Regular readers of the site will be aware that Ferretbrain is a pretty happening site these days; we've got more people commenting on more articles, we have two whole podcasts up, we have snazzy business cards. I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later someone would recognise us for the bigshots we clearly are - we've already had slightly dubious e-mails offering us silly money in return for a few links on the Friends page, which we courageously turned down because it was a blatant scam.

But now, at last, our international fame and prestige has won us that most precious resource that all Internet Critics dream of: freebies. You see, author Jim Bernheimer has a new short story collection out, entitled Horror, Humor, and Heroes, and he's sent us a PDF copy to review for the site. Score!

We actually had a moment of confused panic when we got Jim's request: is he serious about this? Has he read our reviews? If he has, does he simply have balls of steel or is he so confident in the quality of his work that he doesn't expect us to pan it? And most importantly, who gets first crack at the pinata?

Eventually our editor offered me the job on the basis that I've got as much claim as anyone to being the resident horror expert. Amusingly enough, title aside this volume has only the most tenuous of connections to the horror genre. Granted, it wheels out zombies and werewolves and vampires, but it invariably either treats them in a comedic manner or takes a more fantasy/SF-based approach to them: the zombie stories, for example, are more about the implications of mankind surviving a zombie apocalypse than they are about scaring the reader; they're "what if" stories that happen to feature the undead.

Horror, Humor, and Heroes is available in any format you could possibly want, from paperback to PDF to Kindle; the full range of places you can purchase it are avaiable at Jim's site. My PDF copy is a reasonably nicely put-together package, despite lacking the cover art (though that might be down to it being a review copy), although I did notice typos and grammatical errors unfortunately frequently. This is not the only aspect of Jim's writing where he really needs an editor to help him out, but it's the most obvious one; there's even typos in the opening dedication. Another oddity is that every single story in the collection has "by Jim Bernheimer" written prominently underneath the title, which in a multi-author compilation is obviously the normal state of affairs but is utterly pointless when you have a collection of short stories that are all by the same author and don't involve any collaborations.

Normally, with short story collections, I'd tend to focus on the generalities and pick out perhaps one or two stories for special comment, but I am going to take a different approach here and discuss each story in turn. This case merits such an approach, because each story is notable and inspires comment. (It's just that, ah, most of the time that isn't a good thing.) First off I'll discuss the various shorter tales, then I'll dive into Confessions of a D-List Supervillain, the novella that takes up about half the book, and I'll conclude with a look at the two-chapter preview of Bernheimer's upcoming fantasy novel series Battle Maidens.

The Short Stories

The Wolf's Story
by Jim Bernheimer

The Wolf's Story is a story written from the point of view of a wolf, a sort of more carnivorous Watership Down. Specifically, it is about Nal, an impetuous young wolf whose pack adheres to something which I think is intended to resemble Native American spirituality - they refer to God as the Great Spirit and are all about Nature, maaaan. Actually, the wolves' religion is more like Christianity, or rather a common evangelical Christian interpretation of how man lived before the Fall - the wolves believe the Spirit has made them custodians of the forest, and that as a result it is only fair that the other animals give them sustenance and sport, and animals can by and large talk to each other (being "of the Spirit"), but can't understand the speech of human beings (who are not "of the Spirit"). Oh, and they are closed-minded and judgemental and superstitious and they believe that crazy people are possessed by evil spirits and - wait, can anyone else hear that axe being ground?

Anyway, we find Nal taking time out from patrolling the forest to go on a solo hunt for a big deer that he can kill by himself and impress everyone with his skills. Let me back that up a second: he's a wolf, right, wolves being pack animals that aren't really known for solo hunts, their basic hunting tactics pretty much requiring the pack as a whole to participate, and he's hunting solo. I'm pretty sure this story is intended for adults - certainly, it's a bit too gruesome for small children - and I'm pretty sure that most adults who have any sort of interest in reading stories about talking wolves would want and expect the wolves to behave in a wolf-like manner, so this jarring bit of distinctly un-wolfy behaviour gets the story off to a bad start.

Anyway, we are meant to get the impression that Nal is an impetuous free spirit who isn't afraid to sass his elders, but he comes across as a preachy fuck - observe:

“If you have no pride in what you are and no joy in what you do, then your life must be empty and without meaning. I pity you.”

So, trotting through the forest with the egotism of an arrogant teenager, Nal encounters a wounded bear and wonders if the pack attacked it. I don't think wolves make a habit of hunting bears unless they're actually starving, but if Jim can't get pack tactics right he certainly can't be expected to depict a realistic food chain. (Incidentally, the narration is very dismissive about bears, which is odd because if the story had been about bears instead of wolves Nal could have been a lone bear wandering about being a forest guardian, and the story would have worked just as well and it wouldn't have flown in the face of bear behaviour.) Between the injured bear and the distant sounds of what are quite clearly gunshots - although obviously Nal does not recognise them as such - nobody's going to win any surprises for guessing that humans are encroaching on the forest, and they're packing heat. After encountering an injured fawn and having a chat with it (because it's his duty to investigate trouble in the forest), Nal resolves to solve the mystery of these strange forest intruders.

But not before eating the fawn. By himself. Not sharing a scrap with the pack. Because that's how pack animals work.

At first the men elude Nal, but in the middle of a prayer to the Great Spirit for guidance he's interrupted by the arrival of a raven, who is a sort of allegorical atheist in the same way the carrion bird in Animal Farm is an allegorical priest. We are told that ravens aren't blinkered by the religious worldview of the wolves, because they fly far and wide and learn about the world outside the forest, and then - gosh, there's that axe being ground again, louder and louder, who could possibly be doing it?

Anyway, the raven tells Nal about that crazy little thing called man and Nal tries to warn the rest of the pack, who are lead by a wolf called Fang because Bernheimer has no shame, but the pack won't believe him, and demand that Nal either provide proof or shut up. How he is expected to provide proof, short of dragging a human (dead or alive) into the midst of the pack, I'm not sure - I mean, he's a wolf, he lacks opposable thumbs, it's not like he's going to bust out his forensic skills and go all CSI: Nature on us. Incidentally, the scenes with the pack are a bit more interesting than the rest of the story, possibly because they are engaging in recognisably wolflike behaviour - there's a nice touch where it's mentioned that the wolves believe the Great Spirit lives on the Moon, so they sing hymns to the Spirit whenever the Moon is full.

It's during the course of his investigations that Nal has a chat with a wise old raccoon who explains that, yes, men do exist, and they have pointy sticks which shoot death at you. The raccoon conversation is important because it yields some much-needed context; the raccoon alludes to men turning others of his kind into hats, which raises images of the pioneer era of westward expansion in US history. "Oh," I said to myself, "the wolves are allegorical Native Americans - hence the spurious Native American trappings applied to their badly-photocopied Christianity - and the story is going to be about how their peaceful way of life that was perfectly in accordance with nature was savagely ripped to shreds by the Europeans." Fair enough; there's a mild Noble Savage undercurrent and a lack of understanding of the culture in question, but the motive is at least benign.

Then the raccoon mentions that there's two types of man - there's a white variety, and there's a red type who "throw sticks at each other with great force". Both are dangerous, both act in strange manners, both are not of the Spirit.

OK, so to recap: Jim has constructed a Noble Savage allegory with Native American trappings set during the pioneer era. And then he explicitly excludes actual Native Americans from the allegory by making them just as unintegrated with Mother Earth as whitey. So the true victims of the US's westward expansion are not, in fact, those silly human beings who had the dashed bad luck to get genocided, but the poor little woofles.

Oh, and the trees. Mustn't forget the trees.

Anyway, eventually there's a confrontation between Nal and Fang and Fang is all LISTEN NAL YOU'RE A LOOSE CANNON AND I GOT THE MAYOR GREAT SPIRIT BREATHING DOWN MY NECK, I'M TAKING YOU OFF THE CASE and Nal is like CHIEF YOU CAN'T DO THIS JUST GIVE ME TWENTY FOUR HOURS TO SOLVE THE CASE and Fang is all LISTEN SON YOU'RE A GOOD KID BUT YOU CAN'T FIGHT CITY HALL THE MOON IF YOU KEEP AT THIS I'LL HAVE TO TAKE YOUR BADGE and Nal is like SCREW YOU CHIEF, YOU WANT MY BADGE YOU CAN TAKE IT - I'M GONNA GO IT ALONE.

I'm paraphrasing slightly, by the way. But that's how the scene comes across.

Anyway, Nal lopes off to stake out the clearing where the lumberjacks are doing their logging, hoping to catch them at it in order to obtain proof, and his love interest (with attitude!) Teya shows up to help him, prompting this hilarious line:

“You risk much just by being here, Teya. Stay upwind from me unless you want them to smell me on you.”

What is he doing, pissing into a gale?

And then, quite predictably, things go to shit, Teya and Nal end up dead, and all the wolves cry and vow that the spirits of Teya and Nal will strengthen them in the fight against mankind. If you didn't see that coming, you're either 6 or brain damaged, which is a funny coincidence because that's the general level of sophistication the story assumes the reader has. With every plot twist and revelation telegraphed well in advance, The Wolf's Story is a suspenseless fairy tale. Whatever merits it had were suffocated at birth by a pillow stuffed with cliche and ignorance. To say that Horror, Humor, and Heroes doesn't have a strong opening number is putting it mildly.

Raw and Real
by Jim Bernheimer

If The Wolf's Story was mishandled, at least it tried to communicate an idea that wasn't completely trivial, vacuous, and obvious. The central message of Raw and Real is "reality TV is shallow and exploitative!", which is about as shocking and uncontroversial as saying that water is wet or that fire is hot or that Horror, Humor, and Heroes is a terrible shot story collection. In Jim's next compilation I fully expect to see stories about how bad airline food is and how George Bush sure was prone to verbal goofs.

That said, even though the concept behind Raw and Real is neither weighty nor original it is at least amusing. The story is set in the run-up to The Beast Must Die, a live monster-hunting reality TV pay-per-view special, in which three bounty hunters with outlandish stage personas are tasked to hunt down and kill "El Lobo", a Central American werewolf. Jim does have the decency to acknowledge that the idea isn't exactly fresh - the show is named after a hilariously bad werewolf-hunting B-movie, and it's briefly mentioned that the studio has had to fend off a lawsuit from the estate of a famous horror author for plagiarism - perhaps a reference to Stephen King and The Running Man. (In fact, one of the bounty hunters is a nebulously described man called the Gunslinger...)

The protagonist of this story is not one of the bounty hunters. Nor is it El Lobo, or the estate of any deceased horror author; instead, our main character is David, the executive producer of the whole sleazy affair. I get the impression that we are meant to intensely dislike David, a process which is hampered by the prose taking a sudden downward turn partway through the story, as if Jim half-finished a second draft and then gave up. I mean, check this out:

Five hours later, David muttered that his bonus better be huge!

That's just a horriby constructed sentence (especially with the exclamation mark at the end): it's as if the third-person narration slips out of a neutral tone and into David's voice.

That said, at least David has a distinctive voice. Pretty much every other character involved in the story is a one-dimensional stereotype. (The Wolf's Story was a bit like that, actually. It's like Jim can't quite stretch to writing two interesting characters at once.) For example, one of the Bounty Hunters is called Gangsta Mike and has a "posse" - but let's give Jim the benefit of the doubt there, Mike never gets any spotlight time in the story and it's entirely possible he was meant to be a stab at the way the mass media portrays black people.

Let's focus instead on the only bounty hunter who actually gets a speaking part - the big-titted bimbo who is only in the show to add some sex appeal. She hunts in a leopardskin bikini, and with her "huge knockers" and Amazon-themed schtick she's meant to be more popular with monster hunt fans than she really merits, considering her talent. Fair enough, she's a woman who allows her image to be exploited for ratings, it happens. Maybe she has a fully fleshed-out and colourful personality off-camera... oh wait, no, she's a shrieking prima donna providing comic relief in the manner shrieking prima donnas have traditionally done in stories about the entertainment industry for centuries. Oh, the hilarity as the producer gets things under control by calling her a bitch! On its own, this scene might be excusable - just because Jim writes about one female character being a spoilt brat doesn't mean that's how he sees all women, and David's intended to be a misogynist - but it's part of a disturbing trend that extends throughout the book that I'll comment on a litte later.

But what of the other major character in the story? Is El Lobo truly a monster, or has he been framed for a crime he didn't commit? You be the judge!

El Lobo spat at David’s feet, “My ‘victim’s fund?’ You mean all the people they say I killed in that village where I went on my rampage? Do you know that it was a stronghold of government opposition? Was I there that night? Perhaps, I do not know what happens when the beast overtakes me. I only know that I awoke the next day in the middle of the wild instead of the cage I went to sleep in. Forty-three is a considerable number of victims for one werewolf to kill in a single night, is it not? The number is even more impressive considering I traveled nearly twenty kilometers and bypassed another village to accomplish this feat.”

By the way, that's a nasty typo with the "victim's fund" (make your mind up, did he kill one person or dozens?), and it's repeated several times. There's actually the germ of a more interesting critique of reality TV than "it's stoopid" here - by posing as factual programming reality TV takes funding and attention away from genuine documentary and journalistic works. There could have been a nice opportunity for a subplot here - maybe instead of El Lobo spilling his guts an enthusiastic assistant producer could suspect the truth and try to dig into it, only to be overruled by David because there's no ratings in journalism any more. But no, Jim squanders the opportunity, and we are left wallowing in a story as insipid as the very thing it is satirising. Two pages later the producer is killed by irony and I simply can't bring myself to care.

My Son - The Monster
by Jim Bernheimer

This is a pretty short tale - it's only two and a half pages long - and it's quite fun. It's a brief reimagining of the story of Icarus and Daedalus, told from Daedalus's viewpoint. It's an interesting alternative take on the myth that fits nicely with the ancient Greek milieu. Unfortunately, the title completely gives away the major twist that Jim puts in the tale, but even if the title were different the game would still have been blown in the first paragraph. The idea is interesting, but the opportunity is sadly wasted.

The Red Badge of Doom, Charlie Horse, and The Rally
by Jim Bernheimer

A triptych of zombie stories next, with the longer Charlie Horse bookended by the extremely brief The Red Badge of Doom and The Rally. The Red Badge of Doom is so brief it looks more like a creative writing exercise than a fully-fledged story, and consists of the thoughts of a soldier on the frontline of the war against the zombies as he makes a promise to himself that he's going to take being infected and possibly turning within the next three days with dignity. It's nicely done, although the titular "badge" - a bedsheet with a big "B" on it, tied around the neck - seems like a ludicrous and jarring waste of resources in a war of attrition against the zombies, and seems designed for no purpose other than to allow Jim to construct a vaguely pretty image towards the end of the story.

Charlie Horse has more meat on the bones, but - like so many zombies - its guts are all inside out. The basic premise is that after a zombie apocalypse people have eventually managed to adjust, and have taken to using the zombies as a source of cheap labour and power generation. (The zombies are set to turning big turbine blades to generate electricity, which probably isn't actually cheaper or easier than just using conventional generation methods in practice but never mind.) It opens with a couple of zombie collectors venturing into an abandoned city to lure a few zombies out to be captured and processed; naturally, the young inexperienced one gets killed and the old pro feels bad about it and complains to his supervisor, a woman named Noel. (There are women named Noel? That confused me a bit because I've only ever seen Noel used as a man's name.)

So, Sean, our protagonist, spits a few cliches at Noel, and once again I'm having flashbacks to cheesy action movies and start expecting her to demand his badge. Of course, Sean quits first, in a scene which is almost as cliched; the most notable thing about the interactions between the characters is how stiff and artificial they feel. These people are supposed to have worked closely together for five years, but none of that ever comes across; the characters are simply wooden, cardboard cutouts painted with bright and easily-grasped stereotypes and designed to slot neatly into a cookie-cutter plot.

But then we move on to the actually interesting scene: a day at the zombie races! You see, Sean's fast-moving buddy, being in fairly good condition, has been entered into the races, and Sean realises he's a surefire bet to win, so Sean puts all of his life savings on the guy (whose name, in case you haven't guessed, is Charlie) so that he can win enough money to retire. Charlie wins the race. Sean retires and does not have to go zombie hunting any more. He feels grateful to his dead buddy.

You see, the problem is this story is told all backwards. What Jim needs to have done is cut the opening segments entirely - they're unnecessary and they show up the weaker points of the setting (such as the zombie electricity plants). The story should have focus exclusively on the Derby and concentrated on really getting us inside Sean's head, showing us the desperation that's brought him to gamble everything on this race and the fear that he'll lose and have to go acting as bait for zombies again next harvest season and his confidence that his "horse" will win. The revelation about the true nature of the "horses" should have been made about halfway through the tale, once the race starts, and then Sean's prior relationship to Charlie which gives him the inside knowledge he needs to win his bet should be revealed only at the end. As it is, this story blows all of its ammunition in the opening segments, leaving the ending a foregone conclusion. How dull.

The concluding part of the trilogy, The Rally is set in a political rally in the aftermath of "World War Zed". (Ouch, careful about acknowledging better zombie writers there, Jim.) The political speech presented is suitably emotive, despite some occasionally dodge prose ("He not only stands on his record, but he built a fortress on it!" - ow, the change in tense gave me whiplash!), but the story is otherwise devoid of substance. It's a three-page joke, and not very funny, which centres around a right-wing knee-jerk reaction to the "zombie tolerance act".

All in all, as a set of thematically linked stories these stories are remarkably lacking in thematic links, beyond the recurring zombie motif. The best one is Charlie Horse, and the other two could frankly have been cut without hurting the collection. Even then, Charlie Horse is botched, showing more potential than actual merit. Let's move on.

Reality Bites and Cookie?
by Jim Bernheimer

I'm reviewing them together because they seem to be earlier samples of Jim's work - apparently they've previously been aired on a horror podcast. Perhaps they worked better in the spoken word, but I have to say in print they are nothing special.

Reality Bites focuses on a conversation between a vampire and a lawyer for his life insurance firm, who refuse to pay out on his policy because he's undead rather than properly dead. The vampire's first response is to point out that he has a legal death certificate and the government is demanding inheritance tax from him, and threatens to sue. The lawyer laughs at him and points out that a jury would never rule on his behalf because of societal prejudice against undead.

Hold up there. Firstly, I'm not an expert on the US legal system, but I'm not sure whether a jury would necessarily be involved in a civil case about an insurance payout. Secondly, let's think about the implications of the lawsuit: our vampire can either win and establish in court that he is legally dead, in which case he gets the insurance money, or he loses and sets the legal precedent that he is not really dead, in which case he gets out of the death taxes. He ends up ahead whichever way the case goes. There is no reason for him not to sue. But he's an idiot so he tries a different tack. He tries to hypnotise the lawyer, fails, then she turns out to be a vampire, beats the crap out of him, and recruits him to be a vampire hitman for the government. It's all very abrupt and rushed.

Now, by this point I've started to notice a trend with Jim's female characters: they all seem to be hard-nosed, pushy types, or they're spoilt slutlets with an entitlement complex. Sometimes they are both. The lady wolf in The Wolf's Story was a bitch (literally hurr hurr), the women in Raw and Real consist of a spoilt slutlet bounty hunter, a hard-nosed assistant producer, and a nigh-characterless chick that the protagonist happens to be having sex with. There are no women in My Son - The Monster, The Red Badge of Doom, and The Rally. The two women in Charlie Horse consist of a hard-nosed pushy type (Noel) and a media slutlet (some actress who acts as bait for the zombies in the zombie race). And now we've got a hard-nosed, pushy lawyer who, once the vampire has left, begins to slut it up for the janitor when he shows up in order to get at his blood. I feel concerned. Does Jim have issues with women, or does he just have issues with writing women? It's hard to tell.

Cookie? is just bad, unfinished, unformed. There's no character, little plot (little girl talks to demon, demon has her make evil cookies which put people under her control), and no depth to it, just an extremely shallow glance at life on a trailer park. Poor people live in depressing circumstances? How nice to know. It would have been nice if that were at all relevant to the story.

Adventurers Beware
by Jim Bernheimer

This is a Dungeons & Dragons parody based on the idea that HEY ADVENTURERS ARE BASICALLY CRAZY. In itself, that is problematic, since it occupies a niche which is already well-populated by the likes of Norbert, The Order of the Stick, and a host of others. Much of the story focuses not on the adventurers themselves, but consists of a group of completely indistinguishable villagers with nigh-identical modes of speech discussing ways to get rid of them. It's reasonably well-observed, but caters too much to the niche for a general audience, and the jokes are a bit too stale for the geek crowd, who have surely heard them all before.

Wait, I tell a lie, some of the participants in the conversation are distinguishable by virtue of being female. One of them the buxom daughter of the innkeeper. The other one?

Duncan started to reply, but stopped. Wanda was a “sturdy” woman whose most attractive physical feature was her “personality.” He was fairly certain that Dirth Nimblefinger’s fingers were the only ones that dared touch the hag’s body.

Add "desperate fatty" to the extremely limited list of Jim Bernheimer Female Character Archetypes. (There's a bit later when he refers to Wanda's encounters with Dirth's fingers as a "female moment". Jim is a classy man!)

There's not much else I really want to say about this one, beyond drawing your attention to this especially loathsome bit of writing:

"Look at the buffoon! He’s wearing full plate mail, but every time he’ll jump off and almost fall over like a turtle. For what? Just so he can go over to help the unarmored elf off her horse. Hell! They’ve got me talking to myself again!”

Random people talking to themselves isn't a D&D cliche, it's a cliche of bad writing. Jim is using the fact that he is writing a parody to excuse his own terrible writing habits. What the hell, Jim?

A Matter of Perspective
by Jim Bernheimer

This one is about a nerd who is mistreated by emotionally manipulative beautiful women who mainly fall into the "nice tits but selfish and stuck-up" category of Jim's female characters - specifically, there's the hilariously named Bunny, the nerd's socialite ex, and her pal who is just as shallow. Like with Raw and Real, I'm a bit confused as to how to handle this - on one hand, the female characters are horrible, but at the same time the central character is a nasty little shit so that might just reflect his perceptions of people. Except the female characters in stories with a more neutral point of view are also horrible. Hmmm.

Anyway, this nerd is also a mad scientist who has invented a reality inverter in order to win Bunny back. Actually, it's more of a class inverter, a sort of zap gun which shoots a ray that flips your social status; Bunny's friend turns into a trailer park tramp (again with the knee-jerk dislike of people from trailer parks!) and her male friends turn into hicks, for example. When turned on Bunny it takes away her Oxford education and "about twenty points of IQ" but gives her huge tits. (I will miss my doctorate when Jim Bernheimer flips out on seeing this review and comes after me with his reality inverter but it's good to know there'll be a plus side.) Eventually, he shoots himself and turns into a redneck and gets back together with Bunny, who because she is now trashy and of a low nature is happier to shack up with him than she was back when she had standards.

Oh, Jim. I do worry about you.

The View From My Room
by Jim Bernheimer

Suddenly, bafflingly, Jim pulls out a genuinely excellent story. Why this gem was buried here rather than leading the collection is a mystery to me; certainly, if Jim hadn't solicited a review I would have never have read this far otherwise. It's got a strong concept and great characterisation of the protagonist; if I were Jim I would jettison the rest of this collection, keep this one, and keep practising until I had a book's worth of stories of equal merit.

The story, told in the first person, is about Adam, who is the first human being to be born on the lunar colony, and is as a result something of an international celebrity simply by virtue of having astronauts for parents. It's a tale of the nervousness he feels leaving the sheltered existence he has enjoyed on the Moon and heading off to college on Earth - the first time in his life he's ever set foot on the mother planet - it's genuinely moving, raises some interesting ideas, has plot developments that actually take you by surprise, and has an air of emotional verisimilitude about it which none of the other tales in Horror, Humor, and Heroes ever manage to attain.

Of course, maybe I'm just going a little funny after wading through Jim's sewage and mistaking a competent and average story for a great story that shows real verve and talent. I hope not, for Jim's sake, because the rest of the stories in this collection are even worse than the ones that came before.

Lieutenant Armchair
by Jim Bernheimer

The premise behind Lieutenant Armchair might have proven to be interesting if Jim had chosen to engage with it instead of taking yet another opportunity to express his ideas about male/female relationships. In a fierce ground war against giant mutant animals that have taken over many agricultural states of the USA, the draft has been reinstated. Since this is a mildly dystopian near future, officers are considered too precious to risk their lives on the front line, so they issue their orders remotely via radio and only the drafted grunts actually go toe-to-toe with the garguantian bees and the titanic deer and the ubercows. Since this causes a certain amount of resentment, their voices are digitally masked, so the troopers never know who their commanding officer is, or whether they have the same officer this week they did last week. (Keep that in mind, because it's going to be relevant.) Because the officers stay at home in the bunkers and give their orders remotely, the soldiers refer to them as "Armchairs".

Anyway, the story, opens with a bland and confusing battle scene that introduces us to our protagonist, Gibson, and his unit, a squad of soldiers differentiated only by ethnicity and rank. There's a Hispanic guy named Chico and who calls people "ese" and has no other character traits, and a Jewish guy called Moses who is the subject of lots of Exodus-themed jokes and wonders whether the canteen food is kosher and is generically wise and says "shalom". Jim really didn't need to give these guys much in the way of a rounded character since they have absolutely no bearing on the story, but it's nice to know that he can deliver an offensive stereotype in as few words as possible.

Anyway, there is a lot of shooting and yelling and the protagonist sasses back to the unit's current commanding officer in a way which would get him in serious shit in any real army. He isn't disciplined when he comes off duty, and he goes to a bar to score some action. After chatting with his sassy and promiscuous ex-girlfriend, he finds the bar's regulation Jim Bernheimer Hard-Nosed Frigid Bitch (a female archetype from the Jim Bernheimer line of cardboard cutouts). Gibson, our manly hero whose irreverent attitude we are meant to respect and admire, hassles the ice queen for a while until she starts crying and then calls her a whiny little bitch. This makes her shut up and do what he says, so he takes her outside and sits with her and makes small talk and then they start making out. Classy as ever, Jim!

Then the very obvious revelation that she was the Armchair on the day's patrol comes up. So there's some arguing and she starts crying again and Gibson twists the knife a little before making nice and building her up again, and then yells at her again to shake her up a little, and then they get back to the making out, and then they go off and fuck. There's a lovely exchange between them around this point:

“Let’s go to the suites,” she says with determination. “I think we both need this.”

“And protocol?”

“You’re probably a guy from the motor pool who smells a little like gas. I could be a nurse who has seen one too many body bags. It’ll be our little secret. Besides, you haven’t lost a member in eight weeks. That does mean you’re good. I can do a lot worse. The next group I end up with could be a complete waste of sperm.”

And a little later:

Her reply is a husky laugh. “You must have said three or four times today how you wanted to shove something up my ass. I’ve got standards, Mister! Survive another eight weeks and I might consider it. C’mon draftee, let’s see if you’re any good without the flamethrowers!”

The story concludes with Gibson, more laid-back after a three day sex binge, out on patrol and engaging in sly banter with Miss Armchair over the radio, whilst she is more capable of respecting her subordinates and giving them instructions because she has had Gibson's penis inside her for three days. In the final line of the tale Gibson expresses his hope that the current tour of duty lasts eight weeks - ahahaha! The punchline is buttsex!

Confessions of a D-List Supervillain
by Jim Bernheimer

We've made it through the short stories! Why not have a rest and a drink of water or something. You're going to need to keep your strength up for the final stretch. About a third of Horror, Humor and Whores Heroes consists of Jim's magnum opus, the novella Confessions of a D-List Supervillain. It's the story of a third-rate supervillain called Mechani-CAL, who is a talented inventor who isn't really cut out for the supervillain lifestyle and who keeps being overshadowed by a far more popular superh-

Oh, hello Dr Horrible, nice to see you. I almost didn't recognise you under the mechanical suit.

Chapter 1: I Went To New Orleans (and All I Got was This Lousy Prisoner!)

Anyway, the story starts with him about to be taken down by the Olympians, a superhero team of twelve college students who were given their powers by the Greek Gods. (I've got to admit, that's a pretty good superhero concept.) The twist is that the Evil Overlord, top supervillain in the evil genius field, has had a mild accident in his genetics labs, causing the uncontrolled release of a swarm of mind controlling aliens that within a fortnight have taken over most of the world and are busily organising a hivemind - and the Olympians, like everyone else of significance, are under their control! Which is a cool twist, but I don't think it needed to be revealed immediately; it could have been nice to start with a normal superheroes-vs-villain battle and have Mechani-CAL slowly realise that something is wrong with the Olympians.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly realising that something is wrong with the narration: it lurches uncomfortably between first person present tense and first person past tense on a regular basis. Rookie mistake, Jim: pick one and stick to it, and if in doubt go with past tense. Anyway, the battle concludes with Cal killing the parasite on one of the Olympians and escaping with her. No prizes for guessing by this point that it's Aphrodite, Cal is as classy as all of Jim's other protagonists:

“Too slow! We can go faster if I carry you. Grab on!” Alright, just about every guy’s and more than a few girl’s dream is to wrap their arms around Stacy Mitchell, the most heavily-photographed woman in the world, but I never thought that it’d be happening to me. If I survive, it’ll definitely go in my memoir, or at least in an email submission to an adult magazine.

Oh look, they've got to his hideout and he's desperately trying to impress her like a teenager trying to convince his girlfriend that his bedroom doesn't smell as bad as it actually does. When she mentions that her powers are sexual in nature and need "recharging" my heart sank, but thankfully it turned out that it was just a ruse of hers to try to get Cal to let his guard down - he guesses, correctly, that the bugs are addictive somehow, and she's currently going cold turkey and is desperate to knock him out, run away, and get her fix from her roachy overlords. So he locks her in his cellar until she calms down and plays nice.

Here's a revealing passage:

Stacy is trying new tactics with me. Instead of screaming and threats, (which got progressively more graphic) she wants to be my friend. It won’t last, but I’ve got to hope she can kick this thing. She doesn’t know the “lament of the nerd.” Every geek that gets into their late twenties looks back at all the girls/women that crossed their path and sees how the good-looking ones were always trying to get something. How many of them had I helped in study groups? They never overlooked the bad acne and eczema that followed me to UCLA. How many tires did I change and computers did I fix, hoping for a number from a grateful coed? How many boxes and pieces of furniture did I carry because a pretty pair of lips asked me?

Now, after David in Raw and Real and the inventor in A Matter of Perspective and Gibson in Lieutenant Armchair I think it is safe to come to the conclusion that Jim Bernheimer writes about guys with women issues far too frequently and too believably for it to simply be an artistic choice: I think he actually believes this shit. Jim, I know it's hard being rejected but you've got to get over it. Women hate it when guys get too desperate, especially when that desperation makes said guys lock said women in steel boxes and let them sit there coated in their own shit.

Chapter 2: Songs That Get Stuck in Your Head

This chapter opens with Cal bumming about in his lab, Aphrodite sitting around coated in her own shit in her cell (to be fair, she has access to shower facilities, she's just too mad to use them, but it's still an incredibly demeaning position for her to be in), and the past and present tense still doing a dizzying tango. Jim continues to weave his geek fantasy of having a superpowered supermodel stuck in his house, not allowed to leave until she is nice to him. At one point she has a mild heart attack and nearly dies. Cal revives her, and Stockholm Syndrome begins to set in. I begin to know how it feels. Words start bleeding into each other, I'm having trouble concentrating, and I am bored out of my skull. The monotony is briefly broken when one paragraph is printed in italics for no discernable reason.

Oh, and Aphrodite throws a tantrum so Cal knocks her out and clamps a big metal helmet on her head so she can't use her psychic powers. A bit later, to test out his new battle suit, he releases her from the iron mask and then beats her up. Jesus, Jim, do you have something you need to talk to a counsellor about?

I absorb her next four blasts, and my pulse rifle blows her into the adjacent cell. She’s bruised and beaten, barely able to stand.

I drop the rifle and grab Stacy with both hands as she tries to flee out the opening into the cellblock. Somewhere in all this, she became a symbol of all my failures and all the people who’ve beaten me.

I push her into the wall face-first and hold her there for a minute, unsure of what to do next.

His brilliant plan is to tell her to go to the bugs and get her fix, while he blows up his base and commits suicide; she's been bug-free for over a fortnight, if a strong-willed superhero with divine power like her can't give it up after that time then detox is going to be impossible, so he may as well just die now. Naturally, she is a bit conflicted but she chooses to stay with him and fight the good fight. Hooray for Stockholm Syndrome!

Chapter 3: Like I Need Another Reason to Invade Branson, Missouri

Aphrodite and Cal start the fightback by activating a few hidden caches of combat robots while they bicker in a way which is meant to come across as amusing banter but just underlines what a bitter dickhead Cal is. Then they attack some town in order to get the attention of superheroes and whack the bugs off of them. Another confusing and weirdly boring fight scene follows and some of the supers are debugged. Cal and Aphrodite capture two, and go back to the hideout to stash them in the cells until they detox. I have entered a strange state of consciousness where everything is completely dull. It was the fight scene that did it. Yes, the fight scene. It was full of short sentences which were meant to sound snappy. They did not sound snappy. They sounded dull and lifeless. Like an old man reciting an office's fire safety procedure. Quite dull. Yes. Quite dull. At least the past tense and present tense have stopped dancing about. The fact that much of this chapter is taken up by another creepy detox sequence might also have something to do with it. ("One man! One basement! Three beautiful women with Stockholm Syndrome! It's Friiiiiiiiitzlmania!")

Chapter 4: Free Choice and Other Positively Stellar Ideas

Happily, Jim decides to accelerate the pace of the story a little bit and advances the timeline by one raid-and-rehab cycle. By this point, Cal has assembled quite a decent resistance force, augmented by some liberated robotic superheroes. There is some banter, hampered a little by the fact that everyone sounds the same. Aphrodite asks Cal out on a date like we all knew she would, and then she has a girly chat with Athena where she convinces her that Jim Bernheimer Cal is awesome. Everyone puts their heads together and technobabbles as hard as they possibly can and they come up with a plan for saving the world which - IRONY! - involves breaking into the Olympians' HQ. It's all very nice and cosy and everyone's sort of getting along and it's like a Justice League cartoon. Except it's a Justice League cartoon which involved extreme and sustained abuse and violence towards women in the first act.

Oh, and Aphrodite and Cal finally fuck.

Chapter 5: War Dialing FTW

Because Cal has no self-esteem and all of Jim's women issues he's already trying to work out whether Aphrodite is exploiting him as the party sets off to attack the Olympian stronghold.

They win.

Cal gets the girl.

Because he loves her for who she really is, not the superhero.

She knows this because he's seen her on cold turkey and covered in her own shit.

Shit she was coated in because of him. Keeping her prisoner. In his basement.

Fucking hell. I think Jim just scored one full Goodkind on the Fantasy Rape Watch scale with this one.

Battle Maidens: Book One
by Jim Bernheimer

The compilation concludes with two chapter series from Jim's upcoming epic fantasy series, Battle Maidens.

Oh god, he's trying to do an epic fantasy series.

Oh god, he's going to try to write about women.

I am filled with fear and trepidation.

Chapter One: The Cracked Horn

Battle Maidens opens with with the protagonist, Majherri, and his companions entering a town, one of a series they have visited on a long journey in the company of their Battle Maiden riders. You see, Majherri and his friends are unicorns, and whenever they come into town all the people are very excited, especially the young girls. Majherri is weary from touring and has clearly had a lot of groupie action, for we are told that "He was tired and didn’t fancy yet another town full of maidens fondling him." But this is not a trivial fondling: no, this fondling is serious business, for the single unicorns like Majherri (who has lost his previous rider) are seeking suitable young girls to pair up with. They are the unicorns of the ancient order of the Battle Maidens, and their Bond with their rider makes the Maiden-unicorn pairing an excellent team. But Majherri has a problem: he is old, his horn is cracked, and has broken at the tip. It's been so long since he lost his last rider, this may be Majherri's last chance to establish a Bond before it's too late! With the opening scene of Battle Maidens Jim Bernheimer is asking us a striking and difficult question: Can a tired old warhorse find the right maiden to fondle his embarrassingly small horn?

Hurr.

The opening chapter gives us a taste of what to expect from Battle Maidens: dull, stilted dialogue and hilarious Freudian imagery. Like with so many of Jim's stories, there's a kernel of a decent idea in there - the Battle Maidens, as well as being ferociously powerful cavalry riders, know various interesting types of magic vaguely connected to the four classical elements, making them pretty damn kickass for female characters in a fantasy novel, and there is a noted lack of chainmail bikinis. This is frankly amazing for Jim; I suspect he wrote this one with an eye to appealing to the ladies rather than indulging in his fantasies.

But that doesn't change the fact that this is basically Pern with unicorns. Unicorns with inferiority complexes about their horns, and women who get all of their magical prowess through their connection to the unicorns. That's right, ladies: if there ain't no horn in your life, there ain't no magic.

This story isn't really about the Battle Maidens, see; it's all about Majherri and his own maiden problems. You see, his rider died, and that's not how it's meant to go: the unicorn is meant to die for the sake of the rider. Can his heart heal and ever know the sacred Bond again or has his horn been fondled for the last time? More importantly, will Jim Bernheimer ever write a story which isn't about men and the trials and tribulations women put them through? Dumb bitches, they won't stroke your horn, they cry when you lock them in a cell, they whine when you beat them up, they make you wait eight weeks before yielding up sweet, delicious buttsex...

Anyway, Majherri isn't picked by any of the snooty rich girls but finds a poor teenage girl who wasn't allowed to take part in the choosing due to some social stigma. She gives him a hug and he immediately pops a horseboner feels the Bondspark. Oh yeah, there's life in the old horse yet!

Chapter 2: The Girl in Poor Standing

The girl is called Kayleigh, apparently, and she wasn't allowed to take part in the choosing because her mother is suspected of being a whore and nobody knows who her dad is. That's probably going to be plot-relevant in the future. Not that we especially care about this, because Jim doesn't really seem to care either; he doesn't write Kayleigh anywhere nearly as convincingly as he does Majherri. It's almost as if Jim struggles to portray emotionally realistic female characters or something. In fact, Majherri's problems manage to upstage Kayleigh in her own chapter, when the Battle Maidens leader (canoness? Why not, they're basically the Sisters of Battle with unicorns...) yells at him for bonding with a girl too old - why, you're only meant to Bond with thirteen year olds!

Hurr hurr hu- wait, actually that's kind of sick.

Anyway, Kayleigh take's Majherri's side, because that's what she's there for - to help and support him, rather than be a full character with her own problems. All of the difficulties she faces in life stem from her background, and when she joins the Battle Maidens she'll travel far away and never meet most of the people who know her history again; oh, there's that bitch of a rival who's been picked by one of the nastier Unicorns, but she's clearly either going to be redeemed and be friendly or go evil and be a legitimate kill target in due course. No, the fact of the matter is that Kayleigh's problems are raised, examined, and dismissed extremely quickly, and Majherri's issues come to the fore yet again. It's almost as if Jim is more interested in the male protagonist than the female one!

That's the end of the sample, and I am left speculating what will happen to Kayleigh when she's off training with the Maidens and Majherri can't protect her from the wrath of her superiors. I bet she ends up in a Sisters Repentia squad by the time she faces her first battle.

Jim's Problems

Horror, Humor, and Heroes is a self-published book. It is easy to see why; were I a publisher I would fire an editor who approved of any of these stories, with the exception of The View From My Room and maybe My Son - The Monster. But Jim clearly wants to be a professional author these days and make sales to publishers that impose higher standards than Lulu and vanity press operations. How can he go about improving his work so that it can be lifted to the standard that we know, from The View From My Room, he is perfectly capable of?

First, Jim needs to either sort his head out or seriously address the way he addresses certain subjects. I've made fun of him a fair bit in this review, but joking aside he really does come across as someone who has deep-seated issues with women. If he genuinely mistrusts women then he needs to talk to a professional about that; if I've got the wrong end of the stick, that's fair enough, but he needs to seriously look at how he portrays female characters, and sexuality in general, if he's to avoid disasters like Lieutenant Armchair or Confessions of a D-List Supervillain.

While he's at it, he could work on trying to portray women, members of ethnic minorities, and people of different social classes from him as human beings instead of cardboard cutouts.

Actually, the white men of his own social class could do with some more characterisation.

And the wolves.

OK, so his characterisation sucks and needs a serious amount of work.

Secondly, he needs to be more selective about what he puts out there. I get the impression that Jim compiled this book by opening up his writing folder, dumping all of the stories he's failed to sell professionally into a PDF document, and adding some dedications and a copyright notice. Had he simply kept those stories back and continued to work on them until he managed to get the better ones into a sellable state and satisfy himself that the lesser tales aren't worth wasting further time on, he would have improved significantly as an author, and he wouldn't have this embarrassing abortion of a collection staining his bibliography.

Thirdly, he needs to stay well away from self-publishing. In this day and age self-publishing is too easy; there's little to no financial risk, which means that you can put out any old crap you like, and because there's no editors to please there's no impetus to improve - so long as you think it's good enough, then it's good enough, right?

Wrong. I think Jim and others like him are seriously stunting their growth as authors by taking the self-publishing route instead of submitting their work to editors. It is all too easy to insulate oneself in a warm, glowing bubble of positive feedback these days, and you're never going to grow as a writer like that: you need someone to kick your ass and rub your face in the mess you made on the carpet and show you exactly what you've done. A good editor would have thrown most of these stories straight back at Jim and given him pointers on how to salvage the ones that are worth salvaging; they would also have sorted out most of the typos and grammatical errors which are scattered throughout the book. Ramsey Campbell is an excellent example of why editors are incredibly important to a new writer; his earliest efforts are absolute dreck (and thankfully only one has seen the light of day), but with the advice of August Derleth he was able to take the sixth-rate Lovecraft pastiches he'd submitted and rework them into The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants. Which, granted, was a first-rate Lovecraft pastiche, but it was a decent start to his publishing career.

Sadly, Jim has chosen to lose his bibliographic virginity far too early. He is trying to run before he can walk, and he doesn't even have a decent running coach to tell him when he's going off the track. When he's on form, as he in The View From My Room and just about no other story in this collection, he really is quite good. But he lacks all discernment and judgement when it comes to his own work and can't tell his shit from his silver. It is an absolute crime that a decent story like The View From My Room must be hidden beneath piles of steaming hot literary excrement, but that is what Jim Bernheimer has done. He is suffocating his own best work. He is living proof that easy access to self-publishing technology can horrendously damage your growth as a writer. Please, aspiring authors everywhere, heed the warning. And please, readers, don't buy this book: you will not do Jim any favours by encouraging this. If you must read some of his writing, his fanfiction.net page is here, knock yourself out.

If you are a creative sort who would like Ferretbrain to review something you've made, then please contact the editor using the instructions on the About page. Go ahead, make my day...

Corrections!

I have been asked to point out two factual errors in the review.

Firstly, I misremembered which wolves died in The Wolf's Story. Nal dies, his love interest does not. I do not, however, feel that whether she lives or dies really affects my main complaint about the story, namely that it's a noble savage story which portrays the primary victims of the westward expansion of the US as being the poor little woofles.

Secondly, at no point in Confessions of a D-List Supervillain is it explicitly stated that Aphrodite ends up covered in her own shit. However, it does state that in one instance she has a seizure vomits and pisses herself. I suppose it's not completely impossible for her to have some sort of special seizure where she loses control of her digestion and her bladder but her super-bowels are a-OK, but that's kind of a stretch.

Whether Aphrodite ends up covered in piss, shit, and vomit, or just piss and vomit seems to be supremely academic to me. Granted, she's coming off magic sci-fi heroin, this sort of incident is to be expected. Granted, she is being kept in confinement, some rehab programs demand that. But Cal is playing her the same song over and over and over again for hours on end. That is psychological torture. Cal beats her up to test out his new mechanical suits. That is physical abuse. I can think of no reputable rehab program in the world which advocates torture and abuse as healthy elements of the healing process. Cal treats Aphrodite horrendously badly, but she falls in love with him anyway. That's an incredibly creepy message. I don't think the absence or presence of one flavour of bodily waste really changes that.