01/08/2026 Guest Review from Craig Brownlie!
- Candace Nola
- 12 minutes ago
- 4 min read
It’s Been A Year, Part 3
Reviews and thoughts on writing with Craig Brownlie
I have been reading and writing, but it’s been a minute since I’ve completed any reviews because 2025 has been a worse year than even 2024, which is saying quite a bit on a personal level.
Bringers of Hell by Patrick C. Harrison III, Eric Butler, M Ennenbach, Chris Miller
Disasterpieces by Wesley Southard, Wile E Young
Talk about a dystopian roundup! Honestly, I did not read these books back-to-back. If I had, then I would have finished the shelter beneath our garage. Like a fool, I’m counting on duct tape, tinfoil, plastic sheeting, and canned goods. Though a pass through these two collections is enough to make all efforts at self-preservation moot. And to think I read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank for fun when I was a kid.
Bringers of Hell is a tour de l’apocalypse led by Harrison, Butler, Ennenbach, and Miller as they manifest the Four Horsemen of Biblical fame. Each author picks a rider and off we go, clutching desperately to their waists. In Disasterpieces, Southard and Young destroy the world with less thematic je ne sais quoi though the stories hang together as world-breaking tales with the other work under consideration.
The end of everything does have epic sweep built right in. This tends to be the failure of most works and probably explains the obsession of 1970s disaster movies with large casts of characters drawn in two simple dimensions. The space between characterization and spectacle can be too great, so choices need to be made about what sort of story is being told.
For me, the finest stories marry the existential threat with the characters portrayed. All the tales in these two collections utilize the events as such commentary. Somehow, the writers manage to tell unique stories, and not simply because of switches in locale, proximate cause, and beat placement. Arguably, reading these six stories is a lesson in the importance of authorial voice. No one here hides behind the action. In many ways, they each hang their dirty laundry out to dry.
Hellboy/B.P.R.D. by Mike Mignola et al
Some of this is a reread because of massive gaps in my prior reading, and I’ve gone from the very beginning, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction to B.P.R.D.: King of Fear. Forget about the movies because this is immersive and wonderful and beautiful. If you want to laugh and have your heart broken and be left in awe, this is for you.
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis et al
More rereading because it’s nice to follow in order without holes, so we’re talking issues #1-32. A truly brutal landmark in pure social commentary with a lot of ribald jokes. Rabelais and Swift would be proud. In the intervening years since publication, this kind of work has become more common and more extreme because it’s tougher to blow current reality out of proportion. But still… a lot lands here, more than any opinion page or disguised opinion page on paper or screen these days.
LOONEY! by Stephen Kozeniewski, and Gavin Dillinger
Oh, this swerves… are you expecting satire? PTSD? Cosmic horror? Like Howie and Eddie always said, the writers write from beginning to end and are just as flummoxed as anyone trying to decide how to describe it when they’re done. Naturally, I enjoyed this tale of classic cartoon characters who come to life. As a youth, I read all the paperbacks my brothers owned, and the pinnacle was Out of Their Minds by Clifford Simak. That gem involves comic strip characters who lived in the woods. Simak bypassed copyright by simply not providing names, only descriptions. K&D start from scratch, which allows them to craft their inventions to story purposes. Also, both stories gain heft as they progress. Settle in for excellence.
What’s driving Craig apeshit:
Dense paragraphs!
One of the best pieces of advice I received in the last ten years is to limit paragraph size. It was described as a kindness to readers because no one likes looking at a page covered in words. It can make reading feel like exercise during swimming lessons where you place your face in the water and hold your breath.
The reality of this advice for me has been another editing tool. A nasty secret is that I don’t necessarily like editing, so I need many tricks for my brain to do a good job. Here I go through the text and identify digestible chunks which must be cohesive and accomplish something. Once it has done its job, everything else is superfluous. Time to kill those darlings.
Pack for the coming dystopia and include these highly recommended books
BIO:
Craig recently edited the anthology Five Raging Hearts: Splatterpunk for the Soul. Look for Craig's recent work in Hotel of Haunts, Demons and Death Drops, Wands: Year of the Tarot, and Unspeakable Horrors 3. He has three books out in his Little Books of Pain series: Hammer, Nail, Foot; Thick As A Brick; and A Book of Practical Monsters. These are in addition to the re-release of his middle-grade novel Comic Book Summer. He also has a surprise zombie novel dropping early in 2026. He’s been working on it for years.
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