With no signs of stopping, Derrick Ferguson's Dillon racks up another win.
Dillion is hired to investigate his old friend Lord Chancellor C'jai of Xonira, accused of piracy. We get submarine battles and swordfights, but not near as over-the-top as other entries.
A civil servant who monitors sex offenders is losing his mind. He's suspended for actions he doesn't remember, prone to fits of anger, has horrifying hallucinations, and is visited by a stranger in his backyard warning him to not use the phone.
Is it a government conspiracy? Demon possession? Time travel and alternate universes? Is it all a dream? Is he dead and being tormented in the afterlife?
Good prose, but the story reaches a level early on and doesn't move from there, aside from a quick scene of violence that felt out of place. Without things ramping up I was just left to guess what the resolution would be. I didn't guess completely right, but given that the story felt four parts Jacob's Ladder and one part Angel Heart, it wasn't a surprise either.
Some loose threads are wrapped up at the end, but like Jacob's Ladder a lot is dropped. The audiobook's narration was a good artistic choice, whispery and lethargic, but didn't help with the pacing.
Newcomer Greg Gifune challenges the champion Derrick Ferguson for the Young Guns Title
Robert "Author of Psycho" Bloch worked from Weird Tales through Tales from the Darkside. Known mainly for the Hitchcock adaptation, my favorites from him have been in horror anthology TV and film.
A school bully is menaced by the cat of a witch whose house he burned down. Just gruesome enough to stay in the ring.
A woman wanting a dragon statue and our "hero" run around a warehouse getting menaced and knocked out. No adventure, an unfair mystery, and caps off with a bad-even-for-spicy-pulps light hearted rape.
A mill owner prone to blackouts believes he's been on a murder spree and is a danger to his wife. Standard shudder stuff, though Blassingame crafts a more dreamlike atmosphere than most.
Lansdale waxes sentimental with an elderly man fighting death to save his wife.
Deep in the inner earth, the evil Fellowship of the Black Cross worships a giant worm with a human head.
Everyone drops dead at the death themed restaurant Café Styx, where guests sit at coffins and are served by waiters dressed as skeletons. Felt like he wrote a mystery into a corner and just abandoned it as a horror tale.
A homeless man finds a woman dead in the jaws of a lion statue at the La Brea tar pits. Promising premise runs aground in a series of false finishes in a single locatiom.
Brackett goes over the ropes. Robert E. Howard is disqualified and escorted out of the ring by security.
Our next entry Wyatt Blassingame started with Weird Menace before moving into juvenile non-fiction.
Spooky story of interplanetary body transference.
A man seeking to kill his romantic rival is bonked on the head and awakens in the past as Conan the Reaver, who has square bangs, wears a loincoth and worships Crom. This supposedly isn't officially Conan, but whatever. These framing stories of people regressing to past lives feel like ways to fill out story fragments.
Narrative of a man still conscious after dying in a crash. Cliché subject saved by Shaver's inept yet impassioned take.
Guy dies in a car wreck, dies in a plane crash, looks for his houseboat, killed his wife.
Batman fights Lansdale's interdimensional serial killer The God of the Razor, from his novel Nightrunners. Mostly prose, but parts are written in comic book script, which was distracting.
Disgraced former cop navigates the world of criminals and crooked police to uncover the truth of his brother's suicide. My favorite tough guy prose, but the plot was a little limited.
An Alabama preacher is seduced by a vampire.
Etchison goes over the ropes.
Tunneling up through the floor, Richard Shaver emerges from the hollow earth and joins the fray.
Was Shaver a man haunted by strange messages from beyond and used those experiences to become a pulp writer? Was he an aspiring pulp writer first and used the Shaver Mystery as a gimmick? Was he a rambling lunatic whose inane scribblings were rewritten by Ray Palmer?
Whatever the truth, the man was crazy.
A prisoner learns a novel means of escape - into his own mind. The world his dreams created has spawned life, and he can live in that world while a robot in the dream world controls his daily activities. He can travel into other dream worlds, where he recruits other prisoner and seeks to bust up the Prison Industrial Complex Racket, only to find it run by a former Nazi with strong mental defenses. Ambitious, creative, and Shaver definitely doesn't pull it off.
Mall kitchen appliance pitchman with dark motives.
A crystal cube creates a doorway to a gruesome dimension of the dead, where a man tries to dump the body of his murder victim. Truly chilling.
A falsely accused man hijacks a ship to Mercury for evidence to save his loved one and encounters telepathic crystals.
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Dark quickie tale of human sacrifice.
Arcane African rites and a carnivorous gorilla in the pine swamps of Mississippi. More racist than it sounds.
All authors stay in the ring