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Book Review: The Apocalypse Strain by Jason Parent

cover art for The Apocalypse Strain by Jason Parent

The Apocalypse Strain by Jason Parent

Flame Tree Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1787583535

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

Back in 2014, French scientists made an ancient virus found in Siberian permafrost infectious again after 30,000 years. This real-life event raised the possibility that diseases we thought were long gone might reappear. Add to that a post-pandemic world in which it seems as though science fiction has become real life, yet again, and we have to wonder what the future will hold. Our collective literary imagination will now need to take us to a new level of horror fiction contagion. Who better to infect us than Jason Parent in The Apocalypse Strain?

 

In this exciting and shockingly plausible book, a group of international scientists are under attack at a remote site that will self-destruct in case of an accident. Their human bodies are invaded, consumed, and incorporated into living, moving blobs of squirmy flesh when their research process goes terribly wrong. Within the facility, a woman with MS mysteriously becomes mobile, infected plants grow with abandon, a man marked with a black cross on his forehead seems bent on terrorism, many people die violently, and it becomes very difficult to tell who or what can be trusted. Everyone is focused on containing and exterminating the hybrid monsters, but will some humans escape only to spread doom outside the lab?

 

The action is nonstop in The Apocalypse Strain. With relentless intensity, Parent’s fantastic descriptions of the ever-morphing threat and the horrible deaths suffered by the victims are disgustingly graphic and amazing in their variety. As for the characters, they are not just stereotypes of people in their profession. We get to know the personal histories of some who are lured to destruction by actual, whispering voices from their past. Others are revealed by their fleeting thoughts or visceral reactions to their coworkers, details that are startlingly normal in contrast to the terrible circumstances in which they are trapped.

 

As the apocalypse seems imminent, we realize that this tale is not really the end of anything. If you like speculating about where science can take us and how science can potentially end us, The Apocalypse Strain will give you plenty to ponder. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on April 3, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Chew on This! edited by Robert Essig

Cover art for Chew on This edited by Robert Essig

Chew on This! edited by Robert Essig

Blood Bound Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781940250465

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition  ( Amazon.com )

 

Chew on This is a themed horror anthology dealing with…food.  Can food actually be horrifying?  Based on this book, the answer is a resounding “yes.”  It combines creativity and gut-wrenching disgust into a brew of good stories.  Fair warning: some of these stories are truly barf-inducing, and sicker than any “splat” style horror writing.   Combinations of food and body fluids (and limbs), babies roasted in ovens: it’s all on the table.  This is a fun batch of horror stories, and also the National Restaurant Association’s worst nightmare.

 

With only a few exceptions, the overall story quality varies from good to very good, and most of them aren’t disgusting, just good, smart stories.  Some of them are “cycle” stories, where the story focuses on one event and then ends, leading into another of the same event.  Chad Lutzke’s “Cherry Red” and Kristopher Trianna’s ‘The Feeding” fall into this category.  One deals with a psychotic kid and his fascination with red cereal box toys, the other with a sandwich delivery service that takes much more than the customer’s money.  Ronald Kelly’s “Grandma’s Favorite Recipe” is Kelly doing what he does best: taking a lovable southern character, in this case the “saintly granny,” and turning her into something more sinister, by way of her cooking.  Vivian Kayley’s “Roly Poly” is notable for its entertaining look at the lengths some unfortunate women will go to for weight loss. It’s also the only story in the book with a happy ending.  Shenoa Carroll-Bradd’s “Barrel Aged” may be the most intriguing story, although it might take a second read to understand, as the author squirrels away the most important details in only a few sentences.

 

If you want to avoid (or read first) the stomach churners, here they are.  They are solid pieces, just gruesome.  Tonia Brown’s “A Woman’s Work” features the aforementioned cooked human baby, and John McNee’s “With a Little Salt and Vinegar” has an eating contest, with dead fetuses on the menu.  Nikki Noir’s “Magick Brew” is a hilarious look at combining a certain reproductive body fluid with margaritas to make a drink that renders the consumer ravenous with lust…to the extreme.  The true pukefest is K. Trap Jones’s “Seeds of Filth”.  With restaurant employees combining any and all types of bodily fluids with condiments and serving them to rude customers, this story is likely to make the average reader upchuck their last meal.  It might be the most revolting story ever committed to paper.

 

Overall, Chew on This is a well-written, creative anthology, it just takes a stomach of iron at times to read the full book.  Recommended.

 

Contains:  violence, profanity, gore, body horror, cannibalism, and everything disgusting you can think of

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on March 16, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

(  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey, 2020

ISBN: 9780525620785

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook, Kindle

 

In 1950’s Mexico, Noemi, a flirtatious, intelligent fashionista, decides her cousin Catalina has been out of touch for too long.  When Noemi receives a disturbing letter from Catalina suggesting that she might want to escape from her new marriage, Noemi packs her gorgeous wardrobe and heads to isolated High Place, the ancestral home of the English Doyles, to investigate.

Ever the realist, skeptical of her cousin’s fairytale princess notions about marriage, Noemi immediately distrusts her suave brother-in-law. She soon realizes that he is evil, and so is his menacing house that has wallpaper “slippery, like a strained muscle” and walls like “sickly organs” with “veins and arteries clogged with secret excesses.” Something is not right at High Place, and Noemi starts to feel its curse invading her mind and body, slowly but surely, just as it has infected her cousin.

What begins as a poetic, gothic fairytale, becomes a wild blend of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The Doyle men and women have preserved their family line by choosing between “fit and unfit people.” The men wield their power by practicing eugenics through a weird and totally terrifying combination of sexual abuse, drugs, intimidation, and psychological control. The house has an actual heartbeat that is pulsing with mold, fungus and rot, and the creepy family patriarch, an ugly man full of secrets and disgusting tumors, sores, and black bile, is directing and insuring the family’s future from his deathbed. Murders have occurred at High Place, and strange epidemics have killed droves of workers in the family’s silver mine. Once Noemi has the facts, she knows she must fight and use her wits  to survive and save the people she cares about before the evil overcomes them and traps them in a living hell forever.

Although the book seems set in a period later than the 50’s in terms Noemi’s language and sensibility, it still is, in more than one sense, a horror story that reflects the historically violent subjugation of women used as breeders in families and cultures obsessed with lineage and legacy. Religion, status, and seclusion frequently became barriers to freedom for these women by preventing them from making choices about the direction of their own lives. The women of Mexican Gothic cope with horrible suffering and mirror the superhuman strength it took for real women to endure, and sometimes find rare opportunities to escape, the nightmarish situations forced on their gender. Highly Recommended.

Contains: gore, sexual situations, profanity, incest, body horror

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: Mexican Gothic is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. 

 

Posted on March 1, 2021 by , Reply
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