Oooooooo spoooooooky! Some of our friends over at Tales From The Parent’s Basement decided to do a fun podcast centering on horror films, in particular some of the offerings from British film makers over the years! It looks like once a month they will have a new podcast featuring two movies which they announced a month prior, so the listeners can also have a chance to watch the films and participate. Pretty nifty idea, and I will be trying to get my hands on a few of those films to give them a watch!

Films for next month: The Mummy (Hammer, 1959), The Blood On Satan’s Claw (Tigon, 1970)

Also, check out that sweet banner created by Andy Bloor!

I recently had the pleasure of checking out a book that combines two of my loves: blueberry muffins and big band music! But that is a tale and blog post for another time. Instead I am going to let you know about a pretty well done horror book that blends the western and zombie genres in a very intriguing way: Dead or Alive from author William Harms.

Dead or Alive follows two brothers, one as awnry as they come, and the one just trying to reign in his brother’s terrible misdeeds so they don’t end up in jail, or worse yet, dead. After losing their family farm several years back, and their father to suicide, the brothers have been migrating from one work farm to another, trying to scrap by a living, but things always run afoul for the two. Finally fed up with the way their life is going, the two brothers end up robbing a stage coach, killing several men in the process. Escaping after the cash grab, they stumble into some trouble, and unwittingly, bring it upon a small town . . . yep, as you can guess, a good ol’ case of the undead!

The little bit I have read about William Harms has led me to believe he is known for being a horror writer, but I will be damned if this guy should not be writing Western tales. The plotting and feel of the book for the first half is nothing short of nailing what the genre is all about, especially when you throw in some of the wicked characters that make the brothers’ lives a living hell (although who is to say two murderers don’t deserve what they got coming).

That all being said, the novel in the middle 50 pages or so for me hit a real dry spot, right when the breakout of the zombie plague begins to hit, and had me worried that a great book I was really enjoying was going to fall flat once the new element was introduced. It did for awhile, and I honestly wondered if it was the same author handling this section of the story, as everything I loved from the beginning seemed to go missing. But as quickly as the book took a down spin for me, it soared right back up to deliver punch after punch of what I can only describe as great horror story action!

So, with the rough patch aside, this is one book I can recommend to fans of both the zombie genre and the classic Old West tales, and it being a very enthusiastic recommendation at that! I will be checking out some of the author’s past work, and look forward to checking out future stories, including his 39 Minutes comic book coming out from Top Cow.

Score: 3.95/5 (For John’s enjoyment of the series)

Recommend for: Fans of Old West stories and zombie tales, fans of the movie Ravenous

Links:

http://williamharms.typepad.com/

Click the picture at top to be taken to the Amazon page where you can purchase this book.

Edit: How can I not check out his Impaler series when it has a page like this!