Review: Horror Movies, The First 75 Years, Volume 1: The Mummy - David Whitehead

I always think of David Whitehead as a Western author, either under his real name or his pseudonym Ben Bridges, and he’s a top-notch Western writer, too. But he’s also written horror novels and he’s a long-time fan of the genre. How long-time I wasn’t really aware of until I read his recent non-fiction book, HORROR MOVIES: THE FIRST 75 YEARS, VOLUME 1: THE MUMMY.

I’m a horror fan, too, although on a somewhat limited basis. I tend to like the older stuff (no surprise there), including the classic Universal monster movies from the Thirties and Forties. As I’ve mentioned before, I saw a bunch of them on NIGHTMARE, the Saturday night monster movie showcase on one of the local TV stations, hosted in suitably creepy fashion by Bill Camfield as Gorgon. During the week, Camfield was also kid’s show host Icky Twerp, playing cartoons and Three Stooges shorts on SLAM-BANG THEATER. I loved both shows but had no idea Gorgon and Icky were actually the same guy.

I’ve wandered ’way off into the weeds of nostalgia. To get back to David Whitehead’s book, he’s a fan of the same era of horror movies as me, although his expertise extends up to the Hammer Films horror boom in the Fifties and Sixties. I like those movies, too, just not as much as the ones from Universal. Whitehead starts what promises to be a very entertaining series by focusing on movies featuring sinister mummies. I had no idea there was a mummy movie made in 1899, in the dawn of filmmaking. The subgenre really gets underway, though, with 1932’s THE MUMMY, starring Boris Karloff, and its assorted sequels. THE MUMMY is an excellent film, and Whitehead covers its story, cast, production details, and reception in fascinating detail. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this movie, its sequels, and other movies featuring mummies, most of which I’ve never seen. I’ve already made a list of several I intend to try to hunt up.

If you’re a fan of classic horror movies, I can’t recommend this volume highly enough. It’s written in a fast-moving, entertaining style and presents a lot of interesting information but never in a ponderous way. Honestly, it’s easy for a book like this to bog down in minutiae. Whitehead avoids that trap and delivers a fine book of movie history. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the books in this series, which will cover Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and other classic horror movie characters.

Creepy Archives, Volume 1 - Archie Goodwin, et al.

The black-and-white Warren horror magazines just didn’t show up on the newsstands where I grew up when I was a kid. The first Warren magazine I remember seeing was VAMPIRELLA #27 in 1973. I picked it up, enjoyed it, learned of the existence of CREEPY and EERIE, and began seeking them out. I enjoyed them all. In fact, one of the first times my writing ever saw print was a fan letter published in an issue of EERIE. But I was very late coming to these magazines and never saw the early issues, although I came across an occasional reprint of a story from them.

Now those early issues are being reprinted in very handsome volumes, so out of curiosity more than anything else, I picked up Volume One of the CREEPY ARCHIVES, which reprints issues #1-5 of the flagship Warren title. They have great covers by Frank Frazetta and Jack Davis. The artwork on the stories themselves is by Reed Crandell, Gray Morrow, Angelo Torres, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, Jack Davis, and Alex Toth. It’s just magnificent, stunning, however you want to describe it. Just great stuff, story after story.

Most of the scripts are by Archie Goodwin, who was also the editor of the magazine. Otto Binder contributes the scripts for two installments of an adaptation of his pulp series about Adam Link, Robot, and there are a few other stories by various hands. And here’s where I’m going to annoy some fans. As much as I love Archie Goodwin’s work (the Manhunter series he and Walt Simonson did is fantastic, and he wrote a lot of other great comics), I didn’t care much for the stories in this volume. These short, twist-ending tales are very formulaic and predictable, and even spacing them out over several months, as I did, the sameness bothered me. I know, I’m being hypocritical. Anybody who loves the Spicy pulps as much as I do shouldn’t be complaining about anything being formulaic. But that’s the way this book came across to me, great art but mediocre stories. Quite possibly you had to be there, and if I’d been buying the individual issues at the drugstore and reading them when they were new, I might feel completely differently about them.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of these magazines, this is a beautiful book and probably well worth your time and money. Whether I’ll continue picking up these Archives editions, I don’t know. I might give the second volume a try.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1941

FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES was primarily a reprint pulp, bringing back science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories originally written and published before such genres truly existed as we know them now. I seem to recall reading that some of the reprinted novels were abridged, but I don't know that for a fact. FFM was also noted for its good covers, many of them by Virgil Finlay including this one. As you can see, the lead stories in this issue are "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft and "Palos of the Dog Star Pack" by J.U. Giesy, neither of which I've ever read. There's also a short story by L. Patrick Greene, better known as the author of the African adventure series featuring a character called The Major, and a poem, apparently original in this issue, by Robert W. Lowndes. I really ought to read more of this stuff.

Now Available for Pre-Order: The Last Martian Chronicles - John Hegenberger

From the cold, rocky surface of Mars to the vast reaches of deep space, from the dusty pages of the pulps to the cutting edge medical technology of the future, the stories in John Hegenberger’s THE LAST MARTIAN CHRONICLES span the frontiers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Unlikely friends try to survive the dangers of future war in “Keys to the Kingdom”. A bizarre fate befalls a famous author in the alternate history story “Howard’s Toe”. Sinister forces are on the prowl in “Dead Dames in Dayton”. Alien visitors come to Earth with surprising results in “Last Contact”. And two races face a poignant destiny in “The Last Martian”. These stories and others from popular author John Hegenberger are filled with imagination, ingenuity, and heart.

Joe Frankenstein - Graham Nolan and Chuck Dixon

Joe Pratt is a pretty hapless case: 17 years old, living in a foster home because his parents were killed in an airplane crash, delivering pizza at night and struggling through school in the day. That all changes one snowy night in Buffalo when he makes a delivery to a house full of beautiful women who turn out to be vampires wanting to feed on him. Before that can happen, a giant but somehow urbane monster crashes in, dispatches the vampires, and tells a stunned Joe that his real name is Joe Frankenstein. The monster, of course, is the legendary Frankenstein's monster, who has spend centuries protecting the descendants of Victor Frankenstein.

This all happens quickly in the beginning of a very fast-paced tale originally published as a four-part mini-series. This collection adds a new ten-page prologue that establishes the history behind the on-going conflict in which Joe finds himself. The back cover calls it "an action-horror-adventure tale", and it's all of that and more, as there's plenty of dark humor (including a Sesame Street joke that you'll miss if you blink) and a sort of globe-trotting, international intrigue vibe. The monster, you see, is a tycoon (easy to make money when you have all the time in the world, he explains) who has all sort of high-tech weaponry and gadgets. He needs that because he's engaged in a long, bitter war with his renegade "bride", who now commands a vast supernatural criminal empire.

JOE FRANKENSTEIN was created by Graham Nolan, who provides the art and co-wrote the script, and Chuck Dixon, the other scripter on the project. It's great, over-the-top fun from start to finish, never taking itself too seriously as it races along at a breakneck pace. It's clearly only the first chapter in a much bigger story, and I hope the sequel(s) come along soon. If you're a comics and/or horror fan, I give it a high recommendation.

Now Available: Crazy Greta - David Hardy

The Netherlands in the 16th Century is wracked by civil and religious strife, but all Greta wants is to be left alone to run her tavern. The most dire prophecies of doom come true when the dead rise from their graves and set out on an apocalyptic campaign of terror, slaughtering everything in their path. Cast down into Hell still alive, with unlikely allies such as Christopher Marlowe and the Archangel Michael, armed with a sword and her trusty skillet, Greta sets out to do battle with hordes of demons, imps, and ultimately Satan himself. No one but Greta would be crazy enough to try to conquer Hell! 

Inspired by the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, this historical horror/fantasy novel by acclaimed author David Hardy is full of vivid imagery, compelling characters, and a towering, unstoppable protagonist in Crazy Greta. This is an unforgettable novel about the never-ending battle between Heaven and Hell and the depraved depths and heroic heights of humanity. 

David Hardy is the author of the novel PALMETTO EMPIRE and BROTHERS BY THE GUN AND OTHER TALES OF SAMARIA, KANSAS, as well as many other works of historical fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas.

(I'm very pleased to be able to help bring Dave Hardy's first novel back into print. Check it out!)

What Rough Beast - James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge

WHAT ROUGH BEAST is a new limited edition chapbook from James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge, with art by Keith Minnion, available from White Noise Press. It combines horror and sword and sorcery with a Western yarn, making for one of the weirder Weird Westerns you'll ever read. And it's top-notch work, as well.

The protagonist is Tom Morton, a deputy whose wife is on a stagecoach lost in a snowstorm. When he asks for help from the townspeople in looking for the coach, three of the four volunteers are strangers: Jonathan Crowley, a normal-looking hombre who is more than he seems; Slate, a mysterious and dangerous albino; and a huge man who calls himself Kharrn. No mister, just Kharrn.

This odd group sets out to look for the stagecoach, but there is more lurking in the snowstorm than a disabled vehicle. The cover art is a pretty good tip-off to what's waiting for our heroes. They find a lot more than Tom Morton expected, and the result is a bloody, epic battle in the snow with creatures made more dangerous by the fact that they're partially human.

WHAT ROUGH BEAST is a well-written, fast-moving tale that generates quite a bit of suspense before it explodes into action. Moore and Rutledge have crafted an excellent story with some great characters, and Keith Minnion's art and production match it. This is actually the first thing I've read by these two authors, but I have several more of their books and look forward to reading them soon.

Forgotten Books: The Essential Tomb of Dracula, Volume 1 - Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan

Since today is Halloween, it seems appropriate to write something about the longest-running and many would say the best comic book series about a vampire ever published. I'm referring, of course, to Marvel's THE TOMB OF DRACULA, which ran for 70 issues from 1972 to 1979. Recently I've been reading THE ESSENTIAL TOMB OF DRACULA, VOLUME 1, which reprints in black-and-white the first 25 issues of the comic book, plus one issue each of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT and GIANT-SIZED CHILLERS in which Dracula appears.

The creative team most associated with this title was Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, but while Colan handled the art from the first (and superbly, too), the writing on the first six issues was split equally between Gerry Conway, Archie Goodwin, and Gardner F. Fox. So it's actually Conway who introduces Frank Drake, one of Dracula's descendants, and his friend Clifton Graves, who makes the mistake of removing a stake from somewhere he shouldn't have and freeing Dracula to roam the earth again. Goodwin expands the cast of characters by introducing beautiful vampire hunter Rachel van Helsing and her Sikh assistant Taj. Frank, of course, joins in their quest to rid the world of Dracula. Fox sort of marks time in his two issues, then in #7 Marv Wolfman takes over the scripting and brings in Quincy Harker, another descendant of a character from Bram Stoker's novel. The wheelchair-bound Harker is the final regular member of the group, and once everyone is in place, the series really takes off.

Colan's atmospheric art is great, and it works really well in this black-and-white reprint. Superhero comics don't work as well in that format, I've found—that type of story really benefits from bright colors—but horror comics hold up just fine. Wolfman's scripts are top-notch, fast-moving morality plays that function as stand-alones much of the time but still manage to move the larger story arcs forward. Blade the Vampire-Slayer, who went on to have three movies made about him, is introduced in the tenth issue and will be a recurring character in the series for a long time.

I bought and read the whole run of THE TOMB OF DRACULA when it was new. I liked it then, but I think I enjoyed reading this reprint volume even more. Some of that is probably due to nostalgia, but really, these are just excellent yarns, and if you're a comics fan or a vampire fan and haven't read them, you definitely should check them out.

Forgotten Books: Black Horizon - Robert Masello

I don't remember seeing this horror novel when it came out from Jove in 1989, and Robert Masello's name is only vaguely familiar to me. But BLACK HORIZON turns out to be a pretty entertaining psychological horror yarn.

Jack Logan is a musician who plays in the orchestra for a newly opened Broadway show. It's opening night, in fact, when Jack saves the life of an old man who's been hit by a cab outside the theater. The old man actually dies, but when Jack touches him, he's able to go across to the Other Side and pull him back. This isn't the first time such a thing has happened—Jack saved the life of a friend of his the same way when both of them were kids—and this mysterious ability is probably connected to the fact that while Jack's mother was pregnant with him, she was terribly injured in a car crash and was kept alive by artificial means until he was born.

The incident on opening night brings Jack to the attention of a scientist who's investigating what happens when people die. It won't come as a surprise to anybody who's ever read a horror novel that the scientist turns out to be more than a little crazy. He's able to convince Jack to make more trips to the other side of death and back, which is okay until on one of those trips, something comes back with him...

Two things that work against BLACK HORIZON are its predictability and its slow pace. But Masello writes well enough to keep the reader interested, and Jack is a likable protagonist and you can't help but want to find out what's going to happen to him. And when Masello does finally crank up the action, it's pretty darned good. Everything comes to a satisfying conclusion, and I have to say I enjoyed BLACK HORIZON. The original edition is long out of print, but there's an e-book edition that's available. If you're a fan of psychological horror, it's worth reading.

Scream Queen and Other Tales of Menace - Ed Gorman

SCREAM QUEEN AND OTHER TALES OF MENACE is the latest collection of Ed Gorman's short fiction from the great Perfect Crime Books. As you'd expect, this is a fine bunch of stories that cross over into a number of genres, although given the title of the collection there's a thread of fear that runs through all of them. "Cages", "Duty", and "The Brasher Girl" (a novella that served as the inspiration for Gorman's novel CAGE OF NIGHT) are science fiction...or horror...or both, if you look at them right. Several stories deal with serial killers. Others feature everyday joes trapped in bad circumstances, like the poker-playing protagonists of "Out There in the Darkness", which Gorman expanded into the novel THE POKER CLUB. This story is just full of pure suspense. The title story "Scream Queen" involves three young men with dreams that may well be unattainable and an actress famous in some circles, anyway, and is more mainstream fiction than anything else. No matter what sort of tale it is, it's told in finely crafted, melancholy prose that goes straight to the heart.

Some of these stories were new to me and some I'd read before, but that doesn't really matter. Gorman's stories are endlessly rereadable because they're filled with fascinating characters and plenty of nuanced observations about the world in which we live. Every time I read one I've read before I see something else I'd never noticed or look at things in a different way than I did the first time through.

If you've never read Gorman's suspense and dark fantasy stories, SCREAM QUEEN AND OTHER TALES OF MENACE is the perfect place to start. If you're already a fan, you know you're in for a treat.

E-book on Amazon

Trade Paperback on Amazon

American Vampire Volume 4 - Scott Snyder

Even though I'm not the biggest fan of horror comics, I'm still reading and enjoying the collected editions of Scott Snyder's AMERICAN VAMPIRE, a comic that's almost as much historical fiction as it is horror.

Volume 4 collects three storylines from the comic. The first one, "The Beast in the Cave", is a Western, a prequel story that finds Skinner Sweet, who will later become the American Vampire of the title, and his adopted brother and soon-to-be nemesis Jim Book fighting on the same side as U.S. cavalrymen during the Apache Wars. As you might expect, a supernatural angle crops up and leads to plenty of bloody violence, although things don't really play out the way you might think they would. This arc has some nice artwork by European comics legend Jordi Bernet that reminds me of Joe Kubert's art.

The second storyline, "Death Race", has art by series co-creator Rafael Albuquerque and is set in California in 1954. The protagonist is a typical teenage delinquent and hot-rodder, only as usual things aren't what they appear. This JD has a secret that involves Skinner Sweet, and this four-issue arc features an epic chase and battle between the two of them.

A two-parter called "The Nocturnes" rounds out this collection and spins a yarn set in Alabama in 1954 that mixes doo-wop music, the Korean War, and a type of monster that's new to this series. The art is by Roger Cruz and Riccardo Burchielli.

All these stories were written by Scott Snyder, and the scripts are fast-paced, bleak, and occasionally punctuated by some very dark humor. I think there were too many flashbacks in "Death Race", which made the story a little hard to follow, but overall I enjoy Snyder's work and I like this series. I'm sure I'll continue to read these collected editions as they come out.

Witchery: A Duo of Weird Tales - Keith Chapman

I've been reading and enjoying Keith Chapman's Westerns written under the name Chap O'Keefe for several years, but his recent e-book WITCHERY: A DUO OF WEIRD TALES proves that he does a top-notch job with other genres as well. After an interesting introduction that addresses the genesis of these tales, he produces a fine Clark Ashton Smith pastiche set in Smith's evil-haunted French province Averoigne, "Black Art in Yvones". A young protagonist, a beautiful blonde, and a sinister femme fetale even give this tale a slight noirish feel. In the second novelette in this collection, Chapman ventures into sword-and-sorcery territory with "Wildblood and the Witch Wife", featuring a very likable pair of adventurers reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It's set in historical England rather than a fantasy world, but there's still plenty of sorcery and action.

These are excellent stories and I'm looking forward to more fantasy from Chapman. In the meantime, this duo is well worth the very affordable price.

"That Damned Coyote Hill"/"Deadland, USA: Mindless Consumerism" - Heath Lowrance

Heath Lowrance's debut novel THE BASTARD HAND is one of the best books I've read so far this year, so I had high hopes for a couple of his short stories I read recently, "That Damned Coyote Hill" and "Deadland, USA: Mindless Consumerism", both of which are available as e-books on Amazon.

"That Damned Coyote Hill" is a Weird Western, a crossover genre that's a lot older than some people think ("The Horror From the Mound", anyone?), but it's enjoying a well-deserved resurgence right now. Some of the new stories I've read have suffered from being unbalanced: the horror elements are strong and done well, but the Western elements aren't, or vice versa. Lowrance, however, does a fine job with both. You've got a mysterious gunfighter on a mission of vengeance, an isolated settlement, a trio of fairly formidable bad guys, a kidnapped little girl . . . but you've also got an even more mysterious old Indian, townspeople who don't act quite right, strange creatures that haunt the prairie . . . mix that together and you have a very entertaining yarn that's an excellent example of the Weird Western. I'm hoping that Lowrance's protagonist in this story, the gunfighter called Hawthorne (named after Nathaniel Hawthorne, perhaps?) will soon make a return appearance.

Not having read a lot of zombie fiction and written even less (one unsold novelette that's now lost), I hardly qualify as an expert on that genre, but it seems to me that zombie fiction can be viewed as an oddball variation of the old "man vs. nature" plot, only in this case it would be the "man vs. unnature" plot. But a horde of hungry zombies is as much a vast, inexorable threat as a flood, a forest fire, or an earthquake. You can't really identify with them, they have no back-story (or rather, they have so many back-stories that it's too unwieldy to deal with them), and so the writer has to focus on their potential victims, as Steven Booth and Harry Shannon do so well in THE HUNGRY, which I blogged about a few days ago.

"Deadland, USA: Mindless Consumerism" is definitely the first in a series, and Lowrance makes it work by giving us a really likable narrator/protagonist, 19-year-old would-be slacker Sammy, who's forced to grow up and take over the leadership of a small group of survivors on the run from a zombie apocalypse. The supporting characters are good, too, but Sammy really carries this story, which reads like the first chapter in an on-going serialized novel. The focus is very tight, the reader doesn't really know what's going on beyond this small group of characters, but I'm sensing some sort of epic structure behind it all. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I also have Lowrance's short story collection DIG TEN GRAVES (a great title), but I haven't gotten to it yet. Between THE BASTARD HAND and these two stories, though, I'm very close to saying that whatever Heath Lowrance wants to write, I want to read it. Highly recommended. 

Dark Harvest - Norman Partridge

Since today is Halloween, it seemed appropriate to post about a Halloween novel. I decided to read Norman Partridge's DARK HARVEST for two reasons: he has a reputation as a very good writer, and it was handy, sitting in a stack just a couple of feet from my computer. It was a good choice.

DARK HARVEST is one of those novels that takes place in only a few hours of time, something I always like. Set in 1963 in a quiet Midwestern town, it's about a strange ritual called the Run. It seems that every Halloween, a pumpkin-headed monster known as the October Boy rise from the cornfields outside of town and for reasons unknown tries to reach the church in the middle of town. Opposing him are all the boys from the ages of sixteen to nineteen, who compete to see who can kill the October Boy (or Sawtooth Jack or Ol' Hacksaw Face, as the monster is sometimes called).

To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with that setup. It seemed like something out of a low-budget horror movie (not that there's anything wrong with that). But Partridge turns it into something else with a number of nice plot twists and some excellent writing. I usually don't care much for books written in present tense, but if an author can make it work, I don't mind, and Partridge does. A little more sense of the time period might have been nice, but the story hurtles along so well, that's not a real problem.

This is a fairly recent book, coming out in a hardback from Cemetery Dance in 2006 and a trade paperback from Tor in 2007 (the edition I read). I don't know if there's a mass-market edition, but there may be. It's well worth reading, and if you're in the mood for a Halloween novel tonight and have a copy on your shelves, you should definitely give it a try.

Book Alert: The Imposter #0: Suiting Up - Richard Lee Byers

Matt Brown is just an ordinary guy...until alien invaders attack the Earth, and humanity's superheroes go down fighting. By chance, Matt falls heir to their powers, but how can a fake hero save the world when the real ones have already failed? To find out, join him on a quest through a post-apocalyptic world where alien horrors and human supervillains battle for dominion. The Impostor is the new superhero series by veteran fantasy and horror writer Richard Lee Byers, a frequent contributor to the Forgotten Realms universe.


(This short story preview is a lot of fun, and you can't beat the price.  It's free, and you can find it right here.  Byers is a fine writer, and I look forward to the rest of the entries in this series.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Vampire's Ghost

Somebody on the PulpMags group mentioned this movie favorably a few weeks ago. I’d never heard of it before, so I decided to give it a try. When I think about Republic Pictures, I don’t think about horror films. Republic means Westerns and serials, of course. And THE VAMPIRE’S GHOST definitely has some Western and serial connections.


One of the villains is played by the great Roy Barcroft, the bad guy or chief henchman in many a Roy Rogers movie, and Western fixture Grant Withers plays a priest. There’s even a saloon brawl, albeit a brief one. The movie was directed by Leslie Selander, who directed a lot of B-Westerns, and written by John K. Butler and Leigh Brackett. Butler went from a career writing wacky, hardboiled detective stories for the pulps to writing wacky, hardboiled Western yarns for the movies. Brackett, of course, is a legend, and this movie was some of her first film work.


So with a pedigree like that, you’d think that THE VAMPIRE’S GHOST would at least be worth watching, and here’s the good news . . . it is. It’s a really nice little low-budget thriller, set in the African river port town of B’kunda. An Englishman named Webb Fallon owns a bar and casino there, and there’s a rubber plantation nearby managed by the stalwart Roy Kendrick.


When some mysterious murders in the area spook the natives and threaten production on the plantation, Kendrick decides to get to the bottom of the killings. He enlists Fallon to help him, which is maybe not the best idea in the world since Fallon is actually the 400-year-old vampire who’s responsible for the deaths. This is revealed almost immediately, so it’s not much of a spoiler. It doesn’t take long for Kendrick to find out what’s going on, either, but he can’t tell anybody, because Fallon, who has befriended him and doesn’t want to kill him, mesmerizes him into not revealing his secret.


This is an extremely pulpish yarn, right down to a final showdown in an ancient jungle temple, and it probably would have been very much at home in a 1940s issue of WEIRD TALES. The screenplay by Butler and Brackett races right along, ably abetted by Selander’s efficient direction. Having made a career out of B-movies, Selander had to be very accustomed to shooting quickly. The performances are good, especially that of John Abbott as Webb Fallon, who manages to be both sympathetic and suavely evil at the same time. As a tormented, angsty vampire, he’s something of a forerunner of all the romantic hero bloodsuckers we have running around in books, movies, and TV today. Also, one of the highlights comes early in the movie in the form of a wild, erotic dance done by the beautiful Adele Mara, who is dark and exotic in this movie, rather than blond and wholesome like she is in many of her films. This dance, which takes place in Fallon’s casino, is hot stuff and ends with Mara looking defiantly right into the camera. It’s a quick shot, but very effective.


All in all, I found THE VAMPIRE’S GHOST to be very entertaining. It’s available on Netflix to watch on-line, and at a brisk 55 minutes, it’s well worth your time.

The Heretic - Joseph Nassise

The men’s adventure genre, combined with horror and the supernatural, continues to make a strong comeback in the form of e-books, what with the success of THE DEAD MAN and now this book, the first in the Templar Chronicles series. Not surprisingly, Joseph Nassise is one of the authors who will be writing a Dead Man book, and after reading THE HERETIC, I’m really looking forward to it.


But to get to the book at hand, THE HERETIC is former cop Cade Williams, who is now a Knight Commander in the Knights Templar, which, unknown to the public at large, has evolved over the centuries into a large, well-armed, and well-organized paramilitary force that battles supernatural threats all over the world. As the book opens, various Templar strongholds are under attack by a group of evil sorcerers known at the Council of Nine, who are trying to steal powerful religious relics in the custody of the Templars, including the Spear of Destiny.


These are pretty familiar elements, but what makes the book work splendidly is Nassise’s strong sense of pace and storytelling, along with an interesting and very likable protagonist in Cade, who possesses the ability to move between this world and the next, the realm between life and death. Cade’s tragic past – he lost his wife to supernatural evil, along with one of his eyes – haunts him and makes him a figure feared even by his allies at times. The closest of those allies, the three top men in Echo Team, the combat squad Cade commands, are also well-developed characters, especially Sean Duncan, who has secrets of his own.


Nassise keeps the reader turning the pages (or the e-book equivalent) all the way to a spectacular final confrontation in the Louisiana swamps. I don’t know about you, but commandos armed with machine guns and swords fighting a pitched battle against demons and revenants with the fate of the world possibly at stake is my kind of showdown.


Oddly enough, THE HERETIC reminded me a little of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., with two secret organizations battling each other, and the Templar strongholds, with their underground tunnels and sliding doors, really seem like something you’d find behind Del Floria’s Tailor Shop. And you know I was and still am a huge fan of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., so I was bound to like this book. I’ve already bought the next two books in the series. Highly recommended.

Cast in Dark Waters - Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli

How long has it been since you read a good, old-fashioned, swashbuckling pirate yarn? Well, neighbor, that’s too long, as they used to say on the Wolf Brand Chili commercials. What you need to do is read CAST IN DARK WATERS by Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli, which is a pirate yarn . . . and more.


Gorman and Piccirilli have come up with a fine protagonist in the young woman known as Crimson, a beautiful, redheaded female pirate in the Caribbean sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century. She’s hired by a tobacco planter from Virginia and the man’s wife to retrieve the couple’s daughter, who has run off with a pirate who makes his headquarters on an island that’s supposed to be cursed.


Because this is as much a horror tale as it is a pirate story, you know things aren’t going to go particularly well on this mission, and sure enough, they don’t. But there’s plenty of pulpish goodness along the way, including swordfights. You know I love me some swordfights.


Gorman and Piccirilli have done a great job on this novella, which was originally published as a limited edition hardcover. I missed out on that edition and have wanted to read it ever since, so as soon as it became available as a very affordable e-book, I grabbed a copy. It’s available at all the usual outlets, including the publisher’s website, and if you enjoy high adventure yarns with more than a touch of creepiness and some fine characters, I highly recommend CAST IN DARK WATERS.

The Demon Cross - Nathan Shumate

Nathan Shumate runs the excellent Pulp of the Day website. I’ve been a subscriber to it for years, getting a cover image in my email every day. Not all of them are exactly what purists like myself consider pulps, but hey, I love vintage paperbacks and men’s sweat mags, too, so it’s all good. Very good, in fact.


But in addition to this fine work, Shumate is also a writer, and his new e-book, THE DEMON CROSS, is a top-notch horror/private eye yarn. PI and single mother Rennie Avalon tends to get involved in cases that have a supernatural angle to them, and in this one she’s hired to recover an ancient book that contains dangerous information. (That’s right. It’s a wandering book job.) Naturally things get both complicated and dangerous. How could they be anything but with neo-Nazis and demons involved?


The pace in this one really races right along, which I always like, and Shumate does a good job with the characters as well. Despite all the fantastic goings-on, Rennie Avalon doesn’t come across as some sort of super-heroine but rather more of a realistic character who’s reasonably tough when she needs to be but certainly not perfect. The supporting cast consisting of her daughter and various people who help her with her cases is well-drawn, too.


THE DEMON CROSS reminds me of the pilot episode of a good TV series. Shumate has more Rennie Avalon novels coming, and I plan to read them. Recommended.

A Host of Shadows - Harry Shannon

I don’t know Harry Shannon well, but we have a lot of good mutual friends and have had stories in some of the same anthologies. I also hadn’t read much of his work until now, but I just finished the massive collection, A HOST OF SHADOWS, which has been nominated for a Stoker Award by the Horror Writers of America.


Despite that nomination, there are quite a few stories in A HOST OF SHADOWS that aren’t what you’d think of as traditional horror. You got your Westerns, your war stories, your crime and suspense stories to go along with plenty of stories that definitely are horror yarns. What they all have in common, though, is that they’re very dark and very well-written. Shannon’s clearly a master of the terse and hardboiled.


Another thing I like about this collection is that a number of the stories take place in the West and Southwest, and Shannon does an excellent job of portraying the bleak high desert country that manages to be both starkly beautiful and depressingly ugly at the same time.  He's written a number of mystery novels with the same setting, and I plan to read those as soon as I get a chance.


So I think the Stoker nomination for this collection is well-deserved, and if you haven’t read Harry Shannon’s work yet, A HOST OF SHADOWS would be an excellent place to start. Highly recommended.


(Harry Shannon is a member of the Top Suspense Group.)