Recent Readings

Thankfully, I’ve been able to do a little more reading for pleasure of late, so, I thought I’d share some of that. Note: there may be spoilers ahead.

First off, I enjoy Joe R. Lansdale‘s website, and I hit it on a regular basis. He always has interesting stuff to check out, including his “Totally Free Mojo Story of the Week.” If you like weird, short fiction, you can do a lot worse for your no money. Plus he’s an East Texas boy, so I feel some affinity.

I also read Wardenclyffe by F. Paul Wilson (144 pages). This book caught my eye for a few of reasons. 1) I had not read anything by F. Paul Wilson, and I felt it my duty as a writer of dark spec to check him out, 2) the length is kinda in my wheelhouse, and 3) the book is written around Nikola Tesla, a fascinating, brilliant man. The protagonist is Charles, a young electrical engineer who immigrated to the United States from the UK, studied at MIT, and is looking for work. Charles eventually finds said work under the employ of Mr. Tesla, whose experiments with the wireless transmission of electricity (real) cause a gash in the barrier between parallel worlds (fiction). The story hums a long with a deft writing style that feels time-period appropriate (it’s told by the engineer, mostly recounting events from 1903). The historical accuracy and the writing earn the book high marks, in my opinion, but the lack of a compelling conflict, coupled with what I felt was a gratuitous “twist” included for no other apparent purpose than to give the story a little deus ex machina and “spice”(?), left me disappointed with the story itself. Still, if you like Tesla and well-written dark spec, it’s worth reading, especially given it’s fairly short length.

The next stop on my tour of dark spec authors I was yet to read was Richard Laymon. I read Blood Games, a 479-page novel originally written in 1992. The title has nothing whatsoever to do with the story, as best I can tell. Apparently this was not the best intro to Mr. Laymon’s work; however, the blurb sounded good. In the end, I found the book a difficult slog. It’s about five girlfriends who went to college together and now reunite annually for a girls’ getaway. This year, it’s at an abandoned lodge where multiple guest families were mass-murdered one evening several years ago. You can see why that setup would be appealing, right? Well, not a damn thing happens for the first half of the book. That’s nearly 250 pages of “horror” in which nobody dies and not a damn thing of interest happens. Nothing. Have I mentioned, not a damn thing happens? I chose this book expecting a period-style gore fest where one person makes it out alive, but no. One girl dies (offscreen, even- we only discover her body later) about halfway through, and at the end, the one who killed her dies. Along the way, there are flashbacks to college pranks and encounters with murderous hillbillies, including a hermaphroditic witch/warlock hillbilly. Yes, that happened, and not in a good way. There’s a few scenes where some girls run around naked or topless, and there’s one nympho girl who can’t help but try to screw a homicidal, teen aged hillbilly who literally dresses like he came out of Li’l Abner and, by-golly, hasn’t bathed in a gosh-darned coon’s age. The book might have been more palatable at half the length. In the end, it was one of those yarns you finish because you feel like you’ve invested too much time in it to walk away. I would not recommend this book to anyone, ever. Maybe I’ll read another Laymon book one day, but he’ll have a short leash after this pile of pulp.

More reviews to come…