Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 8

Little Weirdos

There are few things better than little weirdos. By that, I mean gribbly little monsters of various stripes, from goblins to Gremlins to smaller, weirder things. And while there are plenty of examples from throughout history, folklore, and media, some of the original little weirdos are the ones that appear in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

These early illustrations varied considerably – from the elaborate illuminated manuscripts and illustrations meant to accompany and elucidate the text to bizarre marginalia of knights jousting with snails to the equivalent of doodles and modern day stick-figure drawings. However, for our purposes, we’re interested in the monsters.

These share creative DNA with the grotesques and gargoyles that can often be found decorating churchyards. I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to get into a whole history of how these various weirdos came to be, other than to suggest that there are certain similarities of form that crop up again and again in medieval marginalia, in gargoyles, in heraldic beasts, in depictions of demons, and elsewhere.

It is these similarities of form that bring me to the specific little weirdos I’m here to talk about today. In the new Cities of Sigmar line from Games Workshop, the various human residents of the eponymous cities are accompanied into battle by a wide array of weird little guys who, like the grotesques and creatures from the margins of medieval manuscripts that inspired them, are mostly there to serve a decorative purpose.

Saddled with the unfortunate name “Gargoylians,” these weirdos would have been right at home in the margins of a medieval manuscript, an idea that has previously been pursued by other miniature lines, such as Medieval Marginalia Miniatures. They aren’t the first time that GW has delved into similar inspirations for little guys to decorate their bases, either. The line of Gloomspite Gitz (that’s goblins to you and me) have a wide array of delightful “squiggly beasts,” though they’re more inspired by mushrooms and the design of the original squigs than by medieval marginalia.

One need not look far to find precursors to the “Gargoylians,” though. Check out the extremely weird Chaos familiars in Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower which include a book with feet, and fish… with feet. Apparently, the Ruinous Powers love to give things feet.

Still, as a longtime fan of weird little guys, the “Gargoylians” are some of the best that GW has done. They simultaneously feel like they could have stepped straight from the margins of a medieval manuscript, while still feeling right at home in the Mortal Realms – the setting of GW’s Age of Sigmar tabletop game.

As someone who enjoys a lot of what GW puts out while also bemoaning a steady loss of the personality and “handmade” touch that the games once had, the whole new Cities of Sigmar line feels more like something that could have come out of the Mordheim era of the game than anything they’ve done in a while – and that’s a good thing.

I don’t really play Age of Sigmar. My patience for tabletop wargaming is apparently pretty much limited to skirmish-level engagements, which mean that I interact with the Mortal Realms almost exclusively through games like Warhammer: Underworlds and Warcry. And the only even modest AoS army I have is a Gloomspite Gitz force, who will always have my undying affection and loyalty.

If I were inclined to pick up another army, though, the new Cities of Sigmar line would be tempting, and their array of marvelous little weirdos a big reason why. In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy looking at them online, and seeing all the ones that folks paint up as the line is actually released.

“Then the law of the night gave birth to crevices through which ghosts could slip.”

I think I was first introduced to the works of prolific Belgian writer Jean Ray (in fact only one of the many pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer) in Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s doorstop survey of classic weird tales simply titled The Weird.

The two stories of Ray’s collected in that volume (“The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter“) are probably his best-known among Anglophone readers, and represent two of his best works of weird fiction. Certainly, they were enough to make me track down everything that I could get my hands on in translation – and I have not regretted a single thing that I have read.

Since 2019, Wakefield Press has been putting out a series of new translations of Jean Ray’s short stories and some of his many novels, including his undisputed classic Malpertuis. With the exception of that title, which maintains the extant (and quite good) translation by Iain White, with an extensive afteword by Nicolay, these have all been newly-translated by Scott Nicolay who, as I have said many times before, is doing the proverbial lord’s work in bringing these out in a way that allows me to read them.

As Nicolay himself puts it in his introduction, The City of Unspeakable Fear, first published in French in 1943, sometimes suffers for being the “other novel” from a writer whose debut (the aforementioned Malpertuis) is an acknowledged masterpiece. And certainly, City of Unspeakable Fear is no Malpertuis, and shows no interest in being any such thing.

It is, instead, an admixture of detective novel and ghost story that is, perhaps more than either of those things, a love letter to an England that may only ever have existed in books and in our imaginations.

As I said on social media immediately after finishing the novel, Ray describes his fictional English town of Ingersham with the kind of overly British exoticism that Anglophone writers usually use when writing about pretty much anyplace else – an accurate enough sentiment given that Ray read a lot of English literature, but may never have visited the British Isles.

In proper Ray fashion, however, The City of Unspeakable Fear is nothing so simple as either a detective story or a ghost story – or even some cross-pollination of the two. It is a many-layered thing filled with digressions, narrative cul-de-sacs, false identities, personal obsessions, literary references, and so on. As in just about any Ray story, you could (maybe) summarize the plot of The City of Unspeakable Fear, and still only describe a small fraction of what is actually going on in the book.

Which is not to say that there aren’t moments of genuine horror and compelling mystery in City of Unspeakable Fear. Ray is, after all, the author of the long-running Harry Dickson detective series, so it’s not as if he didn’t know how to spin a mystery yarn.

Indeed, some of the most powerful scenes in City of Unspeakable Fear could have been borrowed from one of Ray’s other ghostly tales, and, because of the nature of the book, with its many stories-within-stories, there are whole miniature ghost stories contained within, including a particularly good one involving a powerful rainstorm and Epinal prints.

There are moments in The City of Unspeakable Fear that would have felt right at home in a Richard Sala comic – the death of Cobwell, for instance, and the explanation of how it came about – while other elements could have come from an Italian giallo film of later decades, such as the truth about Lady Honnybingle. And though it may ultimately engage in more of a “Scooby-Doo ending” than Ray fans might desire, there is something incredibly potent in the way that the novel’s ratiocination often leads to fictions, while the ghosts are presented as decidedly real, if inexplicable.

On Facebook, Nicolay expressed concern that some people might not like this book as much as many of Ray’s others. And perhaps some won’t. But for anyone who is willing to reliniquish the idea of narrative and genre conventions and embrace a book that moves fluidly between them, or defies them altogether, The City of Unspeakable Fear is a gem and an absolute delight.

The Man with Fire on His Face

If you also follow me on social media, then you probably already know that I co-host a monthly podcast called the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon. You probably also know that we record it live at the Stray Cat Film Center, after hosting a free screening of the movie that we’re talking about that month.

You may even know that last night we screened and discussed Insidious. What you’re less likely to know, unless you’ve been following me for a very long time, is that I’m a big fan of Insidious, and of James Wan’s horror films more broadly. Which is perhaps not unusual, given that they are actually extremely popular, but within horror circles they seem to often be regarded as somehow bad, even by people who should know better.

This is not intended as an apologia for Insidious or Wan, though. I’ve written those before and, frankly, looking at the box office take of pretty much anything the dude has done since Dead Silence, he doesn’t need my help. The purpose of all this is to establish that I have seen Insidious a whole bunch of times before last night, and I’m looking forward to catching the new one in a week or so.

Despite this, I noticed something last night that hadn’t ever clicked for me before. For those who haven’t seen Insidious, the story involves astral projection into a spooky version of the astral plane that the movie calls “the Further.” (Also, the working title of the film.)

Probably for budgetary reasons (even though it looks pretty great, Insidious only cost about a million dollars to make), the Further looks just like the regular world, if the regular world were a Halloween haunted house. Which is to say, it’s darker, and there’s fog everywhere. Also, waxy ghosts.

That is, it looks like that with one exception. The movie is about the Lambert family, and their son Dalton, who is in a coma. Spoilers for a movie that’s over a decade old, but it turns out that he’s in a coma because he has astrally projected and been trapped outside his body, and there are ghosts and things trying to get in. I say “and things,” but it’s mostly ghosts. The one non-ghost thing is a demon that the movie calls “the Man with Fire on His Face,” but that fans and detractors have dubbed, in proper Pinhead fashion, the Lipstick Demon.

The Lipstick Demon lives in a frankly delightful, weird, red-litten lair within the Further, on the other side of a red door (red doors become extremely important in the series, to the extent that the new, fifth and final film, is subtitled The Red Door). He has decorated this lair to his liking, including chandeliers, a sculpture of a horse, a carnival mask, and some nice marionettes. He’s also got a grindstone in there where he can sharpen his cool metal claw while listening to Tiny Tim, as one does.

For the longest time – until last night – I regarded the demon’s lair as the one part of the Further that wasn’t simply an analogue to some part of the Lamberts’ house, tied to the experiences of the person journeying in it. Which makes sense. Unlike the ghosts who inhabit the Further, the demon is presumably native to there. Why would he not have a nice house of his own?

It was only last night that I realized that, while the demon’s lair is different from the rest of the Further, it also isn’t entirely separate from the reflections of the Lamberts’ house that make up the rest of the plane. Instead of being a room inside the house, as the rest of the Further is, it is the inside of their furnace.

When Dalton first encounters the Lipstick Demon, he is in the attic of the house, next to the furnace. Earlier, his mother was drawn up there as well, and spooked when the furnace kicked on. When his father ventures into the Further to rescue him from the demon, he passes through a Further version of the house, but when he reaches the attic, the furnace is gone. In its place is that red door.

Beyond it, the demon’s lair is red-lit, as I mentioned, and massive, like the inside of a cathedral. But the demon’s personal little redoubt, where he sharpens his claws and listens to his jams, is up behind a baroque window – a window that echoes the shape of the furnace’s grating.

So, the demon’s lair is both a unique space and a size-distorted space within their home, which I found delightful, adding yet another check to the list of reasons why I like this movie quite a lot, and always will, regardless of anyone else’s thoughts on it.

“the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul”

If you’ve been following me on social media, you probably saw that my story “The God of the Overpass” is in the June issue of The Dark. I’ve published a lot of short stories over the years, including a couple of others at The Dark, but this one is kind of a big deal for me simply because it’s the first new story of mine to be published in quite a while. Even the new stories that were in How to See Ghosts & Other Figments have already been out in the world for several months now.

Since the start of COVID, I’ve produced less original fiction than I used to. This is due to a variety of factors, with the chief one being that freelancing as a writer full time means more time writing lots of other stuff, and less time spent on my own fiction. So it’s a bigger deal for me than it used to be when something sees publication.

Over on Twitter, I called this story “Clive Barker-inflected,” which is true enough. It’s one of what I think of as my “Kansas City stories,” those explicitly set here in the metro where I live. It’s also of a piece with some of my other stories which have explored the kinds of gods and monsters that have developed out of the post-industrial world in which we live. Stories like “Shadders,” an original in my third collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales, or “Black Hill,” originally published in Historical Lovecraft all the way back in 2011 and the story that first got me the attention of Ross Lockhart, who has become my most frequent publisher.

As much as and maybe more than Clive Barker, “The God of the Overpass” and those other stories I mentioned owe their inspiration to Fritz Leiber’s classic story “Smoke Ghost,” which I quoted in the title of this post. (That’s also an Edd Cartier illustration from the story’s original publication off to the side there.)

Leiber is best known for his sword-and-sorcery stories featuring Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser (and perhaps rightly so), but his weird fiction accounts of the modern supernatural had an enormous impact on me and my work. From stories like “Smoke Ghost” and “The Glove” to short novels like Conjure Wife and, perhaps especially, Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber had left an outsized impression on me when I was beginning to write seriously, and he remains one of the voices I most long to be able to emulate.

In “Smoke Ghost,” in particular, Leiber conjures “a ghost from the world of today,” the sort that “would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings.” His depiction is a ghost not of one person, but of the “tangled, sordid, vicious” things that make up our “rotten world.”

“I don’t think it would seem white or wispy or favor graveyards,” Leiber’s protagonist muses. “It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?”

Ever since Leiber revitalized the ghost for what was then the modern world of 1941, plenty of other writers and creators have updated these spooks and specters for an ever-changing world, with some of the most successful being the analog and digital ghosts that have crawled their way out of TV screens and modems in a deluge of Japanese horror tales going back at least as far as The Ring.

“Smoke Ghost” is, itself, an oddly written story, strangely more stilted than some of Leiber’s other classics. But the idea of that modernized ghost, a projection of a world built by humanity, rather than the spirit of the dead, or something from the ancient past, was important, and it has remained important through all these years.

At this point, 1941 is almost as distant from us as the Industrial Revolution was from Leiber’s original writing, depending on how you measure. But the idea of that ghost still holds resonance, and it’s ripe for plenty of other writers to try their hands at similar things.

“The God of the Overpass” is just one of my attempts at doing so. A story about hubris and the gods that we create without ever meaning to. “Monsters that chewed up the earth to make new earth, to build roads and bridges, ditches and canals. Flattening mountains here, building mountains there. So much power, so much motion – how could it do anything but create something more than just inert stone and steel?”

Cat Scratch Fever

Back when I was working on the Borderlands & Beyond expansion for Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, I got the privilege of creating several new monsters for the accompanying Borderlands Survival Guide. Among these were a handful of critters that were essentially my take on Iron Kingdoms versions of classic monsters from mythology, inspired by the fact that several of the big robots from the Retribution of Scyrah faction were named after beasts of legend that did not yet have representatives in the Iron Kingdoms.

One of these was the manticore which, in my version, became a feline predator covered in onyx-like spines. “In outline, a manticore resembles a large lion or other hunting cat. Seen up close, however, the similarities end. Rather than fur, the manticore is covered in jagged spines of glassy chitin that sweep backward from its beak and end in a tail like a morningstar.”

For those who don’t already know, Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is the latest iteration of a tabletop roleplaying game that takes place in the same setting as the hit tabletop wargames Warmachine and Hordes. These have been around for more than two decades, and have recently released their fourth incarnation, which takes place some 15 years in the future from the time that Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is set.

The previous version of Warmachine and Hordes culminated in a world-changing cataclysm, while Requiem takes place in its shadow, as the world is just beginning to rebuild. By the time Warmachine Mk. IV is happening, things have changed considerably from what they were like at the end of Mk. III.

One of the biggest of those changes is to the elven nation of Ios, where those manticores I mentioned up above live. I won’t get into the nature of the change, except to say that the new elven faction, Dusk House Kallyss, is largely unrecognizable from the previous Retribution of Scyrah. For one thing, the cavalry of Dusk House Kallyss ride those manticores I created.

This is all a very long winded way of saying that, for what I believe is the first time ever, official wargaming models have been made of something that I created. As was revealed in the latest episode of Privateer Press’s regular Primecast, there are now official models of Dusk House Kallyss cavalry riding on top of monsters that I dreamed up.

As someone who has been a nerd about these kinds of games since small times, and a fan of Warmachine for more than twenty years, this is a bit of a dream come true. At one time, seeing my name on a product put out by Privateer Press was something that I never imagined would happen, but over the last decade, having worked on literally dozens of projects for them, I’ve grown used to it (not that it isn’t still cool). This, though, is something else entirely.

Obsolescence

I haven’t posted about this before now for a few reasons. For one thing, I’m a working writer, and I’m busy and, frankly, this should all go without saying. Furthermore, I don’t want to talk or think about it because it annoys the fuck out of me but, unfortunately, I have the think about it, and it’s irresponsible not to talk about it. So, I’ll try to keep this brief:

I support the WGA strike. That’s the first part that should go without saying. Writers are workers, and workers deserve to be compensated extravagantly for the work they produce, let alone fairly. The fact that we have arguments about how much someone is entitled to when they literally produced all the work is fucking absurd. The strike should go on as long as possible, it should be joined by everyone affected, and the studios should fuck off into the sun. If there are no new movies or TV shows made for the next five years, that’s great, we already have plenty, and if the result nets a life that is even one iota better for the people who are actually making these things, then it will have been more than worth it.

But that’s only part of it. Partly due to timing, the discussions around the WGA strike have also become discussions around AI art and writing. And I need to be as clear as possible on this subject: So-called “AI art” (or writing, or any other creative endeavor) is bullshit. It is a misnomer, where the only accurate part is “artificial.” It has no intelligence, and even less art. What’s more, it is anathema not merely to art and writing itself, but to everything that makes life even moderately bearable. I don’t have much in the way of religion, but if I did, this “AI art” garbage would be one of its few blasphemies.

What’s more, while calling it “art” is crap, calling it “AI” is, too. I’m not an expert in software or “machine learning” or any of that, but I know this: There is no sapience here. There are no cool machine overlords coming down the road. There is nothing here but exploitation. These machine learning algorithms can do only and precisely what they are told, and when it comes to creative pursuits such as art or writing, they can do it only through one methodology: stealing. They are not AI, and they are not “creating” anything. They are advanced plagiarism engines, and that is all that they can produce.

By the same token, these algorithms are neither threat nor salvation. They are, as their proponents so often like to point out, only tools. But they are not being wielded by those proponents, not truly. Rather than evil robotic overlords, they are being deployed by the same evil overlords we have always had: corporate greed. Their one and only goal is to steal from writers and artists without paying them in either money or dignity. These engines run on exploitation, and produce nothing – literally nothing – but more exploitation.

Damn them, curse them, scorn them, and let them fuck off into the sun with the studios and corporations I mentioned earlier, who are the only people they will ever “benefit.” We will all be far better off without them.

Obsolete

I haven’t posted about this before now for a few reasons. For one thing, I’m a working writer, and I’m busy and, frankly, this should all go without saying. Furthermore, I don’t want to talk or think about it because it annoys the fuck out of me but, unfortunately, I have the think about it, and it’s irresponsible not to talk about it. So, I’ll try to keep this brief:

I support the WGA strike. That’s the first part that should go without saying. Writers are workers, and workers deserve to be compensated extravagantly for the work they produce, let alone fairly. The fact that we have arguments about how much someone is entitled to when they literally produced all the work is fucking absurd. The strike should go on as long as possible, it should be joined by everyone affected, and the studios should fuck off into the sun. If there are no new movies or TV shows made for the next five years, that’s great, we already have plenty, and if the result nets a life that is even one iota better for the people who are actually making these things, then it will have been more than worth it.

But that’s only part of it. Partly due to timing, the discussions around the WGA strike have also become discussions around AI art and writing. And I need to be as clear as possible on this subject: So-called “AI art” (or writing, or any other creative endeavor) is bullshit. It is a misnomer, where the only accurate part is “artificial.” It has no intelligence, and even less art. What’s more, it is anathema not merely to art and writing itself, but to everything that makes life even moderately bearable. I don’t have much in the way of religion, but if I did, this “AI art” garbage would be one of its few blasphemies.

What’s more, while calling it “art” is crap, calling it “AI” is, too. I’m not an expert in software or “machine learning” or any of that, but I know this: There is no sapience here. There are no cool machine overlords coming down the road. There is nothing here but exploitation. These machine learning algorithms can do only and precisely what they are told, and when it comes to creative pursuits such as art or writing, they can do it only through one methodology: stealing. They are not AI, and they are not “creating” anything. They are advanced plagiarism engines, and that is all that they can produce.

By the same token, these algorithms are neither threat nor salvation. They are, as their proponents so often like to point out, only tools. But they are not being wielded by those proponents, not truly. Rather than evil robotic overlords, they are being deployed by the same evil overlords we have always had: corporate greed. Their one and only goal is to steal from writers and artists without paying them in either money or dignity. These engines run on exploitation, and produce nothing – literally nothing – but more exploitation.

Damn them, curse them, scorn them, and let them fuck off into the sun with the studios and corporations I mentioned earlier, who are the only people they will ever “benefit.” We will all be far better off without them.

“One day, men will look back and say that I gave birth to the 20th century.” – Terror at London Bridge (1985)

This extremely weird made-for-TV movie about Jack the Ripper with an incredibly made-for-TV cast including Adrienne Barbeau, Clu Gulager, and David Hasselfhoff takes as its jumping-off point the true fact that the whole-ass London Bridge was relocated to Lake Havasu City, Arizona at the end of the 1960s.

For those (like myself) to whom this is Brand New Information, a little history lesson is in order. In 1831, a new bridge was built in London over the River Thames to replace the medieval one. This new London Bridge was designed by John Rennie and completed by his son of the same name. It served its purpose for more than a century, but by 1962 it was beginning to show its age. (There’s a traditional song about London Bridge falling down, after all, though it massively predates the bridge’s 1962 problems or, indeed, Rennie’s bridge itself.)

The City of London needed to replace the bridge with a newer model. Enter Robert P. McCulloch, an entrepreneur who was having trouble attracting buyers to the more than 3,000 acres of land he had acquired as part of the planned community of Lake Havasu City. McCulloch bought the London Bridge off the City of London for the equivalent of $2.46 million and arranged to have the whole thing shipped over and reconstructed in the middle of the Arizona desert.

This new/old London Bridge in Arizona was made of concrete underneath, with the original bridge stones used as cladding. Around it was built an “English Village,” essentially an open-air mall and tourist trap designed to look like, well, England. This unlikely but very real place provides the setting for our film, which also goes by such titles as Bridge Across Time and Arizona Ripper.

According to the movie, Jack the Ripper was slain in 1888 during a fall off the London Bridge. In the course of it, he took one piece of the bridge’s masonry with him to the bottom of the Thames. When the missing piece is recovered and replaced on the bridge in Arizona, a bit of blood gets on it and brings Saucy Jack back to life, where he resumes his killing spree, and it’s up to David Hasselhoff to stop him.

(For the purposes of the film, the missing piece of masonry isn’t recovered and installed until 1985, when the movie takes place. This is creative license, as the actual bridge was completed in 1971 and, thus far, no cursed piece of additional masonry has been appended.)

This delightfully off-kilter idea comes to us from prolific genre scribe William F. Nolan. A Kansas City native who may be best known for co-writing the novel Logan’s Run, Nolan also contributed to innumerable other projects, including the screenplay for Burnt Offerings and the teleplay for a much better-known TV movie, Trilogy of Terror.

The result is one of those slow-moving TV movies that feels like a tourist ad for Lake Havasu City, in spite of all the murders and the ripped-from-Jaws subplot about the city council trying to downplay everything in order to keep the tourist business booming. We are treated to lots of loving shots of the English Village and the beautiful, if stark, landscape around Lake Havasu.

Among the various attractions around the newly restored London Bridge, the one we spend the most time with is a wax museum Chamber of Horrors, continuing the long and fruitful symbiotic connection between Jack the Ripper and wax museums. This one is nicely Halloween-y, and makes me wish that the place was still open today, so that I could go visit. Since it probably isn’t, however, and even if it was, it would no longer look like this, long sequences set in it, with proper TV movie lighting, will have to do.

The cumulative outcome of Terror at London Bridge is perhaps more interesting than good, but it has that TV movie quality that I find very comfortable, and some nice moments of atmosphere, often existing around that wax museum, or the eponymous bridge itself. And while the quote that I used to anchor this post is obviously from Alan Moore’s From Hell, rather than Terror at London Bridge, there is a moment in the movie when David Hasselhoff and Stepfanie Kramer go to a nightclub and dance to a song whose only lyric appears to be “just a modern man,” repeated over and over again.

“One day, men will look back and say I gave birth to the 20th century.” – Terror at London Bridge (1985)

This extremely weird made-for-TV movie about Jack the Ripper with an incredibly made-for-TV cast including Adrienne Barbeau, Clu Gulager, and David Hasselfhoff takes as its jumping-off point the true fact that the whole-ass London Bridge was relocated to Lake Havasu City, Arizona at the end of the 1960s.

For those (like myself) to whom this is Brand New Information, a little history lesson is in order. In 1831, a new bridge was built in London over the River Thames to replace the medieval one. This new London Bridge was designed by John Rennie and completed by his son of the same name. It served its purpose for more than a century, but by 1962 it was beginning to show its age. (There’s a traditional song about London Bridge falling down, after all, though it massively predates the bridge’s 1962 problems or, indeed, Rennie’s bridge itself.)

The City of London needed to replace the bridge with a newer model. Enter Robert P. McCulloch, an entrepreneur who was having trouble attracting buyers to the more than 3,000 acres of land he had acquired as part of the planned community of Lake Havasu City. McCulloch bought the London Bridge off the City of London for the equivalent of $2.46 million and arranged to have the whole thing shipped over and reconstructed in the middle of the Arizona desert.

This new/old London Bridge in Arizona was made of concrete underneath, with the original bridge stones used as cladding. Around it was built an “English Village,” essentially an open-air mall and tourist trap designed to look like, well, England. This unlikely but very real place provides the setting for our film, which also goes by such titles as Bridge Across Time and Arizona Ripper.

According to the movie, Jack the Ripper was slain in 1888 during a fall off the London Bridge. In the course of it, he took one piece of the bridge’s masonry with him to the bottom of the Thames. When the missing piece is recovered and replaced on the bridge in Arizona, a bit of blood gets on it and brings Saucy Jack back to life, where he resumes his killing spree, and it’s up to David Hasselhoff to stop him.

(For the purposes of the film, the missing piece of masonry isn’t recovered and installed until 1985, when the movie takes place. This is creative license, as the actual bridge was completed in 1971 and, thus far, no cursed piece of additional masonry has been appended.)

This delightfully off-kilter idea comes to us from prolific genre scribe William F. Nolan. A Kansas City native who may be best known for co-writing the novel Logan’s Run, Nolan also contributed to innumerable other projects, including the screenplay for Burnt Offerings and the teleplay for a much better-known TV movie, Trilogy of Terror.

The result is one of those slow-moving TV movies that feels like a tourist ad for Lake Havasu City, in spite of all the murders and the ripped-from-Jaws subplot about the city council trying to downplay everything in order to keep the tourist business booming. We are treated to lots of loving shots of the English Village and the beautiful, if stark, landscape around Lake Havasu.

Among the various attractions around the newly restored London Bridge, the one we spend the most time with is a wax museum Chamber of Horrors, continuing the long and fruitful symbiotic connection between Jack the Ripper and wax museums. This one is nicely Halloween-y, and makes me wish that the place was still open today, so that I could go visit. Since it probably isn’t, however, and even if it was, it would no longer look like this, long sequences set in it, with proper TV movie lighting, will have to do.

The cumulative outcome of Terror at London Bridge is perhaps more interesting than good, but it has that TV movie quality that I find very comfortable, and some nice moments of atmosphere, often existing around that wax museum, or the eponymous bridge itself. And while the quote that I used to anchor this post is obviously from Alan Moore’s From Hell, rather than Terror at London Bridge, there is a moment in the movie when David Hasselhoff and Stepfanie Kramer go to a nightclub and dance to a song whose only lyric appears to be “just a modern man,” repeated over and over again.

See You Later

For nearly three years now, I have been working on and off for Privateer Press as a freelancer, writing large swaths (roughly 50,000 words each) of their Iron Kingdoms: Requiem RPG. It isn’t the first time I’ve worked with the folks over there, either. Those who have been around for a while remember that I worked in a more limited capacity on the previous Iron Kingdoms RPG, and also wrote some considerable amount of fiction for the brand, including my first (and thus far only) novel.

Working on Iron Kingdoms: Requiem has been something special, though. More than any other time, I have been able to help shape the fate of a setting that has been an important favorite of mine for more than 20 years. I’m proud of the work that we’ve all done to help update the Iron Kingdoms and bring them back to tabletops in a whole new form, so I’m happy to announce that the fourth series of books in this run is now up on Kickstarter.

Into the Deep Wild goes right where that title suggests, delving into the wilderness of the Iron Kingdoms in ways both familiar and entirely new. Perhaps most exciting for me, personally, it also brings to the tabletop (for only the second time, in RPG form) my favorite faction from the wargame: the gatorfolk.

As I mentioned, I’ve been playing Warmachine and Hordes since the very beginnings of both games, and I’ve tried my hand at a handful of factions in that time, but ever since they were first released, the gatorfolk of the Blindwater Congregation have been my go-tos. Delightful cartoon alligator people that are like if the voodoo alligators from a Disney movie got a (slightly) more serious makeover, they have delighted me from the moment they arrived on the scene, and I’m very happy to have played a role in this book.

As has been the case with the last couple of launches, I did quite a lot this time around. I wrote most of the setting gazetteer, as I have done throughout Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, and I also created some new subclasses, designed new feats, and did plenty of other fun stuff. There are a lot of cool new toys in these books, including an entire new bestiary which, if you know me, you know I love few things more than a good bestiary.

Perhaps most importantly, I have loved working in this sandbox again, and if these books continue to sell, I should continue to get more chances to flesh out this incredible world. And given that Into the Deep Wild has nearly doubled its funding goal in a matter of hours, that’s looking pretty hopeful. If you’d like to see what we’ve been up to, this Kickstarter is a great place to dig in to a world filled with monsters and robots and, yes, my beloved gators.