Black Gate

The self-published book review will be going on hiatus for the next few months while I start on a new project. Feel free to continue sending me submissions, but don’t expect to see many reviews posted before 2016.

Peter Nealen’s Nightmares is this month’s self-published novel. As a marine serving in Iraq, Jed Horn had a nasty encounter with an ifrit, a creature of fire and darkness. Returning to the states, he tried to forget, but no matter how much he drank, it wasn’t enough. So he started looking into the matter, hooking up with ghost hunters and amateur occultists. That turned out to be an even worse mistake. Dabbling, with no real knowledge of what you’re up against, is a quick way to attract the attention of some very dark, very evil things. One of them is following Jed now, killing those he’s interacted with. When he meets up with a priest, Father O’Neal, and Dan, who claims to be a Hunter of the dark things, they give him an ultimatum: either join up and fight back against the things hunting him, or keep running, and probably die in short order. You can probably guess which one Jed chooses.

The hunt takes Jed back to a small college in Colorado, where he first met Professor Ashton, whose studies into the occult have unearthed something real. From a stone tablet that only the professor can read, to ancient books and artifacts imbued with a sense of wrongness, Ashton has begun to glimpse what lies beyond, and has developed a mad obsession with summoning the chthonic spirit buried beneath Powell Hill. Much of the book is about Jed’s interactions with Ashton, trying to determine whether the professor is the source of the things hunting him, or merely a tool of larger forces. There’s something Lovecraftian about the horror here, manifest in wrongness and madness and alien spirits, hidden in ancient tablets and underground vaults and art and sculpture that change when you’re not looking. But Nealen turns away from Lovecraft’s nihilistic existential horror, and filters the same imagery through the lens of Catholicism.

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I’m nostalgic for most things that belong to the age of my childhood and teenage years (i.e. the 70s and 80s), especially for things we now mostly think of as geek-ish (though that label was hardly admirable when I was a kid).

In this spirit, I recently watched a very interesting documentary on Netflix called Atari: Game Over, about one man’s quest to find the (now legendary) dumping ground of Atari’s fabled mass of unsold game cartridges based upon the Steven Spielberg movie E. T. (And by the way, I highly recommend watching that very short documentary.)

Atari: Game Over includes footage of author Ernest Cline, who is about my age and seems to have similar 80s interests. Case in point: the man owns a DeLorean sports car like Marty McFly’s from Back to the Future.

Cline made his 2011 novel debut with Ready Player One. I’d heard nothing but great buzz about this book since it was first released. But since I’m not a gigantic fan of science fiction literature — I tend to read more fantasy and horror — I hadn’t really bothered to pick it up. After seeing the documentary I became more intrigued, and so I bought and read it.

Oh my goodness!

I can definitely say that I am now a huge Ernest Cline fan. What a great book! This was one of those books that I could not put down. I blazed through its nearly 400 pages in just two days — I would’ve done it in one if I hadn’t had real-life responsibilities. It was definitely something of an 80s nostalgia-fest, but that’s merely surface, and not integral to enjoying this book.

What’s Ready Player One about?

It starts in a dystopian near future — though not dystopian because of nukes or zombies. Rather, in Cline’s book our current fears are extrapolated to a world feeling the effects of increasing  overpopulation, in terms of climate and economics. Many people are unemployed, and where once cushioned bastions were unaffected by such, like most of the United States, they are now populated with flimsy towers of RVs and trailer-homes (Jim Massey’s paperback cover presents this in awesome detail).

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