Forever & Father and Son

One of the most pleasant discoveries I’ve made is the Dark Voices series from Borderlands Press. It’s a very nice concept, in which you get an attractive chapbook containing one or more of an author’s stories, and included in the package is an audio disc of the author reading the material from the chapbook, with background music and some sound effects. Not every author is a good reader, but those who are seem better equipped than anyone to bring out the emotional resonance in their work. Earlier, I reviewed the classic story The Night They Missed the Horror Show by Joe R. Lansdale, and this time, a double feature of Jack Ketchum’s stories, Forever and Father and Son.

If you are familiar with classic Ketchum work such as The Girl Next Door, you know he is known for his ability to look without flinching at the everyday horrors that threaten us. At times, he does such a good job, it’s difficult to read the story. Few authors can get under your skin like Jack Ketchum, and he demonstrates this in the first story, Forever.

Forever is the story of a good marriage coming to a tragic close. The protagonists have been married for a long and happy time, and now, in their mid-forties, must cope with the wife’s steadily worsening bone cancer. The story follows the steady deterioration of her condition and the death of her husband’s hope. It is all too real, and struck uncomfortably home. After all, I’m probably not going to be menaced in real life by a vampire or a werewolf, but cancer can strike my family or yours. It made me face what I would go through if this happened to my wife, and how lost I’d be. The ending is also a genuine “Oh My God” moment at the end which caught me by complete surprise.

The second story was Father and Son, which was much shorter, and much lighter in tone, despite more grisly subject matter. It is the story of, not surprisingly, a father and son living together after the death of their wives. The elderly, frail father is trapped when his 300-pound son collapses and dies, blocking the door of the bathroom with the father behind it. Although it is definitely horror, there is a somewhat lighter tone to it.

Forever & Father and Son, along with the rest of the Dark Voices series, is highly recommended. You can buy it directly from Borderlands.
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Offspring

Based on a fairly literal reading of the horror novel by Jack Ketchum, Offspring is something unusual in film: It is the sequel to another movie that hasn’t yet been made. Even more amazing, this doesn’t work against it.
Offspring the novel was a sequel to Ketchum’s acclaimed book Off Season. The filmmakers were unable to secure rights to the first book, so they shot the second instead (Off Season is now reportedly in development). This leads to a lot of comments about events which occurred “eleven years ago”, but the story is so straightforward, it doesn’t really matter, although there may be some viewers unaware of the film’s backstory who will be looking for the first, nonexistent movie.

For years, the northern east coast, from Maine up into Canada, had been plagued by a tribe of primitive cannibals who lived in the caves along the coast. Since they moved sporadically, and the area in which they lived is fairly isolated, it too a long time for people to realize the disappearances along the coast were the work of the tribe’s hunting party. Eventually, some cops and locals who figured out what was happening managed to blow up the caves in which they were sheltered, wiping them out.

But there were survivors (not really, but it was needed for the sequel), and, over the course of time, they have built the group back up, using infants kidnapped from massacred families. In this film, they return to the site of their near extermination and stage bloody raids against the locals. Fortunately, one of the cops who stopped them the first time (now retired) is still in the area, and he is recruited by local law enforcement on an expedition to stop them again.

There is an interwoven subplot about an abusive husband, which serves to contrast the “naturalistic” evil of the tribe to the more “civilized” evil of the husband. I thought it was mostly filler, though.

Although a lot of people will be turned off by the excessive amount of gore and violence from start to finish in the movie (when an early scene shows someone holding a plastic bag of baby parts, you know there will be few limits), but I thought it was pretty effective. It’s a short film, which works in its favor, and although Art Hindle playing the retired cop is the only recognizable face in the cast, the acting is solid, particularly Tommy Nelson, who plays the juvenile lead without making him annoying.

There were a couple of touches I especially liked. First of all, most of the murderous savage cannibals are children, but once the outsiders confront them, there is little hesitation to use lethal force. I don’t know about you, but if I were attacked by a screaming primitive, knife-wielding child who I had just interrupted eating one of my friends, I would pull the trigger. Also, the police quickly accept what they are facing. This spares us the oft-repeated stereotype of the Amazingly Stupid Cops who ignore the One Guy Who Is Right. You know the type, where standing over the dismembered victims of the cannibal/zombie/werewolf, the One Guy Who Is Right says it must be the work of cannibals/zombies/werewolves, and the Amazingly Stupid Cops reply, no, it was probably the flu.

In places, it isn’t an easy movie to watch at times due to the violence, but I thought Offspring was an entertaining little gorefest, and if you like this sort of stuff, you probably will, too. Look for author Jack Ketchum (acting under his real name, Dallas Mayr) in a cameo as a paramedic.
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Absinthe

Absinthe is a chapbook from Bloodletting Press, containing two short stories, “Papa” by Jack Ketchum and “Bleeding Things” by Tim Lebbon. The two stories tie together by a common use of the titular drink.

At first thought, Jack Ketchum and Tim Lebbon seem unlikely authors to share a book. While both are well-respected, Ketchum is known for his grim and gritty realism, and Lebbon as someone who tends to stay closer to the fantasy side of dark horror. This does result in a jarring transition of tone between the two stories. “Papa” is a vignette about someone mistaken for the late Ernest Hemingway, and “Bleeding Things” is a surreal story set in World War II. “Bleeding Things” was the more interesting of the two, to me. In it, a protagonist who may or may not be a British spy makes his way through Berlin at the end of the war. Everything is disintegrating around and inside him, the internal troubles due to a piece of shrapnel working its way through his brain, destroying memory as it goes. When the story opens, he has already forgotten his name. He becomes fascinated with his discovery of a Jewish woman kept by a Nazi officer who has discovered if she drinks absinthe, she bleeds gold. Lebbon, as always has a most inventive mind.

Definitely recommended for fans of either author.
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Triage

Triage is three novellas built around a single premise: A woman receives a phone call at her place of work “I’m coming to get you” and then a man comes in and starts shooting everyone. Each story has a different, top-of-the-line author, the late Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, and Jack Ketchum. Any one of those names is good enough to persuade me to buy a book, so all three together had me very eager to read it, even though the reviews I had read were mostly negative.

The first story, Laymon’s, was the most straight-forward in its execution. I would call it good, solid Laymon, nothing spectacular by his standards, but certainly well worth reading, with a typical Laymon twist in the middle.

The longest story was Edward Lee’s, which surprisingly used a science fiction setting, which also made it the widest deviation of the three from what is expected. I started out irritated at this. I was looking to read a horror story, not science fiction, but I was won over by the end. Edward Lee is an inventive writer, and uses the science fiction milieu for a bit of social commentary, well in keeping with science fiction traditions. The reveal at the end will probably delight some readers and annoy others, but I liked it.

Jack Ketchum’s story is the last and shortest, and he, too plays around with the format somewhat. This is one of his Stroup stories, and adventure of his hard-to-like recurring character. I thought the story was more of a character vignette than a full-fledged story, but Ketchum’s gift is characterization, and this is a good example of his talents.

So my verdict is to ignore any harsh reviews, and if you like Ketchum, Lee or Laymon (and who doesn’t?) pick up Triage.
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