Category Archives: Horror

Quick Novel Update

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So, 3 out of 5 acts have been proofed so I am nearing the point where I will be looking for beta readers for ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point.’

I often hear about writers who detest their first drafts, but I am not one of those. Sure, sometimes the draft fails, and I didn’t get to my target. But it’s never detest or I can’t stand reading it as I edit and revise. This novel was no different even though it was written without an outline. There were elements that need minor adjustment because as things became clearer to me near the end earlier scenes had to be adjusted to ensure a consistent continuity.

As I wait for my sweetie-wife to complete her pass on the final two acts I have begun actual writing on the next horror novel. I may need to put something else as the opening scene however as this sequence is so dark and troubling it may be more of a turn off that an enticing opening.

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A Late Christmas Gift

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A gift my sweetie-wife ordered from the UK arrived this weekend, a six-disc collection of the BBC’s Ghost Stories For Christmas. A series of television productions, many which are adaptation of stories by M.R. James, that we have been wanting to watch for some time.

We have started in on any of them yet because we are completing the annual marathon of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Man, 20 years old but they still hold up. After that we will be exploring the spooky, uncanny, and horrifying.

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2023 A Personal Review

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The year, as we in the west number it, is coming to a close and that is a time for reflection. This year has seen triumph and tragedy in my personal life, much like the years that preceded it and that will follow.

In January I began the world building work for my next science-fiction novel, a dystopic and cynical story set on the corporate cities of Mars under the thumb of a once brilliant billion now degenerated into madness and paranoia. With it set only a hundred years into the future that required lots of research and planning to keep from making myself appear too foolish. This month also saw a dear friend of nearly 40 years struck with a terrible wasting degenerative neuro-muscular disease.

February saw the released of a pair of films that I thoroughly enjoyed, Megan a fun take on the killer doll cliche and Cocaine Bear which delivered precisely what was labeled on the tin.

In March I continued the work on my Mars novel and endured the lackluster Antman and The Wasp: Quantum Mania and the even less enjoyable 65 but was treated to the spirited and fun Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

April saw the historic event of a former President of the United States charged with crimes and his party lash themselves to the mast of his sinking ship. Sadly, nothing in the intervening 8 months changed and they remain devoted to his insurrection and criminality. April was also when I began thinking seriously that the time was right for someone to revisit the werewolf as presented in 1941’s The Wolf-Man with particular attention to the fascism in the subtext.

May was a birth month, a celebration if you wanted of my own and the experimental scene I wrote for a very vague and unformed concept of a werewolf novel. After its reception at my writers group and with their encouragement I continued on past that scene and unwittingly started writing a novel without a prepared outline.

In June I watched Asteroid City a strange almost poetic film nearly devoid of any traditional plot and yet strangely compelling. All world building work ceased as the werewolf novel took over all of my creative CPU cycles.

July was a very good month for movies with the release of Oppenheimer and Barbie both film outstanding in their quality with resonate themes of deep importance. My sweetie-wife and I finished the TV series Silo and agreed it had been a waste of time and talent as had Marvel’s Secret Invasion. It was about this time that I began to seriously consider that my unplanned novel was not going to crash and burn and might actually get finished.

In August The unplotted novel passed 40,000 word and my sweetie-wife and I discovered the delightful Australian murder/comedy series Deadloch a real hidden treasure on Amazon Prime.

September witnessed the passing of that dear friend diagnosed in January and once again the hard terrible lesson of life is that it ends. The movies of this month, A Haunting in Venice, and The Annual secret morgue of genre films, did little to mitigate the sadness of that period.

With October I became confident enough in my werewolf novel to reach out to a former editor and pitch him the book. He expressed an interest but also cautioned I would need a pen name for it. The Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage enrollment started and the day-job became more stressful and busier but work on the novel continued.

November was a pleasant month. Two enjoyable features at the theater, The Marvels and Next Goal Wins provided comfort cinema, the annual sf convention LosCon provided friends and geek infusions as well as seeing to completion of the novel first draft.

That brings us to December, I closed out in theater film watching with the fantastic Godzilla Minus 1, abandoned the series The Crown as the Charles and Diana story held little interest for me, and turned my manuscript over to my darling sweetie-wife for her red pen of corrections.

As I said at the outset, 2023 held triumph and tragedy and now onto 2024.

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Series Review: Ultraviolet (1998)

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Several weeks ago, spurred by a discussion of the HBO series The Wire I decided that I wanted to rewatch and earlier television series with Idris Elba Ultraviolet.

Starring Jack Davenport, that many people will recognize as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the series follows Detective Inspector Mike Colefield (Davenport) who upon investigating the disappearance of his best friend that night before that friend’s wedding stumbles into the knowledge that vampires are real, and that a secret organization has been fighting them for centuries. Teamed up with a war veteran Vaughn Rice (Idris Elba), a physician Angela Marsh (Susannah Harker) and a former priest Pearse Harman (Philip Quast) Mike tries to uncover what really happened to his best friend, dodge the determined prying of the jilted fiancé, and help the organization discover what grad scheme the vampires have sudden launched.

My sweetie-wife originally exposed me to this series as she had the program on VHS tapes. Much of the vampire lore has been jettisoned. While the vampires are immortal, ageless, and possess fantastic strength and speed, they do not have the ability to enthrall, assume animal or gaseous forms but remain invisible to mirrors and all form of electronic imagery and recording.

While the series is far from perfect, the fiancé character is far too annoying and Mike’s attraction to her indicates to me that this marriage would have been in serious troubles without vampiric intervention, it is quite enjoyable and a nice take on ‘modern vampire hunting.’ These undead creates are not the romantic seducing lovers of modern fantasy but intelligent deadly predators. The entire story is told in six self-contained episodes. They can currently be streamed on Tubi for free. (You just have to endure the bloodsucking of adverts.)

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The Journey in Writing a Novel Without an Outline

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On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.

About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.

I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.

The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.

I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.

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The First Draft is Complete

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This will be brief as the day-job continues its usual Medicare Open Enrollment madness and for the near future I will be using mass transit to get to the office.

So, the first draft of my werewolf horror novel temp titles ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point’ is finished. I completed the draft at LosCon, working from my laptop in the hotel lobby after the parties had lost their allure.

Originally, I had aimed, or hoped, for a length of about 80-75 thousand words and the draft landed at 94 thousand. I am about halfway through the revisions, which are smaller scale than I would have expected for a novel written without an outline, and I have added about 1000 words.

I have written horror before. My short story collection ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ is principally horror short stories, but I had never attempted a full novel in that beloved genre. The fact that my first horror novel was also my first without the outline process continues to surprise me.

Once the draft has been cleaned up and the inevitable run-on sentences and mild misspellings have been located by my sweetie-wife it will be time to beat the brush for beta readers. I suspect that this novel will survived its encounter with beta readers, but I have been wrong on that front before.

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Movie Review: Godzilla Minus One

Toho Studios

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In the nearly 70 years since the very first film the Godzilla has ranged from the very serious thematic representations of Atomic Age fears to wildly chaotic affairs aimed at children. The brainchild of filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki who wrote, directed, and served as Visual Effects Supervisor on the film Godzilla Minus One is a return to employing the legendary monster as a thematic metaphor exploring serious adult topics.

Eschewing the lore of the previous movies in the franchise this film can be considered essentially a remake of the original 1954 classic Godzilla, but with an entirely new set of characters and subtextual intentions. Covering the period from just before the end of World War II until the late 1940s Godzilla Minus One speaks powerfully to the destruction, stupidity, and waste of war.

After an encounter on Odo Island that left his deeply traumatized Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lives in disgrace and poverty while being generally despised by his neighbors for surviving the war. Thrown together in the ruins of firebombed Tokyo with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) Koichi is unable to escape the nightmares of his past and only through confrontation with Godzilla might he possibly excise the unwarranted guilt and shame he has carried since the war.

Yamazaki has crafter an excellent film. As a screenwriter he cracked the difficult problem of combining a deeply human and dramatic story with a plot that finds a monstrous Kaiju leveling destruction on a recovering Japan essential. As a director he possesses a keen eye and understand that keeping the camera mostly at human eye level injects terror rarely experienced when a kaiju is photographed level with their own head. The visual effects of the film are utterly fantastic. While there are bits and pieces where the seams show, naval vessels that aren’t quite perfect in the rendering, the same for some trains, Godzilla itself always is perfectly depicted. Production design has captured the feel of devastation that encompassed Tokyo following the horrors of the Allied bombing campaign.

The film’s score uses movements from the original film’s composition, notably the marches for the Imperial Self Defense forces and Godzilla’s theme. The recording and performance of these pieces is simply epic.

Unlike previous serious Godzilla movies, this film is not concerned with minister and generals, keeping it story focused on civilians and veterans, the people on the ground who lived through a war in which their government too often decided that their lives were something to be lightly tossed away in futile gestures.

I cannot recommend enough that Godzilla Minus One needs to be seen in a proper theater. The movie is epic and grand in every way save for it tightly focused human story. While I could quibble about some aspects of the story final resolution, those issues are not enough to devalue any of my admiration and love for this piece of art.

Godzilla Minus One is playing in theaters in Japanese with English subtitles.

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Spooky Season Finale: Mulholland Dr.

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I had planned to cap off Spooky Season with a re-watch of David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Dr., but sadly sleeping poorly on the night of the 30th, having extra errands add extra stressors to the day, getting zero words down on my werewolf novel, and a minor headache in the evening left me with the brain capacity of a reanimated slug.

Mulholland Dr. is an amazing piece of cinema that the first couple of time I viewed it left deep emotional impacts while remaining just out of intellectual understanding. I think I finally have an interpretation that works for all the aspects of the film, but it could be something entirely of my own invention. Lynch’s work, with the exception of his adaptation of Dune, defies convention and straight forward representation.

The key to understanding Mulholland Dr. is knowing that one of Lynch’s favorite and formative films is 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, and this film is his most direct reinterpretation of that classic movie’s themes. Lynch’s film is the story of a young woman, Diane, played by Naomi Watts, who dreams herself to a magical setting, Hollywood, which she describes a ‘this dream place.’ In the land of her dreams Diane is instantly recognized for her tremendous acting talent and falls in love with a mysterious amnesiac woman, Rita, that loves her back. There are subplots with a vain director tormented by infidelity and criminals forcing his casting choices, but the locus of Diane’s dreams are her career and the love between her and ‘Rita.’ None of this is real and more than halfway through the film we are shown, but it is never explained to us, Diane’s real life, where she is Betty, her career is shit, the woman she loved, ‘Rita’ has left her to marry a man, and everything ends in murder and madness.

In The Wizard of Oz, we experience Dorothy’s real world before being shunted of to her fantastic fantasy. In the end we return to reality and the deeply uncynical message that there is no place like home. Mulholland Dr. inverts all this, we first experience the Diane’s fantasy, unaware that all the characters in it are reinterpretations of people she has already met, so when we meet them in the real world it is reality that is strange, threatening, and confusing. Our disenchantment with reality is the same as Diane’s. This is not the glittering land of dreams that Hollywood has always presented itself to be, and we do not like that. In the end Diane’s madness at what she has done in reality breaks down her ability to separate dream from reality and what had once been a dream transforms into a nightmare as she pursued by figures of innocence from her dream to her death.

Mulholland Dr. is rarely counted among the films or horror but the deep unease and unsettling nature the film places for me it squarely in that genre. It is a film of dreams and nightmares and how though those two things feel very different that are inf act the same thing.

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Even More Spooky Season: Who Invited Them?

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Adam and his wife Margo are throwing a housewarming party with the guests principally Adam’s co-workers and employers. However, one couple, Tom and Sasha, professing to be neighbors has crashed the party and linger well after the other guests have departed. As the two couples, with drinks and drugs, get to know each other Tom and Sasha’s presence inflames lingers issues for Adam and Margo. It becomes clear that Tom and Sasha are not what they claimed and are manipulating the rising tension for some hidden agenda.

Who Invited Them? falls into the genre of horror that is suspense/thriller without any supernatural elements. Suspense/thriller is very script and character dependent and without relatable characters behaving in understandable ways it very easy loses its suspension of disbelief. This movie doesn’t completely fall apart but neither did it fully engage me, and I was always at a bit of distance from the Adam and Margo never really invested in their relationship. Still, I was curious enough to keep watching and see how the entire plot unfolded and what coming reveal might twist the script into a new direction.

Sadly, the reveal when it was presented turned out to be precisely what I had suspected with Tom and Sash’s goal proved to be underwhelming. Perhaps more damaging to the film overall success as a story is that in the final resolution Adam and Margo turned out to be far too passive as characters with happenstance and chance playing far too great in the movie’s climax. Still at a scant 80 minutes Who Invited Them? plays quickly and for some it is a thrilling psychological horror, just not for me.

Who Invited Them? is streaming on Shudder.

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The Thematic Failure of ‘The Savage Curtain’

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If you know anything of the original Star Trek series episode The Savage Curtain, it’s that it is the one with Abraham Lincoln sitting in space.

Of course, it’s not the real Lincoln but one created by aliens from Kirk vision of Lincoln. Soon Kirk, Spock, and a couple of ‘good’ historical characters are engaged fighting with ‘evil’ historical characters, some from real history as with Lincoln and some from Star Trek’s future history. The aliens are curious about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and has created this contest to learn about these concepts. (Really, a forced pit fight is a terrible experiment, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.) After some loses Kirk and Spock win the fight and the baddies run for the hills with the aliens drawing the conclusion that ‘evil’ when forcefully confronted runs away.

Really Star Trek? That’s you conception of evil, that it is something that is cowardly at heart? Was that the result when the fascists were fought tooth and nail over every damn kilometer of Europe? That when ‘forcefully confronted’ that fled?

This is back in my head because as I am writing a novel populated with evil werewolves instead of the more popular sexy ones it has gotten me thinking about the nature of evil.

It is not that evil is more cowardly. I think one of the defining aspects of evil is that it is inherently selfish. It considers its own wants and desire above all else. it considers others as resources to be used, exploited, and discarded not as people in their own right.

In my novel this has raised its head among the pack of werewolves and it’s something to consider when viewing tragic, evil events in our all too real world.

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