Oculus Presents: More bookses!

 

Greetings, everyone!

 

As I said in my last book-collecting post, I had a couple more books relevant to this blog on the way, and they arrived a few weeks ago, I was just a bit busy (read: lazy) to properly introduce these beauties.

Not that the one on the left needs an introduction, I think: it's an original edition of the first book in legendary Scary Stories series, which has been scaring the living bejezus out of American kids for generations now. Like many people, I'm not a super great fan of the more recent editions with the new drawings; I perfectly understand wanting to make these books more kid-friendly than the gnarly nightmares concocted by Stephen Gammell were, but the horrifying black-and-white watercolors were at least half of the charm of these books for me when I first encountered excerpts from them on the internet. Especially the drawing for the story called The Dream - yeah, I mean her. Hats off for spicing up my nightmares, Mr. Gammell. I've had my eyes on this book for a while now; and when it arrived, it was to my great delight that I saw: yes, it does contain the drawings. I won't review this book on the blog, because it's not rare or obscure at all, quite the contrary - but I can definitely appreciate it on my own.

The book on the right with the gorgeous cover, meanwhile, is a short story collection by the esteemed former horror author (I say former because as far as I've heard, she's mostly moved on to other genres lately) Kathe Koja. If you know anything about American horror literature history you know her: she is the author of the groundbreaking, legendary horror novel The Cipher, kickstarting the famed Dell/Abyss line of boundary-pushing horror books. For a while The Cipher had fallen out of print and became a collector's item, going for tens if not hundreds of dollars on the book market; but just last year Meerkat Press fulfilled every broke horror fan's dream and released a brand-new paperback edition of it, which I'm so buying next year. Until then, Extremities will be my first book of hers I'm actually going to dive into - the reviews on the back cover liken it to Poe and Calvino, two authors I love, so I think we're in good hands here.

Apologies for the quiet on the blog lately, I'm especially sour about not doing a Halloween-themed post like I said I would, but I do have something very cool planned to finish this year with a bang, so keep your eyes peeled in the next few weeks for new posts. Cheers!

Oculus Reviews: Bats in the moonlight, oh my

Welcome, folks, to Oculus Reviews.

Busy, busy, busy, but that doesn't mean I don't read! In the past few weeks I've gone through several good and some not-so-good books, from horror novels to literary fiction and even chick lit (look, I'm not immune to stories about little quaint village bakeries). I've read morality tales (blargh), kitschy beach reads (double blargh) and some absolute gems like The Haunting of Hill House (if you haven't read it yet, you owe it to yourself to correct that ASAP). If I had to choose a best book of the year, I'd be very hard-pressed. But as for most fun read so far? Oh, yeah, I know which one I'd pick.

The price sticker I didn't have the heart to take off this book informs me that someone, at some point, has owned it for precisely one dollar, and for the life of me I can't tell if they paid too much or not enough for it. It's that kind of book.

Chris Blaze is an undercover detective in Miami. He's also blond, blue-eyed, works out regularly, and he's so handsome that he's making the bad guys look even uglier, as the book kindly informs us in his very first scene. Where he's busting a cult trying to sacrifice a virgin on Walpurgis night, because of course. The cult, by the way, is led by a man named Batiste Legendre (I'm not kidding) and worships a god of hate named Hadifes, as we find out precisely in the first three paragraphs. To paraphrase a friend from my writing group, one page in I knew I had a goddamn treasure in my hand.

So, Chris busts the evil cult with a classic "Freeze, Legendre, or I'll blow your fucking head off!" line, letting us know that he's a Tuff Cop Man right off the bat. Alas, the bust goes awry, and while the cult is subdued, Legendre curses Chris with immortality, doomed to walk the night as a vampire; as Chris soon discovers when another undercover bust gets outed and he's pumped full of lead, gets back up, and proceeds to go through a roomful of bad guys like papier-mache. It's kind of awesome. However, Chris is soon forced into the night shift by his acute sunlight allergy, where he's paired up with a smart-talking black cop named Reggie who regularly hoses down the pages with quips and wisecracks, because of course. He also romances a cute night-shift doctor named Sue with a domineering fiance, who he falls in love with pretty much at first sight, because of course. And then he gets assigned to some mysterious killings happening at night, and the killer's identity is something I'd rather not spoi... Oh, fuck it, he's a vampire named Yosekaat Rakz (still not kidding, guys) and he inspired Dracula's legend, because of course. [EDIT: I just remembered that he's actually a descendant of the guy who was the inspiration for Dracula, but still. I also remembered that according to this book Bram Stoker was Van Helsing himself, only no one wanted to buy his memoir, so he released it as fiction under a pen name. Which... wow. I wonder if the biographers knew that. /s] And now it's up to Chris, his cute girlfriend and smart black sidekick to stop him, because of course.

Oh, man, I'm giddy just talking about this book - I swear, this puppy has to have been one of the most entertaining trashsploshions I've ever read. One-dimensional characters, Darwin Award-winning plot points, wooden dialogue, tired racism (the racists are actually pointed out to be racist, but I hope you can stomach the n-word) and tin-eared descriptions litter the pages, and yet the whole thing has so much going for it. There's this manic, deadly serious trashy energy to Vampire Beat which makes it a quick, compulsive read, miles above groaners we've seen here like The Terrified Heart. The book has a whole lot of gory killing, but also holy water, staking, giant rats, turning into bats (!) and even a zombie (!!!), plenty of fun nastiness for everyone who likes to dip into the less sophisticated side of horror every now and then. And while these heroes have to be some of the dumbest I've ever seen, there are a few mildly (mildly) clever bits like the aforementioned zombie episode, which I found myself smiling at, and the finale was honest-to-god exciting to read. Above all I abhor dullness in my horror literature, and while my keyboard would probably crack in two if I called this book good, I certainly can't call it dull. The bad guys are all entertainingly nasty, and the fact that they appear to have been written by a middle schooler (seriously, Yosekaat Rakz? With a name like that, he must be from the mystical region of Fictionalia) just ups the fun factor of the whole thing. And if you think the fact that the writing is bad means that the writing is bad, take a gander at magnificent quotes like...

Drago had a face only a mother could love, and even then she would have to be blind.

...and...

A snooty-looking bitch came out of the little girl's room with her nose up in the air. She looked good and knew it. Everyone she passed smiled at her. She could see them out of the corner of her eye. Too bad she couldn't also see the trail of toilet paper she was dragging behind her.

I'll let you be the judge. Thank you, Vincent Courtney, for blessing my Halloween season with one of the dumbest books I've ever read.

Writing: Trying to rate the writing style of this book is like trying to rate an exploding garbage can that's somehow also on fire. It stinks, but it makes for excellent entertainment. 3/5

Availability: While this book is pretty obscure as far as vintage horror literature goes, copies of it aren't that hard to find and go for relatively cheap. 3/5

Entertainment value: Through the roof, baby. 5/5

Do I recommend it?: Oh, man, I can't recommend this book enough - but at the same time, if you've gotten this far in this review, you probably already know if it's your kind of story or not. Vampire Beat is for serious trash enthusiasts and vampire fanatics only, those who like their horror fun, nasty, not too smart, and with enough ham and cheese to feed a small country. 3/5

Oculus Presents: Merry Book Haul, and a friend

Welcome, folks, to the biggest book haul this blog has ever seen.

I don't normally go on book-shopping sprees, but every now and then I feel like I'm allowed to splurge a little - and sometimes books I ordered separately all arrive at the same time and bury me with a very welcome avalanche. This time, I got five books within a week of each other! I've been very excited to get to these babies for different reasons, and they look quite nice on the Shelf, too. Four out of five I've ordered from Better World Books, which I very much recommend for you folks to check out - they have an excellent horror and genre fiction selection, offer free shipping on many titles, and they do a lot of good work with nonprofits and donated books with the money they get from book purchases, so you're doing something good while scoring great finds for your own shelf. Win-win scenario!

The fifth book is from my trusty Thriftbooks - a pricier venture shipping-wise, but one whose selection has never disappointed me. And as to what those books are? Well...

First of all, the greats - King and Matheson. I really dig the cover of Thinner, although the premise of the book is a little... uh... we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. I Am Legend, on the other hand, is a book I've been looking forward to for a while. I find both the shouting Will Smith sticker and the praise from Dean Koontz, hackmaster extraordinaire, a little comical; but the rest of the cover is very atmospheric, and I've heard nothing but good about the book itself. We shall see whether it holds up to that praise, but I've read from Matheson before and I trust his writing a whole lot.

Next is this great little find: a YA horror from the 80's, and one with the true rarity of having gay characters, even in the main cast if my memory doesn't fail me. I have mixed feelings about the YA phenomenon, but I've read a lot of great YA books - some even in the horror and thriller genre, and they were delightful -, and between the premise of YA horror, the gay characters and this awesome cover, The Lake is a book I'm very eager to check out.

Poppy Z. Brite is one of those slightly lesser-known (to non-horror lit fans anyway) authors who were the powerhouses of horror publishing in the 1990's, known for being fresh, daring and original; and he in particular was known for featuring queer people and outcasts in a genre heavily dominated by straight white men as protagonists. That alone would win my undying respect, but then he also came out as trans - nowadays he goes by Billy Martin, although he still uses Poppy Z. Brite, his pre-transition pen name, professionally. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) And since I'm always up for reading more from minority authors, especially in horror, I've been glad to find this much-praised short story collection, from the famed Dell/Abyss line, at a pretty good price. I've only ever read one short story by Brite before, but unlike Clive Barker's writing (Hellbound Heart, the novella Hellraiser is based on, is an awkward book to say the least), I really liked what I'd seen of him so far.

And finally, this well-loved, but still wonderful copy of Borderlands, a boundary-pushing horror anthology from genre greats like Harlan Ellison and Joe R. Lansdale, with one hell of a cover. Fantastic work by Dave McKean (the title is on the black part, but it's done in transparent reflective foil, so it's only visible in a certain lighting). As for whether the stories inside are just as great... well, other horror blogs tell me a very resounding YES.

Thus concludes the book haul - I have two more on the way, and then the book-shopping shall stop for a while; both because I have enough stuff to read for a year, and because the Shelf is getting rather full. (But worry not, gentle reader! I have a bigger bookshelf on my other wall.) As for the friend I mentioned...

Yorick?

 

I've been organizing my bookshelf for the umpteenth time, and I relocated my Tolkien collection (why yes, I am a giant nerd, why do you ask?) to a more visible spot; and then I couldn't resist adding an extra touch of fantasy with this wizard figurine I bought from an antiques fair. Someone get me a Boromir figurine or a dragon to go with it, and my bliss shall be complete.

Oculus Presents: Latest finds for the Shelf

Heya, folks, this is Oculus Presents.

Been a bit busy these past few weeks with work, writing and suchlike, but that doesn't mean I stopped buying books or reading (these days I'm mostly doing literary fiction, that's why the blog has been a little quiet on the review front). As usual, I scour the used bookshops for anything neat I can find, and I've ordered a few... interesting things online as well, so the Shelf is quite teeming with life. I've managed to score an excellent vintage copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and a biography of Franz Liszt among others, but let me show you the ones relevant to my genre collection...

My earliest find, from last month, is this copy of Savage by Richard Laymon - a western novel about a young boy pursuing Jack the Ripper into the American Wild West. The premise sounds neat enough, and Laymon fans are eating up the book, but I haven't heard super mega great things about his writing skills from people whose tastes I trust, and the first chapter had a teenage boy in Victorian London calling people "tough hombres", which, er, yeah. I have a feeling that this is going to be an experience.

Something I'm already quite fond of, though, is this story collection by the awesome C. L. Moore. Catherine L. Moore was one of the pioneers of female speculative fiction writing in the pulp era of the 30's and 40's (although she didn't retire from writing until the early 60's). There had been other female specfic writers at the time, of course, but she had been probably the most iconic. This is a collection of her short stories with the rugged space adventurer, Northwest Smith, as the hero - including the first Northwest Smith story ever, Shambleau, which is one of my favorite short stories. She also wrote Jirel of Joiry, one of the earliest female sword-and-sorcery heroines, and let me just say, I'm dying to get my hands on a copy of that collection. I'm going to do a Moore-stravaganza on this blog where I review this collection and discuss Shambleau in more detail, but until then - let us admire this fantastic cover.

And finally, one of my favorite used book finds: this reprint of an iconic, much-respected collection of short vampire fiction, edited by the late Alan Ryan (who I'm quite fond of, if you recall from my review of Cast a Cold Eye). Dunno who the hell okayed this lackluster cover and the weird font choice (the original cover art, done by Edward Gorey, fit the book's themes so much more); but the collection has stories from Bram Stoker, August Derleth, Stephen King, Richard Matheson, C. L. Moore again and other genre greats, and I've heard that Alan Ryan was an editor of great taste in short fiction, so I'm very much looking forward to diving in. Not this year, alas (I have 25 books to read until the end of the year for various reading challenges I signed up for, pray for me - I swear it's fun though, or I wouldn't be doing it), but chipping away at this book, one short story at a time, sounds like the perfect entertainment for the upcoming chilly winter months.

Well, folks, that's it for today - I'll be returning soon with a few reviews, gods willing (two of the books I'm planning to read until December are Hawk & Fisher and Vampire Beat from the Shelf, and I'll try to fit in The Lure as well); and hopefully I can do something interesting to celebrate Halloween with, I'll figure out what. Until then, have a very spooky October, everyone.

Oculus Presents: This 'Exorcist' cover is metal as hell

I mean, seriously. Look at it! It's more like something you'd expect from a Books of Blood cover than Blatty, but the design is absolutely fantastic. The work of one Dan Alexandru Ionescu, this is the cover of the first of the two Romanian editions of The Exorcist, from the publishing house Nemira. This edition appeared in 1994 as part of Nemira's horror collection, translated by Vasile Stoica. I usually try to avoid reading translated works if I can read them in the original, but I'm also trying to read more in Romanian, and I just couldn't resist this epic cover when I saw it. Whether the contents will hold up to my fond (if a little squicked) memories of this book and the movie adaptation remain to be seen, though.

Oculus Reviews: The past is in your blood

"Have you the blood, John?"

Welcome to the first Oculus Reviews in a year, folks.

If you're like me, you know that hunting down underrated and lesser-known genre books is the literary equivalent of going out into the Wild West - you never know what you'll find along the way. Sometimes you unearth a lost classic like the Terminator novelization; sometimes you find a book that makes you long for the excitement of unloading the washing machine. And sometimes it's Nazi Leprechauns.

Today isn't one of the "lost classic" days, because the book I'm about to review is still in print and relatively easy to find; but it's definitely a quieter gem of the horror paperback boom, one that is little talked about by non-fans of niche horror literature and very much appreciated by fans of it. Which includes me now, because this book bewitched me the way maybe not a single non-King horror read has managed to do.

"Have you the blood, John?" begins Alan Ryan's 1984 novel Cast a Cold Eye, setting the mood with a single sentence for a beautifully written, evocative ghost story, set in the wildest parts of Ireland where the past still rules the present. Jack Quinlan, an American writer of Irish descent, decides to travel to the country to do research for his latest historical novel, which takes place during the Great Famine. At first everything goes well: he meets friendly Irish beauty Grainne, with whom he shares a real spark, and finds himself a nice place for research in the isolated village of Doolin. But Doolin has a few secrets hanging heavy over it, secrets Jack senses immediately: ghostly figures in the road at night, old folk doing something inexplicable in the cemetery, a strange distance in the behavior of the friendly old priest, Father Henning (easily my favorite character in this, besides Grainne). And naturally, the more time Jack spends reaching for the ghosts of the past, the more they reach back for him.

Where do I even begin with this book? Let me say first that the William Peter Blatty quote on the front, unlike a lot of these paperback praise quotes, is entirely accurate: the late Alan Ryan's prose is something to behold. Literate, moody, atmospheric - these are just a few words to describe it. He had a real skill with painting a scene with his words; his descriptions of the gloomy Irish countryside, the lashing cold rain, the muddy sheep grazing on the hillsides were vivid and almost poetic, without ever going into purple prose, the bane of my existence. Listen to these descriptions:

In the village of Doolin, where the breezes carried the salt and scent of the ocean onto the stone-strewn hills, a man named Padraic Mullen was nearing death.

The circle of people stood silent among the graves. Near Jack's feet, a stone, its inscription long ago blurred away by wind and rain, leaned over as if weary of its own weight.

It's books like this that make me want to become a writer myself. The atmosphere, that sense of foreboding and dark secrets, is done perfectly in every single sentence. Even before Jack witnesses the four village elders pouring a vial of blood into an open grave, we already know that Doolin is a haunted place, and I don't mean it in the ghostly sense (oh, that comes later): a place haunted by history and old customs, and by the very real horrors of the Great Famine. Ryan sketches the picture rather subtly, and rarely ratchets up the quiet chill into real terror... but when he does, oh man. The scene where Jack hears a baby crying outside his house on a foggy day and goes to investigate ended with some of the most shocking imagery I have seen in a horror novel; not grotesque like a Barker or in-your-face like a splatterpunk, but something that honestly chilled me to the bone. Too many horror writers never learned how to write a scene like this.

The character portraits, too, are wonderful. Jack, I'll admit, won't be my favorite protagonist ever (if I never see another straight white male writer in a horror story it'll still be too soon), but he does feel like a real person, rather than a blank slate or a thinly veiled self-insert. He's a bit of a tool sometimes: his approach to historical accuracy is basically "if I research too much it'll bog down the book, so I'll just make up a few things" - I can almost feel my writing circle cringe collectively as I write this - and he's not above spying on a funeral if it means inspiration for a new scene. But I'd rather have a flawed protagonist than a bland one, so that's more than fine with me. Jack's chemistry with Grainne is open, easy and sincere, an affectionate but down-to-earth romance that brings a little warmth into the cold seaside air of Doolin. Father Henning, the old men and women and the quiet, hard-faced sons of the village all felt like people I could have met and walked among, the sense of community - one of the central themes of this book - subtly woven into everything they said and did.

The plot of this book is, I think, what will make it or break it for horror fans. Relatively little actually happens: a lot of the story concerns Jack's comings-and-goings, his relationship with Grainne, and his slow discovery that something past his understanding is happening in Doolin. Which, again, is fine with me: the sense of something big slowly approaching, the ghostly secrets teased and hinted at, and the simple, believable character dynamics carried this book forward and absorbed me a lot more than a 100-page trashy romp would have. (Nothing wrong with trashy romps, of course, but they don't attract me nearly as much as thoughtful chillers like this one.) And the finale... "Beautiful" is the only word that comes to mind. But if you like your monsters, entrails and adrenaline, you won't get it in Cast a Cold Eye. What you will get is a haunting, at places almost lyrical slow-burn story of relationships, community, kinship and the power of old traditions. Whether that is your kind of book, I can't tell - but I know it will stay with me for a while.

Writing: Some of the best I've read outside of straight-up literary fiction. 5/5

Availability: While this probably isn't a book you'll find on every bookstore shelf like a King or a Koontz, it never quite fell out of print either, and used copies of it - even the first edition I own with this gorgeous Gothic cover - go for relatively cheap as far as I could tell. And if that's not for you, there's always the ebook. 4/5

Entertainment value: This is one of the most absorbing horror books I've ever read, but I know the slow pace and ominous atmosphere aren't for everyone. 4/5

Do I recommend it?: I'm biased because I love this book, but yes - very much. As a matter of fact, this is a new favorite for me, not just from this year, but from the genre in general. 5/5

Oculus Presents: The story of my favorite Hungarian horror cover

Hey, everyone, this is Oculus Reviews. It's uh. Been a while, hasn't it.

IRL stuff has kind of eaten up my time and energies in the past year or so, hence me heinously neglecting this blog, but honestly, the more time goes on, the more I miss being able to talk in-depth about genre fiction that I love. I have found some true underrated gems in the year that has passed since my last post on this blog, as well as some true duds - stuff that has embroidered itself into my brain for whatever reason, but also stuff that relatively few people have heard about in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I probably won't surprise anyone by saying that Frank Herbert's Dune books are masterpieces, but how many of you folks have heard about his novel The Green Brain?

Bottom line: we're back with a vengeance, baby. And to kick off things, let me present my favorite Hungarian edition of the one and only Dracula by Bram Stoker:

I still recall the surprised euphoria I'd felt years and years ago (I don't think I was older than 14) when I found this book in my favorite used bookshop, although back then I was too excited to read it to really stop and savor this fantastic cover art. I really dig the sharp, surprising color scheme as well as the ghastly imagery that evokes old tapestries or perhaps woodcut art; the ship episode is by far my favorite and most remembered of the book, so I'm extra into the fact that the cover artist chose that particular bit to illustrate.

At first glance, the book doesn't name the person who drew this - even with some dedicated Google-fu, all I could dig up is that my copy is a 1989 edition by the publishing house/literary society Jókai Irodalmi Egyesület, and is the reprint of a 1925 Hungarian edition translated by Ferencz Tar. (Amazingly enough, the 1925 one was the fourth Hungarian edition of this book - looks like the readers really ate up this one.) Some more research, however, finally netted me the cover artist's name: this same cover art, only in green instead of red, adorned the cover of the 1925 edition, and was drawn by acclaimed Hungarian artist Tibor Gönczi-Gebhardt. Not sure who in particular is interested in this bit of Hungarian literary history, but I find it really neat to have discovered a bit of lore behind one of my favorite covers ever made for a horror novel. As for whether the contents of the book hold up to my fond memories - only a reread will answer me that question, am I right?

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 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

Oculus Reviews: Lovecraft and claymation? Hell yeah! Sort of.

Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.

The truth is... I have a real love-hate relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. I love him for the reason everyone else does: his incredible, vast imagination in creating alien terrors beyond human comprehension. He even wrote an actually good story every once in a while. The reasons I hate him are the flagrant racism that makes even his better-written stories horribly uncomfortable sometimes (it's a bit hard to take The Shadow Over Innsmouth seriously when its main theme is basically "ooo miscegenation is spooky"... and we all know what the guy named his cat); and the fact that he's lauded as a much better writer than he actually was. I do admire his creativity, but his actual writing skill was rather far behind it: I can't help but be allergic to his overindulgent purple prose and badly-written women (if he ever actually bothered to write a woman at all), even when he does manage to scare the bejezus out of me.

I should duck all those rotten tomatoes flying at me, shouldn't I?

Lovecraft adaptations, on the other hand, are... diverse, to put it gently. From the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's excellent Call of Cthulhu silent movie and the devastating Dagon to the recent Colour Out of Space that I'm still planning on watching, there have been a handful of actually watchable Lovecraft movies—and a lot of horrible crap, let's not kid ourselves. I suppose that's the case with every household name in horror (let's play a game: name the best and worst Stephen King movie that comes to your mind, and keep the "worst" down to one), but so far I can call myself lucky in that I've only seen the better Lovecrafts. And a fairly unique one that I'm not sure where to put on the scale.

imdb.com

H. P. Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror and Other Stories is a 2007 Japanese claymation movie that adapts three of HPL's short stories, some better-known and some less so: The Picture in the House, The Dunwich Horror and The Festival. I'm not actually a fan of any of these stories (racism, purple prose, see above; my personal favorites are Pickman's Model and Cool Air), but I'm always up for some novelty value, and the combination of claymation with cosmic horror is definitely a new one. Alas, the movie really underperforms in some ways, despite all the potential in the concept.

The first segment, The Picture in the House, is probably the best-adapted of the three stories, with slowly mounting dread escalating into a crescendo as the blood begins to drip... Movement is scarce: most of the story is told through small gestures, still images and dialogue, adding to the oppressive atmosphere. The art style of the movie is incredibly stark and grotesque, with even normal faces appearing gaunt, distorted... haunted. Whether this is a clever stylistic choice or just ugly is up to the viewer. (I'm leaning towards the former.) But to my great annoyance, the movie leaves out my favorite Lovecraft quote ever, from the beginning of the story proper:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausoleums of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Why wouldn't you put this into your Lovecraft movie?! It's an iconic quote!

The second story, The Dunwich Horror, is where things start to fall apart a little. Told through narration, the story begins with Wilbur Whateley's dying moments, then rewinds to the beginning of the actual short story before plunging into the action-packed finale. The bizarre animation style really lends itself here to the horrors of the tale, but claymation and "action-packed" rarely go together well, and with the way the segment sprints through the plot of a pretty lengthy short story in barely ten minutes, there's little for the viewer to actually engage with.

The third story, The Festival, is easily the weakest of the trio. Even if I'm not a big fan of Lovecraft's Dramatique™ purple prose, without it this story—the eyewitness account of a bizarre eldritch celebration—really falls apart. With almost nonexistent narration, this segment mostly comes across as an exercise in set design: the horrific visuals really are great and would make for a stellar short film with a little more meat to it, but if you don't know the original short story, you probably won't even know what the hell you're looking at and why. There's very little character, plot, anything to hold the viewer's attention beyond "ooh, pretty!" (well... in a certain definition of  'pretty')—I was mostly nodding off through this segment, to tell you the truth.

He clearly doesn't approve.

Too bad about this movie, folks. I really do feel like there could have been more done here: maybe with a better selection of stories to work with, a longer running time, or just more effort to translate the stories to animation, this could have been an absolutely terrifying Lovecraft movie. As it is, it's mostly memorable for the sheer novelty of it; as far as Lovecraft adaptations go, there are definitely better-executed ones out there.

Writing: Not much to speak of, sadly. 2/5

Visuals: Probably the strongest aspect of the entire short film, but still not enough to carry it through all 46 minutes. 4/5

Do I recommend it?: For Lovecraft connoisseurs only—newcomers would probably just find it confusing and boring. 2/5