The Revelation By Bentley Little

The Revelation
By Bentley Little
Copyright 1990

Dead babies can’t take things off of shelves
Dead babies can’t take care of themselves

- Alice Cooper

The Revelation was Bentley Little’s first published novel and won the Bram Stoker Award for first novel in 1990.

From Wikipedia:

The novel (as many of Little's works do) deals with a series of unexplained events in a small town in Arizona. A church is defaced with goat's blood, the pastor and his family disappear, and several townspeople begin having terrifying visions of deformed infants. Eventually, an unknown force begins to attack and murder several of the townspeople.

Gordon, the main protagonist, discovers that his wife is pregnant and begins to fear for her safety and that of the unborn child. Soon, a seemingly unbalanced evangelical preacher named Brother Elias comes to the town to preach about the end times. Widely ignored at first, he gradually gains a following of people as more and more bizarre events unfold in the town.

As the terror mounts, Elias convinces Gordon, the sheriff, and the new pastor to join him in his quest to stop Satan from raising an army of deformed infants. It seems that the devil has the power to corrupt the unborn into horrible servants of darkness, and over the centuries hundreds of these stillborn children have been buried in the hills surrounding the town.

Elias reveals he is not human, but an earthly servant of God whose role it is to stop Satan from assembling his army. He further explains that he has done this several times over the millennia. The four men face off against the incarnation of the devil, who has taken the form of the missing pastor. They succeed in stopping him, though Elias knows that the battle is never truly over and begins wandering away to make preparations for the next battle.

The Revelation is an outstanding first effort for a writer and compares favorably to Robert McCammon’s Baal as a good first effort.

The book closely resembled plots of many early 1970s slasher films. This book could have easily served as source material for Mario Bava or Dario Argento. Much of it is crudely violent. The descriptions of the killer babies are crude. But it’s a crude that works for Little. It has served him well over the years in later work.

It does have a few weaknesses in the characters which is to be expected from a first novel. The sheriff is quick to embrace the supernatural explanation of what is happening to his town. Little’s sheriff is not all that different than the stereotypical small town sheriff. He is level-headed. He takes things as he sees them. Yet his arrival at his conclusion required no hard convincing. It required no dramatic epiphany. His conclusion was necessary to advance the plot and Little took the easy way out.

I liked the ambiguity of Brother Elias. Was he good? Was he evil? Was he a nut? We really don’t get a read on him until the climax when the group must go out and make their stand against evil. But through the book, he acts very much as an antagonist. His preaching causes civil unrest. He shows up at the most inopportune times to disrupt. Little was magnificent in his development of this character.

Little consistently writes well-paced fiction and The Revelation is no exception. Little gets down to the business of establishing his main characters early. The trigger for the action arrives within the first few pages as well when the church is desecrated and the minister and his family disappear. This is how young novelists usually go about their business and Little is no different. From there, Little keeps the action moving nicely and provides a climax that is just the right length for a novel like this. Little is definitely plot driven.

The Revelation was a good way to pass the time with some raw, basic horror. There’s nothing new here. No twist on established tropes. No outstanding characters. Just plot driven horror. It’s not bad and it’s a great outstanding first effort.

The Town By Bentley Little

The Town
By Bentley Little
Copyright 2000

Bentley Little writes two different types of horror. He writes straight horror like Stephen King used to write, and he writes social parody horror as he did in The Policy where he takes a societal problem and embellishes it to absurdity, then crafts the horror around that. The Town is the former. It’s straight horror, but not one of his better efforts at it.

Gregory Tomasov wins the California lottery and decides to move his wife, mother, and three children from the California suburbs back to the small Arizona mining town where he grew up. His mother is a devout Molokan and when she arrives in McGuane, where she also grew up, she’s immediately afraid because she forgot to invite “The Owner of the House” spirit known in the Russian faith as Jedushka Di Muvedushka to come with them. She fears their home will be cursed.

It very well may be cursed because soon after Gregory moves into the home, he learns that the previous owner murdered his entire family there with a shotgun.

The move goes well for no one. His older daughter, once a studios teenager, falls into the wrong crowd and starts drinking, smoking, and sleeping with boys. His son finds new friends, but gets into trouble for tossing rocks at cars. His youngest daughter is picked on at school and has no friends.

Gregory reconnects with an old high school buddy who owns a coffee shop in the depressed old mining town and decides to help him with his business by investing in it and booking local talent to play on stage.

Shortly after the Tomasovs move to McGuane, people begin to die in strange ways. The Molokan minister is beaten to death by a flying Bible. A man grows an appendage from his belly button that strangles him. The Molokan church grows human hair, covering it and turning it into a living organism.

Teo, the youngest daughter starts visiting an old bath house on the property. She feels compelled to bring it dead animals to “feed” it. In return, the entity that lives in the bath house promises her revenge upon her tormenters. Later, a swarm of birds attacks the school playground, swarming everyone but Teo. After that incident, the bath house spirit suggests that she kill one of her friends and bring the body there to feed it to the spirit. That’s more than Teo is willing to do.

The incidents lead to tension in the town and people seem inclined to believe that Gregory Tomasov’s arrival has awakened local spirits that haunt the town. His mother visits a burned out section of the town, chasing a dwarf-like spirit and we learn of a crime committed two generations ago and the sin of revenge committed by the Molakons in return.

The longer the Tomasovs stay in McGuane, the more strangely people behave, including Gregory. They feel compelled to violence and mayhem.

The tension comes to a head in the town and within the Tomasov family when the lighting rig at the coffee house collapses and kills several people – including the owner’s wife who was Gregory’s wife’s best friend. At the scene of the accident was the mischievous dwarven spirit.

Gregory stops by the coffee house the day after Paul’s wife’s funeral to console his friend and finds him in the mood to fight. They fight and Gregory feels compelled to kill Paul. He’s able to stop himself and instead heads for a local bar.

Gregory’s wife stops by, looking for him, and she feels compelled to make love to Paul. Just as the heavy petting is getting started, Gregory walks in and sees them. He doesn’t say anything and leaves. Later, when his wife gets home, he beats her.

Eventually murderous mayhem sweeps through the town as violence directed at the Molokans, the local Indians, and the Mormons erupts. Meanwhile, Gregory’s mother leads a group of Molokans in summoning a local Molokan hermit who helps them corner the demon – who is a pissed off Jedushka Di Muvedushka in the Tomasov home and destroy him.

The Town had a well conceived plot to build upon, but Little misses the mark and the story, which has some great elements, really is disjointed (as my plot summary is) and doesn’t rise to meet the excellence of its conception.

Gregory, his wife, and mother are well developed characters within the novel. We’re inside their head a lot and we know that something is acting upon them to make them behave strangely. The oldest daughter, whose death is supposed to be tragic to the reader, is so poorly developed that we really don’t care. The boy, Adam is well developed, and disappears just as the story builds to a climax and is not integral to the story’s resolution. The younger daughter, Teo, is developed early on, but disappears halfway through the novel.

The elements of horror, other than the incident at the coffee shop, happen to characters that the reader doesn’t know at all. This can work if these incidents are woven into the plot. But they seem to be random chapters that don’t relate to the evil spirit that is tormenting the residents of McGuane.

Then there is the evil entity itself. I think it was supposed to be duality of good (the Owner of the Home who protects its residents) scorned and committing revenge with evil acts. But Little doesn’t make that clear. He hints that the evil may have come because, two generations before, the Molokan men broke their vowels of passivity and took revenge upon their tormenters. But once it’s mentioned, it’s never developed.

The evil spirit – a dwarven shadow – is not menacing at all and is not developed. It appears, is there and does some things, then is gone again. We know nothing of its nature and its death is really dull.

Bentley Little has written some intense horror like The House and The Association. There is no doubt the man can write quality horror and sometimes mix it well with gonzo social commentary. This book seems rushed, as if he had some good ideas for his plot, but never got around to developing them.

Little doesn’t get enough credit among horror fans for his work and he’s not especially good at marketing himself. That is why I recommend him all the time to my friends who enjoy horror. But I won’t be recommending The Town.

Book to Movie: The Washingtonians (2007)

Book to Movie: The Washingtonians (2007)
Teleplay by Richard Chizmar and Jonathon Schaech
From the Showtime Network Series, Masters of Horror
Based on the short story The Washingtonians by Bentley Little

The teleplay expands upon Bentley Little’s short story which contains a thinly veiled distrust and dismissal of the popular conception of history and the men and women who made it.

The teleplay opens with a young woman hitchhiking along a lonely road at night. A car passes and does not pick her up. She continues walking. She is set upon by a man on horseback, wearing a tricorner hat. He decapitates her.

The scene then switches to a family of three in a minivan. Mike Franks, his wife, Pam, and their daughter Amy are on their way to Mike’s grandmother’s house. She has recently died and he has been willed the house.

After taking possession of the house, the little girl finds a portrait of George Washington in the basement. She knocks it over, damaging the frame. When Mike picks it up, he notices something tucked behind the canvass. It is a letter from George Washington and a fork. In the letter, George Washington says the fork is carved from the bone of a human femur.

Mike takes the letter to the lawyer probating his grandmother’s will. The lawyer is eager to have the letter to sell to collectors. When Mike refuses to turn it over, the lawyer gets aggressive and demands that he hand it over. He then backs off and tells Mike to sleep on it.

The next day, the family is in town at the local diner. They notice that the people in the diner are all attacking their meat – raw meat – with gusto, allowing the blood to run down their faces.

That night, a group of men dressed in the regalia of Continental soldiers show up at the house and begin hammering on the doors. Mike calls the police. The men disperse, promising to return.

Mike calls a friend who is an historian. His friend is alarmed when he learns about the letter and promises to come over. He arrives and explains to Mike that history is not what it seems. Historians, he explains, are little more than public relations people for historical figures. History, he says, is actually ugly and many of our revered heroes were men of great evil.

He says there is a secret society in town called The Washingtonians. George Washington was in fact, a cannibal who enjoyed dining on the raw flesh of humans. This society was created after his death to preserve the traditions established by Washington of eating humans.

As they are discussing this, the Washingtonians return. Mike’s friend takes the letter and disappears. The Washingtonians burst in and seize the family. They take them to a great dining hall where the people are all dressed in period costumes and dining on human meat.

The leader of the group takes them on a tour of the hall. He shows them the forks carved out of the bones of the Continental Congress. He shows them the table Thomas Jefferson – himself a member – anointed with his own blood by sacrificing himself to be eaten by the Washingtonians. He then informs Mike that the group plans to dine on him and his family. But first, they want the letter.

Mike refuses to tell them where it is. The Washingtonians cut his wife’s cheek and begin to lick the blood from her wounds. Just then, the door bursts open and the historian is leading a group of armed federal agents who mow down the Washingtonians with automatic weapons. Mike’s friend leads them to safety and tells them that these federal agents are the great coverup men of the government and that the secret of the Washingtonians will be buried forever unless Mike releases that note.

We flash forward to six months later. The family is living in a modern home in a modern suburb. They have ordered vegetarian Chinese food and are listening to a talk radio host rant about the distortions of history. Mike is at the door getting his change when he notices the one dollar bill is new. They’ve changed Georges the delivery man tells him. Mike looks at the one dollar bill and it is George W. Bush who now appears on the single.

The episode is great camp, but it is also incredibly graphic which was a trademark of the Masters of Horror series. It’s one of the better episodes in the series, but not the best. One should watch it with a sense of humor because it really degrades our nation’s founding father and first president.

The teleplay varies somewhat from Little’s story, but keeps the premise intact. Little’s story skips the prelude of the lawyer and the lunch at the diner. It really gets rolling when he goes to his friend the historian. However, it is the historian who reveals the existence of the letter to the Washingtonians. In the teleplay, he was the hero. In the short story, he was the villain.

The short story ended with an alternative group of historical preservationists dressed in Redcoat garb bursting into the room and taking on the Washingtonians.

To date, this is the only Bentley Little work to find its way into the electronic media. That is a shame because, while Little tells a lot of really off beat, whacky stories, some of his stuff is creepy and almost always contains an interesting subtext.

The Collection by Bentley Little

The Collection
By Bentley Little
Copyright 2002

The Collection is the first published collection of short fiction by horror writer Bentley Little. Little’s stories tend to have thinly veiled social commentary and subtext. His short horror is no different.

The Sanctuary
A boy comes home from school to find out his mother has done it again. She has killed someone and a member of the family must die to cleanse her soul. The boy goes to the sanctuary within the zealously religious family’s home to find his little sister has been crucified. Her cross stands beside the cross where her father once hung. A few days later, the boy finds himself overcome with the urge to kill. When he does, somebody in the family must pay for his sins. . .

Little says he often wonders what goes on inside the families of religious zealots. I’ve always suspected zealotry concealed something evil the person didn’t want you to know about themselves or their families. Apparently, Little feels the same way.

The Woods Be Dark
A young boy is forced to confront an evil undead creature living in a nearby mansion in the southern United States.

I know it’s a short summary, but Little uses a lot of pages to tell just a little story. It’s not bad with the boy’s voyage to meet the vampire like creature reminiscent of Young Goodman Brown. Little wrote this while in college and every aspiring horror writer has to imitate Young Goodman Brown at least once.

The Phone Book Man
A suburban housewife hears a morning knock at the door and answers it. It’s a young man delivering phone books. He politely provides the lady with a phone book and asks to use her bathroom. The woman allows him in and starts watching television. It occurs to her that the phone book man has been awhile in the bathroom. She hears him showering. She’s prepared to lay into him when a different man – a large bearded man – emerges from the bathroom and wants to know what’s for breakfast. The woman flees the house. Regaining her composure, she returns to find a note from the phone book man saying he’s gone to pick up her daughter from school.

This was a tight little tale just quarky enough to be entertaining. Sometimes when I read Bentley Little, it seems as if it’s just a penname for Robert McCammon. While the novels are completely different, they have a very similar short story prose.

Estoppel
A young man discovers that whatever words come out of his mouth become a reality. At first, he is intrigued by this power when he discovers it in college. He makes himself into an important adviser to the president. When his words cause a nuclear war, he alters his reality back to that of a college student. He tries to live his life in complete silence and manages for more than a decade. He finally decides he can’t take it anymore and sets out to end his power once and for all.

Estoppel is a legal term that means, “it is what it is.” Little takes the Midas Touch story in a different direction that is exceptionally engaging with a character well developed in just a few pages.

The Washingtonians
A man visits an antique dealer with a most unique item of exceptional historical existence. It is a letter from George Washington where the father of our country promises to eat children and to make utensils of their bones. The man takes it to a friend who is a history professor who tells him one of history’s greatest secrets: George Washington was a cannibal who delighted feasting on his fellow patriots. As he is talking to his friend, a group of historians breaks into the room. This group is dedicated to preserving Washington’s tradition of dining on people.

This story is so whacky and twisted it is one of the most marvelous pieces of short fiction I’ve ever enjoyed. Imagine, historians are great conspirators to conceal a club dedicated to eating human flesh! As an amateur historian, I love it! In horror fiction, historians are always at the periphery, supplying that key piece of information at a key moment. Never do they get to be front and center as the villain. Little says he was inspired by the tight control of information coming out of the first Gulf War.

To date, this is the only Bentley Little work to make it into a visual medium. The Washingtonians was made into an episode of the Showtime show, Masters of Horror.

Life with Father
An adolescent girl describes her household composed of her, her father, and younger sister. In this household, everything is recycled – and I mean EVERYTHING. Finally, after her father uses her to recycle “emotions,” the girl and her younger sister take action. When the deed is done, she decides how father can be recycled because, “Old habits die hard.”

This was a dark, disturbing story. Little says he wrote it for an anthology of eco-terror stories and it was rejected. I can see why. It is some of the darkest, most disturbing writing I’ve ever read. It left me with mixed emotions – horror and disgust. I lean toward disgust and can say I did not enjoy this short story.

Bob
Brandon is enjoying a quiet day at home when several women arrive at his door and enter his home. One woman speaks for the entire group who says they are there on behalf of their friend. They keep calling Brandon, “Bob.” Despite his constant correction, they still call him Bob. They need his help to extricate their friend from a brutal relationship and they won’t take no for an answer.

This one really lacked a focal point and the ending was too ambiguous. The character, Brandon, was never really horrified about what it was they were asking him to do. He was, in fact, quite patient and polite as it seemed they had the wrong guy and wouldn’t accept it. There was no conflict. There was no horror and the main character was not changed by the experience in any fundamental way.

Bumblebee
A white private investigator is hired by a priest in a small Arizona town to find the coyote who has killed numerous illegal immigrants while smuggling them into the country. The investigator tracks him down, but the priest’s parishioners mete out their own form of justice in a remote Arizona ghost town.

This is a rare instance of a traditional horror story from Bentley Little. He says it was written for an anthology and that he hates being hemmed in by writing parameters. I’d say he did ok on this one. A well developed central character and a compelling plot are the ingredients necessary for a good short story and they are here.

Lethe Dreams
A man and a woman struggle to get adequate sleep as they take care of their newborn baby. He is having terrible headaches that make it difficult for him to function. They trade nights getting up with the baby. One night, as the man is holding his infant and feeding it formula, we learn its true nature.

I supposed the end was supposed to be some kind of twist. But for a twist to be effective, some clue must be given. Some red herring must be placed to misdirect the reader. Some element must be there to make the twist satisfying. This was just a straight forward narrative that led to an unexpected and wholly unsatisfying ending.

Paperwork
A couple traveling across the desert stop in a small town to buy gas. They notice that the town is nearly empty and the gas station attendant is frightened badly. The wind blows waste paper and other detritus around in swirling mounds. There is something sinister in those swirling mounds of paper.

Think Stephen King’s Trucks with garbage instead of machines. There’s just a touch of dark comedy in this story of a couple trapped in one of those strange small towns where inexplicable things happen.

The Idol
Two buddies venture to the Griffith Park Observatory, bent on finding the tire iron James Dean threw in the movie, Rebel Without a Cause. Having watched that particular scene in slow motion many times, they are sure they know where it is. When they arrive and search the brush beneath the observatory, they find someone has been there before them and has built a shrine to it with the tire iron itself embedded in stone a la Excalibur. Women from southern California come to worship at the altar in their own, peculiar way. It is a rite of passage for southern California women.

What a fantastic story! There is just enough character development to create sympathy in the reader. The tale itself is twisted and bizarre and perhaps a vague commentary on the women of southern California.

Skin
A family stops by a roadside attraction claiming to be the largest house in the world made entirely of skin. The husband and his children enter. The children are fascinated, but the husband is disturbed. He thinks the skin is not animal skin. He is further disturbed a recent patch in the “fabric.” They beat feet out of there. The family is changed by the experience – and not for the better.

Little says this story was inspired by the many roadside attractions that dotted the landscape of America in the 1960s.

The Man in the Passenger Seat
A man leaves his car unattended for just a few moments to visit an ATM. When he returns, he finds a corpulent, foul smelling man in the passenger seat armed with a gun. The man orders him to drive. They hit the freeway and events go downhill from there. Strangely, the man finds himself less a hostage and more a willing participant in the stranger’s pursuits.

Stockholm Syndrome is a frequent theme in thriller stories. But they usually have some context in which the hostage and the hostage take bond. There is no context here. While Little may have wanted this lack of context to create the mystery of the story, it fails to do so. There is also a distinct lack of tension in the story, making it a complete dud.

Comes the Bad Time
A farm couple agrees to allow a wandering 17 year old girl to spend the night on their farm. They invite her into their home to stay. That night, she has a violent seizure and at one point, levitates from the floor as she seizes. The seizure passes and the girl, who reveals little about herself or her background, stays with them for a period of time. One day, on a ride back from town, she starts seizing again. They get her out of the car, and she screams, “I’ll get you assholes!” and dies. From then on, her image starts appearing in fruits, vegetables, rug patterns and other manifestations. The couple is terrified. When a man shows up at the door who bears a striking resemblance to the girl, the farmer kills him. The haunting continues, ad infinitum.

This story had a great premise and what story there was, was exceptionally well told. But like so many Little stories, it left me wanting much, much more and Little didn’t provide it. A few more pages; a few more words and this story could have been much better.

Against the Pale Sand
A man’s car breaks down and he is forced to hike to a house in the middle of nowhere. There he finds a young woman and an old man living in seclusion. In their living room is a cocoon of sorts hanging over a box of sand. The man is trying to find out if he can use a phone when that cocoon opens and unleashes its horror.

Another of those stranded motorist stories that all horror writers engage in from time to time. This one had gratuitous pseudo erotica and not much of a story. Exceptionally thin characters and nearly incomprehensible plot made this one a clunker.

The Pond
An agent for a resort development company is searching through his attic when he comes across marketing materials and swag from a group called POP – “People Over Pollution.” He recalls that he’d belonged to this group in his hippie days back in the 1960s. He also finds a photo of a meadow with a pond he clipped from a magazine. He recalls that he thought that he and his future wife would settle down in a meadow just like that, living the primitive, pollution free life. Later, he is in an Arizona forest, scouting locations for a new resort when he finds that particular meadow and that particular pond. The setting is not as idealistic as he remembers it. It occurs to him that he’s not as idealistic as he thought he was.

Little says this story is all about people who sold out. He says the sellouts are not confined to the Baby Boom generation. I hate – absolutely hate – politics injected into my escapist reading and this story is no exception. It’s well written with a sympathetic character. The end, however, is ambiguous and not in a good way. It just ends without a clue as to the ultimate fate of the main character.

Roommates
A man tosses out his piggish and slovenly apartment mate and sets out to find a new roommate to help pay the rent. As he screens applicants, each is worse than the last – to the point of absurdity.

This story was comical rather than horror oriented. Little says he never had to shack up with a stranger to make ends meet. But the prospect of having to do it filled him with horror. It’s mildly humorous and was fun to read.

Llama
A bookstore owner finds a dead llama in the alley behind his shop. He has always been obsessed with numbers and numerology. He measures the size of the llama’s head and begins to apply that measurement – and many other calculations – to his twisted and morbid life.

This story had a creepy main character, a spooky premise, and worked on every level. Just enough character development and just enough story to please.

Full Moon On Death Row
A native American man spots the men who gunned down his father many years before in a nearby town. Although decades have passed, they have not aged a day. He consults the tribal elders and finds his friend who lost his father to the same men, at the same place, in the same manner. They aim to get revenge, but find out who their real enemy is.

This was the longest story in the book and worth every page. The story’s construction was much more mainstream than Little’s normally offbeat approach to short fiction.

The Show
A young man is invited by a buddy to attend a “snuff show” where a woman is sexually abused, tortured, and eventually killed in front of a live audience. The man attends and is horribly disgusted. Several days later, his buddy calls to ask if he received an unsolicited mailing offering to help him commit suicide. Unfortunately, his horribly depressed mother received it first.

This is one of the most disconcerting, horrifying pieces of short fiction ever written! Lovecraft and Poe would have blanched. It’s light on gore, but heavy on emotion and disturbing imagery conjured by the reader’s own mind. Absolutely brilliant!

The Mailman
A new suburbanite is disturbed when he finds out his mailman is a dwarf. As a child, he was harassed by a dwarf at a carnival. Since then, that dwarf has shown up in the Vietnam POW camp where he was imprisoned and in other locales throughout his life. He’s determined to rid himself of the dwarf once and for all.

This was a well paced story with a strong central character. However, the story just isn’t that interesting. It is, however, a bit politically incorrect.

Monteith
A man comes home from work early one day to find his wife gone somewhere. On his kitchen table is a single piece of paper with a single word written on it. He is so puzzled by this word and what it means he starts looking around the house for clues as to an affair, demon worship, and other bizarre notions. He finds his wife has some strange undertakings while he is off at work.

I was really into this story. It got stranger and stranger and Little’s narrative builds the tension nicely. But we get no resolution. I know sometimes the ambiguous ending is best left to the reader’s imagination. But this story screamed out for resolution that never came.


Pillow Talk
A man suddenly finds his bed dressings have become possessive, amorous beings bent on sexually ravaging him. He fights them the best he can.

It’s just as silly as my summary makes it sound. The worst clunker in the book. Does not work on any level.

Maya's Mother
A mobster has sex with the young daughter of a Guatemalan maid and the maid puts a curse on him. He hires a private investigator to track down the woman. The private investigator soon finds that this mobster is in for a short, painful life.

This was good. The hero is from an earlier story by Bentley Little entitled Bumblebee, so the main character is not developed in this story, having appeared before. The curse is cool and you don’t mind seeing the mobster get his in the end.

Colony
The newly elected president of the United States finds out that 230 years of history and all of our government is a sham. We really lost the American Revolution and have been a secret colony of the Empire of Great Britain ever since with presidents from Washington on taking orders from the throne. This president is determined to end it.

How delightfully corny! Bob Haldeman isn’t really dead! He’s just been hiding because his boss, Richard Nixon dared to resist and paid the price. Kennedy too! This story is offbeat and fun!

Confessions Of A Corporate Man
In the corporation of Little’s imagination, turf wars within a corporation are real wars fought with weapons fashioned from office products. Real casualties are incurred and departments within the corporation are taken as prizes. Little’s tale tells of one ongoing war within one corporation.

I know that when you read Little, you are going to get absurd premises to demonstrate real world absurdities. However, this absurdity was not well conceived. It was too absurd with no basis in reality. He tried for a parody of corporate culture that just did not work well on the printed page. However, something like this might make for a dark comedy on the big or small screen.

Blood
A man preparing macaroni and cheese sees a face in the swirling, boiling water and macaroni. That face asks for blood. The man first supplies dog blood. But the face, which reappears with the next batch of boxed treat says it wants human blood. So, the man goes out and kills a little boy for blood. He mixes it in and the face is sated. The man eats the dish. The next batch asks for more blood, so the man cuts his own wrist and supplies blood from his own veins. In doing so, he learns a horrible secret from his past.

Another offbeat premise from Little. This is the first story I’ve ever read of haunted macaroni and cheese. It fell flat because the story was rushed. There was no real building of tension. There was no motivation for the character to act (who does something because their macaroni and cheese tells them to?). One of the weaker entries in the collection.

And I Am Here, Fighting With Ghosts
A man, recently divorced from his wife, fights to maintain his sanity as he lapses from reality into dreams that appear real. He can never be sure if he's living his life or living a dream.

Little says this story was the fusion of four separate dreams he had. It is written in the disjointed manner in which dreams occur. While the story and writing are disjointed, it is effective and the story is intriguing.

The Baby
A group of four boys discover a dead baby in a warehouse. They build a shrine to it and soon, all the kids in the neighborhood come to worship before the corpse of the abandoned infant. One day, one boy begins to wonder if their new deity is lonely. . .

This story is creepy in the same way Children of the Corn was creepy. The story is implausible. But given the unpredictable manner in which adolescents react and behave, it’s easy to forget that implausibility.

Coming Home Again
A young man travels home to meet the “woman” with whom his widowed father plans to spend the rest of his life. He finds the outside of the home just as neat and tidy as he remembered it. Bu the inside is a disaster. When he meets the new love of his father’s life, he is horrified. He turns to the neighbors for help, but it seems the old neighborhood has gone to hell, literally.

Another lapse into the absurd by Little. This story is not without its charm. But something this outlandish warrants at least a little development and/or explanation – none of which are provided.

The Potato
A farmer discovers a huge, oddly colored and shaped potato growing in his field. Curiosity by neighbors eventually leads him to charge people to see it. He lets his farm go to hell while his obsession with the potato grows.

Again, another lapse into absurdity with no development of the main character’s motivation or the nature of the predicament. Little should learn that not every idea he has is a good one.

The Murmurous Haunt Of Flies
A man and his wife visit his grandfather who lives on a farm. During the visit, the grandfather tells them that they must never go near the old bath house near the barn. It is haunted. His wife died there and others in the area suspect that whatever evil lurks in the barn is responsible for the death of livestock in the area. But the man and his wife can’t resist the urge and head inside. There, they find millions of house flies – and those flies have a will and a purpose. . .

A brilliant story with which to conclude this collection. It was a traditional tale of haunting with all of the elements of a good horror story. The creepy bit of poetry set the mood and who isn’t repulsed by swarms of flies!

The Policy by Bentley Little

The Policy
By Bentley Little
Copyright 2003

Bentley Little writes books as if he has axes to grind with the subject at hand. I’ve read a few of his books where he takes the absurdities of ordinary institutions and melds them into fantastical horror scenarios. In The Town, it was small town government. In The Association, it was homeowners associations. In The Policy, his beef is with insurance companies.

Hunt Jackson is an unemployed tech specialist, recently divorced, and living in Los Angeles. He decides to break with the grind of southern California and head back to his hometown of Tuscon, AZ.

He looks up some of his old buddies and finds that a friend from junior high school, Joel McCain. They hook up and renew their old friendship. It isn’t long before Joel and his wife find a girlfriend for Hunt. Hunt meets Beth and before long the two fall in love.

Hunt travels back to California to gather his furniture and belongings and transport them back to Tuscon. He stays the night in his old apartment and when he wakes up in the morning, he finds that the windshield of his car is cracked. So, he calls his insurance company.

He finds out that his insurance company has been acquired by another larger insurance company. When he talks to the adjustor on the phone, the adjustor says the time of the accident occurred, “Half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter past his balls.” Joel is taken aback and asks to speak to the adjustor’s supervisor. The line goes dead, so Hunt calls back and gets a courteous woman who is able to help him get his claim underway. She has no explanation for the prior adjustor’s behavior. Before hanging up, she suggests he look into renter’s insurance because you never know what can happen.

Hunt soon finds work with a tree trimming crew in Tuscon city government. One evening, while he is out, his apartment is broken into. His furniture and belongings are trashed. He calls his insurance company to file a claim and he is promised that his home will be repaired and his belongings replaced. He decides to spend the night with his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, Little injects a short chapter of a man who has an earthquake isolated under his home. While his home lies in shambles, no other home in the area is affected. The man laments not buying the earthquake insurance that his agent recommended, even though they don’t have earthquakes in Tuscon.

Joel returns to his apartment to find repairs have been made and possessions replaced. However, the work is not to his liking. The walls are painted black. His bed is replaced by a water bed shaped like a penis. His movies are replaced by pornography and his music collection is multiple CDs of Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.”

It’s not long before Hunt is approached by an insurance salesman offering him better renter’s insurance, but he decides to move in with Beth.

Soon after they move in, they are hounded by an insurance agent who wants to sell them life insurance, homeowner’s insurance, health insurance, and unemployment insurance. The unemployment insurance actually guarantees that neither he nor Beth can lose their job. They decline.

Other members of Hunt’s circle of friends and acquaintances are also hounded. Hunt’s supervisor turns down the homeowner’s insurance and the edition he is trying to build on his home is repeatedly knocked down by freakish accidents.

The insurance salesman continues to show up and force his way into their home. He offers Hunt a policy that will insure against arrest. Hunt laughs at the agent and throws him out. Just days later, he is arrested for molesting a child in the neighborhood. While in jail, the insurance man visits and offers him insurance against being convicted. Desperate to be out of jail and clear of the charges, Hunt jumps at the policy. The next day, the little girl who was his accuser is killed by a hit and run driver and all of the video tapes of her statement disappear.

Hunt’s friends have similarly bizarre occurrences. His friend, Jorge and his wife are expecting a baby. They have health insurance through his job, so they don’t purchase the insurance from this bizarre insurance agent or his company simply known as “The Insurance Group.” When the time comes for the baby to be delivered, the hospital will not admit his wife, saying that his insurance requires her to go to another hospital. She is taken to a hospital that is virtually empty of patients. She expects to deliver a boy. The child is delivered and whisked away. Moments later, the doctor returns and states “Here is your daughter!” The little boy’s penis has been cut off.

Soon, Hunt and his friends are intimidated into buying whatever bizarre insurance this agent offers. Hunt purchases the good neighbor rider on his homeowners insurance and when his next door neighbor starts to hassle him, the neighbor’s house is burned to the ground. When he purchases the employment insurance, the people in city government who are trying to outsource his job are caught in an embarrassing scandal and the supervisor dies in an accident.

Hunt and his friends decide to find out what’s behind this insurance company that wields such power and influence and acts with malice and immorality. Hunt’s search takes him to a partially collapsed building in a remote part of town where they encounter the insurance agent. Hunt has an inspired idea.

He wants to purchase the mother of all life insurance polices – the policy that guarantees immortality. The agent is thrilled! It will be expensive, the agent tells him, but well worth every penny. The agent has such a policy himself. Hunt signs his name to the policy.

But they find out that the Tuscon office is just a branch office. More research leads them to Mexico. Hunt, Joel, and Jorge, along with their spouses, travel to Mexico determined to find this agent’s life insurance policy and destroy it.

Through the help of some locals, they are able to locate the home office which is way out in the middle of nowhere. There, they find offices maintained by nameless, faceless beings who do not notice their presence. Eventually, they find the file room. It includes maps and documents that show that this insurance company helped topple Rome because it was behind on its payments. It had a hand in defeating Napoleon because he had not purchased insurance. They also find the agent’s policy, etched in runes they don’t understand. They destroy the stone tablets. But the agent lives.

Hunt figures out that for the policy to be null and void, all copies must be destroyed and the agent would certainly have a copy of his own. They find their agent’s office in the complex and find his policy. The agent shows up, but too late. Joel takes a match to the policy and the agent dies. They are free of the menace of the Insurance Group.

This book was exciting and intriguing for the first three quarters. Little builds the tension and suspense nicely with each twist to the insurance racket. But the ending was so woefully bad that I ended up not liking the book at all.

The trip to Mexico and the absurdity of these ancient beings working in an office in the desert stretched credibility too far. He should have written a better ending when Hunt found the Tuscon office.

There were also red herrings and other occurrences that were put forth several times, but then never explained. Hunt and Beth were certain that their spare bedroom was haunted. They saw reflections in the mirror. They heard noises like wood striking wood. This was left as a loose end. We never get to find out who or what was in the spare bedroom or why.

Also, the men who were responsible for enforcing the policies were described as men who wore trench coats and fedora hats. We never get a hint at who or what these men were or what their motivation was.

This is the fourth of Little’s books I’ve read. The first three were compelling, well plotted books from beginning to the end. This one just veers off into absurdity near the end and leaves too much unresolved. I would recommend Bentley Little to anyone who enjoys horror, but I would caution them against reading The Policy. The ending is just too poor, leaving the reader completely unsatisfied after being led through more than 300 pages of exciting and riveting horror.