Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

How we view the Horror genre is perhaps an insight into our own imagination; like many offerings of art from the individual or group that may disturb the peace of one, it can offer in another the release of vision, and in the case of that which brought to the attention the minds of Stephen King, Lovecraft, Poe, and Anne Rice to the public arena, and by doing so reveals a truth of humanity when pushed to the extreme. Imagination, it should be argued is the ability to reckon with the impossible and see it as a reality, that horror is a fact we should not hide from, no matter the subject, no matter the intent.

Horror reflects life, and even in the most unlikely scenarios that the plot of such a novel can portray, it is in the psychological feelings of what lays beyond in the other world that we grasp the meaning of the fragility of the human soul; and in some cases, why horror and sex are joined at the hip.

D. E. McCluskey’s Reboot: A Cosmic Horror is one that places itself firmly into the realities of imagination, of proclaiming a will of expression that digs, tunnels into the heart of fear and our own abuses of the soul, whilst exalting the beliefs that H.P. Lovecraft set forth in his own creative world, the unseen dread that King placed before the reader in The Mist and touching upon the terror caused by the historic ‘Dear Boss’ letters in a modern way that it captures the dynamic of the novel in such a way that you cannot but help be deliciously creeped out, your mind, your imagination pinging with trepidation as the magnitude of the event unfolds.

Manipulation from the ethereal voices, whether in the form of our own disturbed, arguably fractured mind, or the influence of another realm beyond our senses, is one of tragedy, and yet in Horror it is the manifestation of a two way conversation in which we drag out the dirtiest of secrets from our inhibited self, the ego waging war on the id, the result being one of surrender, either to silence, or to the acceptance of our own demise.

D. E. McCluskey weaves a narrative that fully embraces the disturbed mind and the madness that envelops those around them, and as the terror explodes, as the gruesome and the shocking blend themselves together in a fight against the straight and narrow we all like to portray, so Reboot: A Cosmic Horror becomes a force that is absolutely engrossing, you might read the words with one eye sheltered for fear of being drawn in to the nightmare, but your imagination, that complex beast that separates us from the sullenly dull, is enriched beyond measure.

There is no doubt that D.E. McCluskey is a modern great of the genre, a writer of sharp insight and wit.

Ian D. Hall