Category: Nerd in a Bar with a Book

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I grew up in a town where the Pied Piper was (is) a big deal. In fact, because of it, I was a rat in a parade.

My home town is Frankenmuth, Michigan, known as Michigan’s Little Bavaria. One of the town landmarks in the Glockenspiel at Bavarian Inn. The Glockenspiel is a 50-foot bell tower that plays music and tells the story, with the help of carved figures that emerge onto a platform, of the Pied Piper.

One year the kids in my neighborhood entered the annual Children’s Parade, part of the then-weeklong Bavarian Festival, with a Pied Piper rat group, and a Pied Piper child group, with two of the older boys playing the Pied Piper. So… I was a rat.

When I say I have always been fascinated by the darkness of the Pied Piper of Hameln story, I mean it.

In Children of Chicago, Cynthia Pelayo took a dark tale and made it even darker, dark as pitch. In Pelayo’s hands, we have a Pied Piper that is truly the stuff of children’s legends, and the instrument of the kind of pure anger of which children can be capable. This is a story about children killing children. And somehow, it is told with compassion. Unflinchingly, but also with empathy. It’s a stunning accomplishment.

If you are familiar with the Pied Piper story, don’t think that will help you. This is a horror story with thriller overtones, and the mysterious twists and bends that come with a good detective mystery. You might think you have it figured out, and you might, partly. You won’t see the whole thing coming at you, I assure you.

Chicago is as much a character in this story as the children and the detective trying to save them. Calling it a love song to Chicago is trite. But still true. I’ve been to Chicago a dozen times, but I’ve never seen it presented in quite this loving, honest, respectful way. The next time I’m there, I’ll try to visit Humboldt Park. I won’t be chanting rhymes in front of candlelit mirrors, though. No way.

The drink is a mimosa. It was early-ish and I’d had … some beers… the previous night. The place is the Crazy Horse bar and grill in Bloomington, Indiana.

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It’s Appalachia January for me! I really love that region of the country, and would like to get to know it better. But for now, here’s what I’ve been reading.

Madame Cruller’s Couch by Elizabeth Massie at Stooges in Jackson MO with an Old Fashioned. Subtitle is apt: Dark and Bizarre Tales.

Brother by Ania Ahlborn at Walker’s Bluff (again) with a Blackberry Whiskey Lemonade. Just when you think it’s gotten as dark as it’s going to get, guess what? It gets darker. For me, Ahlborn is one of the scariest writers out there right now.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby at Walker’s Bluff with a Black Rose cocktail — a high octane heartbreak of a book. I’m actually about two chapters from finishing it. I’m slowing down because the high speed making me race too fast!
NOTE: OK. I finished it. Might be the best last sentence ever.

Happy reading! Read horror! Read flash fiction!

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I’m starting out the year with a few anthologies I’ve been pretty anxious to read. I’ll read simultaneous with novels and other books.

Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird, edited by Jonathan Maberry, is going to be great. I became a Weird Tales fan in the late 1980s, when Weird Tales was part of Terminus Publishing and under the helm of George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer. The magazine covers were beautiful and lavish, and I can see some of the illustrations with my eyes closed. Weird Tales in that era introduced me to some of the best writers in horror at that time. I can’t wait to dive into this 100 year retrospective and forecast, edited by Jonathan Maberry, who is absolutely a perfect choice for this. (He’s also the editor of the current iteration of the magazine.

I brought the book with me to Route 51 Brewery, where I enjoyed a Pumpkin Ale, easily the best of its kind in the region.

I just finished Stories We Tell After Midnight, vol. 2 edited by Rachel A. Brune. I’ll have to get volume 1 now. It’s a Crone Girls Press publication. Support indie horror publishers and get this book! Seriously, the founders are terrific people who were very welcoming to me at my first horror con. After-midnight nightclubs, nursery rhymes gone awry, dating while cannibalistic, becoming part of an all-too-real movie premiere—and more.

I had this book with me just after Christmas at my favorite dive bar in Union County, Fuzzy’s, while starting out the night with an Angry Orchard.

I’m a little bit fixated on the Appalachians right now. I’m always low-key into that region but driving through a corner of it on the way home from Scares That Care / AuthorCon last spring poured fuel on the Appalachian-love fire. So I’m ready to tear into Tony Evans’ Better You Believe: A Collection of Horror. Also, I plan to attend AuthorCon IV in St. Louis in October. I don’t have a book yet, but I will have a manuscript by then, I hope.

I started reading this one at Blue Sky Vineyard, where my wine of choice that day was Seyval.

Read horror! Share your #nerdinabarwithabook!

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So…. I usually do NanoWriMo Flash with Nancy Stohlman. I will be checking in there. I will also be joining my mentor-in-flashing, Meg Pokrass, with her 300 words or less stories.

But… as of not even five minutes ago, I signed up for the novel version. Because it’s about damn time.

So, real quick. I read The Whisper Man by Alex North at The W in Du Quoin, a place I am pre-disposed to like because it is a horse facility. No horses in sight (except for a chestnut mare in a disagreement with a dog, glimpsed briefly in a back pasture), but still, the place gots good vibes. I was fireside with a flight of fall cocktails. Pictured is a cider and brandy combo.

Truly chilling book. A serial killer with a little tinge of supernatural. And about how crime and trauma affects people in our society, calling to some in a gruesome way. Also, families and love and trust.

I tore through The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon. Characters in McMahon stories are so damn believeable, relateable, even—even when they do strange things. Like become obsessed with a cursed spring that grants wishes and cures ailments. This is a story about sisters, generational inheritance, curses, blessings, and the importance of being very, very careful what you wish for.

It was right before Halloween. Tim had a basement gig—but it was a cool basement, and only a little bit haunted. That’s a Skrewball Russian sitting between my book and the Tito’s. Cool backdrop, eh?

As always, read more, and read more horror. And now I need to get my NanoWriMo set up. See ya’ round!

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A trifecta of folk horror. I was reading The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones while I was at Archon 46, a sci-fi and fantasy event featuring writing hero Jonathan Maberry. Whom I got to meet. And to hand-deliver a bottle of local Chambourcin after alerting him to the presence of a wine trail here in Southern Illinois.

Back to the book. Holy shit. SGJ wrecks me. In a good way. But I will have to take a few deep breaths from now on before starting reading. The Only Good Indians is a wonderful example of what happens when someone breaks a rule pertaining to the Other world and doesn’t know it or doesn’t take it seriously. In this story, four young Blackfeet men know they broke a rule—they hunted elk in a section reserved for their elders. Ten years later, they begin to realize they did more than poach—they transgressed. They have made an enemy of Elk Woman. And her fury is implacable. Their (self) destruction is painful to witness, and the struggle of those around them to avoid becoming collateral damage is heart-rending.

I stopped in at the Old Herald Brewery & Distillery for lunch and an Oktoberfest. The building is the former offices and printing site of the Old Herald newspaper. This ex-reporter appreciates the theme, carried through as it is on some of the menu items.

Harvest Home, by Thomas Tryon, makes just about every list of folk horror ever. I am late to the party, but can confirm—folk horror gold.

This is another one where the main character, Ned Constantine, knows he broke a rule. He fails to consider the consequences. Ned brings his wife and daughter to the quaint farming village of Cornwall Coombe, where they resolve to embrace country living and leave behind the pace and distractions of NYC. Ned counts befriends young malcontent, Worthy Pettinger. Ned begins to understand the nature of the strange pseudo-religious beliefs in the community, and the role of the Widow. Fearing for Worthy’s safety after the young man disappears, Ned determines to uncover the mystery. One great thing about this slow-build book is how the reader is constantly two or three steps ahead of Ned. You get the thrill of discovery as the plot unfolds, and the dread of watching Ned make mistake after mistake.

I was at Alto Vineyards for this one, drinking a Chambourcin blend, Dawg House Red. It should have been mead…

I just finished reading The Hunger by Alma Katsu. Katsu makes the horrific story of the Donner Party—the pioneers who resorted to cannibalism to survive after forced to winter in the mountains during their ill-advised shortcut to California—even more gruesome and terrifying. Blending folk tales and dread whispers from German settlers and Native Americans of several tribes, Katsu creates a threat that is monstrous, vicious, and horrifying when you realize what “the shadows” are and where they originate. While this book is clearly fiction, equally as clearly Katsu did plenty of research. It’s easy to lose yourself in this book, and to feel kinship with some of the characters.

I was at a nearby winery, Starview Vineyards, drinking Chambourcin, the same wine I brought to Archon. That oak tree you can see in the background is one of my favorite trees in the area, and is a true landmark.

Remember: read more horror. And share what you are reading!
#nerdinabarwithabook

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Stoker award winner. Deservedly so. Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn, is a beautiful book. Literally, the cover is compelling, and the interior illustrations lend magic. The fourteen stories that make up the anthology are, every one of them, breath-takers.

The authors are all Southeast Asian writers. These stories emanate, get their strength, from the authors’ relationship with their heritage, and with the culture and tradition that come with it. Some of the conflicts in the story are universal — disappointing a parent in your choice of partner or career or by the act of moving away, for example. But in these stories, there are struggles specific to Asian women who don’t fit in, or who struggle with aspects of their culture.

The stories blend fantasy and folk horror, ghost stories and dystopia and dark humor. The stories have been flowing over each other in my mind for days, making me feel haunted at times, pensive at others.

Though I wasn’t trying to match my drink to the book, the house special cherry mule, made with local ginger beer, seemed appropriate. Joe’s Friendly Tavern, Empire, Michigan.

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Gothic-punk. Okay, I can dig that designation for Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman.

This story is terrifying. And pretty damn bleak.

We begin with a quartet of friends — or should I say, Silas and his fan club — trespassing in a cemetery late at night with the intention (Silas’) of stealing a corpse’s tongue for occult purposes. Should I mention the four of them are tripping? I should. Addiction and drug abuse are main features of this story — ah, but not just any drug addiction. A Ghost addiction. Fungi are having a moment…

Silas is low-key obsessed with his dead mother. Erin (the narrator of this haunted foray into horror) is obsessed with Silas.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but be prepared: These ghosts are some of the scariest I’ve ever encountered in literature. You remember how Odysseus fed blood to the ghosts in the Underworld to restore their memory temporarily? Like that. Only worse.

Setting is key. Richmond, Virginia. An old city on long-established ground with a history of past cruelty and enslavement and conquer. A city where the ghosts of the trampled want to be seen and acknowledged. They are hungry ghosts. Insatiable. So, Chapman asks: What should we do with our ghosts?

I don’t think I’d have been friends with Erin. She can be pathetic, needy, spineless. But occasionally, I’ve been just like her. There is something so pure in her desperation, so relateable in her self-sabotage. Because this story, like all the best horror, is about people — about how people decide who they are, and what people will do if you let them.

And I assure you, as horrifying as these ghosts are, they aren’t the worst monster in these pages.

Since setting is so important to this book, I wanted to emphasize setting where I was when I started reading it — by having an exclusive Trout Town Steelhead Amber at Trout Town Tavern in Kalkaska, Michigan, where beer comes with a pretzel!

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When I travel, I like to read a book set where I’m going, or by someone from that area. Hence, Drowning Ruth, a novel set in rural Wisconsin west of Milwaukee—the debut novel by Christina Schwarz.

It’s a story about tragedy unfolding from a secret—a secret that required lies and subterfuge to keep hidden, and one that literally had its keepers precariously balanced on thin ice. It’s also about sisters, family, parents, children, gossip, friendship, love, mental illness, and finding one’s place in this wild world of expectations and reality.

It’s also about adoption—which I did not know when I picked this book out to read.

But how very appropriate to my travels in Wisconsin and Michigan!

I shall have more to say later. And I’ve said a little bit previously. But my recent journey was a visit home, to my birth families.

I started reading Drowning Ruth at Toonie’s in Bellaire, Michigan. The brew is a local from Right Brain Brewery (Traverse City, MI)—Northern Hawk Owl Amber Ale.

That is the lighthouse at Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It’s as good a symbol as any of the amazing adventure of visiting my long lost sister, and meeting four siblings I never knew. I’m not posting their pictures here yet, but may in future.

Before I met my “Up North” Michigan family—my maternal siblings—we stopped at Seven Bridges Natural Area in Rapid River for some rushing water therapy. I soon discovered that my maternal cousin was quite familiar with the area and found solace there herself. It’s nice to have things like that in common.

This is a 450-foot dune that comes with a warning. If you go down it and can’t get back up, expect to pay $3,000 for a rescue. I did go down it as a teenager. The beauty was so astonishing, it actually hurt my heart. The blues of the water, the gold of the sand, the solitude of being so far away from people up top, the challenge of the climb back up… Then, I made the climb in 45 minutes. I think these days I’d take closer to the average 2 hours. The Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes are visible from the top of that dune. One of my very favorite places in all the world.

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I missed getting this book in the Night Worms book subscription, which would have been really cool because it would have come with fun add-ons like stickers and bookmarks. Still, I got it within the first week or two after release.

101 Horror Books To Read Before You’re Murdered by Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann isn’t a list of the greatest horror books of all time. It’s not a list of favorite horror books. It deliberately leaves out Stephen King (because it goes without saying, if you know modern horror, you know Stephen King!). It is a dissertation on modern horror. And it is amazing. Cue the chorus: “You’ve left off a favorite of mine!” Yeah, that’s not really a valid point here. This is a survey of the last 20 years in horror, with an eye to presenting some of the very best, and to do so over a chainsaw-sweep of sub-genres. If you read all of these books (before you are murdered) you will be an educated horror reader, a scholar of modern horror. And you’ll still be behind Sadie Hartmann, who is still reading and researching and compiling and reviewing. It’s not just the depth, though. It’s the insight. The first pages of this book give you an At a Glance reference guide which offers keen details on sub-genre, tone and style. I’ve made it sound easy. It’s clear that every book included in this guide has been thoroughly read, considered and studied. It’s already a classic.

The drink is a King Ale, a cream-style beer created in cooperation with Ravinia Brew Works and SIU Carbondale’s Saluki Brew Works. Enjoying at The Underground Public House. A couple patrons good naturedly moved over to let me get this photo.

This book now—I haven’t seen a description of The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones that does it justice, and I won’t do it justice either. The plot basics: The villain, Jakob, is a man from a long-lived, aristocratic race of people gifted with, among other things, the ability to shift into any other person’s likeness. The hero—the final girl, if you will—is an altogether likeable young wife and mother whose entire life has been shadowed by the generations-long obsession of Jakob to possess a descendent of his long-ago love. That his advances aren’t wanted is not part of his consideration. The story sweeps across Europe and over a century, beginning in a frenzy and, building from there. Beautifully written, with vivid characters, mystery, secret societies, and an obvious love for scholarship.



The wine is a peach lavender sangria at the Peachbarn Winery & Café.
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What are you reading? And what are you reading it with?