It is always a delicate dance when two writers take on the task of co-authoring a book. There is never any guarantee that the final product will ring true, that the artists will complement each other. Thankfully, in this case, T.D. Trask and Dale Elster have developed a common language and style in crafting a… Continue reading Review: Deadsville by T.D. Trask and Dale Elster
A short but terrifying ride. In Virginia, William Esmont confronts us with a dreadful question: exactly how far would you be willing to go in order to save a loved one? For Ray Shelby, the answer is pretty far. Much in the vein of Stephen King’s short story “Quitters, Inc.” and David Fincher’s film The… Continue reading Review: Virginia by William Esmont
The concept of the dead returning to life is ancient, leading all the way back to the cave. Of course this was in a supernatural sense – the revenant, the zombie, the vampire, creatures caught between this world and the next. These archetypes persisted in cultures the world over, haunting dreams, shaping belief systems, influencing… Continue reading Horror Convention: Reanimation
In The End Is All We See, authors M.F. Wahl and A.J. Brown offer two finely crafted tales of what this reviewer would term “environmental horror.” Here the settings themselves are the antagonists, pitting the characters against natural threats – both the elemental and the alien. This theme is not a new one, though uniquely… Continue reading Review: The End Is All We See by M.F. Wahl and A.J. Brown
William Cook is a painter of impressions and moods, artfully rendering complex, authentic characters and weaving a twisted, darkly psychological narrative. In his exploration of the minds of a pair of prolific serial killers (those peculiar creatures of popular morbid interest), Cook introduces us to the Cunningham brothers – products of a long hereditary line… Continue reading Review: Blood Related by William Cook
The introductory chapter to W.J. Renehan's The Art of Darkness: Meditations on the Effect of Horror Fiction - Why is it that we so often turn to works of horror fiction as a source of entertainment when they should, by all rights, turn us off completely? Why should we pay good money to be scared… Continue reading The Art of Darkness – Introduction
Edward M. Erdelac’s new novel Monstrumfuhrer is a tour de force, playing on the classic horror convention of science gone awry. The novel posits Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as truth, the main character (Jotham Podczaski) and his brother (Eli) discovering the correspondence of Captain Robert Walton in the attic of a Polish bookstore in which they are… Continue reading Review: Monstrumfuhrer by Edward Erdelac
The strength of H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpiece lies in its closing of aesthetic distance between the text and reader. Lovecraft achieves this effect by building the suspense/tension slowly and subtly, encouraging the reader to engage in/anticipate the progression of events, and in so doing drawing them to the edge of an actual psychological threat. Here we… Continue reading At the Mountains of Madness
I recently revisited an old favorite and thought I’d sit down and share some thoughts on it. One cannot meaningfully discuss the overall effect of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot without considering the concept of horrific metonymy. The idea, as you may already know, is a simple one: that an antagonist can be rendered more frightening… Continue reading A Look at ‘Salem’s Lot
Dark Hall Press 