Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 60

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.

The Big Deal

Today I can finally announce what is without a doubt the biggest news in the history of my writing career so far: My first short story collection will be coming out this October from Evileye Books. This has been in the works for a little while now, but this is the first time I've been able to talk about it officially. Here's the press release, though I'll summarize a couple of salient points below.

The collection is called Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings. An official announcement of its complete table of contents will be forthcoming, along with some other details, but it'll feature nine stories plus my out-of-print novella The Mysterious Flame. A couple of those stories will be previously-unpublished. There will be a trade paperback edition available at launch, as well as digital editions, with plans for a special hardcover edition sometime next year. And did I mention all this is planned for October, in time for Halloween? Happy birthday to me!

I'll have a lot more information on this between now and publication, so keep an eye on this space!

Historical Lovecraft Guest Post

The Aristocrat, the Victorian, his Wife, and their Shoggoth

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

When we issued a call for historical Lovecraftian stories, Paula and I expected some Victorian stories. We also expected that there'd be more tales about men than women because the default mindset seems to be that women did not hold positions of power or significance in the past (though this is untrue on so many levels, especially when you consider different social classes in a given time period). Thus, we thought we'd get some of the more famous women in history (Cleopatra, Agrippina, Elizabeth I), but few tales about women who were not so famous, or women in certain cultures which seem very macho to the casual viewer (such as Prehispanic societies, for example). We did not, however, expect to find ourselves wondering where all the women had gone. Story after story featured a male Victorian aristocrat – other social classes were seldom represented. If we were lucky, maybe a wife or girlfriend was mentioned in passing. Most of the time, though, women were entirely absent.

Lovecraft did not have female heroines. Heck, some of his characters didn't even seem to know what a woman was. However, it struck us as odd that, with so many cultures and periods in history to choose from, we'd have contemporary writers zeroing in on one period (Victorian England) and dismissing female characters as unworthy of study. Eventually, some feedback came up the grapevine telling me that some writers felt there were just not enough time periods and cultures in which women had enjoyed a significant or free enough position. There was just not enough material for inspiration. We may never do a Historical Lovecraft 2, but I thought I'd point out some interesting women who are absent from our anthology. Some of these may inspire new stories for you writers reading this post:

The Dahomey Amazons were an all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahome. The regiment was created in the 17th century.
La Monja Alferez was a 17th-century woman who served as a soldier. Renowned for her temper and her prowess with a sword.
Blessed Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess and writer. Some of her work includes medical texts.
Trotula was an Italian female physician. She authored several important texts about women's health.
Émilie du Châtele, French mathematician. She translated Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.
Tapputi, possibly the world's first chemist, from Mesopotamia.
Artemisia I of Caria, commander of the Persian king Xerxes. Remembered for her participation in the Battle of Salamis.
The Vestal Virgins were priestesses of Vesta, Goddess of the Hearth. They enjoyed a number of privileges, and were free to own property and make a will.
Ix Tzutz Nik might have been queen of Tikal in the Mayan Early Classic period. Alternatively, she might be a mythological figure. Or both, as Mayan rulers are often depicted as deities.

I do not intend this to be an exhaustive overview of women through history. However, I hope it will provide food for thought for those interested in writing historical fiction with fantastic elements.

In closing, I'd like to mention that we did not receive submissions set in one of my favourite time periods: Tudor England. For some reason, the Mexica (aka Aztecs) were also absent.

The final table of contents of Historical Lovecraft features a wide variety of cultures and characters – from monks to pilots. There are female characters from Iceland, Japan, Peru, and other places. I think it's a good, sound mix. However, we did have to wade through a lot of Victoriana to arrive at a more eclectic selection. I'm still not sure why this happened, but it was an interesting experience.

Bio: Silvia Moreno-Garcia was born and raised in Mexico. She moved to Canada several years ago and now lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. She writes speculative fiction (from magic realism to horror). Her short stories have appeared in professional publications such as Fantasy Magazine and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She is a member of SF Canada, SFWA and HWA. She co-edited Historical Lovecraft with Paula R. Stiles.

Vault of Secrets

I'm very happy to finally get to announce The Vault of Secrets, my new column on vintage horror cinema for Innsmouth Free Press! I'm really excited about this one, since, as anybody who's been reading this for long knows, old horror movies are some of my favorite things in the world. That link will take you to the first installment, where I talk about Mark of the Vampire.

I came to the vintage horror scene late in the game. I didn't grow up with these movies, like a lot of the people I know. I had never seen a Hammer movie or even one of the Universal movies until I was in college, and I didn't get really into them until just a few years ago. When I did fall, though, I fell hard, and I've been watching them voraciously ever since.

What I grew up on instead were the great Crestwood House monster books. I read them again and again, and pored over the black-and-white stills all through my youth, which made finally watch these movies feel like a homecoming when it happened.

I'm looking forward to sharing a lot of obscure (and sometimes less obscure) old movies that I love with everyone. I've got the first six entries already planned out, as I'll be going through all the movies in the really excellent Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection, which is one of my favorites among the many, many boxed sets of old horror movies I've picked up so far.

Free Comic Book Day & Others

I had a surprisingly good Free Comic Book Day yesterday. I made it out to Elite, where I was surprised to see Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt, which is always a pleasure. I wish I'd known they were gonna be there, I'd have planned for more time out.

I picked up the Baltimore/Criminal Macabre issue, as well as the Mouse Guard/Dark Crystal issue. I also picked up while I was out a copy of the latest issue of Rue Morgue, which has an artist's tribute to Vincent Price, including work from Mike Mignola, Belle Dee, and Gary Pullin, among others. Really awesome.

Then, because the optometrist had unexpectedly gotten my glasses in that morning, I went out with Jay to see Thor. The short review is that I really liked it, and don't have any relevant complaints. It did everything I wanted a Thor movie to do, short of having some Jack Kirby-style trolls, but I guess frost giants, some kind of Kothoga-like monster, and the Destroyer will have to suffice.

In the evening, Grace and I went out to The Steel Show, where we were able to catch a couple of acts, notably John McKenna and the Blue Sea Fishermen's Union, featuring the husband of one of my wife's coworkers on drums. Unfortunately, we had to turn in before we could catch most of the rest of the show, but what we heard was pretty fun, and hopefully we'll be able to make it out for something like that again soon.

All in all, it was a really pleasant day, though I spent less of it at home than I had anticipated. Today gets to try to make up for that, because I've got a lot of writing to do, and there are old movies sitting on my shelf just begging to be watched.

A Much-Truncated World Horror Report

Due to a whole combo of things, not least among them exhaustion, incipient con crud, and more exhaustion, this report will, by necessity, be shorter than I'd like, and I'll leave a bunch of people (and things) out, no question. The other option, though, is to wait to do it until I have time and energy, by which point I'll have forgotten, or it'll be time for the next con report, or something, so here goes:

For me, probably the most exciting thing I knew about this trip in advance was that I was going to get to meet Jesse Bullington, Molly Tanzer, and Selena Chambers in person for the first time. Which I did, and it was good times! Much fun was had by me at least, and I hope by all, and no one seemed too disgusted with me by the end of festivities. Though I am forbidden by dark oaths and fear of legal reprisals from disclosing everything that we said and did, I can say that, in addition to the con stuff, there were absinthe bars, bacchanals, food carts, and lots of good conversation.

As far as con stuff is concerned, the highlights reel includes a panel featuring myself, Molly, and Joe Hill (among others), Molly's incredible reading of her badass Historical Lovecraft story "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins," and John Langan referring to me as "the monster guy." I was asked to sign stock of Delicate Toxins by a dealer in the dealer's room, and there was an impromptu dinner with myself, Selena, John Langan, Paul Tremblay, Jordan Hamessley, Joe Hill, and Steve Niles, during which I got to be the guy at the table who knew which Howling movie was the one that featured marsupial werewolves (this should probably not be a proud moment for me).

I got to meet a lot of new friends, and re-connect with some old ones, though I got to talk to pretty much everyone more briefly than I'd have liked. An exhaustive list of names is way beyond the scope of either this entry or my memory, but one big surprise was running into a couple of fellow Kansas Citians in the form of Bear Weiter/Jacob Ruby and Steve Scearce, both of whom live within a few miles of me, and one of whom lives on virtually the very same street, which was a huge surprise, since neither of them were aware of me (nor me of them) beforehand, and we only met because we happened to end up in the same room party!

Again, I could do this list all day and not get through all the people I met, nor all the people I missed, nor all the people I didn't get to spend enough time with. I'm sad to say that I missed the announcement that Chizine is publishing Ian Rogers' collection, but I did get to congratulate him a little later on at the mass writer signing.

The long weekend culminated in the launch party for Selena and Jeff VanderMeer's Steampunk Bible. It was a pretty awesome party. I got to meet Rick Klaw (who I actually met my first night in Austin, and who showed us around a bit) as well as Liz Gorinsky, Jess Nevins, and Michael Moorcock! Then it was time to go back to the hotel for something like fifteen minutes of sleep before catching my ridiculously early flight home.

There are about a million more things to tell, but I think that's going to have to suffice for the time being, until I think of something really, really important that I forgot to tell. To everyone I met and didn't mention (and to all those whom I did), it was great to meet you! To all those I missed, or didn't get to chat with long enough, sorry to have missed you and I would've loved to have more time. That basically goes for everyone there.

It was a great con, and I'm looking forward to next year!

Last Post Before WHC

OK, World Horror is in two days. At this time tomorrow I'll be panicking about whether I forgot everything, and at this time the next day I'll be… arriving at Austin, give or take. For those who're going to WHC, I'm looking forward to meeting you, if I've not met you already, or to seeing you again, if I have! If you're trying to find me, I'll be on a panel on short fiction at 11am on Friday. Thursday night I'll be at the readings that Jesse and Molly are doing. And Sunday night I will for sure be in attendance at Selena's Steampunk Bible Booklaunch Party, where there will also be such luminaries as Liz Gorinsky, Jess Nevins, Rick Klaw, and Michael Freaking Moorcock! So if you're around, definitely stop in for that!

Things around here have been incredibly hectic for the last few days. I'm hoping to have some more news when I get back from WHC, but for now most of my time has been tied up with various things, and this'll probably be my last post before my departure, though I'll certainly be around on Facebook and Twitter some as a safety valve to keep myself from going nuts over the next day or so.

In the meantime, Historical Lovecraft is still doing well. If you haven't picked up your copy, there's no time like the present. Molly'll be reading from her amazing story in it at World Horror, and we'll have bookmarks to hand out, and at least three of us contributors (me, Molly, and Jesse) will all be there together, so if you've got a copy that you wanted signed, we could scrawl in it.

Delicate Toxins is also available. I got my contributor's copies the other day, and they are pretty much unbelievably gorgeous!

I think that's pretty much it for now. I'll wrap this up and go back to worrying about what I'm forgetting. And if you're going to WHC, I'll see you there!

The Places I'll Go

The programming for this year's World Horror convention has been announced. I'm on a panel about short fiction, where I'll be sharing space with a bunch of cool folks, including Joe Hill(!). It's my first panel, but Molly Tanzer is the moderator, so hopefully she'll keep me from doing anything too terribly stupid.

Where else will I be? Well, I'll definitely be at the reading that Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington will be doing on Thursday night, and there are a bunch of other panels and readings that I'm going to do my damnedest to catch. If you're gonna be there, I'm sure I won't be too terribly hard to find. Then on Sunday night, for those lucky few who'll still be around, I'll be attending a book launch party for the Steampunk Bible, along with Selena Chambers.

In other news of places I'm going to be (albeit not physical ones this time), Scape, a new online magazine of speculative young adult fiction just launched. My story "Letters from the Monster Show" will be in the second issue, coming sometime later this year.

Finally, just one more reminder, there's only five more days to pre-order Historical Lovecraft at 20% off.

Certified!

Those of you who are regular readers here probably remember my article at Strange Horizons, and you may also remember that it recently won their 2010 readers' poll for best article. Well, apparently as part of winning I got a nice framed certificate in the mail, which came this weekend as a nice offset to how miserably most everything else was going. I promised pictures of it when I was feeling less miserable, and, as I have been feeling marginally less miserable today, I am delivering said pictures as promised!