suspense

Lost River (2014)

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

This review was originally written in July of 2015

On the surface Lost River is a devastating portrait of urban decay after the housing collapse, delving into the virtually empty remnants of what were once thriving Detroit neighborhoods…but it ends up being so much more than that.
Ryan Gosling proves himself to be perhaps more talented as a writer and director than as an actor, which is an impressive feat considering just how good he really is as an actor.
As grim and heartbreaking as the story is, there is a sense of stubborn hope and refusal to give up threaded throughout the narrative. In the desolate and unsettling environment and conditions in which the movie takes place we find Gosling displaying intense imagination and creativity as he weaves a story that is as much dark fantasy as it is drama.
Matt Smith (yes, that Matt Smith, The Doctor) portraying a deeply unstable and psychotic antagonist taking control of the neighborhood is fantastic opposite Iain De Caestecker (probably best known for his role in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) in his role as a son desperate to help his family survive by stealing copper from the abandoned buildings around where they live.
Christina Hendricks (Saffron from Firefly) is amazing as the mother driven to extremes trying to keep her home and her family together.
Honestly, I can’t think of anything I disliked about this movie and I am damn glad that I took the time to watch it. Gosling’s writing and directing are about perfect, the acting is superb, the filming locations manage to get under the viewers’ skin and create an atmosphere that truly works with the beautiful score to enhance every aspect of the story that’s being told, and the cinematography is so well done that it really draws you in.

Bobcats by Matthew Weber

/ MeltdownMessiah / 1 Comment

Matthew Weber’s Bobcats succeeds as a coming-of-age horror tale not altogether unlike Ketchum’s Hide and Seek and King’s IT. In fact, if one were to mix those two books together with a dash of the King novella, The Body, and just a smidge of Deliverance for flavor–as well as a touch of Friday the 13th–one might have a good starting point for the story that Weber’s put together.
Joey and his four compatriots in the Bobcats–a small fraternal outdoors troop not altogether unlike BSA–plan to hike The Gauntlet, a trail that weaves through the wilderness of Black Oak Mountain. The adventure is the boys’ plan to honor the legacy of Joey’s father, the foundation of The Bobcats, who recently died of cancer. More than that, it’s a rite of passage into manhood for the five adolescent boys.
As a powerful thunderstorm rolls into the area, the expedition becomes true to its name, becoming more a gauntlet than it already might have been. Sadly, nature is only the beginning of the challenges the boys face.
Black Oak Mountain is home to more than the expected wildlife, and for the Bobcats, it’s one of the inhabitants of that dark forest that changes their lives forever. The Cleaver soon has the five boys in his sights, and no amount of preparation and survival training could have adequately qualified the Bobcats to deal with an inhuman monster who makes his living slaughtering people for money with his cruel, handcrafted blades.
Weber does not shy away from the harsh reality of precisely how an encounter like this would turn out. Bobcats is not a feel-good story with a tidy, cheerful ending replete with plot armor and reliance on suspension of disbelief. To learn how it ends–or whom it ends–you’ll have to read it for yourself.
Matthew Weber deserves additional points for hinting at a history of mysterious occurrences on and near Black Oak Mountain without delving into them and erasing the mystery. It seems like a sequel could be in order, as there’s plenty more to fear in the night than solely The Cleaver.

Room 138 by Jay Wilburn & Armand Rosamilia

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

Wilburn and Rosamilia together weave a disorienting tale. The individual narrative threads that make up Room 138 are as difficult to follow and keep straight for the reader as they are for our confused, terrified, and often paranoid protagonist, Hank Smith.
It’s hard to blame Hank for feeling paranoid, though. Waking up in a recently vacated hotel/motel room in a new year and a new city from where you’d gone to sleep would do that to a person. Just trying to imagine that life, where the month and date on the calendar keeps marching forward, while the year dances around to a tune you can’t quite hear…it’s enough to give someone a headache. With no recollection of who he really is, no concept of how long he’s been doing this same thing, and without the foggiest notion of why he’s even doing it…Hank keeps searching for abstract clues that he hopes will lead him to the next Room 138 and some illumination for the regions of his memory that remain in shadows.
If that sounds confusing to you, you’re in precisely the right state of mind to begin reading Room 138.
It’s a book that is equal parts a thriller, a science fiction fantasy, and a feverish, internalized mystery…but it’s so much more than those individual components.
It’s probably a good time to climb aboard and allow Mr. Train to guide you down the rails at breakneck speeds until the view beyond the window becomes nothing more than a peculiar blur of familiar objects twisted into alien shapes. Maybe you’ll be the next in line to join Hank and Savannah on their mission to save the world, one day at a time.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn: Narrated by Rebecca Lowman, Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins, & Robertson Dean

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

Dark Places indeed.
This book takes the reader/listener to some truly dark places.
A Kansas family was slaughtered in the middle of a cold January night in 1985. The only survivor was the youngest daughter, Libby Day.
The oldest child, Ben, is the easy suspect for everyone. He’s a troubled teenage boy with a darkness inside of him that easily feeds into the Satanic Panic running rampant in those days. But was he guilty? Was Ben just as innocent of these horrific crimes as he was of the sexual assault accusations being leveled against him by numerous grade school girls?
We join Libby as an adult, running out of money from the donations sent her way as a sympathetic child survivor of the Day family massacre. No longer the sympathetic, victimized young girl, Libby lives in squalor and never quite figured out how to properly take care of herself. This desperate situation is what leads her to The Kill Club, a group of true crime fanatics who imagine themselves to be investigators.
Ripping off painful bandages and digging into a past she only barely recalls, Libby begins to question her courtroom testimony from all those years before. Some mysteries are better left in the shadows, though. Proving Ben’s innocence might lead to nothing more than further death and horror.
Gillian Flynn has a knack for developing interesting characters without making them feel particularly sympathetic. The characters populating Dark Places are no less captivating than others she’s developed, in large part because of precisely how flawed and sometimes awful they happen to be. Despite those flaws and the fact that it’s hard to care about the characters, you can’t help but find yourself invested in what’s happening.
The narrations performed by Rebecca Lowman, Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins, and Robertson Dean are fantastic. We experience different characters, at different times, with distinctly different voices…and it’s a nice touch.

The Wind In My Heart by Douglas Wynne

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

Douglas Wynne knows how to craft a captivating tale. The Wind In My Heart–while taking place in the 1990s–hearkens back to the hard-boiled detective stories of authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. For being a couple of generations removed from the anti-hero protagonists of those books, Miles Landry wouldn’t be out of place at all. Of course, it helps the aesthetic that this takes place in New York’s Chinatown.
Blending this combination of an old school detective noir with Eastern philosophy–in the Tibetan crisis-conscious New York of the early 1990s–creates an enchanting sort of mandala in literary form. Threads of the story circle back around, creating new patterns and surprising twists as the narrative takes shape and arrives at a final form…before being swept away like sand as you reach the conclusion and set the book aside.
Hired by the monks of a Buddhist community center to investigate what they believe to be a supernaturally perpetrated series of murders, Landry must traverse a dangerous gauntlet between Chinese gangs, the police, and a possible supernatural threat that stands to tear his world apart.
Unlike altogether too many books, there was an unexpected twist to this story…but not one that felt flimsy or poorly crafted. Nothing about Wynne’s book was poorly crafted.

https://www.crystallakepub.com/product/the-wind-in-my-heart-by-douglas-wynne/

The Mailman by Jeremy Bates: Narrated by Jenna Green

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

Jeremy Bates spins a particularly unsettling tale with The Mailman, introducing us to a mid-1980s Los Angeles and focusing tightly on the listless, unsatisfying life of a record executive’s housewife.
On the surface, Mick and Jade Freeman appear to have it all, including a particularly bright future ahead of them as Mick is on the verge of signing a heavy metal band that’s being billed as the next Mötley Crüe…if he can only keep them from imploding before they record their debut album. Everything is not as perfect as it seems.
Jade isn’t sure whether she even loves Mick anymore and she’s haunted by her infertility and the memory of the one child they’d had and given up for adoption decades earlier.
Like a cliché, this is when the stunningly handsome mailman appears at Jade’s door…and again at her table while she’s having lunch by herself in a busy restaurant. Unlike the cliché, things get truly dark and disturbing from there.
This story is a fine example to display why one should not cheat on their significant other…albeit a pretty extreme example.
With a twist straight out of Oldboy, whether we’re talking about the manga or either of the movie adaptations, it’s hard to walk away from this story feeling clean.
Jenna Green’s narration is excellent, capturing the UK accent of the frontman, and bringing the characters to life in the audiobook edition of this novella.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

My first exposure to Jeff VanderMeer was my purchase of City of Saints and Madmen in May of 2006. I was in my mid-20s and exploring more surreal literature; strange fantasies and bizarro being the two genres I was most greedily diving into. Upon reading that peculiar assortment of strange tales and explorations of the fantastic city of Ambergris, I could hardly wait to read more of his work.
I’ve been a fan since that time 15 years ago, and VanderMeer has not disappointed me since.
Hummingbird Salamander is a bit different from his other works, taking place neither in a feverish land of nebulous division between dreams and waking life nor in a future version of our world, transformed by otherworldly forces. Instead, this novel takes place in the here and now, though perhaps not quite the way you or I would recognize it in subtle ways.
We are first introduced to a mildly paranoid digital security consultant who serves as our unreliable guide through the events that unfold as she begins her journey to unravel a mystery that remains at least somewhat unclear as you reach the final page. It should be said, that if you go into one of this author’s books expecting clarity and a tidy resolution, you’re probably in the wrong place.
Elements of mystery and layered narratives are far from uncommon within VanderMeer’s work, but this particular story showcases the excellence of the suspense form when lovingly crafted by his mind and hands.
Familiar themes from his work are on vivid display within this narrative, ecological concerns, curious uncertainties relating to identity and the self, and suggestions that what is real might not be quite so clear as we commonly understand it to be.

Ocean Grave by Matt Serafini narrated by Sean Duregger

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

Matt Serafini’s Ocean Grave is a much larger story than I could have anticipated. When I say it’s larger, I don’t mean in page-count or anything, but rather all of the elements involved in the narrative. There is a lot more to this story than it seems like there could be, and somehow it still works. It manages to add some social commentary into the mix as well, as the best fiction usually does…involving international relations, the Western world’s obsession with a sanitized tourism-focused exploration of untamed locales, and the widespread impact of poverty in third-world nations.
This book has something for anyone who enjoys adventure…a honeymoon retreat plagued by secrets, treasure hunting, pirates, soldiers of fortune, a centuries-old mystery, inhuman creatures, and a seemingly unstoppable sea monster. Even with all of these elements, Ocean Grave never feels particularly disjointed or difficult to follow.
One thing I will say is that, if you get to know a character within this narrative, you can expect them to have a 70/30 chance of dying before the tale is complete…and it won’t be some noble, glorious death. This story is real-to-life, in that the characters aren’t unnaturally lucky or imbued with the almost superhuman ability to survive the impossible conditions they face. Like those of us in the real world, most people don’t survive extreme situations involving modern-day pirates and warlords…and when you add in a monster lurking in the ocean depths, no one walks away unscathed.
The narration from Sean Duregger is clear and professional. He does an excellent job of providing characters with distinct voices and accents (where appropriate).
One bit of warning, if you, like me, get tired of hearing the term “CIA spook” over and over again during one of the earliest chapters of the book, don’t worry…that repetitive nature doesn’t persist through the rest of the story. It took me a lot longer to finish listening to this audiobook because I stopped it near the end of that particular chapter precisely because that repetitive terminology was driving me mad. I wish I’d just powered through it because the story is excellent after that.

Run by Jeremy Bates

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

Jeremy Bates’s Run is a fast-paced, intense story with an underlying message of how we as a society have dropped the ball concerning mental health for our former military personnel.
Our protagonist, Charlotte, is a prime example of Murphy’s Law being in full effect. Her parents were murdered when she was a child and then her high school sweetheart returns from a series of traumatic deployments overseas (one of which terminating in multiple lives lost by those beside him) with psychosis that pushes at the very edge of worst-case scenario PTSD. During a camping trip that was intended to help Luke find his balance, he lashes out and severely assaults two of Charlotte’s friends before attempting to harm her as well.
We flash forward from there to a year later with Charlotte attempting to move on with her life, dating a new guy, and focusing on finishing school…and then Luke reappears after being released from prison.
Everything takes on a staccato quality from there, as Luke becomes increasingly paranoid and violent, his instability culminating in an act of violence befitting only those we consider terrorists.
It’s a short read/listen and it’s well worth taking the time to do so.
The audiobook is narrated by Jenna Green, someone I consider a friend, an individual I’ve known for a great many years–since we worked together once upon a time at a local television affiliate. The quality of her narration is superb, and I’m not saying that because I’m biased. I feel entirely confident that I have recommended her to other writers who are looking for a woman to narrate their audiobooks in the future.

The Fireman by Joe Hill

/ MeltdownMessiah / Leave a comment

I’m copying over some reviews of titles I’d written up in 2018 and earlier, just in case these titles are new for other people.

The Fireman is, in my opinion, the best book Joe Hill has written. I positively loved Horns and Heart-Shaped Box, and NOS4A2 had a great dark fantasy element to it that made it stand out even though it was my least favorite of his works.
This book takes elements of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and mingles it with a bit of King’s The Stand to create a gripping, devastating, original piece of fiction that falls somewhere between horror and straightforward dramatic literature.
It’s a story about people pushed to the limits of psychological and physical endurance, a world in flames, and paranoia brought on by pandemic conditions. It’s a love story and a story about forging family from ash.
The titular Fireman may be one of the more captivating figures I’ve encountered in a while, and a truly well-developed one for a man who really isn’t the focus of the story at all but rather the vastly important secondary role that helps to bind the narrative together into something fantastic.
At the end of the novel it indicates that Joe Hill spent close to four years writing this book and those were four years well spent.