Author: Alex Doenau

December is a rough month for reading and, depending on the reader, any Christmas themed book undertaking may well keep you occupied well past the day of festivities. Hence Hark! The Herald Angels Scream was finished on New Year’s Eve. The best thing about it is the title, which isn’t exactly a shame, but this collection of vaguely Christmasy horror is a mixed-bag, and a randomly curated one at that. These eighteen stories range from twelve pages to novella length, and a lot of them have exactly the same ending: children dying, women screaming in another room or, often, an unholy combination of the two — and then, consecutively.

It’s not entirely clear why Hark! The Herald Angels Scream begins with a streak of its weakest stories, including a travel nightmare where the people “punished” for Christmas infractions are completely innocent. There are a few transferable curses on display, there’s a stern warning of the dangers of technology in that unbelievably accelerated way those sorts of stories take on, and also a bizarre entry in what is presumably a pre-existing world that remarkably little information exists about.

But Hark! The Herald Angels Scream is not without its gems: Jeff Strand’s brief “Good Deeds” is a genuinely amusing study of a truly awful Christmas song, which is particularly relevant to the last six weeks of the year when all of the music in public spaces is both a) about Christmas; and b) somehow something you’ve never heard before from that incredibly specific cottage industry; “It’s a Wonderful Knife”, editor Christopher Golden’s contribution, does more than coast on its title and offers a magical movie history time travel revenge tale; John McIlveen’s “Yankee Swap” is a seasonal Saw take that doesn’t quite stick the landing but is arresting up until that point; Tim Lebbon’s “Home” provides a post-apocalyptic ritual in a world that’s moved on; and it’s all tied together by Sarah Pinborough’s quite long “The Hangman’s Bride”, which starts with a chimney adventure and is almost as emphatic as Dickens at assuring us that Tiny Tim did NOT die by the end.

Hark! The Herald Angels Scream isn’t a consistent collection, and it’s not overly fun to dip in and out of, but there are a few pieces genuinely worth the time. It’s an impressive collection of authors, but apart from the final story there’s no logical order to proceedings. Horror and Christmas are bedfellows from way back — A Christmas Carol is a ghost story after all, and through it Dickens invented the modern conception of the day — but Hark! The Herald Angels Scream isn’t quite enough to put you in the festive mood enough in time for the day itself.

Richard Bachman, you crazy kidder. You should have started with The Long Walk! Stephen King’s alter ego’s sophomore effort is a blood bath set in a horrible seventies dystopia, but it’s not inhuman. It is the first of Bachman’s novels about deadly competitions, and one that has firmly influenced future generations of writers of nightmare dystopias — in a far more positive way than Rage ever inspired anyone. The Long Walk is Bachman’s first good novel and, chronologically, the first novel that King ever wrote. Sometimes things just don’t happen in order.

Stephen King’s first short story collection is from the olden days when genre short stories ruled the earth, and people would just read them where they lay — in the pages of Penthouse, no less, when you really could read them for the articles. Of Night Shift’s 20 stories, a full 80% were published ahead of collection, and half of them were published ahead of Carrie. The short story mode is completely different to the novel, and King was rightfully confident in this early selection. There are some remarkably strong entries in here, several of which became films — in at least one case, entirely too many films — the embryos of later works, and a couple of continuations of ‘Salem’s Lot (which are now published in modern reprints of same). 

Night Shift is a collection of short stories for people who no longer believe in them, and because of the form and era, not all endings have to be neat or happy, or undisturbing. King has a bit of everything in here, and few weaknesses.

One cannot accuse Stephen King of getting sentimental in his old age, because he has always had a soft heart, and it’s not always very deeply buried beneath the evil clowns, cars, and hotels. Elevation, essentially a novella, takes ideas that King has tackled before — Thinner springs readily to mind — but twists them, and makes them optimistic. Elevation is a short work that eschews complex explanation of its contents in favour of a quick burst of emotion and a punch of an ending.

The world of Young Adult fiction is incestuous. If you read the acknowledgements in the back of a book, and you really should, they all have the same names. Adam Silvera is no different, and his books, although gay-flavoured, aren’t that much different to the rest. There’s some sort of statute that means every YA novel must have at least one reference to Harry Potter, unless there’s need for a parallel universe equivalent. History is All You Left Me has the same plug-in-and-play cultural references as every other novelist in the Silvera crew. Maybe this makes the teens feel safe and at home. At any rate, History is All You Left Me is instantly better than Silvera’s debut More Happy Than Not, which leant too heavily into the teenage tearjerker genre.

If you sell enough books, or enough movie tickets, or designer scents, you get at least one free pass. With Nine Perfect Strangers, on the back of the dual number one New York Times bestsellers Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty and the HBO adaptation of the former, Liane Moriarty has published her free pass. Because really, what is Nine Perfect Strangers? You can read it from cover to cover without being entirely sure. There is something here, but it becomes buried under the extraneous compost that Moriarty tosses about with abandon.

Grady Hendrix knows a little something about Satan, as both his non-fiction Paperbacks from Hell and his fictional canon would attest. As concerned hand wringers have long known, those who know much of the Dark Lord and Master are also quite familiar with Metal in all its forms – Heavy, Dark, Speed, Thrash, and, Beelzebub help us, Nu – and in We Sold Our Souls, Hendrix literally marries the two. The names have changed a bit, but the facts remain: listen to the “wrong” music and be damned. Hendrix’s satire of dark materialism is sleek and compact, about as subtle as some of music it pays homage to, and is best read while wearing a lead foil hat (tinfoil is for amateurs).