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Bastards of Alchemy
reviewed by
Bastards of Alchemy
Tom Piccirilli & Gerard Houarner
Necro Publications
Chapbook $9.95
ISBN 1-889186-30-9
When you're in the mood for some really dark fiction, it's safe to say you have a short list of authors you have come to know who deliver shocks and grue enough for you. If Tom Piccirilli and Gerard Houarner aren't on that short list, then by gum they ought to be! Go write them down now, before you forget.
Now, these two guys have written some of the most confoundingly gruesome horror—none of that simplistic A-Z stuff with them! No, you have to work for the thematic elements in novels such as The Beast That Was Max (Houarner) and A Lower Deep (Piccirilli). You can't skip pages or skim, and you're not likely to want to. In these short stories, however, their sometimes oblique thematic approach is shrunk to fit the space available, making the work more readily accessible. Without losing any of that trademark grue you wanted in the first place.
In "Alchemy," Tom Piccirilli tells of a group of hopeless post high school friends leading hopeless lives and—here's the true horror—knowing it. The narrator and his buds, Wes and Dan and Jude and Betty, head out for the point with a cooler full of beer, and then the bodies start to wash ashore... "A process, an alchemy designed to take what was common and turn it into the extraordinary." That's the least of it, I tell you. This one will give anybody the creeps, and leave you hollowed out.
Gerard Houarner's "The Bastard," on the other hand, deals with a different kind of hopelessness—which may or may not be madness, involving Gary, who converses with his father's skull while taking calls (and grotesque or bizarre assignments) from an arcane secret group he knows as "the unnameable path" which is dedicated to chaos. Only now there's a group within the group, and things may change. "The world was full of secret faiths in the invisible, conspiracies fearful of accomplishing their goal, cabals servicing the unknowable, each with their own taxonomy of lesser and flawed constructs of reality." If that doesn't blow your mind—along with some of Gary's tasks—I don't know what will.
Necro does a great job with signed and numbered chapbooks. This one stands out thanks to David Barnett's glossy cover art and Erik Wilson's interior illustrations, which complement the dark tone of the stories perfectly, making it yet another short but robust work worth perusing. And adding to your collection.