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

CARRIER WAVE by Robert Brockway

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Just when you think you might be jaded reading a particular genre, along comes a great book that blows you away. The latest example for me being CARRIER WAVE by Robert Brockway. It’s goddam extraordinary.

The novel is about a frequency that once heard infects you with an alien intelligence, an intelligence that wants to consume humanity. It turns you into a machine of destruction, one that can take one of several horrible forms. Once it appears, so does the black spot in the sky, a spot that grows larger with each passing day. This is the story of humanity’s destruction, desperate struggle for survival, and possible salvation. Picture THE SIGNAL (2007) or Stephen King’s CELL meets Lovecraft, and you’re in the ballpark.

It’s not so much a novel as a collection of short stories, each story having its own protagonist and dealing with a different aspect or phase of the apocalypse. This was hard for me to get used to, since as soon as I truly invested in a character, that particular story was over and it was on to the next one. The convention took some getting used to. By the end, all the surviving characters end up in the same place in the same storyline, though by then I’d forgotten some of their names. Some of the writing is indie rough, with favorite phrases like, “he fell like a puppet with its strings cut.”

But that’s pretty much my only criticism. Otherwise, I found the novel roaring fun, if you consider watching humanity flounder in its own blood to be fun, as, uh, I do. Brockway’s characters are ordinary people facing an impossible horror, and they’re all quickly likeable and people you can root for to survive. Their battles to survive are dramatic and rarely predictable. The horror element never grows stale but remains interesting and occasionally surprising to the end, particularly as the black spot and the things that inhabit it are revealed.

In the end, CARRIER WAVE accomplishes something difficult to do–carve out its own identity and stand out in a very popular and therefore packed sub-genre. It has great ideas and a terrific premise, loads of violent fun, touches of comedy, plenty of humanity, and just enough hope. I’m happy to recommend this one to apoc fiction fans.

REMINA by Junjo Ito

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I love Japanese manga creator Junjo Ito, particularly his longer graphic novel work like UZUMAKI, and I was thrilled to receive a surprise gift from my partner Chris Marrs this Christmas: REMINA, hot off the press. Like his other work, it’s wonderfully weird, dark, bleak, Lovecraftian, and beautiful.

The story focuses on Remina, whose father detected a mysterious planet that has emerged from a wormhole he discovered. He names the planet Remina after his beautiful daughter, who becomes a pop star in the tide of fame.

Alarmingly, however, the planet appears to be sucking everything around it into itself, and it’s now coming toward Earth.

I won’t say more about the plot, as you should check it out for yourself, but I really enjoyed this manga. There isn’t a lot of depth in terms of character, with the story being driven by its fantastical plot elements rendered in Ito’s distinctive creepy artistic style. What Ito delivers is pure spectacle, a great creep factor, and a bleak feeling that leads you to conclude character change and development kind of don’t matter when people are confronted with horrors too vast for human influence or meaning.

Overall, I loved it, and it proved horror does indeed make a great gift!

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.

COMPLEX by Brian Keene

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Brian Keene’s COMPLEX is thrilling survival horror. While it’s short on answers, it’s a lot of fun, a nice pulpy escape.

The novel follows a series of people living in a low-end apartment complex, including a mom and her son newly arrived to the complex, two potheads hiding out after a score, a writer at the end of his career and rope, a transsexual, a tough old lady, a Vietnam vet, and others. The wide cast find themselves in the midst of a bizarre apocalypse, as naked people flood the complex bent on sadism, torture, and slaughter of anything living. Thrown together by circumstance, these people must fight to survive the night.

The madmen are great, tribal and deranged and utterly homicidal, like something from the brutal world of CROSSED or GHOSTS OF MARS. Led by a large brute they nickname Tick Tock, they scour the complex and the town, searching for the living while our heroes suffer, struggle, fight, and sometimes die, delivering plenty of action. As for our heroes, they’re likeable, tough, and resourceful, though their best is no match for the invading horde.

Some might take exception to a lack of answers by the end, but overall, I thought it was a lot of fun, which I’d guess was Keene’s sole intent.

UZUMAKI by Junji Ito

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Junji Ito’s manga UZUMAKI is a weird and wild horror story about a Japanese town plagued by the “spiral curse,” which begins to spread until it threatens to devour everything. I absolutely loved the art, original story, and haunting strangeness of it.

The manga is a collection of series of interconnected stories about Kirie Goshima, a teenage girl whose boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, believes their town is haunted by uzumaki, the spiral and mesmerizing secret shape of the world. Time after time, she sees people become obsessed or infected by spirals. As the incidents mount, the spirals grow until becoming a whirlpool threatening to consume everything.

In some ways, the story reminded me of PI, a 1998 film about a man who discovers a number that is one of the names of God and drives him to the brink of madness. UZUMAKI has the same level of originality and strangeness, though it takes its concept much farther, straight to an unflinching, very satisfying finish.

If you like graphic novels/manga and horror (or anything just plain weird), check out UZUMAKI. It’s a lot of fun.

WASTELANDERS by K.S. Merbeth

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K.S. Merbeth’s WASTELANDERS, which puts her novels BITE and RAID in a single volume, tells the story of Kid, a young girl struggling to survive another day in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland until teaming up with a band of misfit marauders straight out of the Frankenstein child of THE ROAD WARRIOR and the game BORDERLANDS.

The stories are packed with post-apocalyptic tropes and adventures with Kid finding her way in a marauding tribe, where morality has little survival benefit but where she does discover a personal code. Along the way, she toughens up to become a raider herself, as the gang plows through one problem and enemy after another. The fun is in the fact this gang are the bad guys, a mini version of Lord Humongous’s army, and they’re in it to survive and have a good time doing it. Merbeth does a good job making these raiders sympathetic if morally gray, prone to betrayal, and occasionally cannibalistic, largely by showing how worse everybody else is in this insane post-apocalyptic world.

While WASTELANDERS might have benefited with an overarching plot where by unlocking a dormant morality or through naked self-interest they make the world a better place, the stories offer plenty of fun romping around this Mad Max world trashing enemies and surviving by the skin of your teeth, with plenty of action. Overall, WASTELANDERS is just good fun.