Review:
Tabloid Purposes IV |
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by Adicus Ryan Garton |
Not having read any of the previous Tabloid Purposes horror anthologies, I had no expectations going into this. It was like picking up a novel by an author you've never heard of and not reading the back cover.
So, like any book by an author we've never heard of, we're going to first judge it by its cover. The front cover is very blurry and almost smeared, as if it were a copy of a copy of a copy made at Kinko's and then scanned. It gives it a very 'underground journal' feel, so it has an almost punk rock feel right off the bat. You open it (I'm not sure if this part is the same for the paper copy; I read a .pdf review copy) and the pages are black with white words printed on them. At first, this annoyed me, but as I was reading it on a computer monitor, I found that it was much less stressful on my eyes, so I can appreciate it, and indeed, reading the anthology probably would've taken twice as long had it been black words on white screen.
So now we've cracked it open, noted its novel printing and we're scanning through the authors. I have to confess that I don't know any of them. Google searches on many of them bring up only print-on-demand services and the occasional surprising technical writing or, in Zdranka Evtimova's case, Bulgarian translations. Again, that merely warrants an absence of expectations. Still, no problems.
Then we start reading the stories. You like vampires, werewolves, zombies, serial killers/rapists, etc., then this is the book for you. There are 4 vampire stories, 2 werewolf stories, 1 zombie story, 5 killer stories, 3 ghost stories, 6 assorted monster stories (not including werewolves or any other standard horror monsters) and a whopping 19 other stories. That should tell you something right there: there's quite a bit to read here. It is by no means a short anthology.
It is very likely that somewhere in this anthology you will find a story that you like, no matter what your horror tastes go. There are ridiculously gory stories as well as subtle, psychological stories. There are stories about people from all walks of life, in all stages of life (and afterlife) from all over the world (though most of the stories do tend to congeal in the States).
That being said, it seemed that this anthology was padded with stories that weren't great, and it slows down the action and dulls the blade. For every story that I felt was a winner, there were two or three before and after that seemed a bit cliché, or worse, disappointing.
An example: “Hobo” by David Hilton. It's a story about a couple of kids who hitchhike to the next town over to get some costumes for Halloween. On the way back, they hop a train. This story is great in that for almost the entire length of it, it steers clear of clichés. There are no “close calls” where someone almost falls of the train or loses a leg, or anything trite like that. Instead, you are drawn into the juvenile world of kids and the disappointment that children have when they expect something and get something wholly inferior to what their imagination has created. And then.
There's a dead hobo and an escaped felon in the boxcar they slip inside. Even that is okay because Hilton carries it off so well. And then.
Well, the ending is so ludicrous and head-shakingly bad that it almost made me cry. I thought for sure that this story was going to remain with me as one of the best stories I'd read in a long while. Instead, it's been delegated to a couple of paragraphs in a review.
I found this happening quite a bit in this anthology. A story would get my hopes up, and the ending would dash me to the rocks.
That being said, there were a few stories that were definitely worth reading: “Faustralia” by Hayden James Price, “The Cutters” by Gary J. Beharry, “Night of the Red Spider” by Kevin Andersen, and “The Family” by the Davis Bros. These stories had me laughing, wincing, scratching my head, and best of all, empathizing with the characters. (I'm just saying, I'm not a serial killer; I can't feel bad for a serial killer who gets killed by ghosts or a vengeful victim.)
If you want to support small press horror, I encourage you to pick this up. If you want to read a lot of stories about werewolves and vampires and killers and the ever-changing other, pick this up. It's not the most amazing thing you'll ever read, but whatever horrible thrill you're looking for, it'll probably get the job done.
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