Horror Mall Indie Spotlight
Posted by Peter Schwotzer in Books, Terror Tales with Peter D. Schwotzer on February 10th, 2009
Children of Chaos by Greg F. Gifune
In a torrential downpour, Phil, Jamie and Martin—three teenage boys—encounter a strange and enigmatic man covered in horrible scars who will change their lives, their destinies and the very fate of their souls forever. When their encounter leads to murder, they realize this eerie stranger may not have been a man at all, but something much more…
Thirty years later the boys—now men—lead tormented lives filled with horrifying memories of the scarred man. Phil is a struggling writer, divorced, with a daughter and a mounting drinking problem. Jamie is a defrocked priest with depraved secrets and horrible addictions, and Martin, a madman who thinks himself a god, has vanished into a desolate desert region of Mexico and established a feared and violent blood cult. When Martin’s dying mother hires Phil to find her son and bring him home, Phil embarks on a perilous journey that will take him from the seedy streets of Tijuana, to a dangerous and allegedly haunted stretch of desert Mexican road known as The Corridor of Demons. At the end of the road, in an old and previously abandoned church, Martin and his followers wait in the Hell-on-Earth they’ve created deep in the desert. There will be only one chance for redemption, one chance for salvation, and one chance to stop the rise of an antichrist’s bloody quest for demonic power.
From the void, came chaos. These are its children.
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SHADOWS OVER NEW ENGLAND by David Goudsward & Scott T. Goudsward
Traditional New England was in decline after the Civil War. The war had decimated the male population. Farms were being abandoned in favor of the mills. This environment of change and instability gave birth to a new milieu of isolated villages, declining blue-bloods and hidden scandals that were ripe for inspiring horror and dark writers. Literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, in his 1940 study of New England literary trends, New England: Indian Summer 1865-1915, described it thusly:
“There were colonies of savages near Lenox, queer, degenerate clans that lived “on the mountain,” the descendants of prosperous farmers. There were old poisoners in lonely houses. There were Lizzie Bordens in the village, heroines in reverser who served the devil. There were Draculas in the northern hills and witch-women who lived in sheds, lunatics in attics.”
This was the golden age of ghost and horror tales in New England, culminating in H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence carried over into modern writers such as Robert Bloch, Ramsay Campbell and Stephen King. Shadows Over New England is a guide to geographical locations, real and fictional, utilized in horror tales set in New England. It is hard to say which is more disquieting, terror amidst staid Yankees in a familiar setting or horror in obscure, forgotten corners of New England. Both have their uses as weapons in the battle to scare you out of your wits.
And the line blurs. To a fan of horror, there are fictional towns that are as real as any found in an atlas: Castle Rock, Maine, Arkham, Massachusetts or Oxrun Station, Connecticut. Even those who don’t follow the genre have heard of the nonexistent Connecticut town that is home to the Stepford Wives or Collinsport, Maine with more Dark Shadows, witches, vampires and werewolves per capita than any colonial seaport really needs.
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Shadows and Other Tales by Tony Richards
Get ready for the scariest journey of your life. Becaue it doesn’t matter where you go–London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Japan, Jamaica–you’ll find one thing waiting for you when you get there…shadows. They’re on every street, down every narrow alley. They even haunt the corners of a bright tropical beach. They are always there, lingering at the edges of your vision. And they never, ever go away.
Come with Tony Richards as he wanders the globe in search of new ones. You see, anything can cast them. A raggedy old circus tent. The dim corridors of an old-age home. The incense-smelling depths of a traditional Chinese temple. You can even find them in a house just like your own. And if you dare to step into those shadows, you’ll find something even more terrifying…
The fear of the unknown.
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Edward Lee and H.P. Lovecraft join forces…
Sort of, although Lee does most of the work on this one…
Imagine this… In 1934, ground-breaking horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is invited to write a story for a subversive underground magazine, all on the condition that a pseudonym will be used. The pay is lofty, and God knows, HPL needs the money; therefore…he agrees.
There’s one catch.
It has to be a pornographic story…
ALL ABOARD TROLLEY NO. 1852
Through the midnight bowels of New York City, the decrepit trolley clatters on, its single yellow headlight illumining one desolate alley and squalid, trash-strewn street after the next, through crumbling ghettos and betwixt drab skyscrapers and labyrinthine edifices–indeed, the very guts of the Depression-ravaged metropolis. The Trolley admits only a special sort of rider, and takes them to a very select destination…
THE 1852 CLUB
What is the meaning behind the cryptic number, and what is the ghastly truth behind the club’s voluptuous madam? For, yes, the 1852 Club is a bordello of the most macabre discrimination. Destitute academician Morgan Phillips will learn of all the club’s pestiferous secrets but not before he is first subjected to unnameable acts degradation and abuse, and is then thrown body and soul into a morass of erotic abandon, sexual perversion, and gut-churning, brain-warping, inter-dimensional carnality so unspeakable it can scarcely be described…
Join horror veteran Edward Lee in this bold homage to his favorite horror author: H.P. Lovecraft. Herein, Lee boldly converts HPL’s obscure fragment “The Thing in the Moonlight” into a full-fledged novella, incorporating as best he can the Master’s rich, singular style and vision, while integrating some of his own lurid tricks and treats…
