Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors

This anthology's theme is horror stories that have some connection to shopping malls, those dying bastions of consumerism. Not that consumerism is dead, mind you. It's that we're transitioning from roaming their vast corridors of myriad wares to surfing the digital versions on our phones and laptops. To wit, the editors thought that the demise of shopping malls would make for an excellent theme for a horror anthology. And I thought so too.

The stories cover a wide gamut of horror sub-genres, so it isn't all about gore. There's a "Content Warnings" section—something I've never seen in a horror anthology—which I thought was odd. I mean, it's horror. If your mental health is such that certain things will trigger a traumatic emotional reaction, maybe you shouldn't be reading horror. I know that there are certain aspects that I won't read because of my issues. So I guess a content warning is considerate of the authors, can one find it before purchasing it?

Author representation is quite diverse. While North American authors are present, there are stories from African and Asian authors. Also, there are many non-binary authors in this collection.

Ok, onto the stories. Of the 22 stories in this collection, I liked 15 of them. Of those that I didn't enjoy, a good deal of them were too focused on gender identity, with the mall serving as mere setting. A couple of the others were too esoteric or allegorical to connect with.

On with the good stuff! The opening story, "Hard to Be a Mall God," was excellent. It deals with a demonically possessed escalator. "The Intercessor" shows how retail associates deal with trollish customers. "Why I Won't Eat at the Food Court" is part of the Generation Dead series. It drags in some cosmic horror for teen mutant superheroes to deal with but doesn't forget to add a dash of humor. "A Plague Upon Both Our Houses" is Romeo and Juliet with Zombies in a mall. "A Quick Trip to Ryan's" delves into masochism on a whole another level. "Kim, Ray, Trey, and Morgan" delves into drugs as a mind expanding experience with a dash of cosmic horror.

Some stories confront serious matters. "You Must Drop Buy" tackles the subject of rampant materialism and false promises made by deceptive marketing. In "Poseurs," a teen girl deals with her father's suicide by re-enacting a drama with mannequins.

In case anyone feels I'm being unfair to non-binary character stories, there were good stories that had non-binary characters and authors. These stories didn't lose sight of the objective. For example, "The Basement of Crowley's Artefacts and Interests of the Occult" has some non-binary teens dealing with demonic invocation in the supply room of an odd store in the mall. "Cherry Cola Lips" features a woman reflecting on her first crush back in high school, a girl who wouldn't come out and later disappeared. Rumors are that she was murdered, but the truth is stranger.

My favorite story was the closer, "The Temple of All." Makoma is forced by ritual to take her dead husband's remains into the ancient ossuary. It's a post-apocalyptic story with a touch of Handmaid's Tale where the ultimate act of rebellion is to live.

Yes, I'm glad I read this anthology. While I wish some of the stories were better, the good stories made it worth the price and my time.

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Full Disclosure: I backed this book on Kickstarter and received a digital copy as a reward.

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DED

The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

Meet Vimbai. She is a young single mother working as a hairdresser. That's a book right there. Add to it that The Hairdresser of Harare takes place in Zimbabwe, a culture turned upside-down and anarchic. Inflation is so bad, cash is a nuisance; it takes a brick of notes to buy a loaf of bread. Sugar is available through shady black marketers. Armed gangs roam the streets with impunity. People who don't like the government lie low. Caucasians are fair game. Most people find solace in religion. The culture's attitudes towards gay people is pretty much pre-Stonewall. Vimbai is one of the star hairdressers in Mrs. Khumalo's shop, and inherited a house from a relative (which leaves her on bad terms with much of her family), so for the moment she is not destitute. She is able to feed herself and her daughter, Chiwoniso, and can send the child to school. Then Dumi, hairdresser extraordinaire, walks in. He outshines even Vimbai in hairdressing skills, and is soon catering to government ministers and their spouses. He befriends Vimbai, who soon falls in love with him. His family dotes on her. But what does it mean when someone says at a family dinner that Vimbai has “cured” Dumi? Why does he disappear some nights? The answer is obvious to an American reader, but not to someone in a culture made so different by the swing from colony to dictatorship that its situations could pass for science fiction.

The beauty shop thrives and expands. Vimbai allows herself a little happiness. The denouement is as expected; she is mutely uncomprehending, and behaves as any spurned woman might, but also with a tinge of resignation that is heartbreaking. She is not bereft of empathy, and like the poorest of the poor in her country, is still able to show generosity of spirit in the end. The prose is great. The metaphors provided by Zimbabwe are there to be plucked, and Huchu is a deft harvester.

Hell and Gone by Henry Brown

<—Original cover on the left. New cover on the right. —> Just looking at the covers, which book would you rather buy? Presented as a lesson to indie authors on the importance of investing in one's book covers.

Veteran's Day was yesterday (Thank you to all who served). In light of that, Hell and Gone seemed like an appropriate book to review.

The plot is pretty straightforward: Muslim terrorists have a nuclear bomb. The CIA recruits a dirty baker's dozen of veterans and mercenaries to neutralize the threat. There are only a few questions: "Will they succeed?", "How high will the body count be?" and "Who's going home in a body bag?" Instead, Brown focuses his creative energy on the characters and the action scenes.

In an action thriller it would be very easy for the characters to resemble cardboard props waiting their turn to become cannon fodder, but Brown doesn't go that route. Each of his characters has a story and Brown gives each one the time to tell it, although with the sheer number present some get more time than others. And they're a diverse, fractious lot. Yes, they're all dark-skinned (Caucasians would be a dead giveaway in the Sudan, where the action takes place) ex-military or mercenaries loaded up with testosterone, but the similarities end there. They're distinct individuals with their own sets of skills and shortcomings. They're men, not superheroes. You'll hate Mai for his arrogance and bigotry, but you'll admire Scarred Wolf's ability to execute his bloody job with honor and integrity.

The villains in Hell and Gone are truly evil. I don't say that lightly. The manipulation that the Jihadist leader, Ali, and his Chinese consultant, Chin, put fifteen-year old Bassam through is nothing short of diabolical. The scary part is, none of it comes across as far-fetched.

Brown, a veteran himself, uses his characters to address a range of issues. He explores veteran alienation through several men. We get to see how each dealt with feeling disconnected from friends, family and country once they were “back in the World.” There's also the matter of American foreign policy. At his weakest point, Brown's characters sound like they're reading neocon talking points from the back of a cereal box. But at his best, he presents an intelligent examination of our relationship to Israel and the Middle East. You'll wish our leaders would have such a frank discussion with all the facts, rather than dishing out the rhetoric.

The battle scenes are meticulously detailed. It wouldn't surprise me if Brown built scale models of the locales in his basement so that he could properly choreograph each step and shot. He'll have vets and military aficionados nodding their heads as he relates the pros and cons of various weapons down to their milspecs. Meanwhile, civvies will run to Wikipedia to look up the old planes that have been out-of-service in the Western World for decades. But he doesn't do it to impress anyone, he does it to stay true to his characters and himself.

While the dialogue is great, I do have gripes. For a bunch of leathernecks, they never curse! "Shit" doesn't appear until three quarters of the way through the book. "Damned" has been replaced by "doomed." Every variation of profanity involving "dick" has been replaced by "Richard." For example, "limp Richard" and "Richard head." And there isn't a single F-bomb. This behavior is never explained and strikes me as disingenuous.

As for the technicals, a few homophones slipped through the cracks. There are a few point-of-view shifts that might violate some rule somewhere, but honestly they don't disorient the reader at all. Towards the end of the final battle, the writing breaks down into short, choppy sentences, which impart the feel of a grocery list of action rather than a flowing narrative.

Overall, Hell and Gone is a military thriller that delivers the goods on the action, has vivid, realistic characters who interact with great dialogue, and presents some food for thought. If enough people chew on it, maybe the all too plausible scenario presented here will remain fiction, assuming it hasn't happened already.

Hell and Gone is available in print from Amazon and in several eBook formats from Smashwords. Free samples are available through the author's website and at Smashwords.

Review Roundup by Libby Cone

by Libby Cone

I have been on another Smashwords adventure, catching book samples on my hard drive as they drop from the conveyor belt of the literary fiction genre. Using this method, I hope to save readers time, energy, and money by reporting on books worth reading, worth sampling, and worth letting fall into oblivion.

The latest offering is Brakenstroom by Jacob Singer, a book of short stories about Jewish emigrants to South Africa. When I noted that only the first ten percent of the book was offered as a free sample, I was concerned that I might not appreciate its essence by reading such a small excerpt. I need not have worried, though. I invite experts on the complicated and tragic history of South Africa to comment on the accuracy of the author's account in the introduction. No expert is needed, however, to find “it's” being used as a possessive pronoun, or an implement for blade sharpening being described as a “wet-stone.” I began to have serious doubts when I read this sentence: “He worked hard, the hours spent pouring over accounting books giving him the stooped scolitic back and chronic myopia that on his tall thin frame, offered a portrait of the Scrooge circumstances had made him.” Then I read this sentence and gave up: “As a boy he was always a head and shoulders taller than others his own age, as thin as a stick, with two large ears on either side of a very Jewish nose.”

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Next is “To Come Back So Far From Nowhere in Particular” by Jon Thorpe. This is a free short story. Unlike the previous work, which dealt with a skinny, four-eared Jewish kid, this story describes the challenges facing suburban Christian youth devoid of bizarre physical deformities. I stopped reading after Page 6, which contains this sentence: “One young woman, Virginia Talbot, someone who would proclaim that Lubeck had seduced and corrupted her and led her astray from her good Christian values, had come forward and admitted Lubeck had arranged meetings with her in seedy hotel room where the two would smoke crack and Lubeck would masturbate as she pleasured herself with a crystal dildo.”

The next book in line is “The Sister City Initiative,” also penned by Mr. Thorpe. Forgive me, readers, for skipping his other ouevre, and the next book in line, which is written in Japanese.

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The next book is “The Album” by Sandra White. It is actually published by “The Fiction Works.” POD purists may skip the rest of this paragraph. Ms. White gets brownie points from me for correct usage and spelling of the words “pored” and “its.” However, after wading through onslaughts of telling-and-not-showing, I was finally defeated by this bit of dialogue: “'It's beautiful out here, Jack. Blakefield's city fathers have done a superb job expanding and building without totally demolishing the wonder of Mother Nature.'”

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Everyone knows the conflicting urges to look, and not to look, at something ghastly. I decided to give in to the desire to look at another short story of Mr. Thorpe, the next story in line, called “Never, Ever, Bring This Up Again.” I am happy that I did, because this cold-war-era story of a failing oil platform (sound familiar?) while somewhat difficult to follow, is actually an attempt at satire. It led me to return to the previous story by Mr. Thorpe, about the crystal dildo, and indeed, satirical narrative followed. My bad. While I did not think either satire was very clever, far be it from me, hoodwinked as I was, to reject Mr. Thorpe's pieces out-of-hand. You may wish to sample them yourself.

As that wasn't much of a ringing endorsement, I proceeded to the next book, “Chips & Gravey,” only to find that it does not seem to be self-published, having already garnered advance comments from the likes of E. Annie Proulx and Atom Egoyan.

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Next in line is Wes Patterson's Wherever You May be Searching. A weird book. A motormouth know-it-all boy has a creepy, borderline-incestuous relationship with his sister, who is just a couple of years younger than he. I think he's supposed to be a "bend-the-rules", "different drummer" sort, but he comes off as controlling and manipulative. Sample it if you wish.

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“107 Degrees Fahrenheit” is another short story by Barry Rachin, whose “Just Like Dostoyevsky” I have reviewed previously. Barry, Barry, Barry, what's with the weird commas? What's with the snappy dialogue like: “'Marauding insects and harsh weather often destroy the eggs. Raising them in captivity helps even the odds they’ll survive to adulthood and reproduce.'”?

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Beyond Redemption – The Forbidden by Jax Alexander. Adjective-noun, adjective-noun, adjective noun, ad nauseam: “Gagging down bile mashed up by the crushing grip, Mike was assaulted by the stench of decaying carrion as he oozed through the clashing colors into the center of the stinking swirl. Toxic thoughts filled with ancient anger forced their way into his head and fouled his mind with an oily presence.” Need I say more?

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Finally (my eyes are crossing), Embrace the Rain by Michael Holloway Perronne. I only read the first thirty pages or so, but it looks good. Technically, it's published by Chances Press, which seems to specialize in gay erotica, but I don't see any encomiums by Edmund White or Sarah Waters, so I'll include it in the self-pub category. A bunch of couples and families, gay and straight, are affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, some in a completely negative way, some in an opportunistic way. The writing is good. Take a look at it.