Kevin Lucia's Blog, page 28

My Stuff: A Long Time Ago....

One of my treasured possessions (unfortunately, as you'll soon see, I didn't treat them that way) growing up was a series of limited edition, collectible STAR WARS glasses Burger King produced during the run of RETURN OF THE JEDI. They were possibly the first things I owned which could be considered collectibles, and therefore something of value past nostalgic or their "neat factor." Unfortunately as a kid, I didn't understand their worth, and it wasn't long before I managed to break both of them. At the time, I pretended it was no big deal when my parents mildly admonished me that I'd just broken something I couldn't replace, but inside, I felt a little twinge of loss, realizing they were right, and not knowing what to do with the idea that I HAD foolishly treated something of value poorly. Recently, in cleaning out some stuff at home, Dad presented me with these collectible glasses, which they had purchased back then and had wisely squirreled away for a time when I WOULD appreciate them. You can imagine how I felt, having this come full circle, that my parents had the foresight to buy extras, knowing ahead of time that, as a kid, I probably wouldn't understand the value (both actual and nostalgic) of those glasses. And, though we live in a culture in which you can buy specialty glasses at the local dollar store, it's neat to see Rey's glass next to Luke's, all these years later. I can only hope I'll have the wisdom to teach my kids to value such things, as my parents taught me. 

Horror 101 - "The Ghost and the Ghostly" and "The Monster and the Monstrous"

A double issue of Lamplight Magazine is live on Kindle today, featuring my continuing series of columns on the horror genre, "The Ghost and the  Ghostly" and "The Monster and the Monstrous." It's also on Smashwords, too.  Print, Kindle, Smashwords and Nook copies of Issue 1, featuring my first Horror 101 column "The House, the Gothic and the Bad Place" is available. An introduction to my series can be read free here:

http://apokrupha.com/2015/09/29/horror-101-introduction/

My Stuff: Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned In Universal Monster Picture Books

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I find it eternally intriguing that, even though I had very little concept of what the "horror" genre was as a kid, I was always drawn to the strange and fantastic. I loved the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark series,  original Scooby-Doo, I loved comic books, ghost stories, alternate dimensions, time travel, weird stories about real life unexplainable things, and The Hardy Boys which, believe it or not, I found several to be kinda creepy.
I also adored these Universal Monster books - again, having no understanding of what the Universal Monster Movies were, other than old black and white movies. Anyway, I read them all: the Frankenstein books, the Wolfman books, this Mummy book (found last year at the library's used book sale) and of course, Dracula.
They summarized the movies, with black and white stills from the film. I liked those pictures the best, but I must've read the stories over and over too, because when I flipped through The Mummy upon finding it last year, I recognized nearly every word immediately.
Funny, how I was always interested in this stuff, even before I knew what the "horror" genre was...

My Stuff: A Study in Pulp

Never seems to fail, when I decide to start a new blog series, life intervenes and said blog series disappears for about a week until I get my feet under me again. In any case, here's another installment of My Stuff, a detailing of all the miscellany crowding my "stuff" shelf, important to me and no one else...
Like many writers, I figure, I was a rabid reader growing up. I didn't read one genre in particular, I kinda wanted to read ALL THE THINGS. So, it was only a matter of time before the shelves of hardcover pulp novels in my great grandmother's trailer caught my eye. She knew of my love for reading, and she started giving me one novel every month, which turned into a novel a week, with the promise that, when she passed, I'd get the rest.
When she did pass they came into my possession, and they were marked by an amazing diversity. Classics such as Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Riders of the Purple Sage, a collection of Ellery Queen short stories, mixed in with forgettable titles such as The Nursing Home Murder and Crimson Ice, also along with several John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My father said my great grandmother went through a period in which she collected these book club editions indiscriminately, for no other reason than she wanted a collection a books. The romantic in me, of course, likes to think she was collecting them for her yet to be born great-grandson who would entertain fantasies of being a writer someday.
These books line the back of my "Stuff Shelf." I read them all, loved them, only remember a quarter of the plots, but they helped introduce me to weird and strange stories, and I hope to pass them on someday, myself.

Devourer of Souls Re-Release Freebies

Friday, April 1st is the re-release day for Devourer of Souls, a novella duet set in the small Adirondack town of Clifton Heights, New York. In celebration, as always, especially for folks who haven't yet visited the humble town of Clifton Heights, I offer you the following titles free on Kindle for the next three days. Also, I chat some today on the Crystal Lake blog about the inspiration for "Sophan," the first novella from Devourer of Souls.

Clifton Heights Tales:

Strange Days
The Way of Ah-Tzenul
The Gate and the Way
Bassler Road 
Way Station
The Sliding
A Brother's Keeper

Hiram Grange & The Chosen One
American Horror Cinema

My Stuff: Vintage Soda

Those of you following my Facebook no doubt learned of my mother's passing late Sunday night. I'm continuing my little blog series, however, because we know she's at peace and out of pain, and writing always makes one feel better, regardless the circumstances. So, without further ado....
I'm not sure where my love for old fashioned soda bottles came from. I was just always drawn to them, I guess. They represented another time and culture, a world very different from my own, yet still very much the same. Of course, my thoughts back then weren't so articulated. I just thought they were COOL.
When I was a kid, most of the soda bottles (because all soda was in glass back then, because soda bottled in glass TASTES BETTER), were plain, oblong things, but you could still buy old fashioned Coke and Pepsi bottles. My great grandmother always had one for us every time we visited, and again - I wish I'd saved more of those.
Luckily, by the time I was a senior, I discovered that the soda machine in the faculty room in school dispensed old school bottles of soda for a quarter. Thus, I often snuck into the faculty room (ready with an excuse about looking for a teacher to ask about a homework assignment), to not only grab myself a cheap soda, but also a cool looking bottle.
I find a lot of them alongside the road in my walls. Someday, I might even spend a little bit of money and try to acquire one of each brand from the sixties or seventies. For right now, though, I'll be happy as a clam finding them for free.

My Stuff: On the Hess Express

Who remembers the original Hess Truck, the green tanker offered every Christmas? That thing was awesome. Its headlights lit up, and it was just so...AWESOME. Sadly, my Hess truck didn't survive the years well. By the time I understood (too late) that it might be something worth keeping nice, it had already been beaten up pretty badly. In fact, I'm sorta ashamed to admit I ended up cutting the  wires which powered the headlights, simply because I wanted the tanker to detach from the cab like a real truck.
And they've been discontinued, and new ones are astronomical on eBay. At least I still have it, however, even though it's a bit worse for wear...

My Stuff: Go Bots, Orbots, Transformers and Tripods

I grew up during the age of the original Transformers and Go-Bots (a cheaper version of Transformers). I had the toys, I watched the cartoon, and everything was very fine. Far as I was concerned, this was the best time ever for cartoons and their toys. In addition to the former, Saturday mornings and after school hours were filled with G. I. Joe, Thundercats, Dungeons & Dragons, Pole Position, Orbots, The Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk hour, Super Friends, and who knows how many others. They were silly and ridiculous and shallow, commercially-driven toy advertisements which ran for a whole season, but even so. They fired the early sparks of my imagination.
Also of huge importance was the comic strip version of Johnathon Christoper's When the Tripods Came, The White Mountains, featured in Boy's Life Magazine, and I'm mentioning it here simply because my old Transformer (a Decepticon, to be exact) and Voltron-Rip-Off Toy stand before the book. Waiting for that monthly installment of The White Mountians was a pleasurable agony, and I believe that those sluggish, H. G. Wells Martian-rip-offs offered me my first shivers of cosmic horror.
I have no idea what happened to my Boy's Life magazines. And sadly, The White Mountains comic strips have never been collected into one edition. You know who wil be all over that when it happens...

I Join Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman, and More of My Stuff: HO Dreams

So, what's this Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman business? We'll get to that in a minute, after the more important stuff. When I was a kid we had a modest HO scale train layout my dad built. It wasn't that big; the size of a table, really, but I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. It was only allowed to be run during the winters, but during that time, I used it whenever I could. The thing fascinated me. The track layout itself was fairly simple, but my Dad's attention to detail with the landscaping and the buildings amazed me. I always swore when I grew up, I'd someday build a layout the size of a room. I just loved (and still do) the idea of crafting landscapes and arranging towns and cities.
Over the years, I've fiddled with the idea, even made some half-hearted attempts at layouts, but quickly realized I had neither the space nor the time to do it RIGHT. However, that hasn't stopped me from collecting supplies and trains, track and buildings whenever I see them at garage sales, and I have totes and boxes full of stuff waiting to be used. This love of trains, of course, inspired my short story "On A Midnight Black Chessie" in my first short story collection Things Slip Through.
On another note, I am so beyond stoked to see my next Clifton Heights story, "When We All Meet at the Ofrenda" appearing in collection featuring Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Chizmar (introduction) and so many others. Just take a gander at the TOC below...

My Stuff: Life, Painted in Testors

So let's keep this rolling for the five of you who are following, shall we? A big portion of my childhood is bound up in Testors airplane glue or Elmer's glue (for the cardboard models) and coated with Testors paint. The first model I "built" was a large space shuttle I basically watched my Dad build over Christmas break. After that I was hooked, and every Christmas I could count on a model or two I'd then spend Christmas break working on. Eventually, I was making them whenever I wanted, as many as I wanted -  NASCAR, stock racing cars, funny cars, dragsters, hotrods - especially when I started making them from scratch. It's funny, while some horror writer kids grew up making Universal Monster models, I was making anything with wheels.
I was only ever an average modeler - I was too impatient, cut too many corners, and went too fast - but I loved modeling, and bullt maybe twenty or thirty of them before leaving for college. Last year, on a whim, I took it back up again, and, as it turns out, I'm still only average, but still love doing it, as you can see in the results below...