Previous shows have featured HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, Margo Lanagan, Kaaron Warren, and a truckload of other talent, so you would truly be aiming to keep good company with your submission. Good luck!

(On a personal note, this is my favourite horror podcast. Period.)

AHWA and JournalStone Publishing (JSP) have entered into an exclusive joint marketing agreement. AHWA and Midnight Echo magazine will be the exclusive Australian distributor of the quarterly magazine, Dark Discoveries, while JSP and Dark Discoveries Magazine will become the exclusive USA distributor of Midnight Echo. This means the pre-existing high premium that potential readers of each respective magazine have had to pay to receive the other periodical in their respective countries will be eliminated, making both magazines much more affordable and accessible/available for all. Look for availability on both the JSP and Midnight Echo websites soon, where you will be able to purchase the magazines individually or in a bundled offering that includes both Dark Discoveries and Midnight Echo.

The Giveaways:-

Midnight Echo is holding a subscription drive in the lead up to the much anticipated release of issue #8, with a swag of prizes to be won. Just take out a 1- or 2-year print subscription between now and November 30 and you will go into the draw to win the following:-

• ‘The Woman’ signed by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee
• ‘Edge of Dark Water’ signed by Joe R Lansdale
• Original ME8 artwork by Glenn Chadbourne (signed)
• A copy of ‘Tolerance’ plus 3 signed lithographs, by ME8 cover artist Chris Mars
• 1-year print subscription to Cemetery Dance magazine
• Original Allure of the Ancients artwork, signed by creators Mark Farrugia and Greg Chapman
• 1-year print subscription bundle to Midnight Echo and Dark Discoveries magazines

The winners will be announced on December 1. Go here for more details or to subscribe.

LIMITED TO THIRTY (30) PARTICIPANTS. All welcome. The Australian Horror Writers Association has arranged a three-day/two-night stay at Aradale Mental Hospital (formerly Ararat Lunatic Asylum) for writers, editors, artists and any other creative-type people. It will involve having the days to create and the nights to investigate how to be scared stiff. There will be a ghost tour on the Friday night, and a paranormal investigation on the Saturday night (all equipment supplied).

When: THREE (3) DAYS – February 22-24th 2013

How Much: $395 PER PERSON all-inclusive three days

Includes: accommodation/full catering/tour/paranormal investigation.

Supplied: All meals, camp-beds. Please supply sleeping bag or bedding (if you are travelling from interstate, talk to us and we will be able to help with this).

***Email to confirm interest: ahwa@australianhorror.com***

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151247632771388.511927.317342821387&type=1

Atom, 2012

Hmmmn.

I’ve tagged this review as both a book review and a movie review, because this “novel” is in fact a hastily written movie tie-in that reads like the Cliffs Notes version of the script. There is no author name on the cover. When exploring the title pages one finds the following explanation: a novel by Lily Blake, based on the screenplay by David Loucka, from a story by Jonathan Mostow. Lily Blake’s name is also attributed to the Snow White and the Huntsman movie tie-in “novel”, which I’ve got here somewhere for review too. A quick Google turns up no photos or meaningful information about Lily Blake, so I can’t tell you anything insightful about this author (except that I don’t believe she really exists and is instead probably a personification of a gaggle of entities churning out these sort of movie promotional tomes).

I repeat: hmmmmmn.

The House at the End of the Street starts off in Twilightesque fashion with a teen girl (played by The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence in the film) leaving the big city and moving to a quiet country town. Elissa and her mother score an impressive house cheaply due to its grisly history – the couple who lived there previously were murdered by their mentally handicapped daughter, Carrie Anne, who then disappeared without a trace. In true Twilight fashion, Elissa is the focus of many boys in her new town, but her own interest lies with strange and brooding Ryan, Carrie Ann’s brother, who still lives reclusively on the property in a separate house. Then, to use the phrase on the back of the book, “unexplainable events begin to happen” (ugh). There’s a twist that is fairly obvious from  early in the tale, although to be fair, it probably works much better onscreen. There’s also a lot of gratuitous use of “spooky” kids and tugging on the heartstrings ineffectively, which I tend to get my back up about these days, as a parent. If you’re going to use kids in horror, use them well, and use them with respect.

Putting aside my sneery judgemental jabs at cynical money-grubbing exercises masquerading as literature…the book goes through its motions pretty much as you would expect it to. I would class it as YA, and teens would probably enjoy it. It’s a quick read, not atrociously written, but certainly with nothing inspiring between its covers. The prose is cold and simple (and there are quite a few typos – hence my “hastily written” comment earlier). Whoever did actually write it phoned it in and didn’t bother to hide the fact – and why would they. This accompaniment to the movie is what it is. I didn’t hate it. I read it all the way to the end. I did feel dirty afterwards, but I read it anyway. I’ll probably go see the movie, as it’s a competent enough teen thriller, albeit predictable and cliched. What came across as one dimensional in print may do a far better job onscreen with Lawrence and others injecting life into it. It’s very hard to judge a movie when it’s slammed between paper covers and dubbed a “novel”.

Don’t bother reading it, but if you like teen slasher flicks with a bit of a psychological twist, you might enjoy the movie. I’ll go along to see if I do.

Co-written and produced by Joss Whedon

Starring Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kanz, Jesse Williams

Here’s the integral thing you need to know about me in the context of this review: I’m not part of the cult of Joss Whedon, because I’m largely unfamiliar with Joss Whedon.

I can say “I like his work”, but when I say that, what I’m actually saying is “I like the episodes of Buffy I’ve seen” (because I haven’t seen all of them – and while I do like Buffy, I wouldn’t say I’m a massive fan of the series – I enjoy it, but I’m not passionate about it). And that’s it. I know he also did Firefly and Dollhouse, but I haven’t seen either of those, and in fact I don’t even know what they’re about. I haven’t even seen Angel. I’m sure he’s done other stuff that I don’t even know exists, which is essentially my point – I’m not an avid Joss Whedon fan; I don’t even have a solid awareness of his body of work. Yes, I am a Bad Geek, but the flipside of that is that I went into Cabin in the Woods without preconceived expectations or a pre-existing unshakeable belief that it would be good because Joss Whedon is good.

I’m pointing this out because one of the criticisms I’ve seen of positive responses to Cabin in the Woods is that people are just enthusing about it because Joss Whedon! – which, in my case, is obviously not true.

Now, on to the enthusing. BEWARE: SPOILERS AHEAD. Seriously, spoilery spoilers of extreme spoilerdom. If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read on, it will totally ruin the experience for you. Don’t read any other reviews, either. Just go see the movie.

Cabin in the Woods is ostensibly the story of five college students who drive out to a remote, uh, cabin in the woods, to drink and smoke pot and screw, following which, gory bad things happen to them. The end.

Not.

There’s overt foreshadowing (actually, “foreshadowing” isn’t an accurate descriptor, there’s no subtlety to it, it’s just shoved in the viewer’s face because it’s not a secret, we’re meant to think we know exactly where things are at here) that all is not as it seems from the very start of the film, with technicians in an unnamed facility watching the five teens through surveillance equipment and gearing up for some nasty process to take place that they have obviously overseen many times before. We assume it involves the five’s messy demise. We’re also shown a type of forcefield around the cabin site that a bird smashes into and is electrocuted by. Got it. Can’t get in or out unless something/someone wants you to.

So even now, we think we know what’s going on, right? Yes, the five hapless teens – archetypes from horror movies gone by, including the whore, the virgin, and the jock – are in a secluded cabin and horrific things will happen to them, and as an added twist, the technicians will watch, presumably for jollies or to produce some sort of warped reality show or…something. The end. Right? Nooooooooo.

Once in the cabin, our five become overstated parodies of the archetypes they represent, and there’s all the usual male-gaze and women taking off their tops and dirty dancing and tongue-kissing stuffed wolf heads (what?) and…all that stuff. In Cabin in the Woods, though, this is intended to be ironic. Y’know, the male-gaze here isn’t really male-gaze but a commentary on the male gaze in horror films, and also the product of deliberate manipulation of the five occupants into archetypal behaviours by the technicians overseeing the cabin. And I think, largely, this irony is successful. I still don’t enjoy sitting through pervy scenes of tits and bimbos. It’s still irritating and uncomfortable. But that’s kind of the point. It’s uncomfortable but Cabin in the Woods knows it’s uncomfortable – points out that it’s uncomfortable, and then laughs at itself. And us. And we let it.

And there’s a lot of laughter in Cabin. Scares, yes. Blood, yes. Authentic laughs? Yes. That’s a hard combo to pull off – comedy in horror rarely works well. It works here. And even that is a kind of ironic parody of itself, because the comedy in Cabin is silly and obvious and cliched. But it works because it’s meant to be silly and obvious and cliched and that’s why it’s funny. And we know it’s ironic and that our laughter is ironic and how silly and pretentious that is, and how silly and pretentious we are for buying into the irony, dahhhhhling, and that’s funny too. Aren’t we all so special and hip and bored with life. Ha ha ha. We’re laughing with the movie at the movie which is laughing with us at us laughing with it at it and who’s the idiot here, really?

So, the five go into the basement (which, of course, you should never do), and find weird and wonderful things, and touch the weird and wonderful things (another thing you shouldn’t do), and read out a Latin incantation (definitely never do that), and awaken a zombie redneck torture family who attack, maim, and kill them while the technicians watch and even manipulate to ensure maximum carnage. And eventually everyone except the “virgin” is apparently dead, the watching technicians are rejoicing, and the movie should end.

But that’s where it actually really starts.

Because someone who should’ve been dead isn’t, the order of things is destroyed, and the zombie redneck torture family turn out to be just one of an array of vast subterranean horrors housed beneath the cabin and brought up by elevator based on which object the five choose and activate in the basement.

Things go nuts. The scene where the elevators are all opened and all the creatures fly out and drown everything in all the blood is fucking awesome. The cameo by Sigourney Weaver is sweet. The old Gods thing is cool. The global perspective and the variations in horror between cultures is fun. It’s all massive rapid-fire sensory overload at this point, as the movie inverts itself over and over again, with so many homages and little treasures for fans to spot and enjoy, and it’s delicious.

Sure, some of it’s a bit weak, when you reason through it in hindsight. Like, for such a sophisticated and well-established facility, they sure don’t have any strategies in place to deal with things going wrong – one brain-challenged and easily overthrown guard to deal with escapees? No one thinks to go straight to the elevator the two surviving kids have entered to escape the cabin, despite it being easy to track it as it can only be the elevator the zombie redneck torture family entered the cabin from? Why are the elevators set up to bring all the horrors up from underground and give them free access directly into the facility, anyway? Isn’t there an easier way for the old Gods to get the blood sacrifices they require – like, just shoot the archetypal victims in the head, for instance? And even the archetypes are sort of confused and conflicted – the virgin isn’t a virgin, for example. I could go on. There are silly aspects. But, y’know…

I just didn’t care.

It was that good. I’ll pass them off as deliberate silliness, or more irony/commentary/enigma/critique, or hell, just genuine errors and oversights – whatever. I don’t care. They didn’t matter, the film worked, it was fresh, it was different, it had tension, laughs, surprises, a million small gore-geeky touches (like a device that resembled Lemarchand’s configuration, held by a Cenobite-esque creature called Fornicus, FTW!), it was smart and scathing of everything including itself, the climax just kept on climaxing, there were brilliant monsters and BIG SCENES OF EPIC  BLOOD AND HORROR, and I fucking loved it.

Brilliant. Best horror movie I’ve seen in a long time. So much more than just a horror movie, actually. It raised questions – was the whole thing a critique? A parody? A joke? A puzzle? Or a serious…something? What does it mean if I liked the movie? What would it have meant if I didn’t? The actors were all flawless in their roles (at face value, you’d think that would be easy to achieve in most roles in this movie, but I don’t believe that for a moment because nothing is what it seems here), the effects were fabulous, the aesthetic was gorgeously perfect, and I came out of the cinema reeling with bliss and raving with praise.

If I had a star system to rate movies,Cabin in the Woods would score five out of five.

Maybe I’ll have to consider joining that Whedon cult, after all.

Full details and submission guidelines here. Submissions close 20 August, so hurry up!

Bloomsbury, 2012

I’ve not previously come across anything by The Uninvited’s author, London-based writer Liz Jensen (www.lizjensen.com). She is by all accounts an accomplished professional, with a list of achievements that includes seven best-selling novels, three Orange prize for fiction nominations, and publication in more than twenty countries.

Marketed as “part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare”, The Uninvited focuses on Hesketh Lock, a talented anthropologist with Asperger’s Syndrome, as he tries to piece together the meaning of a global pandemic of murders commited by children and seemingly unconnected acts of business sabotage commited by adults, whilst also grappling with the fallout from a messy relationship breakdown, and struggling to reconnect with his young stepson.

The writing in The Uninvited is coldly rational, yet there’s a thread of frustrated and misunderstood emotion woven through every sentence. This is a very effective tool for inserting the reader straight into the brain of Hesketh Lock and truly telling the story from his point of view, as well as achieving the difficult task of converting what might have been an unsympathetic protagonist into a sympathetic one. The novel itself has many moments of keen insight, both from an intellectual and philosophical standpoint. What begins as a fairly gratuitous tale of blood and woe very quickly morphs into something completely different and far more intelligent, and there’s no denying that the topics addressed are extremely relevant to our world today – namely, our greedy and foolhardy abuse of our planet and its finite resources, and the tragic future we’re creating for our children should we continue down the road we’re on. I very much appreciated the crucial issues explored and the thought-provoking and disturbing hypothetical future invoked. I also enjoyed the various cultural mores and myths explored throughout the story – this is a book that educates and enlightens.

However, I felt let down by The Uninvited’s denouement. It was a little vague and some things were left unexplained, or explained so scantly that they were done injustice.  In thematic context once the novel’s resolution is reached, the “need” for pre-pubescent children to murder adults (usually their loved ones) starts to appear tenebrous and confusing the more one contemplates it in hindsight, and it did feel like that was perhaps injected to give the novel its grisly oomph rather than as a true integral part of the novel’s purpose, which is something quite different to the evil children hook, really.

That said, overall The Uninvited is a well-written, clever, important novel. The amount of flawless research that clearly went into the story is mind-blowing. I read it in one day, so it’s certainly a page-turner (although I was confined to a hospital bed at the time, so it may have had an unfair advantage!). Despite the final dissonance I personally felt between the murderous children and the climax, I would definitely recommend The Uninvited. It’s unsettling, it’s brutal, and it’s a welcome twist on the much-loved apolocalyptic fable. The Uninvited is a Book With a Message (or, actually, many different messages, all equally valuable), and we as a species need to heed its warning. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of Jensen’s work.

The Australian Horror Writers Association is pleased to announce the opening of the 2012 Australian Shadows awards. The awards are open to submission of any horror fiction published, or anthologies edited, by an Australian/New Zealand/Oceania resident or citizen in the 2012 calendar year. Submissions close February 28th 2013.

The Shadows are awarded to the stories and collections that best typify the horror genre, delivering a sense of ‘creeping dread’, leaving the reader with chills and a reluctance to turn out the light.
Past winners of the Shadows include a who’s who of Australian Horror Writers; Lee Battersby, Terry Dowling, Paul Haines, Brett McBean, Kirstyn McDermott, Bob Franklin, Kaaron Waaren, Will Elliott, Deborah Biancotti, Amanda Spedding.

The award has five categories: Novel; Long Fiction (novellas and novelettes); Short Fiction (short stories); Collection (single author collections); and Edited Publication (anthologies and magazine issues).

Judging is by a group of six published writers well familiar with the Horror genre – B. Michael Radburn, Greg Chapman, Jenny Blackford, Gerry Huntman, Steve Gerlach and Stephen Clark.

Details can be found on the AHWA website at:
http://australianhorror.com/index.php?view=39

All enquiries to Robert Datson australianshadows@australianhorror.com

At much-loved writer and friend Paul Haines’ memorial earlier this year, Cat Sparks gave a speech, during which she said: “True horror is the fact that we’re all standing here today when Paul is gone.” I agree, so strongly. We all deal with real horror in our daily lives, of countless different kinds – horror’s name is Legion. People say “I don’t like horror”, and whilst I understand the sentiment, I think to myself that’s like saying you don’t like breathing. Too bad if you don’t like it. It’s part of life. You’re living horror. I’m living horror. Ignoring and rejecting it makes it sordid, and it doesn’t have to be. It can be beautiful, albeit painful. We can explore it, probe it, know it, and thus, paradoxically, find a framework within which to de-scarify everything around us. Humanity has always lusted to light up the darkness; it is why we needed to discover fire. But you can’t illuminate the shadows without accepting and understanding what lurks within them. Horror is important, and leads us to the light, by holding our hand and allowing us to safely confront the dark.

I, like so many of us, have experienced a great deal of real horror in my life. Humour me, if you will, while I share just a little of it with you for the purpose of context. I’m not going to tell you everything, but I’ll tell you enough to, hopefully, show you why horror is my hero. I have no hesitation in sharing my stories with others; any shame therein is that of others, not my own. So please, don’t feel uncomfortable about reading. It’s safe. Horror is holding our hands. We will not be lost in the night.

My childhood was riddled with extreme familial and parental dysfunction, and as a result I was a very isolated, introverted child, who preferred her own company and found solace in literature from a very early age (I’m talking, like, 6 – I read early, and I read all the time). I read widely, but I always loved horror best of all. I believe there was a reason for my choice of genre, which is the point of this Op Ed, and I’ll get to that in a moment. For now: back to establishing context.

Horror gifted me with reading and writing as power; my superhero skill.

My parents divorced when I was very young, and I think that was a good thing, ultimately, though it meant I spent the following years caught in that boringly traumatic push-pull between them that so many children of divorce experience. Later, the emotional and psychological dysfunction I lived with every day turned into full-blown domestic violence, when my mother remarried an alcoholic psychopath who regularly beat her to a pulp and on more than one occasion actively attempted to murder her. I became intimately acquainted with women’s shelters, halfway houses, and police stations. I attended five primary schools in six years; three high schools in just one month (that was during a period when my stepfather was particularly energetic in his efforts to kill my mother…we moved a lot). As I grew older, I vowed never to be a helpless victim, always to go down fighting, to hit first, to hurt first (not necessarily a healthy thought process in every situation, but one that has saved me many times). Later, when an ill-chosen boyfriend choked and punched me, I knocked him out and dragged his unconscious body outside into the freezing Hobart night (and broke up with him, obviously). Not for me the abused woman role. Never. Ever. Again. I couldn’t save my mother, but I could save myself.

Horror taught me to fight.

My mother died when I was 22. After having survived so many things, including several brain aneurysms, she died alone, of pneumonia. Nobody even knew she was sick. I didn’t know she was dead until days later when my estranged brothers called me to tell me, after one of mum’s neighbours became worried, called the police, and they broke down her door and found her dead on her couch. It was a type of suicide. Actually…no, it wasn’t a type of suicide, it simply was suicide. Even now, it’s incredibly hard for me to accept that…I want to delete the statement because it can’t be true, right? My mother was lonely – having finally left my stepfather, and with me having left the state a year earlier to go be young, flighty, selfish and rebellious in Melbourne (and oh, the guilt!) – destitute, and, I believe, mentally unwell, as she had been for most of her very rough life. She got sick – very, very sick – and rather than seek treatment, I think she saw it as an escape.She kept it secret, like a magical key, and used it to unlock the door out of this life that had always been so harsh with its treatment of her. I remember visiting her house the day of her funeral, finding everything just as it had been when the police broke the door down. Blood-and-mucous-stained handkerchiefs everywhere. Blood liberally soaking her pillow and the sheet around it. (So there was no way, no way, she didn’t know she was seriously ill. No way it was quick. And can you imagine how that weighs on a daughter’s mind?) No real food in the place, but it was clean and tidy – my mother was house proud. Her box of tobacco lay tumbled on its side on the couch where she’d knocked it over when she died next to it – yes, smoking, whilst dying of pneumonia. I remember throwing up in her toilet at the horror of it all. She hadn’t told me any of it, not about being sick, not about being in financial strife, not about anything. We’d chatted on the phone numerous times before her death, and they’d been hopeful, loving, positive, redemptive conversations. I’d called her several times the day she died and thought it unusual, though not alarming, that her phone rang out, unanswered. She would have been dead on her couch right next to the phone while I was calling.

Horror. Real, savage, stark, inescapable horror. Reading and writing it helps me live through it.

Whilst mine pales into insignificance compared to, say, the horror experienced by men, women and children struggling for their very survival in the face of unfathomable violence, starvation and disease in war-torn countries; it is horror, it is real, and it is mine. I live with it every day, and it’s hard not to buckle under its weight. Often, I do buckle. My knees give out from under me and I fall in a heap and I am useless for days, sometimes weeks. In addition to the loving care of my husband and friends, books save me, every time, as they always have. Horror books. Like cures like.

On June 2nd, 2012 (next Saturday), it will be the ten year anniversary of my mother’s horrible, horrible, horrible death. I’ll travel to Tasmania to visit her plaque and be with the memories, good and bad. I loved my mother so dearly. I saw myself as merely an extension of her, we were so tightly connected. Us against the world. Her loss almost killed me – still has the power to bring me to the brink. That’s some of the real horror I’ve experienced. I know I’m not alone – we each have our unique horrors to deal with.

On the ‘plane on my way home to be with my mother’s ten year old ghost, I’ll be reading a horror book. It will keep me company. It will look after me.

Through all the things I’ve outlined above, the professionals who got me through the horrors in my life weren’t doctors, they were horror writers. Stephen King was a better father than my own and remains so to this day. I might’ve had to listen to my stepfather beating my mother through thin walls, but hey, the world was dying from a plague and the apocalypse was looming, man! Jack Torrance’s demons were far worse and more powerful than mine, Carrie fucked people’s shit up when they messed with her, and Rose Madder exacted the revenge on her abusive husband that I wanted to exact on my stepfather. There were bigger worries than mine in those books, so I escaped and found relief and reassurance there; and there were solutions. The victims fought. They got revenge. They got justice. Even when they lost, there was rhyme and reason. There is an order to things in horror, a savage, merciless order (as in life), and I love it. It comforted a little girl living amid blood and tears and violence, and it comforts me still as an adult.

It’s why I have always read horror, and it’s why, now, I write it. To not only be able to escape to those words, but to have the power to shape and craft them myself! Oh, bliss! What a privilege!

To put the wrong things right. To remind myself that I may have seen a monster ten feet fall, but that there are monsters thousands of feet tall out there, so it’s not so bad, really – I can survive. To get justice. To escape. To reassure myself I’m not weird and others have danced in the abyss with monsters too. To confront death and destruction and know I can accept it, even if I can’t defeat it. To face insanity and know I’m already insane – we all are, we all float down here – and so there’s nothing to fear, because the worst is already here with us. To fight. To fight. To have the power and strength to go back in time and no longer be a powerless little girl, to be an arse-kicking huricane who can devour my evil stepfather and visit pain and destruction on everyone else who ever hurt anyone.

I write and read horror to set the wrong things right. Horror is my hero.

How about you?

I was first sent a review copy of Grants Pass when it was published in 2009. In the time it took for me to get around to reading and reviewing it three years later (like, er, y’know, now), it picked up the 2010 Australian Shadows Award for edited publication – and,now that I’ve finally had the pleasure of devouring the book for myself, I can see why.

Like many good things, Grants Pass was a long time in the making. The concept originated from a blog post by Jennifer Brozek in 2004, a “thought exercise” positing the notion that, when the world ends, everyone should meet in a pre-destined place to pick up the pieces and carry on. The responses Brozek received led her to the idea of the Grants Pass anthology, which, after much pitching and reworking, came to fruition in partnership with her co-editor Amanda Pillar and publisher Morrigan Books. Brozek’s original blog post was used as inspiration for a journal entry by Kayley Allard which kicks off the anthology, and provides the central point (and a sort of meta-character-contributing-author) around which the entire book revolves: “when the end of the world comes, meet me in Grants Pass, Oregon”.

The end of the world does indeed come, thanks to three plagues released by terrorists (why, who, how, and to what end other than total annihilation of the planet is not explained), and a wave of very nasty natural disasters. Eighteen stories nestle between the covers of Grants Pass, detailing what comes next for survivors of the apocalypse. Each of the stories are never anything less than very good. Some are superb.

The standout piece for me was definitely Animal Husbandry by Seanan McGuire. A bleak, blunt story with an ethically curious core, this one stayed with me long after I put the book down. Touching on themes of euthanasia and humans as “domesticated animals” (I particularly enjoyed that perspective), and pulling no punches, this is an important, expertly told story. I remain perplexed as to where I stand on the protagonist’s actions. A very clever unexpected tale.

Several other stories were also striking (well, they all were, in their own unique ways – and that’s astonishingly rare in an anthology – but I’ve decided not to cover every story in this review, so will stick to the few that really leapt off the page at me). The disturbingly poetic Hell’s Bells by Cherie Priest was told from the point of view of a troubled young child with a morbid fascination with death and the bells that toll for it, and very little regard for human beings in general. Ascension by Martin Livings was probably the most original take on the end of the world theme, told from outside the planet looking in, and involving a stroll through space that truly chilled and moved me. Black Heart, White Mourning by Jay Lake introduced a frightening and unlikable mentally ill protagonist who I found myself nonetheless sympathising with due to Lake placing me squarely inside the character’s head – an impressive feat of authentic dialogue.

Grants Pass is vaguely reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Stand, what with the whole “illness wiping the world out and survivors being their own worst enemies” thing, though there is no religious apocalypse or any supernatural elements at all in the anthology – all the tales are very human indeed, and centred in a gritty, realistic future dystopia, told from various points around (and in one instance, outside) the globe. The horror in Grants Pass stems from these truths: people we love die and we can’t stop it, life is fragile, people can be terrible, loneliness can bring madness, and survival is something almost all of us have never really had to fight for before – and would be ill-prepared to do so if forced to.

I think the ultimate strong point of Grants Pass is its cohesiveness – the shared character (Kayley) and theme (Kayley’s blog post urging survivors towards Grants Pass) work to provide a united suite of stories and an immersive reading experience, which in turn forms an irresistible emotional connection between reader and words. Post apocalyptic fiction needs to make us care, or it just falls flat. Grants Pass made me care, and broke my heart more than a few times over.

Grants Pass has few weak points, and really I’m only pointing them out here for the sake of pure objectivity, so as not to write a review that is in fact just gushing praise (which is what I really want to do). One or two stories, whilst beautifully rendered, felt somewhat more like settings than fully developed narratives, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. The very cohesiveness that works so well for the collection can also bring a feeling of “sameness” and repetition; I liked that feeling, but some readers may need to take a break before diving back into the book to truly appreciate it. A few stories were harder for me to connect to because their locations and language were so far removed from anything I’ve personally experienced – but that in itself is a blessing, an educational journey within print – and I liked that not every story was set in the same geographical location.

Quite simply, I didn’t want this book to end. Highly recommended. Morrigan Books regularly release stylish, top-quality literature, and Grants Pass is no exception. It’s 2012; there’s no better time to read about the end of the world, and few better places to read about it than Grants Pass.