Don't Be Afraid by JC Piech #review

Title: Don’t Be Afraid
Author: JC Piech, 2012

From the get go, I do need to state that I’m no great fan of reaper/blissful afterlife stories, but JC Piech engaged me from the start. I must add that I’ve had the pleasure of including one of her stories in an anthology that I edited a few years ago, so I knew more or less what to expect with regard to tone and style – so let me assure you she’s an absolute joy to read.

The premise of Don’t Be Afraid is simple. Jason Stone is a British scientist far away from home on a day that will change the fate of the world; the date is July 16, 1945, and he is part of the team that saw to the creation of the atomic bomb.

Only he never gets to live with the repercussions of his actions, as he dies on that fateful day. From there it’s a pretty standard reaper theme – some departed souls are tasked to work as guides for the newly departed, to bring them to whatever waits on the other side. And Jason is one of those guides, and what he experiences as he submerges in others’ lives, will change him. It’s not so much about bringing peace to the newly dead, but also for Jason to fully understand the peril that mankind faces in the atomic age.

Here is where the beauty and sensitivity of Piech’s telling comes into play, as she explores the horrors of the aftermath of nuclear warfare and the people whose lives are torn to shreds at the touch of a button. A series of seemingly loosely connected vignettes vividly illustrates the pain and suffering in a way that poignantly makes cold terms like “thousands dead” become tangible – as I found myself immersed in individual lives with histories, as opposed to nameless throngs.

A secondary thread was also illustrated in how Jason remained watchful over his mortal family throughout the years, and how their lives too were bound in tragedy. A strong message of peace and acceptance of the inevitability of death and the cherishing of life flows through Don’t Be Afraid, and if I had to best encapsulate the genre in which I’d place this book, I’d call it mystical fantasy.

Granted, in many ways this novel is not my chosen genre, and if it had not been offered as a review book, I’d never have read it of my own volition – I prefer GrimDark, to be quite honest – but have to admit that a bit of light, accompanied by a slightly squishy message of love and hope, was possibly not a bad thing in the midst of the parade of my usual doom and gloom.

Don’t Be Afraid is a feel-good story about not forgetting one of the most important, timeless aspects of the human self – love. No matter your culture or creed, we all have family and friends, and we must never forget that despite our disparities, that we are all woven together by complex ties. And perhaps now, more than ever before, we must all play our parts (however small) to forestall future horrors.

Fear the Reaper (with Joe Mynhardt)

Joe Mynhardt is a fellow South African who's steadily creating quite a buzz in the horror genre. He's definitely one to look out for and I hope to bring him down to Cape Town for one of our SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment events (that's a hint, Joe, BTW).

Anyhoo, Joe's been at the helm of a new horror anthology entitled Fear the Reaper, which is available in paperback and Kindle. It was published on October 25 through his company, Crystal Lake Publishing.

Over to you, Joe!

* * * *

It was some time in the middle of last year that I couldn’t get the thought of death out of my mind. Like always, I was looking for topics or themes for the next Crystal Lake Publishing book, and for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about death. Not so much death as the process or act of dying.

I couldn’t even play with my two dogs without thinking about their eventual demise. Holding them in my arms and watching the life fade from their eyes as they stare up at me. I once had the horrible experience of holding my dog in my arms as she bled out. Luckily we made it to the vet on time to save her. But… that feeling of her body growing weaker, and her cries fading away, has haunted me ever since.

Noticed how I referred to the dog as her, instead of it. What if it’s a person? Someone I love? I know they’re all going to die one day, perhaps I’ll go first. It’s not knowing when or how that can drive you crazy, but knowing might be even worse.

These very personal thoughts haunted all the authors in Fear the Reaper as they created and wrote their stories. Feel free to check out this blog post by Rena Mason as she talks about her sister. We even lost one of the authors along the way. Rick Hautala, you are missed, indeed. I wish we could’ve chatted more.

One shouldn’t dwell on these thoughts of death, but let them motivate you to enjoy life more, even if those bad thoughts scratch at the back of your mind. No wonder most Reaper tattoos are on people’s backs or shoulder.

In this collection you’ll find people fighting death, trying to cheat death, becoming death, even catching death. Each with their own personal issues and motivations, of course. I’ve never seen such a collection of well-established 3-dimensional characters in an anthology.

So be sure to check out Fear the Reaper, you never know when it might be too late.

TOC: Taylor Grant, Joe McKinney, Rick Hautala, Gary Fry, Ross Warren, Marty Young, Stephen Bacon, Dean M Drinkel, Richard Thomas, Sam Stone, Eric S Brown, Mark Sheldon, Steve Lockley, Robert S. Wilson, Jeremy C Shipp, Jeff Strand, Lawrence Santoro, E.C. McMullen Jr., Rena Mason, John Kenny and Gary A. Braunbeck. Includes a poem by Adam Lowe. Edited by Joe Mynhardt.

LINKAGE
Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and check out our YouTube reading of Adam Lowe’s Hecate poem.

All the best,

Joe Mynhardt

Crystal Lake Publishing

RIP Oswald (January 1, 2000 to October 2, 2012)

Today my mom called with bad news. I hate those phone calls: "Nerine, ek het slegte nuus".

It would appear that my sibling ran over Oswald, my family's beloved Boston Terrier x Pug. Now Ozzy, as I called him, was originally my dog, but my parents decided to keep him when I moved out. Granted, I was a bit miffed at the time, but my dad was nuts about Ozzy, so he stayed with my parental unit, eventually moving to Swellendam with the folks.

It wasn't too bad. I still got to see the crazy critter whenever I visited. Recently, my parents downscaled to a retirement village, and couldn't keep pets, so Ozzy went to go live with my sister.

Yeah, I'm pissed off. Ozzy liked to snooze in the shade in the driveway. My sibling *could* have looked. But jawellnofine, at least he died quickly, and it wasn't something horrible, like him getting cancer or getting chewed up by another dog.

So, this is Ozzy as I like to remember him. He was a total clown. Oh, and by the way, I named him after The Penguin, Oswald Pepperpot. Wherever you're hunting, Oz, have a good one. You were one helluva dog.

#drabble Headstones

A metallic rasp draws my gaze upward. A pied crow lurches in the pine’s boughs, its beady eyes glittering, small chips of onyx set among plush feathers.

All details are sharp where I stand among the granite headstones. The markers are polished to a high sheen and I can’t help but wonder who rests here, beyond caring. Some sort of barrier is pierced and the sense of vertigo makes me stumble. What must it be to just not be, to not know anymore?

It’s then that I realise these stones are laid not for the dead but for the living.

#Friday Flash: How Does Your Garden Grow?

It’s an open-casket funeral. I only notice once I’ve clutched at D’s suit and left creases and tear stains in the silk after I hug him.

Don’t look, says the crow.

A dozen nightmares of animated corpses eyeballing me flood to the surface but I hunch on the pew—not quite in the middle of the church but not at the back. I’m not family. I was the daughter of the next-door neighbours. No one important. Today my funerary attire is not out of place.

The people I remember from a decade ago are older, balder and fatter. The kids are all grown up, like me. I struggle to marry faces to names. The projector displays its slide show and the dearly departed is broadcast for all present and I can’t stop the tears. I’m not crying for the departed. She is gone. I cry for myself, for the fact that I’m the one who hurts. Selfish.

A nasty little voice suggests I could have gone to visit more often and reminds me of others who will shuffle off this mortal coil next, each taking another fragment of my past; my childhood cremated to ash and scattered to the four winds. But I know the truth of it. We grow up, we grow apart. We can only mourn that which has passed. We cannot force branches together that have grown perpendicular to each other.

The sermon is bland, staid words repeated a million times before by parish priests in dry whispers that wash over those gathered like a river of sand. Vague notions of guilt remind me of the faith I’ve cast aside.

It’s all lies, it’s all lies, my atheist grandfather says from his death bed while my mother prays for his salvation.

I can’t go back. I’m the acorn that’s germinated and grown into an oak with twisted boughs warped by the wind. It’s impossible for me to fold myself back into that easily contained package that will match the dozens stacked away into neatly regimented rows.

People wonder where the soul goes upon death. They would like to believe that a new body is prepared for an afterlife. It lets them feel better about the fact that we all bear the black mark on our foreheads. It’s wishful thinking. Tooth Fairies in which big people can believe.

They play Don’t Cry for me Argentina, but the music fails to move me the way it did when I was a kid. I used to dig Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now the tune seems hackneyed, worn out from overplay. It was the deceased’s husband’s favourite song. They played it at his funeral too, though he was an atheist and they held his funeral in this very same church more than a decade ago.

We get a last chance to view the deceased once the service is over. I can’t help but think she looks pinched, a dried-out husk and the placeholder of the woman who taught me to love my garden. Why is she so small? I could lift her in my arms. The coffin is heavy lacquered wood with shiny brass handles. It seems incongruous when compared to the features of the woman who taught me to plant avocado pips and steal cuttings from botanical gardens.

I want to yell at them that this is wrong. I want to scoop her up and run with her and plant her beneath a spreading ficus so that its roots can tangle with her hair and worms can dance beneath her skin. The white satin is sterile. It is death.

Afterward, I sit on a bench beneath a cypress and watch as the family carries the coffin to the waiting hearse. The funeral director is a thin, upright man with precise movements. He shakes hands mechanically after the family have slid the casket into the back of the vehicle. Faces are expressionless, thoughts blown away with the Southeaster that shakes the plantains and rips the clouds into tattered shrouds. This isn’t really happening, is it?

The leaves are turning and summer draws to a close. I wonder about the deceased’s garden, about the plants growing there that hail from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Mauritius. They planted her husband beneath an Iceberg rose, but so far as I can remember, the plant died within months. Will she return to the earth or will her family keep her locked away in an urn so that they can keep her near? Does she even care now that she’s gone, her essence flown to star stuff?

All that matters is here and now. My husband comes to fetch me after I’ve had too-sweet mango juice and endured people telling me the last time they saw me I was a wee sprog that was so high. My husband and I talk about normal things, like what we’re going to do later, about fabric that needs to be bought for a photo shoot and pictures he needs to print out. I lose myself in his words and dream about my garden. I need to plant more trees.