Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

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Rue morgues magazine's 200 alternative horror filmsI had a clever title in mind for this post, something about a book you need to see, but the name of the book was so long nothing else would fit. Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See. See what I mean? Damn near had to start a new paragraph just to say it again.

200 Flicks (which we’ll be calling it going forward) is a marvelous little treasure I found on the B&N magazine rack while digging around for the latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m vaguely aware of Rue Morgue magazine (and should probably be moreso, granted), but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was the title, and the fact that this perfect bound “magazine” is an impressive 162 pages.

I flipped through it, and was sold instantly. This is the kind of invaluable reference work I’ll be drawing on for years. It’s packed to the brim with text, with plenty of color stills and crisp reproductions of 200 movie posters and DVD covers. The heart of the book is the carefully-selected collection of well written and informative reviews of overlooked horror films.

A quick check showed many of my favorites are here, including a guilty pleasure or two: Session 9, Let the Right One In, Psycho II, Something Wicked This Way Comes — and plenty more that I’m not familiar with. And isn’t the joy of discovery the true reason you lay your money down for this kind of thing?

The entries are organized alpahbetically, but it’s really something you browse rather than read cover-to-cover. It has numerous lists: 10 Made for TV Terrors You Need to See, 10 Foreign Zombie Films You Need to See, plus lists covering vampire flicks, foreign zombie movies, family fright fests, gore films, slashers, and many more. There are also interviews with directors and film personalities like Guillermo del Toro, Tobe Hooper, Roger Corman, Fred Dekker, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, and others.

The book is so inexpensive (a criminally low $9.99, or $4.99 for the digital version) and so packed with content that the only way it can possibly be a money-making venture is if it’s primarily recycled material from Rue Morgue magazine. Which is fine by me — if the magazine is a fraction as interesting and entertaining, I’ll be getting a subscription.

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MAKE THIS TRUE OR HARVEY SMASH! Planet Hulk to Come after Avengers 2

MAKE THIS TRUE OR HARVEY SMASH! Planet Hulk to Come after Avengers 2

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HulkPlanetHulkHCHULK SMASH MARVEL STUDIOS FOR SENDING HULK INTO SPACE!

Maybe he will and maybe he won’t, because that is how “scoops” work, and in this case we are dealing with a scoop for a film quite a few years out.

However, Latino Review and their esteemed El Mayimbe have a long history of accuracy with breaking movie news, so when El Mayimbe says that Marvel wants to make a movie version of Planet Hulk as a follow-up to 2015’s upcoming The Avengers 2, it bears serious consideration.

And, if true, damn I’m psyched and ready to Hulk-out. You should be too.

(Caution that El Mayimbe’s video may be considered mildly “spoilery” about the possible end of The Avengers 2. My comments below may also infer bits about Avengers 2.)

Planet Hulk is a long 2006 arc from The Incredible Hulk comic book (with tie-ins) by writer Greg Pak and illustrator Carlo Pagulayan. The gist: A small group known as the Illuminati, composed of the most powerful heroes on Earth, decide that the Hulk is simply too dangerous for the planet, so they shut him in a spaceship and blast his green butt off into space to land on a peaceful planet to spend the rest of his days. Only… this is a comic book and such a development would be boring. Nobody wants to see Hulk traipsing through a shady copse, smiling, and picking up alien daisies. TRA-LA-LA, HULK NO SMASH! HULK LOVE RHODODENDRONS!

Instead, the Hulk’s ship goes through a wormhole, and he crashes on the violent planet of Sakaar. What follows is basically a sword-and-sorcery epic with the Hulk playing a Robert E. Howard hero who battles his way from gladiatorial slavery all the way to becoming the ruler of the planet. Trust me, it’s awesome — breaking away from the traditional “Hulk vs. General Ross” storylines on Earth and fulling embracing the Leigh Brackett and ERB style of muscular planetary romance. (Try to imagine Hulk as the star of The Sword of Rhiannon!) And the whole enormous thing is available digitally from Amazon.

Our own Bill Ward did an excellent write-up of the comic in 2009 if you desire more details.

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New Treasures: IDW’s Popeye

New Treasures: IDW’s Popeye

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Popeye Issue 2Okay. I’m fully aware that Popeye was not what you expected on a Monday morning here at your online radar for all that’s great and new in modern fantasy. But please, indulge me for a moment.

I buy comics on Saturday, on my way home from the post office. Finally finished with a busy Saturday morning packing and mailing back issues, I reward myself by browsing the stacks of new arrivals at Graham Crackers Comics in St. Charles. My point here is that, when I’m purchasing comics, I’m a bit more prone to impulse buys than I am with other forms of entertainment.

It was just such an impulse that caused me to pick up the first two issues of IDW’s new Popeye comic. Certainly it wasn’t any special affection for E.C. Segar’s character — in fact, I can’t really recall the last time I read Popeye, unless it was in the pages of Rick Norwood’s excellent Comics Revue two decades ago. Probably Bruce Ozella’s clean and dynamic art style in the first issue didn’t hurt — flipping through the pages reminded me immediately of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, and that’s a good thing.

The first issue, a 22-page epic featuring a dangerous quest to a lost island, mysterious fog, a Sea Hag, pirates, and witchcraft, reads like a Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story too. Except here it doesn’t quite work. It’s funny, sorta, and the art is great, but the whole affair doesn’t really come off.

Fortunately, the second issue is a huge improvement. In fact, it’s a mini-masterpiece. This one is split into two tales — the first a complete farce, as Popeye discovers his girlfriend Olive Oyl is being courted by the smooth-talking Willy Wormwood. Popeye’s crazed attempts to one-up Wormwood — for example, uprooting a 100-year-old elm tree to present to Olive when Wormwood offers her flowers — reveal the essential core of his relationship with Olive. Their love and friendship, such as it is, is based almost wholly on mutual misunderstanding.

The second story, “John Sappo and Prof. O.G. Wotasnozzle and Saffer’s Wife Myrtle,” is even better. In fact, it is a small slice of genius. All three title characters live together in a small house, and all three have simple ambitions: Sappo wants to be left alone to read his paper; Myrtle wants to unceasingly nag her husband; and Prof. O.G. Wotasnozzle desires only to quietly work on his inventions and best his hated rival Prof. Finkelsnop. Naturally, only one can be satisfied at any moment. When Sappo asks Wotasnozzle for an invention that will block out his wife’s nagging, and a peeved Myrtle asks for something to nullify Sappo’s new Jar of Solitude, the result is an ever-escalating battle of invention and counter-invention that leads to hilariously catastrophic results. This is a comic that had me laughing on virtually every page.

Popeye is published by IDW, individual issues are priced at $3.99. Issue #1 was written by Roger Langridge and drawn by Bruce Ozella; Issue 2 was written by Langridge and drawn by Ken Wheaton and Tom Neely. Check it out at a comic shop near you.

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Pit Slave” by Vaughn Heppner

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Pit Slave” by Vaughn Heppner

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oracle of gogThe young warrior Lod, hero of “The Oracle of Gog” (from Black Gate 15), returns in an epic tale of death and treachery in the gladiatorial arena.

“Look at me,” the Games Master said.

Lod’s head felt heavy. He turned in what seemed like slow motion.

“If you win,” the Games Master said, “I’ll buy you. I’ll turn you into a champion.”

Someone shoved Lod from behind. He stumbled up the wooden ramp into warmer air. A trumpet blared. Lod twisted in surprise.

The stadium was gargantuan, built from cyclopean marble blocks. There were giants in the stands, the Nephilim sons of the First Born. Those were arrogant and lordly, and mostly they wore military attire, leather tunics and bear-furs.

He gripped his sword. “Give me strength, O Elohim,” he whispered. “Let me die today like a man.”

Vaughn Heppner has written a number of Amazon best sellers, including Star Soldier, Invasion: Alaska and People of the Ark. His last articles for us were “The E-book Revolution” and “A Look behind Lod’s World, or How to Strike Gold.” Read an excerpt from his novel Star Soldier here.

“The Pit Slave” is the sequel to “The Oracle of Gog” (from Black Gate 15), and part of Lost Civilizations, a six-book series: Giants, Leviathan, The Tree of Life, Gog, Behemoth and The Lod Saga. A slightly different version of “The Pit Slave” appears in The Lod Saga, available now at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Gregory Bierly, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“The Pit Slave” is a complete 7,000-word sword & sorcery tale offered at no cost. Art for “The Oracle of Gog” by Mark Evans.

Read the complete story here.

The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

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groundhog dayIn this day-after-Groundhog-Day edition of “The Weird of Oz,” I’ll consider how — and why — the 1993 film Groundhog Day has quietly joined the ranks of American classics.

First, let me quickly situate this film with regard to how it warrants discussion on a website devoted to fantasy media (an interesting issue David E. Harris raised in his post of December 26, 2012). Although billed as a comedy, and by no means a traditional fantasy or supernatural tale, it does fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction.

Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” noted that all imaginative fiction begins by posing a question: “What if?” He offers the example of someone imagining a green sun: “To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”*

How would the world be different given the changed variable(s)? The “what if” question puts the speculative into speculative fiction. What if ghosts are real? What if werewolves existed? What if a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire shared a flat? What if corpses began rising from the dead? What if an alien lord traveled through time and space in a British police call box?

Groundhog Day’s premise is that the protagonist wakes one morning to discover the day he just lived is repeating itself. What if a person were caught in a time loop so that he kept living the same day over and over, never aging yet retaining all his memories?

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Vintage Treasures: The Fuzzy Papers by H. Beam Piper

Vintage Treasures: The Fuzzy Papers by H. Beam Piper

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the fuzzy papersThe Fuzzy Papers was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and it’s one of the small handful of books that made me an SF reader for life.

The Fuzzy Papers contains two novels by H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy (1962) and Fuzzy Sapiens (1964, also known as The Other Human Race), and was published by the Science Fiction Book Club  in 1980. I joined the SFBC at the age of 12 at the urging of my friend John MacMaster, who turned me on to science fiction by loaning me book club editions from many of its finest writers, including Frank Herbert and Clifford D. Simak. The club specialized in low-cost reprints of popular SF and fantasy, ideal for a teen with little disposable income, and best of all, it occasionally produced magnificent omnibus editions of genre classics.

The Fuzzy Papers was a perfect example. Available exclusively through the club, it collects two long out-of-print paperbacks in a durable hardcover with a beautiful Michael Whelan cover, all for under 7 bucks. Not the kind of thing an impressionable teen could resist, and I didn’t even bother to try. I checked off my order form and put it back in the mail pronto, and impatiently waited for it to arrive.

I was not disappointed. Piper’s novels follow the adventures of down-on-his-luck space prospector Jack Holloway, who’s been exploring the planet Zarathrustra — a Class III uninhabited world run for profit by mining magnate Victor Grego. But everything changes when Holloway discovers the Fuzzies, curious little humanoids that almost seem to have the power to reason.

In fact, the more he interacts with them, the more Holloway is convinced they can reason — and if the Fuzzies are intelligent, that makes Zarathrustra a Class IV inhabited world, and Grego’s mining privileges would be gone for good. His company isn’t going to let that happen, no matter what the cost.

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Jay Lake’s “The Hour and Manner of my Death”

Jay Lake’s “The Hour and Manner of my Death”

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jay-lakeFantasy novelist and Black Gate contributor Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer in April 2008, and since then he has followed the progress of the disease and his tireless efforts to combat it with brutal honesty on his blog.

His posts are frequently painful to read, but Jay’s characteristic humor and love of life always shine through. But this week the news turned darker, starting with Thursday’s post titled “The Hour and Manner of my Death.”

The new metastatic tumor sites uncovered during the surgery make things a lot more serious than they already were. And that is saying something. I have not given up seeking a cure… but it seems highly likely to me I will go terminal within the year, or at best, sometime in 2014. Even then, it will take time for me to die, possibly up to another year…

Obviously I do not know the precise hour and manner of my death. But I know it will likely come in the next year or so, and it will come due to organ failure and the related system breakdowns as my cancer advances. The bullet with my name on it has been inching towards me for almost five years. I can watch it spiral in the air as it lazes ever onward toward my as yet still beating heart.

For the past five years, Jay has staunchly avoided a fatalistic tone on his blog, so this change has understandably caused a tremor among his fans, including his friends here at Black Gate.

I first encountered Jay Lake in the BG submission pile over a decade ago. He impressed me immediately — not just for the quality of his fiction, which was exceptional, but for the exuberance of his cover letters and the sheer volume of submissions. Jay is one of the hardest-working authors I’ve ever met, and he never gave up. One of his early short stories featured a hero who builds a fully-automatic, self-loading ballista using nothing but fallen logs and rope. That resilience and never-say-die attitude reminds me of Jay to this day. I purchased two stories from him, the brilliant “Fat Jack and the Spider Clown” (BG 8), and the vividly original “Devil on the Wind” (BG 14, co-written with Michael Jasper). Even after his diagnosis, Jay’s output continued to impress, and his latest novel, Kalimpura, arrived January 29 from Tor Books.

We’re not sure we can get ever get used to the idea of a fantasy genre without Jay Lake in it. We hope we don’t have to.

You can read Jay’s complete post here and follow his daily updates here.

New Treasures: Dead Things by Stephen Blackmoore

New Treasures: Dead Things by Stephen Blackmoore

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Dead Things-smallI talked about genre mash-ups Monday in my post on The Last Policeman. There’s an obvious one I forgot: hard-boiled detective zombie novels.

Not sure how I spaced on that one. Three titles I’ve covered as New Treasures in the last few months alone have been undead crime novels: Stefan Petrucha’s Dead Mann Running, Tim Waggoner’s The Nekropolis Archives, and Chris F. Holm’s Dead Harvest. As trends go, this one is a little more welcome than most, at least for me. Necromancers and tough-talking private eyes… what can I say, they go together.

The latest entrant into this crowded sub-sub-genre, Stephen Blackmoore’s Dead Things, sounds like it will fit in nicely:

Necromancer is such an ugly word, but it’s a title Eric Carter is stuck with.

He sees ghosts, talks to the dead. He’s turned it into a lucrative career putting troublesome spirits to rest, sometimes taking on even more dangerous things. For a fee, of course. When he left LA fifteen years ago, he thought he’d never go back. Too many bad memories. Too many people trying to kill him.

But now his sister’s been brutally murdered and Carter wants to find out why. Was it the gangster looking to settle a score? The ghost of a mage he killed the night he left town? Maybe it’s the patron saint of violent death herself, Santa Muerte, who’s taken an unusually keen interest in him. Carter’s going to find out who did it, and he’s going to make them pay.

As long as they don’t kill him first.

Dead Things will be published by DAW Books on Feb 5, 2013. It is 295 pages, and priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery Only $6.40 at Amazon.com

Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery Only $6.40 at Amazon.com

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swords-dark-magic-256One of the best swords & sorcery anthologies of the last ten years is available at a deep discount on Amazon.com.

Swords & Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, contains 17 original stories — including a new Elric novella by Michael Moorcock, a Majipoor tale by Robert Silverberg, a Cugel the Clever tale by Michael Shea, a Black Company story by Glen Cook, and a brand new Morlock tale by James Enge. Contributors include Steven Erikson, C. J. Cherryh, Scott Lynch, Bill Willingham, Joe Abercrombie, Tanith Lee, Garth Nix, Greg Keyes, Gene Wolfe, Tim Lebbon, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and many others.

Our man Jason Waltz examined it in one of the longest and most detailed reviews we’ve ever published.

At Worldcon, I had the pleasure of hearing James Enge read his fabulous story “The Singing Spear” — which includes the classic line “You killed my bartender!” James is one of our most gifted practitioners of modern S&S, and “The Singing Spear” is one of his finest stories. It’s worth far more than $6.40 all on its own — and if you get the chance, hearing James read it live is worth far more than that.

Our most recent round-up of discount fantasy titles at Amazon is here.

Swords & Dark Magic was published by Avon Eos in June 2010. It is 519 pages, and was originally priced at $15.99. While copies last, it is being sold online for $6.40 at Amazon.com.

Self-published Books: Review of Noggle Stones: The Goblin’s Apprentice by Wil Radcliffe

Self-published Books: Review of Noggle Stones: The Goblin’s Apprentice by Wil Radcliffe

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noggle stones-smallWhen I first started this series of reviews on self-published books, I had two criteria for reviewing a book.

First, it had to be a self-published fantasy novel. Second, based on the blurb and the excerpt, it had to be a book that I wanted to read. At the time, I didn’t realize that the first criterion would be the more difficult one to figure out.

I discuss some of the difficulties in deciding whether to review a book on my personal blog, but the bottom line is that I almost didn’t review Noggle Stones: The Goblin’s Apprentice. It was originally published by a small press, and only later self-published by the author. I might have still decided that it didn’t quite qualify, since it wasn’t originally self-published, but it certainly met my second criterion: . I really wanted to read this book.

If there’s one word to describe The Goblin’s Apprentice, it’s charming. From the author’s own illustrations, to the poetry, to the language. At times, it’s a bit too charming, but in the end I forgave it. The book seems to be aimed at the Middle Grade level, and it has the same sense of whimsy found in the best books of that type.

The Goblin’s Apprentice is the first book of the series Noggle Stones. The central character is Martin Manchester, an aspiring stage magician in 1899 America. His career plans are interrupted by the fact that our world has merged with a fantasy world populated by elves, dwarves, ogres, and yes, goblins. Martin soon finds himself a student of the goblin Bugbear, a scholar of Non-Logical Thought, which forms the basis of the magic system in the novel. Accompanying them is Bugbear’s scoundrel of a cousin, Tudmire. Their wandering takes them to the kingdom of Willow Prairie, which is really a small town that’s been awaiting the arrival of a king for centuries. After rescuing the dragon bride Maga from a show trial, the heroes quickly get caught up in the war against the Shadow Smith and his army of patchworks.

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