Cemetery Dance announces new Stephen King hardcover, ‘The Dark Man’

Cemetery Dance has been teasing something big the last couple of weeks, saying only that “something dark” was coming.

Well, it’s here.

The publisher announced today a new collaboration between Stephen King and artist Glenn Chadbourne, the black-and-white specialist who has worked on a number of King projects for CD, including their Secretary of Dreams books. This latest venture is the first hardcover publication of King’s poem “The Dark Man,” a piece the author wrote in college about a character who would later come to figure prominently in much of his work. We’re talking, of course, about The Walkin’ Dude, Randall Flagg.

There are a number of editions on the way (and quickly, as CD’s website has at least the trade version listed for a July release), ranging from a $25 bookstore edition all the way to a deluxe signed edition that will run you a cool $1,750. All the details and ordering instructions can be found at the links above.

Between this and yesterday’s Joyland news, it’s been a big – and expensive – couple of days for King collectors. The good news for the average fan (such as your humble host) is that these new works will also be available in affordable additions that may not have all the bells and whistles, but will have the most important part – the story. As these books hit the shelves, please feel free to let us know which editions you grab and what you think of them.

Stephen King’s ‘Joyland’ gets special treatment from Titan Books

Titan Books has announced that three special limited editions of their upcoming Hard Case Crime release by Stephen King, Joyland, are now available for preorder.

Subterranean Press has released special editions of Hard Case Crime books in the past, but these appear to be directly produced by Titan. The three editions are:

• A signed, lettered hardcover edition, limited to 26 copies, signed by King, housed in a clamshell box and featuring the Hard Case Crime logo in gold foil;
• A signed, numbered hardcover edition, limited to 724 copies, signed by King; and
• An unsigned hardcover edition limited to 1,500 copies.

All editions will feature artwork by Robert McGinnis and a map of Joyland, the amusement park that serves as the novel’s setting, by Susan Hunt Yule.

Here’s the synopsis straight from Hard Case Crime:

College student Devin Jones took the summer job at Joyland hoping to forget the girl who broke his heart. But he wound up facing something far more terrible: the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and dark truths about life—and what comes after—that would change his world forever.

A riveting story about love and loss, about growing up and growing old—and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time—JOYLAND is Stephen King at the peak of his storytelling powers. With all the emotional impact of King masterpieces such as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, JOYLAND is at once a mystery, a horror story, and a bittersweet coming-of-age novel, one that will leave even the most hard-boiled reader profoundly moved.

The paperback version is set for a June 4 release, and these special editions are listed as coming out on June 11. I’d suggest jumping on these quickly if you’re interested, as Stephen King special editions don’t tend to stay available for long.

Short Story Review: “Invisible” by Nancy Kilpatrick

“Invisible” by Nancy Kilpatrick
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

Horror stories are more often than not filled with things unseen. Ghosts, the past, regrets, the threat just around the corner – these are things with no tangible presence, yet they can have a very tangible effect on people.

In “Invisible,” Nancy Kilpatrick examines the ways we find to make the people around us disappear, reducing them to an intangible presence in the hopes of minimizing their impact on us. Sometimes it’s someone considered “beneath us,” a person performing some menial task for us like bringing our food to the table and refilling our coffee cup. Other times it’s someone who needs – or needed – our help.

“Invisible” is also a story about the staggering weight of grief and loss, two other things we might wish we could make disappear. Perhaps we can deny it attention, just as we look away from some people, but these  are things that won’t be denied. Grief and loss have a way of weighing you down whether you acknowledge it or not.

“Invisible” is a quiet, contemplative piece. Kilpatrick teases us through the story with a mounting sense of dread that builds to a subdued but effective payoff. It’s easily one of the most memorable and effective stories in this collection.

More reviews from The Devil’s Coattails.

*A little background on Short Story Reviews, and why I’m doing them this way*

Short Story Review: “Attitude Adjustment” by C.L. Gordon

Reality television is rarely about reality as it exists now – it’s more often about reality as we want it to exist. You’d think that such concepts would be reserved for the fictional shows, but no, someone, somewhere figured out a way to sell the viewing public content that is just as idealized even thought it is supposedly “real.” And the public loves it, just laps it up.

Thus you have shows on which overweight people lose large amounts of weight in seemingly unhealthy amounts of time; on which people win ungodly sums of money through manipulation, deceitfulness, and their mastery of over-sized obstacle courses in remote locations; in which people pretend to invite you into their lives for a peek at what it’s “really like” to be a redneck or a fashion designer or a movie star, even though “real life” doesn’t involve a handful of producers helping you make day-to-day decisions.

How far will the trend go? How much are people willing to alter their lives via made-for-tv shortcuts in the hopes of getting the kind of life they’ve always dreamed of? We’ve gone a long way down that rabbit hole, but according to C.L. Gordon, there’s plenty of room left on the downward slide.

In Gordon’s short story “Attitude Adjustment,” we’re brought on the set of a show called “Radical Makeover: Attitude Adjustment.” Participants on the show have agreed to a new neurological procedure to help them deal with the issues that they don’t have the ability – or the patience – to deal with through more traditional means. Thus, after a quick operation, the inhibited recluse becomes an impulsive hellion, the over-giver becomes the embodiment of selfishness, and so on and so on. On a set, and in a world, like this, who can be trusted?

It’s a good idea, one that I wish Gordon had delved into a little deeper. This is a short piece of writing, and really only takes a broad swipe at the concepts the author introduces. This is the kind of subject matter in which the more you know about the characters getting these procedures, the more engaged and invested you’ll be. In the short amount of space Gordon gives this story, we don’t really get full characters, just quick sketches. There’s also a little twist at the end, something which I generally enjoy but felt a little out of place here.

To say much more is to give too much away, and I don’t want to to that. “Attitude Adjustment” is enjoyable enough, but it really opened up a lot of questions that I’d like to see explored more fully. Perhaps this is a subject the author will return to at another time. In the meantime, if you’ve got a tiny hole in your reading schedule and ninety-nine cents to kill, you could do worse.

Hill and Rodriguez to bring the Keyhouse down with two-part ‘Locke & Key’ finale

Over the past six years or so, writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez have been crafting one of the finest comic series on the shelves - Locke & Key. I’ve not been shy about professing my appreciation for their work in the past, and I’m anxious to see how they wrap up this intricate, intimate story of a family haunted by demons of both the internal and hellishly external natures.

The series is currently in the middle of its concluding arc, Locke & Key: Omega, and it’s killing me because I wait for the nice hardback collections to come out so I have no idea at this point what’s going on. And now comes along this news, which is great because it means we get just a little bit more Locke & Key than was originally planned, but awful because now we have to wait just a bit longer to see how everything plays out.

While adding an extra issue may scream “cash grab” to some, it’s clearly not the case here. Hill gives me the impression of being a guy who is all about the integrity of the story, first, last and always, so if this is the space they need to tell the ending, then I’m glad they are getting it.

Hill has also promised that, while this is the definitive end to the story of the Locke family, there are still more stories to tell involving the rambling Victorian mansion known as Keyhouse.

Can. Not. Wait.

Review: ‘The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones’ by Jack Wolf

Your enjoyment of Jack Wolf’s The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones will be in direct correlation to your tolerance for the author’s gimmicky writing style. Wolf really wants us to feel that Olde English atmosphere he’s cooking up, and he leans heavily on old-school grammar rules such as capitalizing every noun and the use of arcane spelling (“drippt” instead of “dripped,” for example) to try and sell it.

The thing is, such gimmicks aren’t really necessary to capture the mood and the time period Wolf is trying to recreate. Go read any of the novels in Robert McCammon’s “Matthew Corbett” series and you’ll see that I’m right. Those books are set in roughly the same time period as Bloody Bones, but the only gimmicks McCammon resorts to are exacting research and impeccable storytelling.

So, for me, Wolf’s style here became a distraction, and as a result it took me a while to get into the story – which is shame, because it’s a pretty good story. Tristan Hart is, if not a wholly likeable character, a very compelling one. He’s curious, intelligent, and quite possibly completely barking mad. Much like a certain Doctor Frankenstein, Hart sometimes has a difficult time curbing his enthusiasm for new knowledge and new experiences. His greatest struggle is his attempt to understand his own overwhelming desires. He’s tortured but determined to simultaneously control and satisfy urges he can’t fully explain. It’s the kind of struggle that would be tough to witness in a character you’re rooting for, but Wolf isn’t completely successful in making Hart a sympathetic lead.

Hart’s struggle parallels the world he’s growing up in. It’s a time when new ideas are really starting to hold their own versus the old ideologies that have an iron grip on people in general and society as a whole. It’s heady stuff, and to pull off over 500 pages of it requires a light touch that Wolf hasn’t quite developed. There’s good material here, and Wolf is definitely a solid talent worth keeping an eye on, but he can’t seem to get out of his own way this time around.

My advice to Wolf would be to let the story take over. Stylistic touches can be nice, but rely on them too much and you end up derailing the very thing readers come for – the narrative. The plot. The STORY. In the case of The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones, the story didn’t completely come off the tracks, but it easily could have been a much smoother, more satisfying ride.

Short Story Review: “Dying to Forget” by Sunni K. Brock

“Dying to Forget” by Sunni K. Brock
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

In which we meet a man named Tim as he is hopping from consciousness to consciousness, inhabiting the bodies of random people in their final moments of life. The guilty lover with a rope around his neck; the sword swallower with a fatal tickle in his nose; the blind man with a faulty heart…he’s there for all of them, experiencing death with them – or, perhaps, for them. No one wants to die, but Tim is able to push through the experience multiple times – until he looks in a mirror during one of his “stops” and sees a familiar face staring back at him. Suddenly, Tim is no longer interested in riding the wave to the next death. Suddenly, he decides to take matters, and fate, into his own hands.

“Dying to Forget” is a compact, economical sucker punch of a story with a touching and surprisingly poignant ending. No matter how you may feel about editors who include their own work, or the work of a relative or loved one, in something they produce (Sunni Brock is editor Jason Brock’s wife), there’s no doubt that this particular tale is a snug fit in this collection.

More reviews from The Devil’s Coattails.

*A little background on Short Story Reviews, and why I’m doing them this way*

Short Story Review: “The Man in the Ditch” by Lisa Tuttle

“The Man in the Ditch” by Lisa Tuttle
From A Book of Horrors edited by Stephen Jones
Cemetery Dance/PS Publishing, 2012

“The Man in the Ditch” is a tense and unsettling contribution from veteran genre author Lisa Tuttle. It starts with a simple yet disturbing image: a dead body by the side of the road. Or, at least, that’s what Linzi thinks she saw. She can’t convince her husband J.D. to turn around, but the idea of it – and the fact that she saw it so close to the land where the couple is about to build a new home – shakes Linzi to her core and throws a pall over the whole day.

Linzi’s refusal to let the idea go is just another wedge in what appears to be a somewhat shaky marriage. There’s a dark secret between Linzi and J.D., a single misguided act that resulted in a large gap in their marriage. It leaves Linzi on an island, and Tuttle takes a nearly sadistic glee in ratcheting up that sense of isolation throughout the story. In her marriage, in her new home out in the country, in her inability to conceive, and in her absolute belief that something dreadful is haunting her, Linzi is alone at every turn.

This is the kind of horror story that finds true fear in the details, the subtle moments, that quiet pause before the big explosion. It’s the kind of story that stays with you. It’s the kind of story that makes collections like this so damn good.

More reviews from A Book of Horrors

*A little background on Short Story Reviews, and why I’m doing them this way*

Short Story Review: “The Woods Colt” by Earl Hamner, Jr.

“The Woods Colt” by Earl Hamner Jr.
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

Earl Hamner Jr. created two well-known television shows from the 1970s, Falcon Crest and The Waltons. This might make his appearance in an anthology of dark fiction a bit surprising, but it’s less of a surprise when you realize that his other writing credits include eight episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Subject matter notwithstanding, Hamner’s story “The Woods Colt” has more of a Waltons vibe than a Twilight Zone vibe. It feels a bit old-fashioned in pace and execution; this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a bit jarring when held against some of the edgier content found in The Devil’s Coattails up to this point.

The story centers around a man named Fletcher who has returned to the family home for one last look around before it’s out of his life for good. His mother has died, and with his father and sister also gone, Fletcher is left alone at last to get ride of this bastion of bad experiences and memories. Unfortunately for him, his presence stirs up some otherworldly presences, and Fletcher finds that there are still family secrets to be told – and blame to be assigned.

It’s not a bad story, but it lacks a little something needed to make it more memorable. To me, haunted house stories require a ton of atmosphere to work, and the house in question needs to feel like a character in and of itself. That doesn’t happen in “The Woods Colt,” leaving it a pleasant but largely forgettable read.

More reviews from The Devil’s Coattails.

*A little background on Short Story Reviews, and why I’m doing them this way*

Vincent’s new Dark Tower book is a worthy ‘Companion’

Bev Vincent had a double-tough job in front of him when tackling the writing of The Dark Tower Companion. He had to find compelling new material that would be of value to readers who’ve been reading and studying the series for years, and who’ve had already had access to a comprehensive guidebook in Robin Furth’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance. He also had to find ways to separate this new project from his own book The Road to the Dark Tower.

Fortunately, a lot has happened in the world of the Dark Tower since Stephen King published what was then thought to be the final volume in the series in 2004. Marvel Comics produced several series adapting and expanding material found in King’s Dark Tower books. Hollywood powerhouses Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman hatched an ambitious plan to adapt the material in a series of movies and television programs. And King himself revisited the series with an eighth novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole, a story set between the fourth (Wizard and Glass) and fifth (Wolves of the Calla) books in the series.

This flurry of creative activity provides plenty of fodder for Vincent’s new book, due out on April 2nd from New American Library (and in special editions later this year from Cemetery Dance). Vincent conducted a number of new interviews with the creators behind these new Dark Tower side projects, from artists and writers involved in the comics;  to Howard and Goldsman giving separate interviews on their movie-making plans; to King himself, who discusses these new projects, sheds additional light on several key Dark Tower characters, and touches on his own relationship and approach to the series.

In addition to these interviews, Vincent provides a synopsis of each Dark Tower book, discussing events and characters while saving the major spoilers for a clearly-marked section at the end of each chapter. There’s also a wealth of information on the important “people, places and things” in the series, handily divided into “Mid-World” and “Our World.” Maps, timelines, Mid-World history…you’ll be hard-pressed to find any corner of the Dark Tower mythology that Vincent hasn’t shined a light on.

Books like this are made to be perused, dipped into here and there when a question or confusion about something Dark Tower-related arises. However, Vincent’s open, thoughtful approach to the writing makes it a book that you could easily read cover-to-cover. The material flows in a way that most guidebooks don’t. Vincent’s knowledge of the material is encyclopedic, but his writing style reads nothing like an encyclopedia. It’s incredibly readable, packed with detail and information and insight, and completely approachable. Vincent set out to write something that would appeal to Dark Tower junkies and newbies alike, and in that he has succeeded handily.

Oh, and one more thing – after reading a few pages of material, I was fired up and ready to dive headfirst back into the Dark Tower series again. So, if you pick this book up, make sure your reading schedule is clear – not only are you going to want to absorb every word of Vincent’s book, you’ll likely be stacking up those eight Dark Tower novels right behind it.