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.

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.

Sean Costello’s Horror Novels: The Cartoonist, Eden’s Eyes and Captain Quad

In honour of Canada Day next Saturday, here’s some books by a Canadian author. Exactly one year ago, I read a horror novel by Sean Costello. It was great. I discovered that Costello had written two other horror novels, so I decided to read those too. Doing so was an excellent decision. I greatly enjoyed all three of these books.

The Cartoonist

Scott, a successful psychiatrist with a horrible secret, meets a strange patient at his hospital. This drooling geriatric can’t walk or speak, but he can draw. At first the drawings seem random and unconnected, but Scott soon realises this is not the case.

I really enjoyed this novel. It’s set in Canada, and at its core, it’s about a father trying to protect his little girl. Both the antagonist and protagonist are horribly flawed people, but it was difficult for me not to empathise with both of them, and parts of this novel really got to me. In the 3 days leading up to me reading this book, I read 3 other “paperback from hell”-esque novels (The Kill, Joyride, and The Scourge) , and I had enjoyed each one less than the one before it. I was expecting the same from this one, but it was way, way better. It’s not perfect (my friend Micah made some valid criticisms when he reviewed it), but I found it very entertaining.

Eden’s Eyes

This book starts off with a father signing the consent forms to donate his recently deceased son’s organs. The eyes go to a blind author, the kidneys go to a sick child, and the heart goes to a homeless alcoholic. Unfortunately for everyone, the donor’s mother is not happy about the organ transplants, not happy at all.

That’s the basic premise of the book. That probably doesn’t make it sound like anything special, and in truth, it didn’t really feel like anything special for the first 50 or so pages. Then things started to get darker and weirder by the chapter. It ramps up and up and up, and the ending is bloody glorious. This is a slasher at heart, but the characters are interesting, and there’s weird supernatural elements that make it quite exciting.

I was so excited after the ending that I spent about 15 minutes trying to talk my wife into reading this one. (She wasn’t remotely interested.) Eden’s Eyes was a lot of fun to read.

Captain Quad

I think this book may have the most off-putting title and cover of any horror novel ever. I didn’t want to read it, but I’m glad I did. It’s very dark, and I quite enjoyed it.

Peter Gardener is just about the greatest guy ever. He’s smart, athletic, handsome and kind. Unfortunately for him, he falls off his motorbike and breaks his neck. Being paralyzed from the neck down does two things to him. It gives him the opportunity to develop the ability to leave his body at will, and it also turns him into an evil psychopath.

That’s a horrible idea. It’s horrible because part of it is understandable. If I went from having the world in my pocket to losing the use of my body along with most of my relationships and dreams, I’m sure I’d become bitter. Hopefully not bitter enough to kill my mom, rape my ex, and shove an ice auger (basically a giant corkscrew) up an old friend’s anus, but definitely bitter.

Yes, this book gets very nasty. It was a bit like Eden’s Eyes in the way it transformed, fairly suddenly, from a gripping thriller to a gorefest.

Also like Eden’s Eyes, this one is about a person who develops psychic powers after going to a hospital. Sean Costello worked as an anesthesiologist, so this explains why sizeable parts of all three of these books take place in hospitals. The other books that came to mind when I was reading this were Trumbo’s Johnny Get Your Gun and Hallahan’s Keeper of the Children.

Captain Quad is unpleasant because Peter starts off as the good guy. He’s an extremely sympathetic character. You don’t want him to do the bad stuff he does, but it’s not too hard to understand why he does it. It’s difficult to read the book without imagining the same thing happening to yourself. I ride a bike to work every day, and the idea of getting hit by truck and paralysed is far more terrifying than a poltergeist. Honestly, the idea is almost a little too scary for a horror novel. I read these books to forget about my life, not to worry about it.

I really enjoyed these books, and I was really impressed with Costello’s writing. These are a step above a lot of the crap I read. Luckily for everyone, these three Canadian classics are now available as ebooks.

More Potato Famine Horror: Alan Ryan’s Cast A Cold Eye

I reviewed Alan Ryan’s The Kill and Dead White last winter. I was originally going to talk about Cast a Cold Eye in the same post as those two books, but I realised that that pair were set in the same village and shared characters, so I kept Cast a Cold Eye for later.

Sphere – 1986 (Originally published 1984)

Jack, a successful American author, goes to Ireland and rents a house so that he can research and write his new novel. He’s staying in Doolin, a little village on the west coast of the island, and shortly after arriving, he sees some old men pouring a bottle of blood into a fresh grave. Soon thereafter, he starts to see ghosts of victims of the potato famine.

Alright. Let’s stop there. More potato famine horror? I was not a fan of the last book I read within that very niche genre. Fortunately, Alan Ryan’s writing is far, far better than Ann Pilling’s, and the story here is more intriguing, even if it does also feature very skinny ghosts.

I want to make it clear that my disdain for potato famine horror isn’t because I’m offended by the author turning the suffering of an oppressed group of real people into entertainment. It’s more the fact that the potato famine is the only thing a lot of North Americans know about Ireland. This is like an Irish author writing a horror novel set in America about a hamburger monster or a story set in Australia about a zombie kangaroo. (I think the only other horror novel set in Ireland that I’ve read by a non-Irish author was Paul Huson’s The Keepsake. Thankfully that one had no hungry ghosts. It was about a stone that turns into a vampire. Cool!)

In fairness though, Ryan does a pretty good job of making it seem that he really likes Ireland, and I would be shocked if part of this story isn’t autobiographical. He has to have been there to write some of the things he writes. Trust me. He references tea 45 times throughout the 350 pages.

I was 23 when I left Ireland. I wasn’t planning on a long term move, but things ended up that way, and I still miss Ireland greatly. It’s strange going back. I’ve been gone for long enough that little things that I grew up with seem foreign. There’s moments when I feel like a tourist in my home country.

It was interesting reading this book. Some of the descriptions about the landscape were great. I tend to travel more in Ireland when I return now than I ever did when I lived there, and the only time I’ve visited Clare, the county where this book is set, was as a tourist. Ryan gets the countryside right.

At the same time though, there were definitely a few cringey bits. I didn’t like the author’s idea of “Irish time”. Granted, the buses in Dublin are shit, but I don’t think Irish people are less punctual than anyone else. Not everyone wears woolen jumpers either. Also, the parts where people would say “I am” instead of “yes” annoyed me.

Of the three books I’ve read by Ryan, this one is probably the best horror novel. Dead White is good, but clowns aren’t scary. Skinny little children running around at night are scary. This is, at its heart, a good old-fashioned ghost story. The ending was ok, but things didn’t come together quite as much as I was hoping for. I really enjoyed reading this book, but I think a large part of my enjoyment stemmed from the fact that I’m going to Ireland in a few weeks, and all of the talk of rainy days and cups of tea made me really excited. I will try to track down Ryan’s short stories in the future.

Maggoty Bodily Fluid Soup: Michael Green’s The Jim-Jams

The Jim-Jams – Michael Green

Pocket – 1994

As soon as I heard of this rare, disgusting work of cosmic-horror, it jumped straight to the top of my to-read list..

Blue Turtle Island is an isolated holiday resort for old people. The small team of staff working there are in for a rough weekend. Not only has a gang of thugs sailed over with plans to mug the visitors, but there’s a weird… thing in the woods, and it’s having some rather strange effects on the creatures that come into contact with it.

It feel from the sky, and it seems to mess with the DNA of all lifeforms who encounter it, altering their physical structure and behaviour. Insects and small animals seem to morph into each other, and people get really messy. There’s lots of swelling, tumours, fluids, new orifices and more. Oh and there’s bugs in everything.

A plot centering on a bunch of old people is novel, but the real fun of this book lies in it’s relentlessness. It’s really gross. Think of all the horrible things that can happen to a human body, and then imagine most of them happening at once to the same body while that body is being infested with worms and spiders. There’s no great build-up here either. Things get gooey early on, and they never dry up.

There’s weird references to other horror writers in here. Different bugs are referred to as koontzes, bradburys and straubs. One character is called Farris too. Also, there is a direct reference to another horror author that had me laughing. One of the characters sees a mutated freak and assumes it’s an alien.”Feeling almost faint with excitement, Lana strove to keep in mind the courageous example of Whitley Strieber, a man she admired more than any other, an ambassador for all humankind who endured so many hardships during his encounters with Visitors from other worlds.”

The Jim-Jams reminded me of Edward Lee’s Slither. That one was also about people trapped on an island with gross mutating bugs. Both are very silly novels, but there’s enough self awareness and plot to keep them enjoyable. If you like Edward Lee, give The Jim-Jams a read.

This book has been out of print for almost 20 years, and it’s almost impossible to find. There’s no copies for sale online right now. I read it online at the Internet Archive, one of the greatest resources on the internet for people with an interest in books. The Internet Archive is currently in a legal battle with the biggest publishers in the world. You can show your support for libraries here.

The Travelling Grave and Other Stories – L.P. Hartley

The Travelling Grave and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley

Valacourt Books – 2017
This book was first published by Arkham House in 1947, but many of the stories were published years before that. In truth, I found it very boring. It’s mostly ghost stories, but none of them are particularly scary. The writing is quite dense at times too, and it usually didn’t feel worth the effort. It’s less than 250 pages, but it took me more than 4 months to get through it.

Here’s what I remember about the stories:

Story	My thoughts (includes spoilers)
A Visitor from Down Under	A lad listens to weird kids’ games on the radio and a ghost comes from Australia to get him. Shit and confusing.
Podolo	A creepy island. Somebody tries to kill a kitten? Maybe it’s a werewolf or something. I forget.
Three, or Four, for Dinner	Some lads arrange to meet another lad, but he dies. Shows up to dinner anyway. Supposed to be droll?
The Travelling Grave	A lad collects coffins. One can bury itself and does when a person is in it.
Feet Foremost	A ghost can’t come into the house because there is a step or something. Not scary at all.
The Cotillon	A lad kills himself, but he goes dancing afterwards.
A Change of Ownership	A truly idiotic man gets upset because he was too much of a wuss to invite his boyfriend in for some sex, so he has a nervous breakdown instead and imagines he is a ghost or something.
The Thought	A lad goes for a walk and gets confused. This went so far above my head. Hated it.
Conrad and the Dragon	Predictable fantasy story. Maybe for kids.
The Island	A lad gets caught by his girlfriend’s husband. At least one of them is dead.
Night Fears	A lad gets scared while working the night shift. Short.
The Killing Bottle	A lad gets mixed up with another chap who murders people who hurt animals. Then the other chap kills his own brother. Who knows what becomes of the dipstick protagonist?

A lot of lads.

I have nothing else to say about this book.

This is probably a poor time to mention this, as the above review is hardly riveting reading, but I have noticed a dramatic drop in traffic to this blog recently. Google updated its algorithm on the 15th of last month, and it seems to have worked against me. I’m seeing roughly half of what I had been seeing for the last 3 years. This is quite frustrating, as (with the exception of the above post) the content on here has been pretty good recently. I have glanced through a few pages explaining search engine optimization, but the thoughts of spending hours trying to make sure my posts are tagged and titled appropriately seems horrendously boring. I’d far prefer to spend my time reading a weird book. I’ll probably update the layout in the near future to make the 400+ posts on here easier to sift through, but until then, do me a favour and share this blog with your friends.

Sex, Satanism and Cannibal Freaks: Mark Mirabello’s The Cannibal Within

The Cannibal Within – Mark Mirabello

Mandrake of Oxford – 2005 (first published 2001)

A friend recommended this to me a few weeks back. I found an ebook versio n online, but after reading the fourth paragraph, I ordered a physical copy. This is one I knew I’d want on my shelf.

We may think we are special – holy, honoured, valued – god’s chosen primates – but that is a fraud. The dupes of superhuman forces, we are misfits and abominations. We have no higher purpose – no saviour god died for our sins – we exist, only because our masters are infatuated with our meat.
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Mirabello is an academic. He has a Ph.D, and he has lectured at different universities. His fields of research are fairly wacky, but I have no reason to belief that his research itself is questionable. He has appeared on some ridiculous documentaries and talk shows about aliens and conspiracies. Having an education doesn’t necessarily make a person a good writer, but Mirabello’s credentials, along with what I knew of this book, made it seem very, very intriguing.

The narrative in The Cannibal Within is framed as a memoir that was presented to the author due to his academic standing. A crazy lady walks into his office and gives him a document describing her bizarre experiences. She was abducted by cannibalistic trans-humans after her and her friend performed a Satanic ritual. The unholy freaks eat her friend and then kidnap the protagonist and lock her in a cage in their underground layer for decades. They do really bad stuff to her, but she takes it rather philosophically. While recounting the utterly horrendous abuses she suffered, she quotes from and/or discusses the work of Yukio Mishima, Friedrich Neitzsche, Plato, Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, De Sade, Goethe, George Bataille, Octave Mirbeau and Philip K. Dick.

Oh, and there’s a big part at the end of the book that talks about how the trans-humans evolved from brain eating cannibal monkeys. This sounded very familiar to me, and it was immediately followed by a quote from The Beginning Was the End, my favourite book. Hell yes.

Also, the Satanic ritual that kicks things off is supposedly taken from the Red Book of Appin. Anyone remember my post on that mysterious grimoire?

If you’re not familiar with this blog and/my reading proclivities, let it suffice to say that I have an interest in the above authors and texts. I felt very much that Mirabello had somebody like me in mind when he was writing this book. I can’t really say that it’s a brilliant book, but I also can’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy every page. I finished it in an afternoon. I really found it hard to put it down.

When the book isn’t discussing the absurdity of life, it’s shoving giant mutoid cocks down your throat. There’s an awful lot of rape, in here, and the pricks doing the raping are all hilariously large. One of them is described as an “enormous fascist rod”. LOL.

Objectively, The Cannibal Within fails as a novel. It sets the scene, but doesn’t really go anywhere. The ending of the book felt like the point at which a team of marines, armed to the teeth, should have been entering the freaks’ burrow, Aliens style. I don’t need (or want) a happy ending, but I would have liked a bit more conflict. I suppose it would have taken a lot of effort to ramp up the gross-out sequences as a plot developed, but it would take that kind of commitment to make this a real masterpiece.

Mirabello, if you’re reading this, please write a sequel, a long one.

The Cannibal Within is splatterpunk for grad students. If you’re a misanthropic book-nerd with a penchant for the disgusting (and you probably are if you’re reading this blog) you will likely get a kick out of this horrid book. Honestly, I doubt anyone else will get past the first few pages.