Thomas Jane headlines as David Drayton, movie poster artist and devoted husband and father, who ventures into town with son Billy (the remarkable little Nathan Gamble) and curmudgeonly neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Brauer) after a fierce New England storm sends a tree through his art studio and crushes Norton’s car. While at the local supermarket, a local townsman (character actor Jeffrey DeMunn) comes running in, bloodied and breathless, with warnings about something “in the mist”. Within seconds, the titular fogbank engulfs the supermarket, stranding several dozen shoppers. Over the course of several well-executed scenes, it becomes apparent that the strange mist holds unimaginable horrors. The trapped turn to, and on, each other in their fear and increasing insecurity.

Darabont’s pacing is spot-on, with spectacular sequences of action and horror interspersed between engaging scenes of character development and human drama. Aided by the tag team efforts of Ronn Schmidt’s moody cinematography and Hunter Via’s crisp editing, Darabont’s script comes to pulse-pounding life on the screen as few horror films in recent memory have. Darabont has an effective way of bringing out the nuances of King’s written works in his screen adaptations, raising appreciation for the source material considerably in the process. In The Mist, he once again proves that he “gets it”, that the horrors lurking just under the surface of those we meet walking down Main Street USA (in this case, the local supermarket) are often more horrifying than the monsters we conjure in the darkest places of our minds.

The ensemble cast is exceptional. Jane, who brings just the right balance to his action hero and devoted father role, is every bit the leading man here and probably the most convincing parent-protector since Dee Wallace in the film adaptation of King’s Cujo. Audiences feel his heartbreak as he struggles to assuage his son’s fears in the face of mounting hopelessness. The sorely underrated British actor Toby Jones (from The Painted Veil, Finding Neverland, and that other Capote movie) turns yeoman’s work as kindly store employee Ollie into a memorably sympathetic and heroic character, while Frances Sternhagen, no stranger herself to King adaptations with her role in 1990’s Misery, is a bonafide scene-stealer here as the feisty, grandmotherly Irene. Silent Hill’s Laurie Holden and American Pie’s Chris Owen show promise as well, while Brauer does his best with his clichéd role as the “heavy”. Nods also go out to William Sadler and DeMunn who prove why character actors are so important to American cinema. It’s Marcia Gay Harden, however, who is the standout here. As the more than slightly left-of-center religious zealot Mrs. Carmody, Harden is mesmerizing to watch as she skillfully develops the character from sideline joke to minor annoyance to legitimate threat. She embodies every facet of religious fanaticism to perfection, and her performance eerily conveys the dangers of blind faith in desperate times. In the hands of a lesser actress, Carmody could have come across as pure parody but Harden nails it, taking Carmody to dramatic heights without going over the top.

King purists may find something to gripe about by way of the film’s ending, which varies significantly from the source material. Bleak and ironic to the point of absurdity, it’s both a scarlet letter on Darabont’s chest and forgivable given the near-perfection of the two hours that precede it. Hopefully, in this age of vapid remakes and the depressing lack of originality exemplified by films like Hostel and the glut of torture porn masquerading as horror it spawned, fans will forgive his transgression and realize The Mist for the red-bowed love letter to horror aficionados that it is.

Rating: 10 out of 10 Bloody Butcher Knives

Always there, history, like dust, frosted the present. It could be wiped away, scrubbed, and for a long time forgotten, but it always returned, settling on life’s ornamentation. If left unchecked it grew thick and opaque, covering all that might be with the filth of what had already come to pass.

Ken Nicholson is a man running from his memories, haunted by the events of the past during which questioned sexuality and the hedonistic pursuits of youth combined to lure him into the web of a seductive club called Wonderland and the seemingly unending clutches of its proprietor, the enigmatic Travis Brugier. Years after Wonderland and its owner came to a violent end, Nicholson fled his New Orleans home, plagued by terrifying hallucinations that play out like waking nightmares. But despite the physical distance he puts between himself and his nagging past, he is summoned home by his ex-wife when his son is viciously attacked. Dust tells the story of Nicholson’s homecoming during which he must confront the mistakes of his past while doing battle with a cunning evil he thought long dead in order to protect his loved one’s and his own sanity.

Thomas fashions a classic ghost story, with enough twists and turns to qualify Dust as part mystery, and strong characterizations that power the narrative forward like a solid psychological thriller. It’s often tricky business when writers blend genres, but Thomas pulls off his ambitious narrative undertaking so well here that the lines between supernatural ghost story, psychological drama, and suspense thriller are marvelously blurred – ultimately creating a wholly satisfying reading experience. He sets his story against the richly atmospheric backdrop of New Orleans - overplayed and clichéd in the hands of lesser writers - in which the fabled French Quarter and the bars of Bourbon Street come alive as secondary characters yet never overshadow. Not since Christopher Rice’s gothic gay coming-of-age tale, A Density of Souls, has a novel so seamlessly integrated the New Orleans mystique or so perfectly captured the dichotomous melancholy and pure, hedonistic charisma of the region.

The key strength in Dust is the author’s masterful use of characterization to create layers of internal and external conflicts for his players, at once humanizing them and investing the reader in their struggles. Nicholson, in particular, is a marvelously flawed creation, the embodiment of an entire generation of gay men for whom Stonewall came too late to save them from having to travel the heterosexual highway before realizing that they had missed their homosexual exit. In Nicholson, readers are made acutely aware of his struggle toward self-acceptance and how real and very difficult that struggle to reconcile the divergent aspects of family, friends, and faith can be. Nowhere in Dust is this recurring idea of the sheer messiness of the human condition more brilliantly captured than in the scene in which Nicholson stumbles upon the cathedral in which his severely injured son was to have been married:

After several minutes of uncertainty, looking into the vast and ornate temple, Ken left the church. He was being foolish, ridiculous, and desperate. He felt weak and hated himself for it. How many of his friends had he watched in their last moments of life, friends who had despised the intolerant religions of their birth, turn back to inefficient faiths? People needed their gods, he knew, and Ken wished he had found one to believe in so his prayers wouldn’t feel like the ramblings of a hypocrite, but he wasn’t going to indulge in foxhole Christianity. Not yet. Such a turn would mean all other hope was lost.

Thomas is one of a newer crop of horror writers whose writing clearly seeks to transcend the limits of a genre frequently dismissed as disposable and criticized for its excessive indulgences in violence and bloodshed that (sadly) often forsake narrative structure, mood and nuance. Thomas’ rich prose harkens back to the moodier works of Straub’s Shadowland or King’s Dolores Claiborne, while reflecting this newer and welcome trend toward literary horror from the likes of newcomers like Sarah Langan and Alexandra Sokoloff. Thomas demonstrates time and again throughout Dust that true horror need not be visceral to get under one’s skin:

How long he stood in front of the gate to Wonderland Ken couldn’t say, but he found himself terrified by the place. Like a wasp’s nest, this structure and its grounds had served as a shelter for vicious and poisonous things. History and the disease of memory emanated from the decimated structure. Windows, filthy and dark, played the films of history; they showed a magnificent courtyard and bubbling fountain, and they harbored a unique master with incomprehensible power. Ken remembered numerous wonders, numerous pleasures and a single atrocity in which four children had battled for their lives. A soft bed spoke words of confused sensuality. Hallways led visitors through priceless ornamentation. Wandering these halls were the ghosts of children who were lost in their pursuit of happiness as they served their benefactor. All was brilliant light. All was unfathomable darkness. All was fractured light. All was a story.

And, like the best supernatural horror writers, Thomas ably conveys the paranormal without getting bogged down in over-explanation or talking down to his audience. In getting across the essence of the horrifying mind control games that plague the central characters, Thomas conveys this rather abstract concept through simple dialogue between the characters. When one character likens their psychic torture to being caught in “…a mind fuck…a virtual reality game without an Off switch” the audience understands it.

At the core of all great stories is the human condition and our endless attempts to quantify, qualify, and question it. In The Dust of Wonderland, Thomas explores that totality of the human experience like a master painter, first with broad strokes to color the palate then with a fine-point brush to bring forth the depth and detail. While dodging the literary snowballs that Thomas skillfully laces with the genuine chills of an old-fashioned ghost story and hurls liberally throughout, readers will be ensnared in the intricate web of humanity he casts out over his characters, caught blissfully unaware by this dazzling portrait of human hope and heartbreak.

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Zombie’s modernized Halloween is a brutal, relentless retelling of John Carpenter’s 1978 film of the same name, itself a masterful exercise in which mood is used to create suspense. Wisely, Zombie doesn’t attempt to recreate the subtlety of Carpenter’s original here – instead using the escalating intensity of time and narrative to ratchet up the tension. The new and improved Halloween is told in three acts: Michael’s childhood that culminates in a murderous rampage against his family, his years incarcerated in the Smiths Grove Sanitarium that ends in his bloody escape, and his reign of terror over an unsuspecting suburbia on the titular holiday that took up most of the running time of the original – here condensed into the final 40 minutes.

In Act I, Zombie overreaches and his exercise in white trashiness nearly boils over the top. Understatement is an art form which the director has yet to master. Fortunately, actress Sheri Moon Zombie (in classic Hollywood casting nepotism) grounds these early scenes with her surprisingly sensitive and layered turn as Deborah Myers, Michael’s loving mother. Mrs. Zombie ably captures the essence of a young mother struggling against the hopelessness of her circumstances. Her performance is something of a revelation here (having overplayed it in both of her husband’s previous films) and helps to nicely counterbalance William Forsythe’s caricaturish performance as Michael’s lecherous, booze-guzzling stepfather. Hanna Hall, taking on the expanded role of ill-fated Judith Myers also shows promise – particularly in her grueling death scene.

Zombie does his best work in Act II, in which Dr. Samuel Loomis (Michael’s kindly psychiatrist who we meet briefly while trying to sound the future cuckoo alarm in the film’s early scenes) attempts to reach the deeply troubled boy during his 15-year-institutionalization. Zombie demonstrates that he has the directing chops to take a concept from Point A to Point B here with a nicely executed series of scenes in which we witness young Michael (played with genuine creepiness by vacant-faced newcomer Daeg Faerch) slowly descend deeper and deeper into his own twisted psychosis. Told against a backdrop of scenes in which the young Michael creates a succession of gruesome masks “to hide my ugliness”, this part of the film has an emotional depth missing from the original that makes it hard not to empathize with not only Michael’s tortured mother and his paternal psychiatrist but with the killer himself. The tragedy in these scenes comes out of the idea that love is not boundless – that both a mother’s love and the genuine altruistic desire to help another human being have their limits. And as Michael’s mother sinks deeper into despair, and the hopelessness of her life comes full circle, and as Dr. Loomis resigns himself to failure and cashes in instead on Michael’s story, there is no turning back from the monster Michael is about to become. Of noteworthiness in Act II is British actor Malcolm McDowell, who does an outstanding job fleshing out the iconic Donald Pleasance role and creating a decidedly more three-dimensional Loomis, and Zombie mainstay Danny Trejo as kindly hospital attendant Ismael Cruz whose own well-meaning, albeit untrained, attempts to reach out to Michael ultimately misfire. Both actors, along with Moon Zombie’s continuation from the earlier scenes, help infuse the film with a sense of humanity that drives home the idea that the story of Michael Myers is much more than bloodshed and carefully orchestrated scares – it’s a tragedy at its core.

While the idea of boiling down the events of the first film into a streamlined 40 minutes or so in the third act might give the impression that the audience is in for a rush job of epic proportion, Zombie actually pulls off the final frames well enough. We meet up again with baby sister Boo, now Laurie Strode, who we learn was plucked from the scene of their mother’s suicide and given a chance at normalcy via kindly parents (genre vet Dee Wallace and character actor Pat Skipper), a decidedly more middle class life in Haddonfield, and requisite gal pals Lynda (Kristina Klebe) and Annie (Danielle Harris of Halloween 4 and 5 – all grown-up and the director’s only wink to franchise fans). The stalk-and-slash action that follows is formulaic slasher all the way and Zombie plays it straight here, actually creating more of an authentic homage to the genre than Scream and its string of self-referential knockoffs that followed. It’s in this final act that we most clearly see Zombie’s ability to line-straddle than anywhere else in the film, with meticulous re-creation of certain key scenes that worked in the original layered between the infusion of a few innovations and surprises along the way. The result is an experience that’s simultaneously familiar and fresh.

While Scout Taylor-Compton is agreeable enough in the heroine role (although her intrinsic blandness reminds us of why Jamie Lee Curtis became a star in the first place), the performances in Act III are largely forgettable with two notable exceptions. Dee Wallace makes the most of her glorified cameo and infuses her too-few scenes with such naturalness that we are reminded of why the woman is a bonafide horror veteran. She is able to so effectively establish her maternal bond with Taylor-Compton’s character in the space of two short scenes that when she comes to her inevitable celluloid crossroads, the audience actually mourns her fate. And it doesn’t hurt that the woman can out-scream every ingénue in the cast. Hulking Tyler Mane is also a standout here as the adult Michael Myers. While actors in non-verbal roles are often easy to dismiss, Mane impresses with his ability to communicate using body posturing – menacing at times, vulnerable at others as the child buried within the adult monster bubbles to the surface in one surprisingly effective scene.

At the heart of Halloween – both old and new alike – is the boogeyman in human form. But whereas Carpenter’s Michael Myers was more an indestructible monster whose motivation was nebulous evil, Zombie grounds his Myers incarnation in reality and fashions him as a killing machine who’s the product of human cruelty and indifference. It’s here that the two versions vary most – and the heart of the contentious debate between fans on both side of the slasher fence. In Carpenter’s original, Myers symbolized those leftover childhood fears of the boogeyman – that irrational fear of what’s under the bed or behind the closet door. There’s a nostalgic comfort in that kind of fear, one that’s steeped in innocence and largely unlikely. And while that idea echoed the time period and worked well in the ’78 film, the limitless boundaries of nebulous evil lent itself to exploitation in a string of unnecessary sequels during which the concept of evil crossed over into mythology and ultimately cannibalized itself. Zombie’s Michael Myers also plays upon childhood fears, but those fears are now well-grounded in the reality of a modern society in which the speculative terrors lurking under the bed have become an inescapable inundation of information about global terrorism, violent home invasions, and unspeakable crimes committed against children that taint the innocence of childhood. If the boogeyman appears different, Zombie tells us here, it’s because he is. What scared us in 1978 is very different from what scares us in 2007; Zombie acknowledges that and modernizes the boogeyman.

With this modernization of the boogeyman, Zombie takes artistic license to fill in the substantial blanks of Michael’s back story in Carpenter’s original. Here we see Michael Myers reimagined as the product of a white trash background, living amidst blue collar squalor with his stripper mother, abusive, alcoholic stepfather, and trampy teenaged sister. Only the presence of pure innocence in the form of a baby sister holds him from slipping permanently into the well of evil his surroundings have forced him into; when he is separated from her, his motivation is established. In essence, Michael Myers kills because he’s searching for his lost innocence, personified in the form of his younger sister. Bullied at home, bullied in school, Zombie paints a bleak and hopeless backdrop for young Michael’s descent into madness. These scenes are vulgar and harsh, even difficult to watch at times, but they’re integral in establishing the more fully-realized character of Michael Myers. The most effective cinematic villains are those the audience can simultaneously sympathize with and loathe – Norman Bates, Hannibal Lechter, and Annie Wilkes are a few who came to mind. Zombie admirably attempts to fashion a more three-dimensional Michael Myers, employing a well-scripted back story and relying on the acting chops of Faerch and Mane to bring the character to life. Like a skilled archer, Zombie stretches his bow and lines up his arrow with as much deft precision as he can muster three films into his career; ultimately, he misses the bullseye, but the arrow hits as near to the center of the mark as it’s gotten in any previous film in the franchise – save for the original.

Chances are that Zombie’s reimagined Halloween will follow the same long and laborious road to gaining respect that some of the best (and now most revered) remakes had to traverse - films like The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing (ironically, a Carpenter undertaking). These remakes were the scorn of an entire generation who grew up watching the originals, a generation whose cries of foul eerily echo those of the Carpenter loyalists now. But, like the decade or two that it took those films to gain the appreciation they deserved, only time will tell if Rob Zombie’s Halloween will age like fine wine or ferment like stinky cheese.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Bloody Butcher Knives

Horror novelist Jason Tennant is one of those moderately successful writers who straddle that broad line somewhere between bestseller and obscurity. Equally far from King as he is from the anonymity of a ghostwriter, Tennant is a working-class scribe plagued with the insecurities, uncertainties, and fears anyone who has ever dared call himself or herself a writer can relate to. Those literary self-doubts reach far into Tennant’s personal life, and when Burke’s narrative opens, we find him grappling with an indifferent father’s disappointment and a wife’s possible infidelity.

Tennant is surprised then when he’s invited to attend a science fiction and horror convention amongst a shortlist of guests of honor that includes his literary nemesis - Kent Gray, author of disposable “sex-fi” novels. When Tennant agrees to attend, a dark journey during which he will confront demons old and new, real and perceived, begins.

Midlisters is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale, populated with what one suspects are colorful characters based on Burke’s own ride through the midlist funhouse. Admittedly, half the fun here comes from trying to figure out which real-life writers and convention regulars Burke has met along the way may be along for the ride. It’s a brilliantly balanced ode to the writer’s life, never self-pitying and perhaps tinged with just a touch of arrogance perfectly in keeping with the requisite ego of a writer writing about the writing life. With razor-sharp insight, Burke dissects the writer’s psyche like a master surgeon. He crafts a richly layered and finely nuanced narrative here, his pen a sharp scalpel drawing painful lines through tender flesh until he can reach in and pull back the musculature to show us the bare bone underneath. And what’s underneath is the ugly, nasty stuff of the human condition.

Whereas King made Misery’s antagonist the focal point of his celebrity morality tale, Burke’s version of Annie Wilkes is a peripheral character, an insidious presence that creeps up on you versus hobbling you with a sledgehammer. It’s a wise narrative choice, and one that pays off handsomely with a far more resonant story. While the influence of King’s Misery is readily apparent, there are also shades of Enduring Love, Ian McEwan’s 1998 suspense thriller disguised as highbrow literature about a science writer stalked by a deluded religious fanatic, here. For while Burke admirably ratchets up the horror a few requisite notches at points, it’s his reflections on the true horrors of life – the fragility of love, failed expectations, death – that transcend the genre and make Midlisters something special. Something (gasp)…literary. Consider the poignancy of this passage in which Tennant confronts the mortality of his aging mother:

Jesus, I thought, when did she get so old? I’d made a point of visiting her at least three times a year, outside of holidays which we alternated with Kelly’s parents, and had never noticed before how much she’d changed from the picture of her I always saw when she was in my thoughts. I was afraid that one of these days only her voice would be recognizable, everything else loosened around her thin frame like an ill-fitting glove, as if God’s Laundromat had returned to her the wrong costume. I was more than afraid; I was terrified and saddened. She had always been a face in the audience, bearing witness to my spotlighted theatrics when the houselights had gone down. Invisible, but there.

Few writers can give voice to everyday fears with such precision, and fewer still can do so in the context of a story like Midlisters without losing momentum or tension.

It’s refreshing to find horror writers who refuse to pander to blood and guts at the expense of the more literary machinations of writing. Burke flexes both his craft and carnage muscles here with equal aplomb, with passages of visceral gruesomeness (book sandwich, anyone?) matching some genuine literary finesse as when he constructs a rather clever metaphorical parallel between the protagonist’s wife’s possible marital infidelity with another man and her unfaithfulness in reading a rival writer’s work.

With a vivid and fully realized narrator to anchor the narrative, Midlisters will mesmerize in its dichotomy of complex ideas simply executed. This surprisingly compact novella gets to the core of what makes writers tick like hungry teeth on a baby spare rib, its succulent bits of narrative meat and chewy conceptual gristle whetting your appetite and leaving you eagerly seeking out the next course to devour from Burke's literary kitchen.

Forward by Jack Ketchum

Cover and Interior Artwork by Keith Minnion

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Yes, Brian thought. That was exactly what the shaky letters looked like, and he recalled the previous message, with its random vowels and consonants that seemed to be trying to break through the straightjacket of the alien language. It was as if his dad were gradually regaining his faculties, coming up from the bottom of some mental well and slowly remembering life in the real world.

Brian eventually meets up with social worker Carrie Daniels, who in a parallel story arc has discovered a network of hideously deformed children and their frightened mothers, all seemingly connected to the larger story unfolding around them. Brian and Carrie team up in the third act, a decidedly Mulder/Scully pairing that works well enough.

Little has always had a knack for creating realistic, average Joe kinds of male protagonists; in The Vanishing, it’s his heroine who stands out. Smart and resourceful, Carrie is a working-class Josephine fraught with Little’s patent insecurities, the kind of gal who has to go out and buy new underwear for a date. It’s always a breath of fresh air to see a character act intelligently in a work of horror, as too many of the genre’s terrors (implausible enough in their own right) often rely on the characters’ innate stupidity. But Little fashions Carrie as a refreshingly quick-witted and capable heroine as demonstrated in a key scene in which she makes a horrifying discovery while visiting the home of a wealthy suitor and purposefully cuts off her own 911 call to enhance the police’s impression of her imminent danger.

With hints of homage to everything from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and the monsters-mounting-humans mating chiller Humanoids from the Deep to Sasquatch folklore and Day of the Triffids-like botanical horror, Little runs characteristically afoul of over-ambition in concept, yet he’s somehow able to keep his narrative from veering all over the map. Reading a Little novel is like watching an attention-deficit cannibal who overstuffs his cauldron with too many body parts, never really cooking anything all the way through yet crafting something edible nonetheless.

Like in his best works, the author also gives readers an authentic ambiance of historical fiction here with some California gold country folklore and a nifty Lewis & Clark tie-in that works surprisingly well. Likewise, the insertion of perennial favorite recurring character Phillip Emmons into the action, appearing here as an armchair detective version of The Night Stalker’s Carl Kolchak, is a welcome highlight and a clever, ongoing wink to longtime fans.

Somewhere in the midst of the bloody mayhem, one of the peripheral characters proclaims: “It’s like being in a goddamn science fiction movie”. And he’s right. Little’s books have always had the comfortable predictability of a cheesy Sci-Fi Channel movie – the man-in-a-rubber-monster-suit kind that’s entertaining enough even when one glimpses a boom mike in the corner of an action shot. Here, that old Chiller Theatre influence is evident from the lurid monsters to the laugh-out-loud, expletive-ridden nursery rhymes that keep them at bay. The ending, in particular, lends itself to this idea and one can almost see Casper Van Dien or Antonio Sabato, Jr. leading the band of mercenaries down the yellow brick road into Bigfoot land.

Little has elevated envelope pushing to an art form with passages of graphic sex and violence that are downright macabre in parts, revolting in others. It’s an uncomfortable blend of horror and erotica that at times kicks you in the teeth. It’s often in this simultaneously titillating and nauseating mix of sex and violence that fans are either made or run screaming from the room, and The Vanishing will not disappoint in this aspect with its graphic depictions of creature-to-human connubiality and urine as facial treatments. Little should seriously consider coining the term “creature porn”. It’s almost a shame that such a solid writer seemingly sets out to appall because that shock value comes at a price, and the author’s brilliant underlying social themes (here a cautionary parable of environmental rape and the revenge of conservationism) get overshadowed in the grandeur of the titillation.

With the comforting nostalgia of a long-lost Saturday afternoon creature feature, The Vanishing will ably entertain despite its sometimes predictable matinee-like atrocities and Sci-Fi Channel silliness.

Be sure to check out an exclusive in-depth interview with Bentley Little in the augural issue of Dark Scribe Magazine.  Coming soon!

In this third retread of the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers), critics and audiences will likely be caught up in the backstage brouhaha that had director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s original cut deemed “too cerebral” for studio execs, the much-ballyhooed Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame being brought in for eleventh-hour rewrites, and up-and-coming action director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) adding extra action sequences to the mix. What they’ll likely miss is an effective update on this classic allegorical tale about the dangers of conformity and the paranoia of multi-culturalism.

Nicole Kidman headlines as Dr. Carol Bennell, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist for whom the science of psychiatry has been replaced by the mindlessness of polypharmacy. (In early scenes, Hirschbiegel nicely foreshadows the personality-robbing alien invasion to come with modern psychiatry’s pharmaceutical over-reliance.) When a mysterious space shuttle crash brings with it an alien microbe, it isn’t long before the good people of our nation’s capitol morph into expressionless, emotionless shells of their former selves. When Kidman’s ex-husband (British actor Jeremy Northam of The Tudors) goes pod person early on, weekend visitation takes on an entirely new meaning for her young son Oliver (played well by newcomer Jackson Bond), and it’s up to Kidman and physician pal Ben Driscoll (played here as the archetype stalwart British hero by the yummy Daniel Craig of newfound James Bond fame) to save him before the city is locked down to contain the infection.

There is much here that we’ve seen before in the previous triumvirate of Body Snatcher films: fooling the pod people by dumbing down emotions, sleep as the conduit for transformation, the idea that the human race is fucking up the planet with its own humanity. Updated to reflect modern-day fears is the idea of the alien invasion coming in the form of a virus versus plant spore, effectively embodying our societal fears of pandemic by chemical warfare or avian flu. There are also some pretty obvious late-to-the-party nods to AIDS here, with infection spread through bodily fluids (Coffee, anyone?). Even fears over a country seemingly without borders gets a nod here with the idea that (illegal) aliens walk among us.

Acting is solid with Kidman and Craig making a capable on-screen pairing. As original Invasion of the Body Snatchers star Kevin McCarthy popped up in the 1978 remake in a clever wink to fans of the original, so too does genre veteran Veronica Cartwright from Philip Kaufman’s version. Cartwright again proves that she can make the most of yeoman’s work with a chilling and effective turn as one of Kidman’s troubled patients – a glorified cameo in the hands of a lesser actress. Fairing less well is veteran stage actor Jeffrey Wright (Angels in America) whose talent is admittedly wasted in a one-dimensional “science guy” role.

While the latest Invasion incarnation falls well short of Kaufman’s chilling ’78 retelling, it compliments Abel Ferrara’s ‘93 version with its ability to effectively update a now-classic premise. Summer blockbuster? Hardly. Still, the Hirschbiegel/Wachowski/McTiegue hybrid is nothing to dismiss. Slick, well-paced, and not nearly as disjointed a vision as the chorus of pre-publicity zombies would have one believe, The Invasion is an enjoyable Saturday matinee that adds just enough twist without bending a classic out of shape.

Rating: 6 out of 10 Bloody Butcher Knives

In the classic slasher films of the 80’s, there was a gleeful abandon of credibility as virtually indestructible supernatural killers like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger sliced and diced their way across the screen. Their motivation was simple: revenge. There was a cause and effect to their actions, much in the same way those making social commentary in these films saw a cause and effect relationship between promiscuity and drug use and the moral decline of the day. Audiences could watch in relative comfort, knowing that those guilty in some way were receiving comeuppance for their sins. There was a sense of detachment in that knowledge. In the worlds of Eli Roth and Rob Zombie and Greg McLean, the social commentary is still there (but the thinking is more global as in anti-American sentiment abroad versus domestic mores) but the motivation behind the carnage is blurred, making the experience that much more unsettling and effective on a whole new level. Whereas the classic slasher film wrapped up the experience in a tidy bow, the new torture films present audiences with the idea that bad things happen for no good reason. Some people are just plain nuts – and they look just like you and me. Talk about inducing paranoia.

Devin Gordon, in an April 2006 Newsweek article, writes that “it’s practically cliché that you can tease out a generation’s subconscious fears just by watching its horror movies”, and a film like Hostel certainly seemed to strike a nerve when it arrived at the local multiplex just as we were inundated with reports of sadistic prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. That abuse was made all the more horrific because it wasn’t enacted by some covert team of government interrogators trying to extrapolate plots of mass destruction from would-be terrorists but rather by the cherub-faced everyday young men and women we sent off to fight a war, the same ones for whom we tied yellow ribbons around trees in gestures of support. There was an air of incomprehensibility to the news, one that unsettled and discomfited and reminded us all that good people do really bad things. Roth reflected that in his film with the story of American youth abducted, tortured, and killed at the hands of everyday businessmen who just so happened to have the inclination and money to buy victims. The killers in Hostel and its sequel are just like the suit-and-tie stock brokers and real estate brokers and company executives driving in the Lexus next to us on the freeway. And it is in this convincing facade of normalcy juxtaposed against the heinous inner workings of these killers that shakes audiences to the core. Whereas we rarely asked the “what if?” question when Jason Voorhees survived an axe to the head or Michael Myers walked out of a burning hospital unscathed, we view these images and ask very real questions. What if there are organ harvesters waiting to snatch me from the beaches of Cancun? What if there are underground societies where our college-aged sons and daughters are abducted from European youth hostels to be sold to the highest bidder with the most depraved mind? The answers frighten us as much as the graphic on-screen images, thus, when we leave the theaters, we take a piece of them back home with us. And after a Jason, Michael, or Freddy movie-going experience? We took a sigh of relief after the requisite final shock, chuckled at the lunacy of what we had just seen, and then argued over whether it would be mozzarella sticks at Applebee’s or TGI Friday’s.

Torture cinema, while reverent to the classic slasher roots in which it’s steeped, has simultaneously promulgated the genre while turning the slasher formula on its head. The set-ups are still there: youthful, party-going victims in isolated locations who run afoul of a demented madman or two. But whereas Jason or Michael or Freddy cut to the chase and lopped off a head or sliced through a jugular before moving on to the next victim in need of systematic dispatch, the madmen in torture cinema tease and tantalize the terror from their victims, savoring the anguish. For audiences used to quickly covering their eyes just before the big kill, it’s as if filmmakers have now stuck toothpicks under our eyes, forcing us to endure the same sadistic torture as their onscreen victims. Indeed, it’s grueling to sit and suffer along with the victims, whose painful screams linger longer onscreen and in our ears than those of their cinematic brethren of slashers past. It’s s if we’re the ones being tortured.

Our beloved final girls are still present in these reinvented slasher films, but gone are the days of Laurie and Alice and Nancy where they ran a bit, hid in a few closets, had some hair ripped out in a light battle, and then took a little breather before the sequel. No, the new generation of filmmakers don’t seem to care as much for our beloved heroines as we do – often dismembering, disemboweling, and otherwise dispatching with these scream queens late into the third act. Case in point: in Wolf Creek, a 2005 Texas Chainsaw Massacre retread set in the Australian outback, a deranged Crocodile Dundee-like psychopath severs the would-be final girl’s spinal cord and matter-of-factly declares, “Now you’re just a head on a stick.” Laurie Strode never had it so good.

Film historians have often likened watching a horror film to riding a roller coaster; and as engineers have developed new coasters at dizzying new heights with nauseating new twists and turns and drops and jolts to enhance our experiential fear, so too have filmmakers upped the ante in horror films with ideas and imagery meant to rattle us to our cores. Subtlety, it would appear for now, is a thing of the past. Until at least the next reincarnation of the horror genre.

With advance accolades coming from the likes of Straub and Ramsey Campbell, it’s easy to be caught up in the promotional blitz of such a book – even easier to be let down against the backdrop of such hype. But Langan doesn’t disappoint with a debut so entrancing, so unnerving, and so downright chilling that readers will feel as if they’ve witnessed the birth of a bona fide classic and the beginning of a literary career of the King-Straub-Campbell caliber by the time they read the final sentence. If any genre book should carry a “guaranteed good read” label, this or any other year, it’s The Keeper.

In The Keeper, Langan tells the tragic story of Bedford, a small Maine town that pins its collective hopes on big business commercialism only to find itself sucked dry by the vampire of corporate America. As the story opens, the Clott Paper Mill, once regarded as the corporate savior of Bedford, has closed its doors. Having depleted the town of its resources and leaving in its wake a pending environmental disaster, the corporation that once ran the mighty paper production plant has turned its back on the denizens of Bedford, leaving the townsfolk jobless and hopeless and mired in the alcohol, drugs, and hollow sexuality that accompanies their newfound abject poverty.

Like all good small towns in literature, Bedford has some nasty secrets – lots of them. Under Langan’s expert pen, these secrets fester and grow like a deformed fetus in the town’s symbolic womb, here embodied in the character of Susan Marley, equal parts resident misfit and town whore. Victimized as a child, Susan has retreated into herself, aimlessly wandering the streets of Bedford, trading sex for rent, and regarded by most as crazy. But, as the residents of Bedford are soon to learn upon her tragic death, Susan Marley is also a supernatural vessel, one that collects and harbors all of the town’s ugly secrets and those of the Clott Paper Mill. As an apocalyptic rainfall begins, those who remain behind in Bedford are plagued by increasingly foreboding nightmares, dreams of Susan Marley and an otherworldly revenge against a town that turned its back on her and itself.

The Keeper insinuates itself into the reader’s subconscious through the use of a fully realized ensemble of characters which allows Langan to alternate points of view and power through a richly layered, yet deceptively simple plot. Langan capably sketches her characters with a refreshing realism, avoiding cliché and pastiche. Few writers can so adroitly juggle an ensemble of characters like Langan does here in The Keeper, each with an original and distinct voice. Although her three-dimensional creations are full of flaws, simultaneously likable and unlikable at times, they are never without an empathetic quality that causes the reader to be invested from first mention. Deftly, Langan conveys the complex dichotomy of the imperfect humanity of her characters:

Susan squeezed harder, and the voices stopped. He looked in her eyes, and he saw his own reflection. He saw himself through Susan’s eyes. In her left eye was a man to whom she was grateful. In her right eye was a man who had betrayed her. These men stood side by side. One man was bigger, but then a drinking man’s devils are always stronger than the angels of his nature.

Most remarkable about The Keeper is its delectable mix of subtlety and overt horror. Langan skillfully layers on the atmosphere and mood and knows just when to start to peel back those layers in an escalating rhythm of dread and urgency. The Keeper builds in momentum like a cauldron of boiling water, with Langan stoking the fire beneath the pot by exploring every crevice of her atmospheric setting and developing her characters. Her prose is literary and fluid, its lushness never detracting from the gut-punch intensity of the horror at hand. Amid the horrific images Langan creates on her pages, there is also a sheer beauty to her language:

She had not slept well since Susan’s death and her thoughts were increasingly difficult to string together. They were names disjointed from their faces that fluttered like the thin wings of moths in a somnambulist’s dream.

Reading the final pages of The Keeper, one is reminded of the third act of John Carpenter’s The Fog as the citizens of Antonio Bay try to escape the encroaching titular horror. Langan employs a similar plot device here in her denouement, and, like Carpenter’s film, it works because the author imbues the characters with a commonality of cause – survival. As the imperfect populace of Bedford is affected by toxins that contaminate the air, toxins that saturate the soil, and toxins that pollute the water, Langan shows us that the most dangerous toxins of all are those within us – secrets that poison the deep wells of the soul.

Order Sarah Langan's The Keeper at Amazon today.

When Chicago PD detective Ed Comparetto is called to the grisly murder scene of a young gay man, his life is plunged into a nightmare as he is caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with a creepy killer – who may or may not be dead himself – who uses a gay Internet hookup site to lure his victims. Told from the multiple perspectives of Comparetto, both the killer and his occasional victims, and through the journal entries of the killer’s estranged aunt, Reed creates a fresh, multi-layered narrative that never tires. It is this approach, in fact, that skillfully saves the book when Reed weaves dangerously close to formula territory. Characters run the gamut, most engagingly colorful with hints of cliché. There’s the fired cop racing against time to salvage his life and career, the misfit serial killer who was orphaned and sexually victimized as a child, the aging society matron who drowns her demons in Bloody Mary’s, and the hunky new boyfriend whose do-good ways may just get him killed. While it’s formulaic suspense thriller all the way, Reed wisely pitches just enough curve balls to keep the reader invested right down to the “nick of time” ending. Ripe with genuine suspense and an escalating momentum that doesn’t let up until the very end, IM is the kind of deliciously nasty psychological thriller that’s guaranteed to raise gooseflesh even under a hot summer sun.

Peppered with enough graphic violence laced with sexual overtones to satisfy fans of James Patterson and Christopher Rice, the novel repulses and titillates with equal aplomb. Squeamish readers beware – IM is explicit in its depictions of the sexual violence that befalls the gay victims of Reed’s fiendish serial killer. But if you’ve long-hungered for a gay version of S7ven, then IM is your dream come true.

Thematically, Reed crafts a strong allegorical tale of promiscuity within the gay community and its dire consequences. There’s a lament here for the cautionary message that the AIDS virus sent in discouraging the often life-threatening practices associated with random sexual encounters – now virtually discarded by the new circuit party generation. As AIDS has become less death sentence and more manageable malady, Reed seems to indicate here that the gay community may be taking false comfort in that manageability. With his aggressive and merciless serial killer, the author seemingly reminds us that there are always new threats forming, unseen and undetected as we go about the monotony of our daily lives – genes mutating into diseases, childhood abuses cultivating future violent predators. Be mindful, Reed advises with IM – what you can’t see today may indeed be able to kill you tomorrow.

Pre-order Rick R. Reed's IM today from AMAZON.

The three erotic horror stories that comprise Grave Cravings all share the rather broad theme of sex and death, the alpha and omega of life, and the fact that our mortality makes both inescapable. Gouveia and Peck take the reader on an oft discomfiting trip through the darkest places where the forces that create life and those that take it away crisscross in bloody mayhem. Each of the tales features male protagonists, each from a different Florida town. Grave Cravings is structured to give us glimpses of each writer’s individual voice, as well as a collaborative effort wedged in between.

In Gouveia’s opener, Delusions of Love, we are introduced to collegiate lothario Scott Locke who discards the women in his life like most of us discard soiled tissues. His womanizing ways come to an abrupt halt when he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Rachel, and Scott is left reeling when she dumps him in a case of mistaken infidelity at the manipulation of Lisa, Rachel’s best friend who has romantic designs of her own. When the mysterious Cynthia unconventionally enters the picture, Scott learns of an equally unconventional way to exact revenge on Lisa and win back his beloved Rachel. But old habits die hard, and it isn’t long before Scott learns (literally) that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It’s The Cell meets Fatal Attraction.

Delusions is an enjoyable tale, albeit the weakest of the three stories in terms of narrative with too much ground covered in its few pages. The set-ups and characterizations (particularly in the case of Cynthia) seem rushed in spots, some of the logic sketchy. The out-of-body sequences are imaginative once the reader accepts the idea that Scott is able to successfully master an advanced form of astral projection on his first attempt. The twists are solid however, and ultimately leave the reader with an appropriately stomach-tightening sense of dread in the end.

When Gouveia and Peck collaborate on Latent Killer, the novella really kicks into gear. The authors demonstrate an ability to shock and outrage here, and the effect is reminiscent of that first Jack Ketchum book one picks up as a teenager. Fraught with unsettling gore, sexual explicitness, and a borderline political incorrectness, Latent paints a picture of how virulent sexual repression and internalized homophobia can be. Set against the backdrop of the annual Gay Days celebration in Orlando, Latent tells the story of harried hotel manager Jonathan Pierce who is trying to juggle too many check-ins with too few employees as the story opens. When a flamboyant S&M couple arrives, Pierce finds his tolerance sorely tested. Aside from a misstep with the bellboy character of Mason who never rings quite true, this is one stomach-churning tale.

Guaranteed to offend someone, Latent Killer is both deliciously retro in its approach to the maladjusted closeted gay killer (think the 1980 Al Pacino serial killer opus Cruising) and dated in its delivery of gay stereotypes. Although some may initially balk at the reinforced idea of homosexuals as promiscuous predators, Gouveia and Peck wisely sketch the leather daddy and his slave as so over-the-top as to be almost cartoon-like; on the downside, this approach detracts from the reader’s ability to sympathize with the victims. While purveyors of the PC may well be screaming homophobia over this one, a closer read reveals a brutal story of mainstream culture colliding with a fringe subculture as the authors juxtapose the family-friendly innocuousness of Disney World against the sexually aggressive subculture of gay fetishism. As harrowing and uncomfortable a read as one is likely to encounter this year, Latent Killer earns its horror classification in its ability to simultaneously disturb and repulse.

Peck closes the collection with Blood Betrayals, the longest story in the anthology. The story concerns Count Francois Trias, a French vampire of the debonair variety who relocates his ancestral castle, brick-by-brick, from France to the unlikely venue of a northeastern Florida beachfront. The cultured count has manners to spare and, apparently, a penchant for buff surfer dudes as he befriends best buds Thad and Chad (insert groan). It seems that the good count has a propensity to fall fast and hard for these Abercrombie boys, and the task of keeping cover over their clandestine existence falls squarely on the shoulders of his loyal manservant, Jean-Claude, who himself has otherworldly tastes (fresh testicles, anyone?). As the title implies, betrayals of all shapes and sizes populate and drive this at times engaging and at times maddening vampire tale.

It’s not clear whether Peck purposefully eschews necessary semblances of logic in favor of crafting a purely fantastical gay vampire yarn here, but whatever the author’s intent, the result nevertheless detracts from an otherwise engaging story. From the aforementioned illogical and improbable relocation venue to the fact that Jean-Claude spends so much time worrying about his master’s cover being blown despite having constructed an ostentatious 18^th century castle in the middle of the beach and then offering tours to the general public (!), it’s hard to take a story seriously when it seemingly tosses this degree of plausibility aside. Even when the reader can reasonably be expected to suspend their disbelief when one after another of the tale’s reluctant straight boys raise their legs quicker than a railroad-crossing gate (OK, the count is a vampire after all – we can at least buy into his powers of seduction), we’re left dumbfounded when the characters open their mouths. Consider this line, uttered by one of the male characters during an argument with his fiancé:

“It’s pretty typical behavior for a woman scorned to attack her lover’s cockmanship.”

Forgetting the fact that this is recent high school grad speaking, what adult speaks like this? The rest of the dialogue ranges from condescendingly trite…

“Wow,” Thad said when Trias broke off the kiss. “That was the best. To think, I used to make fun of gay guys. I had no idea what I was missing.”

…to gay porn clichéd:

“If it takes a small prick to make your prick big, then I’m willing. Do what you have to.”

This plethora of descriptive and dialogue distractions is a shame because Peck’s narrative is actually quite strong, and there is a genuinely touching romantic story of heartache and longing that should be easy for the reader to get caught up in. But literary disruptions ultimately overpower – from a nearly offensive misogynic mention of one character’s “fishy-smelling” vagina to some shockingly adolescent gay porn jargon like “battered bunghole”, “joy juice”, and “trouser snake”.

Fans of gay/bisexual erotica will find some genuinely titillating moments here; fans of horror may find more in the way of concept than execution. Sexually charged, thematically cohesive, and bold at times, Grave Cravings ultimately scores a passing grade on the strength and audacity of its center square. Like an Oreo cookie, it’s all about the cream center.

Purchase an autographed copy of Grave Cravings at Shocklines.