Friday, September 25, 2015

Friday Links: Death Note, Morituris, and the Halloween Weeny-Witch Party Book

As Fall falls upon us, promising cooler weather for everyone not in Florida, take a look back at the week to see what you might have missed in the world of the macabre, horrific, or just plain weird:
  • Jasper Bark continued his study of author Michael McDowell at This Is Horror: "McDowell was a very fast and a very prolific writer. Before the sale of his first published novel The Amulet, he wrote five unpublished novels. Between 1980 and 1987 he wrote 19 novels, mainly crime and thrillers, in conjunction with Dennis Schuetz and John Preston under the pseudonyms: Axel Young, Nathan Aldyne, Mike McCray and Preston MacAdam. He also wrote three romantic murder mysteries about a couple called Jack and Susan."
  • Jim Mcleod gave us an early look at Midwinter of the Spirit at his Ginger Nuts of Horror: "The plot is also intriguing, with Merrily being called in by the police when a body is found crucified in the wood (“We were led to understand you were the church contact for… this sort of thing.”), then later being taken to the house of the victim, where she discovers a Satanist shrine in the basement."
  • Mondo Bizarro introduced us to the weird Japanese film series called Death Note.  Pleasantly, it doesn't seem to portray tentacles going into unfortunate places.
  • Nev Murray reviewed some of Frank Westworth's JJ Stoner stories at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Eh…..wow. JJ Stoner. I’ll bet my mortgage on this guy against anyone. Bond. Reacher. The Expendables (all of them together). This guy has it all. Let’s face it he is effectively a hired assassin. No idea who he’s working for and he doesn’t care. He also doesn’t care about who he kills. Give him a gun and a target and he will do the job. Simple as that. Sounds horrible doesn’t he? Someone you should hate and abhor and boo every time he comes on screen? Well I say arse to that! This character is superb. Brilliantly written. Straight to the point with no messing about at all. You cannot help but like him."
  • In Kenya, a woman committed a horrific murder, claiming that she was possessed: "A woman who hacked dead her elderly mother-in-law in Kiambu county has said she was driven by Satan, who also wanted her to kill her mother and sister. Caroline Wanjiku, 29, turned herself in on Monday hours after killing Ann Nyambura in Gishobo village, Ndeiya ward, Limuru constituency. “I keep seeing visions of snakes coiling on my body around the waist,” she told journalists at Thigio chief’s post."
  • At Hayes Hudson's House of Horror, Hayes reviewed the film Morituris: "Two lovely Romanian girls take a trip with three Italian men to a rumored midnight rave in the middle of a dark forest. As the gang proceeds on foot to their final destination, a mysterious graveyard is discovered, a shockingly vile plot twist is revealed and bloodthirsty undead Roman gladiators rise from the dead to torture and mutilate their victims!"
  • From Zombo's Closet emerged the Halloween Weeny-Witch Party Book, which really must be seen to be believed.  
  • Ghost Hunting Theories showed us a series of vintage witches, some cheesecake, some just plain strange.
  • Sean Eaton drew from the past and the present to bring us modern necromancy at his never-miss, must-read R'lyeh Tribune: "Is there a modern, more reliable means of conjuring the dear and the not-so-dear departed, both for edification and profit?  Some readers may be familiar with the recent feature story in The New York Times* that described one young woman’s plans to preserve her connectome—a microscopically detailed three dimensional map of her brain—using advances in cryogenic technology."
  • Here, I discussed the everyday horror of roaches and pointed you to a new short story I had published at Liberty Island.
Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.

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