Captain Clive's Dreamworld

To date, Jon Bassoff has authored nine novels of dark crime-fiction and nightmarish horror. I read his debut novel, Corrosion, originally published in 2013, and really enjoyed it. The author has popped up on several “best of the year” lists over the last decade, including his novel Captain Clive's Dreamworld. It was published in 2020 by Eraserhead Press and received an audio book treatment by Blackstone Publishing. The book gained high praise on Amazon's reviews, which caught my eye while shopping for the next horror title to read. 

Deputy Sam Hardy works in a low-life, scum-ridden town plagued by violence and poverty. When a dead prostitute is found with her throat cut, Sam becomes a suspect in her murder. In an odd chain of events, Sam is instructed to move out of town to a place called Angels and Hope. The Sheriff sets Sam up to be the lone lawman of this sleepy desert town. Angels and Hope's claim to fame is a giant amusement park built by a zany entrepreneur named Captain Clive. But, the town is wonky and made up of two-faced citizens that seem to be hiding secrets. These characters evolve from the warm welcoming committee to malevolent tormentors over the course of the book.

Captain Clive's Dreamworld is a weird book, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's presented in a dreamlike way that ultimately conveys the book's title. At times it's like the quirky Twilight Zone episode “Stopover in a Quiet Town”, with the protagonist discovering that his small town is just a reproduction. Other times, Bassoff's writing is dark erotica, complete with disturbingly graphic sex scenes that mostly involve rape or incest. In that regard, it isn't a far cry from the likes of Jack Ketchum or Bryan Smith, two authors I mostly stay away from. Perhaps the best comparison is that of Bentley Little – a little of this and a little of that to make an outlandish horror story memorable. 

Bassoff is a terrific writer that can get the most out of his characters through heartache, emotional angst, homicidal thoughts, and guilt. This gauntlet of emotions lies before the reader to enjoy or combat, which makes the reading  a rip-roar, gut-wrenching event. The reader feels something – good, bad, squeamish - which is what every author desires. There was also a great story here worth telling. It's a cyclical narrative with a plot development that offered some horrifying surprises. 

If  perverted horror is really your thing, then you'll love Captain Clive's Dreamworld. Honestly, I was just lukewarm on some of the provocative stuff, but the story as a whole was good enough for me to...thrust onward I suppose. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

Conan - The Frost-Giant's Daughter

“The Frost-Giant's Daughter” was written by Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s. The story, featuring Conan the Cimmerian, was originally rejected by Weird Tales, so Howard changed the character to Amra of Akbitana and called the story “The Gods of the North”. It was accepted and published by The Fantasy Fan #7 in March, 1934. As a Conan story, its original, more popular form, “The Frost-Giant's Daughter”, was published in The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953) and Conan of Cimmeria (Lancer, 1969). At just 10 paperback pages, it ranks in the top echelon of Conan literature. 

The titular hero has returned to his homeland in Cimmeria, but grows a hunger for battle. He decides to participate in a raid into Vanaheim with his old barbaric friends the Aesirs. As the story begins, Conan is the last remaining combatant of the Aesirs and an enemy named Heimdul is the sole member left of Vanaheim's fighting forces. They both lock into battle and Conan kills Heimdul, but collapses from exhaustion on the hard frozen ground. 

Conan awakens to feminine laughter and then sees a beautiful ivory-skinned woman in front of him. She's naked and barefoot, yet dancing on the snow. Lusting for this cold-weather maiden, Conan trails the woman for miles through the frozen wastelands. Growing tired, he suddenly realizes that the woman has led him to her two brothers, savage frost giants. They want to cut Conan's heart out for some sort of ritual sacrifice. Forced into battle, Conan kills both giants and then the woman vanishes in a blue flame after asking her father, a god named Ymir, for help. Conan collapses yet again, but this time awakens to find another band of Aesir comrades by his side. 

Conan explains that his encounter with the strange woman and the Aesir don't believe him. They also fail to locate any tracks made by the woman. One Aesir warrior confesses that he does believe what Conan is saying is true and explains that this woman is Atali, the daughter of the god Ymir. The Aesir still refuses to believe Conan's account, but are surprised to see that the warrior is holding a piece of the woman's clothing in his hand. 

“The Frost-Giant's Daughter” has a special kind of frosty ambiance. Howard's descriptions of the battlefield, cold weather, the beautiful woman, and the frost giants themselves was just so vivid. The opening dialogue between Conan and Heimdul seemed epic, despite the fact that the reader never experienced the actual battle. For such a short story, the whole narrative felt this way due to the storytelling and pace. Conan's realization that the dream was reality was a fitting ending and proved to his comrades that his sanity, along with his fighting spirit, was still fully intact. Howard absolutely nailed this Conan story and I'm surprised it wasn't picked up by one of the publishers of that era in its original form.

The Bride Wore Black

Up until 1940, Cornell Woolrich was mostly writing shorter works about the rich and privileged, like Times Square (1929) and Children of the Ritz (1927). After 1932's Manhattan Love Song, eight years passed before another Woorich novel was published. This hiatus set the table for a re-structure of Woolrich's subject matter and a new direction for his literature. 

In 1940, The Bride Wore Black (aka Beware the Lady) was published, the first novel-length suspense thriller from Woorich. The novel kickstarted a crime-fiction career that flourished for twenty years, producing over 15 masterworks of suspense and landing Woolrich in the upper echelons of crime-fiction authors and pioneers. 

The Bride Wore Black is presented in five separate parts, each titled as the last name of a potential victim. In between, the author includes a small portion of insight from the eyes of the murderer, an unnamed woman Hellbent on revenge. Then, another short narrative featuring insight on the victim, and then a paragraph serving as the postmortem. In this presentation, each part is set as its own short-story or novella. These parts eventually connect to make a spectacular whole, but the pure pleasure lies in the construction. 

The first victim is a man named Bliss, lured to the top of a building for an engagement party. It is here that he meets the beauty, a mysterious woman rejecting men while searching for someone special. Bliss, unfortunately, falls for the trap and takes a deadly tumble. His friend, a man named Corey, remembers the woman's eyes moments before Bliss's death. This tidbit will be of some use later in the book.

This same set-up is used as various men meet their demise after gaining some contact with this dark female avenger. The murders are clever, a cross between diabolic (shot with an arrow, suffocated) to quiet death (poisoning). All of these are written with a sense of white-knuckled dread. After Bliss, readers realize that they will be reading the last moments of life for all of these poor unfortunate men. 

Perhaps the most compelling and shocking is Moran. On his last day, his wife is lured out of town with a telegram informing her of her mother's sudden sickness. This was a way to isolate Moran, but there's a catch. He is left caring for his young son. When a woman arrives at the house, promising she is the teacher, Moran's son immediately rejects the visitor, explaining that she isn't his who she claims to be. Prone to fibbing, his warning falls on deaf ears and Moran is led into a macabre, murderous game of hide and seek. 

The Bride Wore Black is a masterpiece that essentially helped define the suspense-thriller market. The novel's use of certainty – a predetermined sentencing for each character – is oddly a paradox of suspense. Readers realize the outcome before death arrives. There is a void of uncertainty, but the build-up to death and murder creates an emotional stirring that's hard to suppress. Woolrich purposefully cranks the wrench, tightening the intensity until the last gasp. If Hitchcock was the master of visual suspense, then Woolrich was certainly his equal with literature. The Bride Wore Black is a must-read. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

Homicide Handicap

Florida resident Bob McKnight authored 11 short novels published as Ace Doubles between 1957 and 1963. He also wrote a bunch of non-fiction books on horse race handicapping and didn’t forge into fiction until the ripe old age of 51. Homicide Handicap was his last Ace novel from 1963.

Sox Bradley is a thoroughbred racehorse trainer and our narrator in this 100-page conventional mystery. His wealthy ex-wife, Carla, owns a bunch of racehorses, and Sox still works for her despite the marriage being long over. When Carla’s dead body is found stashed away at her Florida mansion, the cops naturally question Sox for the murder.

Yes, this is another one of those paperbacks where the falsely-accused protagonist needs to solve a murder to save his own hide, and it’s a pretty enjoyable iteration of this trope. Sox is a decent main character despite a lack of charisma, and the setting in the world of thoroughbred horse training was an interesting glimpse behind the curtain of a sports subculture. I learned a thing or two along the way that will make me a hit at cocktail parties when the topic of horse racing arises.

There’s a sweet girl interested in Sox and a handful of likely suspects with motive and opportunity. There’s not much action other than a couple of peripheral murders that narrows the field of suspects. You’ll see the solution coming from a furlong away, but it will only serve to make you feel smart in the final chapter when your suspicions are confirmed.

To be clear, Homicide Handicap isn’t a mystery masterpiece, but it was an enjoyable diversion about as good as a typical long-story from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The novel has never been reprinted, but many Ace Double collectors probably have a copy that’s been sitting on their shelves for decades. The other side of the paperback is The Dead and the Deadly by Louis Trimble. It’s a good pairing as both authors knew how to execute a formulaic mystery.

Double Indemnity

James M. Cain hit a homerun with his femme fatale crime-fiction novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The bestselling novel was adapted to film seven times, converted into an opera, a radio drama and a play. It is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century. So, how would Cain ever top it? Well, he really never did, but he came really close with Double Indemnity. This novel was originally published in Liberty in 1936. The book was later published in 1943 in the collection Three of a Kind, an omnibus containing Double Indemnity as well as two additional works by Cain, Career in C Major and The Embezzler. 

Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity is told in the first-person as a sort of “if you are reading this then I'm in the deathhouse” kind of book. The protagonist is Walter Huff, an insurance agent in Beverly Hills. Like Cain's character Frank Chambers, Huff is a strategist who helps plot a murder when he falls for a young seductress named Phyllis. The problem is that Phyllis is married to a wealthy guy named Nirdlinger, one of Huff's clients. After Huff falls for Phyllis, the two collaborate on knocking Nirdlinger off to cash in on an accident policy. 

Like most of the femme fatale novels, which Cain perfected for similar novelists like Gil Brewer and Orrie Hitt, the murder plan develops into treachery, jealousy, lust, greed, and plain 'ole lyin' and cheatin'. The murder hits a major snag when Huff learns that Phyllis may have played him for a fool in hopes to run away with another guy. But, Huff gains some insight through Phyllis's gorgeous stepdaughter, whom he ultimately falls in love with. 

This book is rather short, but packs a punch. The gauntlet that Huff runs from A to Z in hopes to successfully murder for love, then backtrack to kill for vengeance is clever, compelling, and masterfully written. It's a tug-of-war as Huff clamors with the concept of murder, the ultimate sin. There's a deep mystery centralized as the narrative rotates different characters off the playing field. Who is truly innocent is one of the book's most perplexing questions. But, thankfully Cain keeps the characters to a minimum, keeping the plot development tight as the story expands outward into a brisk “man on the run” concept. 

Double Indemnity was adapted to film in 1944 by mystery powerhouse novelist Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder. It was filmed again in 1973 and staged as a play in 2011. It's a prevalent bookend that butts up nicely with The Postman Always Rings Twice. While inferior to that masterpiece, Double Indemnity is still a mandatory read for any crime-fiction fan worth his salt. Highly recommended! 

Buy a copy of the book HERE.

Conan - The Road of the Eagles (aka Way of the Swords, Conan Man of Destiny)

The December, 1955 Fantastic Universe issue featured an L. Sprague de Camp Conan story called “Conan, Man of Destiny”. This story was taken from a Robert E. Howard manuscript, originally titled “The Road of the Eagles”, discovered by Glenn Lord, about the Ottoman Empire featuring a hero named Ivan Sablianka. Howard's original version was edited by Lord and published in the Donald Grant collection Road of Azrael as “The Way of the Swords”. de Camp changed the title “Conan, Man of Destiny” to “The Road of the Eagles”. That story – de Camp's version – was later published in Lancer's 1968 collection Conan the Freebooter as by both de Camp and Howard. The comic adaptation appears in The Savage Sword of Conan #38. 

“The Road of the Eagles” continues where “Shadows in the Moonlight” leaves off. Conan and his pirates, now referred to as the Red Brotherhood, are attacked by Yildiz, the king of Turan and his General Artaban. Meanwhile, a young woman named Roxana escapes the ransacking and destruction of her village by a man named Kurusk Khan. Roxana, and a small army of Hyrkanians, runs into Artaban and he explains to her that he was in debt to Yildiz and basically attacked Conan's pirate crew to just pay off debt. Now, he is sort of rethinking his decision to serve Yildiz and wants to go independent and do his own thing with his army. 

With Artaban's change of heart, Roxana also reveals that the chief rival to Yildiz is Prince Teyaspa, her lover. She tells Artaban that Teyaspa is in a dungeon jail and he agrees to assist her with liberating him. While this is happening, Conan, nearly playing a bit part by this point, is running around with his surviving pirates trying to find and kill Yildiz. Here is where the story becomes very complicated and rather convoluted. Which, seems to be a pattern now with de Camp's reworking of Howard's stories that were never meant to feature Conan or The Hyborian Age. 

My understanding is that the castle where Teyaspa is imprisoned is simultaneously attacked by the Hyrkanians wanting revenge for their village destruction and Conan and his Red Brotherhood that want to find and kill Artaban before they seek Yildiz. Then, you have Artaban and Roxana attempting the prison break for Teyaspa. Honestly, this is like Game of Thrones on drugs that just leads to a Shakespeare-styled tragic ending. But, before the suicides (yes, they happen) the best part of the story reveals itself. Conan vs vampires!

Inside the dark cavernous tunnel system below the castle are ravenous hairy cave creatures called brylukas. They are vampiric in nature and attack Conan and his crew. This portion of the narrative is just brimming over with intense action-adventure as the titular hero attempts to climb through the cave's passageways while fighting off these savage monsters. This is more of what I want from Conan – brawn versus monsters, evil men, and sorcerers. Unfortunately, this exhilarating story within the story of Conan's escape from the creatures comes at the very end and is very short-lived. 

“The Road of the Eagles” is an okay read, but requires patience and pen on paper (or a handy phone notepad) just to keep up with who is chasing whom and for what reason – revenge, power, loot, women, etc. If you can dedicate 45 mins of heavy concentration, then the story totally works. If you are looking for just casual escapism, look elsewhere.

Rosemary's Baby

American author Ira Levin (1929-2007) struck gold in 1967 with his second novel, Rosemary’s Baby, selling four-million copies and counting. The novel’s iconic standing was solidified by the 1968 film adaptation by Roman Polanski (Full Disclosure: I’ve never seen it). The novel remains in-print today in every format imaginable. 

Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse are upgrading their Manhattan apartment to an exclusive, in-demand building called The Bramford. After signing the lease, the couple learns that the building has a dark past. Historic residents were accused of cannibalism, child murder and witchcraft. Decades ago, the building was thought to be cursed.

Despite these warnings, Guy and Rosemary move into Apartment 7B. Rosemary quickly makes a friend who promptly commits suicide. This brings her directly into the orbit of her busybody neighbors who all seem very interested in Rosemary’s fertility. 

Rosemary’s husband Guy is a struggling actor, but something about The Bramford has him acting quite different than normal. One night Rosemary has a vivid dream that her neighbors and Guy were involved in a dark ritual of sorts. When Rosemary awakens, she’s covered in scratches and soon learns that she’s pregnant. 

Levin does a great job of writing Rosemary as a naive ingenue from Nebraska, and she seems to be the only character willfully blind to the subtle manipulation of all the other characters and what may be growing in her womb. The novel is a slow burn to be sure, but the creeping dread that rises in the reader displays some really adept horror writing with a gentle touch. Scary? A little. Unnerving? Bullseye! Recommended? Definitely. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.