Brimstone and Marmalade by Aaron Corwin

Brimstone and Marmalade is a short story by Aaron Corwin, published on the Tor website. It's a delightful, surprisingly sweet, little gem of a tale about a little girl who desperately wants a pony for her birthday. Instead, she gets a demon. This is presented as a perfectly normal and reasonable activity -- pet demons can be cool (unless you want a pony), but aren't unusual by any means. And, as Mathilde's Nana points out, they can be great for convincing parents that a little girl is responsible enough to care for a pony.

It takes Mathilde a while to warm up to Ix'thor, but warm up to him she does. And Ix'thor seems to like her. When she asks him his name, he tells her at once. When mean Billy throws her collage in the mud, Ix'thor suggests she "destroy the interloper." Or at least feed him to the ravenous tongue-beasts of Garakh'nurr. (Mathilde doesn't know where that is.) She gets lots of candy when she takes Ix'thor along for Trick-or-Treating. ("Ix'thor says fear keeps the peasants in line.") And when tragedy, in the form of the horrible Becky, strikes, it isn't a pony that Mathilde wants. It's Ix'thor. She can't have him, though. Even miniature Dark Lords are weakened by sunlight, and after Ix'thor's darkened ball breaks, there's nothing the man from the demon shop can do. Perhaps a pony with glowing red eyes, then. One that will allow Mathilde to crush her enemies' skulls beneath its flaming hooves.

This story captures the feelings of not getting what you want, and then coming to like what you didn't want; of the loss of a beloved pet; of the trials that come with the Billys and Beckys of the world. 

Recommended for people who like a bit of humor with their horror.

Squidges: Ix'thor is a demon, even if he does come across as more grandiose than evil. (He eats prepackaged grub souls, which are souls nonetheless. He suggests that Mathilde give him her soul in exchange for limitless power. (She turns him down.) It is implied that he either threatens people into giving Mathilde more candy on Hallowe'en or encourages her to threaten them. He and Mathilde may or may not have a greater plan for world domination.)

Check out Tor's website for more speculative fiction short stories.

The Panic Virus : a True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear by Seth Mnookin

Mnookin traces the opposition to vaccination from Colonial America to current times, focusing largely on the recent autism scare. The book is written in an engaging, accessible style. Technical terms are defined, and the footnotes are worth reading.
Early opposition to smallpox inoculation came in two basic forms: the disgust factor -- inoculation was achieved by rubbing smallpox pus into an open wound to cause a mild case of the disease that would confer immunity -- and the belief that the disease was divine punishment and interfering with it was interfering with God's will. Cotton Mather, a supporter of smallpox inoculation, had his house firebombed. (Later, cowpox infection was used to prevent smallpox. The word "vaccine" comes from the Latin term for the cowpox virus, variolae vaccinae.) Later opposition had considerably less to do with God's will than distrust of the government. Such distrust, as regards vaccination, was not always misplaced. Poor oversight and weak reporting rules allowed bad batches of vaccines to infect, injure, and kill. And while Mnookin spends some time on these tragedies, he devotes most of his book to the thoroughly discredited beliefs that thimerosal and the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine cause autism, and the terrible results of failure to vaccinate. (Read about thimerosal here: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/)
Mnookin lays blame for the modern vaccine scare squarely on two parties -- Andrew Wakefield and the press. Wakefield first raised the alarm about the measles component in the MMR vaccine, claiming that the three-in-one jab overloaded children's immune systems and that the measles component should be delivered separately. (At the time, he and a partner were developing just such a vaccine.) His research methods were so poorly documented that it was not possible for other scientists to replicate his work. The mountain of evidence against his proposal was dismissed by Wakefield and his desperate followers as proof of a conspiracy to harm kids, at worst, or fail to protect them, at best. (Mnookin also explains why Wakefield's followers continue to support him. Having been told there is nothing that can be done to help their children, that they simply lost the genetic crap shoot -- or worse, caused their children's autism with their own bad parenting -- they found in Wakefield someone who both listened to them and gave them hope. In the cases presented in the book, parents made the "vaccine connection" only after being told there was one. This was sometimes months or even years later. Add to that the natural human tendency to hold tighter to beliefs when they are challenged, and parents' continued support of Wakefield and belief in his discredited ideas becomes easier to understand.)
Still, Wakefield's ideas wouldn't have gained traction without one more ingredient: exposure. Every time a news outlet refers to vaccines as "controversial", when vaccine conspiracy theorists with no background in public health or immunology are treated as experts, when anecdote is regarded as evidence, the ugly balloon-and-sheet ghost rises from its grave to frighten parents. And some of them (mostly liberal, well-educated whites) will choose to forgo or delay vaccination. The result is a resurgence of diseases like measles, hib, and whooping cough that have been gone from the U.S.A. for so long that many doctors don't recognize the symptoms. In some communities, herd immunity (also called community immunity) has already been compromised -- something to remember if you're planning to take your not-fully-immunized baby to Ashland, Oregon. (Read more about herd immunity here: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/pages/communityimmunity.aspx)

Neonomicon by Alan Moore, et al.

I read a couple of good reviews of this book -- plus I like Lovecraft and it's written by Alan Moore -- so I requested that the library purchase it. I apologize. I wasn't surprised by the sex and violence because, again, it's Alan Moore. I was surprised that I didn't care about the characters. At first, I disliked them. By the end, I couldn't even summon up that much feeling for them. They are universally racist and misogynistic. (Maybe that's supposed to be a comment about Lovecraft himself. Maybe Moore was trying to capture that feel from the original stories. I don't know. I do know that I found it off-putting.) We know little about any of the characters, except that the female FBI agent is a recovering sex addict. Lest you forget, poor reader, it's mentioned every couple of pages. The book's premise, that Lovecraft was writing about real aliens and a real threat with cults that have survived to modern times, is interesting. It could have been great. Unfortunately, it wasn't even good.

Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon

I'll start by pointing out that we don't actually have this in our collection, although it is obtainable through interlibrary loan (which is how I got it). Nor do we have the movie based on it, Night of the Lepus. We wouldn't get it even in the unlikely event that it's available for purchase, based on its Rotten Tomatoes rating of a whopping 11%. Read the critical reviews, they're right on target. (In my defense, I'm pretty sure I caught the movie on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Also, it was in a Jeopardy answer. I got the question right.) The movie is about giant, carnivorous rabbits in the American Southwest. The book, set in Australia, is about the dangers of political corruption and an uninvolved electorate. The rabbits serve mostly as a domino. A rancher has a rabbit problem, so he extorts help from the politician he got elected. Then things go horribly wrong. Then they go fantastically right for Australia, which extorts the rest of the world into doing what Oz wants under threat of bio attack. Then things go horribly wrong again. And from there, they can only get wronger. For the most part, though, the rabbits aren't particularly important. It's a scary creature movie. It's a political satire book.
Here's the movie poster:

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror by Chris Priestly

 

 

Description:

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is a loosely connected collection of short stories framed by the larger questions of how Montague has come into possession of his odd assortment of belongings, why he tells the stories he does, and who the odd children in the woods are. Each story is introduced in the story preceding it as Edgar, the narrator, asks about this or that object in Montague's sitting room.

 

Summary:

Edgar visits his peculiar Uncle Montague regularly, walking through the woods to get to the house. When he arrives, Uncle Montague always asks if Edgar saw anyone on the way, and Edgar always answers, "No." After all, it's not worth mentioning the strange, silent, town children who watch him pass. And walking past them, odd as they are, is a price Edgar is willing to pay for his uncle's stories. There's a story for every object in Uncle Montague's sitting room. The pocket watch from a boy who climbed a tree he wasn't supposed to and disappeared. The tiny doll from the doll house that trapped a woman in a room that isn't there. The demon book end that torments its thief. Curiously, Uncle Montague tells these fanciful stories as if they were true. Finally, Edgar learns the terrible truth about Uncle Montague, and the children in the woods. Uncle Montague, it turns out, was once the headmaster of a school. He was also a gambler. And while he was a decent card player, he still went through all of his savings. Needing more gambling money, he stole from the children at his school. To cover his thefts, he blamed a student, William. William pleaded with Montague to declare his innocence, but Montague refused, and William took his own life. Montague's punishment is to have the ghostly children that Edgar sees in the woods -- not town children at all! -- bring him objects and tell him their stories.

 

Thoughts:

I enjoyed this collection. The ending is satisfactory, and left me wanting to read more of the author's work. A couple of stories deal with demons or other evil/Satanic creatures, which are depicted as cruel, manipulative, and bad. Overall, it's more Edgar Allan Poe, less Stephen King. 

Recommended for middle schoolers looking for scary stories.