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Book Review: Attack From the ’80s edited by Eugene Johnson

cover art for Attack from the '80s edited by Eugene Johnson

Attack From the ’80s edited by Eugene Johnson

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2021

ISBN-13: 978-1735664446

Available: Hardcover  Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

 

Eugene Johnson brings together 22 incredible short stories and poems as a fitting tribute to the horror of the 1980s. There is something for everyone in this collection. “Top Guns of the Frontier” by Weston Ochse, a strong open to this anthology, tells the story of friends coming face to face with an ancient evil. In “Snapshot” by Joe R. Lansdale and Kasey Lansdale, Gracie and Trevor, the famous Snapshot Burglars, rob the wrong house. Jess Landry’s “Catastrophe Queens” takes place on the movie set of an ’80s SS werewolf horror film. Pink fake blood starts to take over people…and anything it touches. In “Your Picture Here” by John Skipp, a couple decides to take in a double feature of horror movies only to discover one of the films is closer to the truth. Lee Murray’s “Permanent Damage” invites us to a bridal party at a salon that turns into a bloodbath. “Munchies” by Lucy A. Snyder is a great story about a group of drag queens and the terror that was Nancy Reagan who has come to deliver a check to the local high school’s antidrug drive.

 

No ’80s horror anthology would be complete without the topic of D&D. In “Demonic Denizens” by Cullen Bunn, friends at summer camp discover a new game to play after the counselors forbid them to play any more of that “satanic” Dungeons & Dragons. “Ghetto Blaster”, by Jeff Strand, presents Clyde, who is cursed to carry a rather heavy ghetto blaster until he learns his lesson about loud music in public spaces. Everyone, check your candy before reading “Stranger Danger” by Grady Hendrix. A group of boys, hell-bent on taking revenge on the Judge, discover an army of Yoda-costumed children who have their own havoc to create, with apples containing razor blades the treat of the night. In Lisa Morton’s “The Garden of Dr. Moreau”, a biology experiment on corn plants is a success, but it could be at a deadly cost for life on Earth.

 

Other authors in the anthology include Ben Monroe, Linda Addison, Thomas F. Monteleone, Tim Waggoner, Stephen Graham Jones, Vince A. Liaguno, Rena Mason, Cindy O’Quinn, F. Paul Wilson, Christina Sng, Mort Castle, and Stephanie M. Wytovich. Pick this up if you need a good dose of 80s horror reading. Highly recommended.

 

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Graphic Novel Review: Her Life Matters: (Or Brooklyn Frankenstein) by Alessandro Manzetti and Stefano Cardoselli, art by Stefano Cardoselli

cover art for Her Life Matters: (Or Brooklyn Frankenstein) by Alessandro Manzetti and Stefano Cardoselli

Her Life Matters: (Or Brooklyn Frankenstein) by Alessandro Manzetti and Stefano Cardoselli, art by Stefano Cardoselli

Independent Legions Publishing, 2020

ISBN-13: 9788831959827

Available: Paperback  Bookshop.org )

 

Dr. Jamaica Foxy, a brilliant scientist, creates Franky, an eight-foot tall gentle giant. Dr. Foxy teaches Franky life lessons, essentially raising him. Franky even calls her Mom. He loves his mother, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and watching baseball games. Apart from his mother, Franky has only one friend in the world: thirteen-year-old Mary Shelley. Set in the summer of 1977 in Brooklyn, New York, the Son of Sam killings keep people off the streets… most people, anyway. One morning, Dr. Foxy’s path crosses that of some white supremacists wandering the streets looking to start a fight. When Dr. Foxy doesn’t return home after hours of waiting, Franky searches for her himself. What he discovers enrages him, turning him into a force of vengeance.

 

I love seeing what authors can do with the Frankenstein story. While this isn’t the first one where the authors have used Black Lives Matter as a focus, it is one that has a unique take on the monster tale. Dr. Foxy is a Black woman striving to improve her community through her science, teaching and raising Franky to be a caring, thoughtful individual. Against the backdrop of a tumultuous time in history, the authors call out the racial injustice faced by Black Americans today. The authors created a powerful story in Her Life Matters: (Or Brooklyn Frankenstein). The artwork is stark in its presentation, black and white art using negative space effectively. I would put Cardoselli alongside Mike Mignola and Frank Miller in its presentation.

 

Linda D. Addison provides a short but powerful introduction to this incredible graphic novel.  Recommended.

 

Contains: depictions of white supremacists, gore (in silhouette), violence against Black community, violence against women

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Editor’s note: Her Life Matters: (Or Brooklyn Frankenstein) is a nominee on the final ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel. 

Book Review: The Place of Broken Things by Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti

The Place of Broken Things by Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti

Crystal Lake Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1646338573

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

Imagine sitting in a poetry gallery appreciating each masterpiece while enveloped in a cloud of perfectly matching music (think Coltrane, Tchaikovsky, Hendrix). In the background, the words of famous poets move you to greater emotion and deeper understanding of each work of art. The Place of Broken Things by Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti delivers this sensory experience through the poems they have written together.

 

This collection includes poems written by Addison, poems by Manzetti, and poems that are a collaboration. Addison’s poems are spare, clear observations on and assessments of emotions. Her images are dark and sometimes threatening and describe pain and suffering even in the midst of love. In contrast, Manzetti’s poems show a reality that is often unexpectedly beautiful but hints at a hidden or not fully acknowledged darkness. His poems are abstract with colorful, sensual, exotic, and spiritual imagery combined with musical, artistic, and literary allusions. Both poets create poems inspired by the work of other writers such as Neruda, Wheatley, and Ginsberg.

 

The collaboration poems are the most evocative because they take the individual artists’ styles and images to the next level. “The Dead Dancer,” for example, focuses on the music that accompanies this “dance” (“horns mourning,” “can loneliness have a soundtrack?” “dreams become strings played by Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique”), and “Like Japanese Silk” features a church with a bronze cross “which looks like God’s antenna” and a “back” that “looks like Japanese silk.” In “A Clockwork Lemon Resucked,” a poet with “a cure for sorrow” and a knowledge of “the secrets of Mozart and Stevie Wonder” is now suffering “reeducation” in a cell “overlooking a dump and two lemon trees.” “The Yellow House” is a magnificent poem that captures the beautiful rawness and disturbing need that must have been a part of Van Gogh’s artistic desires (“I will give you color – / I will give you stars and revelations”).

 

Addison and Manzetti have collected “broken things” and found a painfully exquisite emotional beauty in them. Highly Recommended

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: The Place of Broken Things was a nominee on the final ballot and lthe winning title for the category of Superior Achievement in Poetry for the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards.