Tag Archives: Cemetery Dance

When Alice Walks, Alice Stalks

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Alice Walks
Michael Aronovitz
Cemetery Dance
ebook $4.99

Alice Walks is one of the best ghost stories I’ve read in quite a while. I bought a few weeks ago and managed to read it last week.

Mikey Fitzsimmons’s father used to be a respected English teacher until a scandal cost him his career. Now he’s the caretaker at the cemetery.  One winter night, Mikey steals his father’s keys and sneaks into the maintenance shed with a couple of friends to smoke a little pot. The conversation turns to Alice Arthur, a girl their age who drowned the previous summer.

Alice is buried in the same cemetery Mikey’s father works for.  Due to a problem with a new embalming process, her coffin is currently sitting open in her mausoleum.  Mikey makes up a story about Alice’s ghost.  One thing leads to another, and the soon the boys are sneaking into her crypt.  After all, what’s a little teenage grave desecration?  Continue reading →

A Review of Six Scary Stories

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king15large_360x540Six Scary Stories
Selected by Stephen King
Cemetery Dance
hardcover $24.95 (with custom slipcase $49.90)
paperback $14.95
ebook $4.99

I’d already bought but hadn’t had a chance to read the electronic version of this book when a review copy showed up in the mail.  Cool.  Now I can read the book in either format.  Then I did a very foolish thing.  I, um, well…I put the book on my desk.  Where it disappeared.

I found it when I was moving things from the desk to the new bookshelf.  I dove right in and finished it in two or three nights.  Which isn’t bad with all the time constraints I’ve got at the moment, but is pretty slow compared to my regular reading rate.  (To give you an idea of how tight things are at the moment, I finished the book over a week ago and am just now getting a few minutes to sit down and write.)

In case you just fell off a turnip truck awoke from a coma and don’t know the genesis of this little anthology, Stephen King was asked by his British publisher to select a story in a contest the publisher was running to promote The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.   The publisher would select the final shortlist of six (from what turned out to be over 800 entries).  King would make the final selection from those.  King writes in his introduction that he had hoped to find one good story among the finalists.  What he found were six stories of publishable quality.  Hence, the anthology we’re discussing.  Here’s a quick summary of the contents: Continue reading →

Rick Hautala’s Indian Summer

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hautala06Indian Summer
Rick Hautala
Cemetery Dance
signed limited edition hardcover $40

It’s only been within the last year or two that I’ve really become acquainted with Rick Hautala’s work. The fact that we lost him last year really irks me, because I know that there won’t be any more stories coming from him.

One of the things I’ve liked about Hautala’s fiction is how well he captures childhood and adolescence while telling a very grown up tale. Not all of his work is like that, but much is. Indian Summer is a perfect example. While the protagonist is a 12 year old boy, the story provided plenty of thrills and chills for the adult reader.

This short novel concerns Billy Crowell, who goes along with some of his friends to watch a forest fire late one hot October afternoon. The boys get recruited to help fight the fire, which is pretty much under control. Trying to cut around and head off a portion of the fire, Billy gets lost.

While he’s wandering in the woods, he comes upon a deer that has been butchered. Billy runs until he comes out at a run down house. The woman who lives there, whose name is Ellie Martin, lets him call his parents. By this time the sun is going down, and Billy knows he’s in trouble. But once he tells his parents whose house he’s at, they change their tune.

Before he leaves, Ellie Martin asks him to come back. Billy is scared of her, but he also is attracted to her. He soon realizes he has a crush on her.

Billy finds himself in a tight spot. He’s both frightened by and attracted to Ellie. None of the adults seem to be willing to talk about her. And Ellie is very obsessed with something she believes lives in the woods… Continue reading →

Turning Down the Lights

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Turn Down the LightsTurn Down the Lights
Richard Chizmar, ed.
Cemetery Dance
trade hardcover $35
slipcased artist edition $75
traycased limited edition $750

Cemetery Dance has long been one of the major players in the horror and dark suspense fields. That’s true for the magazine and the publishing house. The first issue of the magazine Cemetery Dance was published just over 35 years ago.

To celebrate, Richard Chizmar has put together this little volume. It’s a great introduction to the type of thing you’ll find in the magazine as well as among the titles in their catalog.

In addition to an introduction by Chizmar and an afterward by Thomas Monteleone, there are stories by Stephen King, Norman Partridge, Jack Ketchum, Brian James Freeman, Bentley Little, Ed Gorman, Ronald Kelly, Steve Rasnic Tem, Clive Barker, and Peter Straub.

Some of the top names in the field. May favorite stories were by King, Freeman, Little, and Gorman. All of them were well-written. Not all of the stories are supernatural. The Gorman and Freeman entries especially dealt with more mundane terrors. In fact these two were some of the best short fiction I’ve read in the horror field.

There’s not a bad story in the book, and there’s something here for every taste.  This is the type of book Cemetery Dance excels at.  With Turn Down the Lights they’ve met and surpassed their own standards.

Adventures Fantastic would like to congratulate Cemetery Dance on 35 years of publishing some of the best dark fiction to be had and wish them another 35 years. If you haven’t read them, check them out.

Two Items of Halloween Interest

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I’m buried under a mountain of grading, so there won’t be any post on Robert E. Howard’s horror stories tonight.  Tomorrow doesn’t look too promising, but I’ll see what I can do.

HalloweenMagicMysMacabre-500I did, however, want to make you aware of a couple of items of seasonal interest.  First, I’m reading Paula Guran’s Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre  from Prime Books.  The review is for Amazing Stories (TM) and will go live on Monday.  It’s the sixth installment of a series I’m been running over there I’m calling Six Weeks of Scares.  I’ll be sure and post the link here when the review goes live.  I’m about halfway through the book at the moment, it’s quite good.

ShiversVIIThe other item is one from Cemetery Dance.  It’s the latest installment in the Shivers anthology series edited by Richard Chizmar.  I received a copy of the ARC through Cemetery Dance’s ARC club earlier this year.  I’ve read a few of the stories, and the ones so far are top notch.  There are a couple of rare stories in this one.  One is “Weeds” by Stephen King, which hasn’t been reprinted since 1979.  The other is a story by Clive Barker that was originally published in the New York Times on October 30, 1992.  I haven’t read those yet.  I’d hoped to have this collection finished by Halloween, but I probably won’t make it.  I will review it early in November if things go as planned.  They rarely do, but I can dream.