Staining The Timbre

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 c...

It's little secret that I'm a fan of the high strange; weird tales of grim fantasy and supernatural supposition meant to scratch the parts of our minds that beg for answers to the unknown. Those that ring true give vigor to the falsities and, at its core, conspiracies as people most frequently intend amount to little more than world building exercises. You start with an established, objective fact and spin wildly from there. In this effort The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre succeeds, eventually. The story's thrust follows Abraham Richards, a war veteran recently returned to Cattaraugus County, a backwater conglomeration of acreage that resembles a town as much as any other 500 population fly-over. Plagued by wartime traumas, and perhaps hoping a job might give him some much needed direction, Abe falls under the employ of Sheriff Cecil Kotto as the County's newest deputy. As any good pulp story asserts, the main character (Abraham Richards, in this case) will alway...

Poetry has never been my forte. I prefer prose only in that I don't have to try as hard, and as such I have a special respect for proper poets; those who can string a verse with poignancy and grace without fracturing the flow of the piece. These authors are in touch with themselves and their emotions more closely than I could ever hope to be, and that only comes from a place of brutal honesty with oneself. Coincidentally, that's exactly how I would describe Bedroom Music : brutally honest. You don't get that feeling when you first crack its pages, because the overture ("How to Give a Purple Otter Pop") is a brightly-light painting of youth tinged with Castor's characteristic physicality. It's a beautifully candid way to start the collection and serves as the foundation for the rest of the first half. The book itself is informally divided into two sections: the first focusing on experimentation ("Hacienda Avenue"), taking the knocks life serve...

The Silo Series , by which it is referred to in totality, is a popular sci-fi book partly because it's a quality work of art, but also because of the mythology surrounding its publication. Originally only the first book (simply titled Wool ) was meant to stand alone. Hugh Howey self-published the story, having previously decided to do so because of the increased artistic freedom, and let it ride. Driven by the  story's popularity he wrote more entries, starting with Wool: Proper Gauge , which expands upon the grim events of Wool and follows a new set of characters met only briefly in the previous foray. In less than two months he had written the next three entries, Casting Off, The Unraveling, and The Stranded respectively, and completed the core story of the Silo series. This isn't even covering the alleged seven-figure publishing rights payday Howey turned down to maintain online publishing rights while the series was sent to print by Simon & Schuster. He ha...

For a long, long time my favorite book was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This was in part because it's objectively a hugely influential novel, and also because I made the decision at a very young age. When you're 14 and you want to sound smart in front of your friends, you pick the most "academic" book you've read and double down on it. That's just how it goes. Luckily reading, unlike the rest of my adolescence, wasn't just a phase. Until my mid-20s I would devour pages and pages in a single sitting, enjoying my time but having convinced myself that, no matter how good a book was, it would never be my favorite book because that slot was already spoken for and, as we all know, favorites are permanent. It was last year when my mother, of all people, told me about Children of Time . She was in the midst of listening to it on audiobook and wasn't having a great time, which was unsurprising given that she's not big into highbrow scifi....