Customer Reviews

Guises

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Charlee Jacob has developed a distinctive style of horror fiction, writing perhaps unparalleled scenes of gore and ickiness to make the most hardened splatterpunk squirm, but with the poetic prose of a true artist, and without the misogyny usually associated with such visceral work. Indeed, Jacob's women are strong, scary, at least as dangerous as her male characters. No writer I know of can so consistently and effectively blend beauty with violence and decay. She has a singular and breath-taking imagination, a singular and fascinating prose style. Simply put, Charlee Jacob is one of the very best practitioners of modern horror.

The power and the poetry...the beauty and the horror...as thick and rich as a garden of unearthly delights... With a fascination for the grotesque and a true insight into the eternal, Charlee Jacob's unique literary vision is both disarming and disturbing. If Nightmare were given a pen, Jacob's hand would be its operator. Highly recommended.

I couldn't decide where to start; GUISES is Charlee Jacob's latest collection from Delirium Books. I recieved it in the mail
a few days ago,and there are no words I can use to describe the
stories in this book. I'll try: Charlee Jacob does what she does
better than anyone else; she constructs stories of heart-stopping
beauty and doesn't shy away from gruesome images. Believe me,
she'll make you see horrible,beautiful things. To read Jacob is
to be dragged naked but happy through blood-soaked fields of broken glass. As a bonus,besides her incredible stories,there
are POEMS. Get this or remain ignorant about modern horror.

After discovering Charlee Jacob through her gore-soaked vampire novel, "This Symbiotic Fascination," it seemed stupid to wait until the release of her second novel sometime next year without dipping into more of this excellent author's horrific writings. "Guises" is a worthy collection of vintage Charlee: a series of gruesome short stories written in lofty prose not normally found in the horror genre. Also included in "Guises" are more than a few poems, although this is not the type of poetry Robert Frost would recognize, let alone write.

There are ten short stories in this collection, with many of them previously appearing in horror magazines. The first story, "The Piper," is a grim reworking of the "Pied Piper of Hamlin." But there aren't any mice in this tale. Instead, a man who has spent his life helping others discovers that when children die in violent events, they tend to come back in spirit. Through a case of mistaken identity, this man, John Piper, must find out why the children haunt him, and what he can do for them. This is one of the better stories in the collection, and an excellent way to start the book.

Another personal favorite is, "Four Elements and an Emphatic Moon." This story is about reincarnation of a type that would make Shirley McClaine shriek in horror. The starting point is medieval France, where a group of nuns comes down with some sort of disease. One of the nuns is not what she seems, and a woman who falls in with this monstrosity becomes attached to her through the ages. Through endless reincarnations the two seek each other out for some sort of sick reconciliation. The grue flows like water as Aztec rituals, mental asylums, and autopsies all make an appearance.

Charlee takes a stab at Lovecraftian horror with "The Begetting," and "The Vanishing Point." In "The Begetting," old French rituals in a Florida town reemerge in the modern day when a man calls a degenerate local woman for a mating ritual. The subsequent scenes of conception and birth are too sickening to include in this review, but Jacob's prose does worthy tribute to Lovecraft. Check out this line:

"In her mind Nicole saw a creature shaking a rattle filled with dead stars and howling the end of aeons."

"The Vanishing Point" is also Lovecraftian, although a bit harder to decipher. It seems to be about an alternate dimension (or is it our dimension?) populated with dead people and strange creatures that undergo plastic surgery to hide their hideous physical forms. Well, reading Lovecraft is tricky at times, so this story fits right in with that author's strange writings.

"Window for Anon" is a creepy story about an interstellar cloud slowly nearing the Earth. Before the cloud arrives, people who look into the sky see something so horrifying that it literally causes them to freeze with their eyes locked towards the heavens. The story is also about a Gellie, a mother imprisoned for arson and her strange son, Anon. It is difficult to discern whether this story is an apocalyptic tale or a story about a mother and child because of the hallucinatory imagery that runs rampant throughout the story.

Finally, there is "Guises," the last short story in the collection. In this tale, a woman, named Tombi, is born with a real chip on her shoulder about her looks. Tombi manages to somehow acquire the ability to change her appearance, often with horrific results. At the same time, a few gruesome murders occur that have a direct bearing on Tombi. While the ending isn't very satisfying, it is the trip along the way that bears real fruit. Tombi's transformations are unsettling, to say the least.

As for the poetry, all that should really be said is that it's free verse and it often conjures up some strange imagery. If you enjoy poems that stray far from accepted standards, the stanzas in this book should do the trick quite nicely.

The cover art on this book in no way relates to some of the excellent stories found inside. Ignore the cheesy cover and pick up a copy of "Guises." Remember, these small press books go out of print fast. Charlee Jacob's next novel, if anything like her previous work, promises to be an impressive addition to the horrorphile's bookshelf. Read "Guises" to steel yourself for the coming horror.

Charlee Jacob, Guises (Delirium Books, 2002)

Charlee Jacob went from publishing obscure short stores in small-press and online magazines to the toast of the horror community virtually overnight with the 2002 mass-market publication of her 1998 debut novel, This Symbiotic Fascination. Haunter, which appeared the next year, has solidified Jacob's rightful position at the top of the horror heap. While much of the shorter work she has published (over six hundred pieces, to date) remains uncollected, fans will definitely want to head out and pick up the two currently-available small-press collections of her shorter work. Of the two, Guises is the easier to find (though not by much). (Note to clarify: other collections of her short work have seen print; however, you'll pay collector's prices to get them. These two you can still find for cover price.)

Which is kind of depressing, because Dread in the Beast (released in 1999 by Necro Publications) is the better book. Slightly, I grant you. If you pick up Guises, and you know Jacob's work, you are likely to not be disappointed. Like Dread in the Beast, Guises contains an eclectic mix of stories, some of them the drenched-in-gore work fans of the novels have come to expect, and some (which are usually the more compelling stories) lighter on the gore and heavier on the atmosphere. The title story in "Guises" is one of the latter variety, and of the short work of Jacob's I've read, it may be the finest piece. It alone is worth the price of admission here. A few of the other stories also stand out ("A Window for Anon" and "The Vanishing Point" worked especially well for me).

After the story collection is finished is a poetry collection. Which, I should note, is large enough on its own to have been a single-author collection of poetry (sixty-five pages). And really, there's some decent stuff here at times; Jacob obviously knows how to stick to image, and occasionally does let image get a word in edgewise. Unfortunately, "some" is the key word. Unlike her short stories, her poetry here varies widely in consistency, craft, and talent, and I found myself skimming more than once. Which shouldn't put you off the book, for the bulk of it is quite wonderful. Just be prepared for the quality to slip a notch here and there. ***