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Goth Chick News: “Waking the Witch:” An Interview with Kelley Armstrong

Goth Chick News: “Waking the Witch:” An Interview with Kelley Armstrong

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image004Fresh off my movie frenzy of the last few blog entries, I felt it was time to unplug for a least a week and pick up what looked like the most interesting of the new book releases to find their way first to the Black Gate front office, and then to the underground bunker of Goth Chick News.

With the summer interns finally packing off to their respective institutes of higher learning, I am back to actually getting my mail — as opposed to having it pillaged by a pack of over-hormoned neophytes who snag anything with a girl on the cover. Thus I felt fortunate that this particular new release made it to my mail slot.

On July 27th, prolific author Kelley Armstrong released the 11th book in her Women of the Otherworld series, Waking the Witch. Narrated by twenty-one year old witch Savannah Levine, who readers will recognize from her appearances in prior stories, Savannah is eager to prove herself not only as a sleuth, but as a storyteller in her own right.

And though it is first and foremost a mystery, Waking the Witch is chock full of enough supernatural beings to satisfy the most devout occult enthusiast, though I am almost relieved to say; no vampires to be found. And really, haven’t we all had enough at this point?

Readers like me who haven’t read the prior books, will be intrigued enough by the many hints of multiple back stories to head out in pursuit of the first ten in the series; while devotees will be thrilled with the continuing saga that was born in 2001 with Kelley Armstrong’s first book in the series, Bitten.

I was honored to have recently discussed the books as well as the creativity behind them with Ms Armstrong herself.

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Exploring Fantasy in Metal, Part III: Dangerous Side Effects

Exploring Fantasy in Metal, Part III: Dangerous Side Effects

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Or, How Metal Messed With Mike Allen’s Already Dark and Twisty Mind

Blue Oyster Cult's Cultösaurus Erectus, with lyrics by Michael Moorcock
Blue Oyster Cult's Cultösaurus Erectus, with lyrics by Michael Moorcock

For the last seven months, I have been (with great reluctance and an even greater determination to finish the thing or be consigned to a heretofore undiscovered circle of Dante’s Inferno) exploring some of the fantastical aspects of Heavy Metal.

Part One and Part Two of that adventure can be found here on the Black Gate blog.

I had lots of help. Because I knew next to nothing of this musical genre, I turned to those who did.

I had noticed, you see, some time ago, that some of my smartest guy-friends, all who liked reading the same books I do (and who led me by my snooty nose to such works as Beowulf and George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, which I’d avoided due to their being “boy books”), were all, well, Metalheads.

It got me curious. So I started asking questions. Among those men I interrogated was Mike Allen.

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Goth Chick News: Do the Dead Really Matter In the Movies? Thirteen Questions for Midnight Syndicate’s Edward Douglas

Goth Chick News: Do the Dead Really Matter In the Movies? Thirteen Questions for Midnight Syndicate’s Edward Douglas

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dead-matter1All right movie fans, its here! We’ve been telling you about it for months and today is finally the day when Midnight Syndicate’s new horror flick The Dead Matter goes on sale nationwide at Hot Topics stores and on Amazon.com.

As I may have mentioned once or twice at most, Ed Douglas and the gang gave me a sneak peek at their creation last week and as a fan of the drive-in-horror-movie genre, I can tell you The Dead Matter is quite an amazingly fun ride. If that’s not enough, the DVD comes packaged with two new Midnight Syndicate music creations; the original motion picture soundtrack and the Halloween Music Collection.

For me, it’s like Christmas Halloween in July…

And for those of you who may be entertaining the idea that I’m just a hopeless sycophant with an ongoing crush on a bunch of bad-boy musicians, PIFFLE I say to you! They’re not at all bad boys; they’re actually nice and highly articulate, and have a lot of really entertaining things to tell us about.

See for yourself in the interview below.

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Goth Chick News: Close Encounters – The Week We Made Contact

Goth Chick News: Close Encounters – The Week We Made Contact

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ce3k1Back in May I told you all about cyber-stalking little Barry Guiler, that adorable little tot from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (now apparently referred to as CE3K by you unbelievably cool kids).

I also let you know that though at the time I had turned up a fat lot of nothing in my attempt to contact Barry, who is Cary Guffey in real life, something told me I was eventually going to meet with success. I mean, what little I had read about Cary seemed to point to him being a nice normal guy, which by default meant he was likely the opposite of that other child actor I tried to interview who by all on-line accounts is a bit of a tool.

So for three weeks I busied myself rearranging my voodoo dolls and abusing my new crop of interns, all the while hoping for pay dirt in the form of an email from Cary. So I would be spared from looking like a hopeless poser who spends a lot of time writing about great interviews, without ever closing escrow.

Well, today I am here to tell you that though I may indeed be a grade-A cyber stalker, I am definitely NOT a poser.

Cary Guffey did get in touch and he is indeed a nice guy; actually a really nice guy with a great sense of humor. And since none of you believed I’d end up interviewing him and therefore didn’t send in any insightful and provocative questions, I was forced to make up my own.

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Goth Chick News: Pass Me the O-Positive Please

Goth Chick News: Pass Me the O-Positive Please

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image008Back in 2005 I had the pleasure of lunching with Charlaine Harris, who was on a book tour celebrating the release of her fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel Dead to the World.

It was a major milestone — not only was it her first hardcover release but the cover was embellished with gold sparkly bits; naturally Ms. Harris and her publicist were thrilled. Frankly, being a novice contributor to Black Gate at the time, it was really hard to say which one of us was more thrilled, but I’m pretty sure it was me.

Always the quintessential Southern lady, Ms. Harris was the picture of floral-print charm as she quite proudly told me about the advent of her characters and how excited she was about her next series, Grave Sight, to be released later that year. It was with a slight blush that she admitted her writing mortified her teen-aged children, which made me like her even more.

At the end of that lovely lunch I followed Ms. Harris across the parking lot to a Borders bookstore, where she appeared before a small but adoring crowd of around thirty fans who greeted her like a rock star. And I drove home that day thinking that those sexy, imaginative Sookie books which had become favorites of mine didn’t seem like the sort of stories that would spring from someone who smelled of lilacs and carried a patent leather purse.

Around that same time, on the other side of the country Alan Ball was stuck in an LA airport waiting on a tardy departure when he stopped into a news stand and picked up a paperback copy of Living Dead in Dallas, Ms. Harris’ second Sookie Stackhouse novel, thinking he’d kill some time with a pulpy vampire story. Having just wrapped Six Feet Under for HBO, Alan Ball was looking for his next project, never believing he’d find it in an airport. Numerous interviews indicate that once Alan Ball dug into chapter one of Living Dead, he didn’t close it until he’d read the last page.

And that is precisely when sexy, steamy, vampire magic happened, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I was practically at ground zero.

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Goth Chick News: A Decomposing Neverland — an interview with Douglas Clegg

Goth Chick News: A Decomposing Neverland — an interview with Douglas Clegg

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neverlandImagine the family vacation from hell.

I know you can do that because you’ve had one, and I know you’ve had one because everybody has. Usually the “from hell” part has to do with long-term forced exposure to family members in an environment you have no hope of escaping for the duration of your tortured imprisonment (known as the “vacation”).

For me it was a remote cabin in the Canadian woods; go north, turn left at anything that looks like fun, and drive for another four hours. The location alone was the perfect setting for a knife-wielding maniac to off a few sinful teenagers including at least one cheerleader; which is probably what got me to where I am today. But enough about me…

What if your personal family vacation from hell, contained a real Hell? I mean a dictionary-definition Hell complete with a soul-eating demon? It is under this premise that we follow author Douglas Clegg into the no-Tinker-Bell, Peter Pan-less nightmare called Neverland.

Beau Jackson is destined to spend another summer with his extended family in their run-down “summer home” on Gull Island. Isolated and remote, the island is privy to even more nasty little secrets than the ones the adults spill out each evening during their alcohol-induced arguing, and Beau’s cousin Sumter is up to no good at all in that broken down shed at the back of the property.

Sumter has always been a little off, maybe even a little evil. But what he’s got hiding in a box back there is about to rip the fabric between reality and Sumter’s sadistic imagination, taking Beau and the rest of the Jackson family along for the ride.

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Mischief and Starlight: The Fantastical Music of S.J. Tucker

Mischief and Starlight: The Fantastical Music of S.J. Tucker

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witches-pagans21So I said to myself, “Self, let us write a blog about the presence of High Fantasy in Music.”

To which I replied, in my characteristic thought-bubble: “AWESOME! That should be EASY PEASY! …Right?”

Well, I told me direly, we’ll just have to see.

I knew I should avoid scribbling about how music itself has influenced Fantasy literature since time immemorial. After all, that’s been written before, and by people with Ph.D.’s no less, and even if I felt like giving it a go, I’d have to memorize all those ballads about Tam Lin and talk intelligently about Margaret Atwood and Ellen Kushner, and learn Old English; I just couldn’t stir myself to that level of scholarship.

What I wanted to explore is the music of now. What does music right here, right now, today, this moment, have to do with Fantasy as a genre? Is there some kind of movement? Are there professional musicians who make their livings singing about dragons and elves and ghosts and, I dunno, Time Lords – and if so, where can I find them?

Two things immediately came to mind when the words “Fantasy” and “Music” collided. The first was S.J. Tucker. The second, Heavy Metal.

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An Interview with Midnight Syndicate mastermind Ed Douglas

An Interview with Midnight Syndicate mastermind Ed Douglas

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The Dead Matter

Yes, my goth friends, there is a Santa! The highly creative people over at Midnight Syndicate are finally delivering on my personal wish list in the form a movie, The Dead Matter. Best known for creating amazing soundtracks to your worse nightmares, Ed Douglas and company are raising the stakes (or should I say “driving in the stakes”?) with this spine-tingler due out later this year. If their latest CD, The Dead Matter, Cemetery Gates is any indication, you won’t want to miss this cinematic horror extravaganza that mixes all the best elements of a classic, 1930’s monster movie, with your favorite bits from the 80’s. And if you’re listening to a Midnight Syndicate classic as you read this article, you’ve got something in common with Hugh Hefner! Read on to learn more as we clear the cob webs and sit down for a chat with the masterful music and movie creator, Ed Douglas. …

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Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

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In the old days, when sheep were sheep and ewes were embraceable, genres tended to ossify pretty fast. But no genre-formula became so formulaic so fast as sword-and-planet. Burroughs set the pattern with A Princess of Mars: a lone American (not a Canadian–not a Ugandan–not a Lithuanian–an American) is mysteriously plunged into an exotic other world which is both more advanced and more primitive than the earth he knows. He conquers all by virtue of his heroism and marries the space princess. In the inevitable sequel the pitiless author will somehow compel him do it all again, sometimes under another name. This sounds like mere mockery, and of all subgenres sword-and-planet may be the most mockable (one has but to mention the magic syllable “Gor” to banish all useful thought), but when well-done it can be a blast. Burroughs’ Barsoom books are still being read, are still being filmed and name-checked in other media, and not because of his melodious prose style or his thoughts on the eternal verities; somehow the pattern he hit on (and partly appropriated) rang people’s bell, and continues to ring it. Figuring out why wouldn’t be a waste of anyone’s time, even if the books are not a matter of high seriousness.

In this genre or subgenre, Almuric is of special interest, because it is by one of the greatest fantasists of the pulp era, Robert E. Howard. It’s also interesting as one of REH’s few booklength works and, it seems, his only experiment at building an entire secondary world. Although the story (like much of REH’s work) is now in the public domain and available online, I read the novel in Planet Stories’ new edition and I recommend that anyone really interested in the book do the same. I say this not because the publisher has paid me an enormous illicit bribe (although I will accept one if offered). The online texts are mostly poor transcriptions littered with many obvious proofreading slips (e.g. “forward” and “foreward” for “foreword”; “premediatated” for “premeditated”, etc.–and that’s on the first two screens of this one). In contrast, Planet’s text is clean and readable; there’s an interesting introduction by Joe Lansdale and a great cover in the Jeff Jones tradition by Andrew Hou.

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Black Gate at Late Night JengaJam

Black Gate at Late Night JengaJam

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Last week Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones was the guest of Jefferson Jenga at his popular and well-regarded call-in podcast show Late Night JengaJam. During the interview they talked with callers and each other about the ups and downs of the fantasy field, numerous authors such as Robert E. Howard, Harold Lamb, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and especially about the perils and rewards of editing one of the premier magazines of fantasy fiction.

It was a lengthy and engrossing conversation, so grab the entire show, pop it onto your iPod, and give it a listen. You can download the entire podcast in MP3 format here.