Anna Dressed in Blood / Girl of Nightmares, Kendare Blake (2011, 2012)

Sometimes when I pick a book, it’s not always because of a review or an author’s name or even a recommendation. It can just be because of the cover art. I’ve been guilty of this pretty often, though more often for videos when video rental stores were still around. So Anna Dressed in Blood came to my attention not because it’s got a good recommendation from Stephen King, and nor because it’s a female voice in the horror genre (though that gets it big stars in my book). The outside cover is dressed up in this very (ok, yes, it’s pretty stereotypical) foreboding picture of a girl facing a house. She’s dressed up in this pretty, lacy white dress with a pink sash. Her hair is being swept up an away from her by a harsh wind that’s blowing through the portrait, and the edge of her dress is coated in a deeper color than its sash. Frankly it looks not unlike many a j-horror icon with long black hair curling as though it were an entity with its own free will. Staring at the cover long enough makes you hope that the girl never turns around.

The innards of the book do not quite live up to the cover – there’s a very generic love story between a boy and a girl, but one that’s twisted enough to keep your attention. The main character is Cas, a ghost hunter who’s been looking for the spirit responsible for his father’s death many years prior. He has a special blade that he uses to dispatch ghosts into what he believes is a better plane of existence for them; he and his mother move from place to place quite often, seeking out the most bizarre and terrifying urban legends so that he might one day find the thing that ate his father. This is how we learn of Anna Dressed in Blood, the titular character. For me, the best parts of the book were descriptions of Anna – she’s a ghost who is forced to kill anyone who enters her home. When we are initially introduced to her, her story is a simple one: a girl on the way to a party all on her lonesome has her throat slashed unceremoniously in an alley way where she’s found the next morning. It certainly leaves the reader wondering how she came to be back in her house, haunting it and killing anyone who sets foot inside.

The majority of the story revolves around Cas and Anna’s relationship, and Cas’ obsession with freeing Anna from her curse. There are a few other interesting characters – Thomas, a psychic, and Carmel, a sort of Buffy stand-in – but the main two are the ghost and the ghost hunter. It’s your typical Romeo and Juliet love story, only one’s already dead. The other downsides to the book are that there aren’t any real rules for the ghosts; their behaviors and abilities vary, especially Anna. She’s able to float through walls and other objects, but she’s also able to grip a man and tear him in two. It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but when facing a supernatural subject, little rarely ever does. There’s also the issue of the villain of the piece, who ends up being a black character who is a voodoo/hoodoo practitioner. There was a lot left to be desired when it came to him, to be perfectly honest, but he did serve his purpose as the antagonist very well.

The best part of this book, however, is the descriptions. Kendare Blake wastes no words in describing the state of Anna’s victims, who are plentiful throughout the novel, or in helping her reader visualize the villain, who is quite bone-chilling to read about. When it comes to gore and horrifying passages, Anna Dressed in Blood definitely has it, and it seems incredibly surprising for something found in the Young Adult section that is quickly taking over any and all book stores.

And then there came the sequel. After enjoying the first so much, anticipating Girl of Nightmares was no easy feat – I was ready to dive back into the realm of Anna and Cas, especially following the ending of Anna Dressed in Blood. The second book gives more detail as to where the ghosts Cas slays are going – and it’s not a pretty sight. Girl of Nightmares follows a similar pattern to Anna Dressed in Blood in that Cas is struggling to rescue Anna again, but Anna is left out of the majority of the book. I found this odd and disconcerting, since she is, again, the titular character and essentially the main selling point of the novel. She was one of my favorite characters, and in the second novel she was reduced to little more than a damsel in distress waiting for a knight in shining armor to come and save the day.

The second novel also suffered from a lot of other issues – the story covers a wider geographic area, sending our heroes to England to find a cult who may be the source of Cas’ knife, but there is little that really goes on in the first half of the book. By the time we get to anything interesting (such as Cas and a competitor all but committing suicide to pass over to the ghosts’ plane), it’s closer to the end of the book, comprising maybe a quarter of it or less. There are very few what you might describe as horror scenes in the book (with the exception of Cas' dreams of Anna, which he interprets as cries for help), instead choosing to focus more on action and some deduction work that becomes incredibly tedious. There is one interesting scene of the characters being forced to travel through a suicide forest, but again with no specific rules on the ghosts, sometimes it seems a bit jumbled. I would think that a second novel would be tighter than the first, a better concept that was polished to completion, but it feels more like there was a rush to get it out for public consumption.

Overall, I definitely recommend the first book. Maybe get the second from a library, if you feel that you absolutely must read it to get some closure from Anna Dressed in Blood. 

Saturday Horror Shorts #10

Today's SHS comes to us already a winner at the San Diego Comic Convention, and it's easy to see why. While "The Insane" comes off as a generic Resident Evil knock off or spoof, the twist is where it'll get you. So sit back, enjoy some popcorn, and watch the show!

Smiley (2012)

What it’s about: After discovering an urban legend of a demented serial killer, who has nothing but a carved 'smiley' on his face, a mentally fragile teen must decide whether she is going insane - or will be the next victim.

Review: Smiley is, for all intents and purposes, a generic slasher flick. But is it a successful slasher flick? Well, this is where people might be divided. Me, I know exactly where I fall in the spectrum of people who will consume this film, but first lets go over the finer points of it before we get to a conclusion. Smiley, the titular character, is an urban legend that grew out of the internet’s backwater forums not unlike 4chan, creepypasta, etc. And he’s only got one thing inside his smiley little head. Or rather, big head… It looks kind of like a growth, doesn’t it?

Now hold on...I didn't mean anything by that...

Such Wicked Intent (2012)

Kenneth Oppel returned with a sequel to This Dark Endeavor with Such Wicked Intent. This book follows the same basic formula as the first: following Konrad’s death, Victor swears off of alchemy and burns the Dark Library, vowing to himself that he will abstain from all that he believes resulted in his twin’s demise. This includes leaving Elizabeth, Konrad’s betrothed, alone. Of course, we can’t have these things stay like this for forever, and all too soon Victor is presented with a doorway into the spirit world, where he finds his brother still trapped in an alternate version of their home.

Once again, Victor, Elizabeth, and Henry are working against the clock to save Konrad. This time though, it’s from a far larger threat which stems from their past – their ancestor’s past, that is. There’s no fan service with a pop in from another historical face like there was with Dr. Polidori in the first book, but instead the story this time focuses more on the idea of bringing someone back to life. Much like the first book, it riffs off of the original Frankenstein mythos, but takes it in a new direction. Rather than being obsessed with dead flesh and the re-ignition of life, Victor and company are introduced to a more Promethean kind of creation: clay.

The group finds a strange underground passage beneath the family dwelling, one that’s full of catacombs and primitive drawings on the walls. Further exploration reveals a kind of burial ground, where one large and obviously revered grave is set. In the mortal plane, everything looks normal and somewhat dull, but in the otherworldly setting, the grave pulses and gives off a sort of life. It also sprouts out black butterflies, the reasoning for which I won’t explain here since it will give away part of the ending. However, the description of all of this is basically the best part of the book – once again the subject matter is brought to life with tight and elegant prose, something I absolutely love Oppel for.

Still, things are not as simple as they seem and the process of creation, which seemed straight-forward, turns out to be working against them for there’s another presence in the otherworldly house. Deep within the house itself lies another dormant soul, one that’s looking to get out, and plans to use what Victor and his friends are using to save his brother. All in all, it quite veers away from what we all know as Frankenstein; while it still deals within the realm of alchemy and the occult, I was surprised to see this kind of…I don’t know, spiritualism come into play? But I had to keep reminding myself that this was not the Frankenstein mythos but a retelling or reconjuring of it.

Many other reviewers have called this sequel much darker than its predecessor, and that’s not without truth. Victor, Elizabeth and Henry are really dabbling with life and death in this book, and it even goes so far as to change one of their personalities. Other, darker topics are touched upon. The way the book flows had me believing that it would end in one fashion, but then I was surprised to see that it was not. Rather, it was left open for another sequel, which left me feeling a little miffed. I thought it would be a natural course of events for the book to take a closer leaning toward the mythos by introducing the Creature, but it does not (or rather it seems to for a moment, but then dashes those hopes).

The ending of the book hints more at the Victor we all know, which left me asking why this book was made at all – it seems like a detour on the way to a larger story. Hopefully Oppel can clear up the reasoning behind this bit, but all in all it’s still an enjoyable read.

The Walking Dead game (2012)

I’m going to start this off by saying the creators of The Walking Dead game are bad people and they should feel bad. This is, of course, not to say that the game itself is bad – in fact, it’s fantastic. It’s incredibly moving and every turn will present you with another hard hitting question or decision that pushes you, as a survivor of the zombie apocalypse, to your very limits.

The Walking Dead game is a point and click game (with a few quick time events sprinkled throughout) developed by Telltale, the people who brought us Tales of Monkey Island. It tells the story of Lee, a man convicted of murder, and Clementine, an eight-year-old girl, as they try to survive through the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. The two are brought together by chance when the patrol car Lee is being transported in gets into an accident with a walker and Lee must fight to survive. He finds Clementine along the way – she’s hiding in her house, where she had been babysat while her parents were away in Savannah.

The entire game hinges on the decisions you, as the player, will make. Will you tell strangers about your past? Who's going to live and who's going to die? How are you going to keep everyone around you calm as more and more walkers continue to appear, hungering after your living flesh? Any and all actions have intense repercussions, and often in ways that you could never expect. The story itself is intensely gripping. Each character has their own story and will react in their own way to the decisions you make.

Thus, every time you play and make a decision differently, you alter the course of the game. Where one character might have died in your first play through, they could live in your second. Outcomes, punishments and justifications will all change as you move through the game in various ways. And, man, the storylines in the game do not pull any punches. Some characters that I at first hated I came to like, while others lost my respect due to different reactions. Sometimes it didn’t quite make sense, or I imagined something I had Lee say coming off in a different context, but I suppose that can be chalked up to the stress that everyone would be under in an apocalypse.

The entire game is presented in a comic-book style, where you can see lines and brush strokes coming off of the characters. This cartoony representation in no way diminishes the gore – in fact, it makes it almost worse. All of the characters are extremely expressive, with mobile faces and large eyes. What’s also neat is that there are a variety of body shapes – no stick-figure women and buff men are to be found here. Each character, even the walkers, seems separately molded to fit into a world of varied people. The walkers tend to look a little odd after a while, with skulls for faces, but in truth they’re only a small part of the game. But yes, varied people of different shapes and sizes! Varied races! The main character is not a know-it-all white guy!

I don’t want to spoil any of the chapters, because honestly they’re far more hard-hitting as you play through and discover the story along the way. Some things will be painfully obvious, hinted at with an unsubtle hand, but it’s all in the reveal. To offer you some kind of a measuring stick, the show doesn’t have anything on this game in terms of storytelling. The only thing I wished they’d done differently was make the puzzles harder. This game is pretty easy to get through with a lot of basic observation and exploring every nook and cranny. I suppose, then, the meat of the game is the story and its characters, and it in no way disappoints.

I just hope you get a better initial ending than I did.