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Book Review: Siphon by A.A. Medina

Siphon by A. A. Medina

Hindered Souls Press, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-06980217

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Siphon by A. A. Medina describes an unhappy nebbish who becomes possessed, and, eventually, controlled, by an urge to drink blood and act out his sexual fantasies.  Dr. Gary Phillips is a hematopathologist, orphaned as a child and raised by an abusive grandfather.  He is tortured by unfulfilled sexual fantasies and dotes on a sexy phlebotomist whom he follows on Facebook.

Dr. Phillips’ compulsion to drink blood (hematophagia or Renfield’s syndrome) arises from his own psychosis, not from vampirism or a supernatural entity.  When he “blanks out”, his “God” takes more and more control of his thoughts and actions.  His mania increases from sneaking sips of lab blood, to drinking menstrual blood, to siphoning blood from living humans.

Siphon is a horror story, but not a fantasy.  Although the plot is shocking, it is not altogether unbelievable.  I wish the author had delved more into the origin and power of Dr. Phillips’ psychosis.  His duties in the laboratory are those of a hospital lab technologist, rather than that of a hematopathologist.  The book contains profanity and intense sexual scenes.

 

Contains: profanity, graphic sex, gore

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

Posted on January 15, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: Bloody Kids by Andrew Holmes

Bloody Kids by Andrew Holmes

Sasquatch Books, 2017

ASIN: B078437KK2

Available: Kindle edition

 

Bloody Kids by Andrew Holmes is a gory thriller about a rural English town that is rotten to its core.  A rich farmer controls the town and most of its inhabitants, including the police, much as lords of the manor did in medieval England.  He entertains and controls many of the village men with annual hunting bacchanals and a clandestine brothel at the Lizard Farm.  A sadistic widow runs the Farm and is the madam for comely ‘cleaning women’.  She physically and psychologically abuses her orphaned or abandoned ‘foster children’, who work the Farm.

 

Things begin to go awry when the widow becomes demented, and loses control over the once-cowed children.  As they take control of the Farm, their base instincts come to the fore.  Think of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  The children begin to abuse and torture the prostitutes.

 

The rich farmer’s son-in-law takes his young son on a winter picnic in a field near the Farm, and the boy disappears.  An intensive search leads nowhere, and a local veteran Detective Inspector is ordered to investigate.

 

It’s a tangled web.  The DI has had a midlife crisis and an affair with a hostess-prostitute at the bacchanals, who is also the nanny/cleaning woman for the children.  Although she ends the affair, she still communicates with the DI by cell phone, until the boy disappears.

 

A boy’s body is found in a gravel pit.  It seems that no one is innocent.  Mutilations (yes, even with a chainsaw), torture, and murder, crescendo to a gory, blazing denouement on a bone-chilling, snowy night.  As in a morality play, most of the malefactors get their just deserts.

 

The story is fast-paced, and keeps the reader engaged.  Setting his story in England, Holmes treats the reader to many English colloquialisms, such as “twee” (quaint), “gutted” (upset) and “gob” (spit, mouth).  Holmes has written many other action/adventure/fantasy/horror novels under the pseudonyms Oliver Bowden and A. E. Moorat.

 

Recommended for teens and adults

 

Contains: violence, gore and sex

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on November 29, 2017 by , Reply

Book Review: The Naturalist by Andrew Mayne

The Naturalist (The Naturalist Series Book One) by Andrew Mayne

Thomas & Mercer, Seattle, 2017

ISBN-13: 9781477824245

Available: Paperback/Kindle ebook

 

The Naturalist is a mystery and thriller about a serial killer.  But, is the killer an animal or a human?

 

Theo Cray, a professor of bioinformatics (biology and computer science) is in a remote town in Montana, when a young woman, a former student of his, is found mauled nearby.  Cray has an unusual approach to research.  He uses his knowledge of biology, skills in computer science and a unique imagination to look for unexpected patterns in nature, such as the behavior of frogs and large apex predators.

 

The local law authorities at first suspect that Cray is the killer, but soon decide that a rogue grizzly bear is responsible.  But Cray’s knowledge of bear behavior tells him that they are wrong, and that a human made the killing look like an animal attack.  What’s more, he finds a report of a young woman who was similarly mauled nearby 6 years ago.  He suspects that these are not the killer’s first murders.

 

Cray created an artificial intelligence computer program for his research.  It can analyze reams of seemingly unrelated data to reveal the probabilities that underlying patterns exist.  Cray enters data about missing persons and population.  He finds that Montana and Wyoming are among the states with the highest number of missing persons per capita.  He filters the data for young women and interstate highways.  The program identifies possible patterns around certain highways, not unlike the feeding circuits of great white sharks.

 

Using this information Cray investigates the cases of missing young women in the area.  When he finds evidence that some were not run-aways, but might have been murdered, the authorities come after Cray again.  For Cray, it’s now a race between avoiding the law and a finding serial killer, who has murdered over a hundred persons over two decades and is coming for him.

 

Mayne does a good job drawing in the reader as Cray systematically works through the many steps in identifying the killer.  The pace of the plot is steady and fast, and the characters are appropriately sympathetic or chilling. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: moderate gore.

Reviewed By Robert D. Yee

 

 

Posted on October 22, 2017 by , Reply
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