Books

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.

It has been said that the human mind is the true final frontier. In that squishy gray matter between our ears originates every earthly idea, impulse, urge, desire and function, and there are those who argue the mind is capable of feats—ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis—as yet unproven by medical science. Certain esoteric disciplines such as Theosophy teach that human thoughts exist in reality as surely as any tangible object, and remote Tibetan Buddhist practitioners have pushed the notion to its extreme with the manifestation of tulpas, three-dimensional corporeal entities conjured solely through concentration. Such thought-forms, it is believed, may initially act in accordance to their creator’s wishes, but can, and often do, develop their own willful, independent personalities.

While grand Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Stoker’s classic Dracula were benchmarks of early horror, beginning with the days of Poe and Hawthorne and carrying through to the pulp-era of the twentieth century, the genre’s most innovative works lay indisputably within the realm of the short story. Indeed, acerbic American critic Amborse Bierce, himself an acknowledged master of the weird tale, defined novels in his satirical 1906 tome The Devil’s Dictionary as ‘...A short story, padded.’ One individual’s opinion, perhaps, but short form fiction provides a quick hit of adrenaline in a way that longer works cannot; plots, characters and atmosphere here are reduced to their most chilling, primal state, like a ghost story told ‘round the campfire.

As the infamous tagline for Ridley Scott’s 1979’s classic film Alien noted, ‘In Space No One Can Hear You Scream’, and audiences ever since have been drawn to the devilish combination of science fiction and horror. Movies such as the Alien franchise (and, by extension, the Predator movies), Event Horizon, Cube, Starship Troopers, Dark City, Splice, and even Jordan Peele’s Nope have bequeathed a wealth of distinctly disturbing futurist visions, yet literary icons including H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson were mixing the two elements into hybrid concoctions decades before Xenomorphs first burst onto the silver screen.

"What’s your sign, baby?”

It’s perhaps the oldest pick-up line in existence, and for good reason: astrology, that oft-misunderstood, sometimes vilified study of celestial movements, dates back to Babylonian times. Dividing the night sky into wedges under the guidance of twelve distinct constellations, to believers the effects of each zodiac sign imprint themselves on an individual at the moment of their birth, influencing them in ways both great and small, from body types to personality, romance and health. And though critics have for centuries attacked the practice on scientific grounds, its popularity has nonetheless surged in recent years.

The fictional worlds created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) have had an immeasurable influence on modern horror. An isolated, introverted, impoverished pulp writer, in death The Gentleman of Old Providence has achieved the success that constantly eluded him during life, and the cosmicism of his work has spread to become the ideological backbone to an entire subgenre of stories, novels, films, comics and games. Lovecraft’s conceptual output was a unique byproduct of the changing post-Victorian industrial-machine era he came of age in: his terrors were not the antiquated ghosts, vampires and werewolves of European folklore or the demonic shades of Judeo-Christian construction, but the stark conceit that humanity is an insignificant speck in a hostile universe, forever at the mercy of uncaring alien forces far beyond its comprehension.