Please Don't Tap on the Glass and Other Tales of the Melancholy & Grotesque by Mike Lombardo
Hell Hath No Sorrow Like A Woman Haunted by R.J. Joseph
Reviewed by Craig Brownlie
I have had a dinosaur fixation from a young age. Fortunately for you, I’m not here to review news coverage on prehistoric animal research, although I should probably search for a place to submit reviews of certain dinosaur adjacent books.
Bear with me because this will be about horror short stories.
I grew up within driving distance of Pittsburgh and, specifically, the Carnegie Museum. We visited a few times. If I was going, then we were hitting the dinosaur fossils first. What you may not know about the phenomenal and massive Carnegie Museum is that it is two museums in one: natural history and art.
I had no problem looking at the art because it was cool from the grotesque torment through the modern humor, to say nothing of the bizarre sculptures. Also, the Impressionists made me chill out, so good for them and my mom.
The thing was that you walked the art galleries, passing through a chronological history of fine art. I may not have memorized centuries, but I definitely absorbed the ebb and flow of humanity’s approach to capturing existence in an image.
And it was intensely circumscribed so the march of gothic to classical and so on made sense to a developing brain. While not a news flash, the parallels to the written word are no secret. In ye olden times, you could write about torture and suffering as long as it was for the edification of others. But limits surrounded the writer’s allowance for expressing their own feelings. (Yes, artists bled on the canvas, but you had to make it clear that it was for the good of the general morality and not simply prurient or, Heaven Forbid, because you needed to express your personal feelings.)
Then, with abstraction and expressionism and so many ‘ism’s, we started screaming from the stage and stabbing the canvas and just yelling through the paint. Some turned out terribly well and others are forgotten.
Which brings me to the modern horror short story, where the boundaries have fallen in favor of personal expression. What can an author do in a world inundated with tropes? Maybe it depends on how they ended up on the playing field for scary stuff. A lot of writers utilize serial killers and final girls and ancient curses and mortifying monsters. They move them around like playing pieces. Others reconfigure life and the world in a way which comes out as horror. Lombardo and Joseph follow the latter path to great success.
These are stories driven by pain. The loss and suffering are right there on the surface, but it takes talent to supersede mere melancholy. The stories move and flex with rhythm and life and emotion. For a century or more, artists have been ripping open their chests and showing their hearts while also prying apart their skulls and displaying their minds. When it succeeds, it makes an honest connection with the reader, which must be cherished.
Let’s drill down a little into each of these collections. I particularly enjoyed Weekend at Escobar’s in Lombardo’s Please Don’t Tap on the Glass. Here we have a down-on-his-luck protagonist following a last chance into the ultimate Narcos den of iniquity. If only Sean Penn had read this story before his own ill-advised visit.
This could have been a knock off from From Dusk Til Dawn, but it transcends that humble setup by imbuing its main character with a tragic backstory. I’m usually the first to complain when a movie or book pauses to give reasons to a character. Contrast the latest villain du jour who survived a paint-by-number awful childhood with Lombardo’s use of personal experience. This is classic writers’ room vs. writer’s room.
Every story in Hell Hath No Sorrow has a kick to it, so when the protagonist wakes “in a puddle of breast milk” then the road ahead is expansive though certainly filled with landmines. Joseph’s story, Bloodline is a kick in the procreative impulse. Pregnancy, delivery, etc., is ripe with potential for horrific storytelling. Left Hand Torment reads like a heady mix of Karl Edward Wagner and Poppy Z. Brite. The difficulty in crafting short stories is finding the right when in and the right way out. When a trope like a protagonist telling her tale of horror feels immediate and fresh, you know you can trust the artist. The real beauty in Joseph’s tale-spinning is her ability to ground the stories from the get-go and then let them spin out of control. It’s as if Shirley Jackson blossomed in Louisiana instead of New England.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that Lombardo’s book provided the basis for one successful film, I’m Dreaming of a White Doomsday, and soon a second. You can find the former streaming on Amazon and support the latter, Dead Format, on Indiegogo. So many times, we have all read something and wished for it to be transformed into a movie. In a world where the author can make that happen, we ought to support the effort, especially when it is done with Lombardo’s skill, verve, and panache. Because let me assure you that I would stand in line or cue up on the streaming services for whichever story R.J. Joseph would choose to adapt to the screen.
Careful how quickly you consume these highly recommended collections
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Bio for Craig Brownlie
Find Craig on the usual social media and who knows where else? He's been busy submitting stories and books. His collection Thick As A Brick is available on Godless. In the meantime, read his stories in Wands: Year of Tarot, Space and Time Magazine, Unspeakable Horrors 3: Dark Rainbow Rising, Jersey Devil Press, Lovecraftiana, Stranger With Friction, No More Resolutions, and Demons & Death Drops.
He will have three books out by mid-October in his Little Books of Pain series: Hammer, Nail, Foot, Thick As A Brick, and A Book of Practical Monsters. These are in addition to the re-release of his middle-grade novel Comic Book Summer.
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