Howe vs. Dubrow

Adam Howe, author of Black Cat Mojo and Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet consented to let me interview him at The Slaughtered Bird.  We discussed many things, including horror fiction, action movies, and the American south.

I wish I could say it went well.

"You’ve already described how you won Stephen King’s On Writing contest some time ago; what do you think the horror genre would look like today if the King of Horror hadn’t taken up the craft?

These things are cyclical. Not to devalue King’s work – talent like his will always out – but no doubt another writer would have filled the void left by King’s major influences: Matheson, Bradbury, Bloch. And today we’d probably still be enduring shitty rip-offs of that guy’s work! A more interesting question – I’ll just pose my own Q’s, thanks – is to wonder how King would fare as an emerging writer in today’s market. A slim book like Carrie would be considered a novella."

Click to read the rest.

I mean...wow.  Just...wow.

My Top Five Horror Books of the Year

I had sent my list of top five favorite horror books of 2015 to Ginger Nuts of Horror before learning that the site's owner had kicked me out, so rather than let it languish unpublished, I am presenting this list here.

I read a lot, and not just in the horror genre. History, literary fiction, science fiction, politics, current events: they all go into my brain's mill to be ground into thought-flour, and...um...

Well, maybe that metaphor doesn't work so well. Anyhow, here are my top five horror books of the year:

• 5) My Early Crimes by Paolo Di Orazio: This anthology of stories about children and murder was uniquely horrifying, both for the subject matter and the skill the author displayed at telling each tale. Every story worked on some level, making the reading experience a long, agonizing squirm. As the father of a little boy, I found the author’s ability to put the reader into the minds of disturbed and victimized children particularly disquieting.
• 4) Joe Coffin: Season One by Ken Preston: If you think you’re vampired out after reading the classics, Joe Coffin is a breath of fresh, coppery air.  Each character had depth, making you care about even the most worthless ones (Tom in particular): they read as real as you or me. Everything everyone did had an effect on the plot and the other characters, adding complexity to a story about a vampire outbreak in Birmingham, England.
• 3) The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker: While I wrote long paragraphs of criticism about this novel, I still very much enjoyed it; a notion that might have gotten lost in the flurry of mediocre reviews it received. Barker took a movie figure we all knew and loved, reclaimed him, and gave him a history and homeland all his own.  The Hell of The Scarlet Gospels really was Hell, and not just some nightmarish dimension. I hope and pray we’ll see more stories about Harry D’Amour, the dead, and the vastly changed world Barker created in future works.
• 2) Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet by Adam Howe: Three novellas, three visions of hard-boiled horror. The less said about the title story the better: read it with a fresh eye and you’ll thank me later…once you stop ralphing. Gator Bait really puts you into the setting, making you dirty and sweaty and hoping against hope everything will turn out all right. Damn Dirty Apes is absolutely hysterical, with lines you’ll repeat to yourself later and laugh about when nobody’s around. Howe knows his pacing, keeping you on the edge of your seat the whole read through.
• 1) Stuck on You and Other Prime Cuts by Jasper Bark: Not since reading Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in the late 1980’s have I found a short story collection that’s as fresh, horrifying, and consistently imaginative as Jasper Bark’s work. They say that the greatest torturers are the most empathetic, and Bark proves this: he knows people inside and out, and is able to describe humanity’s pathos and absurdity with equal expertise. These are stories that will stay with you for a long time...perhaps forever.

I'm looking forward to 2016's crop of books!

Friday Links: The Haunted Palace, the Altay Princess, and Zombie Ninjas vs. Black Ops

Halloween's over, sadly enough, and as we recover and get ready for next year's holiday, let's take a look back at what's happened over the week in the world of the strange, the bizarre, the horrific:

• Mondo Bizarro reviewed the Australian movie Zombie Ninjas vs. Black Ops: "The Film is about...well, you can probably guess.  What you wouldn't guess, however, is the tone of the Film.  Despite the Troma-style Title, this Film is pretty much played 100% straight.  Alright then.  The Story involves mutated super-soldiers, the plot from Die Hard and lots of fighting."
• At the penetrating, perspicacious R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton brought us an archetypal terror from Lovecraft contemporary William Sloane: "Stephen King, who wrote the introductory notes to the most recent release [of The Rim of Morning], notes that Sloane once met Carl Jung, the famous psychotherapist and J.B. Rhine, a renowned expert in extrasensory perception at a special luncheon in 1937.  Jung had read an earlier version of To Walk the Night—it had first appeared as a play—and was apparently impressed with Sloane’s work.  Jung’s notion of the mysterious archetypal feminine principle, the “anima” is strongly echoed in Sloane’s character of Selena LeNormand."
• The Slaughtered Bird reviewed Adam Howe's Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet: "I’ve written long & hard about Adam’s storytelling and it’s here in abundance, more so than ever before in fact. I can’t imagine why he restricts himself to the novella but it makes for a pacy, breathless and tightly wound read without ever feeling rushed or crowded. To compliment the oddest of tales are characters that never feel out of place, and with exquisitely torrid back-stories as a rule." (Interested readers can find my review of this book here.)
• Nev Murray reviewed Jonathan Janz's Wolf Land at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "The plot is not unlike some of those old horror films you might have watched when you were younger. Basically the werewolves come to town and it is a battle for the good to survive against the evil. The difference with this story is the fact that people know from the outset that they are dealing with werewolves. There is initial disbelief at what they have witnessed but at the same time an acceptance of what is happening and a desire to stop the evil in whatever way they can."
  
• Breakfast in the Ruins deconstructed Roger Corman's Lovecraft film The Haunted Palace: "As in so many things, Corman was ahead of the curve in choosing to adapt Lovecraft. Whilst HPL’s name may be ubiquitous in horror fiction today, he did not actually attract a widespread readership until mass market paperback editions of his work began to proliferate in the mid/late 1960s. At the time Corman was planning this film, Lovecraft’s following was still a closely-guarded cult within the wider cult of Weird Tales/fantastic fiction devotees, his reputation kept alive largely via the expensive, small-press editions produced by August Derleth’s Arkham House."
• Shock Volume 3, Issue 2 from May 1971 was the latest bit of horror to fall out of Zombos' Closet.
• Demonic possession is on the rise in the Philippines: "'These days we have around 80 to 100 cases at any given time,' says Father Jose Francisco Syquia, the chief exorcist at the archdiocese's Office of Exorcism. The sudden increase in cases of possession has stretched the country's few exorcists thin and, according to Fr. Syquia, most Philippine dioceses do not have in-house exorcists. As a result many of the faithful are turning to "healers and occult practitioners" in the hopes of curing the afflicted. This route, however, only attracts the demonic and exacerbates the problem, says Fr. Syquia. By the time the exorcists from the archdiocese of Manila are able to see people, the victims are in bad shape."
• Some of Siberia's most bizarre mysteries were the subject of discussion at Ghost Hunting Theories: "Siberian Ice Maiden "Altay Princess": From 5th century BC, this mummified lady was found in a subterranean burial chamber. This tomb was on the border of China. She was buried with food and with her horses, facing east. Her skin still showed tattoos of deer shapes. She was buried in a beautiful gown and leggings and a 3-foot tall headdress, a fur, a mirror, and deer figurines. Interestingly, DNA testing proved her to not be of Asian descent as the Altai's in the area."
• At the Film Gutter of Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Alex Davis introduced us to The Girl Next Door: "If there's a single thing that elevates this movie, it's Blanche Baker's role as pretty much the sole adult in the lives of the children of the neighbourhood. In the beginning she's free in giving out the beer and cigarettes to all the youngsters, but her attitudes towards men, women and sexual relationships are warped to say the least. And Meg is soon enough a victim of her ire, resulting in a couple of beatings and unpleasant scenes."
• Soiled Sinema sprayed us with the Aussie film Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat: "A 47-minute piece of outstandingly outlandish and obscenely offbeat Australian iconoclasm, the alliteratively titled flick Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat (1988) directed by experimental musician, composer, academic, film scholar, and sometimes filmmaker Philip Brophy, who is probably best known for his satirical slapstick biopunk horror flick Body Melt (1993), is indubitably one of the best kept secrets of Australian cinema."
• Here, I talked about social media strokes and why I'm no longer hunting skunk apes.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.

Skunk Ape Hunt

In an earlier post I mentioned Adam Howe's difficulty with the Society for the Preservation of the North American Skunk Ape (SPNASA) and how the contretemps spurred me to look for skunk apes in my area, as Florida is ground zero for such cryptids.

However, after last weekend's events, I'm afraid I'm going to have to swear off such explorations for safety's sake. As a husband and father I have responsibilities, and I can't just risk my neck the way I used to as a young man.  Let me tell you what happened.

Recent rains had brought a relative coolness to the weather (high 70's instead of high 80's, but you take what you can get out here), so when my wife and son went on a neighborhood bike ride, I drove into the swamps to catch another glimpse of the elusive Florida skunk ape.  I had no desire to capture or hunt one, mind: simply to see it and get further photographic evidence of its presence in my part of the state.  So, with my trusty cell phone camera and bottle of Zephyrhills Spring Water, I parked the car on a fairly dry patch of ground near an overgrown trail and went exploring.

While I didn't get lost, exactly, I will admit that after an hour of wandering the swamps I couldn't find my car again.  I had taken a picture of where I'd parked (a trick I learned from parking at the airport so often: if you photograph where your car is, you don't have to remember after your trip where you parked it), but getting to where the terrain resembled the picture presented some difficulty.  As the afternoon shadows lengthened toward evening, my concern became anxiety.  Wasn't this the grove of palms where I left the car?  No.  Not even tire tracks.  Damn it.  Was I going to have to call 911?  How embarrassing would that be, to call for help?

And that's when I smelled it.  Not quite feces, exactly.  Not quite gone-over tomatoes.  Not quite the buildup of bodily fluids on a hairy, unwashed animal, but something that combined all three into a stench that had me gagging.

I hadn't found a skunk ape: one had found me.

Panicking, I made my stumbling way across pools of slimy algae and sunken mangrove roots, frantically looking between the picture on my phone and my surroundings.  Where was my car?  Where was it?  If the skunk ape was following me I didn't hear it over my own labored breathing.  My car had to be somewhere here.  It had to.

Something in the trees above uttered a low, hollow grunt.  It was followed by a shriek and another grunt.  Were there two of them?

I reached into my pocket to hit the panic button on my keychain, and to my relief, my car's horn blasted across the swamp in staccato bursts.  There!  I must have passed by it at least twice, judging from the footprints.  Why hadn't I seen it before?

The alarm didn't put off my pursuers.  In fact, it incensed them: they shrieked louder.  Nevertheless, emboldened by the proximity of a safe haven, I spun, took a few hurried pictures behind me, and hauled the car door open.

I was on the road a few minutes later with the air conditioning on full blast and my hands shaking from the adrenaline dump.  The only picture that came out is a bit blurry, but it very clearly shows one of the creatures chasing me; I've circled the relevant part on the photo.

So I'm done with skunk apes for the time being.  Best to let the experts deal with them.

In fact, the safest and best thing to do is get Adam Howe's Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet, an excellent anthology of three novellas that includes Damn Dirty Apes, a hilarious story of skunk apes, redemption, and the desire for fame.

I Saw a Florida Skunk Ape

I was privileged to receive an early draft of Adam Howe's Damn Dirty Apes, a novella included in his anthology Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet.  Moreover, I was honored to write a blurb for it.

Despite the humor (there are many laugh-out-loud moments in Damn Dirty Apes), the story has a core of realism, especially in reference to the skunk ape that figures prominently in the narrative.  As part of his research into skunk apes, Adam reached out to an organization called S.P.N.A.S.A.: The Society for the Preservation of the North American Skunk Ape.  As it turns out, SPNASA found Adam's literary efforts insulting, and sent him a letter threatening legal action.  It's my understanding that the matter has since been cleared up, but it proves that there are plenty of people out there who take the legend of the skunk ape very seriously.

A Google search on skunk apes brought up a Wikipedia entry, plus some other websites with varying degrees of credibility, but I found my curiosity still piqued.  After all, the skunk ape lives almost literally in my own backyard here in Florida.

So I went out to do some of my own investigating.  My neck of the (back)woods is full of nature trails, swampy areas, and pine forest that few people bother to explore, so that's where I started.  To be honest, I didn't take it terribly seriously, and even brought my little boy along with me to "hunt the skunk ape."  He thought it terrific fun at first, but the walking and waiting and, most importantly, staying quiet was difficult for him, so after an hour or so of farting around and taking pictures, we called it quits.

It was only a few nights later, when I casually flicked through the photos on my phone, that I saw this:

I've circled the relevant section of the picture.

It's chilling to think how close this thing got, not just to me, but my son as well.  Believe me, I'll definitely keep my little boy at home on any future skunk ape hunts.  It's only because we were downwind that I didn't smell it, I suspect.

The chase is on, though.  I know it's out there.  I just have to go find it.