Canadian horror to make you shiver ... and it ain't the low temperatures!
The opening story in this frightening little anthology of horror shorts is enCanadian horror to make you shiver ... and it ain't the low temperatures!
The opening story in this frightening little anthology of horror shorts is entitled WILD THINGS LIVE HERE. Perhaps, editor Don Hutchison should have included a foreword entitled "WILD, WEIRD, AND WONDERFUL HORROR AUTHORS LIVE IN CANADA"!
NORTHERN FRIGHTS 3 is an all too short and completely entertaining collection of stories that beautifully covers the entire spectrum of emotions that well written horror and dark fantasy can elicit. These stories are moody, thought-provoking, frightening, darkly humorous and just plain old creepy! To my pleasure, these Canadian stories were also written in that distinct, uniquely Canadian flavour with a quiet and unerringly accurate pride of place and setting.
Some of my favourites (that is to say, what I felt to be the "best" among a collection of very, very good stories) were WILD THINGS LIVE HERE, a distinctly creepy take on missing children in Vancouver's Stanley Park; IMPOSTER, an insider's look at vampire culture in a modern world; THE SUCTION METHOD, a laugh out loud story about cleaning even the most stubborn dirt off your carpets at home; and, GRIST FOR THE MILLS OF CHRISTMAS, an exceptionally clever re-writing of the Christmas myth of St Nicholas and the tradition of gift-giving (I hope this one in particular makes you scratch your head and wonder how it could possibly qualify as a horror story!).
I count myself as having been lucky to find this one at a deep discount on the remainder table of a local book store. But, now having read and so thoroughly enjoyed it, I wonder why such a fine collection of stories met with such an ignominious fate. I'm certainly going back to find copies of the first two collections that Don Hutchison put together. If they're as good as this one, they'll be well worth the effort!
OK, Bella, so you're hot and bothered already! GET ON WITH THE STORY!
Hundreds and thousands of fans couldn't possibly be wrong, could they? I figured OK, Bella, so you're hot and bothered already! GET ON WITH THE STORY!
Hundreds and thousands of fans couldn't possibly be wrong, could they? I figured with so much hype surrounding Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, there had to be something to it. So I took the plunge and dug in.
Now, please ... before hordes of young female fans climb all over me and shower my review with negative votes, I hope that they'll understand this review is being written by a fifty-something male for a similar audience. In summary, it just wasn't my cup of tea and I don't think it will be for any other male reader that's much past the age of twenty.
Bella is the seventeen year old daughter of a family split by a typical amicably negotiated divorce. Mom lives in Phoenix, Arizona, while her father, Charlie, is the police chief in Forks, Washington, a foggy, perpetually cloudy, rain-soaked stereotypical piece of small town America. The story is simplicity itself - Bella meets and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a boy in her class who coincidentally turns out to be a 100 year old vampire!
No less than the entire first half of the book is filled with endless breathless expressions of Bella's infatuation with Edward. Her adulation knows no bounds and while it was forgivable in the sense that it was probably a realistic portrayal of teenage first love, the mind-numbing repetitive nature of her hormonal utterings definitely started to grate on my nerves.
On the other hand, when Meyer FINALLY got around to telling the Cullen family story and outlining her somewhat modern mythology of the origin of vampires, the transmission of vampirism and their interaction with daylight and the regular world of the human species, things got genuinely interesting. But, too little too late, and even that bit of enjoyable quality was mitigated by the fact that the stars in Bella's eyes continued to shine unabated through the second half of the story.
Edward's perfection and Bella's hero-worship was simply too much for me. One star for the tedious repetition, four stars for the quality of Meyer's version of the vampire myth - that's two and a half stars on average. But I'll call it two stars because I also couldn't figure out why a 100 year old male vampire - a "man" by any standards even if he's housed in an eternally youthful boy's body - would be interested in a 17 year old girl. That was more than questionable to me. It actually started to push the needle on my moral meter into the red zone!
If you're a teenage girl, go for it with all the gusto you can manage. I'm sure you'll love it! If you're a male over the age of twenty-five, consider yourself warned. You'll probably have as much difficulty seeing the fascination as I did.
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