Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 59

Death is Not the End

I avoided talking about this for awhile, in order to avoid spoilers, but I think we're past that time now. It's been reported by major news outlets, it's plastered up all over the Internet, there's a big banner at Dark Horse.com, the comic has been out for a week now, and I've even seen a cake commemorating the event. Hellboy is dead.

The death of a major character has never carried much weight in comics. In comics, people die all the time, and everyone always makes a big fuss, and then they're back again before you know it. Even the death of Superman some years ago, which made the national news, was overturned in relatively short order. I remember when I was a kid there was a joke amongst comic fans that the only person who ever stayed dead in comics was Bucky, and last I knew he'd actually been dusted off recently and brought back as the Winter Soldier.

In the wake of the announcement of Hellboy's demise, I saw a lot of people reacting the way that they would in response to the deaths of one of these characters, the kind who are always back again shortly. But Mike Mignola's Hellboy has never been a normal comic. We've lost major characters in it before, so we have some idea of what to expect here. As Mignola himself says, when people die in his comics, they just get more interesting. Rasputin died at the end of Seed of Destruction, the first Hellboy mini-series, and he stuck around to bedevil Hellboy as a ghost for a long time to come.

But there's something else that Mignola always says about his comics, which is that when they break stuff in them, it stays broken. This isn't some kind of publicity stunt death, and it's not something some other writing is going to ret-con or overturn in a few months or even a few years. Hellboy is dead, yes. And he's not gone, no. But he is changed. That's what death is, in the Hellboy comics. It's a change. And once things change, the status quo is never restored.

But we don't really have to speculate too much on what this means for the future of Hellboy. We've already been told. It's right there in the title. "Hellboy in Hell, coming in 2012." There was never any illusion that this was The End. For some time, Mignola has been saying that he's going to be returning to regular art duties on Hellboy once this arc with Duncan Fegredo was done. Now we just have a little bit better idea what those drawing duties are going to entail.

So what is Hellboy in Hell going to be like? The best explanation I've seen from the horse's mouth is here, but really, even that tells us only a little. If I had to guess, I'd say we're looking at a somewhat more surreal, dreamlike series of Hellboy stories. I once said of The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects that the stories in it felt like "pure Mignola," unfiltered by the needs of an ongoing comic franchise. I think Hellboy in Hell will skew more toward that "pure Mignola" aesthetic. Mignola has called it his "semi-retirement" book, and says that it'll "drift him off into this Hellboy inside my head, just rattling through all the images I want to draw and all the stories that I've collected over the years that I want to do."

I've seen a lot of people worried, but I'm not. Mike Mignola is my favorite creator, full stop, and I trust him pretty implicitly by this point. Whatever he does, whatever direction he goes, I'm sure it's going to be cool, and I'm even more sure that it's going to be inspiring. And if what we've got in store is more "pure Mignola," well, that's even better.

So, Hellboy is dead, long live Hellboy!

Weird Horror Manga

I-don't-know-how-long ago, Jesse Bullington suggested to me that I check out some manga by Junji Ito. Much to my chagrin, it took me until now to do it. More's the pity, as it turns out that Jesse was (unsurprisingly) absolutely right: Junji Ito is a genius.

I started out with the third volume of Ito's Museum of Terror series, because I figured it was stand-alone stories, so I could get a feel for whether I liked them or not without getting plunked into the middle of something too big. I didn't just like them, though, I was addicted. I followed that up with the other two Museum of Terror volumes, which featured Ito's Tomie series, and then I couldn't stop. I wanted more. And when I couldn't find more Ito to read right away, I delved into the works of Kazuo Umezu, one of Ito's influences and the "godfather of horror manga."

Junji Ito

What is there to say about Junji Ito, really. As of the time I write this, I've read almost everything of his that's been officially translated into English (and a couple of things that were unofficially scanlated, I admit). I'm still waiting for the second volume of Gyo. And I already want more. I promise that I'm not engaging in my trademark hyperbole when I say that Junji Ito is one of the most consistently brilliant creators–in any medium–I've ever encountered.

His two most famous series–Tomie and Uzumaki–are both actually sequences of short stories that stand variously well on their own. The majority of the Tomie stories could probably be read entirely out of context and enjoyed just fine, though there's the occasional continuity between a couple of tales, but when they're read all together (as they're currently collected in the first two volumes of the Museum of Terror) they create a kind of mythology, a building sense of dread that's at once claustrophobic and yet immense (yes, even cosmic) in scope. It's an approach that he'd perfect in his Uzumaki saga.

To describe the plots of any of Junji Ito's stories are to miss the point of them, largely. He's a creator whose work succeeds mostly on the level of atmosphere, of pacing, of sudden reveals and potent images. Uzumaki, for instance, tells the story of a town obsessed with spirals, but it's so much more than that.

Junji Ito cites Lovecraft as one of his influences, and Uzumaki is often credited as a Lovecraftian work, but, again, it's much more than that. Like Laird Barron or Thomas Ligotti (to name a couple), Junji Ito starts from a position of Lovecraftian cosmic terror, but uses that influence to create something wholly and uniquely his own. Viewed in the context of Ito's other works, Uzumaki feels less like an homage to Lovecraft, and more simply the culmination of Ito's own unique vision. Whatever it is, it's a true modern masterpiece of weird fiction, of a type and scale that's rare and breathtaking. As I said near the beginning of this post, Junji Ito is a genius, and Uzumaki is his masterpiece. I'd recommend all of his work about as highly as I can recommend anything, but Uzumaki is pretty much required reading for anyone with an interest in weird horror.

Kazuo Umezu

As I said before, Kazuo Umezu is one of Junji Ito's claimed influences, and is considered the "godfather of horror manga," according to the Internet. Unlike with Ito, I haven't read nearly all of Umezu's output, but I've read quite a bit, starting with the first volume of his Cat-Eyed Boy series (the second volume is waiting for me as I type this) and moving on to the first volume of his Scary Book series, and all of his epic The Drifting Classroom.

Umezu's work is mostly from the 60s and 70s, and his art style is reminiscent of older anime/manga work like Astro Boy. This, and the child-age protagonists, make his occasionally incredibly gruesome stories seem all the stranger. While the Cat-Eyed Boy stuff is a lot of fun, Umezu's masterpiece is widely considered to be The Drifting Classroom, and I've certainly never read anything else quite like it. I initially compared it to a cross between Lost and The Mist, but with elementary school kids. Certainly there's more to it than that, but it gives you an idea. There's more than a little Lord of the Flies thrown in as well, and the violence by and against children is as unflinching and gruesome as any you'll ever see, but it never feels exploitative. It really is a truly amazing series, especially considering it was initially published in the early-to-mid 70s.

Further Reading Viewing

There's a particular kind of weirdness in these manga. It's most prominent in Junji Ito's stuff, but you can see it a little bit in Kazuo Umezu's work as well. It's uniquely Japanese (and to some extent uniquely their own), but it seems to come from the same well as the great weird and cosmic horror of folks like Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc. (I can definitely see a bit of Hodgson's House on the Borderland in The Drifting Classroom, for example.) If, like me, this unique weirdness is something that you kind of can't get enough of, you'll appreciate knowing that I've found a couple of movies that I think kind of capture it.

Matango (1963)

Pre-dating much of the stuff I've mentioned here, Matango is a Toho-era adaptation of Hodgson's weird fungus classic "The Voice in the Night," complete with amazing rubber-suit mushroom people. It's remarkably better than you could ever imagine, and has an almost perfect tone of spiraling madness and increasingly psychadelic, otherworldy weirdness. I've posted a longer review of it as part of my old column on international horror cinema, which you can read here.

Uzumaki (2000)

Obviously an adaptation of Junji Ito's manga of the same name, Uzumaki fails to deliver on the same level of genius as its source material, but it comes surprisingly close. Cherry-picking events from across the Uzumaki series, and changing many of them around, it nonetheless gets the very unusual tone of the story down almost perfectly, and is as good a cinematic channeling of Ito's unique weird energy as I've ever seen. Things definitely don't get nearly as big as they do in the manga here, but the atmosphere is almost exactly right, and the sense of something much bigger than what you've seen at the end is very nice.

Supernatural & Occult Fiction

I've talked before about the uncertainties I have when it comes to genre designations. What I write is horror, almost certainly, but horror is a big country, and I'm far from the first person to wonder where exactly my flag is planted in that dark territory. This isn't really a post about that, not exactly, but it provides an interesting segue.

I recently read Spook Stories by E.F. Benson, about as charming a collection of ghost stories as you're likely to encounter. I got it from the library, and the edition I got was a hardcover put out by Arno Press as part of a book line called Supernatural & Occult Fiction. There's a list of all the books in the series here. I've heard of several of them, of course, and others are completely new to me. I'm definitely going to start doing some research, and adding some of these volumes to my to-read queue. Based on the titles alone, if nothing else.

But, I dunno, something about the name of the book line really struck me. Supernatural and Occult Fiction. It's so simple and scholarly-sounding, almost antiquarian, as befits most of the recognizable titles in their stable. Yet it's also evocative. The minute I see those words, it makes me want to read those books on a gray rainy day, or on the proverbial dark and stormy night. So, is this a useful subgenre distinction? Supernatural and Occult Fiction? Probably not. But it does sum up most of what I write decently well, and it's definitely got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Cover!

Those of you who were around this weekend may've already seen this, but it deserves a good big post of its very own. The pre-production (so not necessarily final, but probably close) front cover of my forthcoming collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings has been revealed:

You can go to the publisher's site to read a little about the background that went into the cover, but for now I can tell you that the cover art is by the fabulous Bernie Gonzalez, who also did illustrations for every story in the collection (more on that later). There'll be a lot more news and details about the collection coming down the road, but for now I wanted to share the cover with everyone.

In other news, I believe I can safely announce that I sold my story "The Labyrinth of Sleep" to the fine folks at Innsmouth Free Press for inclusion in their forthcoming Future Lovecraft anthology. Stay tuned and you'll be hearing more about that in the near future, as well!

Suspiria & Others

I recently watched Dario Argento's Suspiria for the first time (right before it got pulled from Netflix's Watch Instantly) and I've been a little obsessed with it ever since. I'm somewhat (rightly) famous for my hyperbole and my enthusiasm for the things I like, but it's been awhile since I saw anything that galvanized me in quite the way that Suspiria did. Anytime I watch something I usually want to talk about it afterward, but with Suspiria, I still want to talk about it, even though it's been something like a week. (Does anyone reading this actually need me to tell them about Suspiria, though? If you haven't seen it, by some chance, consider this my recommendation.)

Moreover, only after watching it I realized the connection between it and Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which prompted me to go back and re-read the latter, and has also prompted me to track down the thing that inspired them both, Thomas de Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis, which has dutifully taken its place in my reading queue. I've been thinking a lot about the connections between these things (and their connections to some other works). I don't know yet if anything'll come of it, but it's been fun to muse about, anyway.

I've actually watched quite a bit of new (or, new to me, anyway) stuff lately, some of which is worth mentioning. Black Death is another surprisingly good one (though it shouldn't be too surprising, as several people had recommended it to me). And I caught the Anthony Hopkins exorcism flick The Rite, which was mostly just OK, but it had at least one scene of great atmospheric creepiness. Also, Rutger Hauer in a surprisingly restrained role as the protagonist's undertaker father which, my unhealthy love for Rutger Hauer notwithstanding, was still pretty great.

My wife and I also caught The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was really good, but very intense. Parts of it definitely reminded me of Zodiac, mostly in the "making sorting through papers and looking at old photographs exciting somehow" department, so I'm still eager to see David Fincher tackle the remake. I'll be curious to see if they action-movie up Daniel Craig's Blomkvist, though.

And I re-watched Mimic for something like the third or fourth time. Sadly, it's still a bit of a disappointment in del Toro's canon, but it's got some interesting moments, and looking at it from this point in his career you can definitely see the building blocks of several things he'd do later (there are especially a lot of echoes of it in The Strain). The big surprise this time, I think, was that Josh Brolin had a supporting role. I guess I probably didn't know who he was the last time I saw the movie.

I've also been reading a fair bit of good stuff of late. Besides the aforementioned Our Lady of Darkness, I picked up Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol, an artist I've liked for awhile. I also checked out some stuff by Junji Ito, finally, which someone (I think Jesse Bullington) had suggested I do long ago. Both were really great, though also kind of as different as two comics about supernatural stuff could possibly be, with the Brosgol angling toward the charming and the Ito keeping to the creepy and disturbing as shit.

And last but not least I finally got around to reading Laird Barron's newest collection, Occultation, which delivered on all the promise of his first collection, and then some. Laird's been one of the top practitioners of the weird horror story from the word go, but this collection is a massive jump up in awesomeness from the first one, and that's from someone who thought the first one was pretty great. My favorite stories in it often deal with some kind of fringe occult activities in a way that feels totally real and new and ominous and creepy. I'd already read "Catch Hell," but "Mysterium Tremendum," "Six Six Six," and the title story are all original to the collection, I believe, and are all major favorites of mine. I think "Six Six Six" is probably my favorite Laird Barron story to date. Good stuff.

The Burning Maiden and the Book Club

The website and table of contents for the first volume of The Burning Maiden, which will feature my story "Count Brass," is up here. I'm in a really just jaw-dropping table of contents. I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing here this time, though I should, but we're talking about the likes of Cullen Bunn, Matthew Pearl, Tim Lebbon, Mike Oliveri, Jeremy Shipp, Sarah Langan, Mort Castle, and Joe Lansdale, among others! So yeah, wow!

It's coming out this October from Evileye Books, the same folks who're going to be publishing Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings (my collection). "Count Brass" will also be in my collection, though I sold it to them for The Burning Maiden before we'd ever started talking about the collection. Still, this means October is going to be a big, big month for me, for lots of reasons.

While I'm on the subject, you should check out the Evileye book club. It's the only way to get the limited-edition hardcovers of their various books, including Never Bet the Devil, The Burning Maiden, Cullen Bunn's Crooked Hills, and Mike Oliveri's The Pack: Winter Kill, among others. There's no commitment involved, and it also gets you access to various other special deals. Plus, even though it looks like you do, you don't have to have a Twitter handle to sign up. Just, if you do, they do updates and stuff via Twitter.

Out of Town

Heading out of town for the weekend. Not much in the way of Internet access until I get back. See you guys next week, and try not to burn the place down while I'm away.

What've I Been Doing?

A lot has been going on, which, as usual, means I've been posting less. Honestly, while I'll always keep updating my site here, the best place to keep up with me these days is probably over on my Facebook (I know, I know).

So what's up? Well, my ninth anniversary came and went on June 2nd. Nine years I've been married to my very favorite person in the world, which is pretty good, I think. We didn't do much to mark the date this year, but next year we're planning to go to Hawaii.

I've seen a lot of movies lately. I re-watched Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time in many years, and the very first time all the way through. It was still good. Then we watched the movie, which was flat crazy. I also caught X-Men: First Class, which was better than I could've reasonably expected. I would've liked more Magneto/Xavier/Mystique/Shaw, and less weird Z-list mutant supporting characters, but it was mostly pretty great.

Besides that, I watched a bunch of stuff for my column over at Innsmouth Free Press, and I also caught a weird anthology horror flick on Watch Instantly called Trapped Ashes. I watched it because Joe Dante directed the framing sequence, but I actually found it to be a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting, in spite of a pretty stupid ending. The framing sequence had a great Mario Bava/Dario Argento homage house setting, and while the rest of the movies had the (sometimes uncomfortable) eroticism of a late-night cable show, I found that almost all of them had something going on that I could enjoy. I think my favorite was probably "Stanley's Girlfriend," which, though it didn't really bring anything new to the table, had a tone of lingering regret, rather than horror, that I found interesting.

Those who follow me on Goodreads will note that I've not been reading much. That's not actually strictly true, but I've been working my way through a massive pair of tomes collecting the macabre short fiction of Basil Copper from PS Publishing. I'll post reviews eventually, but I'm still getting through them. I've also been going back through in an effort to thin out my comic collection, which means reading a lot of my old comic books. And, by and large, they're terrible. Man. But I still love some of them anyway.

Tonight I'm going to Tessa Gratton's book launch at Rainy Day Books, so I'm looking forward to that.

I think that's about it for me, though. What've you guys been up to?

Vincentennial & Others

Today is the official Vincentennial! Today, Vincent Price would have turned 100, had we been lucky enough to have him around that long. Last weekend, a bunch of friends got together at our place for a Vincent Price Movie Night in honor of the celebration. Tornadoes and various other responsibilities broke it up a little early, but we managed to get through The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood, and a few stragglers watched about half of Comedy of Terrors before the weather forced us to put a stop to festivities.

The 100th birthday of Vincent Price would be enough cause for celebration today, but there's more! Today is also the 89th birthday of Christopher Lee, and yesterday would have been the 98th birthday of Peter Cushing, were he still with us.

Not to slight Lee (who I'll talk more about in a moment), but Price and Cushing are probably my two favorite actors of all time. Are they the best actors of all time? Probably not, but they're both always a complete joy to watch, and they both always elevate whatever material they're in. Both have been in a lot of good movies, and more than a few that weren't so good, but whenever they showed up on screen the movie always suddenly picks up, no matter how much it may have been dragging before.

Price, Cushing, and Lee have only ever been in one movie all together, though you can find any number of combos of Cushing/Lee, and even a few Price/Cushing pairings. The one movie featuring them all is The House of Long Shadows, which I've surprisingly never seen. It's not available on DVD, and I haven't yet gotten so desperate as to watch it in segments on YouTube.

There is no shortage of great movies starring any of them, though, and while I'm going to suggest a few that are maybe a little more unusual (and a few that probably aren't), there's no way anything's going to be exhaustive here. Basically, if it's got their names on it, chances are it's worth checking out.

Vincent Price

When it comes to watching Vincent Price movies, there are the usual suspects. The aforementioned Abominable Dr. Phibes, Theatre of Blood, House on Haunted Hill, The Fly, etc. He co-stars with Cushing (however briefly) in the sequel to Phibes, and for a more extended period in Madhouse. Personally, if called upon to recommend just one Vincent Price movie that a lot of folks haven't seen, I'd suggest Comedy of Terrors, which is available to stream from Netflix. It doesn't feature Cushing, but it does feature Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff. Lorre and Rathbone are also back in Tales of Terror, an anthology film of Edgar Allan Poe stories.

The Vincent Price/Roger Corman collaborations on various Poe films are probably a little better known. My favorite might be The Pit and the Pendulum, but for some more unusual ones try The Haunted Palace, which is actually the first film adaptation of a Lovecraft story, or the 1962 Tower of London, which isn't Poe at all, but features Price giving a really great performance as Richard III. (Amusingly, Price is also in the 1932 Tower of London, again with Karloff and Rathbone, albeit this time in a smaller part.)

Also well known from Price's oeuvre, but well worth watching, is The Last Man on Earth, the first and easily the best film adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. (I'll admit that I haven't actually seen Omega Man yet, but I don't think the title is in any danger.)

Peter Cushing

It's hard to say what Peter Cushing is best known for. I know that to a lot of people he's Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars, and I think a lot of others know him as Van Helsing in the various Hammer Dracula flicks (where he is great, don't get me wrong), but to me his most striking role has always been as Baron Frankenstein in the Hammer Frankenstein series. Last night, Jay and I watched Evil of Frankenstein in honor of Mr. Cushing's birthday, and I don't know what more you could want from a Frankenstein movie. It had a great, Kirby-ish (or, as Jay pointed out, Dick Tracy villain-ish) monster design, a carnival, a sinister hypnotist, not one but two amazing labs, they discovered the monster frozen in a block of ice, and Peter Cushing got to stride about owning the universe as Baron Frankenstein.

Cushing and Lee co-starred in about fifty million movies together. Let me try to list them all: Oh wait, that's ridiculous. I'll mention another favorite team-up here in a minute, when I talk about Christopher Lee, but for now I'll throw out some suggestions for Cushing movies that aren't Draculas or Frankensteins. How about the really great Hammer Hound of the Baskervilles (actually one of the aforementioned billion movies co-starring Lee), or the 1957 Abominable Snowman? One of my favorite of Cushing's roles when he's not playing Van Helsing or Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes is his great turn in Captain Clegg a.k.a. Night Creatures, which, in spite of not actually having any monsters, is one of my favorite Hammer films, and is somewhat less well known than some of the others on this list. Give it a shot!

Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee isn't quite as high-ranking in my personal pantheon as Price or Cushing. It took me a little longer to really fall in love with him. And when I did, it wasn't actually through the same roles that I think a lot of people did. The first few times I saw Lee in movies, he was playing monsters. And while his Dracula is suitably impressive, he never really connected with me until I started to see him playing some different roles. I think it might have been The Devil Rides Out that first made me start to see that there was more to Lee, but my favorite Lee performance just might be the really over-the-top one in The Gorgon (where he once again co-stars with Cushing). The Gorgon probably isn't near the top of the Hammer horror heap, but Lee and Cushing are both great fun in it, especially Lee's disheveled, be-mustached Professor Meister.

Gothic Anthology Cover & TOC

The cover and table of contents for the second anthology from Innsmouth Free Press have been posted. As before, I've bolded my story, but, as before, I'm in some very august company, all of whom are well worth a look.

Dark Epistle, Jim Blackstone

Obsessions, Colleen Anderson

Stone Dogs, Paul Jessup

The Victorians, James S. Dorr

Liminal Medicine, Jesse Bullington

Nightmare, Wenona Napolitano

The Shredded Tapestry, Ryan Harvey

Desideratum, Gina Flores

The Seventh Picture, Orrin Grey

Housebound, Don D'Ammassa

Elizabeth on the Island, Josh Reynolds

At the Doorstep, Leanna Renee Hieber

The Ba-Curse, Ann K. Schwader

Broken Notes, Maria Mitchell

I Tarocchi dei d'Este, Martha Hubbard

The Malcontents, Mary E. Choo

Frozen Souls, Sarah Hans

New Archangel, Desmond Warzel

The Ascent, Berit K.N. Ellingsen

Nine Nights, Theresa Sanchez Bazelli

Vodka Attack, Meddy Ligner

The Forgotten Ones, Mary Cook

The City of Melted Iron, Bobby Cranestone

A Fixer-Upper, Amanda C. Davis

The Snow Man, E. Catherine Tobler

In His Arms in the Attic, Alexis Brooks de Vita

Hitomi, Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

I'm very excited about this anthology. I'm a big fan of Gothic stories, and you don't see many contemporary anthologies themed around them. At least, I don't. So I think this is going to be something pretty special. It's set to be released in September, so it should be out in plenty of time for your Halloween reading.