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Note to our readers from E.D. Trimm:
My fellow readers of the dark and twisted, there is something you must know about me if you wish to read my reviews. I won’t review a book unless I feel it is worth five alien heads. So if you see my by-line, you automatically know the book has been awarded five alien heads. What makes a book a five-header? Its characters must be alive during the reading and memorable thereafter. The plot must be intricate and of a complexity so subtle that it haunts, nags at the back of my mind, long after the reading of the tale, until clarity of its complexity is finally attained. Or the plot must be so dazzlingly simple it is like a tree from which the branches of the characters and the tale are beautifully draped. I don’t ask so very much. So enjoy the reviews, if enjoying is what we do when we indulge in reading works from the horror genre.
by
Christopher Fahy
Publisher: Overlook Connections Press
253 pages
ISBN: 1892950731
Be warned: Christopher Fahy will mess with your mind in a major way. Another collection of Fahy’s delightfully creepy short stories will be available in a couple of weeks, another brilliant offering from Overlook Connections Press.
Christopher Fahy is the author of fifteen novels including Fever 42, Eternal Bliss, The Fly Must Die, Dream House, The Night Flyer, and Limerock a collection of Maine short fiction. His short fiction has appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine, Cat Crimes, Predators, Night Screams, Gallery, Santa Clues, The King is Dead: Tales of Elvis Postmortem, Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy, among others.
Matinee begins innocently enough with “Matinee at the Flame,” an old burlesque house that should have been closed for decades. Elmer Hutchins, an aging junk man answers a call to assess the value of any junk that might remain in the old theatre he had frequented as a young man and haul it off. A good deal is hauled off all right, but not the stuff old Elmer had expected.
Druggie Tony the C., a failed artist, is living off his wealthy girlfriend, in a dreadful Germanic town where it rains constantly. His life changes when, still on a bizarre drug high begun in Amsterdam several days before, Tony visits the Musee Royaux Des Beaux-Arts. As an artist, he can’t help touching a painting. Very bad move it was, I think, touching that painting in that particular museum.
Blumberg, the aging Jew with aging physical equipment and an acquisitive wife, visits an auction and comes home with an authentic Ku Klux Klan outfit. Out-of-work Dillon owes an unsavory group of people a large sum of money they’re coming to collect, and Dillion thinks he can take the money from a decrepit old man he meets in a small shop in Indiana. Hanson’s television begins handing out prizes like Hanson has won “King for the Day.” To keep the goodies coming, all Hanson has to do is ask no questions.
Fahy’s cunningly warped imagination draws the reader forward: vampires make an entrance; God requires a sacrifice, for someone in town has sinned; a photographer on the graveyard shift finds he should have left the possessions of the dead he photographed with the dead. Then Fahy really messes over your mind with “A Fire in the Brain.” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein saga is finished for us, and we learn the dangers of recycled gold. Fahy’s increasingly ghoulish tales crescendo with “Carnival.” In all, he gives his readers twenty-two tales of the twisted that leave you breathless – particularly if you read like I do, inhaling one book per night.
