BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Lady of the Shroud (1909) Bram Stoker  Midnight Tales  Bram Stoker (Ed. Peter Haining, 1992)   Who Is Dracula's Father? And Other Puzzles in Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece (2017) Jon Sutherland Dracula (1897) is a seminal cultural text - brilliantly written. There is little more to say other than to advise that you read it and enjoy its dark pleasures - but what of the later Bram Stoker? The Lady of the Shroud (1909) is a truly dreadful book in so many ways - theatrical, sentimental, nonsensical, militaristic, imperialist, patronising (to women and to the peoples of the Balkans) and often leaden. Beyond being one for Bram Stoker completists - and the early failed promise of creepy thrills - it is nothing but a fraud designed to inveigle the reader of the 1900s into a conservative political tract. So why bother reading it? Two reasons make this worth it (although only for the dedicated): the psychological insight into the fantasy world of an aging Edwardian male;

Salem's Lot (1975)   The Stand (1990 Revision of 1978 Edition) Night Shift (2008 collection of stories from the 1970s) Stephen King     Song of Kali (1985) Carrion Comfort (1989) Dan Simmons    Supping with Panthers (1996) Deliver Us From Evil (1997) Tom Holland Salem's Lot was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006) this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills. He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young

Nethescurial/The Mystics of Muelenberg from Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) Teatro Grottesco (2006) The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (2011) This review is essentially about the later Ligotti of the current century. We hope to return to the earlier Ligotti in a later review but we can set the scene with just two stories from his second major collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Nethescurial , for example, appears to be a very obvious homage to Lovecraft almost to the point of pastiche in terms of structure and mood although it is clearly very much a Ligotti production. It is as if Ligotti decided to see how he could take as many Lovecraftian tropes about ancient cultic lore and the dark occult, refine them to their basics and come up with a definitive layered narrative oozing unease rather than outright horror. Ligotti is at his best not in trying to present something visceral, disgusting or terrible but in presenting som