Black Static

The latest issue of Black Static includes The Ripples Continue, a feature on the work of five time Stoker Award winner Gary A. Braunbeck, one of the finest writers currently working in the Horror field. The feature consists of an in-depth review of Braunbeck's latest release from Leisure, Far Dark Fields, plus an over view of the four previous novels in his Cedar Hill cycle, a lengthy interview with the author and some sidebar factoids. There's also a competition to win complete sets of the novels, but for details of that you're going to have to buy the magazine.

What I can do, by way of an incentive to buy Black Static, and also to get you gagging for Gary A. Braunbeck and all things Cedar Hill, is to reprise here my review of the previous volume in the cycle, Coffin County, from Black Static #7 and, as a bonus, post the rather tasty book trailer for that title. And, time and inclination allowing, I don't rule out more Braunbeck blog material to come.

The review:-

Coffin County (Leisure paperback, 334pp, $7.99) is not a book that's easily reducible for purposes of plot synopsis. The latest in author Gary Braunbeck's cycle of Cedar Hill novels and stories, it ties in to its predecessors and flips back and forth through time so that the end result is almost a collage style novel. The opening section details events that led to a part of the town becoming renamed as the eponymous Coffin County, an explosion that left caskets scattered far and wide. Elsewhere we go right back to the foundation of the town and the bloody crimes that attended its birth. Intercut with this are asides on chaos theory and the suggestion of other dimensions overlapping with our own, hints of archetypal and mythic figures, and all of it part of some great cosmic balance. The main strand of the story though, the one in the present day, concerns a massacre at a coffee shop, the latest atrocity in the town's history, but far from being the last, as more horrific deeds are performed. Central character Ben Littlejohn, a detective investigating the massacre and not believing each impossible turn the case takes, is a man who has lost his wife in a previous shootout and so must deal with bad memories. All trails lead back to a mysterious graveyard, where the future victims are already buried, and Ben Littlejohn is presented with a terrible choice.

And that's about the best I can do, as regards the story, without breaking it down into a blow by blow account.

What plot synopsis doesn't reflect is the sheer artistry of Braunbeck's prose, how he can put down on the page an exquisitely phrased sentence, one that can leave the reader lost for words until the other shoe drops and you register that what is being described is a mutilated body, a loop of intestine, a disaster that rips the still beating heart out of a community, all of those things and much worse. Nor does plot synopsis capture the masterly way in which Braunbeck delineates character, how he brings people to life with only a few carefully chosen words, capturing all their vices and virtues, the foibles and failings that make them uniquely who they are. And finally, plot synopsis only touches on the concepts with which Braunbeck infuses the work, the way in which he can reify small town tragedy on a metaphysical and cosmic plane, so that in some ways what we get is reminiscent of the ideological depth found in Barker's later work, but rendered in the language and imagery of the earlier Books of Blood.

Braunbeck is, quite simply, one of the best authors working in the horror field, a fully mature writer using the tropes of genre to tackle serious philosophical and scientific themes, to pose questions about the nature of good and evil that challenge accepted wisdom. There is gore in nearly all of his work, but there's compassion too, only it comes at a high cost. He is not afraid to look in the face of hell and report back on what he sees, to force others to see it with him in the hope of leaving them changed by the experience.

Yes, this book has flaws. The style will not be to everybody's taste, may be a tad too lacking in cohesion for comfort, while some of the info-dumps are a bit unwieldy, the pseudo-religious subtext may offend others and the final twist, while undeniably apt in one sense, is nonetheless hard to swallow, but being challenged, stepping outside of our comfort zone, is all part and parcel of what this thing called horror is about. Gary Braunbeck knows this and his work revels in it, warts and all, and such is his skill as a writer, the grandeur of his bloodstained vision, that invariably the good outweighs the bad.

Two stories close out the book. I'll Play the Blues For You is pretty much duelling banjos revisited with angelic competitors while the protagonist of Union Dues finds out rather more than he wants to know about the blue collar life. They're good solid stories and worth reading, but all the same, only icing on the cake that is Coffin County.