Category Archives: Book Review

Book Review: Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

In 1960s, Lester Bullard lives alone in the mountains of Tennessee.  Abused as a child and scorned as an adult, Bullard is the type of person that most people try to ignore.  He’s angry, bitter, and not all that knowledgeable about the world outside of his own fevered imagination.  Having been evicted from his home, he moves into an abandoned shack where he spends his time voyeuristically watching the teenagers who sneak off to the isolated mountains so that they can fool around in their cars without being harassed by the grown-ups.  When Bullard stumbles across two dead bodies in a car, it doesn’t so much send him on a downward spiral as much as it just accelerates the only fate that can be waiting for someone like Lester Bullard.  Bullard does some truly disturbing things but, as the narrator reminds us, he’s “a child of God, much like yourself perhaps.”

(No, definitely not like me!  Though I do get the narrator’s point.)

First published in 1973, Child of God was Cormac McCarthy’s third novel.  It tells a disturbing story and one that will leave readers unsettled.  Inspired by the type of macabre tales that used to be told around campfires, it’s a novel of cold, gothic horror.  McCarthy’s prose creates such an atmosphere of darkness that it’s difficult to read the novel in one sitting.  You almost have to put the book down so you can step outside and take a deep breath after some of the more grotesque moments.  Child of God is also a character study of a man living on the fringes of what most people would already consider to be the fringe of society.  Just as the people living on the East and West Coasts have rejected the citizens of Appalachia, Appalachia has rejected Luster Bullard.  The book links Bullard to the violent history of Appalachia, with the Bullard family having been involved in many of the feuds that helped to define the region.  McCarthy’s matter-of-fact prose serves to make Bullard’s crimes all the more disturbing, with McCarthy refusing to give the reader the easy out of a traditional, guns-blazing ending.  Bullard’s ultimate fate feels almost as random as his crimes, challenging the idea of any sort of karmic justice.  In the end, Bullard is destined to become another barely-remembered regional legend, like Ed Gein or the Bloody Benders.  By telling his story without a hint of melodramatic excess, McCarthy leaves the reader with no choice but to consider that the world is full of real Lester Bullards.

 

Horror Novel Review: The Lifeguard by Richie Tankersley Cusick

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I read 1988’s The Lifeguard earlier today.  It’s a fast read, which is always a good thing.

The book tells the story of teenage Kelsey, whose father has just died and whose mother is already getting ready to marry her new boyfriend, Eric.  Personally, I think mom is moving a bit too fast but then again, Eric’s rich and he invites Kelsey and her mom to spend the summer on Beverly Island.  Kelsey makes new friends.  She meets the people who might soon become her stepsiblings.  She develops a crush on two of her potential stepbrothers, shy Justin and the intimidating Neale.  And she gets involved in a potential murder when Beth, yet another of Eric’s children, disappears.  Did Beth drown or did she fall victim to the killer of Beverly Island?

This book was so silly.  Can Kelsey solve the mystery?  Even more importantly, can Kelsey decide which one of her future stepsibilings she wants to date?  Justin seems nice but Neal is so dark and mysterious.  Can Kelsey figure out why the mysterious old man keeps yelling at her?  Could he be the killer?  He seems like kind of an obvious choice but Kesley might as well go ahead and break into his boat just to be sure….

Apparently, this book is considered to be a bit of a cult classic, solely because of the cover.  And the cover is pretty cool.  The book itself is nothing special but I probably would have appreciated it more if I hadn’t already read countless old school YA books with the exact same plot.  I can only guess the R.L. Stine read The Lifeguard at some point.

This book also wins some points from me for having a ludicrously “happy” ending.  Everything works out even though, to be honest, nothing should have worked out.  Kelsey should have been traumatized for life and whatever plans her mom had to marry Eric should definitely have been cancelled!  Seriously, there’s some things that not even the best of relationships can survive!  That said, the ending was so over-the-top and — here’s that word again — silly, that I couldn’t help but appreciate it.

Book Review: Revolution In The Head by Ian MacDonald

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since today would have been the 84th birthday of John Lennon, I want to take a minute to recommend a book called Revolution In The Head.

First published in 1994 and subsequently revised two more times, Revolution In The Head is both a chronological history of the songs that the Beatles recorded and a cultural history of the 60s.  By examining the recording of each song, Ian MacDonald not only describes how each song reflects (or doesn’t reflect) what was happening in the group at the time but also how the Beatles’s changing sound reflected what was happening in the world at the time.  Author Ian MacDonald was clearly a Beatles fan but, more importantly, he was not an apologist and, in the book, he’s just as quick to criticize as he is to praise.  While he praises the majority of the band’s recordings, there’s more than a few that he totally dismisses.  It’s a well-researched and passionately argued book, one that makes interesting reading for both fans of the group and history nerds like myself.

As for the Beatles themselves, they come across as fully developed people.  MacDonald neither idealizes nor demonizes the group and instead focuses on the idea of them as working musicians who usually collaborated well together as a group but sometimes feared and resented that they were losing their individual identities.  Neither Lennon nor Paul McCartney are presented as being saints and MacDonald doesn’t shy away from showing how frayed their relationship had become by the time the group split up.  (They’re portrayed as developing a classic love/hate relationship with each other.)  But both are also presented as being talented artists who were capable of creating beautiful music that would survive the test of time.  For all the conflict and for all the times that Lennon complained about McCartney’s commercial sensibilities and for all the times that McCartney complained that Lennon was not committed to keeping the Beatles going, they were still capable of creating songs like Eleanor Rigby and A Day In The Life.

A lot of Beatles fans will probably disagree with MacDonald’s opinions.  He’s surprisingly dismissive of a lot of George Harrison’s songs, including the wonderful While My Guitar Gently Weeps.  But that’s okay!  There’s nothing wrong with having differing opinions.  It’s actually a good thing.

Horror Novel Review: Aftershock by Robert W. Walker

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dangerous work is being done at the Coppelmier Center For Disease Control.  In an underground lab that sits beneath a major American city, three scientists are working on creating the ultimate biological weapon.  That’s definitely not a good thing, especially when you consider that the city in question is Los Angeles and Los Angeles has a history of getting hit by earthquakes.  You would think that Dr. Leo G. Coppelmier would have understood that building his underground bio weapon lab in a place known to randomly and violently shake was a bad idea.  But Dr. Coppelmier is a wealthy genius and he wants to do things his way.

Of course, an earthquake does hit.  And, of course, a really dangerous plague is set free.  Soon, a horrifying creature with claws is killing people all over Los Angeles, removing their heads and their spinal columns and leaving the bodies in the sewers.  (Yuck!)  Could this be related to the earthquake and the mutated virus that was set free as a result?  Of course it does …. but good luck getting the powers-to-be to admit it!  The government would always rather cover up a problem than admit they played a role in creating it.

Reporter Bill Quinn is determined to discover and reveal the truth and he’s got two scientists and his best friend helping him out.  But will he be able to track down and stop the killer before the plague is spread even further?

Published in 1987, Aftershock is a quick and pulpy read, one that feels like a gory throwback to the B-movies of the 50s and 60s, the ones in which some scientist would make the mistake of trying to play God and end up getting transformed into a fly or a member of the Alligator People.  The subtext of those movies always seemed to be that it was dangerous to look for too many answers and that scientists should stop trying to change things just for the sake of changing them.  The subtext of Aftershock is not quite as reactionary, instead it just suggests that it’s dangerous to build a bioweapon lab on the San Andreas fault and I agree with that.  Aftershock is a violent and bloody tale that holds your attention and offers some genuinely frightening imagery.  Reading it today, it’s hard not think about the fact that COVID undoubtedly escaped from a lab as well.  After everything that we, as a society, have been through over the past four years, books about mad scientists and poorly-planned lab schemes hit a little bit differently nowadays.

Book Review: The Mall by Steve Kahn

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Just from the cover, you would think that The Mall, which was first published in 1983, was a horror novel about a bunch of shoppers getting trapped by a collection of angry spirits whose slumber was disturbed by the titular building being constructed on an ancient burial ground.

Or you might think that The Mall was a sci-fi story in the style of Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall, in which The Mall of the Future turned on shoppers and refused to let them escape while a bunch of robots struck a blow for machine rights everywhere.

That’s certainly what I thought when I came across this book and spent a few minutes starting at the cover at Half-Price Books a few months ago.  The cover seemed to show a man melting as he tried to open the doors of the mall!  I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a horrific image?  (If I did die at a mall, I would hope that I would at least die in an expensive store so people would be impressed when they heard.)  I bought the book because of the cover and the cover is why I waited until horrorthon to read it.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the cover is the best thing about the book.  It’s not really a horror novel, either.  Sure, it’s listed as being a part of the horror genre on every online listing that I’ve found for it but the book itself is more of a Die Hard rip-off.  (Yes, the book was published before Die Hard even went into production but that’s the power of Die Hard!  It was being ripped off before it even existed.)  The plot is that The Mall is a state-of-the-art playground for the upper and middle-classes.  It was built by Mel Goodman, an industrialist who built himself up from nothing.  On the same day that Mel is having his birthday party in the mall’s offices, his former employee, Jeffrey Prince, leads a group of criminals in an armed but surprisingly dull takeover of the mall.  Prince threatens to kill everyone unless his financial demands are met.  Unfortunately, no one can escape or enter the mall because the doors, I kid you not, have been superglued shut!

The frustrating thing about The Mall is that we are told that there are 40,000 people in the mall.  And yet none of them really try to do anything to thwart Prince’s plans.  Instead, they just wait patiently and some even continue to shop.  That might seem like a satirical commentary on American consumerism but this isn’t half as clever (or emotionally resonant) as Dawn of the Dead.   If anything, it’s the literary equivalent of one of those disaster films where a bunch of different people find themselves trapped in one location and they deal with their personal issues while waiting for the crisis to end.  I’m a little bit surprised this was never turned into a made-for-TV movie.

In the end, it’s not a very good book but the cover continues to haunt me.  Seriously, let that man out of the mall before he dissolves!

Book Review: Runaway Train Or, The Story Of My Life So Far by Eric Roberts with Sam Kasher

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hell yeah, Eric Roberts has written a book!

A friend of mine recently sent me Eric Roberts’s just published autobiography as a gift.  I was excited because, as any of our regular readers know, I am a huge fan of the insanely busy Eric Roberts.  That said, I wasn’t really expecting much from the book because most Hollywood autobiographies that I’ve read have had a tendency to be a bit dry.  Often times, the author (or their ghost writer, as the case may be) is either too concerned about not offending anyone or too bitter about the state of their career to really provide much honest insight into their life or their chosen profession.

Eric Roberts, however, is the exception to the rule.  Runaway Train is a fascinating read.  Roberts comes across as being very honest about his career, his demons, his family, and his compulsive need to always be working.  Roberts admits to being a workaholic but, as he explains it, it’s better to be addicted to acting than to be addicted to cocaine.  And I have to say that I think he has a point there.

Roberts writes about his dysfunctional childhood, his time as a star, and his more recent career as an actor who is willing to appear in just about everything.  He writes about his addictions and how they almost ruined his life.  He writes about his marriage to Eliza and fully takes responsibility for all the times that he’s screwed up.  (Roberts screwing up is a recurring theme throughout the book, almost to the extent that you just want to give the guy a hug and tell him to stop being so hard on himself.)  He writes about the time that he spent as a patient of Dr. Drew on Celebrity Rehab.  (In perhaps the book’s funniest moment, he realizes that he needs to be addicted to something if he’s going to go on Celebrity Rehab.  Eventually, he agrees to go on the show for help with his marijuana addiction, despite Roberts belief, which I agree with, that you can’t actually get addicted to marijuana.)  Roberts writes about some of his films, though he obviously can’t write about all 700 of them.  So, while there is no Top Gunner trivia, there are three pretty interesting chapters devoted to Star 80, The Pope of Greenwich Village, and Runaway Train.

Roberts does write about other celebrities, though he does so in a way that is neither petty nor obsequious.  He writes about his friendship with Robin Williams with an honesty that few other celebs would be willing to risk.  Danny Trejo, Eddie Bunker, Mickey Rourke, Christopher Walken, Sterling Hayden, Doug Kenney, Sharon Stone, Rod Steiger, and Sylvester Stallone all show up at one point or another.  And yes, Eric Roberts does write about his relationship with both his sister Julia and his daughter, Emma.  Eric is open about he and Julia having been occasionally estranged but he manages to do so in a way that protects everyone’s privacy.  One might never expect this from some of the roles that he’s played but Eric Roberts comes across as being a pretty classy, if somewhat eccentric, guy.

I loved this memoir.  I recommend it to all of you.

Horror Novel Review: The Spear by James Herbert

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1978 novel The Spear, Harry Steadman is an ex-Mossad agent who is now a private investigator.  Steadman is hired to investigate the disappearance of another Mossad agent and soon finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy of wealthy and high-rnking Neo-Nazis who are hoping to use the Spear of Longinus to resurrect the feared head of the SS Heinrich Himmler!

The Spear is a fast-moving mix of horror and action.  Imagine James Bond if Bond found himself battling ancient demons and you have an idea of what The Spear is like.  As often happened to James Bond, Harry Steadman is lucky to be dealing with a bunch of villains who just can’t stop themselves from stopping the action to lay out all of their plans.  That said, the book does a good job of creating an atmosphere of paranoia and unease as Steadman finds himself going up against an occult conspiracy that involves some of the most powerful people in the world.  Like all good paranoia thrillers, The Spear creates a world where literally no one can be trusted.  The action is frequently over-the-top and the horror is memorably gruesome.  A scene involving a crucifixion is particularly nightmarish.  Harry Steadman is a compelling hero, one who doesn’t love violence but who understands what’s at stake.  The Spear does not shy away from discussing the evil of the Nazis and, in today’s world where anti-Semitism is on the rise and where people are openly making excuses for Hitler and arguing that the Allies were somehow not the good guys in World War II, Herbert’s novel feels very relevant to the world today.

The Nazis search for ancient artifacts and Himmler’s belief that their power could be wielded for Germany also inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.  A former chicken farmer and a committed Pagan, Himmler was reportedly a strong believer in the power of the occult and there is some speculation that, along with the Lost Ark of the Covenant, Noah’s boat, and the Holy Grail, the Spear of Longinus was one of the artifacts that Himmler instructed his agent to search for.  For all the time that they spent searching, the Nazis apparently never found any of the artifacts that they believed would deliver them to victory.  By the end of World War II, even Himmler was secretly negotiating with the Allies.  At the war’s end, Himmler committed suicide while in custody of the Allies.

Of course, the real Holy Lance was discovered in Antioch during the Crusades and currently sits in the Manoogian Museum in Vagharshapat, Armenia.

 

Horror Book Review: Bats Out Of Hell by Guy N. Smith

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“You think those are bats?” someone said as we all stood out on the balcony of a hotel in the mountains of Switzerland.

I was 18 years old, a recent high school graduate who was spending my summer in Europe with my sisters.  We were in Switzerland and had just eaten dinner at our hotel.  I had stepped out onto hotel’s balcony, joining several other tourists who were looking up at the evening sky.  The sky was was full of shadowy, winged creatures that seemed to be circling the hotel.  As I stared up at the creatures and listened to the people around me wonder what they could be, I thought to myself that they very well could be bats.  That freaked me out a little.  Growing up in the Southwest, I had seen my share of bats.  I’ve seen bats get trapped in garages.  I’ve seen bats come flying out of tunnels.  I’ve never been attacked by a bat.  In fact, you have to be pretty obnoxious to attract the attention of a non-rabid bat.  But that doesn’t make the sight of them any less frightening or the thought of them sucking your blood any less alarming.

We all stood out on the balcony, staring up at the bats and wondering if we were about to be attacked.

“Those are definitely bats,” someone else said, “Is it safe to be out here?”

By this point, my sister Megan had come out onto the balcony in order to make sure that I hadn’t fallen off.

“What’s everyone looking at?” she asked.

“Those are bats!” an old woman exclaimed, pointing at the sky.

“Those are birds,” Megan replied.

The “bats” chirped in agreement.

I found myself thinking about that Swiss evening as I read the 1978 horror paperback, Bats Out Of Hell.  This novel opens with Professor Brian Newman developing a new virus as part of an attempt to find a cure for Meningitis.  Unfortunately, he has tested his virus on a bunch of bats at the laboratory and now, they’ve all become increasingly aggressive.  Since the virus also appears to ultimately be fatal to the bats, Newman can’t help but feel guilty about what he’s putting the bats through.  Even though he’s told he just be happy that the bats are going to die eventually, he can’t stop thinking about their accusatory stare.  He knows that the bats blame him and well they should!

An argument with his girlfriend leads to Brian falling and accidentally setting free all of the infected bats.  The bats swarm across the British countryside, attacking everyone that they see and spreading the virus.  The government reacts by declaring martial law and trying to isolate the bats to one city.  Soon, rioters are taking to the streets and vigilantes are enforcing their own violent interpretation of the law.

That’ll teach humanity to try to cure Meningitis!

Bats Out Of Hell is a pulpy read, one that works because bats are scary and author Guy N. Smith keeps the action moving quickly.  The novel is at its best when envisioning a world where fear of disease has led to mass panic and a suspension of civil rights.  Hmmm …. why does that seem so familiar?  It’s amazing how science fiction can eventually become science fact.

Horror Novel Review: Gila! by Kathryn Ptacek, writing as Les Simons

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Watch out New Mexico!

Your long history of atomic testing is coming back to haunt you in the form of giant Gila Monsters!  Hiss, they say before they attack.  Hiss, they say as they look at the severed body parts that inevitably show up as a result of their rampages.  Hiss, they say as they make their way across the desert.  Hiss, hiss, hiss!

(Thanks a lot, Oppenheimer!)

Admirably, the 1981 novel Gila! is pretty straight-forward.  It’s about giant Gila monsters and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than quick and rather pulpy read.  With the lizards cutting a path of destructing through New Mexico, Governor Bubba J. Roy wants something done and he wants it done now!

Heh heh — seriously, his name is Bubba J. Roy.  All of his dialogue is written phonetically, as if we might otherwise not guess that a character named Bubba J. Roy would have a fairly strong Southwestern accent.  That’s the type of novel this is.

It’s up to Dr. Kate Dwyer and her Native American lover, Chato Del KIinne, to figure out how to stop the mutated lizards.  It won’t be easy, both because the lizards are really big and, as always happens in this type of situation, there’s a bunch of ambitious bureaucrats who think they know better.  Before the humans can figure out a way to deal with the giant lizards, the monsters wipe out the patrons of a diner, the passengers on a school bus, and a huge amount of fairgoers, along with several soldiers and more than a few reporters.

(As I read the book, it occurred to me that perhaps the best solution would have been to build an electric fence around New Mexico and just let the Gila monsters have it.  Seriously, my family briefly lived in New Mexico and not one of us has ever had any great desire to go back.  I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake at one point.  Agck!  The state is dangerous enough even without all of the atomic monsters.)

Gila! is basically a throw-back to the classic giant monster movies of the 50s, though this book features a lot more sex than any of those films.  It’s relatively tame sex but still, there’s a surprisingly large amount for a relatively short novel about killer lizard.  Obviously, the writer knew what her readers were looking for and, to her credit, she gave it to them.

(It’s a bit of a shame that Gila! was apparently never turned into a movie.  Reading it, I kept thinking about how much this seemed like the type of story that just cried out to be the type of 70s movie that Leslie Nielsen made before he started doing comedies.  Ali MacGraw could have played Kate.  Burt Reynolds could have played Chato.  Bubba J. Roy?  Ned Beatty, of course!)

It’s a deeply silly book but entertaining and a quick read.  I picked up a beat-up paperback copy while visiting Snooper’s Book Barn in Fort Smith, Arkansas and I read the book the same day.

Horror Book Review: Lights Out by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Never go camping!

Seriously, if there’s any lesson to be learned from the nearly 600 posts that showed up on the site through the month of October in 2023, do not go camping.  If you take nothing else away from Horrorthon, I hope you’ll take away a strong disdain for camping in general and summer camp in specific.  Seriously, the wilderness is full of monsters and summer camps seem to breed madmen.

Just consider R.L. Stine’s 1991 novel, Lights Out.

In Lights Out, Holly is spending the summer working as a counselor at her uncle’s summer camp and it absolutely sucks!  Not only does the summer camp have a long history of weird events and tragedy but no one seems to be happy about Holly being there.  Holly doesn’t like the outdoors and she doesn’t like bugs and she certainly doesn’t like snakes, even if they’re just made out of rubber.  The other counselors, rather than trying to help Holly out, spend the entire time bullying her and then threatening her to keep her quiet.  At one point, they even throw leeches at her!  Seriously, who does that!?  Who not only collects leeches but also throws them at someone!?

Why is everyone being so mean to Holly?  Well, a lot of it because the two resident mean girls think that Holly is going to steal the attention of the male counselors.  But Holly feels that there’s something even more sinister happening at the camp.  Someone appears to be vandalizing the camp and trying to force her uncle to shut the place down.  Eventually, one of the counselors dies when someone shoves her face against the pottery wheel.

Of course, the camp doesn’t shut down.  It takes more than just one murder to shut down a summer camp.  Things come to a head when, despite being terrified of the outside, Holly takes part in leading the camp’s nature hike.  Why is Holly even working as a camp counselor?  I know it’s because her mother demanded that she do something more than just hang out around the house during the summer but, seriously — there’s a lot to do in Shadyside!  There’s so much Holly could have done!

The main message of this book is that camping sucks and I could definitely agree with that.  If the girl on the book’s cover had red hair, she could have easily been me whenever I was up at my grandfather’s farm in Arkansas and I was trying to figure out if there was a snake in the nearby high grass or if all the hissing was just my imagination.  As for the plot, it was basically Friday the 13th with a much smaller body count.  (Christopher Pike would have killed off the whole camp.  R.L. Stine is a bit nicer.)  It’s a bit of a silly book but the message comes through loud and clear.

CAMPING SUCKS!