Román Leão

Tag: horror

  • Angel Down—Daniel Kraus

    I was not emotionally prepared for Daniel Kraus’ 2025 book, Angel Down. I can’t remember what drove me to pick it up in the first place, although it lives firmly within my wheelhouse. Man’s inhumanity to man? Check. The utter indifference of heaven? Check. Biblical allusions that don’t turn out like what you’ve been led to believe. Oh, yea.



    Had I looked up Kraus’ CV before jumping in, I would have noticed his bona fides as a past collaborator with such masters of the filmic horror genre no less than George A. Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Even so, I should have been tipped off by the cover blurb by one of my favorite authors of this decade, Stephen Graham Jones.

    There is a scene in Jones’ The Only Good Indian that still haunts me five years after I read it. Perhaps the saving grace of the depth of real horror that Kraus serves up from the trenches of the Western Front is that the senses become so overwhelmed that nothing sticks. In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, speaking on yet another war, Drive on, it don’t mean nothin’. Can you become shell-shocked from a novel?

    My favorite stories all have a memorable anti-hero, this book has five… well, four and a total innocent that is unfairly lumped in with the rest. These doughboys are saddled with a suicide mission precisely due to their expendability. Their vainglorious commanding officer, the only character that rings a little hollow, sends the mismatched quintet out to the middle of No Man’s Land as the division retreats as a way to rid himself of them all in one fell swoop.

    The relentless style that Kraus employs, as if the entire book were one run-on sentence, propels the reader headlong through the narrative, as if you, too, were scrambling over the broken pieces of men and machines in a desperate bid to save… oneself? A wayward angel? All of mankind? In the end, the effect is one of exhausted fatalism. “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones,” as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver famously stated.

    Krause is capable of dark flights of poetic abstraction as well, as best shown when our final anti-hero is driven into the center of the Earth, to Hell itself, in a peek behind the curtain that rivals the mechanical dread of Ken Kesey’s Combine, the machine behind the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Chae Burton 2

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    I guess Lucious Cole was just on our minds that night. He was all over the radio as he had just been reported missing. The pirate radio station out of Boonville had been playing nothing but National Loaf records all weekend. It was a weird soundtrack to the founding of Girassol.

    I was seeing Charlie at the time and he was helping Zongo and Enrique move a bunch of lumber and building materials up to the scene. I was a big Lucious Cole fan in those days, and was probably driving Charlie crazy by moping around his pad so he took me with him on some of the runs.

    You can say what you want about our generation, but when we set our minds to something, we can really get things done. I had never seen so many groovy people in one place working so hard.

    Everybody there had given up on the plastic lives that the prevailing death culture had prescribed for them. There was a real feeling that we were starting something authentic, for lack of a better word.

    I had just really gotten into astrology, and it was a new moon that night, the perfect time to be starting a new venture. So when this groovy chick brought out what we starting calling her Moon Juice, it was to celebrate the birth of a new society. It probably sounds naïve now, but we really thought that we could transcend the trips that our parents had laid on us.

    There were about a dozen of us all sitting around the bonfire, partaking of a little pakalolo, when the morning glory started coming on. I don’t remember who dug it first, but pretty soon we were all seeing a huge meteor streaking across the sky. It was so big and so close that you could hear it tearing through the atmosphere, and then as quickly as it came, it was gone.

  • The Return—Roberto Bolaño

    This collection of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s short stories reads like a Cliff Notes introduction to the world he traveled in, and in his literature, populated. The Return is stuffed with whores and hit men, poets and porn stars, Communists and black marketers, ghosts and conjurers, and (obviously) detectives.

    The book kicks off with a pair of stories about misplaced foreigners in Russia, one by choice, and the other by bureaucratic snafu. In Snow, a Chilean ex-pat living in Barcelona tells the story of when he was “a trainer’s assistant for a man of dubious and disconcerting moral character” in post-Soviet Moscow.

    Rogelio Estrada falls in with a gangster called “Billy the Kid” né Misha Pavlov and ends up procuring young women for him. “Pavlov’s taste in women was for athletes: long jumpers, sprinters, middle-distance runners, triple jumpers… but his real favorites were the high jumpers. He said they were like gazelles, ideal women, and he wasn’t wrong.”

    Herein lies the rub: one Natalia Chuikova, who Estrada lovingly describes as “five-foot-ten and can’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. She had brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered all the grace in the world. Her eyes were jet black and she had, I swear, the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.” Let’s just say, that’s not the healthiest attention to detail for a hired goon to have.

    Another Russian Tale follows a Spaniard captured while fighting with the Nazi Germans in a World War II footnote that I was completely unaware of. The Spanish Blue Division was a volunteer force sent by fellow fascist Franco on (according to Wikipedia) “condition they would exclusively fight against Bolshevism (Soviet Communism) on the Eastern Front, and not against the Western Allies or any Western European occupied populations.”

    Within such a historical anomaly lies the kernel of a tragic novel in its own right, but Bolaño purposefully crash lands the premise, turning the man’s fate on a linguistic misunderstanding of a sputtered epithet.

    Detectives, the piece in this collection that best shows off Bolaño’s singular talent is written entirely as an extended dialogue between two policemen pulling duty in a Chilean jail. Bolaño slips in exposition, politics, and world history all without letting the conversation seem forced or false.

    His own literary counterpart, Arturo Belano—co-founder of Visceral Realism and co-hero of The Savage Detectives—makes an appearance as little more than an apparition, but one real enough to shake one of the detectives out of his comfortable stupor.

    In one of the most heartfelt examples of Bolaño’s ability to bring the seedy underbelly of society to life and make it seem as valid a way to live as any other—perhaps even more valid, as hypocrisy must be one of the first vices to burn away in the fires of Earth-bound hell—he chronicles the story of an Italian porn star, Joanna Silvestri, who returns to Los Angeles in 1990 after AIDS has run rampant and rocked the industry. Its “biggest” star, a barely-disguised John Holmes, still haunts the valley, a walking shell of his former self.

    Silvestri knows “Jack” from the old days and looks him up in a tender scene that stands out no less for being surrounded by work-a-day debauchery. Her matter-of-fact accounting of her chosen trade is at first shocking but soon begins to make sense.

    Porn, for the professional who makes it, must end up being just another day at the office, and in the end (no pun intended) don’t we all whore ourselves out in search of the all-mighty dollar?

    And while we’re on the subject, Murdering Whores paints the gruesome picture of a prostitute who singles out a guy coming out of a soccer match, kidnaps him, and tortures him to death. I read somewhere that this collection was originally named after this story: Putas Asesinas. I think it sounds better in Spanish.

    Ghosts real and imagined flit thematically throughout these tales, some of them merely glimpsed and some of them fully present and pissed off. The way that the specter of death hangs over this book, one can’t help but wonder if Bolaño was working through his own approaching mortality, picking it up and observing it from every angle.

    One hopes that he didn’t become like the ghost that narrates the title piece. “I have good news and bad news,” he begins. “The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.”

    I’ll leave it to the porn star to sum up what Bolaño finally discovered while turning his imminent death into The Return. “I’m tempted to tell him that we are all ghosts, that all of us have gone too soon into the world of ghost movies, but he’s a good man and I don’t want to hurt him, so I keep it to myself. Anyway, who’s to say he doesn’t already know?”

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Romantic Dogs
    Savage Detectives: A Novel