You are invited to look after the Kendall Reviews Cemetary, and to choose eight books, preferably horror/dark genre, to take with you to cover your shift; here you can discuss why you chose the books.
As well as the books, wardens are allowed one song/album to listen to. Again, an explanation for this choice is required.
You must also discuss one luxury item you can bring, which must be inanimate and not allow communication.
If you’d like to take part in The Graveyard Shift then please submit an application to gavin@kendallreviews.com
A new shift is about to begin. The warden for the week’s #GraveyardShift is…
Kyle Winkler
It’s 1986. Cade McCall is an assistant manager for a catering business.
Driving to work one morning, part of the local graveyard explodes. Later the same day, Cade gets an odd message from a client who needs catering for an Extreme Food Club.
He calls himself Mr. Dinosaur. And he’s paying $11,000. Despite Cade’s reservations, he takes the gig. Although, who’s feeding whom is another question entirely…
Involving female biker gangs, cults, possessed furniture, and a full dose of cosmic horror, The Nothing That Is serves up the weird.
You can read the Kendall Review for The Nothing That Is HERE
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
I was a rather relative latecomer to reading King in a sustained manner. Like a bunch of folks, I’d read a few things here and there. When I sat down to do a thorough reading of his catalogue, I started here. I don’t know why. But I don’t regret it. Everyone mentions that scene with the floating boy out the window, but scratch that. I have at least five scenes more terrifying. Want one? When Barlow appears out of nowhere in Mark Petrie’s house. And again, when Ben goes into the space underneath the flophouse to kill Barlow. The only book to make me jump out of my seat.
Come Closer by Sara Gran
I read this on the Kindle app on my phone in the dark mornings after I would take a walk. Or at night because it wouldn’t wake my kids up. Although, it scared the piss outta me. Probably because it’s a great first-person narrative about a woman who’s not entirely sure if she’s going crazy or getting possessed by a demon. I mean, the story leans heavily on her being possessed, which is played almost straight and is incredibly creepy. There’s a vision scene where the narrator is on a red sand beach and out of an ocean of blood, the demon in the shape of a beautiful woman lays next to her and comforts her. I wanted to hide in a lead bunker after reading that scene. It’s also a wonderful book about, I think, how women are driven to the brink of questioning their own sanity when in stifling and loveless relationships.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
This was a standout book for me in 2019. The first of a major dark fantasy trilogy. The intricacy James creates with African folklore and demonology is so admirable and inspiring. He’s a fucking wizard. Specifically, one of the creatures in the book are called Omoluzu. They walk on the ceiling. And if blood is flung upward, they appear and strike at you with shadow swords. The whole saga is about rumor and love and redemption and these magic doors that you can only go through one time. About a tracker going after a small boy; ghost children, witches, swamps. It’s amazing.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I mean. That scene. You know what I’m talking about. The one in the basement? Yeah. But really, this book is everything about McCarthy’s aesthetic stripped down into reified chunks. Almost like visceral prose poems. And in between those, these raw snippets of dialogue between father and son about evil, death, life, and persistence. One of the few books I stayed up all night to finish once I started it.
True Crime by Samantha Kolesnik
Break away star of the past few years. Easy. You get maybe two pages in and realize that what you’re reading is so far from anything you’ve read before. And it just keeps going. I’ll say this: the book is honest. It doesn’t flinch. And it’s not going to fucking compromise on you. Brother and sister escape a sexually abusive home and drive wild to try and survive but end up having to kill to do just that. Some characters are out of the frying pan and into the volcano. That’s this type of story.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The whole thing is a mess of anxiety—and it’s practically 1,000 pages long! But “Part 4: The Part about the Murders” is far nastier than anything ever written. The book is ostensibly about a group of different people trying to find out who’s killing all the women in Santa Teresa (a thinly veiled version of real-life Ciudad Juarez). Thousands of women over a number of years have been murdered or disappear and dumped in very public, very abandoned places. They work in the maquiladoras, the factories on the border. Suspects have included the cartels, those surrounding them with enough power to rape and kill women, and just plain old misogyny and copycat killers. Bolaño ties in his potential killer, a reclusive author, into this. But the fourth part of the book is in itself a book, mind you, and is a long, almost forensic retelling of all the women who’d been found. He did extensive research for this part. It’s like reading autopsy report after autopsy report. And the straight-forward voice of it is brutalizing and will wear you down. I have friends who can’t finish the book because of this part. But power through. It’s worth it. This part of the book is also why I know what a “hyoid bone” is—because almost all the women found had theirs broken: a sure sign of strangulation.
My Dark Places by James Ellroy
The whole book is a cold but highly wound and deeply sad story of an unsolved murder—Ellroy’s own mother. I know everyone loves his fiction. And it’s great! But, for me, where he bears his soul and writes with such control, Ellroy elevates above the genre. It is a frenetic tale about hunting a murderer and also about a fragile young boy, Ellroy himself, trying to come to terms with that fact. And then trying to solve that murder as a grown man and a crime writer. There are few real origin stories in the world, especially those we’re served in superhero tales or in psychological fiction, but James Ellroy would not, in any way, be who he was if it was not for this one absolutely tragic event in his childhood. And you understand the total sadness of that fact immediately. The first line is my favorite line, ever, anywhere—“Some kids found her.”
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The quiet oppression of children by their unaware parents. That’s the theme here. There’s nothing more horrendous than that, and Gaiman is a master at exploring and exploiting that theme. But here, and not in his bigger books, does he set down a masterpiece. The narrator, grown, but looking back, remembers suddenly a story about meeting a magical neighbor girl and her mysterious family, about a housekeeper, come to stay with his family named Ursula, a horrible monster (literally) who wants to push out his mother and take over his father, and about how the girl and her family help the narrator-as-boy defeat this monster. It’s simple upon examination, but in execution, it may be one of the best, most well-composed, horror stories ever written. The imagery will last and haunt you well beyond the closing of the book. You definitely won’t be able to look at or hear canvas flapping in the wind anymore.
Album
The Grimmrobe Demos by Sunn O))) — I listened to this album every morning during the Fall of 2018 to Summer 2019 because I got up very early and wrote a novel called Grasshands. It was the first novel that got me an agent and which I submitted to editors. COVID sort of ruined that submission, but the album is a major reason why the book is good. Or finished. Sunn O))) are a guitar drone group, and their music is gloriously beautiful, I think. It’s what lava would sound like if it could play an instrument. Or what the core of the earth would like to listen to if it was stressed out. It’s dark and calming and inspirational and it girds the parts of me that like to write horror.
Luxury Item
I walk a lot, so I would probably be weaving in and out monitoring shit. I’d like a thermos of milky tea or black coffee. Also, when that runs out, I can use the thermos to bash people over the head if they try and eat my flesh.
The Nothing That Is
It’s 1986. Cade McCall is an assistant manager for a catering business.
Driving to work one morning, part of the local graveyard explodes. Later the same day, Cade gets an odd message from a client who needs catering for an Extreme Food Club.
He calls himself Mr. Dinosaur. And he’s paying $11,000. Despite Cade’s reservations, he takes the gig. Although, who’s feeding whom is another question entirely…
Involving female biker gangs, cults, possessed furniture, and a full dose of cosmic horror, The Nothing That Is serves up the weird.
You can buy The Nothing That Is from Amazon UK & Amazon US
Kyle Winkler
Kyle Winkler is the author of the cosmic horror novella The Nothing That Is. His stories appear in Conjunctions, Night Terrors, Novel Noctule, and forthcoming in Coffin Bell.
His website is www.kylewinkler.net. And he’s on Twitter @bleakhousing.
Leave a Reply