Goth Chick News: A (Sort of) Jaws Prequel With a Whole Lot of Whaaaat?

Goth Chick News: A (Sort of) Jaws Prequel With a Whole Lot of Whaaaat?

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Jaws swimming

I have no problem admitting that Jaws is in my top five favorite movies of all time. Granted, some of that love is of the “point in time” sort; as in it was the first R-rated movie I was ever allowed to see, it was the first time I saw special effects approaching realistic (I had been on a steady diet of classic horror movies since I was 8) and it was the first time I had a concrete method of expressing my fear of deep water (“Sharks!”). Forgetting of course, that the closest I had ever come to salt water was the Shedd Aquarium.

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Shut Up, You Freak!!

Shut Up, You Freak!!

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Shut Up You Freak-small

Recently, as I watched the San Antonio Spurs pummel and demoralize the Oklahoma City Thunder, I was pummeled and demoralized myself, as I was smacked with a halftime commercial for the upcoming movie Alice Through the Looking Glass. Combine this with the recent rumors of a Beetlejuice sequel, and the conclusion is inescapable: it’s sixteen years into the twenty first century, and we haven’t learned a thing. Tim Burton just isn’t going to go away, and apparently there’s nothing that we can do to make him go away. (I know that the new Alice isn’t being directed by Burton, but he’s responsible for it in the same way that Nixon was responsible for the depredations of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.)

The man is seemingly bulletproof; no number of Rubberstamped, predictable, underperforming movies can stop him. “Tim Burton” is a firmly established pop culture brand, and it hardly matters that he hasn’t directed a good movie since the end of the last century. (I do make a partial exception for Big Fish, which wasn’t good, but was at least an ambitious, honorable failure. It also seemed to take something out of Burton; he’s never tried anything nearly as serious since.)

How did it come to this? Back in the day, I liked Batman, Ed Wood, and The Nightmare Before Christmas as much as anyone. I was initially underwhelmed by Mars Attacks but later came to appreciate it. Now, however, I greet the announcement of every new Tim Burton project in precisely the same way I greet every new American commitment in the Middle East: “Oh God — we’ve already done this, and it never works!”

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Clarkesworld 116 Now Available

Clarkesworld 116 Now Available

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Clarkesworld 116-smallI love Peter Mohrbacher’s cover for the May issue of Clarkesworld, a gorgeously creepy piece titled “Ananiel, Angel of Storms” (click the image at right for a bigger version.) Mohrbacher has covered other Clarkesworlds — mostly recent issue 111 — but this is the first to really make me sit up and take notice.

Robert L Turner III at Tangent Online raves about Rich Larson this issue, calling him “an excellent new talent.”

“Jonas and the Fox” by Rich Larson is set in a post revolution farming community. Fox is a poet and fugitive from the new junta after the revolution starts to eat its own. He is hiding in the body of his nephew who is brain dead after an accidental fall. His Nephew Jonas, the other title character, must come to terms with the stranger inhabiting his brother’s body. The novelette cleverly links the revolution’s rewriting of history with the disconnect between Fox and his new body. The story is touching, and manages to keep you guessing as to how it will end. Larson is a young author and well worth keeping an eye on. If this piece is representative of his work, we could be looking at an excellent new talent.

Read his complete review here.

Clarkesworld #116 has five new stories by Cat Rambo, Robert Reed, Cassandra Khaw, Rich Larson, and Luo Longxiang, and two reprints by Joe Abercrombie and Sunny Moraine.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Part Seven – “Karamaneh”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Part Seven – “Karamaneh”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on May 23, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

The_Mystery_of_Dr._Fu-Manchu_cover_1913-227x350karamaneh-1“Karamaneh” was the sixth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in The Story-Teller in March 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 16 and 17 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication). The story opens with Nayland Smith, Dr. Petrie, and Inspector Weymouth preparing a dragnet around the area where Dr. Fu-Manchu is known to have a base of operations. They have no illusion that they will capture the doctor himself, but hope to round up enough of his minions to deal a significant blow to the enemy.

Smith and Petrie are among a dozen Scotland Yard men combing the area. As they pass by a gypsy encampment, Smith recognizes one of the gypsies as a disguised dacoit who is wanted for murder in Burma (where Smith serves as police commissioner). While they fail to apprehend the man, they succeed in capturing the female gypsy before she can escape. The disguised gypsy woman turns out to be the mysterious slave girl who has repeatedly saved Petrie’s life since Smith first involved him in the affair. Rohmer does an excellent job of conveying Petrie’s mixed feelings of compulsion and revulsion when faced with this dangerous and exotic woman.

The reader shares Petrie’s ambivalence towards this complex character. She is beautiful and graced with a foreign otherness that defies precise identification and she has risked her own life several times in order to save Petrie, yet she has also willingly participated in the murder of countless other innocent men. Rohmer makes much of her unabashed stare that few men would be able to hold. Petrie is fascinated with her, but also feels ashamed that the object of his affection is opposed to all that defines a British subject at this point in time.

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Vintage Trash: Producers Releasing Corporation, the Poorest of Hollywood’s Poverty Row

Vintage Trash: Producers Releasing Corporation, the Poorest of Hollywood’s Poverty Row

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Strangler_of_the_Swamp_poster

The 1930s through 1950s are generally seen as Hollywood’s Golden Age. It was a time when major studios had glamorous stars and made blockbuster pictures with casts of thousands.

It was also a time when cheap production companies ground out quickie films on a shoestring budget, and sometimes, just sometimes, created something worth watching.

Welcome to Poverty Row, the result of the world’s insatiable appetite for film. In the days before television, many people went to the movies every day. Not only did they get a movie, but they also got a newsreel, cartoon, and a shorter “B” movie. Neighborhood theaters often showed B-movies as features since they were cheaper to rent and the audience of local kids didn’t care about great production quality, they just wanted to see some cowboys shooting it up. And that’s where Poverty Row came in.

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The Birth of the Novel

The Birth of the Novel

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daphnis-and-chloeIn my last post, I described one product of the Hellenistic period of ancient art as the invention of the novel. This surprised many people, who thought that the novel was an invention of a much later time. So of course, being an academic of leisure (she says as she ducks a flying juice box), I had to say more about it.

Some scholars do date the invention of the novel to the Modern period in Western Europe. I will display my ignorance and say I do not know why this is. Many books exist outside of English, outside of the Modern period, and in fact outside of the Western hemisphere that easily qualify as novels, so it is difficult for me to see this claim as much more than chauvinism. But if someone wants to correct me on this point, I am willing and eager to be enlightened. Or to fight you on it.

The first novel that we have comes from somewhere between the 2nd Century BCE and the 1st Century CE. It is a positively charming little book called Callirhoe, and it describes the travails of a beautiful young woman who marries her true love, an equally handsome young man named Chaereas. Shortly after their wedding, he kicks her in a fit of jealous rage and she dies.

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Support the Launch of Skelos, a New Magazine of the Weird

Support the Launch of Skelos, a New Magazine of the Weird

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Skelos Journal of the Weird-small

It’s always exciting to hear about the launch of a new fantasy magazine — and it’s especially exciting when it’s as promising as Skelos, a new journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy.

Skelos is edited by a trio of Weird Fiction rock stars — Jeffrey Shanks, co-editor of the fabulous Unique Legacy of Weird Tales, Mark Finn, noted blogger and author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, and Chris Gruber, editor of Robert E. Howard’s Boxing Stories, from the University of Nebraska Press.

The Kickstarter campaign to fund the first issue is already at 150% of goal in barely 24 hours — which means that the first issue of Skelos will be arriving this summer. It will be packed with new fiction and great art, including a never-before-published fantasy piece by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by none other than Mark Schultz. Here’s the complete details.

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New Treasures: The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan

New Treasures: The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan

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The Trials of Apollo The Hidden Oracle-smallI was tremendously impressed to see best-selling author Rick Riordan matching $10,000 in donations made to Rosarium Publishing’s recent (and very successful) Indiegogo campaign. You don’t often see that level of small press love from someone who makes millions through a Manhattan publisher.

Rick Riordan seems like a solid all around guy, and I’m not just saying that because he said great things about my man Carlos Hernandez’s first collection, The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria. Riordan is the author of the international bestselling Percy Jackson series, as well as the Kane Chronicles, and the Heroes of Olympus. His latest series for young readers, The Trials of Apollo, kicks off with The Hidden Oracle, now on sale from Disney-Hyperion.

How do you punish an immortal?

By making him human.

After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disoriented, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus’s favor.

But Apollo has many enemies-gods, monsters, and mortals who would love to see the former Olympian permanently destroyed. Apollo needs help, and he can think of only one place to go… an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood.

The Trials of Apollo, Book One: The Hidden Oracle was published by Disney-Hyperion on May 3, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition.

The Granddaughter of Fu Manchu

The Granddaughter of Fu Manchu

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MSMM 0181Mike Shayne, the redheaded tough guy private eye, was introduced in the decidedly more lighthearted detective novel, Dividend on Death penned by the pseudonymous Brett Halliday in 1939. The character was an instant success and Michael Shayne (as he was initially known) quickly became a cottage industry leading to another 77 (mostly hardboiled) detective novels through the mid-1970s, over 300 short stories through the mid-1980s, 11 B-movies in the 1940s, a radio drama series that lasted nearly a decade, an early 1960s television series that made it for a full season, a TV tie-in Dell comic book that lasted three issues, and his own magazine digest that ran for nearly 30 years. The character may seem like just another clichéd private eye today, but over the years a number of very talented authors hid behind the fedora and turned-up collar of “Brett Halliday” – Bill Pronzini, Dennis Lynds, James Reasoner, Frank Belknap Long, and the ubiquitous Michael Avallone among them.

The reason we have turned our attention to this particular ginger with the mean disposition is a trilogy of stories that appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in 1981 and 1982 featuring a character known as the Black Lotus. As the storyline developed “Brett Halliday,” in this instance James Reasoner, strongly suggested the Black Lotus was the granddaughter of Fu Manchu. Mr. Reasoner was cautious and did not name names, of course, but elements of the three stories read like a Sax Rohmer tribute – including the Black Lotus’ real identity, Leiko Smith sharing the surname of the protagonist of the Fu Manchu stories, Nayland Smith. The character’s first name (which is Japanese, rather than Chinese) was likely borrowed from Leiko Wu, the love interest from Marvel Comics’ contemporaneous Master of Kung Fu series (1973-1983) which licensed the Fu Manchu characters from Rohmer’s literary estate. I first learned of the Black Lotus storyline from Win Scott Eckert’s very useful Fu Manchu chronology. My friend, Don O’Malley was kind enough to send me scanned copies of the three issues in question in order that I finally have a chance to read them.

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Thieves Can: A review of the A Tale of the Kin series

Thieves Can: A review of the A Tale of the Kin series

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AmongThievesFantasy has a wide range of heroic archetypes, from the classic sword-wielding warrior to the wand-waving wizard, but I’ve always been fond of the characters that have at least a touch of the rogue in them. I’m pretty sure that over my decades of roleplaying, the number of characters I’ve played who could pick a lock probably outweighed those who could kick down the door by a factor of about two. From Aladdin to Bilbo, heroes that rely on skill, cleverness, and deftness over brute force have always appealed to me.

Despite that, though, I’ve rarely been drawn to stories explicitly about the criminal underworld, whether it be in fantasy or real-world fiction like The Godfather or The Sopranos. Fights over which particular thief or murderer can get the upper hand over his rival thieves and murderers have never captivated me that strongly.

That’s part of the reason why I was so surprised with how much I loved Among Thieves (Amazon), the first book in the A Tale of the Kin series of fantasy by Douglas Hulick.

“The Kin” from the series title is the underground criminal society of Hulick’s world, and it’s this rich and vibrant society that he has built that drew me in as much as anything else about the story. This isn’t a story about just some criminals having adventures, but about a people who, as a society, are as thoroughly developed as most cultures that an author has developed for their fantasy series. And, of course, as a criminal underworld, there’s also a larger society in which they exist and operate, and that society is itself fully realized.

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