Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 75

Hellboy vs. Dylan Dog

Somehow I am just now learning about a big spread of articles done several months ago by Pop Matters to celebrate Hellboy's sixteenth anniversary. I accidentally stumbled across them by way of an article comparing Hellboy to Dylan Dog, which I found while I was talking to Reyna about Dylan Dog today.

Like I think a lot of people in America, my first experience with Dylan Dog came by way of the movie Cemetery Man, which is a Dylan Dog movie both only loosely and at the same time sort of...

Other Peoples' Horns

There's been a veritable flood of good fiction (and non-fiction) hitting the Internet over the last few days, my own story notwithstanding, and I figured since people have been giving me some signal boosts it would behoove me to do the same.

First off, the always fantastic J.T. Glover has a story called "Waiting, Just Underneath" up at Dark Recesses. Then check out Francesca Forrest's very short but very sweet "May Spirit" at Three Crows Press.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Jesse Bullington

"The Power of the Dead" on A Thousand Faces

The tenth issue of A Thousand Faces, the quarterly journal of superhuman fiction, is online as of today, and it includes my story "The Power of the Dead," which you can read there absolutely free. It's a tale about a necromancer superhero inspired in part by a particular story arc in Alan Moore's justly-fabled Swamp Thing run. Those of you who've read it will probably be able to pick out which one.

Blogathon Wrap-up

We have now reached the end of my contribution to the Boris Karloff Blogathon. Hopefully it's been informative and fun for everybody. I didn't come to the table as the biggest Karloff fan, but I've gained quite a bit of appreciation for him in recent months, in no small part due to research and movie watching done for the purposes of writing these posts.

But just because I'm done, doesn't mean the Blogathon is over! By no means! It's still going strong through Sunday. So go and keep...

Blogathon Day 4: Isle of the Dead

(This post is part of the Boris Karloff Blogathon. Follow the link to learn more.)

Isle of the Dead is the last of the Val Lewton/Boris Karloff teamings that I watched, and, for my money, it was also the least of them. It starts off with a lot of promise, though. When we first meet Karloff's General Pherides he's handing another man a gun so that the second man can go outside and kill himself. The most sympathetic of our three Karloff characters, ladies and gentlemen! But of course, the...

Blogathon Day 3: Bedlam

(This post is part of the Boris Karloff Blogathon. Follow the link to learn more.)

Of the four Val Lewton movies I've seen, Bedlam is the one that is least like a horror film, and feels the least like it's trying to pretend to be, though there are a few atmospheric or chilling scenes to be had, and the film's climactic trial is not to be missed. Perhaps as a result, this also feels to me like the movie where the performances do the largest percentage of the heavy lifting, and it's thrilling...

Blogathon Day 2: The Body Snatcher

(This post is part of the Boris Karloff Blogathon. Follow the link to learn more.)

I'm writing this one out from some time distant, so bear with me.

The first Val Lewton movie I ever saw was The Body Snatcher, from the Robert Louis Stevenson story of the same name. It was directed by Robert Wise, the same Robert Wise who would later direct The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Haunting and West Side Story and The Sound of Music. My fellow Blogathon participant Steve Miller called The Body...

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Boris Karloff

This is undoubtedly a gimmicky way to start off a post for a Boris Karloff Blogathon, but the fact is, until recently, I was never much of a fan of Boris Karloff. Though I grew up reading picture books about vintage horror films, I didn't actually see very many of them until after I got out of college. When I did start watching them, I of course saw Karloff in Frakenstein (not to mention Bride and Son), and so I became directly acquainted with his famous turn as the Monster. Which was...

Bros. Grossbart Launch Day!

Today is the official US launch day for Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, a freaking amazing debut novel from a good friend that I reviewed here.

In honor of the occasion, there are all sorts of reviews and guest 'blogs and other goodies going on at places like Powell's, Orbit, Strange Horizons, and J.T. Glover's journal. I, sadly, have nothing further to add to all the festivities, save to reiterate that it's a very special novel (the kind you don't take home to...

Versions of Dracula

For Halloween this year we decided to do some kind of themed movie marathon, and at about the same time I realized that I actually owned five different direct film adaptations of Dracula (not counting sequels and spin-offs and movies that just have Dracula in them as a character). So we decided that we'd do a "Versions of Dracula" marathon, starting with the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu and working our way across the next seventy years in chronological order to Francis Ford Coppola's...