful font to influence my overall response to the words on the page.

Let me just say this: I am more than glad I persevered.

This first story takes an age to get going, coughing and rattling like an ancient jalopy before roaring into unexpected life. Okay, the font doesn't get better, but the sense of reading something truly worthwhile sure does. It is a quest story set in a post-apocalyptic world, but that description is like saying Riddley Walker's about some weird kid in a Kent of the future. And returning to those opening passages now, I see something I completely missed first time around: Santoro's writing style itself is a comet that comes closest to being captured by the orbit of a star named Bradbury than anything I've read in a long, long time. Yeah, go back and read that slightly awkward sentence again. I mean it. And because on this occasion I had been looking for a Barker or possibly even a Ligotti, I almost missed out on the equally dark treats that followed.

I don't want this post to get out of hand, so I'll resist a blow-by-blow account of each individual story. Suffice it to say, there is plenty here to creep you out, all the way down to the follicles, to turn your stomach, to genuinely frighten you enough to want the lights turned back on for real. Even the stock monsters of horrordom appear in altered form, disguised enough to terrify anew via the delayed shock of recognition. The voice is often perfect for each story. Gruff, strange, foreign, familiar. Settings and mood are never repeated one story to the next. New Orleans here. Chicago there. 1940s England elsewhere. The most common theme is one of haunting. Again, not ghosts per se, but something cold and spectral seen through dirty gauze in an infected room. A feeling we ourselves are the ghosts trying and mostly failing to engage with the world within these pages just out of reach. A world we might be better off avoiding, all the same. Speaking of which, I have encountered many an atrocity, both in fiction and in real life, sadly, but there's one story here I would seriously hesitate to recommend to anyone with even the slightest tenderness in his or her heart. I'll merely describe "Little Girl Down the Way" as one of the most harrowing horror stories I never want to read again. It is vile and yet it is brilliant. And I almost hate myself for even admitting that.

Alongside the frankly bizarre font issues throughout, let me issue one more word of warning: these stories, almost without exception, are long. They occasionally ramble and twist, taking tangents that occasionally work and that sometimes don't. But sit with them, stay with them, prop them up when they flag, let them reciprocate, and as Santoro suggests in his foreword, read them aloud. Taste the writhing sounds of life itself trying to make sense of the darkness, defining its own opposition to that negation of all things.

No doubt there's some moral here, something along the lines of the serendipitous defiance of expectations, but, whatever, I'm glad I pushed through and found myself in a very odd and eldritch dimension indeed, perhaps not the one I was expecting, but one that scratched another itch—a crawling, anxiety-ridden itch—I didn't even know I had.

Friday
Feb172012

A Quiet Belief In Darkness

Okay, a couple of reviews I wrote this week for two better-than-decent books I recently read. Don't know why, but I love that opening sentence. Anyway, they're both on Amazon, but I'll reproduce them here.

First up, what is ostensibly a horror collection titled The Dark Is Light Enough For Me, by John Claude Smith:

In a market that is pretty much saturated with the tiredest of horror tropes (vampires, zombies, werewolves), along comes this refreshing debut collection by John Claude Smith. And when I say refreshing, I certainly don't mean "lightweight". The darkness itself, in fact, is very much a constant character in these stories of guilt, hubris, paranoia, abuse, vanity, addiction, desire and depravity.

Many of these stories, though modern, have Lovecraftian antecedents in mood and theme, and if I had to name a more contemporary writer with which to make comparisons, I'd have to say Thomas Ligotti—although, again, with a slightly more modern twist. I don't want to say "gothic" exactly, since that would unfairly typecast these unsettling tales, and they deserve a wider audience than that.

Smith's language is often baroque and inventive, occasionally straying into the ambitious realms in which a scrupulous editor is necessary (and perhaps lacking at times), but any risk of overreaching is admirably offset when compared to the largely anodyne nature of so many contemporary horror clichés. Smith manages to unearth and expose more layers of that deceptively simple term "horror" than most: here, existential dread arrives in unexpected places; disgust and dismay, too. Some of these stories are downright distressing, in fact.

Which is all a convoluted way of saying: buy this book, read it, and be prepared for some serious insomniac unease.

I said "ostensibly" back there as it manages to be something more than straight horror. Anyway, moving on to my second offering, RJ Ellory's A Quiet Belief In Angels.

At first glance, A Quiet Belief In Angels is a coming-of-age crime melodrama with an ameliorating echo of Steinbeck. But if we recall the familiar dictum that truth is stranger than fiction, we can appreciate that RJ Ellory's plot owes at least as much to his own backstory as it does to any lurid dimestore novel. It earns its occasional extravagances, in other words. And it does this in two ways. First, as mentioned, the author's own life has been punctuated by some remarkably similar losses and heartaches as those of his protagonist, Joseph Vaughn. And second, the gentle, lyrical tone of the novel manages to temper and even mask what might otherwise appear ludicrous.

In an interview with fellow author Richard Godwin, Ellory claims there are "two types of novels […] those that you read simply because some mystery was created and you ha[ve] to find out what happened. The second kind of novel [i]s one where you read the book simply for the language itself, the way the author use[s] words, the atmosphere and description. The truly great books are the ones that accomplish both."

Ellory very much accomplishes that difficult synthesis. It's flawed, of course; what isn't? But the balance between the dismaying mystery that emerges from a series of violent child murders in small town 1940s Georgia onwards, and a soft, lush lyricism redolent of the southern landscape itself, is both a satisfying one and a successful one. This is a mystery yet it transcends genre conventions. It is a story of serial killings yet it transcends the police procedural. It is character-driven (Vaughn in particular is a compelling and unorthodox protagonist) yet quietly contemplative. It's a haunted tale, more than anything, a branch of southern gothic with a tragic twist.

Finally, I was also extremely impressed with the deft manner in which an English author manages to capture the authentic atmosphere, speech rhythms and culture of the American south, with very few jarring notes ("launderette" for "laundromat" was one of them, alongside the publisher's puzzling decision to use British style single quotes for dialogue in the Kindle version I had).

That aside, this is a novel well worth your time.

Enjoy them both.

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also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Wednesday
Dec142011

The Versatile Blogger Award

The Versatile Blogger Award. Pour moi? Well who knew? A blogging award after only five posts? Must be that new cologne (no, I don't wear cologne).

Although, now I have to pay my dues by linking back to the person who sent this my way, by outlining seven things about myself, and by rewarding five other bloggers with this same award.

So first up, a big thank you to Nicole Storey for passing this award on, it was very kind of her. Pssst, Nicole: I'll get the money and that "special object" to you as soon as it won't look at all suspicious in any way whatsoever, okay? Oh wait, inside voice!

Seven things you may or may not know about me (and which may or may not be true):

1. In the movie This Is Spinal Tap, I played a small part as a bass control button that only went to 9.

2. Koalas utterly terrify me.

3. Seeing the colour turquoise on a traffic sign makes me go temporarily deaf in one ear.

4. A distant relative once owned Stonehenge and lost it in a bet over how many toothpicks someone could hide in the Grand Duchess of Doncaster's cleavage.

5. I secretly wrote the major Shakepeare tragedy King Lear. Shhhh... I'm actually not proud of the typos in that one.

6. I once planned to gather a harem formed entirely of slightly irritable soccer moms. Sadly, at the last minute, I discovered a local bylaw prohibiting it.

7. Eerily, my fingerprints match up perfectly with those of actor Robert De Niro. As a result, I am considering framing him for a heinously spectacular crime, if only for some of his disappointing late-career roles.

Five worthy recipients:

Michael Edward ("Ed") McNally: Sable City

Yvonne Hertzberger: Yvonne Hertzberger

Patricia Carrigan: Patricia Carrigan

John Claude Smith: The Wilderness Within

Chuck Wendig: Terrible Minds

*     *     *     *     *

also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.