Oculus Reviews: A little indie horror treat

Hey, everyone, this is Oculus Reviews.

Today we’re gonna be doing things a little differently, because I’m covering a medium I haven’t done on the blog yet: video games. I’ve brought two horror games from indie developers, called Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow and DIA by Vidas Games.

First: Anatomy.

kittyhorrorshow.itch.io

I actually can’t tell you too much about this game because it’s relatively short and simple and most things I could tell you would be spoilers, but let me just say that I love it. LOVE it. The basic rundown is that you’re in a house and you collect audio tapes with narration about the build and layout of a house and what you could call its anatomy compared to a human being. However, things soon start to get… not normal.

I won’t tell you where this all goes, but I was genuinely scared all the way through. It’s a psychological horror game, so rather than relying heavily on jumpscares and chase scenes (which are fine, of course, I’m just not a fan of ‘em) it mostly opts for unease that slowly mounts into terror as you go on with the game. The tagline on the developer’s site is “Every house is haunted”, and if you play, that tagline will soon make terrifying sense to you. The game is based on a very old fear, that the safest, most basic personal space in your life is not so safe after all, but takes that in a direction much more insidious than simply a ghost or monster going BOO in your face. As the narrative – if you can call it that – slowly unfolds, the experience inside the house becomes genuinely terrifying to sit through, even if the gameplay mechanics are simple and straightforward: walk around, find tape, play tape. If you want gameplay that’ll make you sweat I’d suggest a different game, but play this one for the dread.

That being said, I do have some issues with this game. For one, it is very dark, and I don’t just mean the content, but literally dark. You can’t see more than a few inches in front of your face. Now I realize that this is intentional and part of the gameplay, and I’ll be the first to say that it’s very effective because you just never know what could be lurking in the dark. And once things start to lighten up a little, you’ll wish they hadn’t. However, in the beginning I actually couldn’t see something very important because it was too dark. I simply kept missing a room I needed to go into, and my dumbass had to look up a walkthrough so I wouldn’t just wander around in the darkness like an idiot. But that might just be me being terrible at games.

My biggest issue, though, is the lack of subtitles. This game is very dialogue-heavy, and as things start to unravel it also gets very static- and distortion-heavy, and while there’s some in-game text none of it belongs to the dialogue. Now, I’m thankful that my auditory issues aren’t bad enough to warrant medical attention, but I do have problems with making out distorted dialogue, especially because English isn’t my first language. And I imagine there are would-be players of this game with very different and possibly worse auditory processing problems than mine who might have been thankful for a little help. I was at first unsure if you can put subtitles into a Unity game, which is the engine on which Anatomy was made, but some friends assured me that you can put subtitles into any game – and here especially I feel like that effort should have been made.

Thankfully, though, these are my biggest gripes, and I still found the game a very intense and beautifully crafted horror experience. Rather than being in-your-face with its approach, it’s subtle, weird, unsettling in an almost eldritch way, which in my opinion is the best kind of horror there can be. Sorry, Five Nights at Freddy’s. If you want an unconventional and genuinely unnerving horror game that won’t give you a heart attack every five minutes I strongly recommend Anatomy. It’s more than worth the price the developer is asking for it; and I found it so cool that I’ll definitely be replaying it a few more times. (That’s also a little joke to y’all who have already played it.)

Now, on to DIA, another little gem – and I do mean little.

As far as gaming goes, I’d call DIA more interactive fiction or a short walking simulator, since literally all you can do is walk along and play into the story; and the gameplay time wasn’t longer than, say, 10 minutes or 12 if you want to be generous. However, what little there is is worth getting into. Without telling you too much, you’re in a town named DIA covered in blue fog and snow, and there’s a mysterious dead body that keeps turning up no matter where you go...

Tell you the truth, I was actually dreading the damn thing as the game went on, because that’s what DIA does excellently even with such few tools: creep you the hell out. And the ending… well, there’s a BRUH moment if ever I’ve seen one. The only thing that kinda lost me was what happened after the ending. [SPOILERS:] It does the thing a famous free horror visual novel also did (do you know the one?) where it gets your username from your PC to make it look like it’s calling you by your name. But if you’ve got your username on the default setting or just something that’s not your name, that just becomes Narm instead. Plus I feel like it’s kind of a cheap shot to begin with. [end of spoilers] That little questionable moment aside though, DIA is a fun, short ’n’ sweet creepy experience, especially because I love winter horror; the replay potential is sadly not very high, but it’s definitely worth experiencing once.

Visuals: Anatomy has genuinely the most creative I've seen in a Unity horror game; and DIA is just lovely in a wintery, unnerving way. 5/5 to both.

Audio: You want unsettled? You'll get unsettled. Also, good voice acting. 5/5 to both.

Gameplay: I won't rate this one because I for one enjoy simple and to the point games, but to hardcore gamers it might be a turn-off. I liked not having to count on my terrible reflexes, that's all I'll say.

Availability: They're indie, one of them is free and the other literally costs 3 bucks. I can't tell you any system requirements, but from the looks of it they'd probably run even on a coffee machine. 5/5

Get ANATOMY here from Kitty Horrorshow.

Get DIA here from Vidas Games.

 

When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.

Oculus Presents: My favorite Hungarian sci-fi cover

I don't suppose I'll be reviewing this short story collection on the blog, since it's a Hungarian-only edition, but this cover was pretty much love at first sight.

The work of artists Gábor Szikszai and Zoltán Boros, I really dig that sweet retro cyberpunk goodness with just a hint of Terminator. And the title too: The Death of Lies. Badass. I do wonder if any of the short stories inside will live up to this image.

Oculus Reviews: The smart, intimate horrors of Lisa Tuttle

Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.

How do you like your horror fiction? Some people like it old-fashioned, with vampires and ghouls and ghastly creatures; others like to dip into the strange, the amorphous, the unnamable. Some seek sophisticated scares that reach deep into the psyche, others are here for blood and guts and a trashy good time. Me, I'm a pretty anything-goes kind of horror fan, but if I had to choose a favorite subgenre, I'd be pretty torn between psychological horror and ghost stories (I read my first "true" ghost story at age 5 and it was love at first sight). What I like the most, though, in any subgenre, is smart horror. I like my ghouls and creepy-crawlies and buckets of blood just fine; but sometimes you just really want to read or watch something carefully written, well-thought out, something with real insight that shows you a thing or two about human nature.

Enter Lisa Tuttle, a new horror favorite for me.

My first Lisa Tuttle was actually a short story in the groundbreaking 1980 horror anthology Dark Forces, titled Where the Stones Grow, a beautiful, folkloric chiller with a very unusual supernatural twist; but her 1986 short story collection, A Nest of Nightmares, had been on my to-read list for a while. And now that I've read it, I really wish I'd gone for it sooner.

goodreads.com

A collection of 13 stories with mostly female protagonists, this is a gem of short horror writing for everyone who likes their horror fiction thoughtful and personal. The really scary things in this book aren't just ghosts and monsters and maniacs with chainsaws, but something much more down to earth: isolation, loneliness, the stress of everyday life, grief, failing relationships—and insidious real-world horrors like SPOILER/trigger warning rape, child death and child abuse. Yes, Lisa Tuttle goes there, and while her approach to some issues feels like a product of its time, for the most part they're handled in a thoughtful and not at all crude way. One story in particular (I'm not spoiling which one) has one of the most chilling portrayals of rape I've ever seen, written with a woman's hand and a woman's eye. The women and girls in these stories are mothers, sisters, wives and lovers who have their own flaws, their own problems, their own—sometimes ugly—worldviews and insecurities. They feel like real people, which in horror short stories is a real blessing.

The first story, Bug House, is one of my favorites from the book, a dark and suffocating tale of a woman in marital trouble visiting her dying aunt, with an absolute gutpunch of an ending. The next tale, Dollburger, is more traditional horror with a child's perspective and a nice and nasty finale. The high points of the book for me, though, were the next two tales, Community Property and especially Flying to Byzantium. They're not the kinds of stories to make the reader afraid to turn off the lights—they couldn't be more everyday—but they're amazingly uncomfortable, bleak looks at a failing marriage between selfish people and at the ugly world of female insecurities. The characters in these tales just aren't good people (Community Property has to hold a record for some of the most slap-worthy protags I've ever seen, and oh, Flying to Byzantium had me squirming the entire time), and I love 'em for that. These tales wouldn't look out of place in a literary fiction anthology either—smart and insightful, like I said.

Treading the Maze is another favorite, a lovely mix of pagan horror and heartbreak; The Horse Lord, on the other hand, I don't feel guilty not personally recommending. It's great as a horror story, with a particularly chilling twist, but I'm just tired to death of the good ol' 80's horror trope of the cursed Native American property, and I didn't much care for the protagonist's husband writing "slave novels" and wondering "how to get the chief slave into bed with the mistress of the plantation without making her yet another clichéd nymphomaniac". Yikes. Yicycles.

The Other Mother, though, is another beautifully written story, this time about the frustrations of motherhood with a supernatural twist. Lisa Tuttle acknowledges the reality of women who were never meant to have children but did so anyway, who love their kids at the same time that they feel suffocated by them, in a sensitive and understanding way that was a real delight to read. The horror side of this tale is excellent too, and genuinely gave me a chill, even though I wouldn't call A Nest of Nightmares a terrifying book per se:

That night Sara dreamed of a woman in white, gliding along the lake shore, heading towards the house. She was not a ghost; neither was she human.

Need and A Friend In Need are both tales about lonely people reaching out to others in hard times; one is a story of a melancholy loner and a self-centered college girl forming an unlikely friendship in a cemetery (and I think every single woman would nod with understanding at the part in Need where Corey feels creeped out by the strange boy but feels compelled to be polite anyway), while the other one is a heartbreaking story of female friendship reaching through the bounds of imagination. The story between these two, The Memory of Wood, features one of my favorite scary tropes, the implied horrors: what will horrify you about this tale is not what actually happens (although that's plenty spooky) but what it doesn't state outright because it doesn't have to. Connect the dots and be disturbed, dear reader.

Stranger in the House is a somewhat unassuming story that again, leaves a lot implied but has an absolutely spine-tingling ending; Sun City is probably the most outright scary of the collection, with gruesomeness and more intimate horror intertwined, but I'd recommend to read this one with a critical eye because it's a very... white person-y horror story. The Nest on the other hand is a beautiful note to end the book on, a tale of troubled sisterhood and ominous almost-Gothic imagery that leaves just enough to the imagination to chill the reader.

Despite its (few) flaws, I feel pretty much obligated to recommend this book because of how well-written and sensitive it is; at its core it's an examination of human relationships, but with beautifully done horror imagery and a uniquely female focus. It's the exact kind of intelligent, literary horror I'm always eager to see more of, ranging from simply dark stories to a few genuine chillers. And since the Kindle version doesn't cost a whole lot, I'd say it's a crime for any fan of short horror fiction not to grab this one and at least give it a try.

Writing: The best of the best; sharp, clean prose with great imagery and insight. 5/5

Availability: The original 1986 paperback edition of this book is a collector's item that you won't find anywhere under 40 or 50 dollars; the Valancourt Books reprint from last year, I think? Is still a little pricier than some of the paperback horror out there, but those folks are truly doing the literary gods' work making obscure and rare fiction available in new print, so I say support 'em if you can. The Amazon Kindle version on the other hand is only a few bucks and an absolute delight, even if you can't hold the beautiful original cover physically in your hands that way. Go and get it! 4/5

Entertainment value: I wouldn't call this a fun book; but if you're aiming for some genuinely unsettling fiction, you couldn't find any better. 5/5

Do I recommend it?: For any horror fan who's not strictly with the blood 'n' guts crowd. 5/5

Oculus Reviews: Cornfields, angst and watching paint dry

Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.

Have you ever read something so mediocre that words were escaping you to even describe it? Something so dull and tepid and just nothing that it's the literary equivalent of chewing on cotton wool? And when you closed the back cover on it, you lamented the hours of your life you could have spent doing something more useful, like sewing all your shirts' neckholes shut or counting grains of rice? Because I've run into such a book and am now cursing my completionism that made me finish it when I have authors like Lisa Tuttle, Chinghiz Aitmatov and Larry McMurtry waiting for me on my bookshelf.

I suppose I should name the monster, shouldn't I? Let's dive into Marlys Millhiser's 1974 novel, Nella Waits.

goodreads.com

I'm proud to report that even though this book sucked me dry and made me want to break a window several times over, it didn't break me. Finishing it might have been the most pointless enterprise of my life, but I came through, dammit. When I came across it in the local library several years ago, the beautiful cover and the tagline A novel of the supernatural had instantly caught my attention, but I hadn't been quite in the mood to read it at the time. A few days ago, though, I was browsing the library catalog when I came across this book again, and a little Google-fu netted me the surprising results that print copies of it were relatively rare, going for prices like 28 dollars and above on eBay and Thriftbooks. My curiosity was duly piqued. Marlys Millhiser is apparently the author of several Gothic, romantic thrillers and mysteries, and while I'm not big on Gothic literature—I like my spooky fiction leaner and meaner—several of those seemed promising (especially Willing Hostage—what a thrilling title!), and I've preemptively put a few on my TBR list before diving into Nella Waits.

Yeah, that'll teach me.

Twenty-four year-old widowed nobody Lynnette Stewart has to travel back from Colorado to Boringville, Alabama (actually, Roggins, Iowa, but the sentiment is there) for her father's funeral and soon becomes trapped in a suffocating small town she'd been trying hard to escape from. At the same time, Jay Van Fleet, the mysterious bastard heir to the spooky Van Fleet estate is finally tracked down after several years abroad and arrives back to claim his inheritance. The two meet and share some non-flirting charged with non-chemistry, attracted by mutual loneliness and the fact that they both have the personalities of a slice of toast, but the jealous ghost of Jay's mother zzZZzZZzz...

I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm genuinely trying to write a review here, but this book is so boring I'm having trouble even remembering what it's about. I tried, folks, I really tried. The first few chapters were actually promising, making me lament what came after: I adore my small town horror fiction, all the closely intertwined lives shaken up by the supernatural (I've grown up in a village myself, and what I wouldn't have given for a ghost or two), and I was sort of intrigued by the subtly chilling prologue of Jay's old uncle finding his death in the Van Fleet house at the hands of his dead sister. Lynn's frustration with her family, who still treat her like a child and expect her to jump at their every whim even though she's twenty-four and has already been a married woman, was believable. But after a while my enthusiasm waned because nothing. Was. Happening. A good 70% of the book is taken up by tepid small-town intrigue between characters who share zero physical or emotional spark, despite the book weakly insisting that they're just so attracted to each other. Ghostly encounters are described in lackluster prose when they actually happen at all, and eventually everything comes together to die a whimpering death in a non-climax so barely-described and nonsensical I'm genuinely not sure what happened, with the obligatory The End... Or Is It?! type epilogue that I love to hate.

Actually, the lackluster prose is mostly what ruined this book for me. Cliche as it is, and even with so little actual plot, this could have been a lurid and perfectly entertaining chiller (there's a SPOILER/trigger warning possible incest plotline that's straight out of some of the more scandalous kind of Gothic fiction), but the beige prose really kills the tension after a while. I'm not a big fan of overdone purple prose either (another reason I rarely read Gothic stuff—lean and mean, like I said), but the "they went there and did this, and then went there and did that" style of writing became so grating after a while. (And it made the obligatory sex scene about as erotic as my electricity bill, in case well-written sex scenes are a draw for some of y'all in a book—the one in Nella Waits is one to avoid, and not even in the Bad Sex In Fiction Award kind of way, alas.)

Not that the characters helped my opinion, once we truly came to know them. Lynnette is a well and truly useless protagonist who has to be rescued over and over and over again, Jay Van Fleet is an unlikeable jerk (and not in the "sexy bad boy you love and hate" way); Hymie, Lynnette's childhood friend is an enigma in that he's repeatedly described with nice and ableist language (I hope y'all can stomach the r-word if you plan on reading this dreck), but he's easily the most perceptive and likeable of the cast; Nella is the most annoying, white-hot hatred-inducing ghost I've ever read about, with the maturity of a twelve year-old even though she's supposed to be a forty year-old mother (there are few words in the English language that make me go HULK SMASH faster than "mischief" or "making mischief"); the rest of the characters are perfectly forgettable, much like the writing itself.

Come to think of it, "Perfectly forgettable" would have been a much better tagline for this book.

Writing: Hemingway this ain't. Or King, or Joe R. Lansdale. You get my point. 1/5

Availability: Only if you have a good 30 bucks or more to throw out the window for a book; but the Kindle edition is there if you don't mind the fact that Amazon is evil. Alas, often it's the only legal source for a book some of us can afford. 3/5

Entertainment value: Rice grains, I'm telling ya. Or I could have repainted the bathroom. 1/5

Do I recommend it?: Well, maybe if you were shipwrecked on a deserted island and this was the only book you could rescue... Otherwise for ghost story fanatics or Marlys Millhiser fans only. I don't think I became one after reading this. 1/5