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Man with No Name by Laird Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This slim volume contains two exemplary tales by the inimitable Laird Barron. The first, the novella “Man with No Name,” is an excellent reminder that nobody captures the mystery and disorientation of being caught up in unknowable supernatural forces like Barron does. Hints of a much larger and more terrifying backstory pepper this tale of a Yakuza enforcer, a popular professional wrestler, and a terrifying excursion into the liminal realm between the worlds of the natural and the supernatural. It’s an amazing piece of work, filled with darkness and disquiet.

The second story, “Blood & Stardust,” is somewhat lighter in tone, an astute and often amusing take on mad scientists and their creations. Barron shows a deep sense of compassion for his narrator, despite her many crimes, and infuses the story with his trademark hints of a wider and scarier world than we’re aware of.

Both stories provide ample evidence of why Barron is widely considered one of the finest horror authors working today. This small, two-story collection is a must-own for Barron fans, and not a bad place to start for those looking to experience his ghastly and arcane cosmos for the first time.

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“The Rest is Noise” is now available to read for free on the Nightmare Magazine website! So is an author spotlight Q&A with yours truly.

The entire issue is available for purchase as an e-book for just $2.99, and of course you can subscribe to Nightmare Magazine for just $23.88 a year. Check out the website for more info.

Aickman’s Heirs by Simon Strantzas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Robert Aickman’s stories were all about the irrational and the unknowable. The authors in this homage anthology put those same qualities to good use in fifteen intriguing tales of the unknowable’s intrusion upon seemingly normal lives.

The writing is uniformly beautiful, although this reader will admit to finding a few of the stories frustratingly oblique. Regardless, there were many standouts for me, including Brian Evenson’s “Seaside Town,” which makes great use of the dream or nighttime logic that Aickmann reveled in; Michael Cisco’s “Infestations,” a surreal meditation on identity, voyeurism, loss, and insanity; John Langan’s “Underground Economy,” which mixes exotic dancers and insect mating rituals; Malcolm Devlin’s “Two Brothers,” which I found to be one of the more straightforward horror tales in the anthology, and as a result one of the most effective; Nina Allan’s remarkable novelette “A Change of Scene,” which does a great job of keeping the reader off-balance; and my favorite of all of them, Nadia Bulkin’s “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” in which our narrator discovers she’s part of a terrible secret reflected in a children’s game she used to play.

Bulkin’s story is outstanding and well worthy of the Shirley Jackson Award nomination it received. As is AICKMAN’S HEIRS, which won the Shirley Jackson Award in the anthology category. Editor Simon Strantzas has created something special with this anthology, a rich compendium of extraordinary and strange tales that I hope will find the many readers it deserves.

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My story “The Rest Is Noise,” which was originally published in the anthology Dark Fusions (PS Publishing, 2013, ed. by Lois Gresh), is being reprinted in Nightmare Magazine this month! This is good news, because I think “The Rest Is Noise” is one of my very best stories, but Dark Fusions wasn’t read by many people. Now it has a chance to reach a much wider audience! My story will be joined by other works of fiction by Amanda Downum, G. Neri, and Lara Elena Donnelly, as well as non-fiction from Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Morton, and John Joseph Adams.

“The Rest Is Noise” will be available to read for free on the Nightmare Magazine website starting August 10th. But if you don’t want to wait, the entire issue is available right now as an e-book that can be purchased from the website for a mere $2.99. You can also subscribe to Nightmare Magazine for just $23.88 per year. It’s a cool magazine and well worth it!