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Author: Sue Granquist

Goth Chick News: Devolution Gets Picked Up by Legendary – Let’s Hope They Get It Right

Goth Chick News: Devolution Gets Picked Up by Legendary – Let’s Hope They Get It Right

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First, let me apologize for not telling you about this last summer. Max Brooks, son of Mel and writer of one of my favorite zombie tales ever, World War Z, dropped another excellent story last year, called Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. I was certain I had written about it until I just went to look for the article and found I did not.

So, let’s start there.

I didn’t grab Devolution the moment it hit the shelves. Why? Because when I read “sasquatch massacre” I pondered the likelihood I could take this book seriously. I mean, come on. Big foot, in most of his iterations, cannot help but evoke images of bad reality TV, insurance commercials and debunked mythos. I wasn’t sure I could set these images aside and willingly go with Brooks into a tale where the words “sasquatch” and “massacre” were used in the same sentence while keeping a straight face.

Having met Brooks on a couple of occasions, I know how seriously he researches his subject matter. We discussed how much of what he describes in World War Z is based in actual science, and how many scientists and doctors he interviewed to get everything just right. So, I should have known better than to think he wouldn’t do exactly the same thing with his topic in Devolution.

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Goth Chick News: The Horror of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures

Goth Chick News: The Horror of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures

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In 1991, Peter Jackson was a wee New Zealand lad of thirty-three who was embarking on what would become a very lucrative film career. He was still seven years away from becoming a near household name with the release of Lord or the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and was on the hunt for film project that would get him recognized.

Having grown up in country with roughly the same population as the state of Alabama, he was well aware of the nation’s most infamous murder. Earlier that year fellow New Zealander Fran Walsh, with whom Jackson had worked on Meet the Freebles, suggested they tackle the tale in the form of a movie drama. The Parker-Hulme murder took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 22 June 1954, when Honorah Parker was killed by her teenage daughter, Pauline Parker, and Pauline’s close friend, Juliet Hulme. Parker was 16 at the time, while Hulme was 15. On that June afternoon, Honorah took Pauline and Juliet for tea and then for a walk in Victoria Park. In a wooded area about 400ft from the tea shop, Pauline and Juliet bludgeoned Pauline’s mother to death with half of a brick enclosed in an old stocking.

The murder itself was shocking enough, but as Jackson began his research into the circumstances surrounding it, what emerged read like Hollywood fiction. It was a tale of fantasy, forbidden sexuality and obsessive love which ended in violence and death, all involving two teenaged girls. Over the next year, Jackson dug deep into the story of Pauline and Juliet. In addition to reading Pauline’s diary, Jackson undertook a nationwide search for anyone who had known the girls and interviewed them to get a closer look at their lives.

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Goth Chick News: Just in Time for Mardi Gras: The LaLaurie Mansion Series

Goth Chick News: Just in Time for Mardi Gras: The LaLaurie Mansion Series

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An illustration of the fire at the LaLaurie mansion

As you all know, I fancy myself somewhat of a connoisseur of the paranormal. Over the years I’ve told you about some personal experiences (both real and imagined), some that others have experienced, and a few that are little more than unsubstantiated folk tales. But every once in a while, there comes a time and place where something so disturbing has occurred that the stories of hauntings associated with it morph into anecdotes that even a hardened skeptic could make room for.

Such is the LaLaurie Mansion located in New Orleans’ French Quarter which ranks near the very top of the “give me nightmares” scale.

If you haven’t heard of Marie Delphine LaLaurie, she was a New Orleans socialite who built a two-story mansion at 1140 Royal Street upon the event of her third marriage in 1825, to physician Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie. Long before this, NOLA was a unique place, not the least of which due to its Code Noir, or laws governing the treatment of slaves. Unlike the rest of the south there was at least the expectation in NOLA, that slave owners would treat their slaves well, and NOLA had the largest population of free people of color of any major southern city.

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Goth Chick News: Hendrix Does It Again with The Final Girl Support Group

Goth Chick News: Hendrix Does It Again with The Final Girl Support Group

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Final Girls

Back in 1992, medieval history researcher Carol J. Clover wrote Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Fascinated by film as just another iteration of the ancient art of oral storytelling, she theorized that horror fans are not closet sadists who relate to the violence and terror of the films. Instead, Clover argued the reverse: that horror films are designed to align spectators not with the (most often) male tormentor, but with the tormented female’s suffering, pain, and anguish. The “final girl,” as Clover calls the victim-hero, endures before finally rising up to vanquish her oppressor, with horror fans cheering her on.

Enter one of my favorite authors Grady Hendrix and his upcoming new novel The Final Girl Support Group. If you’re trying to place the name you’ve definitely read about him before, here at GCN, when I talked about his previous releases, Paperbacks from Hell, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör, to name a few. As he often does, Hendrix recognized a trend, as horror franchises went back to visit their “final girls” with characters such as Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the latest Halloween installment, and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream. When you think about it, nearly ever horror movie has a version of a “final girl,” and Hendrix decided to tell us a story about what happened to them “after.”

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Goth Chick News: The Stoker Awards Are Back, And I Need One

Goth Chick News: The Stoker Awards Are Back, And I Need One

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Gather round friends – as we’re all still stuck at home, we can at least take consolation in the idea that writers all over the world continue to have plenty of time to create stories with which to entertain us. And as always, the end of January gifts us with the most awesome reading/watching list of the year: the annual preliminary ballot list for the coolest award ever.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Several members of the HWA, including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

Which is lovely and all, but I believe I would not be above doing something mean-spirited — if not downright evil — to get my hands on the award itself; a haunted house whose front door opens to reveal the category and winner.

This week the HWA announced the preliminary ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Awards. And whatever you do, do not call these folks nominees (yet). Only works that appear on the Stoker Award’s “Final Ballot,” to be formally announced on February 23, may be called nominees.

Therefore, the preliminary ballot achievers are…

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Goth Chick News Presents: “Tots:” A Wonderfully Uncomfortable Short Story by Peter Schneider

Goth Chick News Presents: “Tots:” A Wonderfully Uncomfortable Short Story by Peter Schneider

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Flights, edited by Al Sarrantonio (Roc, 2004). Cover by Steve Stone

In December I told you about my magical meeting with Peter Schneider, author and owner of boutique publisher Hill House Press. During the course of one of our many conversations since, Peter let me know he had written a short story called “Tots,” which he thought I would like. It had originally appeared in a 2004 collection called Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy edited by horror and science fiction writer Al Sarrantonio. In the introduction for “Tots,” Sarrantonio states that Peter’s sense of humor is reminiscent of National Lampoon. When Peter sent me a copy of original manuscript of “Tots,” I absolutely agreed. I’ll also add that it’s just the right amount of wrong and knew I had to share it with you.

So, reprinted here with Peter’s permission, I am excited to share…

TOTS

By Peter Schneider

It is 2:45 a.m., in the parking lot of one of the massive superstore shopping centers that have sprung up like a series of mushrooms across the country.  But the action at this time of the morning isn’t in the Barnes & Noble or Home Depot–it’s in an isolated corner of the lot, surround on two sides by security fencing and hemmed in on the remaining sides by a variety of vehicles, circled like wagons and facing inward with their headlights shining.  The halogen illumination reveals a ring, roughly twelve feet in diameter, crudely outlined on the pavement with a can of purple spray paint.  Outside the circle perhaps fifty or sixty people, mostly men but including a smattering of well-dressed women, stand and watch.  Money changes hands here–big money.  But their attention right now is on the two combatants standing within the ring, long and deadly sickle-like blades strapped securely to their right arms.  One fighter takes a tentative step in the direction of his foe and raises his hand in preparation to strike.  He’ll have to get in closer, however–his four-year-old arms aren’t long enough to deliver a killing blow from such a distance.

This is the world of totfighting.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: The Room VR: A Dark Matter by Fireproof Games

Goth Chick News Reviews: The Room VR: A Dark Matter by Fireproof Games

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A couple years back I did something I have always wanted to do: commission an ultimate gaming computer. As I work in the industry, I only had to ask a couple of my team members if they were interested in building a “sky’s the limit” device. A month and several written checks later, I had a computer I was sure could hack NASA, containing a liquid-cooled, AMD Ryzen 1800x 8-core processor, an MSI AX370 motherboard, an AMD Vega 64 8GB video card, and 11TB of storage. I named it “Winston” and my designers lit it from the inside with a red pulse light that looks like a heartbeat.

When it was delivered, I felt like Victor Frankenstein, screaming “It’s aliiiiiivvvee!”

So, what’s the point? I had my heart set on an HTC Vive virtual reality gaming system and I did not want the word “latency” to ever cross my lips. It took quite an engine to power the first generation Vive, so though I mostly wanted computer bragging rights around the Black Gate offices, I also wanted to turn my home office into my own personal holo-deck. And that’s what I did.

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Goth Chick News: In 2021, The “Stakes” Get Higher…

Goth Chick News: In 2021, The “Stakes” Get Higher…

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No surprise, I absolutely love a good vampire story. And though I’ve had a bit of an up and down relationship with Stephen King over the years, one of the “up” periods involved his book Salem’s Lot. During the year-end holidays I reread it, followed by a revisiting of the 1979 TV miniseries starring David Soul and directed by Tobe Hooper. Though it had its moments, not the least of which being the vampires themselves, I’ve always felt a little “meh” about this rendition as compared to its literary source material. The “meh” goes double for that hot mess on TNT starring Rob Lowe in 2004. This is also no surprise, as a King novel successfully translated to the screen of any size is a rare thing indeed.

Still, hope springs eternal in these matters, as shown by Carrie and The Shining, so when The Hollywood Reporter said director Gary Dauberman had signed up to bring Salem’s Lot to the big-screen, my interest was piqued.

Why? It’s not just due to Dauberman’s horror-chops, but the fact that he is also signed on to write the interpretation. To me it seems that whenever King gets involved as the screen writer, to ensure his stories are told his way, a train wreck ensues. The most recent case in point was Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining which I enjoyed so much I’ve read it twice. But hating Stanley Kubrick’s take on his original installment, King insisted on writing the script for Doctor Sleep himself, resulting in such a disappointing theatrical interpretation that I nearly primal screamed on the way out of the theater.

Raw fish does not belong on a pizza, and Stephen King should not write movie scripts – it’s that simple.

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Goth Chick News: Christmas Spirits

Goth Chick News: Christmas Spirits

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As I enter the last leg of my doctoral studies, I couldn’t help taking advantage of my university’s very impressive library to take a bit of an intellectual detour. I did a search on the origins of modern-day Christmas traditions. Not unsurprisingly our current celebrations owe most to pagan winter festivals, and the rest to mid-19th century England; either way, very little has changed.

And because you’re here at Goth Chick News, you’ve got to know that I zeroed in on the association between Christmas and ghost stories. That particular practice, as it appears in American celebrations, is actually a Victorian tradition which was as much a part of Christmas to them, as Santa Claus is to us.

“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” wrote British humorist Jerome K. Jerome as part of his introduction to an anthology of Christmas ghost stories titled Told After Supper in 1891. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters.”

The most obvious example of a Victorian holiday ghost story is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has become such a ubiquitous part of the season that most people don’t even wonder why Dickens chose ghosts to bring about Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation. So, what is it about Christmas and ghosts that go so well together?

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Goth Chick News: More True Blood? Yes Please

Goth Chick News: More True Blood? Yes Please

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The original HBO series True Blood remains one of my favorites, even through its first episode aired way back in 2008. The show was based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris, which also have a special place in my heart. Harris was my very first Black Gate interview in 2003 when she came through Chicago promoting the third book in what would ultimately be thirteen. Right around that same time, director Allan Ball got stuck in an airport due to a cancelled flight and picked up book three to pass the time. Ball was just coming off another HBO success, Six Feet Under, and fell in love with Harris’ characters, thus True Blood was eventually born.

If you’re unfamiliar, both the books and the series take place in Louisiana, at a time in the not-too-distant future where vampires have “come out of the coffin” due to the invention of synthetic blood. The story follows the adventures of telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse who falls in love with a vampire, then encounters werewolves, fairies, witches and more as the story progresses.

True Blood was very sexy, sometimes violent and occasionally corny, making it an addictive combination. It also made Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgård, Joe Manganiello, and Stephen Moyer household names. If you have never seen True Blood and don’t think you have the patience to wade through all seven seasons, which are still available on HBO or for rent, at least try Season One. Of all of them, the first is pretty much a complete story in itself. At the time, Ball had no idea if the series would get resigned, so though Season Two storyline appears in the final moments of the last episode, Season One still stands on its own.

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