Families in the American Pack have deadly agendas in Kelley Armstrong’s collection of werewolf tales, Men of the Otherworld.

Out of the two novellas and two short stories here, I’d already read three in previous incarnations, when they were available free on the author’s website. Now they can only be found in this anthology, with the proceeds going to World Literacy of Canada.

“Ascension” is a fine short, focusing on Jeremy Danvers’s birth. The racist, unlikable Malcolm Danvers manages to attract a quiet Japanese lass, but she has a definite plan to keep the resulting baby from his father.

Review by Tez Miller

The Trouble With Being God is the first book published by William F. Aicher, about a journalist named Steven Carvelle and the murders he is covering. Dubbed a “philosophical thriller,” The Trouble With Being God delves into heady themes while we watch Steven’s struggle with one question, “Did he do it? Did he really commit those murders?”

Part-horror, part-thriller, the book is written well and attempts to bring in philosophical questions from a non-believer’s perspective. Structurally, the chapters are fairly short and Aicher offers a suggested song playlist to play right along with every chapter.

“Midnight Harvest” (OWC4003) is the second of three Call of Cthulhu adventures currently available from Super Genius Games. While “The Doom From Below” suggested ways to tie the other two adventures to it, this adventure does not. In this modern-day adventure designed for four to eight investigators, players are introduced to the town of Five Lanterns, Rhode Island (suggestions for running the adventure in either the 1890s or 1920s strengthen the book’s introduction) as it celebrates its annual Halloween bash. Of course, this is a CoC adventure so expect cultists, mad dreams, and more from the Things Man Is Not Meant To Know.

I like to start out with the book’s artwork and layout. The book’s cover art by Zak Plucinski depicts a group of trick-or-treaters going on their merry way while a dread skeletal figure looms just beyond their reach.

Review by Todd Cash

After reviewing Natasha Mostert’s book, Season of the Witch, I was curious to see how this up-and-coming author’s next book would fare. Keeper of Light and Dust is not a sequel to Season of the Witch, but was written as a stand-alone story about the duality of healing as it relates to chi. Mia Lockheart is a mystic protector, a healer who works as a tattoo artist in South London secretly guarding the lives of today’s warriors, a group of boxers. The villain of this tale is a modern day vampire, a man who learned how to steal chi, that mystical and ancient energy force that fuels our souls and provides us with life’s energy.

Well-researched, Keeper of Light and Dust is an excellent nod to the modern day sport of boxing mixed with the ancient form of martial arts. Not often do we find athletics at the center of a supernatural tale, and it’s refreshing to read a book where the sport is part of the plot.

Friday the 13th opens with a flashback to Crystal Lake in 1980 as Alice beheads Pamela Voorhees with a machete. Then we’re introduced to a cadre of modern day horn dogs as they trek through the deep woods somewhere near the now abandoned Camp Crystal Lake. The coordinates of their marijuana crop have been programmed into their GPS unit, but they can’t seem to find anything. Sensing they’re close they decide to make camp and resume searching come morning. Hot casual sex ensues as well as some pot smoking followed by a cavalcade of brutal butchering courtesy of Jason Voorhees. And that’s just the prologue, ladies and gentlemen.

Review by Jason Thorson

The PDF opens with fiction to set the mood. While written well, the white text in a scripty font was pretty hard to read on a black background, so I missed a lot of the details. The first section dives right into discussion cross-pantheon politics with commonalities broken out. This is a very useful section for Storytellers because it offers a high-level overview of how the Atzlanti philosophy works versus the Pesedjet that they can use in and out of game. I really like sections like this one in game supplements because it helps water down conflicting ideas and offer ideas for players to work together in a game. Sometimes, finding common ground when your characters come from different pantheons can be a challenge.

Since monsters of various types are pretty much White Wolf Publishing’s stock and trade, it makes sense that they would attempt to diversify their product line to include horror-themed board or card games. One of White Wolf’s offerings, Monster Mayhem, has each player taking on the role of a different classic monster, seeking out victims and devouring those parts of them each fiend finds most delectable.

Players begin by selecting one of the five monsters – Vampire, Werewolf, Mummy, Zombie or Poltergeist – and placing the token for that monster on its starting space. The board is a grid of hexagons, and the players flesh out the city by placing the notable location tiles, either randomly or according to one of several sample layouts provided. Each player then draws three victims from the Victim deck and places that card by their monster’s data card.

Hurts so Good: A Friday the 13th Retrospective Part 1 wrapped up with Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Be sure to check out Retrospective Part 1 before continuing here.

There are so many Friday the 13th movies, even this retrospective gets a sequel. So let’s continue with our bloody stalk down memory lane as we try to answer the question: Despite these movies being so bad, why do I and millions of others love them?

Jason Thorson

Amanda Feral is back and just as glamorous (and bitchy) as she was in Happy Hour of the Damned. But make no mistake: Road Trip is a very different book than its predecessor. Sure, there are still risks of zombie “mistake” outbreaks, partially digested food, and gruesome murders (only some of which are performed by our heroes–and really, the murders they perform are a public service, not a crime).* But unlike Happy Hour, Road Trip begins with the assumption that the readers already know how Amanda’s world works. There’s much less meandering into explanations of zombies, vampires, and other supernaturals and more delving into Amanda’s troubled past.** Now that Amanda’s mother is on her death bed, Amanda struggles to come to terms with a childhood she’d really rather forget.

On February 13th, 2009 a new installment of horror cinema’s most prolific series opens, unlocking Camp Crystal Lake and unleashing Jason Voorhees on yet another generation of horror fans. By way of Michael Bay and Platinum Dunes, Marcus Nispel’s (Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake 2003) Friday the 13th re-imagining/remake will mark the twelfth time in the last 29 years that we’ve been given the opportunity to spend an hour and a half at Camp blood.

The Friday the 13th films are guilty pleasures one and all. They’ve contributed as much to the global pop cultural make up as any other film or film series made. The iconography in these movies is among the most recognizable, comparable to The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. The hockey mask-wearing, machete-wielding maniac is now considered cliché. Harry Manfredini’s musical score has been imitated arguably more than any other. And we all know what happens to those morally bankrupt youngsters who have sex, do drugs, and decide the investigate strange noises – rules that have become permanent fixtures in the horror genre.

Jason Thorson

Empty Room Studios produces full-color tiles for use with miniatures in an adventure-game setting. The sets I’ve looked at most closely are the Blasted Canyon and the Caverns Tiles Base Set 1.

The Blasted Canyon set provides a wide variety of terrain features that can be printed and cut out to produce more than four square feet of unique terrain. Box canyons, cul-de-sacs, a large temple, a marketplace, transition pieces, dungeon entrances, and an oasis are all included, each with either a desert background or with canyon walls added around the edges. This is a handsome set, and much thought clearly went into its design.

Review by Bill Bodden

Tales of the Seven Dogs Society is a collection of three short stories framed against the background of the Seven Dogs Society, the player group of Abstract Nova’s Aletheia RPG. If the game is unknown to you, I recommend taking a look at the reviews found at rpg.net, flamesrising.com and abstractnova.com, as they will reveal a great deal about the setting which I cannot go into here. The cover is one of Eric Lofgren’s typical pieces, showing an evil-looking man leering at the reader, with flames rising around him.

The short stories give some useful ideas for an Aletheia GM, and (if you don’t mind the spoilers), for some good ideas on how a PC can be integrated into the team – Matt McElroy’s narrator, a former private eye, for example, is recruited after getting a name for himself as a missing persons expert on ‘weird’ cases.

Review by Nick Lemming

After a long hiatus, Little Nightmares is back. This month, I’ll be covering somewhat related products from two different companies; full-color stand-up cardboard figures from Precis Intermedia, and ready-made maps from Empty Room Studios.

Precis Intermedia produces stand-up cardboard figures, called Disposable Heroes, in a variety of themes. Since this is Flames Rising, they sent us a pack of monsters to look over: Disposable Heroes: Horror Statix 1. The figures themselves are available in two different formats within each set: two-sided and three-sided. The two-sided figures may require some kind of plastic stand to assist them, as the fold is at the top like a sandwich board sign. Printing the figures on lightweight cardstock before cutting them apart will probably remove the need for bases – at least until the figure has a few miles on it and the crease begins to wear. The front of the figure is a full color image and the back is a black silhouette of the same image for ease in determining rear/surprise attacks.

Demons are more personal when one’s father is summoning them, in Cassandra Clare’s second Mortal Instruments novel, City of Ashes.

Shadowhunters (Nephilim) can defeat antags by carving runes on their skin and surroundings, and by using various blades and whatnot. But Clary Fray’s and Jace Wayland’s father Valentine has stolen a Mortal Instrument or two, using them to summon demons. Why? I’m not sure. Will the teens hunt down their dad and destroy him? There’s definite hunting, but we’ll have to wait for the final installment in the trilogy, City of Glass, for closure.

Review by Tez Miller

As I was currently playing a Wizard in a D&D 4E campaign, I figured that when the opportunity to review The Quintessential Wizard came up it was serendipity. When I created my character I was a little let down at the lack of options and flavor for building my arcanist. The choices available in comparison to the other classes seemed a bit…bland, or maybe un-unique. Same-ol, same-ol. The Quintessential Wizard goes a long way towards rectifying this.

One note: the book was designed by Italian studio Asterion Press, and there are a few instances where the translations show. Nothing major, the work they did was exceptional and I seriously doubt any of us could do better on an Italian published book. When reading, be a bit forgiving of a few awkwardly worded sentences.

Review by Jeff Preston

The best paranormal private investigators have been brought together in a single volume—and cases don’t come any harder than this.

This book offers something a little different from the several Urban Fantasy anthologies that have hit the shelves over the last couple of years (Blood Lite and Many Bloody Returns for example). Instead of a collection of short stories by a bunch of different authors, this book has four novellas. The novella allows the authors a chance to develop the plot a bit more and occasionally drop a few more twists and turns into the mystery.

Last house on the Left is director’s Wes Craven’s (Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream) first movie. It’s a low budget exploitation movie about two teenagers that head to the big city to attend a BloodLust concert. On the way they get kidnapped by a gang of escaped convicts that torture and rape them.Then the movie takes a turn into revenge tale territory where bad guys get their comeuppance. I thought the movie was OK, certainly not the masterpiece I expected to see, judging from the hype surrounding it. The plot is pretty standard fare, the characters rarely have any kind of motive or reasoning behind their actions and there are plot holes in most of the film.

Review by George Cotronis

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Scott Sigler’s book entitled Infected was my favorite read in 2008. Written as the first book in this series, Infected‘s sci-fi/horror mood was set by a few inventive elements. Infected explored the now infamous blue triangles (and their hatching) with the claustrophobic devolution of Perry Dawsey’s (the main character’s) mental state. The book was an absolutely thrilling work, and left me quite excited for Contagious, the next story in Sigler’s current trilogy. The third book entitled Pandemic is the last work in this trilogy.

Review by William Aicher.

White Wolf Publishing is well known for their Horror and Dark Fantasy RPGs. From the World of Darkness to games like Exalted: Abyssals, White Wolf creates great tabletop RPGs that define and shape gaming. In addition to their core game lines, White Wolf Alternative Publishing products include a wide selection of horror board games that range from World of Darkness games to fun board games for kids.

Flames Rising has been fortunate to receive support from White Wolf over the years; they’ve provided us with review copies, contest prizes and give-a-ways. When we mentioned we wanted to check out their recent selection of board games, Kelley Barnes-Herrmann (White Wolf Marketing Director and all-around awesome individual) agreed and sent us a box of games to dig into. The box arrived a day or two ago and we’ve only had the chance to crack them open a bit. So, what follows are our initial impressions after messing around with the contents and skimming the rules. More complete reviews will be on the way after we’ve had the chance to play the games.

12 to Midnight’s Skinwalker (TWL-0021) is a modern horror campaign using the fictitious town of Pinebox, Texas as its setting. I reviewed the “Savaged” version of the rules, but a D20 version of the same campaign exists. The PDF, which is sixty-plus pages, comes in a regular and printer-friendly format (I suppose that makes it 120-plus pages). As with most of 12 to Midnight’s products, the attention to detail is the first aspect that pulls in the reader. They love their haunted town so much that fans can visit their website (www.12tomidnight.com) and print out their own map of the city. This attention to detail is why the scenario never puts in the “you can adjust this campaign to fit your own setting” speech. They went ahead a built the town you would need to create for the campaign.

Review by Todd Cash