LITERAL REMAINS

Stacie Ponder is my Internet crush.  Read her blog, Final Girl, and tell me she isn’t the funniest, most informative and incisive, horror aficionado out there.  So, this review may be a little biased, but her comic, Slashers 101, speaks for itself. What can be said about a comic that tells the history of the [...]

Tom Havyn is a man in a crisis.  After his grandfather dies,Tom inherits his Idaho ranch and decides to move there, where he spent so many wonderful times as a child.  So he leaves behind his research job as a biological psychologist and moves to Idaho with the ultimate goal of killing himself.  See, his [...]

Before I go any further, I want to point out three movies that should really be seen.  They are three very different independent films, and they represent the best of what the horror genre has to offer.  D4, Emerging Past, and Mask Maker.  They represent science run amok, psychological horror, and the slasher categories respectively. [...]

In Florence, Italy, sixteen murders were committed between 1968 and 1985 with the same gun.  The victims were couples and they weren’t just shot in cold blood, but often times mutilated as well.  In the years since the first killings, suspects have come and gone, and innocent people have been implicated as the killer or [...]

Sixteen year old Jacob looks back at his not too distant childhood and can’t believe he thought all his grandfather’s stories were true.  His grandfather had lived in an orphanage at the onset of WWII before running away to join the fight.  His grandfather told him fantastical stories of the other kids who lived at [...]

Some towns have all the luck.  Take Orangefield, for instance.  They are the pumpkin capital of the world.  Every Halloween, the town hosts a pumpkin festival that boasts pumpkins of all shapes and sizes, bands of every musical variety, games, food, good old fashioned fun, and death.  That’s right, death.  Every Halloween in Orangefield, Samhain, [...]

It’s 1963 and it’s Halloween in an anonymous small Midwestern town.  This little town that appears to be like so many others through the country has one Halloween tradition that no one else has.  For five days before October 31st, families lock their teenage sons in their rooms without food or drink, and then release [...]

“My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession.  In June of 1922 I murdered my wife, Arlette Christina Winters James, and hid her body by tupping it down an old well.” Thus begins the first, and best, story, “1922″ in this Stephen King collection.  None of the stories are bad, but the [...]

After the sudden and tragic death of her parents, Erica Falck returns to her hometown of Fjällbacka to settle their estate.  Her sister and brother-in-law want to sell the house; actually, it’s mainly her brother-in-law wanting to sell off the house, her sister is just kowtowing to his demands.  But she is there, uprooted and back [...]

Author Brian Moreland’s new novel, Dead of Winter, does something that seems really almost rare:  much like the films The Burrowers and the darkly brilliantly Ravenous, Moreland succeeds at mixing the horror and western genres.  With echoes of The Thing, The Exorcist, and even The Shining, spiced with Native American folklore and legend, vivid period detail, [...]

Joe McKinney’s Flesh Eaters is a prequel to his amazing one-two punch of zombie literature, Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead.  This third novel begins just before Houston, Texas, is battered by hurricanes and follows Eleanor Norton and her family as they struggle to survive the barrage of destructive storms and the eventual rise [...]

Dimiter is written by William Peter Blatty.  The dust jacket blares “author of The Exorcist“.  Don’t pick up Dimiter if you’re looking for something along the lines of Blatty’s horror classic.  USA Today called Dimiter a “tightly wound, suspenseful novel”.  I found it to be neither tightly wound, nor suspenseful.  That’s not bad, though.  It’s [...]

Some time ago in my review of a book based on Assassin’s Creed, I said that maybe video games shouldn’t be turned into books.  I may have been a little hasty in that opinion.  Alan Wake is kind of a poor man’s Duma Key, but I really like this book a lot better than that [...]

The paperback copy of Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter, which is the format I read, is splattered with high praise from critics and other major novelists alike.  It’s called superb, terrifying, a masterpiece, and the San Francisco Chronicle says it ”leaves one satisfied.” Lies, all lies.  Here’s my opinion of A Dark Matter:  Pointless–completely and utterly [...]

About twelve, thirteen years ago, I had a falling out with Stephen King.  I had read three of his books–Needful Things, Insomnia, Bag of Bones–and I hated them.  Hurt me bad.  I don’t want to talk about it. So, I haven’t read any new King in a very long time.  I’ve read, or reread, some [...]