The Complete Carpenter: The Thing (1982)

The Complete Carpenter: The Thing (1982)

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drew-struzan-the-thing-1982-posterIf you’re a fan of the career of director John Carpenter, you probably have an idiosyncratic favorite among his pictures. The one that has special meaning for you, possibly because of nostalgia, a particular theme, or sheer rewatchability. I’ll telegraph ahead in this series and mention that In the Mouth of Madness is one of those special Carpenter films for me. Looking backward, Assault on Precinct 13 is the Carpenter movie I’m mostly likely to rewatch, and it rises in my estimation each time I return to it. One of my close friends is deeply in love with Big Trouble in Little China, and his wife roots hard for Christine. Carpenter’s catalog has a range of minor-league wonders, and I can’t feel upset for anyone picking offbeat choices. I’ve even heard stimulating defenses of The Ward, which (spoilers for future reviews) I think is Carpenter’s worst film.

However, general consensus says 1982’s The Thing — a remake of the 1951 SF classic The Thing from Another World by way of its source material, John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” — is John Carpenter’s masterpiece. And general consensus is right.

The Story

It’s the first week of the winter-over at US National Science Institute Station 4 (aka Outpost #31) in the Antarctic interior. It doesn’t start well. A helicopter from a Swedish Norwegian base makes an explosive landing at the outpost while trying to gun down a runaway sled dog. The men at the outpost take in the dog and try to figure out what happened, although failed radio communications make it difficult. They investigate the Norwegian base and discover it devoid of life with signs of a horrific violent event. It seems the Swedes Norwegians dug up and thawed out an alien lifeform from a spaceship trapped under the ice pack for thousands of years, and that didn’t turn out that swell for them.

Oops, too late … That adorable sled dog allowed into the US station is actually the alien, which can alter its shape and assimilate other organics while perfectly imitating them on the outside — and it’s started in on the men at Outpost #31. Paranoia and alien transformation freakiness break out. If it takes them over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it’s won. World assimilation in 27,000 hours after first contact with civilized areas.

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The Opportunity for Awe: An Interview with Scott Andrews

The Opportunity for Awe: An Interview with Scott Andrews

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Scott H Andrews Beneath Ceaseless Skies-smallBeneath Ceaseless Skies is a five-time Hugo and seven-time World Fantasy Award-finalist online magazine of literary adventure fantasy. In nine years, BCS has published over 475 stories and 200 audio podcasts by authors such as Saladin Ahmed, Richard Parks, Marie Brennan, Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Seth Dickinson, and more.  Find their ebooks and Best of BCS anthologies on Amazon and WeightlessBooks.com, their podcasts on Google Play and iTunes, and stories, artwork, new issues, and more at beneath-ceaseless-skies.com.

For nearly a decade now, BCS has been showcasing the work of both new and established writers in the realms of fantasy with a literary bent. My first professional sale was to BCS, and the magazine has published several of my stories since then, including my most recent, “Deathspeaker,” in the August 3rd issue. Recently I approached BCS editor Scott Andrews with some questions about “literary adventure fantasy” and its appeal to readers of sword & sorcery.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy.” It’s pretty clear what those first two words mean separately, but can you explain the juxtaposition? What does adventure fantasy lack when it’s not literary (or gain when it is)? What does literary fantasy miss when it lacks adventure?

“Literary adventure fantasy” is my tagline for literary fantasy set in other worlds. The literary element that’s for me the most enjoyable and rewarding is a focus on character. A lot of secondary-world fantasy feels to me focused on the setting or the plot, but I like it on the characters, for example using narrative approaches like close points-of-view or conflicts that are internal in addition to external.

What adventure fantasy gains for me when it’s literary like that is the human highs and lows, the emotional exhilaration and gut-punch, that great literary fiction has. I love the line from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. That may sound like highbrow English-class stuff, but there’s an author in SF/F/H today who I’ve heard reference that Faulkner quote:  George R. R. Martin. His fantasy is the most popular in the world, and he’s constantly praised for his characters and how realistic and emotive they feel. His work absolutely has those human highs and lows, those profound comments on what it feels like to be a parent or a sibling or a hero or a failure or a survivor. That’s character-centered focus I love to read.

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July/August Issue of Black Static Now Available

July/August Issue of Black Static Now Available

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Black Static July August 2017-smallBritish horror magazine Black Static #59, cover-dated July/August 2017, is now available. Over at Tangent Online, Jennifer Burroughs offers a detailed review of the entire issue, including “Ghost Town” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

“Ghost Town” is a story of dark magic and gruesome secrets that explores the difficult question of what the living owe the dead… A river full of a strange substance flows around a small town haunted by thousands of ghosts, the economy fueled by a black market for human bodies. Three years ago, the body of Rae’s dead wife, Emily, was stolen, which has prevented Emily’s spirit from fully passing on. She haunts Rae every night…

Stufflebeam has imagined a strange place full of horrors caused both by the power of the river and simple human ingenuity. She raises an interesting question about what people would do in a reality where the dead need a corpse, any corpse, in order to leave the physical world, and there are more ghosts than corpses. This is an eerie tale that leaves the reader with several layers of meaning to contemplate.

And “Endoskeletal” by Sara Read

A well-executed, nightmarish tale of body horror. Ashley, an ambitious archaeologist, ignores rules of policy and respect for a strange discovery found in a Swedish mountain cave, where a strange burial has been hidden away for tens of thousands of years. She finds several jars inexplicably sealed after all this time, and takes one back to the lab, setting off a horrifying chain of events…

Not a story for the squeamish, “Endoskeletal” reads like a fevered nightmare full of warnings about foolish mistakes.

Read the complete review here.

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Goth Chick News: Chas Kline Makes a Friend… Literally

Goth Chick News: Chas Kline Makes a Friend… Literally

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Frankenfriend-small

As you likely know, the staff at Black Gate has the distinct honor and pleasure to witness the passion that goes into the creative process. We get early looks at everything from books to movies, and comics to gaming. Each and every effort is the result of someone making the decision to put their imagination and creativity on display for the world to enjoy or possibly to pick apart – but in the mind of the creator, the risk is worth the reward.

Back in 2000 when I began contributing to the print version of Black Gate, I submitted a rather scathing review of a new author’s work. True, it was my opinion and to this day I stand by my comments, but I never stopped feeling bad about delivering this critical feedback in a public forum. That new author made a leap of faith sending his work to Black Gate and I feel my review disrespected the creative process.

Since that point, if I truly am not a fan of something that is sent to me, I simply do not tell you about it. And if pressed by the creator, I will share my thoughts with them privately, but never here.

So what’s the point of telling you this?

It’s a typical GCN setup of course and a way to tell you that if I write about a topic, it’s because I truly believe it’s something you need to experience for yourself. And in a rare case, that your need is more important than say, Tom Cruise’ ego or the collective commercial power of the Twilight franchise.

So with this in mind, I invite you back to last week when I reintroduced you to the wonderful, twisted world of Charles M. Kline in the form of his latest book, The 12 Frights of Christmas. At that time, I also said we’d talk about Mr. Kline again this week in the context of his short film, Frankenfriend.

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An Incomparable Voyage Through Dreamland: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

An Incomparable Voyage Through Dreamland: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

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The Forgotten Beasts of Eld-smallThe Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Patricia A. McKillip
Tachyon Publications (240 pages, $14.95 in trade paperback, September 19, 2017)
Reprint edition (originally published by Atheneum, August 1974)

The moment you begin The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel by Patricia A. McKillip, you understand you have put yourself in the hands of a masterful wordsmith. McKillip has no peer when it comes to incantatory prose, and her wizardry spells you into a waking dream in this breathtaking tale.

The young wizard Sybel comes from a legendary lineage of animal keepers. After calling a magisterial bounty of magical beasts to her castle, she protects them with the unwavering love of a lioness. When a knight entrusts an infant boy into her care, unbeknownst to the so-called ice-hearted wizard, her life unravels into the pursuit of true love, justice, and the attainment of one’s free will.

Though the animals play a prominent role in the tale, the action mainly revolves around Sybel and the two men who love her. Tam, the babe given to her not long after leaving the womb, cares for her throughout the story. Through the numerous hardships that befall Sybel in her quest for justice in a troubled world, he remains steadfast in his love for the woman he considers his mother.

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Fantasia 2017, Day 5: Prisons, Rituals, and Explosions (The Honor Farm, Shock Wave, and Free and Easy)

Fantasia 2017, Day 5: Prisons, Rituals, and Explosions (The Honor Farm, Shock Wave, and Free and Easy)

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The Honor FarmSunday, July 16, felt in some ways like the day Fantasia 2017 really began for me. I had three movies I planned to watch, of three very different kinds, though all at the De Sève Theatre. The first was a horror-inflected American independent film called The Honor Farm. The second was a Hong Kong action movie called Shock Wave (Chaak Daan Juen Ga). The third was a Chinese art movie called Free and Easy (Qīng sōng yú kuài). That mix of approaches, genres, and countries was characteristic of the festival. I looked forward to each movie individually, and to how they’d work together.

The Honor Farm was directed by Karen Skloss from a script written by Skloss with Jay Tonne Jr. and Jasmine Skloss Harrison — Skloss’ teen daughter. It’s the story of Lucy (Olivia Grace Applegate), who’s about to attend her senior prom and plans to lose her virginity with her boyfriend Jake (Will Brittain). It is, Lucy reflects, “the night I was finally free to do whatever I wanted. And everyone was expecting me to.” But things don’t go as she’d hoped. The date goes sour, and Lucy ends up hanging around with her best friend Annie (Katie Folger). They run into another group of teens led by the gothy Laila (Dora Madison Burge), who’re planning to go into a deep forest and take mushrooms provided by a group of boys led by the presumably-symbolically-named JD (Louis Hunter). There’s an abandoned prison close by they plan to investigate, the Honor Farm of the title. What will they find in the supposedly haunted building?

Nighttime, woods, hallucinating teens, an abandoned building, ghost stories: this sounds like a certain kind of horror movie, but in fact isn’t that at all. The Honor Farm owes very little to Wes Craven, and much more to John Hughes and David Lynch. That’s an odd pair of influences, and yet I found them inescapable: structurally the story’s about a weird mixture of teens with nothing in common who learn to be friends, while the story itself is built out of surrealism, dream-imagery, disorienting sounds and cuts, and extended sequences that might have happened and might only be hallucinations. Surprisingly, the two things balance each other very well. The arc of the story gives a clear framework for the stylish eruptions of the unreal.

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Future Treasures: Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Future Treasures: Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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Infinity Wars Jonathan Strahan-smallInfinity Wars is the sixth volume in what Jonathan Strahan calls The Infinity Project, a series of science fiction anthologies from Solaris that include Reach For Infinity (2014), Meeting Infinity (2015), and one of the most acclaimed anthologies of last year, Bridging Infinity (2016). Jonathan says he’s “already pushing ahead on the seventh.”

The success of the project is a huge vindication for Solaris, who took a chance on the ambitious series just when it was starting to look like the original SF and fantasy paperback anthology was dead. Infinity Wars arrives in trade paperback next month. Here’s the description.

Conflict is Eternal

We have always fought. Tales of soldiers and war go back to the very roots of our history, to the beginnings of the places we call home. And science and technology have always been inextricably linked with the deadly art of war, whether through Da Vinci’s infamous machineries of war or the Manhattan Project’s world-ending bombs or distant starships fighting unknowable opponents.

Oppenheimer once wrote that “the atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.” But unendurable or not, future always comes. War was integral to science faction at its birth and remains so today, whether on the page or on the screen.

Infinity Wars asks one question: what would Oppenheimer’s different country be like? Who would fight it? Because at the end of it all, it always come down to a soldier alone, risking life and limb to achieve a goal that may never really make sense at all. How would those soldiers feel? What would they experience?

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Raphael’s Drawings at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Raphael’s Drawings at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

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23. Two Apostles (c) Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

The heads and hands of two apostles, c. 1519–20.
Black chalk with over-pounced underdrawing
with some white heightening.

One of the highlights of my regular stays in Oxford is visiting the Ashmolean Museum. With its fine collections of all periods, especially Medieval Europe and Ancient Egypt, it’s a place I and my family keep going back to. It also has excellent special exhibitions. I wrote up last summer’s exhibition on Underwater Archaeology for Black Gate, and this year we got to enjoy the treat of studying some little-seen drawings of an Italian Renaissance master.

Raphael: The Drawings brings together 120 rarely seen works by the Italian master, including 50 from the Ashmolean’s collection, the largest and most important group of Raphael drawings in the world. They came to the museum in 1845 following a public appeal to acquire them after the dispersal of the collection of the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), who had amassed an unrivalled collection of Old Master drawings. A further 25 works are on loan from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which will show the exhibition in autumn 2017. The remaining drawings come from various international collections.

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GenCon 2017, Pt. 2: Science Fiction Edition

GenCon 2017, Pt. 2: Science Fiction Edition

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starfinderScience fiction themes were front and center at GenCon this year, in a way that surpasses what I have seen in previous years. Usually the science fiction games are almost entirely tied into existing property lines, like the various Star Wars miniature battle lines produced by Fantasy Flight Games. These were certainly present, but they were matched by new science fiction games that had an appeal independent of being tied to well-established and beloved properties.

I’ll dig into several of these games more deeply in future full reviews, but for now here are some high-level looks at some of the new science fiction-themed games and expansions from GenCon.

Starfinder

The release of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game was one of the central events of the convention, the science fiction/space fantasy game set in the distant future of Paizo’s Pathfinder universe. We’ve spoken about Starfinder previously (see here, here, and here). I’ve been enthusiastic about the prospect of this game since the day it was announced, so it’s a pleasure to see that its release was an astounding success. As Erik Mona of Paizo explained to me, the company had looked at their past records and brought more copies of the Starfinder Core Rulebook than the number of any previous book they’ve ever released at GenCon … and it sold out in less than 7 hours. (The PDF, however, is available through Paizo.com for only $9.99!)

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New Treasures: The Suffering Tree by Elle Cosimano

New Treasures: The Suffering Tree by Elle Cosimano

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The Suffering Tree-smallElle Cosimano is the author of Holding Smoke and the Nearly Boswell Mysteries (Nearly Gone, Nearly Found). Her latest is a thriller that Kirkus Reviews calls “A dark mixture of mystery, history, romance, and fantasy.” It’s available now in hardcover from Hyperion.

Tori Burns and her family left D.C. for claustrophobic Chaptico, Maryland, after suddenly inheriting a house under mysterious circumstances. That inheritance puts her at odds with the entire town, especially Jesse Slaughter and his family — it’s their generations-old land the Burns have “stolen.” As the suspicious looks and muttered accusations of her neighbors build, so does the pressure inside her, and Tori returns to the pattern of self-harm that landed her in a hospital back in D.C. It all comes to a head one night when, to Tori’s shock, she witnesses a young man claw his way out of a grave under the gnarled oak in her new backyard.

Nathaniel Bishop may not understand what brought him back, but it’s clear to Tori that he hates the Slaughters for what they did to him centuries ago. Wary yet drawn to him by a shared sense of loss, she gives him shelter. But in the wake of his arrival comes a string of troubling events — including the disappearance of Jesse Slaughter’s cousin — that seem to point back to Nathaniel.

As Tori digs for the truth — and slowly begins to fall for Nathaniel — she uncovers something much darker in the tangled branches of the Slaughter family tree. In order to break the curse that binds Nathaniel there and discover the true nature of her inheritance, Tori must unravel the Slaughter family’s oldest and most guarded secrets. But the Slaughters want to keep them buried at any cost.

The Suffering Tree was published by Hyperion on June 13, 2017. It is 357 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Justine Howlett.

See all our latest New Treasures here.