Friday Links: Bark, Dick, and Torment

Let's take a long look back at what happened last week, shall we?

• At the compulsively readable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton talked about Hugh B. Cave's story The Murder Machine: "Near the climax of the story, [Michael Strange] explains the nature of his evil device to the beleaguered Dr. Dale by asking some rhetorical questions:  'You have heard of hypnotism, Dale? You have heard also of radio? Have you ever thought of combining the two?'  Dr. Strange certainly has, and the result may allow him to rule the world, beginning with London."
• The Horror Review Hole reviewed the film Torment: "Isabelle and Dunne play a recently married couple, heading off to his holiday home in the country for a little family time. Things are complicated by two things: his son (from a previous marriage, with a dead wife) being a twat to his new mother, and a home invasion visited upon them by a cult of mask wearing loonies set on stealing said twat away from his family. The first is easily worked around (via a great conversation in which daddy tells his son that, if you're lucky, mummies die, and sometimes you get two). The second: not so much."
• Christina Bergling discussed psychological horror at Terrorphoria, a great place to talk about such things: "The worst hells are created in our minds. As someone with a bit of experience in being my own worst enemy, I can attest that there is nothing quite as unrelenting and pervasive as ourselves. There is no escape from our own minds, and no one knows what will torture us more than us. I think the scariest situations are when we lose reality and turn on ourselves. There is not stopping the momentum of a mind unraveling; there is no way to find a foothold against the descent of a mind."
• John Kenneth Muir reviewed an Amazon pilot for a television adaption of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle: "The filmmakers have worked with great skill and artistry to adapt the Hugo Award-winning 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick to a visual format. Dick’s story has been termed an “alternate history” science fiction story, meaning it ponders what might happen had history gone differently.  In this case, the Axis Power won World War II, and have since carved up America. Imperial Japan now controls the West Coast, and Nazi Germany controls the East Coast, with a “neutral zone” in the mid-west separating fiefdoms."
• At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Jim interviewed horror author Jasper Bark: "As I've been selling fiction professionally for a couple of decades, first scripts for radio and the stage, then scripts for comics, then fiction, I have to confess that four years seems like quite a short period for me. Both Joe, the editor, and I were quite definite that the stories all had to be in a similar vein, so my main concern was finding recent stories that would fit the tone and character of the collection as a whole. I think 2009/2010 marks the point at which my work, in horror at least, moved into its current trajectory, so I chose stories, written after this point, that reflected this new trajectory, and discarded those that didn't."
• Here, I reviewed two movies: Jodorowsky's Dune and Interstellar.  Most of the week I worked on a short story, a Lovecraftian effort set in 16th century Mexico.