A Masterpiece of Old School Horror: The Cursed

A Masterpiece of Old School Horror: The Cursed

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My son Tim and I went to the movies yesterday, as we do most Saturday nights. I wanted to see Tom Holland’s Uncharted, but the crowds were a little daunting, so instead we opted for a low-budget horror film that neither of us knew anything about: The Cursed. We settled into a virtually empty theater with a bucket of popcorn and no expectations.

Turned out to be a splendid choice. I doubt The Cursed will get much attention, as it was released with a virtually non-existent marketing budget — and I don’t expect a larger one would have done much good anyway, as it’s a claustrophobic little tale with few of the things modern horror fans seem to care about.

But those who love classic horror? Ah, that’s a completely different story. The Cursed is positively packed with all the delicious ingredients of top-notch vintage horror: a terrifying monster, a torch-wielding mob, a gypsy curse, a village with ghastly secrets, mist-covered countryside, a (very) creepy scarecrow, a monster-hunter with a tortured past, sinister clergy, wide-eyed children who stumble on things they shouldn’t, and a whole lot more.

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Slapdash Slapstick: Ron Goulart, January 13, 1933 – January 14, 2022

Slapdash Slapstick: Ron Goulart, January 13, 1933 – January 14, 2022

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Ron Goulart in 2009

Contrary to popular opinion, comic science fiction didn’t start and end with Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The humorous mode has a long and honorable history, exemplified by writers like Stanislaw Lem, Harry Harrison, R.A. Lafferty, Frederic Brown, Robert Sheckley… and Ron Goulart.

Ron Goulart, who died on January 14th, a day after his eighty-ninth birthday, was an insanely prolific science fiction and mystery writer, especially in the 70’s and 80’s, when he wrote over one hundred novels, many of them pseudonymous entries in various “copyrighted character” series such as The Avenger, Flash Gordon, Vampirella, and The Phantom. These productions are about what you would expect — professional, work-for-hire potboilers written at high speed for the sole purpose of keeping the refrigerator stocked and the gas and electricity on. Hack work, in other words.

He was also William Shatner’s ghostwriter on the actor’s TekWar books; what would you give to have been a fly on the wall during their story conferences? “What do you think of this idea, Ron?” “It’s dead, Bill.”

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One From the Bucket List: The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Second Annual Collection edited by Allan Kaster

One From the Bucket List: The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Second Annual Collection edited by Allan Kaster

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The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Second Annual Collection (Infinivox, November 21, 2021). Cover by Maurizio Manzieri

I’ve been reading and writing about Year’s Best volumes for decades, and I’ve covered a lot of them, including anthologies by Terry Carr, Don Wollheim, Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, Rich Horton, Neil Clarke, and many others.

So I hope you can appreciate what a pleasure it was to receive a copy of Allan Kaster’s The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Second Annual Collection in the mail in December, a book that fulfilled a long-held dream. It’s the first Year’s Best to include a story of mine: “The Ambient Intelligence,” originally published in the October 2020 issue of John Joseph Adams’ Lightspeed magazine.

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Goth Chick News: A Year of Weird; Hitting the Road with Goth Chick News

Goth Chick News: A Year of Weird; Hitting the Road with Goth Chick News

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You’d think that, as we approach the 2-year anniversary of the division between “BC” (before Covid) and everything else, nothing would seem strange anymore. Yet here we are less than 8 weeks into the new year, and 2022 is shaping up to be a doozy. We’ve already experienced cars that can change colors, exercise bikes in McDonalds, French-fry-scented perfume, and a once-in-a-millennium palindrome day, and we’re not even through February yet.

In this brave new world where pillow-fighting has become a legit combat sport, it might be easy for Black Gate photog Chris Z and I to decide to remain in our subterranean offices until October. I mean, covering the horror industry might seem scary until you consider that this is the year that avatars of the group ABBA will be in concert in London for six months and the event is basically sold out.

Seriously. WTF?

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Random Reviews: “Final Report” by Richard Grey Sipes

Random Reviews: “Final Report” by Richard Grey Sipes

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Analog, January 1965, Cover by John Schoenherr
Analog, January 1965, Cover by John Schoenherr

Throughout 2022, I’ll be reviewing short stories. Some of these may be classics, others forgotten. The two things that all will have in common is that they are part of my personal collection and they will be selected through a randomization process.  What works and authors I look at will be entirely selected by a roll of the dice.

“Final Report” by Richard Grey Sipes appeared in the January 1965 edition of Analog Science Fiction – Science Fact, an issues more noted for including the first part of Frank Herbert’s serial The Prophet of Dune, which would eventually be published as the second part of the novel Dune. The issue also included stories by Christopher Anvil, Harry Harrison, John T. Phillifent, and James H. Schmitz.

Sipes was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and in 1928 and died in Missouri on June 12, 1989. He worked as aan Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Long Island University and was a cross-cultural correlation methodologist who wrote several papers on the topic, including “War Sports and Aggression: An Empirical Test of Two Rival Theories” and “War, Combative Sports, and Aggression: a Preliminary Causal Model of Cultural Patterning.”

“Final Report” really doesn’t qualify as a short story. There are no characters and it has no plot. Instead, the piece is a written as an army evaluation of new communications equipment. Sipes’ language and format follow a very proscribed and technical manner and he commits fully to the piece. Unfortunately, this has the effect of making the essay dry. The reader keeps expecting Sipes to deviate and throw in something humorous or off kilter as the testing of the equipment enters the science fictional realm, however the entire article is written almost straight faced.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Goofballs in Harem Pants, Part 2

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Goofballs in Harem Pants, Part 2

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Son of Ali Baba (Universal, 1952)

Including Arabian Adventure (1979) in last week’s article reminded me that there was a slew of films from Hollywood’s postwar spate of Arabian Nights-inspired B-movies that we hadn’t covered here yet. There were a lot of these, quickies shot in about a week apiece, mostly on the same Hollywood backlot. Though tedium reigns over most of the running time of these faux-desert adventures, there are nuggets of good fun scattered among the dunes. If only somebody would compile a half-hour supercut of the best bits from the films that follow, they’d be doing the 21st century a favor. Any takers?

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Close to the Borders of Fairyland: Dark Breakers by C.S.E. Cooney

Close to the Borders of Fairyland: Dark Breakers by C.S.E. Cooney

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Dark Breakers by CSE Cooney (Mythic Delirium, February 15, 2022). Cover by Brett Massé

It’s been a delight watching the meteoric career of C.S.E. Cooney, Black Gate‘s first Website Editor. Her short fiction has been reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year and Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (five times); her novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2015, and in 2016 she won a World Fantasy Award for her collection Bone Swans.

Somewhere in there she also found the time to release three albums (Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir), and a poetry collection, How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, containing her 2011 Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” More recently she published a Tor.com novella (Desdemona and the Deep, 2019), and in April of this year Solaris releases her long-awaited first novel, Saint Death’s Daughter.

Last week Mythic Delirium Books published her newest book Dark Breakers, a collection of five linked stories — including three never before published — all set in the same world as Desdemona and the Deep. ZZ Claybourne calls it “an art deco mural under the guidance of Galadriel, Zora Neale Hurston and the Brothers Grimm,” and Publishers Weekly proclaims it “Extravagant and gorgeous.”

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The Triumphant Return of Fantasy Magazine

The Triumphant Return of Fantasy Magazine

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The September, December and January issues of Fantasy Magazine (Adamant Press).
Covers by Thana Wong, OopsPixel, and Warmtail

Fantasy Magazine has a long and storied history. It was founded as a print mag by Sean Wallace in 2005, and edited by Wallace and Paul Tremblay. In 2007 it shifted to digital format, and Tremblay was replaced by Cat Rambo. In 2011 the magazine was acquired by John Joseph Adams’ Adamant Press; Adams became the new editor, and in 2012 he merged it with Lightspeed.

In November 2020 we covered the news that Fantasy was returning as an independent magazine, with new editors Christie Yant and Arley Sorg at the helm. The new regime has now produced sixteen issues, every one on time, publishing popular writers like Dominica Phetteplace, Beth Cato, Marissa Lingen, Bogi Takács, and many others. I’ve been very impressed with the timeliness, top notch art direction, and overall contents of the new edition of Fantasy. It deserves your attention.

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 37

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 37

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So, in 2020, as the Pandemic settled in like an unwanted relative who just came for a week and is still tying up the bathroom, I did a series of posts for the FB Page of the Nero Wolfe fan club, The Wolfe Pack. I speculated on what Stay at Home would be like for Archie, living in the Brownstone with Nero Wolfe, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Horstmann. I have already re-posted days one through thirty-six. Here is thirty seven (April 27). It helps if you read the series in order, so I’ve included links to the earlier entries.

Day Thirty Seven – 2020 Stay at Home

I was looking through some old notebooks today and came across this gem from a case I never finished writing up. There have been times when I think Inspector Cramer really did want to lock me up forever, and this was one of them.

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The doorbell rang. More than once, I thought that some day Wolfe would put a button under his desk which would cause the doorbell to ring. He would push it in the middle of one of my eloquent speeches, and when I was at the door checking on our caller, he would hightail it to the elevator and escape. I suspect the reasons he hasn’t yet are because, one; it might work the first time, but I’d never answer the door again. And two; unless a woman is displaying her emotions, Wolfe doesn’t hurry from the office for anything.

I got up and went into the hall. I recognized the familiar silhouette through the one-way window. Normally, I would leave the chain on and test the weather when Inspector Cramer of Homicide West was on the stoop. But I figured Wolfe could use a little bothering by someone not named Archie Goodwin, so I opened up.

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Galactic Magic for Starfinder

Galactic Magic for Starfinder

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Since its inception, Paizo’s Starfinder RPG has been a science fantasy game. The deep melding of magic, science, and technology is built into the setting from the foundation, and classes like Technomancer and Witchwarper really exploit a mystical connection with scientific and technological knowledge. One of the major deities, Triune, is deeply tied artificial intelligence and computer technology. Many of the rulebooks released for the series have included magical devices and new spells.

Despite all of the emphasis on magic, though, Starfinder has not previously had a supplement fully devoted to magic. They’ve had a variety of technology-focused supplements like Armory, Starship Operations Manual, and Tech Revolution.  (Tech Revolution, it is worth reminding people, introduces mechs into the game. Seriously, look into it.)

The drought of magical supplements finally ends with the recent release of Starfinder: Galactic Magic (Paizo, Amazon), which sets the stage to add mystical flavor to the game.

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