24 Hell

My Beautiful Wife sits through a lot of really bad movies with me (just click on “movies” under categories and you’ll find a lot of examples). I definitely owe her for that, and how I pay that debt is to watch the TV series 24 with her when the new season hits DVD, watching it in large concentrations. This is more than fair.

The snag is, I’m among the few people who really hates 24. The preposterous plots, improbable plans, etc. torques me off in a big way. I’m 22 hours into this year’s 24 Hell, and there have been a series of biological attacks, a near chemical spill, terrorists seizing the White House and holding the President hostage, and the use of the air traffic control system to cause planes to collide in mid-air. As with every season, any government or law enforcement agency is composed of at least 50% traitors and double agents. The main character has been infected with prions that are eating his brain, although it’s a certainty he will be healed, even if that’s impossible. One past season had an agent shot through the throat, severing his carotid artery. He had quick surgery, and was back in action after an hour or so.

So why am I whining about this here? Well, I’m certainly not going to whine about it to BW, as that would defeat the purpose of my sacrifice, and I love whining too much to let the opportunity slip by.
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I Get Letters (No Kidding)

Someone e-mailed me a question about the organization of my sidebar, so I thought I’d answer it here. As you can see, my “links” are divided into three categories: General Horror Links, Horror Writers, and Other Blogs of Note. Setting aside the clumsiness of this, the e-mailer pointed out that several of those listed under Other Blogs of Note (actually a majority, but who is counting) are themselves writers. Am I making a distinction between writers I think are good and those I don’t? No, absolutely not. The major reason I did it like that was being in a hurry to throw the site up, and then being too lazy to go back and fix it. I work for the government, after all, and it is tiring organizing the big Friday bonfires where we burn the leftover tax money for the week.

I’ve had a chance to at least glimpse at work by John Hornor Jacobs, Kent Gowran, C. Michael Cook, Erik Williams, Mark Justice, and Erik Smetana, and I can tell you they are writers to keep an eye on. Some very talented folks with as yet just a few publications under their belt, this is a group from which some of your favorite will come from in the years ahead. When it happens, remember I told you so. I still won’t have gotten around to fixing the site.
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Moonbane

“Why do werewolves howl at the moon?
Because that’s where they originally came from!”

That’s the tagline for Al Sarrantonio’s 1989 novel Moonbane. Out of print for some time, it has now been re-issued in an attractive hardcover from Cemetery Dance, featuring a cover by Alan M. Clark, and interior illustrations by Keith Minnion. In it, Sarrantonio takes one of the classic monster archetypes (the werewolf) and melds it with a classic from science fiction, in this case H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It is a delightful, fast-paced B-movie of a book.

Jason Blake is a poet (oddly enough, not starving) living in west Texas with his wife and son. Father and son are watching the Geminid meteor shower when the sky is set alight by many more meteors than expected, one of which falls to Earth nearby. Upon investigation, the younger Blake is bitten by an animal which crawls out of the meteor. This will be a tragic night for Jason Blake.

It seems years ago the Moon was home to a race of werewolves. When the Moon lost its atmosphere, the werewolves went into a state of suspended animation, waiting for more hospitable times. Volcanic eruptions have now sent some of these werewolves to Earth, where they are reborn and go on a killing rampage. Anyone bitten or scratched by one becomes a werewolf, also. The creatures kill and eat everyone they come across, leaving only a carefully arranged pile of bones behind.

Blake begins a long journey, accompanied by other stragglers he meets, to a distant military base. There, it is hoped, a solution lies that may keep mankind from being exterminated by the lunar invaders.

I’ve also been a sucker for a mixture of science fiction and horror, so I enjoyed the book a lot. There are a number of scientific inaccuracies that could be nitpicked, but to John’s surprise, I won’t. This is a very entertaining, quick-read of a book. If you’ve never read Moonbane, here’s your chance, and if you read and enjoyed it, this is an opportunity to own a hard-bound copy of a minor horror classic.
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Dig Me No Grave

Reading Steven Shrewsbury’s book Tormentor naturally got me to thinking about Robert E. Howard. My first exposure to Howard was not through his Conan stories, but rather through a comic book adaptation of his horror story “Dig Me No Grave” (I was creepy as a child, too), in the relaunched book Journey Into Mystery. I was delighted to find the story, adapted by Roy Thomas, Gil Kane and Tom Palmer, can be read online at the website The Horrors of It All. Click here to read it, and imagine yourself reading it as a pre-teen on a dark, rainy night and you’ll get my experience. I don’t recall anything about the two other stories in that comic book, but “Dig Me No Grave” has stuck with me ever since. Check out the rest of the website while you’re there, there’s lots of cool stuff.
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Laid To Rest

Robert Hall’s first movie, Lightning Bug, ran into controversy because of its marketing. Since Hall (and his company, Almost Human) is best known for visual effects/makeup in genre films, the movie was pushed as a horror film, and viewers expecting that were disappointed to learn it is mostly an autobiographical drama. His second movie, Laid To Rest, allows no ambiguity to what it is: an old-school slasher film.

A woman (Bobbie Sue Luther, whose character is unnamed but eventually is nicknamed Princess) wakes up in a coffin in a funeral home (!) with no memory of how she got there or even who she is. She quickly discovers she is being chased by a sadistic killer, who never speaks (he later communicates with her by text messages, so it’s a good thing he didn’t have access to her Facebook page) and wears a shiny chrome skull mask, hence his nickname, Chrome Skull. Princess understandably flees from Chrome Skull, and in doing so becomes a sort of slasher flick Typhoid Mary, because everyone she meets comes to a gory death. Helping damsels in distress worked out so much better in the old fairy tales. No one ever shoved a knife through Prince Charming’s face. The plot of the movie is pretty much Princess flees, Chrome Skull chases, Chrome Skull kills everybody.

Not that the simplicity of the plot is a big detriment. Laid To Rest is intended to be a gory slasher, and nothing more, and it achieves that goal, and does so with a style that makes it one of the better retro-Old School slashers, much better than the over-hyped Hatchet. The murders are suitably gory and over the top, which is to be expected given Hall’s background, and the cast does a good job. Due to Hall’s connections, there are some better-known actors in some of the small parts, such as Lena Headey and Johnathon Schaech.

A bit of quibble involving telephones: At the beginning of the movie, when Princess wakes up, she calls 911 for help on an old model landline phone, but doesn’t know where she is. The operator tells her to stay on the phone long enough to trace the call, but she walks away and pulls the receiver cord out of the phone, disconnecting it. First of all, while TV shows used to be full of attempts to keep someone on the line long enough for a trace, nowadays, it’s almost instantaneous*. Secondly, pulling the receiver cord out wouldn’t disconnect the phone, you have to push down the bar to do that.

These nit-picks aside, if you are a slasher movie fan, you’ll probably enjoy Laid To Rest.

* As a teenager, I worked in the summer in the switching room of the local phone company, where I learned how to trace a call manually (never had reason to do so), as well as the complicated procedure used to disconnect someone’s phone, i.e. sticking a toothpick in the connection. It would cost the customer a $75 re-connection fee to get me to pull the toothpick out.
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Tormentor

Author Steven L. Shrewsbury (Hawg, Thoroughbred) has long been compared to Robert E. Howard, who is best know for creating Conan the Barbarian, although he wrote in practically every paying field in the 20s and 30s. This comparison comes closer, in my opinion, in his new novel Tormentor, than any of his other work. Tormentor is the book Robert E. Howard would have written had he been born seventy years later.


Battlin’ John Kern is a former boxer, a one-time top contender. He gives up the ring after a man dies from his fists, and joins the Marines. After being wounded in a blast in Iraq, Kern begins seeing unworldly visions, which persist after he is sent to Germany. There, the visions lead him into a battle with a transsexual alchemist*, a group of necrophiliacs, and a cult dedicated to bringing a legendary torturer (the titular Tormentor) back from Hell to ravage the Earth. Kern is never one to back away from a fight, but he’ll face long (and weird) odds here.

There is also a story-within-the-story, an adventure of Shrewsbury’s barbarian creation, Erik Bedlam, a Conan-esque berserker with a shard of metal stuck in his skull. Bedlam stories are always a treat, and here you learn the ultimate fate of the character. The story is integral to the main plot, so it is not added just to make the book longer.

One of the best adjectives used to describe Howard’s work (though mostly out of use today) is “two-fisted”. It denotes a rugged action oriented approach to story-telling. I’m happy to say Shrewsbury’s work, including this novel is very two-fisted. Characters are direct, and the action sequences come along quickly. Battlin’ John Kern is a hero writ large, and his opponents are of the type seldom seen.

As always, Shrewsbury pulls no punches. The sex and violence is graphic, and if you occasionally have to pause in reading you Murder, She Wrote novel tie-in because it makes your heart race too much, his work is probably not for you. But anyone who appreciates a good story well told, and an adventuresome style rarely seen these days, should be reading Shrewsbury’s work, and should definitely pick up Tormentor. It is published by Lachesis Publishing, and may be ordered on line or wherever fine books are sold.

My 300th post on this site. Yay me. I need to get a real life.



* As a running gag on some message boards, I’ve teased Shrewsbury about scenes in his work where a male character suffers a traumatic loss of his genitals. In this book, Shrewsbury has reversed that trend, and added a penis to a woman, so I guess there is a type of cosmic balance at work here.
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Link: 10 Questions for Douglas Clegg

David Wilbanks has posted an interview with Douglas Clegg at dunderthome. Clegg is one of the better authors the genre has ever produced, so check it out. Ford Madox Ford, eh? That brings back memories.
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