Review by Steve Hansen

Some time ago, I interviewed author Robert Dunbar. Aside from the puerile “pull my finger” trick I tried on him, the interview went off without a hitch.

And then I read his book.

Martyrs & Monsters is the hitchiest, grittiest, filthiest, nastiest and (ahem) most well written batch of horror stories you may ever read. It is pulp without the dangling participles and lousy syntax; splatterpunk without the gratuitous disembowelments and severed heads. Although there are notable exceptions, Dunbar tends to exclude the viscera littering the slaughterhouse floor. He opts instead to describe the causal prenuptials and the peripheral trappings surrounding the sundry horrific deeds. The negatives that emerge are as shocking (and compelling) as chalk outlines on a cordoned-off street.

With settings varied as inner city projects to medieval steppes, interpersonal devotion is the thread that thematically links the majority of these diverse tales. One of the most striking examples of this devotion comes in the excruciatingly good “Gray Soil” wherein Mara leads her daughter away from a zombie/vampire that’s caught their scent as they return home from scavenging a fresh battlefield.  Mara exhorts her daughter to run for it as she turns to confront the monster. In the course of killing it, Mara is bitten. In an effort to avoid becoming the mother that consumes her own young, Mara hangs herself. However, the sash she uses rips before her body dies. The zombie madness overcomes her, and she attacks the hovel where her children await the return of their mother.  Without giving away the rest, let’s just say the transfigured Mara becomes the host for her children’s salvation.

Another high point in this collection is the elegant dichotomy struck between “Mal de Mer” and “The Folly.” Both stories feature female protagonists caught between a monster and a hard place. In both cases, “the hard place” is the psychological desolation both characters face after the problem of the corporeal monster has been resolved. Toward the conclusion of these thematically similar stories, the protagonists weigh the probability of living the rest of their lives alone, and their endings dramatically diverge.

There was only one story in the entire collection that I couldn’t get through.  “Away” was just so maddeningly claustrophobic and seemed a contrived set up for a surprise ending, which of course is total speculation since I never got there! Shame on me, I guess. Also, I didn’t really get why “The Moon (Upside Down)” was included in a collection of horror stories. Though well written, this narrative of two mismatched homosexual males, Lon (Chaney?) and Boris (Karloff?), didn’t have anything on the surface of it that was particularly horrific. But, in its defense, the couple’s sado-masochistic dynamic does perfectly parallel the book’s title.

Martyrs & Monsters is most definitely worthy of horror fans and fans of good fiction alike. No matter your persuasion, the human element at the heart of these stories is the source of an abundance of royal satisfaction.  Robert Dunbar, I dub thee King of Alternative Horror.

Steve Hansen and his wife and kids live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.