Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Burning Bulb Publishing, 2010, ISBN: 9781453844854) I’ve always enjoyed just a little more works of fiction that take place in locales with which I am familiar. It adds something special when I can not only visualize a place, but have actually been there. Having lived and traveled extensively in the northern half of West Virginia since moving here a little over four years ago, I found the locales in which Vincent places his vampires to be perfectly suited to both their peculiar sensibilities and those of their typical victims. Darkened Hills is the first installment of Darkened—The West Virginia Vampire Series (the second book, Darkened Hallow, is now available. It’s sitting on my shelf, ready to be read). It is the 2010 Book of the Year Winner from ForeWord Reviews Magazine and shares a publisher, Burning Bulb, with The Big Book of Bizarro, which I also recently reviewed. Vincent was a contributing editor. He has published several non-fiction books as well as the novel Passageway and...

(2011, Burning Bulb Publishing, www.burningbulbpublishing.com) by Joey Madia This ambitious collection of over 50 “bizarro” tales, edited by West Virginia authors Rich Bottles Jr. and Gary Lee Vincent, is divided into three sections: Horror, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, and Erotica. There are many definitions for the ever-evolving genre of “Bizarro,” including one in the book, although I define it simply as taking graphic violence and erotica a little further than the mainstream would and then, once it’s there, pushing it just a little further. The potential problem with this approach is that the violence and erotica wind up at times as being the whole point of the work, and there is no story; no craft. To the editors’ credit, there are few stories in this collection that fall into that trap and they stick out like a severed, rotting, puss-running thumb that had previously been up to no good in someone child’s back end (see how Bizarro works?). In this reviewer’s opinion, the strongest...