After 600 years of sleep, Coont Draculi emerged from his casket hungry and horny. No longer in his homeland of Romania, the vampire found himself ensconced in a mansion built at the foot of British Columbia’s coastal mountains. It was a strange new world he found himself in. 

“Igor,” he immediately said to his faithful slave, “bringeth the blood of a virgin maiden. I needeth thine nectar. Bathe shalt I in their blood as they surrender to mine desires.”

Unfortunately for the newly arisen monster from the 15th century, privy chambers had changed over the years. “Thou cannot bathe in maiden’s blood now, Master,” replied the slave. “The manse we live in only has a shower.”

Assembling a harem of succulent maidens was also going to be a problem for the Coont. It wasn’t like the good ol’ days in Transylvania when there were queens and princesses aplenty who were accessible to his charms.

The Coont settled on a single woman named Josephine, known locally as the blowjob queen of Vancouver. She was a druggie with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, but the horny bloodsucker was soon hooked on her opioid and psychoactive gifts. “Sinking his teeth into her neck, the vampire groaned with pleasure as he felt the crack cocaine, heroin and everything else Josephine had pushed through her system that day began to flow through his veins.”

Obviously, The Disciples of Coont Draculi isn’t your standard vampire story. Not only has author Paul Slatter written a spoof of Bram Stoker’s iconic monster novel, but he’s also written a blunt commentary on the worst traits of humanity. Overall, it’s funny and miserable at the same time. 

The Coont was supercilious and grand and looked like some kind of ridiculous street mime. At first, Josephine thought he was just an idiot from a local community theatrics club. Only later did she realize that he was a relic of the forgotten past. 

As entertaining as the Coont could be at times, the real hero of Slatter’s novel was Igor, the former medieval warrior with scars all over his body. He’d been granted immortality 600 years ago in exchange for servitude to the undying vampire. There was one catch, however; Igor would only live as long as the vampire lived. It was imperative that he kept his master safe. 

Over the years, Igor turned a blind eye to his master’s unholy perversions and had reinvented himself as a cultured gentleman. He was a violinist who played music composed for him by Antonio Vivaldi. On his walls hung original paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and others. And even though he was duty-bound to protect Coont Draculi, he was a relentless demon hunter who tried to rid the world of evil. 

But Igor was a phony. He didn’t deserve the gift of immortality. Deep down he knew that he should’ve killed Coont Draculi the first chance he got. “How long do you need to live?” asked a character late in the novel. “What gives you the right to eternal life when this bloodthirsty vampire has cut short so many?” 

[ The Disciples of Coont Draculi / By Paul Slatter / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9798861653817 ]

Satan’s Anus was a tricky route through some very tall and very rugged mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Treacherous to navigate, the passageway was nonetheless used by cartels to move illegal drugs from one distribution outpost to another. 

It was also a place where huge and dangerous cryptids lived. These eight-foot-tall monsters were notorious for pillaging isolated villages, killing pets, abducting children and raping men and women. “Few who ventured into Satan’s Anus ever returned,” said author J. Rocky Colavito, “and those who did were struck mad by the experience.” 

One night, a small plane carrying a big payload of heroin sputtered while passing through the passageway. The plane and its passengers crashed and burned. The illegal cargo, on the other hand, tumbled safely to the bottom of the gaping crevasse. 

The incident caught the attention of the local drug cartel and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Each organization dispatched paramilitary personnel to the area to assess the situation. It wasn’t a rescue mission, though. It was a recovery mission. Or rather, according to the lead DEA agent on the case, “It was a goosefuck of a mission.” 

The cartel goons and government agents arrived at the crash site simultaneously. Waiting for them was a raging sasquatch taller than two men and stronger than ten. He had ingested several doses of high-end smack and was alert, cognizant and hornier than hell. The recovery mission had suddenly turned into a suicide mission. 

In addition, six freewheelin’ coeds were having an orgy in a nearby cabin. These over-sexed kids would unwillingly play a big part in the third and final act of Colavito’s sleazy and violent novel. 

There was, in fact, a lot of sex and violence in SmackSquatch, but I wouldn’t call the sex erotic. There was nothing titillating about it. For example, here’s what happened the first time readers caught a glimpse of the sasquatch in action: “The beast picked up the dead body and raped it with his engorged penis, easily the size of a mature daikon radish. The corpse hung on his penis like a pig on a skewer. He then slid the husk back and forth, squeezing gore out of the ruptured carcass like toothpaste from a tube. He savaged the body until it fell apart.”

Things only got worst from there. A few pages later, the woodland monster approached one of the obligatory female characters. “The creature’s eyes were red with lust and she could see his penis rising. He rammed it into her mouth, shattering her front teeth. It tore open her epiglottis, and the spasms shattered her nasal cavity. The flood of semen cascaded into her lungs, drowning her.”

It’s hard to feel sorry for any of the characters, however. All of them (except two) were disposable. The DEA agents, the college kids and the cartel mercenaries all died in some horrible way. The slaughter even continued into the denouement. It was never-ending. 

[ SmackSquatch / By J. Rocky Colavito / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9798340845023 ]

Some monsters are born and some are made. And some, like Mouth, are simply bizarre glitches of nature. 

Mouth was certainly weird, but it wasn’t evil, predatory or ambulatory. It was just a hole in the ground with teeth like a leatherback turtle. When Wayne Rogers discovered the phenomenon in his seven-acre backyard, it felt a bit magical, like something out of a fairy tale. 

Rogers quickly turned his woodland fairy tale into a bloody nightmare. As a former horror movie director, he recognized an opportunity when he saw one. He immediately began abducting hitchhikers, runaways and criminals to throw into Mouth’s gaping maw. By the end of his “career,” Rogers produced a staggering 30 years worth of snuff films. The townspeople silently called him the Dillsboro Death Dealer.

Rogers was gone now, but Mouth was still in the forest and chewing up scenery. Its current caretakers were a pair of lonely and damaged misfits: 50-year-old Rusty and 19-year-old Abigail. There was no romance between them (thank god!) but the couple was united in their commitment to the hungry hole in the ground.

Even though Mouth looked like an old-school monster movie monster, Rusty didn’t consider it a monster at all. It was a living organism just like him. And besides, he didn’t consider the term “monster” to be negative. He saw beauty in the diversity of nature and that beauty was manifest in Mouth. “I think it may be my best friend,” said Rusty.

At this point, Joshua Hull’s debut novel makes a big pivot. Instead of being a full-on horror monster novel, Mouth morphs into a story of redemption and rebirth. Rusty, Abigail and their man-eating hole unite to form a strong family bond that’s surprisingly sweet. “Life had a funny way of fucking everything up,” said Hull, “but it also had a funny way of bringing misfits together.”

In addition to its life-affirming message, there’s a lot of jibber-jabber about movies and moviemaking in this short novel. In fact, the novel itself is sort of like a cross between two iconic films: Tremors and The Blair Witch Project. 

Even beyond that, it’s a love letter to the power of cinema. Rusty and Abigail found solace in the monster movies they watched as kids—most notably Jaws and The Blob—and movies gave them the hope to find light in the darkness. 

Said Abigail: “Movies are the best. They’re the greatest gift we’ve been given. Can you imagine where humanity would be without them? We would be lost, man. LOST. Movies make people feel alive. Without them we’d all be fucking miserable.” 

[ Mouth / By Joshua Hull / First Printing: March 2024 / ISBN: 9781959790020 ] 

When I pick a book to read (especially for this site) I have expectations. I want to see sentient flora, evil blobs, Nazi werewolves and zombie private investigators. I want to see a giant ape shove the Transamerica Pyramid up the ass of some otherworldly beast. 

I definitely don’t want to read a story about a man’s sad attempt to contact his dead sister. But c’est la vie, that’s exactly what I got in Beyond Here Be Monsters, the new anthology from author Gregory Frost.

“That Blissful Height” takes place a couple of centuries ago during the golden age of somnambulism, clairvoyance, metaphysics, alchemy and all that supernatural jazz. It was an exciting time in history when spiritualists were squinting into the inexpressible.

Even Robert Hare—a stuffy academic who thought all phenomena must be open to the proofs of science—saw some merit in mediumship. To prove his hypothesis, he hired numerous psychics to help locate his sister in the afterlife. He even went so far as to invent a Ouija board-like contraption called the Spiritoscope. 

After summoning his sister a few times (along with a group of famous dead people like George Washington, Isaac Newton, Lord Byron and others), Hare was honestly convinced that a communication pathway between the living and dead truly existed. 

Unfortunately, his carefully researched and documented theory was dismissed by everyone. Did he actually talk to his sister? Did he really discuss Saturn’s rings with Isaac Newton? No concrete evidence could be established because the entire business of spiritualism was clouded in trickery. “Did you genuinely believe you sat in the presence of Washington, Franklin and Newton?” asked one skeptical colleague. “Honestly, you’re as possessed as any medium ever claimed.” Poor Robert Hare, how desperately he wished to embrace those shabby spiritual charlatans. 

“That Blissful Height” is an excellent story and there are more delightful non-monster stories included in this collection as well—“The Final Act,” “No Others Are Genuine” and “Traveling On” to name a few 

But (thankfully) the book’s main agenda is monsters. In service to this programme, Frost partially rewrites Homer’s Odyssey (!!) to include vampires inside the Trojan Horse, he reports on Abraham Van Helsing’s first undead encounter and he follows two grifters as their dupery unexpectedly brings forth the “First Mother.” 

There’s also a few nods to Lovecraftian monsters in this volume—which is odd because in his endnotes, Frost confesses that he doesn’t like the writings of H.P. Lovecraft very much. I had to laugh because, despite his lofty reputation, I don’t care for Lovecraft and his clumsy purple prose either. 

If I had to choose, though, I’d say my favorite of these Lovecraft-inspired stories is “The Seal of New R’lyeh.” Cthulhu comes to Earth and destroys civilization. Later we find out that the cosmic creature is actually fleeing from a pantheon of ancient gods. There’s no doubt that Cthulhu is an immense and terrifying entity, but it’s nice to see ol’ octopus-head finally get a little well-deserved comeuppance. 

[ Beyond Here Be Monsters / By Gregory Frost / First Printing: November 2024 / ISBN: 9781958880265 ]

“I write whatever I feel like writing,” says author Grace Mirchandani on her website. “My books cover a wide variety of genres, tropes and styles.” Good for her. I hope her genre-hopping hero’s journey is fruitful.

But if I may be so bold, I’d like to encourage Mirchandani to stick with the science-fiction-monster-invasion sub-genre she plays around with in her novel The Them. It’s a terrific effort that’s a bit like H.G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds with a genderfuck twist along with plenty of heart and a little bit of humor. 

Like all SF invasion literature, Mirchandani’s novel taps into our insecurities about invincible alien forces coming to Earth unopposed. In this case, froggy neck-headed slug beasts slaughter two-thirds of the planet’s population before eventually abandoning their mission. And, for some inexplicable reason, these monsters really hate the ladies. They go out of their way to decapitate every woman they come across. That’s the big mystery in Mirchandani’s tale. 

In The War of the Worlds, the Martian invaders are defeated by indigenous microscopic bacteria. But in this case, it’s the female population who hold the key to forcing the aliens to retreat from Earth. Again, and like always, women are the best weapon for saving mankind.

The Them isn’t feminist science fiction, however. There’s no male/female paradigm to smash or political message to explore. The action and storytelling is pretty straightforward. I can only imagine what kind of novel Mary Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin or Lois McMaster Bujold would have written given the same milieu.

Instead, Mirchandani finds a way to keep her storytelling as chipper as possible. She gives us a gaggle of characters who never pictured themselves in an apocalyptical scenario. Instead of being comic book superheroes, they turn out to be a motley crew of helpless victims. 

Readers see the invasion through the eyes of three main characters. Brian and Tamara are two regular people trying to survive the tragic loss of their partners. They’re hanging on as best they can. 

It’s Cal, on the other hand, who’s the wildcard. I wouldn’t call him an idiot savant, but he’s definitely an eccentric guy who possesses extraordinary survival skills. He helps his friends navigate the situation and is a valuable expositional tool for the author. 

In due course, Cal figures everything out. He understands the power of women and he finds a way to weaponize it against the invading space monsters. “We hold all the cards now,” he says triumphantly. “We found their kryptonite. It’s time to reclaim our planet and send those fuckers home.”

[ The Them / By Grace Mirchandani / First Printing: July 2024 / ISBN: 9798329433890 ] 

Forget about Christmas and all that Winter Solstice stuff. In my opinion, Halloween is the most wonderful time of the year. It’s even better than Ice Cream Sandwich Day, Chocolate Covered Cherry Day, Bourbon Day and Free Comic Book Day. 

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. I’m sure publisher/writer Christofer Nigro agrees with me. For proof, I recommend that you check out his latest effort Halloween Horrors, Vol. 1. 

The holiday-themed novel is about a young girl’s ill-advised alliance with Lord Samhain and includes a klatch of Wizard of Oz-like monsters including a murderous scarecrow, a rampaging android and a werewolf. For fun, Nigro also throws in a couple of otherworldly monsters from the All Hallows’ Realm. 

Samhain is no joke. Generally, he’s referred to as the Lord of Darkness, but some people think he’s the Celtic God of Death. Either way, he’s not the kind of deity you want to fool around with—especially if you’re a high school kid named Jennie Quinn. 

Jennie is a girl obsessed with ancient Celtic mythology and the tenets of the Book of Samhain. She says she wants to bring back the good ol’ days of Druidry, but secretly, she simply wants to crush all the bullies at school. If possible, she’d like to kill her older sister too. 

At first, Lord Samhain is happy to make Jennie’s dreams come true. And why not? He’s a bad mammy jammy who enjoys causing mayhem on Halloween. With delight, he helps his young charge fulfill her reign of revenge. 

But after a while, the ancient Celtic god goes rogue. He’s got his own agenda. And besides, he hates Jennie. She’s a brat with a potty mouth who barely understands the magick surrounding her. 

The story follows Jennie as she terrorizes her home town killing cheerleaders, jocks and anyone else who gets in her way. Ostensibly she’s the villain protagonist of Halloween Horrors.

It’s Lord Samhain, however, who steals the show. He’s seven-feet tall with an oversized jack-o’-lantern head. He’s got rows of ultra-sharp teeth and his eyes possess a radiant yellow glow like a candle being lit inside his head. He is a charismatic blowhard who talks like a megalomaniacal Marvel supervillain. In other words, he’s a lot of fun. 

Eventually Halloween comes to an end. Lord Samhain gets “dispersed” and Jennie is captured and sent to the local psych ward. “You can’t keep me there forever, fuckers!” Jennie says as she’s loaded into the back of an EMS vehicle. “Look what I did tonight! I’ll do better next Halloween!” To be continued in Volume Two of Halloween Horrors. 

[ Halloween Horrors, Vol. 1 / By Christofer Nigro with Dustin Dreyling / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9798990366145 ]

All monsters crave a mate. King Kong, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Phantom of the Opera all notoriously pursued a pretty young lady for companionship. 

Probably the most famous example of this trope remains Frankenstein’s original monster. Brought back from the dead, the creature asked his creator for a similarly cast bride. “Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?” he cried. 

Acid Green, the Frankenstein-like creature in Loretta Kendall’s latest novel, suffered from the same unrequited desire. Unfortunately, he was having trouble finding someone who could match his preternatural passion. 

Acid was a big time horror movie star and a real-life reanimated monster. “He was twice as sexy as any human actor,” wrote Kendall, “with more charisma than the original Frankenstein.” In fact, he was so handsome, he had to use monster prosthetics to make himself look more threatening on screen. 

Even though Acid was a heartthrob to thousands of ghoulish groupies who doted over him like a goth king, he was a lonely guy. Being undead meant that he lived in a shadowy realm somewhere between life and death. And as a result, it was difficult for him to relate to normal woman.

That was before he met Roxy Malone, however. She was anything but normal. A punk rock queen who came on like a wrecking ball, she had a mad crush on Acid—the only man who made her lady parts quiver, despite the neon green hue to his skin. 

The attraction between Roxy and Acid was certainly explosive. In one chapter, their lovemaking took place during a rain storm. Thunder and lightning illuminated them like characters in a classic monster flick. “Howl for me,” Acid begged her. “Scream my name and let the stars know you’re mine!” In love or lust, the two were definitely wavering on the edge of romantic insanity together. 

Without a doubt there’s more sex in Twisted Diaries of a Monster Groupie than in any previous novel I’ve read by Loretta Kendall. The sex was more freaky too. Initially, Roxy and Acid’s affair was similar to the one between Harley Quinn and the Joker (and maybe Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious). But after a while, things became less rocky. “We’re a couple of misfits,” said Roxy philosophically, “but being different makes us special.”

There’s also a couple of crazy twists late in the novel that turn everything upside down. But even then, Roxy and Acid remain the dynamic duo of anarchy. One way or another, Roxy Malone was going to be the bride of a real-life Frankenstein monster. 

[ Twisted Diaries of a Monster Groupie / By Loretta Kendall / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9798344258126 ] 

Sasquatch Valley is a region in Canada that stretches north from Toronto to Pine River. If you want to learn more about this area, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Jason White’s latest effort. 

Attack on Sasquatch Valley includes four somewhat related stories about the convergence of ape-men and local residents. Mostly, the encounters don’t go well. But sometimes—maybe once or thrice in a generation—something miraculous occurs.  

A family of sasquatch kill a pack of hunters and kidnap a 16-year-old girl in the book’s first story. The massacre is horrible, but the abduction, captivity and implied rape of the young teenager is the real horror story. In this way, “The Horror at Dyer’s Grover” is a lot like The Searchers, the 1956 movie from director John Ford. 

The next story is just as sad. A Humane Society employee finds an injured sasquatch on the highway. But instead of administering humane aid to the poor creature, he imprisons it in the sewers below the city. “I’m going to be rich,” he says. “Famous!” 

A quarrelsome married couple have a disastrous confrontation with a sasquatch during a violent squall in the third story of this collection. The surprise ending of “I Am the Night” establishes the unescapable continuity that exists in Sasquatch Valley—and it certainly escalates the narrative to another level. 

And finally, the anthology ends with a sprawling tale of one man’s personal account of the region. It’s the perfect capper to this qualogy of stories. 

As a child, the anonymous narrator witnesses a group of sasquatch tear apart his best friend in the woods of Pine River. “I remember the sound of my friend’s arms being ripped from his torso,” he says. “I remember the look of pure enjoyment on the creatures’ faces. They used his arms as clubs, ramming them at his head and ribs. His screams didn’t stop until a blow cracked his skull.”

The narrator is spared, thankfully, when a female sasquatch interrupts the carnage. The boy doesn’t understand the woodland creature’s charity, but he quickly hightails it back to town and to safety. 

Now, 70 years later, the sasquatch have returned to Pine River for a July 1st Canada Day massacre. Fourteen people died that day, all of them beheaded. 

Just like in the past, the narrator’s life is saved. Months after the Pine Valley slaughter, the old man begins hearing nightly howling in the nearby woods. He knows that his sasquatch girlfriend is watching him and keeping him safe. It was an ineffable act of kindness that stretched across decades and generations.

[ Attack on Sasquatch Valley / By Jason White / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9780987856487 ]

When the vagina squids from Mars arrived on Earth, they found a home on the shore of a small northeastern beach in England. While acclimating to our ecosystem, they would rise from the sand like flowers reaching toward the sun—preying upon birds, crabs and seal pups. 

Their first human victim was a popular indie horror writer who was in town for a local comic book convention. One night after the con, he took a naive female fan out to the beach for some rape-y fun. Thus triggered, the squid-like creatures couldn’t control their appetite. They crushed the author’s testicles and pinched the bottom two inches of his cock. The aliens probed his anus for a moment before pushing forward, thrusting themselves deeper within his bowels. The young fangirl escaped the attack, but no one ever heard from the author again. Good riddance. 

The hungry squids were horrible Medusa-like monsters with wet and fleshy serpentine bodies. Their mouths were circular but misshapen orifices that contained rows and rows of razor-sharp gnashers. Early in the novel, a victim described one particular creature as an “anus with teeth.”

Readers might wonder: how did these creepy monsters get tagged with the name “vagina squids”? They could easily have been called butt munchers, urethra invaders or testi grinders.

The nickname was actually coined by a local stoner and conspiracy nut named Freddy “Roswell” Grady. He took one look at the squids and the word “vagina” immediately spilled out of his mouth. I don’t know why, maybe he had a bad experience with vagina dentate in the past. Who knows?

No matter what the invasive aliens were called, one thing was certain—they unfailingly attacked the most intimate parts of the human body. For example, a football player had a tentacle explore his urethra. At some point, his cock ruptured and split wide open like an overcooked sausage. A woman had her silicon implants ripped from her chest. And a pregnant lady watched as her unborn baby was snatched from her womb. 

In the most disturbing scene in the book, a woman was violently dragged below the sand. Here’s how co-authors Kelvin V.A. Allison and Renn White described the attack: “The woman screeched as one of the squids pushed between her thighs, thick tentacles probing at her exposed labia, barbs tearing into her folds of flesh, pushing hard to get inside. She lost control of her bladder in fear, the hot urine coating the creature. In a frenzy, the monster dug at her opening, forcing its tentacles deeper inside and ripping her vulnerable cervix to bloody shreds.”

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The authors continued unabated with their tentacle rape narrative: “The woman grunted in horror as her body suddenly jerked in unwanted ecstasy. The harder she writhed in denial, the faster the creature thrust with its thick tentacles, over and over until she came in a brutal climax of agony.”

[ Vagina Squids From Mars / By Kelvin V.A. Allison & Renn White / First Printing: April 2024 / ISBN: 9798322487630 ]

When a cleanup crew find a patch of radioactive orange muck alongside a forrest stream, readers immediately know what’s going to happen in Terror at Back Woods Lodge by Eddie Generous—there’s gonna be one or two mutated beasties causing trouble before the novel ends. And just like the berserker bear-thing from the 1979 movie Prophecy, the creatures will be insatiable with unbounded toxic rage.  

The story begins in 1911 but quickly jumps to the mid-90s, a time when people are obsessed with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Generous uses the trial as a timestamp for his story, but nothing more substantial. His attempt to connect the dots between O.J. and one of his characters is half-baked at best. 

Tracey and Luna have mortgaged their future by turning an old, abandoned lodge in the Vancouver woods into a retreat for divorced artists. This kooky business plan makes sense to Tracey. “Divorce works just like shining a light on plants,” she explains. “The plants are free to grow, to breathe, to bloom and that often happens through art.”

Everything’s going great at first. Each morning artist-in-residence Paul Webster takes his students on field trips while teaching them about craft and creative expression. Mostly, his enthusiastic lectures sound like freshman-level RISD pep talks, but his heart’s in the right place. No one disagrees when he says “art doesn’t have to be what the world expects of it.”   

The idyllic artistic getaway soon becomes the hunting ground for a 15-foot-tall rat walking on two legs. It’s a rat but also decidedly un-rat-like, says the author. It actually resembles both a rat and a bear and maybe even a man. To quote one of the early victims: “It’s a monster! A real-life monster! It’s a fucking monster!!”

One by one, the artists-in-attendance are killed and chewed up like a wad of Big League Chew bubblegum. In a bold twist, Generous even kills the hero of his damn story. The death scene is so unexpected, I had to read it twice (maybe three times) before it sank into my thick skull. 

What happens in the end is a total scream (in a good way). I can’t say anything specific or the spoiler police will destroy me on social media. But suffice to say, the author is able to cross the finish line in the most monsterific way possible. Good job. 

[ Terror at Back Woods Lodge / By Eddie Generous / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9781998763443 ]