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Author: Nick Ozment

Oz loves Godzilla, middle-school G.I. Joe (not old-school, not new-school; middle-school, spooky stories, trees, and really too many other things to list here.
The Color Out of Time: Michael Shea Takes a Dip Into Lovecraftian Horror

The Color Out of Time: Michael Shea Takes a Dip Into Lovecraftian Horror

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The Color out of TimeI’ll mention this first about Michael Shea’s 1984 novel The Color Out of Time: the protagonists consume copious amounts of Wild Turkey. They fortify their coffee with it; they carry hip flasks full of it. This is a fact the narrator always notes casually in passing. Never are the potentially debilitating effects of alcohol mentioned; it simply occurs to the reader that these people might well be past the point of tipsy into “whiskey-river-take-my-mind” territory through much of the central action of the adventure. Perhaps that’s how they maintain their sanity. And make no mistake: sanity is but one of the possessions at stake for our heroes, because they have waded head-deep into Lovecraft territory. If they do manage to survive with their sanity intact, though, they might want to consider rehab.

The second thing I’ll mention is that because some of my own fictional excursions overlap with Shea’s foray into Lovecraftian horror — we tread similar unhallowed ground, digging up the bones of past masters of weird horror and coating them with fresh slime, if you will — I find myself contemplating the book not just as a critic, but as a writer: appreciating moves he makes while noting missteps and potential pitfalls. Ultimately, Shea’s sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space” is entertaining, but slightly off, a tad unsatisfying, and I’ll try to pinpoint why — to isolate the juncture at which it diverges from Lovecraft’s vision and to articulate how this impacts the effectiveness of the tale. (For a different take on the book, check out Douglas Draa’s review for Black Gate last year HERE.)

The premise is straightforward enough. Take the story that is generally regarded as Lovecraft’s first successful amalgam of science fiction and horror, a blend that became his unique trademark (“The Colour Out of Space” is one of Lovecraft’s most highly regarded and was always, according to Wikipedia, the author’s personal favorite. For the sake of full disclosure, it ranks high on my list of best horror stories and is one of my top two or three favorite works by Lovecraft). Start from the central event of that tale and then project its aftermath some sixty odd — very odd — years later.

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Hearing the Voices of Dead Authors in the Present Tense

Hearing the Voices of Dead Authors in the Present Tense

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tolkien lighting pipeThere are a number of citation styles for a variety of fields, but the two biggies are MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association). The latter is used in the natural sciences and research fields. The former is used in the humanities — literature, philosophy, visual and performing arts — so it’s the one I grew intimately familiar with while earning my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature and Language.

MLA is also the one I primarily taught my first-year composition students during my nine years as an English instructor (which, in retrospect, was a bit of a disservice to all the kids who were going on to pursue non-humanities degrees). In my defense, it is the style primarily used in high school, so it is the one that most students entering college have some degree of familiarity with — which is strange when you think about it: it’s as if our secondary-school system assumes most students will go on to pursue degrees in theater or English. The way I couched my presentation of MLA went something like this: “Whatever field you go into, you will have to write papers that follow a particular formatting and style guide. It may not be this one — it may be APA or Chicago — but using this one will get you accustomed to using one.”

In recent years, I’ve had to get more familiar with APA because I do a fair amount of copy-editing on the side for education, sociology, and psychology professors who write their chapters and academic papers in APA style. The differences between the styles are myriad — each one, after all, has its own labyrinthine manual of hundreds of rules in small type (with sometimes counter-intuitive indexing — as anyone who has spent wasted minutes vainly searching for the guideline pertaining to this one particular set of circumstances knows). Whatever the differences in details, though, their main purpose is to provide a consistent way for other scholars to easily locate the sources one has cited.

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Take Zombies Seriously: The Pentagon, Mayo Clinic Researchers, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control All Do

Take Zombies Seriously: The Pentagon, Mayo Clinic Researchers, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control All Do

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are-you-ready-for-a-zombie-attack_1First there was the much-ballyhooed U.S. Strategic Command document discovered earlier this year outlining a plan of action in case of a zombie apocalypse (read the CNN report HERE). Then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention capitalized on the zombie zeitgeist with their campaign for zombie outbreak preparedness (HERE). Even researchers from the Mayo Clinic, the top-ranked hospital in the United States, have participated in “Bounce Day,” which describes itself as “an integrated disaster response experience” that simulates a zombie plague (HERE).

Such stories are noteworthy and amusing, especially to a horror maven such as myself, but perhaps they aren’t as surprising as some folks may first think. Really, they make perfect sense.

Protocols for dealing with a zombie outbreak are pretty similar to those for virtually any pandemic (minus gunshots to the head). As the Bounce Day blog notes, using “actors simulating illness (zombies) and those affected by the crumbling of society” in such training scenarios helps “participants [learn] both medical and nonmedical response protocols ranging from vaccination and treatment to refugee camp management and security.” In other words, even though zombies don’t exist, the skills we would need to utilize in order to contain them are highly practical for many real-world threats (avian flu, Ebola — take your pick of scary viruses that keep World Health Organization officials up at night).

Zombies provide a fill-in-the-blank marker for such quarantine situations — a growling, rot-faced placeholder for any number of nightmare scenarios. Ironically, by giving such hypothetical scenarios the zombie veneer, you make them less scary. Practicing for a bird-flu pandemic is kind of depressing, and really kind of terrifying. Zombies are fun because they don’t exist. Hence we have an illustration of how monsters are often used to sublimate real fears under the guise of stand-in bogeymen. We can deal with our real fears at one level removed, without having to cogitate on them directly.

And as an added bonus: in the unlikely event the dead do start rising again with a hunger for human flesh — hey, we’ll be prepared for that too.

Oz Revisits Under the Dome

Oz Revisits Under the Dome

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under the dome cdThe CBS TV series adaptation of Stephen King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome went into its second season this summer. I haven’t watched the show, but I always thought the premise would make good television. Since the show clearly has a following, I figured I’d revisit my initial impressions of the novel. Up first is what I posted on Goodreads immediately after I finished the book in the summer of 2010. Following that are some additional thoughts as I look back four years later.

June 2010: In a way, this is The Stand on a small scale: specifically, the scale of one rural Maine town. At over 1,000 pages, however, the book’s scale is anything but small. Typical King, though — all the things that fans enjoy about his writing are here: a broad cast of characters, lots of pop-culture references, and everyday people suddenly thrust into a strange situation of survival-of-the-fittest.

Basic premise, if you haven’t already heard, is that the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine — population 2,000 — finds itself cut off from the rest of the world by a sudden, inexplicable, invisible dome that rises far up into the stratosphere and goes deep into the earth. Things, as you can well imagine, go to hell. What may be surprising is how quickly it does: in a matter of days, not weeks or months.

I won’t say anything about the ending, except to say I found it somewhat unsatisfying — King sometimes seems to have trouble wrapping up his books. They start with a bang and keep you turning the pages until the end, but the endings are often lacking in finesse.

One other pitfall that King falls into too much here is the tendency to break people into two camps: the white-hats and the black-hats, with villains so villainously drawn they could be twirling their curly moustaches as a train heads for a damsel tied to the train track.

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Collector the Barbarian: One Man’s Trash…

Collector the Barbarian: One Man’s Trash…

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apes

“I love trash.” — Oscar

It had long ago slipped my mind, but I was recently reminded of one childhood fad that was literally a load of garbage. I’m speaking of tin waste bins (garbage pails, trash cans, or whatever you happened to call them) lithographed with licensed characters from popular films, TV shows, and comic books.

Thinking back, it seems everyone had one when I was in grade school – you’d start in on a book report, crumple up your first attempt in frustration (yeah, we actually wrote reports with pen and paper back in the olden days of yore), and toss it into the knee-high basket emblazoned with characters from Star Wars or G.I. Joe. When you were sick, they also served as a handy vomit bucket.

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R.I.P. Robin Williams (1951-2014)

R.I.P. Robin Williams (1951-2014)

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aladdin genie

Mork has returned to Ork; the Fisher King has departed; the Genie, after granting us the wish for laughter, is gone.

Robin Williams died Monday, an apparent suicide. The Great Jester of my parents’ generation had been battling severe depression in recent months, according to his manager. Those who have followed Williams’s decades-spanning career know that this demon was the dark side to his manic comic talent. Ironically, while he so often made us laugh, there was no healing humor left for himself yesterday. The Jester has exited the stage, leaving an echo of laughter as the curtain falls on this tragic final act.

Here is part of what James Lipton, host of Inside the Actor’s Studio, had to say in remembrance of Williams Monday evening on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:

I asked him If heaven exists what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?, and this is what Robin Williams said to me: “‘There’s seating near the front. The concert begins at five; it will be Mozart, Elvis, and one of your choosing.’ Or, to know that in heaven there’s laughter. That would be a great thing, just to hear God say, ‘Two Jews walk into a bar…'” And look where he went with that. In fifteen different directions at once. You know, I suppose everybody has said it already, and I’m the last to say it: we are dealing with a real-life pagliacci. This is the clown who laughed, who cried. This the clown who cried, at last, in life, and who breaks our hearts. But in the end…in the end, as so many comedians are, Robin was pagliacci. 

Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy is Space Opera at its Best

Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy is Space Opera at its Best

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guardians of the galaxyI somehow missed the Guardians of the Galaxy comics when I was growing up, but I was steeped in that whole “milieu” — ragtag crews of strange and quirky characters of mixed planets of origin on interstellar quests and cosmic adventures, from Star Wars to Atari Force. On the fantasy side, you had ragtag crews of strange and quirky characters of mixed realms of origin on mystical quests and quasi-medieval adventures. Collectively, that pretty much sums up my pop-cultural background during those formative years in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.

That stuff was put down as escapism, then and now.

And, yep, it was.

When life got crappy, disappointing, or just boring, there was always the promise of derring-do on Barsoom, which we could pine for along with John Carter staring wistfully at the red beacon of Mars. The next wardrobe could be a gateway to Narnia, but in the meantime we could roll up characters and get down to an all-night session of Dungeons and Dragons with friends who had imaginations similarly primed for a little bit of escape. Safer than drugs, anyway.

Guardians of the Galaxy, the new Marvel/Disney film from director and co-writer James Gunn, is a love letter to us — to anyone who grew up with that wild-eyed longing to escape into other worlds, to spend some time with characters who were larger than life and carried the fate of worlds on their shoulders (and yet could still crack a good joke about it all), to boldly go where no man had gone before and discover that, once there, you had to fight a dragon-headed man to win the affections of the green lady. Or whatever. This movie was made for us by people who obviously are “one of us.” Gooble gobble we accept you…

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Why Must Han Solo Die?

Why Must Han Solo Die?

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han soloLast week, I made the prediction that Han Solo will die in the new Star Wars film. I have no evidence; it’s just a theory based on a confluence of random speculations and gut instinct. Here I’ll lay out, in no particular order, some of the thoughts that led me to posit this guess.

My premise begins with the knowledge that Han apparently plays a fairly major role in the plot, given that Harrison Ford’s recent injury shut down the entire production schedule for two weeks (an indication that his is much more than just a “cameo,” which easily could have been filmed around, with some scenes rescheduled for later in the shoot).

Observation #1

Some critics decried the rescue of Han from Jabba in the first act of Return of the Jedi as a cop-out, contending that his death would have provided a dramatic catalyst for the other characters. Of course, Lucas wasn’t going to go there (he’s George Lucas, not Joss Whedon); even Han’s blindness following his release from carbonite was temporary. Such characters in traditional heroes’ tales often suffer a permanent physical loss, such as blindness, that is compensated for by new wisdom or insight. Han’s blindness wore off pretty fast, and by the end of the movie he was back to being good ol’ Han Solo, the wise-cracking pirate with a heart of gold. So maybe J.J. Abrams and company will want to make a big end for the character this time out.

Observation #2

For all we know, Harrison Ford — who just turned 72 this month — stipulated that while he’d gladly reprise the role that made him famous, it would be just this once, and that he didn’t want to be running around playing a space pirate at 75. Even if he made no such stipulation, the age of the actor is a big factor. Which leads me to…

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Han Solo Breaks a Leg

Han Solo Breaks a Leg

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Han-Solo-Harrison-Ford-Star-Wars-7As with most “BIG EVENT” movies, from the first day the new Star Wars film was announced, fans, critics, and Hollywood pundits have been speculating about what the storyline will be. The rumor mill is in full gear and so it will go until the first previews are actually screened late next year. The studio and filmmakers have been playing their part by keeping everything mum, hush-hush, top-secret —  confidential scripts and non-disclosure clauses in actors’ contracts (on threat of being tossed into a rancor pit). The usual.

So when Harrison Ford broke his leg on the set a few weeks back (as I’m sure most of you have heard), the Hollywood gossip machine was already fired up and spitting out rumors on cue.

First, though, if somehow you missed it, this is what happened: Apparently, a door on the Millennium Falcon fell on him. And pause for a moment here to let that sink in. Could you have imagined, ten years ago, that in 2014 you’d be reading about Han Solo breaking his leg on the Millennium Falcon? The Falcon is undoubtedly a bit more dangerous to navigate when you’re 72 years old — but who would have thought that old space smuggler would be back on the big screen? Ford has vehemently insisted for the past THIRTY years that he would never again reprise the role that made him famous. The prequels came and went, and the clock kept ticking, and George Lucas said he wasn’t going to make any more films, and most people just naturally assumed that Ford was probably correct. But — surprise — Han Solo is back!

And then he breaks his leg.

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Weird of Oz Travels Ahead Three Weeks in Time, Finds Himself in New House

Weird of Oz Travels Ahead Three Weeks in Time, Finds Himself in New House

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photo-4My wife and I just bought a house, so for the next couple weeks we will be moving and unpacking. Hopefully, it’s a haunted house! (But if it is, please let it be only in a benevolent way — not one of those houses where the haunt tries to turn the husband into an ax murderer or anything, or goes sucking the children into television sets. I just don’t have time for that.) The Weird of Oz — yours truly — will be taking a brief hiatus, returning with a new column on July 14.

In the meantime, I thought I’d tell you — here in my 70th post for BLACK GATE — what a pleasure it is to be a part of this team and to share, discuss, and debate with this fantastic (in all senses of the word) community. With the phenomenal growth of BG’s visitors, it is also gratifying to know that so many readers are seeing one’s output! I will continue to do my best to inform and entertain.

As for what I have in the works for future posts, I’ll be resuming my blogging of the ‘80s DC comic book Arak at some point, I promise. But there will also be book and film reviews in the mix, as well as new installments of “Collector the Barbarian”, highlighting vintage toys from our childhood that I’ve been hunting down — toys and games of the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror variety that have become collectible.

Finally, here’s a little peek into the column-writing process: these are a few “leads” I’ve typed up for potential posts, with commentary from the internal editor included…

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