Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 73

The Gate

This morning, Jay and I watched The Gate, which I am now going to summarize here because it's way, way better in summary form than it was in actual execution. There will be spoilers.

A very young Stephen Dorff plays Glen, a kind of sissy kid who lets his friends push him around a lot but who will eventually grow up to be a really awesome vampire. There are a bunch of other people in the movie too, but most of them are annoying and none of them grew up to be awesome vampires, so who cares who t...

Sundown (& Friends)

On Saturday, Grace went out of town to visit family and Jay and I had a spontaneous movie marathon. In the morning we watched Escape from New York, and then we went to the local indie video store and got Sundown, the first and fourth Hellraisers, and the recent remake of The Amityville Horror with Ryan Reynolds. I'd seen most of these before, but not for a long time. Escape from New York still isn't one of my favorite John Carpenter flicks, I still enjoyed both Hellraisers, and this version i...

The Things

This story by Peter Watts from the most recent Clarkesworld is fanfiction for John Carpenter's The Thing, from the Thing's point of view. I don't know what more I need to tell you. Go read it now.

I Sell the Dead

This morning my lovely wife and I went to Blockbuster to use a free rental coupon I had and pick up something cute and funny that we could both watch together. The last thing I expected to find on the shelf was a copy of I Sell the Dead. Needless to say, it didn't exactly fit our criteria, but when Grace saw how excited I was she more or less insisted that I get it. I'm so glad she did.

I'm sure that with distance and some healthy perspective, I Sell the Dead won't be the best freaking movie e...

Post a Story for Haiti: "Spiders"

I've seen a couple of people participating in the Post a Story for Haiti thing that Crossed Genres is doing, and I figured anything that's good enough for Jeff VanderMeer or Sarah Monette (who also has some good suggestions for where to donate) is good enough for me. Plus, if I can help out a tiny bit, all to the good.

So here's one of my oldest published stories, now out of print and probably difficult to locate. It originally appeared in the third issue of The Willows magazine in September...

Prolegomenon

For those of you who don't already know who I am and what I do:

My name is Orrin Grey. I write weird and ghostly stories, but it has never been my primary intention to scare anyone. Above all I want the stories I write to be fun, and what's fun for me happens to be curses and ghosts and monsters. Several people have called what I write "weird adventure," and I like the ring of that, so that's what I use as often as not.

Paper Fruits & Skull-Faced Toads

Back in December, Molly Tanzer (aka vegan_vulcan ) ran a flash fiction contest on her 'blog to celebrate its one-year bloggiversary. Now the winners are up; J.T. Glover's incredible Waning Moon, Drew Rhys White's Beth/slash/Nathan, and S.J. Chambers' How a Blog was Born. All of them are great, and I don't feel bad about getting beaten by any of them.

See, I entered a story in the contest too. It's called "Ex Libris," and it's currently being sent out to other flash fiction markets where it'l...

There'll Be Some Changes Made

Over the past year or so I signed up for a website and started experimenting with how I wanted to use it, how it worked best for me. For awhile now I've been cross-posting everything here and on a 'blog on that site, but I've decided that that doesn't work very well for me, and so with the start of the new year I'm going to be changing things around. There'll still be a 'blog on my site (now on the main page), but it'll become a more streamlined news feed detailing publications, reviews, an...

There'll Be Some Changes Made

Over the past few months I've been experimenting a little bit, seeing what works for me and what doesn't, and with the dawning of a new year I'm going to be making some changes to how I use this website. Already I've switched the 'blog function back to the main page, and in the next few days the 'blog here as it currently appears will disappear entirely, to be replaced by a more streamlined series of updates detailing publications, reviews, and other writerly news as it happens. I'll...

Daybreakers

Went out to the theatre this morning to see Daybreakers. I'd been excited about it for awhie thanks to the fact that the previous movie I'd seen by the Spierig brothers (Undead) was one of the only clever movies to come out of the glut of zombie pictures that occupied the early 2000s. I also liked the noir-ish Gattaca meets Dark City meets Blade production designs I'd seen, and Sam Neill as a vampire businessman is just awesome.

It was pretty good. Before going in I'd heard a lot of people ...