Tough Guys, Dark Sides, and Tales of Hard Knocks Redemption: Norm Partridge’s Lesser Demons Is A Must For Fans, New and Old

Review: Norman Partridge, LESSER DEMONS, (Subterranean Press).
By Jason S. Ridler

Norm Partridge has fought the good fight of writing smart, tough, and dark stories of the fantastic for over twenty years now, and like a good slug of scotch, he’s is getting better with age. Best known for his short novel DARK HARVEST (Tor Books), Partridge is a free range writer of fiction, a mercenary of genre stories that range from the gentle and atmospheric to the true grit of the fiction he’s best known for, hard boiled horror. With an equal love of horror and rugged literature, the influences etched on his sleeve range from Ray Bradbury to Lee Marvin, Poe to Peckinpah, and his body of work, from novels, novellas, to short stories, should sit comfortably on the shelf of any fan of Joe Lansdale, Richard Matheson, or John Skipp.

But Partridge has always been his own writer, following his own lodestar, and his most recent collection of short fiction and novellas, LESSER DEMONS, shows not only breadth but depth from a natural born storyteller whose got mean chops and knows how to use them. Each of Partridge’s short fiction collections has been stunning. The Man with Barbed Wire Fist and Mr. Fox and Other Feral Stories are contemporary classics of dark fiction, and chock full of great insight from Partridge’s essays on his stories. But in Lesser Demons, I think Partridge has made what might be the best introductory collection to his worlds and works. Don’t get me wrong. Go and buy both the two previous collections. But Lesser Demons has a span and variety that, in lesser hands, would come off as disjointed, and instead links together as strong as a swinging chain.

The opening shot, “Second Chance,” is lean and mean. A tale of hard boiled horror, psychic voodoo, and bad love, it’s a quick and dirty introduction to Partridge’s world, originally written for a collection of stories in honour of the late horror maestro Richard Laymon. “Big Man” harkens us back to Z-grade SF apocalypse movies of big bugs and frontier justice, and a young kid’s attempt to survive the monsters created by radiation, and cheap whisky. In the title story, “Lesser Demons,” Partridge tasked himself to write in a similar vein as H. P. Lovecraft, and instead creates a story less about honouring the style of the haunted man from Rhode Island, but of the differences between himself and the horror legend. The result is a weird crime story that’s worthy of the collections marquee. “Carrion” is a fun and twisted quasi zombie story riffing on one of Partridge’s great mentors, Robert E. Howard. Partridge has mentioned that, unlike a lot of the great names of the pulps, Howard’s body of work still captures his imagination. And this gruesome tale honours that pulp master’s own love affair with horror.

Then the collection shifts gears and voice in a way that lets you catch your breath and still grips our mind. “The Fourth Stair up From the Second Landing” is a quiet, unnerving tale more akin to the works of Poe, but completely in Partridge’s voice. Here, the clipped sentences and kinetic pacing of the previous stories transforms into a saunter, the cadence of ghost stories and tales of the disquiet. A haunting story of family loss, it’s a jewel in the center of the collection. It is followed by a tougher edged but no less unnerving story, “And What Did You See in the World?” Indeed, both stories employ a great use of omission to generate suspense through inference as we try and piece together the mysteries surrounding the characters.

And like a Cadillac going from zero to 90, we blast off in the high paced, action driven “Road Dogs.” Werewolf stories will never reach the iconic status of vampires, but in Partridge’s hands they are the cunning underdogs of genre, offering a refreshing twist to a classic trope, and done in dirty noir fashion. “The House Inside” shoots us off into the realm of toys that come alive at the end of the world, a story of how to face the end when you can’t outrun it, and while it tilts its hat to Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling, the hard edge, the desperate sense of noble action wrestling with futility makes it pure Partridge. “Durston” keeps the action dark and dirty in a noir fable with a western back drop, leading to the star attraction of the collection: “The Iron Dead.”

A novella that reads like the best horror-action film you’ve never seen, “The Iron Dead” is Partridge firing all cylinders. A ragged tale of a satanic machine and the outlaw from hell sent to finish it off, it crackles off the page and into your brain like a mad mash up of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN meets HELLBLAZER. When the action is done, and the guns go silent, you’ll demand to read a novel or see a movie based on this story. Trust me, pilgrim, it’s that good.

The cinematic inferences here should bolster your idea of the dramatic visual power of Partridge’s stories, but don’t let them fool you into thinking they aren’t rich lit of the printed page. Partridge is one of the few writers of short fiction who can deftly handle using multiple view points in a single story without losing cohesion or a compelling hook. “The House Inside” masterfully weaves the POV of different toys and bugs so that the ending feels truly like they end of their world. These are tactile worlds that get under your finger nails and stain your blood.

While Partridge has got the most heat for his novels, he’s a great short story scribe, and the results in this collection are stellar. And as usual, Subterranean Press has done a stellar job in the packaging of the collection, a haunting cover by Vincent Chong gives you the first glimpse into the stories, evoking the kind of gritty realism Partridge infuses with high octane and operatic genre elements. If you’re a fan of Joe Lansdale, John Skipp, David Morrell, Jim Thompson, Tom Piccirilli, and other writers who can mash genres like a master chef, pick up Lesser Demons and make Norm Partridge part of your healthy diet of the dark fantastic.