It's another sad day for the horror community. We've lost Sid Haig, the star of Spider Baby, House of 1000 Corpses, the newly released 3 From Hell, and many more great films. R.I.P. Sid. You will be missed.
I read Mike Thorn's Darkest Hours about a year ago and was seriously impressed by it. Peel Back and See might be even better. There are some truly great stories in this collection, and while not every story will work for every person (and you might not want to eat before reading some of these), I found myself enjoying most of them even more than I expected. My favorites include "Mini McDonagh Manor." In this story, after her mother's death, Julie builds a replica of her childhood home, before ultimately deciding to go home and visit the real thing for the first time in years. She believes something sinister lurks there and wants to find out once and for all what it is. This is the most legitimately creepy story in the whole collection and gave me actual chills. If you like this one, make sure you also don't miss out on "Dreams of Lake Drukka," which could easily be a companion piece to "Manor." Another standout is "Deprimer," which a...
Mike Thorn's Darkest Hours is a diverse collection of stories, that, at its best reminds me of Graham Masterton, less in style, more in terms of subject matter and gore. Some of the stories (for instance collection opener, "Hair") were a little stomach churning for my taste, but Thorn is a talented writer even when going for the gross-out. Animal lovers like myself might want to skip "Fear and Grace" and "Satanic Panic" (although the latter has a standout ending). I also found the cruelty to the creature, although it really wasn't by strict definition an animal, in "A New Kind of Drug" hard to take. Many of the stories in this collection concern the topics of academia (with academics being alternately portrayed as buffoonish or somewhat sinister) and drinking/drunkenness; the two are most amusingly combined in the clever "Speaking of Ghosts." "Long Man," concerning the titular creature that haunts children's mirro...
What a fun ride! Kill River by Cameron Roubique is the perfect slasher, just in novel form. Seriously, someone should make a movie out of this! The book begins with Cyndi, a quiet, somewhat shy teenager, being shipped off to summer camp on a bus by her parents. She meets three other teenagers on the bus: bubbly, pretty Stacy, jock Brad, and cute joker, Zack. Upon reaching camp, Cyndi and Stacy quickly bond, and when her three new friends decide to run away from camp on a raft, Cyndi joins them. The four teenagers get lost and end up at an abandoned water park, where they begin to get picked off one by one. I really liked the characters here. Rather than typical, one dimensional slasher victims, all four teens were pretty well rounded. Even Brad, the least likable of the group, seemed human. He could seem spoiled or irresponsible, but he clearly truly cares about Zack and Stacey. Meanwhile, the friendship between the lonely Cyndi and popular Stacey was probably the heart of the book. T...
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