Friday Links: The Towering Inferno, The Devil's Bottles, and The Mark of Satan

The day we've all been waiting for: Friday! Let the revelry begin. As you celebrate, why not take a look at what happened over the week in the world of the bizarre, horrific, and just plain weird?

• Violent Shit: The Movie got an interesting write-up at The Slaughtered Bird: "Fans will be divided – they already know the story and want to see blood spraying as Karl hacks his way mercilessly through those that stand in his way. What they get is a benchmark to work off. Setting a new scene, a new pace, a new style…"
• Sean Eaton wrapped up his must-read analysis of Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at his always-erudite, never-derivative R'lyeh Tribune: "Another striking aspect of the novel is its overt religiosity.  This is a very temple-ridden, priest-ridden, prayerful adventure. In the very beginning, Carter “prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream” and asks for a formal blessing from two priests, whose advice—essentially: ‘Don’t mess with Great Ones’—he ignores."
• The Horrors of It All brought us The Devil's Bottles.
• In Japan, ghosts are taking taxicab rides: "Taxi drivers working in towns in north-east Japan that were devastated in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami are reporting picking up "ghost passengers". At least seven drivers in the coastal town of Ishinomaki, where nearly 6,000 people died after it was battered by tsunami more than 30 feet high, claimed to have encountered phantom fares."
  
• At his Confessions of a Reviewer!!, Nev Murray reviewed Dallas Mullican's A Coin for Charon: "The plot has been done before. Hasn’t it? Serial killer that is seemingly impossible to trace and stop, with the main cop having a troubled past that interferes with his life on a daily basis? Yeah I seem to remember a few books and films with a similar vain. What makes this different then? Why does it hold your attention to the very end? This would be where tick three for writing skills comes in."
• The disturbing film Room got a poignant write-up from Jeremy the Critic: "The plot details of the screenplay (adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own best-selling 2011 novel) are almost incidental, as the commercials and trailers freely gave away what most would consider spoilers under different circumstances. It's also an ordeal, albeit one built on the foundation of logic and sound decision making by the filmmakers. And none of it comes together without the two performances at its center, functioning as a single unit."
• Zombos' Closet opened, and out fell issues one and two of Shriek! The Monster Horror Magazine. Take a look at them: they...they have to be seen to be believed.
• John Kenneth Muir dipped way back into 1974 to discuss an old favorite, The Towering Inferno: "Essentially, the film suggests that if the contest for a business is between turning a profit, or insuring the safety of its customers….the bottom line is going to win out, and people aren’t. As we discover early in the film, shortcuts have been taken on the fiery building’s electrical wiring by a morally bankrupt subcontractor, Simmons (Richard Chamberlain). Simmons wasn’t exactly acting alone, either. Jim Duncan (William Holden), the head of the construction company, was going perilously over-budget on the project, and needed Simmons to save two-million dollars...somewhere."
• Ruined Head reviewed Ann Loring's 1968 novel The Mark of Satan: "Unable to escape the considerable shadow cast by Rosemary’s Baby, The Mark of Satan casts a web of diabolical intrigue around its innocent young heroine, but fails to provide the least bit of surprise in delivering its occult chills."
• Albert Pyun's Alien from L.A. got the House of Self-Indulgence treatment: "Every time they would refer to "Africa," as if it were a country, I would cringe. Thankfully, all references to "Africa" cease the moment Wanda arrives in... "Africa." Judging by the climate and architecture, I'm guessing she's going to Egypt or Tunisia."
• Here, I reviewed the movie Pay the Ghost, told you about R.M. Huffman's Leviathan, and pointed you to an interview I conducted with Adam Howe at The Slaughtered Bird.

Illustration by Earl Geier for Call of Cthulhu's The Complete Dreamlands supplement, 4th edition.

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.

Two-Minute Movie Review: Pay the Ghost

I'm a Nicolas Cage fan, no two ways about it. I know that if I'm watching a movie with Nic Cage in it, I'll be at least mildly entertained. Consistency is a quality to be prized, depending on context; obviously, some things are consistently awful, like mayonnaise and root canals. Nic Cage is not like mayonnaise and root canals.

Pay the Ghost is a fun movie, imaginative and disturbing.  It was based off of a novella by Tim Lebbon, whom I've never read before but deserves great respect for being a successful writer. The film has one great strength that makes it worth watching and one titanic weakness that almost made me turn it off. I'm glad I didn't.

The strength is in the portrayal of how Mike (Nic Cage) and Kristen's (Sarah Wayne Callies) son Charlie goes missing.  You know what's going to happen, but it doesn't lessen the tension in the lead-up, the panic in the event, and the grief afterward.  As a parent, it becomes very easy to identify with the loss of a child: every missing or kidnapped child becomes your own, if only for a moment.  That part was very well done.  Callies always seems to take thankless, unlikable roles, like the doctor in Prison Break and Lori in The Walking Dead: it's not her performance that makes you dislike her, but the writing. This unlikability carries over in Pay the Ghost, where her character Kristen immediately blames Mike for losing the boy, and even later, in the aftermath, continues to hold him responsible.

And this is where the weakness comes in: a year later, after they've separated, both Mike and Kristen get intimations that Charlie is asking for their help, reaching out to them from some other place.  Later, when Kristen approaches Mike with news of her occult visitations with Charlie, Mike immediately and pathetically accepts her as if nothing had happened in the intervening year. No acknowledgment of Kristen's venomous words or behavior, and most importantly, no apology from Kristen. It threw me off, made me like both Mike and the movie a bit less.

The addition of a sexy German folklore professor played by Veronica Ferres and harried cop played by Lyriq Bent didn't do a lot for the film's plot or interest: both could have been fleshed out a little more.  Stephen McHattie had a great little cameo as a blind homeless man (a sentence that both amuses and depresses in equal measure).

Overall, though, I enjoyed the movie and recommend it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Friday Links: Rogue Redcaps, Reptoid Tunnels, and The Making of Jaws 2

In addition to my big news there's lots of stuff going on in the world of the strange, the macabre, the horrific. Let's take a look back at what happened over the week.

• Sean Eaton began a must-read series of pieces analyzing H.P. Lovecraft's novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at his always-incisive R'lyeh Tribune: "S.T. Joshi concurred with Lovecraft’s evaluation of the novel, which he dismissed as “charming but relatively insubstantial”.  However, Lovecraft’s renowned biographer felt that the novel was autobiographically significant in that it served as a snapshot of Lovecraft’s psyche at a particular point in his life, circa the late 1920s.  In my view the novel seems to be a kind of culmination or systematization of various ideas Lovecraft had been developing in various stories at that time in his career."
• The President of the International Association of Exorcists had something interesting to say about the Devil: "'Satan is not the god of evil against the God of the good, rather he is a being who God created as good and who, with some angels — also created good by God — became evil because they refused God and His kingdom with their free and final choice,' Father Francesco Bamonte, president of the International Association of Exorcists, wrote last week in Vatican Newspaper L'Osservatore Romano."
  
• The little-known but much-dreaded Reptoids' tunnels under Los Angeles were discussed at Ghost Hunting Theories: "The legends state that the key room is the directory to the rest of the city, and to the historical gold record tablets. These gold tablets were slabs of gold, 4 feet long and 14 inches wide. The tablets were believed to contain the records of the origins of the human race, and the history of modern man in the Americas, including details regarding the history of the mysterious Mayan people."
• It's been Karen Malena week at Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!. Start with part one of this in-depth interview and keep scrolling: "It’s a scary thought especially when you write dark characters to realize that they are parts of you. For how else could we make this stuff up? You dig deep down into yourself. I also like to joke with people I know and say, “You better watch. You never know when you’ll end up as a villain in one of my books.” But seriously, I think all writers to some extent utilize people and situations they know. Or at least parts of them."
• It's going to seem a bit silly at first, but really, go take a look at these vintage photos of loving couples that Vintage Everyday posted. Some are funny, some disturbing, some just weird.
• Micro-Brewed Reviews reviewed the film Ex Machina: "Ex Machina is a small and relatively contained movie with an incredibly tiny budget for something of this scope with a cast that can be basically counted on one hand; a nice little throwback to the sobering sci-fi tales of the late 1960s and ‘70s."
• Hammer Horror Issue 1 emerged from Zombos' Closet (I'm always amazed at the material he posts: simultaneously nostalgic and bizarre).
• Holly Evans posted a piece of short fiction at her blog that's definitely worth your time, titled Rogue Redcaps: "The stench of old blood and rotting meat surrounded me while I tried to clear my head through the agony. A nail slowly ran down the side of my neck following the line of one of my butterfly tattoos there, I punched in the direction of creature it belonged to. The darkness shattered, bright white light filled my vision before it settled into a warm light that allowed me to see again. I wished it hadn’t."
• Cool Ass Cinema reviewed the book The Making of Jaws 2: "Authors and heavy duty JAWS fans, Pisano and Smith, have amassed a great deal of behind the scenes stories, anecdotes and rare photos from many who worked on JAWS 2; this extends to those who worked, albeit briefly, on the production before being fired and replaced. Among those released from the picture early on included a handful of the young cast, one of which was Ricky Schroder (SILVER SPOONS [1982-1987])."
• Here, I discussed what social media can't do for you as a writer, and announced the publication of the sequel to The Blessed Man and the Witch, titled The Nephilim and the False Prophet.

Illustration by Kevin Ramos for Call of Cthulhu's Cthulhu by Gaslight supplement.

The Nephilim and the False Prophet

The second book in my Armageddon trilogy, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, is live in the Amazon bookstore!

From the blurb:

Fueled by brutal, random violence and a worldwide leprosy epidemic, the Earth descends into chaos. Preparing for Armageddon, Hell plans an atrocity called The Slaughter of the Innocents while Heaven’s scattered agents fight a cold war against superstar evangelist Kyle Loubet, who they believe is the False Prophet foretold in the Bible. 

The Eremites walk the Earth: black magicians kept alive through unholy relics. Terrible visions assail the world’s remaining psychics, promising an eternal night of blood and fire and endless agony. Caught in the middle, Hector, Ozzie, and Siobhan face terrible dangers from all sides. Now free from their infernal prison, what are the Watcher angels planning? With only days before the Apocalypse, can humanity be saved?

This edition includes a synopsis of the first book in the trilogy, The Blessed Man and the Witch; a list of characters; and a glossary of terms.

$2.99 or free to read through Kindle Unlimited. Get your copy now!

Friday Links: David Hochbaum, Kristy, and Satan Is Waitin'

The Friday Links, like me, are back and better than ever. Now that you've had a week to shake off the detritus of the holidays, let's look at what's been going on in the world of the macabre, the bizarre, the horrific.

• Elisandre - L'Oeuvre au Noir brought us a number of bizarre, surreal images by David Hochbaum that must be looked at to be believed. NSFW but not pornographic.
• At the invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton brought us an analysis of the Robert E Howard story Rogues in the House: "There are no heroes, nor are there any victims, at least not innocent ones.  It is useless to summarize the plot, because each of the characters’ plans unravel, leaving only a couple survivors.  Although there is an evil priest and a mysterious palace, there is a conspicuous absence of incantations, occult paraphernalia or supernatural effects.  Instead there are numerous scenes of simple, brutish violence complicated by several of the “red priest’s” treacherous contraptions."  (Note also that Mr. Eaton is accepting guest posts for the Tribune, so you Lovecraft fans with something to say should submit your best analytical work.)
• My good friend Holly Evans had some good news and cool photos to share.
• Breakfast in the Ruins brought us an entertaining Top 20 First-Time Viewings list for 2015. An eclectic collection, it includes Shaw Brothers kung fu films, Euro-trash horror, and much more.
  
• The hysterical Satan Is Waitin' was the subject of The Horrors of It All.
• If you're a monsterkid like me, you'll appreciate what emerged from Zombos' Closet: Monster World Issue 1. Part Two is available here.
• The Slaughtered Bird reviewed the movie Kristy: "Sure, this is another stalker/slasher film, and yeah, it’s a bit derivative, but it’s actually a really entertaining watch. There are great moments of genuine tension and catch-your-breath moments, and also a few jump scares thrown in for good measure. The acting done by the small cast is also what helps put Kristy above others of its kind."
• In very good news, Nev Murray's winter break is coming to a close, and he'll be back to full-strength reviewing next week at Confessions of a Reviewer!!
• Ghost Hunting Theories theorized that the gray aliens of song and story are actually of terrestrial origin: "I have come to believe alien greys were actually terrestrial people before our time, who evolved into a highly intelligent people and had to share this realm with us for a period of time when they were prepared to go to the next level of knowledge that takes us out of this limited world we still inhabit."
• Jess Franco's She Killed in Ecstasy was analyzed in The House of Self-Indulgence: Of course, I'm not saying Soledad Miranda should be allowed to murder the scientists who fucked over her hunky scientist husband just because she looks like Soledad Miranda. No, what I am saying is that the scientists should be thankful that their final moments on planet earth are being spent straddling a half-naked Soledad Miranda. In other words, if you have to be murdered, wouldn't you want Soledad Miranda to be the one holding the knife that plunges deep into your worthless, improperly utilized genitals?"
• Here, I talked about readers, writers, and Facebook; and reviewed the movie Sicario.

Illustration by Nick Smith from Call of Cthulhu's Masks of Nyarlathotep supplement.

End of Year Post

I'm going to take the rest of the year off to spend Christmas with my family.

Yes, I'm Jewish, but my wife celebrates Christmas, and I don't feel like trying to make my little boy pick between Judah Maccabee and Santa Claus for holiday heroes, so we do both, and now's the time when things get busy: holiday meals to be cooked, Christmas cookies to be baked, house to be cleaned, presents to be wrapped.

(Though he should totally pick Judah Maccabee as his holiday hero; I mean, what's cooler: a guerrilla fighter or a fat old guy who slithers down chimneys?)

It's been an eventful year.  Some of the highlights include:

• In March, I wrote my first review for the website Ginger Nuts of Horror.
• In April, my short story Hold On was published at Liberty Island.
• In June, Nev Murray reviewed The Blessed Man and the Witch.
• In August, Adam Howe gave me the honor of blurbing his story Gator Bait. 
• In September, my short story How to Fix a Broken World was published at Liberty Island.
• In November, I released the second edition of The Blessed Man and the Witch.
• December was quite busy. Get the Greek, my Kindle Single, made it to #1 in a free category on Amazon; the Beyond Lovecraft Indiegogo campaign I supported made its funding goals (and then some); and I learned that I had been kicked off the website Ginger Nuts of Horror (more on that later).

2016 is shaping up to be a good year, too. I'll release The Nephilim and the False Prophet in the first quarter of the new year, and I hope to be finished the entire Armageddon trilogy by early 2017 at the latest. I continue to meet new readers and writers, which is great fun, and it's a joy to watch my son become his own person every day.

Best to all of my readers, both new and familiar. 

See you in 2016!

Friday Links: Jeruzalem, Satan's Blade, and Yuletide Yog-Sothoth

The last Friday Links before Christmas! Yip yip yahoo! So, what's been happening in the world of the bizarre, the strange, and horrific?

• A demonic apocalypse film called Jeruzalem released a trailer that's worth a look.
• At his Confessions of a Reviewer!!, Nev Murray has been thrilling us all week with his Top Five lists of best books he's read this year. Start at the bottom and get clicking. You might recognize a title or two, and if you don't, then you know what you should add to your reading list!
• Fascination With Fear told us about three Christmas monsters that aren't Krampus: "It isn’t surprising to see Japan at the top of the list, as their folktales are equal if not more terrifying than the Germans’. Namahage are demonic ogres that dwell high up in the mountains—how they have come to live there varies by region. All year long they watch each household in the village and monitor the children’s behavior, keeping notes in a little book."
• The 2006 remake of the movie Black Christmas came up From the Depths of DVD Hell: "Yet another remake while one which chooses to tackle Bob Clark’s 1974 original which as I covered in my review of the original was also one of the first slasher and one which would have a much more subtle tone than the slashers which followed in its wake."
• Monster Times Issue #30 from February 1974 fell out of Zombos' Closet: "Issue 30 of The Monster Times gives Long Island a bad rap by providing way too much coverage on The Horror of Party Beach, annoys comic book fans with an assessment of The World's Worst Comics, and goes ape over John Landis's Schlock."
  
• Zombots has a brilliant article on Jewish mythology in movie and television horror: "I didn't cover the golem in my rundown of Jewish "monsters," largely because it's the most well-known creature of Jewish myth. For that reason, the golem often appears in Jewish-inspired genre fictions. The X-Files, of course, has a golem episode (season 4, episode 15: Kaddish). The last name of the Jewish family who play a central role in this episode is Luria. It bears mentioning that Issac Luria, who was a 16th century Jewish mystic, features in a number of Jewish folktales in which the rebbe deals with the supernatural. The Luria family in the X-Files and their use of a golem suggest that someone at work on the show had at least a passing familiarity with Kabbalah."
• Breakfast in the Ruins picked up another striking novel: Gideon's Ride by John Creasey.
• At Sean Eaton's always-brilliant R'lyeh Tribune, guest blogger John L. Steadman talked about The Dunwich Horror and the Christmas season: "The Christian mythographers, for various reasons, have shown interest in Yog-Sothoth.   The most prominent of these myth makers and the most representative, Robert M. Price, in Biblical Bits in Lovecraft (2013), imposes a Christian interpretation on Lovecraft’s great tale, The Dunwich Horror (1928). This tale develops the interesting idea of sexual congress between the Great Old Ones and human consorts.  In the story, Wilbur Whateley’s grandfather evokes Yog-Sothoth on the top of Sentinel Hill on Candlemas evening, 1913, and afterwards, Yog-Sothoth couples with Lavinia Whateley, a deformed albino woman."
• Of course, no self-respecting horror fan would do Christmas without another look at Silent Night, Deadly Night. The Dwrayger Dungeon does it right.
• The 1984 slasher flick Satan's Blade was the subject of an interesting post at Chuck Norris Ate My Baby: "On the surface, Satan’s Blade is a terrible slasher film. It’s not particularly well made, sharing more in common with a public access show than something like Halloween or Black Christmas. The performances, while being consistent, are amateurish and best comparable to that of an eighth-grade school play. And even the story – which focuses on two groups of vacationers being stalked and slashed by a guy who, as it turns out, is possessed by the spirit of a killer mountain man wielding the titular blade – is somehow convoluted, despite being so simple."
• Here, I celebrated my brief status as #1 and told you about my five favorite horror books of 2015.

Illustration by Nick Smith for Call of Cthulhu's Cthulhu Casebook supplement.

Beyond Lovecraft: Less Than One Day Left!

The picture says it all, folks:

This is it: the last push. It's not too late to invest in the Beyond Lovecraft Indiegogo campaign and become part of something extraordinary, something original, something made just for you that will have your name on it.

I've talked before about my experience with author Jasper Bark and artist Rob Moran: see for yourself why I'm such a fan of both of these skilled men. Beyond Lovecraft, a love letter to the Cthulhu Mythos, promises to be a true work of art, a book you'll look through again and again.

Art, true art, doesn't come cheap.  Remember when the special effects company behind the film Life of Pi went bankrupt despite winning an Academy Award? Our convenience-based culture is moving away from appreciating the skill and work and agony behind every piece of treasured artwork, whether it's a book, a painting, a vase, or even a graphic novel, and when we lose that, we lose artists. Artistic success is becoming a crapshoot, a function of blind luck leading to viral popularity. We can and should push back against that, and one way is by supporting independent content creators and their projects. Here is a great place to start.

Give yourself or a friend an early Christmas (or Hanukkah) present and invest in Beyond Lovecraft.

Friday Links: Conan in Love, The Demon Samurai, and Last Rites for the Vulture

Melvin Williams AKA "Little Melvin," a former drug kingpin in Baltimore, has died. This kind of news normally wouldn't be relevant to this blog, except that I met and worked with Little Melvin, albeit briefly. It was an interesting experience.

And now, on with the Friday Links.

At this time of year I envy my friends who live further north, with snow and ice and slush and...

Actually, I don't. Let's see what happened this week in the world of the unusual, the bizarre, and the horrific:

• Sean Eaton discussed Conan in love with a lady pirate at his always readable R'lyeh Tribune: "There are a number of Lovecraftian themes in Queen of the Black Coast, including the reference to an elder race, the devolution of a once proud civilization, concerns with cultural and racial purity, bizarre vegetation and haunted ruins.  The winged creature Conan eventually fights is similar in some respect to the monsters in Lovecraft’s earlier ghoul stories, that is, in being devolved."
• Ghost ships full of rotting corpses are washing ashore in Japan. Go figure.
• For real pulpy goodness, Breakfast in the Ruins brought us Simon Quinn's novel Last Rites for the Vulture: "Despite the blatant horror / witch-smut come-ons of the cover and the papal evil-hunting nature of it’s protagonist, ‘Last Rites of the Vulture’ is a more or less generic globe-trotting, Bond-esque action adventure story, very much in line with other mid/late ‘70s ‘action’ series like the ‘Enforcer’ or ‘Destroyer’ books. There are plentiful exotic locales, daring crimes, gratuitous pop history info-dumps and cartoon tough guy antics... but very little hint of any supernatural/ or occult elements, insofar as I could tell. Oh well."
• A Mexican lobby card for The Last Starfighter flew out of Zombos' Closet. I loved that movie as a kid, though I saw it in a theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and not in Mexico.
  
• At Confessions of a Reviewer!!, Nev Murray reviewed the novel Demon Mania: "It’s eighteen months after the attack at Blackwood. Amy Malone along with her husband Shane and daughter Emily think they are safe and sound in their new life. They are wrong. The Lost Society have found them again."
• Ruined Head reviewed the 1978 classic novel The Demon Samurai: "Kirk, seeing a psychiatrist in Tokyo to combat his nervous exhaustion, undergoes an experimental treatment involving the injection of an LSD-derivative drug. The psychedelic dose transports his mind to a stylized landscape reminiscent of an ancient Japanese scroll, where he glimpses the threatening figure of the samurai. Meanwhile at the studio, a screen test of Monster Valley unleashes the spirit-samurai, who physically erupts into the corporeal world from the spools of film."
• Sharon Day showed us some unusual rock spheres at Ghost Hunting Theories (it's cooler than it sounds, trust me): "In the 1930s, hundreds of huge stone balls were found in Costa Rica. They have ranged in size and up to 16 tons. They were made of a hard stone, granodiorite. There were deemed made by man and not made by nature (such as was the case in Mexico)." 
• Soiled Sinema took on the movie A Safe Place, starring Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson: "Based on a play by Jaglom that he originally performed in NYC in 1964 with his then-girlfriend Karen Black in the lead role and himself portraying a character that would eventually be played by Jack Nicholson for the silver-screen, A Safe Place was mainly aesthetically influenced by both improvisational theater and European arthouse films by Fellini, Godard, John Schlesinger, Ingmar Bergman, etc., among various others. "
• Here, I talked about the new edition of The Blessed Man and the Witch.  Nev Murray gave it a very kind write-up.

Illustration by Earl Geier for Call of Cthulhu's Blood Brothers supplement.

The Blessed Man and the Witch 2nd Edition

I've released a Second Edition of my novel The Blessed Man and the Witch that includes a new cover and an excerpt of the sequel The Nephilim and the False Prophet.

While the Second Edition doesn't change any of the story in any way, I have cleaned up some of the grammar and added back matter like About the Author and Author's Note sections. That's one of the great freedoms of digital publishing: improving the product as you go.

It's likely that I'll improve the blurb, but after that, no more tinkering. I'm moving forward. The Nephilim and the False Prophet should be ready for publication early next year, and I'm already working on the outline for the third and final volume in the Armageddon series.

If you haven't already, pick up your copy of The Blessed Man and the Witch today!

Ken Preston's Lost the Plot

In a world of spam selling African princes who need your help to uncover untold riches, magical pills that increase everything a man might want to increase, and vacation packages to paradise on Earth, author Ken Preston has presented a giveaway that's too good to be true...but nevertheless is true.

Not only is he giving away a free Kindle Paperwhite e-reader to a lucky winner of his contest, but every entrant, win or lose, get a free copy of his awesome vampire novel Joe Coffin: Season One. That's...that's crazy. Even if you don't win, you still win.

I can only assume that Ken's lost the plot. So what you need to do as soon as you can is click the link, enter, and get ready to win either way, because I suspect Ken will come to his senses pretty soon.

Interview with Ken Preston

I very much enjoyed Ken Preston's vampire novel Joe Coffin Season One, and in honor of the release of the sequel, Joe Coffin Season Two, I sat down with Ken and interviewed him.

Next to zombies, vampires are the most written-about monsters in horror today. What makes the Joe Coffin series stand out from the rest?

I know exactly what you mean. Do we really need another vampire novel? Seriously?

The answer to that question is tied up with the reason I write fiction. My stories aren’t about vampires, or zombies, massive robots, aliens, sex, love, hatred, racism, bravery, monsters, sinners, saints, well you get the picture, I could go on but I won’t.

Whatever story I write, in whatever genre, my main focus is always on the people in that story. I want to find out who they are, what makes them tick, what they would do in certain situations and why. I want to feel something for them, even the villains, I want the reader to feel something for them, become invested in the story through the people in that story.

So the fact that the Joe Coffin books are populated with vampires is kind of secondary to me. I’m not particularly clever at the author marketing side of the business, or making a plan to write a bestselling novel. If that had been the case I would have researched what was the up and coming genre to be writing in. But no, I had a story I wanted to tell, I needed to tell, and that story was about a mobster called Joe Coffin.

Who happens to fight vampires.

Some people like to listen to music when they read. What would be a good soundtrack to read Joe Coffin by?

Oh wow, now that is an interesting question.

I’m not sure I know how to answer that question, so can I tell you what I have been listening to whilst writing Joe Coffin?

You have to bear in mind that I recently bought myself a turntable, and so my listening choices suddenly became limited to what I still had on vinyl.

Let’s see…

I picked up a record recently called Louisiana Rock n Roll. Hadn’t got a single idea what it was going to sound like, but I was pleasantly surprised. Highlights on that album are ‘Sea of Love’ and ‘Breaking up Is Hard to Do’, both of which I can envisage being played over a violent scene in a movie adaptation of Joe Coffin.

I have also been listening to a lot of Electric Light Orchestra, and I actually namecheck one of their songs in Joe Coffin Season One. ‘Evil Woman’ aptly describes Steffanie.

Jim Croce has also been a favourite recently, and here I’m going to let you in on an in-joke in Season One. In the chapter titled ‘meaner than a junkyard dog’ Emma jokingly refers to Coffin as Leroy. Big Bad Leroy Brown is a Jim Croce song, and one of the lines in the song describes him as “…meaner than a junkyard dog.” But I never actually explain that in the book!

Some Ennio Morricone would be great to listen to. He writes such cool musical scores, and again I reference him with Tom’s ringtone being the theme tune from ‘The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly’.
And last but certainly not least, we need to have some Queen. Maybe ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ or ‘Killer Queen’!

Of all the places in the world to set a vampire outbreak, in Joe Coffin you placed it in Birmingham, England. Why?

The short answer to that question is, because I live there. Or at least very near. I’m familiar with Birmingham, so I don’t have to do a whole lot of research for my settings.

The longer answer is this: Partial inspiration for Joe Coffin came from an old BBC TV series called Gangsters. When I was a child I used to stay up late on a Friday night to watch it. I was far too young to be exposed to material like that (particularly the scenes involving drug taking) but I loved it. There was nothing else like it on TV, and there hasn’t been since.

The setup is fairly hackneyed and overused, even back then when it was first shown. A villain is released from prison and wants to simply get the money he is owed and then get out of town. Of course it’s not that simple, and things become a lot more complicated.

What made it stand out was the writing. Quite simply it’s written and filmed as though it was a spaghetti western, (there is even a nod to this from the director in that the strippers in the club strip to the theme tune to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly) or an American film noir.

In fact, I was so enamored of the series that an early draft of Joe Coffin was set in the 1970s, when Gangsters was filmed and set.

Unfortunately the final series of Gangsters wound up becoming extremely surreal and disappeared up its own arse, something I promise isn’t going to happen to Joe Coffin.

Tell us about your plans for the ungentle giant named Joe. Where do you see the series going?

The core concept I initially had for Joe Coffin was of a vampire hunter who happens to be married to a vampire. That’s kind of where I am headed still, although the series has become much broader than I anticipated, and with a multi-character storyline.

The vampire threat is going to keep growing, and Joe is going to keep on being right in the middle of it, even though that is the last place he wants to be! I feel like I am telling one huge story over the course of these books, and there will definitely come a time when I will write THE END and that will be it, no more Joe Coffin books. But when that is, and how it will happen, I have no idea.

Joe Coffin isn’t the only thing you’ve written. Tell us about your other books.

I have a short story collection out, called Population:DEAD!. That has had some great feedback, especially the title story (zombies, another horror trope!) and How To Eat A Car, and The Man Who Murdered Himself. The Man Who . . . in particular struck a chord with readers, and I get asked about the ending. I have to say, yes I know for sure what happens at the end, and I even point out that there is a clue in the story, but you’ve just got to go with what you think. Go with your ending.

That particular story is also about depression, and I was just coming out of a period of serious depression when I wrote it. It was part of the healing process for me, and I think that can be partly why it resonates with readers.

I also write romance books for a British publisher. Quite a big gap between those two genres, I know, but like I said, it’s always more about the people than the plots or the genre for me.
I also have a Young Adult series starting soon, involving time travelling dinosaurs!

Which of your characters has the most Ken Preston in him (so to speak)? I do hope it’s not Corpse.

Ha! Nope, and neither is it Stump! Actually, it’s someone much worse than either of those two. It’s Tom Mills. Readers reacted so strongly to him. They said things like ‘I hated Tom,’ and ‘I absolutely loathed him’. And I was punching the air, going YES!

Because Tom is a despicable character. Absolutely. But I kind of felt for him, and empathized with him a little. I can’t excuse anything he does in the book, but still . . .

Shortly after Joe Coffin Season One was published and I was getting this reader feedback about Tom I was still going through counselling, and I chatted with my therapist about this. She said, maybe those people who have expressed this feel this way because they see a little bit of Tom in themselves, and it repulses them.

I don’t know. Maybe.

Everyone likes to talk to genre writers about genre fiction, so let’s get away from that for a moment. Who’s your favorite literary (non-genre) fiction author? Favorite literary work?

I absolutely adore To Kill A Mockingbird. I don’t want to say anything about the controversy surrounding Go Set A Watchman, but I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. To Kill A Mockingbird is too precious to me.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is another amazing book, although we are straying back into genre here, as this big, fat, Man Booker nominated novel is simultaneously a science fiction tale, a fast paced thriller, a historical drama, a comedy, and an end of the world fable. Don’t tell me how rubbish the film is, read the book instead.

You’re a family man. How do you think that affects your writing?

Family is very important to me, obviously. As I write this I am at a skatepark where my son is having skateboarding lessons. Everything else, including the writing, fits around family. Family, and family history, also infuses my writing. It was difficult for me to write the opening chapter of Joe Coffin Season One, with the two boys exploring the abandoned house. And then, coming back to Tom Mills, it was very hard being in his head sometimes, especially when writing down his thoughts and feelings on his son, and his wife.

Another aspect is my own relationship with my father, which wasn’t particularly good. Absent fathers are a common theme in my books, although I never intend them to be. Joe Coffin’s father was a difficult man, and helped shape the young boy into the man he is now. Tom is an absent father to his own son. The most evil vampire of all is referred to as ‘the Father’. Hmm, maybe I need to go see that counsellor again.

How have your artistic background and training affected your writing career?

It’s all wrapped up in one, to be honest. Creativity is the driving force of my life. If I was stuck in a job that didn’t allow me to express myself creatively I know I would go insane. Seriously.

I’ve written about this before, but I am convinced that part of what made my father the man he was, was his denial of his true, creative self. Unfortunately for him he was born into a culture and a time that pressured men to be a ‘Real Man’. To be a ‘Real Man’ seemed to involve spending your all his time outside of work in bars, with a cigarette permanently dangling from your mouth, and bullshitting his way through life.

But he did have a creative side which, despite his attempts to hide, I caught glimpses of. It makes me sad that he was ashamed of his creativity, and that he had to hide it and, ultimately, do his best to deny it.
Creativity, whether it be writing, painting, music, tapestry, rock carving, anything, is the driving force of the universe, and shapes the meaning of our lives.

Tell us about your love affair with the movie Jaws.

It is the perfect movie.

Oh, you want more? ;-)

I first saw Jaws upon its release in 1975 in a packed cinema, and I was eleven years old. Almost as a single entity we, the members of the audience, screamed, laughed, gripped our armrests, and jumped out of our seats for the running time of 120 minutes.

At the end of the movie, when Chief Brody takes aim and blows the shark out of the water, the entire cinema audience jumped to its feet and cheered and clapped, releasing all that tension, and reveling in Brody’s (our) victory.

That was it for me. I was hooked on movies forevermore. And for me, Spielberg has never topped that movie experience. Yes, he’s made some damn fine movies since, but Jaws? That film is note perfect.

I was going to finish there, but I think I will say one more thing. Something I have never told anyone before. I think maybe another reason I loved Jaws so much is the character of Brody, played so brilliantly by Roy Scheider.

Looking back from a perspective of being a father myself now, I think as a child I projected Martin Brody onto my own life. He was the man I wanted to be my father. And no, not because he kills a man eating shark. But because he is a family man, one devoted to his wife and sons, who isn’t absent in their lives. Well, for the first half of the movie anyway. But then when he is absent in the second half, that’s because he’s hunting down that man eating shark, to ensure the safety of his children and the town of Amity.

Right, time for me to look up the number of that counsellor again!

I highly recommend the Joe Coffin series as a terrific, character-driven vampire tale full of blood and sex and even some laughs. Visit Ken at his website, and say hi to Joe while you're there! 

Of Busts and American Colleges

The president and the chancellor of the University of Missouri have resigned due to pressure from students over three or four unconnected campus incidents that have been characterized as racist. Now students across the country are up in arms, protesting university leadership and demanding changes to the college and financial systems of the United States.

There's no easy way to put this, so I have to say it straight out: nobody who supports trigger warnings, complains about microaggressions, or demands a "safe space" free of disagreement will ever achieve greatness in any field of endeavor worth mentioning.  And yet the American college system is where such concepts are birthed, promulgated, and put into practice. What these young revolutionaries are demanding is destructive and poorly thought out at best.  Lacking ideas, lacking the work ethic and accomplishments and education of the people they seek to destroy, what they'll replace the current system with is unworkable.  Granted, the current system is absolutely terrible, with overpaid professors filling young skulls with rancid, politicized custard from a bully pulpit, but it's better than forgiving all student loan debt, demanding free public college education, and upping the federal minimum wage to an arbitrary $15.00/hour. That doesn't just affect colleges: it affects everybody, and it's not possible to implement.

Compare that to what's going on in science fiction literature, where certain authors have been ostracized by a small but powerful (and vocal) minority devoted to redefining the genre. Their latest success is replacing the bust of H.P. Lovecraft with something else as the World Fantasy Award because Lovecraft held racist views. Renowned Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has since returned his World Fantasy Awards, saying:

I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.

I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.

Joshi correctly made the point that the outrage over Lovecraft's racism is selective, at best: John W. Campbell and Bram Stoker were also racists, yet still have awards named after them. Why?

Like the protesting college students, not one of the people supporting the removal of Lovecraft's image from the World Fantasy Award will ever achieve greatness. None of them will ever have the same effect on genre fiction that Lovecraft had. They're destroyers, not creators, and what they'll put in place of what they've torn down is without value.

Friday Links: Embrujada, Charles Herbert, and Devil Times Five

As we start the next holiday countdown, this time to Thanksgiving, let's look back at what happened in the world of the strange, the unusual, the horrific:

• Nev Murray, the UK's foremost fan of turkey dinosaurs, reviewed the novel The Other Boy at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Now, for whatever reason, I didn’t fancy this one. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. I think it may be because I have never heard of either authors. I am generally a bit sceptical of collaborations, especially when it is authors I have never heard of. Very especially if it’s a husband and wife team. I have been there before. It didn’t work out so well. However, I have faith in the chaps at Dark Chapter Press so decided to give it a go. How did it work out?"
• Professor Kinema talked about the late, great Charles Herbert from inside Zombos' Closet: "At one Monster Bash several years ago Charles Herbert was sharing a table with B-movie/schlock producer/director Bert I. Gordon and his daughter, Susan.  He was very fan-friendly and we had one brief chat.  I bought a few items, he autographed a few items and, with Susan, posed for a few photos."
• The Horror Digest had this to say about the movie Last Shift: "It's not that I'm in awe by what I just saw but more like ummm what the fuck just happened? Also I need to change my underwear. Also seriously what just happened? Oh right THAT. Hot tip: If you're not into shitting your pants every 5 seconds, maybe stay away from this one." (I'm not into shitting my pants at all, so this is a no-go for me.) 
  
• At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Mike Duke reviewed the movie Stung: "Later, once its dark and the party is in full swing a horde of the wasps burst out of the nest entrance and begin flying around and stinging some of the guests who, within in a couple of minutes collapse with seizures and then have a human sized wasp sprout out of their now shredded bodies. Here’s where the blood and gore begins to run rampant."
• Continuing our film theme, House of Self-Indulgence reviewed the 1981 movie The Loveless: "These cats have the market on coolness cornered, and no small town is going to cramp/undermine their style. Whether they're lighting a cigarette or dragging a comb through their greasy hair, everything they do has the potential give off an air of cool. In a way, I kind of feel sorry for those saddled with the task of being cool nowadays. I know, nothing's technically been cool since at least 1985, okay, maybe 1986, but that doesn't stop people from trying."'
• Embrujada was the subject of a post at Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!: "The problem is that Sarli’s character, Ansise, is married to Leandro (Daniel de Alvarado), a despotic lumber baron with a malfunctioning pee pee. This means that we get to see scenes of Leandro futilely humping the leg of a supine Isabel Sarli while weeping. In fact, if watching a voluptuous woman have blighted sex with catastrophically ugly old men is your thing, you can put those worn Ron Jeremy tapes away, because Embrujada is the only film you will ever need from now on."
• Sean Eaton reread Herbert West: Reanimator at his incisive, brain-ripping R'lyeh Tribune and analyzed the experience for our reading pleasure: "Herbert West: Reanimator is for the most part a pre-Mythos tale, and like The Horror at Red Hook (1927) derives some of its weird imagery from vaguely Judeo-Christian or Greek and Roman mythological sources.  (The latter story contains appearances by Satan, Lillith, incubi, succubi, Moloch and so forth.)"
• I Think, Therefore I Review brought us four movies from the 1970's involving bizarre children and/or horrific mothers: "Devil Times Five – Teen idol Leif Garrett and his sister Dawn Lyn make for some creepy youngins in this 1974 picture also known as Peopletoys – and a dozen other titles for good measure. Eerie seventies lullaby notes ironically accent the snowy vacation spot, yuppie couples, and old fogies as perilous, icy, winding roads lead to vehicular disasters. Nuns and kids should be a sign of safety, however, real snow filming, old fashioned cars, and past technological isolation up the apprehensive mood."
• Here, I reviewed the movie Bone Tomahawk and The Mighty Jewmanberg's book Super Syndicate: When Heroes Divorce.

Illustration taken from Call of Cthulhu's The Complete Dreamlands supplement.

Two-Minute Movie Review: Bone Tomahawk

Bone Tomahawk is a low-budget movie ($1.8 million) that expertly weaves horror elements into a western setting.  It starts off slow and ends with a great payoff, but what keep the slow parts from tedium are the great dialogue and characterization.

As it turns out, the cast took low salaries to make sure the film could get funded: Kurt Russell, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, and Patrick Wilson head it up, and each actor fills his role to a T.  Sean Young, David Arquette, and Sid Haig are given minor, even thankless roles, but they do a great job with them.

Chicory, played by Richard Jenkins, has the stand-out role, and his delivery keeps the clever repartee from descending into comedy.  Matthew Fox runs a close second as a fastidious-but-murderous figure: he's grown as a performer since Lost and takes full advantage of his tendency to seem, if not villainous, somewhat questionable of character.

There's not a lot I can say about this film without giving the fun away: a lot of it comes from the surprise as well as the creepiness.  There's one scene near the end that was particularly gruesome; it's the first time I can remember feeling nauseated during a film, which says something.  Just go see it.

Four out of five stars.

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.

Free E-Book for Halloween!

From today through November 1, my novella Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City will be free through Amazon.

Combining themes of Lovecraftian horror, ancient evil, teenage angst, and zombies, it's a short, punchy read that takes place at this time of year: Halloween!  In it, high school sophomore Paige Ashton and college freshman Ryan Kincaid face a terrible horror that seeks to not only consume their town, but the entire world.

The supporting characters were taken from local teen volunteers, and takes place in Dunedin, Florida, home town of Henry S. Whitehead, a horror author and friend of H.P. Lovecraft himself.

I guarantee at least one hour's worth of horrific entertainment with every copy, or your money back! How many YA, PG, non-PC Lovecraftian novellas are you going to read this year?  Pick up your copy today!

Halloween, Zombies, and You

What follows is a short piece that didn't make it to the final manuscript of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.  Like all good survival advice, it is timeless and necessary, especially for this time of year.

For children, Halloween ranks right up there with Christmas as the best time of year.  For the informed adult concerned about the coming Zombie Apocalypse, Halloween can be a gut check.  It doesn’t mean, however, that you have to dread it entirely: costumes, free candy, and parties are celebrations of life and a thumbing-of-the-nose at grim death.  As such, you should have fun.  Take the kids out trick-or-treating.  Throw a party.  Dress up as Batman.  Just keep a few things in mind that will maximize your personal security.

A Supernatural Zombie Apocalypse is more likely at this time of year than any other.  Halloween is when the veil between life and death is at its thinnest, making it easier for unquiet spirits to cross over from Purgatory to the land of the living.

• Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things: Stay away from graveyards at all costs.  A dead body buried in unhallowed ground can be an attractive vessel for ghosts seeking a return to life (or unlife, as it were).  It may be traditional to hold parties at cemeteries during Halloween, but as an enlightened student of zombie combat you know that the best way to avoid being killed by the undead is to not be where there are going to be large numbers of them.  
• The Craft: Stay away from practitioners of the occult, and don’t dabble in it yourself this one time.  Just like you wouldn’t play with matches near a gas station, getting out the Ouija board to see if you can contact a random spirit from the Great Beyond on Halloween is a terrifically bad idea.

To most of us, Halloween means dressing up as someone or something else.  The continuing popularity of zombies in modern American culture means that there are going to be many people shuffling around outside at night looking like hungry undead.  One of the worst things you could do is shoot an innocent living person because he made the unfortunate choice of having a realistic costume.  So it’s up to you to make sure you can tell the difference between a zombie and a person dressed up as a zombie.

• The Scent of Blood: Because any true zombies active at this time of year are most likely Supernatural Zombies, they’re probably going to be more rotten, and hence smell a lot worse than a fresher Viral Zombie.  Putrefaction has a scent all its own, and the vast majority of zombie poseurs, even the most hardcore, won’t go the extra mile of smearing rotting meat on their bodies to complete the costume.
• The Naked and the Dead: Clothing and funeral cerements tend to rot in the grave, and the effort of breaking through a coffin and digging out from six feet of earth tends to destroy burial garments.  It’s extremely unlikely that someone will shuffle around town with his private parts exposed to the wind as part of his zombie costume (though you can’t entirely rule that out).
• Body Parts: It’s an easy thing to apply white, green, red, and gray splotches of makeup on your face, dress up in carefully torn clothing, limp around, make pitiful moaning noises, and call it a zombie costume.  But you can’t convincingly fake a truly skeletal hand with missing flesh over moving, bony digits.  

The most important thing is to make 100% certain of your target before shooting.  That smelly, grunting, half-naked person might be an Occupy protestor, not an actual undead creature.  Don’t shoot until you know beyond a shadow of doubt that the zombie in your sights is a true monster.  If necessary, call out verbal commands.  Even the most “in-character” zombie actor will fill his trousers and stop approaching at the sight of a drawn gun and a proper command to freeze.

Just take behavior and appearance in aggregate before deciding to act on a perceived threat.  What’s unacceptable the other 364 days out of the year can be the norm on Halloween.  Use common sense.  Real zombies don’t ring doorbells looking for candy: they’ll try to break the door down.  Keep an eye out, make sure your children are safe, and have a good time this year.  I can’t speak to the specifics, but I’m quite certain that next year you’ll have more pressing concerns than buying the economy bag of Snickers or Clark bars for the neighborhood kids.

Happy Halloween, and if you're concerned about the safety of yourself and your loved ones at this  dangerous time of year, arm yourself with knowledge and run, don't walk to get your copy of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.

Beyond Lovecraft: Pickman's Model

Several years ago I had the distinct honor of working with Peter Fuller, arguably one of the most talented reproduction armorers alive today. Peter's a true artisan in addition to being a good man, and I'm privileged to call him a friend.

One thing he said to me is that in today's culture it's rare to own something of worth, something you use and look at and treasure that another person made just for you. Furniture, silverware, and even artwork are typically mass-produced and sold as part of a set or created to fill a stylistic niche.  We've lost our connection to the artist, to the craft and effort and sweat it takes to make something valued.

With that in mind, take a look at this short video from my friend Jasper Bark:

As perks go, this can't be beat.  At the brand-new Pickman's Model level you get a physical copy of Beyond Lovecraft, something you can hold in your shaking, horror-numbed hands as you read; an electronic copy of the same to take with you when your hard copy becomes too soaked with fear-sweat to carry; a 100 page behind-the-scenes e-book so you can truly learn what Man Was Not Meant to Know; your name inscribed on the honor roll of contributors for bragging rights; shout-outs on social media so everyone in the world knows just what kind of disturbing stuff you're into; and that most priceless thing of all: a piece of art by a true artist created just for you.

There are only ten Pickman's Model slots available, so don't wait until the last minute to see if there are any left: get yours right now.

Even if you can't afford your slot at the moment, please do what you can to support this extraordinary project by sharing the Beyond Lovecraft Indiegogo campaign link: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/beyond-lovecraft/x/12314422#/