Horror Review: Tower of Evil by James Kisner (1994, BMI Inc./Leisure)

One thing I've noticed in my years of consuming horror literature the way dogs devour their way through pretty much whatever you plop into their food dish: it's rare as hell to find any writer, whether top-tier blockbuster, mid-lister, or bottom-feeding barrel scraping author, who gives two shits about Indiana. That isn't to say nobody sets books here, but they're usually not horror stories. Think about it: Maine has Stephen King, Rhode Island has Lovecraft, California has Laymon, and Indiana has...?

Well, I guess David Levien if you want to count his modern-day noir detective novels as some form of horror, but let's face it, the worst thing Indiana's seen in terms of horror novel setting is a nod-and-a-wink by Jack Ketchum who's book The Girl Next Door was inspired by the real 1965 torture-murder of Sylvia Likens. Indiana's flyover country when it comes to horror fiction, often ignored for the quaint timelessness of New England, the skyscrapers and high-rises of New York, the seemingly lawless wastes of Texas, or the bastion of incest, baby-eating, and Satan worshiping some authors confuse with 'California'.

(Edit: I should point out Scott Kenemore wrote a pretty awesome trilogy of zombie books set in the midwest with the inventive names of Zombie, Illinois; Zombie, Indiana; and Zombie, Ohio, and I neglected to give him credit for doing so in the original version of this post. Sorry, Scott!)

But all that changed when James Kisner showed up on the scene, folks. Because James Kisner ain't no ordinary author, no sirree. James Kisner was Hoosier born and Hoosier bred (and, apparently after a tragic carbon monoxide poisoning accident in 2008, Hoosier dead), and despite a not-very-prolific output when he was alive, he set his tales of terror just south of Lake Michigan. For those of you who need a map, it's the one between the US and Canada looking like a big, flaccid dong that convinced Indiana to let it put it in (but only just the tip).

So, being the Indiana native that I am, I was pretty excited to learn somebody out there was representing the 19th state in the realm of horror fiction. So excited, in fact, that I paid a buck plus shipping to get my hands on his final novel, 1994's Tower of Evil, to see how the Evansville native handled horror. I selected Tower for two reasons: first, it was the last book he wrote and I assumed would thus showcase him at the culmination of his skills after a 13-year career, and second, it was one of his few works not published by Zebra. Don't get me wrong, I love me some trashy Zebra horror (where else can you get the gun-toting insanity of William W. Johnstone, the depravity of Ruby Jean Jensen, and the devil-may-care attitude which was willing to publish pretty much anybody with a 300-page manuscript that could be promoted by a drawing of a creepy skeleton on the cover?), but Zebra before it's demise was the gum-encrusted, booger-flecked desk's underside of the horror market. Leisure, on the other hand, was slightly more sensible in their treatment of manuscripts and desire for quality. I discovered a lot of fine talent through Leisure's line over the years...surely they wouldn't steer me wrong here.

Ha.

Ha ha ha ha ha...

Oh when will I ever learn?

So, to get the obvious out of the way first, and with absolutely no disrespect to the dead intended, James Kisner was either having a bad day, or he was a Zebra-caliber author who lucked into a contract above his punching weight. I had low expectations going in, but holy hell, I was not expecting the level of cheese Tower of Evil delivered. Rest in piece, Mr. Kisner...I apologize in advance for what I'm about to write.

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Tower of Evil, as mentioned before, takes place in Indiana. Specifically, downtown Indianapolis, in a fictitious analog for what, at the time, would have been the Indiana National Bank Tower before it became the Bank One Tower, then the Chase Tower, and now (as of the time of this writing, at least) the Salesforce Tower. Kisner, it seems, used the memories and experiences of his time as a night watchman for the real tower to bring a sense of veritas to this story, and it shows. This is one part of the book that really works: Kisner has no problem showcasing, through the routine of protagonist Shannon Elroy, the sheer tedium of working security in a thirty-story building. Whether it's the hassle of dealing with inappropriate comments and the way security guards are looked down upon by those in the upper echelons of the building's tenants, the wear-and-tear of the overnight shift, or just the day-to-day boredom of walking the same hallways on the same floors, making sure the same doors are locked, the same lights are turned off, and occasionally startling some poor soul who is staying late to make sure tomorrow's presentation is flawless, the novel's opening does an adequate job setting the stage for what the downtown life of the blue-collar worker was like in the early 90's. Kisner relates these details in an enjoyable style, and I'd have enjoyed sitting down and listening to him tell the real deal just as much if not moreso than reading about Shannon's experiences.

Unfortunately, nearly everything that comes after this is just an absurdity of coincidences and paranormal/metaphysical word salad showcasing that, while Kisner had some interesting ideas, he apparently had no editorial help in sanding off the suckage and crafting a coherent or compelling narrative for the book's 368 pages.

Tower of Evil's antagonist is a deceased hobo who goes by the moniker of Dead Ted. Ted is a disembodied spirit who discovers he can take control over some of the bank tower's systems. His first casualty is a hapless elevator repairman, called in to diagnose and fix a faulty car. When no one is watching, Ted pulls him into an empty elevator shaft. The man dies violently, impaled on one of the springs at the base of the shaft, but Ted realizes he can also control the man's body even though the poor guy's got a giant coil of metal running through his torso. Stuck as he is down at the base of the shaft, Ted can't do much with him, but it doesn't take Ted long to realize that if he can control one dead body, he can probably control more. Intrigued by this idea, Ted sets out to use the building's various electric components, everything from telephones and vending machines to cleaning equipment and computers, to build his own zombie army and take over the building.

The one thing Dead Ted didn't count on was overnight guard Shannon Elroy. A twenty-eight year old ex-military veteran and hot blonde possessed of a truly impressive rack which everyone, including herself, notices, Shannon's a straight-shooting, no-nonsense sort who doesn't believe in supernatural bullshit and is concerned with her looks as the ripe old age of thirty, with its promise of spinsterhood if she doesn't find herself a nice guy to settle down with soon, looms on the horizon. The night promises to be a dull one, as a massive blizzard buffets the city, plunging temperatures to sub-freezing levels and making driving hazardous for anyone crazy enough to be out in it. It doesn't take long for Shannon to realize that everybody in the building when she arrives, both cleaning crew and late-working employees alike, are going to be trapped inside for the foreseeable future until the plow crews can dig out downtown.

Dead Ted goes about his business with alacrity, turning one area of the building after another into his own torture playground, first dispatching his victims with vacuum cleaners and ice machines, then re-animating them and puppeting them around to continue the carnage. Shannon, in the meantime, stumbles across some of Ted's handywork and naturally dismisses it as some kind of juvenile prank conceived to try and scare the night watch. She's too cool for school and not about to fall for it until she realizes the wounds people are sporting (not to mention the talking, decapitated head of Stan, the guy she just replaced for her shift) are way too high-tech and well-executed for a simple gag. She's not sure how, but she's going to make damn sure whoever's behind the bullshit pays in spades as she stalks the floors of the bank tower, dispatching reanimated corpses and everything else Ted can throw at her, in a desperate bid to find survivors and stay alive until the sun comes up.

If you're thinking, "Oh cool, Die Hard with zombies!" then you're right where I was when I read the back cover blurb. "Die Hard with zombies" should be as impossible to fuck up as the Reverse Cowgirl sexual position, but here comes James Kisner bellowing, "Hold my beer!" and the rest is history.

This is one of the most batshit insane horror novels I've ever read. It's filled with violence that somehow manage to be yawn-inducing instead of cringe-worthy, not to mention some of the absolute least-sexy sex scenes one can possibly imagine, often combined with one another. That's saying something when one scene involves a man's sudden realization that he can use the dark power inside him to conjure up a sharp-toothed demon dick shaped from his own wang which he then uses to devour a woman by humping her violently and chewing up into her stomach with his mouthy meat. If your boning scenes inspire laughter instead of sweaty palms and quickening hearts, dude, you're doing it wrong. I've read better descriptions of sex in My Little Pony fan fiction, uh, other horror novels.

But for all the carnage and impotence-inspiring sexual bits, the main problem I have with Tower of Evil is that it never explains anything. Dead Ted doesn't get any background until 290 pages into this thing, and then, while it relates who he is, how he died, and why he might be upset at the building's tenants enough to murder-hump them into mind-controlled zombies, it never says anything about the power animating him. Dead Ted comes to life because James Kisner says so. We don't even get a reason for his survival into un-life, except that he did. Why can he remote-detonate a rat who is jumping from brain to brain and killing off his soldiers on an upper floor? Why can he control the building's various electrical systems? Because he just can, OK, gosh! Kisner's got a story to tell, and he couldn't be arsed with giving us so much as a "because the Devil lives under downtown Indianapolis" back-story. That's really all it would take, but instead we get author fiat, which is the least-enjoyable horror trope of them all.

My other major issue is that Shannon's so obviously a 'woman-written-by-a-guy' as opposed to just being a woman that it's insulting. In fact, all of Kisner's female characters are flat enough personality-wise to make poster board envious, yet top-heavy enough to make porn stars surrender in shame. It's this sort of crap that gives people ammo with which to paint the Horror genre with the broad strokes of misogyny and indifference, and unfortunately, Tower of Evil dispenses that ammunition in high-caliber format. When your female characters are either slags or prudes instead of women, you're doing everyone a disservice, and apparently nobody let Kisner know this in 1994.

The final nail in this review is the book's ending, or rather lack thereof. It's common in horror stories to have a massive dust-up in the end which puts the horror to rest, only to leave a little question mark that something may yet live. What's less common, and what will inspire me to verbally grind a book to confetti, is the non-ending, where it becomes clear the writer simultaneously hit his page count and ran out of fucks. Tower of Evil ends with a group of firemen breaching their way into the building as Shannon watches, only to be overrun and attacked by a swarm of evil broodling babies while the re-animated body of a character we presumed dead a long time ago, holding his severed Schlongzilla in one hand and his decapitated head in the other, leers at Shannon and asks, "What's up?". That's page 368.

Page 369 is the blank inside of the back cover.

What the literal fuck, James Kisner?

I've read a lot of horror in my life, but I have never in all my years encountered a full-fledged turd-and-hemorrhoid salad dressed with a diarrhea chutney and served with a side of jizz-sticks like Tower of Evil. The action is dull, the sex is unsexy, the violence is laugh-worthy, the characters are so flat they could be spokesmodels for bulimia, and the plot so half-baked you couldn't get Denny's to serve it to a table of drunks at 3am. Hell, this book is so awful I don't even want to try anything else Kisner wrote, because if this was his final novel, I can only imagine what the first or second must have looked like.

Is this why nobody sets horror novels in Indiana? Did James Kisner ruin it for everyone else? If so, on behalf of Indiana natives everywhere, I deeply and sincerely regret and apologize for the actions of my fellow Hoosier. Tower of Evil earns one enormous gaping anus out of five, along with my most heartfelt hopes that nobody reading this will go searching for a copy on the off-chance it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be.

Do not read this.