Review: Vampires, Ghostfinders, & Meikle

William Meikle’s been a good friend of mine for the past decade. Kindred spirits, Willie’s a prolific storyteller, melding a fascination with the best of pulp fiction with a modern sensibility and a keen eye for advancing genre fiction. A perfect example of this is found in his startling vampire thriller Eldren: The Book of the Dark. This is a novel that strips away the modern trend of the vampire romantic, delivering beasties with real bite. Willie deftly controls the pace of the tale, amplifying the tension and injecting some truly frightening imagery. What really makes Eldren sing are the characters, all too painfully real you see. These are real people facing down a fantastical supernatural menace and that’s what gets you. It’s real. It’s dirty. And, by the gods, it’s bloody. No sparkles. No erotic fantasies. No aristocratic seductiveness. This is a horror story with all the messy bits intact. As it should be.

I also took Willie’s Carnacki: Heaven and Hell for a ride and was thrilled beyond measure. Occult detectives are my bead and butter and Carnacki is one of the greats. Through this author’s devotion and craftsman’s eye, William Hope Hogdson’s creation lives and breathes again. Meikle captures the tone of Hogdson’s Carnacki tales perfectly and infuses them with an atmosphere all his own. These are stories meant to be read by a warm fire, with a pipe of exotic tobacco and a sifter of brandy on hand. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Visit Willie’s homepage for more information or saunter on over to the William Meikle Amazon Author Page to order one of his fine works today.