Christopher Alan Broadstone

Suicide The Hard Way: And Other Tales From The Innerzone is a collection of short stories,screenplays and song lyrics by Christopher Alan Broadstone. This anthology hits on subjects such as psychological horror, man’s inhumanity to man and obsession. In these pages lies some excellent horror fiction and it shows there is more than one way to scare a reader. One of the things that I thought was interesting about this book was the three screenplays in it plus an essay on the making of the short films that came out of the scripts. This is something you don’t see in a lot of horror anthologies.

My favorite part of this book was the short story Little Jimmy Combat. The story is about a young kid who sees himself as a soldier and the forest surrounding his house as the enemy. Jimmy gets a big surprise though as the forest starts to fight back against him. The imagery that Christopher uses is excellent and you can see the forest coming to life before your eyes. You then start to wonder what the forest fighting the kid signifies. I took it as the Earth fighting back against the humans who try to bend it to their will, but it is open to interpretation. In Christopher’s stories you get the feeling that this is a philosopher at work and you can get several different meanings from his stories.

Another good story here was Hellbound Hillary which has some startling imagery that is both beautiful and horrific at times. I’m not even sure how to describe this story except that it is about addiction and loosing your mind. What Hillary goes through will make you cringe. This story paints a picture that is enough to drive you insane but wanting to read more at the same time.

Suicide The Hard Way is like a work of art from a true artist. The reason I say that is because Christopher Alan Broadstone has written a book that gives you three very different examples of storytelling via screenplays for his three short films, song lyrics from the band he was in and short stories. To write in each format you would need to rely on a different skill set and Christopher shows that he can tell a good story in each format. This book is disturbing but at the same time its fascinating because you can tell the author really put his soul into his work. Suicide The Hard Way is a book that will keep you up at night and make you think.… (altro)

Puzzleman by Christopher Alan Broadstone is one ambitious novel. When you first start reading it you think its going to be a gruesome horror novel meant to shock people. That’s exactly what it is, but as you start reading you find there is a lot of depth to the story and characters. The story begins with a woman named Amanda buying an earring that looks like a ball of metal wires. Amanda is recently divorced and her infant child has died leaving her bitter and wondering where her life went wrong.

Little does she know that the earring will soon lead her to some answers she doesn’t want. Amanda isn’t the only one searching for answers in Puzzleman. We soon meet a legless heroin addict named Erik who wants vengeance, a professor named John who feels his life has passed him by, a French vintner named Jeannette who wants to revisit a lost love and a former detective named Ben who wants to get back into the game. All of the characters are searching for something and all of their destinies are intertwined in the Puzzleman’s maze like pipeworld.

The pipeworld is a place where life is eternal but is also a place of suffering. It’s a place of living nightmares crawling with grumemonsters but also a place where the five people in the story can find what they are missing. The Pipeworld is like a giant macabre puzzle with the puzzleman as the master and the people as the pieces. The question is, can the pieces find the answers they seek and escape with their sanity?

My Favorite character in Puzzleman was Amanda, this is a woman who has questioned god and everything else around her since she was a child. It almost seems like god is punishing her for her questions with the death of her young child and her abusive husband. She shows how tough she is in the pipeworld though by not giving up even when things are at their worst. I loved how towards the end she makes a comment to the Puzzleman that shows that her viewpoints on god have not changed and I enjoyed the Puzzleman’s reaction to the comment. Another thing I liked in the story was finding out why her husband was the way he was. My only problem with the story was that there was a long section on the mythology behind the Puzzleman. I felt the section was to long and took the reader out of the story and would have been better if it was divided into segments within the story and not just one big chunk.

There is a lot going on in this book, it starts as a horror novel then turns into a text-book on world mythology and then goes back to being a horror novel. This isn’t just any horror novel though, it asks some important questions such as What are you willing to do for the ones you love? What would you do for eternal life? and Why does god allow so much misery? This is a thinking man’s horror novel. It delivers the scares and the gore but it also makes you think. In fact you might have to read it twice to understand everything that Christopher Alan Broadstone is trying to say. Puzzleman is Mr. Broadstone’s first novel and it will be interesting to see what he has in store for future novels.… (altro)