House of Leaves is a peculiar novel, not precisely one thing and not quite another. It isn’t quite a dark fantasy novel, it isn’t quite a horror novel, it isn’t quite a piece of kafkaesque surrealism and isn’t quite a cohesive work of fiction. It is at once pretentious and deep, confusing and captivating, disturbing and curious. The thrust of the story, which is really several stories, is the discovery of a peculiar manuscript by ‘Johnny Truant’ a no good tattoo artist and deadbeat who, thanks to the manuscript, seems to start a slow descent into madness. The manuscript came to him via Zampano, a crazy old man who died and from whom Johnny effectively stole it. The manuscript itself is an examination, investigation and critique into a strange film called The Navidson Record which records the peculiar happenings at the titular ‘House of Leaves’ a place owned by Navidson, his wife and their children and where the house takes on a sinister aspect as it shifts shape and time and seems to try and swallow them up, all of which is supposedly documented on a peculiar film that is doing the rounds.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The subtitle of this 2007 Permuted Press offering is ‘A novel about zombies.’ This isn’t entirely true. Ross fills his days with selling bootleg horror movies, cheating on his two-timing girlfriend and hating life in general. He feels trapped in a vicious circle of uselessness.

Just as he begins to resign himself to the mid-twenties twilight he seems unable to escape, he starts to notice men in radiation suits, following him. Filming him.

Review by Leah Clarke

I am an unabashed Peter F Hamilton fan. I was initially introduced to his work by my great friend (and co-writer on The Munchkin’s Guide to Powergaming) Steve Mortimer through his Mindstar series (a bio-modified psychic detective of sorts in a post-warming, post flood, post ‘socialist’ Britain) and then followed on through the brick-like Night’s Dawn series and on into Pandora’s Star. Most of his books I have liked I great deal (apart from Misspent Youth) to the point where I even negotiated, and held for a year, the RPG rights to Mindstar and Night’s Dawn – but nobody was interested in pursuing it.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

We’re proud to announce the first Flames Rising Fan Appreciation contest. Some of you may remember that Flames Rising hasn’t always been a horror and dark fantasy webzine; it started out as a Live Action Role-Playing Site devoted to those dark and brooding vampire clans from White Wolf’s Mind’s Eye Theatre system. Through a love for gaming and other things that go bump in the night, Flames has evolved to its current incarnation, a horror webzine that shines the spotlight on up-and-coming authors, horror artists, game designers, and more!

To celebrate the new site launch, we want to show our appreciation to the fans who make Flames Rising possible by returning to our dice pool and pencils. Prizes include a variety of products from Abstract Nova, Apophis Consortium, Bob Goat Press, Cubicle 7 Entertainment, Eden Studios, Evil Hat Productions, Monolith Graphics, Neoplastic Press, Rogue Games, Snarling Badger Games, Talisman Studios and 12 to Midnight.

We’re suckers, so we bought the collector’s edition. In this edition you get a nice tall box that you feel bad about throwing away, a six inch or so plastic figurine and… that’s it. *rattles the box, turns it upside down* yes… that’s all you get. No art book, no strategy guide or hint booklet. Just the plastic figurine. They didn’t exactly go all out. To make matters even more annoying they’ve plastered a ‘not for resale’ tag across the front of the game box so you can’t even trade in the game. After the wonderfulness of the Bioshock collector’s edition this was… a little aggravating. If you’re going to have a special edition and charge that much more for it you should really push the boat out a little and this just wasn’t the case with Assassin’s Creed.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Starring the voices of Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones and John Hurt

What do vampires, an ancient goddess and Hellboy have in common? In this animated feature film, Hellboy and all his friends take on myth in his signature, sardonic style. True to the mythos, there is a touch of good versus evil mixed in with some savvy backstory and character development.

Review by Monica Valentinelli

Lots of updates to the Flames Rising Amazon Store today. Horror & Dark Fantasy fiction, games, movies and more. Included in these updates is the option to pre-order: Ventrue: Lords Over the Damned (Vampire the Requiem) Battlestar Galactica (Season 3) Small Favor (Dresden Files) Purge the Unclean (Dark Heresy) Over at FlamesRising.RPGNow.com you can check […]

A Japanese terror movie remake is frequently a bad idea, but an American horror movie that looks like one is worst. “Wind chill” tries to tell a declared true story in a Japanese way. That means to use a claustrophobic atmosphere, an aesthetic style and especially a plot based on spirits that want revenge. But in the end, it’s just a nothing-happens movie with bad acting and lazy direction.

Review by Douglas Lobo

Do you enjoy listening to things that go bump in the night? Do you imagine what your favorite horror characters sound like in real life? Enter Psuedopod, a site devoted to bringing you original fiction read by passionate readers. The authors are paid for their efforts, yet the site is free to listeners and survives […]

Sometimes, as an author, you might have it in your head that you’re going to write a very long story. Instead of writing an “epic novel” in one book, you break it up into smaller pieces so that when the end is in sight, the pieces fall together neatly like a stack of dominoes. Small Favor was, to me, one of the dominoes of the over-arching plot. While it tied up a lot of previous plots, it also opened the door to a host of questions for Thomas, Murphy, Michael and, of course, Dresden.

Review by Monica Valentinelli

Bioshock tells the tale of a fallen utopia, I’ll try not to give too much away but you play jack, a survivor of a plane wreck in the mid-atlantic (actually the North Atlantic near Greenland and Iceland where the main plane route is if the coordinates given for Rapture’s location are right) who discovers this rotting vision and plays a key role in breaking a stalemate between two opposing forces there.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Review by: Jason Thorson

Sometimes the most innovative ideas are so simple, it’s amazing they haven’t already been done. Such is the case with Cloverfield – a giant monster movie shot entirely from the perspective of a character’s camcorder. Produced by J.J. Abrams, written by Drew Goddard, and directed by Matt Reeves, all of whom are television vets having been responsible for episodes of Lost, Buffy, Angel, Alias, and others, Cloverfield is more than merely Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project. It’s unique in that it attempts to give us fully developed characters to inhabit it’s high concept scenario and entirely besieged Manhattan setting.

The plot is exactly like the movie. The movie is good, so the book is good by default. It’s definitely a page turner. De Candido’s style is largely free of literary flourishes. It’s as if he literally transcribed Joss Whedon’s screenplay verbatim while tossing in only a few extras. Story-wise, I thought that the book could have gone into a little more depth than it does. However, it does elaborate a bit on the battle of Serenity.

Borrowing snippets from the back cover of the book, Blood Games II is an occult-horror role-playing game about courage, self-sacrifice and desperate heroism with no hope of reward. I think of it along the lines of “John Constantine meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. There are a lot of great ideas in the book and there is an underlying sinister tone that helps separate this game of occult horror from lighter traditional urban fantasy.

A Modern Fantasy game written by Stewart Wilson.

The simple version of the game’s premise is this: there is a magical world existing alongside our own. The Unaware cannot fully comprehend everything and so the magical realities of life are concealed from them.

You can now search by publisher at the Flames Rising eBook Shop. This includes lots of fiction and comics (in addition to all of the RPGs). Basically all of the publishers from the various OneBookShelf sites are now listed in one handy spot. For example, all of David Moody’s Autumn tales from Infected Books and […]

While its another dicepool system the roll-and-keep and the exploding dice seem to focus people’s attention on the game pretty well and make rolling the dice unpredictable enough to be exciting. Combine this with ‘raises’ (extra risk for extra effect) and the mechanics fairly naturally lend themselves to skilled characters using a bit of flair and expertise rather than simply hacking away.

Review by: Jason Thorson

David Slade has provided us genre geeks something to get excited about. 30 Days of Night is quite simply a very solid horror flick. All the ingredients for success are here: good acting, beautiful photography, and great source material. It’s scary, fun, and dramatic, while also giving us a nice example of the potential this genre has to deliver engaging stories. And if a month in the dark shows us anything about modern horror, it’s that David Slade’s future is looking very bright.

Twilight of the Dead now a free online read! Five years after the dead rose a small band of survivors has taken refuge in the fortified town of Eastpointe. When a newcomer arrives claiming to know the location of the antidote to the zombie plague, it sends the town into an uproar. To retrieve this […]

The Devil’s Rejects is Rob Zombie’s follow up to his House of 1,000 Corpses though most of it is so different to House of 1,000 Corpses, despite being a sequel, that you wonder if it really is a sequel in spirit. The Devil’s Rejects feels more like a remake than a sequel per se, a sequel made by someone who has come off the fun psychedelics and sobered up.