Undivine Interventions: Reviews of Horror Novels, Past and Present.

William Schoell and I meet again! Frankly, we are going be meeting a whole bunch, because his books are fun, goopy and pulpy, just how I like them. In fact, three or four more of his books are in my to-be-read pile right now. This, Shivers, is his sophomore offering to the literary world, originally published by Leisure Books in 1985. I reviewed his debut, Spawn of Hell, a few months back and you can read that here . Upon that post, Mr. Schoell was kind enough to endorse the blog, as well as comment on the review, shedding some backlight on his career. He stated that his books got better as they went along. And I would say Shivers is indicative of that in many ways. Shivers plays a bit like Spawn of Hell on a bigger budget, with a clearly more solid editing job, a cleaner presentation and aesthetic to boot. What a killer cover on this thing. We have many of the same story tenents going on, (searching for a lost sibling, goopy menace dwelling under the city, corporate entity vs. the...

A quick digression from our regularly scheduled program, folks. The focal point of this blog, and 99.9% of the reason 99.9% of you are here, now has a reference point, that can essentially serve as the centerpiece of our little (and probably soon to be pretty large) cultural hub. Paperbacks From Hell is out in all major bookstores as of yesterday. I pre-ordered my copy months ago and counted the days for the thing to arrive. While I obviously haven't read it cover to cover yet, as I am neck deep in a pile of about hundred "to be reads", sheer excitement led me to give it a skim last night, upon its arrival. This is an absolutely gorgeous book, with some great anecdotes about the genre and its "boom". It's worth the purchase based on the incredible archive therein of all the fantastic looking cover art alone. There's some speculation in the community of horror fiction readers that this may cause a renaissance in the market...which could be a great t...

I've wanted to read this one for a long while. Tom Deady nabbed the 2016 Bram Stoked for Superior Achievement in a first novel on this one, and garnered lots of praise for it in the horror community, by a lot of people whose opinions I respect. Thing is, 2016 was a hell of a year for first novels. There was some great stuff coming out, including one of my personal favorites, Mayan Blue, by the immensely talented Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason. Basically I wanted to know who the hell had the chops to beat that fanta stic book out. So, I got to my searching to get my hands on a copy...and the damn thing was sold out. Cemetery Dance put out a limited edition hardcover, a few hundred copies, and they were all gone. So, for me, Haven crawled to the dark, deepest caverns of my ever-loaded brain and to me, the real winner was Mayan Blue. 2017 rolls around and as things go, Haven is out in a much more attainable trade paperback, self published by the author. He was nice enough to se...

Not too long ago, Leigh Clark appeared on my radar as an author to get into. His first book, The Feeding, caused some pretty significant buzz in the ravenous 80s horror fiction community. That books sported some fantastic cover art, with some particularly brutal sequences adorning it's pages. While it was fairly pedestrian in it's presentation, the fact Clark writes very well, smearing his cookie-cutter characters with horrific gore and cruelty made it a fun, worthwhile read. Clark wrote four books in the genre, 1988's The Feeding, 1994's Evil Reincarnate, 1997's Carnivore and this, his 1991 follow-up to the fairly revered debut. Given the amount of fanfare that The Feeding generated, not to mention that I enjoyed that book, it was a pretty logical decision to move this one up to the top of my to-be-read pile. Blood Sabbath is the 418 page telling of a 16 year old girl who gets wrapped up in the Occult, unknowing summoning an evil demon that terrorizes her, her f...