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English Gothic: Britain Goes to the Movies

English Gothic: Britain Goes to the Movies

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english-gothic2Jonathan Rigby’s ENGLISH GOTHIC (2000) is an excellent survey of British horror and science fiction films. Misleadingly subtitled A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA; the book focuses instead on the 20 year period from THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) through TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER (1976) when British production companies like Hammer, Amicus, and Tigon consistently outperformed the Hollywood majors in producing the finest and most influential genre films.

Part of the book’s strength is not just Rigby’s detailed and chronological survey of nearly every genre film to come from the British Isles during these two decades, but the fact that he captures the social and economic factors that helped shape the pictures and, more importantly, the public’s reception to them.

The rise of the horror genre in film started with the German Expressionist classics of the silent era and the contemporary Lon Chaney and John Barrymore efforts in the States. The genre solidified with the phenomenal impact of Universal’s horror franchises of the 1930s and 1940s.

The interesting thing here is that the majority of these films remained unscreened or else limited to adult-only audiences in the UK where censorship was extremely puritanical in the first half of the last century.

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Almuric – Howardian Sword & Planet

Almuric – Howardian Sword & Planet

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Planet Stories - Almuric

A few years back I became more enamored of Robert E. Howard’s writing than I already was (which is saying something), and made it a personal quest to read as much of his work as I could find. El Borak, Solomon Kane, Bran Mac Morn… I tried to locate copies of everything I could. (This was before the Del Rey editions came along, and made the quest easier).

Among the many treasures I gathered was a copy of Almuric, Howard’s first and only foray into the Sword & Planet sub-genre, and one of only a handful of book-length works he completed — although Robert E. Howard scholars now seem fairly certain that someone else completed the novel. Some believe that this posthumous collaborator may have been Howard’s agent Otis Adelbert Kline, himself a successful author of Burroughs pastiches such as Planet of Peril, but Howard scholar Morgan Holmes has argued convincingly that it might well have been pulp author Otto Binder. The late, lamented The Cimmerian posted a fine article by Al Harron describing the history or Almuric’s composition and scholarship about its origins.

Be that as it may, Almuric is a classic adventure tale in the Burroughs tradition, but written in Howard’s muscular prose. The narrator, Esau Cairn, is cut from the same familiar cloth as many of Howard’s protagonists. Thick with muscle, a bit of a social outcast, Esau is a true Howardian hero, and provides a relatable figure for the reader to experience the alien world of Almuric.

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Short Fiction Review #32: Bull Spec #2 Summer 2010

Short Fiction Review #32: Bull Spec #2 Summer 2010

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bullspec2a-1The unfortunately named Bull Spec (I’m assuming this is a reference to Bull Durham tobacco and/or the Kevin Costner movie that takes place in Durham, N.C. where the magazine is based and its intent to feature local writers of “speculative fiction”) has published its second issue as part of an ambitious plan in an age when print is on the decline to put out two more in 2010 and qualify as a quarterly magazine.  Editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn responded to my complaint that the website looks like something from the 1990s that it was in fact built using software tools of that era because, for now, he’s more concerned about the look and quality of the print publication (also available as a pdf download).

In that, he’s succeeded in producing a full-size, glossy, thick stock, some color magazine that has a look and feel comparable to Interzone, featuring interviews, a serial graphic story, reviews. poetry and short fiction. While the magazine looks fresh and contemporary, like the website the short fiction is from another era, i.e., a pulp magazine of the 1940s. All five stories hinge on the main character coming to some realization about his/her plight in life due to some science fictional contrivance or fantastical occurrence. In every case, you see the O’Henry twist  long before it is supposed to surprise you.

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Dracula: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

Dracula: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

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In November and December 2009, my jaw was wired shut for eight weeks. During that time I read voraciously being able to accomplish little else. Among the many books I devoured were five Dracula-related titles.

dracula_the-un-dead1DRACULA THE UN-DEAD (2009/Dutton) by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt achieves what it set out to do: bring income from Dracula back to the Stoker family and re-establish Dracula as the literary “property” of Stoker’s heirs by creating a new franchise from the public domain characters.

I wanted to love this book. I wanted to view it as the authorized sequel to DRACULA, the true heir to Bram Stoker’s literary classic. The trouble is one cannot make that claim when the sequel tries so hard to undo everything in the original.

Rather than pay homage to Bram Stoker’s work, the authors spend nearly 400 pages proving to us that everything Stoker wrote was wrong. Prince Dracula (Stoker was even wrong about his title, it seems he wasn’t a Count) was a “good” vampire working for God (a bizarre interpretation of the historical Vlad Dracula’s papal honor – later rescinded – of Defender of the Faith) and the real villain of DRACULA was the historical Countess Elizabeth Bathory who, it turns out, was a vampire and was also Jack the Ripper.

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Art of the Genre: Boot Hill‘s Ballots & Bullets: The 80’s Magic of TSR

Art of the Genre: Boot Hill‘s Ballots & Bullets: The 80’s Magic of TSR

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bullets-and-ballots1As I was walking the hallowed halls of the Indianapolis Convention Center during this year’s GenCon, I managed to uncover a handful of truly wonderful relics. Perhaps the greatest of these [although I contend that L3 Deep Dwarven Delve by Len Lakofka with Wayne Reynolds art in 1st Edition format is still in the running] was this masterpiece from TSR’s defunct Wild West game Boot Hill.

Now you may be asking “Boot Hill, really?”, and indeed I would be saying the same thing — if I hadn’t made it a personal quest to uncover many secrets about early TSR artists and their antics in the legendary ‘pit.’ So we have BH3 Ballots & Bullets by David James Ritchie, which by no means defines the game or genre, and yet played out in the cover is a true stroke of genius. Here, in muted color, we are once again reminded as fans of the fantastic comedy of artist Jim Holloway.

The four men featured here are all that truly matters about BH3, as right to left we are shown TSR Art Director (and cover artist for such classics as B2 Keep on the Borderlands and D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth) Jim Roslof, a very Jimmy Stewart looking Jeff Easley; the gambler himself, Jim Holloway, and all the way to the left on horseback, the crazy old coot Larry Elmore (click on the image at left for a larger version).

Yes, that’s them, the entire TSR ‘pit’ crew circa 1981. Looking at this cover it seemed as though I had a snapshot of that time period, but this was even better. Having these artists, all in their youth, portrayed by the hand of one of their own made this purchase perhaps the greatest in my collection.

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A review of Chase the Morning, by Michael Scott Rohan

A review of Chase the Morning, by Michael Scott Rohan

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chaseSteve is a very normal man, perhaps even a bit boring. He works at an English shipping company, handling inventories and looking forward to a career in politics once he climbs the business ladder as far as it will take him. One day, for no particular reason, a sudden fit of discontent sends him down to the docks looking for something different, perhaps a restaurant he hasn’t visited. In an alley, he sees a man being attacked . . .

Chase the Morning, by Michael Scott Rohan, doesn’t have all that much in common with modern urban fantasies like The Dresden Files. It does, however, feature a magic world hiding in the shadows and back streets of this one, so it may fit the category. The setting of Chase the Morning is easily my favorite part of the book — not because the rest of the book is bad, but because the setting touches my sense of wonder.

It’s nicely built up, too. The man Steve rescues is named Jyp, and as Steve’s wounds are stitched up in an old-fashioned gaslit pub, Jyp casually discusses his ship’s exotic cargo: black lotus, conqueror root, merhorse hide. But the pub proves elusive the next time Steve searches for it, the sailing ships he saw at the dock don’t exist, and as for the cargo, Steve actually finds it in his computer — on a ship from 1868. Ass he slips in and out of the mundane world, he keeps seeing an illusory landscape in the clouds — the same landscape. The magical world starts intruding into Steve’s world, to find out who he is and why he’s interfering; this culminates in the kidnapping of his secretary, Clare, by not-quite-human savages called Wolves. In search of Clare, in search of Jyp’s help, he manages to locate the magical version of the docks, the one that’s packed with sailing ships from all eras. And then, too desperate to be skeptical, he watches a ship sail off into the sky, into the landscape of clouds.

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Die Hard With Avatars: A review of Surrogates

Die Hard With Avatars: A review of Surrogates

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surrogates-dvdEarly on in this film we see Bruce Willis with hair and looking young, and not Die-Hard bashed up, and we wonder absently if this time he’ll actually finish the film as scar-free as he began it. The Willis we begin with is quickly established as a ‘surrogate,’ the robot avatar of the real Willis character, Tom Greer, and it doesn’t take long for both Greer and his surrogate to get bashed up in familiar form.

The problem for the inhabitants of near-future Boston — as well as of the rest of the world — is that mind-boggling economies of production have resulted in custom made, universally affordable, avatars brought to market for just about anyone who wants one, and now real people are vegetating alone in their homes while vicariously carrying on social interaction with each other through their surrogates.

The two inventors have had a falling out as to how much of a good thing surrogates really are. The ousted partner, Lionel Canter (James Cromwell) has decided they are robbing humankind of their humanity and has taken steps to sink the business.

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Midnight – When evil triumphs…

Midnight – When evil triumphs…

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“Imagine if Frodo had died during his journey and the One Ring had returned to Sauron.”

That was how it was described to me the first time I picked up the Midnight Campaign Setting book, once again from Fantasy Flight Games. A very apt description, and if it doesn’t get your d20-shaped heart pumping, nothing will.

Midnight is a world where an evil god has triumphed in his war for power, and the characters are fighting a seemingly hopeless battle against the forces of darkness. The races of Eredane, the main continent, are besieged on all sides by orcs, demons and the Night Kings.

In flavor and description, Midnight borrows heavily from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. But where his story is that of the light of hope sparking in the midst of descending darkness, Midnight is one of the fading glimmer of hope in the midst of near-total darkness. The rulebook does quite a good job of creating this sense of doom, and strife.

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Hyperborean Mice: Grim Swords & Sorcery Action… With Talking Mice

Hyperborean Mice: Grim Swords & Sorcery Action… With Talking Mice

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hyper-miceAm I a bad gamer if I really, really want to play this game?

I mean… a role playing game of heroic rodents, tiny critters struggling valiantly against barbarian rat tribes, gargantuan predators such as foxes and owls, legendary horrors that prowl the land, and foul sorcery.  All in Conan’s backyard.

Just listen to this product description:

The ancient White Lords, albino mice with magical powers, rule over the valley of Hyperborea, but their empire is crumbling. Barbarian rat tribes, deadly predators and political intrigue threaten to bring their mousy civilization to an end. Terrible predators like foxes and owls take the place of giants and dragons. Voracious shrew clans raid the Fallows, seeking mice and rats to fill their larders. Centipedes scuttle beneath the underbrush, seeking prey. Hawks force the inhabitants to stay under cover during the day, while owls stalk the sky at night… Legendary horrors stalk the land, unique predators with potent magical abilities of their own. The terrifying Mocker, a centipede whose only voice is the imitated cries of his victims. The serpent Ssaaa gathers a cult of worshipers to do her bidding in the valley. And no mouse dares stand against dread Hoorooru, the ancient ruler of Rookswood and the enemy of the gods.

It’s like Robert E. Howard was hired to write the screenplay for The Secret of Nimh. Scott Oden reports that it’s “Filled with REH and Lovecraft homages! Like an owl that’s worshipped as a god by clans of savage mice.” I got chills, I swear.

Hyperborean Mice was written by Frank Sronce and published by Kiz and Jenn Press. It’s 102 pages, and is available as a softcover book from Lulu.com or as a digital download PDF from RPGNow and DriveThru RPG. Show it some love and check it out, and let me know I’m not crazy.

Under the Mountain

Under the Mountain

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under-the-moutain-penguinUnder the Mountain (1979)
By Maurice Gee

Although not a household name outside of New Zealand, Maurice Gee is one of the island nation’s most prominent and respected novelists. Born in Auckland, Gee established himself as an author starting in the 1960s with his novels A Special Flower, In My Father’s Den, and A Glorious Morning, Comrade. His later acclaimed books include Plumb and Crime Story. All these novels are mainstream adult works, but Gee turned his hand to books for younger readers and made a parallel career in the field of the young adult science fiction. It started with Under the Mountain in 1979, which gained popularity outside of New Zealand with a television mini-series released in 1981. (For more about the mini-series, read my post on its appearance on the Nickelodeon program The Third Eye.)

Why did Gee decide to write a science-fiction book for younger readers? The author explained his choice in 2004 upon receiving the Storyline Gaelyn Gordon Award:

It all began with having two red-headed daughters—not twins though. Then there was my desire to write a fantasy—get away from the real world of my adult novels—but set it in a place New Zealand children would recognise, so that they might get “our story” feeling. What better place than Auckland’s volcanic cones? It was seeing Mt. Eden looming in the mist one morning that really got it started. Everything, monsters and all, followed from that.

It ended up as his best-selling book, never out of print in its home country. But, unfortunately, not so easily available in the U.S. It struggled even to get published in New Zealand in the first place, and finally ended up first released by the Oxford University Press. It has had a long home with Penguin since then.

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