What Price Gory – by Terry M. West – book review

What Price Gory
Terry M. West

This is a fantastic collection of short stories in the paranormal horror genre. West manages to steer clear of the usual horror tropes that plague the horror market and conjure new ideas and concepts. Most important, he creates real characters that live and breathe, not perfect, but likeable nevertheless. They are interesting people that you feel the need to follow into the dark pits of terror and see their journey to the end. I’ll recap a few of my favorite stories.

In Car Nex, Adam Campbell and some poker buddies are holed up in a barn as a dark and nasty supernatural beast rips apart their town. Adam is the only one with information about the beasts origin, and he has one hell of a confession for his neighbors. Next, Cecil and Bubba aren’t the brightest cards in the deck but they earn an honest… well, fairly honest living. They are hired as bodyguards for a ghost hunter, in an investigation of a house with a bad reputation. Read what happens in Cecil and Bubba Meet a Succubus. In Midnight Snack, follow Colin Winslow on a detour to avoid a traffic jam that leads him straight into a roadside truck stop from Hell – it’s a fantastically amusing story. And finally, What Price Gory is the price one has to pay for horror author glory and to reach the pinnacle of best-seller fame.

Also included is an excerpt/preview from the upcoming book, Cecil and Bubba meet the Thang. I had already taken a liking to these two characters in the short story. The excerpt just builds on that and I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

This is a top-notch collection of supernatural tales featuring authentic characters who are plunged into extraordinary circumstances. These are imaginative concepts in terror that bleed off the pages like gouged flesh and lead you to nightmare destinations. It’s not a gorefest, for those who are questioning the title; these are well-written character driven tales. I recommend it as an entertaining and enjoyable read for the horror fan.

Amazon Kindle Edition

Amazon Paperback Edition

www.terrymwest.com

www.pleasantstorm.com

 

My writing in 2013 – an overview

Fun facts about my Fiction:

My favorite horror story I’ve written this year: Motel Impressions is a ghost story that takes place in a motel room. It is set in Long Beach NY and was sparked by a true story (of a murder, not ghosts) for which I built a fictional story around.

My favorite creature/monster that I created: The giant tentacled worm from The Gates of Lament is part Lovecraft and partly inspired by my post, Scariest Creatures of the Sea

My best opening line in a story: Upstanding Citizen  – The moment old lady Ambrose bent over to look in my basement window, I hit her in the back of the head with a hammer… (read more at the Carnage Conservatory)

My favorite character: Jason from The Suitcase is probably most like myself. This story takes place on Long Island and was written in 2011 when the state police were finding the remains of several female victims off of Ocean Parkway.

My favorite message/bigger meaning in a story: Holiday Icon demonstrates the hypocrisy of people during the Christmas holiday. Most of my stories have some alter/bigger meaning, moral or message. Some are more obvious than others.

The two demons in Lessons in Demonology are named after the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos – Greek mythological words that translate to ‘fear’and ‘terror’

In The Gates of Lament, there are three blatant nods to 1970’s Americana in the names of the characters.

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A list of published works for 2013:

(story title/place where published/date published)

Upstanding Citizen – the Carnage Conservatory (website) 2/6/13

The Suitcase – From Beyond the Grave (anthology) 4/15/13

Lessons in Demonology – Twisted Dreams Magazine 6/1/13

Pig – Shadow Masters: An Anthology From the Horror Zine – 6/23/13

X-Ray Specs – SNM Horror Magazine (website) – 7/1/13

Maynard’s Secret – SNM Horror Magazine (website) – 8/1/13

Awakening – Twisted Dreams Magazine – 10/1/13

Bloodsuckers – Infernal Ink Magazine – 10/1/13

Uninvited – 100 Doors To Madness (anthology) – 10/12/13

The Memory Thief – Dark Eclipse Magazine – 11/3/13

Motel Impressions – Miseria’s Chorale (anthology) – 11/26/13

The Gates of Lament – Cellar Door II (anthology) – 12/06/13

Holiday Icon – Oh, Little Town of Deathlehem (anthology) – 12/24/13

total: 13 for 2013 – more info on my Bio page
– published stories in the horror fiction short-story market to date – 24

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Visit my Amazon.com Authors Page: Michael Thomas-Knight

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I would like to thank the editors of all the publications for taking the time to work with my fiction and for seeing something original and provoking enough to accept them for publication. Look forward to working with you all in the coming year.

   

Shadow Masters – new horror fiction book release

Bentley Little, Yvonne Navarro, Earl Hamner, Ronald Malfi, Melanie Tem, Elizabeth Massie… What do all these famous horror fiction authors have in common? They all have frightening stories in the new horror anthology book, SHADOW MASTERS.

Oh yeah, and I do too!

My short story ‘PIG’ has been published in:
Shadow Masters – An Anthology From The Horror ‘Zine
from Imajin Books.

Other authors include: Scott Nicholson, Simon Clark, Lisa Morton, JG Faherty, Christian Larsen, Cheryl Tardiff, Jeff Bennington and Jeani Rector. Jeani is the publisher of The Horror ‘Zine and pulled together this wonderful collection of horror fiction. She also has a wicked gem of a story in the anthology.

Includes a forward by Joe R. Lansdale

More about my short story, ‘PIG’ –  This tale involves a young woman who wakes in the dead of night to find a demon in a pig costume standing at her bedside. What this demon wants will lead Vickie on a frightening discovery of her own psyche.

Amazon.com – Kindle Version

Amazon.com – Paperback Version

The Horror ‘Zine – www.thehorrorzine.com

Imajin Books – www.imajinbooks.com

Release date: May 27^th, 2013

More Horror Fiction by Michael Thomas-Knight

Songs of a Dead Dreamer – Thomas Ligotti – book review

Songs of a Dead Dreamer – Thomas Ligotti (1986)

This is Ligotti’s first collection of stories, a book that is now out-of-print and editions sell for prices ranging from $26 to $260 on Amazon and Ebay. This was the very first book I downloaded onto my Kindle-Fire and may have been part of the reason I even wanted an e-reader in the first place.

This collection encompasses the strange worlds and people in the Ligotti universe. They all start off as rather bland subjects – an artist with no imagination in one, a Christmas Eve at Aunt Elsie’s in another – but take a wicked turn during the course of the tale. The artist stumbles upon a church to an unknown God in a dream, waking to find his latest painting has changed. The young man, tired of Aunt Elsie’s fireside story, leaves the house and is drawn through the fog by twinkling Christmas lights to a house that should be abandoned. They are all weird tales and subtle horror, so do not expect blood and guts violence or dominating monsters to rise from the ashes of nuclear fallout. And this collection from his earliest writings is not super strong on character development. However, the overall absurdness and abstract reality of his writing shines through in many places.

In Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech, the doctor searches a seedy part of town to engage the service of one Mr. Veech. He is told to bring his wife and best friend down a certain block at a certain time. Once there, the cheating spouse and her lover are suddenly plucked from the street by some unknown force. Dr. Voke looks up to see them dangling by strings, somehow turning into wooden puppets before his eyes.

In Sect of the Idiot, a man rents a room in an old town. The town is claustrophobically clustered, with stacked roof peaks overhanging one another, upper stories of shops and homes reaching to unknown heights and blocking out the sky. A knock at the door by a stranger leads the man to a high room in the highest towering structure in the town, where some sort of entomo-aliens sit in commune and oversee the town’s activities. They have a special reason for summoning the man, a fact he will soon learn.

The abandoned mental hospital in Dr. Locrian’s Asylum holds some bad memories of wicked events that took place there. The asylum casts a constant shadow upon the town and a blemish on its good standing. However, when the townsfolk decide to tear it down, they unleash all the trapped souls that have so long been waiting for this day, to exact revenge upon the town that ignored their cries.

Songs… also includes two essays on writing. In Notes on Writing Horror, Ligotti describes different writing styles, then takes one short story and rewrites it in several ways to exemplify those styles. In Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horrors, Ligotti attempts to explain man’s want and need for horror from a historical perspective.

While not all the stories share the same persistent voice as his later works – most were written for the small press with common small press themes – in many you can see that Ligotti’s unique style had already solidified. His strange worlds of puppets and clowns, hypnotists, conspiring entities and strange troupes with hidden agendas, rush forward from the darkest places of man’s psyche.

Recommended for fans of Lovecraft, Machen, Blackwood, Poe.

“Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.”  Thomas Ligotti

V/H/S (2012) – movie review

V/H/S (2012) – movie review

This is a fantastic modern anthology worthy of your attention. Directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and the filmmaking team, Radio Silence, V/H/S delivers five found footage shorts that are on the cutting edge of horror films. In the first few minutes we are introduced to a rowdy bunch of hooligans, nasty characters for which I could not feel any empathy or concern. I thought I was going to hate the film because of this, but luckily it is just the wrap around story. When these hooligans break into a home in order to find some nasty home-porn VHS tape, the real good stuff begins. One culprit sits to view-search the many vhs tapes as the others search the vacant home. Thus we are introduced to the five stories. ‘Amateur Night’ shows how a one-night-stand/bar pick-up can go horribly wrong. Though it seems like a simple and much used theme, it is done quite well and the strange young lady is interesting, to say the least. ‘Second Honeymoon’ has a couple on vacation in the mid-west, in a story that gets creepy as hell and ends with a shocking plot-twist. ‘Tuesday the 17^th’ may be the scariest episode, just because of the visual aspect of the killer in the woods attacking a group of campers. ‘The Sick Thing that Happened…’ was perhaps the best story and had some engaging creepiness in the context of video chats between a guy and his girl. We see some strange things running around the woman’s apartment in the dark behind her concerned ’skype-face’.  ‘10/31/98’ follows a group of young men breaking into a ‘haunted house’ on Halloween. They discover another group of men, religious fanatics in the attic, doing some kind of cleansing ritual to a young woman. They save the young lady from the witch-hunt, only to discover, maybe they shouldn’t have. I know there is a bit of a back-lash to all the found footage films in release these days, but this one is done with the rawness and intentionally sloppy editing that makes the stories seem genuine.
 

Michael Thomas-Knight published in The WDC Anthology

Michael Thomas-Knight published in The WDC Anthology

My short story, Department Store, has been chosen for publication in the WDC Anthology. The story is based on a real life event that happened to me when I was a youngster. It contains a strong element of horror in it. The book, published by Wynwidyn Press will be out this November 2012. It is a collection of best stories and poetry that have appeared on the Writing.com website (WDC). For more info on the book, check out this link:
http://wynwidynpress.com/buy-a-book_20.html

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Now would be a good time to tell you about writing.com (aka WDC). Writing.com is a website that hosts your stories, poetry, articles, etc. and allows (and encourages) reviews of your work by your peers. You will get constructive criticism from dozens of reader/reviewers which will enable you to hone your craft and allow your stories to become the best they can be. If you ever wanted to see what readers really think about your work, it is the perfect place to get a start. If you only want praise, this is not the site for you. If you want honest opinions of your work so you can better your writing, WDC will be beneficial to your goals. If you do join the site and start posting your work, you will also be expected to review others work. Check it out at: www.writing.com

Cthulhurotica – book review

Cthulhurotica – edited by Carrie Cuinn
Dagan Books

They say seafood is an aphrodisiac. What if the potential seafood is at least as big as you are, often bigger, and even more often, considered to be an ancient God? Cthulhurotica is an anthology that explores some of the possibilities of love and lust intertwined with the Cthulhu Mythos. We have some potent tales within these pages; ‘Descent of the Wayward Sister’ by Gabrielle Harbowy leads us to a dark basement with an erotic secret. ‘The Assistant from Innsmouth’ by Steven James Scearce, shows us an accountant who hires local help on a project but soon doesn’t know who is assisting who. ‘Infernal Attractions’ by Cody Goodfellow unveils shades of From Beyond as a young woman forces her man to build a Tillinghast Resonator, in order to quench her demanding addictions.

Despite these transgressions, this collection does not portray a far-fetched world of monsters and sex. It relays a world that is very much like it is today with a bit of Cthulhu around the edges of its reality. It is more like an aphrodisiac than the main event and never gets too harsh. So if you are expecting caustic aggressions that would shock as much as they would arouse, this is probably not the anthology you have in mind.

Cthulhurotica made for some enjoyable reading and entertained in its melding of seemingly incompatible worlds. My only concern is that perhaps this is the first step to Twilight-izing the Cthulhu Mythos – to turn the silver-gray and dismal dark shades of alien beasts to lavender and fuchsia, turn the rotting stench of decaying sea-life to a supine fragrance, and turn the slimy, scaly textures of monstrous hide to a subtle oiled leather – creating a more acceptable world for the non-horror reader. The Lovecraft world is an exclusionary one. The people that love it have an instant bond in their knowledge of strange secrets that no others could fathom. The last thing I want is a Lovecraft film staring Robert Pattinson and a bunch of tweens discussing the merits of The Great Old Ones. Did you know that Nyarlathotep’s skin shimmers in daylight?

Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood – Algernon Blackwood – book review

Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood – Algernon Blackwood
Dover Publications
Selected and introduced by E.F. Bleiber

These collected tales by Algernon Blackwood are not all traditional ghost stories but are supernatural in a larger sense. I had been familiar with his more famous tales in this collection, The Windego and The Willows which portray elemental powers – where natural geographies possess a conscious malevolent will. In The Glamour of the Snow, we find that same elemental will as swirling flakes materialize into a beautiful maiden and lure a man further from the safety and warmth of his mountain holiday hotel. In Secret Worship, a phantom boarding school in the German Alps calls to its alumni in order to continue its secret ceremonies of dark powers.

While the British author is famous for these weird tales and expanding the field of horror to encompass more (along with his contemporaries, Lovecraft, Machen), it is the traditional ghost stories in this book that intrigue me the most. My favorite, The Listener, is a tense ghost story that builds suspense in small steps and never lets up. A writer, seeking the seclusion of a quiet boarding house, finds no sanctity as he is slowly tormented and pushed to the edge of sanity by a malicious entity. The Empty House dares a young man and his aging aunt to stay the night and see the truth, in this epitome of the haunted house tale. The story increases intensity with every paragraph. I would highly recommend both of these tales to anyone who wants to read a good ghost story, write a ghost story, or just wants a chilling yarn to keep them awake at night.

Blackwood does not feel the need to explain the supernatural happenings in his fiction. He only presents them in the stories as fact and for the reader to accept that these things exist. Noting the impact of these stories as I read them, I shudder to think what his readers felt like when these tales were first published in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I imagine that many readers fostered little sleep and kept lanterns burning through the night. Don’t be misled by my analogy, these stories are timeless and will have the same impact today, for those who dare open the pages of this book.

The Theatre Bizarre – (2011) – movie review

The Theatre Bizarre – (2011)

The Theater Bizarre is a modern anthology, not aimed at a PG-rating or casual horror fan. These stories are loaded with sex and violence, yes, but also with something you’ll never get from American studios; the freedom of not having to capture the widest audience possible ($$$$) to please the conglomerate company. What we have is six short films by six different directors, who were not pressured into keeping it tame.

The films outlining premise is a theatre puppet-show of sorts. The puppets represent real people and as their section of the stage lights-up, we are treated to their story. It is all hosted by the ringleader, Udo Kier,  whose marionette-like movements exude a general sense of foreboding. He walks stage-right, holds out his hand like a model on a game-show and the film begins.

In ‘The Mother Of Toads’ A young couple’s purchase of a pendant while traveling the back roads of France lead to a conversation with an old woman with a wicked glean in her eye. There is a brief Cthulu reference to “The Old Ones” by the old woman and the boyfriend goes to learn more about the pendant’s symbol and origin at her secluded cottage in the woods. There, he is seduced by a beautiful woman and when he tries to escape the next morning, he is assaulted by generations of her offspring emerging from the swamp. This segment exudes great mood and atmosphere but holds back at the end as we don’t see the actual attack on the girlfriend or the main character. Next, in “I Love You”, we get a bitter look at love gone awry, a hostile break-up and violent end to a relationship. Although a familiar story, it is an entertaining segment as the woman talks about her secret trysts, and we see them in flashback. The kitchen scene even made me chuckle.

Third, we have the Tom Savini directed story, Wet Dreams. A couple locked in an acidic relationship, attack and torture each other in their dreams. There is one really bizarre scene in this episode, that I will not totally spoil, but it’s a real ‘doozy‘…, when the sexy dream-girl drops her panties past her ankles and…oh, boy! The husband wakes up screaming and immediately stuffs both hands in his shorts to take inventory. The film is worth seeing for this segment alone. There are three other stories, not as good as these first three but not bad. As with all anthologies, there are segments you’ll like better than others. I will mention the story, Vision Stains, about the young woman who has found a way to see what other women see at their moment of death and is addicted to that rush.

The Theatre Bizarre is an entertaining horror collection with solid storylines and plots, graphic violence and a strong ‘R’ rating for the true horror enthusiast. If you are a fan of anthologies, this is one of the better ones; it’s a keeper for me.
 

The Middle of Nowhere – Horror in Rural America – book review

The Middle of Nowhere – Horror in Rural America
Edited by Jessy Marie Roberts
Pill Hill Press

Farms, open fields, woodlands and arid western plains are common settings for these various tales that range in subject matter from murdering madmen to malevolent spirits. This is an entertaining anthology of heartland horror, a collection of engrossing very short stories. Some are only 3-4 pages with most weighing in at 9-12 pages. This makes for perfect bedtime reading. I will mention a few of my favorite stories here, so you can get an idea about the collection’s contents. In ‘Hallowskreig’ by Stephen D. Rogers, a man is transported back to a WWII battlefield when a group of trick-or-treaters come strolling up his front walkway. A couple looks for a better life in the western expansion years as they attempt to settle their wagon on land that had once been Choctaw Indian burial grounds in ‘Closer By the Second’ by Rob Rosen. ‘The Cabin’ by Jack Burton features a species of crab spider who’s secretions turn an entomologist and his wife into slaves, in order to provide safe haven for it’s offspring. Lastly, and probably the creepiest of the collection, is ‘Storm Chase’ by D. Nathan Hilliard. As a brutal storm arrives and a farmer and his current love prepare to head for a shelter, he sees a female figure standing in his farm field, in the exact place where he had buried his wife when he murdered her a few years back. Middle of Nowhere is a fun collection of ghostly and ghastly stories for the horror fan no matter where the reader may reside. If you like your story short and not-at-all sweet, this anthology is a great read.