‘Last Year, When We Were Young’ by Andrew J McKiernan – review by Greg Chapman

DISCLAIMER: Thirteen O’Clock is managed by Alan Baxter, Felicity Dowker and Andrew McKiernan as Contributing Editors. While the Contributing Editors’ roles at Thirteen O’Clock are editorial and critique, all three are primarily writers. It is inevitable that their own work will form part of the Australian and international dark fiction publications which are Thirteen O’Clock’s focus, and as such it is also inevitable that their work will be reviewed at Thirteen O’Clock (to prohibit this would not only be unfortunate for Baxter, Dowker, and McKiernan themselves, but for their hardworking editors and publishers).

Thirteen O’Clock will always have a third party contributor review the Contributing Editors’ work. Such reviews will be unedited (aside from standard corrections to typos and grammar), posted in full (be they negative or positive), and will always be accompanied by full disclosure of Baxter, Dowker, and McKiernan’s place at Thirteen O’Clock. At no point will Baxter, Dowker or McKiernan review their own work.

Last Year, When We Were Young - coverLast Year, When We Were Young
by Andrew J McKiernan

Satalyte Publishing (www.satalyte.com.au)

Paperback: ISBN 978-0-9925095-2-1
E-book: ISBN 978-0-9925095-3-8

Review by Greg Chapman

Andrew J. McKiernan’s collection, Last Year When We Were Young, is proof yet again of the incredible writing talent that can be found in Australia and further still, proof that horror can have a meaningful voice that goes well beyond blood and gore.

Whether it is a story about a secretary taking phone messages from the dead, a group of clowns trying to avoid forced conscription in a travelling circus, or astronauts encountering cosmic monsters in the depths of space, the impossible in McKiernan’s stories never fails to engage because the stories always orbit characters that are quantifiably human.

McKiernan’s deft hand with prose is also addictive, with each turn of phrase sweeping the reader away from reality. Although many of his supernatural tales exude mysterious atmosphere, demonic forces or faith, I think the stories where the uncanny takes a back seat are where he really shines. Here the horror is less inexplicable, but no less haunting. The tales, White Lines, White Crosses, The Memory of Water, Calliope: A Steam Romance, and the title story being prime examples.

Overall, the collection is engrossing, every story leaving the reader with sensations of loss, hope, melancholy, repulsion and joy. It’s not often that a writer can convey such a broad section of emotions, but this is what makes collections so worthwhile – and enjoyable.

I recall reading one of Andrew’s Facebook posts some time ago about how he was finding it a real challenge to select the stories for Last Year, When We Were Young, but I can safely say that he and Satalyte Publishing have put together a wonderful treasury of fiction that is well worth any reader’s time, horror fan or no.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Year-When-Were-Young/dp/0992509521/
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22523234-last-year-when-we-were-young

Review by Greg Chapman (http://www.darkscrybe.blogspot.com/)

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud – review

9781618730602_medNorth American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

Published July 2013
Trade cloth: 9781618730596
Trade paper: 9781618730602
Ebook: 9781618730619

Small Beer Press

I’ve never come across the short fiction of Nathan Ballingrud before, but when this book was released I saw a sudden buzz around my social media feeds. I always pay attention to that sort of activity, so I picked up a copy of the ebook. Having just finished reading it, I went straight back to the Small Beer Press and ordered the Trade cloth edition. This is a book that needs to stand proud on a bookshelf.

There are nine stories in this debut collection from Ballingrud and each one of them is amazing. There is not a low point anywhere in this book. Balligrud’s writing is both beautiful and unrelenting, artistic and brutal. The same can be said for every story and every character. He draws on pain for his work, whether that pain is a lost young white supremacist, a broken down waitress, a man who recently got out of jail and doesn’t know his daughter any more, a man who lost his child, a husband who has become increasingly disconnected from his wife who suffers terrible depression and regularly attempts suicide. Against those characters of raw realism and terrible everyday struggle, Ballingrud draws the most incredible supernatural and horrific environments in which to put those people. The crass, the ugly, the brutal, the terrifying. It exists in every inch of every story and the characters reflect their terrible situations as much as those situations reflect the characters.

And yet, while I might make it sound horrendously bleak by the above description (and believe me, it often is!) it’s also sublimely beautiful, in both idea and execution. This book contains one of the most amazing vampire yarns I’ve ever read. Also one of the best werewolf stories and, at a stretch, the best zombie story ever. It’s not a zombie story in the Romero tradition, but even so. It’s better than that. More subtle, more heartbreaking. I’ve also read several stories based around the horror of New Orleans and Katrina, but Ballingrud’s The Way Station blows them all away. And there’s a touch of Cthulhu mythos in this book, equally well handled.

There are no answers here, no happy endings. Some stories are left hanging, almost too soon, but only better for that. There’s no suggestion of a way out of the darkness drawn by these tales, whether that’s the darkness of Elder gods, blood sucking vampires or humanity’s incredible ability to care so little for its fellows. Yet for a book with such a diverse eye for monsters and the supernatural, the overall sensation left after reading is one of humanity. Which should ever be the root cause of horror writing, that exploration of the truly dark nature of the human, in the face of monsters or of themselves.

Ballingrud’s touch is light, his implications subtle. For that reason, the moments of stark and visceral horror have all the more impact. This is without a doubt one of the best short fiction collections I’ve ever read. Not for the faint of heart, but worth the trauma for the incredible writing, absolutely real characters and palpable sense of wonder that comes from every touch of the unnatural along the way. This book is a dark road, emotionally battering and utterly incredible. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Andrew McKiernan Signs Two-Book Deal

Australian writer and illustrator Andrew McKiernan has just signed a two book deal with Satalyte Publishing.

The first is for a collection of his short stories, “A Prayer for Lazarus & Other Strange Offerings” (14 published stories + 2 new stories), which will appear in print and e-book in the second half of 2014.

The second deal is for his crime novel “A Quiet Place”, which he sold on the strength of
the first 8,000 words and will be appearing in print and e-book in early 2015.

Stay tuned for further updates as the publication dates approached.

Andrew J McKiernan is an author and illustrator living and working on the Central Coast of New South Wales. His stories have appeared in magazines such as Aurealis, Midnight Echo and the Eclecticism e-zine, as well as the anthologies In Bad Dreams 2, Masques, Scenes from the Second Storey, Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, and Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2010. He has twice (2009 & 2010) been shortlisted for both Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, as well as a Ditmar Award shortlisting in 2010. His story “The Desert Song” from the Scenes from the Second Storey anthology received an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Vol.3. Andrew’s illustrations have appeared on many book and magazine covers, as well as featuring in the collections Shards: Short Sharp Tales by Shane Jiraiya Cummings from Brimstone Press and Savage Menace & Other Poems of Horror by Richard Tierney from P’rea Press.

Satalyte Publishing is an Australian publishing house of Australian authors for a global market. Their mission is to put Australian authors back on the world map of reading, and they will be offering the best of Australian authors in a variety of genres.

Satalyte Publishing

Living With the Dead by Martin Livings – Review

Living With the Dead by Martin Livings
Publisher: Dark Prints Press
ISBN: 978-0-9871976-6-5

There’s a quote attributed to Harlan Ellison about writing which goes: “The trick isn’t becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.” If this is taken as true, then Martin Livings has certainly mastered the trick. For twenty years Livings has been publishing horror fiction fairly consistently, and of a quality high enough to have received multiple nominations (and a couple of wins) of nearly every major Australian speculative-fiction award there is. He has published a novel, novellas, and novelettes, but it is in the short story form that Livings is most prolific, and possibly, at his best.

Living With The Dead is Martin Livings’s first published collection of short stories. Brought to us by Dark Prints Press, the book (in its physical form) is a striking and hefty trade paperback with a marvellously evocative monochromatic cover illustration by Vincent Chong. Inside are twenty three stories; a reprint story for each of Mr Livings’s published twenty years, plus three brand new stories. That might seem like a lot of stories for a single-author collection, but this isn’t just a ‘greatest hits’ compilation. Living With the Dead is more a retrospective collection of Livings’ writing career to date. While not presented in publication order, the decision to include so many stories does mean a more variable collection overall. But, considering the high quality of the stories throughout, this matters little, and the inclusion of so many tales does give an interesting (and more complete) overview of Livings’s progression as writer.

Being as there are so many stories, I’ll limit myself to commenting on those I found exceptional and name dropping those that I found merely good. As you’ll see, even that will still cover a great portion of the collection.

Lollo is the lead-story, and as it is a story about an evil clown doll, it is sure to creep out a large portion of the horror reading genre. I’ve never really been bothered by that particular fear — I think clowns much maligned, in fact — but Lollo was written well enough to keep me hooked. Maybe it’s the 80s slasher film feel to the story that lifts it above the typical evil-clown tale? Sort of like a Tarantino mash-up of 80s horror. Whatever it is, Lollo is a great lead in to the collection and certainly sets the tone.

You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet is the first original tale to the collection, and one that tickled both my ‘what if’ and ‘film history’ buttons. The premise? What would a snuff film from the era of Silent Film be like? In typical Livings style, he holds back from the obvious tack of hack-and-slash gore until the last excruciating moment. I’m glad that, after a rough publication history, this story has seen print. It’s a really good one.

Running is a story originally written for Agog Press’s giant monster anthology ‘Daikaiju’. It takes the absurd ‘sport’ of Running With the Bulls and makes it even more absurd. And yet, at the same time, Running is a touching story of how the forces of nature (such as hurricane Katrina) can affect and change our lives. It is often this mix of the absurd with the touching that makes Livings’ work so memorable.

Piggies is a story I missed when it was first published, and a good thing too or I probably would never have written my own The Final Degustation of Doctor Ernest Blenheim. The ideas are so similar, that Piggies acts almost as a prequel. What lifts Piggies far above my own story, is Livings’ ability (like that of his story’s protagonist) to cut things right back to the bone. Piggies is short and sharp and all the more disturbing for it.

In Nomine Patris (see, I’m listing near every story here!) is another short tale. Incest, abortion, cannibalism, religion and all handled sensitively in only 3 1/2 pages. Where many authors would pad out a idea like this, Livings leaves you with only the barest of bones. It is restraint like this that makes Livings well worth reading.

Hooked is possibly the most twisted tale in the book. Not for the gore or surreal twists of Livings’ other works, but for the way it takes our childhood dreams and turns them into something much more horrible and (probably) much more realistic. Here J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan is given the Livings treatment, with all our favourite characters descending into crime, prostitution and drug addiction. A cautionary tale maybe, for those who find it too hard to give up their childhoods?

Living With the Dead, the title story, is one of the older tales in the collection. Despite the spectre of HIV/AIDS Hysteria having long faded from our media-ruled consciousnesses, it would be too simple to change this tale of social cleansing to a more modern disease or even life-choices and other perceived ‘differences’ (such as sexuality or religion) and for it to still have relevance. Keeping this in mind, Living With the Dead loses none of its impact almost 20 years past its original publication.

Birthday Suit is another story original to the collection, and my favourite of the lot. Others must have thought so too, because Birthday Suit was recently short-listed for just about every Australian spec-fic award and won the Australian Shadow Award for best Horror Short Story. The tale has the feel of Ray Bradbury about it, of normal lives lived and the bittersweet experiences that can bring. I won’t even go into the premise of Birthday Suit, because I want you to discover it for youself. It is so good an idea I can’t believe nobody thought of this before. But, then again, I’m glad it is Martin Livings who was the writer who did think of it as he certainly does the concept justice. Birthday Suit is so wonderful and beautiful and sad, that (even though I’d read it before) it really topped off the collection for me.

A few other stories deserve mention. Down Town, Smiley, Into the Valley and The Last Gig of Jimmy Rucker (written with Talie Helene) are all wonderful too. This isn’t too say that any of the stories in this collection are bad or not worth reading. Some are indeed more mature, more assured, than others but all were deserving of their initial publication and it is a treat to read them all collected here.

Overall, Living With the Dead is a great collection of tales, although a little uneven at times. It shows Martin Livings to be an author who enjoys tugging on his readers’ heartstrings just as much as he enjoys severing them. Twenty years is a long time to have been publishing short stories but, on the strength of Living With the Dead, I’m hoping that in twenty years I’ll be waxing lyrical about Martin Livings’ second retrospective collection.

Midnight and Moonshine by Lisa L Hannett and Angela Slatter – review

midnight-and-moonshine-web[2]Midnight and Moonshine by Lisa L Hannett and Angela Slatter

Published by Ticonderoga Publications

ISBN: 9781921857300

Angela Slatter and Lisa L Hannett have become well known for their collaborative short fiction work. Last year they won an Aurealis Award for it. They’ve also won plenty of awards for their individual efforts, including Ditmar, Aurealis and British Fantasy Award wins and World Fantasy Award nominations. So we’ve come to expect good things from these two, especially when they work together. And now they’ve worked together on an entire book – the mosaic novel, Midnight & Moonshine.

A mosaic novel is like a novel by stealth – a collection of individual short stories, each self-contained, yet featuring repeated characters, themes and consequences to make the collection a far greater narrative as a whole. For Midnight & Moonshine, Hannett and Slatter have retold the Norse mythology of Ragnarok, woven in with Faerie lore, in the new world of America.

I won’t give away any particular details. Suffice to say that the central recurring theme is the character of Mymnir, the white raven. And such a brilliant character she is, beautiful and terrible, immortal, powerful and sometimes all too human. To explain the general focus of the book, I’ll use the official blurb:

The gods are dead, but will not be forgotten.

When Mymnir flees the devastation of Ragnarok, she hopes to escape all that bound her to Ásgarðr — a heedless pantheon, a domineering brother, and her neglectful father-master, Óðinn. But the white raven, a being of memory and magic, should know that the past is not so easily left behind. No matter how far she flies, she cannot evade her family…

In planting seeds of the old world in the new, Mymnir becomes queen of a land with as many problems as the one she fled. Her long-lived Fae children ignite and fan feuds that span generations; lives are lost and loves won because of their tampering. Told in thirteen parts, Midnight and Moonshine follows the Beaufort and Laveaux families, part-human, part-Fae, as they battle, thrive and survive in Mymnir’s kingdom.

Midnight and Moonshine is a collection of interconnected tales with links between them as light and strong as spider-silk. From fire giants to whispering halls, disappearing children to evening-wolves, fairy hills to bewitched cypress trees, and talking heads to moonshiners of a special sort, Midnight and Moonshine takes readers on a journey from ninth century Vinland to America’s Deep South in the present day. Hannett and Slatter have created a mosaic novel of moments, story-tiles as strange as witchwood and withywindles.

The stories are told from a variety of differing viewpoints and in a variety of styles, but the powerful combined voice of Hannett and Slatter shines through consistently. These are two writers with a masterful touch for prose that is always enchanting, yet never prosaic. Each story is a complete and fascinating thing in its own right and, naturally, I preferred some more than others. Only one story didn’t really work for me on its own, but it still had important seeds of the greater narrative in it and was far from a bad story. Some of the high points for me were Kveldulfr, a really powerful horror story in its own right and an excellent insight into some of the smaller details of the greater narrative. The Red Wedding was another high point, as was Midnight, both excellent stories with memorable characters. Interestingly, these three stories appear in that order right in the middle of the book, so there’s definitely no slack in the middle of this collection.

Most collections are at their strongest in the beginning and the end, as that’s where editors usually put the strongest tales. With a mosaic like this, there’s a chronology at work that dictates the placing of stories. But this volume is only enhanced by that, as everything is informed by that which came before, adding the depth and scope.

Another favourite of mine is the final story, Seven Sleepers, that ties everything together and has a truly mythic quality, and is perhaps the most epic in scale. It leaves us without a certain amount of closure, yet a strong desire to know more. It’s clear there are more stories to be told about the Beauforts and the Laveaux, the two central families in these tales, and probably about Mymnir too.

This is an almost entirely original collection with only the penultimate story, Prohibition Blues, being previously published. That was included in the Damnation and Dames anthology (also from Ticonderoga Publications) and was, according to the Afterword, the catalyst for this entire book. So we have to thank Ticonderoga and editors, Liz Grzyb and Amanda Pillar, for putting together the Damnation and Dames anthology, which is itself a fantastic book. [Caveat – for purposes of transparency, myself and Felicity Dowker collaborated on a story called Burning, Always Burning which was published in Damnation and Dames.]

Midnight and Moonshine draws deeply on Hannett’s PhD subject, both author’s skill at fairy tales and two of the best existing mythologies (Norse and Fae) to create something with lashings of style. Norse gods and Fae folk, bayou and voodoo, prohibition and giants, epic quests and personal triumphs and tragedies, this collection explores them all and more. A brilliant collection, well worth your time and money. It should also be noted that, as is usually the case with Ticonderoga Publications, this is a beautiful artefact of a book as well, with stellar cover art by Kathleen Jennings, herself the recipient of many awards and nominations for her art. In this age of crappy graphic design and homogenous cover art, it’s a pleasure to see a book that is so exquisitely crafted by its authors and so beautifully presented by its publisher.

There’s no question that this collection has leapt straight onto my Books Of The Year list.

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