Heretics

Greg Gifune

Unless you're one of a select few horror fans, you've probably not yet heard the name Greg F. Gifune. As it sometimes is in these situations, this is truly a crime. Gifune has been quietly making a name for himself in the horror community for quite a while now, publishing deeply disturbing tales in a myriad of small-press magazines. Heretics is a collection of a select few of these tales (four, actually), with some unreleased (as of 2001, anyway) material to flesh the collection out. Delirium released it to a storm of acclaim back in the day, and it sold out very quickly. (Gifune's new novel, being released by Delirium in July of 2005, has already sold out its limited editions in pre-orders with insane prices; this should give you an idea of the guy's rep in certain circles.) One can only hope that Delirium either brings it back into print with a much wider release and a whole lot of publicity (not to mention really good distribution) or they sell the rights to someone who'd be willing to publish the collection (Leisure comes to mind immediately) who's already got the publicity and distribution channels in place, because Heretics is a fantastic book, and deserves a much wider readership than it presently has.

Make no mistake, Greg Gifune writes the sort of extreme horror one sees from an author like Charlee Jacob (though Gifune never pushes that envelope out to the edge)-- and it wouldn't surprise me one whit to see Gifune's career explode the way Jacob's did a few years back-- but it's extremity wrapped in a cloak of atmosphere. Gifune isn't just going to go for the gut, he's going to disturb you on deeper levels while he's at it. The title story in this collection, a novella-length piece, is an excellent example of how good he is at it, but the real gem here is a shorter piece called "The Snow Angels." In fifteen all-too-short pages, Gifune goes for the extreme, then doubles back and shows how effective the power of suggestion can be. It's a shocking twist on the way things are normally done, or as shocking as anything in the horror biz can be these days, and it's powerfully effective. "The Snow Angels" alone is worth the cost of admission here; the other stories are icing on the cake. But what icing it is. There's not a single dud here; for that matter, there's not even a place where Gifune's mastery slips. While the majority of the horror-reading public is busy being satisfied with the ponderous tomes turned out by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, et al., like clockwork, and the slightly more hip have discovered Leisure's recent catalog of writers, the in crowd are being blown away on a regular basis by two of the best horror short-story writers of the last century; Greg Gifune is one of them. (For the record, the other is a guy named Dale Bailey. You'll be seeing as effusive a review of his book The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories from my keyboard in the very near future.)

Gets four and a half because of five through no fault of Gifune's; the editor at Delirium seems to have gotten drowsy towards the end of the book, and there are some really odd typos (there's quite a few underlines, of all things, peppered throughout the final story; one every six or seven pages). But make no mistake, this book is the real deal. A shoo-in for my twenty-five best reads of the year list in 2005.