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A Shard in Horror’s Broken Mirror…

A Shard in Horror’s Broken Mirror…

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The Dad Who Turns Into a Supernaturally Driven Psycho Killer

shiningAre you afraid of the dark? Are you afraid of ghosts? Hey, if you’re a family man, are you afraid a malevolent ghost is going to possess you and turn you into a psycho killer?

[Okay, before I get to all that, let me give a quick shout-out to those who have been following my ongoing blog of ARAK, Son of Thunder: I’ll have a new installment (covering the two-part story of issues 7 and 8) here for you next Monday. But this week I’d like to introduce the first in an occasional series examining aspects of the horror (primarily film) genre, which I’m going to call A Shard in Horror’s Broken Mirror. (Hey, how many “occasional series” does this guy have, anyway? Is he really, like, three different guys who take turns writing this blog under the same pen name?)]

The shard of horror I’m looking at today is an oft-recurring theme in many modern ghost thrillers: A character — usually, but certainly not always, the lead male — is manipulated or outright possessed by a supernatural agent (ghost, demon) and gradually becomes mentally cracked. This nearly always culminates in a final act where he is chasing his loved ones through a spooky locale with murderous intent.

Let me say at the outset that I’m generally not a big fan of this plot twist in most contemporary horror films. More on that later. First, though, a few words on where this narrative concept comes from.

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Vintage Scares: The Most Terrifying Short Stories Ever?

Vintage Scares: The Most Terrifying Short Stories Ever?

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In my fourth grade year, my teacher, for reasons still unknown to me, decided to read F. Marion 3852814493_5637bb50a9_o Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” aloud to our class.

The story is not so well known these days, but back in the late seventies, it had gained a certain notoriety by virtue of its inclusion in Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery, an omnibus to which I have (with trepidation) returned to many times since. If Hitch was the source from which my teacher made her choice, perhaps she was gulled by the book’s subtitle, which read, “Eleven spooky stories for young people.”

Let me reiterate the salient feature of that rash, dangerous subtitle: FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

Ha!

To be sure, “Miss Emmeline Takes Off” (Walter Brooks) and “The Haunted Trailer” (Robert Arthur) are easy on the soul, but how to explain the inclusion of “The Waxwork” (A.M. Burrage) or “In a Dim Room” (Lord Dunsany)?

As for “The Upper Berth,” suffice it to say that just as my teacher reached the climactic moment, our rapt, wide-eyed class erupted into chaos. One child whimpered; another screamed. Poor Alicia literally leaped to her feet and fled the room, running for dear life for the imagined safety of any spot on earth where she could no longer hear the teacher’s voice.

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The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

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free-standing-dry-stone-archAs of Sunday, August fourth, the last installment of my Gemen trilogy is up and published right here on the Black Gate site.

It’s a curious feeling to have these three closely linked tales “on display” at last. I wrote the first entirely on a whim back in 2004, but the storyline itself had actually evolved decades before, in 1986. How Gemen got to where he is today — that is to say, fictionalized, and available for public scrutiny — is a tale that will perhaps be instructive to rising writers, and hopefully of some interest also to those readers who’ve kept pace with my hero’s travails.

Yes, Gemen is the love child of Dungeons & Dragons (possibly too much Dungeons & Dragons, although that, I hope, will be left to the eye of the beholder), but consider this: in all the literally thousands of hours of role-playing in which I immersed myself from approximately 1980 until 1989, only one idea, one small glimmer of a scenario, presented itself later as worthy of being translated to fiction. Lucky Gemen: alone among my endless sword & sorcery imaginings, he has stumbled into a literary afterlife.

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Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

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1002747_514919775228258_344973762_nA few weeks back, I had the good fortune to take in productions of The Tempest and Peter and the Starcatcher at the Utah Shakespeare Festival (Cedar City, Utah). As I drove away afterward, I could not but help thinking that plays, too, are literature, and that more than a passing handful of theater’s best, these two titles included, are outright, unabashed fantasies. Adventures, even.

It is admittedly difficult to keep current with theater, since stagecraft is not, as books, comics, and film/television most surely are, a truly mass media. Access is tricky; productions are both local and fleeting. Also, the habit of theater can be expensive.

Nevertheless, I’m going to make a case, here and now, that Black Gate’s readership should take stock and keep track of contemporary theater. Scripted plays, after all, predate the novel as a form by many centuries, and we would be as blind as Tiresias were we to forget that were it not for Oedipus Rex, we would know nothing of that fantasy staple, the talking, riddling sphinx.

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Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Immutable Hallmarks of Genre

Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Immutable Hallmarks of Genre

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The Gone-Away WorldEvery once in a while, usually in the midst of conversations about the history of SFF or arguments about its greatest works and writers, I’ll guiltily remember how few of the Classics I’ve read, and make rash promises to remedy the situation.

I know Orson Scott Card is a raving homophobe, I’ll think to myself, but I really should read Ender’s Game. In a fit of mad optimism, I’ll add various works by Isaac Asimov and William Gibson to my Amazon wishlist, only to delete them the next time I’ve got money to spend, because I just can’t muster up the interest. Friends have lent me copies of Jack Vance, Vernor Vinge, and Gene Wolfe, and each time, despite my best intentions, the books are left to molder by the bedside in favor of something by Catherynne M. Valente or Nnedi Okorafor.

It’s not like I have any moral objection to books by straight white male writers – after all, I’ve been compulsively reading and rereading both Discworld and A Song of Ice and Fire for over a decade, I’m an absolute sucker for China Mieville and Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World will forever be one of my all-time favorite novels (and that’s just for starters).

But with the genre developing in so many different directions at once, it feels needlessly regressive to pry myself away from the latest book by Elizabeth Bear or N. K. Jemisin and instead try to read, out of duty rather than passion, some decades-old novel that’s already been analysed, reviewed, and criticised ad nauseum.

Which doesn’t make them bad novels, or mean that there’s anything wrong with loving, critiquing, discovering and talking about them now. They’re just not for me, is all, and most of the time, I can live with that. But then I’ll read yet another article complaining about newcomers to SFF reinventing the wheel for lack of familiarity with the Classics, or hear someone bemoaning the fact that fantasy Isn’t What It Used To Be, and part of me starts to doubt my own credentials. Can I really call myself a fan of science fiction if I’ve never read Dune? If I let slip that I never made it past book one of The Wheel of Time, are the Geek Police going to come along and revoke my right to talk about epic fantasy on the Internet?

If I’ve never read the Classics, then how did I get into SFF in the first place?

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King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

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41EQ75FAXGLThe legend of King Arthur has become one of literature’s greatest footballs, and it gets punted hither and yon with often quite careless abandon. Legions of celluloid spinoffs litter the vaults of Netflix, and on the printed page, one can select from heavyweights like Mallory, White, or Steinbeck to enjoy your Age of Chivalry fix.

Flying well under the radar is one of the twentieth century’s best known metafictional writers, Donald Barthelme. His story collections, including City Lights and Sixty Stories, are classics of the form, endlessly inventive, cartwheeling-freewheeling-Catherine wheeling lunacies that manage nonetheless to pack a surprising emotional punch.

Most of Barthelme’s output centered on short fiction, but every so often he ventured into the realm of the novel, as with his knowing, nudge-nudge/wink-wink Snow White and his unjustly forgotten Arthurian outing, The King.

Released by Harper & Row in 1990 and featuring the evocative, jutting illustrations of Barry Moser, The King is an anachronistic treat from start to finish, and hilarious besides.

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Mythic Delirium, Clockwork Phoenix, Kickstarter & You

Mythic Delirium, Clockwork Phoenix, Kickstarter & You

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KickPlayHello, Black Gate denizens! Has it really been a year since I posted here?

Just about. The last time I did a guest post here, it was to talk about a Kickstarter I was running for an anthology called Clockwork Phoenix 4. In that campaign, I asked for $5,000 to fund the publication of the volume and ultimately raised more than $10,000.

And guess what: all those backers have received their rewards, and the anthology has been published.

You can buy it on Amazon for Kindle and in trade paperback, and in numerous other places. The reviews have been terrific – check them out here if you don’t believe me.

Ever since the campaign finished, Black Gate overlord John O’Neill has been asking me for a guest post in which I’d talk about what I’ve learned about Kickstarter. I’ve always intended to do so, but I’ve never been able to budget the time.

So here’s one lesson: A Kickstarter is all-consuming, both when you’re running it and afterward.

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How to Run a Successful Kickstarter – Part I

How to Run a Successful Kickstarter – Part I

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This is Part I of a two-part series on How to Run a Successful Novel Kickstarter

For years I’d been planning on pulling together my short fiction into a collection of some sort to get it out and into the world. And for years I hemmed and hawed about actually doing it. I didn’t have the time. It wouldn’t do well. My time would be better spent on my next novel. You’ve probably said many of the same things yourself.

Well, late last year, a few things changed. One, I wrapped up my debut trilogy, The Lays of Anuskaya, which finally freed up a bit of time for me to work on something besides novel-length work. And two, Kickstarter happened. What do I mean by that? Well, Kickstarter had been around for a few years, but more and more I was seeing successful projects being started and completed on the platform. I saw how impressive some of them were as well, how caught up I got in the “community” that successful projects could bring about. I saw how savvy some project owners were about running the Kickstarters during the ‘Starter itself.

And it got me to thinking: it may take some time and effort, but if they can do it, so can I.

And if I can do it, so can you.

The first Kickstarter I ran was for Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories, my premiere short story collection.

The second Kickstarter I ran was for the third book in my Lays of Anuskaya Trilogy, The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, and it came about all quick-like. That is, I hadn’t planned on running a second Kickstarter, but there were a few, well, “issues” with my publisher, Night Shade Books.

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Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

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the-mysterious-benedict-society-0316003956-l_5462In the original 2011 edition of Fantasy Out Loud, I took a stab at reviewing the fantasy books I had read aloud to my children. Back in those halcyon days, The Hobbit was front and center.

Some eighteen months later, my boys are older and taller, but not necessarily wiser. Much to my chagrin, older son Corey, aged thirteen as of this writing, no longer wants me to read aloud to him prior to bedtime. On his own, he’s lately polished off all four of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, and is now slamming through Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which he describes as “weird.” (We’ll see what he says when he gets to the end, one of the best reveals in written English.)

But, because Corey is tackling these titles on his lonesome ownsome, this column is necessarily dedicated to eight-year-old Evan, who still can’t get enough of pre-bed daddy readings.

In the last year, fantasy titles we’ve tackled include The Warriors: Into the Wild, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Black Beauty, Summerland, Tuck Everlasting, and Magic By the Lake.

Well, all right: Black Beauty isn’t strictly fantasy, since author Anna Sewell never allows Beauty to actually speak, but for a horse to be so observant, so proscriptive, so downright brilliant?  Sounds like fantasy to me.

Here’s the rub: Evan did not like these books equally. Nor do his growing sense of taste and literary discretion always parallel, sadly, my own. At least two of the books above were volumes I would have preferred to hurl across the room, but in one case especially, despite my jaundice, Evan was enraptured.

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Adventure on Film: Merlin

Adventure on Film: Merlin

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shot08Bad films reek, and at a distance, too.

Bad Arthurian films have a special odor all their own. John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981)  may be a mess, but it’s a glorious mess, chaos of the highest and noblest order; in retrospect, it smells remarkably sweet.

Sadly, where Excalibur rises above both its Wagnerian grand guignol and its elaborate and intentional eccentricities, the mini-series Merlin (1998) sinks beneath a morass of imitative, careless, and flashy choices. It’s like a pretty stone chucked into dark and thankless waters: for an instant, on its way down, it glimmers. And then, blessedly, three hours later, it’s gone.

The star-studded cast is jaw-dropping. A film that boasts John Gielgud, Miranda Richardson, James Earl Jones (voice only), Isabella Rossellini, Rutger Hauer, Billie Whitelaw, and Helena Bonham Carter shouldn’t be a failure –– such an outcome shouldn’t be possible –– but as with so many popular music albums featuring a glittering luminati of “guest stars” and “collaborators,” star power proves to be yet another form of lead weight. Without the grace of good storytelling and with far too many overwrought effects, even the best actors on the planet prove to be nothing more than celluloid cannon fodder.

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