Gary A. Braunbeck

This time in the Horror Review Corner, we have a pair of chapbooks by Ohio author Gary A. Braunbeck. Gary is a horror write who recently served as president of the Horror Writers Association.

Gary serves up a hot dish of horror in abandonment, loneliness and alienation in both of these stories. The horror is in humanity-what we do to each other-in the deliberate evils we perpetrate on one another or the thoughtless indifference we inflict, blind to the bleeding souls we leave behind. In these chapbooks it’s not the zombies or the bloody ghosts that kept me wide awake at night. It was the nameless D.J. desperately seeking a simple phone call or Alan, the homeless writer with nowhere to go save the rundown tree house from his youth. Their quiet desperation screamed volumes.

We Now Pause for Station Identification

This chapbook won the 2005 Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction. It came out two years after Brian Keene’s Stoker winning fast-zombie book The Rising. This is significant because We Now Pause is a zombie story, Gary’s only zombie story, and is dedicated to Brian. The Rising pushed the zombie genre in its revelation of what the zombies actually were and Gary pushed it even further from the George Romero archetypal zombie.

In Gary’s world the zombies are the dead, returned to the world of the living and at first it seemed like a wondrous thing - the living spared the loss of loved ones. But it soured fast. The zombies weren’t back to eat their families but what they did do was unprecedented in the annals of zombie literature, equally destructive in its own way and so very Gary.

The story revolves around a lone DJ at WGAB, broadcasting to anyone left alive to listen. It’s been days since he locked himself in the broadcast booth and he is slipping at the end of his rope. The story is his rambling monologue as he begs and pleads for a caller - for anyone else to be left alive.

Then he tells to story of Laura McCoy, a former employee of the radio station and her sad fate. How she lived, how she died and how she came back is perhaps the most powerful part of the story. The nameless DJ, suffering the loneliness and teetering on the edge of destruction, recounts the story of how she was destroyed by loneliness with the clarity and empathy provided by hindsight which leads to an ironic twist at the end.

I don’t want to ruin the story for you but take a good hard look at the Chad Savage illustration on the cover. That isn’t representative art. That’s one of Gary’s zombies. Read the story or listen to the author reading on Gary’s website. You won’t be sorry.

And you’ll never trust a zombie, no matter how nice they seem to be.

We Now Pause for Station Identification is available for purchase from the Endeavor Press website, however, as an added treat you can hop over to Gary Braunbeck’s Official Website and listen to an audio recording of Gary reading the entire story or watch the reading in a 3 part video.

Smiling Faces Sometimes

Gary A. Braunbeck

Alan is a writer who has hit rock bottom. His leg is damage from a motorcycle accident, his marriage dissolved, his heart still grieving the loss of his infant daughter and his spirit broken. With his house locked against him due to foreclosure, Alan has no place to go and no help is possible until the following Monday.

Alan returns to the place where his life was once golden and full of friends - the tree house where he, “Brian, Kevin, Tony, Johnny and Sam” swore a blood oath, becoming the Last Defenders of the Valley Forge and pledged friendship forever.

The friends have all gone, scattered to the winds, and all that is left of them is the blood collected the day they all swore the oath. But this is Cedar Hill and in Cedar Hill, Ohio, weird things happen . . . a lot.

Using the mysteriously preserved blood gathered in a jar, Alan summons the blood ghosts of his former friends to read the one manuscript he never read to anybody - the story of his life and his loss. For this is the last meeting of the Last Defenders.

The final image that Gary closes with is priceless. And speaking of images, publisher and artist Keith Minnion did a superb job of illustrating the story and putting together the most artful and beautiful paper bound chapbook I’ve ever held. That artwork is well preserved in the special offering Adobe Acrobat document version of Smiling Faces Sometimes, now available for reading on the White Noise website. Printed in a limited 150 copy run, the chapbook has sold out but The Horror Mall is taking names and e-mails addresses of those willing to go on a waiting list for the next time a copy becomes available.

Until next time . . .