#daryl gregory

[ninawolv3rina]

Since my last horror recs post did so well, I thought I’d celebrate October’s beginning with another.

This time, we get a little sacrilegious. You know, for fun.

Between Two Fires

Revelator

Church of the Mountain of Flesh

Clown in a Cornfield

First Creation

[lottiesoka]

Revelator by Daryl Gregory

[inariedwards]

Reading rec

[ohwhatagloomyshow]

not a full endorsement yet cause I’m only about 25% through, but other cousins might like Daryl Gregory’s novel Revelator. Main character named Stella! Lovecraftian creatures in the hollers! at the very least I’m really digging it so far.

would also recommend Christina Henry’s The Ghost Tree, which is also about a cursed town. (I also recommend Christina Henry more broadly, her novel Alice is incredible.)

And because I’m tagging those authors/books - if you’re browsing the tags for these authors/books, 100% check out the visual novel point & click game Scarlet Hollow by Black Tabby Games on Steam! It’s phenomenal.

[rhetoricandlogic]

REVELATOR by Daryl Gregory

RELEASE DATE: Aug. 31, 2021

A bootlegger tries to kill her family's god in this gripping horror novel.

As a teenager during the Great Depression, Stella Wallace couldn’t wait to escape the Smoky Mountain valley where she was raised by her grandmother, Motty. Her fantasy of escaping is understandable—she comes from a family that worships their own god, a ghostly apparition called Ghostdaddy who lives in a mountain. Stella meets the god for the first time when she’s 9 and is struck with a sense of “wonder so deep it was almost adoration”—but the charm of the god wears off as she realizes it’s more sinister than she first thought. Fifteen years later, Stella, now a brash bootlegger working in nearby Alcoa, Tennessee, gets word that Motty has died, and her thoughts immediately turn to Sunny, her 10-year-old cousin. Stella’s scared that Sunny will be adopted by Motty’s scheming brother, Hendrick, and that he’ll try to get the young girl to commune with the god the way that Stella once did, all in service of his Church of the God in the Mountain. Stella wants to rescue Sunny and kill the sinister god, but Hendrick will stop at nothing to gain control of the girl. Gregory’s novel is packed to the gills with action and suspense, and he has an enviable skill for characterization—the reader feels a connection with Stella, a complex woman who “had learned to do a passable impersonation of a normal person,” and even, at times, with the irascible Motty. The Smoky Mountains of Tennessee become a character as well, and Gregory writes about them beautifully. This is an excellent work of horror, perfectly structured and dark as a Tennessee night.

Smart, original, and scary as hell.

[pithia]

Something like an idea rose up in the back of his mind, gathered weight, and then crashed upon the beach of his consciousness: complete, beautiful, loud.

from "Even the Crumbs Were Delicious" by Daryl Gregory (The Starlit Wood)

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Seven Covers in Seven Days: THE ALBUM OF DR. MOREAU by Daryl Gregory.

tagged by @asexualbookbird

Every day post the cover of a book you love and tag someone to do the same!

tagging: @tinynavajoreads

[jellyfishjuliet]

trying not to cry about this story about a single mom and her daughters raising a zombie baby, but failing fast

[cranialgunk]

It doesn’t have to be Greek to us

I needed something to take the weight of Arrival off my mind. Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders was a very effective and enjoyable salve. It’s Daryl’s clever observations about life and the poesy he wraps it in that makes Spoonbenders such potent medicine. When we are introduced to Teddy Telemachus, he is cruising for women in the aisles of an upscale supermarket. He spies an attractive 40ish woman –…

[lottiesoka]

I stan one (1) eldritch magic wielding moonshiner

[vigilante-3073]

Masterlist

Bucky Barnes x Female Reader

Hold Me Part 2

Apology Flowers

Helping Hand

My Love Mine All Mine

Daryl Dixon x Female Reader

Cuddle For Warmth

Tree-hugger Part 2 Part 3

James Wilson x Female Reader

Blue Or Pink?

Cancer

Loss & Grief

Wedding Bells Or Separations?

Pretty In Pink

Distance

Insecurities

Infertility

Internships & Relationships

Dean Winchester x Female Reader

Ink

Snooze

Love Story

Fast Car

Figure You Out Part 2

Jason Kolchek x Female Reader

Chemistry

Carlisle Cullen x Female Reader

Diamonds

Edward Cullen x Female Reader

Daddy's Credit Card (Platonic) Part 2 Part 3

Harm

Rosalie Hale x Emmett Cullen x Female Reader

Mouse

Logan Howlett x Female Reader

Flowers In Bloom

Slice Of Heaven

Ultraviolence

Evan Buckley x Female Reader

All Those Who Go Unnoticed

[rhetoricandlogic]

Gary K. Wolfe and Adrienne Martini Review The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory

July 15, 2021Adrienne Martini, Gary K. Wolfe

Already in the public domain for years, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau has practi­cally spawned a microgenre all its own, with Brian Aldiss, Gwyneth Jones (as Ann Halam), Gene Wolfe, Theodora Goss, the Simpsons, and even Marlon Brando having a whack at the story or its characters and themes. I’m pretty sure, though, that Daryl Gregory is the first to come up with the notion that those human/beast hybrids would make a dandy boy band. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise; Gregory has been fasci­nated with the plasticity of the body and altered humans throughout his career: the grotesquely transformed residents of a small town in The Devil’s Alphabet, a zombie somehow raised from infancy in Raising Stony Mayhall, the victims of mutilations, cannibals, and cults in We Are All Completely Fine. The idea of mashing up the closest thing Wells wrote to a pure horror story with KPop-style media stardom might sound fatally whimsical, except for two things: the compassion with which Gregory customar­ily treats his most damaged characters, and his decision to cast the whole tale as a locked-room murder mystery with all its formal conventions, even to the point of quoting T.S. Eliot’s “five rules of detective fiction” (which, for the most part, Gregory cheerfully ignores).

Calling themselves the WyldBoyZ, the band members are all genetic human-animal hybrids, victims of a heinous Moreau-like program on a mysterious barge, which we eventually learn about as their backstory unfolds. Rescued by an Ecuadoran fishing boat after they escape, they become an international tabloid sensation, and then a musical sensation once they come under the management of a sleazy promoter who calls himself Dr. M – who has been ripping them off royally, mostly by taking advantage of their legal status (technically, they entered the country as livestock). As they gain fame, they inevitably adopt the de rigueur roles of boy band members – the romantic one (part bonobo), the shy one (part pangolin), the funny one (a giant bat), the smart one (part elephant), and the cute one (part ocelot). The mystery opens when Bobby O – the cute one – wakes up in his hotel room covered in blood, the butchered corpse of their manager in bed next to him. He has no memory of what happened after a wild party the night before, but he’s not the only suspect: another band member has been sleeping with the manager’s opportu­nistic wife. The detective assigned to the case, Lucia Delgado, also happens to be the mother of a nine-year-old WyldBoyZ superfan, setting up some tension as well as some rather sweet sitcom moments for later in the story.

As usual, Gregory writes with empathy and in­sight about the plight of damaged outsiders, as the unique problems and resentments of each of the band members emerge during the investigation. His neatest trick is keeping the grim backstory balanced with the sort of wacky good humor that teen superstars are expected to display, and with the formal demands of the locked-room proce­dural. The whole thing is structured as an album, with 14 tracks, an introduction, and a “bonus track,” and framed as a letter sent years later to the detective’s grown daughter, now a superstar herself. As with much of Gregory’s fiction, there’s a sentimental edge to the grotesquerie, and a grotesque edge to the comedy (which sometimes edges into James Morrow territory), but it all somehow works, thanks to Gregory’s essentially optimistic humanism and his apparent total lack of concern about recriminations from Wells’s vengeful ghost.

-Gary K. Wolfe

Daryl Gregory’s novella The Album of Dr. Moreau is a wink to the H.G. Wells novel but wholly its own detective story about a murder, an intrepid investigator, and genetic engineering. It’s about a million times more entertaining than both the Wells novel and the Val Kilmer-vehicle that was made from it.

It’s 2001 in Gregory’s Las Vegas. Last night, the WyldBoyZ, a boy band, played their last show. This morning, the band’s Svengali-esque Dr. M is discovered dead, shredded to death by someone or something with big claws. Band member Bobby woke up in the same bed as the dead doctor and, given that he’s part ocelot, happens to have very big claws. Detective Luce Delgado, who has her own very Vegas backstory, is called in to figure out whodunnit. The result is a straight-up detective tale with science fictional tropes about gene splic­ing underpinning the whole world. There are puns a’plenty and colorful characters to keep the tone brisk and engaging. Underneath, however, there are questions about what makes a human human, and that makes Gregory’s sleight-of-hand more meaningful than it first appears.

-Adrienne Martini