Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 19

AS I PLEASE IX

Before I resume Halloween Horror 2022, I thought I'd empty this bucket I call a brain into an As I Please column. It does touch upon horror movies so it's not cheating.

* While hiking yesterday I reaped the humorous benefits of my horror-movie bingewatching. I was at the part of the Lake Williams branch of the Old Field trail which crosses the stream, listening to an old-time radio program on my headphones, when a gut-wrenching cry seemed to blast out of the woods. It was so savage, so full of animalistic and almost insane fury, that I jumped like I'd been stung by a scorpion and half-expected to see some celluloid maniac burst out of the woods wielding a chainsaw. The actual culprit of this terrible noise, this deafening drawn-out dirge, was a white crane flapping overhead. I have been around cranes for many years, they frequent the C & O canal in Maryland where I basically grew up, and yet I have never once heard their cry. Believe me, once is enough. Curiously, they strongly resemble pterodactyls. Probably they are descended from them. At any rate, it was easy to picture the ancient ancestor of this flying fiend as the last thing many a large animal saw before it was whisked off its feet to be eaten alive in a bone-littered nest somewhere.

* My temper is never improved by malfunctioning smoke alarms. Especially if there are two in such close proximity I can't tell which one is making the eardrum-piercing chirp. Especially if one of them is twelve feet off the ground and even on a step-stool and using an instrument and standing on tippy-toes I can't reach it. Especially when I finally do work the battery out and it still chirps. Especially when I finally manage to dislodge the thing so it's hanging on wires and it's still out of reach. Especially when somehow I pull it off without breaking it and now the chirp is clearly coming from the other alarm. Especially when I pull the battery from the other alarm and it still chirps. Especially when I replace the battery with the battery from the apparently fully functional alarm and it chirps a final time as I'm putting the stool away, simply as a fuck you.

* Speaking of fuck yous, many years ago, in this same apartment building, I was aggravated to the point of violence by a similarly unreachable alarm which decided to shriek and stay shrieking in the middle of the afternoon. I tried every civilized method of switching it off to no avail. Finally, in a rage, I seized a broom and proceeded to beat it from the ceiling, destroying it completely. Bellowing villainous laughter, I kicked the now-shattered alarm all over the apartment and then gleefully dropped it into the trash. The very next day -- the very next day my landlord slipped a note beneath my door informing me that the city fire marshal was coming "the day after tomorrow" to inspect each and every smoke detector in the building. No longer smiling, I went to three different home improvement stores before I found a smoke alarm that matched the original, and with considerable difficulty (because of my very high ceilings), managed to get it screwed into place and functioning. I was feeling smug again when the marshal arrived, looked at the alarm, and said, "That's an outdated model. Better swap it for a new one." The landlord's handyman immediately produced said new one from a bag, removed the "old," and promptly fired it down the nearest garbage chute. There went $27.50.

* I am now twenty films into my "31 horror films in 30 days" Halloween extravaganza, and therefore ahead of schedule. I cannot deny, however, that watching all of this scary shit in such amount and close proximity hasn't had its effect. Aside from jumping out of my skin because of the afformentioned crane, after about the fifteenth movie in less than two weeks, I was feeling jumpy before bed and had troubling dreams. Having worked in the make up effects industry for many years, I should be more immune than most to stage blood and screaming actors, and I admit I am no longer as vulnerable to scary movies as I used to be, but neither am I immune. In the long run it's probably not psychologically healthy to watch so much carnage on the tube, even when it's fake. That having been said, the news is full of carnage, too, and despite what you've been told, it's real.

* My fourth novel, and most recent release, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER has now won a second trophy, specifically the Pinnacle Book Achivement Award for Summer 2022. Why am I telling you now, in the fall? Because my notice ended up in a spam folder and not my e-mail inbox. The goddamned congratulations message with all of its links and bells and whistles was hung up like a fly in a spiderweb for almost 45 days before I accidentally stumbled upon it. Notwithstanding the fact a congratulatory phone call would have been nice, Gmail can kiss my ass. It's back to my 1998-era MSN address for me.

* G4TV, once the most famous and influential show devoted to the gaming industry, has officially gone out of business as of today. I care about this in the sense that I was a part of that industry from 2011 to 2020, during which time I worked at no less than seven different trailer houses, helping to make game trailers for some of the biggest brands in the industry. G4TV was once funny, sexy, irreverent and innovative. Later it was rebooted to be wokeist, political, and decidedly antigamer, to the point of hiring a contentious talking head called Frosk who boasted she did not even play video games. As incredible as it seems, G4TVs post-reboot content was deliberately calculated to anger and insult its own audience. Even more incredibly, this is now a trend with studios. Not incredibly, it doesn't work very well: G4TV 2.0 went out of business. I have a great deal to say about how wokeism represents a clear and present danger to every form of artistic content regardless of one's political beliefs, but for now it will be sufficient for me to repeat the mantra "go woke, go broke."

* My novella THE NUMBERS GAME got a positively lovely review from beautys.library on Instagram. It opens with, "Oh man… This was intense. This was my second story by Watson going into this, so I knew to expect something morbid. And this did not disappoint." I am not going to lie, I laughed pretty damned hard at that.

Tomorrow I resume my horror-movie orgy, which I intend to climax on Halloween night with, appropriately enough, HALLOWEEN ENDS.

HALLOWEEN HORROR (2022)

Ah, the suffering. The sweet, sweet suffering. -- Pinhead, "Hellbound: Hellraiser II"

When I first began Stone Cold Prose in 2016, I wrote a series of blogs which showcased my love of all things Halloween: I discussed horror movies, horror soundtracks, even my favorite villains. For some reason or another, as time went on I abandoned this practice: I can't remember the last time I even discussed cinema, much less horror movies. Well, as of today, October 9, 2022, I am abandoning my abandonment, and devoting much of the rest of October to the spirit of the season.

My love of Halloween is paradoxical. On the one hand, I think most adults (with souls, anyway) have nostalgia and affection for that time of life when dressing up in costume and trolling the neighborhood for candy was an integral part of life, perhaps even more important (and certainly more actively fun) than Christmas. I could a tale unfold about the many Halloweens I spent happily frolicing (rampaging might be a better word) around the block on sharp late October nights, accompanied by friends, classmates, parents, the Glen Echo Fire Company and the Walt Whitman High School band. The adrenaline rush was real, and in its way unique to the holiday. Nothing else quite matched the mixture of silliness, spookiness, greed for sugar, and the concominant sugar-high which lasted for days afterward. Samhain, the pagan festival upon which Halloween is based, was the time when the barriers between the spirit world and physical reality came down: and in my mind, as tacky and commercialized as Halloween has become, it still carries a strong hint of that magic. It's a night when kids can throw aside the civilized masks they are forced to wear by parents and teachers and be what they are: lawless, thrill-seeking monsters.

On the other hand, Halloween is a time of fright, and being an ex-coward who still nurses a yellow streak when it comes to certain subjects, images and concepts, I am often baffled by my own desire to scare the shit out of myself by paying -- paying! -- for the privilege of laying sleepless in my bed after watching what are usually good and decent people get terrorized by demons, ghosts, or chainsaw-wielding cannibals. Stephen King has explored, quite brilliantly, the need humans have to release stored-up fear through inventive tale-telling, and I am not qualified to expand on his thesis. I will say that what it boils down to is the humanistic urge to play with fire, open the forbidden door, and peek under the bandage. It's dumb as shit, but we have to do it.

This having been said, I will now reveal another of my many flaws. I do not like new things. A great deal of what I do in life is actually re-doing: I re-watch television shows and movies, re-read books, re-play videogames, re-tell stories. I'm told that anxious people do this because they find knowing the outcome of an activity to be soothing, and that makes sense to me. In effect, however, it means I only slowly and grudgingly encounter films, books and games which everyone else got to years ago. I often joke that I am a generation behind any trend, and while this is a strength as a writer, it leads me to forever make lame excuses about why I still haven't seen The Crying Game after 30 years. ("I'll get to it. It's in my Netflix queue.")

In hopes of breaking out of this habit for awhile, and also of stepping away from the now- exhausted collection of classic horror films I break out every Halloween without fail, I decided this year to watch 31 horror movies in October, one for each day of the month, culminating in a final flick, or flicks, on Halloween proper. The only criteria is that I must never have seen all of them before. That's it.

So far I am running ahead of schedule. As of Octover 9, I have seen thirteen (boo!) "new" horror flicks. The fact that I haven't seen some of these may astonish you, considering my claims to love horror movies, but again I reference my anxiety and the fact that, after spending my first twenty-odd years practically living in movie houses I seem to have gotten legally separated from cinema at some point in the late 1990s. It wasn't quite a divorce, but there have been entire years -- even before the advent of streaming services -- where I doubt I crossed the threshhold of a movie theater. Why this happened is a separate subject, but suffice to say that I am trying now to backfill a huge order of movies which have come out in the last 20+ years, and not just horror movies, either.

And so, without further adieu, here is where I'm at as of tonight, with a short review of each flicktoon:

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2022). I am generally not a fan of horror-comedies: they usually fail to be either scary or funny, and the opening of "The Wolf of Snow Hollow" is sufficiently at cross-purposes with itself that I was tempted to yawn it off. I'm glad I didn't. While not exactly scary even at its darkest, this black comedy about an almost terminally tense small town sheriff trying to puzzle out a series of grisly murders while navigating his rage issues, alcoholism and disintegrating relationship with his teenage daughter, is surprisingly engaging and even touching. Jim Cummings does a great job as the very-nearly-mad sheriff, and Robert Forster, in his final role before he himself passed away, is touching as the old sheriff trying to come to terms with deteriorating health.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). Considered a B movie classic, "Kingdom" pits William Shatner against a horde of venomous, carniverous tarantulas which swarm suddenly over his isolated Arizona town. If this sounds terminally dumb, the film actually does a fine job of walking the greasy tightrope between seriousness and camp, while working in all the usual monster-movie tropes: bumbling sheriff, disbelieving mayor, good-looking scientist sidekick. If you hate spiders, you'll freak seeing real tarantulas swarming over shrieking townsfolk and generally causing mayhem everywhere, even aircraft. The climax of this film is sufficiently eyebrow-lifting to linger with you for a good while.

Grizzly (1976). A "Jaws" ripoff down to individual story beats and even its climactic scene, this movie about a killer Grizzly bear working his way through campers in a state park, is stupid and silly, but actually succeeds in holding your interest for most of its length. The keys to its success are an above-average cast, including Andrew Prine, who shows up in another movie on this list, and a rapid pace: that damned bear is no sooner disembowelling one camper than its off to do in another. Does it even eat its victims? Again with the tropes of both horror, monster and disaster flicks, the park supervisor is a cold-blooded jerk who does everything he can to frustrate the hero's quest for the rogue bear. This movie also features one of the more unexpected and cruel deaths of a hero-sidekick around: one guy is mauled and buried alive, then digs free only to find the bear waiting for him for round two. Not a good day to be a sidekick.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976). This cult classic, told in semi-documentary and slightly "meta" style, is a somewhat fanciful retelling of the very real Texarkana Sundown Murders of 1946, in which that city was terrorized by a sadistic psychopath in a burlap mask who emerged after dark to wreak havoc. "Sundown" follows the efforts of a local sheriff (Prine) and a Texas ranger to hunt the elusive killer. The kill sequences are quite brutal and graphic, and to my surprise Dawn Wells (a.k.a. Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island") is one of the more fortunate of the victims. The film's evil tone is badly undermined by the bumbling antics of a cop named Spark Plug who can't do anything right, but it still hits a few genuinely nasty notes, especially since "The Phantom" was never caught.

Death Line (1972). A bizarre but haunting movie laden with sarcastic social allegory, "Death Line" begins with the disappearance of a high-ranking member of the British government in a London tube station. An eccentric detective (Donald Pleasance) is brought in on the case, but is hampered by MI6 (in the person of Christopher Lee). The real perpetrator is, of course, not a terrorist or a spurned lover but a vicious cannibal lurking beneath the tube. Alternatively funny, head-scratching, weird and gruesome, this flick's central message seems to be that allowing the existence of neglected, forgotten, abandoned people will eventually come back to haunt you.

Dead & Buried (1981). An extremely well-made and well-acted film I'd never really heard of, or heard of but never bothered to see, finds the idyllic seaside town of Potters Bluff suddenly visited with outbursts of savage, gruesome violence -- especially to strangers just "passing through." The local sheriff is baffled, but does he really want to know the answer, when signs begin to point at his loving and beautiful wife? This is one of those movies that uses the red herring technique in a very clever way, letting you see the twists from far away, but not the twists behind the twists. The end of this film tends to haunt. Throw in an appearance by a young Robert Englund and this one is a keeper.

Salem's Lot (1979). It's rare that a film is better than the book it's based on, and in the case of Salem's Lot that's not saying much, but this old TV movie is actually pretty decent for much of its 3 hour length: decent, but not decent enough. King's retelling of the Dracula story in a contemporary New England town pits a writer (David Soul) against a vampire named Barlow and his suave assistant, Straker (James Mason). The vamp makeup is striking, especially for the time, there are a few creeps and jump scares, and it papers over some of the dumber aspects of the novel, but this one hasn't aged all that well: the ending(s) are just too predictable to satisfy.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014). This is not a remake of the older cult classic, but a totally ficticious sequel, set in contemporary Texarkana, which makes frequent references to the original and even uses it as part of the plot. After a hiatus of 75 years, the brutal Sundown murders resume, complete with hooded killer, and a traumatized teen must solve the mystery of "why" before she becomes his next victim. While beautifully shot and credibly acted, this slasher fails to do more than deliver a jump scare or two despite all the screams, blood and mystery boxes. Even a hard twist at the end can't elevate the material. Ultimately it's shiny but hollow, like a Christmas ornament.

Sinister (2015). Ethan Hawke is a once-hot true crime author whose career is now circling the drain. Desperate to regain his status on the NY Times bestseller list, he moves his fam into the house where a horrible series of murders occurred a few years before, hoping this "immersive" research will score him another hit. Instead, it draws him into a supernatural mystery involving the deaths of five other families under different but equally horrible circumstances. Are he and his next? Like "Sundown," "Sinister" is a shiny object, with a creepy score and shadowy lighting: unlike "Dread" it has something to say and a rather new way in which to say it. Hawke is excellent as the whiskey-suckling writer, who is neither a very good nor a very bad man, but rather one obsessed to the point of destructiveness. The film's final line, "Don't worry, I'll make you famous again," is a truly nasty piece of work.

Blood Quantum (2019). Tired of zombie apocalypse stories? So am I. And this one is not good enough to reinvent the genre. However, it does come at the problem from a very different angle. When the usual zombie outbreak occurs on a Red Crow indian reservation in Canada, the survivors discover the flesh-eaters are much less dangerous than the living. I was much less interested in this as a zombie movie than I was as an examination of the challenges of life on an Indian reserve, and frankly the flick was at its strongest when it was simply First Nations people trying to puzzle out the pending apocalypse. It's still worth a watch, though, and for once I actually enjoyed the social commentary (the Indians have to decide if they are going to protect the rather useless white townsfolk).

Mister. Frost (1990). In this hard-to-find little gem, Jeff Goldblum plays a suave serial killer named Frost who tries to convince his psychiatrist that he is the devil. More a psychological tug-of-war than a splatter film, Goldblum is marvelous in his slow deconstruction of his doctor, who he insists will murder him by the end of their "session." While the idea of the devil struggling to find purpose and meaning in the post-religious age was not new even in 1990 (I tackled it myself in my story "The Devil You Know"), the screenplay attacks the problem as a practical one: Frost must force his atheist doctor into an act of faith to be reborn. This is worth watching just for Goldblum's mischievious, slightly nasty performance, which flirts with over-the-top but never descends into camp.

Last Train From Busan (2016). Zombie movies. As you may have guessed, not really a fan. So few are done well, including many of those revered as classics. "Busan" may not be a classic, but it is a pretty damned good movie, one which quite rightly uses the usual zombie outbreak as a mere pretext for a study of ordinary people under extraordinary pressure in a pressure-cooker setting: a high speed train. The hero is a Korean version of the usual blunted Wall Street parasite, who is taking his estranged daughter to his estranged wife on the kid's birthday. When the crisis hits, he must overcome his selfishness not just to survive, but win back his daughter's love. In a story with plenty of sarcastic social messaging about greed, money-privilege and bad government, this remains just a tale mostly about love: even the human villain, a psychopathically selfish corporate CEO, sobs at the end that he just wants to get home to his mother. The look of compassion in the hero's eyes at that moment, despite having nearly been killed by this goon a half-dozen times, speaks volumes about that most neglected of storytelling tools, the moral compass.

Paranormal Activity (2007). Yes, it's true: I never saw this fucking thing before tonight. I was decidedly not a fan of "The Blair Witch Project" and keen to avoid anything that involved low-budget found footage ever again. I did see one of the sequels a few years ago and was surprised to find it engaging enough for what it was, so I finally gave this 'un a try. I'm happy to say it that after a boring start during which I almost turned it off, it gradually establishes a mounting sense of dread and helplessness which culminates in a predictable ending which is not less jarring for being predictable. I can't say the couple in question was overly likeable, but I sympathized with their plight. Sometimes the most effective horror stories are the ones that show the least, and I partially credit this film's success for helping bury the torture porn trend which briefly hijacked horror in the early-mid 00s.

And that, my friends, is it for tonight. I still have eighteen films to go, and much to choose from. Hollywood has such sights to show me.

PUTIN AND THE GHOST OF MUSSOLINI

Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. -- Scrooge

Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. – Pericles

The most curious thing about world news is how easy it is to ignore. Under ordinary circumstances it is perfectly possible for an American to pretend as if most of the rest of the planet doesn't exist -- or exists in a fictional sort of way, like the happenings of Middle Earth. We share only two borders, and one of those is with Canada, a nation which (Quebec notwithstanding) is so much like our own that going there hardly even seems like leaving the country. Between us and almost everyone else, there are huge oceans or vast distances, or both. We are vaguely aware that what happens in Europe, or Asia, can effect us financially, but we don't really understand how, and even if we did understand, we probably wouldn't care. Broadly speaking, our focus is us.

The war in Europe, between Russia and Ukraine, is not something which occupies the hourly thoughts of the ordinary Yank. Most Americans are probably only vaguely aware of it, even though it periodically dominates the headlines. Nevertheless, it is getting increasingly hard to ignore. In 1914, a general war broke out in Europe which eventually dragged in the United States and cost us 100,000 dead. In 1939, another war broke out, and the U.S. was once again sucked into the maelstrom: this time the price was much higher, 300,000 dead in Europe alone. In 1947, the Cold War began, and dragged on until 1991: total deaths were fewer, but the stakes were higher: global annihilation. When it ended, America, with the greatest sigh of relief, let go of the idea of ever having to put a fighting army in Europe again. Our once-mighty military forces there dwindled to a kind of token, meant more for the psychological comfort of Europeans than practical use. Some openly questioned the need for any American military in presence there at all. And yet, just two years after an anti-NATO Trump presidency, here we are once again, being dragged toward a European war. It seems that America is once again learning that it cannot extricate itself from its place on the world stage: that in the age of a global economy, in which no nation is actually self-sufficient, what effects one large area of the earth must naturally effect others.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set in motion a whole chain of events which have, in turn, brought the world to the edge of total catastrophe. There is no way to gloss this over or to sugar-coat it. As Orwell said in 1940, "We are in the soup, full fathom five." Anyone who says differently is lying to you. Both your retirement fund and your life are at risk. On the other hand, neither panic nor anxiety is productive, and both can generally be kept at bay by possessing a clear understanding of what the hell is going on. Possession of this is best obtained by an understanding not of Vladimir Putin, but Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini is in my estimation the historical figure most analagous to Putin. In certain very distinct ways their careers, outlooks and ambitions follow the same general courses, and since courses foreshadow ends, it may be that in the grisly fate of Mussolini we see the most likely end to the life of Putin.

Mussolini is today regarded as something of a joke: even the Italians refer to him as the "Sawdust Caesar." It is easy to forget that until 1939, Mussolini was regarded as one of the great figures of modern history. Following a brief, tumultuous career as a politician after service in WWI, he rose to power in 1922 at the head of his self-created Fascist Party. Shrewdly cutting deals with the Italian Crown and the Vatican, he secured himself near-absolute power, and then embarked on a quest to restore Italy's former Roman Imperial glory. First, in 1930, came the "pacification" of Libya, which Italy had conquered 20 years before. This was carried out ruthlessly and with great cruelty. Then, in 1936, Italy conquered East Africa, a huge area which today comprises all of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, as well as other territories. This conquest was even more savage than the Libyan "pacification," with Italian forces employing poison gas against a native population which had no defense against it. Mussolini's desire for empire was not merely an expression of hunger for dominion: he needed a foreign war to distract Italians from the effects of the Great Depression, and also to give him an excuse to further radicalize his domestic social agenda and increase his own personal power.

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Mussolini threw the full weight of his military behind Fransisco Franco, head of the quasi-fascist Falangist Party fighting in rebellion against the elected government. The Italians were by far the greatest contributor of men and equipment to the nationalist cause, and Mussolini could be counted as a fellow victor when Franco emerged victorious from the war in 1939.

In '39, Mussolini invaded and swiftly conquered the small nation of Albania, which put him in a position to attack Greece and strengthened his hold on the Adriatic. At this point he had been in power for 18 years, won a series of conflicts, expanded Italian power, reach and prestiege, and yet was still seen -- accurately -- as eager to prevent a second world war. Had he retired or died then, he would have been regarded quite differently by history, and certainly seen as a success, if a badly bloodstained one. But here Mussolini, unlike Franco, made a fatal error. Having spent his career slaughtering African tribesmen and the second or third-rate armies of European nations, he decided, in 1940, to enter the Second World War on Hitler's side. This event cost him first his empire and then his life.

For much of his career, Mussolini's strengths largely rested upon his sense of practicality. He understood the limitations of Italian military power, the Italian economy, and the Italian people themselves, and only operated within the boundaries of the possible, never pushing his machine past its design limits. Even as a bully-politician in the 20s, he was careful in his estimations of what the Italian public would and would not tolerate. But in 1940, vicariously drunk on Hitler's successes and previous instances of Allied cowardice, he decided a general war could be fought, and won, without much in the way of cost. He was wrong. The French easily repulsed his attacks into their southeast border. The British swiftly conquered the whole of Italian East Africa, and his army in Libya was so badly mauled he had to plead with Hitler for military assistance to prevent losing North Africa as well. In late 1940, conscious of his damaged prestiege, he launched an invasion of Greece which failed so miserably he actually lost part of Albania too, again requiring Hitler's intervention to save him. In 1941, determined to be a part of the war in Russia, he sent a large army there, only to see it almost annihilated in the Stalingrad campaign. And by 1943, Hitler's star now waning itself, North Africa fell to the Allies, collapsing all of his African ambitions and destroying any lingering confidence the Italian people may have possessed in him. The Allied invasion of Sicily toppled his government, and only Hitler -- once again! -- was able to save him, sending commandos to rescue him from imprisonment, and then placing him ahead of a puppet government in northern Italy. The last two years of Mussolini's life were joyless farce: a mere figurehead without any real power, without any popular support, he "governed" over the north of Italy while the Germans ruled the country, and the Allies gobbled not only the last of his Balkan conquests but gradually worked their way up the Italian peninsula. In the spring of 1945, when the Axis finally collapsed, he was captured by anti-fascist partisans while trying to flee northward, possibly to Switzerland. These partisans were part of a huge guerilla movement which had opposed both the Germans and the Fascists: they hated Mussolini and were gleeful to have captured him. This article from Ranker picks up the narrative:

"After the partisans seized Mussolini and [his mistress Claretta] Petacci, they hid them in a remote northern Italian farmhouse for a night. From there, they took them to a village near Lake Como where the two were placed in front of a stone wall and executed. Afterwards, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and 14 others were driven to a central square in Milan where vast crowds awaited their chance to channel their rage...The bodies were stoned, beaten, hit with vegetables, used for target practice, and eventually strung up at a gas station on one side of the square. By the end of the day – when it could finally be taken to the morgue – Mussolini's body was unrecognizable."

Such was the end of a man who, at his height, controlled nearly a million square miles of territory in Europe and Africa, and who, but for a single terrible decision, might have died in bed in the 1970s like Franco did. But the difference between rule or ruin is often a single bad decision, and the more powerful the man, the more terrible the consequences when a gamble craps out. Which brings us back to Vladimir Putin.

Putin, like Mussolini, enjoyed a highly improbable rise to power. In a brief span of time, Putin went from being an obscure KGB officer to the presidency of Russia. Once there, he gradually but systematically eroded, weakened, ameliorated and finally destroyed all barriers to his personal power, using intimidation and violence against his political opposition. He then embarked on a string of foreign adventures in places like Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, all of which were ultimately successful despite embarrassing setbacks and failures along the way. In doing so, he raised the prestige of the Russian army, which became regarded as "the second best in the world" behind the United States. Wary of fatiguing his people with conflict, he only engaged in small wars, and brokered economic deals that temporarily fattened the Russian economy, giving his autocratic, corrupt rule a modicum of popularity. Like Mussolini, he tapped, or tried to tap, into nationalistic fervor to motivate the populace, and to keep them distracted from their increasing lack of freedoms. In 2014, he took a huge but calculated risk, and seized almost without bloodshed a huge swath of Ukrainian territory, a "land grab" of the Hitler-Mussolini style. He then legitimized the theft by organizing elections which voted the stolen territories into Russia. This near-bloodless conquest carried his domestic popularity to its highest levels, and he endured the Western sanctions which followed without weakening his grip on power.

Like Mussolini in 1939-1940, Putin was now at a crossroads in his career. His capture of the Crimea from Ukraine was a fait accompli, and his army was still respected and feared in Europe. He also had economic cards to play with his near-monopoly on natural gas, upon which Europe was and is largely dependent. He was in effective control of Belarus, which was basically a Russian vassal-state. A wise course would have been to sit back, make consoling diplomatic noises, and let the West gradually acclimate itself to his Ukraine adventure. Instead, he came to the conclusion that between Donald Trump's avowed desire to divorce America from NATO (and Europe), and Ukraine's seeming inability to defend itself, he could conquer Ukraine in a Blitzkrieg attack, install a puppet government, and then once again sit back and ride out the sanctions. Like Mussolini (and Hitler), he let himself be seduced by a vision of his place in history and by an over-identification of his own imperial ambitions with the good of his people. And ike both Mussolini and Hitler, he failed to grasp that democratic nations, while generally cowardly and short-sighted when initially confronted with military aggression, are capable of tremendous unity and ferocity once they realize there is no choice but battle. The Ukraine of 2014 was like the France of 1939; the Ukraine of 2022 was like the Britain of 1940: full of defiance and determination to win at all costs.

There is no need to go into the military situation in Ukraine in detail, except to say that seven months into the war, Putin is roughly where Mussolini was in 1941-1942: a dictator who has discovered his army is inadequate to fighting the war which he started; whose domestic popularity has cratered in tandem with his international standing; whose economy is crumbling; whose authoritarianism is growing in proportion to public hostility to the war; whose young men are fleeing military service by the tens of thousands; who is beset by powerful enemies and has no clear (or even blurry) pathway to peace without humiliating himself and surrendering all hopes of empire. The critical difference is, of course, the existence of nuclear weapons. Mussolini had none. When his armies were beaten, his fleets sunk, his air force shot out of the sky, he had no recourses, no way to save himself. Putin, on the other hand, still has a radioactive ace up his sleeve. And history shows us that tyrants, especially those whose egos have swollen to the point where they see themselves as the living embodiment of their own nations, will happily see those nations burn rather than admit defeat. The very act of placing nation above self is antithetical to the mentality of a dictator, and even if it were not, no dictator can step down and expect anything but a hangman's noose. The crimes they commit to obtain and maintain power mark them for death should they surrender it.

In my novella "Deus Ex," I explored the psychology of a defeated dictator who, having lost a bloody global war he himself initiated, flees his capital in a hypersonic jet, leaving behind a ticking nuclear bomb for both his enemies and his former supporters, many of whom are still completely loyal to him. Magnus, my fictional tyrant, does not even trouble to justify this horrific act: in his mind it is the logical outcome of any scenario in which he is not the winner. I do not, at this point, believe Putin will employ even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine: he is not yet far gone enough in the head to believe this will prolong his life or grip on power, which are in fact bound up. My fear is that when and if he comes to believe he cannot salvage the situation through conventional warfare or diplomacy, he may turn to this method in the same way a child kicks over a gameboard when he realizes the game is lost. It is not a last attempt to win: it is an assurance that everyone else loses.

Someday, if we all live to see a someday, historians may look back on the present era and take note of the selfishness, narcissism and egotism which have marked politics in both East and West in recent years: the insistence that the power and privilege of an individual, or a small coterie of individuals, outweigh the rights and even the lives of the masses they supposedly lead. Until then we are stuck with men like Putin. And the ghost of Mussolini.

Deus Ex

THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER IS A GOLD MEDALIST

I am pleased to announce that THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL has won the Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Historical Fiction. Some of you may remember that the previous entry in the series, SINNER'S CROSS (2019) also took this award. I hope in the months to come that I will be able to make more posts of this nature, but this time around I'm more interested in sales and publicity than literary awards. I like a well-stocked trophy case the same as the next boxer, bowler, or bass-fisherman, but so far as I am aware, no landlord accepts trophies in lieu of rent.

I conducted a brief interview with Literary Titan about this book which can be found at this link:

https://literarytitan.com/2022/08/31/...

Granted, I always sound like a jackass in interviews, a cross between Frasier Crane and Hunter Thompson: but I defy anyone not to sound like a jackass in an interview.

THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER is the second of what I hope will be seven novels in this series.
It is an epic yet intimate look at the final year of the Second World War as seen through the eyes of the men who had to fight it. It is a story of soldiers under extreme pressure, rising to challenges or falling before them, a saga of courage and cowardice, heroism and hate, which -- I hope and trust -- will haunt readers for years to come.

In this multi-novel series you will meet unforgettable characters from both sides of the conflict: Halleck, the tough-as-nails Texan who drives men like cattle; Breese, the pretty-boy poseur who finds out the hard way war is not like the movies; McDermott, the former artist hiding a dangerous personal secret; Lucas, the mixed-race sergeant whose rage against the world threatens everyone around him; Miller, the nurse whose passion for saving lives may cost her her own; Fox, the Jewish general whose hatred for the Germans clouds his judgment; McGraw, the former Missouri lawman who traded a sheriff's star for a colonel's eagles; Villin, the English officer who fights for a way of life which victory cannot save; and Cuffle, the private from Joliet whose choices may take him from military prison to a firing squad.

You will also meet the Germans: Zenger, the legendary paratrooper whose resolve to continue the fight is beginning to waver; Cramm, the aristocratic staff officer mutilated by the bomb meant to kill Hitler; Vondra, the professional Nazi who has ceased to believe in any cause except his own survival; Reinscheid, the newly-minted general who finds his fanaticism is no substitute for skill; Christgau, an old-school officer whose intrigues against the regime come back to haunt him; and Prulick, once the darling of German cinema, now sent to the front as a private.

Because women were an integral part of the war, we will also meet Pamela Street-Smith, the beautiful British intelligence officer who may or may not be a traitor; Ursula Wolf, a brilliant German physician whose desire to serve is frustrated by Nazi attitudes about women; and Marjorie Miller, an American nurse who toils just behind the front lines. These characters' lives -- and their deaths -- will intersect at the place called SINNER'S CROSS.

I hope to see you there.

DEVILS YOU KNOW -- THE BOOK THAT WON'T DIE

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666. -- Revelation 13:17

Way back in the gentle year of 2016, I published Devils You Know, a collection of horror-themed short stories I had written over the course of my lifetime. When I released this book, I did so with the full knowledge that collections by unknown authors do not sell, and I wasn't disappointed. From a financial standpoint, it barely moved the needle. However, it collected a certain amount of critical acclaim and was a Hoffer Award Finalist -- an honor I wasn't expecting and still take great pride in (even though "finalist" is another word for "you didn't win.")

2016 was obviously a long time ago, and I have done much since, both personally and professionally, so it would be fair to say that Devils slipped off my radar. I viewed it as a necessary, noble, and fully intended failure, a grand and well-intentioned gesture rather than an actual, material accomplishment. Every now and again, however, I made some feeble, niggling effort to do something with it, to get it a slightly larger audience, a slightly wider hearing. I succeeded only in more than doubling the number of the book's reviews, which sounds like a big deal until you consider it didn't have all that many to begin with.

Now, I am not a huge fan of book giveaways, but I ultimately decided to list it on Amazon for free. Not permanently, not even for a long while: just five days. Since it never made me any money to speak of anyway, I literally had nothing to lose, and much to gain in terms of a wider audience: the more people read a book, the higher the proportion of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and the more new, paying readers ultimately come along. So I bit the proverbial bullet and gave it away.

For the first few days there was a mere trickle of downloads. Many, many people put out free content on Amazon, and it's always hit or miss as to whether you will find any of those intrigued enough to click the mouse, or no. Today, however, and to my very great surprise, I saw the fabled, mythical, also proverbial needle rouse itself from its dusty place on the floor of the dial, and rise swiftly and surely until it pegged itself at maximum. As of today, Devils You Know is ranked:

#1 in Horror Anthologies (Kindle Store)
#1 in Horror Short Stories
#2 in Horror Comedy

The really interesting part is this. Out of the top 1,000 free books on the platform, its Amazon Best Sellers Rank is...no kidding...666. When I saw this, I didn't know whether to laugh or cross myself. I mean, it's not a collection of cozy mysteries or comedy stories. The devil is literally in the book. Who knows? Maybe someone is trying to tell me something.

In a day or two, possibly as soon as tomorrow morning, these numbers will fall and Devils will slink back into its crypt, all thirteen stories of it. Before it goes, however, I'd like to encourage you to go to Amazon and give it a try while it's still free. You have nothing to lose but your soul.

PRAISE FOR THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary. -- Brendan Behan

You may have noticed I am never shy about publicizing my writing, but perhaps I can be forgiven this rather venal sin. Independent authors have to cling to praise and awards like Scrooge clung to coins. I would therefore like to announce that Literary Titan is the first reviewer to weigh in on my new novel, The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel. , and their verdict is as follows:

"The Very Dead Of Winter by Miles Watson is a work of historical fiction revolving around the Battle of the Bulge and is set during World War II. This interesting story centers around the three main characters with intermingled storylines, Halleck, Breese, and Cramm.

"In The Very Dead of Winter, Miles Watson explores the very concept of war. The author addresses how war affects the mind, morality, and the relationships of the soldiers involved, in addition to the cruelty and horror of the subject matter in which enemies actively murder each other in an effort to advance their personal cause.

"Each of the main characters in this book is complex, and we see in his writing how Watson brings each to life in the pages. Though the characters are different war officers, Watson portrays them in such a way that they are convicted by their morality, each one striving to do the right thing.

"Watson has written a book that is sobering but intriguing. If you are looking for a book with rich characters, an enticing story, and significant historical context, this book is for you. It will make you think, empathize, and put yourself in the shoes of those men and women in the military, specifically those in active combat. This book is well worth the read and will give readers a brand new perspective. I highly recommend it.

"The Very Dead Of Winter is a complex and thought-provoking historical war fiction novel. This captivating book can unmask the stereotypical idea of what the average citizen thinks a soldier looks like. The author’s storytelling abilities allow readers to get to the heart of the matter in distinguishing the humanity and moral choices people in the armed forces make in their daily decisions. FIVE STARS."

As first blushes go, this ain't bad. I am certainly very proud of the book, and God knows it had one of the most lengthy drafting processes I have ever undergone. I'm looking forward to the critical reactions to come, even if they should prove less sanguine than this one: Sinner's Cross, viewed from an awards/acclaim standpoint, is certainly not an easy act for me to follow. Every writer knows when he's fouled or bunted, but he also knows when he's hit one out of the park. This second book in the series will have to sweat hard to escape its progenitor's shadow.

Ultimately, my objective with these novels is not to build temples to "Greatest Generation" worship, nor to cater to war movie stereotypes, nor to produce one of those novels so slavishly faithful to actual history that you may as well ditch it for a book by Cornelius Ryan, but to do what I feel that I do best: create a highly atmospheric story that immerses the reader not only in the physical sensations of war, but the emotional pressures and their ultimate effects on my characters. In short, books that try to take you there. I trust that I have succeeded, but whether I succeeded or not, that was my aim, my working ideal.

So if you haven't already, give the series a try, or at least a look. You may not like what you read, but I guarantee you will never forget it.

FEAR AND 50: THOUGHTS FROM THE ROAD

Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard? -- Paul Simon

When a man turns fifty, it's only natural that he indulges in a little reflection -- especially when his own father died at the age of fifty-four. Well, your humble correspondent not only turned fifty last week, he marked the two-year anniversary of his return to the East after twelve and a half spent in California; also his two-year anniversary of returning to the fold of criminal justice. In short, it was a date filled with milestones: so he did the only thing possible: he hit the road.

I haven't had a proper vacation in longer than I can remember, and the days leading up to it were so riddled with anxiety I could hardly function. After years in the pressure cooker, I couldn't adapt to relaxation, to being my own master. I almost scuttled the trip out of sheer discomfort with the idea of taking it that easy for that long. Subconsciously, I think there was something else going on. I was afraid to be alone with my own thoughts.

When you turn fifty, you are painfully well aware that you not only have more days behind than ahead, you are also aware that the days remaining also include physical and mental challenges you didn't have worry about at 18, or 31, or even 44. You are aware that even if you live for decades yet, all the vigor of youth, the natural energy and strength, the smooth unlined skin, the full head of hair -- all of that is behind you. Between forty and fifty you can absolutely convince yourself that you are still young in many ways. Between fifty and sixty that prospect becomes impossible. Even with all the modern tools of the anti-ageing trade, steroids and surgery and hair transplants and teeth-capping, the real magic of youth can never be recaptured. It's gone, and that's that.

When I started the drive north, I was simply relieved to get away. Stress seemed to ebb as the miles piled up and the hours dragged by. And when I finally arrived at the bed and breakfast tucked in the middle of a huge state park, itself tucked into a great wilderness that encompasses most of the upper part of the state, a place that not only looked but felt and even smelled differently than where I had come from, it tapered into a feeling of exhaustion. I didn't know how tired I was until I got there and just lay down for about three hours, listening to the silence.

I didn't feel relief, or happiness, or excitement. I felt nothing of note. Even when I went up to the top of a mountain and watched the full moon rise above the trees like a huge gold coin, bathing the sky and the land both in its radiance, I can't say I was struck with any profound thoughts or emotions. I was just tired and cold and a little annoyed I couldn't see more stars. I went back to my cabin, drank a lot of beer and went to bed.

It was on the second day that I felt the change. Having slept well between crisp cool sheets in cold country air, I woke up full of appetite and indulged in a huge breakfast of sausages, bacon, loaded French toast covered in preserves, fresh fruit, and coffee. I then drove an hour to a huge old railway bridge, half-destroyed by age and a tornado, which has a glass bottom. I stood on that bottom and looked 275 feet down to the valley floor, trying to overcome my fear of heights. Then I took a four-mile hike in the woods. Another hour in the car and I was at the Elliot Ness Museum, full of beautiful old cars and gangster memorabilia. A few hours of rest, some food, and I was out hiking again, deep in the woods, on a trail so raw the lumber was still stacked by the silent earth-moving machinery. That night I slept very well indeed.

On my last full day -- not of vacation, but this part of it -- I indulged in yet more excessive breakfast, then met an old friend an hour away at a WW2 museum packed with relics of the conflict. I hadn't seen this guy in years and we ended up spending hours there, and then in a roadside diner, "jawjacking," as he likes to put it (I'm convinced he borrowed this expression from my character Halleck in SINNER'S CROSS, a book I know he has read, but if I call him on it and I'm wrong, I will look a pretentious clod). Late afternoon was upon us before I hit the road again, for the four-plus hour drive back home, two hours of which were spent in country roads cut narrowly into the pine-covered hills of northern Pennsylvania.

When you drive through God's country, you have plenty of time to think about those things you weren't keen to think about. I thought about the face of my friend, who I have known for 31 years, and how it is now as old as the face of his father when I met the man in 1991 or thereabouts, yet is still clearly the same face: slim, tanned, strong-featured behind a neatly trimmed grayish-white beard. Sometimes when I run into people from my past, I am saddened and frightened by their appearances, or by their circumstances -- divorces, economic ruin, depression, physical ailments. It is, of course, myself I am partially feeling sorry for: not that I am in any dire straits, in fact I am ageing better than I could have hoped, but let's face it, there comes a time in any one of those encounters when you wonder what they are thinking about you. And if they catch you on the wrong day, when you forgot to shave and are ten pounds over your fighting weight and didn't sleep so well the night before, you go home cursing vain and shallow curses. But it's really Father Time you're cursing, and his chief enforcer, Death. This time I was just glad to see my old pal was in good shape and good spirits, and that our bond had only strengthened with years. Sometimes we forget that: age is not merely destructive: it can make things sturdier, can give them vintage and wisdom, a tang of experience. It is not for nothing we call it "seasoning."

As the miles disappeared beneath the wheels of my rental car, I considered the life I was returning to, and its attendant anxieties. They seemed less now than before, but I knew that was an illusion; rather, it was a difference in perspective. The problems of life seem much worse when you are tired, or angry, or lonely or frustrated or sad, or even hungry: I felt rested, if a touch fat after all that beer and country cholesterol, so naturally my woes seemed less woeful. The terrible anxiety and even terror that had gripped me the day before I embarked on my little trip north now struck me as absurd and cowardly. This too, however, was a matter of perspective. I am a man juggling two distinct careers which have nothing whatsoever in common with each other. By day I am an advocate for victims of crime. By night -- like a superhero! (or a supervillain) -- I am a writer with a small but growing audience, a regular on three different podcasts, and a guy who still keeps a foot in the entertainment industry, if only remotely. This is not exhausting. My second career takes the role of a hobby which refreshes me and keeps me reasonably sharp for my first. What is exhausting is the constant internal voice which tells me I can do more -- much more -- and that time is running out to do so. The Germans call this "torschlusspanik." In my case the "panik" is rooted in the fact that I spend far too much time and energy in things that take me out of alignment with my purpose. Sure, I'm working, but do I have the right job? Am I making enough money and taking care of myself? Sure, I'm writing, but am I doing everything I could be doing to reach the widest audience, win the most awards, rake in the most cash? Sure, I try to enjoy life, but what does that mean practically -- drinking beer and watching 40 year-old TV shows in my underwear on Sunday afternoons? Couldn't I -- shouldn't I -- be doing MORE?

In life I have often found that the people around me who are most unhappy are the ones least aligned with, or simply ignorant of, their purpose here on earth. They drift, and are aware they are drifting. I don't have the latter problem, but I do have the former. When my energy, my focus, my discipline are all in line with my goal here in this existence, I achieve a Nirvana-like state which we Americans refer to unimaginatively as being in the "zone." But this path is very easy to stray from. There are many distractions, and beneath those distractions is fear. To be what you were meant to be is frightening. To be what you were meant to be every day is to change from who you were -- potential -- to what you could be: realization. It means becoming someone else, and that is scary. Everyday life (work, commute, relationship) has the curious effect of actually distancing us from our life's purpose. We get so caught up in the trivia and the bullshit and the day-to-day, that we either forget or put off our passions and our actual reasons for occupying space on this planet. When I lived in Los Angeles, I saw this all the time, guys with film degrees from great schools who had let their day jobs consume their lives and before they knew it, had forgotten their grand plans to conquer Hollywood. Some kidded themselves with an occasional "I'll get around to that script yet" but they knew they were lying, and they knew I knew. They scared me, because in them I saw a possible future for myself. And isn't that why we really shun homeless people? It's sure as fuck not because we can't spare a quarter. We shun the homeless for the same reason we shun sick people, dying people, crazy people, and so-called losers. We're afraid they'll infect us. What we don't consider is that we're already infected. The infection comes from within. It's called fear.

When I was in seventh grade, I sat next to a girl named Ellen in school. I was a mess at that time: I had greasy hair and dandruff, was heavily overweight, and failing half my classes. I had no friends to speak of and had to fight bullies with humor, my only weapon. Ellen, however, was in an even worse place. She was truly obese and wore Coke bottle glasses. She had a tiny voice, almost a squeak, and no friends at all. She had nothing to fight the bullies with, and they tormented her with the utmost cruelty. Ellen was always unfailingly kind to me. When I forgot my pencil, when I was out of paper, when my ruler went missing, she always offered to help me and I always accepted politely. But that was where it ended. She would say, in that timid little-girl voice, "Would you like a pencil?" and I would say, "Thank you," rather formally, and take it. But I never smiled at her. I never looked her in the eye. I never tried to protect her from the bullies in the class. In short, I never offered her friendship or even friendly acquaintanceship, which I sincerely believe she was looking for -- that poor, lonely, isolated girl. Instead, I treated her the way you'd treat a bank teller -- politely, but with no warmth, no human kindness, no acknowledgement that they are suffering. Why? Because as low as I was on the totem pole of Thomas W. Pyle Junior High School, Ellen was lower, and so long as I kept my distance from Ellen I was safe from the added burden I'd entail if I called her my friend -- the extra bullying, the sneering remarks about how Miles landed himself a girrrrrlfriend. But beyond that, I was just scared that I'd lose the fragment of social standing I actually possessed if I publicly showed her compassion. Cowardice and selfishness gave me an easy way out of a difficult situation...except the way out was a dead end: I ran into a guilt and a shame I carry to this day, this moment as I write this. Fear can be a healthy thing, but in civilized life it is usually moral and not mortal fear. It is fear of doing the right thing. The necessary thing.

When at last I arrived home, fed the cat, and looked at my bank balance, I groaned a little, but then simply turned the page in my own mind. I wasn't going to let the most contrived fear of all -- money -- or the Puritan work-ethic ruin a much-needed exercise in self-care. The vacation was a good idea; it did me good. I wanted some clarity and I got it: I see a path going forward. I cannot really make out the details of the path through the mists of uncertainty which we call life, but I know it is there, and I am moving upon it, if only stumblingly and with hesitation. One thing I have come to understand completely, even if I don't frequently act upon the knowledge, is that without overcoming the inertia which fear places upon me, no positive change is ever possible; and positive change always begins with anxiety, doubt, uncertainty, fear, trepidation, and self-negotiation. In short, change and discomfort are two sides of the same coin: to flip the coin one must actually come into contact with its dark side. There is no formula by which we can achieve positive change without sweating and feeling pain or fear. I have long known that “breaking the ice” kicks in my adrenaline and my courage; the trick is that I can't break the ice with these weapons, they lie on the other side of the scrim. A different kind of courage, a kind of pushing-the-boulder-up-the-hill-kind-of-courage, real courage, not reckless abandon but the overcoming of fear, is necessary: and that's what I generally avoid. Actually, I must overcome the fear of getting what I want in all aspects of my life, which has been holding me back from day one. It's not enough to be a theorist, I have to practice. We all have to practice, because no one will practice for us.

When I was alone in the woods on that windy overlook in the early evening, no one around for miles, just a vista of white pine and hemlock as far as the eye could see and the sun like a gold blaze, I held up my arms and demanded the universe align me fully with my purpose. But of course there is no one listening when you make these sort of demands. The universe isn't, I believe, a conscious entity in the way we understand consciousness. It is a gigantic force that wheels slowly and irresistibly like a galaxy or the hands of a clock, or perhaps more accurately a rushing river, and you either actively align yourself with its movement, i.e. or you allow it to carry you along, or you swim in the other direction entirely. The universe doesn't care what you do. It gave you certain abilities and perhaps certain inborn desires, and the free will to act upon them or no. But if you swim with the current, with its intentions for you, you get to where you want to go quickly and have some control over your exact course; if you just ride along, you will perhaps arrive, or perhaps be swept past that point without realizing it until it's too late; and if you fight it, you will simply accomplish nothing at all, except to exhaust yourself. When I look upon my own life, I see that most of it has been spent either fighting my destiny, or trying to force another, different destiny into existence, or simply running away from destiny, period. All stupid wastes of time and effort which have inflicted great pain upon me and others, too – friends and family and lovers who had to bear the brunt of my self-created bitterness, either by witnessing it without being able to stop it or actually suffering from it by having to live with me at the time.

When I was on the road, I reflected that I have – if I'm lucky – perhaps twenty-five years left to me at the maximum, and only ten of those, the next ten, will really still fall in that active period of life when one can achieve great results physically as well as creatively and spiritually. I have wasted so much time it makes me sick, and time is passing faster and faster, so it's really no longer a question of deferring dreams. I'm sure my dad had many dreams about his later life and how he wanted to spend it. He shared some of them with me when he was dying. I don't think about that much because it hurts too badly. Maybe in his own way he was trying to warn me about not letting time slip by, not assuming there will always be opportunities to do the things you wish to do. If so, I wasn't listening then; but I'm listening now.

THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER

I am pleased to announce that the sequel to SINNER'S CROSS (2019) is now available for pre-order on Amazon. This has been a long time in coming and it is not only pleasure that I experience at this moment, but a certain sense of relief, as I reveal its title: THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER.

When I released SINNER'S CROSS, I did so with the conscious knowledge that for the first time as a novelist, I had exceeded my own expectations. I know how that sounds, but consider the journey I went on in writing the damned thing. It began as a lark more than twenty years ago, lines scrawled to no particular purpose or aim, just writing for the sake of writing. At some point I realized I'd written almost fifty pages, and for the first time began to wonder if I hadn't stumbled on to something. Then, almost ten years after I scribbled the first sentence, I decided to "finish" it, eventually producing a 20,000 word novella I called "Bone Meal" which comprised one very rough day in the life of Master Sergeant Thomas Edward Halleck during WW2. I shopped this little story around for a time but, because of the awkward length -- way too long for a short story, way too short for a novel -- found no takers. Back to the drawer it went.

A few more years passed, and having finished CAGE LIFE and KNUCKLE DOWN, I found myself needing a project which did not involve gangsters. Out of the drawer came the manuscript, now called "Crossroad," and after a lot of metaphorical blood and very real sweat and tears, SINNER'S CROSS came into the world. It was a number of years yet before I published it, but I do believe a long cooling-off always period benefits a novel. It gives the author time to gain perspective and even forget some of what he's written, which helps the editing process immensely. Because only after numerous self-inflicted editing passes do I hand it over to my actual editor, Michael Dell of One Nine Books. His suggestions proved of immense value and helped greatly in making it the novel that it ultimately became -- winner of the Best Indie Book Award (2019), the Literary Titan Gold Medal (2020), the Book Excellence Award (2020), a Finalist badge in the International Author Network Awards (2020) and a Reader's Favorite "5 Stars" rating (2021). It is also my best-selling novel to date, and has cracked Amazon's Top 100 several times in several categories.

When one works that hard for that long, any talent one possesses must come to the surface, and whatever talent I possess, and whatever style, and whatever passion, are all contained with that grim tale of three soldiers fighting the same bloody, futile battle for a useless crossroad on the edge of Germany. I had originally planned to leave everything I had in the story and move on, but the characters -- the ones who survived, anyway -- so haunted me that I soon realized a sequel, indeed an entire series, was warranted. And so, sometime around 2015, I began the process of writing THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER.

Without giving away the store, I can tell you that WINTER picks up where the previous novel left off: the eve of the Battle of the Bulge (16 December, 1944). It employs a somewhat different storytelling structure than the last book, rotating the three main characters chapter by chapter and sticking to a purely linear narrative. Nor is it divided into acts. I designed, or tried to design, a story that rolls along at an ever-increasing pace to another apocalyptic climax. As before, I have employed a "no character is safe" strategy borrowed from the great English novelist Derek Robinson, who mastered the art of slaughtering beloved characters long before HBO learned the trick, and done my level best to depict, through the character of Cramm, the German soldier of WW2 in an accurate and objective light, without either demonizing or romanticizing him.

In the previous book, I examined the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, a half-forgotten bloodbath that raged for six months and killed 30,000 soldiers on both sides. In this one, the setting is the much more famous Bulge campaign of '44 - 45, but in keeping with my tradition, I am avoiding the familair-to-the-point-of-cliche battles such as Bastogne and concentrating on the lesser-known, and in some cases deliberately forgetten fights, such as the Snow Eifel and the Losheim Gap. In any event, the emphasis is not on big historical events but how men trapped within them react. There is heroism here, and clear-headed thinking, and gritty resolve; there is also chaos, panic, viciousness and cowardice. With this series, I have never been interested in writing hardcore historical fiction, i.e. real history with a few fictional characters tucked along for the ride. Rather, I am telling "emotional history" which synthesizes events and downplays geography, place-names, and tedious techno-babble, so that I can concentrate on the purely human elements: what the soldiers felt, what they saw, what they feared and what they endured. War concerns weaponry, tactics, strategy, geopolitics and economics: but it is fought by human beings, and as a storyteller, that is where my interests lie.

So, there you have it. My first full-length novel in almost three years is about to hit the (electronic) shelves on July 4, 2022, with the softcover 6" x 9" arriving shortly thereafter. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I was tormented by writing it.

AS I PLEASE VIII: TELEVISION EDITION

The space between the television set and the viewer is holy ground. -- Fred Rogers

Television is a bottomless pit of shit. -- Stephen King

Every now and again I am reminded of the fact that my relationship with television is somewhat abusive.

I love TV, and I also hate it. I watch it every day when I should be reading, and I ridicule those who don't read and watch too much of it. I bitterly envied those who worked in the medium, and then, when I finally became one of them, I often felt overworked, underpaid, disrespected and generally sorry for myself.

When I look at the state of television today, I see that the word itself no longer really has any meaning. Aside from the fact you no longer need a television to watch TV, but can view programming on your cellular phone, tablet, or even watch, the very description "TV show," which used to mean either half-hour or one-hour episodic series which broadcast about 22 episodes a season, now only describes a small part of the vast universe of "content." There are TV shows which run entirely on Amazon, on Netflix, on Hulu, on YouTube Red, on Disney+, HBO, and God knows what else. And these networks are putting out not only their own movies but their own episodic and "event" series. On several occasions, when I was living in Los Angeles, I saw for the first time "series finale" advertisements for shows which I had never heard of -- they had run for years without me knowing they ever existed. In my day, this would have been almost physically impossible. Children of the 80s were well aware of every prime-time television show, sit-com, soap opera, and talk show. We might not have watched them, but we knew of their existence and when that existence ended. We knew this because the TV Guide, that indispensible little booklet which always smelled so distinctively of newspaper and ink, gave us the broadcast schedule for 12 hours of every day, 7 days a week. A glance at it was sufficient to let us know when something new had taken to the air, and because there were so few channels, we inevitably saw commercials advertising the latest pilot weeks or months before it was broadcast. Similarly, we knew the dismal slate of daytime TV like the backs of our tiny hands, because every time we faked sick and got to stay home from school, we sat in bed for hours, staring dully at re-runs, talk shows, game shows and soaps. We even knew about the schedule of late-night TV, because we were allowed to stay up late on Fridays and Saturdays and watch "adult" programming like "Dallas" and "The Late Show." Like house pets who find the movement of a lamp across a room to be an earth-shattering event, the slightest deviation in the television schedule was known to us.

Things change slowly, or at least tend to, and so it was about 1996 that I finally encountered a TV program which had been running for some time whose existence was a complete surprise to me. Myself, and a girl I was dating by the name of Michelle, were up late one night, lounging in front of the tube, when through the static of her shitty old Magnavox television on came a show called "The Pointman." Both of us watched in complete astonishment -- astonishment, because we had never heard of the fucking thing. How could a TV show exist without our knowledge? It seemed fantastical, ridiculous, and indeed, we made great fun of "The Pointman" for weeks afterward for daring to exist without telling us. TV shows were very public things, and for one to slip beneath the radar, even on late-late-night television, was unprecedented.

Because of this, and at the risk of sounding even older than I am, it is very hard for me to relate to people who grew up with unlimited television options. In my day, people had exactly five choices: the big three networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), PBS (mosly for "grownups"), and that one local station. Every town in America had this one local station and regardless of who owned it or what part of the country it resided, its programming was always the same: a kind of trash heap of very local news, old war movies, cartoons, and Kung Fu Theater.

Because of these limited options, and because remote controls didn't enter widespread use until the early-mid 1980s, channel surfing was not a possibility either. In fact there was no channel surfing: you turned the dial click, click, click, click, click, and in the space of those five clicks discovered all your choices. Cable TV and VCRs added a little dimension to this very dismal scenario, but both were considered extravagances in middle-class families until the mid-80s. The former, however, was a clunky medium best suited for watching movies, and the latter expensive and unreliable: our cable used to go out every time the wind picked up, and the schedule of movies was often astonishingly repetetive and bad. If I remember most moronic moments of that Clint Eastwood movie with the oranguatan, blame cable television, which never seemed to show anything else.

The upside of this paucity of selections was that television served as a great unifier of people. Sometimes everyone watched The Super Bowl not because they gave a damn about football, but because there was simply nothing else on the air. If this was limiting, it also served as a form of ready cultural currency: everyone had seen the game, so everyone could discuss it at the locker or the water cooler the next day. The effect was inclusive. Nowadays, with hundreds of series to choose from, it is completely normal to be watching a half-dozen programs regularly that perhaps none of your friends or family have ever seen or even heard of. Even "popular" programs draw only a few million viewers. In fact, a "good" ratings share today would have meant instant cancellation in 1989, whereas network executives of 2022 would literally commit murder to have the sort of numbers the most popular programs of the 70s, 80s, 90s and early-mid 00s posted on the regular. The landscape is too fractured, too honeycombed, for cultural phenomenons like "Friends" or "Seinfeld" or "90210" or even a latecomer like "CSI" to happen ever again. Thus we will never again have a moment like the finale of "M*A*S*H" or the "Who Shot J.R.?" episode of "Dallas," which literally everyone in the goddamned country watched and then discussed at length for days or weeks afterwards. It simply won't happen. And the effect of this is a further atomization of our already atomized culture. Everyone has their own select favorites in the queue, but nothing brings us all together.

Another advantage of the old system was the excitement we experienced while awaiting a "television event" -- one of those lavish mini-series costume dramas which were chock-full of faded stars of yesteryear mingled with young up-and-comers. Some of these mini-series were appallingly bad, even laughable, but a few rose to dizzying heights of excellence, and nearly all were enjoyable on some level, even if only as popcorn entertainment. I have the fondest memories of sitting around the TV with my father, mother, older brother and cat, watching things like HOLOCAUST, MASADA, THE WINDS OF WAR, WAR & REMEMBRANCE, SHOGUN, PETER THE GREAT, NORTH AND SOUTH, and many others, until this medium too began to fade away with time. The last full-court-press TV mini-series I can remember was FALCONE, in 2000, and it was a dismal failure, completely ignored in the wake of "The Sopranos"....an HBO cable series. If that isn't an example of an old medium being crushed beneath a new one, I don't know what is.

Then there was the waiting. We live in an era of binge-watching, in which new seasons of shows are released all at once or in clumps, two and three episodes at a time, so that audiences can burn through a year's worth of stories in a single weekend or even a day. This simply underscores the fatal idea that TV shows are merely disposable "content" to be consumed like soda or popcorn, and not something to be savored. In my time, you had to wait about 30 weeks -- minimum -- for your favorite show to play out, and God help you if you missed an episode and nobody taped the fucking thing. This may seem like a disadvantage, but it taught us to savor what we had, to be patient -- always a good lesson for kids to choke down -- and to appreciate the process of following a story to its conclusion. Whatever our television was or was not in terms of quality or maturity, it was not "content." We grasped the enormous effort and expense involved, not to mention the emotional investment, into even the shittiest shows. By parceling stories out slowly, we respected the medium in which they were conveyed more and held it in greater value and esteem.

There is another aspect to television of yore, somewhat unappreciated, which I dearly miss, and that is its moral sense. Time was that there were fairly clear boundaries drawn between good and evil in television land. Good guys were generally flawed -- you can't tell me Dr. Quincy, Thomas Magnum, or Hawkeye Pierce were perfect or even close to it -- but we knew ultimately they were always going to do the right thing as they saw it: that they had a firmly fixed moral compass and certain internal governors which would prevent them from doing some things or tolerating others. But at a certain point about twenty years ago, audiences began to lose patience with heroes who were actually heroes. They not only wanted more egregious flaws and more pronounced eccentric quirks, they began craving outright anti-heroes like Vic Mackie or Tony Soprano, who had few redeeming qualities as human beings and were merely interesting to watch, in the way a drunken college student with a baseball bat is interesting to watch. As an alternative to the traditional TV hero this sort of thing served a very definite purpose: it more closely reflected the world we live in, which, at the risk of kicking an already dead cliche one too many times, has a helluva lot more gray than black or white in it. It also freed writers from the somewhat tedious limitations of Network Standards & Practices, which often forced happy endings onto episodes whose stories demanded otherwise.But because Hollywood is almost pathologically imitative, the "troubled and flawed protagonist with a haunted past," of the sort which -- for example -- abounded in the 00s era reboot of "Battlestar Galactica," suddenly became at first the norm and then the same sort of tiresome cliche. Today it is literally almost impossible to find a hero anywhere. Even Superman, the Dudley Doo-Rite Boy Scout of the comic book world, has been turned into an angry brooder who kills when he feels it necessary. The Good Man has been replaced by the Bad Boy, who, it turns out, is kind of a candy ass, what with all that existential brooding and crying into the void.

Is there a place for the troubled, deeply flawed protagonist on television? Of course there is. Nobody wants to see 100 shows about Superman. But nobody -- at least this nobody -- wants to see 100 shows about Batman, either. When did we, as a society, become so corrupted that the idea of a hero became offensive to us? That courage, decency, selflessness, patriotism, and so on were regarded with cynicism, disbelief and contempt? I don't know, but I do know it has happened within my lifetime.

By now you're probably thinking I'm jammed in some nostalgic feedback loop, where anything I grew up with is better than everything today, just because I grew up with it. This is not so. There are definite upsides to the destruction of the Big Three, five-channel system: a lot of melodramatic, sappy, saccharine, feel-good trash is no longer produced for the simple reason that nobody would watch it. What's more, writers no longer have to pretend that America consists of 95% white people and 5% "others," with "others" filling out ridiculously cliched roles (as someone once joked, black actors of the 80s had plenty of roles to choose from: convict, drill instructor, and escaped slave). Also, writers are no longer handcuffed to heroic sterotypes or fanciful, idealistic depictions of police officers, doctors, or ordinary housewives. They can, if they wish, depict the human experience in its full spectrum, with the very adult notion that good people can do bad things, and bad people good ones. (Prior to "The Shield," for example, TV did not depict police corruption as something that could be systemic, but rather the result of individual cops on the take.) My problem, and it is a serious problem, is that they do not avail themselves of this right. Modern writers of television operate along guidelines which do not correspond with reality, but with the demands of Stitch Fix enneuchs from Human Resources. The generic television show of 2020 is racially, ethnically, sexually, and morally diverse, but it bears no relation to what I see when I walk outside my door, in either form or content. It is unrealistic in the way the 80s shows were unrealistic, but without the rigid moral standards of those shows to redeem their many other failings.

In "1984," Winston Smith notes that the Party's depiction of people in Oceania -- attractive, healthy, athletic and happy -- not only does not correspond with reality, it is in fact the exact opposite of reality. Smith realizes there is a yawning gap between what the Party says is true and what is actually true. So it is with modern television writing. "They" want to sell us a world in which you walk into a crime lab and it is basically a meeting of the United Nations during Pride Month. And maybe the American workplace should actually look like that. But I do know, from personal experience, that it does not. The writer's rooms in Hollywood are about as racially diverse as your nearest synogogue, NRA meeting or NBA franchise, and this hypocrisy is not lost on those who have a deeper understanding of the system. Who is Hollywood to sell us this rainbow fantasy, when, according to an official study conducted by The Hollywood Reporter, 90% of studio executives are Jewish and the Academy is almost exclusively white and predominately male? The fact is, if you want to claim that your show is "grittty" and "depicts reality" then you ought to do just exactly that. Give us a show in southside Chicago where 100% of the cast is black and I'm with you provided it's well-written and well-acted. Give me a show in New York where everyone is Jewish, Puerto Rican, or gay and I'm also there under the same caveats. But don't give us a show in Bangor, Maine with the same casting. Don't pretend that racial-ethnic diversity is found everywhere in this country. It isn't, and we all know it isn't. Stop depicting the reality you want and exchange it for actual reality you have yet to change for yourselves. Or otherwise give us fantasy, and have the nuts to call it that. The shows I grew up with, I am very well aware, often failed to present this country as it was, and are mocked for it: but the shows of today also fail this test, albeit in a much different way.

Don't mistake me. I still love television, and despite being an increasingly cranky middle-aged man, I still watch it: new TV, old TV, domestic TV, foreign TV, event TV, streaming TV. I find a great deal of pleasure and even some joy in the worlds I'm allowed to visit, the people I'm permitted to know, the adventures, triumphs and tragedies I'm favored to share in. I will never stop enjoying a well-crafted, well-executed television series be it a 70s sit-com or a 2020's "limited series event." But I will also never stop grumbling and complaining about how badly this medium often fails to deliver on its immense promise, how often it reaches for the lowest-hanging fruit, and how it frequently becomes a tool in the hands of bumbling social justice warriors who do not practice what they preach. Television is a grand thing, and it is also, as King said, a bottomless pit of shit.

GONE TOO SOON III

By now you are probably familiar with my “Gone Too Soon” series here on Stone Cold Prose, in which I examine television shows which I deem were cancelled before their time. In the first installment, I tackled five shows which were murdered either within or just after completion of their first seasons: they were The Lone Gunmen, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Alien Nation, Kindred: The Embraced, and the original Battlestar Galactica. In chapter two, I looked at seven television shows which had not necessarily closed their eyes during their inaugural seasons, but nevertheless left us before they should have: Friday the 13th: The Series, WKRP in Cincinatti, Rome, Forever Knight, Millennium, The Lost World and Angel.

Today kick off the third, but sadly not the last, chapter of Gone Too Soon, with five shows I feel were cruelly taken from us well before their time. In some cases the series were excellent but suffered from poor marketing or political interference; in others they were the victims of bad business decisions by studio suits or simply weren't strong enough to survive the opening frame despite their promise and potential. In every example the loss was ours. Stephen King once famously remarked that television was “a bottomless pit of shit,” and while this is certainly true, he might have added that there would be less fertilizer for the hole if those in power were able to tell said shit from Shinola at cancellation time.

Proceeding in order of appearance, we begin with WEREWOLF (1987 – 1988). This little piece of costume jewelry is virtually forgotten today. You won't find it on any streaming services, and it was never officially released on DVD. Poor-quality bootlegs and YouTube videos are the best you can get. How things change. Back in 1987, WEREWOLF was an integral part of the Fox Network's first ever broadcast lineup, and in its own way it was quite the innovation. First and foremost, it was a horror series, which remains a rarity on network TV but was almost unheard-of back then; second, it was shot in half-hour format, which by the 80s was used almost exclusively for situation comedies. Because of this, the show felt and looked very different from anything else on television at the time. WEREWOLF was the story of Eric Cord (John J. York), a college grad who gets bitten by a lycanthrope and discovers the only way to free himself from the curse of transforming into a slavering, blood-thirsty monster is to track down and kill the originator of his werewolf bloodline, one Janos Skorzeny (Chuck Connors). As he hunts Skorzeny, he himself is tracked by bounty hunter Alamo Joe Rogan (Lance LeGault), one of the go-to character actors of the 70s and 80s. Now, if this sounds like a furry version of THE HULK, you're right: the premise is exactly the same, right down to the fact that Cord is a wanted man who wanders from town to town, pursued from without and cursed from within. What's more, at that stage of his career, John J. York was one of the worst actors ever to step in front of a camera. When he talks, even when he handles a prop, he's absolutely unconvincing and has all the acting range of a wood block. Some of the episodes are trash, and while the special effects are good for 80s TV (they had some heavy hitters in the FX department), the show was only intermittently frightening. Having said that, the werewolf mythology was quite well thought out, LeGault was a great anti-villain, many of the guest actors were first rate, and Chuck Connors had the advantage of actually looking and sounding like a monster without makeup. What's more, unlike The Hulk, Cord's werewolf did occasionally kill people, and if they all happened to be evil, well, that didn't make their eviscerations any less gruesome. This show was never going to be really good, because York was just a terrible actor (he did get better), but there were a number of really promising episodes that showed what it might have been able to accomplish if it had stuck around a few more years.

HARSH REALM (1999). In 1999, Chris Carter was on a roll. THE X-FILES was still going strong, and MILLENNIUM hadn't yet been canceled. Approached by Fox to put together another series, he borrowed loosely from a graphic novel of the same name to create HARSH REALM, one of the most miscast and mismanaged good ideas anyone ever had. Released after THE MATRIX, but in gestation well before THE MATRIX hit theaters, REALM is the story of Lt. Tom Hobbes (Scott Bairstow), a U.S. Army officer fresh from Kosovo, who is tapped by his superiors to enter Harsh Realm, a virtual reality program “created by the U.S. Army, programmed to minutely replicate the real world for training simulations.” In this case, his mission is to assassinate an opponent named Santiago (Terry O'Quinn). When he enters the simulation, however, he discovers the virtual world in a dystopian state, and even worse, quickly realizes that anyone who dies in the Realm dies for real. Furious over being lied to, but unable to escape, he tries to carry out his mission, picking up a foul-mouthed mercenary companion named Pinocchio (D.B. Sweeny). The two men, often at odds, pursue differing agendas while trying to kill the elusive Santiago, who has set himself up as a warlord in Harsh Realm and plans to destroy the real world via nuclear holocaust, so he can reign supreme in the “virtual” world. Anyone familiar with Chris Carter's work will recognize his trademarks here: Vancouver setting, superb cinematography and lighting, stylized (often wooden) dialogue, dark conspiracies, and a nebulous but fertile mythology. Unfortunately, the show suffered from the beginning from questionable casting and a confusion of focus: Bairstow is too flat to carry a TV series, Sweeny relishes his cigar-chewing role as the mercenary but doesn't quite sell it, and the story hiccups from idea to idea without ever establishing a clear-cut identity. However, some of the episodes are pretty good, with one in particular (“Keine Ausgang”) demonstrating just how truly flexible the format of this series could be: within Harsh Realm, Hobbes and Pinocchio discover a WW2 battle simulation which repeats itself endlessly, trapping anyone who enters it a hellish version of Groundhog Day. HARSH REALM is a mess, but it is a fascinating mess, with an almost bottomless well of potential stories that we never got to see: only nine were shot, and only three were ever aired.

DA VINCI'S CITY HALL (2005). One of the best television shows I ever watched was DA VINCI'S INQUEST, a hard-hitting, brilliantly written and superbly acted Canadian TV series about an irascible, conscience-driven, alcoholic coroner named Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell). For seven years, this Chris Haddock-created masterpiece followed Da Vinci around Vancouver as he investigated a long series of murders, accidents and scandals, and also pushed a series of controversial social reforms on unwilling cops and politicians. A unique blend of the police prodecural, medical and forensic detective show, while simultaneously taking on numerous “causes” a la QUINCY, it made for excellent viewing. It was so good that when it ended, Haddock decided to keep the story going by taking more or less the entire cast into a continuation spinoff called DA VINCI'S CITY HALL. The last few seasons of INQUEST were increasingly political, and at the end, Da Vinci becomes a candidate for mayor; CITY HALL picks up a year into his tenure as Vancouver's politican chieftan. The series displayed a relish for its brutal examination of city politics: muffled scandals, backroom deals, egotism, personal vendettas, and cynicism abound, and the series' protagonist must walk a very fine line between pushing his forward-thinking agenda and falling into the various traps and ambushes his enemies have laid out before him. Being free of its procedural roots, CITY HALL was in some ways even better than INQUEST; the complexity of its intrigues between politicans, businessmen, and city agencies was fascinating, especially from an American perspective. Unfortunately, CITY HALL debuted in Canada during a television strike, and as a result was afforded almost no publicity; few Canadians knew the show was even on the air, and its ratings were insufficient to justify a second season. Haddock, a resourceful man, tried to keep things going with a Da Vinci television movie called “The Quality of Life”; he was hoping for a whole series of them a la the very successful PERRY MASON TV movies of the 80s and 90s, but “Quality” was the only one ever produced, it is not streamed anywhere, and it is goddamned next to impossible to get your hands on a copy of it. This was a bitter pill when one considers just how damned good the politico-criminal universe Haddock built really was.

K-9 & COMPANY (1981). During the run of "classic" Doctor Who (1963 - 1989), the time-traveling Time Lord had many memorable companions. The most noteworthy of these was arguably Sarah Jane Smith, played by Lis Sladen, who served as companion to both Doctor #3 (Jon Pertwee) and Doctor #4 (Tom Baker), appearing in a staggering 80 episodes between 1973 - 1976. She left the show, curiously enough, via a misunderstanding: believing she was going to be ushered out by the new showrunner, Philip Hinchcliffe, she departed on her own. Hinchcliffe, a man of great genius, had no such intention, and when he later discovered he was the motive force behind her departure, allegedly "turned pale" with shock and upset. The character of Sarah remained extremely popular with fans, however, and various ideas were concocted to bring her back. In 1981, a different showrunner named John Nathan-Turner came up with the idea of a "Who" spinoff series. The robotic dog K-9 had become a very popular companion for the Doctor, but could obviously not carry a series on its own, so Nathan-Turner asked Sladen to reprise Sarah Jane as the human lead. She accepted, and "K-9 & Company" was born. Now, I am hardly a fan of Nathan-Turner's aesthetic, and the idea of a freelance journalist and a robot dog fighting evil is questionable even for a kid's show, but the pilot, "A Girl's Best Friend," despite having arguably the worst opening credit sequence of any show in televsion history -- it's atrocious, is a remarkable piece of work, harkening back to Doctor Who's golden age, when Hinchcliffe utilized horror and mystery rather than science fiction tropes to fuel the storytelling. Sarah is snarky, scrappy, and smart,
the plucky dog makes an amusing sidekick, and the creepy story about a rural English cult that practices human sacrifice, is spiced with performances from, among others, Colin Jeavons and Sean Chapman. The atmosphere is pure Hammer horror, and Nathan-Turner deserves much credit for tapping into that aesthetic. "A Girl's Best Friend" was a pilot with enormous promise, but unfortunately was not picked up despite huge ratings. Though Sladen ultimately did return in the sucessful "Sarah Jane Adventures" in 2006, which ran until her untimely death in 2011, "K-9 & Company" represents, to me, an enormous opportunity cruelly wasted.

INTELLIGENCE (2005 - 2007). "Da Vinci's Inquest" aside, Chris Haddock had a rather tragic history of creating great entertainment which didn't have, or rather wasn't allowed, to live out a natural life. "Intelligence" was a prime example of this. This minor masterpiece ran but two Canadian seasons (13 episodes each), but makes an indelible impression on anyone who watches it. "Intelligence" is the story of Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracey), a cagey Vancouver mob boss, and Mary Spalding (Klea Scott), director of the Organized Crime Unit of the Candian Security Intelligence Service. The two form a tense, unlikely, mutually exploitative alliance, with Reardon supplying information on his many enemies to Spalding, who uses that intelligence to further her own career ambitions. The complex world of Canadian gangsterism, which includes bikers, Mafia, and various immigrant gangs is explored, as is the even more Byzantine world of CSIS, which straddles the line between cop shop and spy agency. There is also plenty of personal drama, with Reardon trying to manage his irresponsible younger brother Mike and crazy ex wife Francine, while Spalding tries and fails to juggle a dying marriage with her relentless personal ambitions. Like all Haddock shows, this one is full of sharply drawn characters, blistering performances, naturalistic dialog, and scathing social commentary. The United States is presented, through Canadian eyes, as a bullying, intrusive, arrogant "partner" which views Canada as a back yard rather than a country, and both the Canadian gangsters and Canadian cops see the Yanks through suspicious and even hostile eyes. This perspective is fascinating, especially when American spying in Canada is discussed, and indeed, these hot-button topics ultimately caused the CBC to cancel the show, proving that squeaky wheels don't always get grease: sometimes they get the axe. The show ended on a cliffhanger, which made it all the more cruel to the audience. (On a pair of side-notes: I met Klea Scott, who also happened to star in the third season of Millennium, and she is a fine human being who has had the curious luck of being on two classic shows who died before their time. I also feel it worth mentioning that Haddock is a showrunner who knew how to employ the most diverse casting imaginable without ever making it feel like box-checking.)

On that note, I bring the third installment of Gone Too Soon to a close. I am experimenting with trying to be grateful for the things I have rather than bitter over the things I don't, and it seems to be working, so instead of extending a huge middle finger at the suits, bureacrats and assorted morons responsible for killing these babies in their cradles, I'll just say "thank you" to the folks that brought them into existence.