Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 58

Richard Gavin on The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Richard Gavin is one of my favorite contemporary writers of the supernatural, and I'm also lucky enough to consider him a friend. (Whether he feels the same is a mystery.) I also happen to know that he shares my love of a good Vincent Price movie (is there any other kind?) and so when I went looking for contributors to this countdown, he was more than happy to wax poetic on The Tomb of Ligeia:

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I never celebrate Halloween without Vincent Price.  His presence is as requisite in my home as carved gourds and candy.  So when I received the invitation to participate in this list of suggested viewing for All-Hallow's, my confirmation was instant.  The only difficulty to be overcome was selecting a single title from Price's long and impressive filmography.

Because he was as diverse an actor as he was a distinguished one, Vincent Price wore many masks over the decades, from the ridiculous to the sublime.  I prefer my Horror straight rather than sly, so my taste has always run toward Price's more earnest roles, the ones in which he manages to step out of his endearing persona and avoids giving audiences his subtly reassuring wink, reminding them that it was all in good fun.  As my initial choice, Michael Reeves' unflinching Witchfinder General (1968), is in the capable hands of another contributor, I turned my attention to what I consider the most sterling entry in the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman for American-International Pictures: The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

None of the Corman/Price/Poe films are without merit, even those that play fast and loose with their source material.  But one of the elements that elevates Tomb is its faithfulness to Poe's original 1838 story (titled simply 'Ligeia').  All of the story's major beats are hit and it is also further fleshed out by excellent dramatic performances.

The Tomb of Ligeia's plot centres on a recent widower, Verden Fell (Price) who simultaneously mourns for and fears his dear departed wife, Ligeia, whose otherworldly willpower may just enable her to conquer death itself.  When Verden becomes smitten with the aristocratic Rowena Trevanion, Ligeia's wrath begins to stain the lives of Verden and his new bride.

Price is pitch-perfect as the Byronic lead, exhibiting the classical Poe obsessions of desiring what one fears and fearing what one desires.  His mourning for the Lady Ligeia never really slips into hand-wringing melodrama.  He delivers his lines in a controlled, morose tone and traipses his ruined priory as quietly as a walking corpse.  He is a man who longs for the grave as much as he dreads it.  With his strange aversion to sunlight, his emotional torment, his undertaker's garb, Price becomes the very embodiment of Poe's world-weary misfits. (Rowena: "Don't you ever laugh?"  Verden: "Only at myself.")

The film roams that thin boarder between private obsession and the supernatural, and thus strongly echoes Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).   (Roger Corman made no secret about the fact that his Poe films drew inspiration from the Master of Suspense.) Both films feature broken men who harbor passion for a deceased woman, both also feature lead actresses assuming the dual role of the departed and the new love who reminds the protagonist of the object of his obsession.  Like Kim Novak in Hitch's masterpiece, Elizabeth Shepherd is excellent as the vengeful Ligeia and the rather innocent Rowena.

The Tomb of Ligeia is an elegant nightmare.  The bounty of outdoor scenes really give this film a more organic, less "stylized soundstage" feel than the other titles in this series. Kenneth V. Jones also provides a wonderful score.

Like all great horror films, the supernatural elements are ambiguous and archetypal.  Shapeshifting, or rather the possibility thereof, is a recurrent theme.  The dominant suggestion is that Ligeia's determination to return from the great beyond is so strong she will assume the form of a cat or a fox in order to keep a baleful eye on Verden.

The divinity of the female was one of Edgar Allan Poe's lifelong obsessions.  Romantic love was both his Muse and the demon that hounded him until his tragic death at the age of forty. Because Poe's real life romances often ended tragically (several of the women he loved suffered protracted and painful deaths due to consumption), love and death became inextricably bound in his life.  This marriage of seeming opposites is the thread that unifies his most notable work.  He was forever in search of the ideal Woman, one whose spirit was so great it might even enable her to defeat death itself.  The Lady Ligeia is the ultimate expression of this wish.

The ecstasy of love and the insufferable silence of the grave; these were the inevitable forces in Poe's life, in the life of Verden Fell, and indeed in our own.

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia on The Tingler (1959)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia runs Innsmouth Free Press, where she's co-edited several anthologies including Historical Lovecraft and Candle in the Attic Window, and where she puts up with me on a regular basis. She's also a very talented writer in her own right, and her story "Flash Frame" was recently reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu. Here, she talks about the great Vincent Price/William Castle joint, The Tingler:

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I remember watching The Tingler on TV with my mom. It's a black-and-white flick produced and directed by William Castle, and it has the usual Castle 'gimmick' you'd expect. But it's a pretty cool gimmick. Vincent Price is a doctor who discovers a parasite which attaches itself to the human spine and feeds off fear (hence that tingling you feel on your back when you are afraid). Eventually one of the Tinglers escapes, which leads to the famous sequence where Vincent Price rushes into a darkened movie theatre and orders everyone to scream for their lives.

I actually thought the Tingler was rather creepy and the thought of being attacked by a parasite that comes from someone's spine did give me some pause. It's pretty fun to watch with friends because you can scream (or maybe drink) when everyone starts screaming on film.

I will also confess this was one of the first movies I bought on DVD when we purchased the DVD player. And I had to import it from the USA. How's that for affection?

A Vincent Price Halloween

Okay, I admit, I have dropped the ball on this whole Countdown to Halloween thing. But I'm going to make it up to you.

Starting on Monday, the 24th, and running every single day through Halloween, I'm going to be hosting a special feature here. I've approached a bunch of writers, editors, and illustrators (mostly writers, I'll admit) and asked them to pick a favorite Vincent Price movie to suggest for Halloween and write up a paragraph or two about why. Starting Monday and running through Halloween day, I'll be posting the results, one a day. Barring misadventure, you can expect to see names like Richard Gavin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jesse Bullington, S.J. Chambers, John Langan, Gemma Files, and Drazen Kozjan. And on Halloween day itself, I'll throw my hat into that particular ring, too. So check back next week and we'll all celebrate Halloween the way it was meant to be, with Vincent Price movies!

All Hallow's Read

I said earlier that I had originally hoped to post a book recommendation a day for the entire month of October. Part of the impetus for this was to have something to do for the Countdown to Halloween, but part of it was also Neil Gaiman's All Hallow's Read. The gist of All Hallow's Read is to start a new tradition where you give people scary books to read on Halloween. I think that's a great tradition, and it's something I wanted to support. So, since I can't actually give everyone a scary book, I was going to suggest a bunch of them.

Again, that's not going to happen, at least, not in the depth I would have liked. But while I may not be able to go all out, I did do some thinking about what I would have suggested, had I had the time, and while I can't do a suggestion a day, with explanations of why, I can still suggest 31 great scary books. To make it a little harder on myself, I restricted it no more than one book by the same author, and to no books by Mike Mignola. (Do I still need to suggest books by Mike Mignola? If so, this is me suggesting all of them.) To make it a little easier on myself, I let myself do whole series, rather than picking individual installments. Beyond that there's no real rhyme or reason here, besides that these are spooky books that I like.

Without further ado (and in no particular order):

31. Tales, H.P. Lovecraft

30. Count Magnus & Other Ghost Stories, M.R. James

29. The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson

28. The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard

27. The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, William Hope Hodgson

26. Owls Hoot in Daytime & Other Omens, Manly Wade Wellman

25. The Ghostly Best Stories of Robert Westall (2 volumes)

24. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

23. A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny

22. Hell House, Richard Matheson

21. A Coven of Vampires, Brian Lumley

20. Cabal, Clive Barker

19. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

18. The Courtney Crumrin books, Ted Naifeh (4+ volumes)

17. Gothic!, edited by Deborah Noyes

16. The Bone Key, Sarah Monette

15. The Monstrumologist books, Rick Yancey (3 volumes so far)

14. The Dylan Dog Case Files, Tiziano Sclavi

13. Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites, Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson

12. The Enterprise of Death, Jesse Bullington

11. Uzumaki, Junji Ito (3 volumes)

10. Occultation & Other Stories, Laird Barron

9. The Darkly Splendid Realm, Richard Gavin

8. Mr. Gaunt & Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan

7. The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists, Norman Partridge

6. Basic Black, Terry Dowling

5. Worse Than Myself, Adam Golaski

4. Saga of the Swamp Thing hardcovers, Alan Moore & others

3. Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson

2. Jack Kirby's The Demon

1. Creatures, edited by John Langan & Paul Tremblay*

*Yeah, this is skirting my rule about no two works by the same person. Also, I haven't finished reading this one yet. But hey, it's my list, and monster anthology!

 

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Longview Literary Festival

This Saturday, I'm going to be a guest at the Longview Literary Festival on the Longview campus of the Metropolitan Community College. That's in Lee's Summit, Missouri, for those of you who're in the Kansas City metro area and might want to stop by. It doesn't look like the official schedule is up on the website yet (the one that's up there currently is for last year's festival), but I should have a reading at 2:30 and I'll be on a panel about the future of the horror genre (a subject on which I can speak with absolutely no authority) at 4:30.

October Country

So, it's been October for four days now. Like last year, I'm participating in the Countdown to Halloween, and I had originally planned to post a book suggestion a day for the entire month. Obviously, that's not going to happen. I've been busier than anticipated, and it doesn't really look like that's going to change in the immediate future. So, while I won't be doing that, I will be trying to do something.

October is my favorite month, after all, and autumn is my favorite season. And Halloween is, of course, my favorite Holiday. Not just because my birthday is the day before. In fact, the other way around. I love my birthday because of its proximity to Halloween.

Even as a kid, it wasn't the usual stuff that made me love Halloween, not the dressing up and certainly not the candy, although those both play their part. It was the feeling of the season, the atmosphere of pleasant spookiness. I've said before that the month of October is the one month of the year when the world actually becomes closest to the way it is in my head all year round. In a comment to a post on his Google+, artist Eric Orchard summed up my position decently well when he said, "I could always use bats and jack-o-lanterns in my world." Yeah, pretty much that exactly.

Fungus of Terror

For years (since at least 2007) I've wanted to edit an anthology of dark fungus stories. I love fungus monsters, from William Hope Hodgson's "Voice in the Night" to Matango to various comic books and video games to the "moldy corpse" enemies from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Fungus monsters are (some of) the best monsters, and they're near and dear to my monster-loving heart.

Well, after all this time, I'm pleased to announce that that anthology is really happening! Back when I first started writing columns for Innsmouth Free Press, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and I had a discussion about Matango, in which I revealed that it was a favorite of mine, and she revealed that it scarred her for life. This, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I won't trouble you with the specifics, but suffice it to say that somehow between then and now I tricked convinced them to let me co-edit (with Silvia) an anthology of fungus stories.

This'll be my first anthology as co-editor, and I've already learned things I didn't know about the process, but Silvia has been awesome and patient with me so far. It's early days yet, so there's not a lot I can announce, but it is really going to happen! We've got some really amazing writers who've already agreed to contribute pieces (again, sorry to tease, but they'll have to stay under wraps for now) and big plans for the anthology, including possibly releasing a limited edition as IFP's very first hardcover! That may not be much for now, but I promise you'll be hearing a lot more about this one as it develops!

Playmobil Solomon Kane

Those of you who follow me on Facebook or Google+ might remember me mentioning recently that the incredible Thomas Boatwright put together an awesome Playmobil conversion of Solomon Kane. Well, he went ahead and sold the conversion, and I was lucky enough to be the one to buy it. The package arrived yesterday, featuring not only Solomon Kane himself, but also a couple of pirates, a couple of Vikings, and an original sketch of Playmobil Solomon Kane, in all his glory.

"... a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch of the pagan"

Solomon Kane faces down some Vikings!

Solomon Kane: Scourge of Villainy!

A dramatic pose!

My Review Policy

I'm not going to say mean things about books or movies anymore. At least, I'm going to try not to. A lot of reviewers do. I have in the past. And I'm not critiquing anyone's review style here. I like to read a scathing review that calls someone a war criminal as much as the next guy. It can be fun to read, and it can be fun to write, and if that's your thing then by all means, keep it up. I'm just going to try not to do it myself.

I'm going to be honest about things, of course. If I don't like a book or a movie, I'll say so. I'll probably even say why, if it comes up, or if I feel like it. And I certainly won't ever imply that I like something when I don't. Even though I occasionally write reviews, and even though I do a column on vintage horror movies for Innsmouth Free Press, I don't really think of myself as a reviewer. I just like to talk about the things I read and watch. But I'm certainly not an expert. Not on much of anything, really. I'm a writer. Hopefully I'm decent at it. I try to be good at it. And I like to think that I like good things. But all I know is that I like the things I like. Sometimes I can tell you why. Other times I'm not so sure.

I definitely recommend the stuff I like to people who tend to like the same stuff as me. And if we agree, awesome. And if we don't, that's great too. It takes all kinds, and more than once I've had my opinion of something changed by someone who convinced me to look at it from a different angle.

I'm still going to talk about the things I read and watch, whether I liked it or not. I'm just going to try to be nice about it. Being nice seems like a pretty good policy, in general.

Important Collection Update

My first short story collection is coming out sometime early next year from Evileye Books! For most of you reading this, that's probably not news, though the "early next year" part might be. The fact is there's still not a date set in stone, but we're shooting for March.

The book is going to be called Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings. It's going to consist of ten stories, two of which are previously unpublished anywhere, one of which is my currently out-of-print novella The Mysterious Flame. It's going to be fully illustrated by the incredible Bernie Gonzalez, who also did the cover, which you can see here. I've seen the illustrations, and I can say that this book is going to look amazing. Hopefully you'll like the stories, too.

There'll be more news about it coming down the line, but for now I can say that we're planning to release the collection in trade paperback and e-book editions in the spring, and then later on there'll be a limited-edition hardcover, if there's enough demand. And here's the part where I ask for some help. If you're interested in the collection, and would like to stay in the loop on it, it'd help out if you dropped a line to theloop@evileyebooks.com and let them know. And if you're a reviewer and would like to get an ARC, send an email to reviews@evileyebooks.com. Finally, if you want a copy of the limited-edition hardcover, send an email to bookclub@evileyebooks.com and let them know that you're interested in the hardcover of my collection. None of these will commit you to anything, but it'll help let the publisher know that the demand is there.

To say that I'm excited about this would, of course, be the grossest of understatements, and I want to say thank you to everyone who has already expressed their enthusiasm for it, and to everyone who reads this website, no matter how you got here. I'll have more news (and other things) coming down the pipe very soon.