The CriminOlly Plain Dealer #1

Weekly newsletter 8th September 2024

I’ve spent most of this week in bed with a virus that has knackered my asthma and left me not able to do much at all. Other than read, because I can always do that.

I’ve found myself drawn to shorter fiction, something I’ve neglected recently, and it’s been an enjoyable return. Short stories can be enormously satisfying when they’re done well, and the vast majority I read this week were. The constraints of the format make authors think about their words in a way I’m not sure they always do with novels.

The time resting has also given me a lot of time to think about this whole blogging/reviewing/YouTube thing. It’s helped crystalise my thoughts about how I want to approach it in the future and also made me reflect on the things I was missing. One of those was definitely writing, and so this newsletter was born.

It’s intended to be a summary of what’s been going on in my reading and on the channel, a written accompaniment/alternative to my Weekly Wrap Up videos on YouTube.

Do let me know in the comments if you think it works, or if there is anything else you’d like to see in it.

Cheerio!

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Books I’ve read this week

Six Bullets to a Man by Jethro Wegener

‘Six Bullets to a Man’ (great title!) is a riveting 70s set Southern thriller with hero Duke Gibbs going up against racist bad guys in Mississippi. Imagine a blaxploitation version of The Executioner and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. It’s gritty, action-packed, very tense at times, has a decent sense of place and some great supporting characters. Plus lots of racists getting their arses kicked. The plot is a bit more complex than it appears at first and when it borrows tropes from the wider genre it does it in a really satisfying way. Recommended if you like tight action thrillers.

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I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

I enjoyed this a great deal. It’s fun, funny, smart and very readable. Pargin manages to pull off the trick of taking a dumb (but very enjoyable) caper story and using it to reflect on the modern social media age in a really interesting way. There are a bunch of different threads that get juggled very effectively and come together at the end to make an enormously satisfying conclusion. All in all, a success.

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Cruel Nature by DB Albiza

This is a very entertaining and beautifully presented horror short story collection for younger readers written by a school teacher who wanted to engage her students with a book that was fun and creepy.
Reader, she succeeded!
The tales are efficiently told and effective, with some good concepts and an engaging, simple prose style. Don’t let the middle grade label fool you, there’s some creepy stuff in here! DB Albiza definitely has a talent for horror and the illustrations by Elizabeth Quinonez are fantastic.
Recommended, especially if you have younger horror fans in your life, or just fancy a bit of nostalgia for your own formative years as a horror reader.

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Dread by Kevin Bachar

‘Dread’ is an enjoyable volume of horror stories, all of them short (some very short) and punchy. There’s decent variety here (ghosts, cryptids, killer animals, to name but a few) and a really impressive building tension in each story. I kept on going to put it down and then finding myself reading just one more story. A great one to have on your phone or erreader for coffee break reads, just don’t blame me if you don’t get back to work on time.

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Red Moon by Kerry Richardson

An enjoyable collection of short horror stories that I flew through. There are some interesting ideas here and a load of variety, with the stories ranging from Lovecraftian to supernatural revenge to creepy demons. The prose can be a little overly embellished at times, but the stories have energy and are clearly written by someone who loves the genre.

Death is Funny Sometimes by MC August

A pleasingly varied and very satisfying short story collection. Broadly speaking it’s horror, but there is some crime and sci fi in here too. There’s a definite movie theme to a number of the stories (one is about a middle aged giallo actress, another concerns snuff movies) and what struck me as the author’s greatest strength was the characters’ dialogue, which really is pretty great.
As the title suggests, there is a string vein of black humour running through it all, which helps make the goings on seem not too horrible, even when they are pretty horrible.
All in all a very enjoyable set of shorts to sit down with. I particularly enjoyed the descriptively titled ‘Dead Kid at a Sleepover’.

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Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy

‘Rest Stop’ is a gloriously tight piece of suspense/horror fiction that manages to cram more into it’s 160 pages than many far longer books do. After a brief lead in, it grabs hold and absolutely refuses to let you go. The claustrophic “guy trapped in a small space and weird stuff starts happening” style story is almost unbearably tense, with a wonderfully mysterious and memorable villain. 
What’s most impressive is that, as with his excellent novel ‘Mary’, Nat Cassidy manages to include so much interesting and reflective character detail. The main character is complex and there’s as much interest to be had in learning more about him as there is learning what happens to him. 
The cherry on top is a really great epilogue. Oh, and the fact that the formatting of the book is amazing. Multiple cherries.
I now count myself as someone who will read anything Nat Cassidy puts out from this point on.

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This week’s videos