Zero Saints by Gabino Iglesias was published by Broken River Books late in 2015. A quick, propulsive tale packed with violence and threat, in which a gang-connected drug dealer on the dark side of Austin, Texas receives a warning from a group of rivals, who might also be demons. Fernando tries to find the right path through a dangerous milieu that stretches across the border into Mexico, venturing there and back again.

I don’t know who came up with the phrase “Barrio noir,” but it fits. Some readers have complained about the amount of Spanish or “Spanglish” mixed into the text, but I found this helped create a sense of atmosphere, of partial foreignness or at least separateness from the dominant American culture more familiar to many of us. It allowed me to believe I was seeing through Fernando’s eyes, and let me feel privy to his thoughts.

Visceral and tough, poetic and beautiful yet oh-so-dark. Zero Saints is a highly recommended thrill ride, artfully told, and sets Gabino Iglesias apart from the bulk of his neo-noir contemporaries. I can’t wait to see what this guy does next!

Zero Saints on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27230788-zero-saints

Zero Saints on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Saints-Gabino-Iglesias/dp/1940885337

One of the highlights of this year has been Michael Wehunt’s debut collection, Greener Pastures.

On Goodreads, I said:
“Often we judge first collections by a lower standard, and we’re willing to excuse a few weak or clumsy stories in the mix because it’s the writer’s first try. Once in a while, though, a writer emerges on the scene already so capable in craft and so fully developed artistically, they manage to immediately surpass the efforts of most of those who’ve been doing this for years, or even decades. Wehunt focuses the camera eye closely upon his subjects, and lingers obsessively, scrutinizing detail, weighing nuance and exploring delicate, varied and sometimes unexpected aspects of feeling. These are sensitive, serious and strange tales of real literary achievement, executed with real confidence. With a debut like GREENER PASTURES, the notion of applying diminished expectations to a debut collection seems not only unnecessary, but ridiculous.”

I haven’t talked to a single person who’s been anything less than very impressed with this book. I’m sure it will be regarded as one of the most significant books of 2016.

Greener Pastures on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29632862-greener-pastures

Greener Pastures on Amazon:

One thing I stopped doing last year and would like to start again is posting reviews, or at least brief comments, about the books I’ve recently read. I’ll start with posting a few of the books I recently finished and already reviews on Goodreads and/or Amazon.

First off, then…

Earlier this year, one of my favorite writers released her second collection. That writer is Livia Llewellyn, and her book is Furnace.

On Goodreads I wrote:
“Darkly wonderful, powerful and lushly poetic writing. Livia Llewellyn creates her own genre merging the erotic, the dreamlike fantastic, and the blackly horrific. In only her second book, she’s working at such an amazingly high level, and has already become a powerful magicians of the word. Livia Llewellyn ranks among my very favorite writers.”

Also, I discuss my reaction to Furnace at greater length on Scott Nicolay’s The Outer Dark podcast, in episode 33. I talk about Furnace and other “News of the Weird” in between the two interviews, so somewhere in the middle. Link HERE.

Furnace on Word Horde:
http://wordhorde.com/books/furnace/

Furnace on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815195-furnace

Furnace on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Furnace-Livia-Llewellyn/dp/1939905176

I kept reflecting, as I read Richard Gavin’s fourth collection At Fear’s Altar, about what horror fiction ought to be. Horror stories should be dark, disquieting. Too often what passes for “horror” is mundane or predictable. Whereas familiarity can be a virtue in some genres, where readers seek the recurring comfort of touchstones, horror by its very nature should unsettle.

Richard Gavin’s work stands out as chillingly dark, wickedly strange and otherworldly. These stories have the heart-pounding feel of nightmare, and carry a strong suggestion of the numinous. Where other writers offer familiar monsters in comfortable territory, always stopping short of threatening the reader, Gavin explores the weird and surreal just as much as the horrific. His strength is conveying an otherness, something looming out there, threatening. There’s a commonality with the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, but I find a greater kinship to the spooky occultism of Machen and Blackwood, whose best stories have at their heart a sense of something unknowable happening just out of view, completely out of proportion with human experience, and vibrating on an entirely different wavelength.

Highlights include “Chapel in the Reeds,” in which an elderly man moves back home with his daughter, who doesn’t want him there. The man wanders the countryside, seeming to shift into different realms, seeking a strange, mystic chapel, and speaking with his late wife. His young granddaughters are frightened when they witness his strange behavior, standing in the middle of a field, talking to no one. His daughter thinks he’s disintegrating, while he remains focused on finding the chapel again. Whether his reality or his daughter’s is most true, either possibility is disturbing.

In “The Abject,” Petra watches an eclipse, along with her husband tad and two male friends. Out across the water is a jagged island know as The Abject, about which Petra’s friend recounts a legend. Petra has a vision of proto-humans on the spire, and feels dangerously drawn to go there herself.

The main character in “A Pallid Devil, Bearing Cypress” walks the streets among falling bombs in a time of war in Europe. He’s trying to see the devil, feeling sensitively attuned to the city’s shadow side, and thinks he sees something. He finds a broken Cypress flower, red and star shaped, the spots a devilish, horned creature. Excited and inspired, thinking he’s found the devil he seeks, he then hears the cries of a girl trapped under rubble, and leaves her, trying to chase the devil. After he loses track, he to Helma and helps her out from under the rock. They connect, end up marrying, though not too happily. He’s still preoccupied with seeking darkness. They move out to the country, and nights he roams near their new house, looking for the devil’s traces. At times he finds these scattered Cypress flowers, but never quite what he seeks. Finally he learns Helma too is seeking something.

“King Him” is a shocking story of domestic unease, an adult brother and sister living together. She thinks he’s the crazy one, insisting on talking about an entity called “King Him.” Maybe he’s insane, maybe they both are, or maybe King Him is the real cause of the dysfunction creeping into their relationship.

“Only Enuma Elish” is a good example of Gavin’s treatment of characters with supernatural or occult beliefs. This story’s narrator meets an older woman across the street, and she introduces him to the book “Enuma Elish,” a tale of the universe’s creation, from ancient Babylon.

In “Darksome Leaves,” an isolated, socially awkward man becomes attracted to a young woman in his apartment building. His hopes of getting closer to her shift when they discover an ominous mask.

By far the book’s longest and most ambitious story, “The Eldritch Faith,” is both philosophical and metaphysical in its focus. It follows a boy who grows up seeking to understand reality’s true nature, to find a way out of the depressingly mundane ordinary existence. He comes up with a game called Curtains which he believes allows a ghost or spirit to communicate with him, and possibly enter our world. This exploration unfolds gradually, and feels chillingly real. His interactions with the entity he comes to know as Capricorn are among the more creepy and unnerving things I’ve ever read. “The Eldritch Faith,” which concludes the collection, exemplifies what Gavin is capable of.

At Fear’s Altar achieves heights — or perhaps depths — of darkness and disquiet almost unrivaled in recent horror fiction. It’s among the few most notable and impressive story collections I’ve read in the past five years. With this book, Gavin rises in my estimation to rank among the strongest practitioners of horror and weird fiction currently active. At Fear’s Altar is my first exposure to Gavin’s fiction, but now I gladly anticipate the pleasure of going back to investigate Charnel Wine (2004), Omens (2007), and The Darkly Splendid Realm (2009).Even more, I eagerly anticipate Gavin’s future works.

Astoria is the second in a series of novellas linked to S.P. Miskowski’s Shirley Jackson Award nominated debut, Knock Knock. Each of the linked works follows a different spoke outward from the hub of Knock Knock’s primary characters, a trio of young girls and their immediate families.

One of these is Ethel Sanders, stuck in a life she finds unbearable. She reacts to sudden tragedy by abruptly fleeing Skillute, Washington, the small town she’s lived in all her life. Ethel not only leaves home, but steps out of her whole identity like shed skin. She travels down the Columbia river, which divides Oregon and Washington, toward the small coastal town of Astoria, on the Oregon side. There she tries on aspects of a new life, picking up elements one at a time, fantasizing that all of it’s real. Ethel clings to belief in the possibility of an unhappy middle-aged woman simply leaving behind the mundane existence that caused her dissatisfaction, to truly start over. For a while, it seems she’s reinvented herself, truly run away from the elements in her life that troubled her. But has something come along for the ride? Her escape may not be what it seems.

At times, Miskowski’s approach reminds me of Stephen King’s. Many attribute King’s lasting popularity to the horrific story elements, but I’ve always believed what he does best is tell the story from a place so intimately wound up in a character’s perspective that the reader feels as if they’re living someone else’s experience. Miskowski too writes in a style straightforward and transparent, yet vivid and always engaging. A deceptively simple narrative surface hides churning layers of confusion, pain and psychological turmoil.

Just as in Knock Knock Miskowski leads the reader to identify with the primary characters, in Astoria’s we share Ethel’s turmoil, her desperate grasping at a possible alternate future life. Every time she seems to have taken a step closer to this goal of reinvention, she seems to slip deeper into a state of delusion or self-deception. By the end, Ethel’s situation seems at once more settled, almost domestic, and also nightmarish. Astoria is the most accomplished work of fiction yet from S.P. Miskowski, an author still improving, achieving stronger effects. It’s a work of confidence, of engrossing atmosphere and real narrative control, strongly recommended.

Many of the 22 short stories in Every House is Haunted, the debut collection by Ian Rogers, feel connected. As the title suggests, this is a book about hauntings, though the stories Rogers tells venture beyond the well-worn template of the haunted house tale. On top of this unifying theme, several stories also feature paranormal investigators, something like agents Mulder and Scully of the X-Files, or hint at a shadowy group overseeing such intrusions. Rogers seeks to establish a common world in which paranormal events and entities are controlled, studied and policed by a broad and shadowy organization devoted to these functions.

Rogers starts off strong with “Aces,” on its surface a routine family drama in which Toby’s sister has trouble in school and exhibits weird behavior, like many adolescents. This seeming normalcy masks the extreme strangeness of what’s really going on with the sister, who is obsessed with finding “aces,” playing cards which she discovers in strange places, such has hovering in mid-air. Toby only comes to understand his sister’s unusual nature when paranormal investigators arrive and explain.

Another strange and surreal piece early in the book, “A Night at the Library With the Gods” again displays Rogers’ skill for creating a familiar, mostly normal world, then gradually increasing the strangeness until the reader recognizes they’re in something more akin to nightmare. In “The Dark and the Young,” linguist Wendy takes a mysterious job, translating an occult “black book.” Some of the rituals described in this bizarre text make Wendy and some of her coworkers hesitant to participate.

A few less mature stories are sprinkled throughout, and in my opinion Rogers could have made a stronger debut impression by omitting these. I understand the desire to include early work, and indeed this flaw is so common in first collections I’m hesitant to mention it. At any rate, the few less-compelling pieces are more than offset by a high overall quality. The more recent stories seem generally darker, more macabre or surreal.Rogers closes the collection with a powerful series of tales, deftly and confidently told.

In “The Inheritor,” Daniel Ramis unexpectedly inherits a house from his father, with whom he had a terrible relationship. He visits the childhood home, a place evoking the terrible memory of his sister’s early death. Daniel always thought his father had sold the house when he moved, and can’t understand why he’d held onto it. Along with the house, Daniel is also left contents of safe deposit box: a gun, and a note from his father hinting at explanation. All that remains is for Daniel to discover what responsibility comprises the most horrible aspect of his father’s legacy.

A husband in “The Candle” gives his wife a guilt trip about possibly forgetting to blow out a candle before coming to bed. Time passes, and feeling guilty, he goes downstairs and finds something weird and disquieting in the dark. Here’s another story that starts off realistic, then takes a weird disconnect, making a subtle and eerie observation of the ways we open gaps in relationships through small acts of selfishness or distrust.

The last tale, “The Secret Door” makes a powerful ending to the book. Sarah and husband move into an old country house, and find a secret door bricked up on back side. She sleeps, and wakes again to find her husband’s not there. Other details, such as the bed and their car, inexplicably have changed. The story veers more deeply into surrealism. Sarah envisions a boy yelling from the bottom of a well, telling her she’s the one who put him there, hinting at connection to her earlier decision never to have kids. Her experience swerves between alternating realities, now alone and sick, then with her husband telling her she’s not well. It depicts increasing detachment from reality, a creepy back-and-forth between the real and the surreal.

Every House is Haunted is an above-average short fiction collection, especially noteworthy as a debut. The writing is both transparent enough for mainstream readers, and artful enough for those who like their prose with an edge. At his best, Rogers is very compelling, and the growth demonstrated within these pages suggest he’s one to watch.

Die, You Donut Bastards is the latest collection of short fiction and prose poetry by Cameron Pierce. The whimsical title and cover art may suggest a mostly humorous approach to Bizarro, a genre which can range from arty surrealism to shock-focused extremity, and also at times encompassing more conventional storytelling with a subtler twinge of the surreal. While many authors focus on a single approach, Pierce here shows himself capable of covering all the bases.

Most of the pieces are just a page or two, and focus on wild invention and playful absurdity. I detect in these shorter works the influence of Russell Edson, the master of surrealist prose poetry, though Pierce is less oblique, less blatantly symbolic, and more confrontational. Readers approaching this book from outside the Bizarro realm can expect a lot of zany humor and intentional absurdity, but will also discover a great degree of subtlety and sensitivity. In fact, those seeking a full-on Bizarro blast may be surprised by the restraint and emotional honesty present in the longer stories.

The lengthiest of these, “Lantern Jaws,” is a lovely tale of wonder and emotion, both subtle and graceful, reminiscent of something Kelly Link might create. In it, a teenage boy falls in love with a girl schoolmate who carries a vaguely Lovecraftian doom or curse. It’s a gentle, touching story, characteristics which may seem at odds with some of the extremes on display elsewhere in the book, yet it’s also quite dreamlike and surreal.

Another longer story, “Death Card” shows a couple, Tristan and Emily, shifting from youthful, carefree obsessions, such as Tristan’s comics and his collection of vinyl figures, to more adult concerns now that Emily is pregnant. Tristan goes along, half-reluctantly boxing up his collection to make a room for the baby. The story focuses the feelings of impending loss and disconnection from self, arising from Tristan’s recognition that life’s simple freedoms and youthful pleasures are soon to change.

In “Pablo Riviera, Depressed, Overweight, Age 31, Goes to the Mall,” an odd outsider catalogs an endless stream of pleasures, mostly fast food, during a trip to a shopping mall. This litany of cheeseburgers, taco corn dogs, and other excessive treats could be seen as Pablo’s attempt to numb the pain of his solitude and isolation, or perhaps simply exhibits the weirdly alienating effect of our obsession on grotesque, commercialized pleasures.

“Disappear” is the weird story of a pregnant woman’s baby disappearing right out of her belly. It turns out the fetus was stolen by horror author Stephen King, who apparently steals unborn babies and installs them into his typewriter as fuel or grist for new stories.

In “Mitchell Farnsworth,” one of the more transgressive pieces, Katie recollects once having sex with her boyfriend, the Mitchell Farnsworth of the title, while watching the movie Alien. After Mitchell moves on, the story recounts Katie’s long string of boyfriends, forming a detailed catalog of explicit sex acts, foods and drinks consumed, and the movies she watched with each — often Alien, sometimes The Exorcist or other horror films. Katie is increasingly stuck, unable to stop and reflect on this pattern, until she hears news about Mitchell Farnsworth.

In Die, You Donut Bastards, the shorter, weirder stories are greatest in number, and seem more geared toward a Bizarro audience. The longer stories, comprising about half the collection’s page count, exhibit greater emotional realism and even a bit more seriousness mixed in with the strange pop surrealism. I enjoyed the provocative range of styles, moods and approaches on display in Die, You Donut Bastards. It makes me eager to check out more Pierce’s work.