Goth Chick News: A Lost Boys Musical? Oh, Hell Yes

Goth Chick News: A Lost Boys Musical? Oh, Hell Yes

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The Lost Boys (Warner Bros, 1987)

In the constantly evolving world of pop culture the horror genre, like fashion, cycles through which monsters or tropes are currently in vogue. In the dark era from 2000-2010 we lived through sparkly vampires thanks to the Twilight books and subsequent movies. From 2010-2014 it was all about zombies due to the height of Walking Dead fandom and from 2015-2020 we had a run on jump scares and final-girls, while overlapping those last couple of years were a lot of slasher/serial killers. Of course, these subgenres weren’t alone during these timespans, but every so many years Hollywood seems to turn its attention to one specific monster more often than others.

Considering how shafted vampires got the last time it was their turn, it seems only fitting that this time around they are being portrayed as nature intended. Both big and small screen offerings like Blood Red Sky (2021), Midnight Mass (2021), The Invitation (2022) and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) have returned to depicting vampires as dark-needing, dirt-sleeping, human-eating, bringers of terror – which is how things should be. The only way this depiction gets better is when vampires are all of the above, as well as being really great to look at. And for that we need to go back to the 80’s.

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Murder as Comedy, Murder as Fantasy: Unfaithfully Yours

Murder as Comedy, Murder as Fantasy: Unfaithfully Yours

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Of all the subjects for comedy (romantic entanglements, domestic misunderstandings, military SNAFU’s, workplace kerfluffles, political shenanigans, high school hi-jinx etc.), murder might seem one of the least promising. That’s actually not the case, however, as there have been many comedies of homicide, among them Murder He Says, Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Monsieur Verdoux, The Trouble with Harry, Murder by Death, and The Ladykillers (watch the wonderful 1955 Ealing Studios version with Alec Guinness, not the woeful 2004 Cohen Brothers misfire with poor, miscast Tom Hanks), to name just a handful. …

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Retro Review: Fantastic, August and October, 1972

Retro Review: Fantastic, August and October, 1972

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Fantastic magazine, edited by Ted White. August and
October 1972. Covers by Jeff Jones and Mike Hinge

My Retro Reviews of Amazing have concentrated on the Goldsmith/Lalli years, but I recently read this pair of issues from Ted White’s era, which extended from 1969 to 1979. As a youngster, I started reading Amazing in late 1974, so right in the middle of White’s editorship.

These two issues, then, date a bit earlier than my first encounter with Amazing. I bought them so I could compare the serialized version of Avram Davidson’s Ursus of Ultima Thule with the book version. But there was plenty more of interest in these two magazines.

TOCs first.

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A World Built on Atrocity: Damon Knight’s “Down There”

A World Built on Atrocity: Damon Knight’s “Down There”

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New Dimensions III, edited by Robert Silverberg
(Signet/New American Library, February 1974). Cover by Charles Moll

One of the writers who strongly influenced me when I was learning to write fiction was Damon Knight.

Although he founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, co-founded the Milford Writers’ Workshop, made the Clarion Writers’ Workshop the force that it is in the development of speculative fiction, edited the influential anthology series Orbit, and wrote one of the first significant critical works on science fiction, In Search of Wonder, his fiction is little remembered today.

Knight was a brilliant writer of short stories. He also wrote some damn good novels; his last one Humpty Dumpty, An Oval, published in 1996, is sui generis. But I want to talk about one of his most obscure stories, “Down There,” which appeared originally in the anthology New Dimensions 3 in 1973. It’s also available in The Best of Damon Knight.

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Bob’s Books- Shelfie #9 (Hillerman, Monk)

Bob’s Books- Shelfie #9 (Hillerman, Monk)

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It’s installment number eight in Bob’s Books Shelfie series. Links to the prior shelfie posts can be found at the end of this one. If you’re new to this column, I posted shelfies of over a thousand of my books, in the r/bookshelf subreddit. The mods got too annoying for me, and I quit the group. Today it’s Tony Hillerman, and Adrian Monk.

TONY HILLERMAN

I am a huge Hillerman fan, having gone through his Navajo Tribal police series (reading and audiobooks) easily a half dozen times. And his The Fly on the Wall is in my Top Five Novels. His books are terrific police procedurals, drenched in Native American Culture (primarily Navajo, but there’s more).

After he died, the series was continued by his daughter, but they’ve gone from bad to terrible and I quit reading them. Even with her father’s last name, she’s less qualified to write them than I am.

Season one of AMC’s Dark Winds streamed the summer of 2022, based on his series. Very good show – not good Hillerman. I wrote 5,000 words about Hillerman and the series over at Black Gate. I have not yet seen season two.

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Bringing a Whetstone to an Old Blade: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine #1

Bringing a Whetstone to an Old Blade: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine #1

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New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2023. Cover by Caterina Gerbasi

Disclosure: I was a Backer for the first four issues of this new journal.

As with the Zero issue, New Edge has absolutely fantastic, journal-level production values: heavy paper stock, trade or hard-cover binding, 8.5 x 11 stock, clean, professional layout, and absolutely terrific artwork. It looks great, feels great in the hand and has nothing amateurish about it. Whereas a counterpart magazine, Tales From the Magician’s Skull, has similar production quality but leans into a 30s pulp-retro vibe intentionally, NESS has a much more contemporary vibe, which fits its idea of taking a venerable genre and recasting it for modern audiences. (Which it does to varying degrees of success.)

So, looks great. How’s the contents?

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A Nightmarish Vision of Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

A Nightmarish Vision of Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter (DreamWorks/Universal Pictures)

A doomed ship and a doomed crew: The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Rated R – Bloody Violence.

Bloody great film! I watched this film while recuperating from another back procedure in December. The movie stars Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworthy from Game of Thrones), and Corey Hawkins (Heath, from The Walking Dead.) This film is well acted by a superb cast, masterfully directed by André Øvredal, with an excellent script written by Bragi F. Schut Jr and Zak Olkewicz, and a nice soundtrack by Bear McCreary, who’s worked on a lot of theatrical films and television shows, including The Walking Dead.

The combination of CGI and practical special FX works quite well, too. And an incredibly skinny actor named Javier Botet is perfectly cast as Count Dracula, who is depicted here as an ancient, malnourished, emaciated inhuman creature; the more he feeds, the more he “evolves” and grows stronger.

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A to Z Reviews: “Fire in the Dark,” by Alex Azar

A to Z Reviews: “Fire in the Dark,” by Alex Azar

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A to Z ReviewsOver the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

The final story in my collection by an author whose name begins with an A is Alex Azar’s “Fire in the Dark,” which appeared in the anthology Wyrms, edited by Eric Fomley in 2022. Wyrms is a collection of drabbles, a literary format in which a story is told in exactly 100 words. In the interest of transparency, I should note that my story “Best Policy” also appears in Wyrms. I’ll also note the last word of this sentence (including the introduction) is the 300th word of this article.

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Goth Chick News: As I’m in No Danger of Being Replaced by AI, Let’s Talk About Abigail…

Goth Chick News: As I’m in No Danger of Being Replaced by AI, Let’s Talk About Abigail…

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You likely don’t know I have a day job in the tech industry where I have funded all my macabre obsessions for more years than I care to count. Like nearly everyone these days, my company is in a frenzy over artificial intelligence (AI) and all the cool ways we can/will use it. Through said day job, I also have access to the most current generative AI engine which got me to thinking whether or not this technology would eventually do me out of my Black Gate side hustle? Could AI create my GCN content in a seamless undetectable way, thereby effectively Cyberdyne’ing the whole BG staff out of existence? I decided to give it a go.

I had planned on the topic of this week’s article being a new big-screen offering scheduled to land in theaters on April 19 entitled Abigail. Entering all the appropriate links and prompts into the AI engine, I held my breath for the few seconds it took to return a response.

My initial reaction was dismay. AI’s article looked to be about the right length and was interspersed with visually interesting graphics. Remembering that I had pointed the AI engine toward my content, asking it to mimic the style and “voice” of my previous work, I had a moment of panic wondering, “Is this technology actually me, only better?”

The answer, at least for now, is thankfully no.

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Bad Things Come in Threes: Terry Bisson (February 12, 1942 – January 10, 2024), Howard Waldrop (September 15, 1946 – January 14, 2024), Tom Purdom (April 19, 1936 – January 14, 2024): A Tripartite Obituary

Bad Things Come in Threes: Terry Bisson (February 12, 1942 – January 10, 2024), Howard Waldrop (September 15, 1946 – January 14, 2024), Tom Purdom (April 19, 1936 – January 14, 2024): A Tripartite Obituary

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Terry Bisson, Howard Waldrop, and Tom Purdom

On the heels of Terry Bisson’s death I heard news that Howard Waldrop had died. And this morning I woke up to learn that Tom Purdom had also died. A profound 1-2 punch to the SF community, followed by a knockout. Bisson and Waldrop were two of the most original, indeed weirdest, SF writers; and if Purdom wasn’t as downright weird as those two he was as intriguing in his slightly more traditional fashion. All three writers wrote novels, but it’s fair to say they are all best known for their short fiction.

I never met Terry Bisson (we exchanged emails once, when I asked for permission to reprint one of his stories) and I only met Howard Waldrop briefly at a couple of conventions (a ConQuesT and a World Fantasy.) I also never met Tom Purdom in person, though we did correspond for a while back when he was writing his online autobiographical posts. So I can’t say I knew any of these men well, but all seemed, from a distance if you will, people eminently worth knowing. And if I couldn’t know them personally, I had to settle for knowing them via their fiction.

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