Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 3
January 29, 2025
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "A FAMILY AT WAR"
Memory Lane is a long and winding road. Some of the houses that stand alongside it require only a short walk; we can visit without breaking a sweat, have a faintly nostalgic look around, and be home before the sun goes down -- indeed, before lunch is on the table. With others, however, it's best to pack that lunch, along with a thermos, a lantern, and a sturdy pair of walking shoes, because they do not reside in this millennium. Indeed, they are to be found near the end of the Lane, in that frighteningly long-ago decade known as the 1970s. When we visit such places, we'd best be prepared to come home in the dark.
A FAMILY AT WAR is not likely to trigger the memory of Americans reading this. It was a British production produced by Granada Television, which ran from 1970 - 1972 on the BBC, and until recently it was incredibly difficult to find: even now, most streaming services idiotically only carry the first of its three series (seasons, in American lingo). If you are willing to make the effort, however -- and I did, obtaining bootleg Region 1 DVDs which had to be shipped to me from Australia -- it is well worth your time. FAMILY is a near-perfect representation of what British TV did regularly for decades before it succumbed in part to the bizarre ideologies of today: make damned good entertainment on a shoestring budget.
A FAMILY AT WAR chronicles the lives of the sprawling Ashton family, a lower middle-class clan from Liverpool, before, during, and immediately after World War 2, focusing on the hardships of "the home front" -- bombing, rationing, shortages, war profiteering, and the collapse of moral standards -- rather than combat, though a handful of memorable episodes do take us to places like North Africa, Spain, France, the North Sea and the flak-filled air over Germany. It was created by John Finch, who, IMDB tells us, "states he only wrote the original treatment as a ruse to be invited to the annual Granada conference where new drama ideas were discussed." Well, the ruse worked. Essentially a wartime soap opera, FAMILY boasted a huge ensemble cast, and was shot mostly -- but not entirely -- on soundstages, seldom venturing on location. Many of the best British productions of the 60s, 70s and 80s were remarkably low budget, with the delightful side-effect that the plots, dialogue and acting had to be first-rate to retain audience interest.
There are too many characters in FAMILY to list in detail, but in essence the story was held together by the Ashton patriarch, Edwin (Colin Douglas): a kindly, forebearing, hard-working man who married above his class when he wedded Jean (Shelagh Fraser), his seemingly doting wife. The two have five children, the oldest of which, David (Colin Campbell) is an absolute menace -- a selfish, philandering, drunken, self-pitying, rage-filled skirt chaser who bristles with class resentment and naturally volunteers for the Royal Air Force when the war breaks out, proving to be a much better soldier than he is a son, husband or human being. The others include Margaret (Lesley Nunnery), whose husband goes MIA in France while she is pregnant; and Philip (Keith Drinkel) a thoughtful veteran of the Spanish Civil War who finds the British Army somewhat more difficult to deal with.
A great deal of the conflict in the series, as well as much of its humor, is provided by Sefton Briggs (John McKelvey), Jean's cheap, scheming, greedy older brother, who cares not one damn about the war and lives to increase his wealth in underhanded ways. He's the sort of manipulative sneak who will steal your fingers while you're shaking hands. Sefton is continually opposed by his exasperated son Tony (T.R. Bowen), who always hovers on the brink of estrangement from his wicked old man, but can never quite make the break.
FAMILY is of course a soap opera, so there are tawdry affairs, abortive pregnancies, long-missing spouses thought to be dead who turn up at inconvenient moments, and a certain amount of drama for drama's sake. However, beneath the surface there is a great deal going on. The war is presented as it really was to working and lower middle class people in Britain: a calamity, and the attitudes of the Ashtons and their friends, lovers and in-laws reflects the full range. Edwin, a veteran of WW1, is both patriotic and deeply dubious of the necessity of war. Philip is so opposed to Fascism he fights for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, but returns confused and disillusioned, a feeling that persists when he joins the British army. Sefton regards the war as an opportunity to make money, while David sees the RAF as the means by which he will escape the drudgery of his working-class existence. Some of the female characters, like David's wife Sheila (Coral Atkins), suffer agonies trying to keep their families intact as social roles shift and already shaky marriages are tested by separation, scarcity, and in Jean's case, by the revelation of long-buried secrets. Other characters are conscientious objectors, pacifists, socialists, communists, fascist sympathizers and war profiteers, and each is given a full and reasonably fair hearing for their viewpoint. The whole "greatest generation" myth which is sold in America like a commodity is not so much exploded here as simply ignored. The Ashtons are not heroes. They are not villains. They are wholly ordinary people subjected to a catastrophe which was not of their making and which they try to navigate as best they can. Sometimes they cheat the ration system. Sometimes they question the need for the war. Sometimes they feel disgust at the bombing of German cities or pine or a negotiated settlement with Hitler which will end the carnage and return them to normal life. But of course there will be no return to normalcy for the Ashtons when the war ends. They have lost too much, suffered too much, grown and changed and experienced too much, to ever be the same again, and in that sense they are quite deliberately a metaphor for Britain itself.
I would be remiss if I didn't give special mention to Colin Douglas for his earthy, workmanlike, quietly charming performance as Edwin, the son of a dirtpoor coal-miner who married above his station and discovered, 30 years into the marriage, that his wife rather looks down on him, some of his kids are really screwed up, and his brother-in-law/boss Sefton has been grifting the bejeezus out of him since B.C. Throughout the calamity of the war, which visits every form of personal agony upon him, Douglas portrays Edwin as a good and kindly man, decent to the bone, not a saint by any means, but with an essential dencency and dignity which is deeply touching to witness. Douglas, a real-life WW2 vet who saw some the heaviest imaginable combat in Sicily and Holland, manages to hint at Edwin's deeper trauma without ever discussing it. It's a quietly masterful performance, complimented by the delightful, cartoonish villainy of McKelvey's Sefton, and the fiery mix of self-pity, class resentment and selfishness that Campbell's David brings to the table.
One of the great nerdly pleasures of watching FAMILY is picking out the faces of actors who later appeared on much more famous programs and movies. Fun fact: a staggering number of people who would perform important roles on other classic series, including:
Colin Douglas - Doctor Who
Shelagh Fraser - Star Wars
John Nettles - Midsomer Murders, Bergerac
Patrick Troughton - Doctor Who (the character himself! #2)
Wanda Ventham - Doctor Who, Invasion: UFO
Kenneth Colley - The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi
Mark Jones - The Empire Strikes Back, Doctor Who
William Marlowe - Doctor Who
I could go on, but you get the point. There's a ton of talent here, much of it seen at the beginning of its career. Afficianados of sci-fi in particular will delight in this.
So...where does that leave us? What is the legacy of A FAMILY AT WAR, a half-century after it drew its final curtain? Why are we here in this drafty old house in Liverpool, hiding under the dinner table while the German bombs fall around us?
I have no idea what influence FAMILY had (or did not) on British television. I can say that it had a great influence on me, because it presented a glorified and much-mythologized war in a realistic way, a sort of low-budget cinema verite that showed that for most people, the war was dreary, frightening, boring, frustrating, anxiety-inducing, and seemed to be ripping the fabric of society apart. That it was an opportunity for some and a tragedy for others but almost everyone wanted to it end, preferably at once. That the people who fought it came home and often discovered, and right quick, that they were already in the process of being screwed over and forgotten by the upper classes whose power they had fought to maintain.
It proved as well -- as if the thing needed proving, though it does need periodic reminder -- that dialogue-driven, character-heavy stories can be just as entertaining as those driven by action and sex. And that big budgets are completely unnecessary if you have the right idea, the right script, and the right actors. That human stories will always beat CGI. This is a lesson Hollywood would do well to take to heart, and for that reason alone, A FAMILY AT WAR is worth a watch.
A FAMILY AT WAR is not likely to trigger the memory of Americans reading this. It was a British production produced by Granada Television, which ran from 1970 - 1972 on the BBC, and until recently it was incredibly difficult to find: even now, most streaming services idiotically only carry the first of its three series (seasons, in American lingo). If you are willing to make the effort, however -- and I did, obtaining bootleg Region 1 DVDs which had to be shipped to me from Australia -- it is well worth your time. FAMILY is a near-perfect representation of what British TV did regularly for decades before it succumbed in part to the bizarre ideologies of today: make damned good entertainment on a shoestring budget.
A FAMILY AT WAR chronicles the lives of the sprawling Ashton family, a lower middle-class clan from Liverpool, before, during, and immediately after World War 2, focusing on the hardships of "the home front" -- bombing, rationing, shortages, war profiteering, and the collapse of moral standards -- rather than combat, though a handful of memorable episodes do take us to places like North Africa, Spain, France, the North Sea and the flak-filled air over Germany. It was created by John Finch, who, IMDB tells us, "states he only wrote the original treatment as a ruse to be invited to the annual Granada conference where new drama ideas were discussed." Well, the ruse worked. Essentially a wartime soap opera, FAMILY boasted a huge ensemble cast, and was shot mostly -- but not entirely -- on soundstages, seldom venturing on location. Many of the best British productions of the 60s, 70s and 80s were remarkably low budget, with the delightful side-effect that the plots, dialogue and acting had to be first-rate to retain audience interest.
There are too many characters in FAMILY to list in detail, but in essence the story was held together by the Ashton patriarch, Edwin (Colin Douglas): a kindly, forebearing, hard-working man who married above his class when he wedded Jean (Shelagh Fraser), his seemingly doting wife. The two have five children, the oldest of which, David (Colin Campbell) is an absolute menace -- a selfish, philandering, drunken, self-pitying, rage-filled skirt chaser who bristles with class resentment and naturally volunteers for the Royal Air Force when the war breaks out, proving to be a much better soldier than he is a son, husband or human being. The others include Margaret (Lesley Nunnery), whose husband goes MIA in France while she is pregnant; and Philip (Keith Drinkel) a thoughtful veteran of the Spanish Civil War who finds the British Army somewhat more difficult to deal with.
A great deal of the conflict in the series, as well as much of its humor, is provided by Sefton Briggs (John McKelvey), Jean's cheap, scheming, greedy older brother, who cares not one damn about the war and lives to increase his wealth in underhanded ways. He's the sort of manipulative sneak who will steal your fingers while you're shaking hands. Sefton is continually opposed by his exasperated son Tony (T.R. Bowen), who always hovers on the brink of estrangement from his wicked old man, but can never quite make the break.
FAMILY is of course a soap opera, so there are tawdry affairs, abortive pregnancies, long-missing spouses thought to be dead who turn up at inconvenient moments, and a certain amount of drama for drama's sake. However, beneath the surface there is a great deal going on. The war is presented as it really was to working and lower middle class people in Britain: a calamity, and the attitudes of the Ashtons and their friends, lovers and in-laws reflects the full range. Edwin, a veteran of WW1, is both patriotic and deeply dubious of the necessity of war. Philip is so opposed to Fascism he fights for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, but returns confused and disillusioned, a feeling that persists when he joins the British army. Sefton regards the war as an opportunity to make money, while David sees the RAF as the means by which he will escape the drudgery of his working-class existence. Some of the female characters, like David's wife Sheila (Coral Atkins), suffer agonies trying to keep their families intact as social roles shift and already shaky marriages are tested by separation, scarcity, and in Jean's case, by the revelation of long-buried secrets. Other characters are conscientious objectors, pacifists, socialists, communists, fascist sympathizers and war profiteers, and each is given a full and reasonably fair hearing for their viewpoint. The whole "greatest generation" myth which is sold in America like a commodity is not so much exploded here as simply ignored. The Ashtons are not heroes. They are not villains. They are wholly ordinary people subjected to a catastrophe which was not of their making and which they try to navigate as best they can. Sometimes they cheat the ration system. Sometimes they question the need for the war. Sometimes they feel disgust at the bombing of German cities or pine or a negotiated settlement with Hitler which will end the carnage and return them to normal life. But of course there will be no return to normalcy for the Ashtons when the war ends. They have lost too much, suffered too much, grown and changed and experienced too much, to ever be the same again, and in that sense they are quite deliberately a metaphor for Britain itself.
I would be remiss if I didn't give special mention to Colin Douglas for his earthy, workmanlike, quietly charming performance as Edwin, the son of a dirtpoor coal-miner who married above his station and discovered, 30 years into the marriage, that his wife rather looks down on him, some of his kids are really screwed up, and his brother-in-law/boss Sefton has been grifting the bejeezus out of him since B.C. Throughout the calamity of the war, which visits every form of personal agony upon him, Douglas portrays Edwin as a good and kindly man, decent to the bone, not a saint by any means, but with an essential dencency and dignity which is deeply touching to witness. Douglas, a real-life WW2 vet who saw some the heaviest imaginable combat in Sicily and Holland, manages to hint at Edwin's deeper trauma without ever discussing it. It's a quietly masterful performance, complimented by the delightful, cartoonish villainy of McKelvey's Sefton, and the fiery mix of self-pity, class resentment and selfishness that Campbell's David brings to the table.
One of the great nerdly pleasures of watching FAMILY is picking out the faces of actors who later appeared on much more famous programs and movies. Fun fact: a staggering number of people who would perform important roles on other classic series, including:
Colin Douglas - Doctor Who
Shelagh Fraser - Star Wars
John Nettles - Midsomer Murders, Bergerac
Patrick Troughton - Doctor Who (the character himself! #2)
Wanda Ventham - Doctor Who, Invasion: UFO
Kenneth Colley - The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi
Mark Jones - The Empire Strikes Back, Doctor Who
William Marlowe - Doctor Who
I could go on, but you get the point. There's a ton of talent here, much of it seen at the beginning of its career. Afficianados of sci-fi in particular will delight in this.
So...where does that leave us? What is the legacy of A FAMILY AT WAR, a half-century after it drew its final curtain? Why are we here in this drafty old house in Liverpool, hiding under the dinner table while the German bombs fall around us?
I have no idea what influence FAMILY had (or did not) on British television. I can say that it had a great influence on me, because it presented a glorified and much-mythologized war in a realistic way, a sort of low-budget cinema verite that showed that for most people, the war was dreary, frightening, boring, frustrating, anxiety-inducing, and seemed to be ripping the fabric of society apart. That it was an opportunity for some and a tragedy for others but almost everyone wanted to it end, preferably at once. That the people who fought it came home and often discovered, and right quick, that they were already in the process of being screwed over and forgotten by the upper classes whose power they had fought to maintain.
It proved as well -- as if the thing needed proving, though it does need periodic reminder -- that dialogue-driven, character-heavy stories can be just as entertaining as those driven by action and sex. And that big budgets are completely unnecessary if you have the right idea, the right script, and the right actors. That human stories will always beat CGI. This is a lesson Hollywood would do well to take to heart, and for that reason alone, A FAMILY AT WAR is worth a watch.
January 18, 2025
AS I PLEASE XXIX
My first "As I Please" of 2025 finds me digesting the dinner I cooked (mashed sweet potatoes with fried onion crisps, roasted broccoli, roasted BBQ chicken), and reading the weather report. We're due for something like 5" - 7" inches of snow tomorrow. This got me thinking, in the rambling, ADHD, stream-of-consciousness manner of writers, about a whole slew of nonsense which I will now share.
* When I lived in California, the thing I most missed about the East was the change of seasons. In Southern California, there were only one and a half seasons. One I called Summer, and the other, Not Summer. Summer was what you'd expect. Not Summer was a kind of slovenly version of autumn -- autumn with most of the virtues left out. A sloppy, wet, coldish, bleak half-season which wanted to be something definite but never quite achieved that definite status. Now I'm back East, and we're getting the most definite winter I've experienced since 2007, and boy, am I a mess. My skin is powder. My sinuses ache. My eyes have Samsonite luggage beneath them, which seems to be caused by allergies, though nobody can tell me whatallergies since all the goddamn plants are dead. The snow and ice from the last storm hasn't melted and now we're gonna get slammed again. "Be careful what you wish for" is perhaps the most useful of all the ostensibly worn-out, dumb, overused cliches in existence.
* Yesterday I went hiking in the Nature Preserve. I go there a lot because it's wild country, full of hills and streams and little ponds, and generally empty. The first time I went hiking there I go so lost it took me hours to find a road, any road, that I could follow back to my car. That was in summer, and I've been very careful to pay attention where I am at all times and memorize numerous landmarks. Unfortunately, this technique is useless in winter when the trees are bare, some have fallen, and snow covers everything. I got very, very lost, and just before sunset, no less. I won't say I panicked, but I will say being lost in the deeps of the woods when it's just above freezing, the ground is icy, you don't know where you are, your cell phone is at 42% so the flashlight feature won't burn long, etc., etc. definitely knocked on some primal fears of mine. I love the woods, I love nature, I actually enjoy being muddy and don't mind bruises and cuts on my knuckles, but I am not, nor do I pretend to be, a woodsman or a country boy. I'm a suburban kid who has spent adult life in big cities or large towns. When I finally found the right track, the relief I felt was comical, as I had visions of becoming the picked-over heap of bones and moldering deer fur I use as a landmark.
* Speaking of demise, among the celebrity deaths of the last few days were David Lynch, Bob Eucker and Christopher Benjamin. All of these saddened me for different, selfish reasons, so quick note about each:
* Lynch was a cinematic icon -- perhaps iconoclast might be a better term, since he hardly fit the mold of a "Hollywood director." Indeed, he was anything but Hollywood. Quirky, offbeat, original, totally uncommercial, he was one of those artists whose impact was felt the most keenly by people who didn't know who he was or watch anything he made. They just loved the things those he influenced made. TWIN PEAKS was bizzare, discursive, inaccessible, occasionally incomprehensible, and in short, destroyed the prefabricated concept of what a network television show could be. For that alone he is owed a huge debt. He also had one of the best reputations in the business, and I have that on very good authority -- from crew members who worked with him.
* Bob Eucker was the Rodney Dangerfield of baseball. A former pro player who became a commentator, actor and de facto comedian, he made a second -- third? fourth? fifth? -- career of making fun of himself in commercials, especially the legendary "I must be in the front rowwwww" Miller Lite commercial that is branded on the cerebral cortex of every Gen Xer out there. We just loved that guy.
* Christopher Benjamin was a British character actor with a list of credits that goes back to Christ. He was one of those guys who was in everything, and always gave a great and memorable performance, but never extruded into the script or got in the way of the stars he was supporting. He managed to stand out without upstaging, which is goddamned difficult to do. He was in ZULU with Michael Caine back in the 60s. He chewed scene for scene (with absolute genius) with the great Tom Baker in the all-time classic DOCTOR WHO episode "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" in the 70s. He managed to easily hold his own against the megalithic talent of Jeremy Brett in the Grenada SHERLOCK HOLMES in the 80s. He provided a kindly, Fezziwig-type figure in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in the 90s and showed up in FOYLE'S WAR and THE MIDSOMER MURDERS in the 00s. The list of classic films and television shows he appeared in was staggering, as was the list of stars and top flight actors he worked with, and toward the end of his life he even cranked out 55 episodes of the DOCTOR WHO spinoff Podcast series JAGO & LITEFOOT, reprising his "Weng-Chiang" character of Henry Gordon Jago. Just an absolute legend in his field.
* When I was in college, I quite literally couldn't boil water. I didn't know how to use a hotpot or even make Ramen noodles. It was pathetic. By my junior year I was a fair hand in the kitchen or at the grill, but only in the last three or four years have I learned to elevate my skills to the point where I can cook a turkey without giving anyone salmonella, have a thick recipe book, and feel comfortable tackling more complex dishes without the fire department showing up. I mention this because it's proof of how much we limit ourselves in life by starting sentences with "I can't ----" or "I'll never ----." For years I dreamed of having a YouTube channel, but I kept telling myself there was too much technology involved, that I didn't know how to edit, that I didn't understand keywords or hashtags or search optimization, etc. and so on. Then one day I took the first small step. Then another. Then another. Before long I was there -- idea had become very modest reality. And now my little hobby channel, which I anticipated might have 100 subscribers by the end of this month, is one short of 400 and has over 40,000 total views -- a going concern, however modest. There is no task that cannot be completed if you break it down into small enough components.
* One interesting thing about YouTube is you open yourself to all sorts of commentary and attack, some of it quite vicious. It doesn't bother me in the least. I thank my writing experience for this. When I first began publishing in 2016, I tried to steel myself against the inevitable reader who came away less than satisfied by my work. I got considerably less hate, or even dislike, than I was expecting, but the random flak bursts I did receive always hurt. Over time, I came to see a lot of this criticism as a gross positive. Not only did it thicken my skin -- and thick skin is something every writer needs -- it opened up my mind to the idea that some criticisms are valuable even if tactlessly delivered. On a petty level, it also gave me the satisfaction of knowing that anyone who is trying to get under my skin is only doing so because I got under theirs first.
That about empties the brain bucket for today. But I'd like to accounce that SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2 are now available on Amazon for pre-order. I am going to write a separate, dedicated blog about this in a day or so, but feel free to check out the link below. As some of you are already aware, I am an afficianado of sorts of horror, but I haven't delved too deeply into it myself as a writer -- my short-story collection DEVILS YOU KNOW was a Hoffer Award Finalist, and I'm quite fond of my independent short story "The Brute," but SOMETHING EVIL is quite different -- a full-on assault on the genre, inspired by Stephen King's IT and Clive Barker's BOOKS OF BLOOD, it's a three volume, six-book series which pits a large cast of characters against an ancient, supernatural evil. Combining supernatural and slasher vibes with a more philosophical exploration of the nature of evil and the way evil plays out in each of us (even "good people"), it was a work a quarter century in the making. Anyway, if you've a mind to scare yourself, links are below.
SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2
Devils You Know
The Brute
* When I lived in California, the thing I most missed about the East was the change of seasons. In Southern California, there were only one and a half seasons. One I called Summer, and the other, Not Summer. Summer was what you'd expect. Not Summer was a kind of slovenly version of autumn -- autumn with most of the virtues left out. A sloppy, wet, coldish, bleak half-season which wanted to be something definite but never quite achieved that definite status. Now I'm back East, and we're getting the most definite winter I've experienced since 2007, and boy, am I a mess. My skin is powder. My sinuses ache. My eyes have Samsonite luggage beneath them, which seems to be caused by allergies, though nobody can tell me whatallergies since all the goddamn plants are dead. The snow and ice from the last storm hasn't melted and now we're gonna get slammed again. "Be careful what you wish for" is perhaps the most useful of all the ostensibly worn-out, dumb, overused cliches in existence.
* Yesterday I went hiking in the Nature Preserve. I go there a lot because it's wild country, full of hills and streams and little ponds, and generally empty. The first time I went hiking there I go so lost it took me hours to find a road, any road, that I could follow back to my car. That was in summer, and I've been very careful to pay attention where I am at all times and memorize numerous landmarks. Unfortunately, this technique is useless in winter when the trees are bare, some have fallen, and snow covers everything. I got very, very lost, and just before sunset, no less. I won't say I panicked, but I will say being lost in the deeps of the woods when it's just above freezing, the ground is icy, you don't know where you are, your cell phone is at 42% so the flashlight feature won't burn long, etc., etc. definitely knocked on some primal fears of mine. I love the woods, I love nature, I actually enjoy being muddy and don't mind bruises and cuts on my knuckles, but I am not, nor do I pretend to be, a woodsman or a country boy. I'm a suburban kid who has spent adult life in big cities or large towns. When I finally found the right track, the relief I felt was comical, as I had visions of becoming the picked-over heap of bones and moldering deer fur I use as a landmark.
* Speaking of demise, among the celebrity deaths of the last few days were David Lynch, Bob Eucker and Christopher Benjamin. All of these saddened me for different, selfish reasons, so quick note about each:
* Lynch was a cinematic icon -- perhaps iconoclast might be a better term, since he hardly fit the mold of a "Hollywood director." Indeed, he was anything but Hollywood. Quirky, offbeat, original, totally uncommercial, he was one of those artists whose impact was felt the most keenly by people who didn't know who he was or watch anything he made. They just loved the things those he influenced made. TWIN PEAKS was bizzare, discursive, inaccessible, occasionally incomprehensible, and in short, destroyed the prefabricated concept of what a network television show could be. For that alone he is owed a huge debt. He also had one of the best reputations in the business, and I have that on very good authority -- from crew members who worked with him.
* Bob Eucker was the Rodney Dangerfield of baseball. A former pro player who became a commentator, actor and de facto comedian, he made a second -- third? fourth? fifth? -- career of making fun of himself in commercials, especially the legendary "I must be in the front rowwwww" Miller Lite commercial that is branded on the cerebral cortex of every Gen Xer out there. We just loved that guy.
* Christopher Benjamin was a British character actor with a list of credits that goes back to Christ. He was one of those guys who was in everything, and always gave a great and memorable performance, but never extruded into the script or got in the way of the stars he was supporting. He managed to stand out without upstaging, which is goddamned difficult to do. He was in ZULU with Michael Caine back in the 60s. He chewed scene for scene (with absolute genius) with the great Tom Baker in the all-time classic DOCTOR WHO episode "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" in the 70s. He managed to easily hold his own against the megalithic talent of Jeremy Brett in the Grenada SHERLOCK HOLMES in the 80s. He provided a kindly, Fezziwig-type figure in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in the 90s and showed up in FOYLE'S WAR and THE MIDSOMER MURDERS in the 00s. The list of classic films and television shows he appeared in was staggering, as was the list of stars and top flight actors he worked with, and toward the end of his life he even cranked out 55 episodes of the DOCTOR WHO spinoff Podcast series JAGO & LITEFOOT, reprising his "Weng-Chiang" character of Henry Gordon Jago. Just an absolute legend in his field.
* When I was in college, I quite literally couldn't boil water. I didn't know how to use a hotpot or even make Ramen noodles. It was pathetic. By my junior year I was a fair hand in the kitchen or at the grill, but only in the last three or four years have I learned to elevate my skills to the point where I can cook a turkey without giving anyone salmonella, have a thick recipe book, and feel comfortable tackling more complex dishes without the fire department showing up. I mention this because it's proof of how much we limit ourselves in life by starting sentences with "I can't ----" or "I'll never ----." For years I dreamed of having a YouTube channel, but I kept telling myself there was too much technology involved, that I didn't know how to edit, that I didn't understand keywords or hashtags or search optimization, etc. and so on. Then one day I took the first small step. Then another. Then another. Before long I was there -- idea had become very modest reality. And now my little hobby channel, which I anticipated might have 100 subscribers by the end of this month, is one short of 400 and has over 40,000 total views -- a going concern, however modest. There is no task that cannot be completed if you break it down into small enough components.
* One interesting thing about YouTube is you open yourself to all sorts of commentary and attack, some of it quite vicious. It doesn't bother me in the least. I thank my writing experience for this. When I first began publishing in 2016, I tried to steel myself against the inevitable reader who came away less than satisfied by my work. I got considerably less hate, or even dislike, than I was expecting, but the random flak bursts I did receive always hurt. Over time, I came to see a lot of this criticism as a gross positive. Not only did it thicken my skin -- and thick skin is something every writer needs -- it opened up my mind to the idea that some criticisms are valuable even if tactlessly delivered. On a petty level, it also gave me the satisfaction of knowing that anyone who is trying to get under my skin is only doing so because I got under theirs first.
That about empties the brain bucket for today. But I'd like to accounce that SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2 are now available on Amazon for pre-order. I am going to write a separate, dedicated blog about this in a day or so, but feel free to check out the link below. As some of you are already aware, I am an afficianado of sorts of horror, but I haven't delved too deeply into it myself as a writer -- my short-story collection DEVILS YOU KNOW was a Hoffer Award Finalist, and I'm quite fond of my independent short story "The Brute," but SOMETHING EVIL is quite different -- a full-on assault on the genre, inspired by Stephen King's IT and Clive Barker's BOOKS OF BLOOD, it's a three volume, six-book series which pits a large cast of characters against an ancient, supernatural evil. Combining supernatural and slasher vibes with a more philosophical exploration of the nature of evil and the way evil plays out in each of us (even "good people"), it was a work a quarter century in the making. Anyway, if you've a mind to scare yourself, links are below.
SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2
Devils You Know
The Brute
January 13, 2025
EXILES IS A DIGITAL BOOK TODAY AWARD WINNER
If you follow me here on Antagony (yes -- I changed the name of the blog again, so as not to confuse it with Stone Cold Prose, my YouTube channel), you know that there are some books I've written which are more commercial in nature, and others which lay nearer and dearer to my heart, which are written not with the objective of popularity or profit but simply because I wanted and needed to write them. An example of a "commercial" book, or books, would be my CAGE LIFE series. I'm sentimentally attached to these novels, and I strive to write them at a very high level from a stylistic point of view, tapping into my own emotional history to provide authenticity to the characters and situations. No, I'm not a professional fighter with a mobbed-up background and a penchant for self-destruction,* but the series is an accurate analogy-cum-allegory for my life, or at least for my life when I originally wrote the books. So in one sense, they too are dear to me; but writing them, including the third one in the series which I'm drafting now, is largely a mechanical exercise. They are crafted from the point of view of an author who is trying to write something entertaining, fast-paced and immersive, with some insights into the nature of struggle and redemption, but in the end they are commercial art, with the emphasis firmly on "commercial." They don't pretend to be Tolstoy or St. Exupery or Dostoevsky. More like Silva or Parker or Sanders with liberal doses of Hemingway. They're meant to be read at the surface level of entertainment, and if people discover they have depth, terrific; if they don't, well, non è un grosso problema.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that some of my books are much less commercial and much more "art," at least within my own mind. I hope they sell, I hope people read them, and the more the better, but even if nobody read them I'd still write them, because they mean something to me. They are, in essence, the distilate of a lifetime of reading and observation and thought-experiment. My CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS series falls firmly in this category, so permit me a little exposition here.
In 2021, I published DEUS EX, a novella about the downfall of a European dictator named Magnus Antonius Magnus. In this imagined world, Magnus had come to power by overthrowing The Order, a faceless bureaucracy which suffocated its subjects with red tape, restricted technology, waged pointless wars, and permitted every form of depravity that did not threaten its own power. At his height, he ruled a quarter of the Earth's surface and was worshiped as a god. The novella, however, introduces him to us at the moment of his undoing, when his empire is in the final stage of collapse and he decides to escape his fate while simultaneously testing the reality of his own godhood. I wrote DEUS EX as a standalone work, meant to study the psychology of absolute power and the corrosive effect it has not only on those who wield it, but the world around it. However, in creating a backstory for Magnus' ruin, I had to understand his rise; I had to create, if only in my own mind, the world that he had toppled in order to seize power. Eventually I came to realize this world was too fertile a soil to leave untilled, and that propelled me to write a sequel-cum-prequel, EXILES.
EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS is set decades before DEUS EX. Unlike DEUS, it is not told from Magnus' perspective, but from the vantages of Marguerite Bain, a ruthless smuggler for a "licensed" criminal organization known as The Brotherhood, and Enitan Champoleon, a luckless orphan who deserted the Army of the Order to pursue the life of a tramp. Through this unlikely pairing, we encounter Magnus as he begins his transition from a mysterious mercenary working out of North Africa, to a European revolutionary bent on absolute power. It is not meant as a "full reveal" of the shadowy and enigmatic Magnus, but rather as a partial exploration of his methods and motives, as well as a rather lavish depiction of life under The Order. We see a world in which red tape, backed up by a selective use of brute force and harsh restrictions on technology, rule over 300 million people. A world so thoroughly controlled by social engineers and social psychologists that even its political opposition -- foreign and domestic, works in its favor. A world which can offer neither a past nor a future but only an endless now spent working, gambling, drinking, whoring and seeking out other forms of mind-deadening entertainment.
EXILES is, for me, the result of a lifetime of reading George Orwell and Frank Herbert, as well as a fortunate exposure to I, CLAUDIUS and the works of Gerard K. O'Neill, and an even-more-fortunate obsession with the power of lies. I have never had an easier time writing a book, in large part because most of the story elements had been occupying space in my brain for decades. It seemed to pour out of my fingertips onto the page, and required very little correction in the drafting and editing processes. Moments like this are, for a writer, as rare as total eclipses of the sun, and are to be cherished, which is one of the reasons I am so fond of this story. Of course, EXILES does not come close to telling the whole story of Magnus, but it does expand the universe enormously and begin to map out his terrifying outlook upon himself, which can be summed up in one sentence: "History will not happen to me...I will happen to history."
On a more personal note, EXILES is also the study of outcasts from society, people who are "in but not of." Magnus, Bain and Champoleon are all people exiled from the common stream of humanity, albeit for very different reasons. They are also refugees, in a figurative sense, from the society in which they were born and live, people who cannot or will not "fit in." Each gropes toward a solution which will satify their desires, and each faces enormous, perhaps insurmountable obstacles to doing so.
This is the part where I now tell you that EXILES was a Reader's Favorite "5 Stars" pick in 2024, and now in 2025 I have been informed it took 3rd place/bronze in the Digital Book Today Awards "Literary" category. At this point in my writing career, writing awards no longer quicken my pulse -- this sounds shameless but it's true -- however, in this case I confess to some blushes here. Because EXILES is so intensely personal, because it is the sort of book that could never be written without a thousand different influences weaving together over decades to form its story, anything good that happens to it at all is cause for celebration. I hope you will join me in that celebration by giving it a read.
Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus
[* the penchant for self-destruction is probably accurate.]
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that some of my books are much less commercial and much more "art," at least within my own mind. I hope they sell, I hope people read them, and the more the better, but even if nobody read them I'd still write them, because they mean something to me. They are, in essence, the distilate of a lifetime of reading and observation and thought-experiment. My CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS series falls firmly in this category, so permit me a little exposition here.
In 2021, I published DEUS EX, a novella about the downfall of a European dictator named Magnus Antonius Magnus. In this imagined world, Magnus had come to power by overthrowing The Order, a faceless bureaucracy which suffocated its subjects with red tape, restricted technology, waged pointless wars, and permitted every form of depravity that did not threaten its own power. At his height, he ruled a quarter of the Earth's surface and was worshiped as a god. The novella, however, introduces him to us at the moment of his undoing, when his empire is in the final stage of collapse and he decides to escape his fate while simultaneously testing the reality of his own godhood. I wrote DEUS EX as a standalone work, meant to study the psychology of absolute power and the corrosive effect it has not only on those who wield it, but the world around it. However, in creating a backstory for Magnus' ruin, I had to understand his rise; I had to create, if only in my own mind, the world that he had toppled in order to seize power. Eventually I came to realize this world was too fertile a soil to leave untilled, and that propelled me to write a sequel-cum-prequel, EXILES.
EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS is set decades before DEUS EX. Unlike DEUS, it is not told from Magnus' perspective, but from the vantages of Marguerite Bain, a ruthless smuggler for a "licensed" criminal organization known as The Brotherhood, and Enitan Champoleon, a luckless orphan who deserted the Army of the Order to pursue the life of a tramp. Through this unlikely pairing, we encounter Magnus as he begins his transition from a mysterious mercenary working out of North Africa, to a European revolutionary bent on absolute power. It is not meant as a "full reveal" of the shadowy and enigmatic Magnus, but rather as a partial exploration of his methods and motives, as well as a rather lavish depiction of life under The Order. We see a world in which red tape, backed up by a selective use of brute force and harsh restrictions on technology, rule over 300 million people. A world so thoroughly controlled by social engineers and social psychologists that even its political opposition -- foreign and domestic, works in its favor. A world which can offer neither a past nor a future but only an endless now spent working, gambling, drinking, whoring and seeking out other forms of mind-deadening entertainment.
EXILES is, for me, the result of a lifetime of reading George Orwell and Frank Herbert, as well as a fortunate exposure to I, CLAUDIUS and the works of Gerard K. O'Neill, and an even-more-fortunate obsession with the power of lies. I have never had an easier time writing a book, in large part because most of the story elements had been occupying space in my brain for decades. It seemed to pour out of my fingertips onto the page, and required very little correction in the drafting and editing processes. Moments like this are, for a writer, as rare as total eclipses of the sun, and are to be cherished, which is one of the reasons I am so fond of this story. Of course, EXILES does not come close to telling the whole story of Magnus, but it does expand the universe enormously and begin to map out his terrifying outlook upon himself, which can be summed up in one sentence: "History will not happen to me...I will happen to history."
On a more personal note, EXILES is also the study of outcasts from society, people who are "in but not of." Magnus, Bain and Champoleon are all people exiled from the common stream of humanity, albeit for very different reasons. They are also refugees, in a figurative sense, from the society in which they were born and live, people who cannot or will not "fit in." Each gropes toward a solution which will satify their desires, and each faces enormous, perhaps insurmountable obstacles to doing so.
This is the part where I now tell you that EXILES was a Reader's Favorite "5 Stars" pick in 2024, and now in 2025 I have been informed it took 3rd place/bronze in the Digital Book Today Awards "Literary" category. At this point in my writing career, writing awards no longer quicken my pulse -- this sounds shameless but it's true -- however, in this case I confess to some blushes here. Because EXILES is so intensely personal, because it is the sort of book that could never be written without a thousand different influences weaving together over decades to form its story, anything good that happens to it at all is cause for celebration. I hope you will join me in that celebration by giving it a read.
Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus
[* the penchant for self-destruction is probably accurate.]
January 1, 2025
SINNER'S CROSS WINS AGAIN
I think we all need some good news today -- I know I did -- so it was a great personal relief to begin 2025 by getting notice that SINNER'S CROSS, my most decorated novel, now has a new decoration. Last year the book was given a "5 Star Award" by the Historical Fiction Company. Well, today, as I was driving back from my daily hike, I received notice that it had also taken the Silver Medal in the Hemingway War Fiction category for 2024. Maybe it's because I'm a fan of Hemingway, but I find this especially satisfying. Along with this, here is the list of awards this book has won since it was released in 2020:
Best Indie Book Award
Book Excellence Award
Literary Titan Gold Medal
Readers Favorite Gold Medal
Readers Favorite "5 Stars"
Historical Fiction Company "5 Star Award"
International Author Network Award Finalist
For those unfamiliar with SINNER'S CROSS, it's the inaugural novel in a WW2 series which also includes the award-winning VERY DEAD OF WINTER, and should see its third installment, SOUTH OF HELL, appear sometime late in 2025 or early 2026. In writing this series I created a simple architecture for storytelling which I have clung to religiously from the very first word:
1. All the novels are set during events which are less well-known to the public than, say, the Normandy Campaign or the Battle of Bastogne -- the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, the Battle of the Snow Eifel, the Alsace Campaign, and so on. This is in large part an effort to shed a bit of light on sadly and sometimes deliberately neglected corners of history. However, they are not history lessons. I never hesitate to compress, conflate, composite, or "synthesize" events for the sake of the narrative.
2. All the novels are told from multiple viewpoints, which include the Germans, and all the characters are protagonists and antagonists both. There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" per se. One common remark readers make about these novels is, "During the German chapters, I found myself rooting for the Germans." I am always pleased by this because that is not an easy task when dealing with American audiences (Europeans find it easier). But you should take note that the larger issues of the war are simply taken for granted.
3. The novels are about people, about human beings, not technology or place-names or strategy. They are a study of human beings under immense, unrelenting pressure. Though I have taken enormous pains to get all the little details right, I never hesitate to sacrifice historical accuracy in favor of emotional honesty.
4. The lives of the various characters, whether fighting for the Allies or Germany, must intersect in some way, directly or indirectly or both.
5. There is no "Greatest Generation" worship in these books. My characters, including the Americans, are portrayed with a wide array of human faults and failings.
In any event, SINNER'S CROSS, both as a novel and as a series, represent my lifelong obsession with the Second World War and in some ways are the culmination of a lifetime of study and hobby. Like Sauron and his Ring, I have poured so much of myself into them that in some ways they are more "me" than I am. I hope some of you reading this will give it a chance.
Sinner's Cross
The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel
Best Indie Book Award
Book Excellence Award
Literary Titan Gold Medal
Readers Favorite Gold Medal
Readers Favorite "5 Stars"
Historical Fiction Company "5 Star Award"
International Author Network Award Finalist
For those unfamiliar with SINNER'S CROSS, it's the inaugural novel in a WW2 series which also includes the award-winning VERY DEAD OF WINTER, and should see its third installment, SOUTH OF HELL, appear sometime late in 2025 or early 2026. In writing this series I created a simple architecture for storytelling which I have clung to religiously from the very first word:
1. All the novels are set during events which are less well-known to the public than, say, the Normandy Campaign or the Battle of Bastogne -- the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, the Battle of the Snow Eifel, the Alsace Campaign, and so on. This is in large part an effort to shed a bit of light on sadly and sometimes deliberately neglected corners of history. However, they are not history lessons. I never hesitate to compress, conflate, composite, or "synthesize" events for the sake of the narrative.
2. All the novels are told from multiple viewpoints, which include the Germans, and all the characters are protagonists and antagonists both. There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" per se. One common remark readers make about these novels is, "During the German chapters, I found myself rooting for the Germans." I am always pleased by this because that is not an easy task when dealing with American audiences (Europeans find it easier). But you should take note that the larger issues of the war are simply taken for granted.
3. The novels are about people, about human beings, not technology or place-names or strategy. They are a study of human beings under immense, unrelenting pressure. Though I have taken enormous pains to get all the little details right, I never hesitate to sacrifice historical accuracy in favor of emotional honesty.
4. The lives of the various characters, whether fighting for the Allies or Germany, must intersect in some way, directly or indirectly or both.
5. There is no "Greatest Generation" worship in these books. My characters, including the Americans, are portrayed with a wide array of human faults and failings.
In any event, SINNER'S CROSS, both as a novel and as a series, represent my lifelong obsession with the Second World War and in some ways are the culmination of a lifetime of study and hobby. Like Sauron and his Ring, I have poured so much of myself into them that in some ways they are more "me" than I am. I hope some of you reading this will give it a chance.
Sinner's Cross
The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel
December 31, 2024
2024: A RAMBLE
Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one. -- Brad Paisley
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something. -- Neil Gaiman
I have seldom lapsed in writing this blog as badly as I have this December -- it's been more than three weeks since my last post, and it's supposed to come out once a week. Shameful. On the other hand, this version of Stone Cold Prose is now one of two, and the other, YouTube version, isdropping precisely once a week. Now, when I spoke to you last, that channel had just gotten its 10,000th view and its 100th watch-hour, with 63 subscribers. It now has 362 subscribers, 34,432 views and 1,316 watch hours. One video on Generation X has 13,000 views by itself -- it's not viral, but it's whatever the hobby channel version of viral might be. So perhaps I can be forgiven for pushing where the results are so visible and satisfying. Goodreads got rid of weblog statistics many years ago, so I no longer have the faintest idea how many people read this. Perhaps that shouldn't matter, but it does.
The end of the year makes people naturally thoughtful. They look back on the 364 days previous and think about their triumphs and tragedies and how those things play in the larger drama of their lives. Working on the YouTube channel has reminded me that there are acts we perform out of necessity, things we do for pleasure, and services we do for others, which can, I suppose, be a blend of both. When I started this blog in 2016, I did so out of necessity: I thought I should do it, given I'd just published my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, and now had a Goodreads author page. Later, I continued it because I enjoyed it: it served both a psychological purpose (sweeping out my brain) and a minor public service, in the form of the way the occasional blog actually resonated with a random reader.
The YouTube channel now occupies a similar place in my life. I greatly enjoy it because it provides a creative outlet that writing cannot satisfy, a combination of the emptying of the psychological bucket with the gratification of my admittedly embarrassing desire to be seen, to perform, to be in front of a camera, to ride my hobbyhorses in public. Will this enthusiasm last? I have no idea. Notwithstanding my gross negligence of the last few weeks, I've been pounding away here on Goodreads for eight years, producing probably 350 blogs. So at a certain point -- and hey, I did a video about this! -- motivation ceases to be necessary. Discipline takes over. And that was one of the things I of which was forcibly reminded in 2024: the uselessness of motivation and the utility of discipline.
One of the notable quirks of the age of social media is the way people like to post "the life we lead in 2024" photo collages. I find it interesting because it's usually unreflective. It talks about events, not the lessons learned from them. This would seem to contradict what I wrote above, but actually it simply runs alongside it. We boast in public, showing our pictures of Bali and Bimini, our new cars, our kids' graduation photos, the "after" shots of our weight loss campaign, et cetera and so on; in private we put on mood music, light a fire, pour a stiff drink and brood as we stare into the flames. George Orwell once wrote that any life viewed from the inside was simply a series of defeats; Shelby Foote noted that he'd been in 30 fistfights in his life and the ones he remembered best were the ones he lost. My brain works much the same way. There was a lot about this year that went well, but my thoughts tend to drag in the direction of everything that went wrong -- the engine on my car burned out and had to be replaced; my cat Spike, my familiar for 17 years, died in my arms; a person I regarded as a close friend betrayed me in the most cowardly and cold-blooded manner possible; books I were certain would take top honors down in Miami did not; the plans I had to see three new cities this year came to nothing. All of that stings and gives me a bleak, windblown sort of feeling. On the other hand, when I exert conscious effort, I remember the successes: starting this channel, which had been an ambition of mine literally for years; its unexpected success; SINNERS CROSS being longlisted for the Hemingway Award and netting a Historical Fiction Company Five Stars; CAGE LIFE snagging a bronze at Reader's Favorite despite being eight years from its debut; seeing Patrick Page perform his brilliant one-man show "All The Devils Are Here" live on stage; traveling to the hinterlands of Pennsylvania with old pals to drink beer, build fires, swim and chop wood; and of course the book signings in Greensburg and York, both of which were big hits. And of course I finished DARK TRADE: A CAGE LIFE NOVEL, and although almost all of that feat was accomplished in 2023, it still broke the tape in 2024 and must be credited accordingly. I also made great progress on SOUTH OF HELL: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL, albeit not as much as I should have. I do wish, however, that my default state wasn't darkness and anomie and ennui. Then again, if it were composed only of light, I probably wouldn't be half the writer I am. Writers mine pain for a living, usually their own, and the more pain, the more gold. A curious condition. But I wouldn't trade it for anything if it meant losing contact with my Muse.
Speaking of Muses, it was a great pleasure to crush this year's Goodreads Challenge. Granted, I didn't set a particularly high bar for myself, but as I've noted in these blogs, I fell away from reading for pleasure for several years and to my surprise, and horror, when I tried to resume in earnest, I found all those hours watching television and film had blunted my ability to concentrate on books, especially novels. It was accordingly a bit of a process even to hit the modest goal I set for myself. The good news is I've now regained my ability to flop into a chair and relax for hours with a good book of any type, but I'm also aware that this sort of ability can be lost, or at least dulled, by disuse. In any event, I read some good ones this year:
Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall (history)
The Peace by Ernst Jünger (non-fiction)
Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (novel)
Death on a Distant Frontier by Charles Whiting (history)
No Colours or Crest by Peter Kemp (memoir)
Duce! by Robert Collier (biography)
Alms For Oblivion by Peter Kemp (memoir)
Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker (novel)
Raging Bull by Jake La Motta (autobiography)
Execution by Colin McDougall (novel)
The Long March on Rome by Charles Whiting (history)
The Thief of Always by Clive Barker (novel)
Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (novel)
The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway (memoir)
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (novel)
A Tanker's View of World War Two by C. Windsor Miller (memoir)
A Cat's Cradle by Carly Rheilan (novel)
Showdown by Errol Flynn (novel)
I also reread a number of my favorites. Re-reading books is a pastime many would mock or simply fail to understand entirely, but anyone who has a Goodreads account will understand the pleasure involved without further explanation. I used to reread books as a matter of course, but it was years after I moved back East that I was able to regain even part of my library through the mail -- a dirty, tedious and expensive process that ate up a lot of my vacation time in California, but worth it. In any event, there is nothing more comforting to a bibliophile than opening one of their dearest-loved stories or histories or memoirs, especially when things seem bleak and harsh and hopeless. It's like the glow of firelight, or a sudden and unexpected reunion with old friends -- a welcome antidote to the trevails of living.
This brings me, clumsily, to my main point: the older I get, the more I realize that life is not about learning lessons, but about relearning them. I cannot count the number of life-lessons I've learned in the most painful and humiliating ways, which I held close to my heart and used to navigate around, over or through problems in the future...only to forget them, and have to start the whole ugly process anew at some future time. I sometimes wonder if Sherlock Holmes wasn't correct when he told his Watson, "It is a mistake to think that [the mind] has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before." Perhaps every new fact, theory, book, life experience, etc. I acquire simply shoves an old one out the back door. Still, I'd rather continue the process of living the way I do, however clumsily and randomly and unsystematically, than decide that I've learned enough, done enough, experienced enough, and could now sit back and tend to the furniture in my head, neither adding nor taking away. Orwell, through his character of George "Fatty" Bowling, remarked that a man does not die when his heart stops beating: he dies when he loses the power (or perhaps just the willingness) to absorb new ideas. At that moment he becomes a ghost, resembling his living self in every way save for the fact he exists entirely in the past.
I'm not yet ready to become a ghost, literal or figurative. I like to think that so long as I do live, I will want to learn new skills, have new experiences, travel to new places, and find outlets both old and new for my creative drives. I like to think that he who dares, wins, and that I will never allow my rather active fear-glands (the price of an equally active imagination) to interfere with my desires to be more and do more, each and every year I'm permitted to occupy this body and this planet and this life.
That's the plan, anyway.
Happy New Year.
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something. -- Neil Gaiman
I have seldom lapsed in writing this blog as badly as I have this December -- it's been more than three weeks since my last post, and it's supposed to come out once a week. Shameful. On the other hand, this version of Stone Cold Prose is now one of two, and the other, YouTube version, isdropping precisely once a week. Now, when I spoke to you last, that channel had just gotten its 10,000th view and its 100th watch-hour, with 63 subscribers. It now has 362 subscribers, 34,432 views and 1,316 watch hours. One video on Generation X has 13,000 views by itself -- it's not viral, but it's whatever the hobby channel version of viral might be. So perhaps I can be forgiven for pushing where the results are so visible and satisfying. Goodreads got rid of weblog statistics many years ago, so I no longer have the faintest idea how many people read this. Perhaps that shouldn't matter, but it does.
The end of the year makes people naturally thoughtful. They look back on the 364 days previous and think about their triumphs and tragedies and how those things play in the larger drama of their lives. Working on the YouTube channel has reminded me that there are acts we perform out of necessity, things we do for pleasure, and services we do for others, which can, I suppose, be a blend of both. When I started this blog in 2016, I did so out of necessity: I thought I should do it, given I'd just published my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, and now had a Goodreads author page. Later, I continued it because I enjoyed it: it served both a psychological purpose (sweeping out my brain) and a minor public service, in the form of the way the occasional blog actually resonated with a random reader.
The YouTube channel now occupies a similar place in my life. I greatly enjoy it because it provides a creative outlet that writing cannot satisfy, a combination of the emptying of the psychological bucket with the gratification of my admittedly embarrassing desire to be seen, to perform, to be in front of a camera, to ride my hobbyhorses in public. Will this enthusiasm last? I have no idea. Notwithstanding my gross negligence of the last few weeks, I've been pounding away here on Goodreads for eight years, producing probably 350 blogs. So at a certain point -- and hey, I did a video about this! -- motivation ceases to be necessary. Discipline takes over. And that was one of the things I of which was forcibly reminded in 2024: the uselessness of motivation and the utility of discipline.
One of the notable quirks of the age of social media is the way people like to post "the life we lead in 2024" photo collages. I find it interesting because it's usually unreflective. It talks about events, not the lessons learned from them. This would seem to contradict what I wrote above, but actually it simply runs alongside it. We boast in public, showing our pictures of Bali and Bimini, our new cars, our kids' graduation photos, the "after" shots of our weight loss campaign, et cetera and so on; in private we put on mood music, light a fire, pour a stiff drink and brood as we stare into the flames. George Orwell once wrote that any life viewed from the inside was simply a series of defeats; Shelby Foote noted that he'd been in 30 fistfights in his life and the ones he remembered best were the ones he lost. My brain works much the same way. There was a lot about this year that went well, but my thoughts tend to drag in the direction of everything that went wrong -- the engine on my car burned out and had to be replaced; my cat Spike, my familiar for 17 years, died in my arms; a person I regarded as a close friend betrayed me in the most cowardly and cold-blooded manner possible; books I were certain would take top honors down in Miami did not; the plans I had to see three new cities this year came to nothing. All of that stings and gives me a bleak, windblown sort of feeling. On the other hand, when I exert conscious effort, I remember the successes: starting this channel, which had been an ambition of mine literally for years; its unexpected success; SINNERS CROSS being longlisted for the Hemingway Award and netting a Historical Fiction Company Five Stars; CAGE LIFE snagging a bronze at Reader's Favorite despite being eight years from its debut; seeing Patrick Page perform his brilliant one-man show "All The Devils Are Here" live on stage; traveling to the hinterlands of Pennsylvania with old pals to drink beer, build fires, swim and chop wood; and of course the book signings in Greensburg and York, both of which were big hits. And of course I finished DARK TRADE: A CAGE LIFE NOVEL, and although almost all of that feat was accomplished in 2023, it still broke the tape in 2024 and must be credited accordingly. I also made great progress on SOUTH OF HELL: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL, albeit not as much as I should have. I do wish, however, that my default state wasn't darkness and anomie and ennui. Then again, if it were composed only of light, I probably wouldn't be half the writer I am. Writers mine pain for a living, usually their own, and the more pain, the more gold. A curious condition. But I wouldn't trade it for anything if it meant losing contact with my Muse.
Speaking of Muses, it was a great pleasure to crush this year's Goodreads Challenge. Granted, I didn't set a particularly high bar for myself, but as I've noted in these blogs, I fell away from reading for pleasure for several years and to my surprise, and horror, when I tried to resume in earnest, I found all those hours watching television and film had blunted my ability to concentrate on books, especially novels. It was accordingly a bit of a process even to hit the modest goal I set for myself. The good news is I've now regained my ability to flop into a chair and relax for hours with a good book of any type, but I'm also aware that this sort of ability can be lost, or at least dulled, by disuse. In any event, I read some good ones this year:
Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall (history)
The Peace by Ernst Jünger (non-fiction)
Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (novel)
Death on a Distant Frontier by Charles Whiting (history)
No Colours or Crest by Peter Kemp (memoir)
Duce! by Robert Collier (biography)
Alms For Oblivion by Peter Kemp (memoir)
Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker (novel)
Raging Bull by Jake La Motta (autobiography)
Execution by Colin McDougall (novel)
The Long March on Rome by Charles Whiting (history)
The Thief of Always by Clive Barker (novel)
Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (novel)
The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway (memoir)
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (novel)
A Tanker's View of World War Two by C. Windsor Miller (memoir)
A Cat's Cradle by Carly Rheilan (novel)
Showdown by Errol Flynn (novel)
I also reread a number of my favorites. Re-reading books is a pastime many would mock or simply fail to understand entirely, but anyone who has a Goodreads account will understand the pleasure involved without further explanation. I used to reread books as a matter of course, but it was years after I moved back East that I was able to regain even part of my library through the mail -- a dirty, tedious and expensive process that ate up a lot of my vacation time in California, but worth it. In any event, there is nothing more comforting to a bibliophile than opening one of their dearest-loved stories or histories or memoirs, especially when things seem bleak and harsh and hopeless. It's like the glow of firelight, or a sudden and unexpected reunion with old friends -- a welcome antidote to the trevails of living.
This brings me, clumsily, to my main point: the older I get, the more I realize that life is not about learning lessons, but about relearning them. I cannot count the number of life-lessons I've learned in the most painful and humiliating ways, which I held close to my heart and used to navigate around, over or through problems in the future...only to forget them, and have to start the whole ugly process anew at some future time. I sometimes wonder if Sherlock Holmes wasn't correct when he told his Watson, "It is a mistake to think that [the mind] has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before." Perhaps every new fact, theory, book, life experience, etc. I acquire simply shoves an old one out the back door. Still, I'd rather continue the process of living the way I do, however clumsily and randomly and unsystematically, than decide that I've learned enough, done enough, experienced enough, and could now sit back and tend to the furniture in my head, neither adding nor taking away. Orwell, through his character of George "Fatty" Bowling, remarked that a man does not die when his heart stops beating: he dies when he loses the power (or perhaps just the willingness) to absorb new ideas. At that moment he becomes a ghost, resembling his living self in every way save for the fact he exists entirely in the past.
I'm not yet ready to become a ghost, literal or figurative. I like to think that so long as I do live, I will want to learn new skills, have new experiences, travel to new places, and find outlets both old and new for my creative drives. I like to think that he who dares, wins, and that I will never allow my rather active fear-glands (the price of an equally active imagination) to interfere with my desires to be more and do more, each and every year I'm permitted to occupy this body and this planet and this life.
That's the plan, anyway.
Happy New Year.
December 4, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXVIII
Half a week before the winter
The chill bites before it comes
We've another three weeks before the onset of winter, but you wouldn't know it to look at the thermometer here in South-Central Pennsylvania. It's 7:09 PM, pitch black, and the temperature is 24 degrees. I'm about to knock off the keyboard and head to the bar for a pint, because what else can you do in this dismal town on a dismal Wednesday night like this --? -- but first, a few thoughts.
* As you know I began a YouTube channel called Stone Cold Prose one month ago exactly, and this morning it got its 10,000th view and its 100th watch-hour. By the standards of the medium that's a very modest figure, but I seem to be getting a few more subscriptions every day and am enjoying the whole process immensely. I mention this because starting a YT channel has been a dream of mine for years, and I finally made it a reality. Mind you, I did not do this alone. I hired an English bloke named Olly Dobson to guide me through the process and help me with building a personal brand; otherwise I would have counted it among those things I was "going to do someday," and I have quite enough of those in my life. I think we all have, and I would encourage any of you reading this who harbor dreams but are too intimidated or confused to try and make them come true to seek out a mentor. This sort of thing may cost a few bucks, but the more skin you put in the game, the more likely you are to see it through to the end and get what you've always wanted. In my case the money spent was well worth the unfolding reward.
* I went on Amazon the other day to put up my review of Carly Rheilan's superb novel A Cat's Cradle, but they rejected it because some of the words I used went against their "community standards." It used to be this meant you were using obscene language, making threats, etc. Now it means you used words like "obese" or "Holocaust." I would find this funny if it weren't so pathetic. In this case, they flagged the review because I used the word "rape" in a book about a sex predator who preys on children. What the hell was I supposed to call the act itself, I wonder? Is there a benefit to trying to soften the word "rape?" Sure there is -- if you're a rapist, or want to defend one in court. But as an advocate for victims of crime, I rather like the fact that words like "rape" and "murder" and "molestation" are so aesthetically ugly and jarring. The description fits the crimes. So many words are banned, shadowbanned, flagged or otherwise given a Mark of Cain nowadays that it's becoming impossible to say anything online at all. And people wonder why conspiracy theories find such fertile soil in this century.
* Speaking of Amazon...I wrote my first Amazon review in 2000. Today I went on and discovered my entire review history, spanning 24 years and hundreds of films, books, TV shows, products and suchlike, has been erased without my consent or even my knowledge. I'm not particularly upset, nor am I particularly surprised, but I think it sad that this immense body of reviews was wiped out, if only because there was some really good stuff in there, some of which proved grist both for this blog and for my TY channel. I mention this because it is one more argument in favor of owning physical media, something I've propounded on these pages more than once. Nothing you cannot access yourself, without an internet connection, is truly yours - it can be taken away at any moment by hackers, server crashes, or the simple caprices of corporate policy, and there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it. I have some slight hope of regaining this massive trove of reviews a quarter of a century in the making, but if I don't, well, I never really liked Jeff Bezos anyway.
* This is the first Thanksgiving in several years I didn't cook a turkey, and frankly, I'm relieved. Cooking a turkey is a job of work and nerve-wracking in the bargain, because the recipes constantly remind you improper cooking of a turkey can pretty much kill you, and there was that time William Shatner tried to fry a turkey and nearly incinerated himself. I must say I have a 100% success rate with cooking turkeys, but I can't take any credit because the recipes came from the internet. So thank you, internet, for actually providing a service rather than simply deluging me with bad news or reminding me of the huge numbers of weirdos and trolls and psychos out there.
* Speaking of food: on Monday night I began my first-ever voluntary fast. It lasted 36 hours and was not as hard as I expected it to be, but neither was it a lot of fun. I've never been diagnosed hypoglemic but I'm pretty sure I am, so not eating for long period sof time can put me in a right state. Still, I was curious to see if I could do it and what the effects would be. Coffee got me through the morning and early afternoon without difficulty. After that I felt increasingly lightheaded and somewhat stupid, and certainly physically weak, especially as the evening wore on, but the main effect was an inability to concentrate, or perhaps more precisely, a feeling of apathy that made even an episode of "Murder, She Wrote" seem too demanding for my brain. The day seemed dull and tiresome. I slept deeply when I slept, but had to get out of bed at least four times to use the bathroom, such was the quantity of coffee, tea and water I'd consumed all day to keep my mind off the fact I wasn't using my mouth for food. I woke up feeling somewhat better, but my head throbbed a little and I didn't have much strength. I was not however actually hungry, just weak. I ate a very light breakfast of oats, honey, blueberries and Greek yogurt, and then had a proper lunch and a hike, so I am fully restored: the one noticeable aftereffect is that my stomach looks decidedly flatter. (This is probably due to a reduction of inflammation or due to changes in water composition. I really have no idea.) This was an interesting experiment, but on the whole I prefer actually eating food to thinking about it all day.
* If memory serves, I have not actually published anything in 2024, but that does not mean I haven't been writing away. I actually finished the first draft of the third CAGE LIFE novel, wrote a screenplay/graphic novel, and have been toiling away on the third volume of SINNER'S CROSS. I also carved my epic horror novel SOMETHING EVIL into a three volume series, Books 1 & 2 of which will drop on Halloween, 2025, with subsequent releases on Halloween 2026 and 2027, respectively (the books will be available on pre-order). I also had two very successful book signings, one in Greensburg, PA in July, and one in York, PA in September, with soft plans for a third in Wellsboro, PA early next year. There are several other writing projects in the works, too, which I will announce shortly, but in the mean time, please check out my latest YouTube video, WRITING VIOLENCE, at
@stonecoldprose
on YouTube.
The chill bites before it comes
We've another three weeks before the onset of winter, but you wouldn't know it to look at the thermometer here in South-Central Pennsylvania. It's 7:09 PM, pitch black, and the temperature is 24 degrees. I'm about to knock off the keyboard and head to the bar for a pint, because what else can you do in this dismal town on a dismal Wednesday night like this --? -- but first, a few thoughts.
* As you know I began a YouTube channel called Stone Cold Prose one month ago exactly, and this morning it got its 10,000th view and its 100th watch-hour. By the standards of the medium that's a very modest figure, but I seem to be getting a few more subscriptions every day and am enjoying the whole process immensely. I mention this because starting a YT channel has been a dream of mine for years, and I finally made it a reality. Mind you, I did not do this alone. I hired an English bloke named Olly Dobson to guide me through the process and help me with building a personal brand; otherwise I would have counted it among those things I was "going to do someday," and I have quite enough of those in my life. I think we all have, and I would encourage any of you reading this who harbor dreams but are too intimidated or confused to try and make them come true to seek out a mentor. This sort of thing may cost a few bucks, but the more skin you put in the game, the more likely you are to see it through to the end and get what you've always wanted. In my case the money spent was well worth the unfolding reward.
* I went on Amazon the other day to put up my review of Carly Rheilan's superb novel A Cat's Cradle, but they rejected it because some of the words I used went against their "community standards." It used to be this meant you were using obscene language, making threats, etc. Now it means you used words like "obese" or "Holocaust." I would find this funny if it weren't so pathetic. In this case, they flagged the review because I used the word "rape" in a book about a sex predator who preys on children. What the hell was I supposed to call the act itself, I wonder? Is there a benefit to trying to soften the word "rape?" Sure there is -- if you're a rapist, or want to defend one in court. But as an advocate for victims of crime, I rather like the fact that words like "rape" and "murder" and "molestation" are so aesthetically ugly and jarring. The description fits the crimes. So many words are banned, shadowbanned, flagged or otherwise given a Mark of Cain nowadays that it's becoming impossible to say anything online at all. And people wonder why conspiracy theories find such fertile soil in this century.
* Speaking of Amazon...I wrote my first Amazon review in 2000. Today I went on and discovered my entire review history, spanning 24 years and hundreds of films, books, TV shows, products and suchlike, has been erased without my consent or even my knowledge. I'm not particularly upset, nor am I particularly surprised, but I think it sad that this immense body of reviews was wiped out, if only because there was some really good stuff in there, some of which proved grist both for this blog and for my TY channel. I mention this because it is one more argument in favor of owning physical media, something I've propounded on these pages more than once. Nothing you cannot access yourself, without an internet connection, is truly yours - it can be taken away at any moment by hackers, server crashes, or the simple caprices of corporate policy, and there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it. I have some slight hope of regaining this massive trove of reviews a quarter of a century in the making, but if I don't, well, I never really liked Jeff Bezos anyway.
* This is the first Thanksgiving in several years I didn't cook a turkey, and frankly, I'm relieved. Cooking a turkey is a job of work and nerve-wracking in the bargain, because the recipes constantly remind you improper cooking of a turkey can pretty much kill you, and there was that time William Shatner tried to fry a turkey and nearly incinerated himself. I must say I have a 100% success rate with cooking turkeys, but I can't take any credit because the recipes came from the internet. So thank you, internet, for actually providing a service rather than simply deluging me with bad news or reminding me of the huge numbers of weirdos and trolls and psychos out there.
* Speaking of food: on Monday night I began my first-ever voluntary fast. It lasted 36 hours and was not as hard as I expected it to be, but neither was it a lot of fun. I've never been diagnosed hypoglemic but I'm pretty sure I am, so not eating for long period sof time can put me in a right state. Still, I was curious to see if I could do it and what the effects would be. Coffee got me through the morning and early afternoon without difficulty. After that I felt increasingly lightheaded and somewhat stupid, and certainly physically weak, especially as the evening wore on, but the main effect was an inability to concentrate, or perhaps more precisely, a feeling of apathy that made even an episode of "Murder, She Wrote" seem too demanding for my brain. The day seemed dull and tiresome. I slept deeply when I slept, but had to get out of bed at least four times to use the bathroom, such was the quantity of coffee, tea and water I'd consumed all day to keep my mind off the fact I wasn't using my mouth for food. I woke up feeling somewhat better, but my head throbbed a little and I didn't have much strength. I was not however actually hungry, just weak. I ate a very light breakfast of oats, honey, blueberries and Greek yogurt, and then had a proper lunch and a hike, so I am fully restored: the one noticeable aftereffect is that my stomach looks decidedly flatter. (This is probably due to a reduction of inflammation or due to changes in water composition. I really have no idea.) This was an interesting experiment, but on the whole I prefer actually eating food to thinking about it all day.
* If memory serves, I have not actually published anything in 2024, but that does not mean I haven't been writing away. I actually finished the first draft of the third CAGE LIFE novel, wrote a screenplay/graphic novel, and have been toiling away on the third volume of SINNER'S CROSS. I also carved my epic horror novel SOMETHING EVIL into a three volume series, Books 1 & 2 of which will drop on Halloween, 2025, with subsequent releases on Halloween 2026 and 2027, respectively (the books will be available on pre-order). I also had two very successful book signings, one in Greensburg, PA in July, and one in York, PA in September, with soft plans for a third in Wellsboro, PA early next year. There are several other writing projects in the works, too, which I will announce shortly, but in the mean time, please check out my latest YouTube video, WRITING VIOLENCE, at
@stonecoldprose
on YouTube.
November 26, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: EVELYN WAUGH'S "OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN" (SWORD OF HONOR #2)
It's going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.
The English power of sarcasm is known and feared throughout the world, but it has infinite nuances. Evelyn Waugh's "Officers and Gentleman" is Book Two in his "Sword of Honour" trilogy, and the very names themselves are deeply and richly sarcastic. "Sword of Honour" chronicles the misadventures of Guy Crouchback, the sole surviving scion of a decaying English- Catholic family which is rich in history and education and rather impoverished of anything else. Drawing on his own life and experiences in the Second World War, Waugh sets a table full of farce, disaster, snobbery, and bureacratic misunderstandings with terrible or ironic outcomes, painting the war as a series of accidents, blunders, misunderstandings, and drunken interludes, with major events turning on flukes and happenstances rather than planning or strategy. Many of his authority figures -- generals, senior officers, MPs, and so forth -- are fools or only dubiously sane. Others, such as the Scottish laird (lord), who hosts Guy's commando unit on the Isle of Mug, are purely comic figures with no interest in the war, or who, like the laird's daughter, are ardent supporters of Hitler. Waugh's view, like Orwell's, is that historical events do not feel very historical when you're a part of them, they are merely boring and uncomfortable; and "great men" don't appear very great at close range, merely silly and venal.
I spoke of satire: this is layered satire, of both British society generally and the military and war, specifically, though one is tempted to wonder how much Waugh is actually exaggerating, or if he's exaggerating at all. He clearly shares the view of a number of other British writers who fought in the war and did their best to demythologize it in the minds of the public, to smash the icons and poke rude fun at the slogans we now regard with such quiet awe.
It's important to note as well that Waugh was an almost incredibly complex and paradoxical man himself, a snob of the very highest order whose view of the class system was positively feudal, and whose Catholicism colored everything he wrote, though his ability to avoid obvious spiritual themes was startling.
As "Officers" begins, our trouble-plagued but decent hero has been kicked out of the Royal Corps of Halberdiers and falls arse-backwards into the Commandos, who turn out not to be an elite outfit at all but a collection of misfits exiled to the frigid moors of Scotland for "training." This is in keeping with the theme of the series: Crouchback and his various fellow characters blunder amid military politics, complex social conventions, and failed romantic relationships, all while vainly trying to get into action against the Germans. When at last they do, on Crete in 1941, it proves to be a complete and utter disaster, and Waugh describes the British defeat and disintegration in great detail. On the other hand, one of his cohorts, "Trimmer" McTavish, becomes a press hero following a failed commando raid carried out under the influence of whiskey and bad planning, while another, Claire, leaves his men to their fate only to be saved from punishment by influential relations. At the risk of repeating myself, Waugh's thesis seems to be that war is rather like an extended natural disaster, that nothing ever goes right, that nobody really knows what the hell is happening and credit and blame are often apportioned entirely in the wrong direction: a metaphor for life itself. The characters, meanwhile, are slaves to conventions and class, traditions and snobbery, as well as a bureacracy that grinds slowly, finely, and unjustly. Guy Crouchback himself, via a series of harmless incidents, becomes suspected by British intelligence of being a German spy, and a ridiculous officer named Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole seems to serve as Waugh's epitome of stupidity, witness this passage:
"Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war."
As you can see, Waugh is a fine writer who alternates between prose of a very spare, almost Spartan nature, and beautifully descriptive passages which rise to the level of the poetic. In this book he both rises above and falls below the standard he set in the previous installment, "Men at Arms." There is way too much meandering and wheel-spinning in the story, but there is also much more in the way of emotional release: his description of the Crete campaign is a vivid account of a catastrophe compleat, a total disintegration of order and discipline, which contrasts marvelously with the complex, rigid, out of touch existence he leads in barracks, where minor social faux pas among officers, or trifling mistakes by enlisted men, are punished without mercy and often have extended and terrible consequences. George Orwell once noted that Britain was "a family with the wrong members in control." Waugh's depiction of the British army is very much in that vein: the leaders exist, mentally, in the Edwardian or Victorian eras. They don't lack courage, merely an awareness of what century they're living in. Meanwhile, British "society," represented partially by his ex-wife Virginia, is depicted as bored, shallow, exploitative, remorseless and utterly selfish, aware of the war only as a grand inconvenience. Virginia is loathsome, but her attitude is not entirely unsympathetic: she sees the war as a kind of costume party thrown by men for their own sake. They get to dress up, do daring things in distant lands, get medals and knighthoods, and in short, have all the fun, while the women and the children live boring, uncomfortable lives in bombed cities, eating tinned food. She doesn't care about the war because the war, in her mind, doesn't care about her.
It's worth noting that I recently watched the half-forgotten and difficult to obtain, but thoroughly excellent A FAMILY AT WAR, a BBC series which ran from 1970 - 1973, which depicts an ordinary British family, the Ashtons, coping with WW2. One fascinating thing about the series was how utterly unsentimental and demythologizing it is: instead of just "stiff upper lip" patriotism and "keep calm and carry on" and all the rest of it, we see much more human reactions to the catastrophe, which include fear, selfishness, boredom, cynicism, anger, disillusionment, and moral uncertainty. The characters of SWORD OF HONOUR often operate in a roughly similar vein. They're in this bloody mess, and they're going to do their duty, but they're damned if they always understand why, or even how. Nothing sums up the series like this one passage:
‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’
The English power of sarcasm is known and feared throughout the world, but it has infinite nuances. Evelyn Waugh's "Officers and Gentleman" is Book Two in his "Sword of Honour" trilogy, and the very names themselves are deeply and richly sarcastic. "Sword of Honour" chronicles the misadventures of Guy Crouchback, the sole surviving scion of a decaying English- Catholic family which is rich in history and education and rather impoverished of anything else. Drawing on his own life and experiences in the Second World War, Waugh sets a table full of farce, disaster, snobbery, and bureacratic misunderstandings with terrible or ironic outcomes, painting the war as a series of accidents, blunders, misunderstandings, and drunken interludes, with major events turning on flukes and happenstances rather than planning or strategy. Many of his authority figures -- generals, senior officers, MPs, and so forth -- are fools or only dubiously sane. Others, such as the Scottish laird (lord), who hosts Guy's commando unit on the Isle of Mug, are purely comic figures with no interest in the war, or who, like the laird's daughter, are ardent supporters of Hitler. Waugh's view, like Orwell's, is that historical events do not feel very historical when you're a part of them, they are merely boring and uncomfortable; and "great men" don't appear very great at close range, merely silly and venal.
I spoke of satire: this is layered satire, of both British society generally and the military and war, specifically, though one is tempted to wonder how much Waugh is actually exaggerating, or if he's exaggerating at all. He clearly shares the view of a number of other British writers who fought in the war and did their best to demythologize it in the minds of the public, to smash the icons and poke rude fun at the slogans we now regard with such quiet awe.
It's important to note as well that Waugh was an almost incredibly complex and paradoxical man himself, a snob of the very highest order whose view of the class system was positively feudal, and whose Catholicism colored everything he wrote, though his ability to avoid obvious spiritual themes was startling.
As "Officers" begins, our trouble-plagued but decent hero has been kicked out of the Royal Corps of Halberdiers and falls arse-backwards into the Commandos, who turn out not to be an elite outfit at all but a collection of misfits exiled to the frigid moors of Scotland for "training." This is in keeping with the theme of the series: Crouchback and his various fellow characters blunder amid military politics, complex social conventions, and failed romantic relationships, all while vainly trying to get into action against the Germans. When at last they do, on Crete in 1941, it proves to be a complete and utter disaster, and Waugh describes the British defeat and disintegration in great detail. On the other hand, one of his cohorts, "Trimmer" McTavish, becomes a press hero following a failed commando raid carried out under the influence of whiskey and bad planning, while another, Claire, leaves his men to their fate only to be saved from punishment by influential relations. At the risk of repeating myself, Waugh's thesis seems to be that war is rather like an extended natural disaster, that nothing ever goes right, that nobody really knows what the hell is happening and credit and blame are often apportioned entirely in the wrong direction: a metaphor for life itself. The characters, meanwhile, are slaves to conventions and class, traditions and snobbery, as well as a bureacracy that grinds slowly, finely, and unjustly. Guy Crouchback himself, via a series of harmless incidents, becomes suspected by British intelligence of being a German spy, and a ridiculous officer named Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole seems to serve as Waugh's epitome of stupidity, witness this passage:
"Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war."
As you can see, Waugh is a fine writer who alternates between prose of a very spare, almost Spartan nature, and beautifully descriptive passages which rise to the level of the poetic. In this book he both rises above and falls below the standard he set in the previous installment, "Men at Arms." There is way too much meandering and wheel-spinning in the story, but there is also much more in the way of emotional release: his description of the Crete campaign is a vivid account of a catastrophe compleat, a total disintegration of order and discipline, which contrasts marvelously with the complex, rigid, out of touch existence he leads in barracks, where minor social faux pas among officers, or trifling mistakes by enlisted men, are punished without mercy and often have extended and terrible consequences. George Orwell once noted that Britain was "a family with the wrong members in control." Waugh's depiction of the British army is very much in that vein: the leaders exist, mentally, in the Edwardian or Victorian eras. They don't lack courage, merely an awareness of what century they're living in. Meanwhile, British "society," represented partially by his ex-wife Virginia, is depicted as bored, shallow, exploitative, remorseless and utterly selfish, aware of the war only as a grand inconvenience. Virginia is loathsome, but her attitude is not entirely unsympathetic: she sees the war as a kind of costume party thrown by men for their own sake. They get to dress up, do daring things in distant lands, get medals and knighthoods, and in short, have all the fun, while the women and the children live boring, uncomfortable lives in bombed cities, eating tinned food. She doesn't care about the war because the war, in her mind, doesn't care about her.
It's worth noting that I recently watched the half-forgotten and difficult to obtain, but thoroughly excellent A FAMILY AT WAR, a BBC series which ran from 1970 - 1973, which depicts an ordinary British family, the Ashtons, coping with WW2. One fascinating thing about the series was how utterly unsentimental and demythologizing it is: instead of just "stiff upper lip" patriotism and "keep calm and carry on" and all the rest of it, we see much more human reactions to the catastrophe, which include fear, selfishness, boredom, cynicism, anger, disillusionment, and moral uncertainty. The characters of SWORD OF HONOUR often operate in a roughly similar vein. They're in this bloody mess, and they're going to do their duty, but they're damned if they always understand why, or even how. Nothing sums up the series like this one passage:
‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’
November 18, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: ERROL FLYNN'S "SHOWDOWN"
Hopelessly he gave himself up to the terrible ecstasy of living in suspended time.
Errol Flynn was the most notorious actor in Hollywood, legendary for his degeneracy and cynical, amoral attitude toward life, and this notoriety existed both during his lifetime and for generations after it. Indeed, the saying "In like Flynn" is still in currency today, or at least it was when I was a kid, though I didn't understand the sexual component of it until I was a little older. Flynn, however, was more than an actor of enormous charisma and fairly respectable talent whose main interests in life were sex and money. He was also a widely-traveled man of great physical courage, with a strong need for adventure and a surprisingly incisive and perhaps even sensitive mind. His lengthy autobiography, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS is proof of this: more than a mere confession of perverse appetites, sexual conquests, failed marriages and profligate spending, it evolves into a scourging self-analysis in which Flynn demonstrated a sort of remorse-free ability to examine his own life, condemn its numerous mistakes, and express regret that he had not chosen a different path. SHOWDOWN is his foray into fiction, and I found it well worth my time in both the sense of entertainment, for its reconstruction of the colonial era South Pacfific life Flynn knew so well, and for its occasional, penetrating insights into human nature.
SHOWDOWN is a semi-autobiographical tale set in the South Seas circa the mid-1930s. It's the story of Shamus O'Thames, a sexually naive, rigidly principled, highly resourceful English sea captain who washes ashore on a South Seas island following a disastrous encounter with "natives" after a failed charter. Rescued by a colorful German missionary named Kirschner who effectively adopts him as a son, O'Thames falls in love with a beautiful young nun named Ganice, and largely to escape the impossibility of the situation, agrees to take a camera crew and some Hollywood actors up the Sepik, the most dangerous river in the most dangerous place in the world, New Guinea -- a place replete with disease, storms, earthquakes, man-eating crocodiles, and headhunting tribesmen. The voyage is naturally fraught with trouble, not the least of which comes in the form of Cleo, an alluring and morally enigmatic actress who tempts the stern young skipper away from his chaste love for the nun with the possibility of more fleshly pleasures...and perhaps more realistic love. At the same time, stormy seas, a hostile local tribe, and the secret agenda of those chartering the voyage come to a head on shore. Shamus is tested not merely in terms of his ability to save his people, but to evolve from the brittle and naive man he was into something stronger and more flexible. If he can survive.
SHOWDOWN is admittedly a strange novel and obviously the work of an amateur, albeit one with great life experience and talent. Flynn knew the South Seas very well indeed, having been born in Tasmania and spent much time in New Guinea running plantations and panning for gold. He was also an expert sailor and his love -- and respect -- for the sea, and his knowledge of seacraft are remarkable. Like George Orwell, who reconstructed Burma so vividly in BURMESE DAYS the reader feels as if he is physically present, Flynn brings the landscape and the water to life. The sequences where Shamus is fighting the storm from the wheel of the "Maski" are beautifully crafted. Likewise, he can explain the incredibly complex racial, ethnic, and tribal dynamics of the colonial era in a way no modern writer would dare, i.e. describing without moralizing. Human life, Flynn notes, was incredibly cheap (he describes the treatment of some native laborers as "the closest thing I have ever seen to legalized murder"), and much of the world and its population were considered simply resources to be exploited, with missionary work, however sincere, being a mere sop to the conscience of the exploiters.
The book also reflects the wry, somewhat cynical wit for which Flynn was well known in his personal life: "Father Kirschner's life was consecrated to the idea of peace on earth and goodwill to mankind, but the principle did not include letting the oil dry out on his gun barrel." This is gold. So too is Flynn's construction of the character of Shamus, a man of stern morals and unyielding principles founded on a sexually scarring experience that occurred in his youth. Shamus seems to reflect the man Flynn might have become, and that Flynn wished he had become, rather than a sexually degenerate, alcoholic actor whose personal life was so notorious it completely overshadowed not only his acting career but the rest of his quite diverse and interesting life. But Shamus is not idealized, not Sir Galahad on a boat: He feels real because Flynn contained elements of the man within him even into the last phases of his life, when he discovered what might have been his true calling -- sailing, shooting documentaries, writing...in other words, real rather than cinematic adventure. (Kind of Ernest Hemingway, but somewhat less inclined to lie.) I find it amusing that Hemingway seems to have disliked Flynn (notwithstanding Flynn's performance in "The Sun Also Rises," which everyone liked), perhaps sensing that Flynn had within him the elements of real greatness that he displayed here.
The main issue come with the book's pacing. We are 156 pages into a 250 page novel before Flynn stops his stage-setting and character introductions and finally gets the plot going. And despite its terse length, the book feels heavily overwritten: it could have come in at 200 pages without any loss, and with considerable gain in terms of narrative flow. Flynn writes often beautiful prose, but he has a love of lanuage that a better editor would have restrained more vigorously, he takes any excuse to plunge into an internal monologue, and he introduces important characters very late in the game and shifts points of view with little regard for structure.
That having been said, I enjoyed SHOWDOWN. Hemingway once declared that "A man shouldn't write what he doesn't know," and in this novel Flynn stands firmly on ground, and water, he knew extremely well. I just wish Errol had stuck around to come to literary maturity. I think he was capable of producing a minor classic.
Errol Flynn was the most notorious actor in Hollywood, legendary for his degeneracy and cynical, amoral attitude toward life, and this notoriety existed both during his lifetime and for generations after it. Indeed, the saying "In like Flynn" is still in currency today, or at least it was when I was a kid, though I didn't understand the sexual component of it until I was a little older. Flynn, however, was more than an actor of enormous charisma and fairly respectable talent whose main interests in life were sex and money. He was also a widely-traveled man of great physical courage, with a strong need for adventure and a surprisingly incisive and perhaps even sensitive mind. His lengthy autobiography, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS is proof of this: more than a mere confession of perverse appetites, sexual conquests, failed marriages and profligate spending, it evolves into a scourging self-analysis in which Flynn demonstrated a sort of remorse-free ability to examine his own life, condemn its numerous mistakes, and express regret that he had not chosen a different path. SHOWDOWN is his foray into fiction, and I found it well worth my time in both the sense of entertainment, for its reconstruction of the colonial era South Pacfific life Flynn knew so well, and for its occasional, penetrating insights into human nature.
SHOWDOWN is a semi-autobiographical tale set in the South Seas circa the mid-1930s. It's the story of Shamus O'Thames, a sexually naive, rigidly principled, highly resourceful English sea captain who washes ashore on a South Seas island following a disastrous encounter with "natives" after a failed charter. Rescued by a colorful German missionary named Kirschner who effectively adopts him as a son, O'Thames falls in love with a beautiful young nun named Ganice, and largely to escape the impossibility of the situation, agrees to take a camera crew and some Hollywood actors up the Sepik, the most dangerous river in the most dangerous place in the world, New Guinea -- a place replete with disease, storms, earthquakes, man-eating crocodiles, and headhunting tribesmen. The voyage is naturally fraught with trouble, not the least of which comes in the form of Cleo, an alluring and morally enigmatic actress who tempts the stern young skipper away from his chaste love for the nun with the possibility of more fleshly pleasures...and perhaps more realistic love. At the same time, stormy seas, a hostile local tribe, and the secret agenda of those chartering the voyage come to a head on shore. Shamus is tested not merely in terms of his ability to save his people, but to evolve from the brittle and naive man he was into something stronger and more flexible. If he can survive.
SHOWDOWN is admittedly a strange novel and obviously the work of an amateur, albeit one with great life experience and talent. Flynn knew the South Seas very well indeed, having been born in Tasmania and spent much time in New Guinea running plantations and panning for gold. He was also an expert sailor and his love -- and respect -- for the sea, and his knowledge of seacraft are remarkable. Like George Orwell, who reconstructed Burma so vividly in BURMESE DAYS the reader feels as if he is physically present, Flynn brings the landscape and the water to life. The sequences where Shamus is fighting the storm from the wheel of the "Maski" are beautifully crafted. Likewise, he can explain the incredibly complex racial, ethnic, and tribal dynamics of the colonial era in a way no modern writer would dare, i.e. describing without moralizing. Human life, Flynn notes, was incredibly cheap (he describes the treatment of some native laborers as "the closest thing I have ever seen to legalized murder"), and much of the world and its population were considered simply resources to be exploited, with missionary work, however sincere, being a mere sop to the conscience of the exploiters.
The book also reflects the wry, somewhat cynical wit for which Flynn was well known in his personal life: "Father Kirschner's life was consecrated to the idea of peace on earth and goodwill to mankind, but the principle did not include letting the oil dry out on his gun barrel." This is gold. So too is Flynn's construction of the character of Shamus, a man of stern morals and unyielding principles founded on a sexually scarring experience that occurred in his youth. Shamus seems to reflect the man Flynn might have become, and that Flynn wished he had become, rather than a sexually degenerate, alcoholic actor whose personal life was so notorious it completely overshadowed not only his acting career but the rest of his quite diverse and interesting life. But Shamus is not idealized, not Sir Galahad on a boat: He feels real because Flynn contained elements of the man within him even into the last phases of his life, when he discovered what might have been his true calling -- sailing, shooting documentaries, writing...in other words, real rather than cinematic adventure. (Kind of Ernest Hemingway, but somewhat less inclined to lie.) I find it amusing that Hemingway seems to have disliked Flynn (notwithstanding Flynn's performance in "The Sun Also Rises," which everyone liked), perhaps sensing that Flynn had within him the elements of real greatness that he displayed here.
The main issue come with the book's pacing. We are 156 pages into a 250 page novel before Flynn stops his stage-setting and character introductions and finally gets the plot going. And despite its terse length, the book feels heavily overwritten: it could have come in at 200 pages without any loss, and with considerable gain in terms of narrative flow. Flynn writes often beautiful prose, but he has a love of lanuage that a better editor would have restrained more vigorously, he takes any excuse to plunge into an internal monologue, and he introduces important characters very late in the game and shifts points of view with little regard for structure.
That having been said, I enjoyed SHOWDOWN. Hemingway once declared that "A man shouldn't write what he doesn't know," and in this novel Flynn stands firmly on ground, and water, he knew extremely well. I just wish Errol had stuck around to come to literary maturity. I think he was capable of producing a minor classic.
November 6, 2024
I SEE YOU(TUBE) NOW
Many a month ago I promised -- or threatened -- to start a YouTube channel on this very blog. This was a long-standing ambition of mine, and recent circumstances have allowed me to take the step at long last. (drum roll).
@stonecoldprose
Yes, the ramblings and rantings of this blog are now to be online and in person, twice a week. I shall empty my brain, such as it is, on subjects like popular culture, cinema, television, history, politics, my creative projects, and any other damn thing that comes to mind. It is my intention to release two videos a week of about 10 minute length, Sundays and Wednesdays. My first broadcast "Woke Broke Storytelling," exceeded my admittedly very low expectations for it and has already garnered almost 100 views. Mind you, I have no illusions, or even any particularly impressive ambitions, about becoming the next Critical Drinker or anything like that. I should be extremely happy to one day reach, say, 1,000 subscribers, and maintain that number. The idea here is simply to provide myself a outlet for the energy I was never able to release in Los Angeles, where, ironically, I worked in seemingly every facet of the entertainment industry except the one I wanted to. In time I will add longform videos as well as interviews with the more colorful personalities I know: actors, cops, gangsters, stuntmen...it's quite a list. For now, however, the shortform scripted videos have arrived. My next broadcast, "Mary Sue Killed The Strong Female Character" drops tonight at 6PM.
I hope to see you at
https://www.youtube.com/@stonecoldprose
@stonecoldprose
Yes, the ramblings and rantings of this blog are now to be online and in person, twice a week. I shall empty my brain, such as it is, on subjects like popular culture, cinema, television, history, politics, my creative projects, and any other damn thing that comes to mind. It is my intention to release two videos a week of about 10 minute length, Sundays and Wednesdays. My first broadcast "Woke Broke Storytelling," exceeded my admittedly very low expectations for it and has already garnered almost 100 views. Mind you, I have no illusions, or even any particularly impressive ambitions, about becoming the next Critical Drinker or anything like that. I should be extremely happy to one day reach, say, 1,000 subscribers, and maintain that number. The idea here is simply to provide myself a outlet for the energy I was never able to release in Los Angeles, where, ironically, I worked in seemingly every facet of the entertainment industry except the one I wanted to. In time I will add longform videos as well as interviews with the more colorful personalities I know: actors, cops, gangsters, stuntmen...it's quite a list. For now, however, the shortform scripted videos have arrived. My next broadcast, "Mary Sue Killed The Strong Female Character" drops tonight at 6PM.
I hope to see you at
https://www.youtube.com/@stonecoldprose
October 31, 2024
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2024)
Well here we are again, folks: Halloween night. As you must know by now, it's my tradition to go absolutely batshit come the month of October, doing things like carving jack o'lanterns, roasting pumpkin seeds, attending costume parties and watching 31 horror movies, one for each day of the month. This year of our lord 2024 I have slightly departed from the formula, in that A) I wasn't invited to a costume party this year (was it something I said?) and, B) I "only" watched 20 films. Given everything going on my life for the last two months, I consider this quite an achievement despite failing to hit the mark, but I'm still going to grind out the remaining eleven over the next month. It's Halloween, so a certain amount of trickery is not only allowed, it's expected.
I must say that this year, as opposed to others, I found a lot more gold, or at least semi-precious stones, than outright shit among the wide variety cinema I chose to sample. Call it entitlement, but I think I was overdue some really entertaining flicks after all the garbage I waded through on Octobers past. (One of the drawbacks of doing what I do every year is that my insistence that these movies must never before crossed paths with me provides no sure things.) So it's with more pleasure than pain that I invite you to my house of horrors and show you what's inside, which includes movies from America, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Poland. Here we go.
Alone in the Dark (1982) - This is an obscure but talent-packed movie directed by Jack Sholder (THE HIDDEN) featuring Dwight Schulz, Jack Palance, Donald Pleasance, and Martin Landau, about four dangerous lunatics who escape from an asylum and do bad things. It's much slower, talkier, weirder and more cerebral than it sounds, and it's really not very good, but it tries pretty hard, and the last ten minutes are darkly hilarious.
Lair of the White Worm (1988) - Hugh Grant's first leading man role is a wild ride, a tongue-in-cheek horror movie adapted from one of Bram Stoker's lesser-known works, about the d'Amptom Worm, an ancient English legend. It's about an ageless sort-of vampire who seduces virgins into serving as sacrifices for a dragon-like monster: Grant plays the modern descendant of a dragonslayer who bested the beast in Medieval times and must now cease his drollery and live up to his family name. Like "Waxwork," this is one of those movies you just enjoy for the exuberantly weird, half-sensical ride it offers, and don't ask any questions.
Deep Rising (1998) - Starring Treat Williams and Famke Jansen, this play on the popular "haunted ship" trope has a lively cult following. Basically it's about a crew of hijackers who board a liner to do bad stuff, but encounter much worse stuff waiting for them. I found it extremely dumb and silly, lacking in both thrills and scares, and full of CGI effects which dated very poorly indeed...although I confess it's frenetic as hell and Jansen, who I have met and was one of the true beauties of modern Hollywood, is mesmerizing to look at every time she's in frame.
Horror Express (1972) - One of the many, and by far the most obscure, cinematic takes on the short story "Who Is There?" by John W. Campbell (which spawned "The Thing"), this flick manages to get Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing AND Telly Savalas into the same frame, as men aboard a Siberian train which includes one (presumably) deceased passenger recently disinterred from the Artic ice. This "thing" naturally escapes and causes mayhem, which is augmented by its ability to switch bodies, and our reluctant (very reluctant) heroes must find a way to destroy it before the train reaches civilization. A weird but modestly engaging old-school horror flick.
The Creeping Terror (1964) - Arguably the worst piece of shit I have ever seen, this no-budget drive-in howler was such a "troubled production" the writer-director-star Vic Savage, ended up a literal fugitive from justice when the smoke cleared. It has almost no dialog (narration only), and the monster from outer space which terrorizes the community was (literally) made from rug remnants someone hastily sewed together the night before the cameras started rolling -- since Savage never paid his effects guy, he simply withheld whatever it was he'd made, hence the slow-moving pile of rugs that devours even slower-moving victims who could have escaped by...walking away at the pace of a crawling infant. A fascinating study in how not to make a no-budget movie.
Fear Street: 1994 (2021) - Derived from the popular YA series by R. L. Stine, this movie, despite what I think was a sincere effort, is a bore and a waste of time, offering nothing but an unlikeable heroine, worn-out horror and high-school cliches, including the tedious one about class warfare, and a lot of not-so-subtle pandering to "modern audiences" and their presumed sensibilities. I think it was about a witch that periodically comes back to a California town to possess people and commit murder, but I don't remember or care. By the time anything cool happens, like the cheerleader who gets her head rammed into a meat slicer, I had checked all the way out. And there were two sequels. Why is it the worst movies are always so full of passionate intensity?
The Babadook (2014) - Low budget movies don't have to be bad, and this one is the proof. Featuring what amounts to a cast of two, "The Babadook" is about recently widowed Australian nurse who is trying to cope with her grief while also raising her troubled son. Things get even worse (much worse), when the son begins reporting that the storybook monster he read about in a mysterious book she can't remember buying him, is now taking up residence in their home. A troubling, dark, very intense story that is partly about grief, cope, denial, and the monsters within, I found the child and animal abuse scenes tough to take, but done in a very non-exploitative way that met the demands of the subject matter.
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020) - An inventive Polish take on slasher films, which combines horror and comedy and then takes a radical turn into sci-fi, is about a group of teens whose internet addictions have banished them to a rural camp where there is no wi-fi. While hiking in the woods they encounter some deformed locals with bad attitudes, and well, shit goes down. I found this movie witty, engaging and innovative, with strong performances and well-drawn characters it takes the time to properly establish, and it has the good sense to shoot the horror as horror and the humor as humor, and not mix the two as so manyhorror movies do.
Thanksgiving (2023) - I can't believe I'm going to say something positive about Eli Roth, but here goes: THANKSGIVING is a fun, well made, and surprisingly well-plotted slasher which manages to pay homage to the genre and all of its tropes while actually managing to come off as fresh and, even more surprisingly, unpredictable. A year after an extremely grisly "Black Friday" stampede kills a number of people at a shopping mall, a masked madman -- or is he just really pissed off? -- starts to exact revenge on those he holds responsible. The film, which has some sarcastic things to say about consumerism, throws so many red herrings at you as to the possible identity of the killer that half the fun is watching your theories get shot down, or rather carved up. Roth wouldn't be Roth without putting one absolutely over-the-top kill sequence in this movie, and I could have done without seeing a woman roasted alive and then served for dinner, but you can't have everything.
In A Violent Nature (2024) - Ever wondered what a slasher would be like told almost entirely from the point of view of the killer? Chris Nash did, and IN A VIOLENT NATURE was the result. Essentially a "Friday the 13th" movie from Jason's perspective, it follows Johnny, an undead murderer whose grave deep in the woods of Ontario was foolishly disturbed by some campers, as he plods through the woods on a mission of revenge. Without a plot worthy of the name, without any character development, without a soundtrack of any kind, with very little dialogue (most of it Johnny overhears as he stalks his victims), and lacking even much of a backstory, it takes some patience (there's a lot of walking through the woods), and it's not what I would call scary, but it is distinctly unsettling and the images (and the kills) stay with you. A very innovative take on a genre most people would have said is deader than Johnny himself.
The Conference (2023) - A deeply satirical slasher with a lot to say about capitalism and corporate culture and the damage it causes, this clever Swedish slasher is about one of those awful "corporate retreats" gone horribly wrong when a killer with a big grudge and no mercy shows up and wreaks havoc with everything he can find, including a boat motor. Another movie that does a pretty effective job of separating its biting wit from its grisly kills, I really liked the performances all the way around, especially by Claes Hartelius as a scrappy old man who gives the slasher all that he can handle, and Adam Lundgren as a sociopathic corporate drone who is perhaps scarier than the killer.
Talk To Me (2022) - This clever and inventive movie from Australia really wowed me. A group of bored teens gets ahold of a Hand of Glory, a variation on the Ouija board, which allows them to talk to spirits, or rather to have spirits briefly inhabit them. It's all fun and games until one of them gets a very disagreeable inhabitant who decides he/she/it don't particularly wanna leave, whereupon things go downhill for everyone in a big way. A not so subtle riff on the perils of drug use and addiction, it's a bit of a slow burn, but manages to avoid being obvious, preachy, or to fall into any predictable story holes. I know I use the word "innovative" a lot but that's because I must reward it whenever I encounter it, as it's incredibly rare horror, a genre which is so heaped with worn-out tropes they can be assembled into a ready-made movie, especially when possession is involved: this is fresh. Sophie Wilde delivers a terrific performance as the heroine, Mia, and the ending is a doozy.
You're Next (2013) - What's more uncomfortable than a dysfunctional family reunion? A dysfunctional family reunion crashed by masked killers with sharp objects and a taste for cruelty. While I would characterize this movie as more of a suspense or even survival-horror story than a "regular" horror film or slasher, I found the protagonist, played by Sharni Vinson, to be likeable and just believable enough in her badassery to be satisfying rather than tedious and silly. The twists are for the most part easy to see coming, but the movie moves quickly, keeps the mayhem to a maximum, and keeps up the pace until the very last second -- literally. It's similar to HUSH, which I watched last Halloween, but executed (no pun intended) on a larger scale and with some layered mystery elements as to the identities and motives of the baddies. Better than I expected by a fair country distance.
American Psycho (2000). Probably no movie has ever made more sport out of American corporate culture generally, and the rampant greed, shallowness and materialism of the 80s specifically, than this horror-satire adapted from the B.E. Ellis novel of the same name. Christian Bale rises to dizzying heights as Patrick Bateman, a shallow, venal, status-worshipping Manhattanite yuppie whose hobbies are pop music and serial murder. Bateman is at once terriying in his capacity for cruelty and his equally creepy obsession with cleanliness and order, and hilarious in the agonies he suffers over things like the font on his business cards, or his inability to get reservations at Dorsia (a restaurant that seems to symbolise the elusive nature of the happiness that's supposed to come from material success). Bateman's inner torment is driven by his awareness that he has no soul, and in a sense does not even exist: his murders are his only outlet, but even they cease to satisfying him over time, necessitating ever more wanton acts of violence that cause his neatly packaged life to slowly unravel before us. The entire story is a masterpiece of unreliable narration, existential angst and savage social commetary. A truly great film.
As Above, So Below (2014) - Ever seen a movie that felt like it drew from so many pre-existing sources it had no identity of its own? This spirited "found footage" film set in the Paris catacombs was like that for me. Taking elements from everything from THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and BORDERLANDS to DESCENT and even EVENT HORIZON, the acting is solid, the pace is very respectable, but I was left underwhelmed. A tale about a treasure hunter with more metaphorical balls than good sense, who tries to find the Philosopher's Stone beneath the City of Lights, it's just too "been there done that" to be effective, despite some very credible performances from Perdita Weeks and Francois Civil.
Backcountry (2014) - I was rather impressed with this man-vs.-nature story about a quarrel-prone Canadian couple who get lost in the woods of Ontario, and first menaced by a creepy woodsman, and then stalked by a bear who doesn't take "dear God no!" for an answer. The acting is good, my favorite thespian, Nicholas Campbell, has a small role, and Eric Balfour does wonders as that creepy Irish woodsman, who may or may not be a red herring. It's always intriguing when we get reminded how dangerous nature is, especially for cityfolk with too much pride and not enough directional sense. Throw in a bear-mauling scene that is truly horrific to hear (they only show what's necessary), and you won't want to go camping any time soon.
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight 2 (2021). As good as the first movie was, is how bad this weird, overexpository, overly comedic, overly "meta," underly scary mess of a sequel is. The first one exercised admirable balance between horror and comedy, and even managed to chuck in some social commentary with paying homage to the slasher genre. "2" is just a slop of ideas, and my guess is that the folks in charge slapped it together all too hastily following the success of the first one, in the spirit of "cash in while it's hot." I'm not even sure there is an actual plot. While there are a few good jokes, the story feels almost improvised, and well, it's just kinda shit. I'm sad to say it, but this has neither trick nor treat.
The First Omen (2024). Remember how ROGUE ONE was the answer to a question nobody asked, a movie whose entire premise sprang from a single sentence in the opening crawl of STAR WARS? THE FIRST OMEN is like that. There's a lot of craft, the acting is good, and it's largely very respectful of the original, 1976 OMEN which started the franchise, but it's just slow enough, just overplotted enough, just enough of a departure from the canon of the original movie, and topped off by just enough plot armor and needless girlbossery, that my ultimate feeling was disappointment. The tale of a young American nun-aspirant who arrives at an Italian nunnery to do God's work, only to discover nothing holy is going on within its walls, but rather a complex effort to summon the antichrist into fleshly existence, THE FIRST OMEN does hit some high notes, most particularly the grave performance of Ralph Ineson as Father Brennan, but in the end it just feels unnecessary. Sure, I was curious about the shadowy cult that facilitates the rise to power of Damien Thorn, but sometimes unanswered mysteries are the most satisfying.
The Privilege (2022) - Strong performances and what I think was a great deal of zeal can't save this German horror movie about a boy who survives his sister's seemingly supernatural murder, only to suspect he's still a target of those same mysterious malevolent years later as a high school student. Kind of a riff on many films you've already seen (THE STEPFORD WIVES comes to mind, among many others including THE BELIEVERS, and to some small extent, even HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH), it tries to play on paranoia, teen and familial alienation, and mystery, and create a sense of "who can I really trust here?" but it's just too predictable, and by the way, not even remotely frightening.
Ghost Ship (2002) - My final entry was a pleasant surprise. Another "haunted ship" story, but this time done right, or at least right-er, it follows a salvage ship which includes Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Marguiles, Karl Urban, and Isiah Washington among its crew, as they try to salvage a derelict cruise ship in the Bearing Strait which was last seen forty years ago, before it vanished off the face of the sea. On board the ghost ship they discover a hoard of gold; unfortunately they also discover malevolent ghosts who have no intention of letting them leave. A combination of haunted house and heist stories, with a large mystery at the center, it opens with one of the most inventive kill sequences I've ever seen -- a mass kill sequence, no less -- and also features one of the most interesting flashbacks I can recall, a grisly bit about a massacre-robbery that consumes its own perpetrators in a series of escalating betrayals. The drawbacks are a limp script which wastes some fine actors, and an uneven performance from Marguiles, who just didn't have the oompf to play the scrappy heroine. But I enjoyed the flick.
And with that, fifty-four minutes before midnight on Halloween, we come to the end of HH24. This has become a bit of an institution around here at Stone Cold Prose, and after this fairly enjoyable haul of spooky films, I must say I'm already looking forward to HH25. But I still owe myself, and you, almost a dozen more of these damned things, and in the spirit of completion, and continuing curiosity, I will report back when I've checked 'em off.
Happy Halloween, y'all.
I must say that this year, as opposed to others, I found a lot more gold, or at least semi-precious stones, than outright shit among the wide variety cinema I chose to sample. Call it entitlement, but I think I was overdue some really entertaining flicks after all the garbage I waded through on Octobers past. (One of the drawbacks of doing what I do every year is that my insistence that these movies must never before crossed paths with me provides no sure things.) So it's with more pleasure than pain that I invite you to my house of horrors and show you what's inside, which includes movies from America, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Poland. Here we go.
Alone in the Dark (1982) - This is an obscure but talent-packed movie directed by Jack Sholder (THE HIDDEN) featuring Dwight Schulz, Jack Palance, Donald Pleasance, and Martin Landau, about four dangerous lunatics who escape from an asylum and do bad things. It's much slower, talkier, weirder and more cerebral than it sounds, and it's really not very good, but it tries pretty hard, and the last ten minutes are darkly hilarious.
Lair of the White Worm (1988) - Hugh Grant's first leading man role is a wild ride, a tongue-in-cheek horror movie adapted from one of Bram Stoker's lesser-known works, about the d'Amptom Worm, an ancient English legend. It's about an ageless sort-of vampire who seduces virgins into serving as sacrifices for a dragon-like monster: Grant plays the modern descendant of a dragonslayer who bested the beast in Medieval times and must now cease his drollery and live up to his family name. Like "Waxwork," this is one of those movies you just enjoy for the exuberantly weird, half-sensical ride it offers, and don't ask any questions.
Deep Rising (1998) - Starring Treat Williams and Famke Jansen, this play on the popular "haunted ship" trope has a lively cult following. Basically it's about a crew of hijackers who board a liner to do bad stuff, but encounter much worse stuff waiting for them. I found it extremely dumb and silly, lacking in both thrills and scares, and full of CGI effects which dated very poorly indeed...although I confess it's frenetic as hell and Jansen, who I have met and was one of the true beauties of modern Hollywood, is mesmerizing to look at every time she's in frame.
Horror Express (1972) - One of the many, and by far the most obscure, cinematic takes on the short story "Who Is There?" by John W. Campbell (which spawned "The Thing"), this flick manages to get Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing AND Telly Savalas into the same frame, as men aboard a Siberian train which includes one (presumably) deceased passenger recently disinterred from the Artic ice. This "thing" naturally escapes and causes mayhem, which is augmented by its ability to switch bodies, and our reluctant (very reluctant) heroes must find a way to destroy it before the train reaches civilization. A weird but modestly engaging old-school horror flick.
The Creeping Terror (1964) - Arguably the worst piece of shit I have ever seen, this no-budget drive-in howler was such a "troubled production" the writer-director-star Vic Savage, ended up a literal fugitive from justice when the smoke cleared. It has almost no dialog (narration only), and the monster from outer space which terrorizes the community was (literally) made from rug remnants someone hastily sewed together the night before the cameras started rolling -- since Savage never paid his effects guy, he simply withheld whatever it was he'd made, hence the slow-moving pile of rugs that devours even slower-moving victims who could have escaped by...walking away at the pace of a crawling infant. A fascinating study in how not to make a no-budget movie.
Fear Street: 1994 (2021) - Derived from the popular YA series by R. L. Stine, this movie, despite what I think was a sincere effort, is a bore and a waste of time, offering nothing but an unlikeable heroine, worn-out horror and high-school cliches, including the tedious one about class warfare, and a lot of not-so-subtle pandering to "modern audiences" and their presumed sensibilities. I think it was about a witch that periodically comes back to a California town to possess people and commit murder, but I don't remember or care. By the time anything cool happens, like the cheerleader who gets her head rammed into a meat slicer, I had checked all the way out. And there were two sequels. Why is it the worst movies are always so full of passionate intensity?
The Babadook (2014) - Low budget movies don't have to be bad, and this one is the proof. Featuring what amounts to a cast of two, "The Babadook" is about recently widowed Australian nurse who is trying to cope with her grief while also raising her troubled son. Things get even worse (much worse), when the son begins reporting that the storybook monster he read about in a mysterious book she can't remember buying him, is now taking up residence in their home. A troubling, dark, very intense story that is partly about grief, cope, denial, and the monsters within, I found the child and animal abuse scenes tough to take, but done in a very non-exploitative way that met the demands of the subject matter.
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020) - An inventive Polish take on slasher films, which combines horror and comedy and then takes a radical turn into sci-fi, is about a group of teens whose internet addictions have banished them to a rural camp where there is no wi-fi. While hiking in the woods they encounter some deformed locals with bad attitudes, and well, shit goes down. I found this movie witty, engaging and innovative, with strong performances and well-drawn characters it takes the time to properly establish, and it has the good sense to shoot the horror as horror and the humor as humor, and not mix the two as so manyhorror movies do.
Thanksgiving (2023) - I can't believe I'm going to say something positive about Eli Roth, but here goes: THANKSGIVING is a fun, well made, and surprisingly well-plotted slasher which manages to pay homage to the genre and all of its tropes while actually managing to come off as fresh and, even more surprisingly, unpredictable. A year after an extremely grisly "Black Friday" stampede kills a number of people at a shopping mall, a masked madman -- or is he just really pissed off? -- starts to exact revenge on those he holds responsible. The film, which has some sarcastic things to say about consumerism, throws so many red herrings at you as to the possible identity of the killer that half the fun is watching your theories get shot down, or rather carved up. Roth wouldn't be Roth without putting one absolutely over-the-top kill sequence in this movie, and I could have done without seeing a woman roasted alive and then served for dinner, but you can't have everything.
In A Violent Nature (2024) - Ever wondered what a slasher would be like told almost entirely from the point of view of the killer? Chris Nash did, and IN A VIOLENT NATURE was the result. Essentially a "Friday the 13th" movie from Jason's perspective, it follows Johnny, an undead murderer whose grave deep in the woods of Ontario was foolishly disturbed by some campers, as he plods through the woods on a mission of revenge. Without a plot worthy of the name, without any character development, without a soundtrack of any kind, with very little dialogue (most of it Johnny overhears as he stalks his victims), and lacking even much of a backstory, it takes some patience (there's a lot of walking through the woods), and it's not what I would call scary, but it is distinctly unsettling and the images (and the kills) stay with you. A very innovative take on a genre most people would have said is deader than Johnny himself.
The Conference (2023) - A deeply satirical slasher with a lot to say about capitalism and corporate culture and the damage it causes, this clever Swedish slasher is about one of those awful "corporate retreats" gone horribly wrong when a killer with a big grudge and no mercy shows up and wreaks havoc with everything he can find, including a boat motor. Another movie that does a pretty effective job of separating its biting wit from its grisly kills, I really liked the performances all the way around, especially by Claes Hartelius as a scrappy old man who gives the slasher all that he can handle, and Adam Lundgren as a sociopathic corporate drone who is perhaps scarier than the killer.
Talk To Me (2022) - This clever and inventive movie from Australia really wowed me. A group of bored teens gets ahold of a Hand of Glory, a variation on the Ouija board, which allows them to talk to spirits, or rather to have spirits briefly inhabit them. It's all fun and games until one of them gets a very disagreeable inhabitant who decides he/she/it don't particularly wanna leave, whereupon things go downhill for everyone in a big way. A not so subtle riff on the perils of drug use and addiction, it's a bit of a slow burn, but manages to avoid being obvious, preachy, or to fall into any predictable story holes. I know I use the word "innovative" a lot but that's because I must reward it whenever I encounter it, as it's incredibly rare horror, a genre which is so heaped with worn-out tropes they can be assembled into a ready-made movie, especially when possession is involved: this is fresh. Sophie Wilde delivers a terrific performance as the heroine, Mia, and the ending is a doozy.
You're Next (2013) - What's more uncomfortable than a dysfunctional family reunion? A dysfunctional family reunion crashed by masked killers with sharp objects and a taste for cruelty. While I would characterize this movie as more of a suspense or even survival-horror story than a "regular" horror film or slasher, I found the protagonist, played by Sharni Vinson, to be likeable and just believable enough in her badassery to be satisfying rather than tedious and silly. The twists are for the most part easy to see coming, but the movie moves quickly, keeps the mayhem to a maximum, and keeps up the pace until the very last second -- literally. It's similar to HUSH, which I watched last Halloween, but executed (no pun intended) on a larger scale and with some layered mystery elements as to the identities and motives of the baddies. Better than I expected by a fair country distance.
American Psycho (2000). Probably no movie has ever made more sport out of American corporate culture generally, and the rampant greed, shallowness and materialism of the 80s specifically, than this horror-satire adapted from the B.E. Ellis novel of the same name. Christian Bale rises to dizzying heights as Patrick Bateman, a shallow, venal, status-worshipping Manhattanite yuppie whose hobbies are pop music and serial murder. Bateman is at once terriying in his capacity for cruelty and his equally creepy obsession with cleanliness and order, and hilarious in the agonies he suffers over things like the font on his business cards, or his inability to get reservations at Dorsia (a restaurant that seems to symbolise the elusive nature of the happiness that's supposed to come from material success). Bateman's inner torment is driven by his awareness that he has no soul, and in a sense does not even exist: his murders are his only outlet, but even they cease to satisfying him over time, necessitating ever more wanton acts of violence that cause his neatly packaged life to slowly unravel before us. The entire story is a masterpiece of unreliable narration, existential angst and savage social commetary. A truly great film.
As Above, So Below (2014) - Ever seen a movie that felt like it drew from so many pre-existing sources it had no identity of its own? This spirited "found footage" film set in the Paris catacombs was like that for me. Taking elements from everything from THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and BORDERLANDS to DESCENT and even EVENT HORIZON, the acting is solid, the pace is very respectable, but I was left underwhelmed. A tale about a treasure hunter with more metaphorical balls than good sense, who tries to find the Philosopher's Stone beneath the City of Lights, it's just too "been there done that" to be effective, despite some very credible performances from Perdita Weeks and Francois Civil.
Backcountry (2014) - I was rather impressed with this man-vs.-nature story about a quarrel-prone Canadian couple who get lost in the woods of Ontario, and first menaced by a creepy woodsman, and then stalked by a bear who doesn't take "dear God no!" for an answer. The acting is good, my favorite thespian, Nicholas Campbell, has a small role, and Eric Balfour does wonders as that creepy Irish woodsman, who may or may not be a red herring. It's always intriguing when we get reminded how dangerous nature is, especially for cityfolk with too much pride and not enough directional sense. Throw in a bear-mauling scene that is truly horrific to hear (they only show what's necessary), and you won't want to go camping any time soon.
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight 2 (2021). As good as the first movie was, is how bad this weird, overexpository, overly comedic, overly "meta," underly scary mess of a sequel is. The first one exercised admirable balance between horror and comedy, and even managed to chuck in some social commentary with paying homage to the slasher genre. "2" is just a slop of ideas, and my guess is that the folks in charge slapped it together all too hastily following the success of the first one, in the spirit of "cash in while it's hot." I'm not even sure there is an actual plot. While there are a few good jokes, the story feels almost improvised, and well, it's just kinda shit. I'm sad to say it, but this has neither trick nor treat.
The First Omen (2024). Remember how ROGUE ONE was the answer to a question nobody asked, a movie whose entire premise sprang from a single sentence in the opening crawl of STAR WARS? THE FIRST OMEN is like that. There's a lot of craft, the acting is good, and it's largely very respectful of the original, 1976 OMEN which started the franchise, but it's just slow enough, just overplotted enough, just enough of a departure from the canon of the original movie, and topped off by just enough plot armor and needless girlbossery, that my ultimate feeling was disappointment. The tale of a young American nun-aspirant who arrives at an Italian nunnery to do God's work, only to discover nothing holy is going on within its walls, but rather a complex effort to summon the antichrist into fleshly existence, THE FIRST OMEN does hit some high notes, most particularly the grave performance of Ralph Ineson as Father Brennan, but in the end it just feels unnecessary. Sure, I was curious about the shadowy cult that facilitates the rise to power of Damien Thorn, but sometimes unanswered mysteries are the most satisfying.
The Privilege (2022) - Strong performances and what I think was a great deal of zeal can't save this German horror movie about a boy who survives his sister's seemingly supernatural murder, only to suspect he's still a target of those same mysterious malevolent years later as a high school student. Kind of a riff on many films you've already seen (THE STEPFORD WIVES comes to mind, among many others including THE BELIEVERS, and to some small extent, even HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH), it tries to play on paranoia, teen and familial alienation, and mystery, and create a sense of "who can I really trust here?" but it's just too predictable, and by the way, not even remotely frightening.
Ghost Ship (2002) - My final entry was a pleasant surprise. Another "haunted ship" story, but this time done right, or at least right-er, it follows a salvage ship which includes Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Marguiles, Karl Urban, and Isiah Washington among its crew, as they try to salvage a derelict cruise ship in the Bearing Strait which was last seen forty years ago, before it vanished off the face of the sea. On board the ghost ship they discover a hoard of gold; unfortunately they also discover malevolent ghosts who have no intention of letting them leave. A combination of haunted house and heist stories, with a large mystery at the center, it opens with one of the most inventive kill sequences I've ever seen -- a mass kill sequence, no less -- and also features one of the most interesting flashbacks I can recall, a grisly bit about a massacre-robbery that consumes its own perpetrators in a series of escalating betrayals. The drawbacks are a limp script which wastes some fine actors, and an uneven performance from Marguiles, who just didn't have the oompf to play the scrappy heroine. But I enjoyed the flick.
And with that, fifty-four minutes before midnight on Halloween, we come to the end of HH24. This has become a bit of an institution around here at Stone Cold Prose, and after this fairly enjoyable haul of spooky films, I must say I'm already looking forward to HH25. But I still owe myself, and you, almost a dozen more of these damned things, and in the spirit of completion, and continuing curiosity, I will report back when I've checked 'em off.
Happy Halloween, y'all.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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