The Cruelest Month?

April 18, 2019

appearances, cinema, comics, interviews, mignola, reading materials, revenge of monsters from the vault

Let us not bury the lede here: There is just over a week left to pre-order Revenge of Monsters from the Vault! You can get it direct from the publisher, avoid putting money in Amazon’s pocket by putting a little extra in mine, and get some special deals that you won’t be able to get any other way. If you’re planning to order, pre-ordering now is definitely the best way to do it! Go forth! Click!

It has obviously been a little while since I updated here. I didn’t post any kind of wrap-up of the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird in Atlanta because, frankly, the trip was a bit of a whirlwind, and I’m just now getting more-or-less fully recovered. Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and I drove overnight to get there, had a full day of programming, and then drove all day coming back. Not an ideal itinerary for restful cogitation.

Highlights, of course, include the various panels and readings of the Symposium itself, meeting Ben Thomas for the first time face-to-skull, hanging out with old friends like Jesse and Selena, and, of course, the Silver Scream FX lab where the Symposium was held, which was piled to the brim with monsters and magicians. Any more in-depth an exploration is simply beyond my capabilities at present.

I managed to come home without loading up on too many books, though I did pick up a copy of Whiskey Tales. I’ve been a fan of Jean Ray’s weird fiction ever since reading “The Mainz Psalter” and his classic weird novel Malpertuis, and I have been frustrated by the paucity of Ray stories that have been readily available in English, so it was with great pleasure that I learned that Scott Nicolay was taking it upon himself to translate the body of that writer’s collection of tales of the fantastique and with equal enjoyment that I read through this first installment, even if the stories themselves are a tad more prosaic than his more famous works–and a lot more anti-Semitic, more’s the pity.

In the time since my return from Atlanta, several things have happened that are worth noting, at least in brief. For starters, I received the gargantuan box containing the first part of my Hellboy boardgame, which I Kickstarted from Mantic Games some time ago. The box is as enormous as predicted, and filled with room tiles, miniatures, delightful cards, and all manner of fun stuff. To date, I’ve only essayed a couple of missions, but it has been a great deal of fun so far.

Speaking of all things Hellboy, well, there are lots of things Hellboy to speak of. Hellboy Day, marking the 25th anniversary of the series, happened while I was in Atlanta, and I was forced to miss the festivities, though I marked them as best I was able with an essay in appreciation of Mignola’s work that is included in the Symposium program book, alongside an illustration by Mignola himself.

Then, last weekend, the latest attempt at transposing the comics onto the big screen, this time helmed by Neil Marshall, hit theaters. So of course I went to see it. My reaction was… complicated. If that’s not enough of me rambling about it, you’ll be able to hear more when I’m a guest on the Nightmare Junkhead podcast soon, where we’ll be talking about the movie.

What’s more, yesterday saw the publication of the last issue of the regular B.P.R.D. series, which rings down the curtain on at least the “present day” of the Mignolaverse titles. There’s plenty of “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.”-style adventures still left to see print, I’m sure, but this is certainly the end of an era, and it was delivered with sufficient pomp and circumstance.

I also published a few more reviews of older films for Signal Horizon and have penned more that are forthcoming over at Unwinnable, and I appeared on Monster Kid Radio talking about The Vampire Doll. If you like what you hear there, The Vampire Doll is just one of the many, many, many classic (and not-so-classic) monster movies I cover in Revenge of Monsters from the Vault, which, once again, you can pre-order right now!

It’s a Scary World

March 20, 2019

appearances, cinema, mignola, monsters from the vault, revenge of monsters from the vault

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Tomorrow night, I leave for Atlanta to attend the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, which is being held in the belly of a real-life monster lab, aka Silver Scream FX Lab. As I write this, there’s still a few hours left to get in on the IndieGoGo, with plenty of cool swag up for grabs. (I’ve got an essay in appreciation of Mike Mignola–along with some art by Mike himself–in the program book!)

Because I’m gonna be otherwise occupied over the next few days, I managed to sneak into a preview screening of Jordan Peele’s latest last night, and I wrote up my (as spoiler-free as possible while still actually talking about the movie at all) impressions for Signal Horizon. It’s a movie I’m looking forward to talking about a lot more once other people have seen it.

I figured, since I’m headed out of town anyway, and I just posted a new film review for an actual new film, rather than something stumbling onto Blu-ray from the ’90s or the ’70s, it was probably a good time to talk about my film writing a bit. (There’s also the little fact that Revenge of Monsters from the Vault is currently up for pre-order.)

For various behind-the-scenes reasons, I’ve been doing a lot more film writing lately, and posting it places other than here, mostly Signal Horizon and Unwinnable. I think, in doing so, I’m also carving out, bit by bit, my own identity as a film writer, whatever that actually means.

I’m especially proud of the writing I recently did for Unwinnable about Audition, an incredible film that I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years. But I also wrote about kickboxing cyborg movies in general and Albert Pyun’s Nemesis in particular, and about the 1994 Double Dragon movie–which, I didn’t know until I was writing about it, was only the second live-action video game adaptation ever made. Which maybe explains some things?

I haven’t had as many things pop up at Signal Horizon lately, though you can go back and read my reviews of stuff like Bloody Birthday and Fulci’s Zombie. More recently, I wrote about the new Arrow Blu of Horror Express, a film that I also covered in the first volume of Monsters from the Vault. (Which, it bears repeating, you can get if you pre-order its sequel here.)

There’s lots more like that on the way, but that ought to keep you all occupied while I’m out of town. If you’re coming to the Outer Dark Symposium, I’ll see you there, and if we haven’t already met, come up and say hi. And if anyone wants to bring me any Hellboy Day swag, I’ll be tied up with Symposium stuff all day on Saturday, so it would be much appreciated!

“Scary Times But Highs For All” – Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI: The Official Novelization

March 10, 2019

reading materials

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Were you ever watching, say, a late-era Friday the 13th sequel only to find yourself thinking, “This could really use a lot more alien abductions/occult conspiracy theories/apocalyptic visions/nefarious cults/metafictional tangents”? Well, have I got a book for you!

The elevator pitch for Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI by Jonathan Raab would probably sound something like, “What if Stephen Graham Jones was hired to write Cabin in the Woods but specifically for late-era slasher sequels?” But that logline, while descriptive enough, is also unnecessarily reductive. It leaves out the particular affinity that Raab has for high strange weirdness, for ufology, for apocalyptic conspiracy theories, dire warnings about the American Nightmare and “tragedy in Babylon.” Without that affinity, this could feel like a pastiche, but with it, the book transforms, sometimes subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly, into something else altogether.

If you don’t already know what high strange weirdness is, don’t worry, you will before you’re done reading Camp Ghoul Mountain. While nominally a novelization of the sixth installment in a fictitious (or is it?) slasher franchise, Camp Ghoul Mountain breaks up that flow with footnotes and intertextual chapters detailing the troubled production history of the film, the cast and crew’s odd encounters with strange lights in the Colorado sky, its unlikely success as a midnight movie mainstay, and Raab’s own struggles in adapting the film to novel format–all of which are, of course, as much a part of the story as anything that happens “on screen.”

If you come to Camp Ghoul Mountain looking for a straightforward narrative, there are plenty of opportunities to be disappointed. The stakes are suitably apocalyptic, but also necessarily uncertain, in keeping with the book’s chosen form. This may frustrate some, but for the book’s target audience, like myself, it’s a feature, not a bug.

Similarly, the writing, especially in the “novelization” chapters, is rarely showy, and often pedestrian. This works to help you feel like you really are reading an adaptation of a relatively formulaic slasher flick, and Raab is ready to break out into more evocative prose when things start to get really strange, such as this encounter in the dark woods midway through the book, “More movement ahead, darkness unfolding from upon itself, a great writhing mass of shadow as what could only be limbs moved through the night air with deliberate patience, followed by the soft impacts of great flesh-wrapped trunks of bone stomping along the ground.”

For those who can enjoy the bloody camp of a slasher flick but might enjoy it a little more if things got a whole lot weirder before all was said and done, Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI: The Official Novelization is a ride like no other.

The Monsters Are Back!

March 5, 2019

cinema, monsters from the vault, news, revenge of monsters from the vault

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A large number of years ago (let’s not worry ourselves overmuch about how many) I started writing a column for Innsmouth Free Press. In it, I had the fairly wide charter of writing about “vintage” horror films, which meant, in practice, everything from the silents to the ’70s. We called it the Vault of Secrets, and I wrote it for five years.

Around the end of that time, Silvia, my publisher at IFP, approached me about the idea of collecting those columns into a book, and Monsters from the Vault was born. What we didn’t know, as we were putting the book together, was that the Vault of Secrets was about to shut down, as IFP ceased online publication. Hence, Monsters from the Vault collected every Vault of Secrets column that was ever published into one convenient tome.

However, being me, I didn’t write my Vault of Secrets columns one a month as they came out. Instead, I ran ahead, and there were several columns I had written before the publication of Monsters from the Vault that hadn’t ever seen the light of day.

For a while, I was unsure what to do with these columns. I considered publishing them on my own website or offering them as rewards on my short-lived Patreon, but ultimately nothing felt quite right, until I hit upon the idea of adding to them and putting out a companion volume to Monsters from the Vault.

Revenge of Monsters from the Vault collects those orphaned columns, sure, but they represent only a tiny fragment of its total page count. A few of the pieces collected here have even shown up online in one place or another, but not many. Most of this book is made up of totally new stuff, written specifically for this volume.

Beginning with a beautiful but underseen film released in 1926 and ending with Toho’s “Bloodthirsty Trilogy” of vampire movies from the 1970s, Revenge of Monsters from the Vault covers a lot of territory. There are sixty films packed into these pages, which is fewer than last time, but each entry is longer, on average, with the shortest entries in Revenge averaging about as long as the longest entries in the previous volume.

Within these pages you’ll find ape fiends, invisible dinosaurs, wax museums, devil bats, zombies, hunchbacks, haunted stranglers, cat people, flying serpents, creatures with an atom brain, terrors from beyond space, cities of the dead, snake women, men with x-ray eyes, and weirder things. There are four films from producer Sam Katzman, a couple from director William Castle, and an exploration of all four of the movies that spun out from Roger Corman’s purchase of the Yugoslavian crime film Operation Titian, to name just a few.

Pre-order today and you can get signed copies of both Revenge of Monsters from the Vault and its progenitor, not to mention some cool swag including a bookmark, postcard, and sticker, all for just $22 plus shipping!

If you’re already a proud owner of Monsters from the Vault, you can always pick up just the new one, which boasts matching cover art from Thomas Boatwright, and keep them both on your entertainment system for quick reference as you’re unearthing old, spooky movies to watch on a dark and stormy night…

Best Horror

February 25, 2019

appearances, cool stuff, news

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52917318_10215725451503426_1097449420703662080_n It’s been a few days since this got announced on social media, so lots of people have probably seen it already, but I’ve been busy so it hasn’t made its way onto my blog until just now, but: My story “No Exit” made it into Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 11!!

This is my third time in Ellen’s Best Horror series, which is an honor that I, honestly, never thought I would manage even once, and I could not be more thrilled to be sharing a table of contents with so many fantastic writers.

“No Exit” originally appeared in Lost Highways from Crystal Lake Publishing, edited by D. Alexander Ward, and is part of my as-yet-unnamed “Hollow Earth cycle” of linked short stories. But don’t worry, you don’t need to have read any of the others to understand what’s going on in “No Exit.”

If you want to read some of the other stories, however, other tales in the cycle are currently available in Chthonic from Martian Migraine Press, Cthlhu Fhtagn! from Word Horde, and For Mortal Things Unsung from Pseudopod, with others coming soon.

Speaking of For Mortal Things Unsung, which is currently the only place you can read my story “New and Strangely Bodied,” it’s available to anyone who pledges $20 or more to the IndieGoGo for The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird.

I’ll be at the Symposium near the end of March (on Hellboy Day, in fact) in Atlanta, Georgia, where we’ll be talking about all things Weird. If you’re thinking of attending or backing the IndieGoGo, you can get lots of cool stuff, including several of my books (signed, of course) not to mention a signed photo of Linnea Quigley with a chainsaw.

There’s another big announcement that will be coming in the next few days, but if you follow me on Facebook, or are an astute reader of interviews, you may have seen some mention of it already…

A Lot of Ground to Cover

February 5, 2019

appearances, guignol, interviews, monsters from the vault, news

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Panic Fest is in the rear view and everything else is up ahead, so it’s been a week or so of catching up around here. There’s been a lot to catch up to, as well, as a lot has been going on kind of while I wasn’t looking.

For starters, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales received a very generous review from Christine Morgan over at The Horror Fiction Review, which refers to my “consistently excellent quality and skill,” so of course I appreciate that. I also learned that my story “The Granfalloon,” which originally appeared in Darker Companions before being reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 10, is being taught in an Advanced Creative Writing workshop that’s being offered by Richard Thomas!

Speaking of stories doing well for me, my story “The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene)” made the Locus Recommended Reading List. I think this may be my first time on the list, and right now you can vote for my story (along with stories and books by lots of other authors) right here. (You don’t have to have a subscriber number, just a name and email address.)

I was interviewed by author Gwendolyn Kiste (whose novella Pretty Marys All in a Row I really enjoyed) at her website, and I was able to sneak in the first official mention, I think, of my next book-length project, which is a sequel to Monsters from the Vault called (of course) Revenge of Monsters from the Vault. It should be out later this year, covering 60 more classic (and not-so-classic) horror and monster movies from the silents to the ’70s including devil bats, ape fiends, space invaders, old dark houses, haunted stranglers, invisible dinosaurs, and a whole lot more!

(On the subject of my film writing, I also unwittingly discovered that I am cited extensively in the Wikipedia entry for John Carpenter’s The Thing. This thing I wrote eight years ago is getting me a lot of traction lately. It was also mentioned in the commentary track for the Scream Factory Blu of Someone’s Watching Me! and quoted in the Devil’s Advocate volume for In the Mouth of Madness.)

Most recently, the full table of contents was announced for Pluto in Furs, an anthology forthcoming from Plutonian Press, which will feature my story “Stygian Chambers” alongside tales by Gemma Files, Jeffrey Thomas, Adam Golaski, Richard Gavin, and many more.

That’s what’s been going on in the last few days, and there’s more on the way. I have other story sales that I can’t announce just yet, not to mention my appearance next month at The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird in Atlanta. I’ll also be a guest at the NecronomiCon in Providence in August, but more on that later…

That’s a Wrap

January 29, 2019

appearances, cinema, panic fest

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home_eyes_2019 Once again, Panic Fest has come and gone. Well, not actually. As I write this, it’s still going on for two more nights of extended programming, but I’ve made it out for the last time, and not just because temperatures are supposed to get to literally below zero over the next couple of days, with windchills that can purportedly cause frostbite in minutes.

Panic Fest is a special time for me. Sure, it’s awesome to have a local horror film festival right here in my own town, let alone one that’s been named one of the best in the country. But that’s not the only reason. It’s not even just because all my awesome local film friends are in one place at the same time, even if we probably actually see each other less than we would the rest of the time, because we’re running around trying to catch as many movies as we can. It’s a special time for me because it marks an anniversary.

I’ve talked at some greater length about it in the past, but it was as I was leaving the house to go to Panic Fest 2015 that I got the phone call that set into motion the series of events which culminated in my dad’s death and several years worth of intervening therapy and… y’know, heavy stuff. Panic Fest felt like the last weekend for a long time where I got to just go be happy, and so every year it stirs up a lot of sometimes conflicting emotions, but I always love it, and I loved it this year, too.

Thanks in part to extended programming, not to mention the Screenland’s two fancy new screens, I got to see more movies this year than ever before. Total for the entire Fest was 11 films if you count Satan Place, which I watched at the kickoff event thanks to the folks at Magnetic Magic, plus one shorts block and about half of a live-reading of an adapted (we’ll say) version of the screenplay for Jason Takes Manhattan, which was a hoot.

Besides that I saw St. Agatha, Book of Monsters, Gags, Luz, The Luring, The Wind, One Cut of the Dead, Lords of Chaos, The Golem, and Starfish. Highlights of the Fest were definitely One Cut (which must be seen to be believed; go into it as cold as possible), Gags, and Starfish, but most of what I saw was good. The highs may not have been quite as high as last year, but the lows were also not as low, and overall it was a good crop. You may see me write more about Gags down the road, too. We’ll see.

Phil Gelatt convinced me to give Letterboxd a spin shortly before the Fest, so I’m on there. I haven’t reviewed the Panic Fest movies yet, and I may not, but if you want specific thoughts about any of them, feel free to DM me or email me or whatever.

One specific highlight of this year’s Fest was getting to meet Charles Pieper in person. He and I had been in contact via Twitter, and he invited me to take a look at his short film “Malacostraca” because we were both fellow monster aficionados. I checked it out, dug it, and recommended that he sub it to Panic Fest, which he did, and it got in, and I got the pleasure of seeing it on the big screen and hearing a guy in the front row loudly exclaim “Jesus!” as the credits rolled. So that was fun.