The Dead of Winter, Jack Night

Ok so as promised today I am going to do a quick review of The Dead of Winter, by Jack Night.

I picked this one up from Amazon under horror / ghosts because I really wanted  a change of pace from all the science fiction I had been reading and felt like being scared.

Scary Cover.  Check.  

In The Dead of Winter Nick Anderson and his family move into an isolated country town after he writes a successful novel so that he can focus on the next one.  They rent a nice little place at the edge of town and as winter sets in it seems like the perfect place to write a book.  Until Nick's Daughter sees a horrifying apparition out in the woods and strange things start to happen.

As it turns out the town has a dark past that is now coming to light.

Native Americans.  Check.  White Settlers.  Check.  Standing Stones.  Check.

If anything that's the problem with this book.

It checks all the boxes but it didn't end up making me feel scared. Getting the fear into a book is notoriously difficult, more so than a movie, and it felt like it should have worked in this book it just didn't.

At the end of the day I think the problem was that I just didn't end up feeling all that much for the characters in the book.  They needed to be fleshed out more and get me to care for them before the horror really started and that didn't happen.
 
Oh don't get me wrong I enjoyed the book, and its a good read, especially early on it got me hooked quite easily and as it went on threw in some good twists.  Ultimately though it felt like one of those horror movies that slides into an action film early on and turns into a group of people running from one horrifying situation to another with explosions and bullets flying.

So it was a fun read in the end, but it didn't scare me which is what I had wanted.   It was almost, but not quite, there.

Having said that the writer has his own blog (Linky) and this looks like one of the first books he has done (the other being People of the Static).  Its pretty good from that standpoint - especially given how tricky it is to get horror right.

I am the first to admit that just because I didn't find this book scary like I wanted doesn't mean someone else wont either so give it a try.

Right now I am reading book 14  of The Wheel of Time, A Memory of Light, but I wont review that - I am sure there are plenty of reviews out there on it.  At least its an ending which I honestly was starting to wonder if we were going to get (much like Game of Thrones).  I might pick up another horror book to review and see if I cant find one that does leave me scared but otherwise I have been meaning to review The Home by Scott Nicholson or one of the science fiction books I read earlier this year.

So catch you next Sunday.

Horror Movie Review: The Mist, Stephen King

Yes I have been slack.  This is what happens when I don't have deadlines so now every Sunday I am going to try to post something.

To that end I was going to do a review on The Dead of Winter by Jack Night but then realised I was only halfway through...

So instead you get The Mist, a movie adaptation of the short story by Stephen King.

Are those giant worms or tentacles?  Who cares RUN DUDE RUN!
(Always wanted to say that)

The premise of The Mist is a fairly simple one: a group of people are trapped in a country supermarket after a thick mist floods into town and there is something in the mist. 

The story moves quickly to this situation.  A wild storm has swept through town damaging homes and forcing people to get supplies from the supermarket.  Some soldiers are called up to the military base nearby and then an air raid siren begins as the deep, soupy mist rolls in blocking vision from the supermarket windows.

"There is something in the mist" cries a man and the doors are locked.

The people who end up trapped in the supermarket make the movie interesting and if anything they provide the bulk of the horror - although there certainly is something in the mist as they quickly learn.  A mix of locals and "out of towners" in the supermarket is a combustible mix as the stress of the situation begins to take its toll and the differences between people become rapidly pronounced.  

Normally Stephen Kings work has a long buildup with a lot of character development but in the case of The Mist we learn about the characters only as the story develops and that's kind of refreshing - and completely appropriate in generating a feeling that the viewer is an outsider and things are moving out of control.  

The main protagonist is David Drayton, who is not a local and not an "out of towner".  This is illustrated early on when David tells one of the handymen in the supermarket that opening a roller door is stupid because there is something outside and gets told so shut up because they don't care that he is a "big shot artist with connections in New York".    At the same time David's neighbour  a successful lawyer, distrusts him because he thinks he is a local and doesn't believe him when he says he saw something saying that David and the locals are just trying to make him look the fool.

As a character David Drayton is fairly simple.  His son is with him, and the driving force behind all of his actions - he left his wife at home but doesn't seem even remotely concerned about her and never thinks to pick up the phone and give her a call.  It makes him fairly two dimensional but its appropriate to the setting; he is "the good father" and "the voice of reason".

The other major character, and the one that had me grating my teeth but in a good way, is Mrs Carmody.  Mrs Carmody is the local religious fanatic and the mist, and monsters in the mist, give her the perfect opportunity to preach the end of days and get a congregation of scared people converted to her personal religion.  She is a nasty piece of work - early on one of the other characters tells her if she ever needs a friend she just needs to ask and Mrs Carmody tells her she has a friend in god and if she ever needs a friend like her she will squat down and shit her out.  

Again Mrs Carmody is a simple archetype and we don't get much depth to her.  She is simply a fanatic who appears to want to use the situation to get her own cult off the ground (perhaps because she is lonely as a number of characters early in the piece identify her as the local loony). 

Now there are a number of other characters in the movie but its the interplay between Drayton and Carmody, and ultimately their factions, that its about.  Oh there are the monsters in the mist and surviving them is important but this is clearly a journey into how badly people turn when they are trapped and scared not just a monster movie.  

People.  Scary as hell.

Overall I enjoyed the movie and its one which has gone into our collection.  Its tense, generates a sufficient suspension of disbelief to allow the things in the mist to feel real - they are genuinely alien and menacing in their own right - and has the right kind of twists especially towards the end.  Worth watching in fact if only for the ending which felt... right. 

Funnily enough it also has two actresses from The Walking Dead in it too - Laurie Holden and Melissa McBride.  I cant help but feel their characters in this movie may have put them in the front running for the roles in that TV series too!

Once I finish The Dead of Winter I will probably read The Mist just to see if the book is better and will pop a little addendum to this post once I have done that. Otherwise next Sunday, The Dead of Winter gets reviewed.

Regardless I promise, oh two readers, that there will be more regular updates.

Blood Skies by Steven Montano

In Blood Skies the world as we know it has been smashed together with other worlds by an apocalyptic event known only as "The Black".  Cities that never were have appeared over night and cities that once were have been laid waste as the world shifted - and the things from our nightmares have returned.

That means vampires, zombies, and other horrors that like to eat or enslave people.  The only positive?  Magic has also returned.  It just comes with a price most of the time.

Mad Max with Magic and Real Vampires.  Hell Yeah!

The story is set 22 years after The Black as an organised faction of humanity, the Southern Claw Alliance, is locked in a stalemate in their war with the vampires of the Ebon Cities.  The vampires can't win any gains due to the bravery and growing powers of the human witches and warlocks, however, a powerful member of the Southern Claw, the witch Red, has stolen information which would give the vampires all of this knowledge and the power to destroy the Southern Claw as a result.

Enter the main character; Eric Cross.  Eric is a warlock in the service of the Southern Claw.  That means that he has a sort of guardian spirit that he can use to lash out in combat or shield himself from harm as well as perform other magics.  Of course there is a price to pay and using the spirit basically means he is guaranteed a short lifespan but when the only other option is being a vampires meal it seems reasonable...

Cross and his unit are tasked with finding and stopping Red at all costs before she can doom them all.

This book made me stop putting a rough genre guide at the top of my posts.  It was too hard to classify it neatly.  Its not a pure fantasy book because the setting has so many science fiction elements to it and overlaying the lot is a strong horror theme.  

Blood Skies has such a strong horror theme because of the atmosphere the book maintains throughout, something that the writer does really well through use of a dark visual imagery system.    As an example the very first paragraph of the book: 

He sees the city. It stands beyond fields of broken sand and salt estuaries, at the edge of a frozen sea, opposite a forlorn tower of black metal and razor protrusions. It is a city of the living.

It looks unnatural, like it doesn't belong.

Nothing in the world of Blood Skies is clean, it is always cold, broken, diseased. References to the world before The Black, by contract, are clean and bright but vague and soon to be forgotten memories.  Where ice, ash and darkness aren't the prevailing colors its sickly blood red or necrotic black.  This constant use of dark imagery really draws you in and reinforces the fact that the world in which Cross lives is a shattered and dying one.

The writer also takes his time revealing the rules and background of his setting to you.  This is something that I would normally be annoyed by, however, it fit in this setting as it helped to enhance the sense of dislocation that The Black seemed to be all about.  A risky strategy to use as it could have lost me but it was well enough done that it actually piqued my interest rather than leaving me confused.

Imagery and atmosphere are definitely the major strengths of the book.  

The adventure itself is exciting and sees Cross and his companions traverse a significant amount of the Blood Skies world including an undead city and a human town that has surrendered to the Ebon Cities.  There is plenty of action and those scenes are well written but the book is definitely not just about the combat. I say this despite the fact that the author refers to the book (series) as a "dystopian military dark epic fantasy. with real vampires." on his blog.

So where does it fail? 

Cross is an interesting character and develops as the book goes on, however, a lot of the other characters in the book aren't as well developed and don't grow much.  To be fair, this is often because life expectancy in the  Blood Skies world appears to be quite brief.

There are a number of spelling and grammatical errors.  Yes.  Pot.  Kettle.  Black.  I realize.  My work is just a blog not a book though and improving all the time (yeah that's what I tell myself...).  The errors in the end weren't enough to put me off or disrupt the flow of reading but if removed would leave the work feeling polished.

Also there is one scene in the book that left me going WTF.  The characters until then had made smart choices that tied in with their mission but at that one point they just sort of went off the reservation. It may have been in character but given the importance of what they were trying to achieve (stopping Red and saving mankind) it was bizarre.  I cant say more than that without spoilers but if you read the book you will get me.  

Despite those failings I have to be honest and say I loved Blood Skies (I made myself sit down and think of some negatives - I haven't pushed myself to do that until now).  It drew me in and I finished it in a matter of days.  

I loved it so much in fact that having read Blood Skies I knocked over Black Scars, the second book in the series, last night and will probably start Soulrazor (book 3) tonight.  The spelling errors persist (at one point yield is used instead of wield) but Cross keeps growing as a character and new ones come on board.

Oh, and the vampires in Blood Skies don't sparkle (possibly why the author refers to them as Real Vampires.  They are truly monstrous in this series - becoming one means losing yourself not just getting super powers in exchange for wanting to drink blood and they definitely aren't pretty.  

Steven Montano has his own blog here.