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Book Review: The Mind Altar: A Novel of Subterranean Terror by Michael Just

 

The Mind Altar: A Novel of Subterranean Terror by Michael Just

Giddings Street Press, 2018

ISBN 13:9781530441297

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

The Mind Altar: A Novel of Subterranean Terror by Michael Just is head and shoulders above most novels in the science fiction, horror and mystery genres. The author describes scenes in just the right amount of detail to place the reader within the story.  He reveals the personalities and motives of the characters gradually, keeping the reader engaged.  His plot has twists and turns that keep the reader continually guessing about the story’s outcome.  The ending is no less complicated and intriguing, seemingly doubling back on itself three times.

Taking place in the near future, the U.S. government sends a team of black-ops mercenaries to the desert in the Four Corners region of the country.  Communications with a secret facility buried in a mountain, called Bright Angel, went dead a few weeks earlier.  Each of the seven-team members has a special skill, and knows only part of their mission.  Our protagonist, Eurydice Wiles, is an expert in resurrecting programs and data from crashed computers.  She is buttoned up, avoids emotional contact and has no memories from the age of seven to eight.

As Eury and her teammates explore the myriad of Bright Angel’s rooms and caverns, they discover hollowed-out, plasticized bodies with no heads, preserved brains cut in-half, and dozens of crisp, burned bodies.  All computer hard drives have been smashed.  Eury intuits that the entire tunneled mountain is a computer and that ghostly visions and voices are part of its programs.  Did the staff and inmates go mad and kill each other?  One-by-one the team members are dying.  What will Eury and the other survivors find when they get to the Mind Altar at the heart of the mountain? Highly recommended.

Contains: Mild sexual situations, moderate gore.

 

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

Posted on December 5, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales edited by Dominick Parisien and Navah Wolfe

The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales by Dominick Parisien and Navah Wolfe
Saga Press, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1481456128
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

The editors of The Starlit Wood challenged writers to choose a fairytale and view it through a dark crystal, choosing a new context to hang over the bones of the original story. In some cases, elements of the original stories were removed, and in others, transformed. Seanan McGuire, Catherynne M. Valente, Garth Nix, Karin Tidbeck, Naomi Novik and Stephen Graham Jones, among others, contributed, so I’m not surprised at all by the quality of writing. The originality and unsettled feelings stirred up by these stories will intrigue fairytale lovers, but you don’t have to be familiar with the fairytale behind each story to thoroughly enjoy the collection.

Outstanding stories include Stephen Graham Jones’ “Some Wait”, a tale of disappearing children and parental paranoia and disintegration that has crawled into my brain to take up permanent residence; Seanan McGuire’s “In The Desert Like A Bone”, a supernatural, magical realist Western; Karin Tidbeck’s “Underground”, which lights the way in showing how a person can be literally trapped in an abusive relationship;  Charlie Jane Anders’ “The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest”, set in a bizarre dystopia of talking animals and breakfast meats; Amal El-Mohtar’s “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, in which two women are able to set each other free; and Kat Howard’s “Reflected”, a science fantasy grounded in mirrors, snow, love, and physics.Every story in the collection plays with the tropes of fairytales from diverse sources and cultures, creating the sense of disquiet and magic that we expect from fairytales, with more darkness and dimension. Highly recommended for lovers of fairytales, short stories, and unsettling, genre-crossing tales. If you enjoy the stories of Kelly Link, you’ll definitely want to try these.

Contains: drug use, violence, abusive behavior and relationships, implied child sexual abuse.

 

 

Posted on October 30, 2017 by , Reply

Book Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell by Paul Kane

Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell by Paul Kane

Rebellion/Solaris, 2016

ISBN: 9781781084557

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Sherlock Holmes and Cenobites sound like a combination that would be truly awful together, but I have to say, Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell blew my assumptions out of the water. With an introduction by Barbie Wilde, I was put at ease.

The book opens with a man solving the Lament Configuration. That man is Sherlock Holmes.

It’s 1895. Moriarty is declared dead, and Holmes miraculously survives the tumble off the cliff in his final adventure. Holmes and Watson are engaged by Laurence and Juliet Cotton, newlyweds with a strained relationship, to investigate the disappearance of Laurence’s brother, Francis. Their investigation leads them to look into a series of unusual missing persons’ cases, in which the missing parties vanish in impossible ways. One man disappears from a locked room, the only traces left behind being the faint scent of vanilla.

This is just the beginning of an investigation that will draw the pair into contact with an organization whispered about and known only as ‘The Order of the Gash.’ Clues lead the sleuth and the doctor to an underground club that services the most depraved of the upper crust of society, a sinister asylum in France, and the underworld of London. They encounter shady operators, meet old acquaintances in the strangest of circumstances, enter a world of depravity and pain, and make dangerous associates—the Cenobites, from hell.

Kane, previously editor of the tribute anthology Hellbound Hearts, clearly has a familiarity with and love of the Hellraiser universe. In this book, in addition to new Cenobites, Kane includes storylines and characters from Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart, as well as the Hellraiser films.  I was pleasantly surprised to also find an authentic Holmes feel and pacing that shows a familiarity with the characters and style of Holmes’ stories. Kane was able to keep with the atmosphere and period sensibilities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s style while still creating the feel of Clive Barker’s world of Cenobites–  and he makes it work. Recommended. Reader’s advisory note: Fans of both Sherlock Holmes and Hellraiser should enjoy this. Other horror/Holmes crossover titles include Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors and others by William Meikle, and Gaslight Arcanum, edited by Kim Newman and Kevin Cockle.

Contains: mentions of body horror, allusions to sexual activity and gore

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker


Posted on August 31, 2016 by , Reply
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