STEVE CARROLL WRITES

I need to start this review with a qualifier:  Carrion Comfort  by Dan Simmons is easily   one of my top 3 favorite horror novels of all time, even though it   straddles   multiple genres, including espionage, historical fiction, and revenge thriller.   But make no mistake—this is ultimately a horror novel of the first   magnitude.  It won the  Bram   Stoker Award , the  Locus Poll Award   for Best   Horror Novel , and the  August Derleth Award   for   Best Novel . The rewards are many and rich for those who have the patience   to allow Simmons to slowly unfold his epic tale. To accomplish this, Simmons   employs a   large cast of characters, good and bad, spanning decades, from   World War II through to the 80s, where he sets the bulk of his action. Be forewarned,   anyone can die at any time and there is a lot of carnage spread out across its   length. To boil the concept down to its barest foundation,  Carrion Comfort  deals with a small fraction of humanity that   manifests a psych

Over the last few decades there have been some excellent examples of the effectiveness of combining horror or mystery plots with a coming of age/ bildungsroman   tale. Robert McCammon’s   Boy’s Life   is a great example, as is Dan Simmons’   Summer of Night.   Stephen King has done it a couple of times with great success, both in his novella,   The Body   (made into the movie   Stand by M e) and perhaps his most famous example,   IT . December Park   takes place over the course of a single year starting in the fall of 1993. Harting Farms is a small, quiet Maryland town in the grips of an increasing realization that they have become the hunting grounds for a predator who abducts and murders teens, labeled by the local media as The Piper. Our main character and narrator is 15-year old Angelo (Angie) Mazzone, the son of a local police officer investigating the abductions. At the beginning of the book, Angie and his tight-knit group of friends happen to be on the scene when the body of a m

Slayground  (1971) by Richard Stark (Donald E.   Westlake) Slayground is my first experience with the famed Parker series of crime novels by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, and what a ride it is! What took me so long? Technically this is the 14th book in the series, though knowledge of any previous book is unnecessary as this adventure starts cold with a bang-up action scene and literally never slows down. We are immediately introduced to Parker and his gang as they successfully take out an armored car, netting them $70,000 in cash. A recurring theme in the Parker novels is how the protagonist’s carefully laid plans fall apart due to the intervention of fate or the carelessness or betrayal of a member of the crew. In this case it is the getaway driver, a man for whom Parker expresses reservations. Almost immediately after the robbery, the driver loses control of the car, crashing within sight of the armored car and leaving Parker as the only member of the crew mobile and

The First Quarry  (2008)  by Max Allan Collins Having recently taken the plunge into crime fiction, I was excited to check out the  Quarry  series from prolific author, Max Allan Collins. I have read that Collins’ primary inspiration for Quarry was the legendary  Parker  book series by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake). There are immediate similarities in regards to ruthless men doing ruthless acts of crime within a specific code of honor, even as they operate well outside of the law.  Though it is the 8th in the series as written, as the title implies,  The First Quarry  details the first mission that our anti-hero protagonist takes on as a young man of 22, recently returned from war in Vietnam. Simply put, Quarry is a hit-man assassin. His mindset is straightforward—if it was acceptable to kill for the government and his country, then he can now kill for personal gain and profit. He justifies this by acknowledging that if someone is willing to pay for a murder to be committed, t