Hooray! Issue #114 of the Iconoclast is finally out and available in print! Why am I so damn excited about that? Because my short story, “Finally” is smack dab in the middle of the magazine! Yee-Haw! A twisted tale about a mentally ill homeless man who picks Christmas Eve as the time to turn himself from being a failure into a success. Yes, he finally does it! At least according to how his pickled egg of a brain works. But his horrible actions are the absolute antithesis of Christmas. The narrative is purposely a bit choppy to bring the reader into Robert’s (the main character) head.

Weird, strange, sad, with some social commentary thrown into the mix “Finally” is more than just a scary story. It is a peek into the heads of the people who walk around many neighborhoods in America today because of so many mental health service facilities being consolidated and put out of reach. Things are too busy, high tech, and none of us know who is safe to talk to on the street anymore. Kindness is not always enough, as poor Mikey Hoolihan finds out. I don’t know what the answer is to the “Roberts” out there, but I do know that pretending they don’t exist isn’t working.

The Iconoclast is a cool independent literary journal that is done totally old school by Editor Phil Wagner. All submissions are mailed in hard copies, as are your communications with the editor. If you’re not a patient person, don’t bother Phil. But, if you are, and you’ve always dreamed of writing like Jack Kerouac or Ray Bradbury on a clanking typewriter and mailing it off with high hopes to a magazine, you might like this. If you write strong poetry and want to see it in print, this is also a good place to try. Single copies of the Iconoclast are $5.00 but the better deal is subscribing and enjoying the slightly irregular appearances of the journal in your mailbox. Lots of good reading and this journal has been a starting point for some famous names as well!

The address for Iconoclast is: the Iconoclast
1675 Amazon Road
Mohegan Lake, NY 10547-1804
please make checks payable to: Phil Wagner
single issue $5
subscription: $20 for 6 issues (great deal!)

The magazine is standard magazine rack size and printed on thick heavy paper. A nice bonus, is that it is not plastic coated, so can be recycled easily, should you wish to do that. Most importantly, by supporting the Iconoclast, we are supporting ourselves as writers and keeping an indie magazine going!

If you do buy a copy and read my story, please let me know what you think! Thanks and good writing-Brian James Lewis

This is a cool poem shared by The Sanguine Woods. Thanks!

Clockwork Universe John W. Dennehy November 19, 2016 Severed Press Reviewed by Brian James Lewis This book is John W. Dennehy’s debut with Severed Press! After reading Clockwork Universe you…

Source: Review of John W. Dennehy’s debut novel Clockwork Universe!

 

Clockwork Universe

John W. Dennehy
November 19, 2016
Severed Press
Reviewed by Brian James Lewis

This book is John W. Dennehy’s debut with Severed Press! After reading Clockwork Universe you will be glad to know that two more books are upcoming in 2017! This book is a Steampunk Thriller, which means Victorian-era-style dress paired with fantastically intricate contraptions that are a mashup of old and new technologies to produce something like the steam-powered Land Rover that is used quite frequently in this novel. Dennehy has also inserted a punk rocker by the name of Kevin Barnes into his story as well. Not only that, but Kevin is a retro-minded punk who enjoys bands from the 70s and 80s such as the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, and Suicidal Tendencies. Even though there are many younger players, punk is truly a very old style of music and dovetails nicely with the idealism of the book. Highly traditional gets a modern twist and likes it!

Kevin, with his purple mohawk, jackboots, safety-pinned ears, and leather jacket, falls asleep on a train to modern-day Boston, but somehow ends up in a very different place than expected and with a beautiful woman at his side. Not that this is an entirely bad thing, but what to do? Where to stay? That quandary takes care of itself somewhat when he is asked to join a pair of men who are in town to hunt down the very dangerous and highly destructive Rhino-pards that have been terrorizing the city. The huge animals came to be through vivisection, a merging of two animals to produce the best and most ornate hybrid creature. Gave me just a quick thought of Wells’ Dr. Moreau, but different here. With the markings and feline grace of a leopard and the tough hide and big frontal horn of the rhinoceros, these are not animals to fool around with!

However, for Silas Cunningham and his very sharp partner, Niles, that is exactly the game plan. Cunningham is a giant of a man, with giant energy and a giant appetite. He and Niles use giant elephant guns as if they were mere rifles. These men are Steampunk superheroes, if you will. Constantly thinking, planning, on the move in a great variety of contraptions, and chasing down the bad guys in the gas-lit streets of Colonial Boston. Wow! They take Kevin’s punk rocker gear for oriental stuff that he picked up while doing a job overseas and this makes him self-conscious. So he steps into the restroom with a bag that someone left in his care while he was at the modern train station and to his surprise finds a suit of Victorian clothes that fit him just right. There is also a secret weapon that you’ll have to read the book to find out about!

Clockwork Universe picks up steam (ha!) very nicely as it goes along, until suddenly you are galloping hell bent for leather into the conclusion. “Damn and blast!” you’ll say, because you won’t want this book to be over! There are too many details, so much to explore, characters you want to know more about. Please write a sequel soon, Mr. Dennehy!

While this may be John W. Dennehy’s first book, he is no stranger to the writing scene. He has placed stories in many magazines such as Disturbed Digest and Beyond Science Fiction. His work has also been featured in many anthologies like SNAFU, and he has served with the U.S. Marines. All of which give him an excellent combination of life experience and writing skills to pull a book like this off. I liked the historical nods, which make the story all the more real. Highly recommended! Pick up a copy today!

Please visit Hellnotes and other JournalStone sites for the best in horror and Sci-Fi!

Hi Friends,

I am going to change my TTT schedule to every other week because I am fortunate enough to have so many brand spanking new titles to review for JournalStone over on their Hellnotes review site. Which, by the way, I highly recommend fans of Horror and Sci-fi to check out! The nice thing about reviews and peeks at movie trailers and cover art is that it allows the customer to be that much better informed when spending their hard earned cash. Unless you happen to be a millionaire. If that’s the case, PLEASE buy work from independent presses and emerging writers and artists! You never know, the unknown you support may be the next big thing, and you will own their first work!

HELL HOUSE
By Richard Matheson
TOR
Viking 1971/TOR 1999
Reviewed by Brian James Lewis

 

Stephen King has taught us many things. One of the most important is to honor and respect those that have come before you. Richard Matheson is one writer well deserving of that treatment. His short fiction was the bedrock for many an episode of The Twilight Zone and many of his books have been made into movies. The reason being the power of Matheson’s prose, along with its amazing timelessness. Yeah, some of the things, like this book for example, have exact dates written in as part of the story because we need to know that. It is very significant that the story ends on Christmas Day. But enough of that. I’m sure that I don’t have to explain Richard Matheson’s greatness to anyone. Let’s take a walk into Hell House.

The book starts with Dr. Lionel Barrett accepting a challenge from a tabloid magazine magnate Rudolph Deutsch to prove that The Belasco mansion, aka Hell House is really haunted. If he can do this, he stands to make one hundred thousand dollars (in 1971 this would be a vast fortune) in cash. But like any challenge of this sort, there are conditions. Barrett will be accompanied by two mediums. One of which is Florence Tanner who has very strong spiritual ties and runs a church. The other is a man named Benjamin Fischer, who is the sole survivor of a previous attempt to cleanse Hell House over 30 years ago. Fischer’s credibility is questionable, but as someone who was able to survive all the horror and depravity of the place before, he is very valuable.

Since I am writing a short review of this book, I’m going to whizz past a lot of the specifics with the intention of showing the core plan. The band of four people (Dr. Barrett’s wife comes along to assist the doctor with his physical ailments.) do enter the Belasco mansion and it more than lives up to its title. The place is creepy and nasty, surrounded by a foul smelling moat, and the former owner has left a recording of his voice to greet his guests. At first, just small phenomena occur. Things don’t feel right, bad spiritual energy, and ghostly visitors arrive. But once the evil spirit who controls the house figures out each challenge and weakness of the visitors, it sets about attacking those weaknesses. Until it literally breaks through.

The most intriguing of these is Dr. Barrett himself, who keeps trying to explain the powers of the house in terms of magnetic forces, air pressure, and temperature. Everything has an exact and scientific reason for happening, he claims. He even goes so far as to build a machine to reverse these energies and cleanse the house of evil. It works-for a very short time. Then the Reversor reverses with horrible consequences. Even as the doctor tries to shout his reason at it, the thing explodes with the negative energy build up, and he goes to a grotesque death. Science is great as far as it goes, but being a non-believer of spiritual forces is as dangerous as sitting on a crate full of dynamite.

Everyone in the house is hurt in numerous ways. There are possessions, visions, attacks by invisible forces that cause a lot of physical damage, and Benjamin Fischer is told to go outside and drown himself in the tarn. He almost succeeds, but Ethel Barrett arrives just in time to grab him. Even Deutsch, the originator of the contract, accidentally kills himself with pain pills. Not a great loss to the world, but it means that the people fighting the evil of Emerick Belasco will never get any monetary compensation for their sacrifices. This turns the fight into good against evil instead of a money making venture or a triumph for science. Together, the two people who did not believe in themselves are the ones to beat Belasco.

A couple of asides. Hell House is cleaned out on Christmas, the day that marks the birth of Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Which is a strong push for a spiritual victory. But Fischer realizes that Dr. Barrett was also right because the chamber that Emerick Belasco hid his body in was lined with lead. This meant that Belasco knew somehow that the radiation from the Reversor would damage his powers. I guess the meaning here is that there is more than one way to fight evil and some fights require all of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HIVE
Alex Smith
Muzzleland Press
October 14, 2016
Reviewed by Brian James Lewis

Wow! What a great read at an excellent price! Even though HIVE comes in at under a hundred pages, it will knock your socks off! Without reservation, I highly encourage you to buy this very powerful little book with the creepy cover!

Things start out on a melancholy, “Holy shit our relationship is going down the toilet” note. Mark and Carolyn have just gone through having a voluntary abortion. Both of them are sad, frustrated, and their hearts hurt. They are awkward and don’t know how to get back to their relationship. After a few very uncomfortable days, Carolyn decides that they need to move from their tiny apartment in the city to something bigger in a nicer location. Since she also tells Mark that this will save their struggling relationship, he goes along with the plan.

At first, things look sunny. It’s a big place in a nice building with a great location. What could be bad about moving here? It turns out, a lot! Problems start quickly after they move in. There’s some minor stuff about the physical condition of the apartment. Odd changes and cover ups that turn on Mark’s bad mojo radar, causing his wife to get pissed off and send him out for sandwiches. It’s all a speedy downhill slide from there.

On the street, things go from a little funky to downright creepy. Mark has an altercation with the building supervisor about the strange looking child he claims is his. When he gets back from the store and tells his wife about what happened, she gets all pissed off and pretty much lays down an ultimatum regarding Mark’s behavior. So he does his best to shut up because he really wants to save their relationship.

That works fine until Mark turns on the TV and finds that it’s tapped in to some kind of security footage for the building. As the screens scroll through the rooms, it shows children locked in cages and some kind of strange operating room…Eeeg! What the shit is going on in this place? Even though Carolyn forbids it, Mark decides that the best thing he can do is try and help the little boy. That decision sets a dramatic cat and mouse chase theme for the rest of the book. Plus, with all the surveillance equipment, it’s nearly impossible to hide or sneak around the building without the bad guys being aware of it. It is done very well with lots of twists and turns. But I am not going to give away any more info than that. You will find yourself glued to the book though, following every new development.

Alex Smith puts forth a great debut. All the characters are well developed, as are the settings. The pace of the book is superb. Building slow and rocketing faster until the surprising end. What really makes it awesome, is how real everything is. The reader will be left wondering what the Super is doing in their building! I am honored to have been asked to review HIVE! Looking forward to reading more from this excellent author!