30 Days of Night by Steve Niles

(Art by Ben Templesmith)

I’m 36 years old. I’m not saying that because I need somebody to help me keep track until I reach AARP age, but because I want the world to know how long it’s taken me to pick up a graphic novel. Until 30 Days of Night, my only exposure to the art form was the TV versions of The Walking Dead and Preacher.

I don’t think I’ve even seen the movie for it. I recall it came out about the same time as 28 Days Later, and I could only deal with one movie about days at the time. Fortunately, my Readings in the Genre class at Seton Hill University put it not only on my radar, but in my in-box. It was no longer about entertainment, but about learning.

This graphic novel took one of the simplest premises I can think of and brought it to life. The most well-known “fact” of vampires is that they cannot come out during the day (and not just because they fucking sparkle, because they fucking die!), and 30 Days of Night sends our vampire f(r)iends to Barrow, Alaska where daylight is a memory for a full month in the early winter. I mean, it’s brilliant. Why did it take until the 21^st Century for a writer to come up with this idea?

Well, Steve Niles probably isn’t the first person to think of setting their vampire story in a land of perpetual dark, but he’s the first to put it to paper (That I know of. I’m probably wrong). Where the plot thins is its use of night to completely decimate a town. Sure, the vampires feast one season, but it continues to beat the drum that the smorgasbord is endless. It’s not. The population is just north (pun intended) of 4,000, which really only leads to one good entrée. It’s like going to a kegger and thinking, “It’s gonna last all night! Wooooo!” and then an hour later, the single keg is kicked and you only have a red Solo cup to show for it. Shit, you’re barely buzzed because you had to share with half the sophomore class…

But I digress. 30 Days of Night takes a simple premise and turns it into a three-book series. There’s little originality beyond its original setting. We see goon vampires and a boss vampire. Inevitably, the boss vampire is not happy with the goon vampire and he (Boss) kills him (Goon). That’s when our hero, Sherriff Eben Olemaun sacrifices himself to become a vampire to gain the strength of the Boss. Which he does.

There’s also a B story involving some New Orleans voodoo vampire hunter, but it ends quickly enough just as he arrives in Barrow. His only purpose was to give the vampire hoard in Barrow a way to make it look like the town was destroyed in a pipeline fire.

30 Days of Night is a good story. It’s not amazing, it won’t change your life. It gives you a solid 20 minute read. I won’t even say the artwork is amazing. Ben Templesmith’s illustrations are raw and horrific, but they are a series of washed out watercolors that often leave you trying to figure out what they’re trying to depict. Or maybe it’s just me. Like I said, it’s my first graphic novel, and I don’t think it will drive me back to that section of the bookstore anytime soon, but I’m more likely to give The Walking Dead compendium a try.

Relic, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Relic was one of the first books I remember reading as a kid. I read plenty others, before and definitely after, but it is one that stuck with me for nearly 20 years. I'll say that 15 year old me enjoyed the book, so it does hold a nostalgic place in my dark little heart.

What does 36 year old me think?

Yeah, I still like it.

But, it's not unqualified. There are issues with plot and pacing that did make the second half drag on. And then there's the worse epilogue I've ever seen this week.

Let's start with plot: A beast from South America comes to the New York Museum of Natural History and eats brains. Totally onboard so far. We go about halfway through the book watching scared scientists and cocky police make silly mistakes. I'm onboard with that, too: I love when hubris gets characters into hot water. There are some science-y things about this I take issue with, but I'm not a scientist so I don't know how valid my arguments are. The biggest is the creature's smell. Here is a creature that is an evolutionary marvel, with everything going for it to be the top of the food chain, but it gives itself away by being stinky. Seems to be a flaw that could be taken advantage of, especially since it needs lots and lots of brains to survive.

The pacing was good... Until it wasn't. It seemed like half the book was climax, and when we got to the payoff scene, it was fairly anticlimactic. Yes, Lincoln and Child cornered several groups with no way out to build tension, but when each group finally found a way to succeed, the conflict and tension lifted unceremoniously.

And then there was the epilogue. It took a good story with believable science and a good, believable monster, and kicked it all to the curb. I wish I had stopped at the end of the story and just left the epilogue alone. But sometimes I go against my best judgement.

Relic does introduce one of my favorite modern popular fiction characters: Agent A.X.L. Pendergast. He's a brilliant, Southern, Ivy League-educated FBI agent. When I look at Lincoln-Child books, I always check to see if it's a Pendergast Novel.

Overall, I though Relic was a solid read. No book is ever going to satisfy everybody, but this is one I can honestly say I can re-read once a decade... Hopefully I'll forget about the epilogue again.

The Blob (1988), Directed by Chuck Russell

The Blob is better than it should have been. In fact, I would venture so far as to say I loved this film. As far as creature features go, The Blob is definitely a throwback to a simpler time, from when planets were named with numbers and Santa Claus defeated the Martians. Of course, that’s because the 1988 movie is a remake of the 1958 film of the same name. I haven’t seen the original, but I imagine what makes this movie so fun (a luckless chap getting sucked down a deep sink drain, anybody?), couldn’t be done with effects back then.

Like nearly every movie in the 80s, there’s plenty of big hair. That’s terrifying by itself. But there’s also Matt Kevin Dillon and a younger version of the lady that crawls around in syringes in Saw II. It’s nice to see Shawnee Smith before she was a junky.

The 80s saw a resurgence of horror, and probably produced some of the scariest films ever put on celluloid, so it might seem strange Russell would go all the way back to the 50s for some inspiration. But while the world was getting used to Freddy Krueger and Cenobites, there was still room for a gelatinous dissolver of human flesh.

What I loved most about the film was the “anybody goes” attitude Russell had. Nobody was safe, nobody was sacred, and what I thought would be a main character dies rather unceremoniously in the first act. That’s what made it scary and fun: anybody could go at any time. Some of these deaths happen on screen, and some off screen, but they’re each terrifying in their own way.

Everything about this movie screamed 80s, from the hair to the reveal that the titular character is a Cold War weapon, but it’s only slightly dated beyond the technology shown. This movie could easily be remade again, and I’ve read that’s happening, but I don’t think anything more can be gained by doing that. In fact, I’m kind of horrified by the thought of a CGI blob. The practical effects in this movie make it cheesy and fun, and that’s what a good 80s horror movie is about: Taking the cheesy and fun and killing you with it.

So, you’re thinking the monster is a little ridiculous. On the surface (pun intended), I suppose it is. But the movie does a fine job of getting you past the ridiculous factor, and, in some cases, cheering for it. You want to see get through the phone booth or drop from a ceiling.

The story-telling is generic at best, and does present a rather formulaic experience. But I can forgive it that, because it does such a great job with the formula. It isn’t meant to be anything more than it is, and I have to respect that.

Without giving anything away, the ending provides a Twilight Zone-esque experience that for today’s cinema-going audience would assure us a sequel. But, just like Nedry’s missing dinosaur egg-holding shaving cream can, that nod to something more sinister down the road was left unchecked. And I applaud that, whether it was by design or by accident.

I don’t do a star system, or two thumbs up, or some other grading scale. But, if I did, I’d give this movie a “Rad” on a scale of 80s lingo.

The Outsider, Pickman's Model, and The Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

This is where I lose friends and acquaintances. This is where I lose the last bits of respect anybody might still have for my opinions. This is where I commit the most heinous of all literary crimes: Critique H.P. Lovecraft.

I will admit that I’ve attempted a few times to read his works, yet rarely got past the first page. This assignment forced me to soldier beyond the opening lines and into the heart of each work. And I’ll admit: I’m not impressed.

This entry will cover the three short stories in the same order as the blog title, followed by a brief overview of his writing style in general. Overall, I tried to keep in mind that these stories are nearly a century old, and were most likely the progenitors of many of the tropes that seem common place today.

The Outsider

I'm... I'm beautiful!

This story was… simple. Yet difficult to explain. We see the story through the monster’s eyes (is he a mummy, zombie, or something else?) By the end of the book the creature is described as something that is most likely a dead thing. And apparently very adept at journaling. It’s a first-person romp about a creature rising from the grave and all it wants to do is see what the party’s all about. Of course, he/it doesn’t know he/it is a horrible-looking creature because he/it has never seen a mirror… until the end. I hated the end because it insulted my intelligence. Lovecraft felt he needed to spell it out for me, even though I long ago used my context clues to figure it all out. But, hey, simpler times I suppose.

But the ending isn’t what’s important. It’s the beginning. At least to a writer, it should be the important part because Lovecraft does a good job of explaining what it might be like to be dead (or something), and raises a few good questions about the afterlife. The key question he poses through this story is: do we remember our lives after we’re dead, or are our memories completely wiped and we just exist? That’s how our character begins. He just exists, with no memory of how he exists or how he survived as long as he has without being taught or taken care of. It raises interesting philosophical questions.

But beyond that it’s just a short story, one that I imagine he wrote as a tangent from other, longer works.

"I call it, "Bowl of Fruit on a Midsummer Morning."

Pickman’s Model

This is my favorite of the trio. Again, written in first person as a story one character is telling another, this story is less about the “twist” ending, and more about the narrative journey. It’s well done as we see our protagonist quickly and consistency work himself into a fervor as he recounts why he no longer sees a certain artist (the titular Richard Upton Pickman). I was hooked from the first page (perhaps if I’d tried to read this story first instead of one of his others, I’d have read more Lovecraft before this assignment), wanting—no, needing—the answer as to what was in the artist’s cellar. Lovecraft also did a great job of putting me in Boston and provided a great guide for my trip.

Again, the twist ending wasn’t amazing, though I suspect it was considered fresh at the time.

The Call of Cthulhu

Those Seaquest: DSV brats and their stupid dolphin

just can't leave well enough alone.

Oh, but I need to tread cautiously through this one.

I wasn’t a fan.

So much for treading softly.

But hear me out, please. The narrative: great. The plot: awesome. The end: meh, but still okay.

It was the beginning that took me out of the story and never let me get back into it.

I read this one first, seeing as it’s the classic Lovecraft that all should know and love. After a couple false starts as I tried to put myself in the mood to get through early 20^th century prose, I finally come across this:

                “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things – in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain.”

And then—get this—he pieces it all together for us! He didn’t just supply a link, he forged the whole damn chain! I’m reading along and all I can think is that there’s got to be something that happens at the end to cause this manuscript to be lost to all of time. Perhaps it ends up in R’lyeh? Maybe he just set it on fire. I could have let him get away with that instead of how it ended up: in a tin box, which he admits an executor may see should he die! “Oh, I hope nobody figures this out like I did, so I’m going to put this in a box of other mysterious items that nobody would ever be interested in.”

It reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons where Bart goes to play at Ralph Wiggum’s house. His dad, the police chief, catches them playing in a closet and asks, “What is so fascinating about my Forbidden Closet of Mystery?”

What is so fascinating about the Forbidden Tin Box of Mystery?

Beyond that, it was a fun read when I could focus. It’s a mish-mash of found papers, word-of-mouth tales, and old-fashioned detective work. Lovecraft creates such a vivid image of Cthulhu, the Old Ones and the places they dwell that it is no wonder his works survive today and have taken on “cult” status (see what I did there?).

Overall Impressions

H.P. Lovecraft was a gifted literary writer. I believe his work transcends traditional genre fiction not just because of his vocabulary, but how he weaves his work together. Of the three stories I read, I recall scant—if any—usage of dialogue. I flipped through a collection of his works and found very little usage of dialogue throughout. So, even though his stories are told from a variety of first-person characters, It appears to always be told in the same voice, and I would believe it to be his own. That’s not necessarily bad, but I can see how Lovecraft as a person is more well-known than his works. I’ll continue to read him since I have so many of his stories in the myriad collections I’ve downloaded/bought, and I will come back and revise this paragraph if my feelings change.

Lastly, in each story there comes a point where the “horror is beyond description” (paraphrased). That just seems lazy to me. You can always try to describe something. Each time I read that, a gaping hole opened in the universe he created. It made me sad because I so wanted to see what the protagonist was seeing.

*I’ve read a few other critiques of his work following my writing of this, and found I wasn’t the only person who took issue with his “beyond description” descriptions. Maybe I won’t be keel-hauled for this after all…

Godzilla (2014)

 It's almost exactly like this

Directed by Gareth Edwards

Starring Malcolm’s Dad, the Sane Olsen Sister and Kick-Ass

I just don’t know.

I mean, the movie was a big deal, people seemed to genuinely enjoy it, and it received good reviews. It has everything I love in a movie: big, flashy special effects… and… and…

The message of Godzilla is clear: don’t mess with nuclear power. Got it. That’s been the message since the first Toho film released in 1954. I didn’t feel as hit over the head with that message in this film, and I’m okay with that. For the most part, the world safely operates its nuclear power plants on a day-to-day basis. Except for Fukushima in 2011, there have been only a handful of core melt events since the advent of nuclear power.

I found the script to be disjointed, and it felt like a slipshod product by an industry working too quickly to capitalize on the Fukushima event and the resurgence of kaiju films (for some reason, Pacific Rim also received good reviews). I can almost chock that up to bad timing, as the work began on the script in 2010, but it’s hard to ignore the similarities.

The film raised a lot of questions it only answered in passing, such as why they’ve allowed a giant nuclear-powered parasite (the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, or MUTO) to feed on the ruins of the power plant it destroyed 15 years earlier. It’s like when you invite your socially awkward friend over to a party and they double-dip in the salsa:

“Oh, hey, that’s cool, you just destroyed our power plant… yeah, you can eat the rest.”

Then there’s our hero. He’s a Navy EOD tech. I’m in the Navy, so this is very nice to see. Go Navy! Beat MUTO!

Except, it doesn’t make any sense. He is not the only EOD tech in the word. He doesn’t have any bomb de-arming superpowers. Wait… why’s he going to Japan again? Oh, yeah, his dad’s in jail for trespassing in the same quarantine zone that used to be the salsa everybody could eat, but now it’s MUTO’s. He used to run that salsa. His wife died in that salsa. He wants to get some information out of his old house (and rescue some photos).

So, our hero gets home to San Francisco (there's no Navy base in San Francisco, so I'm a little lost there) from deployment and immediately leaves to go rescue his dad from Japanese prison.

Okay, fuck that. You haven’t seen your family in how long, and you’re running off to get your estranged dad out of Japanese jail? It’s Japanese jail! He’s got it better than you did on your whole deployment!

But he leaves and gets separated from his family again. Later, when the fleshy Megazords begin to work their way toward San Francisco… he tells her to WAIT FOR HIM!

Wait, what? No.

No no no no no.

No.

They evacuate the city but she refused to go--because, you know, he said he'd BRB--and of course it gets ugly.

Because he said he’d find her.

You know where else you can find her? Sacramento!

I wanted to enjoy this movie, and I was willing to look past a lot of the confusing action scenes (confusing because they were just so big of a scale… like all the Transformers movies), but I threw my hands up in the air in frustration when we got to the train scene. No reason in particular, I just hate train sequences. They’re all the same. Rushing through cars, jumping over couplings, falling from them and rolling violently through the dark. I’ve seen it.

I just… I just didn’t like it. I feel betrayed a little. Was it better than the 1998 version? Yeah, probably. Was it a good movie? No. Not even a little. At least not for me.

I’m not a kaiju fan. Not for any real reason than it just doesn’t interest me. They should be more terrifying than they are. I imagine if I heard of a giant lizard shooting radioactive fire out of his mouth attacking San Francisco, I’d feel some legitimate concern if not outright horror. But the idea in a movie isn’t scary for me. It feels too fake, too impossible.

Give me a Godzilla that’s possible. I think a smaller Godzilla is a good place to start. Make him the size of the Geico gecko. Then multiply him. Thousands of gecko-sized Godzillas melting ankles is kinda scary to me.

And give him a British accent. Every villain or gecko should have a British accent.

Snow by Ronald Malfi

It’s always great to come across a new monster, one that makes you afraid of the familiar. Such as the dark or museums or black lagoons. In Malfi’s Snow, the monsters take that most beautiful of sights—lightly falling snow—and turns it into a nightmare.

Looking at the cover and reading the description, you might think it’s a book about creatures who take advantage of heavy snowfalls like blizzards and storms to stalk their prey. But you’d be wrong (it’s okay, it happens to me a lot). In Snow, the monsters are just that: the snow. And it doesn’t matter if it’s stormy snow or winter wonderland snow, they’re going to cut you open and climb inside, and walk you around like Krang.

Unfortunately, the story Malfi tells is all too familiar: stranded traveler in a strange town holes up with an unlikely gang of survivors and systematically gets them all killed. That’s right, look at that trope: Our heroes inevitably get a whole lot of people killed in their attempts at escape or rally support. But I digress.

With Snow, we see our hero, Todd Curry, trying desperately to get a flight out of O’Hare to visit his son and ex-wife for Christmas. Todd has a checkered past, with his gambling a driving force for his wife to leave him and take his son. But, he’s changed now and he’s ready to make amends. He’s so desperate, in fact, to see his son that he decides to drive from Chicago to Des Moines in a snow storm. At night. With strangers.

Without giving the entire plot away, I will say that he meets up with foes both human and not, and does his best to survive. He does a lot to keep other people safe, but in the end, he also gets a few people killed (not directly, but indirectly—like those kids that were doing just fine by themselves in a church until they rescued him and his female cohort).

Malfi is a great popular fiction writer. He doesn’t introduce any new ideas or fresh characters, but he takes what he knows and weaves a great little story. It’s a quick, read, too. Some of that has to do with page count, but I really feel it was Malfi’s writing. He drops us smack dab in the middle of the action in an arguably pointless prologue (we get the backstory again later), before he pulls back to introduce a few characters, and then drops us back in and never lets up. There is no lull time in this book. It’s the literary equivalent to a Michael Bay movie. (Okay, I just re-read that last sentence, and I think it’s a little too much.)

Let’s talk about gore. There’s a lot of it in here. It’s been awhile since I’ve read an overtly gory book. I haven’t been avoiding them, but I’ve gravitated to more thriller than horror lately. But here’s the deal: Malfi’s gore is there for a reason—to a point. Each blood splatter and length of intestine is there to paint a picture. Except when it comes to the description of the snow creatures entering the body. He describes it in detail. Every. Time. It got redundant and probably added about 10 pages to the book that didn’t need to be there.

Snow is very similar to The Mist. I mean, strange weather phenomenon leads to unseen horrors and anybody caught outside was almost certainly going to be turned inside out or dismembered. I’ll give Malfi this, though: his ending is far less ambiguous than King’s novella (and far less what-the-fuck?-y than the movie).

I didn’t get a chance to read this book in the snow, and perhaps that would have added to its -ahem- chill factor, but it was a solid novel with decent characters (even if they felt forced from time to time, as with Shawna’s back story). Malfi handles the tension well, but there were a few instances where he pulled too tightly and it eventually broke. Unfortunately, one of those times is in the climax with a character who we thought was dead and stopped caring about (hey, sometimes you gotta move on), makes an appearance just in time.

Snow used a simple plot and recycled characters and gave us a solid read. That proves to me that story-telling is more important than plot. I’ve read this story a hundred times under different names by different writers, but I still saw this one through. Why? Because of the story-telling.

The Thing, directed by John Carpenter

No, not this The Thing

The Thing (1982)

Directed by John Carpenter

Starring Kurt Russell

The Thing. What can I say, except I really wanted to love this film. I really wanted to like this film. I really wanted to appreciate this film.

One out of three ain’t bad, I guess. I didn’t love or like the film, but I can appreciate it.

I appreciated the premise and the special effects, but the storytelling and plot didn’t work for me. From the too-long, plot hole-filled opening sequence to the too-short, plot-hole filled finale, I spent more time being mad at the movie for existing and trying my damnedest to stay awake during the expansive lulls in the story.

Let’s talk about plot holes. The movie opens with a helicopter-borne dog hunt. That’s fine, I suppose. I know I’ll learn why this guy’s shooting at a dog soon enough. But it’s about a ten-minute sequence and when they finally land the hunter turns out to be Benny Hill and blows up his own helicopter. Then he points a gun at a group of people, doesn’t say a word, and gets shot in the head. I’m pretty sure if I were chasing an alien dog, I’d be screaming something like, “Hey, that’s an alien dog! Stop him!”

This The Thing

So, that set the tone, and I tried so hard to get past that. But I hate movies dealing with paranoia. Especially when that paranoia is about who’s the secret alien. It almost always turns into two hours of, “Where were you?” and “How do I know you’re not the alien?” or “I’ve developed a test that will definitively identify the monster, though I have no way to test my hypothesis or—ahhhhhhhh! I’m dead now.”

Where was I? Oh, plot holes. There was a lot of fire, but nothing burned down. Not sure if we could classify that as a plot hole, but it was certainly annoying. Especially with all that dynamite laying around.

And there was plenty of other stuff. It was a lot of watching Kurt Russell sulking interspersed with gross-out special effects.

Okay, let’s talk about the special effects, because those were the high point of the movie. They were fantastic, if sometimes cheesy, and were executed seamlessly with the action. There was a period in the late eighties and nineties where the special effects were laid over the film in post-production, and they never came off right. The Thing was laden with practical effects and animatronics that gave the movie a realistic feel. Sometimes it was cartoonish, like when we watch a belly bite the arms off a doctor while he’s using defibrillators, but for the most part they were extremely well executed.

The alien itself is the source of the biggest plot hole for me. It’s a creature that kills and mimics. It seems to be able to take on its knowledge, which leads me to believe it’s not only sentient but also intelligent. So why, oh why, is this creature whose survival depends on his stealthy take-over of all the humans continuously expose itself? The biggest point of contention for me was when it was in dog form. It was placed in a kennel with the other dogs, and instead of biding its time until it could be alone with a human, it

immediately attacks all the dogs and exposes itself.

It does that several times throughout the movie, and it got annoying quick.

From a story standpoint, I don’t feel there was any great character arc from our survivors. They didn’t grow, but instead finally just settled down at the end.

This was my disjointed review of the film, because the film itself is disjointed. John Carpenter didn’t do a bad job, but the premise could have resulted in a much stronger film.

An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis

Directed by John Landis

Starring David Naughton and Jenny Agutter

 An American Werewolf in London is one of those films that proves that not only can comedy co-exist with horror, it’s nearly required. They really are two sides of the same coin, and without one to contrast with the other, the piece is going to fall flat. We see an example of that in Night of the Living Dead, which is as humorless as the British monarchy.

Werewolf gives us a good mix of horror along with the comedy that director John Landis is known for. It isn’t necessarily a fresh take on the story, but Landis and company do such a great job in the story-telling that it is now one of my favorite werewolf movies. What’s great about it is that it doesn’t rely on one element over the other. It is both funny and frightening in equal measure.

A lot of the humor rides on the delivery of the movies three stars: David Naughon, Jenny Agutter and Griffin Dunne. Agutter doesn’t necessarily deliver funny lines, but her role as the straight man, er, woman for Naughton’s David character goes a long way.

I think the real star of the movie is Jim Baker’s special effects. The practical effects used in David’s wolf transformations could still seem fresh by today’s standards with slightly more creative cinematography and post production. His graduated rotting effects for Dunne’s Jack character aren’t just great, but great fun.  I will not, however, that part of the fun is seeing how quickly he rots. Three weeks after the attack and the wounds look fresh. Over the next two-three days he rots further. I don’t think it’s necessarily a goof, so much as a Landis wanting to get gross in an adult theater.

My biggest qualm with the entire movie is the final scene. We went on this great journey with David and Nurse Price (Agutter), but we get no payoff. There’s no happily ever after or anything that could lead us to believe the story may continue in another way. There isn’t even a long stand-off to allow the tension to build.

But it’s the scenes leading up to the finale that make this film above par. Sure, we get some internal shots of an adult theater, in which nobody bats an eye when David starts groaning and grunting as he transforms. We know why, wink!

Maybe because it was brought to us by the same person who brought us Animal House, but I find it hard to believe that a nurse, albeit a British nurse, would bring home a patient. Especially one who acted as odd as David. He gave her no reason to trust him, and she seemed way too willing to accept his crazy rantings. But that’s okay, because it’s a movie. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just entertaining.

And I was greatly entertained by the film, having watched it at 30,000 feet while on a flight from Fargo, ND. I had a choice between that or watching another Marvel movie, and I’m glad I went with An American Werewolf in London. Not just because I got some homework done, but because it is a genuinely good film with good dialogue and great special effects.

Alien, directed by Ridley Scott

Alien (1979) -- The second best thing to happen that year.

In 1979, something amazing happened. It was unprecedented and was a gift to the entire world. People have applauded the stroke of creative genius that was given the planet that year, and it has only gotten better with age. I’m talking about, of course, me.

Oh, wait, something else happened in 1979 besides my birth?

Okay, we’ll talk about Ridley Scott’s seminal hit Alien. It was The Terminator before The Terminator, in that the sequel was better was the original, but was good enough to spawn one.

The movie provides some groundbreaking special effects, and cinematography and story-telling on par with Kubrick, but in a sweaty, face-hugging, chest-bursting kind of way. The story was good, the acting was well executed, and the script was admirable. But what made this film the classic it is, is the monster.

 Aliens to that point were, for the most part, just like us, bipedal and intelligent. Alien upped the ante by showing us an alien that was driven by instinct with all a host of evolutionary traits that make it more menacing than any animal on Earth.

The titular character is actually four different “monsters” throughout the film. We first see it as a large egg. At this point of the film, we are already dealing with unknowns: An mysterious distress signal, a strange world, a monstrous ship. When we come across the eggs they represent a code without a cypher: Where did they come from? What is in them? We know they’re dangerous because the look scary. We know something horrible is going to happen. We just don’t know what.

And then it happens. We see our second iteration of the monster when it bursts from the egg and attaches itself to one of our heroes’ face. Now it’s a little scarier, not because we can see the monster, but because we don’t know what it’s doing. The attack was fast, there was no tension. The tension is in learning about the creature, and waiting to see what it does. In their attempts to remove it, they learn they know even less about it than they thought. It bleeds acid, a fantastic evolutionary defense mechanism. So they wait to see what happens. Now we’re scared because this creature seems so primitive, yet so advanced. And it’s feeding off one of our characters.

Then it lets go. Whew!

But we’re smart and that know it would be a really short movie having the alien just let go and die right there. Something else must be amiss.

So we wait to see what that is, the already heightened tension only gaining more ground. Just when we see the crew begin to relax (our former patient one of them) and have a nice meal, part three of the alien appears.

This time it claims its victim, bursting through the Kane’s chest (we all know the scene, and probably enjoyed the parodied version of it in Space Balls), and disappearing into the bowels of the ship.

And now the genius of the monster’s anatomy and physiology begins to make sense. It’s like a biblical version of Russian nesting dolls. Eggs beget face-huggers beget chest-bursters beget the Alien. So complicated it’s simple.

So now we have the Alien (with a capital A) running around the ship and a group of miners with heavy artillery that they can’t use. Why? Because shooting, cutting or otherwise knicking the Alien will result in its corrosive acid blood eating through the hull and killing them all. So the only recourse is to attempt some space-aged Wile E. Coyote-type traps as they get picked off one by one.

By now we see another trait the Alien has: a rigid tongue that has its own mouth. I’m not sure what the evolutionary value to that is (the better to taste and eat you with, I presume), but it is a creative twist. Because by this time we’ve seen the Alien in all its glory, and not much is left to the imagination. By now, the tension is less about what the threat is, and more about how to deal with it. But I think that’s what separates this movie from its superior sequel: It’s a horror movie, whereas Aliens is a science-fiction flick.

There’s a pretty cool twist that I won’t give away, but it’s a chance for Scott to reimagine what the insides of an android would look like.

This movie provides us with a great example of how to create a new and relevant monster. Forty years on, and this creature holds a spot among the pantheon of greats because it’s creative. More importantly, it’s terrifying because it’s a monster that makes sense for its environment.

Night of the Living Dead, Directed by George A. Romero

The first five minutes of the film features the famous line, “They’re coming to get your, Barbra!”

They didn’t come fast enough.

I really, really wanted to like the movie. I took deep breaths and told myself that even though the movie is nearly 50 years old, it’s a classic for a reason. Even if it’s because it’s so bad it’s good. I also told myself not be a snob about it being in black and white. Plenty of great films are in black and white. Miracle on 34^th Street. Clerks. The first fifteen minutes of The Wizard of Oz. B movies rarely take advantage of the latest in film-making technology, and the same holds true in Romero’s Living Dead.

I know I’m going against the grain, but there are multiple reasons it took me nearly a week to get through, in 15 minute increments.

1.)    Awful acting. The best actor in the movie died in the first ten minutes. He issued his warning (albeit, it was in regards to something altogether different) and then got into the lamest fight ever with a zombie, er, ghoul. We are then subjected to a litany of bad actors who yell for no reason.

2.)    Bad script. The concept was good. No, great. You take Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and swap out vampires with zombies, er, ghouls and you get Night of the Living Dead. Romero admitted it was a direct rip-off of the book in an interview with Cinemablend in 2008. The dialogue, on the other hand, was just terrible. From Ben’s over-the-top berating of everybody in his immediate area (and he’s the hero?), to Barbra’s catatonic presence throughout. And things escalate quickly. A disagreement over where to hole up quickly devolves into a gun grab. There’s no opportunity to develop the characters. None. There are no arcs, no moments of redemption. No heroics. We literally sit down and just watch people die for 95 minutes.

3.)    Abhorrent cinematography. I’ve seen B movies that understand its budgetary limitations and attempts to compensate with creative camera angles or increased thematics. That doesn’t happen here. The filmmakers do little more than show up with a camera. Yes, there are a couple of attempts to get “artistic,” but they feel forced. They were using B&W film, yes, but instead of using it for effective contrast like what we see in Psycho, we just get a swirling mass of grey, dark grey, and black.

4.)    Where are the scares? I didn’t feel any build-up. There was one attempt at a jump scare. We are given gore for gore’s sake, and I guess that was what passed as scary in the late 60s. No, that’s not the case. Rosemary’s Baby came out the same year and had all the elements Living Dead lacked.

5.)    “They’re coming to get you, Ben.” The last five minutes of the movie is a search party under no threat as it systematically dispatches remaining zombies, er, ghouls. One might think, “well that’s just fine!” Well it wasn’t fine. Ask Ben.

It was just such an abrupt end. It didn’t leave anything to the imagination of the viewer. It didn’t hint at a world-ending apocalypse. It was really just a single night of living dead.

So what would I have done differently? I think I would have made the Barbra character stronger. Even for the era this was made she was too weak. It was the sixties! Women’s lib and such! And the best we could get from Barbra was a half-hearted attempt to hold one end of a board in place for Ben as he nailed it over it a door.

I would have beefed up the dialogue a bit, too. Over the course of the entire movie there were really only two dialogues going on, and one was a monologue due to Barb’s silence. The other was whether to go to the basement or stay upstairs. Sure, there were moments that took us away from those two conversations, but the film always went back to them.

Overall, I didn’t find this movie as enjoyable as I should have. It makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with me as a horror writer. Were my expectations too high? Or do I just not know a good film when I see it?

World War Z by Max Brooks

World War Z was one of those break-out hits like The Hunger Games, The Martian, and The Da Vinci Code. But what sets this book apart from those three (other than not starting with the article “The”) is that it is not follow the traditional narrative we see in most books. There isn’t a beginning, middle and end in the sense that we’re all used to when picking up a book.

Rather, it is made up of an end with a prologue.  

I read the first few chapters of the book, like I do with all books. I pick it up, I turn the pages, I follow the story.

I hated it.

I was strapped in and braced for a rip-roaring ride through the zombie apocalypse. I saw the movie, and though I knew it wasn’t exactly faithful to the book, I was hoping for so much more. Where was the instant classic that so many people love? In fact, after this book, I hated the movie more because it could have been so much more. It could have been as great as the book I read.

Wait, what? How could I simultaneously hate it and love? Easy.

I hated reading it, but loved listening to the audio book.

I have never listened to an audio book for more than a chapter or two. I hate being read to. I hate listening to books as much as I hate reading movies. Call it an aversion to media-based synesthesia.

This past week a made a marathon move across the country. Some days I was driving fourteen hours or more. Of course, that amount of time on the road left little extra for curling up with a book. I decided that a book called World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War would best be told, well, orally.

And it was. What was at first a pile of rejected journalist’s notes became a cohesive story that could have been the isolated audio track of a History Channel documentary. The audio book employed some pretty well-known names in the entertainment industry, and it was fun hearing them take on the roles of survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

I listened to the entire book in one shot, after reading only the first section (Warnings) a few weeks prior. I found it far more engaging than what was on the radio in Mississippi on a Sunday (although, there were plenty of horror stories there). I found it more engaging that my travel mix. I found it so engaging, that I drove longer than I should have so I wouldn’t have to wait until the next day to listen to it some more.  I listened to it until I made it to my destination and then I sat in my car and listened to the final Goodbyes.

It was riveting as an audio book.

Brooks does a fantastic job weaving the science, horror and political machinations of a zombie apocalypse into a cohesive novel. Telling the story in any of those three formats would be good, but he goes or great and gets as close as possible with the format he chose.

Because as great as the book is in its format as an audio book, I think I would have enjoyed it more in a more traditional format if I was reading it.

I would almost venture to say Brooks took the easy way out by skirting the essential elements of a good fiction novel and instead relying nearly solely on dialogue. He gives brief descriptions in that dialogue, but for the most part it’s just folks talking. He organizes the “interviews” in a beginning, middle, and end, but for the most parts it’s just folks talking.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant technique and there are some haunting passages. My favorites were Air Force Colonel Christina Eliopolis and Todd Wainio. Not sure if it’s my military background or that they were just the most action-packed, but I really found myself drawn to these characters. Eliopolis had a somewhat cliché story, but it was still haunting—when acted out in audio book. I went back and re-read that section and found it less satisfying in print.

Brooks is the son of comedian Mel Brooks and wrote for a while on SNL. He’s found himself a niche in the zombie genre with a couple of hits, including WWZ and The Zombie Survival Guide. I’m glad I discovered the virtues of the audio book, because I don’t think I would have liked this as much as I did if I’d read it in its entirety.

The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker

There are days I feel exactly like Jack Polo, the protagonist of this piece. We’ve all had those days where nothing goes right: the key doesn’t work, the blinds won’t close properly, the cat explodes all over the living room. After reading Clive Barker’s short story, I can now imagine the worse every time I lock myself out of a hotel room.  But is it really the worse, or did he give me the ability to see things are sometimes just out of my control?

The story is about a minor demon called Yattering who is sent to harass the mild-mannered son of a woman who reneged on a contract with Beelzebub. That contract, for whatever reason, was to result in the woman’s soul being turned over to Hell. Instead, she confessed her sins at death and ascended to Heaven. Jack is to be payment for this broken contract. To get his soul, the minor demon must cause him to go crazy.

I’m now convinced my ex-wife is a Yattering.

But Jack is privy to the plan and never allows himself to lose his temper or allow his thoughts to settle too long on the fact he’s being pursued. In fact, he has a plan to win the day.

Barker is known for his dark works of fiction, including The Hellbound Heart mentioned in an earlier blog post, as well as Imajica and The Great and Secret Show. But The Yattering and Jack is one of his rare jaunts into lighter, more comedic fare.

Where the book stumbles the most is the almost blasé way in which Barker reveals that Jack is in on the secret. The first third of the story is told from the POV of the demon, and so much times passes that I stop suspecting I might get it from Polo’s point of view. Then suddenly I get insight into Polo in an abrupt, head-hopping transitional paragraph. I say abrupt because Barker’s style is so fluid that anything can happen at any moment, and the reader needs to be prepared. Reading Barker is an act of conscientious reading, in which the text should be studied. He is not a lazy Saturday evening read.

There’s nothing spectacular about this story, though it was featured as an episode of Tales from the Darkside. Because we spend so much time with the Yattering at the beginning, it’s hard to see any kind of character arc from our protagonist. We have to assume that he’s been playing the game a long time, and he finally gets a chance at a final showdown. The biggest arc is for the antagonist, who, in a fit of rage, goes a little mad and makes a couple of clumsy mistakes the way he’d hoped Jack would.

The ending was only mildly satisfying, and leaves open the possibility that perhaps Jack didn’t win. Looking back, the reader may wonder if all the events had been foreseen by the Yattering’s masters and they got exactly what they wanted. It’s a classic case of short-story comeuppance that can be satisfying and infuriating in equal measure.

Clive Barker was a force in the 80s, and has given us plenty of classics. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is just an adaptation of some folktale or fairy tale he’d heard as a kid.

Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King

Got your nose!

Stephen King likes to write. That’s about as obvious a statement one can make when referring to a man who has written more than 50 novels since the 1970s.

But that’s not what I’m really talking about. I mean, Stephen King likes to write. This is why he’s given us massive books like The Stand, It, and Under the Dome. When Stephen King begins a book, it has to feel like climbing Everest to him. Most writers are satisfied cresting the 300-page limit, but King consistently produces novels more than 500 pages long. He likes to write stories, page count be damned. But between all those novels, there are dozens of novellas and countless short stories.

Cycle of the Werewolf is a strange amalgam of both novel-writing stamina and his short story acumen. On the surface, it looks almost like a slick children’s book: big print, glossy pages… lots of pictures. But it’s the content that proves it’s pure King. He weaves a single story across several (12) short stories to bring the reader to a classic conclusion to a classic monster story.

Basically, the book is a “year in the life of” tale of a small town werewolf, as told from the point of view of its victims. We don’t learn who the werewolf is until late in the book, but it’s really less about who the wolf is and more about a small town coping with a monster in their midst. Of course, the town is divided into two camps on what to believe. There’s your average folks who believe it’s an animal or some crazy person, and then there are the town’s fringe citizens who know from the start what they’re dealing with.

It’s a classic werewolf story with classic characters and a classic end. There are even silver bullets. If you haven’t read this book, you may have seen the movie based on it, Silver Bullet. The movie starred ’80s favorite Cory Haim as the book’s protagonist, Marty Coslaw.

Yes, even though it’s twelve short stories, there’s still a protagonist. Here’s where I’ll give King credit: Even though it’s a classic story, the hero is not a classical one. Marty Coslaw is only ten years old and wheelchair-bound. After more than 40 years in the business, many of King’s books have a child or disabled person (or, in this case and a few others), a disabled child as the story’s protagonist. This isn’t King exploiting special needs, it’s King honoring them and treating them like everybody else.

Look, Cycle of the Werewolf is an old story with old characters, but it’s still engaging. How does he do that? It’s an amazing talent, and I would love to challenge him to write a book about paint drying, because I know he could do it and it would be horrifying.

The story, for reeking of so much sameness as other takes on the tale, was well done. Even with its non-traditional format, there was a cohesive narrative that worked and a satisfying character arc for our protagonist. King admits the lunar cycle was jimmied to fit the narrative, and he doesn’t apologize for it. It’s a minor thing, and really doesn’t detract from the story.

So what’s the deeper meaning behind this book? What is King trying to saaaay? I dunno. Seems like he just had some fun writing a neat little homage to the classics. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

From the terrifying mind behind The Hellbound Heart (you might know it by its movie title, Hellraiser) comes one of his short story masterpieces…Rawhide Rex.

But is it a masterpiece?

For two pages I read, enthralled by Barker’s easy-to-read, yet substantially artistic prose. I felt I was reading one of the best short stories I’ve ever laid eyes upon. It was amazing, and for a brief ten minutes I felt as if the short story rapture was upon me. Oh, glorious day!

Then Rawhide Rex himself appeared.

I’ll break this blog post into two parts: the good and the bad. In lesser hands, there would be ugly, but Barker is a master of the macabre on par with the greats. Hell, he is one of the greats. He can get away with breaking the rules because he knows what the rules are and doesn’t give a fuck.

The good: This short is full of fantastic, easy to follow prose. There’s nary a place where I stumbled over the text, even though he writes in a literary style. It’s a watered-down literary style that invites the common reader in and rewards them with popular fiction story-telling with smarty-guy words and phrasing. He doesn’t make the reader feel silly about reading about a monster eating a child.

His messages and meanings float to the surface easily enough, and at the hands of an inferior writer would almost be spoon feeding. Religion, parenthood, greed, hubris… they all play prominent roles in this story. But, oddly enough, so does false idolization, loneliness, selflessness and modesty. I was in awe of the way Barker juggled all these themes while telling the story of a centuries-old child-eating beast. Without giving a blow-by-blow synopsis of the story, imagine the Lorax as nine-foot tall, immortal, murderous animal with a hatred toward man but a love of sweet, sweet baby meat… who’s into watersports (not jet ski watersports, the other kind).

The bad: So. Much. Head hopping. As students of popular fiction, we’re told this is bad. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but generally it’s believed it’s difficult for the reader to follow who’s thinking what. Barker takes us from the terror of being chased to the thrill of the hunt in a single sentence. If I had read this without being enrolled in a writing popular fiction program, I may not have even noticed. But I am and I did.

There were also a lot of typos. This isn’t really against the writer in general, but it is about the book. Or books, to be more precise. Several books that were 1.) compiled into six short anthologies… at minimum that is two editing/publishing cycles, and 2.) were further compiled into two anthologies… at a minimum that’s three editing/publishing cycles. The typos should’ve been caught and dealt with far earlier. I can deal with them on a first edition, but c’mon now…

So, the bad was less about content and more about style. Let’s get to some general observances.

Rawhide Rex as a monster is fantastic. He’s properly scary but human-like. Think of a blood-thirsty sasquatch if my earlier description of him seems hard to digest. A blood-thirsty, warrior, immortal sasquatch with little knowledge of the modern world. He’s got an agenda that isn’t so much evil as it is evolutionarily sadistic. He’s just a monster that likes baby meat. He hates people like a wolf hates people: encroaching trespassers who have no right to play in the same arena as he.

I’m not saying he’s relatable. No. I found his methods stomach-turning and a little uncomfortable to read. I’m saying he isn’t a mindless monster like something from The Blob or The Mist. He’s just a thing trying to eat and rule over his land.

Like all short stories, the best parts come at the end. This ending featured an unlikely—and arguably, unlikeable—hero that the reader won’t see coming.

If I gave scores, I’d rate this short story some amount of stars out of an equal or greater amount stars (but closer to equal).

Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Everybody groaned. I could hear them, spread about the continental United States like Cold War sleeper agents. But instead of spies, they were students. Students of popular fiction. Of writing popular fiction. Of looking at what makes a book marketable and engaging (the two aren’t necessarily intertwined, as one would hope). The assignments had been handed out. The dice were cast.

One such die landed on Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground. A book about giant spiders. The premise alone was enough to draw out moans boredom and squeals of self-righteous indignation. I read the one-line quips on Facebook: “The shittiest book ever,” “It’s hard to find because it’s so awful,” “It was a hard one for me to get through.”

I added my own voice to the chorus after only a few pages, even so much as to decry why such a folly had been wrought against us by our class professor. I even debated throwing the book into a campfire just to take pictures and post about how awful it was and how awesome I was.

In the end, I abandoned my Fahrenheit 451 daydreams. And then it happened. I set aside my self-pity and engaged myself in the book. I surrendered to it.

It wasn’t terrible.

In the beginning, I hated the way Pinborough writes. But you know what? The “mistakes” I saw in her were mistakes I myself have been corrected on. Participial phrases, semicolons, poor characterization. I began to see myself in Pinborough, and draw parallels to my own writing. She’s a woman writing about a man. I’m a man writing a woman. She writes men horribly. I write women… subpar.

There’s nothing fantastic in this book. There are no earth-shattering insights or amazing characters. In fact, I’d argue the characters end the book as two-dimensional as they begin. None of them are extremely likeable, especially the protagonist. We’re introduced to this man who loves loves loves his wife. She’s the center of his universe, the light of his life, the apple in his eyes.

Within a week after his wife turns into a giant spider, he’s sleeping with a random woman who survived the arachnid apocalypse. And by the end, he’s running off with another rare woman.

No, I am not a fan of Matthew Edge.

I’m not really a fan of any of the characters in the book. They’re whiny or mean or paper thin. They are not characters that I, as a writer, would ever want to create. They were just there, created to provide eyes though which to tell a story. Near the end of the book, when there’s talk of other pockets of survivors, I so desperately wished the book had been written from any of their points of view.

Pinborough’s apocalypse unwinds too quickly. Not the spiders themselves, but the characters. They abandon hope too quickly and ride away from their nice, safe house the first day. They put themselves in danger for no solid reason except to move the story forward. It wasn’t natural, and it felt forced. As a reader, I don’t want to be forced to believe or feel something, I just want to experience it and let those emotions come naturally. As a writer, I want to do the same thing.

So why did I end up enjoying it?

It wasn’t pretentious. I didn’t have a grand message (except maybe don’t mess GMOs, but I think even that was a false belief held by the sole scientist in the story). I didn’t feel like what I was reading took any effort. It was, in short, a summer read. It took me nearly a month to read. In the meantime, I wrote a lot, read some other things, and just went about my life. But each time I picked it up, it was where I left off. I didn’t need to go back, or put myself in a “mood” to read it. It was simple.

The book’s cover has the following inscription: “Fans of Bentley Little, Richard Laymon and Dean Koontz will be pleased.”

The joke? That’s for an entirely different book! I’m a huge fan of Little and Laymon (my bookshelf will corroborate that), and I enjoy a little Koontz as much as the next person, but I saw no similarities to them in Breeding Ground. There was none of Koontz’s amazing characterization. None of Laymon’s animalistic over-sexualization (okay, there was one passage…) and I turned the book upside down and sideways and couldn’t find any of Little’s hyper-reality.

No, friends, Breeding Ground is not a great book. It’s barely a mediocre one. But, it’s a quick, unassuming read with a fun monster (the ones at the end are even worse!), that taught me a thing or two about myself and my writing.

There’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll pick it up. I’d hate to lose any more respect for somebody who has been lauded of late for her brilliant writing.