EXTREMES 2
Edited by Brian A. Hopkins
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REVIEW BY WILLIAM D. GAGLIANI
The most glaring obstacle to acceptance of the e-book format is its ephemeral quality. You can't hold an e-book or turn its pages; you can't feel the weight of its words. But Lone Wolf Publications, headed by award-winning author and editor Brian A. Hopkins, has quietly produced a line of e-books guaranteed to demolish this obstacle. Lone Wolf's flagship Extreme series combines short works of horror and dark fantasy in limited edition, numbered CD-ROMs. Each of the 321 disks produced includes outstanding original art along with a booklet signed by each contributor. Story introductions and author biographies may include photos, video and audio clips and breathtaking story illustrations for a true multimedia experience. The lush package will convince most skeptics, but what of the stories? The 20 tales of horror collected "from the ends of the earth" and published in Extremes 2 range from superb to excellent. Highlights of the anthology include Michael T. Huyck's "El Cura," possibly the best tale of the collection. In the chilling story, a fallen priest serves horrific penance on a riverbank at the hands of the primitive tribe he hoped to convert. In A.E. Roberts' samurai period-piece, "The Bonsai Artist," the dread-inducing prose is as sparse as bonsai clippings, but no less frightening. In Michael Caron's "The Nagual," a poor border resident sees his family torn apart by an evil spirit and the looming presence of the U.S., while in Daniel Pearlman's cinematic WWII set-piece, "The Colonel's Jeep," German arrogance and Jewish folklore clash on the lost Russian Front. In Extremes 2, we leave our familiar surroundings and reach into history and geography for a glance at man's evil side. Steve Eller's dry and dusty "Facets" details atrocities and the resulting comeuppance after a mine boss mistreats slave-like diamond miners. Simon Morden makes Americans the enemy and turns the walking dead into allies in the Cold War-tinged "Taiga, Taiga, Burning Bright," while Michael Kelly's "Basking in the White of the Midnight Sun" is an old-fashioned drawing-room pulp adventure tale set in the Fiji forest. It's a shame to ignore the vivid storytelling of the other contributors, including Charlee Jacob, Steve and Melanie Tem and Karen Jordan Allen, but all 20 of the stories in this adventurous collection use other cultures as catalysts for drama, forcibly proving that fiction need not be ethnocentric. On the heels of the successful first volume and this second set, Lone Wolf is set to roll out Extremes 3: Terror on the High Seas and Extremes 4: Darkest Africa in the next few months. Too rarely short fiction rings hollow because it lacks context, but these stories are grounded in our rich heritage of nasty deeds, teaching us lessons even as they entertain. Bill Gagliani is the author of Shadowplays from Ebooksonthe.net
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