Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 48

Fund Drive & Countdown

Got a couple of quick announcements to make:

First off, I’ve been a little late in mentioning this, but Strange Horizons is holding its annual fund drive as we speak (or as I type, and you read). As always, everyone who contributes to the fund drive is entered for prize drawings. Among the pool of prizes this year is a copy of my collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings. I’ve written a couple of nonfiction pieces for Strange Horizons over the years, including one on supernatural fiction and one on cosmic horror in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy.” 

Also, as I have for the past few years, I’ll be participating in the Countdown to Halloween again this year. (You can see my badge down in the sidebar, which I picked because it’s a mummy, not because I’ve ever had the cereal. Nobody ever seemed to carry that flavor where I live.) I’m not yet sure what I’ll be doing for it, precisely, but it’ll probably have to do with old movies or monsters or both. That’s a pretty safe bet, around here.

On Mike Mignola

Mike Mignola has a story that he tells in interviews and things all the time, that when he first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. For me, that same moment came when I read Mike Mignola’s work on Hellboy. Which is just one of the reasons that he is, was, and probably always will be who I want to be when I grow up.

I’d always loved monsters and ghosts and robots and weird stuff, ever since I was a little kid. Literally for as long as I can remember, in fact. It was always inevitable that I was going to write about monsters in one form or another. It’s not that Hellboy made me love monsters, it just showed me exactly how I loved them, the whats and the whys and the wherefores (which are really just whys again, but hey).

Most of the people reading this probably already know all of this. I’ve certainly made no secret of it. My first book is dedicated to Mike, and really, if there are any subsequent books, then they just as easily probably all could be, too. I bring it all back up because today is his birthday. I guess we normally reserve birthday celebration posts for more distant heroes; ones who have already passed on, or who we don’t have much direct contact with. And I’ll admit that it feels a little weird to write this about someone who could potentially come and read it. But I don’t have any bigger inspiration than Mike Mignola, and it seemed a shame to let his birthday pass without marking it in some way.

So today, go imbibe some great Mignola art and storytelling. It’s not like you need an excuse. If you’re having trouble deciding what to read, I recommend picking up a copy of The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects. It’s my personal favorite, so far.

In Other News

While the big talk around these parts lately has been me quitting my day job for the life of the full-time writer, there’s also been some other major news that I’ve had to keep under wraps until just now:

I’ve been approached to write some fiction for Skull Island eXpeditions, the fiction arm of Privateer Press. Those who know me know that this is a big deal for me, because I’ve been a fan of Privateer Press, their games and settings, since about forever. So writing licensed fiction in that world is a dream come true. Aside from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe, I can’t really imagine a setting that I’d rather be writing licensed stories in, frankly.

The first piece I’ve written for them is going to be out soon in Called to Battle: Volume One. It’s a 10k story about General Gerlak Slaughterborn, and I had a hell of a good time writing it. But it’s also just the beginning. There’s already been wheels set into motion for bigger and even more exciting things to come from me and the folks at Skull Island, so keep a weather eye on the horizon and I’ll let you know more as soon as I know it!

Also, over the weekend we had a little get-together in part to celebrate the beginning of my new life as a freelancer, and as part of the festivities my wife presented me with a present she’d gotten me. As part of the recent Kickstarter for the Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB Bar, one of the rewards was the incomparable John Langan doing a story about a monster of your choice. Of course I wanted that, but I didn’t get it snapped up in time. It turns out that the reason I didn’t is because my lovely and amazing wife had beaten me to it, and at the party this weekend she presented me the award in the form of this video, which John was kind enough to put together for the occasion:

Thanks to Grace and John and everyone who’s supported me already. Only two days in to this freelancing thing, and already I feel like, whatever else happens, at least I’ll have my friends along for the ride.

A Day of Playing Ball

“I’m gonna be sophisticated and have no job. Or a job that looks from a distance like I do nothing.”

- Troy Barnes, Community

This is it. Final countdown. When I ride the elevators down at the end of the day today, it will be for the last time. And not just at this office, but anywhere, at least for a while. Today’s my last day of full time employment in the 9-to-5, day job kind of sense. Starting today, I work for myself. Freelance writing, full time.

I didn’t sell a novel for a six-figure book deal or anything. In fact, I still haven’t written a novel ever, and it may be that I never do. I’ll still have “day job” work in the form of work-for-hire writing which will make up the vast majority of my income, some of it SEO and web content work, some of it more exciting stuff. Beyond that, I don’t really know what it’ll be like. I haven’t not had a full time day job of the traditional variety since I was about sixteen. I didn’t work a full time job during college, but I took a full load of classes (and by that I mean full, I graduated in three-and-a-half years) and worked two or three part time jobs at all times. And I technically didn’t have a job of any kind for a period of a week or two several years ago, between the time when I got laid off from one law office and the time I got a full time temp job in the mail room of another one. So this is going to be a real change for me.

But it’s also what I’ve always wanted to do. A writer (and occasional editor) is all I’ve wanted to be for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my mom kept one of those “School Days” books where you put in report cards and class pictures and stuff, and there was a space on each one of them for you to write in what you wanted to be when you grew up. For the first couple of years it said stuff like “archaeologist” (when I’d just watched Indiana Jones) or “scientist” (when I’d just watched Ghostbusters), but after about second or third grade, all it ever said was “writer.”

And now I get to do it for a living, every day. I’ll admit that for now the prospect is still probably about as terrifying as it is exhilarating, but still, you can’t get much better than that.

“And a day of playing ball is better than whatever most people have to do for a living.”

- Rube Baker, Major League 2

Yog Monster from Space (1970)

Yog Monster from Space, on the other hand. Oh man. You guys have no idea how close you came to this “review” just being the word “dude” in boldface and all caps with a couple of exclamation points and then a link to the trailer.

For those who aren’t aware, the poster for this movie is on my living room wall, but I’ve never seen it before last night. That’s because it’s been damn hard to track down. As far as I know, there’s only one US release, and that’s a pricey DVD released by Tokyo Shock under the maybe more sensical but less awesome title Space Amoeba. That’s what I watched last night, because I finally managed to snag a copy via interlibrary loan.

I remember I used to own the Godzilla Nintendo game, and one of the first monsters you fight in it is Gezora, and I never had any idea where he was from. Turns out, he’s from here, and he’s, I dunno, very possibly my favorite kaiju suit from all the Toho kaiju movies ever! I mean, I know Godzilla is the better monster, but man, Gezora is just… well, he’s a big muppety squid with googly eyes that walks around on land. He’s fantastic. The other two monsters are pretty great, too. I said a while back that the trailer for this movie was probably as close as I would ever get to seeing Mike Mignola’s Ogdru Hem done as Toho style rubber suit monsters, and yeah, watching the movie, that’s pretty much so, even if they’re quite a bit smaller, and confined mostly to smashing thatched huts on a South Seas island. Anyway, here’s that trailer again:

Anyway, I loved this movie, and it did my somewhat premature poster-hanging proud. I love the monsters and the spy who obviously went to the Bela Lugosi School of Face Twitching, and even the island setting that eliminates any big cities for the monsters to smash. And more than anything else, I love Gezora. I want to be him for Halloween.

Shout! Factory, or somebody, this needs a Blu-ray release, like yesterday!

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Running through the remaining films of John Carpenter that I haven’t already seen, I’m really getting into the dregs now. Still, Memoirs of an Invisible Man wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d heard. Which is just to say that it didn’t spend its entire 99 minute running time trying to kill my mom in front of me.

In some ways, I actually watched it at the optimal point in my Carpenter make-up retrospective; right after tracking down the vastly superior Someone’s Watching Me! While at first glance Memoirs seems distinctly out of place in Carpenter’s oeuvre, it actually makes more sense when placed next to that film. Most of Carpenter’s films channel his directorial influences from folks like Hawks and Leone, but both Someone’s Watching Me! and Memoirs are pure Hitchcock, the former in the Rear Window mode, the latter in the North by Northwest/Man Who Knew Too Much mode. There’s even a sequence on a train!

And while watching Carpenter ape Hitch in Someone’s Watching Me! was a constant joy, in Memoirs it mostly feels lifeless. Like I said, Memoirs was not as bad as I’d heard, because I watched the whole thing and am still alive, but that isn’t to say that it’s good, or anything. It’s still way, way down in the constellation of Carpenter’s films. It’s got some extremely early ILM special effects that aren’t bad (though I think it’s funny that, where invisibility effects are concerned, we still haven’t done much to improve upon James Whale’s 1933 version), there’s not as much lame comedy as you might expect with Chevy Chase in the lead, and we all get to watch Sam Neil being reptilian, as we’ve come to expect from him. At its best, Memoirs is still pretty by-the-numbers, and there’s really nothing to recommend it unless you’re a Carpenter completist. But if you are a Carpenter completist, well, I guess the good news is that it’s probably not the worst thing you have to look forward to.

Me, I only have a tiny handful of titles left to go, though there is still a three-hour Elvis biopic in my future…

Long List

Ellen Datlow has unveiled her long list of honorable mentions from the most recent volume of her annual Best Horror of the Year series. Three of my stories (“Almost Human,” “The Barghest,” and “Count Brass”) made the list. All of those stories are available in Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings. In fact, of the ten stories in Never Bet the Devil, six made the honorable mention long list for the respective year in which they were first published. Can’t get much better than that, right?

At the same time, stories from Fungi received a whopping ten mentions on the long list, with nods going to John Langan’s “Hyphae,” Nick Mamatas’ “The Shaft Through the Middle of It All,” Ian Rogers’ “Out of the Blue,” Ann Schwader’s poem “Cordyceps Zombiii,” E.Catherine Tobler’s “New Feet Within My Garden Go,” Paul Tremblay’s “Our Stories Will Live Forever,” A.C. Wise’s “Where Dead Men Go to Dream,” Laird Barron’s “Gamma,” Richard Gavin’s “Goatsbride,” and Chadwick Ginther’s “First They Came for the Pigs.”

You can check out the full list here and here.

Crypticon (Post)

How to sum up Crypticon KC? I split a table with the inestimable Sean Demory, who is a gentleman and a scholar. I sold a few books. I got to participate in a guerilla reading, thanks to the generosity of author guests Brett Williams and Alan Ryker. I saw a guy on stilts dressed as Pyramid Head, a giant decaying clown, Tiny Freddy Krueger, and Stargate Wolverine. My compatriot Lydia got to make out with the Predator. I got interviewed by a zombie ballerina. Our table was right across from Richard Kiel, and Bai Ling asked me to break a twenty. I gave Doug Jones a copy of Never Bet the Devil, signed “Thanks for all the monsters,” and this is what I got in return:

As this was my first Crypticon, I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but I ended up having a really good time, in spite of it falling right in the middle of the most stressful of a string of really stressful recent months. The con was varied, dynamic, and a lot of fun, and I’ll definitely be back next year in some capacity. Thanks to everyone who put the con together, to all the vendors and guests, to everyone who came by our booth and said hello, and special thanks to everyone who bought a book or two! If you didn’t make it by, I recommend checking out something by my table-mate Sean Demory. His Ballad of the Wayfaring Stranger and the Dead Man’s Whore recently snagged an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and Zobop Bebop is a Voodoo gangster novel. What more do you need?

I’m sure there are scads of things that I’m forgetting to mention, and I know there are some incriminating photos floating around on social media, so chances are you haven’t heard the last of this, though you have for now!

Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

I’m just a few films shy of having seen every movie directed by John Carpenter (most of them lots and lots of times) and in my efforts to finish out the set, I finally got around to watching the 1978 TV movie Someone’s Watching Me! (That exclamation point is in the title, not to indicate my excitement, though I am pretty excited, and I do love titles with built-in exclamation points.) Also known by the better (though exclamation point-less) title High Rise, Someone’s Watching Me! was regarded for a long time as a “lost” Carpenter film, since it was difficult to track down on home video, though that’s no longer really the case. (However, the DVD isn’t super great, so hey Scream Factory, can we get this thing on Blu-ray sometime soon?)

Honestly, while I’m a big Carpenter fan, I wasn’t expecting a lot out of Someone’s Watching Me! I hadn’t heard a lot about it, and the fairly generic synopsis and the fact that it was made for TV made me sort of discount it. More the fool I.

Made the same year as Halloween, Someone’s Watching Me! deserves to be a lot better known. If nothing else, it’s notable for the fact that it’s Carpenter doing his very best Hitchcock. And Carpenter’s Hitchcock turns out to be more than serviceable. While Someone’s Watching Me! isn’t among the very best films by Carpenter (or Hitch, for that matter), it is a lot better than many of his later films. One of the reasons that it isn’t better known, besides its relative scarcity on home video over the years, is probably that it’s aping Hitchcock so closely that it’s missing a lot of what we consider the usual Carpenter touches. After a really great opening that could fit comfortably in with the best of Carpenter’s oeuvre or Hitchcock’s (the telescope looking like a gun barrel is a particularly nice touch) it settles into a pretty standard but always above-average film. Lauren Hutton is genuinely fun and charming as the lead, who has to carry much of the movie in scenes by herself. Adrienne Barbeau is great as always, as a character who is casually a lesbian, which made me happy. Someone’s Watching Me! is also notable for Carpenter fans because it’s where he and Barbeau met. She’d later work with him memorably in The Fog and in a small part in Escape from New York, and they were married for years.

Someone’s Watching Me! is also the first instance that I know of of Carpenter putting references to Lovecraft into his films. (Lauren Hutton’s character lives in Arkham Towers.) He’d take the same tack of throwaway place names referencing Lovecraft a few years later in The Fog.

I don’t want to oversell it. We’re not talking about a lost Halloween or The Thing or even The Fog here, but there’s a lot of really great stuff in Someone’s Watching Me! It may not be as inventive as some of Carpenter’s best pictures, but it’s always good, and there are some welcome thematic resonances that put it head-and-shoulders above the average stalker pic. Plus, and I can’t say it enough times, there’s few pleasures greater to be had than seeing John Carpenter aping Alfred Hitchcock. (There’s even a sort of reverse of the classic climax of Rear Window that goes on in the third act.)

It may not be a lost classic, but it’s a really enjoyable picture from a great director at the height of his talents. I’m glad I tracked it down, and if anyone else has been giving it a pass, I recommend checking it out if you can scare up a copy. And Scream Factory, I’m not kidding about that Blu-ray!

Crypticon (Pre)

What? Crypticon KC

Where? Ramada Conference Center, 1601 N Universal Ave, KC MO

When? Next weekend, August 16-18

Who? Myself and Sean Demory, with able assists from Lydia Ash

That’s right, this time next week I’ll be getting ready to try running a table at a convention for the first time, along with fellow author and all around bad dude Sean Demory and resident booth girl Lydia, who will be cosplaying as a couple of Sean’s characters. He’ll be selling copies of his books Zobop Bebop and The Ballad of the Wayfaring Stranger and the Dead Man’s Whore, and I’ll have copies of my (comparatively prosaically titled) collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings as well as hot-off-the-presses copies of Tales of Jack the Ripper , not to mention bookmarks, stickers, and other party favors. So if you’re going to be at Crypticon KC, stop by and see us! We’ll be somewhere in the ballroom, and you’ll be able to distinguish our table from the piles of books bearing the above-mentioned titles. (If anyone else has piles of those same books, well, that’ll be awesome. Feel free to buy them from them, too.)

Like I said, this is going to be my first time tabling a convention (did I verb that right?) and it’s also my first Crypticon (which I almost misspelled ‘Krypticon,’ a very different but equally geeky convention, I’m sure). I’m looking forward to it, and it sounds like they’re expecting a pretty big crowd. So we’ll see how long it takes me to get completely overwhelmed and end up hiding under the table.

I’m not doing any programming or anything, though Sean has promised Thunderdome-style reading battles of some sort! I don’t know what that means, but I know that you don’t want to miss it!