An anthology of horror stories by the Swedish writer of the novel Let the Right One In, famously made into a superb film (and a Hollywood remake because heaven forbid people read subtitles). The anthology features a follow up to the novel, and events of the novel are vaguely sprinkled in a few other stories as well, though they don’t really connect in anyway. Here’s my take on each story.
Border
A disfigured border guard has an almost supernatural gift for knowing when people passing through customs are hiding something, but when her gift flags up one man who appears to be innocent it will start a reappraisal of her life, and she’ll discover a terrible secret about her own origins. This story was a great way to start the anthology. It doesn’t remotely go where you think it will, and what starts almost as a procedural becomes something more akin to folk horror with a dash of romance. It’s a trifle too long, and the ending is a bit limp, but neither is enough to spoil it.
Village on the Hill
A man living in a tower block suddenly notices that the building is ever so slightly leaning to one side. Another one that doesn’t go where you think it will, ending up somewhere almost Lovecraftian. It’s interesting and doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.
Equinox
A woman alleviates her boredom by breaking into nearby holiday homes when they’re empty, but when she finds a dead body in one, rather than call the police she decides to keep it for herself. This is a great mixture of mundanity and the fantastical.
Can’t See It! It Doesn’t Exist!
I’ve seen this one called Itsy Bitsy elsewhere which is a better title. A paparazzi spends days outside of a villa to try and get a photo of a celebrity In flagrante with her secret lover, but after he sees them cavorting in the pool, he’s amazed to discover his photos are all devoid of life. I liked this one, another Lovecraftian horror.
Substitute
More Lovecraftian horror as a young man is visited by a former schoolfriend who disappeared many years ago after “an incident”. He wants to know if the protagonist remembers the substitute teacher they had, a woman the schoolfriend insists wasn’t human. I liked this one, it was very creepy, did end a tad abruptly mind you.
Eternal/Love
We’re back in Lovecraft territory again. A couple with a deep romantic love for one another are terrified by the idea that one day they’ll die and the husband goes to desperate lengths to keep their love alive forever. I liked this one a lot, even if I did see the EC comics’ ending coming.
Let the Old Dreams Die
This was the story I was most interested in. I’ve never read the novel, but Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation is simply superb. I think I, like many others, got a very distinct idea about the relationship between Oskar and Eli, but it seems I was wrong. Even Lindqvist admits he made an error in not being clearer in the screenplay. Let the Old Dreams Die corrects the mistake, but this isn’t really a story about Oskar and Eli who feature only tangentially. Instead this is a melancholy, romantic story about a ticket collector who befriends a local couple, the woman is a cop who worked the Blackeberg killings, and she and her husband have a deep love that the narrator is envious of. At its heart this is really a story about love and time, and how we all have to face losing the ones we love. Except it’s also very clearly a sequel to Let the Right One In, but I shall say no more except that this was the standout story in the book for me.
TO HOLD YOU WHILE MUSIC PLAYS
I didn’t get this one, I didn’t like this one. Plays like we’re hearing one half of a conversation, but I couldn’t work out what I was missing. I think even the author has said he’s the only person who likes this one! One to revisit perhaps.
Majken
Another story that deals with aging. An old woman caring for her invalid husband gets embroiled with a gang of pensioner shoplifters led by the enigmatic Majken, but are the group about to graduate from petty theft to terrorism? A very interesting tale.
Paper Walls
A young boy acquires a large carboard box and decides to camp out in it. Given many of the stories in this collection felt too long, this was infuriating too short. Another one that I think I need to reread to “Get”.
The Final Processing
Another sequel to a previous novel, in this instance the zombie novel ‘Handling the Undead’. I couldn’t connect with this, in part because it’s very long. Perhaps if I’d read the novel it would have made more sense.
All in all this is a decent anthology and appears well translated. I didn’t enjoy everything, and some of the stories are way too long, but as with most such collections I liked as many stories as I didn’t, and it really was worth it for the titular story alone. Lindqvist’s Nordic sensibilities are evident, and you can tell these stories were written by someone living in a country with long, dark, cold winters. That said, however mournful his stories might be at times, there’s also throughlines of hope and love throughout.
David Ash is a researcher working for the British Parapsychological Society, but unlike most people working there he firmly doesn’t believe in the supernatural and is a famous debunker of ghosts and mediums.
When he’s invited to the remote Edbrook house he thinks this will be a case like any other. The secretive Mariell family believe they are being haunted by a spectre, Ash suspects it’s a combination of environmental factors and the power of suggestion. The house is very old, and in a poor state of repair. The three Mariell children, Robert, Simon and Christina live with their aunt who they call Nanny Tess, the woman who raised them after the untimely death of their parents.
It soon becomes apparent that the Mariell children, thought adults, are childish, and Ash suspects they may be behind the haunting. Nanny Tess encourages him to leave but Ash is going to complete his investigation.
Over three nights his reason and his sanity will be tested by events that can’t be explained, and he will start to recall a trauma from his own past, and the real reason he doesn’t want to believe ghosts are real.
This was originally written as a script for the BBC, there was going to be a TV movie made but for one reason or another this fell through and, not wanting to waste his idea, Herbert turned it into a novel.
It’s incredible to believe that in 1988 Haunted became his 14th published novel, especially when you consider that The Rats was published in 1974! It’s quite different to most of the books that came before it, more subtle and much less gory, but Herbert was evolving as a writer and this book fits neatly into that evolution.
It’s a thin book, with a relatively simple story, although Herbert still feels the need to pad things out with a few flashbacks, not that any of them feel superfluous. There’s more going on than a simple case of ghosts of course, and it would have been interesting to see this as was originally intended, there’s a reveal late on that I distinctly recall scared the bejesus out of me the first time I read this back in the day, and I imagine it would have terrified a generation on screen. Ironically Haunted was eventually made as a film, albeit one that jettisoned much of Herbert’s story and recast one villainous character as a hero, which kinda missed the point.
Haunted will never rank as one of my favourite Herbert’s, but there is still a lot to like whether you’re a fan of his, or just a fan of good haunted house stories. Ash is an interesting hero, with his hardened sceptic predating Dana Scully by a few years, though the alcoholism feels a trifle on the nose. The Mariell children and Nanny Tess are somewhat stereotypes, but again that is the point because Herbert is using the language of the genre, and these are the characters you’d have found in haunted house tales going back to centuries past. Herbert does cast an interesting spin on familiar tropes, and that is where this book succeeds.
Is it Shirley Jackson or Susan Hill levels of good, perhaps not, the story meanders a little, and the off screen death of a character later on feels unfair on both the reader and the character, but this is still a good book, and possibly a great entry point to the world of Herbert.
All Rob ever wanted was a normal life. On the surface she has it, a home in the suburbs, a husband and two kids, but her life is anything but normal. When her eldest daughter, Callie begins exhibiting unsettling behaviour, talking to imaginary friends and collecting the bones of animals, Rob is worried enough to take Callie back to Rob’s childhood home, a place called Sundial in the Mohave Desert, where she knows she might have to make a terrible choice.
Meanwhile Callie is worried too, her mother is behaving strangely, and keeps talking about the past. She’s dragged her off to Sundial and Callie has an awful feeling only one of them will be returning.
After reading The Last House on Needless Street I was eager to get hold of Ward’s next novel, and while I may not have ended up loving it quite as much, there’s still a lot to like about Sundial.
One of the best talents Ward has is her ability to play with your expectations, to hide twists inside of other twists that aren’t twists at all, and she does this superbly in Sundial. This isn’t remotely the story you think it’s going to be, and as much as it’s about the difficult relationship between Rob and Callie in the here and now, it’s also about the past, and about Rob growing up with her twin sister Jack, her father Falcon and her stepmom Mia. Sundial in the past was a curious mix of hippie commune and government research lab, and though you might guess where the story is going, the chances are you won’t foresee every bump in the road. I certainly didn’t.
We see things from both Rob and Callie’s perspectives, but neither of them is a reliable narrator and it’s hard to know who to trust. It’s debatable whether this is horror so much as a psychological thriller, but the line is blurred enough that I wasn’t disappointed and there are definitely hints that something supernatural is occurring, even if it’s somewhat tangential to the story.
Ward pulls heartstrings exceptionally well, and I was genuinely worried for both Rob and Callie at times, both of whom are fully rounded characters, as is Jack. At its heart this is a story about nature versus nurture, although it ventures into some unexpected and unsettling places.
It isn’t perfect. It’s a slow burn and does drag on occasion, but does at least reward your patience. There’s also a selection of chapters written by Rob in the style of a fictional story she’s telling about a private children’s school that one part Enid Blyton, one part JK Rowling and one part Stephen King. I didn’t enjoy these chapters, and while I think there was a point to them, I’m not entirely certain what that point was. Similarly the final twist left me almost wanting to reread the book to confirm that Ward had legitimately wrongfooted me all the way through because it came out of leftfield.
Then again, a book that almost demands to be read again isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Well written, if a little slow at time, this is a very surprising story. I think your milage might vary as to whether you think this is a good thing or not, but for now at least I’m leaning towards the positive, and I’ll definitely be seeking out more of Ward’s work.
Black Spring seems to be a picturesque town in the Hudson Valley in New York State, but its quaint shopfronts hide a dark secret. The town is haunted by the ghost of Katherine van Wyler who was put to death as a witch in the 17th century. After death her mouth and eyes were sewn shut. Now the town is cursed. Katherine randomly appears around town, in the street, in shops, even sometimes in people’s homes. She doesn’t explicitly harm people, but the nature of the curse means that once someone become a resident of Black Spring they can never leave, or rather they can leave but not for long because if someone is away from the town for long enough, they get an overwhelming urge to kill themselves.
The townsfolk track Katherine’s presence using CCTV and an app where people can report her current location. There’s a local group named Hex in charge of this tracking to ensure that visitors to the town don’t find out about her. This can range from closing businesses and redirecting traffic to hiding her under a box!
The townsfolk have mostly accepted her as a curious part of life, but now some teenagers are going out of their way to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in terms of interaction with Katherine, with terrifying results.
This wasn’t a book I had any foreknowledge off and was something of a blind buy based on the blurb on the back, a cool cover and the high praise of the likes of Stephen King. Sadly the book didn’t live up to the promise of the premise, which isn’t to say its without good points, but it’s hardly the ground-breaking horror novel its made out to be.
The first issue is around language. Olde Heuvelt is Dutch and so the novel has been translated into English, in fact more than this the novel has been rewritten, not only to accommodate the English language, but also an American setting. The original novel was set in a small Dutch town, but this edition the story is relocated to New York state. As such even to someone who isn’t American it doesn’t feel authentic. This isn’t the be all and end all, plenty of writers set stories in foreign countries without being a citizen of those countries (I’ve done it myself) but you should try as far as you can to seem authentic. This doesn’t. It feels like a small Dutch town, only one in America. The other issue with the translation is that the prose doesn’t always flow very well, in fact at times it’s downright clunky.
On the face of it the plot is a doozy, though Olde Heuvelt doesn’t always seem to know where to go with it beyond the initial premise. This wizened ghost of a woman with her eyes and mouth sewn shut appearing at random in people’s homes should be creepier than it is, in fact at times it’s played for laughs. As unsettling as Katherine is at times it doesn’t feel like she has any agency or is any kind of threat, except for the risk if you get close enough to listen to her whispers eking out from the corner of her mouth where one of the stitches was cute decades ago. Towards the novel’s end Olde Heuvelt tries to turn things on their head and much like The Walking Dead there’s a narrative thread suggesting that the humans are the real monsters, but this feels like something of a cheat, and the ending seems to come somewhat out of nowhere. Worse still there are plot threads left dangling (who climbed into a bedroom to play Katherine’s whispers to one character for starters).
The story could have worked if the characters had been better, but despite comparisons to King the cast here is formulaic and two dimensional. The angry teen, the token Muslim, the fire breathing gospel quoting council leader. Even the four POV characters are thinly drawn. There’s Steve, a decent man, his son Tyler, a decent kid railing against the restrictions of life in Black Springs. There’s Robert Grim, a decent man and the guy in charge of Hex, and then there’s Griselda, the overweight, ugly widow of the town butcher (and mother of the angry teen™) who despite being a victim of historical domestic violence, and sexual assault in the present, is still presented as just a villain. It’s a reductive stereotype especially jarring in a book about a woman persecuted for being a witch hundreds of years ago.
Proof that a cool premise alone isn’t enough to make for a strong book. It isn’t terrible by any means, but I can’t really recommend it.
Something a little different here. I was always a fan of the 1970s movies and the 70s TV show that featured slubby investigative reporter Carl Kolchak, ably played by Darren McGavin. Earlier this year an anthology was planned celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Kolchak story, the TV movie Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I was thrilled and started work on the story I was going to submit. Sadly time ran away from me and I didn’t get to finish it in time. This left me with a story I loved but one I couldn’t really submit anywhere else, so it seemed to best option was to post it for free here. Consider it fan fiction if you will, and obviously if the rights holders to the Kolchak brand have an issue I’m happy to take it down, but hopefully people can just enjoy it for what it is, my homage to a staple of 70s TV horror, with a slight dash of a homage to something else. I think it’s fairly obvious what else but you never know. Anyway. Enjoy!
Man has always been fascinated with the notion of predicting the future, from the oracle at Delphi to Nostradamus himself.
When 45 year old factory worker Hank Tuttle left the bar on Main Street the only future he was envisioning was a warm bed. If he could have seen what was coming, he’d have stayed in the bar until morning.
He managed to weave barely ten yards down the sidewalk, much to the amusement of the handful of people still loitering on the street that night.
None of them were laughing when a darkly shrouded figure swooped down on Hank and carried him away into a nearby alley.
Though inebriated, several of those witnesses gave chase. A patrol car was parked nearby, ostensibly to watch for drunken trouble and the deputy inside soon added his eyes to the search. Yet no trace of Hank, or his assailant, could be found. Not until morning at least.
Bensonville is the ninth biggest city in Nebraska, and the Clarion was the fifteenth biggest selling newspaper in the state. Had I worked for more prestigious newspapers? Of course, but I’d also written for plenty of rags that made the Clarion look like the New York Times, and the older I got the less choosy I got to be. It was the early autumn of 1991, the last whisps of summer were slowly dying and my 70th birthday lurked too close ahead, poised like a cobra to strike once I got within range.
Hank’s body had been found in the parking lot of a strip mall less than six blocks from where he’d been last seen, a fact (along with others) I gleaned from a contact in the police. As such I was the first reporter on the scene
Back in the day the cops I crossed swords with were all middle-aged, chain-smoking white men who seemed to get their suits from the same store and their hair cut by the same short sighted barber. By contrast captain Maria Rosenthal was 35, her red hair was nearly coiffured, and she looked like she could swap her uniform for a swish evening gown at the drop of a hat.
Of course, as the motto goes, the more things change the more they stay the same.
“Kolchak! How the hell did you get here so fast?” She yelled, hands on her hips, the fingers of her right hand far too close to the butt of her gun for my liking.
“Me? I just happened to be passing and saw all the police cars”
Nearby someone was hoisting a gurney into the back of the coroner’s van. Yellow police tape was everywhere. Eager young officers were combing the ground for clues.
Captain Rosenthal made to speak but before she could I had my tape recorder in her face.
“Is it true his eyes had been removed? Just like the other two victims?”
“No comment” she replied. She tried to turn away, but I still move fast for an old guy, I kept the recorder in front of her
“And what about the other incidents I told you about? In New Mexico and Colorado, as if the killer were moving north?”
She gave me a withering look. “I can’t discuss ongoing communication with other law enforcement agencies.”
“Aha! But you are communicating with them?”
“No comment.” She looked over my shoulder. “Grant, you and Foley please escort Mr Kolchak back to his hotel.”
Beefy arms gripped me.
“You can’t do this,” I said as they began to drag me away. “I have rights!”
Rosenthal was grinning as she started to turn away, but her smile faded and those beefy arms released me. The cops had bigger fish to fry because at that moment, a truck from the local TV affiliate arrived. Seconds later a bunch of other reporters showed up. I guess I wasn’t the only one with contacts in the Bensonville PD.
Rosenthal didn’t have the numbers to evict all of us, so she changed tack and hosted an impromptu press conference right there in the car park.
She didn’t give much away. I tried to ask my questions again, but she ignored me. The other reporters’ questions were so inane Rosenthal looked offended. Say what you like about me, cops are never bored when I’m asking the questions. Annoyed, exasperated, murderous, but never bored.
I tried to get a handle on whether any of my fellow members of the fourth estate had any leads, but nobody was talking to me, in fact no one was even looking at me, and that included the cops. Carl Kolchak was, it seemed, persona non Grata. If such things bothered me, I’d have retired decades ago.
As I meandered back to my car I suddenly realised that not everyone was giving me the cold shoulder. One man was staring at me, a dumb smile on his face.
Glancing back every few seconds I could see that he’d broken away from the pack and was following me.
If it hadn’t been for the smile I’d have imagined he was a reporter who wanted to vent his spleen about how I was ruining things for everyone by upsetting the delicate equilibrium that existed in Bensonville between the police and the local media. Said equilibrium consisting of the police giving a statement and the reporters asking how high they wanted the typeface.
Even without the smile he wouldn’t have looked like a newsman, or a plainclothes cop.
In fact, he looked even less like a Nebraskan than me. He was mid-thirties, with shoulder length blonde hair so light in tint that I suspected it’d go white sooner rather than later. He wore a suit, but no tie, and had the look of a man who’d rather be wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I could see him in a surfboard, he had that California surfer dude vibe to him.
Figuring if he was some serial killer it was best to talk while I was still close to the cops I waited for him to catch me up.
“Oh wow,” he said, his tone easy going, there was definitely a Beach Boys thing going on.
There was recognition in his eyes, but likely confusion in mine. “Do I know you, sir?” I asked.
He shook his head and laughed. “No but I know you. Carl Kolchak. The Carl Kolchak. I’m sorry, I’m just a huge fan.”
And then he proceeded to invite me to a nearby diner where he offered to buy me coffee.
I accepted. When most people I meet want to run me out of town, the lure of someone who wanted to talk was quite enticing.
Once we were sat down he introduced himself. I didn’t recognise the name at the time. In hindsight I think most everyone might recognise it now. He further informed me that he was a television producer.
I still wasn’t exactly sure why he wanted to meet me, but he helpfully explained, although he took the long way around. He was taking the low road and if I’d taken the high I’d have been in Scotland afore him. One day I really must visit Scotland, Loch Ness in particular has piqued my interest over the years.
I didn’t take the high road. I drank my coffee and listened instead.
“I was sixteen, my folks moved us to Vegas, just for a few months while my dad did a job, but I was there, right in the middle of those killings, the vampire, right?”
I said nothing.
“The vampire. I read your stuff, what they let you print, even got a hold of your book a few years later”
That got my attention, I’d heard masses of them had been pulped. I hadn’t seen a copy in years. I wondered if he had it with him? Had he come all this way just for an autograph?
It turned out to be a no on both counts, he wanted something else from me but first he had more to tell.
“I had a buddy in Seattle, so I got clippings of your stories there, the lunatic who was strangling people to gain immortality. By the time you headed to Chicago I was ahead of the curve, had contacts in local newspapers, told them to save me a copy of anything from INS coming off the teletype with your by-line. Man, you had some crazy stories there “
I wanted to tell him I was flattered but ask him to come to the point. I had places to be, and unlike a young woman I had encountered in Albuquerque I wasn’t getting any younger.
I’d barely opened my mouth before he continued.
“And beyond Chicago. Memphis, New York, Jacksonville, Dallas.” He shook his head. “I have scrapbooks filled with your stories”
“Well that’s very flattering, but why have you tracked me down now? If you’ve been a fan for so long?”
‘Because now I have the opportunity to immortalise you forever.”
“You want to paint my portrait?”
He laughed. “Television”
“Say what now?”
“Television. I’ve pitched a show and the network has bought it, well the pilot at least.”
“About me?” I was shocked, flattered but mainly shocked, after spending so many years being laughed at, ignored, threatened, so many years being almost killed by vampires, aliens, werewolves, lizardmen… finally someone understood.
A lifelong cynic I should have known better, but we’re all vulnerable to flattery.
“Kind of. Negotiations are still ongoing. I want the lead to be a reporter, but the networks, they figure he should be a cop, or someone in law enforcement. And they want to partner him up with a woman. I mean I’m fighting against it but they’re paying so I might have to make some concessions.”
“A cop? So this wouldn’t be a documentary series then?”
“Oh no, but obviously it’d be heavily based upon you, on your stories. There’d be residuals in it for you, maybe even an executive producer credit if you play your cards right.”
I actually grinned at that. It was an odd feeling to be wanted. I had something in my bag, something I’d been debating sharing with Rosenthal, but while she’d likely take one look and throw me in a padded cell, perhaps my new young friend would find it interesting.
I rummaged in my satchel. “Just a second, I need to show you this.”
I pulled several photostats out, piling them up on the table. They threatened to fly away so I put my coffee cup on top of them.
“Just a second.”
“Mr Kolchak…”
“Carl! Call me, Carl.”
“Carl. I need to…”
“Here you go!” And with that I revealed the book. It was old, and if I’d let him look at the flyleaf, he might have seen the label for the State Library. He might also have seen that it was overdue. But I didn’t show him this. I opened at the requisite page, turned it around and tapped at the picture. “This is what’s killing people here. This.”
He peered at the picture. For a moment it looked like he was trying to read the text, but unless he could understand ancient Greek he wasn’t going to get very far. Luckily I knew someone who could, a sprightly young professor of antiquity at the university of Nebraska.
I like to think the photo told him enough. It was a crude picture of a man, naked as the day he’d been born. He was holding out his hands. There were eyeballs embedded in his palms, attached to the ends of his fingers. They ran up each arm, they were sunk into his chest, his stomach, and he had two more eyes above those he’d been born with, and several more below mixed to his cheeks. His mouth was wide open as if in a scream, his tongue extended.
And of course there was an eyeball there as well.
“What the hell?”
I smiled. “To Prágma Vlépei,” I said smugly. Pride really does come before a fall.
His face scrunched up. “Huh?”
“The Thing Sees,” I replied. “It’s Greek, this is a monster from Greek mythology, only one forgotten by all but a handful of scholars. Forget Medusa, this guy is far scarier. He exists to see. So the story goes he was a shepherd who always wanted to keep an eye on his flock, but it was so large and unruly that he could never see them all at once, and he lost more than one sheep to wolves and other predators. And so he made a deal with the Gods, to be able to see what other men couldn’t.” I laughed. “He quite literally has eyes in the back of his head. Eyes everywhere.”
“And now it’s in Nebraska?”
I closed up the book, returned it to my satchel where it banged against a khaki metal canister. “And now it’s in Nebraska. Not the original one, this is something more recent, I believe it is, or at least was, a man named Ludwig Baumann, a German national who emigrated to New Mexico five years ago, after an extended period in Greece where he worked as an archaeologist, though by all accounts grave robber might be a more apt term. Apparently, he had an almost supernatural ability to locate items thought lost for centuries.” I grinned. “Wonder how he did it.”
My new friend shook his head. “But why’s he killing people now?”
“It’s the curse, the curse that haunted the original creature. The Gods originally only gave him a few extra eyes, but it wasn’t enough. He got greedy. When you can see around corners you want to see over mountains, and he found he could take the eyes of others, absorb them into his body, until he was covered in them, until he could see everything. That’s why our killer is so hard to catch. He can’t see the future, but he can see around corners, through buildings. He can see all his pursuers and all his viable exits all at once.”
He laughed. “I always wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“Where you got your ideas from, I’m a writer myself but this is incredible. You must have spent so much of your life in libraries researching this stuff.”
“Well I have, months, maybe even years but…” My enthusiasm faded. “This is real, it’s all real, the creatures. The vampire in Vegas, the werewolf on the cruise ship, the succubus in New Orleans.” I was exasperated. “You think they’re all fiction?”
“Well…”
“I’m telling you now, they’re all true. Don’t you believe me?”
He stared at me, a sad look in his eyes. Don’t meet your heroes, that’s what they say isn’t it. Well, he’d met his hero and found he had feet of clay, or at least he thought he did.
“I want to believe,” he said, sounding like a small boy.
I stood. “I don’t have time to wait. Let me know when you make your mind up.”
And so I left him there and returned to my car. The shoal of reporters was still circling Rosenthal like she was bait thrown over from a fishing trawler. I left them to it because I had somewhere else to be.
However much he was turning into a pure monster, the chances were that Ludwig Baumann still retained some sense of self, he could have hidden in the woods, but I figured that wouldn’t suit him at all, the man had been a scholar, used to the finer things in life by all accounts.
He hadn’t used his own name to check into a motel or rent a house, and no one recalled taking money from anyone with a German accent, and I’m pretty sure they’d have recalled a customer with a dozen eyeballs in his face.
My search of the property market did throw up something though. On the outskirts of town was a row of abandoned buildings, and one of them had, until very recently, been a bookstore. The proprietor had died, and the place was still tied up in all manner of legal claims. By all accounts it was still fully stocked.
Where else might a man with a love of learning and a hundred eyeballs be happier?
It was the middle of the day when I got there, parking my battered rental car a short distance away so I could sneak up on the place. It turns out I parked too far away because I was out of breath by the time I got there. Sometimes I forget I’m not in my prime anymore.
My satchel was heavy. I could have left the book behind but the other items in there I might need. I had my camera in hand as I approached the bookstore.
Robbie’s Reads was a lonely place. Unlike the storefronts either side it looked like it was still open for business. There were books in the window. If it had still been open there would likely have been no customers, the street was deserted, in fact I hadn’t seen another living soul since I turned off the highway. This part of town had been fading for many years, the demise of Robbie’s Reads had been its dying breath.
I didn’t approach the front door. Instead I went around back, sneaking through the yard of the store next to it. Judging by the rotting tables and chairs I guessed that shop had sold furniture.
There was a gap in the fence just big enough for me to squeeze through, though I had to remove my satchel. I went first and then reached back quickly for my bag.
I expected to be ambushed at any moment, but the yard was as quiet as the grave. It was also tidy, with just a few boxes piled up beside the back door.
I approached warily. I didn’t expect the door to be open, but the handle turned smoothly. That should have been my cue to leave but I’d never been very smart, and age had made me no wiser.
The door did not creak. Perhaps it had been recently installed, or perhaps its current tenant had oiled the hinges.
Inside it was gloomy. Dust hung in the air, made visible by the shafts of sunlight that peeked in through the open doorway.
There was a door wedge on the floor. I took out my torch before using the wedge to secure the door in the open position. Then I stepped inside.
I was in a backroom; part kitchen, part storeroom. To my left were boxes labelled as having been sent by various publishing houses. To my right was a sink, a small stove, and a refrigerator. The sink looked clean. The smell of food lingered in the air.
A side door promised to lead upstairs but however reckless I was feeling, I had my limits. This left one door, that obviously led into the store.
It too opened smoothly. The smell hit me immediately, the dry scent of old books. The shop itself was well lit, it hadn’t been deserted long enough for the windows to become grimy, so a lot of sunlight streamed in through the windows.
I saw a desk and a cash register, the drawer fully open to show no money was inside.
I saw row upon row of bookshelves and there, hidden from view if you peered through the window, was a camping cot. A lantern beside it, along with a pile of books. A single book was open, face down on the bed.
I’d found his nest!
I reached into my satchel, which was the point a shadow fell over me.
I looked up, saw something dark and monstrous falling from above, a living shadow, a giant winged bat.
I realised moments before he ploughed into me that it was merely a man draped in a cloak.
Or what had once been a man.
He clattered into me and I hit the floor hard. It’s an odd thing to say in hindsight, but in that moment my greatest fear wasn’t death, it was that I’d break a hip.
That soon faded when I looked up into a face of utter chaos.
You could, if you focused, still make out Ludwig Baumann’s mouth, and his nose, but it was hard to focus on anything but the eyes. A dozen or more of them, all shapes and sizes, all colours, arranged with no logic, some horizontal, some vertical, many at an angle, and every single one of them blinking down at me.
“Why are you here? Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” His voice was raw, as if he was talking whilst simultaneously trying to chew, and I realised there must be eyes in his mouth as well.
“I’m almost done. Soon I’ll be able to see everything!”
Suddenly I felt fingers groping my face, reaching for my eyes, preparing to pluck them out.
I was about to scream when I saw something moved in the periphery of my vision. A book.
Ludwig obviously saw it coming, he ducked out of the way, rolled off me.
Another book. Again Ludwig was too fast for my saviour.
“That’s right you monster, over here! Leave Carl alone!”
It was him, my fan.
He was by the front door, which it seemed he’d forced open, with an armful of books, looking like a small boy throwing stones at a bear. Ineffectual, but he’d distracted Ludwig and that was enough.
“Get out of here!” I yelled.
“But, Carl?” he said and gestured to the beast that was now lumbering towards him.
“I’ve got this,” I said and reached into my satchel.
Ludwig was caught in two minds, conscious of the man by the door, but also seeing me though many of his myriad eyes, seeing me take the khaki coloured canister from my bag.
As my new friend turned and ran, this made up Ludwig’s mind. The creature of a thousand eyes turned towards me, fingers raised and ready to tear my eyes from their sockets. My whole body ached, I didn’t think I could even get up.
But I didn’t need to. Pulling the pin on the grenade was hardly a chore, neither was rolling it across the floor towards Ludwig.
Dozens of eyes followed the rolling metal canister.
As for my eyes I closed them tight and smothered my face into the crook of my arm as the grenade began to dispense its load.
Teargas.
The screams that followed will haunt me for the remainder of my days. Even protected my own eyes stung. For Ludwig it was so much worse. There was no way to cover all those dozens and dozens of eyes he had, no way to minimise the pain the teargas was causing, and not a one of those eyes was clear enough to see a way out of the trap.
I can only imagine what happened next as Ludwig, tears streaming from a hundred eyes, staggered around the bookshop in pain and anguish. A man who dreamed of seeing everything suddenly utterly blind. I would have almost felt a smidgen of pity, if he hadn’t slaughtered so many in his inhuman quest.
Eventually he blundered into a bookshelf with such force that it teetered, rocked back against the wall and then forward again even as he staggered away from it.
The avalanche of books hit him first. Unpleasant but any damage they could cause would be minimal.
The bookshelf that followed was a different story. It was heavy. It crushed Ludwig to death, or so I heard.
Time passed. The teargas cleared and the next thing I knew my new friend had returned to drag me back into the light. We waited for the police to arrive. My saviour gently doused my eyes with water, and all he kept saying was. “It’s real. It’s all real!”
The police arrived, along with paramedics who insisted on taking me to hospital. By the time I was released it was all over. Ludwig had died from his injuries. The police were happy to accept that he was the killer, but no mention of his supernatural physicality was ever mentioned. There was an autopsy. I even got a hold of a copy. It was all very bland and ordinary. As far as the coroner was concerned Ludwig Bauman had only two eyes.
I tried to publish my story, which went about as well as you can imagine. I left the Clarion soon after, or rather was encouraged to leave, and shortly after that I left Nebraska.
I considered retiring but I knew that would be a death sentence. A friend of a friend got me a job at a small paper in North Carolina.
As for my fan. I never saw him again. I think his brush with the uncanny was enough to put him off the reality of life, to push him back towards fiction.
His show got made. It became very famous. I even watched it for a while. The hero was young and handsome, and he wasn’t a reporter. And he had a female partner, he didn’t work alone. Together they encountered monsters every week of the kind I’ve encountered, though slightly less frequently, and also became embroiled in an ongoing conspiracy which thankfully I never have.
He was nothing like me except in one pertinent respect.
Writer Ben Mears has retuned to the small New England of Jerusalem’s Lot, truncated by everyone to ‘Salem’s Lot or sometimes just ‘The Lot’. He spent several years living there as a child and the place left an impression. More specifically an old, deserted house that overlooks the town, known as the Marsten House, once the home of a mob era hitman named Hubie Marsten, left an impression. As a child Ben entered the house and believed he saw the ghost of Hubie Marsten, and the place has haunted his dreams ever since.
He looks into renting the house, which he wants to base his next novel around, but it’s already been sold to a pair of men named Kurt Barlow and Richard Straker who plan to open an antique shop in town, so instead he moves into the town boarding house.
Ben strikes up a friendship with local teacher Matt Burke and begins a relationship with a young woman named Susan Norton.
When a young boy named Danny Glick disappears, and his brother Ralphie dies soon afterwards, no one realises that this is just the start of the horror about to befall the town. Barlow is not what he appears, and he has plans for the residents of ‘Salem’s Lot!
It’s an odd thing to say that I’d never read ‘Salam’s Lot before this year, given the story provided an important formative experience of horror when I was still a child, one that’s haunted me ever since, much as the Marsten House haunted Ben Mears. Of course, for me ‘Salam’s Lot was a two part mini series that aired on the BBC in 1981 (when I was just shy of 11 years old). Suffice to say it had quite the impact on me!
But I’d never read the novel, don’t ask me why, just one of those omissions I guess, and as I’ve said before I have an on/off relationship when it comes to Stephen King.
The first thing to say is that I enjoyed the book a lot, and in many ways I think it will enhance my love of the mini-series (which I go back to every few years). It’s interesting to finally understand how faithful the mini-series is, of course characters have been changed or in some cases combined, but overall it’s a good adaptation.
What King is able to do is delve deeper into the characters, who become more fleshed out in many cases, and I don’t just mean the human characters, because the town itself is so well realised by King that it feels as much of a living thing as Ben or Susan, and his evocation of the town as an entity that’s dying, long before Barlow arrives, is very nicely done.
King is also able to take his time. The mini-series truncates things but here the plague running through the town takes time to evolve.
I’m sure the majority of people now understand that ‘Salam’s Lot if a vampire story, but I wonder what people’s initial reactions were back in the day, because at first it appears King is actually telling a haunted house story, and I found his detailing of the history of the Marsten House as fascinating as the history of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
That shift from a homage to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to a homage of Bram Stoker’s Dracula might have felt jarring in some writer’s hands, but King makes it work. The sense of creeping dread is nicely done, as is the way Barlow seduces many of the townsfolk. It’s rarely out and out scary, but there are more than a few unsettling moments.
If I had a complaint, it would be that the final act doesn’t quite live up to what’s gone before, in fact in many ways the book is at its most interesting before Ben and co even realise the town is being infected by vampires, once they do it all becomes a little by the numbers. In addition, as a product of its time, Susan is not handled well (a problem the Mini Series fails to resolve either) and you like to think that if King was wiring it now, there’d be more agency for the female characters.
Finally, and not a complaint rather an observation, it’s interesting to note how tame the book is, certainly to this reader who, when many teenagers were devouring King, was avidly reading through every James Herbert novel he could, Herbert of course was notoriously anything but tame.
If I could reverse engineer any one thing from the mini-series into the book, it would be Barlow, who of all the characters in the book feels the least well realised, and given his vast age this seems a missed opportunity. I never felt like he was a threat, unlike the more feral, Nosferatu like Barlow from TV.
I’m being picky of course. This is a hugely enjoyable novel, and might well stand as my favourite King at the moment (with maybe only his short story anthologies exceeding it.) I’ll always love the TV series more, I’ve loved it for far too long to ever relinquish that affection, but now I get to enjoy the novel too, and I think this is one I might return to one day.
Now, can anyone else hear scratching at the window?
Why do we frighten ourselves for fun? Why is horror such a huge genre? Books, films, TV shows. Darryl Jones, English Literature professor from Trinity College Dublin, strives to explain.
I’ve always enjoyed horror, right from being a kid and watching old Hammer films. I remember being terrified of the original Blob, and the thought of sleeping with the curtains open still gives me the shivers thanks to the miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, shown on the BBC in the eighties, so Jones’ book appealed. It helped that it had such a groovy cover as well.
It’s a slim text, less than 200 pages, but no less interesting for that. Jones splits his treatise into various sections; Monsters, the Occult and Supernatural, Horror and the Body, Horror and the Mind, Science and Horror, and dips into books and films related to each section. From vampires to zombies to the devil, serial killers to mad scientists. And he doesn’t only talk about (relatively) modern horror, pointing out that horror predates Stephen King, MR James, and even Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Shakespeare deals with horror, and Jones goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
Horror has always been with us and always fascinated us, but it isn’t some one size fits all, generic genre, and Jones makes an important distinction between Terror and Horror; Terror is about fear, Horror is about shock (and below both is Revulsion, the gross out.)
Jones has interesting things to say, and even when going over old ground he seemed to find something new to say. I won’t say I always agreed with him, but Jones’ scholarly approach is always interesting, even when I didn’t, and I learned a lot, because for a small book its chock full of little morsels of information; For example the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould who wrote an influential treatise on werewolves in 1865, was also the man who wrote the words to Onward Christian Soldiers, and Jones makes an interesting link between the rise of the supernatural and Darwin’s Origin of the Species, as Darwin strove to explain the world, those of a religious bent reacted by emphasising the spiritual.
An interesting read for anyone interested in horror, or why people gravitate towards horror, that emphasises the cathartic nature of horror, and makes the point that many of those involved in the enjoyment and creation of horror are well adjusted level-headed people. Horror is good for you!
The unthinkable has happened. World War Three has broken out and nuclear missiles have exploded over London. Millions are killed, and pilot Steve Culver might have been one of them, except he fortuitously crosses paths with man from the ministry Alex Dealey, who’s on his way to a government shelter and, along with fellow survivor Kate, they battle through the underground to some semblance of safety, but for the survivors there’s more to worry about than radioactive fallout. Humanity thought they’d vanquished the mutant black rats, but they were merely hiding. Now they sense humanity is vulnerable, and claw their way out of the dark to claim London as their domain!
Given I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, and given my predilection as a teenager for both James Herbert novels and apocalyptic fiction, it’s perhaps no great surprise that this 1984 novel was a firm favourite from my very first read, and I’ve read it many times since (as you can no doubt tell from the photo) though not for years.
The final, and in my opinion best, Rats novel (though there is a 1993 graphic novel) this sees Herbert go all out by killing millions in the opening chapters, and his evocation of nuclear annihilation and a ruined London is superbly done, playing on his usual trick of providing potted biographies for characters, just enough for us to empathise with them before killing them off. There’ll be rat related deaths aplenty later, but early doors the main causes of death aren’t teeth, it’s heat and the shockwaves burning up bodies and demolishing buildings.
He shifts to a second act focusing on the emotional impact of survival. Those in the shelter may be safe, but they’re still traumatised. Suicide is prevalent, and so is the risk of mutiny. Some don’t see why Dealey should be in charge just because he held a position of minor authority before the world ended.
There’s a grim recon mission to the surface featuring a wince inducing encounter with a rabid dog, but soon the survivors are faced with a triple whammy of threats; insurrection, flooding and rats!
This is a high concept novel. Bringing back the rats after a dull second outing and partnering them up with nuclear war, a subject on everyone’s minds in the 1980s. Herbert is disparaging towards authority in this, and the fate that befalls the main government shelter suitably ironic, yet much like his hero, he can’t quite bring himself to choose a side. Culver’s a standard Herbert stand-in; a loner in jeans and a leather jacket, a reluctant hero. A nonconformist who has little time for Dealey, yet seems equally sniffy about the potential mutineers. Dealey is a two-dimensional civil servant, a man who’s fallen back on bureaucracy because that’s all he has left. Herbert suggests Kate’s a strong female character, but really she’s just a damsel in distress for Culver to rescue and fall in love with. It’s a shame Herbert dispenses with a far more interesting female character early on.
A product of its time, women don’t far well, and whilst nowhere near as bad as I’d expected, persons of colour aren’t portrayed too glowingly either, aside from Jackson, who Herbert feels the need to constantly remind us is black which seems to be his only defining character trait, but he isn’t alone here and many people in the vignettes are more fleshed out that some of the recurring characters!
From a great concept the book goes downhill in the final third There’s the fairly predictable apocalyptic trope of the outlaw gang, and by the time we get to the finale there are just too few characters left to make for a final bloodbath, and it has to be said, there’s only so many rat attacks you can read before they all blur into one, and several of the grim interludes Herbert peppers the book with are a trifle samey. That said some other (non-rat related) interludes are nicely done.
He also annoys me by having characters use automatic weapons that appear to carry a ludicrous number of bullets!
A product of it’s time, this is still a very enjoyable read and definitely one of Hebert’s better books. It’s a trifle long and some of the underground scenes, especially late on, drag, but still a damn fine example of 80s’ post-apocalyptic fiction, and still a heck of a concept.
As it’s Halloween, when spooks and ghouls go out to play, I thought it only fair to gift you a tiny tale of terror…enjoy, and when you open the door to Trick or Treaters tonight, well maybe you’ll wonder…
I like Halloween, it’s the one night of the year I feel safe going out.
If I walk up to someone’s front door on Halloween night they don’t cringe or scream when they open the door, don’t shut it in my face and turn out all the lights. No, on Halloween they smile at me, they talk to me, complimenting me on my costume, asking how I create such a vivid effect. I talk about using my mum’s makeup, and charcoal, lots of charcoal. Does this convince them? I don’t know, there’s a flicker in their eyes sometimes, as if they understand but can’t consciously bring themselves to accept that understanding, so they joke and give me candy.
I can’t taste the candy of course, but the wrappers are pretty.
Usually the other children play with me. It seems a different group each year, though it’s hard to tell when they’re all dressed up as witches and vampires. They’re happy for me to tag along with their little gang, though I have to be careful, if they ask who I am then I stick to a first name only, never my own, and if they ask where I go to school I tell them I’m at boarding school far away.
I can’t very well tell them my school is St Michael’s, because St Michael’s burned down in 1976, the only casualty a nine year old girl who’d been playing with matches.
I stay with the other kids until they start to drift away, until they all head home. I used to stick it out to the last, until there’d be me and one other child left, but I don’t do that now. Somehow, once a kid is alone with me they recognize me for who I really am, as if there’s some group hypnosis at work that keeps us all safe and happy, but only so long as we’re together. It isn’t much fun seeing one of your new friends running away from you screaming, and it isn’t fair on them; Halloween isn’t a time for real scares, it’s a time for pretend terrors.
On Halloween night I skip and play and laugh. On Halloween night I have friends, I have fun, and I almost forget…
But then midnight comes and I trudge away from the bright lights and people. Midnight comes and I go back to the graveyard.
It’s an anthology of tales, each of which relates to time in some fashion. From countdowns and deadlines, to travelling through time itself, there’s something for everyone. Here’s more detail on each of the ten stories inside…
Do the Trains Run on Time?
An England that could be today, could be tomorrow, or could even be yesterday, has been invaded by a faceless, implacable enemy, and for a lucky few the only escape is via refugee train, but time is running out for one group of evacuees waiting at a lonely railway station when they find themselves menaced by a monstrous creature.
Irreconcilable Distances
Long distance relationships can be challenging, but as humanity heads for the stars things will only get harder!
The Delicate Art of Deep Space Negotiation
When a labour dispute on a far flung mining colony threatens to bankrupt a galaxy spanning corporation, one senior executive embarks on a desperate mission to resolve the issues, but time is of the essence.
Tempus Stultitia
When a student takes radical action to get a good grade, he imagines he’s thought of everything, but he may have made a very big mistake.
Folding Back the Years.
The place is London, the year is 1970, and Soviet backed forces are on the verge of taking the city. As the evacuation begins only one man knows that this isn’t how things were supposed to be…
Temp Agency
It’s the ultimate part time job, but is there a catch?
Mr Dweeb Comes to Town
The young man who wanders into a bar on a distant planet looks like an easy target for local thugs, but why does he keep checking his watch?
The Astronaut’s Son
Growing up is hard enough without your dad being an astronaut who’s aging slower than you are.
Habeas Corpus
All new technologies get misused, and time travel is no different as some disreputable academics plan a very unique heist.
Ulrik Must Die!
It is another place, another time. Lady Maryam is far from home and heavily pregnant, with only her wits to rely on she must fight to ensure not only her own future, but the future of her unborn child. One thing is clear, for them to survive, Ulrik must die!
By 
Just a quick note to tell you I have a new book out! It’s available to buy from Amazon as a download now. Here are the UK and US links
werewolves on the moon 