This means you have every right to to distrust my objectivity.
Well, allow me to defend my objectivity credentials. I brutally trashed this author's first book on Amazon when it first came out. (I've since retracted the review because it was unnecessarily harsh and it was mostly just me lashing out because I was frustrated with my personal and creative life at the time.)
Here's the kind of guy this author is: he responded to my reckless projectile pooping all over his first literary effort...by inviting me over to watch a horror film with him.
(He kind of embodies what I like about my town- briefly chat with anyone you pass on the street and they'll tell you about their painting, music they make on the side, book about living with HIV, custom rockware, photography business, movies they make on the side, chainmail jewelry store, radio station they jump-started, best-selling book, photography-innovation invention, gaming card art, or music studio. The creative energy is high around here.)
He wrote four books and got them all published. This joker contacted his first publisher via MySpace and got a publishing deal out of it. Good trick.
He told me about his new book in the works, which I'm stoked about. I can't publicly discuss it, but it's gross and funny. And if he continues the upward trajectory his work has followed so far, it should be an outstanding work of horror.
Deane came out swinging with a Southern-fried werewolf tale. It feels like an early Joe R. Lansdale story set in Virginia and this debut novel has its pros and cons.
Pros: the main character is well-developed and likable. This is a huge plus, as most horror movies and novels suffer from UCS (Unlikeable Character Syndrome). Also, the setting is very well-established. The surreal street that the main character lives on with all his colorful neighbors has verisimilitude and other fancy words. The violence is vivid and well-written. Example: the werewolf rips into a dude's back, grabs his spine, and lifts him like a sixpack. Ouch. Haven't heard that one before. Deane has an eye for detail and he knows where the cool parts are.
Cons: some of the plot twists are forced. The inciting incident is when the main character gets ejected from a party and kicked out into the cold in an interaction that makes very little sense. It made the character feel too much like a piece being pushed onto a chessboard. The identity of the werewolf isn't milked for any mystery, either. It's just kind of abruptly revealed without any suspense. Also- like Joe R. Lansdale- this book is jam-packed with similes. Too jam-packed. The wise-ass descriptions are colorful and sometimes funny, but they interfere with the narrative flow.
All in all, it's okay for a first book. It could have been great with another pass on the revision.
This is a shorter effort and short = sweet here.
This one's a (presumably autobiographical) tale of a band on tour taking a wrong turn and getting terrorized by a family with very special teeth.
This quick riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre works well enough. Some of the prose problems from The Sticks are also present here, but Deane writes believably and vividly.
Good luck finding it, though. Far as I can tell, there are 52 copies of this thing in existence. You can buy one here for $59.
This is a higher-quality piece of work. It captures the high school vibe well and does a good job yanking its main protagonist out of his normal life and into non-stop supernatural menace. The vampire is nasty and mean and not Twilight-y at all.
Deane does a good job painting his main character into a corner and his gift for writing likable characters and believable settings is on full display here. The main problem- again- is the torrent of similes. They stop the story cold almost every time. (Though yes, many of them are funny.)
This was a surprising departure from his previous horror novels. As bible study books go, it's okay. But I was just kind of surprised at the lack of spookiness.
I made it all the way to the end and I kept waiting for a twist ending or some big reveal- at least one ghoul or ghost or something. But nope- it's just a bible study book.
Just kidding, this is by some random other guy who happens to share the name Andy Deane.
This is where he really hits his stride. This is a siege story with our cabin-in-the-woods folks getting menaced by a tribe of werewolves. Something really unique here is that the werewolves sexually assault the males in the group. Deane takes the unfortunate misogynistic horror trope of rape-menace and inverts it, making the men the targets.
And it took four books, but Deane finally got his similes under control. I'm gonna take credit for that and say that he read my mean review of The Sticks on Amazon in 2009 and that made him decide to ease up on the figurative language. (Though in reality, he was probably just trying a different writing style.)
The end result: a great horror story with a lot of momentum. This is a consistently tense thriller, like a Jack Ketchum book with werewolves.
If I were you, I'd read this one first and check out his older books if you dig it.
-Phony McFakename
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