Book Review: Crucified Dreams edited by Joe R. Lansdale

Like any self-respecting horror fan, I’m a huge fan of Joe R. Lansdale’s work. So, I was very excited to check out this collection of short stories Lansdale had hand-picked to appear in Crucified Dreams. In the introduction, Lansdale explains how he set out to capture stories that were similar to his maverick writing style, and I think he has done a fine job with the selections featured in Crucified Dreams. He has plucked unsettling, off-kilter stories from the very best horror authors out there (among them Stephen King, Harlan Ellison and Lansdale himself) that span nearly four decades.

From the back cover:

A naïve young woman witnesses a brutal murder and discovers the soul-deadening price of being a New Yorker. The family man quits smoking with the sinister assistance of a family-friendly corporation. A truck driver takes a simple shortcut, and lands in a living hell and a battle to the death. An aging Hollywood screenwriter’s career is on the wane until he reinvents himself as a less principled man.

Crucified Dreams reaches down through the gutters into the shadowy depths of the imagination. These are the savage tales that unite noir with horror and the ordinary with the unfathomable. Combing the urban, the paranormal, and the downright terrifying, these award-winning stories go where your deepest fears—and inner demons—are already realized.

Classic tales from horror masters reside within the near 400 page collection, and while I enjoyed all of the stories, I did have a few favorites. Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” left me breathless and paints quite a gloomy picture for apathetic city-dwellers. “The Mojave Two-Step” by Norman Partridge and “Front Man” by David Morrell show the danger of following fortune and glory, one from the view of a stolen ice cream truck barreling through the desert toward Vegas and the other through the eyes of an award-winning but aging screenwriter looking for work in shallow Hollywood. I wholeheartedly enjoyed the characterization of the two leads in Jeffrey Ford’s “Coffins on the River”, about two old artists who take quite a trip that results in a terrifying ghostly encounter. “Copping Squid” by Michael Shea is an excellent Cthulhu-inspired tale set in the ‘hood, and Ellen Klages gives us an eerie look into an alternate universe through the perspective of a little girl in “Singing on a Star”. “Nightbeat” by Neal Barrett, Jr. offers up another alternate (or future) world filled with made-up words that conjure up a beautiful yet sinister landscape.

These are but a few of the 19 tales featured in Crucified Dreams, and while those mentioned were my favorites I must say that all the short stories in the collection were well worth reading and left an indelible imprint upon my psyche. The collection is a mix of the gritty and graphic with the subtle and psychological and will be a welcome addition to any horror fan’s book collection.

Buy yours today on Amazon!

Book Review: Cthulhu Unbound edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri

Cthulhu Unbound is an anthology from Permuted Press where the Lovecraftian mythos really let’s its hair down and goes a little wild. The authors have transposed some of Lovecraft’s most famous monsters into all kinds of different stories with delightful result!

The book’s description sums it up perfectly:

Imagine being free.

Free from everything that defines you, that makes you easily recognizable as who you are.

Welcome to a place where bleak noir cityscapes share a Technicolor sky with combat fighters, where you can find gunslingers from the Old West and a lost chapter from a literary classic, all with something in common: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

This is a place where the Crawling Chaos has to solve his own murder and the Old Ones come up against the Gods of Las Vegas, a place where the new player in London’s underground isn’t human and masked heroes go toe-to-tentacle with eldritch horrors.

This is a Mythos collection unlike any other. This is Lovecraft in many colors, many guises.

This is Cthulhu – Unbound!

I really enjoyed this colorful, unique anthology and didn’t find one bad story between its pages! All fourteen stories are superb, and range from comedic to quirky to shocking to frightening! Permuted Press and editors Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri have put together a wonderfully imaginative anthology that truly shows the versatility of the authors as well as the Cthulhu mythos itself.

My favorite stories include the Wild West-inspired Hellstone and Brimfire by Doug Goodman, a “lost” chapter of Moby Dick called The Covenant by Kim Paffenroth, superhero story In Our Darkest Hour by Steven Graham, Bubba Cthulhu’s Last Stand by Lisa L. Hilton that features a redneck Cthulhu family and the Hunter S. Thompson-inspired The Shadow Over Vegas by John Claude Smith. The remainder of the stories are equally entertaining, so much so that I find it hardpressed to not list them all as my favorites!

Page after page I was amazed by the many different guises the Cthulhu mythos took! I never knew which eldritch monster I would encounter from story to story or what quirky characters I would meet. No matter if you are a hardcore Lovecraft fan or just a casual one, Cthulhu Unbound will no doubt entertain you! It has so much spunk and bite and is such an ambitious anthology that you won’t be able to escape its tentacled grasp!

Available from Amazon!