Halloween Double Feature: Book Review: The Barrow Will Send What it May, Margaret Killjoy (Book Two in the Danielle Cain Series)

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Anarchists, Book, Book Review, Halloween, Margaret Killjoy, October, Reading

Good morning and Happy Halloween!  It’s time again for my annual double feature pairing a spooky story with a Halloween-themed beverage.  Tradition has the book going first and I see no reason to change that now.  Getting the honors this year is Margaret Killjoy’s The Barrow Will Send What it May, the second novella following the adventures of a young woman named Danielle Cain and a group of anarchist drifters turned demon hunters.

We talked about friends in common who weren’t dead or missing. The state of the anarchist movement and its role in fighting the rise of fascism and nationalism globally. Then, more interesting to me, the state of magic.

The story picks up almost immediately after the end of book one, with our heroes on the road and looking to quickly put some distance between themselves and the multitude of dead law enforcement officers left behind by their encounter with the demon Uliksi back in Freedom, Iowa.  They are headed west and debating whether it’s best to lay low or look for ways to further their understanding of magic and the occult.  That decision, however, soon gets made for them when they hitch a ride with a woman who claims to have been returned from the dead.  She drops them off in the town of Pendleton, Montana where they learn a bit more of her story from some like-minded folks squatting in/running the town library.  From that point on, it’s only a matter of time until they cross paths with the local necromancer and find themselves once again involved with some very powerful magic.

Coming in at a crisp 104 pages, I flew through this story completely entertained throughout.  It had a lot of great energy, mixing in elements of mystery, suspense, humor, and politics (in particular examinations of power and gender) into a bundle of eerie fun.  While the story was perhaps a bit episodic, it successfully provided some much anticipated character development and world expansion.  While in retrospect the supernatural elements were a bit cliche this time around, I didn’t so much mind as the strength of these stories so far is really in the characters.  The cast is quite diverse, with a variety of races and orientations well represented and welcomed throughout the story.  My favorite characters at this point are probably the white female lead Danielle, for her witty and honest internal monologues and Vulture, a black trans man with a slight obsession with Instagram an anarchist exploits.  Overall, though, I enjoyed them all individually and collectively and liked seeing how the various companions, friends, lovers, and those somewhere in between get along with each other and react to the unusual direction their lives have gone.  They just seem like good people and are now officially in the running as one of my top literary crews.

My only regret about this story is that the series hasn’t continued on yet.  Given some of the possibilities left open by certain developments there needs to be at least another novella of two!  I absolutely love my time with these characters and am eagerly awaiting another chance to go on an adventure with them.

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Book Review: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, by Margaret Killjoy

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Anarchists, Book, Book Review, Danielle Cain, Fantasy, Horror, Margaret Killjoy, Reading

Hello again, long time no post!  I’m getting back into action and taking a step into the paranormal with this 2017 novella from new to me author Margaret Killjoy.  Since the author’s bio inspired me to read a bit more about them, I found that they are, among other things, a proud trans woman, anarchist, prepper, and electronic/death metal musician who maintains a Twitter feed worth reading.  But these are all topics for another day. Let’s end my review drought and bring on the book!

So yeah, welcome to Freedom, Iowa.  For the past year, we’ve had this benevolent, murderous spirit watching over us.  Which is weird, but it’s gone fine.

The story is set in the near future in a quasi-distopian United States and opens with our protagonist, a nomadic young woman named Danielle Cain, pulling a knife on an overly friendly man she hitched a ride with on her way to an anarchist commune in Freedom, Iowa.  In going there she hopes to find answers surrounding the final days of her friend Clay, who had finally settled down there only to eventually wander off and kill himself. The town, however, may hold more mysteries than answers for upon her approach to it Danielle encounters a number of horrifically mutated animals, most notably a strange deer feeding upon the carcass of a small animal.  Upon meeting the locals, she learns that the deer creature is the spirit Uliksi, a demon they summoned to prey upon those people who would seek authority over another. Suddenly her grim quest for answers gets a whole lot more complicated.

I enjoyed this for what it was: good, easy reading fun. While I can’t say it was particularly deep, the book’s commentary on the allure of power felt a bit cliche, it did have a certain charm that really drew me in.  The main characters were an immensely likable (if somewhat one dimensional) group of punks and anarchists and the potentially rogue Uliksi provided an intriguing dilemma. I also enjoyed that the book had a very familiar-to-me feeling sense of humor mixed with just enough action to help me make short work of its 84 pages.  Upon learning more about the author, I could see how their own experiences shaped this story and I absolutely enjoy supporting these types of characters and political ideals. As such, I am on board for reading the sequel and curious to see where the series goes from here.

Halloween Double Feature: The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djeli Clark

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13 Days of Halloween, Book, Book Review, Fantasy, Halloween, Horror, P. Djeli Clark, Reading

Good morning and Happy Halloween!  Welcome to part one of my annual Halloween Double Feature.  My first post of the day is a review of a spooky sounding novella I’ve been saving for this occasion.  Published in February 2019, it was also yet another read that I’d really been looking forward throughout the year.

The story is set in an alternate version of Cairo, Egypt in the year 1912.  In this world, Djinn and other supernatural natural entities have come to live openly alongside humans, transforming the city into a modern, prosperous metropolis.  Among their most prominent achievements is a system of magically endowed tram cars that offer a means of clean, efficient travel high above the busy streets. When one of these cars becomes the scene of some unusual happenings, however, it is up to Agent Hamed Nasr and his rookie partner Onsi Youssef of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities to investigate and restore order.

I had a lot of fun reading this as pretty much everything about the novella hit the right notes for me.  There was just a certain energy to the world that I found captivating, and I enjoyed the ways in which steampunk elements existed side by side with the magical to create something truly interesting.  It also helps that I tend to like a good detective story and watching this one play out in this setting was simply amazing to behold. That the action also occurred against the backdrop of preparations for  a massive Women’s Suffrage demonstration brought the story up to yet another level while at the same time making it feel more grounded and real. What brought it all home for me though was the rapport between the more cynical Hamed and the overly enthusiastic Onsi.  Their relationship managed to feel fresh and authentic despite being sounding like a pretty common pairing and gave the reader excellent eyes through which to encounter these events. Add in the other characters, particularly Superintendent Bashir, an uninspiring Tram official with a sweet tooth, and Abla, a shockingly well-connected waitress, and you have all the makings of an impressive novel packed into 100 or so pages.

I really don’t want to give away any bit of this story, so I’ll close by saying again what a pleasure this was to read.  This was easily one of my favorites of the year and I give it my highest recommendations. Being a novella, however, it went by entirely too fast so make sure you have more from the author in queue for when you finish!

13 Days of Halloween – Day Seven: Young Goodman Brown, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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13 Days of Halloween, Book, Book Review, Horror, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Reading

Stepping away from the brews for a bit, the next item on my Halloween countdown is a short story from the famed American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1835.  I want to send a major thank you out to my wife on this for not only helping me through a writer’s block, but for also remembering that she had this story in an anthology she saved from our college days.

Set in the Puritan town of Salem, MA this is the story of a young man named Goodman Brown and his wife Faith.  One evening, Goodman Brown meets with a mysterious traveler with a serpentine walking stick. They then proceed to walk through a dark, foreboding forest on an errand our protagonist fearfully describes as evil.  He eventually arrives at the scene of a dark ritual in which many of his fellow townsfolk, known sinners and esteemed church officials alike, are participating. Shaken by what he sees, Goodman returns a changed and bitter man.

This was solid recommendation from my wife and a very interesting read.  Despite being only 10 pages long, there was a lot packed into this tale. The dark imagery is established early and often to cast a particularly eerie and ominous feeling over the story.  Also, as with any tale of Puritanism, confrontation with sin runs explicitly rampant throughout and is the motivating force and concern of all involved and makes the experiences of Goodman seem very internalized and personal despite the seemingly external nature of the threat.  I imagine much has been much discussion and analysis of this work over the years so I’ll skip all that and just close my two big questions:

• Where did Goodman meet the Traveler and what was he expecting to happen when they met in the woods?  It seemed early on that it was to be some sort of scandalous rendezvous than admission to a dark communion.
• How much of this “really” happened and how much was just a dream/hallucination fueled by hyper religious society?

If you’ve read this, please feel free to comment on these below!

(Image Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/ZQoxShyE3RHiDRct6)

Halloween Double Feature: The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham, by Nick Mamatas and Brian Keene

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Blogoween, Blogtober, Book, Book Review, Brian Keene, Cthulhu, Fear and Loathing, H.P. Lovecraft, Halloween, Horror, Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Mamatas, Politics, Reading

Welcome to my second annual BeerRantsAndBooks Halloween Double Feature!  I had so much fun with this last year that I decided to do it again. Just like last time, my first post of the day is a book review and later on this evening I’ll share a beer with you.  I don’t recall exactly how I came across this title, but once I saw it I knew I found my Halloween book. Written by Nick Mamatas and Brian Keene, described in-world as an “avowed communist” and “vicious libertarian,” respectively, the story is an occult homage to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that drops everyone’s favorite Doctor of Journalism into the universe of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Set in the early months of 1972, the book opens with our fictional Hunter Thompson holed up in his Colorado compound furiously typing away into the night and cursing the fame and attention drawn to him by that “Las Vegas book” and “comic strip” (Doonesbury) that borrowed his likeness.  Inspired by strange noises outside his door and the realization that the American Dream has died, he assumes the alias Uncle Lono and sets off on a new journey in search of the great American Nightmare.  Among the forces standing in his way are nothing less the the cults of Moloch and Cthulhu, the Nixon youth, mutant townies, J. Edgar Hoover, the Deep Ones themselves, and some really powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms from Yuggoth.  And then things get weird.

I had a fantastic time reading this!  A big part of this experience was surely based on the authors doing an excellent job channeling Hunter’s voice and running monologue.  They were clearly familiar with his works and heavily referenced a wide range of things he had written by the time the story takes place.  My one criticism here is that they were maybe a bit over reliant on a few of his sayings throughout the book, but on the whole I’d say they nailed it.  The book was packed full of amazing quotes and rants, almost all of which were unfortunately too long to suitably excerpt here. Another highlight of this story for me was seeing Lono’s infamous attorney burst into the scene right as the Lovecraftian references started to really pick up.  He brought with him an entirely other level of energy and intensity to a book that, despite some really dark and bizarre moments, was a hilariously wild ride that more successfully merged these two worlds than one might think possible.

Again, I can’t say enough just what an incredibly entertaining read this was and don’t think I could have asked for a better book to review on Halloween!  I would definitely recommend it to any Hunter Thompson fan looking for a bit of a twist.

Book Review: A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising, by Raymond A. Villareal

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Blogoween, Book, Book Review, Fiction, Halloween, Horror, Raymond A. Villareal, Vampire

The moment I saw this book in someone’s ARC pile earlier in the year I made a mental note to get my hands on it for my Halloween reviews.  With a name like that how could I not? Officially released in June 2018, this is the debut novel of author Raymond A. Villareal.

The book opens as a young Center for Disease Control agent is sent to investigate a pair of unusual deaths in an Arizona border town, only to learn upon arrival that the corpses seem to have walked away.  The agent and her team soon realize they are at ground zero for the outbreak of a disease they call the NOBI virus, an affliction of the blood that effectively turns those affected into vampires. Dubbed “Gloamings,” this new group of people begin their struggle to win over the hearts and minds (not to mention blood) of humanity.  Extraordinarily well-funded and highly selective about expanding their ranks, the Gloamings work quickly to exert their influence in human society. Using a combination of social influencers and political bribes, their ambitions rapidly move away from mundane goals like access to basic services and protections under the American Disability Act into more nefarious criminal and world domination schemes.  The book tracks the progression of these endeavors through a series of POV chapters told from the perspective of the CDC agent who discovered the outbreak, the head of a FBI task force formed to investigate Gloaming criminal activity, and a Jesuit priest working to combat the Gloaming infiltration of the Catholic Church.

While I thought this book had an interesting premise and some amusing social satire, I ultimately found it falling a bit short of my expectations.  Although the characters and overall story were interesting enough, the flow of the book was a bit choppy. There was a sufficient amount of action and intrigue to keep things interesting, but the story as a whole lacked a cohesive context in which to place the events of each chapter.  With chapters skipping months at a time and only loosely connected to each other I was often left thinking “so what?” when seemingly major developments where either glossed over or abandoned shortly thereafter. Unfortunately that sentiment stuck with me upon finishing the book as well since it did not offer much in the way of resolution to the any of the main conflicts presented and stopped rather abruptly.  At the end of its 400+ pages, I was left feeling that story just kind of rambled on without really going anywhere.

Similarly, the questions raised regarding civil rights for Gloamings, a key advertising point and a central theme of the earlier chapters, were non-starters for me as well.  The reader is never given a clear view of the social dynamics at play in this world and most of the insights into the causes being taken up were presented through dry court documents that were far too easy to skip over.  Since we were never introduced to any even remotely sympathetic or everyday Gloaming characters, the issues they were pushing for seemed inconsistent with what we were told about their secretive and elitist population.

Despite my misgivings, I did stick through with this to the end since more often than not the chapters were intriguing enough as standalone adventures and I was stubbornly holding out hope for some sort of big payoff or revelation.  I don’t know if perhaps my expectations were out of line for what the book was, but I ultimately felt neutral/bordering on disappointed about this one. I can’t say that I’d recommend it, but if you’re intrigued I wouldn’t warn you off it either.

Book Review: Shotguns v. Cthulhu, Edited by Robin D. Laws

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A. Scott Glancy, Blogoween, Book, Book Review, Chris Lackey, Cthulhu, Dennis Detwiller, H.P. Lovecraft, Halloween, Horror, Natani Barron, October, Reading, Rob Heinsoo, Robin D. Laws

I’m starting off my Halloween reading season with a collection of 15 short stories based on the Cthulhu Mythos of famed horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Published in 2013 and happily distanced from Lovecraft’s controversial, read flat-out deplorable, views on race, these stories present a diverse mix of characters in a wide variety of settings.  Although each author’s style is distinctly their own, all these stories share the common themes of “play[ing] with the action side of Lovecraft’s writing” and more often than not dwell on the psychological effects of the human characters encountering all manner of bizarre creatures and/or coming to face ageless, eternal evil.

As with any collection there were some stories I liked more than others, though I will say that they were all consistently strong.  I’m not very well versed in this genre, but every single author in this volume was able to hold my attention and interest throughout their story.  In the interest of time and space, I’ll share here my top five from the collection (in no particular order):

Old Wave, by Rob Heinsoo

Told from the perspective of an indigenous man, the story opens as the he and other prominent members of his tribe set off in their canoes to visit a nearby village.  Upon arrival, though, something seems off to him. The others seem not to notice, but the meat served from the unexpectedly large shellfish tastes wrong and the once familiar ancestral songs have changed and become almost unrecognizable.  Is he going insane or are there greater forces at play?

Lithic, by Dennis Detwiller

A college student returns to his sleepy Vermont hometown for winter break and takes a job working as a security guard.  He is assigned the night watch at a new ski slope being built on a mountain that previously served as a hangout and party spot for the local high school students.  It’s terrain with which the man was once intimately familiar, but something now feels very wrong and his connection to reality is fading.

Snack Time, by Chris Lackey

A laboratory researcher being stalked through the streets of present day Los Angeles by a Hound of Tindalos, a foul, time traveling predator, makes his last stand in a Chinese food/donut shop.  With the creature methodically killing everyone around him, he will need to act fast if he wants to escape alive.

Last Things Last, by A. Scott Glancy

A detective story in which a young woman recently recruited into an occult investigation unit is paired with a seasoned veteran.  Their assignment is to clear the house of a recently deceased former operative to make sure he didn’t leave behind any evidence of his occupation.  This seemingly easy assignment takes a turn, however, when it becomes apparent that the man took on a rather unconventional hobby after retirement.

The One in the Swamp, by Natani Barron

Monster hunting sisters Lydia and Cassandra stumble into a Georgia swamp and work with the locals to try to clear the evil presence preying upon the community.  Upon confronting the creature, however, one of them harbors serious doubts about what the real enemy may be.