Number 13 E - I can Taste the Blood - Vision V - John FD Taff

And on to the final story in this excellent collection.

When I see the editor's name in the contents list as a contributor, the cynical part of me always asks "I wonder if XXX the editor puts as much quality control in when choosing XXX the author's story.  This is grossly unfair and based on a bad experience with a small (micro) press publication I once had a short story published in, where the editor inserted 3 stories of his own, one in his own name and two under pen names.  However his writing was so bad, and so very distinctly bad, that this was blindingly obvious.

I digress, sorry. Back to the book in hand.

The presence on the front cover of a second editor's name relieved some of my fears, and the rest of my fears were well and truly expelled, given a kick up the backside and told never to come back, when I started reading John FD Taff's contribution.

This is an fantastic closer to the collection.  Different again to the other stories in the collection, this one features one of the most original concepts I've seen for a long time.  The story follows Merle, a waster in small town America who, after falling ill and losing an entire day to sleep as a result, finds strange things happening to his hands. To say more would be a spoiler.

At one point I thought this was going to be a variation on the vampire myth but, while some tropes are present, this is so much more.  The final explanations give a truly horrific view of small town America that Stephen King would be proud of.  Indeed King is probably the best comparison I can think of for this story, with the deceptively workmanlike prose, remarkably easy to read yet indepth character studies and an intimate portrait of the town.  And all in 65 pages.

On the strength of this I am certainly going to track down a copy of John Taff's collection "The End in all Beginnings"

I really can't pick which of these five stories is best, or which is the least best. This entire book has been a pleasure to read from beginning to end- in that special way that horror fiction is a pleasure even when it's dredging up and contributing to your worst nightmares. A couple of minor niggles which were mentioned in the other reviews, but other than those, no complaints from me.

Easily 8.5/10

Apparently there is a follow up to this coming out called I can Hear the Shadows.  I can't wait to get my grubby mitts on it.

Number 13 D - I can Taste the Blood - Vision IV - Erik T Johnson

What the fuck?

Ummm...

What the fuck in the name of all fucks did I just read?

This is the weirdest story so far in the book. - as you may have figured out from the start of this entry.

Seriously though - what the hell is going on?

I could leave this entry at that but I won't.  Apart from being almost entirely confuzzling, this is actually another pretty good story.  There were times when I wondered if I should be consulting a thesaurus or dictionary as I read this due to an overwheming multidude of unnecessarily polysyllabic phraseological evocations.

But in the midst of all that, there are some very striking nightmarish images.  The scene that begins with the bird hitting the window is one that will stick with me for a long time. As is Caged-head...

The plot centres around a character named Canny, whose mother has kept him segregated from society his entire existance. He's never seen his mother's face - for reasons we find out later on in the story (I think). After her death he goes on a quest for self discovery where he discovers... things...

Ummmm...

Yes.

Death, rebirth, dog based insects, or are they insect based dogs, aliens, unusual first births.  All this and more can be found in these 50 pages.

Surreal is the best description for this story. This is not a story for those who like easy explanations. I have a feeling that I will wake at 4 in the morning tonight, and in my tired fugue state whilst trying to drop off to sleep, the key to this story will appear, and it will all make perfect sense.  However, when my alarm wakes me again for work a few hours later, I'll have lost it again.

Just in case it isn't clear, I did enjoy this story very much. The imagery was stark and in some places brutal, in others quite stunning.  It's left me feeling more than a little uneasy - which after all is the whole point of a horror story.

Number 13 C - I can Taste the Blood - Vision 3 - Joe Schwartz

Another complete change of pace.  This is a hard boiled crime story  told in a brisk hardboiled prose.  Two paid thugs kidnap a girl on behalf of "the caretaker". The narrator, Sam, is oddly sympathetic as he details his violent past and the tasks he's already completed for his unseen paymaster.

This is possibly just in comparison to the character of Joe, an unflinching psychopath whose first action in the story is an act of unspeakable animal cruelty.

Both Sam and Joe are impeccably drawn and almost step out of the page. Thankfully this isn't actually possible. Neither of them are people you would ever want to meet in real life but their story is totally compelling.

This story of a kidnap gone awry is the most straightforward narrative so far in the book, although I did not see that ending coming. I love a writer who can sideswipe me like that so I will certainly be hunting down his work as well.

Irritating nit pick - at one point in this story, "bleed" is used instead of "bled". 

Judging which story is best in this collection is going to be a difficult task.  It's turning into exactly what I hoped for when I saw what the concept was behind the book.  Take one title, give it to vastly different writers and see what they come up with.  Variety certainly is the spice of life.

Number 13B - I can taste the blood -- Vision 2 - J Daniel Stone

So I don't get confused which story is which. I'm doing each individually.  Not that there's much danger of that. This was as different from the mannnered atmospheric world building of Josh Malerman's story as I think it's possible to get.

This is a visceral story, set in a drug fueled modern day New York City, in a  backdrop of seedy clubs, even seedier theatres, insanity inducing films and fallen angels. It's not a tale for the faint of heart. There is violence aplenty, explicit sex scenes and drug taking. One scene in particular near the end made even me wince.

J Daniel Stone is a brand new name to me so I came to this with o expectations of any sort. The prose is disjointed, but deliberately so. It's sometimes difficult to know exactly what is happening.  What is part of some drug induced nightmare and what is really happening to the charaters. Or is their reality so blurred that it's all real?


The story revolves around Bok, an addict, desperate for money who accepts a call late at night to a theatre where he once again meets Laurenz, an old German film maker in whose film A Chronology of Decay he played an important part. He was introduced originally to Laurenz by his impossibly beautiful boyfriend Jared with whom he shared his entire life, his love and his drug habit.

The story of the his part in the film is told in flashbacks. The timeline is fractured beyond breaking point but as the picture emerges of what is probably happening, this only adds to the feeling of nightmare.

This is almost like a David Lynch movie set to paper. I wasn't surprised to see Kathe Koja mentioned in the afterword to the story as one of his mentors in the industry. I will definitely be looking out for his other work.

Number 13 A - I can taste the blood - Vision 1 - Josh Malerman

A couple of years back I had an idea for an anthology where all the stories had the same title and the contents page would just be a list of the authors names. Sadly I didn't have the time, funds, energy or contacts to do anything about it.  I was quite excited to find out that someone has done it for me.

This book contains five novellas all under that rather bloody good title you see in the picture.

I'll be posting my thoughts on each in turn as I read them.

First up is Josh Malerman.  As those of you who've read my run-down of last year's books will know, I'm a big fan of Mr Malerman (indeed his name attached was my entire reason for ordering this -before I knew the set up of the collection)

His story here is a little belter.  Slightly more stylised writing than I think I've seen from him before.  There's a very mannered feel to the prose.In just over 40 pages he makes the desert into as much of a character and mythic location as the Trail was in Unbury Carol last year.

The story involves a family in their house in the desert who answer the door to a stranger with a horrible tale to tell of a demonic presence following him. To say much more would be to give spoilers. But from this pretty standard plot device, Josh weaves a hypnotic story with a gut punch at the ending. The tension is allowed to build as gradually as the short pagecount will allow. There's myth and allegory, puppets and demons, and that endless desert. The world building here is remarkable.

Minor quibbles - maybe the typsetting should have been italicised for the storytelling segments just for clarity's sake. And there is a misuse of "you're" when it should have been "your".  The editor needed a better proofreader.

But other than that, another excellent piece of writing from one of the best new talents out there.

Oh, and he's also the guy who sings this.
Shameless USA theme song
A talented guy all round.

I bought this from Amazon but there may still be copies available through Grey Matter Press

Number 12 - My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

After two books in a row selected from the golden age of science fiction, a total change around. A bang up to date, crime thriller by a new Nigerian writer.

The set up for the story is in the title.  Korede, our narrator, is called by her sister  Ayoola to say that she's killed her boyfrinsd - again.  This is number three that she's stabbed allegedly in self defence despite never haviong a mark on her.

Korede heads over as a good sister does and heps her dispose of the body - again.

Korede has a major crush on a handsome doctor at the hospital she works at. Things get complicated when Ayoola and Korede's beloved start dating. The clock is ticking.  Is Ayoola going to strike a fourth time? Can Korede save the man she loves from her now clearly psychopathic sister without incriminating herself or Ayoola?

This was an incredibly quick and easy read.  Very short chapters, efficiently written.  Ayoola is a fantastic character, beautiful, totally shallow and self obsessed, and a bit too handy with her favourite knife. We completely understand Korede's reluctance to do anything to stop Ayoola's lethal habits, family secrets are revealed in a sequence of flashback chapters which explain the bond between the two women.

Funny and shocking in turns.  This is highly recommended and I will be looking out for the next book by this new writer. an easy 7.5/10.

Number 11 - The Alley God - Philip Jose Farmer

In my house I have somewhere in the region of 3000 books.  The three authors I have most books by are Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Philip Jose Farmer. The Farmer collection mainly dates back to my teens and early twenties and I don't think I've added more than two or three to that particular shelf in the last decade.

In my teens I devoured these books as quickly as I could find them in scond hand shops (or new if I had enough spare cash). I just found out PJF died almost exactly 10 years ago so picking this book was oddly appropriate.

One of the things I like about his books, especially the pulp paperbacks from the 70s, is the glorious covers. The cover on this is restrained compared to some of his. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the three novellas contained within.

Story 1 - The Alley Man

This was a weird story. The last neanderthal is living in an unnamed city in some weird future/alternate recent history and grubbing off garbage piles for a living.  He believes himself to be heir to some sort of throne which h could claim if he finds a particular hat. He keeps two women in his house who serve his every need.  Women might be too generous a word as they may not be fully human, they may well be part neanderthal themselves. The old guy, as he's known, treats them horrifically, beating the most human of them repeatedly and using the other as a slave. A young woman studying him for whatever reason falls for his pheremone scent and becomes another of his hangers on, grubbing the piles with him and attracting the ire of the two existing slaves who can't compete with her fully human beauty.

The story is pretty damned misogynistic throughout. I genuinely don't know which of the characters, if any, that the reader is supposed to root for. The dialogue is deliberately confusing and needs to be deciphered before any sense of the story can appear.

There are some funny moments and descriptions - for instance one character's first appearaance

"Deena, tall, skinny, clad only in a white terrycloth bathrobe, looked like a surprised and severed head stuck on a pike."

She's the best looking of  the two existing slaves.

Overall though, I didn't like this story. Was the misogyny deliberate to emphasise the neanderthal nature, or was it just a product of the time it was written? I can't decide.

Story 2 - The Captain's daughter

The location switches to the far future and spaceships crossing the vast reaches of space. Technobabble abounds. as does horribly expositional yet still confusing dialogue. As does extraordinarily crass characterisation of the women in the story.

The story concerns a doctor asked to examine the eponymous daughter of the captain of a ship called the Erlking, an intergalactic ship that translates itself across lightyears in mere days. The daughter is suffering from a disease which apparently gives her epileptic seizures.  Also, a crew memner she was very close to has just gone missing. Throw in some futuristic religious cults and an alien parasite that feeds on sexual chemistry (literally, it feeds on the chemicals released when its host is sexually excited) and a murder or two and you have what could be a good sexy romp across space.

Sadly the technobabble in the explanations drowns the story and makes it almost unreadable in places.  there s an excess of scientific explanation, of impossible chemistry and biology. The imagination on display is impressive I suppose. I might have found this a much better story 30 years ago, but now it seems weak and juvenile.

Story 3 - The God Business

We're back on earth in an alternate present day (think 1950s when the story was first published) where Illinois has become a new Garden of Eden inhabited by demigods and naked hedonists who are capable of defeating whole platoons of marines using only water pistols. Our narrator is tasked with entering the the affected area to steal/break the mysterious neverending bottle of liquid that started the whole situation. He has to go with a beautiful blonde woman and of course they have to journey naked so as to fit in with the natives.

This is the most fun of the three stories. It's free of a lot of the faults of the first two stories, the dialogue isn't as clunky (until the end) as in the others. Our two heros encounter all kinds of allegorical situations leading to our narrator's final voyage into his own psyche.

The ending features a complete run down of the story so far from the bad guy's point of view explaining in minute detail why every little thing happened along the way.  It's the worst expositional dialogue in the entire book. Despite that, this remains the best of the three stories.

I realise that I'm placing modern sensibilities on stories written over half a century ago. but I'm sure he was capable of much better writing than is on display in these three stories.  The last of his books I read (about two years ago) was a really good fun adventure story.  His dayworld books are really very good indeed with none of these weaknesses (that I remember).

Disappointing 4/10 overall. The cover is by far and away the best thing about this book.

Number 10 The Dreaming Jewels _ Theodore Sturgeon

Many many years ago I read some Theodore Sturgeon short stories in assorted anthologies and loved them.  i can still quote the opening lines of his story "It" nearly 3 decades after reading it. This writer was a master of short fiction.

Somehow i never got round to reading any of his longer work.  So when I found this in the back of my car, with no memory of where I found it - most likely the Tesco charity book section but I really have no idea- I thought it was about time.

This is still short compared to most of what I've read this year, at a mere 178 pages. But in those 178 pages he manages to spin one of the most weird and wonderful stories I've read for a long while with some fabulous ideas.

I was about to say that the ideas in this book could be likened to Bodysnatchers by Jack Finney - but then I checked and this predated Jack Finney's work by a good five years. So this story is almost entirely original to my knowledge.

It is Sturgeon's debut novel but doesn't read like a first novel often does.  This was a writer confident enough to withold information fom the reader for several chapters before even a partial reveal of what was happening. (I was quite proud when I worked out the relevance of a weird throw away line in the first chapter five chapters before it was explained.)

His style was more than strong enough to waylay the feelings of What the Hell and keep me reading to uncover the secrets. It reminded me of SP Somtow's style of writing science fiction, going all out there ans assuming the reader has the intelligence to keep up and figure some things out for themselves.

Some of the characters are arguably underdeveloped, or possibly underused. I can't quite work out if wanting more about a character because you like them is a good or a bad thing for the writer to acheive.  We know enough about each character for the story to work.  Any more may well have just been padding.

The story is difficult to summarise, an 8 year old boy, after being caught eating ants at school, is beaten and his hand mutilated by his stepfather.  He runs away and joins a travelling carnival.  After that, things get strange.  There are mad scientists, perverted judges, carnival freaks, and above all, strange living crystals which have strange influence on the life forms around them.

And that glorious cover is a definite plus for the book.  They don't make them like that any more.

A quick easy read with some surprisingly deep meditations on the nature of life itself.  Highly recommended.
8/10

Number 9 The Deep Woods - Tim Pratt

My latest cheat read - a fun little YA novella that I picked up cheap on the PS website.  As usual from PS it's a good looking book. This one's even signed and limited to 100 copies which is always nice.

The story is nothing really original to be honest.  A boy obsessed with a fanatasy roleplaying game called Wild Hunt Online accidentally wanders into a "real life" fairyland when he runs into a boy called Silas whe's been trapped there for a century.There's a nice reveal about the nature of the land he's trapped in and the characters are well drawn and sympathetic. I wasn't 100% sold on the very end of the book - possibly a touch too sentimental - but this is a YA book and I'm not really the target audience I suppose.

After the convoluted language of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was good to read something written in modern day English without all the moralising. This is a quick and easy read that kept me entertained for the 123 pages.  Reccommended as a timefiller for adults, younger readers will probably love it a lot more than I did. 

6.5 maybe 7/10 for me. 

Available through PS Publishing.