Bozo.  Ronald McDonald.  Krusty.  Pennywise.

Clowns are iconic in America and whether they are benevolent, corporate, lewd, or utterly evil, most people would agree that clowns are creepy in any form.  Fellow liar Barak has been known to break out in a cold sweat at the scent of face paint or the sound of a honking horn.  As a result, I’m always keeping an eye out for prime clown material to dangle his way.  Elliot’s award-winning Australian novel immediately piqued my interest.

The main character, Jamie, is a bit of what my father would term a “schlub”, an Aussie in his late 20’s who is drifting along in a dead-end job with no goals, a boring social life, and annoying roommates who steal his groceries. Through the simple misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Jamie manages to get tabbed as the latest recruit to join a troupe of clowns in a interdimensional circus that robs “tricks” of their souls and may have had a hand in causing the Holocaust.

Jamie is not all that interested, but he doesn’t have much of a choice, and when he puts on the face paint, his alter ego, JJ, turns out to be a truly sadistic and qualified candidate for the circus. Through the rest of the novel, Jamie and JJ take turns as the dominant personality amid run-ins with acrobats, sideshow freaks, carnies, fortunetellers and his fellow clowns.

If clowns give you the heebie-jeebies, pick this gem up and read it to the sound of a calliope on an endless loop.  I assure you.  You’ll wake up screaming.

A Bentley Little novel is like eating at your favorite pizzeria.  You may have mushrooms one night, double pepperoni the next night, and get the urge for a Hawaiian pie the next week (pineapples and ham?  Can you say “nasty”?), but in the end it’s the same cheese pizza, only with different toppings.  Some people may get bored of it after a while.  I, on the other hand, enjoy every slice.

A typical Little novel takes a seemingly ordinary location or situation and gives it a little tweak.  Something BAD taints the air, and bit by bit the many characters separate into two camps….those who succumb to whatever is causing the taint, and those who resist.  Pretty standard fare in the horror genre.  Little has always had a liberal bent to his books (possibly one of the reasons I enjoy his tales).  In the past he has skewered gated communities in The Association, insurance companies in The Policy, and a thinly veiled Wal-Mart in The Store. The evil in his books usually appear as a totalitarian, Neo-con, corporate hive mind.

His latest offering struck a special chord for me.  In my “real life”, I teach at a middle school and when I heard that Little was releasing a book called The Academy, which targeted the recent disturbing trend of schools becoming privatized into so-called charter schools, I knew I would enjoy it.  He did not disappoint in the least, adding his trademark twist to jocks and cheerleaders, parent/teacher relationships, overbearing principals, and after school activities.  Read this book and you’ll soon be having that nightmare where you show late for finals and you’re naked.  I promise not to laugh.

Have you ever eaten something that you expected to be completely lacking in nutritional value, but still satisfying to some primal urge for junk food, only to spit it out in disgust and rush to the bathroom and gargle some Lysol?

I have just experienced the cinematic equivalent of such a meal.  In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is fecal matter preserved on a DVD.  What did you say?  I should have known better?  The signs were there.  Yet another videogame adaptation by Uwe Boll, the German director renowned for previous affronts to the silver screen like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, and its sequel Bloodrayne II: Deliverance, it stars Ray Liotta (of all people) as the evil wizard Gallian.  Needless to say, he ain’t no Gandalf.

Halfway through the movie, my wife, who had been dozing on the couch, woke up and blearily stared at the screen.  She summed it up with the pointed question, “What the hell is this mindless crap?”  At that, I came to my senses, turned off the DVD, wiped away the brain matter that was leaking from my ears, and headed to the bathroom to get the foul taste out of my mouth.  Uwe Boll is the Antichrist.

Imagine driving down the New England coast on a brisk autumn morning.  The sky is a beautiful robin’s egg blue.  The salt air tingles your nose.  Gulls cry in the distance as the ocean breeze ruffles your hair…and hordes of scorpion/crab creatures swarm from the water across the road ravaging everything in their path.  Within a day, your peaceful seaside vacation has become a frantic pell-mell flight for your life as the clicking crustaceans attack anything that moves.  Next you discover what is hunting and driving them from the ocean…and it gets much, much worse. 

Reading Clickers is like sitting down to watch a classic creature flick with buckets of 21st century gore mixed in.  What it somewhat lacks in characterization, it more than makes up in action, imagery and sheer gut-wrenching terror.  This small press horror gem is simply screaming to be made into a summer blockbuster.  A perfect beach read for fans of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Cthulhu Mythos.

In a word, Brutal.  Having read hundreds upon hundreds of horror novels in my life, I am more likely to smirk at the depicton of violent acts in most tales rather than experience an actual moment of discomfort.  Not that I’m calloused (okay, maybe I am), but that the imagery is always a bit outlandish.

Ryan C. Thomas literally gave me nightmares with this book.  The plot is simple.  Dumb teenagers stumble upon the backwoods lair of a chainsaw-wielding redneck psycho and get themselves into “trouble”.  We’ve seen the same plot in any number of B-movies at your local video store.  Yet, somehow Thomas manages to crank up the reality quotient in this phenomenally disturbing first novel.  I’m truly jealous of his talent. The Summer I Died needs to be read by all fans of horror fiction.