Download the radio adaptation of Gary A. Braunbeck's "Return to Mariabronn" (from Haunted Legends edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas)

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of the short ghost story "Return to Mariabronn," available in the new anthology Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas. Braunbeck has spearheaded a audio adaptation of his story, and it is available for download just in time for Halloween.

"Return to Mariabronn" was broadcast on Ohio radio stations and features the voices of the author, Braunbeck himself; his wife, author Lucy A. Snyder; and some students from Ohio State University. To download the mp3, simply visit the Ohio State University Media Manager.

Great Halloween listening!

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Farm by Scott Nicholson (Southern horror)

For more of Friday's Forgotten Books, visit Pattinase.

For a handful of years, horror author Scott Nicholson released a paperback original each year through Pinnacle Books. He quickly became one of the genre's "writers to watch." Recently, he has embraced the viral marketing potential of electronic books and has begun to self-publish a selection of his high-quality horror fiction.

His latest novel is Drummer Boy, though he is probably still best known for his Bram Stoker Award–nominated debut, The Red Church (recently reprinted by his own Haunted Computer Books). He also has a free ebook of tips for writers, called Write Good or Die.

This review covers his 2006 novel The Farm, one of his paperback originals, now out of print (and thus, by my own definition, "forgotten") but readily available used. One wonders if his fellow North Carolinians appreciate how he portrays their home region in his novels, but the number of readers who do is still growing, and I am one of them.

Katy Logan and her tween daughter Jett Draper are trying to start over. After divorcing her husband Mark because of his drug addiction, Katy was looking for a more stable type of fellow to help raise her daughter through these trying years. She found Gordon Smith, a theological scholar living on his ancestral farm in the small town of Solom, North Carolina (a town patterned after rural Todd, NC).

Gordon's family has a long history in Solom. His first wife (whom Nicholson has rather cleverly named Rebecca) died mysteriously five years ago, but her spirit still haunts the farm, leaving the scent of lilacs in her wake. And Gordon's great-great-great-grandfather was Harmon Smith, a circuit-riding preacher who was killed by members of his own church and still, 200 years after his death, reappears regularly in town — so regularly, in fact, that the locals have gotten quite used to his presence (though he always takes one of them with him each time he comes through).

If that weren't odd enough, Gordon's goats have also begun acting peculiarly — especially in their newly carnivorous eating habits — and his scarecrow, made to appear as lifelike as possible, doesn't tend to stay where you leave it. Does the stranger in the black hat have anything to do with these odd occurrences, or is he just one more of them?

The Farm is not a "barn-burner." Nicholson does not follow the typical horror style here (lots of extreme scenes with a little down time in between), opting instead for a more thriller-like progression where things build and build to a climactic payoff. Nicholson leads us leisurely into these events, always leaving plenty of room for description, character thoughts, and history. Life in Solom is usually pretty slow, and Nicholson's prose offers a taste of that same feeling.

That is not to say that The Farm isn't damned frightening. Nicholson maintains a strong sense of dread, fear, and foreboding, as each character responds to these new events in different ways. Luckily, there are enough recent arrivals in town for us to also experience the old events through new eyes.

Like Stephen King, Nicholson has a tendency to offer up quite a bit of information about each character as he introduces them before moving on with the story. Whether it is too much is up to the individual, but I find this very appealing — and in some ways comforting — as I get to know each person as an individual before he or she is put in mortal danger. But more viscerally focused readers who like a lot of action may find it frustrating that the first 100 pages or so of The Farm is mostly Nicholson setting the stage for what is to follow.

Nicholson has a wonderful eye (and ear) for the details of rural Appalachia; he writes of its pluses and minuses with the same affection his fellow North Carolinian Sharyn McCrumb gives to her mystery novels. Both authors aspire to write more than just another typical genre entry, opting instead to bring a taste of literature into their usually pulpy arena.

The Farm has a more literary feel than the average horror novel. Nicholson even incorporates a good deal of folklore, from Appalachian to ancient Jewish to modern urban legends. The ending is somewhat unsatisfactory, and the book as a whole could have used a little more tightening, but generally speaking, I enjoyed the languid flow of the story. It reminded me of the slow pace of small-town life — one of the few things, other than the mountains, that I miss about living in the South.

Other Worlds by Barbara Michaels (audio book read by Barbara Rosenblat)

Some interesting discoveries can be made through experimentation. I'd been experiencing a shortage of audiobooks for my hour-long commute when I saw one on the giveaway table where I work. I was aware of author Barbara Michaels as a romantic-suspense author, but I had only read one of her mysteries written as Elizabeth Peters and had not pursued any more. But any port in a storm, as they say, so I snatched it up — hardly missing a step, in fact — as I made my way out to the car that evening.

On my way home, I popped it in the cassette player (I drive a 2002 model), figuring to go ahead an try it out. If I didn't like it, I would drop it off again the next morning. To my surprise, I was completely enthralled by the opening paragraph. The tone, the irreverence, the mythic nature of the setup, all really spoke to me, not least of which due to their similarity to Rod Serling's introductions from The Twilight Zone:

The scene is the smoking room of an exclusive men's club, familiar through film and fiction even to those who have been denied admittance to such precincts because of deficiencies of sex or social status.... The tall windows are draped in plum-red plush, shutting out the night air and the sounds of traffic on the street without — the traffic, perhaps, of hansom cabs and horse-drawn carriages. For this is no real establishment; it exists outside of time and space, in the realm of imagination — one of the worlds that might have been.

Other Worlds begins with a meeting of the minds: Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Frank Podmore, and Nandor Fodor all gather in the sitting room of this mythical men's club for their usual discussion of what is today called paranormal research. This time, someone has brought a guest, and Houdini offers up the story of the Bell Witch (a true story that has inspired a number of books and films, most recently An American Haunting).

The story, as Houdini tells it, is wonderfully eerie and filled with surprises as the ghost goes from mere noise-making to verbal and physical abuse. Subsequently, the others gathered each offer his opinion on the real explanation for the seemingly supernatural events.

Later, a different guest is invited, a female mystery writer who presents a similar case (based on the Phelps haunting) rewritten into a first-person narrative told from the point of view of a newly remarried woman and her family's supernatural experience with their new Connecticut home. Houdini wryly remarks that the guest would not have been allowed were this not a fictional gentlemen's club.

Despite a weak, abrupt ending, Other Worlds is an entertaining examination of paranormal occurrences given in an engaging manner. I especially enjoyed the narrative conceit (which is all it is — no effort seems to have been taken to create any genuine characterizations) of the discussion among the famous names of early paranormal research. There's nothing of real substance, and likely nothing new for anyone already familiar with these stories, but it's an interesting way to while away the time between work and home.

Halloween Week: Ghost Stories Deck by S.E. Schlosser (illustrated by Paul Hoffman)

We've all been there. You're at a Halloween party, or some other equally spooky occasion, and somebody asks for a scary story. Everybody looks at you, and you draw a blank! You can't even remember how the story about the hook goes, let alone some terrifying tale that your audience hasn't heard before.

Well, never again. Not with the Ghost Stories Deck. Just shuffle the deck, draw one of the 50 flash cards, and you're the life of the party again (even if it's just a party of one)!

OK, maybe not, but author S.E. Schlosser and illustrator Paul Hoffman have certainly assembled an interesting novelty: an actual deck of cards, each one containing an entire spooky story on front and back. The 50 stories in the Ghost Stories Deck are culled from the duo's series of books entitled Spooky Stories, and each one is rated on a skull system according to its potential scariness. (Though of course how scary they are to you and yours will depend on the individual.)

The stories themselves aren't always written out in the most effectively frightening manner. ("Don't Turn on the Light" perhaps comes closest.) But the pieces are all there for aspiring storytellers to make the tale their own and tell it in a manner that suits their audience, whether around a campfire, at a slumber party, or any other gathering where the call arises for a spooky tale told well. (And, in case you need a refresher, the Ghost Stories Deck also includes the one about the hook.)

Halloween Week: The Two Sams: Ghost Stories by Glen Hirshberg (novella collection)

This review originally appeared in somewhat different form on The Green Man Review. Copyright 2004. Reprinted with permission.

"Any resemblance to places living or dead is sort of coincidental." — from the dedication page of The Two Sams

This collection from author Glen Hirshberg is a welcome refreshment from what has become a decreasingly represented subgenre: the ghost story. In the introduction of The Two Sams, British horror author Ramsey Campbell compares Hirshberg's output to the seminal work of M.R. James, Fritz Leiber, and Thomas Ligotti, and Campbell is willing to "stake [his] reputation that history will hail him as a crucial contributor to the field." That's quite a high expectation for a collection of five novellas, but Hirshberg appears to be up to the test.

From the beginning of The Two Sams, Hirshberg shows that, above all, he knows how to set a mood. He seems to rely on a type of sneaky eerieness to carry these spectral stories through to their seldom predictable conclusions. "Struwwelpeter" is a particularly good example of this practice.

On the surface, the narrator in "Struwwelpeter" appears to merely be relating an adolescent that-one-time-I-got-really-scared reminiscence. The author, however, makes sure the reader understands (if only subconsciously) that these events will build into something else and it's not going to be pretty. "Struwwelpeter" was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and was selected for inclusion in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #15.

Often, as in "Shipwreck Beach," the fright comes from an unexpected place, with Hirshberg using the stage magician's trick of misdirection to get the reader thinking he is being led towards one conclusion while Hirshberg devises an alternate. It's not always obvious where he is going, but he always plays fair and only one of the five stories in The Two Sams is anything less than immensely satisfying.

"Mr. Dark's Carnival" is a particular favorite. It concerns an urban legend come to life and contains a description of a Halloween "haunted house" that had my nerves rattling. Glen Hirshberg can host me on Halloween anytime. "Mr Dark's Carnival" was nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award and appeared in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #14.

The next story, "Dancing Men," is the only clunker in The Two Sams, seeming to go nowhere in the space of forty pages. I've read other stories involving the Holocaust and not been as unaffected by it as in this one. Even so, it was chosen for inclusion in Ellen Datlow's ghost story anthology, The Dark (not too surprising given how Datlow has nurtured Hirshberg's career throughout, not least by her tenure as the coeditor of those Year's Best Fantasy and Horror books previously mentioned).

Luckily, the final and title story, "The Two Sams," is short and instantly compelling. It begins by addressing the ghosts in our memories but soon reveals itself to be about more tangible fears. Coming after the disappointment of "Dancing Men," it makes a terrific closer by reminding the reader of Hirshberg's strengths, one of which is his ability to cover a lot of ground in a few pages.

Taken individually, each tale in The Two Sams offers a chance to appreciate the subtleties that aren't apparent upon first reading, allowing them to simmer subconsciously until the flavors steam forth. Reading them all at once would be like an unnecessary trip back to the buffet — an overwhelming sense of too much, too soon. Tread slowly, and savor.