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Book Review: To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

cover art for To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

Turner Publishing, 2021 (release date June 21)

ISBN: 9781684426348

Availability: Paperback, Kindle ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

If you only have the budget to purchase one book for the entire year, this is the one to buy.  To Dust You Shall Return is superior to everything else out there, might as well just hand the author the Stoker award for best horror novel of 2021 and skip the drawn-out nomination process.  It’s that good: other authors will be hard pressed to equal it.

 

Most of the story is set in Harlow, one of those Children of the Corn-type Midwestern towns you could drive through and not know if anyone actually lives there.  Curtis Quinn, an aging ex-Mafia hitman with a price on his head, is led there while on the trail of whoever butchered his beloved wife into pieces.  He suspects it’s a revenge hit to get to him, but what he finds in Harlow is much more sinister and terrifying than anything the Mafia could have dished out.  Harlow residents live in fear of the Mayor, a sadistic madman (or is he?) with inhuman powers.  The residents’ only hope is the legend of the Griffin, an outsider who may one day come to deliver the townspeople from the Mayor’s grasp.  Could Curtis, a cold-blooded killer, be that man, and is it somehow connected to his wife’s murder?

 

The story scores unbelievably high on every possible level, but the excitement and originality are the two best points.  After a brief prologue, the story shifts into high gear right away, and, in 352 pages, doesn’t let up.  There’s never a hint of a slowdown: this is the type of book you will keep reading well into the night, until exhaustion sets in.  For originality, Harlow itself is one of the most intriguing fictional towns ever invented; it’s an unusual cross between a communist community and Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines.  Residents are provided for and given jobs, but the cost is never being able to leave the town, exceept for a forays lasting a brief hour or two.  The town is surrounded with razor wire and various traps to keep the people in.  If they do escape, rangers track them down and return them to Harlow, where they are ritually slaughtered in front of the townspeople in extremely painful and bloody ways.  This causes the book’s gore factor to run high at times, but it is always in service to the story, never gratuitous for the shock factor.  That said, some of the killings are as hardcore as anything Jack Ketchum ever wrote and will make readers cower in fear, praying to forget what they just read.

 

The characters and plot also sell themselves by their unpredictability: the story does not go where you would expect.  Numerous characters double-cross each other, and the book becomes a guessing game,  keeping the story engrossing.  The legend of the Griffin also helps drive the story’s unexpected twists and turns, as most stories with a creepy little town rarely use the “savior” angle.  It’s just another example of what sets this story apart from all the competition.  Bottom line: just buy this one, and prepare to be blown away.  You won’t be disappointed.  This is beyond highly recommended.

 

Contains: blood, gore, profanity, cannibalism, ritualistic torture.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on May 13, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

cover art for The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

(  Bookshop.org )

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

Sourcebooks, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1728206028

Available: Hardcover, paperback

 

Stuart Turton probably wouldn’t describe his books as horror, but they are compelling, original, and dread-inducing. In a departure from the surreal Agatha Christie-like The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, in The Devil and the Dark Sea, this story takes place in 1634, on a ship leaving from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the center of the Dutch East Indian Trading Company, for Amsterdam, home of the company’s headquarters, a journey of about eight months during which many ships were lost as sea. Readers expecting accurate historical fiction will not find it here: in a note, Turton essentially says he did the research, but threw it out the window if he found it wouldn’t work with his story. By changing as much as he did, he’s basically written an alternate history, which would be fine except that he never identifies it as such, which is unfair to readers unfamiliar with the setting, who will think it’s solidly grounded in the historical period (I guess once someone calls your work genre-bending it’s hard to commit).

 

Passengers on the Saardam include Jan Haan, the ambitious governor general of Batavia; his wife, Sara Wessell; and their inventive daughter, Lia; his mistress, Creesjie Jens, and her sons; his chamberlain, Cornelius Vos; and guard captain Jacobi Drecht.  Also traveling on the ship is Sammy Pipps, a Sherlock-type detective and alchemist of unknown origin who has been accused of spying, and his bodyguard/case recorder, former Lieutenant Arent Hayes. Before the ship leaves, a leper warns the passengers not to leave, warning that the devil “Old Tom” will be their downfall, but the governor general is insistent on leaving for Amsterdam immediately. Complicating things by bringing religion into the mix on a ship where passengers and crew are already uneasy and superstitious, a predikant, or preacher, and his acolyte Isabel, stow away on the ship as well.

 

Just as the ship sets off, the sail is unfurled to show a symbol that Creesje, the predikant, Arent, and one of the sailors individually recognize and associate with Old Tom. Is the devil really on the ship with the passengers and sailors, are they imagining things, or is someone playing with the characters’ fears in hopes of personal gain? The predikant, a former witch hunter, claims they’ll know for sure once three unholy miracles have occurred. As the ship gets further out onto the open ocean, the unholy miracles are identified, and the weather worsens, the onboard situation gets more violent and treacherous, and it becomes clear that, real or not, Old Tom has followers among the crew. As the histories of the characters and plot twists are unraveled, and the deaths stack up, the situation becomes even more unnerving. Is the ship haunted by Old Tom, or is something else going on?

 

Turton does a fantastic job of creating a sense of mystery and dread. There is no escape from the ship out on the ocean, just people, most of whom don’t like or trust each other, adrift after a storm. Turton admits he took liberties with history for the purpose of the story, so I don’t know if sailors truly lived continually in such brutal, violent environments, but he paints a vivid picture of the dynamics. Characters who could have been one-dimensional were fully developed: Arent turns out to be the governor general’s nephew, and while Haan might have been terrible to his wife and underlings,  he clearly cherishes his relationship with Arent. Haan’s wife Sara could have been set up in opposition to his mistress, but they turn out to be close friends. Sammy and Arent, for all their similarities to Holmes and Watson, are completely different in body type, personality, background, and overarching motivation. I found the very ending unneccessarily brutal, unrealistic and extremely disappointing, and felt it marred the story in a big way,  but I felt the atmosphere, character development, and descriptive language still made this worth reading.

 

The Devil in the Dark Water reveals some very dark aspects of overseas trade and the participants in it during the 1600s. No one comes away untainted. Despite the faulty ending, it’s a tale I won’t soon forget, and I would certainly give Turton another chance.

Contains: violence, gore, murder, implied rape, brutal killing of animals, body horror, mass murder

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on February 24, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Conquer (John Conquer Series, Book 1) by Edward M. Erdelac

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Conquer (John Conquer Series, Book 1) by Edward M. Erdelac

Independently published, 2020

ISBN: 9798579334848

Available : Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Harlem, 1976: an era of bad clothes, bad habits, and bad music.  From this scene emerges John Conquer, private investigator, and the baddest brother around.  How bad?  Well, “didn’t he kung-fu Frankenstein off the marquee at the Apollo, and bust him to pieces with John Henry’s hammer?  Didn’t he go fishin’ and catch the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and throw him back because he was too small!  He played ball with Dr. J in Rucker Park, and let him win!”  Conquer is a folk hero to Harlem, and his exploits have grown into legend among the locals.  These are his stories.

 

Conquer consists of seven short stories, three were previously published in Occult Detective Quarterly in 2017.  The stories are consistently entertaining, if a bit formulaic at the beginning of each story.  They usually start with Detective Lou Lazzaroni of the NYPD being assigned a case.  Lou realizes that the cases have a supernatural bent to them, and that’s where John Conquer steps in.  Although he’s a standard PI, Conquer also has a deep knowledge of voodoo, hoodoo, and all kinds of occult stuff, as he was partially raised in Louisiana, America’s capital of pagan weirdness.  It’s up to Conquer to solve the cases and save the day.

 

Author Erdelac has done a nice job writing a horror period piece: his portrayal of the late 1970s feels quite authentic, both in terms of setting (ox-blood leather coats, linoleum, lava lamps, etc.) and dialogue.  The dialogue feels very accurate with its terminology and phrasing, and does a good job transporting the reader back to another time in American history.  After Conquer is brought onto each case, the author shifts gears and shows a strong flair for creativity.  Readers might assume that voodoo automatically means zombies, but only one story actually has the undead.  Instead, Erdelac does a nice job cross-pollinating various African and Asian mythologies into the story.  Examples include a Slip-Skin Hag (or ‘boo hag’), a Popobawa (a bat-wing creature) and a monster based on Dahomeyan beliefs that defies easy categorization.  He did an excellent job researching these creatures for the book, but there are times when a little more explanation would have helped.  Unless you’ve read Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, terms like bokor, vodoun, veve, and Papa Legba are likely to sail over the heads of most readers, sending them scrambling for Wikipedia.

 

The stories are fast with no wasted time. Conquer dives right into the action, destroying villains with often-creative methods, such as cigarettes laced with sage for exorcising demons, and a pocket-coating powder that renders pickpockets immobile and subject to Conquer’s commands.  Part of the character’s appeal is that he doesn’t just blast away with his Colt Python, but often relies on his own magic methods to beat the baddies at their own game.  Special mention must be made of a fantastic secondary character, in the form of the ghost of a dead pimp that haunts Conquer’s car, and speaks to him through the radio.   This also allows Conquer to control the car through voice command, when the ghost agrees.  It’s like a bizarre 1970s version of the television show Knight Rider, and the back and forth squabbling provides unexpected and welcome hilarity.

 

Overall, Conquer is a welcome horror novel throwback to another era.  Let’s hope for more from Conquer and company in the future.  Recommended.

 

 

Contains:  violence, profanity

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on February 16, 2021 by , Reply
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