Leisure Book Reviews and Random Thoughts


It's the holiday season, and what better way to celebrate than with a great big pile of steaming guts and blood, or a creepy kid prowling around beneath the tree? This month Leisure gives us two great books that sit on opposite ends of the horror spectrum.


Succulent Prey, by Wrath James White


Hard hitting, graphically violent, and filled with the kind of sexual content the Marquis de Sade would appreciate. This book isn't for everyone, but if you can look past the body parts and fluids, you'll find a surprisingly intellectual look into a disturbed human mind. Fans of Wrath will love it; the rest of the horror reading public with be split between disgust and awe. A solid B+.

In Succulent Prey, Wrath James White postulates a new take on the werewolf mythos: the idea that serial killers could actually suffer from a communicable disease.

The book centers on Joseph Miles, who as a child was the only survivor of a particularly nasty serial killer. Now a college student, he feels the desire to kill and believes the man who attacked him has passed some type of virus on to him, and now he has to find a cure before he kills the woman he loves (who just happens to be chained up in Joseph's bedroom, already a victim of Joseph's degraded proclivities).

The book provides us with a fascinating examination of Joseph's mind as he struggles with his dark desires and impulses, while at the same time fighting to find a cure for something that somewhere down deep actually excites him.

Wrath fills his book with scenes that are gruesome enough to make a person skip a holiday dinner feast. Sexual perversities, cannibalism, murder, rape, torture, sadism, and more - all depicted in stomach-churningly exquisite detail. Yet at the same time, he manages to pull off two writing feats that make this book so astounding: he never goes so overboard that the impact of the violence or sex become parodies, losing their punch in the manner that the violence and blood in the current spate of torture porn movies have become ho-hum. And then there is his voice, his tone as a writer. By giving us a psychology student as a main character, Wrath establishes a clinical tone that acts like baking soda on the fire of our emotions, dampening them so that the unpalatable is suddenly readable.

For me, what this most reminded me of was the anatomy classes I took in college. The dead corpse on the table wasn't a person. Those weren't breasts, those weren't human eyes. It was a lump of dead, cold meat that meant nothing to me except as a source of information to be learned.

You might not like what you learn in Succulent Prey, but you'll appreciate the learning process.

If you want to read something different from anything else you'll read this year, this is the book to read.

Just don't do it right before or after a good meal.

***


The Reach, by Nate Kenyon


Classic horror in the vein of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Peter Straub. Better than I expected it to be, although not without its problems. A definite B.

The Reach is Nate Kenyon's second novel, following hard on the heels of Bloodstone. It was my first opportunity to read anything by Mr. Kenyon, and after finishing the book, I can see what the buzz around him is all about.

The basic plot, that of a girl with supernatural powers who ends up using them to get back at the people who've abused her and kept her locked up in asylums all her life, is nothing new. Stephen King did a great job with this type of character in Firestarter and Carrie, and other writers have used it ad nauseum as well. But Kenyon does what lesser writers can't - he takes a tired trope and makes it his own, using exceptional writing and characterization to elevate the book above the ordinary.

In The Reach, Jess Chambers is a psychology grad student assigned to evaluate Sara, a psychotic little girl. As time goes by, we find out, along with Jess, that Sara is more than just a schizophrenic. She also has the ability to use her hidden powers in destructive, violent, ways. Now Jess has to not only bond with Sara and find a way to resolve her psychological issues, but also prevent the girl from going on a rampage that could end up destroying more than just the clinic, or even the surrounding town.

Kenyon does a great job of getting us into the mind of Jess Chambers, and unlike Succulent Prey, there is no clinical tone here to shelter us from the events in this story. In The Reach, the emotion is necessary to help us feel what the characters feel, to identify with them. The very things that work here wouldn't work in Succulent Prey, which is why both books work well dealing with the same general topic - psychotic conditions - while sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Where The Reachfailed for me was in the first third of the book, which took a while to gain its feet and get its momentum going. While slow starts were common in the classic horror novels of the 80s - King and Straub especially were known for this - Kenyon doesn't yet have the writing skills to pull this off like those masters of the craft. I fear that some of today's 'I want it NOW!' readers might have trouble with the first 100 or so pages, before the book really picks up steam and gets rolling. After that, however, anyone who sticks with it will find themselves unable to put the book down.

My suggestion is read this book, and keep an eye on Nate Kenyon - he's poised to make a big mark in the genre.

***
I don't know about you, but I'd like to see more holiday-related dark fiction at this time of year. Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Winter Solstice, New Year's celebrations - there's a treasure trove of ideas just waiting to be mined. It seems like each year all we get is the occasional anthology or a magazine devoted to holiday scares. Well I say, give me more! Winter is one of the most frightening times of year - it's cold, dark, and windy. More people die in the winter, especially around the holidays, than any other time of year.

Why save all the scares for the summer, or Halloween?

###

JG Faherty is a writer of dark fiction. His recent credits include Cemetery Dance, www.wrongworld.com, Shroud Magazine, and the anthologies Bound for Evil, Bits of the Dead, and Dark Territories. He writes regular columns, book reviews, and interviews for the Horror Writers Association newsletter, FearZone, and several other online and print venues. You can visit him at JGFaherty.com