Friday Links: Rebecca Hall, Growing up With Ghosts, and The Last Bus

It's almost time to get back to school for those of us who do such things or know people who do such things.  As you consider such things, take a long look back at the last week to see what you may have missed in the world of the bizarre, horrific, and unusual:

• Zombos' Closet of Horror burst forth and vomited out Monster Times Issue 19 from February 1973. 
• Sean Eaton brought us Schneider's theory of Hyperconstriction and Hyperexpansion at his amazingly readable R'lyeh Tribune: "The characteristics of the hyperconstricted mode include confinement, claustrophobia, diminishing life force, descent, retreat, and isolation.  Hyperconstriction directs one toward the grave—or toward the womb.  Taken to an extreme, it leads toward the experience of obliteration."
• Ginger Nuts of Horror interviewed SFX wizard Rebecca Hall: "I have always loved films ever since I can remember. I have wanted to be involved in making film. I was always arty at school always drawing faces and as I got older I started to appreciate make up and the changes it could make to your appearance so the two kind of fell together for me. I have always enjoyed horror films and thought that they always looked like the most fun to do !! As I was learning make Up I sort of discovered that I was better at the FX so from there really."
  
• Sharon Day talked about her book Growing up With Ghosts at Ghost Hunting Theories: "It all began in 1963 when my family moved into an estate in Fairfax, Virginia. Aspen Grove was built in the mid 1700s as a fort against Indians. In the 1800s, it was taken over by the North to be used as a field hospital and during the war, wrestled back as the same thing for the South. Both sides of the war agonized and died in that home. In fact, the wood floors were still stained with their blood, and the earth littered with bullets, guns, bayonets and the like."
• Morgan Freeman's step-granddaughter (I've never heard of such a thing until now) was murdered by her boyfriend, who shouted some bizarre things as he committed the brutal crime: "The perpetrator, identified by the New York Post as an ex-boyfriend, screamed "Get out, devils! I cast you out, devils! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast you out!" as he stabbed E'Dena Hines, 33, whose grandmother was Freeman's first wife."
• It was all Duncan Bradshaw all the time at Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!! this week: "Right where do I start with this one? As I said previously I have discovered a new found love of zombie books, if they have something different. After agreeing to review this one I discovered it had a comedy element to it. Straight away my alarm bells go off. I like a certain amount of wit and humour in my books (the darker the better) but a comedy zombie book? Hmmm."
• John Kenneth Muir deconstructed 2010: The Year We Make Contact: "If Kubrick’s film took a big step back from the characters and attempted to observe the long arc of man’s development with a sense of cerebral detachment, Hyams’ film instead examines man at this juncture with passionate, colorful, up-close strokes.  When considered in such terms, 2010: The Year We Make Contact might be viewed as a pretty strong and, yes, wholly valid complement to Kubrick’s film. It is both a faithful continuation of the franchise’s overall narrative, and at the same time an apparent commentary on the visionary world envisioned by Kubrick."
• Here, I reviewed the movie The Conjuring and Paul M. Feeney's novella The Last Bus.  For those inclined to the political, I wrote a piece about conservative writers and Facebook at Liberty Island.

Illustration by Frank Brunner for Chaosium's Stormbringer 4th Edition Rulebook.

Friday Links: Ooparts, Dead Roses, and Jacob Isaaczs van Swanenburg

It's Friday, so let's hit it:

• Monster Brains put the art of Jacob Isaaczs van Swanenburg on display.
• At the incalculably invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton discussed alien abduction, one of my favorite subjects: "But reports of alien abductions similar to those of Reagan and the Hills were taken very seriously by Charles Fort, among others.  He was a renowned early twentieth century specialist in unexplained phenomena who published four books in this broad field between 1919 and 1932.  S.T Joshi notes that H.P. Lovecraft probably read Fort’s first publication, The Book of the Damned (1919) in the spring of 1927, after Donald Wandrei loaned him his copy.  L. Sprague de Camp comments that Lovecraft appreciated the book mainly as a source of ideas for his weird fiction, though he did not take Fort’s material seriously or as fact."
• Zombos' Closet of Horror made The Monster Times issue 12 available for perusing.
• At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Kit Power gave us another installment of his My Life in Horror series: "13 or 14 – I can be no more precise. Dad had – has still, if I know my old man – a collection of the non- M paperbacks. Beautiful black covers with white artwork and words. That he had a whole set, eight or ten titles at that point, clearly boded well – my Dad reads a ton, but he's not what Mr. King refers to as much of a constant reader – he likes finding new things, new stories, new writing. Very rare that my dad will buy everything someone puts out. I remember too this being one of the few books I borrowed from my dad that was a real loan, and not a 'borrow' that ended up living with me on a more permanent basis. He explicitly asked for the book back when I was done. That was another sign, looking back."
• Terrorphoria showed us some deeply disturbing Easter bunnies.
• Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!! was overgrown with Dead Roses all week, culminating in a review of the eponymous book: "I have been looking forward to this one for a long long time after hearing such good stories about this group’s previous collaboration, Bad Apples: 5 Slices of Halloween Horror. I have read all but one of these authors previously and already know they can produce some very powerful short stories."
• Ghost Hunting Theories delved into Ooparts: "The Klecksdorp spheres are often referred to as an out of place/out of time item. These spheres have been found in mining areas in South Africa in 3-million-year-old deposits. Many believed them to be metallic man-made items of extremely ancient construction. Scientists, however, came to the conclusion that these were made naturally and were formed in volcanic sediments over millions of years and the grooves created by fine grains over time and growth."
• Here, I linked to a review I wrote at Ginger Nuts of Horror for Rejean Giguere's novel Raildogs and celebrated The Blessed Man and the Witch being named Terrorphoria's Book of the Month.

Illustration by M. Wayne Miller for Call of Cthulhu's Beyond the Mountains of Madness supplement.