Next SFF Author: Tim Horvath

Series: Horror

I Am Not A Serial Killer: This one sticks with you

I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells

First novels by new authors are like surprise packages that come in the mail: you don’t know what you’ll find inside, not really, even if there was advance hype. Sometimes you find something so unappealing you wonder that anyone could have thought it was for you. Other times you get a teenaged sociopath who’s fighting hard not to become a serial killer despite his deep-seated wish to create dead bodies, and then you know you’ve got Dan Wells’s I Am Not A Serial Killer.

Let the Right One In: A bleak and chilly horror novel

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is a bleak and chilly horror novel that evokes classic Stephen King works like Salem’s Lot. Lindqvist is a Swedish writer and the book is set in a planned community in northern Sweden, called Blackeberg, in 1981. The novel follows several different point of view characters as the events that will change the community forever begin to unfold.

From the beginning,

The Glister: A literary horror novel

The Glister by John Burnside

Reading The Glister by John Burnside was like opening a perfectly crafted wooden box and finding inside a set of components, nested into cognac-colored velvet. Some components were made of finely worked gold and brass; some were polished wood; some were ethereal blown glass; some were made of jewels and bone. Usually, components like these fit together to form a whole: a telescope, a kaleidoscope or a theodolite. Try as I would, though, I could not get the components of The Glister to merge into one coherent whole.

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine: Too much for my delicate senses

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine by Peter Straub

Ballard, a wealthy businessman, and Sandrine, his much younger lover, are cruising down the Amazon River in a mysterious yacht. The crew is never seen, blank-eyed natives watch the boat from the river’s shores, and there seems to be a dangerous predator in the river. The dimensions of the yacht don’t make sense, the delicious food is unidentifiable, and it’s not clear how long Ballard and Sandrine have been on the boat.

Presumably, they’re taking a vacation somewhere out of the reach of Ballard’s clients and Sandrine’s husband,

Magazine Monday: Granta 117, Horror

Granta strikes me as an unusual place to find horror fiction; it normally is home to the toniest of literary fiction. But Issue 117 is entitled “Horror,” so I thought I’d see what a literary magazine’s vision of this genre is.

As it turns out, the issue is a lot more about horror in real life than it is about the type of horror that is more safely tucked away in my imagination. Tom Bamforth’s nonfiction essay about war in Sudan, “The Mission,” presents a picture one wishes were only imagined,

Black Light: A refreshing mix of horror and urban fantasy

Black Light by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan & Stephen Romano

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan wrote the screenplays for Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI, Saw 3D, and The Collector, which Dunstan also directed. Currently, they are filming The Collection — a sequel to The Collector — and have written Piranha 3DD, which came out this Thanksgiving from Dimension Films. Black Light is their debut novel.

December 5th, 2011. Robert Thompson´s rating: 4 | Horror | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper: This is for a limited audience

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch is justly famous for writing the scariest shower scene in history, even if it was Alfred Hitchcock’s movie that introduced it to a broader audience. Bloch is the author of Psycho, which introduced us to the cross-dressing, multiple personality-mass murder Norman Bates.

Over several decades Bloch wrote crime fiction, thrillers and horror. One recurring theme was that of the unsolved murders in Whitechapel, London in 1888, and the unknown killer with the nickname “Jack the Ripper.”

Subterranean Press has gathered together a collection of Bloch’s Ripper-themed work called Yours Truly,

A Book of Tongues: A strong talent is at work here

A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files

A western horror story full of gay gunslingers and the Pinkerton men they seduce – sometimes you can understand why people ask writers where they get their ideas, because Gemma Files sure has a humdinger of one with this first novel. Throw in some Mayan mythology and a lot of magic, and you’ve got a plot that comes at you so fast and furiously that you have to put the book down just to catch your breath.

A Book of Tongues is Volume One of the HEXSLINGER Series,

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters: An elegant horror collection

Mr. Gaunt by John Langan

We are living in a Golden Age of the short story of the fantastic, as is ably demonstrated by John Langan in his first collection of short stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. Langan writes the sort of psychological horror that reminds one of both Henry James and M.R. James, as Elizabeth Hand points out in her introduction to this collection. Each story is elegantly written, with craft evident in every sentence.

Magazine Monday: Black Static, Issue 24

We thought that Halloween was the perfect occasion on which to combine Magazine Monday with Horrible Monday and bring you a review of a horror magazine. Black Static is a British horror magazine notable not only for the high quality of its fiction, but also for its great commentary and extensive reviews of horror films and books. This was my first experience reading the magazine, but my plan is now to subscribe, because this is great stuff.

Simon Bestwick’s story,

Next SFF Author: Tim Horvath

Previous SFF Author: Anthony Horowitz

We have reviewed 8297 fantasy, science fiction, and horror books, audiobooks, magazines, comics, and films.

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