The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
"Michael Kelly brings all six senses alive, but he knows that senses can't always be trusted. Kelly's world is bleak and beautiful, sharp and blunt, chilling yet ultimately invigorating."
--Scott Nicholson, author of The Red Church
"I wish I could say I discovered Mike Kelly, but I ran into his work almost by accident, a few years ago, when one of his stories appeared alongside one of my own in the short-lived Deadbolt Magazine. I wrote to tell the editor that Kelly's story was the best thing in the issue. I meant it. Since then, I've been on the lookout for Mike's stories wherever they appear. After you've read his work, you'll do the same thing. There's nothing better than discovering an author who consistently delivers the delicious frisson that is the hallmark of good horror fiction. Mike Kelly is that kind of author."
--- Stephen R. George (aka Jack Ellis), author of Nightlife
"Michael Kelly is an emerging writer with a bright future ahead of him. His stories are classic tales about real people in peril and every one of them is a satisfying... and terrifying read."
-- Edo van Belkom, author of Martyrs
"Michael Kelly isn't typical of many modern writers of dark fantasy. Kelly engages and challenges, trusting readers to make judgements and conclusions relevant to their personal realities, discovering rather than being led. His stories reflect life, rarely predictable and never black-and-white, mirroring what makes us human, exploring that which makes us both monstrous and humane."
--C.S. Fuqua, author of Notes to My Becca and the Deadlines audio novel series
"I enjoyed your story very much, and I honestly think, had someone handed it to me, stripped of identification, that I could have guessed it was yours. Atmospheric, moody, surreal, yet rooted in character and relationship. Hell, just the degree of unrelenting misery -- merciless and forgiving yet not gratuitous -- would have provided a major hint. I do respect you for that, by the way... your ability to affect such believable darkness, utter despair without props and melodrama. I always believe the pain of your characters. Strange, that, now that I actually think about it."
-- John Dixon, commenting on my story "Fate and Destiny at the Blue Moon Motor Lodge."
'Like a Stone in a Riverbed’, by Michael Kelly, is pure class, a beautifully written tale about lonely people. Sheryl, a woman with no friends and no love in her life, meets a girl called Emma. Things take a bizarre turn when Sheryl presents her new friend with a rather macabre gift. It is a story that could have lost its impact if it had lapsed into eroticism, or opted for a shock/horror ending; as it is, it ends on a wistful note, and is more effective for doing so. This is a real gem, and the finest story in the issue.'
-- David Price, reviewing issue #2 of Fusing Horizons in Whispers of Wickedness
I tried hard to enjoy all the stories. They're all competently told but I felt that too often their raison d'etre tended to be tales of revenge/just desserts/unjust desserts. The two pieces which buck this trend are Michael Kelly's somewhat meandering, life-affirming post-bereavement 'Fly to the Rainbow' and the only formally innovative story on offer, 'Spreading' by Patricia J. Esposito.
-- Allen Ashley, reviewing Wicked Hollow #5 in The Fix
"In the Quiet Hours" by Michael Kelly is an emotional story of death and a glimpse of what might show up. Michael has the gift of capturing the emotions of his characters, which is sometimes lost with some writers. I predict he will go far with his writing.
-- Pat Nielsen, Scavenger's Newsletter
And, of course, I like 'Flight of the Crystal Bird', another angle on the 'Handmaid's Tale', ending, so I feel, with escape and hope.
-- Doris Speed in a Letter to the Editor (Beyond the Rose)
'Houses at the Borderland', the anthology will feature the works of well-known authors
Simon Clark, and Tom Piccirilli, as well as stories from rising stars John B Ford, Tim
Lebbon, Laura Elvin, Michael Kelly, Suzy Nightingale, Paul Finch, Sheldon Woodbury
and Simon Morden, as well as work by previously unpublished authors.
-- Britain's SFX Review
Michael Kelly picks up the slack with "He Who Dwelleth in the Blue Sky." His story
moves back and forth between a description of Hernando de Soto's violence to a group of
Chickasaw Indians and the modern day tale of a survivor of the Native American people
being robbed by a young thug in a Memphis park. Things do not go well for the hooligan,
and the creepy ending is resonant with poetic justice.
-- Matthew Nadelhaft, Tangent Online.
The award for just plain disturbing goes to "He Who Dwelleth In The Blue Sky," an
uncomfortable short about the penalties for pride and silence.
-- Lisa DuMond, SF Site.
"Decent writing, predictable plot."
-- Laura Elvin, Web of Horror, reviewing my story 'Waiting' in Crossroads #19. Words to live by, eh? A bad review is better than no review, isn't it?
"Definitely one to watch."
-- author Brian A. Hopkins
"Continuing to prove himself as a fine writer."
-- Andrew Busby, Editor, Sackcloth & Ashes
"Soon, in the Beautiful White by Michael Kelly certainly lived up to its delicious title. Serene, subconscious, and yet threatening and ominous."
-- Anthony Evans in a Letter to the Editor (Sackcloth & Ashes)
The horror continues with Michael Kelly's "Soon, in the Beautiful White". Readers of
anthologies like MORE MONSTERS FROM MEMPHIS and MOT's own HOUSES AT
THE BORDERLANDS are no strangers to Kelly's prose. But it is with this story that he
seems to be finding his stride and cutting loose. It opens with the bizarre "The snow
spoke to me today", and from there descends into madness, taking the reader helplessly
along for the ride. Michael Kelly shows great promise with each new story, and he is one
to watch.
-- Brian Keene, Masters of Terror.
"Hell-Bent for Leather" by Michael Kelly is somewhat of a chestnut, with Otis as the main character trying to fit into the gang of the Tuxedo Boys. Otis has to knock over some gravestones, and the Tuxedo Boys try to scare
him with stories of the Shambler, a zombie type urban legend who kills those who violate the graveyard on Halloween. Otis goes into the graveyard and the Shambler duly kills him, the end. The writing is vivid, but the story is a bit old.
-- James Schellenberg, Challenging Destiny
The magazine finishes with Michael Kelly's 'Last Train Home', in which we encounter once again complete paranoia and the search for a true identity. Virgil Phipps is looked down upon by his wife and his boss, and each day as he travels home late by train he thinks he sees a strange creature in the darkness that surrounds the rail track. As in David Gullen's story he decides he can't stand it any longer and chooses to make dramatic changes, resulting in quite a dramatic ending also.
-- Paul Bradshaw, reviewing Roadworks #12.
"The More Things Change" by Michael Kelly opens in a rather flagrantly retro SF way--two space pilots, Jake and Roy, encounter the infamous Vic Youngblood, a legendary pilot who enlists them for his latest job hauling ice in the Jovian system. Yes, it's white guys in space, and for the most part it reads as rather cheesy and melodramatic space opera. Yet there's enough of a twist to the whole set-up to make me think twice about the functionality of all these familiar skiffy cliches, that perhaps there's more careful deliberation to this one than is immediately evident. (See the title.) The point is fairly simple, ultimately, and as SF I didn't find it all that successful, but it's also a bit
more thoughtful than it may look at a quick glance.
-- Reviewed by Christopher East in Tangent Online
"Heart of the Wolf" by Michael Kelly is probably
the odd one out here, being a quiet, serious fantasy rather than straight horror. It concerns the enduring and traditional relationship between an Inuit tribe and successive generations of wolves - a story that lingers in the mind, and competently done.
-- reviewed by Paul S Jenkins in The Fix
"The Black One" by Michael Kelly and Carol Weekes is standard supernatural fare, with a famous white hunter returning to civilisation only to be stalked and killed in his own house by a phantom tiger. It's pretty much by the numbers, and if you haven't been there, done that and bought the T-shirt, chances are your
grandparents did.
-- reviewed by Peter Tennant in The Fix
A story near the end of the issue, Michael Kelly's "Flight of the Crystal Bird," mines the same vein as the Margaret Atwood classic "The Handmaid's Tale." For never adequately explained reasons, certain women in the society of Kelly's story are selected as childbearers, something like surrogate mothers. They have no say in the matter; their role is "divinely decreed by the state." They live apart, as do the men who are the fathers of these children (the mothers are not mentioned) and do nothing with their lives except have a sack of embryos surgically implanted on them. The heroine of the story falls in love with one of the fathers, who teaches her to dream of freedom.
On the surface it is a story of rebellion against tyranny, but I see something else in it I am sure the author did not intend. Deep down it expresses the very modern, Western idea of rebellion against biological reality. In the story the wonder of pregnancy is turned into a horror, not so much by the fact that the childbearer has no choice in the matter, but by the way the embryos are visible in the sack she wears. The ugliness, the alienness, is stressed again and again: "I can see into the sacks at the tiny, perfect embryos, floating, drifting, growing, gaining strength, mewling, then screaming, limbs forming, hands reaching, tearing, pulling, breaching the sack, crawling through, trailing pink-red afterbirth..." The disgust and hatred expressed at the mechanics of childbirth is astonishing. No soft or even neutral words--"baby," "child," "human being" are ever used in regard to what is born; at one point the heroine is informed her friend "produced a male and three females." It is clear at the end of the story the heroine believes living with the man she loves will never result in anything so hideous as a pregnancy.
-- Angela Pancella, Tribal Soul Kitchen