Red Sky

...Prepare for a Fright! Imagine a mashup of Killing Zoe and The Hills Have Eyes and you have an idea of what this satisfyingly brutal novel entails. Nate Southard has created a gem of a horror novel, seemingly crafted to be translated to the silver screen. Grab this one and devour it!

Very good book. I enjoyed the creatures and characters alike!

Danny Black is a professional bank robber, twenty years of experience in his criminal vocation and he's never had to shoot his gun, now the redneck Dale and his psycho girlfriend Gina have messed everything up by starting a killing spree, which will leave many dead, including a trusted member of his gang, several wounded, him with a hostage, and everybody on the run in Texas where the government sanctioned murder machine runs rampant. So after a spectacular please-make-me-into-a-movie exit from the bank and the town of El Paso, the remnants of Danny's crew find themselves in the desert running low on gas, food, and luck. Then they "luckily" find an abandoned factory to bunk down in during the night. Unfortunately they're not alone, not by a long shot, they have company, and their company is hungry. The title of this book comes from the factory's name "Red Sky Manufacturing", and in this abandoned factory even the snakes are ten feet long and deadly. Then everything just goes straight to hell. They get visitors, and these visitors are soldiers that show up to take out Danny's crew, and they're not particularly picky as to who're their shooting at, as they try to take out the hostage along with everybody else. As the crew scatters, the unstable Gina goes off her rocker, and out of the dark comes a swarm of hungry, brutal death. Within moments every faction ends up playing cat-and-mouse with each other, the situation quickly deteriorates into every faction for itself, and it's kill-or-be-killed, and for some, to be the eater or the eaten. As this war of attrition starts, the tension ramps itself up as the pain escalates, the dying starts, and the feasting in the dark commences. What you see is what you get in "Red Sky". There will no subtleties, this is basically a made-for-DVD horror monster movie, it's as if Quentin Terrantino did a low budget "The Hills Have Eyes", with bank robbers. We've seen this novel done dozen's of times on DVD and in paperback before, although, sadly, stuff like this has been conspicuously absent from commercial fiction for far too long, and for far too many years, and that's just too bad. So, even if the plot isn't really anything new or original, what Southard does well is in creating his characters, and keeping the action going smoothly. Danny is believable as a no-nonsense, hard-core professional criminal who hooks up with a couple of unprofessional loose cannons who are more addicted to the thrill than the job. You end up liking him, despite all-in-all. Melanie is great as the hostage, and who realizes that she's stuck between a rock and a hard place, and who will have to throw her lot in with the criminals, and Gina, well, Gina's a fantastic villain, so over-the-top, read the novel and right away you'll be casting some of your favorite femme fatales as her as she steals every scene she's in. If anything, Southard makes a real mistake in having her leave the stage way too early, and cops out with her in the end, as if he was just tired of writing about her. A good editor would have had him fix that. As for the rest of the characters, even though they often run to type, from the hot-dog driver to the steadfast right-hand man, each is endued with their own individual personality, or enough of one, so that the reader will have some investment in their eventual fate. Like a tank racing downhill without any brakes, this short, fast-paced novel is a wrecking machine that will remind you just how vapid the run-of-the-mill commercial paperback is at present. You shouldn't have to go to the small-press for novels like this, but, unfortunately you do, and more's the pity. Unfortunately, the monsters seem like they could use some more work, and I'm detracting a star because the ending just plain sucks. Then there is governmental conspiracy sub-plot which is pretty useless, unless it's there for a sequel. And as a bonus, we get poor proofreading and sentences like "Gina had tried and failed to feed her man to eat some pork rinds." (?) Or, ". . . Nelson and Mel here are hurt, and they're gonna be more of a harm than anything. (??) Still, I was never bored. I kept finding excuses to keep reading it, I wanted more, and for God's sake, will somebody with some money please make this into a movie? It doesn't hurt that this novel is throwback to the time when not every novel has to be a gosh dang epic, and was usually blessed with a great cover. "Red Sky" IS blessed with a cover by Alan M. Clark that is almost itself worth the price of the book. For this site I have also reviewed these indie horror books: Allen K's Inhuman Magazine #3 edited by Allen Koszowski. Andy by Bradley Snow. Dead Science: A Zombie Anthology edited by A. P. Fuchs. Deadfall by Shaun Jeffrey. THE DESERT by Bryon Morrigan. Dubaku by Edward M. Erdelac. Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines. Space Horrors: Full-Throttle Space Tales #4 edited by David Lee Summers. Hissers by Ryan C. Thomas. Kinberra Down by Eric S. Brown & Jessy Marie Roberts. Lucky Streak by Dane Grannon. The Last Horror Show by Bryan Smith. Rise & Walk by Gregory Solis. The Tales of Inspector Legrasse by H. P. Lovecraft & C. J. Henderson. The Undead #4: Headshot Quartet edited by Christina Bivins & Lane Adamson. Zombie Syndrome: A Space Horror Novel by Keith Adam Luethke. Plus a number of things by Tim Curran, like Cannibal Corpse M/C.

Very cool tale about a group of bank robbers getting stranded and falling prey to a group of mutated man made monsters. I really liked this . It's very well-written and is full of action and suspense. Nate does a great job of letting us get to know each character in the story before all hell breaks loose. This was a fun read!

This is one of those books you regret reading, only so you can read it for the very first time again. It almost makes one want to pick up a hammer and give self-induced amnesia a shot - not too hard, now, wouldn't want to send that cold steel through your skull and into the mushy pink stuff. I'm usually a slow reader, but it felt like this book swallowed me whole and crapped me out in no time at all. The action and settings are so well described it's like watching a great horror film on the big screen as you read it, with howls and screams blaring through surround sound speakers. There's action, there's horror, there's even a little romance. Overall, this book is groovy to the max. Nate Southard is definitely an author to keep your eye on. He's growing with each tale he crafts and it shows. I can't wait to see what he's going to have in store for us in a few years - heck, I can't wait to see what he's got in store for us now.

I am usually not a "jump on the bandwagon" type of guy but this book is awesome in every way as the others have stated. I dont remember the obligatory bad review coming from the publishers rivals even. I never got bored while reading it, which is one of my main sticking points with books. If I wanted to read some love story crap, I would watch lifetime. I cant really say anymore than has been said about the book, criminals, place to hide, new type monster, balls to the wall, you get the drift. I will be searching out more books by this author, right as soon as I publish this review. Get this book now!

I loved this book. Red Sky is an action-packed, bullets flying, bank-robbing, character driven, military involved, creature-filled kick-ass horror tale. Nate Southard's Red Sky has it all! Starts out as an action thriller and winds its way into a frightening and awesome horror story that does not let up for an instant. I can't say enough how much I enjoyed reading Red Sky. It must be made into a film. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!

I'm reading this and it's a damn good story but there are dashes in the middle of words multiple times on every page. It's driving me nuts and I almost want to quit. If someone is a good reader and is trying to get into a story and has to read crap like "fur-ther" for example, how do we get past that. My brain sees fur and then ther. There are honestly like at least 100 words formatted of this b.s. so far and I'm only on 34%. Anyone else have this problem? Don't get me wrong, I love this book so far but the formatting is seriously driving me crazy.