Phil Elmore's Blog, page 34

CORRECTION: A Gerald Ruhming Tale of Terror

First of all, as should be obvious from the page count, this is a NOVELLA, not a novel.  It’s priced accordingly and is a good value.  I peg the word count at roughly 20,000, which is appropriate novella (short novel) length.  You can read through this horror story in a single sitting and I think you will enjoy every minute of the experience.  That is, you’ll enjoy it if you like visceral, bloody, messy horror.

One of the things I like about a new world — a new universe, coinciding with the founding of a new intellectual property — is the nearly endless opportunity to expand and flesh out this new reality.  That’s one of the things I found most gratifying about League Entertainment’s SIMON VECTOR.  There’s a whole new version of human existence, politics, war, conflict, and so on, just waiting to be explored.  SIMON VECTOR does this well, giving us descriptions about its universe that range from thorough explanations to tantalizing hints.

The same is true of its characters.  We don’t get a tremendous amount of backstory for these characters because SIMON VECTOR is first a suspense novel, then an action tale (owing to its methodically tense build-up and then epic action climax).  If you’re like me, once you find a character that interests you, you never really get tired of learning more about him.  SIMON VECTOR offers such a fascinating cast of supporting characters — many of them horrible villains — that you can’t help but want to know more about, especially if that “more” involves what makes a man a serial killer so horrrible he is imprisoned in the most remote hole in the galaxy.

One of my favorite sequences in SIMON VECTOR involves Gerald Ruhming, “The Mad Doctor of Mars.”  I won’t spoil it for you here if you haven’t read SIMON VECTOR.  You don’t need to have read that in order to read CORRECTION, as both stories stand alone.  But reading one will definitely enhance your enjoyment of the other.  CORRECTION is nothing less than a full-on origin story.  It’s “SAW” meets “7even” meets “Silence of the Lambs,” although please don’t read anything so trite into my use of that phrasing.  I’m just trying to convey the mood of the story.

This is a horrifying tale.  It’s not gentle.  It’s brutal, bloody, gory, and incredibly creepy.  Gerald Ruhming is a monstrous figure, not because he knows what makes him torture, mutilate, and kill… but because he doesn’t.  The self-awareness necessary to analyze his actions never seems to be part of his equation.  He’s completely insane, yes.  But he’s also slow.  Something about him just isn’t RIGHT, and it’s that out-of-kilter wrongness that makes him completely oblivious to the pain and damage he causes, except insofar as he enjoys what he’s doing.

As a simple-minded monster, he is the most repellant of villains.  He verges on sympathetic but never quite gets there.  He disgusts you and terrifies you because he is, in his slow-witted unawareness, completely implacable.  You can’t argue or bargain with a creature who doesn’t himself know why he does what he does.

As a novella, CORRECTION reads like a cop story, as two Martian detectives race to rescue Ruhming’s last victim.  Intercut with this storyline are the harrowing accounts of Ruhming’s torment of his captive — not for the faint of heart and certainly not for young readers — and also Ruhming’s backstory.  To say he had a troubled childhood is an understatement.

Read CORRECTION and it will make Ruhming’s ultimate role in SIMON VECTOR that much more satisfying.  Read SIMON VECTOR and it will make you want to know the story behind CORRECTION.  Read this novella alone and you will turn on all the lights, if you don’t simply wait for someone else to come home.

Buy CORRECTION today for your Kindle device and support League Entertainment!

Simon Vector Novella, “Correction,” Free on Kindle!

Those of you who enjoyed League Entertainment’s dark science fiction novel, Simon Vector, will enjoy the even darker (so much so that it carries a disclaimer) Correction: A Gerald Ruhming Tale of Terror.  It’s free today on Kindle at http://bit.ly/Ruhming.

This is probably the most effed up thing you’ll read all year.  It’s violent.  It’s gory.  It’s creepy.  Best of all, it features “Doctor” Gerald Ruhming, “The Mad Doctor of Mars,” one of the serial killers imprisoned on Alpha Draconis in the Simon Vector novel.  This novella is your chance to see what made The Mad Doctor who he is today.

Technocracy: It’s the Internet, Stupid

My WND Technocracy column was featured prominently today at the WND News site.  In it, I discuss the differences between Romney’s website and Obama’s.

Mitt Romney understands none of these things, and that is why he is losing this election.

It astonishes me that Obama, with his poor record, is poised to win reelection.  The Republicans have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by nominating the bland and hapless Romney, who is ill-equipped to deal with the Democrat’s particularly dirty breed of politicking.

Read the full column here in WND.

Technocracy — Latest Tyranny: Dictating How Men Pee

You might ask, “What business of your government’s is how you choose to pee?”  Well, you’d ask that if you weren’t a Democrat.

Only a miserable lib could believe it is ever the appropriate role of the State to govern how you pee. …To the liberal mind this disparity, this grievous lack of biological equality, must be corrected.

If, on the other hand, you ARE a good little leftist, you think the fact that men can stand peeing up is very, very unfair — a biological crime tantamount to rape or, at the very least, naked insult.  The solution is NOT to increase facilities to accommodate women (if you are a progressive).  No, if you are a lib, the solution is to diminish facilities for men.  Once that’s been accomplished, you must pass a law telling them how to relieve themselves.

Read the full column here in WND.

Technocracy: Are Men Really Stupid Miscreants?

My WND Technocracy article today is actually a follow up to a piece I wrote some time ago.

That’s what such studies are: monstrous fictions. They are invariably based on surveys, relatively small sample groups and – most importantly – subjective evaluation of the results.

There is this urge to use pseudo-fact, junk-science, to “prove” that conservatives, Republicans, Fox News viewers, men in general, and every other demographic that isn’t progressives/liberals/Democrats is stupid and therefore should be marginalized.  The latest study “proving” that women are smarter than men has been misused for the same purpose, and doesn’t prove anything of the kind.

Read the full column here in WND.

Technocracy: Muslim threat to Pyramids is NOT a hoax

Last week in my WND Technocracy column, I wrote of a purported threat to destroy Egypt’s Pyramids.

…[E]ven historical Muslim artifacts are not safe, because these may be venerated and, thus, also become offensive to their wretched death cult.

While the threat was dismissed as a hoax, it ISN’T one.  Calls for the destruction of the Pyramids are said to have come from an imposter account, but those calls were heard by the Muslim world.  These are people with a long history of destroying antiquities as “idolatrous.”

The danger presented by Islam is real.  We ignore this at our peril.

Read this week’s response to last week’s column here in WND.

“Doomed,” a Short Story by Phil Elmore

John’s brilliant reinvention of Doom.

League Entertainment co-founder and Artistic Director, Johnny “Atomic” Jackson, occasionally knocks around with me some story ideas. When we come up with a fun one, even if it’s not for a League property, we just use it for an exercise and develop something for it anyway. This leaves us with a handful of stories and illustrations that we will never really be able to use, but which are awfully cool.  Rather than just keep them in some file, covered in digital dust, John is now featuring them on his website.  The first of these is Marvel Comic’s Doctor Doom, as seen through the lens of a horror tale.

Read “Doomed” here at Johnny Atomic Studios.

Thomas Jane returns as The Punisher (sort of)

The Punisher starring Thomas Jane is one of my favorite films, mostly because I write novels in Harlequin’s Executioner series (Mack Bolan, The Executioner, inspired The Punisher in comic books).  I was disappointed when Thomas Jane did not participate in a sequel to the film; Punisher: Warzone was horribly uneven, though Ray Stevenson is a great actor who did his best with a bad script. I haven’t seen Jane do much since the awful movie adaptation of The Mist (a film that doesn’t get awful until the very end, in which the the movie departs from the novella on which it is based and basically gives the viewer the middle finger).

Now Jane has is reprising his role as Frank Castle in an incredible new fan film that, no joke, may be the best thing I’ve ever seen uploaded to YouTube.  He’s a little older and a little heavier now, but he strikes every note correctly here.  The film also features a short role for another tough-guy movie favorite, who has come a long way since the days of Beauty and the Beast.  That’s right: Ron Perlman is featured in the fan film, titled Dirty Laundry.

Technocracy: The death cult hopes to destroy pyramids

My WND Technocracy column this week is about the contempt in which Islamists hold history itself.

You see, if some historical artifact might be cause for veneration, today’s Muslims see this is as an “assault” on their death cult — excuse me, their “religion” — and said idol must be destroyed.  They recognize no heritage, no treasure, and have nothing but disdain even for ancient Muslim archaeological treasures.  Most of us have heard of the Buddha statues that were destroyed in Afghanistan.  Recently in Mali, some ancient tombs were destroyed in fabled Timbuktu.

If their “best” is disdain, their worst is naked destruction. This is done with explosives where possible – and painstakingly by hand, with picks and hoes, where necessary.

Now that the Muslim brotherhood controls Egypt and presumably its military, calls to destroy the pyramids (because Muslims consider these idolatrous) have begun anew.  Apparently the only reason these ancient edifices have not yet been destroyed is because Muslims lacked the technology to do so before now.

Read the full column here in WND.

Radical Edge and Final Judgment Now in Stores

It’s a good summer to be a Bolan author.  My books Radical Edge and Final Judgment are both in stores now.

Radical Edge may be the best SuperBolan I’ve written to date, and it’s getting good response from fans of the series.  Final Judgment is special because it includes an homage to my dear friend Lawrence Keeney, who died last December while I was finishing the manuscript.