Creature Feature Tomb of Horror

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Who’s ready for some kick-ass scifi/horror? Me, me, me! Come join me for some rambunctious thrills.

THE MACHINE AWAKES by Adam Christopher

If you’re not familiar with the first novel in Adam Christopher’s killer scifi/action/horror series, THE BURNING DARK, I urge you to jump onboard! In this follow-up novel, we find ourselves a decade past first contact with an alien machine race called Spiders, aliens who are capable of destroying entire planetary systems. Following contact, humans have become embroiled in an interstellar war with the Spiders, and it looks like we’re losing, and losing badly. A top-secret plan of ours has failed, and the Fleet Captain who envisioned the plan has been overthrown by hardliners insistent upon getting back on the winning side of the war. When the failed Fleet Captain is murdered, Special Agent Von Kodiak is called in to uncover a suspected conspiracy. After some digging around, Kodiak discovers that his prime suspect is a war hero reportedly killed in action months previously. At the same time, the dead war hero’s twin sister went missing from the Fleet Academy, where she was in training to join combat like her brother. Kodiak’s investigation takes him to the floating gas mines located on Jupiter where the Jovian Mining Company is hiding something deep beneath the gaseous planetary cover. Something lurks beneath the clouds, something mechanical, intelligent, and very dangerous. Fans of adventurous and scary hard science fiction will love this novel, I guarantee it.

THE BORDER by Robert McCammon

Robert McCammon fans will welcome this return to epic apocalyptic fiction in the vein of SWAN SONG and STINGER. Set in the present day, humans have been caught in an intergalactic war between enemy alien lifeforms, the horrific Gorgons who sail the galaxy in monstrous living starships, and the Cyphers, armored killers that move in blurred motion, gunning down everything in their path. Since the Gorgon/Cypher war has moved into our planetary system, Earth and its inhabitants have been devastated by the ongoing combat. Worse still, the pollution from the alien warfare has done something terrible to the last weary human survivors who are succumbing to despair and starvation, transforming them into hideous Gray Men, cannibal mutants that prey upon the living. The story focuses upon one of the last desperate bastions of humankind located in a place called Panther Ridge. Into this frantic community of survivors wanders a teenage boy with no memory of who his is or where he comes from. He calls himself Ethan, but knows nothing about himself other than his name. It turns out that Ethan has special powers, powers that frighten and threaten the warring aliens, and the boy may just be the savior of our planet and the human race. Fast paced and action-packed, THE BORDER is the kind of killer scifi/horror that has become a trademark of Robert McCammon’s blockbuster fiction. On a personal note, this is the novel I wish BATTLEFIELD EARTH had been.

I so enjoy those rare books that I want to keep forever. Here are two that will remain down here in the Tomb for eternity.

THE DOLL COLLECTION edited by Ellen Datlow

Dolls are creepy. I didn’t like my dolls as a child, thinking they got up to bad business at night while I slept, so I stuffed them into my closet before bedtime, much to my mother’s chagrin. World class editor Ellen Datlow, herself a collector of ultra-creepy dolls, has assembled an anthology of original stories about dolls that utterly transcends the threadbare “evil doll” genre, as she intended for this volume. What the reader will find are disturbing tales from the best genre writers working today: Jeffrey Ford, Seanan McGuire, Joyce Carol Oates, Carrie Vaughn, Tim Lebbon, Stephen Gallagher, Gemma Files, Pat Cadigan, Richard Bowes, Lucy Sussex, John Langan, and others, each author deftly representing their own personal métier within the speculative fiction field. No clichéd devil dolls here, by golly, but you will encounter dolls as disturbing personal talismans and homunculi, as in the brilliant and irrepressible Pat Cadigan’s thoroughly unnerving “In Case of Zebras”, a puppet show gone horribly wrong in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Dr. Faustus”, a read-through-your-fingers horror tale of a terrible thing discovered in the icy wastelands by South Pole adventurers in Tim Lebbon’s “Skin and Bone”, malevolent humans who imbue their dolls with terrible power, well-meaning parents who cause damage to their children with their gifts of dolls, and much, much more. Each story is prefaced by a photograph of a doll and, I must tell you, they are scary! Each tale is superb in its own original way—ranging from refined unease to full-on screamers--and this is the kind of anthology one keeps on the shelf and lends to no one so that it can be reread again and again.

RESONANCE DARK & LIGHT by Bruce Boston

Multi-award-winning poet Bruce Boston presents in this volume a banquet for the mind and spirit—playful, sly, humorous, horrific, mischievous, wonderful! Music and remembrance dance through these pages, songs of life and death and otherness. The music of werewolves is “wrenching heavy metal”, the devil and his minions sing in a drunken revel, the music of vampires is “ethereal and damned”, while the reaper’s music “ends with a death rattle”. Luxuriate in “The Music of Deep Spacers” and “The Music of the Stars”, then fly back to earthly realms and enjoy some grisly but “Tasty Horrors” and an “Endless Summer.” Experience a “Septuagenarian Flashback” and the sad and dispiriting “Death of the Crossing Guard.” Revisit Mr. Boston’s astounding and eerie Mutant Rain Forest, and make a stop in “Middletown, USA, 1953”…if you dare. Many more poems are included herein, and five poems appear in this marvelous collection for the first time anywhere, including “The Music of Skeletons.” What do you think the music of skeletons sounds like? I know, and you can find out by clicking on the cover to own this dazzling--and resonant--collection by a grandmaster of poetry. I’ll be reading it again. And again.

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About the Tomb Keeper (Or, who is this person of mystery)

J. L. (Judy) Comeau is an award winning short story writer whose work has appeared internationally in major horror and dark fantasy anthologies such as the Borderlands series, Best New Horror, The Years' Best Horror, the Hot Blood series, and the Dark Voices series in the UK. She is an active member of the Horror Writer's Association, and she lives in the Washington, DC area where she also teaches short story writing. Click on FIREBIRD to read one of her most anthologized stories.

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Dick Dyszel - Voice Actor