Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

Booklist Reviews THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK

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“An emotionally devastating, ultimately hopeful horror story about trauma, the power of love, and the unexplainable forces that surround us,” writes Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association, in its review of The Children of Red Peak, coming from Redhook (Hachette) in November 2020.

Stoker-nominated DiLouie (One of Us, 2018) returns with a heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, terrifying tale about the meaning of life. In 2005, members of a religious cult committed suicide on top of Red Peak. Five children survived, but when the authorities rescued them, there were no bodies anywhere. Now, as the 15th anniversary approaches, one survivor commits suicide, forcing the others—and their psychological wounds—back together. Told from the alternating perspectives of three survivors, both in the present and in flashbacks to their time with “The Family,” the book illustrates the same events from different angles without sacrificing a compelling pace that builds relentlessly until each narrator is forced to confront their trauma in a beautiful and terrifying climax. Utilizing true crime tropes and the supernatural intrigue that surrounds the mountain itself, DiLouie creates more than a typical cult thriller. This is an emotionally devastating, ultimately hopeful horror story about trauma, the power of love, and the unexplainable forces that surround us. A great choice for fans of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians (2020), Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (2016), or Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (2018).

THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK Coming Soon

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COMING NOVEMBER 2020

“With this chilling story of cult abuse, DiLouie (Our War) proves his mastery of the slow slide from psychological drama into supernatural horror… An impressive twist…feels both shocking and inevitable. Horror readers will be hooked.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“I finished The Children of Red Peak several days ago and I’m still thinking about it—especially those terrific final 50 pages. Gripping, thought-provoking, and suspenseful, Craig DiLouie’s latest is a master study of darkness and light and the meaning of life.” —Richard Chizmar, New York Times bestselling author

“Absolutely riveting… A tapestry of past and present come together in this chilling tale of family, faith, and redemption. Craig DiLouie has a new fan.” —J.D. Barker, international bestselling author of She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

“The Children of Red Peak is ice-in-your-heart, nerve-racking fantastic—Heaven’s Gate by way of Stephen King’s IT. Almost every page made my skin crawl.” —Peter Clines, New York Times bestselling author of Paradox Bound and Terminus

“The Children of Red Peak is both a subtle character study and a chilling tale of horror. It goes deep into the heart of people caught up in terrifying events. Highly recommended.” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Ink and V-Wars

“DiLouie really knows how to simultaneously shatter nerves and break hearts. The Children of Red Peak is a genuinely unsettling psychological horror novel, a story where faith and fear combine to destroy innocence and devastate lives. Intense, compulsive, thought-provoking, and highly recommended.” —David Moody, author of the Hater and Autumn series

“One of the most powerful voices in dark fiction does it again! Craig DiLouie’s The Children of Red Peak delivers a suspenseful and unpredictable psychological exploration of family, belief, and horror as chilling as it is thought-provoking. One of the best books of the year!” —James Chambers, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of On the Night Border

DOWNFALL (2004)

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Depicting Hitler’s last days in his besieged Berlin bunker, DOWNFALL (2004) is a powerful character study not only of Hitler himself but the Nazi mentality in general. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it may drag for some viewers due to its length and bleakness.

It was the movie that launched a thousand memes, as a scene depicting Hitler ranting over failure of one of his generals to break the siege turned up on YouTube again and again with fresh subtitles having Hitler complain about various setbacks in American politics, pop culture, and everyday life. Some of these are pretty amusing, but I avoided the movie because the last thing I needed was to watch Hitler mope around a bunker for 2-1/2 hours. I finally decided to give it a go and I’m glad I did, as the movie really has something to say.

The story is based on firsthand accounts from several people, notably Traudl Junge, a young woman chosen by Hitler to be his personal secretary in 1942. Starstruck, she is all too happy to serve the Fuhrer. Fast forward to 1945, Hitler’s birthday. The Soviets are shelling Berlin, and soon tanks are broaching the city. As the writing on the wall becomes clear, Hitler decides to go down with the ship instead of flee his capital, and the top cadre of the Nazi Party unravels between those who stay at his side to the end and others who flee like rats.

The film was controversial for its depiction of Hitler as, well, human. I had no problem with that, and by the end, I hated Hitler and everything he represents even more. Yes, the Nazis weren’t monsters, they were ordinary people who did monstrous things because of ideology and a yes-man echo chamber that created an alternate reality, and that’s even more terrifying and provides an even greater warning to us now. As the Soviets bring that alternate reality crashing down, we see what everybody is made of, and yup, they’re horrible.

Hitler comes across as the leader of a death cult–personally charming, believing he can change events simply by wishing it so, throwing followers under the bus whenever convenient, blaming everybody but himself, brainwashing kids to pointlessly fight and die, and ultimately killing himself and expecting everybody else to die with him. And like a cult, many of his followers are all too happy to die with him. All the Nazis in their stark uniforms, they look more like dangerous cult members wearing drab costumes than actual political and military leaders of a feared and aggressive nation. Even now at my age, I still expect the Nazis to at least be grand due to all the pageantry and discipline, but they’re just pathetic.

Though we’re shown several people who are somewhat sympathetic, such as Junge, a military doctor, and the general in charge of the city’s defense, they’re only sympathetic by omission of certain truths about them and contrast against those even more monstrous. Honestly, there’s not a single truly likeable character in the film. The only characters I was truly rooting for were the children, and seeing them follow the same fate as their parents was painful. Seeing most of these people go along with Hitler’s desire for the whole country to die, Hitler requiring old men and children to fight to the last, and the Nazi leaders having Bacchanalian parties while their subjects suffer a horrific struggle to survive–yeah, you kind of look forward to them exiting the world, and good riddance.

Overall, DOWNFALL is an excellent character study of Hitler and portrayal of the Nazis, warning about blindly following extremist ideologies, and a raw and believable account of Hitler’s last days.

SURVIVOR’S SONG by Paul Tremblay

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SURVIVOR’S SONG by Paul Tremblay is a literary “zombie” novel with a lot of heart, not a little heartbreak, and a very high degree of realism such it all felt fairly real. I quite enjoyed it.

In the near future, Massachusetts is under quarantine as a new rabies-like disease ravages the animal and now the human population. Like rabies, it’s spread through saliva, but unlike rabies, it incubates in a very short time. When Dr. Ramola Sherman gets a call from Natalie, an old friend who is now eight months pregnant, she hears a frantic plea for help: Natalie has been bitten. Thus begins a journey across a crumbling state to save Natalie and her child before it’s too late.

What I liked: The first thing has to be the world building. I especially enjoy apocalyptic stories where we see the center give way and the rest falling apart. Tremblay’s quarantine zone is filled with panicking people who react in many ways, from denial (including the main characters, to an extent) to paranoia and aggression, along with infected animals and people who lurch and rave as they randomly attack. The police are still in action but overtaxed, vigilantes are taking matters into their own hands, and the hospitals are flooded and starting to break down. Everything rolls out fairly realistically, which made the world feel utterly real to me. The characterizations are for the most part very strong, even the minor characters, and I rooted for Natalie to make it however dimmed her prospects became. I particularly liked two teenagers who treat the apocalypse as something they’ve long awaited and trained for by watching zombie movies. When the story moves, the tension and action are realistic and satisfying.

I had some reservations, notably some long digressions that broke the pacing and tension for me, as well as finding Ramola to be not being nearly as strong a character as Natalie. Despite this, I enjoyed SURVIVOR’S SONG quite a bit, and after reading dozens of zombie novels, found it a standout in a genre to which I’d grown jaded, along with being a solid horror novel overall.

THE BEACH HOUSE (2020)

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Writer-director Jeffrey Brown’s first feature, THE BEACH HOUSE (Shudder) serves up an environmental apocalypse with plenty of body horror. It’s a ton of queasy fun and is rare among apocalyptic films in that I had no virtually head-smacking moments at the characters’ choices.

Young couple Emily and Randall arrive at his family’s beach community in the off season, promising a chance for them to rekindle their relationship after he ditched her and college out of disillusionment. He wants her to drop out too, but she’s dedicated as a student of astrobiology–the study of species that survive in incredibly hostile environments, which yes, foreshadows a whole lot of s**t that’s about to go down.

They discover an older couple–Jane and Mitch–is already at the house, friends of Randall’s parents, and they all decide there’s room enough for everybody. They have dinner together, involving wine and some edibles, and we learn how Emily is dedicated to school while Randall is not, how Jane is fighting a terminal illness while Mitch is struggling to handle the knowledge his wife is dying. Intruding on this basic drama is a strange luminescence in the trees and malodorous fog.

The next day, the horror begins.

I’ve always been intrigued by ecological apocalypse stories such as Tim Lebbon’s THE SILENCE, where an organism adapted to survive in a harsh environment is suddenly released into an environment offering an immense wealth of food and energy, which allows it to run amok. The monster in this story doesn’t care about humans and their problems, it simply sees them as food, as a vehicle to reproduce and evolve. THE BEACH HOUSE doesn’t disappoint in that department, providing a creepy spread of biological threats that Emily and Randall must try to survive.

Another thing that works about this film is it suffers little of the awkwardness and laziness of being a director’s first feature (especially one he wrote) and a low-budget horror film. The acting is decent, the horror effects are great, the direction and pacing work, there’s little pandering plot wise, and everything rolls out more or less realistically, while we start to get the idea that maybe even if the characters make all the right choices, it might not be enough. In particular, Emily is a great character, taking care of Randall, who is more physically affected by the crisis, while consistently making smart choices. She’s not set up as a superhero but instead a smart woman who toughs it out and keeps her head enough to make good decisions. My only real qualm was with the ending; Brown makes a point with it, but in my view it’s not particularly strong or memorable.

Overall, THE BEACH HOUSE is surprisingly good, solid apocalyptic fare.

THE DARK Season 3

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Season 3 of the moody, dark, and apocalyptic Netflix series THE DARK concluded what can only be described as one of the most truly remarkable science-fiction series, so odd and complex it’s one of those TV series you’re surprised got made. Season 3 builds upon the complex relationships and central time travel mystery from the first two seasons while adding another dimension and bringing the whole thing to a powerful and decisive finish.

This was an enjoyable but difficult series to watch. I would have appreciated its intricate details more if I were able to binge-watch it from start to finish, which begs for a second viewing now that the work is complete and I kind of know what’s going on, who’s who in what time period, and how they’re related. The show is not really three discrete seasons but a single vision meticulously planned from the first episode. And holy crap, it’s incredible when you see the whole thing.

During the second season, I have to admit I began to get frustrated with it. Too often, characters appear from offstage to deliver speeches short on real details and long on bland philosophy, while the time travel itself started to rely more and more heavily on the bootstrap paradox. This is a paradox in time travel where, for example, a man has a child, the child goes back in time and has his own child, and that child turns out to be boy’s father (each is the father of the other), resulting in time travel literally creating people, events, and objects living in a time loop. In many movies such as ARRIVAL, it provides an answer or solution that crashes into the plot as deus ex machina, and in THE DARK, it started to feel like the TV show LOST, constantly teasing mysteries that once revealed didn’t really mean anything. THE DARK, however, fooled me, as the bootstrap paradox became the central point of the show, the “knot” the characters seek to maintain or unravel depending on the faction, and with the key to unraveling it being finding the “origin,” the prime mover to a swirling, massive set of events occurring in an endless loop.

Holy crap, it’s dense, it’s enormously atmospheric, it’s tragic, and it’s possibly the work of mad genius. THE DARK isn’t for everybody, but if you like intelligent sci-fi, check it out.