MIDNIGHT’S LAIR
MIDNIGHT’S LAIR isn’t my favorite novel by the late Richard Laymon, but it is compact, fast moving and imaginative in the best Laymon tradition.
Mantids
Get this: somewhere in the skuzzier regions of Astoria, Oregon a failed musician is afflicted with a permanent erection while having to contend with human-sized preying mantises, which include the hero’s own wife
JOKO’S ANNIVERSARY
Maybe this obscure exercise in European absurdism doesn’t belong in a horror book review, but it does contain generous helpings of mutilation, cannibalism and demonic possession.
JEANNE’S JOURNAL
Those lucky few who’ve read Arlette Ryvers’ translation of JEANNE’S JOURNAL all seem to exhibit similarly awe-struck reactions, and having finally gotten around to experiencing this pervy masterwork myself, I fully understand the adulation.
FROM INSIDE
As a veritable epic of sustained surreality this graphic novel is fairly remarkable.
THE EYES
It’s the first and thus far only English language collection of stories by the late Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta, the so-called “Andalusian de Sade” who specialized in scatological excess.
EAT HIM IF YOU LIKE
Definitely one for the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, a novelized account of the “Affaire de Hautefaye” that occurred on August 16, 1870.
THE DEVIL’S POPESS
This wild and strange novella was initially published in French back in 1931. According to the 1999 introduction by Alastair Brotchie, the accredited authors “Jehan Sylvius” and “Pierre de Ruysnes” are pseudonymous; its actual authors may or may not be the surrealist scribes Robert Desnos and Ernest de Gengenbach. As Brotchie smartly concludes, “Whoever the authors were, they evidently enjoyed themselves.”
THE CURSE OF LATOMBA
Here’s an interesting artifact I recently unearthed from my closet, a horror novel packaged as a tabloid newspaper, complete with (bogus) ads and photos. Printed in South Carolina by someone calling himself “Edward Hyde” (a pen name, obviously!), it’s a lurid, nasty, occasionally funny first person account of a cannibalistic serial killer named Edgar, told in the form of a lengthy letter he writes to a supermarket rag called “The Grapevine.” Here’s an interesting artifact I recently unearthed from my closet, a horror novel packaged as a tabloid newspaper, complete with (bogus) ads and photos. Printed in South Carolina by someone calling himself “Edward Hyde” (a pen name, obviously!), it’s a lurid, nasty, occasionally funny first person account of a cannibalistic serial killer named Edgar, told in the form of a lengthy letter he writes to a supermarket rag called “The Grapevine.”
CONSUMED
CONSUMED is the better-late-than-never debut novel 71-year-old David Cronenberg. It has a thoroughly unique and individual voice that falls somewhere between those of William Gibson and Don DeLillo in its concentration on technological minutiae and elegant perversity. It’s also fully in keeping with the obsessions and subject matter of Cronenberg’s films.