If you like your urban fantasies several steps up from the gutter, this is not the book for you. This is closer in tone to the gruesomeness you find on the show, Criminal Minds. Indeed I can easily picture that team investigating the crime that starts off this collection, as they did investigate a crime close to this in nature!
The protagonist of these first person narrated stories, Cal McDonald, is a fucking mess. That’s a result of being able to see all the things sane people aren’t supposed to see: ghosts, demons, zombies, vampires, ghouls, aliens, and everything else that quite fortunately lurks just beyond our perception. Ever since he was a small child, he could see this hidden world. Now at age thirty, he’s scarred mentally and physically, using booze and lots of drugs to ward off the mental pain he feels and to deal with the physical damage he’s incurred in battling these beings.
His locale initially is Washington, D.C., a place well acquainted with people and things that thrive best where the shadows are darkest. His best friend is a ghoul and no, they don’t eat the dead; the local cops despise him with good reason, as he completely fucked up as a police officer and was physically out the precinct door; and he really is far beyond giving a shit about anything.
There are no sparkly sexy vampires in his universe — only undead ones that he rips the heads off. If Buffy ended up in his world, she’d be a freaked out mess after one night. And that’s assuming she wouldn’t dead. Or worse.
It’s also fairly surrealistic at times, i.e., when McDonald battles a man whose been absorbing other brains and now has a gigantic head and virtually no body. They crash out the window of his apartment and both fly up and away. It’s very, very strange.
The stories themselves are good, with the weird factor really high. Savage Membrane, the first novella here, has him dealing twice with a monster that teleports the brains of people out so he can eat them. McDonald eliminates the problem messily with the help of a ghoul and a police lieutenant who sort of tolerates him.
After that tale comes another novella, Guns, Drugs, and Monsters, in which our anti-hero receives the living head of another monster hunter from L.A., who asks him to avenge his death and preferably find his missing body. As thing in D.C. are sketchy right then, he decides to leave, possibly forever, for La-La land. Need I say that lots of violence, drugs, bad juju, alcohol of all kinds, and weird events occur? Thought not.
The short stories, and I mean short at fifteen to twenty pages more or less, are entertaining but feel like they could been fleshed out a bit.
OK, everything here is entertaining popcorn literature, which is to say that you most likely will find everything here entertaining in a mindless way. Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories is highly recommended for horror fiction fans.
(Dark Horse, 2002)
