Kate Jonez

Detritus means: waste or debris of any kind. This collection of story is not a waste at all. Out of 15 stories, I found 3 I didn't care for. I consider that a very good ratio.
So quick recap on each story.
1. Chewed Up - Marcus is estranged from his wife Aubrey. He can't figure out why she won't talk to him. Is it his strange compulsion to collect used bubble gum? Or something more? I enjoyed this story and was surprised by the end.
2. Shots and Cuts - A homicide detective recounts tales of gore/horror that he has collected over the years. From 2 girls, one cup on youtube, to the serial killings in Ukraine. Not one of my favorites.
3. Ride - Man takes last ride on motorbike while world is ending. Bombs have been deployed and falling everywhere. During his ride, he stops to kill and collect hearts. I was bored.
4. Mrs. Grainger's Animal Emporium - Young boy walks into a store and steals a stuffed rat. Old women who owns the store sends other exhibits to retrieve the rat and the boy. Basic story, seen or read this type before, knew the end before I was done reading first page.
5. The Tick Tock Heart - When Kate's sister Meredith returns home, Kate can't take it. Kate collects clocks and feels her sister is upsetting their rhythm. Once again seen the end immediately, reminiscent of The Tell Tale Heart by Poe.
6. Arkitekur - Mother is in the house. Is she collecting or is it the house? This one was a bit boring, but ok.
7.Candy Lady - A story about 2 men stalking a woman. But why are they both stalking and what do they each collect. Not a bad tale, but reminds me of a Showtime show (I'm not gonna ruin the story, you will know what I mean when you read this.).
8. Armoire - Ophelia collects Ultra dimensional creatures. One gets loose and plans revenge.
I liked this one.
9. Shrieking Gauze - James "hears" colors. Blood screams at him. Now he collects bandages to figure out what they are saying. I didn't care for this one.
10. The Highest and The Sweetest - A young woman gets a job babysitting for a woman who keeps having multiple children. Then becomes pregnant with multiple babies herself. I wasn't a fan of this one either, made me think of Octomom for years ago.
11. Heroes and Villains - Ben and Paulie plan to steal a comic book purchase from their employer, and go into business for themselves. Until Ben figures why does he even need Paul. Not a bad tale, but not a new one either.
12. Let Them Into Your Heart - Hampton collects candy wrappers for his art. But who or what is the reason behind the art? I could have passed on this one.
13. In His Own Graven Image - Dauphin is a collector of scars. He has let himself be attacked (in a controlled environment of course) by every animal conceivable, even ones believed to be just folklore or imagined. With one spot left untouched on his entire body, he reaches for the ultimate being to scar him. I like this story, but really couldn't understand this compulsion at all.
14. Crawling the Insect Life - Marvin collects bugs. He is divorced and has gone crazy. He has bugs, dead and alive, all over his apartment. I was a little confused by this one, but it was a fine tale.
15. The Room Beneath The Stairs - Andy goes to visit his grandma. He asks her about the room under the stairs that she keeps locked. She gives a scary tale and reveals her own collection. Not the best in the bunch but not the worst either.

So I do recommend reading this collection. All in all , it was a great read. My 3 favorite story were Chewed Up by Jeremy C. Shipp, Candy Lady by Neil Davies, and In His Own Graven Image by Pete Clark. My 3 Least Favorites were Ride by Brent Michael Kelley, Shots and Cuts by Mary Borsellino, and Let Them Into Your Heart by Lee Widener.… (meer)

Ceremony of Flies is the first work, by Kate Jonez, I've had the pleasure of reading. This is one on the perks of being a member of the Darkfuse Book Club. You get a novel and a couple of novellas every month, sometimes by your favorite authors and other times by folks you may not be familiar with. It's exciting to discover new voices you haven't read before.

There is quite a bit of story packed into this novella. Emily ran to Vegas when things went bad with her former boyfriend in NYC. She spends her days auditioning for singing jobs and her nights as a barmaid in a casino, but when she accidentally stabs her boss, she has to leave town in a hurry. "'I think I should go to Mexico.' Once I said it out loud, it makes a lot of sense. That's what people do, right? The guy in the Shawshank Redemption, Al Capone, Thelma and Louise. Once you stab a guy, Mexico's a place your ought to go. There's no going back after you do something like that."

Along the way Emily takes up with Rex, a kid they call Harvey, and a dog. Before long Emily kills and kills again, she can't seem to help herself, by the end she thinks of herself as an agent of evil and I'm left with the feeling she just might bring about the end of the world.

As much as I enjoyed the ride, the ending seemed to be a bit abrupt and rather vague, leaving more than a little to the imagination. There's nothing wrong with that. It just left me wanting more.

Ceremony of Flies is available now for the Kindle at Amazon.com from Darkfuse Press. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you can read it for FREE through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.

Recommended.… (meer)

Death to the Brothers Grimm
By Emory Pueschal and Kate Jonez
Publisher: Omnium Gatherum Media
Published In: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Date: 2012
Pgs: 202

Summary:
Undisneified fairy tales taken back toward their darker roots in this anthology of short stories.

Red by M. L. Roos **
Jerry and His Stupid Little Trains by Garrett Cook *
The Little Glass Soul by Jeremy C. Shipp *
The Housewife and the Ascarid Nematode by Kirk Jones *
On the Wall by Crysa Leflar *
Skiddoo, Skedaddle, Muscatel, and Gummo by Eckhard Gerdes *
Master Marvel’s Midway by Jessica McHugh *
At the Shoe Shop of Madness by Lee Widener *
The Non-Duality of Elanoir by John Edward Lawson *
Kruppstahl by Jess Gulbranson ****

Genre:
fiction, fairy tales

Why this book:
came to me as a review copy

This Story is About:
Monsters hiding in human, wolf, or postapocalyptic jellyfish humanoid form. Direction is important. Sexual awakening in a postsexual environment can be dangerous. Rebellion. Death.

Favorite Character:
The wolf comes across as a honorable character in Red.
Master Marvel is one scary dude.
The Killer in Kruppstahl comes across very interesting. Can’t decide whether he’s the bad guy or the good guy though. He is Pinocchio turned assassin in service to the Fairy cause. But, then, he seems to be facing off with Cthulhu’s church and a Silver Surfer type character. Shrug.

relatable, hateable

Least Favorite Character:
Lauren’s Sex and the City-ish friends. Way too judgmental. But the characters serve their purpose in the story to feed Lauren’s curiosity about Jerry and his train hobby.

Character I Most Identified With:
N/A

The Feel:
Red is full of the creepy. Jerry is very Stepford, but jerky and uneven. The Housewife is a fast story but it left me with a smirk. Shoe Shop has a great, wonderful creepy vibe.

Favorite Scene:
When Ash calls her whatever he is forth from the cinders in Glass Soul. When Shumacher gets his realization of what he’s done in Shoe Shop.

Settings:
the woods, basements, fairy tale kingdoms, houses in the woods, the circus, villages

Pacing:
The pacing on Jerry seems out of phase like it was written over a period of time and not rewritten in a consistent voice. The Housewife is too fast. Though it may have needed to be a get in, get out kind of story so that it didn’t lose its distinctiveness amidst a forest of twisted fairy tales. Skiddoo is well paced. Shoe Shop is the best paced of the lot so far. The pacing on Elainor is good, but the story is so weird even by twisted fairy tale standards. The best pacing of any of the stories comes in Kruppstahl.

Plot Holes/Out of Character:
What happened to the carriage at midnight in Glass Soul? Even with the hole, it is still the best of the selection so far. Wish we were given an idea of the world after the closing scene of Shoe Shop.

Last Page Sound:
Red - wish it was longer and a bit of disappointment in the denouement
Glass Soul - OMG! That is the weirdest Cinderella story I’ve ever read.
The Housewife - A good smirk.
Skiddoo - Uhm...let’s go with noncommittal.
Shoe Shop - Damn.
Elainor - WTF! I kept thinking this was going to make more sense to me or at least let me figure out which fairy tale it was based on. It’s a unique story and I read all of it and, I guess, I enjoyed it. But it has left me in an odd place mentally.
Kruppstahl - Awww. Not the ending I wanted, but good. Best story in the lot.

Author Assessment:
Some good. Some bad. Not going to hang a judgment on an author for a single short.

Editorial Assessment:
Jerry feels like it’s a little bit of everywhere. Too much imagery, if that’s truly possible, mixed with the necessary character exposition.

Disposition of Book:
e-Book

Why isn’t there a screenplay?
Glass Soul could make a movie. Shoe Shop would make a nice little, grim, horror filled nightmare of a movie.

Casting call:
In Glass Soul, I could see Rachel Nichols from Continuum in the role of Ash and would love to see Fairuza Balk from The Craft as one of the stepsisters.
In Master Marvel, the titular role seems tailor made for Jim Carrey.

Would recommend to:
Would love to say fans of fairy tales or Disney movie fans or horror fans, but I’m just not feeling it.… (meer)

DETRITUS is an anthology of short stories about collectors and collections. Because it’s a horror-themed anthology, I don’t think I’m ruining anything by telling you that these stories all focus on the obsessive, dark side of collecting, often exploring the ways that such obsessions can become destructive or terrifying.

I myself am a collector. I have a number of collections, though I primarily collect books. With nearly 6,000 books, not to mention thousands more comic books and magazines, my wife – and visitors to my home – would probably describe me as an obsessive collector. But I’m not a hoarder, and my house isn’t (yet) collapsing under the weight of all my books. I don’t just buy books and forget about them. I’ve electronically catalogued all of my books, and continue to spend time maintaining my collection, and the records of the collection. I am not happy when I’m on vacation if I can’t visit a bookstore (or two, or three….) I also care about books as physical objects, as artifacts. I’m interested in the physicality of books almost as much as I’m interested in what books have to say. I like to hold books, open them, examine them, smell them. I enjoy being surrounded by books, preferably my own, but I have spent a considerable chunk of my life in libraries. Books comfort me in a strange way that I find hard to articulate. And I am continually on the hunt for new books, despite the fact that I own several thousand books I have not yet read. Many of these, I must be honest with myself and with you, I will likely never read before I die. Even so, I continue to acquire new books. So that’s a very long way of saying that I have some understanding of the kinds of collectors and collections depicted in the fifteen horror-themed short stories in the collection DETRITUS. They each share the common theme of obsessive collectors and the sometimes unfortunate or even horrifying consequences of people getting too caught up in the act of collecting.

Mild plot spoilers for a few of the stories follow.

Not all the stories were extraordinarily memorable, but I will note a few of my favorites in the collection.

“Mrs. Grainger’s Animal Emporium” by Phil Hickes: A very naughty little boy (we all know the type) has a run-in with the eponymous Mrs. Grainger who owns the new taxidermy shop that has just come to town. Delightfully creepy, it reminds me of the classic EC comic storylines in “Tales from the Crypt” and “Vault of Horror.”

“Candy Lady” by Neil Davies: This begins as a story about a woman who collects creepy dolls in an old house infested by a strange kind of black mold and becomes a story about the end of the world, or at least human civilization. A very powerful tale, I’d actually have liked to see this one expanded. As is, it was almost too terse; I wanted to see it fleshed out even more.

“Heroes and Villains” by Michael Montoure: The unhappy tale of two comic book collectors who have the terrible fate of coming into possession of all the comic books they had ever dreamed of acquiring. A very dark piece about the lengths that the obsession with collecting and possession can take the collector.

The final story in the collection, “The Room Beneath the Stairs” by Kealan Patrick Burke, is also a fun one. Andy visits his Grandma after the death of her husband and discovers that Grandma is just a little creepier than he had imagined.

Collecting was a great theme for a collection of horror shorts. These stories make clear that the fetishization of the objects being collected, the collection as a whole, and the process of collecting can all take the collector down dark paths. A warning that should be heeded by all of us collectors, I suppose. I wish that the collection contained a few more stories I loved, but there are few real clunkers here, just some that are forgettable. I recommend the collection – despite the fact that, like most anthologies, not all the stories were winners – because it has an interesting theme and some stand-out stories. If you consider yourself a “collector” and enjoy horror, you’ll enjoy adding this anthology to your…collection.

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers… (meer)