Books

Winter. The word conjures snowball fights and sledding, Christmas displays and lazy days spent home from school. Yet grim shades lurk beneath those cheery wonderland joys. Winter is the time when daylight dwindles and skies darken with overcast gloom. The earth becomes barren, trees turn skeletal, and even the animals slumber. Those long, somber months blanketed with snow and ice, a season of ending before spring’s distant rebirth. And through the ceaseless nights we huddle for warmth and ignore the frightful reminders of death’s ever-stalking shadow…

Few ways exist to combat winter’s dread better than curling up with a good book. One person who understands that fact is Canadian editor Rhonda Parrish, who invokes the season’s foreboding menace with her latest Tyche Books offering, Hauntings And Hoarfrost, a multi-author anthology (available January 28th) featuring twenty-two literary interpretations of the season’s spookier side.

by Michael McKown

In the quiet, sunlit corner of an old, creaky house in Pasadena, CA, where the walls whispered secrets of yesteryears, sat Emily, now in her late seventies. The room was cluttered with memories: photographs, old letters, and mementos from a life well-lived. For decades, her friends and family had been nudging, sometimes pushing, her towards a singular endeavor—writing her memoir.

Emily had lived a life that seemed almost too vibrant to be captured in mere words. She had danced through the '60s, marched in protests that shaped the world, loved and lost, and found love again in unexpected places. Her tales were not just stories; they were chapters of history, personal and global. Yet, the idea of pinning these experiences down to paper was daunting. When was the right time to start?

Dozens of books are reviewed here at Critical Blast each year. Given that the site was founded upon the principle of exposing independently produced genre works to a wider audience, most featured books are of a decidedly science fiction, fantasy, or horror nature. This year was no different, and the submissions sent to us for review were as diverse and exciting as ever.

As with any list, some caveats are necessary. First, while it may say ‘Top 10 of 2024’ in the headline, not every book included was necessarily published in this calendar year; some were submitted to us in 2023 but were read and reviewed during 2024, thus making them eligible. Secondly, while we oftentimes review multiple books by a single author in any given twelve month period, in the name of fairness a writer may appear on our list just once, meaning that only their absolute best is chosen. With those things in mind, let our inaugural ‘Top 10 Indie Books of the Year’ countdown commence!

Folklore is the wellspring from which almost all horror derives. Many of the genre’s most familiar stock figures evolved directly from those superstitious yarns of old, passed down by our primitive ancestors as warnings about the dangers lurking in the dark bowers of man’s domain. The vampire, the werewolf, the zombie, ghosts and ghouls—each began, once upon a time, as tales told in hushed whispers around a campfire, tales that over time become the legends we know today. Every region of the globe has its own distinct folklore, and the horror genre has seemingly plundered them all over the decades for its selfish creative needs, to the point where it seems audiences have become cynical, even bored, by standard tropes and ideas.

Often unfairly maligned as overwrought, melodramatic, and campy, what we now refer to as Gothic literature began in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s seminal novel, The Castle of Otranto. Wildly popular with 18th-century audiences, the book created many of the conventions still associated with the subgenre today: distressed damsels beset by supernatural evils amid the oh-so-scary backdrop of ruined castles, ancient monasteries, and/or creepy catacombs. Gothic literature flourished in its original form, popularized by authors like Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe, and continues to fascinate the public today through the works of mainstream names like Anne Rice and the independent efforts of such niche proprietors as Quill & Crow Publishing House.

Love. It’s the one thing nearly all of us strive for, more than any personal achievement or career ambition. Undying love may be the seemingly unattainable ideal of Shakespearean sonnets and Harlequin romance, but with the proliferation of modern-day matchmakers, speed-dating, Tinder and other online apps, it’s clear people the world over yearn for the unique emotional connectivity love provides. But relationships are hard enough if both parties are alive and well. When one or the other is already pushing up daisies, undying love takes on a completely new meaning, as Lacey Todd, the protagonist in Alana K. Drex and Billy Ray Middleton Jr.’s hilarious new novel, Oops, I Killed My Boyfriend, inadvertently finds out.

All fictional works are voyages of discovery. The audience embarks upon imaginary worlds, eager yet unknowing where its creators will lead them. Whether it be a slam-bang cinematic spectacle or the more intimate patterns of prose, a certain trust exists on such journeys; our time and emotion is invested in the hope that we’ll be ushered to places both entertaining and enlightening. Sometimes, however—as the enduring popularity of horror proves—those escapist excursions can become dark, dangerous affairs. The fear genre’s wisest creators understand that unspoken covenant with their audience and accept the responsibility, temporarily guiding us through blackened nightmare forests. All we have to do is take their hand…

In an unstable and chaotic universe, the only constant is change. From the collapse of galaxies to the passing of seasons, the mutation of bacteria and the splitting of atoms, cycles of birth, death, and renewal envelop us. People, with our finite lifespans, have attempted to defy time’s ticking hands, through science, through medicine, through construction and art. Yet art is itself an agent of change: each creative movement is the inheritor of previous endeavors, sometimes happily, other times gleefully destroying what’s come before.

One author who understands that transitory nature of existence is Jim Horlock, who explores the theme to its most frightful degree in the new Quill & Crow Publishing short horror collection, Change & Other Terrors.

Transformation. In many ways it’s the theme common to all horror tales. Through film and the printed page, the human body—nude, dead, mutilated or deformed—has evolved into the oft-fetishized narrative centerpiece, whether it be a lycanthrope’s bestial metamorphosis, Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, or the putrefying decay of a zombie. With a lineage extending back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’, straight through to Clive Barker’s body-modifying Cenobites and the films of Japanese writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto and Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, horror embraces physical change like no other genre.

Rising from the coastal plains of the American Eastern seaboard, the Appalachians are made up of a broken chain of peaks, ridges and dissected plateaus extending from Newfoundland to Alabama. The Catskills of New York, the Poconos, the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains are just some of the densely forested ranges constituting the chain, and even in this modern technological age, the Appalachians conjure visions of impenetrable, untamed wilds. The early Scots-Irish, Scandinavian, and German immigrants who settled those rural barrens brought with them a rugged, earthen work ethic and clannish pride for kin, but something else, too: beneath their Protestant Christian communities lurked the folk beliefs of the Old World they’d left behind, sprites and witchcraft and creatures of the night haunting the isolated bowers of man’s domain.

Dan·dy (dan’dē), n, pl. -dies, adj. -di·er, -diest. —n. 1. a person excessively concerned about their clothes and appearance; fop. 2. something or someone of exceptional quality. —adj. 3. characteristic of a dandy; foppish. 4. fine; excellent; first-rate. [1770-80, origin uncertain] See also: —dan’dy·ish, adj. —dan’dy·ism, n.

Zom·bie (zom’bē), n. the body of a dead person supernaturally imbued with the semblance of life.

Poetry is the music of the written word. Rooted in the rhythmic magical incantations and oral storytelling of preliterate cultures, from the epic verse of Gilgamesh and Beowulf to the romantic Shakespearean sonnets and political allusions of Yeats, poetry has assumed a vast range of elusive, sensuous, and lyrical forms. In Classical times poems were explained in spiritual terms—Homer and Hesiod claimed their writings were inspired by the Muses of Greek mythology—while in western European tradition, the oft-irrational sentiments of the poet were believed to be tainted with madness.

Ah, the travails of post-adolescent youth. Graduating high school, (hopefully) moving out of your parent’s home and spreading those metaphorical wings to soar freely on your own. It can be a heady time, but the clash between that idealized version of adulthood many of us foster with its stark and oftentimes disappointing reality can be jarring; menial employment, asinine roommates, the pitfalls of alcohol and/or drugs, the first fitful stings of mature relationships, all leave their marks, yet also form who we will eventually become.

Transformation is a staple theme of horror. Whether it be the man-to-beast metamorphosis of a lycanthrope, Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde, or the grisly decay of a rotting zombie, the genre thrives on physical change. In film and on the printed page, the human body—nude and/or dead—has become the oft-fetishized narrative centerpiece; ‘90’s splatterpunk provocateur Poppy Z. Brite, Japanese writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo: The Iron Man fame, and celebrated Canadian auteur David Cronenberg have all built careers upon augmenting flesh in any number of ghastly ways.

It’s in that same vein that the Ghoulish Books multi-author fiction collection Bound In Flesh is presented. Subtitled An Anthology of Trans Body Horror, editor Lor Gislason has masterfully assembled thirteen disturbing tales centered on bodily transformation with startling, evocative, and eye-opening results.

Horror is a tree with many branches. The classics—Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Gothic graveness of Poe and M.R. James—serve as the trunk, and while each burgeoning new subgenre creates its own fledgling offshoot, the tree’s root is undeniably folklore. Many of horror’s most familiar stock figures evolved directly from those superstitious myths of old, passed down through the generations by our ancestors: the vampire and werewolf of Eastern Europe, the Haitian zombie and Arabian ghoul, the Russian child-devouring witch Baba Yaga, the vengeful yōkai (ghosts) of Japanese lore. All originated as warnings about the dangers lurking in the dark bowers of man’s domain, but if, as is often claimed, every legend has some basis in fact, what are we to make of these supernatural archetypes? Are they mere boogeyman fables that have assumed roles in the collective unconscious far beyond their intended purpose?

Whether or not one believes in the existence of ghosts, we’re all haunted by them. If not literal spirits, than the memories of those dearly departed who’ve shared our lives: relatives, teachers, friends. We remember their words of wisdom, their jokes, stories they’d tell. Voices of the dead, speaking to us still.

In its most simplified form, religion is the pursuit of knowledge about who we are, what the world is, and our place in it. While science has largely supplanted religion in that quest during recent centuries, for much of humankind’s existence, tales of gods, divine intervention, and supernatural occurrences were not only vividly real, but often the only explanations available to understand the physical and cosmological phenomena of our primeval surroundings. As time passes and old belief systems fall into the realm of mythology and folklore, so, too, do their ideas and rituals and deities evolve: consider the surfeit of modern-day works of horror that utilize demonic possession and angels and magic as plot points for entertainment rather than the spiritual notions they once were.

Since the first recorded discoveries of their fossilized remains in the early nineteenth century, dinosaurs (Greek for ‘Terrible Lizard’), have captivated our collective consciousness. During their approximately 140 million-year reign during the Mesozoic Era, dinosaurs varying in size from the Compsognathus—no larger than a domestic chicken—to Brachiosaurus, which is known to exceed fifty tons, dominated the earth, and their extinction baffles as much as it intrigues. The simple fact that dinosaurs no longer exist (except, as many scientists concede, the modern-day birds into which some evolved) is perhaps what excites our minds the most; the notion that an entirely different world arose, thrived, and then disappeared before humankind ever appeared captures the imagination in boundless ways.

With the exception of horror, fantasy is likely the oldest of all literary genres. Rooted in the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and Classical Greek and Roman mythology, the sagas of the Viking age, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, medieval romances like Le Morte d’Arthur, the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, fantasy in the modern sense began with authors George MacDonald, William Morris, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, C. S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany and E.R. Eddison, whose otherworldly odysseys paved the way for the pulpy sword-and-sorcery of Robert E. Howard and High Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ever since The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings left their indelible imprint on popular culture, fantasy has influenced everything from role-playing games to television and movies, and the genre’s ageless Good-versus-Evil themes and immersive escapism provide the perfect antidote for our troubled times.

According to legend, American author Ernest Hemingway famously penned one of the shortest short stories with the six-word tale, ‘For sale, baby shoes, never used.’ Unlike a novel, where there’s the literary legroom to overindulge in-depth narratives, short stories require an immediate seizure of the reader’s attention. Flash fiction cuts that definition even closer to the quick; with the average available space of a social media post (sometimes less), it’s storytelling at its most Spartan.