The Frighteners: A Re-View in 3 Parts, Part 2: Humor & Horror Examples + A Recap

The Frighteners: A Re-View in 3 Parts, Part 2: Humor & Horror Examples + A Recap

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The Frighteners (Universal Pictures, 1996)

Read Part I: The Real-Life Inspiration here.

I hadn’t seen The Frighteners since it was in the theaters in 1996, until I watched it again last week. Twice. I had drastically different reactions between the second and third viewings.

After my first 2022 re-view, I came away thinking the movie was mainly just paying homage through pastiche to a lot of things. While it had interesting vignettes with diverse tones and styles, it never fully gelled into its own thing. It’s as if it went to a Halloween costume shop, tried on and modeled a dozen different outfits, then later said, “What did you think of my costume?” It was more a fashion show than a full narrative arc.

It was equal parts horror and humor. Often, an equal ratio doesn’t work well. It comes off as a split personality, or two different films sharing a movie reel. This is especially true when the humor isn’t a coping mechanism for the protagonist or an emotional vent for the audience. The humor was there, but it never really served a purpose in the way humor normally does when mixed with horror. The two parts seemed at odds.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 edited by Terry Carr

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 (Timescape, July 1982)

I’ve realized I enjoy these old Terry Carr anthologies much more now than when they first appeared 40 years ago.

I wasn’t a sophisticated reader in those days (not that I’m particularly sophisticated today, but at least I’m more patient). I was still discovering science fiction, and purely on the hunt for tales of wonder and adventure. I’d read Carr’s Best Science Fiction volumes with a skeptical eye, not at all convinced I was actually enjoying the finest stories of the year, and skip anything that didn’t grab me in the first few pages.

Nowadays it’s a different story. When I plucked The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 off my shelves last week, I was delighted to find it contained David R. Palmer’s Hugo-nominated novella “Emergence,” the tale of an 11-year-old girl traveling through a post-apocalyptic US; “The Thermals of August,” Edward Bryant’s Hugo and Nebula-nominated tale of wingsuit-wearing daredevils on a wonderfully realized alien world; Gene Wolfe’s Hugo-nominated classic “The Woman the Unicorn Loved,” about a genetically engineered unicorn that escapes onto a college campus; and Poul Anderson’s famous novella “The Saturn Game,” which swept all the major awards, about an immersive role playing game played by a crew exploring Saturn’s moons that turns unexpectedly deadly.

Opening these books now is a journey of discovery of a different sort. I’m not on the hunt for new authors, and not simply for entertainment, either. It’s more a journey into the past, a chance to explore some of the most innovative and exciting SF of 1981, and see what authors whom I’ve come to love were up to early in their careers — and, especially, find an overlooked fictional gem or two.

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I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more Andor

I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more Andor

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“Doctor, I’m at my wit’s end with my husband. He’s – changed. It’s like I’m in one of those paranoid movies.”

“I must repeat, madame, lie back. Take a deep breath. Tell me about it as if you are speaking to a trusted friend.”

“Well, it’s this show. Andor. It’s a Star Wars thing. My husband watches it every week. He’s anxious all Monday and Tuesday about it lately.”

“Ah yes. Tony Gilroy is the showrunner I believe.”

“I think so. At first it was just little things. So easy to dismiss. He’d be looking through his old Star Wars books, these sort of technical manuals, and when I asked him about it he said he was trying to figure out if the ship in ‘Kassa’ was an old BTL-B with the engine housing still on or something like that. He asked our son if any NERF guns looked like Cassian’s blaster.”

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Tales of Adventure and Exploration from the Pre-Spaceflight Era: Mike Ashley’s British Library Science Fiction Classics

Tales of Adventure and Exploration from the Pre-Spaceflight Era: Mike Ashley’s British Library Science Fiction Classics

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All ten anthologies in the British Library Science Fiction Classics edited by Mike Ashley,
plus his non-fiction survey Yesterday’s Tomorrows, and interior art from Moonrise (bottom right).
Covers by Chesley Bonestell, David A. Hardy, Warwick Goble, Frederick Siebel, et al

Mike Ashley is a fascinating guy. He interviewed me years ago about founding the SF Site (sfsite.com), one of the first science fiction websites, back in 1995, for his book The Rise of the Cyberzines, the fifth volume of his monumental History of Science Fiction Magazines. He’s edited dozens of SF anthologies over the years, including 19 volumes in The Mammoth Book series (The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, etc.)

But I’m currently obsessed with his latest project, a sequence of terrific anthologies published under the banner of the British Library Science Fiction Classics. There are nineteen volumes in the British Library Science Fiction Classics so far, including long-forgotten novels by William F. Temple, Charles Eric Maine, and Muriel Jaeger, and even a new collection of previously-abridged novellas from John Brunner, The Society of Time, which looks pretty darn swell.

But the bulk of the series — eleven books — consists of ten anthologies and a non-fiction title from Mike Ashley. And what books they are! They gather early fiction across a wide range of themes, heavily focused on pulp-era and early 20th Century SF and fantasy. Mining classic tropes like the Moon and Mars, sinister machines, creeping monsters, and looming apocalypses, Ashley has produced a veritable library of foundational SF and fantasy. Reasonably priced in handsome trade paperback and affordable digital editions, these volumes are an essential addition to any modern SF collection. And they are positively packed with fun reading.

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Random Reviews: “Paramount Ulj” by Avram Davidson

Random Reviews: “Paramount Ulj” by Avram Davidson

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Cover by Dember

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week, I rolled 26,559 which turned out to be Avram Davidson’s short story “Paramount Ulj.”

One of the things I’m hoping to get out of this series, from a person point of view, is to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I’m also hoping to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

Avram Davidson could be extremely erudite, yet, at the same time, rather silly.  “Paramount Ulj” is a story that tends to fall on the latter side of that spectrum and is completely predictable if you share Davidson’s penchant for wordplay. It is one of his more slight stories, which may explain why its only appearances were its original publication in Galaxy (with translations appearing in the Swedish, French, and Italian versions of the magazine) and in Strange Seas and Shores, one of Davidson’s collections.

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The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2022, edited by Rebecca Roanhorse and John Joseph Adams

The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2022, edited by Rebecca Roanhorse and John Joseph Adams

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The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2022 (Mariner Books, November 1, 2022)

The busier I get, the more I treasure editors. If there are unsung heroes in this business, they are the tireless editors who read towering stacks of unsolicited subs to sift out those few precious treasures that get you and me excited to go to the bookstore.

I appreciate editors of all kinds these days. The ones who acquire novels; the ones who edit magazines. But I especially cherish those who comb through hundreds of stories in venues large and small to bring us Year’s Best volumes every year. John Joseph Adams has been editing The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy since 2015, each year with a distinguished co-editor, and this year he partnered with Rebecca Roanhorse, author of Trail of Lightning, the 2019 Locus Award winner for Best First Novel, to bring us the eighth volume in the series, this one containing stories by Kelly Link, P. Djèlí Clark, Caroline M. Yoachim, Stephen Graham Jones, Aimee Ogden, Meg Elison, Nalo Hopkinson, Rich Larson, Sam J. Miller, and many others.

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New Treasures: Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

New Treasures: Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

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Veronica Roth is the author of the hugely popular Divergent trilogy, adapted as an ill-fortuned 4-part film series that was canceled after three installments (Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, Part One).

That’s the kind of thing that might sour me on the writing biz for good, but Roth has carried on admirably. You can’t blame her for losing her taste for young adult fiction though, and in the last few years she’s turned her skills to adult novels with the dark superhero tale The Chosen One, and her newest, Poster Girl, an SF noir.

She certainly seems to have adopted comfortably to her new niche. Library Journal called Poster Girl “Highly recommended for… lovers of Philip K. Dick’s thought-police science fiction,” high praise indeed. And Kirkus labels it a “wonderfully complex and nuanced book.”

Elisabeth Egan at The New York Times has one of the better long-form reviews, calling it “a fun, read-it-in-a-weekend novel, one that pairs well with Halloween candy, spiked cider and a smattering of neighborhood gossip.” I like the sound of that. Here’s her take.

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The Frighteners: A Re-View in 3 Parts, Part One: The Real-Life Inspiration

The Frighteners: A Re-View in 3 Parts, Part One: The Real-Life Inspiration

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Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate are not familiar household names, unless you’re a true-crime or serial-killer enthusiast, or, perhaps, a Nebraska history buff. While they’d received lurid national news coverage at the time of the killings (Dec. 1957-Jan 1958), I’d never heard of them when my then-fiancé, Barry (now husband), first played the Bruce Springsteen song “Nebraska” for me. Those sparse but chilling lyrics are spare enough that you wouldn’t necessarily realize it was about a real, serial, spree killer and his teenaged partner-girlfriend just by listening to the song.

The song was on a 1982 album of the same name. Though MTV debuted in the summer of 1981, the slow, melancholy song featuring a mournful harmonica throughout, was not viewed as a contender for a music video to run on the manically upbeat and cheerful MTV.

But I got to see a music video of it. One put together by my TV news producer husband and one of the anchors at KMTV in Omaha. It was broadcast to homes throughout the country that were tuned into Lloyd Dobyns and Linda Ellerbie’s show, NBC News Overnight.

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Talking The Rings of Power – Tolkien Trivia

Talking The Rings of Power – Tolkien Trivia

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Okay – you have seen all of season one of The Rings of Power. Well, if you haven’t, might be some spoilers below… After writing about The Istari last week, it was logical to cover the harfoots today. But they are ruining the show, and I’m just not up right now for a couple thousand words on criticizing the overbearing, completely unwarranted, hobbit presence in The Rings of Power.

The Second Age is about elves and men. With some dwarves mixed in. The hobbits have NOTHING to do with the story being told. But the showrunners, afraid to make Tolkien without the lazy, constantly hungry, hairy-footed things, had to make them a cornerstone part of the show.

I’m not ready to tackle Numenor, or why the show is more fan fiction than actual Tolkien pastiche, or real Book Tolkien (condensing over 3,000 years of history into one point of time is a part of it). So, I’m gonna share some Tolkien trivia; related to the show in some fashion. Well, mostly, anyways! You probably know a lot of it. Some might be new. But it’s time to Talk Tolkien!

BALROGS

I was playing D&D for several years before I read The Lord of the Rings (LotR). And I loved seeing the influences that Tolkien had on Gary Gygax. Type 6 Demons (Balors) clearly were based on balrogs. A balrog features prominently in my favorite part of LotR – the Mines of Khazad-dum section of book one, The Fellowship of the Ring.
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Vintage Treasures: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton

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“Sonnie’s Edge” by Peter F. Hamilton (adapted for Love, Death & Robots, 2019)

Peter F. Hamilton made a name for himself in the early 90s with a popular SF series featuring Greg Mandel, a veteran of a tactical psychic unit in the British army who becomes a psychic detective in a near-future Britain where the messy collapse of a communist government has left the country in ruins (Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower).

By 1998 he had a bestselling space opera series on his hands, the Night’s Dawn trilogy. Set in a sprawling far-future timeline known as the Confederation Universe, it was a huge departure from his early gritty SF noir. Hamilton first explored the Confederation Universe and the Affinity tech in a series of short pieces published in 1991 and 1992, and when the first books in Night’s Dawn, The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist, started hitting bestseller lists in Britain he released his first collection.

A Second Chance at Eden gathered all the early tales plus two new novellas (“A Second Chance at Eden” and “The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa”) and a new short story, “New Days Old Times.” The first piece in the series, “Sonnie’s Edge,” was adapted as an episode of Tim Miller’s Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots in 2019.

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