The Many Days of Horror - The Hive

Tim Curran may not be overly familiar to you, but that's mostly because he's been circulating in the small press and online fiction resources for most of his career, and it's a damn shame because his writing is bar none some of the goriest, moodiest and most evocative out there. I previously reviewed his work in Zombie Pulp, and it's time to talk about The Hive. This review focuses on the Kindle ebook edition, which includes a lot of additional material omitted from the print copy I read many years go.

We'll get the preamble out of the way: it's well written, its well-researched (as far as I know, not being an Antarctic researcher....worked for me!) and it's a direct sequel to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. No small feat making a sequel to Lovecraft's greatest novella, but Curran does so, not only evoking the memory of the original but also drawing inspiration from a host of modern resources, not the least of which is Carpenter's The Thing. Don't worry, though; the derivations from The Thing are principally a matter of mood and suspense, along with a healthy dose of "last-name-itis" amongst the crew of Kharkov Station deep in Antarctica near the Medusa Ice Shelf. Sure....a shoggoth bears more than a passing resemblance to something Thing-like, but the shoggoths in Curran's version of the mythos are really damned freaky.

Curran's tale weaves between a myriad variety of characters stuck in Antarctica when one researcher and his crew stumble across evidence of subterranean ruins beneath the glacial ice, as well as actual mummified bodies of decidedly alien beings (the old ones, sometimes known as elder things to CoC fans). As things rapidly begin to unravel we are treated to a vast number of hideous and sometimes subtle ways that discovering these ruins and bodies can affect humanity, as the scientists come to grips with the chilling truth about what they are witnessing, and what it means for the ancient history of mankind and possibly all life on Earth. Meanwhile other scientists drilling down to a frozen lake beneath the glacial ice uncover evidence of live, active old ones...and a scientist who's discovered too much encountered a diary of an expedition that preceded even the mysterious lost expedition of the original novel, which serves as a lengthy interlude not in the original book.

The pacing is great, events exciting and believable, the cast of characters thick and filled with those both memorable, deceitful and otherwise problematic, the sorts of personalities that you don't want to be around when you begin to awaken the hive consciousness of alien beings who might have created humanity and all other entities as a byproduct of some other greater experiment.

If you like good horror, and especially if you like good mythos fiction that stands on its own merits, then you need to read The Hive. I'll be hitting the sequel soon!

A+++

Review: Zombie Pulp

Right off the bat: this was a fantastic read. It might not be for everyone, but if you happen to really enjoy visceral, gore-soaked pulp fiction full of zombies, murder, revenge and madmen then Zombie Pulp is barking up your hangman's tree.

Tim Curran is a prolific author, who has perfected the art of horror fiction, with an especially keen sense of both pacing and a talent for descriptive gore. His zombies are very...meaty....and his descriptions of monstrosities make them hard to forget and easy to visualize. He's got exactly the sort of talent for writing this sort of fiction, and it really pays off.

Zombie Pulp is a rare collection of short stories in that every single tale in this volume was at least enjoyable and worth reading. I rarely encounter a collection like this, where I skipped nothing, it was all captivating. That's pretty unusual. Even if you obsessively read every story in a given collection, it's often with the sense that maybe...just maybe...some of those stories were weaker than the others. Not so here. The weakest tale in Pulp Zombies is still heads and shoulders above the zombified competition.

Here's a run down of what the book offers to pique your interest:

Shelter: A holdout in the zombie apocalyptic wasteland barters with life by offering up victims through a lottery system. Is Doc, the head of the compound, just cruelly earning his own life and using survivors, or is there something else at work here? Creepy zombies with a habit of speaking their mind like undead Torrets victims.

Corps Cadavre: An inmate at a prison gets light duty on the graveyard shift at the mortuary, which is freshly stocked from the latest round of riot victims, heart attacks and more. The problem is, there's a guy who takes that shift and has done so for decades, and he's got a unique way of disposing of the corpses.

Emily: A mother is obsessed about her recently deceased daughter, and seeks a means of bringing her back from the dead. She succeeds, of course, and because this is a zombie anthology there are no miracles involved in this process. Mother spirals into madness as daughter learns what it means to be one of the living dead.

Dis-Jointed: Revenge from the grave as some hit men deal with their victims through a process of dismemberment and burial in the deep woods, only to find that they're next on the hit list.

Piraya: Zombie piranahs, need I say more? Second goriest tale in the book behind Mortuary.

They Walk By Night: A private eye and a detective run into a problem when recently deceased criminals start popping up again, and they think it might be tied to a recent serial killer that they caught, and who died in prison unexpectedly. Good noir feel mixed with zombies.

Mortuary: This was an interesting and weird tale, written I feel for its obsession with utter and total gore, and a complete lack of interest in keeping any protagonist alive. A Waco-like scenario is unfolding as the ATF prepares to bust into a suicide cult complex that may or may not be well armed. What they get is....zombies, of course. Probably the goriest tale in the book.

Euology of the Straw Witch: A tale of the old west....or maybe just a very economically depressed backwoods town (just occurred to me that the exact timeframe of this tale is a bit ambiguous, although it's definitely sometime before 1940, I'd say), about a man who misses his mother so much he seeks out the help of the mysterious straw witch to bring her back, with the expected results one might imagine in a tome of this title.

Monkey House: A story which answers two questions: first, why not primate zombies? And second, why you should never leave your hardened post-apocalyptic bunker just because it's been weeks since you've seen a zombie. Although the gore level on this one was through the roof, a lot of it involved depraved simian zombies and therefore wasn't quite as disturbing as a few other tales...but that said, this one managed to hold an abundance of excessive grotesquerie.

The Mattawan Meat Wagon: the story here is similar to Shelter (and could take place in the same universe for all I know), this time about survivor towns which periodically load up the sick and elderly and drop them off in the big cities where the zombies have overrun everything. A driver and his rider, a young man, are about to meet some unfortunate turn of events in the course of this action. A pure gore fest, I felt there were some missed opportunities in this story. Without trying to spoil it, the boy who takes off in town just sort of...dies....and I really felt that was leading somewhere, since he was originally from that town. When it didn't, I was disappointed.

Morbid Anatomy: A lengthy novella tops off the collection, focusing on an interesting spin-off from Herbert West's time in the Great War. The story is told in two parts, which eventually converge (while still remaining essentially separate), bouncing between West's aide and assistant Hamilton, who manages to maintain an affect of mild contempt for West's activites with restoring the dead to life, even as he helps support the vile doctor; on the other side if a war reporter named Creel, who has an unhealthy obsession with death and is finding even the Great War or WWI is perhaps too much for him. This was a great tale because not only was it the slowest of the lot in terms of pacing, it was also a bit stingy n the gore. When the zombie element enters the picture, it's in contrast with the horrors of what has already been happening as a recourse of World War I's notoriously dehumanizing and destructive course, which makes for a fascinating juxtapose. When Tim Curran dabbles in Lovecraft his own spin really makes it special (see the Hive series for another example) and this is no exception.

Love gore-drenched zombie horror? Get this book! At times it reminded me of the golden age of EC Comics, brought into the literary medium. If one tried to classify this in terms of current genre form, I'd label it one part splatterpunk, one big part zombie fiction and a dash of Lovecraft for good measure.

A+++

Available here at Amazon.

Diving Back into Comics...Justice League Dark, Voodoo and Pathfinder

I've been in a funk lately....video games have been unfulfilling (usually), MMORPGs feel like stale toast to me these days, my focus on RPGs has narrowed down to Pathfinder for now as I find I only have time to focus on it for my Wednesday game and (occasionally) the DDN playtests. On the other hand some fiction I've discovered has been very engaging...I've especially enjoyed Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels and Tim Curran's awesome writing (especially Zombie Pulp, a fantastic collection of short fiction that reignited my inerest in both short stories and zombie fiction). Both are excellent reads if you're in the mood for some grizzly, down-to-earth weird horror and modern supernaturalism.

One thing I used to be into which fell to the wayside was comic books. Among my old favorites were Planetary, the Wildstorm universe books (Grifter, Wildcats, Stormwatch, Backlash, Team 6, etc.) and the unbeatable Top 10. Eventually Wildstorm sort of fell apart, and its inconsistent revival through DC made following it tough. Other greats (like Planetary) died due to the whim of the creator, though one can't fault a writer for deciding to end it when the creative drive for the project stopped.

For myself, another big part of the exodus was due to the difficulty of re-entry to the more mainstream comics. Comics are rather expensive by the issue, and the big publishers have a habit of marketing them in ways which make it difficult to get a coherent story if you aren't following every single storyline. I'm a victim of the era of the Blackest Day/Brightest Night (or whatever) era of comics....and effectively dropped out about a year before the New 52 hit. Marvel's even worse in my book....trying to keep track of it all was painful, and some of their writers need to be dragged out back and taught a lesson or two in good storytelling. The Ultimate series was good....until it, too, got overly convoluted and then who knows what they did with it, because staring at the comic shop walls? I can't tell anymore what the hell is going on with Marvel. Easier to stick with the movies, I say.

In the end, the only series I continued collecting were the Dark Horse Conan releases (which are quite good, actually).

Anyway, after a visit to the local Kaboom! comic shop I snagged volumes one and two of Voodoo, the first volume of Justice League Dark, and ordered Grifter and Suicide Squad. I also snagged the compendium of the Pathfinder comic series and put in some orders for the Conan graphic novels my collection is still missing.

I'm kind of excited to be getting back into comics, I like how DC is methodically printing these series in 6-issue compilations at a time, and I think it's just the "spark" I need to help me get some creative energy back.

I'll offer up some belated opinions and reviews soon...