CONFESSIONS OF A REVIEWER TOP FIVE 2015: THE HORRORS!

Welcome back to the Confessions of a Reviewer’s top five lists for 2015!

Tonight we have the top five Horrors! My definition of a horror for this list is a novel written by a single author that would obviously fall under the horror genre and, eh, scare me a bit. Some books that I would put in this class will have psychological horror elements in the story, as well as jump out your skin horror elements. To me horror covers a very large range of writing as you will see in my list.

This list is made up of books I have read this year so the books may not necessarily have been published this year.

I have judged these books purely on the basis of how much they entertained me individually. The books will be listed first, with links to reviews and links you can use to buy them. At the bottom of the page you will find all the info you need on the individual authors.

This is a category I struggled to narrow down to just five books so please forgive me for having a couple of joint positions. Plus, it’s my blog so I get to choose. Na na na naaaaah nah!

Also I don’t subscribe to the adage that, if say, first position was a tie, that second position is skipped and the next falls into third.

So let’s get to it and don’t forget to buy buy buy!

REVIEW: Stephen Kozeniewski - The Ghoul Archipelago

Genre: Horror / Zombies

Publisher: Severed Press

Publication Date: 16^th Oct 2013

Pages: 360

MY REVIEW:

A copy of The Ghoul Archipelago was sent to Confessions of a Reviewer by the author Stephen Kozeniewski in exchange for an honest review. This is said review.

Stephen Kozeniewski’s second novel. I was really excited to get into this one after reading his debut Braineater Jones a few months ago. I absolutely loved it and was hoping for more of the same. You can read the review of it here. This one also has zombies. That’s about the only comparison it has. It’s a totally different style of book. Was that good or bad?

Henk Martigan is the captain of a freighter sailing through the Curien Islands in the South Pacific. His cargo is not exactly what you could call legitimate. It never is. While he is at sea, the world has ended. An army of very hungry zombies has overrun the earth, leaving nothing in its wake.

While he and what is left of his crew battle pirates and ghouls, a three way battle is also raging to take over the islands and ultimately, the world. Probably. This battle is between a genius inventor of a virtual reality collar (or his he), a sinister missionary who seems to have developed a cult worshipping the ghouls rather than the Lord and a ruthless President elect and Admiral of a fleet of American warships recently arrived in the area.

Martigan then gets a distress call from others trapped on mainland US and puts everything in place to go rescue them and bring them back to the more favourable South Pacific.

He only has to survive the three way battle and all should be fine. Oh, and the ghouls!

GUEST POST: Confessions of my Past, Present and Future #2 - Stephen Kozeniewski

Confessions of my Past, Present and Future

by

Stephen Kozeniewski

The Past

The year was 2001.  I was a young college student, full of piss and vinegar, and a cadet in the US Army ROTC.  The ROTC program took a field trip to Antietam, site of a major Civil War battle, and our major takeaway was that undulating ground had decided the course of the conflict, though what, precisely, constituted undulating ground remained a bit of a mystery.

The next day brought us to Harper's Ferry, another important Civil War-related site due to John Brown's famous raid.  Far up on a mountain top lay the entrance to a mine, perhaps, or some kind of door whose purpose was lost to history (at least, as far as a few tourists from Pennsylvania were concerned.)

"Doesn't that look like the entrance to a zombie emperor's lair?" asked Colin Chappell.

And with that, my interest in zombies - emperors or otherwise - was ignited.

This was in the dark days, the long long ago, before "The Walking Dead", the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, or even "28 Days Later", (a movie whose status as "zombie" horror will be left undebated here.)  Zombies were dead, so to speak, a relic of the '70s and '80s, remembered only vaguely and mostly for being hokey.

But...something was happening. Something seismic.  Perhaps at that same moment, I like to imagine, somewhere in the central Pennsylvania countryside, a young author named Brian Keene was working on the magnum opus of zombie horror, a little something which at the time he called "More Than Infinity".  I like to think maybe at that moment when Chappell, who was always ahead of the learning curve, was pointing at that strange door in West Virginia, Keene was sitting down and typing "Chapter One" in the Pennsylvania mid-state.  But no one will ever know if that was the case, I suppose. No one ever can know.

REVIEW: Stephen Kozeniewski - Braineater Jones

Genre: Horror / Noir / Zombies / Fantasy

Publisher: Red Adept Publishing, LLC

Publication Date: 14^th Oct 2013

Pages: 234

MY REVIEW:

A copy of Braineater Jones was sent to Confessions of a Reviewer by the author Stephen Kozeniewski in exchange for an honest review. This is said review.

Another new one on me. Never heard of Stephen Kozeniewski before he sent me this through Confessions, for a review. I love it when new authors (to me) take the time to contact me and push their stuff for a review. You sometimes get stuff that, to be honest, I put down after a page or two. Sometimes you get stuff like this. Looks a bit bizarre and maybe not in your normal reading piles but worth a shot. Imagine my surprise when I noticed Mr Kozeniewski’s name in an anthology I started to read at the same time. Coincidence? I think more fate. After reading Braineater Jones I’m going to jump straight to his story in the anthology. He is rather bloody good.

A man awakes face down in a swimming pool. Well, he doesn’t really wake up. That’s because he is dead. The huge hole in his chest sort of points to that. He has no idea where he is, who he is, what happened to him or where he needs to go. He adopts the name of Braineater Jones and sets about tracking down his killer. His only friend, it appears, is an “undead” like himself. Problem is, he is only a head with no body and pretty useless in a bar brawl.