Customer Reviews

Aberrations: Horror Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Recovering from oral surgery, I picked up this new anthology from Jeremy C. Shipp, the talented author that brought us CURSED and VACATION. Though his one offering in this collection is short, it is exactly what we've come to expect from him - crisp, comedic, and haunting. Not surprisingly, the best story in this collection, "Survivors," comes from Joe McKinney. I love McKinney's realistic take on all matters zombie, and this story is no exception. Here we deal with the scars of war and the limits of human endurance. McKinney's prose is simple, elegant, and always effective! Another great story comes from Lisa Morton. "Tested" deals with true courage against the things that should not be and is deeply satisfying and unpredictable. All the stories here are good or better. Pick this up today!!!!!

Aberrations was a good, diverse batch of stories, and I want to take a moment to discuss my three favorites.

The anthology kicks off with "Money Well Earned" by Joseph Nassise. A hit man is hired to rid Point Pleasant, West Virginia of the Mothman. Never one to turn down a job, he goes, but is surprised by what he finds there. I like the blend of urban legend and gritty crime story. The twist was clever (I knew something was coming, but didn't know what) and the tone really propelled the piece. Great story.

Another that I really dug was Joe McKinney's contribution, "Survivors". I've read Apocalypse of the Dead and thought it was decent, but this one really moved me, a story about survivor's guilt set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. I like zombie stories that aren't about zombies, and this one pulled that off nicely. This tale was all about Canavan, and could have been superimposed over any disaster. That said, McKinney took advantage of the zombies for some nice, non-gratuitous gore. Nice blend.

The piece that knocked my socks off, though, blew me away, was "The Hounds of Love" by Scott Nicholson. I was turned off at first: a kid who tortures animals named Dexter? That's been done. But I stopped caring about that after a page or two. This book explores the concept of love, what it means, what it can do, through an awesome sick and sad lens. It's really hard to read, as an animal lover, but Nicholoson's ending is just fantastic. I can't say anything else about the end `cause I want every person who reads this review to run out and read the story. Three thumbs up.

Editor Jeremy C. Shipp's contribution, "Goat Boy" was good, short and sweet, and I enjoyed Elizabeth Massie's "Beggars at Dawn". Some of the other tales I wasn't wild about, but the good stories make this anthology a must have, especially since the Kindle version is $2.99. That's less than a snack, and infinitely more satisfying. Also, the cover art is beautiful!

I really enjoyed this collection of creepy, haunting stories. Goat Boy is a terrific story by Jeremy C. Shipp; exactly what I've come to expect from his writing. The other writers were just as good. Definitely a 5-star read!

ABERRATIONS is a creepy collection of works by some of the best horror writers in the business. Jeremy C. Shipp's GOAT BOY story is a bizarro journey that leaves you wanting more. Kealan Patrick Burke's FROM HAMLIN TO HARPERVILLE is a spooky twist on a classic tale that I learned is part of a trilogy - I'm looking for the other two stories. :-) Elizabeth Massie's BEGGARS AT DAWN is a bittersweet story that stands out, too, making this a collection that covers the whole gamut of monsters. Overall, a great book.

At $2.99, I can't complain about this collection; it provided, as I'd hoped, a welcome respite from the self-conscious "importance" of the last book I read, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections."

That said, I was pretty surprised to find that the contributors to this collection are so well-accomplished in the horror writing field. Because I found the writing, overall, not very good at all. Perhaps a lot of these stories were of the "back-of-the-drawer" variety, previously unpublished second-rate efforts that the author figured to finally place in a public forum.

In any event, here is a brief story-by-story overview with commentary to give you something of an idea of what's for sale here:

This collection opens with Joseph Nassise's, "Money Well Earned," a succinct and slickly-penned tale of a hitman hired to terminate a creature of myth--it's a clever story whose O.Henry-style ending you don't see coming primarily because the story doesn't take forever to end.

Just the opposite is the case in the following tale, Lisa Tuttle's "Bug House," which unfolds like a bad joke you've heard many times over made all the worse this time by being retold in slow motion.

In "The Thing in the Woods," Nate Kenyon grafts the Bigfoot myth onto a none-too-original story of homicidal infidelity resulting in a rather awkward, confused, and unconvincing hybrid of horror and suspense.

Joe McKinney follows Kenyon with a far better effort, offering up a straightforward, no-nonsense tale of zombies and survivor's guilt, aptly titled "Survivors."

Scott Nicholson makes it two good stories in a row with "The Hounds of Hell," a creepy study of a troubled young boy from a dysfunctional home who tries to piece together the mystery of love by means of his sickeningly sadistic pet sacrifices in the woods.

The guy who edited this collection, Jeremy Shipp, steps up to the plate next with the inclusion of his own story, "Goat Boy," which begins with the promising line, "My cousin Carl's an undertaker, and of course he owes me for the kidney, so that's how I get the corpse blood." What follows is a short tale in the bizarre-absurdist vein featuring a man who invokes a demon to work a spell in the hopes he can get over a lost love. Stylistically, it's the most ambitious, self-consciously literary piece in the collection. I liked it; it may just as easily annoy you.

"Tested," by Lisa Morton is a heavy-handed morality tale that revisits traditional notions of male heroism from a feminist perspective. A man runs his car off the road in the middle of a Seattle forest, his bleeding wife is unconscious in the passenger seat, and a large humanoid beast representing his darkest fear is lurking around the wreckage. He is about to learn the real meaning of courage and it's not what he thought it was. It's all very reminiscent of an old Twilight Zone episode and that's probably what it should have been once upon a time.

Simon Wood follows Morton with the "Bus People," an immature gross-out leftover from the days of splatterpunk in which a couple of teenage drug couriers discover just what a nightmare public transportation can be. Maybe it would work as a script for a comic book; as a short story, it was lame.

After that, I had higher hopes for Elizabeth Massie's "Beggars at Dawn." How could I not? Happily, I wasn't disappointed. Massie's tale, a piece of historical horror, follows a WWI veteran on a grim march through a cold winter morning in Appalachia and a revelatory rendezvous in an abandoned tunnel long-reputed to be haunted. By far, this is the most emotionally compelling, the best-written, most complete and complex story in the collection, which made its simplistic and hackneyed resolution all the less satisfying. But at this point, I realize I'm probably expecting too much philosophical sophistication than is customarily brought to the horror genre.

Finally, we get to "From Hamlin To Harperville," a story by Kealan Patrick Burke that incompletely and rather confusedly combines the Pied Piper legend with contemporary child murder.

All in all, an uneven, lackluster sampling of contemporary horror not bad for the price and a few hours worth of entertainment that, if not entirely mindless, is not very taxing either.