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Book Review: Doorways to the Deadeye by Eric J. Guignard

Doorways to the Deadeye by Eric J. Guignard

JournalStone, 1919

ISBN-13: 978-1947654976

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

Novels about riding the rails can be exhilarating journeys in the right hands. Eric J Guignard is fresh off his first Bram Stoker win for best fiction collection, proof he has the skills to terrify his audience. Luke Thacker is a victim of the Great Depression, scraping by to survive on the dangerous rails of America. Along the way, he learns many secrets to staying alive, from a code left by other hobos, often warning them of strangers who would sooner leave them bleeding in a ditch or a friend ready to help out a guy in need through symbols carved into trees. When he discovers one odd symbol, an infinity sign, he learns that reality is a bit broken.

He meets a gangster ready and armed, John Dillinger, who had perished just months ago in a hail of bullets. Luke  has entered the Athanasia, the realm of the deadeye.

The dead don’t exactly haunt but can be dangerous. The spirits that linger are the ones who are remembered. Dillinger hires Thacker to be his driver for a bit, before being rescued by Harriet Tubman who ferries him to safety through the corridors of the deadeye. The stronger the person was in life, the longer they linger in Athanasia, where the living can see them, hear them, and be hurt by them.

Some are them are pretty angry and vicious.

Luke takes to the rails and meets up with the semi-gentle giant Zeke, and the woman who entrances his heart, Daisy. Together, they explore more of the deadeye world, encountering the Wyatt brothers, bank robberies, and the worst memory of the rails, Smith McCain, a brutal rail worker who made his living tossing hobos from moving trains. In death, his viciousness only has amplified. He tracks down riders to send them into the deadeye where most of them don’t have the strength to remain remembered. They simply fade away into nothingness. McCain is a beast straight out of the best thriller and horror movies, a former man who can never be stopped.

Fifty years later, another former hobo, King Shaw,  is keeping the stories of Luke alive as he tells them to a reporter, and hopefully keeping himself alive, too.

This novel is a stunner. Horrifying and suspenseful throughout, what makes it work is the strong writing of Guignard. Having never read any of this author before, it was shocking to see how powerful his lines were, how well-drawn the characters had become.

This guy is more than someone to watch in horror. He’ll be winning plenty more awards.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

Editor’s note: Doorways to the Deadeye was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel.

 

Posted on April 12, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Del Rey, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-399-18210-5

Availability: hardcover, audiobook, ebook

 

It’s inevitable that any 782 page magnum opus about the end of the world like Wanderers will get compared to the two titans of the apocalyptic pantheon, Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song.  Wendig’s tome compares fairly well. The prose is excellent, character development is strong, and the plot has plenty of surprises.  Wanderers might have been able to join the other two at the top of the mountain, but it does have a couple of faults.  The story sputters to a muddled conclusion at the finish line, and the author’s insertion of his own political beliefs into the stories detracts from the strength of some of the characters, reducing them to stereotypical cardboard cutouts.

 

14 year old Nessie one day starts walking down the driveway in an unresponsive trance, leaving the home she shares with her older sister Shana and her father. Others with the same symptoms soon join her, and soon there is a pseudo-parade of walkers and supporters marching across the country, although no one knows where they are going.  The real focus of the story, however, isn’t the walkers themselves, it’s the reaction of the rest of the country to them.  Are the walkers carriers of a new disease?  A sign from God?  Messengers of the devil?  They become national news in an election year, and reactions vary from solidarity with the walkers to outright violence against the “devil’s parade”.   It becomes a race for medical professionals to find the cause of the trance-walking, set against the backdrop of a country on edge due to its own political beliefs about the walkers.

 

There isn’t much to dislike in the book.  The author writes extremely well in a tight-but-loose fashion, the story peppered with numerous asides and pop culture references that give the book a unique feel.   This is truly a character-driven story.  It’s not so much about what the characters do: how they think, feel and respond to their own lives, and the world falling apart around them is what keeps the story flowing.  Summing up the actual actions of the first 500 pages could be done in a few sentences, but that would miss out on the richness of the characters’ thoughts and emotions.  The plot itself is an unusually complex take on the “end of the world” scenario, as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology play a part.  It is partially a detective story, and it’s not an easy puzzle to figure out, especially with the final twist inserted in the last few pages.

 

The drawbacks to Wanderers are minor, but they prevent a good story from becoming a great one.  As noted, the final showdown between good and evil was a bit convoluted and didn’t really fit the rest of the story.  The real problem is the author’s use of stereotypes when it comes to his antagonists from the conservative side of the political spectrum.  These make the villains far too predictable in their actions and reasons.  Author Wendig also has a bad habit of inserting his own liberal beliefs into the story as narration asides, not as part of the character development.  That damages the narrative, when it is written from the author’s point of view to make a political case, and not to further the story.

 

Overall, Wanderers is a well-written, epic saga of the end of the world, and well worth the time investment to read its almost 800 pages.  However, conservative readers will have to put aside their own feelings and viewpoints to enjoy reading this.  Otherwise, they will probably get mad and quit within the first 100 pages.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, mild gore, racial slurs, rape

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Editor’s note: Wanderers was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel.

Posted on April 10, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-947879-12-6

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

In the Afterword to Choking Back the Devil: Poems, Donna Lynch describes how the reader’s “immersion” in horror poetry can be “an ax right to the torso” and more intense than the horror fiction which she also writes. This poetry proves her right. Lynch has created nightmarish psychological landscapes full of emotional pain and torture and menacing nameless and faceless figures that are humans, monsters, and witches. Her words reveal monstrous truths like the real life horrors that are so bad we might want to believe they could only be fictional.

The central poems in this collection focus on capturing the trauma of torment in terrifying emotional detail. The poet keeps the spotlight on feelings rather than actions. There is despair here and a loss of faith, even in God, as well as symbolic images of mutilated internal organs and “hollowed” victims running in terror. In the most ghastly of these poems, the title poem, a body is invaded by the devil. As if that is not enough, Lynch does not spare the reader from imagining being the random victim of a callous human monster in the aptly named poem “It Just Wasn’t Your Night” and contemplating the chilling fate of each child in “Sacrifice” who is “chosen” to suffer in place of the rest. But, neither does she leave out those who turn their horrific memories into weapons, anger, and even a sisterhood of sorts as is the case in “Legend” and “Honey.”

Other poems move in different directions while maintaining the same emotional content. “If You Love Me” uses terrifying thoughts that a rational person might only think but never seriously enact to show how it feels when a victim of a manipulative love turns what should be doubt in someone else into self-doubt.  A clever little poem, “Wreckage,” uses a mirroring word effect in two stanzas to show alternative perspectives in a relationship, and “My Incomplete Children” makes one think of Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” with Lynch’s poems being the horror version since her poems, as she says, “have teeth.” And, indeed, they do. Highly Recommended

Contains: body horror, posssession, violence.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Editor’s note: Choking Back the Devil: Poems was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection.

Posted on April 9, 2020 by , Reply
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