Black Gate

It began in October 2011, when an anonymous poster on Reddit, going by the username 1000vultures, posted a creepy little short titled simply “Footsteps.” Over the following weeks, the fanbase for 1000vultures swelled as five more stories were posted. Eventually, Dathan Auerbach (the author’s “civilian” name) began the process of revising those six little pieces, connecting and expanding them until he had his first novel, Penpal. After a successful Kickstarter campaign (where he made more than ten times his initial goal), he was ready to publish the thing.

Honestly, I picked up all of that after the fact. I’d never frequented Reddit’s No Sleep page, nor did I catch the Kickstarter campaign when it was going on. I just heard about a creepy little book by a new name on the horror scene and thought I’d check it out.

The book is broken into six parts, each set in a different point in the narrator’s childhood. Taken together, the stories come away like snapshots of one great horror, taken from different angles. The first story, “Footsteps,” evokes the universal fear felt by every child at least once: the fear of being lost. “Balloons” is the story that lays out the groundwork for what is to come. “Boxes” takes the story out of being strictly psychological horror and into something more physically threatening. “Maps” is the point when we are shown that the mystery might truly be something unknowable. “Screens” is the point when the author lets some of his own influences show. And the last story, “Friends,” wraps up the cycle with a couple surprises and a revelation of what truly is the heart of the story.

To be sure, this is the author’s first novel and there are some learning curve mistakes made in the narrative. The only problem I really had with the story was a sort of floating timeline. Ordinarily, it shouldn’t matter in what specific year a story takes place, but cell phones and the Internet seems to float in and out of existence. (Seriously, how do you not know how to find somebody’s phone number?) Otherwise, it’s a creepy little novel from a rising talent who hopefully produces many more.

You can pick up Penpal in print ($9.99) or as an e-book ($4.99) and learn more about the imprint 1000 Vultures (including how Auerbach came up with the name) at his website.

Not long ago, I came across a copy of Jonathan Lethem’s second novel, Amnesia Moon. I was curious: Lethem’s best known for his recent work in mainstream mimetic fiction, but his early novels were science fiction and he also wrote an odd take on Steve Gerber’s already-odd character Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics in 2007. More, between 2007 and 2009, he edited three volumes for the Library of America collecting various novels by Philip K. Dick; another book Lethem edited — The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, containing extracts of a journal in which Dick recorded his visionary experiences — was published in 2011. Lethem’s also written an introduction for a recently-released collection of Dick’s short fiction and explored the influence of Philip K. Dick on his work and life in an extended essay at his web site. Given all this, I was interested in seeing what Lethem’s early science fiction was like.

Reading Amnesia Moon, the Philip K. Dick influence is immediately and strongly apparent, in setting, tone, imagery, and structure. The novel takes place in the west of a near-future post-apocalypse United States, but nobody can really remember what the apocalypse was, or how long ago it happened. Robot evangelists preach the gospel at city corners. Some characters live only as drugs, visible only after they’re injected into the veins of someone else. Dreams are communicable. But more than any of this, the book seems to restart itself at unpredictable intervals, dropping all the narrative strands to begin what at first seems a different story, which then intersects or transforms the overall tale.

Still, Lethem’s book isn’t just a rehash of earlier work. It’s strongly evocative of Dick’s writing, yes, but has a voice of its own. Its theme, I think, is the connection between people, the communities and relationships that they make. So it insists on the reality of the perceptible universe, on the otherness outside oneself, in a way that seems to me to be unlike Dick; Lethem’s asking much the same questions, but suggests different answers. As a result, though Lethem’s style is as spare and fast-moving as Dick’s, the characters have a reality and solidity subtly unlike the characters in Dick’s fiction.

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We’ve been told that we can’t judge a book by its cover, yet we do it all the time. A good cover can catch our eye and attract our interest. The art and title alone can usually tell us whether it’s gritty sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, or paranormal romance. The cover tells us more about the setting and mood of the story than even the jacket copy, and continues to influence us even after we start reading.

And unfortunately, self-published authors usually lack the budget and the specialized skills to do a great cover. Often, self-published covers look amateurish. Some authors decide to forgo a cover altogether, deciding that it’s better to have no cover than a bad cover (my wife takes this approach). This month’s novel, Avarice by Annie Bellet, is a notable exception. It’s not just that the cover is beautiful in itself, it’s that it instantly tells you what the story is about. Between the illustration and the title of the series (Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division) an experienced reader of genre fiction has a pretty good idea what this book is about. I’ll give you a moment to guess before I reveal the answer below the fold.

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The first thing we can tell about Sheila Johnson, before we even open this book, is that she has no fear of jinxing herself with a title like The Book of Horrible Stories. For a change, I was delighted to find that the work did not live up to the title.

Within are five (six, if you count the preface, which I do) short stories that explore the art of storytelling, the source of inspiration and how the tropes of horror are often metaphors for things even more horrifying. Beautiful and surreal, but never so vague that they lose the reader. “The Garden Witch and the Boy” sets the tone with a tale of childhood guilt and nightmares. (And when are guilt and nightmares more intense than in childhood?) “The Tree in the Field” starts with a quirky, surreal premise and takes it further than expected. “An Interlude” is Johnson’s answer to that eternal question asked of writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” (It follows up with the question no one asks: “What happens if you ignore those ideas?”) “Mrs. Ambrose and the Conversational Shimmer” is my favorite of the bunch, a ghost story of sorts and a zombie story of sorts, that delves into themes more disturbing than gruesome. The collection is capped by the story that gave the collection its name: “The Book of Horrible Stories,” a love letter to the horror genre itself and to every child who discovers it.

The collection is beautifully illustrated by Wesley Wong and available for $12.00 on Sheila Johnson’s web site. If money’s tight, you can get the Kindle version for a measly 99 cents. This one goes on the shelf between Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link (and not just because that’s where it happens to fall in the alphabet).

Seriously. Ninety-nine cents. Go. Buy.