Picking the Bones

Dying is easy. Living is hard. "Step back, back into the world of 1996..." "Dark fiction so numbing cold and cutting edge you better hold onto your ass with your free hand...There are no simple 'entertainments' or cheap grabs for the throat to be found here. Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day." So wrote critic Stanley Wiater about Brian Hodge's renowned first short fiction collection, The Convulsion Factory. Three collections later, nothing has changed. Well...maybe one or two trifling entertainments. A couple of cheap grabs for some body part or another. But that's about it. There are still plenty of fates worse than death. And the time has now come to advance to the fourth circle of Hell, whose 17 stations include: The award-winning "With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu," in which a hardened photojournalist glimpses the face behind the atrocities of war... "The Passion of the Beast," a report on the arcane origins and tragic premier of the flipside version of Mel Gibson's most famous movie... "The Firebrand Symphony," which seeds Lovecraftian terrors in the unlikely realms of vintage psychedelia and cinematic sound design... "Brushed In Blackest Silence," the chapter in the life of Dracula's Van Helsing that reunited Hodge with Dell/Abyss mastermind Jeanne Cavelos... "Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin," which finds one of the Middle Ages' seven towers of darkest iniquity thriving in modern-day Los Angeles... Dying is easy. Living is hard. And forces beyond your control have a bone to pick with you.