Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

“When you kill people for a living, you get used to finding the occasional body part lying around your home. I do not kill people for a living, and so I freaked.” – Josh White

Josh White is the victim of what may be the worst case of mistaken identity in history. Arriving home one day to find a severed human nose on his kitchen table Josh does what any reasonable person would do… freak out. Of course once the initial, understandable freak out passes Josh proceeds to make the first in what will end up being a comically tragic series of bad decisions.

Instead of immediately calling the police, Josh decides to store the nose in his refrigerator – after carefully wrapping it in paper towels and sealing it in a plastic baggie – to keep it from rotting while he puzzles out whose nose it could be and why it was on his table. After much deliberation he… falls asleep.

When he returns home from work the following day – no, he didn’t call the police when he woke up – Josh finds an ear on his table. Apparently having reached his tipping point on finding severed body parts in his apartment, Josh calls 911 to report his gruesome discoveries. When the police haven’t shown up by bedtime, despite a follow up call from Josh, he puts the ear in the baggie with the nose and decides to… go to sleep.

Arriving home from work yet again Josh finds… nothing. Which is good, right? Wrong. Because the people who’ve been leaving the fleshy calling cards for Josh decide to pay him a visit to find out why he’s not responded to their none to subtle overtures. The body parts, it turns out, were left as part of a kidnapping and ransom demand directed at Josh White… another Josh White. Not sure whether or not they should kill him, the two gangsters who show up at his apartment kidnap Josh and take him back to the big boss for his decision on the matter. What unfolds from there could only happen in a Jeff Strand novel. (more…)

I’d been fascinated with serial killers for a long time, but it wasn’t until my Jeffrey Dahmer report in the last week of middle school that Mom and my teachers got worried enough to put me into therapy. – John Wayne Cleaver

At first glance John Wayne Cleaver seems like a normal fifteen-year-old midwestern teenager. He hangs out with his best friend, has an after school job, and is obsessed with his hobby.

Of course, he only hangs out with his “friend” – the one kid in school weirder than he is – to camouflage his complete lack of social skills, he works as an assistant mortician, and his hobby… well, it’s serial killers.

The reason Cleaver finds serial killers so interesting is because he believes it’s his fate to become one. That belief is reinforced when his therapist officially diagnoses him as a sociopath.

Naturally, Cleaver wants to learn as much about what makes his fellow sociopaths tick as possible. However, his point in learning about them is not to perfect his fated craft, but so that he can try to find a way to prevent himself from fulfilling his perceived destiny.

To that end Cleaver has established an elaborate set of rules he lives by in order to remove any potential temptation that may lure his inner demon – which he calls Mr. Monster – out from behind the mental wall Cleaver has constructed to contain it.

Things seem to be going well. Working in his family’s mortuary satisfies his curiosities and allows him to get hands-on with dead people, and the weekly visits with his therapist Dr. Neblin (wonderfully written interactions) give him someone he can speak with frankly about his internal struggles. But when horribly mutilated bodies start turning up indicating the presence of an honest-to-goodness serial killer right in his town, it’s all Cleaver can do to try and keep Mr. Monster under wraps while he attempts to track down the killer.

I Am Not A Serial Killer may be the most unique coming of age story ever written. For as much as it is a serial killer story, with a touch of supernatural horror, at its heart it is really a character study. Wells has done a masterful job taking the reader into the mind of a teenage sociopath struggling to come to terms with himself and his inner demon. The matter of fact manner in which Cleaver accepts his condition is at turns honorable, humorous, horrifying, and always, always fascinating.

One may be tempted to compare Cleaver to a teenage Dexter, but there is a crucial difference: where Dexter embraces his sociopathic urges, Cleaver wants desperately to defeat his. Fortunately there are two sequels to I Am Not A Serial Killer already in the works, so we’ll all get to see whether Cleaver is able to keep Mr. Monster harnessed… or whether he really is destined to be a serial killer.

- I Am Not A Serial Killer: Book Trailer -

The usual principles of combat seemed useless when fighting an impervious enemy, an enemy that didn’t need sleep and that functioned on the compulsion to kill, and she knew if they were to get out alive she had to adapt. – Amber Redgrave

If someone had told weapons specialist and ex-military member Amber “Big Red” Redgrave that a security assignment gone bad resulting in two deaths was going to be the best part of her day, she’d probably have stayed in bed. Fortunately for readers of author Shaun Jeffrey’s newest book, Deadfall, she didn’t.

Following the ill-fated security assignment that starts Deadfall off with a bang, Amber returns to the office for debriefing by agency owner and ex-SAS man, John Richmond. Though a lucrative and time sensitive matter has arisen, given the morning’s events he doesn’t want Amber involved and insists that she take some time to decompress.

Amber, however, wants to get right back into things, so when she takes a call from the client indicating that they need an additional team member she talks herself onto the mission team… without Richmond’s knowledge. Understandably, he is not pleased to see Amber later that day at the mission rendezvous point. It being too late to replace her, he begrudgingly accepts her presence.

The eight man team is informed that their mission is to rescue the client’s two children, who have been kidnapped. Though the wealthy client is willing to pay the ransom, he’s not convinced the kidnappers will actually release the kids even if he does. Therefore, having learned that the kidnappers are hiding out in a remote, abandoned mining village he wants the team to go in and get the kids back before the 24 hour ransom deadline expires. A classic insertion and rescue mission, right?

Not quite. Instead of finding the kidnappers and missing kids in the village, they find it eerily quiet and seemingly quite empty. That is until hundreds of people start pouring out of the abandoned mine shaft and begin attacking the team. As they try to repel the assault they notice that the people are not slowing down, let alone dying, despite being shot… unless it’s a head shot. Impossible as it seems, the team quickly realizes that they aren’t dealing with living people, but with the undead. And we’re not talking Night of the Living Dead shuffling, slow moving zombies. No, these are the 28 Days Later chase you down speedy kind of zombies, and the resulting fight by the team to stay alive and get back to civilization is a white-knuckled ride with gore aplenty.

But there’s more going on in Deadfall than just a good zombie romp. In addition to having to deal with scores of the undead, there’s the question of exactly who their client really is and why they were set up, as well as the realization that not all the team members are who they seem to be. Further, Jeffrey has given a unique twist to the origin of the zombies in Deadfall, one that is both believable and allows for an ending that manages to simultaneously wrap things up and leave them open, in equally satisfying measures.

First with The Kult and now with Deadfall, Shaun Jeffrey is quickly establishing himself as the ‘go to’ guy for high-intensity action. Having already demonstrated that he can write both traditional crime fiction and horror with equal skill, I can’t wait to see what Jeffrey serves up next!

“People are predictable. That’s what makes them easy to kill.” – The Oracle

Killing people is The Oracle’s business, and business is good in author Shaun Jeffrey’s incredibly dark novel The Kult. The Oracle, you see, doesn’t just kill people; he tortures and mutilates them in horrifying ways, turning them, in his mind, into macabre works of art. Then he takes photographs of his creations, which he sends to the police.

Detective Chief Inspector Prosper Snow is in charge of The Oracle investigation. He’s also a member of the Kult, a small group of friends he’s known since his school days. Initially formed when they were just kids to help each other deal with bullies, the Kult stayed in contact over the years, occasionally calling on each other for assistance with increasingly “grown up” issues.

An email Snow receives from one of the members calling for a meeting leads to the group facing the most grown up issue possible: murder. At the meeting, Snow learns that the wife of one of his friends has been raped and not only does his friend intend to seek revenge, he expects his fellow Kult members to assist. He argues that the timing is perfect for them to kill his wife’s rapist, because if they do so in a sufficiently gruesome manner it will be blamed on The Oracle.

Though he’d always been there for the Kult in the past, Snow can’t agree to such extreme action. That is, not until his supposed friends inform him that if he doesn’t help, including supplying them with the inside information necessary to copy the unique m.o. of The Oracle, they will reveal to his superiors all the previous questionable activities in which Snow has participated. Caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, Snow caves and assists in the killing. And that is when things go from merely screwed up to genuinely life threatening, because following their attempt to frame The Oracle for the murder they commit the Kult members begin getting knocked off themselves.

In The Oracle Jeffrey has conjured up one of the nastiest, most perversely creative serial killers in recent memory, which makes it all the more impressive that Jeffrey did not make his protagonist an über-Detective. Quite the contrary, Snow spends most of the story frustrated, one step behind, and continuously making extremely questionable decisions based on emotion rather than logic… which makes him a believable and sympathetic lead.

The tension and stakes rise to almost stifling levels as Snow races to discover The Oracle’s identity before he finds himself in the crosshairs, setting the stage for a truly disturbing showdown in The Oracle’s decidedly creepy lair. Definitely not for the faint-of-heart, The Kult is a gripping read that’s part horror, part mystery, part police procedural, and completely in-your-face.

Primarily known for his deft touch in combining horror and comedy, Dweller is Jeff Strand’s second ’serious’ novel, following the Bram Stoker Award nominated Pressure, and with his newest offering Strand may well see another Stoker nomination headed his way.

Dweller introduces us to Toby, an 8 year old with an active imagination and difficulty making friends. Though he’s been told by his parents not to, Toby enjoys playing in the woods that border the backyard of his house. Lost in fantasy while playing one summer day, Toby comes to find himself deep in the woods… much deeper, in fact, than he’s ever been. Scared of the trouble he’ll be in when he gets home late, Toby desperately tries to find his way out of the woods, but what he finds instead will change his life forever.

Toby, you see, finds a monster. An honest-to-goodness, hairy, yellow-eyed, razor-clawed, fanged beast. Of course Toby does what any 8 year old would do under the circumstances… runs away! Once safely back at home he’s chastised by his parents for his misadventure, and as the summer passes Toby convinces himself he didn’t really see a monster in the woods. He couldn’t have, right? Monsters don’t exist.

Flash forward seven years to a Toby who has made the woods his place of refuge from the bullies at school and tedious evenings with his family. While exploring one day after school Toby discovers a cave, which he proceeds to investigate with the notion that it may be his ticket to getting some friends, maybe even a girlfriend, if he has a cool cave-fort he can bring them to. (more…)

One of the surprise sensations in the publishing industry last year was Quirk Classics’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a mashup which re-imagined Elizabeth Bennet as romantically jaded martial arts expert up to her eyes in zombies, also known as ‘dreadfuls’. Though railed against by some Jane Austen purists as sacrilege, adding zombies to such a well known, if intimidating, classic arguably exposed it to a new audience of readers who otherwise may well have never read it (in any form). Such success obviously called for a follow up, right?

Naturally. But instead of going the traditional sequel route, Quirk Classics went in the other direction and has given us a prequel: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Set several years prior to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dawn of the Dreadfuls takes the reader on a journey through the dawn of the zombie plague and Elizabeth’s tentative first steps toward becoming the ultimate zombie killing warrior. Along the way we encounter, among other things, a scientific attempt to interact with a dreadful… through music and dancing (just go with it), a creative use of croquet balls and mallets, and the timely arrival of ninjas.

Obviously Jane Austen did not actually write a prequel to Pride and Prejudice, so author Steve Hockensmith had a freer hand than his Pride and Prejudice and Zombies predecessor to create his tale without being tied to source material. But what made Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a true phenomenon was its creative mashup of classic literate with classic horror, and that hook worked precisely because the reader already knew the story being (lovingly) spoofed. Once the story isn’t tied to an actual classic work, it’s really just another zombie story in an odd setting. (more…)

“At any given moment, the human body contains millions of parasites. This is the story of just one. A really, really nasty one.”

There may well never have been a bigger understatement in the history of official book summaries. Combining horror and comedy in such a way that neither overpowers the other is a delicate operation, but it’s something author Jeff Strand has demonstrated time and again he is a master of doing with surgical precision. And you gotta know when a book starts with a meat cleaver rampage that things can only go in one direction intensity wise, and Strand doesn’t disappoint.

After attending the funeral of one of his students, the perpetrator of the meat cleaver rampage in fact, high school teacher Benjamin Wilson begins to feel, well… odd. At first the changes affecting Benjamin are merely an inconvenience; namely, the inability to control his cravings for sex and candy. But hey, how can more sex and candy really be a bad thing, right? But there are also stomach pains, which Benjamin initially writes off as the result of the massive candy consumption.

Except that the pains don’t go away when he goes cold turkey on the candy, they actually get worse. Considerably worse. So much so that, after collapsing at work with incapacitating pain, Benjamin ends up in the hospital where he receives the news he has an intestinal parasite… one that x-rays reveal looks like “a squid monster” much to Benjamin’s horror. Surgical removal being the only option, Benjamin is prepped for surgery and whisked to the OR. And this, folks, is where business picks up and things go seriously awry. (more…)

If you’ve not previously read anything by Jeff Strand there couldn’t possibly be a better place for you to start than with his new release, Pressure. Though Strand is the author of over a dozen books, with the publication of Pressure Strand has taken his already incredible talent to another level entirely.

What would you do if your best friend turned out to be a sociopathic killer? One who was obsessed with you and everything about your life? That’s the situation Alex faces when his friend Darren becomes increasingly manipulative and violent over the course of their relationship.

Starting when they meet at boarding school, Pressure follows the twisted relationship between Alex and Darren as it builds from kids being cruel, to young men pushing boundaries, to adults who end up in the fight of their lives, figuratively and literally, against each other.

Pressure is aptly titled, because the pressure in this book builds relentlessly… almost to the point of uncomfortableness at times it is so skillfully written. Strand pushes Alex to the brink over and over, seeing just how much he and the reader can take, before finally pushing him over the edge for a climactic showdown that will leave you both stunned and impressed at its unflinching, uncompromising resolution.