Home » Posts tagged "horror book reviews" (Page 40)

Book Review: Hell’s Gulf by Nick Carlson

 

Hell’s Gulf by Nick Carlson

Temple Dark Publications, 2022

ISBN: 9781739749200

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com 

 

If you’re going to vacation on the Florida Coast at a place called Hell’s Gulf, you probably should expect weirdness, and that’s exactly what the reader gets.  Latrine lizards that bite people’s bottoms, deranged murder dolphins, intelligent sand crabs… the gang’s all here.  Throw in a couple demons/gods from Caribbean and Irish folklore, plus a pool that functions as a sort of portal, and you have the ultimate inspirational place for young aspiring writer Rowan Vane.  As he soon finds, inspiration can be deadly.

 

The story hums along as Rowan’s family settles on the Gulf for a week-long vacation, because it is all they can afford.  Naturally, the locals are eclectic, and distrustful of outsiders, hiding the secrets of the town’s sordid past, secrets that continue to plague them in the present day. 

 

This isn’t a new plotline by any stretch, but it still works, as Carlson has written in an entertaining fashion. The combination of strange creatures and  colorful locals is enough of an infusion into a familiar plot to keep the reader’s interest, even if the story can be predictable at times. 

 

The part of the book that really shines the brightest is the supporting cast.  Rowan, as a protagonist,  isn’t particularly inspiring or interesting, but the other characters lend more than enough support to make up for him.  The Clermont family, consisting of an old Caribbean hoodoo woman and her two obnoxious twentysomething sons, are the best part of the book and are the most believable: they truly convey the feeling of a small, backwards, swampy town.  Other locals, such as Large Marge, also lend a hand. This is one of those books where the true stars are the setting and the people that dwell there: the stage itself is the true star of the play.    

 

Bottom line: this is a fun read, nothinlg breathtaking, but still enjoyable.  It will be interesting to see if the author revisits Hell’s Gulf and writes a story focusing strictly on the town and its denizens.  Based on this book, they would have plenty to support a story all of their own.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson.

Posted on August 1, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Sha’Kert by Ishmael Soledad

Sha’kert: End of Night by Ishmael Soledad

Temple Dark Publications, 2021

ISBN: 9781685132040

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

 

The future.

 

The polar ice caps have melted.

 

Those who survived…(whoops, that was Waterworld.  Let me try again)

 

The future.

 

The Amish have crash-landed on a distant planet.

 

Those who survived…have adapted to a new world.

 

That’s the odd but entertaining genesis of Sha’kert, one of the more unusual sci-fi books of the past few years.  It’s a creative, enjoyable read for fans of human conflict stories, brought down only a bit by a somewhat muddled ending.

 

It’s important to note that this is not a survival story in the same style of masterpieces like Verne’s Mysterious Island and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.   There’s little detail concerning how the characters survive on a new world, while starting with minimal supplies.  The story’s focus is the conflict between the Amish and another family that survived the crash, consisting of Greg, his wife Louise, and their daughter Penny.  They aren’t Amish, but are the typical modern, tech-obsessed, cell phone-crazed family.   A doubting Amish youth, Henry, also contributes as a character who is sort of in the middle.  It’s the discord between old and new ways that the author concentrates on and he does a good job of it, presenting both sides without sounding preachy or political.  In the story, all the characters need each other at first to survive, but once they get established and survival is ensured, strife ensues over the possibility of outside contact.  Greg and Henry want to explore the planet in hope of finding others, while most Amish would prefer to have no contact with anything or anyone, preventing their being influenced by outside ideas.  It’s why the left Earth in the first place: dealing with outsiders was becoming unavoidable.  To the author’s credit, all the characters have viewpoints reasonably presented, and the book avoids coming off as biased towards either old or new ways.  It’s an engrossing story of personal convictions, and the problems that stem from the inability to compromise.  

 

It’s only the last quarter of the book that is a bit of a letdown.  The communication between the characters and what they are trying to convey gets somewhat confusing, and the plot wanders away from the original premise with a new religious angle that doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. The story could have been wrapped up in a neater, less metaphysical fashion.

 

Bottom line: this is a good sci-fi tale that does well when it stays on focus, and has more meaning and material worth pondering over then the standard science fiction novel.  Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson.

Posted on June 22, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

Cover art for Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

 

Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

Crystal Lake Publishing, 2023

ISBN-13: 9781957133324

Available: Paperback, ebook

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com 

 

While Live Wire is the book title, it’s also an apt description of the writing: it crackles and snaps with electricity.  For a horror/thriller, this is a good one to start the summer with.  It’s also one of the nuttier ideas to come down the pike.  Transmission line towers that uproot themselves from the desert and start stomping around, wreaking havoc?  That’s one plot that certainly hasn’t been done before!

 

The book runs two threads concurrently.  In the first, former wannabe rock star Pale Brody, his young son, and a long-distance trucker named Ken Lightfeather are hunkered down at a ‘”last chance” desert gas station, riding out the worst electrical storm ever seen.  Also with them is the aging station owner, Otis Thompson.  The towers pull loose at the height of the storm, and the four of them are faced with a situation that is certainly not covered in the US Army’s Field Survival Manual.

 

The other thread covers the shadowy science and engineering firm whose experiments enabled the electrical pylons to go walkabout.  Nikki and Randy are two scientists who leave the firm in the middle of an experiment gone wrong, when it unleashes bloody carnage on the whole group.  The scientists eventually cross paths with the store group, and they band together to survive the towers from hell.  And hell (or something like it) just may be where the towers get their powers from, for they have abilities beyond just walking around and destroying things.  

 

Live Wire is an extremely engrossing book that will have readers zipping through pages, mainly due to the author’s excellent writing and sense of pace.  It’s that classic “tight but loose” style of writing: it drives the narrative and gets the story across, but doesn’t take itself too seriously.  There are a lot of hilarious asides and analogies, both from the characters and the narrator, giving the story an easy, flowing feeling that makes the pages move quickly.  The humor really shows up in the interrogation transcripts that are spaced throughout the book, as Nikki proves hilarious with her sarcastic way of belittling the investigators questioning her.  This book, at heart, is unquestionably a thrill ride, but the humor and wit of the characters help give the story a big boost.   Some readers might be a little bothered by the lack of fully detailed explanation for why things happen, but there’s enough there to keep most readers happy.  Some is left to the imagination, and the story is better off for it.

 

Bottom line: for a thriller with a bit of a horror bent to it, this one covers all the bases.  Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on May 22, 2023 by , Reply
First « 3839404142 » Last