– While the sun blisters a dying world, a mutant spider battles a squad of toy soldiers and a plastic cowboy on his last ride…
– A gangster, a sheriff, and a mysterious traveler face an army of mechanical vampires burrowing up from hell itself during a wild Montana storm…
– In a desert poisoned by atomic radiation, an abused boy stands between a rampaging giant and the hunter who would make him a grisly trophy…
– Beneath a full Arizona moon, a drifter faces a pack of merciless human animals and the werewolf who butchered his sister…
– In the American West, a legendary gunslinger delivers a cursed bounty to the one-horse town where his partner’s ghost awaits.
Tales of hardboiled horror and Twilight Zone noir. Cross-genre blowtorches with bad guys and worse guys. Love stories both dark and bittersweet. A brand new novella and extensive story notes. You’ll find this and more in the fifth collection from three-time Bram Stoker award-winner Norman Partridge, an author Locus calls “one of the most dependable, exciting, and entertaining practitioners of dark suspense and dark fantasy… emphasis on the dark.”
In Lesser Demons, Partridge explores the kind of fiction that made him both a horror fan and a writer. Using the shotgun prose of a crime novel, the title story draws a deadly bead on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. “The Iron Dead” introduces Chaney, a monster-hunting pulp hero with a mechanical hand built in hell. “Carrion” cuts a mean swath through Robert E. Howard territory, while “The Big Man” explores dark shadows of American life never imagined in the atom-age horror movies of the fifties.
Part celebration, part reinvention, Lesser Demons only serves to underscore RevolutionSF’s verdict: “Norman Partridge is the finest writer of short horror fiction going.”
Table Of Contents
* Second Chance
* The Big Man
* Lesser Demons
* Carrion
* The Fourth Stair up from the Second Landing
* And What Did You See in the World?
* Road Dogs
* The House Inside
* Durston
* The Iron Dead
* A Few Words After
The fine people at Subterranean Press were kind enough to send me an ARC of Lesser Demons at the request of the author and am I glad they did.
My initial exposure to Norman Partridge was his brilliant novel Dark Harvest published in 2006 by Cemetery Dance, I had not read any of his short fiction until now and after reading this absolutely stunning short story collection I said to myself, how the hell did I not read any of his short fiction before this?
Lesser Demons is a collection of stories that really can’t be categorized. Mr. Partridge is able to combine the best of The Twilight Zone, classic monster movies, detective and western fiction into a group of tales that hit hard and stay with you long after you close the book.
He populates his tales with memorable characters, bizarre, deadly and otherworldly landscapes, and monsters that will make all you Monster Kids cower under the covers.
There is something for everyone in this collection and you would be denying yourself one of the most memorable short story collections of the year if you don’t pick this book up.
I really didn’t find a weak story in this book, but of course I had my favorites and they are;
The Iron Dead – Mr. Partridge adds an absolutely stunning entry to the vampire mythos and a new vampire hunter that Dr. Van Helsing would welcome at his side.
The Big Man – If you loved the atomic age monster movies of the 50′s you will love this tale.
The House Inside – You will never look at the sun or toys the same way again.
Second Chance – Everybody deserves one but I don’t think this quite what we’d have in mind.
You can guarantee I will be picking up his past short story collections if I can find them. It appears I have been missing out on a monstrous talent in the short story field, but that is one mistake that I fully intend to rectify.
It’s great to find a review of LESSER DEMONS while browsing the FAMOUS MONSTERS site. Partridge is a distinctly American talent who’s expert at serving up the meat n’ potatoes of a story while drawing sharp, concise portraits of characters most of us have run into — or run far away from — during the courses of our lives. As fantastic as some of Partridge’s stories are, there’s always an underlying realism that’s completely original — it’s tragic that Hollyweird seems determined to rehash, re-envision and remake many of yesteryear’s mediocrities when one need look no further than Norman’s catalog for a wealth of new, innovative material.
The beautiful “House Inside,” included in this collection, is still easily one of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read, and worth the price of admission all on its own.
Interested parties should also hunt down other Partridge collections like THE MAN WITH THE BARBED WIRE FISTS and MR. FOX AND OTHER FERAL TALES (REVISED VERSION).