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Worlds Without End Blog

Horror Books in Brief: Sharp Teeth, November Mourns, Lullaby and Mr. Shivers Posted at 1:50 PM by Charles Dee Mitchell

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WWEnd Month of Horrors

Guest Blogger and WWEnd Member, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com.


Sharp TeethSharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Let’s see… What would be a really terrible idea for a book?

I’ve got it! How about a novel about werewolves written in blank verse?

But wait, Toby Barlow has already done that with Sharp Teeth, and everything about it is amazing and excellent.

This novel satisfies on so many levels. For those who have always suspected Los Angeles of harboring rival packs of lycanthropes, here is your proof. For those who treasure the thought that true love knows no bounds, including species — again, here is your proof. For those who like complex noirish thrillers about drug lords and shape shifters, let’s face it, it is not going to get any better than this.

I confess, I wasn’t giving Barlow’s novel credit for how complex his tale would be until I realized I needed to back up and figure out just who was who, what pack they ran with, where the bad blood came from, and why those two lycanthropes were playing in a bridge tournament in Pasadena. (When they realize the two sweet old ladies beating them are cheating, one places a phone call to sweet old lady number one and says, “Keep it up and I will chew the flesh off your fingers.” You gotta love these guys.)

But what’s up with the blank verse? Truth be told, after a few pages I couldn’t imagine the story written any other way. Barlow’s verse is straighforward and flourish-free, but if you try printing out some pages as prose you will see it’s not just Raymond Chandler with line breaks. One blurb compares Barlow to Ovid, and I did get the impression that I could be reading a free translation from an ancient writer that stayed true to the spirit of the original. And that original could be very funny, very brutal, and towards the end kind of sad.


November MournsNovember Mourns by Tom Piccirilli

Like most of the young men in their twenties who are the protagonists of Tom Piccirilli’s novels, Shad Jenkins receives visits from the dead. In Shad’s case the ghost is the mother he never knew. She died shortly after he was born. But a few days before Shad’s release from prison, his father calls to say that Shad’s younger stepsister has been found dead on Gospel Trail Road. Her heart stopped. It is as though she simply went to sleep. The local police call it “death by misadventure,” but before he leaves prison Shad’s sister, or at least her hands, visit him in the night, beckoning him to come to her aid. He knows that when he returns to his Appalachian home, he has work to do.

November Mourns is not as good as A Choir of Ill Children, the Piccirilli novel that precedes it, or that which follows it, Headstone City. Its Appalachian setting comes off as a cruder version of the Southern swampland setting of Choir. Incestuous couple’s and their deformed offspring share the stage with those so wasted on moonshine that their toothless mouths and bloated bodies might just as well belong to a corpse. As in Choir there is one ancient conjure woman for the hero to consult, and both Shad and Piccirilli seem to like her. But most of the other characters are sketched in as ignorant and gross. Shad works to unravel the mystery surrounding his sister’s death, but the sleuthing involved reads like a dry run for what will work much better in Headstone City. That said, I have to admit that the snake handlers Shad spends time with are as weird, entertaining, and homicidal as you could hope for.

This is a minor entertainment from a dependable author.


LullabyLullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

I finished this book around 8 AM this morning. It is now 3:30 PM. I am less impressed by it with each passing hour. I thought I should write something quick.

This is the only Palahniuk novel I have read. I was entertained and irritated in equal measures while it lasted. He can be very funny and the scenes are fully imagined. But I now have the feeling that his writing exists to make us appreciate just how good a writer Kurt Vonnegut really was. This is vacuous, glib stuff, ostensibly daring and outrageous but chickenshit at its core.

Paluhniuk likes to repeat himself, and a phrase that comes up several times is that every generation wants to be the last. Is that why it seems to me that the people who go on and on about this stuff seem to be kids? If so I embrace my fogeyism. I need more meat on the bones of my literary horror fiction, which is the category I suppose Lullaby falls into.


Mr. ShiversMr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

Almost every review of this book mentions the reader’s disappointment with the second half. I will have to join that crowd.

Bennett does a great job setting up the Depression era setting of hobo encampments, drought, and deserted towns. Connolly, his main character, rides in on the side of a cattle car. He is pursuing the badly scarred killer of his young daughter back in Memphis. Any description of the man with his facial scars prompts stories of Mr. Shivers from Connolly’s fellow drifters. He finds more people searching for what seems increasingly to be a serial killer with possibly supernatural powers.

Bennett spends half the book setting up this situation, with few but very unsettling appearances by the killer. As the narrative moves into increasingly mythic realms, with visions of an evil older than mankind, Bennett is not quite able to suggest the psychic deeps he want to conjure. His success is in his major protagonists, men who prove to be weak or tragic or brutal as the situation develops.

This was Bennett’s first novel. It won the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award, and his second novel The Company Man was nominated for the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award. He is a writer worth staying with.

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