Christmas Babies by Christopher Keane and William D. Black (A book so derivative, it might put you in a COMA)

Happy Christmas dear readers. I’ve had this book on my shelf for years, but I thought a tale such as this should be read in December, and I’m not very organized. Despite the title, this second rate medical thriller has nothing to do with Christmas.

Dr. Heller is worried. All of his patients are miscarrying or giving birth to weird babies with green eyes and red hair. His boozehound of a wife gets a job investigating a politician who is trying to cut government restrictions on pharmaceutical companies. While this is happening the Doctor meets a sexy computer sales rep who also has green eyes and red hair. It did not take me long to figure out exactly where this was heading.

A few weeks ago, I read Robin Cook’s Coma, the book that started the “medical thriller” craze. It gets a write-up in Paperbacks From Hell, and while I was decently entertained by Coma, I thought it was one step too far removed from horror to include here. I didn’t actually notice it until I was halfway through Christmas Babies, but the blurb on the back compares it to Cook’s writing. I’ve heard that Cook’s other books, which I have no interest in reading, are extremely formulaic, and I imagine that Christmas Babies follows that formula pretty closely. This is basically the same book as Coma expect the people in comas are replaced with ginger babies. Honestly, thinking back, it’s shocking how similar the plots are – a medical anomaly, a web of lies, an assassin, a climax in a secret research facility…

Coma is a better book, but Christmas Babies has more scabby mutants. It’s a little bit trashier too. It was not the worst book I’ve read, and the last few chapters were relatively enjoyable, but in truth, this book is a pile of Christmas shit.

Ho, ho, ho! Have a good one!

Ivor Watkins’ Demon

**Future – 1994 (First published 1983)**

Aside from Ken Rayner Johnson’s The Cheshire Cat, Demon is the only horror novel set in Wales that I can remember reading. Aside from that, there is nothing noteworthy about this book.

An ancient evil escapes from a Welsh mountainside after a spot of bad weather and proceeds to possess the village idiot. The moron is granted power over the weather, and he uses it to kill a local vicar and a male stripper. An English engineer who has recently moved to town has to try to defeat this evil before it kills his dog.

This is a very silly premise for a book, but it could have been entertaining if the author had made it ridiculously violent or something. He didn’t though. The writing isn’t particularly painful, but it’s nothing special either. The most interesting character, the vicar’s repulsive yet sexy sister, never reaches her potential. The male stripper was an interesting addition, but I would have liked a bit more detail. I feel like this book would have been far better if it was written by Edward Lee.

Demon was not the worst book I’ve ever read, but I can’t say anything about it was particularly good. Ivor Watkins wrote another horror novel called The Blood Snarl. It’s 100 pages longer than Demon though, and I’ve read that it’s a bit long-winded. I doubt I’ll ever read it.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians a few years back, I stopped reading new horror. That book was fine, but there was so much hype around it that I felt like I had nothing original to say when I posted about it here. I was in an awkward situation recently in which I had to take a book out of my local library. I saw this near the front counter, and having a ague idea of what it was about, I grabbed it.

After meeting their favourite film director, pair of movie nerds get sucked into the terrifying world of esoteric Nazi occultism. This director guy made a few weirdo horror movies and then disappeared for decades because one of the films he made was cursed. It was written by a Nazi wizard and never completed. When the 2 friends help edit some of the footage from this film, it activates a spell (or is it a curse?) that the weird Nazi had begun before his death.

So yeah, this book has a Nazi wizard, murders, ghosts, human sacrifices, black magic, occult books, demon dogs and a main character clad in an Iron Maiden tshirt. Hell yeah!

I quite enjoyed Silver Nitrate. Unlike other books about Nazi occultism that I’ve read, the characters in here were fleshed out and generally very likeable. I’d like to see them in a sequel to be honest. Parts of this book do feel a little slow, but overall it’s very easy to digest.

I’m a pedantic dork when it comes to this kind of thing, and I was pretty impressed with the level of detail that went into Silver Nitrate. The bad guy is named Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers. I wondered if this was a reference to Hanns Heinz Ewers when I saw it. The author confirms this in an afterword. (The real Ewers wrote a few horror novels and movie scripts in the early 20th century, but his work has been ignored because he later became involved with the Nazis. I’ve been planning to read his books for a while now.) The attention to detail here made it feel like this book was written for weird nerds like me, but there seems to be some hype about this one. I was only able to borrow it from the local library for 7 days because it’s in such high demand. I’ve seen Silvia Morena-Garica being interviewed by big news websites too. It’s really cool to see an author with a background in Lovecraftian horror getting attention like that.

Melanie Tem’s Prodigal and Blood Moon

Here’s Melanie Tem’s first 2 novels.

Prodigal

I was expecting more from this book than what I got.

Lucy’s brother has disappeared, but something that may be his ghost keeps showing up at her house and attacking Lucy and her mom. Her brother was troubled, and he’d been assigned a social worker before disappearing. A few months later, Lucy’s older sister starts acting up and seeing the same social worker. She goes missing too, but Lucy occasionally finds new messages from her in her diary.

Read no further if you want to avoid spoilers.

Now it’s Lucy’s turn to start misbehaving. She gets assigned the same social worker. It turns out he’s a fat vampire paedophile/balloon who literally feeds on children’s misery. He doesn’t kill the kids completely though. Even after Lucy’s brother’s corpse is buried, part of him is still alive enough to crawl into his mother’s pussy. Is this not making sense to you? It didn’t make any to me either.

By the time I got to the end of this book i was very confused.

Blood Moon

A woman adopts a kid who believes he can move stuff with his mind. Then she gets pregnant. Her dad is a jerk.

This book was a boring pile of shit. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Nothing interesting or scary happens. None of the characters were likeable, and the supernatural element that’s hinted at might just be figment of the characters’ imagination. Pure crap.

Prodigal was Tem’s first novel, and it was released under the “cool” Dell Abyss line. Her third novel, Wilding, was also put out by Dell. Blood Moon came between these 2 books, and it was released by The Women’s Press, a feminist publishing company from England. I’m all for feminist horror, but this is barely a horror novel, and I don’t know if it’s really a feminist novel either. The male characters are all chodes. Is that enough?

Honestly, I wanted to like these books, but I was very disappointed. Prodigal had some weird bits, but Blood Moon was downright unenjoyable. Tem’s writing isn’t horrible, but these novels just didn’t do it for me. This might have something to do with the fact that both books are about abused, at-risk children, one of the topics I least want to read about during my free time. Maybe I’ll give this author’s short fiction a go in the future.

Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World

I had an afternoon to myself a few weeks ago, and I decided to spend it doing housework. I need an audiobook for that kind of thing, so I went to my local library’s app and browsed through the horror section. It was 85% Stephen King and Dean Koontz with 5-6 other books. I had seen the cover of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World online a few times, but I had no idea what it was about. I decided to give it a go.

I finished the audiobook that evening. I really enjoyed it.

A family of 3 are vacationing in a cabin in the woods. 4 strangers come to their house and give them a choice; either they pick a member of their family to sacrifice or the world will end. This is a horrible, miserable book that can only end a few ways, and none of them are happy.

That’s the set up. It’s straightforward and horrible, and it makes for a tense read.

There’s little hints at cosmic/supernatural creepiness, but this is very much a psychological horror novel. You expect to be given an explanation as to how and why these events are happening, but the author doesn’t bother with that, and I reckon the book is far more effective for it. We rationalise to mitigate horror, and by avoiding explanations Tremblay keeps his readers uncomfortable.

The less you know about this one, the better it will work, so I won’t go into particulars. I did find a few of the characters’ reactions unbelievable at certain points, but I guess you can’t be too picky about realism with a book with a premise like this.

I only saw after finishing the book that M. Night Shyamalan recently put out a film version. I really liked the book, but I have no interest in seeing the movie. I might well give Paul Tremblay’s other books a go in the future.

Sorry for not posting last week. I started back at school, and I was involved in a car accident. (Nobody died.) I’ve been reading loads, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend any more time in front of a computer last Saturday. Maybe I’ll make up for it with an extra Halloween post.

Rare Canadian Horror Fiction: Bradley Snow’s Andy

This is a hard one to find because it was self-published, and I don’t think many copies were ever printed. It took me a few years to find a copy for less than 20 dollars. It absolutely was not worth the wait.

A family of four move to a new house in a remote part of Eastern Canada. The mom gets raped by a dream ghost, and the dad starts having an affair with his ex. Their son starts a gang and makes friends with a demented cannibal that lives in the woods and acts as a puppet for a psychic vampire. Oh, and this psychic vampire is apparently a paedophile too because he tries to marry the family’s daughter. In a hilarious turn of events, the woman who the father is having an affair with reveals that she has a son that belongs to him from their previous tryst. She tried to abort him, but it didn’t work so he just came out mentally disabled.

There’s far too much going on in here for any cohesion. We’ve got ghosts, vampires, mind control, cannibalism and a child molester. The plot doesn’t make any sense, none of it is remotely realistic and there are no likeable characters. This is pure crap.

This does feel a little different to a lot of the paperback horror I discuss here though. It was self published, and this gave the author the freedom to have it illustrated. There are 5 or 6 illustrations in the text. The cover art is striking, probably what made me want to read the book, but I thought the illustrations actually took away from the story. The below image faces the scene in which the mom gets raped by a ghoul.

Also, the text on the back of the book makes some very bold claims.

It was for me. I read a few chapters before bed each night. Reading it literally made me feel sleepy.

See above. It was very, very easy to stop reading it. The only thing that made me want to continue reading was the idea of finishing it. I did not care about what happened to anyone in the book. Picking it up was the hard part. I’m so glad I never have to read this shit again.

I googled Bradley Snow and found some interesting results. When he’s not befriending scammers posing as beautiful women on facebook and retweeting Tucker Carlson, he’s accusing Brian Keene and Stephen King of stealing his ideas (and being racists). He also wrote a book about how a big publisher ruined his life. Of the six other books he has published since Andy, only one has any reviews on goodreads. Both gave it a one star rating. I don’t want to come across as too mean here, but this guy’s lack of self awareness is depressing. He describes himself as, “the World’s greatest living Horror Writer”. He’s the kind of person that makes me think that there should be a similar licensing system for internet users as there is for drivers.

Just a taste of the author’s social media presence

The cover of this book is the only good thing about it. Andy is excrutiatingly bad.

B.W. Battin’s Mary, Mary

I started reading this book because it has a creepy cover.

Mary suffers from blackouts, brief periods during which she loses control over what she is doing and retains no memories. Also, she can’t tell anyone about these blackouts or she gets sick and passes out. When a murderer tries to kill her, Mary’s blackouts become more frequent and bad stuff starts happening to the people around her.

That’s the set-up. It’s a bit silly, but it has potential. It turns out that Mary was orphaned and has barely any memories of the mysterious orphanage where she grew up. Pretty much the only thing she does remember about it is that it was run by a Satanic nun. These details are revealed early on in the text, and in context, they set up the story in such a way that one ending seems inevitable. The writing is competent, and there is one particularly effective scene in a closed hardware store, but I was hoping that the author would drop in some shocking twists to elevate this beyond the realm of predictable thrillers. He didn’t.

This book ends almost exactly the way I thought it would. I say “almost exactly” because I thought there would be a slightly cheesy horror twist ending. There wasn’t though. This horror novel has a neat, complete happy ending. Yuck. No fucking thanks. In light of the predictable ending, the other faults of the book seem less forgiveable too. Why didn’t Mary just write her thoughts down instead of having to struggle to verbalise them to every new person she encounters? Also, why was she so afraid to tell her caring husband that she was seeing a psychiatrist? Stupid.

There’s a bit of suspense towards the middle of the book, but there is no real supernatural horror, novel depictions of Satanism, or extreme violence. Mary, Mary was a big let down. A few more of B.W. Battin’s books have cool covers, but I don’t feel any desire to check them out now.

A few more books by Stephen King: Misery, Different Seasons and Christine

Greetings freaks. I doubt many people have noticed, but I have been alternating between posts on fiction and non-fiction since the beginning of the year. I had a big non-fiction post planned for this week, but I’m on holidays at the moment, and I haven’t had time to finish it, so I’ve got to switch it up. I’ve had the following post on the backburner for a long time, and I figure now is a good time to unburden myself. I’ve got something really juicy for you next week, but for now, here’s some more books by Stephen King.

Misery

I have never seen the movie version of Misery, but my mom saw it when I was a kid and told me all about it. I had heard that this was one of King’s better books, and it did not disappoint. I knew that the author was going to be “hobbled”, but I didn’t realise the book was different to the movie. Jesus. I literally winced when I got to that part. This is one of the best books I’ve read by Stephen King. I didn’t like The Longest Walk because it felt like it stuck to one track (excuse the pun). Misery is even more confined, but it works a lot better in my opinion. This was a really good book.

Different Seasons

Different Seasons is known as King’s non-horror collection, but one of the tales, The Breathing Method, is very definitely a horror story. The way it’s framed, as a bunch of old men telling scary stories, reminded me a bit of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. It’s not nearly as ambitious as that book, but it’s not a bad story at all. It’s the only of one the four stories in here that hasn’t yet been turned into a big Hollywood movie. I watched The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me many times as a kid, but the stories they are based on are excellent, and I quite enjoyed Apt Pupil too. I know some high brow literature snobs look down on King, but he really is a talented writer. I loved this book.

Christine

I read Pet Semetery a couple of years ago, and I didn’t really like it, so I gave King a break for a few years. I really enjoyed Misery and Different Seasons, but they contain little of the supernatural fiction that drew me to King in the first place. I thought I’d better read one more book for this post, and Christine, King’s evil haunted car book, was next on my list. (I’ve read nearly all of his novels and story collections up until 1983 so far. ) I found Christine unbearably drawn out and overwritten. I’d imagine it would have been a much better book if it was 200 pages shorter. Honestly, it could have been a short story or a novella. I know some people love this one, but I wasn’t that interested.

Just in case you’re interested, here’s a link to the many other Stephen King books I’ve written about.

Wrestling Splatterpunk: Edward Lee and John Pelan’s Goon

I’m on my holidays at the moment, and I actually seem to have less time for reading than I usually do. Here’s a quick review of a quick little book that I quite enjoyed.

**Overlook Collection – 2003 (First published 1996)**

I haven’t read anything by Edward Lee since I gave up on his Bullet Through Your Face collection in 2020. I don’t mind vulgarity, but the amount of cocksnot in that book was tiresome. I recently came across a free copy of Goon, a book he co-authored with John Pelan, and it was short enough to convince me to give Lee another chance.

This is a brief splatterpunk novel about a serial killer/professional wrestler. It actually contains less wrestling than I was expecting.

I read 2 of the 3 stories in Bullet Through Your Face, but I gave up when I got to The Refrigerator full of Sperm, a story that was taken from Lee’s Splatterspunk: The Micah Hays Stories collection. You can imagine my disappointment when Micah Hays showed up as a character in Goon. Fortunately, it’s only a brief cameo appearance.

Things get weird at end (as they usually seem to in Lee’s books), but most of the plot of Goon is pretty much what you’d expect. There’s an instance of race-baiting in here that dates the book. I don’t think the authors were espousing racial hatred, but I don’t see two (sane) white guys feeling comfortable putting the same words to paper in 2023.

If you like wrestling and gross stuff, you’ll probably like Goon. It was quite a silly book, but it was short enough that I enjoyed it. It contains just the right amount of cocksnot, not too much, not too little.

Evil Bunnies: David Anne’s The Folly

The Folly – David Anne

I’ve read books about evil lizards, evil flies, evil dogs, evil jellyfish, evil mantises, evil butterflies, evil trout, evil cockroaches and several about evil worms. I’ve long been meaning to get around to the evil rats, cats and crabs, but when I heard about a book about evil bunny rabbits, I bumped it to the front of the queue.

When you’ve read a few of these “animal attacks” books, you start to see patterns emerging. This is set in England, and the set up was very similar to the slimey, squelchy, slithery books by John Halkin (which I assume are very similar to James Herbert’s Rats.) Peaceful rural scenes are interrupted by brutal maulings at the hands of hitherto mild-mannered wildlife. The attacks in The Folly were quite bloody, but there was nothing else to note until the end of the book.

Spoilers ahead:

So it turns out that the bunnies are a laboratory experiment gone wrong. A lad who wanted to control the rabbit population in his neighbourhood hired a scientist to genetically engineer a disease that would kill rabbits. Once accomplished, this pair continued their genetic experiments, resulting in a chamber of freaks. The book ends with the protagonist stumbling into a secret room in the scientist’s laboratory which houses his half-human, half-chimpanzee lover (Maybe it’s his love-child: I read this a few weeks ago, and I can’t honestly remember.) The inclusion of this freak is needless and out of place in the story, but I thought it was a stroke of genius. It was like giving somebody a sneaky finger up the bum at the end of a blowjob – the reader’s not expecting it and probably doesn’t really want it, but they shan’t deny it makes things more exciting!

In truth, this is a ridiculous book, but if you’re the kind of person who is willing to read a book about evil bunny rabbits, I don’t think you’ll be terribly disappointed.