Review: "The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations" by Jonathan Raab

My first experience with Jonathan Raab's work was The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre, a pulpy tromp through the high strange that I reviewed two years ago. I reread it before starting this review and I can confidently say I was too harsh. Maybe the near-collapse of democracy and endless emotional assault of recent times has changed my mind, maybe my tastes have just changed, but either way I can say with confidence that Raab is a true artisan of the High Strange, horror or otherwise.

The Secret Goatman Spookshow is a new collection of Raab's short stories and flash fiction, some previously published but most freshly released into the world. The wonderfully over the top cover art sets a high bar for the stories and they reach it with aplomb. The opening tale, "Huntin' Them Hills with Joel and Big Howie" is one of the most bone-chilling things I have read in a long, long time. It also sets the tone for the rest of the collection; it's a weird, unyielding story calling back to the early days of found-footage horror films that provides you with many questions, few answers, and enough thick, eerie atmosphere to fill a lake.

Most of the stories are appended with an authors note providing appreciated context for its development, be it the other bits of media that inspired the work (mostly movies or video games) or the frame of mind the author was in during its creation. It's a nice inclusion that doubles as a palate cleanser when binge reading. The individual pieces are all great but you can get a little whiplash, tonally, going from something like the over-the-top hyper gore of "Dr. Coagulants Splatter Lab" (which is exactly as fun as it sounds) to the slow-burn psychodrama of "A Face in a Cardboard Box".

There's even space made for a reprint of a short from one of Raab's Kottoverse books: "Pause for Station Identification" from Freaky Tales From The Force: Season One. It wasn't my favorite from its original collection but it fits wonderfully with the rest of Spookshow, telling of a numbers station deep in the New York wilderness that has less than noble plans for Sheriff Cecil Kotto, Lieutenant Abraham Richards, and their Freaky Tales From The Force production crew, Veronica and Dean.

That story actually draws from another indie horror author's work: Matthew M. Bartlett's "WXXT" mythos. It's one of the joyful things in reading indie books, especially by authors well-embedded in their industry: The readiness these authors have to let others pull from their work and build a sort of collective mythology that spans multiple works by multiple authors, lashing together a world that feels more and more real with each variation to the canon, is inspiring.

Make no mistake, Raab does plenty of world building of his own throughout Spookshow. He references his other pieces as often as Stephen King, weaving a world split between Colorado and Cattaraugus County, New York but tethered by psychological manipulation and supernatural destruction. That's part of what makes his characters so engaging and his stories so much fun to read. They all live together in this world filled with terror, government conspiracy, and paranormal activity but none of them recognize it outside of their limited purview. To each cast their problems are theirs and theirs alone and that makes things all the spookier; you, the reader, know there's no help coming for these people even if they don't.

The titular story, "The Secret Goatman Spookshow" is the cherry on top of the book sundae. Ostensibly it's an early-00s horror film: A spooky, nonsensical video (or in this case, series of videos) is making the rounds and the main character gets caught up in its miasma. What makes it so intriguing is that there's nothing expressly nefarious about the videos. They're graphic, yes, but no one's dying. There's no actual harm being shown, though it might be implied. There's a lot of blood, a lot of violence, but nothing one could use to justify an investigation, and that ambiguity leaves the reader to decide whether the main character's ultimate path is good or bad (and whether or not they actually have a choice). It comes off almost like a parallel of the induction of so many young men and women into the alt-right's hate machine. "Sure, our actions look bad, but is any of it specifically unconscionable?" Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but even without a deeper meaning the story is still exceptional as a piece of horror fiction.

I'll leave a short list of standouts from the collection below. I don't like giving ratings anymore, because you can find good and bad in any creative endeavor in whatever quantities you like, but I love to give recommendations and The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations deserves more than just my own. It's the type of collection you expect from an author with 10 times the recognition Raab gets and to have these stories disappear, the vision they bring to their respective genres unregarded, would be a disservice to genre fiction fans around the world. You can purchase it right now from Turn To Ash for the low price of $15 and I guarantee, if you like genre fiction of any kind, you'll find something in there to love.

Standouts: "Huntin' Them Hills with Joel and Big Howie", "The Secret Goatman Spookshow", "A Capable Man", and "Observer-Experiencer".