Release date: 2016
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: A lonely, nerdy paperboy encounters ancient evil on the shadowy back roads of his home town. A little girl spends her nights dreaming of monsters and teaching herself the art of murder. Sherlock Holmes journeys to America for an encounter with the ghost of a murdered woman. A samurai sails to a forgotten island to battle the living dead. Special ops soldiers fly the void to fight space pirates. A heartbroken junkie seeks vengeance for his murdered friend. Whistling Past the Graveyard is the first print collection of short fiction by New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. These creepy tales of horror, suspense, adventure and mystery take readers to the troubled little town of Pine Deep, to the Feudal Japan of the Samurai, to the angry red planet of John Carter of Mars, and elsewhere. These are strange journeys through nightmare land, with a five-time Bram Stoker Award winner as your guide.
The Review: This is a collection of short stories by Jonathan Maberry, who we know primarily for his V-Wars series – though none of the stories in this collection are from that world.
The stories come from either from other Maberry worlds or are standalone and those connected to other series can be read without knowing the series. The collection contains four stories from his Pine Deep stories – one set before the three novel series and three afterwards. Now, I haven’t read those books (they are now on my wishlist) and the stories worked without that but as some of the characters come from that series, whether incidental in these or central, I can’t help but think I’d have got even more out of these having read the novels.
What we discover is that the country town of Pine Deep was a scene of a massacre known as the Trouble – officially the scene of domestic terrorism, where drugs were put in the water and the town tore itself apart in hallucinatory paranoia, thousands dying. In actuality there was a mass outbreak of vampirism, and I kind of got the impression of Salem’s Lot with a lot more death and destruction and fight back. The Trouble is covered in the trilogy of novels.
In this we get three post Trouble stories each with vampires featured one way or another – plus something that eats vampires in one story and vampires who avoid human blood (for survival’s sake) in another. In the pre-trilogy story, we actually get a haunted house that offers a glimpse of a broken future and feeds off the despair – so almost a vampiric building. This story really did strike me as one that fans of the Pine Deep books would really enjoy.
All the stories contained within were strong, to tell the truth. I particularly liked a period Japanese based story and an outbreak of Spanish disease (or zombies). I’m scoring, of course, for the vampire shorts and I was impressed with the fact that the author managed to hook into a wider series but also keep them accessible for someone who hadn’t read it. The writing was crisp, as I would expect from Maberry, the action explosive and the book eminently readable. 8 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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