Patrick Loveland's Blog, page 6

A TEAR IN THE VEIL (out now)

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‘When Felix Brewer finally gets the video camera he has been coveting, he discovers a button on the lens housing that isn’t in the manual. Once that button is pressed, the viewfinder shows him glimpses of a nightmarish world living in symbiosis with ours, and reveals his girlfriend, Audrey, to be a frightening creature; her face a burning mass of melting light and distortion. Seemingly alone in his visions, Felix relies on the support of strangers both dubious and intriguing to make sense of it all… and hopefully protect him from the dark creatures that want to brutally silence him. Has Felix discovered a disturbing world no one else can see or is he barreling toward a tragic end through a haze of inherited insanity?

A TEAR in the VEIL – the stunning debut novel from Patrick Loveland.’

It’s been a long road… This novel is based on a screenplay I wrote over a decade ago now. I did many things after finishing said script, but after finishing my second screenplay (unrelated), I decided I was possibly cutting out more than just darlings to get my bigger stories down to acceptable screenplay page count. I decided to try out novel writing and adapted my first script into the longer, messier version of what’s readable here.

To nutshell the rest, dealings with April Moon Books (who will very soon have put out four of my published short stories, and the first three that were published at all) while struggling to get some published shorts out there were very positive and I realized that was where I should focus my efforts on getting this novel published.

And here we are. The jumping-off points for a lot of what’s in this ‘genre-bending’ story are personal, but mostly more as captured and re-processed emotions than many specifics. The rest is all in the interest of good old weird fun.

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P.S. it’s tear as in torn.

RELEASE: Monster Brawl! | #Horror #Anthology

So happy to be a part of this TOC with my story, “Whoever Fights Monsters…” ^_^

The Sirens Song

Sirens Call Publications is pleased to announce the release of its newest anthology…

Monster Brawl!

It’s time to let the monsters loose!

For this book, we collected stories of monsters doing epic battle with other monsters! The beasts could be classical by design with a unique twist, or they could be spawned straight from the author’s imagination. The only rule: there must be a clear-cut winner at the end of each story; one of the creatures had to die!

Some of the stories in this collection pit a single monster against another, while others are all-out gang warfare. Some are campy, some serious, but all a fight for the ages!

It’s time to get your game face on for twelve tales worthy of the title Monster Brawl!

**No monsters were hurt in the writing of these stories**

*This book is a collection of similarly themed yet varying fictitious short stories…

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AFTERGLOW: THE VOID

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Gravillis Inc.

Okay, so I was genuinely worried about this one. I’ve waited a long time for it, and I knew it could go either way—as the last film with a similar throwback to practical creature effects at its core and such I got attached to didn’t live up to my expectations. I won’t be unkind, but even with the best intentions all around, it was very much a letdown.

So, I’m relieved to say that—while not without its flaws—The Void more than delivered in the arenas I was most concerned about—atmosphere, scares, and messy, gruesome practical effects I could take seriously.

The flaws weren’t even glaring. The performances were good to great—the main villain wins just for his frequent perfectly done voice work after a certain point. The mains were strong, and I really enjoyed the main deputy actor. I think he was maybe the guy who died in the shower in the first Final Destination, but I’d have to check—and that goes against the forced spontaneity of this mini-impressions review series, right? ha

(UPDATE: It wasn’t. Still liked him ha)

Some of the writing is trope-y as was expected but rarely dipped into the painfully cliche.

Atmosphere was very pleasantly reminiscent of a few things for me. The shrouded cultists really gave their understated all as something like the almost-ghostly gang members in the original Assault on Precinct 13 and more than provided enough motivation for the characters to stay in the increasingly weirder hospital. Obviously there were elements of  The Thing‘s loving approach to amorphous nastiness, as was expected and more than paid off. Also, I really enjoyed a great sequence with maximum gore and creature showpieces, one of which reminded me—in a good way—of one of the main loping monstrosities in a personal favorite Lovecraft film adaptation, The Resurrected—directed by Dan “ALIEN” O’Bannon himself, and an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

I’d make a Baskin comparison as well, but I think they were produced in parallel, so I don’t think there was any actual influence. Could be wrong, I know. Either way, being able to compare something to Baskin at all is a compliment, I feel.

Also, what seemed to be an homage to The Beyond, which I loved.

And last thing I’ll say since these are just for first impressions is that I was very happy with it and want to watch it again without the anxiety of is-this-going-to-be-good-at-all? in my head.

If you were attracted to this specifically for its practical effects, grimness, and loving, deliberate Lovecraft fondness, I think you could do a looot worse than The Void.

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P.S. My wife Vv says it reminds her of Beyond the Black Rainbow, aesthetically.

P.P.S. I see what she means.

P.P.P.S. Also a good thing to be comparable to, in my opinion-ation

SIRENS CALL #29 — “Not Cavities”

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So, another free ezine I have a short story in for your enjoyment ( I hope ). This story sat around for a few years in my head. I’d kicked it around here and there, but never committed to actually writing it. I almost did write it a couple Halloweens in a row—and once almost as a ‘drabble’—then I realized the Sirens Call Ezine was the perfect spot for it. They were having a special Hween issue and everything.

This is another piece that cheekily fits into my personal universe, but it’s focused enough that the connection is unimportant, and I feel like it’s a great little standalone, as-is.

It’s also fun to have a Halloween story to share again and again ( until I think of another one to write ha ).

SIRENS CALL #28 — “R-Day for Mr. D”

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I’m still working up to getting a better account where I can fully customize and set up a place for checking out the books I have stories in (and soon I will have one all to myself) and such. For now, there are two stories I have totally free in the fantastic Sirens Call Ezine put out by Sirens Call Publications.

This one has a semi-interesting origin. It was actually written for an anthology about the Wu-Tang Clan. That’s a long story. I enjoyed that version… but it really came together when it wasn’t selected for that project and I decided to absorb it into my own personal fledgling mythos. I’m very happy with the result. It won’t change lives, but I think it’s a fun, quick piece.

So, this is a lot of fiction, poetry, and art for the lovely price of Free.99, and also includes the story I’ve just described.

Sirens Call Ezine #28 ( my story: “R-Day for Mr. D” )

My Favorite Failures

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I’d been out of the mental ward four days when I opened my throat on the left side, going for the jugular but I guess just cleaving through lesser veins on the way to it. After a debridement surgery weeks later, the surgeon had told me there were definite scratches and thin gouges on the artery, but all the veins around it got it way worse. I’d used a box cutter—wasn’t the best piercing tool. Hey, it was the only thing in my room, and not leaving that room was sort of the point. Not leaving in my body, anyway. At the time, I was so disappointed and mad at myself that I’d gotten to the jugular, only to fuck up by slicing everything but that. Typical me.

That was the first and last time I got that far the blood way. Fuck the blood way. I’d lost a lot of it, don’t get me wrong—almost enough—but I came-to early the next morning and my body, sheets, and hardwood floor were covered in dried blood. It had congealed in and around my foot prints from the mirror I’d used to help me make the right cuts, to the bed I’d collapsed onto. I wasn’t supposed to come-to. Disappointed and even more desperate to succeed, I’d showered then used first aid stuff to bandage my neck, cleaning the gaping swollen wound. I didn’t want to be caught before I could do what I felt I had to do. I put on clean clothes, snuck out of the house without waking up my roommates, and walked to the nearest BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station.

At the BART station, I’d tried to convince myself to jump in front of a train. About seven times I got up, walked to the edge, and watched the oncoming train speed toward me… Couldn’t do it. Harder than I’d thought it would be. The blood had just spurted and flowed out, and I’d expected to just fade away on the bed. Those trains would do a lot more damage, and I still might live. I decided to have a smoke up at street level before trying to work up to it again. During that cigarette—and you can’t laugh at this… or, maybe that’s the best thing you could do—I decided that smoking could be my reason to live. I think that was my survival instinct desperately searching for something to get its job done, so at the time I decided I could live for smoking—but only if I didn’t have to be myself.

I slept out on the waterfront across from a MUNI streetcar graveyard for a handful of days, eating too much Jack in the Box for the iron and fat to refill my blood supply, and drinking myself unconscious at night. Oh, and smoking—always smoking. It sounds so selfish and horrible probably—since at that point I’d been reported missing after my poor close friend and roommate had finally looked in the room I’d left all bloody—but I even entertained myself, like I really was just living as someone else. I’d bought a copy of DUNE at a used bookstore because I’d always loved the Lynch movie version, and read it by the water at a concrete lunch table—finished it in Hollywood at a park a few days later (longer story). Great book. I even went to see Final Destination in a theater downtown, and what a fun coincidence that was—during the scene where the teacher’s neck is penetrated by glass exploding from a monitor and she starts bleeding profusely after pulling it out, I got jealous. Jealous. She didn’t even die from that, but I was still jealous of her copious arterial flow.

Later came the hangings—once even with shoestrings on a tree in a canyon, after I’d fled another psych ward. Funny thing is, I’d gotten the idea to try with shoestrings when they’d taken them out of my shoes in the locked ward. I’d played nice long enough to get to the ‘unlocked’ ward, and they’d given them back to me. So of course that’s what I did with them once I ran away. After the strings snapped the thick tree branch I’d chosen off and I regained consciousness, I’d had to use my lighter to pop the string apart and it left a deep red mark around my neck for a couple days. Once, and I think this time I was even closer to succeeding than the blood time, I did it with a belt in my dad’s garage while he was at work. Everything faded out—almost had what I wanted… Woke up flat on the garage floor with a split eyebrow and a mouth full of blood and bits of my broken teeth. I was so disappointed.

A different time, I’d bought a big, mean-looking knife to try it the blood way again. Climbed up a mountain above a cemetery town south of San Francisco. Drank a bunch of cheap alcohol and tried to push the knife into my neck, and deep enough this time. Couldn’t do it. It was a different feeling driving me that time. So I just lived on the mountain for a while, kind of like the MUNI graveyard. I’d go into town to a grocery store nestled in among the big cemeteries and buy more cheap alcohol. Ate at a Mr. Pickle’s sandwich shop, hoping no one would smell my body odor from weeks without showering. Back up on the mountain, I’d try to drink enough to convince myself to jump off this tall BART station parking garage in the cemetery town. I’d just pass out and wake up with that stupid knife glaring at me—ditched it by a dumpster near the grocery store on my way to get more roof-jump juice.

After all that, there was a half-baked, extended attempt period where I tried—I shit you not—to starve myself. I’d leave wherever I was staying and lay in the closest canyon or big ditch I could find on the dirt and rocks amidst the brush, and just ruminate on how awful and worthless I was and such, occupying my thoughts for several days at a time until the hunger and thirst became too great. Then I would go through trash cans at night or unhook people’s lawn hoses and get my fill. Or beg old, dear friends for money for food and smokes. One of the very dearest would pull money out of a tip jar where he was working and give me cash… Those friends must’ve thought I was addicted to some amphetamine or something—nope, just wasting away from my ridiculous attempt to overpower my mind and body and not consume enough to continue breathing. Then I’d eat, hate myself for doing so, and keep starving myself again until I’d venture back out into the world several more days later. I put myself—and my rightfully worried, tortured loved ones—through this pitiful, ridiculous cycle for about six months. Obviously, that didn’t work either.

None of that shit worked. I was really bad at killing myself. Slight miscalculations and gaps in my knowledge of biology, physics, and the power of the body to affect the mind had led to me being trapped here. Imprisoned in pulsing, rotting, stupid, beautiful, bleak, absurd, precious, pointless meat space. I’m not going to lie and say I changed my mind on any of that… but I’m still here. For better or worse. How I got through it, clawing and climbing back up from the edge of the gaping, jagged maw of the Bottomless is a different story. This one was about how close I came to succeeding at something I shouldn’t have wanted to succeed at.

I am a (formerly reluctant) survivor.

I am a survivor.

I survived.

Still here.

Gonna stay a while.

These were My Favorite Failures.

 

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Dark Designs: Tales of Mad Science

Great piece up at Thomas S. Flowers III’s Machine Mean blog about a new charity anthology I have a story in (“Beluga”) ^_^

Machine Mean

Science without limits. Madness without end.

All proceeds from the purchase of this ebook will be donated to Doctors Without Borders / Medicins Sans Frontieres.

This is a warning. What you are about to read violates the boundaries of imagination, in a world where science breeds and breathes without restraint. A world very much like our own.

Within these shadowy corridors you will discover characters seeking retribution, understanding, power, a second chance at life—human stories of undiscovered species, government secrets, the horrors of parenthood, adolescence and bullying, envisioned through a warped lens of megalomania, suffering, and blind hubris. Curious inventors dabble with portals to alternate worlds, overzealous scientists and precocious children toy with living beings, offer medical marvels, and pick away at the thin veil of reality.

You can run. You can look away. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Witness our Dark Designs.

David Cronenberg, infamous director…

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AFTERGLOW: KIN-DZA-DZA!(1986)

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[AFTERGLOW: a mini-review series of my just-finished-this impressions]

I’d been meaning to watch this film for the last few years. Can’t remember where I stumbled onto it, but it could’ve been while I was researching the backgrounds of favorite novel Roadside Picnic and novel-reading-stiiill-in-progress Metro 2033 (it’s great, but I don’t get to read much and it’s a dense book full of world-building).

So, Kin-Dza-Dza! is a Russian sci-fantasy film from the 1980s, and I’m sure there’s a lot of analysis I’m not familiar with and symbolism and such I could study and really get more layers out of it on a second viewing. But this is Afterglow, and it’s all about fresh impressions.

This film is unlike most things I’ve ever watched. I’d say elements of it could be loosely compared to the weirder aspects of Monty Python (especially Terry Gilliam’s animations), possibly by-way-of Road Warrior-light. Yeah.

Two random unrelated men, a Russian man walking to the store for his wife and a Georgian carrying a violin case, speak to what seems like a crazed homeless man who says he needs help getting home in another part of the galaxy. Turns out, he ain’t crazy. He transports the two men to a desert planet with some strange people of different segregated groups, very odd flying and driving machines, and deadly sonic weapons (demonstrated continuously by pieces of metal in the environment being sliced clean apart after these weapons are fired toward them).

This film is in no hurry, for better or worse. It could be accused of being slow, but in a way I think that’s one of its charms. It takes its time pulling you in, which by the end made a stronger bond, I feel. It also doesn’t hold your hand, and the audience learns about the people on this strange planet (and others) in step with the two Earthling characters.

I really enjoyed Kin-Dza-Dza!. The characters really grow on you and by the end, you’ve definitely had an otherworldly experience. It’s odd on a level that had to be a deliberate vision, and the characters and oddness combined to win me over.

Also, it has a great, simple soundtrack. Reminded me of another favorite soundtrack (and film), The Third Man—more in its recurring use as a theme than its actual sound.

A good friend told me there’s also an animated version of this film that came out more recently, so you might be seeing another of these mini-reviews sooner than later.

“Koo!”

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Creature Features in Review: The Blob (1988)

Machine Mean

!! CONTAINS SPOILERS !! CONTAINS SPOILERS !! CONTAINS SPOILERS !!

 The Blob (1988) is my second-favorite 1980s remake of a classic monster horror film, The Thing by John Carpenter being the first—and if the ALIEN Trilogy (yeah, I said ‘Trilogy’) didn’t exist, JC’s The Thing would be my all-time favorite film. Now, I’m usually the first to say that JC’s The Thing is not strictly a ‘remake’, because of its alternate take on Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr.—but in his great Creature Features in Review piece on JC’s The Thing, William D. Prystauk beat me to it. John Carpenter’s take was a more accurate, more paranoid version of that novella than Howard Hawks’—and Christian Nyby’s and Edward Lasker’s and others’—The Thing from Another World, while also bringing in elements of amorphous, madness-inducing creature moments that—when paired with the snow-blasted, isolated Antarctic setting—came to…

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THE FOREST [the game] Early Access Review

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[PC GAME—NO RELATION TO RECENT FILM OF THE SAME NAME]

! ! ! THIS GAME IS VERY VIOLENT—SOME SCREENSHOTS MAY DISTURB ! ! !

Just had to check Wikipedia to help me remember when I had first started this journey through… THE FOREST… (sorry) and it was upon release of the early access alpha version—that it’s technically still in, but beta and release must be coming soon if it can be judged by features, content, and playability—in May of 2014. From the beginning, I knew there was something special about this game. Until recently, though, it was not possible to finish the game’s story, and it had slowly been unlocked and built upon with well-guarded secrecy.

You start the game as a man on a plane sitting with his sleeping son in the next seat. After picking up a survival guide book from his small plastic dinner ‘table’—a detail added more recently and a nice touch, since you’ll use this book throughout to build structures, fires, etc. from—the plane hits heavy turbulence and proceeds to break apart as it crash lands on a forested peninsula. While you come-to writhing on the cabin floor, a half-naked man covered in red paint and looking like some sort of tribal native picks up your unconscious son and leaves the back half of the plane while you lose consciousness again.

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So, it’s simple—you want your son back. Except that it’s not.

Your first act after looting the plane for food, sodas, and liquor—it’s a survival, building, and horror game, so you know you’re gonna be consuming sustenance—is to pull a small survival ax out of the chest of a dead flight attendant at the end of the destroyed aisle that opens into the lush forest like a surreal gaping maw.

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This works as acquisition of a welcome tool, a very ominous moment, and a symbolic birth of sorts into your new life—survivor, hunter, killer, and—if anything goes your way—hero.

What follows is an open world experience unlike any other I’ve played. On the peninsula surface you explore; hunt for food; learn recipes for armor, weapons, quivers, pouches; and build shelter and… defenses. You are hunter and hunted here. There are tribes of murderous cannibals living on this island, and they roam around on patrols. There are different tribes, each with their own look, postures, and tactics.

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They also leave different kinds of markers around…

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Let’s just say, you don’t want to get captured.

They travel in groups of at least three most of the time, and in the wrong situation, they will get the best of you. That’s how you learn about the other major element of the game…

The first time you’re ‘killed’ in the game, your screen will go dark. You’ll come-to being dragged by cannibals through the grass before passing out again. Then, you’ll awaken once again in darkness—upside-down, hanging by rope from a cave ceiling. You are strung up with split and otherwise mutilated and/or eviscerated human bodies. It can be safely assumed you’ll be like them soon [I TOLD YOU NOT TO GET CAPTURED…]. You look around—there’s your ax! You cut yourself down and find yourself in deep darkness with only a lighter to guide you. This is an interconnected network of cave systems that run under the whole peninsula.

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You’ve got something… Uh, let me look for some band-aids…

The surface can be terrifying, especially at night, but the caves are where the horror really comes together. Think… The Descent meets loose suggestions of those first few seasons of LOST—when you thought anything could happen—with some malformed, weird surprises stalking about. I normally wouldn’t mention that last bit, but this game is way weirder than it first seems, and some friends I recommended it to might not have ever seen its most warped, menacing inhabitants. The caves are where the best items are, and also where the story actually ‘progresses.’

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Inviting…

If the (first and) last AG reviewed SOMA was a masterwork of explorable but mostly linear progression, THE FOREST is all open world, until you figure out how to access the later story parts.

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Nothing to see here…

The caves are also where you will probably first be struck by one thing this game does better than most that have tried—light versus dark. Or maybe a better way to put it would be… fire versus no fire. They have finely tuned the darkness and how it is penetrated. There is a flashlight that has erratic beam strength and I only used it to get a more distant view through the dark. But the lighter can be used to light up wraps you place around axes and sticks, fires you’ve built, or—my personal fay-voh-ritt—the tips of special arrows. Those arrows remain in my play-style the best source of light that can also do damage at the drop of a hat. What keeps this use of darkness oppressive and claustrophobic is that no light sources are perfect. Wrapped weapons—unless soaked with alcohol—will go out in a few swipes. Then you have to re-wrap for light or swing in the dark. Even the arrows have to be lit every time, leaving you at the mercy of the RNG-affected Bic-style lighter working mechanic.

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Yeeeeaaah… Not ominous at all. Cheery, even.

The use of this inky, deep darkness succeeded in evoking an almost primal level of fear in me at times. That’s pretty impressive, considering I played the game from the comfort of not-actually-being-murdered-by-cannibals-and-whatever-else-in-digital-darkness.

Also, this subterranean darkness can lead to some truly beautiful moments.

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This is a game of many strengths. The cannibals—and their friends—are skilled opponents, and very frightening even in daylight, due to incredible sound work and the cannibals’ behavior programming. The fights are desperate even as you improve and ‘level’ your weapons—by attaching human teeth gathered from fights for damage, and bird feathers for speed—and really visceral—literally, once completed. Let’s just say you can use the cannibals’ body parts for a few things, and more than you might think…

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Building is also very well done. I’ve made many different structures. Right now a friend I are attempting to make something of a tree-house/Ewok-Village kind of setup with the tree platforms and houses available.

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Also, upon completion of the story I discovered Creative Mode. You don’t need to maintain sustenance, can’t be hurt, and the ghostly blueprints you place while building can be filled by holding the E button, as opposed to the hours and hours of chopping down trees and gathering that would take in the normal game modes.

And as for said completion of story, after two and a half years of playing this off and on—at one point finding the barrier of the next story progression placeholder after a hard-fought descent and taking a break other than trying major patches—I wasn’t sure I would be satisfied on a story level, or could be. For my money, this game was worth the price of admission (a very modest 14.99 USD) within weeks of purchase, just from the varied open world gameplay and terrifying caves. But to be a whole piece, it needed to have something to finish, considering how it started if nothing else.

I won’t say anything other than I personally was not disappointed. Very pleasantly surprised, actually. It is not at all what I expected… but they really committed to it and I loved the follow-through.

Okay, so… It’s probably pretty obvious I adore this game. So, do I have any complaints?

I want multi-level tree-house building! Swimming cannibals! More buildable boat styles and wind for sailing! Hang gliders! T-Shirt and potato guns!

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And bring back my flying sharks!

But seriously, no. I have no real complaints. Anything I would mention could be in by release, and even patched in after. This game isn’t even released yet and I’ve put just under 230 hours into it. That took a while, but lots of that was done in focused chunks.

If you love horror games and at least like or can tolerate survival systems, recipes, and building—lots of which can be ignored, but it’s so much fun—this is a grisly, thrilling playground. That’s probably the best line to follow by adding in one thing I’ve hinted around—co-op! Up to I believe eight people can play on co-op servers that one of them hosts, doing everything described above—and more.

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Happy hunting!

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[all screenshots from my personal steam account, other than game logo image]