The Last Stand of the Great Texas Packrat

Steve Vernon brings us the tale of Texas Jack Page in The Last Stand of the Great Texas Packrat. This chapbook is available from White Noise Press and features the artwork of Keith Minnion. Each chapbook in this limited run is signed by both Steve and Keith. Again, the quality level of the small press never fails to impress me. This chapbook is going to stand up to the passage of time not just because of the story quality but because of the production quality as well. Each page features artwork that really helps set the tone of the story. By the time you reach the end you will feel as if you were there with Texas Jack page.

Texas Jack Page is a man who loves his books so don't be surprised to find a part of yourself in the character. This is a story of a man who loves what he reads and collects what he loves. Before the end of the story you will find yourself thinking "Do I have that many books to? Am I on the same path this guy is?" This story serves as a salute to authors and readers everywhere. Keep in mind that for every positive there is a negative. Yin and Yang. Black and white. That book collection of yours is pretty impressive and positive, or is it? I haven't decided which scares me more about The Last Stand of the Great Texas Packrat, the story itself or how much of the story I see in myself.

How much did I enjoy this chapbook? Enough that I bought a second copy just to give away to one lucky reader. The contest will be up within the next seven days.

Big "Thank you!" to Steve Vernon for permission to quote the following:

Texas Jack Page became a hermit. He lived alone in a trailer in the center of a flat Texas plain. The grocery boy brought him case after case of pork and beans. He learned to bake bread and make his own beer. The trailer's breathable space grew cloistered and thick with a miasma of ass-propelled methane and the aroma of brewing yeast.

And yet outside his trailer, outside his tiny world, his legend slowly metamorphosized. He was Texas Jack Page. Groveling sycophants e-mailed his screen name, begging for a glimpse of his dark secret world. The legend began and was added to, in entry after entry, a walking shroud sewn from a cybernetic sky full of countless message board threads.

Teas Jack Page said this. Texas Jack Page found that.

Online, Texas Jack Page was ten feet tall. His high-heeled boot prints stomped across the message boards of a hundred websites, touching lives and tantalizing the imagination of hungry young fiction cannibals.

One more thing: Call me Ishmael

Haunted Harbours Ghost Stories From Old Nova Scotia

Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia by Steve Vernon is a collection of twenty-one ghost stories from around the waterways of Nova Scotia. If you've had a hard time telling an author from a story teller this is the book that will set you straight. Steve puts on the hat of a story teller and invites you to sit and listen as he entertains with this book.

So far this is the only book I've reviewed here that is kid safe. You won't find graphic depictions of death. You won't find zombies dining on human flesh. You won't find vampires flying into the windows of young maidens with violent intentions. You will find some great ghost stories though. Perhaps you remember sitting around a campfire as a child and swapping stories. Of course you had the stories that ended with "the bloody hook was in the door!" or "and it was his feet scraping the roof she heard!" but the best stories were the ones told by the normally quiet adult. The stories that had you seeing shapes in the fire and hearing noises in the dark.

Growing up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico I heard plenty of ghost stories of the sea and was thrilled to see that I had not heard any of the stories Steve tells in Haunted Harbours. The stories here all come from actual ghost stories told in Nova Scotia that are still being told today. I enjoyed the stories so much I ordered a copy of the book for my brother, a boat captain himself.

None of the stories go over ten pages and most are much shorter than that. Steve does a wonderful job of giving us the setting, characters and haunt without overloading the stories with information we don't need. The settings of the stories require the use of some nautical terms but Steve gives enough detail that you don't have to guess at what he is describing.

While you could read through Haunted Harbours, it's only 120 pages, in one sitting I would suggest against it. Take the time to read and enjoy each story on it's own. These are stories you will find yourself telling to people around campfires or in taverns later. Let the stories soak into your system and become a part of you. Then you will become part of the story telling tradition and pass it along to others.

I really like the artwork on the cover by Michael Little and the interior art by John van der Woude. They really help set the mood of each story and spark your imagination. Last week a three masted ship, Stad Amsterdam, similar to the one on the cover of Haunted Harbours spent two days at the Port of Pensacola. Sadly the public was not allowed on the ship but we were able to enjoy some wonderful views of it up close. I had no problem visualizing characters from the book walking the deck and in the rigging of that ship while it was here. The story telling lived on.

It was difficult to come up with a paragraph or two to quote from Haunted Harbours because each story has it's voice that calls out to me. Anybody reading the stories will come up with their own favorite passage. I finally decided on the one below because it shows not only the commitment between a sailor and his captain but the commitment between friends. Big "Thank you!" to Steve Vernon for allowing me to quote the paragraphs below.

John MacNeil was dying. It was his last voyage home from trading in the Caribbean; he was dying of tropical fever and was afraid of being buried away from home - not for himself, you understand, but for his wife, who would worry about where he lay. "Don't bury me in the sea," he begged the captain. "For my bones will know no rest and my widow will weep out an ocean over my empty grave."

The captain was a good and honest man who'd known MacNeil most of his life. He hated to break faith with a sailor and a friend. "I'll do what I can," he promised. MacNeil passed on that night, but not before wringing one more promise from the captian, who swore on his father's good name that he'd see MacNeil's body laid to rest in the Isaac's Harbour Cemetery.

Nothing To Lose

Nothing To Lose was written by Steve Vernon and published by Nocturne Press. Let me start by saying I really hope there are more stories coming from Steve about this character. I loved it.

The book contains three stories about Captain Nothing. This guy is my kind of hero. Yes he wears a mask, or two, and believes in helping others. It's the way he goes about helping people that makes him so entertaining. Who needs heat vision or lightning speed when you have a brick and the bad guy doesn't hear you sneaking up behind him?

After reading Nothing To Lose I found myself wondering if Captain Nothing is a hero out to protect the innocent or a institutionalized patient simply sharing his delusions with us. Either way he is quite entertaining in the three stories.

The Glint Of Moonlight On Broken Glass - Captain Nothing encounters two men assaulting a woman with plans to rape her. If she knew the horrors that awaited her in the future she would have prayed for death instead of a savior. This story gives us the supernatural villain that every superhero must one day face. A being that feeds on the suffering of others. A being that takes the form of it's victims so that it can feed again.

Lamprey Fellatio - The problem with being a hero is there are people out to get you. After all, you can't have good without bad. All our hero wanted was to enjoy a night at The Sloppy Seconds and a few beers. Next thing he knows is his life goes from pleasure to pain as he finds himself chained to a cinder block and rapidly sinking. It's a fear we all have.

The Frozen Axe Of Winter Love - When you have no reason left to live the only thing you can do is die. This is the kind of story that will make you stop and give your mother/wife an extra hug in the morning and an extra kiss at night. If someone is determined to die then the heroic thing to do is comfort them before they go. Captain Nothing is just the man for the job.

So where is the "horror" in Nothing To Lose? Each person will find it in a different way. To me the horror comes from the crimes discussed in the book that you can read about in your newspaper every day. The horror comes from Captain Nothing's point of view. Once you see how he sees the world you learn there is something to be afraid of everywhere. The horror comes from the choices people make when they feel there is no choice left.

For those of us that grew up thinking "Batman should be more bad ass than this. He's the Dark Knight for crying out loud!" Steve Vernon has given us what we wanted. Captain Nothing is beyond cool.

I can't help but wonder if I was the only one to hear KISS singing their song "Nothing To Lose" while reading the book.

Special "Thank you!" to Steve for allowing me to quote the following:
Then I heard the scream. It was more than a scream. More like something was being pulled out of her, yanked and uprooted. I run like my feet have suddenly grown anvils; the purse rattling against my side like a bagful of hammers. In the moonlight I look like the world's ugliest drag queen, cape, purse and all. I don't care. She needs saving.

By the time I get there the screaming has stopped. She's lying in the mouth of the alleyway. Lying wreathed in a halo of sodium lamp, something dark pooling around her, moonlight glinting on a fresco of broken glass.

I have one more point to make today. Why can't the major publishing houses produce books of the same quality as the small publishers? I recently received Ghoul from Dorchester and saw Hannibal Rising at the book store. Both of these books, all of the Hannibal Rising copies in this particular store, were in ragged shape. Apparently the cutting blade used during production was dull. In both books some of the pages were not separated and they both had the very ragged ends that looked like the pages had been ripped apart instead of properly cut. I'm am constantly amazed by the production quality of the smaller publishers and Nocturne Press is one of them. Wonderful production quality for Nothing To Lose.