Goth Chick News: Spirit Halloween Levels Up with Haunted: Halloween ’86 – Spirit Edition

Goth Chick News: Spirit Halloween Levels Up with Haunted: Halloween ’86 – Spirit Edition

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Haunted Halloween ’86 from Spirit Halloween

The only thing I like better than blowing a whole day playing video games, is playing retro video games. Of course I love movie-quality HD graphics, but little pixelated Lego-people give me a case of the warm fuzzies. I did some digging and discovered I’m far from alone. The global retro gaming market has experienced significant growth in recent years. For instance, the NES Classic Edition sold 2.3 million units in less than a year, and the SNES Classic Edition surpassed 5 million units globally. The Sega Genesis Mini also exceeded 1 million units sold worldwide in its first year. Additionally, the arcade gaming sector, closely tied to retro gaming, was valued at $19.0 billion in 2023.

But when I think of one of my favorite retailers crossing over into retro-gaming, I most definitely get the fan girl squees.

Spirit Halloween, the annual haunt-headquarters that pops up every fall in the unused strip mall space near you, has just announced Haunted: Halloween ’86 – Spirit Edition, a pixelated plunge into Halloween nostalgia brought to you by Retrotainment Games.

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Odd Old Indie: Night Tide

Odd Old Indie: Night Tide

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Growing up in Southern California in the 60’s and 70’s was a movie lover’s dream. Late night and weekend television in those days was almost completely given over to old movies, especially on the Los Angeles independent channels: KTLA channel 5, KHJ channel 9, KTTV channel 11, and KCOP channel 13.

The independent stations were especially prone to showing independent movies, small films that hadn’t cost much and hadn’t made much and could be acquired cheaply to occupy all the time that had to be filled until sign-off and the test pattern. Many of these movies were from the House of Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors, The Masque of the Red Death, Dementia 13), but most weren’t, and any night of the week you could watch a pulse-pounder like The Flesh Eaters, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or Beast of Blood (once you had advanced — or descended — to Filipino horror movies you could consider yourself a schlock PHD.)

Most of these films were awful, of course (that’s how you wound up on channel 13 at two in the morning), but sometimes a (relative) diamond could be found among the ashes. One movie that I discovered during those years was Night Tide, an odd little indie that aimed a bit higher than the usual cheapie thriller. I was always happy when it popped up in the week’s TV Guide listings.

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Swordfights, Mysteries, and Dark Sorcery: Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring #1 by Patrick Zircher

Swordfights, Mysteries, and Dark Sorcery: Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring #1 by Patrick Zircher

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Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring #1, and variant cover by Daniel Brereton (Titan Comics, March 26, 2025)

Sometimes a project and a creator are brought together in the right place at the right time. Titan Comics’ Solomon Kane mini series The Serpent Ring is one of those times. Writer/Artist Patrick Zircher is working at the very top of his game. The project is dear to his heart, and it shows.

The first issue begins, fittingly enough, in Africa. This would have pleased Kane’s creator Robert E. Howard, because some of REH’s best Kane tales, “The Footfalls Within,” “The Hills of the Dead,” “Wings in the Night,” etc, take place on that continent.

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What I’ve Been Reading: April 2025

What I’ve Been Reading: April 2025

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I continue to listen to audiobooks daily. They fit my lifestyle and let me get to a lot more stuff than I would if I just read. I mean, driving with a paperback in hand is quite the challenge!

I just re-listened to the entire SPQR mystery series by John Maddox Roberts (who I have written about several times, including here). No way I could have sat down and re-read all thirteen.

And I plodded through listening to all 44 hours of Toll of the Hounds, the eighth book of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. It was the first book in the series I didn’t really care for – possibly because I don’t like the narrator. But I’ve had a paperback copy on the shelves for ten years, I think. At least I worked in listening to it. I have the audiobook for Dust of Dreams, which is just as long. But the same guy read the whole series, and I don’t want another 40+ hours of him.

But, I do like to still read a physical copy. So, let’s get to what I’ve been checking out on the printed page.

FLYING FREEBOOTERS – Frederick Nebel

Nebel’s is the second face on my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore (Hammett on one side, Norbert Davis on the other). I’m not into the Aviation Pulps, but I am a fan of Nebel’s Gales & McGill action stories.

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Shai Dorsai: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson

Shai Dorsai: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson

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Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson (Ace Books, February 1980). Cover by Jordi Penalva

In 1959, Robert A. Heinlein published Starship Troopers, one of the founding works of military science fiction as a genre. But that same year saw the serialization of Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! in Astounding Science Fiction, a work that may have been equally influential, though it seems now to be less remembered. In fact, both were nominated for the Hugo Award in 1960, though Starship Troopers won.

Dorsai! is set in an interstellar future, with some sixty billion human beings inhabiting 16 planets of eight solar systems. Several of the stars are named in the novel, and as was common at that time, many of them are astrophysically implausible candidates to have biospheres, being of spectral types with relatively short lifespans: Altair (type A7), Fomalhaut (type A4), and Sirius (type A0). Fomalhaut and Sirius are also multiple stars, which limits the possible planetary orbits around them. At least Ceta, orbiting Tau Ceti, is a plausible Earthlike planet! It’s also noteworthy that several of these solar systems have multiple habitable planets — though that’s also true of our own, where Dickson has Mars and Venus humanly colonized, a project that seemed far more daunting only a few years later!

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Tubi Dive, Part III

Tubi Dive, Part III

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Kingdom of the Spiders (Dimension Pictures, November 23, 1977)

50 films that I dug up on Tubi.

Enjoy!

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Ah, the 70s. My formative years. Angry nature films were rampant around this time (much to my delight), and now it’s time for tarantulas to be miffed at our overuse of pesticides.

William Shatner plays Rack Hansen (staggeringly good name), a lecherous animal doctor in rural Arizona. When I say lecherous, I mean toward female humans. When Woody Strode finds his prize calf dead, the Shat is called in to figure it out. He calls in an expert from Flagstaff, and unfortunately for the expert, she is hot and blond. Shatner is all over her like tribbles on a starship.

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Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

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Cover for Born with the Dead by Ron Walotsky
Cover for The Saliva Tree by Lee Edwards

Tor Double #3 was originally published in December 1988.  The two stories included are Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with Les Edwards providing the cover art for The Saliva Tree and Ron Walotsky painting the cover for Born of the Dead.

The Saliva Tree was originally published in F&SF in September, 1965. It won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Seiun Award.

Set in the mid-1890s, The Saliva tree is the story of Geoffrey Rolles, a young gentleman of leisure in the East Anglian village of Cottersall. His head filled with socialism, he has embarked upon a correspondent with H.G. Wells, one of England’s preeminent socialists of the time. He has also taken an interest in local farmer Joseph Grendon, who has demonstrated his forward thinking ways by installing an electric generator on his farm.

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Goth Chick News: The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo Breaks Records for Nerdy Goodness

Goth Chick News: The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo Breaks Records for Nerdy Goodness

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C2E2 mailing insert with our Expo passes

Though Black Gate photog Chris Z and I have affectionately referred to ourselves as “horror nerds” almost from the beginning of working together, I was never quite sure if the term “nerd” was offensive to others. Therefore, in making a small nod to Big Cheese John O’s constant plea to not embarrass him, we only said “nerd” (and “geek” for that matter) in private or in hushed tones.

Then suddenly, either due to the term being liberally employed on the Netflix hit Stranger Things, or because compared to the rest of the world right now “nerds” are downright endearing, being one is akin to being a cool kid. So it’s no surprise that I absolutely loved the mailing insert that accompanied our Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo passes this year.

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The Eccentric’s Bookshelf: Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

The Eccentric’s Bookshelf: Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

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1983? Let me tell you how it was.

In a World Without the Internet, before Youtube, before Netflix, before Prime, before 4K UHD smart TVs, before social media or Substack or niche newsletters, before IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, before DVDs and Blu-rays, even before blogs (gasp!), you would find yourself sitting around late at night, channel surfing, listlessly flipping through TV Guide, restlessly looking for something to watch, and you would come across a movie like The Horror of Party Beach and you would think, “What the hell? Is this worth ninety minutes of my life?” And since you would likely have only once chance to see the thing, it was a decision fraught with import. (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase.)

In the absence of all of the resources and options we now take for granted, how did you decide what to do? I’ll tell you what I did — I reached for The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

The brainchild of Uber-Geek Michael Weldon and an offshoot of his Psychotronic Video magazine, the book is, according to the back cover, “The complete viewer’s guide to the weirdest movies of all time!” It’s a boast that the volume makes good on with one pseudopod tied behind its back.

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A Boy and His Dog: How Archaeology is My Biggest Inspiration

A Boy and His Dog: How Archaeology is My Biggest Inspiration

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Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay. This looks like a Stargate. Where’s the dial?

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

Once upon a time, a much younger me fell into an obsession… Well, several related obsessions, if I’m being honest. Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology dug its claws into my brain and would not let go. In what might have been a profound waste of money, I followed that obsession into university, acquiring a Bachelor’s Honours Degree in the subject, with a focus on Celtic Studies. I wrote a thesis that was four times as long as it needed to be (with permission). I wrote on the Continuity of Religious Iconography From the Upper Palaeolithic to the Pre-Roman Iron Age of the Atlantic Façade. Which is to say, basically, some religious beliefs and practices of the Iron Age Celts might just have had their origin in the pre-Celtic peoples of the Stone Age. That’s a lot to cover in just twenty pages, so I handed in eighty-three.

When I say I was/am obsessed, I absolutely meant it.

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