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

Pray, Serpent's Prey. I love that title. I love that artwork. I could have and wished to love the book. But the best I could come up with is, it'll do. OH...there's some spoilers below...so if you don't want to be spoiled, go read the book first. It'll do, if you've never read another horror book from 1988. It'll do, if you've read everything else and need your fix. It will do if you're due for something to read on your flight, that's particularly turbulent and you want to keep your mind off the turbulence. T hat last part was me. I was on a flight from Tampa, from a trip to visit some family members, namely my father, and brought a big stack of things to read with me on the trip. This was the last book I read on the trip... which, of note, while I was there, I hit up a fantastic used bookstore in St. Pete, that was just amazing. I ended up grabbing 14 books while there! Some really cool and hard to find ones at that! All of which will inevit...

I've been singing the praise of R. Patrick Gates since I first read him, just last year. He's quickly become an author I feel compelled to read all of the work of, and have since bought up every title I can get my hand on. I reached out to him to find a bit more about the background of his career and some of backstory on these wonderful books. If you haven't checked out Grimm Memorials or Fear or R. Patrick Gates in general...you're missing out.  Check out what Gates' had to say about his career, his work and his future! Undivine Interventions: Hello and thanks for doing this! I am a huge fan of your work, so this is an extra special interview for me. To any readers out there who may not know you, please share who you are and what type of work you publish/are most well known for? R. Patrick Gates: I publish under the name R. Patrick Gates, and have been a published author since 1989 when my first novel, FEAR, was published by New American L...

Let us get it out of the way. There are so many bummers in Kind Nepenthe. It's a downward spiral through and through. The biggest bummer for me, however, is that I didn't get to reading this last year, when it came out, because it easily would have made my best of 2017. I'd actually heard of the novel around its time of release, and it's concept lured me in for sure, but as things go it fell off my radar. Lo and behold, the author reached out to have me review it and what a lucky reader I am. Kind Nepenthe is a harrowing book, unflinching in it's look at drug culture, human behavior and the unfortunate demise that often grasps those wrapped up in it all. Addiction, human relationships and abandonment are all heavily studied here, with a strong nuance of supernatural horror. Think two parts Requiem for a Dream, one part The Shining and one part modern-day hipster culture exploration. If you think that's a lofty description for a book to live up to, check it ...

The absolute best part of running this blog is easily the exposure I get to authors that escaped me, both those currently writing and those who disappeared. Through this exposure, I'm lucky to have found some of my new favorite authors and books...it's a great thing. R. Patrick Gates has become one of those under-the-radar winners that I am so fortunate to have been exposed to through recommendation from friends I have made through the readership of Undivine Interventions. For that, I am forever grateful. Gates is exactly what I want to read, delivered how I want to read it. He simply writes perfectly to my palat e's taste. Pacing is perfect, prose is clean, and an uncanny ability to captivate me in even the most mundane moments. A criticism I've read is his characterization is lacking, but I find it to work perfectly for his writing style. The at-times questionable decisions characters make in his work (and let's be honest-just about every other piece of genre...

Douglas Clegg. Very prolific, pretty highly revered and currently living in my state, according to his Facebook page. Qualifies for to-be-read status for sure. And so it was. Goat Dance ended up in my queue almost a year ago as the place to start with Clegg. The author's first novel, a tremendously hokey-gorgeous cover, reviews alluding to lots of gruesome gore, and nominated for Stoker in the time of it's release...all solidifying facts as the place to begin checking out Clegg. Problem was this...last summer, when I originally started reading it, I had just come off quite a few straight-forward breakneck paced books, most of which were to the brim with gore, which at that particular point in time was exactly what I was looking for. Goat Dance just isn't that. In fact, it's a bit jarring in it's sporadic storytelling at first, takes a bit to get into. So, it went back to the shelves, and I picked up something else more suited to my taste at the time. It circled...