Customer Reviews

Man-Made Monsters

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With a little history, a little folklore and a lot of imagination, Mad Marv compiled a list of stories and man made monsters to shock and amaze. He thoughtfully includes a few recipes, spells, and tips for making some of the more fantastic and recognizable monsters, but that is where the appeal stalls.

In "Overtime," John wakes up on a slab as he is about to be reamed by a mortician bent on a little last minute necrophilia. He kills the mortician, steals his clothes and hides inside a white coffin that is taken to a viewing room where his wife, his friends and family, and his enemy, Craig, who also works for the same newspaper, file by to view his body, each with a parting comment. After the funeral, John sets out to solve his own murder, aided by the man who successfully brought him back from the dead for a few short hours.

The premise is fascinating and whets the appetite, but the fare is bland, a cardboard entrée with little taste and no believability.

Mad Marv includes four recipes for disaster. The disasters are golems, homunculi, manikins, and zombies and each is based on folklore and fantastical histories that leave little to the imagination. These bright flashes in the darkness are seasoned with a bit of humor that falls flat.

The "Sins of the Mother" is a singularly boring tale that is unbelievable and heavy-handed on the subject of abortion. The characters are flat and without one single redeeming feature. The characters' motivations are either nonexistent or tacked as an after thought and provide little grounding or sense of reality, even for schizophrenics, serial killers, and preaching mad men who wear aluminum hats and survive burning buildings intact.

Of all the characters in the book, the least appetizing is "The Hypno-Chondriac," a singular waste of time and ink in a story of futility and drugs and phantasm that wanders off into the woods, never to be heard from again. This is followed by "Narcolepsy," which has less to do with the disease and more to do with another rage-fueled romp, this time into the seamier side of the drug trade, complete with South American drug lords and expatriate doctors who play fast and loose with human lives and technology in the name of science and power. The retired Special Forces father, who couldn't deal with his son and sent him to military school to make something of himself, is a stereotypical martinet who suddenly finds his heart and love for his wayward son, only to give him up to be reanimated, in order to make him a good soldier who follows orders without question and never complains. Fatherly love is less important to the retired master sergeant than a career as commander-in-chief of a zombie army that puts him back into the action.

The last item on this horrific menu is "Mosquito," about a young man from the Midwest brought up on a farm who wants to make a difference in the world. Larry finds his idealism put to the test on an isolated, near prehistoric island spat up by a volcano. This time the black operations side of a worldwide organization patterned after the Peace Corps wants control of a deadly virus that kills indiscriminately and instantaneously.

In every story there is a glimmer of terror and a slick horrific feel that quickly succumbs to one-dimensional characters who spout tired bromides in melodramatic fashion. The characters lack depth and reality and the narrator's voice is an ever present whine that over shadows what could have been a good collection of tales for a cold, dark night by a camp fire.

This book is weird. Interesting. Informative.
The ideas behind the stories are fantastic. Great action-horror stuff. Neat ideas concerning conspiracy and science and the terrible concoctions made by the marriage of the two.
The writing takes some getting used to. These stories aren't written in a mass-market, standard storyline style. It almost seems like the writer was thinking of telling them around a campfire. There is little or no character development, like in campfire stories. The action happens rapidly, with the setting changing sometimes from paragraph to paragraph. Once I got past the unusual style, I enjoyed the book.
The main reason I bought the book from is because this is the first work from a brand new small horror publisher. We must support those folks.
Buy Man Made Monsters and give it a shot. You'll definitely enjoy the Recipes for Disaster, smaller pieces in between the stories, which detail monster making throughout history (golems and such), along with a short fiction piece concerning the monster. The writing is at its best here, and the humor as well.