Book Reviews
Review of Wounded: Collected Tales of Horror and the Grotesque
by Jane Mulcaster
"Wounded is provocative and disturbing, like a tortured Robert Maplethorpe self-portrait: brilliant, sexual, unpleasant.
"Although the subtitle serves as ample warning, it sells the book short. “Collected Tales of Horror and the Grotesque” implies a collection of unrelated short stories, but in fact, the book is a well-crafted, complex, and cohesive weave of story lines that intersect and collide. The humanness of the characters compels you through the jarring, erotic, and horrifying scenes as they unfold.
"But if you crave resolution and redemption in a story, Wounded will tantalize, then disappoint you. With evocative, oddly gratifying, and often excruciating detail, the book touches on many challenging themes: male and female rape, domestic violence, bisexuality, alcohol and drugs, murder, torture, necromancy, and Catholic contradiction.
"With a few rough edges, David Saliba weaves a provocative narrative that swirls with vivid images and acid-trip snapshots, which lead the reader into the psychotic mind of a demonic killer who intersects the lives of six men and six women in the environs of the Santa Cruz mountains. Tremors occur and faults appear not only in the earth at ironic moments, but also in the psyches of each character as Saliba stitches the limbs of his tale together with the thread of earthquakes, brutality, humanity juxtaposed to inhumanity, and carnal sex against the backdrop of the Santa Cruz mountains and the fissures that run through them: the San Lorenzo River and the San Andreas fault.
"Through his characters, Saliba strides boldly into the contradictions of human nature that are normally repressed. And although compelling in their humanness, the characters are difficult to like. Each has his or her Achilles heel, which is invariably sexual in nature. Saliba gets inside the heads of his female characters with remarkable consistency and detail, although many of them tend toward stereotypical bitchiness. The men are either sexist, violent, testosterone-engorged brutes, or sensitive, vulnerable, and coquettish. All are powerless over their compulsion toward (or revulsion of) the animal savagery of sex and/or violence.
"In the end, is the killer a manifestation of the protagonist’s session with a pen, a legal pad, and too many kamikazes? Or is he really a demon spawned from the Earth’s bowels by the mysterious power of the San Andreas fault? Either way, standing in a doorway is no protection from the raw and carnal power of Wounded."
Review of Rituals of Terror
by David R. Saliba
February 1, 2008
Marshall subtitles his novel, A Book of Nightmares Come True. In the Prologue he suggests that his nightmare is viewed through innocent eyes: “When I finally found sleep…my peaceful bliss was interrupted by frightening visions that no child should ever endure.” That, of course, puts a very important slant on the message and the delivery.
Marshall’s inspiration from Poe’s concept of “A Dream within a Dream” is evident when he frames his story as a nightmare within a nightmare. Just like the message in Poe’s poem, this novel is fraught with hopelessness and the inevitability of death. Marshall reinforces the nightmare concept in the first chapter, “Nemesis of Tranquility,” and prefigures the culmination of the novel by introducing us to a character trapped inside a dream that skips like a scratched vinyl record. Like the innocent voice in the Prologue, this character finds himself in a purgatory of suspended animation.
Because the story is presented to the reader from the perspective of a youth, Marshall resists an overly polished or sophisticated style. He inserts malapropisms that echo “boy speak” and focuses on descriptions that realistically support the prurient interests of a pre-pubescent mind. His action scenes, with their extreme violence and detailed fight choreography, further support the idea that we are viewing the world through the eager eyes of youth. His highly imaginative stories (which he calls “rituals”) serve the same purpose as campfire tales. They captivate the imagination and elicit fear and surprise. And in so doing, they provide excellent entertainment.
But these tales do more than entertain; they provide a philosophy. They are de facto rites of passage for a young dreamer caught up in his nightmare world. The appeal or revulsion of each ritual intermittently takes the reader’s mind off the original premise of the novel. These tales give the reader periodic respite from the claustrophobia of the dreamer’s nightmare. As the novel progresses the intensity of the rituals increases. And as that intensity builds to a final crescendo, Marshall reestablishes his premise and returns us to the beginning. The difference is that from the Prologue to the Afterward there is a transformation—a rite of passage for the reader. The reader no longer sees through the eyes of a child. The record skips and the nightmare starts again. It is now the reader who is “stuck within an endless void between” worlds; somewhere between waking and dreaming.
Review of Fade to Pale
by David R. Saliba
December 31, 2007
Rita Hamilton's world is cast in a red hue--filtered through translucent blood vessels in the closed eyelids of a 7-year old girl. Something changed Rita's life so drastically back then that even as an adult the brightness of the midday sun cannot remove this oppressive veil. The closed eyes of a traumatized child is the metaphor for Rita's nightmare. It is an effective technique that Cheetham uses to construct the inescapable horror that imprisons Rita throughout her tortured existence.
Cheetham takes the reader on a journey through emotional and physical abuse. He peoples his world with characters whose lives contaminate one another with their dark obsessions, sexual urges, and psychoses. He carefully crafts his tale from the distorted perceptions of Rita's mind and the intermittent revelation of actual events. Rita's entire existence is driven solely by her obsession with escape. Her alternating need to escape reality through drug induced sleep and her subsequent need to escape her resulting nightmares and psychotic visions produces a hypnotic rhythm that gradually pulls the reader deeper and deeper into her sunless world.
The journey through Rita's darkening landscape provides the vehicle for Cheetham's increasing horror. But the journey takes the reader to an unanticipated destination. Near the end of the narrative Rita's tragedy finally shows signs of some relief from the violence and horror of her existence; the blood red hue of her vision slowly fades to pale. It is at this point that Cheetham forces his attentions on the reader. He suddenly rents the psychological veil and ushers the reader into a world that surpasses the horror of Rita's psychosis. What he reveals is a landscape--as pale as the one in Poe's "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym"--not of mind, but of supernatural horror.
