Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.19 “Mommy Dearest”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.19 “Mommy Dearest”

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Sam and Dean have a chat with Eve, who decides to take the form of their dead mother.
Sam and Dean have a chat with Eve, who decides to take the form of their dead mother.

Eve’s up to no good in the town of Grant’s Pass, Oregon, by being unusually charming to a college student (named, as we shortly learn, Edward Bright). She runs her hand across his cheek, which cannot be a good thing. He wonders away from the bar she enters. Eve kisses another boy, then walks through and begins touching people. The whole place goes insane with a monstrous, vampiric feeding frenzy, as she sits and calmly watches.

Dean is making bullets filled with Phoenix ashes, but isn’t sure it’s going to work. The ashes certainly aren’t burning him. In fact, it’s all a bit of an exercise in futility without a location, so they summon Cas to try to get a bead on Eve. He has no information, but Sam has the idea of trying to track down an empathic monster to see if they can get Eve’s location from one of them.

Castiel is able to track down a cult favorite: Amber Benson, from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fame. (For those who weren’t avid Buffy fans, Benson played Tara, the lesbian love interest of Willow. Her season 6 death at the hands of a misogynistic nerd nearly triggered the destruction of the world at Willow’s hands. Tara also had the best song in the classic “Once More, With Feeling” musical episode of Buffy, also from Season 6. If you have not seen it, Season 6 of Buffy is some of the best television ever made.)

Fortunately for fanboys like me, Benson also played the non-killing vampire Lenore, who was introduced briefly in Season 2 of Supernatural.

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Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

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bgolympian“What do you do when nobody’s making you do anything?”

His parents are making him meet with me for tutoring in the first place, so why should the kid trust me? I look like any other English teacher to him. No matter what he does when he’s free, he assumes I’ll disapprove. He’ll answer with embarrassment, and be surprised when nothing bad happens.

“And what do you read when nobody’s making you read anything?”

Most of my students, boys and girls both, answer, “Fantasy.” They say that with embarrassment, too, because English teachers are famous for their aversion to fantasy.

Yet when you read around in books about teaching teenagers, or teaching writing, or the intersection of gender and learning, it’s common to find the authors lamenting that fantasy is not just a boy genre (as the reviewer Ginia Bellafante notoriously called it), but the boy genre, the only one their male students read voluntarily. Why does the education community fall into this error? Is it that the girls are able to conceal their preferences better, or that they’re able to stomach the tedious mainstream books they’re assigned better? Or maybe it’s that the kinds of fantasy novels girls prefer are less vexing to their teachers? I don’t know.

I will concede that the boys I tutor tend to be more shut down as learners, and more shut down about literacy, than my female students are. Some education writers have explored this widely observed disparity eloquently and imagined fantasy literature as one of a range of remedies for it. In Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices, Ralph Fletcher implores his English teacher readers, whom he assumes will be mostly female and uniformly hostile to genre fiction, to allow their students to read and write fantasy at school. He takes particular pains to advocate for fantasy stories that incorporate violence.

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Conan Notes

Conan Notes

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Conan, the MovieA few days ago, the comics site Bleeding Cool put up a link to some press notes for the new Conan the Barbarian film, which had appeared on the web site for Lionsgate Entertainment. I read through them; they seemed pretty standard. Like most press notes, they’re relentlessly upbeat, and give strong lip service to the importance of fidelity to the source material for the production. Who knows? Maybe it’s honestly meant. But the more closely I looked at the notes, the less convinced I was by the approach they suggested the movie was taking, or by the reading they presented of Howard and Conan.

I understand the need to change elements in the process of adapting a work from one medium into another, but there comes a point where you wonder what the point of an adaptation is; what is it about the original work that the adaptation is seeking to convey? Or, conversely, would the work have been better served without the framework of the pre-existing story? Personally, I don’t see the character of Conan as I recognise it in these notes. I’m not a Howard scholar, but I’ve read the stories, and to me they were fairly consistent in the depiction of Conan across several decades of his life. That character isn’t in these notes. The film may still be good, of course, but if so I doubt it’ll be because of any fidelity to the themes of the source material.

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Joanna Russ: February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011

Joanna Russ: February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011

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female-man1Joanna Russ, acclaimed feminist writer and one of the most respected science fiction authors of the 20th Century, passed away yesterday at the age of 74.

Russ’s first SF story, “Nor Custom Stale,” appeared in F&SF in 1959. Numerous notable short stories followed, including Nebula Award winner “When It Changed” (1972), and Hugo Award winner “Souls” (1982). Altogether her fiction has been nominated for a total of nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards. Her short stories were collected in four volumes:  The Adventures of Alyx (1983), The Zanzibar Cat (1983), Extra(ordinary) People (1984), and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1988).

Her first novel Picnic on Paradise, the tale of a pleasure cruise that crash lands on a vacation planet with only enough food for a picnic, was nominated for a Nebula in 1968. It was collected with four additional stories featuring the resourceful protagonist Alyx as The Adventures of Alyx (1983).

Her other novels include Nebula Award finalist And Chaos Died (1970), The Female Man (1975),  We Who Are About To… (1977), and The Two of Them (1978).

The Female Man, one of the most acclaimed SF novels of the decade, follows four women across four parallel worlds, all struggling against the restrictive role of the female sex, and what it truly means to be a woman. The character who bears Russ’s first name, “Joanna”  refers to herself early in the novel as the “female man” because she is convinced she must surrender her identity as a woman to be respected.

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Black Static #22

Black Static #22

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314_largeBlack Static is the horror/dark fantasy counterpart to the largely SF magazine Interzone, published in alternating months by TTA Press. The current April-May 2011 issue features fiction by Alan Wall, Time Lees, Allison J. Littlewood, Steven Pirie and Simon Kurt Unsworth.  The ‘transmissions from beyond’ themed art in every issue is by David Gentry. Peter Tennant and Tony Lee provide book and DVD/BD reviews and interviews, with regular comment supplied by Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler and Mike O’Driscoll.  What immediately grabbed my attention is the opening paragraph to Fowler’s typically curmudgeon column:

I think I am finally going mad. As I get older, everything that other people find enjoyable, I seem to find awful.  No, beyond awful. Unwatchable, unreadable, uninvolving, stupid beyond belief!

I’m totally sympatico.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static.

Meet Dick Henry, The Shortcut Man

Meet Dick Henry, The Shortcut Man

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untitled1shortcut-man-novel-p-g-sturges-hardcover-cover-art2The Shortcut Man is the recently-published debut novel by P. G. Sturges. The author comes by his talent honestly. I say that not only because his father was the legendary Hollywood filmmaker Preston Sturges, but because he brilliantly channels Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and Donald Westlake while managing to deftly stamp his own style on his impressive first effort as a hardboiled mystery author.

Sturges has his work cut out for him. The hardboiled detective genre, while still alive, seems as rooted in the past as a slapstick comedy. Modern practitioners of the art seem determined to evoke past glories more so than speak to their own world. Updating the genre seems impossible short of cynically adding what used to be considered in polite company foul language and graphic sex scenes to the established structure.

It would be dishonest to pretend that Sturges does not do just that here and yet, somehow the book does not feel like a cynical cheat. Partly this is due to Sturges’ gift for great dialogue (simply saying it is in his genes is to do the man discredit for his own talent) and an innate understanding of human nature and our common foibles observing others’ mistakes as well as his own in his nearly sixty years on this planet. There is no mistaking that this book is as much a cathartic autobiography as it is a genuine detective novel.

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Looking for the real Robert E. Howard in One Who Walked Alone

Looking for the real Robert E. Howard in One Who Walked Alone

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one-who-walked-aloneIt couldn’t have been easy for Novalyne Price Ellis to write One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard the Final Years (Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc., 1986). Price Ellis’ memoir of her relationship with Howard (roughly 1934-36) is illuminating in its raw honesty. It’s also painful, at turns disappointing and downright frustrating. We might find escape in Howard’s sword and sorcery tales but there is none to be found here.

But above all, One Who Walked Alone is brave. Price Ellis never sacrifices accuracy to save face. Howard was a successful writer and a free spirit, and told wild, vivid stories, traits that Price Ellis found irresistible. But she was also painfully embarrassed with the Texan, unable to accept his occasionally odd public behavior. She was disappointed that he didn’t conform to her own conception of manliness and began to date other men, including one of his best friends, Truett Vinson, which cut Howard to the quick. While her reactions were understandable, at times I found her to be rather shallow and unlikeable. And yet rather than off-putting I find that uncompromising truthfulness highly admirable.

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Goth Chick News: Mad Madame LaLaurie

Goth Chick News: Mad Madame LaLaurie

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image005There are some ghost stories that leave an indelible impression.

I fancy myself somewhat of a connoisseur of the paranormal, and over the past couple of years I’ve told you about some personal experiences (both real and imagined), some that others have experienced and a few that are little more than unsubstantiated folk tales.

And as you may have noticed, reality television has become somewhat obsessed of late, with night vision broadcasts documenting ghostly activity in every episode. If it were really that easy, there would be no question that spirits, or at the very least residual haunts, are a matter of record and I’d have interviewed a few of them for you.

But every once in awhile there comes a time and place where something so disturbing has occurred that the stories of hauntings associated with it morph into anecdotes that even a hardened skeptic could make room for.

I’ve told you about a few of these as well, such as Gettysburg, the Tower of London and the Edinburgh catacombs. However, due to their historical notoriety, these locations have been swarmed by professional ghost hunters over the years and investigated to death (if you pardon the expression); resulting in a magnitude of evidence for your consideration, whichever side of the belief scale you happen to come down on.

Then there’s the LaLaurie Mansion located in New Orleans’ French Quarter. It ranks near the very top of the “give me nightmares” scale.

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The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack wins Philip K. Dick Award

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack wins Philip K. Dick Award

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strange-affair-of-spring-heeled-jackNotch up another win for Pyr Books excellent 2010 line up. The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust announced on Friday that the winner of the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award is The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder, published by Pyr in September of last year.

We reported the complete list of nominees in January.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented each year to “the distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.” Previous winners have included C. L. Anderson, James P. Blaylock, Pat Murphy, Stephen Baxter, Carol Emshwiller and Richard Morgan. The judges for 2010 were William Barton, Andy Duncan (chair), Bruce McAllister, Melinda Snodgrass, and David Walton.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is Mark Hodder’s first novel. The sequel, The Clockwork Man Of Trafalgar Square, also featuring Burton and Swinburne, is the second installment of a three-volume story arc and was published by Pyr on March 22.

The PKD Trust also awarded a special citation this year to the novel Harmony, by Project Itoh, translated by Alexander O. Smith and published by Haikasoru.

Congratulations to the winners!