With fall in the air and the nights turning crisp, Daniel (@dungeondive) opens the channel’s book-review tradition with Matthew M. Bartlett’s Gateways to Abomination — his first Bartlett, and emphatically not his last. The book is neither a novel nor a story collection but what Daniel calls a fragmented novel: a couple dozen pieces, from a paragraph to ten pages, all set in Leeds, Massachusetts, and all orbiting WXXT — a nightmare radio station run by what may be a cult worshipping an amphibious leech-god, whose broadcasts addict listeners and make them do things. He reads two passages aloud, including the indelible image of a man walking into a diner carrying his own brain in cupped hands, and the ‘Uncle Red reads today’s news’ flash-fiction interludes. His verdict: it starts weak and finishes strong, sits in the Lovecraftian tradition without ever reading as pastiche, and — though self-published — is tightly edited, seriously intended work. He even rates parts of it above early Ligotti and Cisco, the reigning kings of weird fiction. The video closes with the incoming autumn stack: Kelly Link, Jeremy Robert Johnson (bought for the covers), Carmen Maria Machado, and Burke’s Sour Candy — plus a first-ever cameo from the dogs.
Daniel says the novella is the perfect length for horror. Do you agree — and what’s the best sub-200-page horror book you’ve ever read?