Edward M. Erdelac's Blog, page 26
October 24, 2013
Coyote’s Trail On Sale For 99 Cents From Now Till Halloween
The Kindle edition of Coyote’s Trail is 99 cents from now until Halloween!
“With COYOTE’S TRAIL, Ed Erdelac has created a story as raw as the wound from a bullwhip. His blistering prose, combined with superb use of time, place, and character, gives COYOTE’S TRAIL the kind of life that springs off the page and into the reader’s consciousness. That’s a rare thing these days, and in the world of genre fiction, rarer still. This is a damn hard story about damn hard men, and told damn well.”
–C. Courtney Joyner, Author of SHOTGUN
I’ve posted the first pages here, or you can go on Amazon to take the Look Inside test and read a random page.
Coyote's Trail: Edward M. Erdelac: 9781936964512: Amazon.com: Books
October 14, 2013
‘Tis The Season Over On The HWA Blog
There are traditionally beloved movies for the Christmas season – A Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life, etc. So what are my picks for the Halloween equivalents of these holiday classics?
Head over to the Horror Writer Association’s blog at - http://www.horror.org/blog/halloween-...
and give it a read.
Hasta pronto,
EME
October 4, 2013
DT Moviehouse Review: The Brides Of Dracula
Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today I review the atmospheric Hammer gothic horror classic The Brides Of Dracula.
(1960) Directed by Terrence Fisher
Screenplay by Peter Bryan, Edward Percy, Jimmy Sangster, and Anthony Hinds
Tagline: The most evil, blood-lusting Dracula of all!
What It’s About:
In 1890’s Transylvania, Marianne (Yvonna Monlaur), a French schoolteacher stranded on the way to her appointment at an all girl’s academy, accepts an invitation from the elderly Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), to stay the night in her castle. When Marianne sees a handsome young man out on the veranda, the Baroness says it is her son, who remains confined to his room due to an affliction of madness. Yet later Marianne investigates herself, and finds the Baron (David Beel) chained. He pleads with her to let him go, claiming his mother has imprisoned him to assume control of his lands. When she releases the Baron, his hysterical midwife, Greta (Freda Jackson) shows her the body of the Baroness, dead in a chair with two red holes in her neck. The Baron has fled. He soon turns up in the local village though, and the peasant girls start turning up dead. The local priest has called in an expert, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Peter Cushing).
Why I Bought It:
For the longest time, this was one of my ‘lost’ films. I must’ve seen it on Son of Svengoolie as a kid in Chicago and only remembered snatches of it. Van Helsing sliding a crucifix the length of a banquet table to repel a vampire, the vampiric mother (she looks a bit like Cinderella’s stepmother) being transfixed by a stake, a woman rising from her grave, and David Beel with his incongruous blonde curls, gray cape, and fangs.
I watched a couple of the Lee/Cushing pairings, and while I liked them, I couldn’t quite find this picture. Knew from the look of it it was either Hammer or Italian. Then a couple years ago my friend Greg Mitchell posted a screenshot of it and I got the same deep down thrill I got when I rediscovered Return Of The Five Deadly Venoms after nearly twenty years of looking.
This is one of my all-time favorite vampire movies, and a top three Hammer pick. Before the plot even begins, the backstory is unique and compelling, completely independent of the Dracula legend, yet complimentary of it. The Baron Meinster was an associate of Dracula, a hanger-on and a bon vivant who attended decadent parties with the count and hosted opulent balls at his own castle, eventually becoming one of Dracula’s bloodsucking thralls. His mother, enamored of her own son and the sophistication (and perhaps the supernatural glamor) of his strange company, at first went along with Dracula. Ultimately she was repelled by her son’s undead condition, but whether out of motherly love or something more unseemly, she opted to keep him imprisoned and alive, trolling the villages for young girls to feed his unholy thirst and keep him alive. All of this has driven the housefrau Greta to the brink of insanity.
The decadent, gothic tragedy of the film is well played out. When Van Helsing snoops about the castle he finds the baroness now a pitiful vampire lamenting her fate.
Once the initial act ends, the draw of the movie swiftly becomes Cushing as Van Helsing. His professor is vibrant and brave, as assured of his purpose as he is ingenious in his methods. Not one of these brooding, angst-ridden anti-heroes who sympathizes with his prey (he does show pity for the baroness, but that doesn’t stop him, when she moans that there’s no way out of her curse, from assuring her pointedly, ‘there is…one way’), he’s a refreshing classic hero who dives right into the fight, barely standing still when the time comes to fight. He tackles vampires, pounds stakes, and flings holy water. He doesn’t even despair when he awakens to find himself bitten, but fills his bite marks with holy water and slaps a hot iron to his own neck as the baron’s lovely vampiresses look on in almost comical disbelief. Cushing’s Van Helsing is God’s bloodhound, not content to fort up or defend himself. Dracula’s death hasn’t allowed him to exhale. He’s determined to run down every evil that has resulted from the deceased count’s touch, and he pursues David Peel to his end, finally trapping him beneath the improvised shadow of a cross, cast by a giant blazing windmill.
The women of Hammer movies are always a joy to look at, and Brides Of Dracula is no exception. Yvonne Monlaur is lovely, but the titular vampiresses, Marie Devareaux and Andree Melly, are knockouts, particularly Melly, who has this amazing facial structure, a slightly protruding overbite, that lends itself very well to her ultimate ‘look.’
The other bit parts, Fred Johnson’s earnest Father Stepnik, Miles Malleson’s comical Dr. Tobler, Vera Wang’s Innkeeper’s Wife and the couple that own the women’s academy, all do a fine job as well.
Best Dialogue/Line:
Baroness: Who is it that is not afraid?
Van Helsing: Only God has no fear.
Baroness: Why have you come here?
Van Helsing: To find your son.
Baroness Meinster: Then you know who I am?
Van Helsing: I know who you were…
Best Scene:
When the innkeeper’s daughter falls prey to the Baron and is buried, she is interred in the churchyard. Van Helsing goes one night to investigate her grave, and finds Freda laying with her ear to the mound, muttering into the freshly turned earth.
“Yes my dear, I know it’s dark. No, I can’t help. You’ve got to push….”
The scene has a really macabre intensity, and the unmistakable allusions to childbirth play out perfectly, with Freda, already established as having nursed the young Baron from infancy, playing the part of an encouraging midwife as the innkeeper’s daughter’s pale hand slowly breaks through the ground and she is ‘born’ as a vampire, emerging at last from her coffin, pale and fanged.
Next In The Queue: Bronco Billy
October 3, 2013
So Uncivilized Part 2 Up At The Official Star Wars Website
Part two of my roundup of the fastest blasters in a Galaxy far far away is up at the official Star Wars website.
It features my personal favorite expanded universe character, Gallandro, the Corporate Sector assassin from Brian Daley’s excellent Han Solo Trilogy books from the early days of Star Wars pastiche.
If you want a good Star Wars read, I can’t recommend these books enough.
So check out this -
And then DEFINITELY check out this -
September 27, 2013
A Writer’s Birthday Wish
So tomorrow, September 28th’s my 37th birthday.
I appreciate the Facebook wishes and comments and emails, but there is one thing I think every writer would REALLY like for their birthday (no, I’m not gonna ask you to go out and buy a book. You will or you won’t based on my ability to sell it and your own interests).
It costs nothing, and takes only a little longer than any of the above.
To those of you who have in the past bought one of my books, take the time to leave a brief review on Amazon. Even if you hated it. Yep, because thirty or forty five star reviews aren’t always the best thing to swing skeptical would-be readers, and usually smacks of just what it is, friends and family being earnest. Of course, if you did like something, shout it to the rooftops. I won’t say boo. Click on the pic in the upper right hand corner of this page, of me standing between the statues, and it’ll take you right to Amazon and a list of all seven of my novels and the various anthologies I’m in.
If you’re one of my Southern California friends/readers, again, I’ll be at Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank, 3512 Magnolia from 2-4pm signing copies of Terovolas for the publisher, JournalStone on Saturday. No, I’m not on their calendar, but I’ll be there. Swing by if you have the time, say hey, or get a book, or do both.
That’s all folks.
Thanks for reading.
-EME
September 19, 2013
‘Great Gunfighters Of The Star Wars Galaxy Part I’ Up At Star Wars Dot Com
I’ve got a new article up at Lucasfilm’s Star Wars website, about the top gunslingers in a galaxy far, far away. Check it out here -
The one that’s still around is the one who shot first.
I remember as a kid going on vacation to Deadwood, South Dakota with my parents, and picking up an illustrated book called The Gunfighters by Lea Mcarty, which had these cool paintings of guys like Doc Holliday, Joaquin Murietta and Clay Allison, with about a page of text on their careers.
That book enamored me. I still have it. Great, flavorful text and awesome, mythic-quality paintings.
There’s always been an element of the Old West in Star Wars, and I wanted to point them out in the article, so I took McCarty’s book as inspiration and wrote up a brief colorful bio for ten Star Wars characters from the movies, comics, books, and video games who I thought were most obviously meant to be transplanted gunfighters.
So head over to Star Wars.com and take a look at part one. It was originally meant to be a top ten ranking, but the powers that be decided to eliminate the ranking system (but on the side, the first five up now were originally #’s 10-5.
So whether you’re a Star Wars geek or a western fan – or both, as I am – go give it a look. Tell me if you agree with my ranking, or go and read some fine books referenced within.
September 11, 2013
Kaiju Rising!
I’m involved in a brand new project from Ragnarok Publishing, an anthology of 19 giant monster stories called Kaiju Rising. Participating authors include Larry Correia, Peter Clines, Peter Rawlik, James Lovegrove, Erin Hoffman, James Maxey, David Annandale, Clint Lee Werner, Jonathan Wood, J.C. Koch, Paul Genesse, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Samuel Sattin, Jaym Gates, Timothy W. Long, Mike MacLean, Natania Barron, and Joshua Reynolds.
Check out the kickstarter -
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1089607742/kaiju-rising-age-of-monsters-anthology/posts
As of this writing we’re a featured kickstarter, about 70% funded and have twenty five days to go. Not bad.
http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2013/09/featured-kickstarter-kaiju-rising.html
My own story, DEVIL’S CAP BRAWL, is a weird western/daikaiju/kyodai hero mashup, drawing on inspiration from wuxia, Godzilla flicks, and Kung Fu among other things.
When an Indian warns the Irish boss of a Central Pacific Railroad gang not to dynamite through a towering rock known as Devil’s Cap, the boss goes ahead and does it anyway, unleashing Dzoavits, a massive ogre-like creature which proceeds to smash the camp flat and endanger the entire crew. But among the hapless Chinese rail workers, a single man, a monk, doesn’t flee the beast’s shadow. He sits down and closes his eyes. And then he begins to grow….
Here’s an excerpt from DEVIL’S CAP BRAWL. Swing by the kickstarter and kick a buck. Kick two and help Ragnarok meets its stretch goals, which include some amazing interior illustrations from monster illustrator Robert Elrod, Chuck Lukacs (of Wizards of The Coast fame), and just maybe, a positively legendary fantasy artist…
Joe cussed and trudged up the incline. He heard a crash behind him and all of a sudden the Chinese priest was climbing alongside him.
Halfway up the top, the ground shook hard and rumbled. A pile of loose rocks tumbled free and one struck Joe bloody in the head. The priest grabbed his shirt and kept him from falling. For nearly a full minute they hugged the rock, watching the trees sway and shed snow down on them. It was like gripping a bull trying to shake them loose.
“Earthquake!” he managed to yell.
Below, the coolies working the west tunnel ran into the open shouting, dirt and rubble sliding from their shoulders.
Bushy bearded Jesus, he had never felt one this bad. It seemed like it would never end. He glanced up and saw the wood enclosure trembling atop the summit. His heart sank when he heard a crack and saw part of the roof shift. The Paiutes spilled out and fell to their bellies just as the roof collapsed inward, the whole structure crashing flat over the engine and the tender. Debris slid down the embankment, carrying a couple screaming Paiutes with it.
Joe put his head down and quietly willed the engine not to fall from the mountain. Christ’s bloody breechclout, they would be here another year if they lost it. What would he tell Crocker? He had talked big to the priest about being footloose and fancy free. Damn if it didn’t look like he really would be. Sure, he’d get the blame, even for an earthquake. And Crocker would put some other mick in his place. It’d be back to Fisherman’s Wharf for him, bareknuckle fighting, spittin’ teeth and pissin’ blood and whiskey till a good job came his way again, if it ever did.
He looked over at the priest but he was gone. Fallen or carried off by a boulder or bit of rubble, no doubt. But no, Joe saw him above then, springing nimble as a goat from rock to rock, even in the midst of the shaking, making his way up to the summit.
Joe held on for dear life, and watched as the priest reached Tolliver where the Paiute had laid him when the shaking had started. He lifted the bloody man up in his arms and hurled himself over the edge like a madman. But instead of tumbling to his death, he skipped lightly till he reached the bottom of the hill, and then knelt there over Tolliver, shielding him from falling rocks with his own body.
No priest Joe had ever seen was like that.
The shaking stopped, and he looked up at the pile of wood and snow that had once covered the engine, and saw Old Judah’s smokestack poking through.
“Well thank Missus Lot’s salt tits for that!” he exclaimed.
Just then something burst from the side of the rock to his immediate left. It looked like a huge, mossy mass of tendril roots.
Joe was so surprised he relaxed his grip on the stone and fell backwards.
Well, that’s the end of me, he thought, as he plummeted into the open air. He supposed he would land on that rock he had been standing on before, and be broken in two. If he was lucky, he might squash a Chinaman and be saved.
But neither happened.
Instead, he felt a dull impact on his upper back and behind his knees, and found himself sagging in the surprisingly hard, strong arms of the priest like a suckling baby.
He looked at the priest in surprise, and noticed the inside of his forearms were tattooed….no, not tattooed. There were designs branded on his skin, puffy scars in the shape of a fanciful Oriental dragon on his right arm, and a tiger on his left.
He put down his feet.
“Ta, boyo,” Joe muttered.
But the priest wasn’t looking at him. No one was. The coolies and the Indians were uniformly staring wide eyed up at the top of Devil’s Cap.
The mass of tangled roots that had surprised Joe were moving, waggling like great knotty, long nailed fingers.
Because that’s what they were.
He didn’t want to believe it, but when the splayed things shot further out causing the rock to crack and crumble, they were on the end of an immensely long, muscular arm, shaggy with string grey hair stained brown by the dirt.
The top of Devil’s Cap moved. It rose and fell once, like something beneath were testing the weight, then it swelled again, enough to tip Old Judah and its tender off the slope at last. The noise of all that iron and steel rolling down was a terrible cacophony, and a few men were caught up in it and smashed flat.
Something burst through the snowy cap….
September 5, 2013
Terovolas Signing At Dark Delicacies September 28th At 2PM
On Saturday the 28th (my birthday), I’ll be signing copies of TEROVOLAS over at the famous Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank, along with JournalStone authors Eric Guignard, Rena Mason, Eric Red, Lisa Morton, and Benjamin Kane Ethridge.
Swing by if you’e in the neighborhood!
More about the book here.
August 27, 2013
DT Moviehouse Review: Bonnie And Clyde
Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today I review Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking Bonnie And Clyde.
(1967) Directed by Arthur Penn,
Screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton
Tagline:
They’re young….they’re in love….and they kill people.
What It’s About:
You’ve read the story of Jesse James
Of how he lived and died;
If you’re still in need
Of something to read,
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde. – Bonnie Parker
In Depression-era Texas, Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), tries to steal Bonnie Parker’s (Faye Dunaway) mother’s car and winds up taking her along instead on an armed robbery, initiating a torrid if somewhat platonic romance which gradually escalates into a storied, violent career of bank robbery and murder along with Clyde’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his shrill wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and mechanic turned getaway driver C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard).
Why I Bought It:
A classic that changed the landscape of American film along with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and kicked off the so-called New Hollywood movement inspired by the French New Wave, it was popular in my household since my dad and uncle both rebuilt 1931 Model A Fords and much of my childhood was spent around classic automobiles of that era, going to shows and on long drives through the country on road rallies (sort of mobile rural scavenger hunts) reading comics in the backseat, or squinting into the roaring wind in a rumble seat.
I also clearly remember the soundtrack to Lester Flat and Earl Scrugg’s Foggy Mountain Breakdown being my personal favorite among my dad’s 8-track collection. I guess it must’ve been some kinda single. It was a red cassette with a pair of Model A’s on the front, and when you played the track, it was overlayed with sounds of screeching tires and gunfire. I used to listen to it over and over again, bouncing on the sofa, pretending I was shooting it out with bad guys. I don’t know if it was actually sounds from the movie or not.
Anyway in Bonnie And Clyde, what you have is perhaps the pre-eminent outlaw love affair movie. Sure movies had come before, Gun Crazy was supposed to be a big influence, and since, Mickey and Mallory in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers is an obvious successor, as is Widsom, and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, which is outright dedicated to Arthur Penn, but nothing quite captures the romantic notion of outlaws in love like this movie.
Yet, it’s not clear why, at first. Bonnie and Clyde’s love affair is anything but typical, idealized romanticism. In fact, Clyde is unable to perform sexually with Bonnie through most of the picture, and the violence, robbery, and gunplay actually takes the place of their physical copulation, with each new caper becoming bloodier and bloodier, much like Taxi Driver. Unlike Travis Bickle, the ultimate bullet riddled showdown doesn’t provide the physical release that allows the protagonists to continue on with their lives. In Bonnie And Clyde, when the lovers finally are able to actually make love, there is nothing left for them but to die, as in Romeo and Juliet. A cursory perusal of the actual history reveals that there might have been something to the plot device of Clyde’s sexual dysfunction. History records that Clyde’s first recorded murder was of a cell mate who repeatedly molested him in prison, where he had spent time for armed robbery. And in the film, when Clyde rebuffs Bonnie’s initial furtive sexual advances following their first robbery, he stammers that he’s ‘not much of a lover boy,’ but hastily adds that ‘there’s nothin’ wrong with me. I don’t like boys.’
We meet Bonnie, the lovely, sensually photographed Dunaway, lounging in her little girl’s bedroom, obviously suffering from some kind of titanic malaise, literally represented by the distressed look she fixes on the camera through the bars of her brass bed, when she gets up and peers through her window and happens to see Clyde skulking around her mother’s automobile with a look of ill intent. Thus, Clyde’s first sight is of a tastefully framed nude Bonnie standing behind the screened in window. I love the looks on their faces in this scene, and the playful talk. When Clyde literally shows her his pistol, it early on becomes a stand in for his manhood when Bonnie daintily strokes the barrel. But again, all this buildup doesn’t really pay off in the traditional sense. As Bonnie says, Clyde’s “advertising is dandy….Folks’d just never guess you don’t have a thing to sell.”
So how does a romance work without romance?
Maybe it’s because despite the lack of physical affection, Dunaway and Beatty are still a great, charismatic match and Bonnie and Clyde are very much infatuated with each other. That’s plain in their actions, in the pained way Clyde makes excuses for her to Buck about being rude to his annoying sister-in-law when a tried and true hardcore outlaw would’ve just kicked her out of the car, in the panic he displays when she runs through a field from him and tearfully declares she wants to see her mother, in the lies he tells her mother for her benefit. Clyde can’t or won’t roll Bonnie in the sack, but it’s almost as if he feels she’s too good for that, and he makes Bonnie believe it, or at least accept it, too. Then bloodshed and violence becomes their passion. Never quite outright, in a psychotic way. They don’t revel in violence, but they definitely enjoy the thrill….until it starts to wear thin.
They have a mission, and I think that’s part of the vicarious enjoyment you get from watching this movie. They’re both down and out kids, one an ex-con, the other an ex-waitress in a dead end life. Yet somehow, when they come together, magic happens. Early on they stop at a foreclosed farm and meet a pair of old sharecroppers, black and white, who’ve just had their place taken away by the bank. Clyde lets both old men blow holes in the windows and in the foreclosure sign. They thank him, and introduce themselves.
“I’m Clyde Barrow and this is Bonnie Parker.” And then, after an afterthought, he grins and says, “We rob banks.”
Because what purer cause can a pair of directionless rebels who’ve found each other take on, than to assume the guise of modern day Robin Hoods? They’ll rob the rich, faceless bullies of the banks, and give to the poor (in this case, themselves).
And this socio-economic crusade resonates as well now as it did when the real Bonnie and Clyde were lionized, when this movie came out, and perhaps moreso today. What bigger villain is there to the American people than the banks and the monstrous corporate state? So, Bonnie and Clyde remain heroes, even in an inaccurate movie, even viewed eighty years after their deaths at the hands of Texas Rangers. They keep to their code too. At one point they rob a bank and Clyde tells a farmer in line to deposit his cash to keep his money. They only want the bank’s.
“They did right by me,” the farmer admits to a reporter later. “And I’m gonna bring a mess of flowers to their funeral.” Meanwhile, in a criticism of media infatuation with murderers, the bank guard and president grin for the cameras and point to a bullet hole Clyde left in the wall when he shot the guard’s hat off.
This movie has since been made again and again in various ways, but Bonnie And Clyde is the original.
It helps that Dunaway and Beatty are surrounded by a fantastic cast. Gene Hackman as Clyde’s good old boy brother, telling the same dumb joke over and over again to anybody who’ll listen, Michael J. Pollard as their ride-along van, the tried and true C.W. whose hero worship ultimately leads to their undoing, and of course, the standout, Oscar winning performance by Estelle Parsons as Blanche, possibly one of the most hilariously annoying characters in cinema (the real Blanche Barrow, having survived to see the movie, reportedly declared “That film made me look like a screaming horse’s ass!”), to say nothing of the small but effective supporting performances by Dub Taylor and Denver Pyle. Taylor and Parsons share a pretty great scene. Blanche, having been blinded in the last shootout and apprehended after the death of Buck, sits with her eyes and head bandaged in an interrogation room as Taylor (as Texas Ranger Hamer) enters, startling her. He masterfully plays up to her simple church upbringing and hatred of Bonnie, and uses her love for Buck to find out where Bonnie and Clyde are headed. Then, as the sorrowful Blanche continues to pour her heart out, he coldly leaves the room and quietly shuts the door, cutting off her speech.
![bonnie_clyde_04_thumb[3]](http://emerdelac.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/bonnie_clyde_04_thumb3.jpg)
This is also the film debut of Gene Wilder, who just kills it in a minor role as a put upon undertaker who, along with Evans Evans chases down the Barrow gang after they steal his car, and are promptly (but amicably) kidnapped by them. His portentious looks and nervous delivery are raucously funny. Watch the expressions of both Evans and Wilder when Evans tells Bonnie her real age and realizes it wasn’t the same age she told her date, or when the admittedly janky looking Pollard accidentally takes a bite out of Wilder’s hamburger and then apologetically offers to trade.
As mentioned, the movie is inspired by films like Breathless and the French New Wave, and that shows up the most in the editing, which protracts certain moments and queues while nearly jump cutting through action. Watch the great moment during the final ambush when they realize what’s coming and Clyde lunges for the car. He meets Bonnie’s eyes and she slightly smiles in a fatalistic way. Then suddenly both of them are being riddles with bullets.
The ending really is shockingly violent for the period, with Clyde’s body dancing on the ground, exploding with squibs as Bonnie rocks back in forth in the driver’s seat of their V8, already dead about a dozen times over.
Before this movie it was the norm in American film to show a gun fire and a man drop bloodlessly. It ushered in a whole new era of screen violence (and sex).
Apparently Warner Bros. thought so little of the picture they allowed Beatty an unprecedented 40% cut of the film, which made him a millionaire when it proved a hit.
Best Dialogue/Line:
I like when Bonnie and Clyde rob their first store on their first ‘date’ together. As they are departing, Clyde hops into a vehicle other than the one they arrived in.
This is a ‘stolen’ four cylinder Ford coupe.
BONNIE: Hey, that ain’t ours.
CLYDE: Sure it is.
BONNIE (indicating her car): We came in this.
CLYDE (grinning): That don’t mean we got to leave in it.
Best Scene:
There’s a lot to choose from. The climactic ending, the bit where they get the drop on Hamish and photograph him (a famously inaccurate scene which wound up costing Warner Brothers money after Hamish’s widow sued the studio for defamation of character), the scene where Pollard, supposed to be their wheelman, parallel parks the getaway car in the midst of a bank holdup and then has a helluva time trying to pull out, but my favorite is probably the scene near the end of the movie, when Bonnie has finally induced Clyde to have sex and they are apparently doing it pretty regular. Lying in bed, holed up in C.W.’s father’s place, Clyde formally proposes to Bonnie, and she tearfully accepts. But they both know they’re nearing the end. They’ve said goodbye to their parents, Buck is dead, and they’re all alone, with what feels like the entire world coming down on them.
BONNIE: Clyde, why do you want to marry me?
CLYDE: To make an honest woman outta you.
Bonnie spreads her hands wide, dreamily.
BONNIE: Clyde…what would you do, what would you do, if some miracle happened, and we could walk out tomorrow morning and start all over again, clean, with no record, with nobody after us?
Clyde grins and exhales. It looks like he’s about to talk about family and settling down.
CLYDE: Well…I guess I’d do it ALL different. First off, I wouldn’t live in the same state where we pull our jobs. We’d live in one state and stay clean there, and when we wanted to take a bank, we’d go to another state…and…
Would I Buy It Again? Yes. It’s a classic everybody should be familiar with.
Next In The Queue: The Brides Of Dracula
August 16, 2013
The Akeldama Dig Now Appearing In Strange Trails
A new weird western anthology from Mechanoid Press, the guys behind Monster Earth, is out and features my short story The Akeldama Dig, about an ex-miner suffering from claustrophobia who agrees to tunnel into a rich man’s grave for a huge paycheck and runs into something….bad.
Born from my own mild claustrophobia (don’t get it in closets or elevators, but can’t be locked in a trunk), The Akeldama Dig takes place in (or underneath, really) Delirium Tremens, a town my loyal readers will be familiar with.
Here’s an excerpt.
“You’re a miner, Mr. Leslie?” Gallow repeated.
“I was,” Spiro said, warmed to the company by the drink, bad as it was. “I used to be foreman at the Copper Queen in Bisbee.”
“Used to be?” Gallow pressed.
“A shaft collapsed.”
He tried to keep the tremor out of his voice. He wasn’t sure if he had. Three little words hardly encompassed what had happened to drive him from his trade for good. First there had been a faraway groaning in the earth, then the timber had splintered and the whole shaft had shuddered and filled with dust and the tremendous clatter of stone. That reassuring pinhole of daylight far over his head had winked out like a pinched candle. He’d never known just how much he’d depended on that little light until it was gone. Hell, he had worked without sight of the surface since a boy fishing for lead in Galena, Illinois, but somehow he had come to think of that point of light in the Copper Queen as a guardian angel looking down. Seeing it go out was like seeing God turn away from you when you needed it most.
He may well have, for tons of rock had come down, enclosing Spiro like a firefly in a fist. He hadn’t been able to move. Could only lay there, feeling the cool subterranean air grow hot.
A few of the men who’d been near him had been trapped too. He could hear their muffled pleas turn to faraway screams as the desperate hours turned to lingering days and all reckoning of time faded like a drop of blood in water. He heard the subdued scratching of men trying to dig themselves free one bootless finger of dust and stone at a time. Then came a deep, perennial silence.
At some point, he knew not when, something animate had penetrated the inches of space around his head and begun to paw and scrape at back of his neck. This alien sensation had thrown him into a trembling panic which, while encased in tons of rock, made Spiro feel like a trapped bird. He had no notion of what it could be…some animal? It was hours before he deduced it to be a single disembodied hand belonging to a man buried very near him. Like a spider, that strange hand blindly groped his neck for hours, growing feeble and finally ceasing its labors, cooling and stiffening as the unseen owner suffocated. He had thanked God for that man’s death. Every stroke of the phantom fingers, every brush of broken, bleeding nails against his sweaty nape had raised his small hairs and got him whimpering.
His head pounding, heart beating only intermittently in his sinking chest, he had prayed in his last moments that a rock might slip and flatten his skull, putting an end to his anguish. When the stone above his face had shifted and light had broken over him on the third day, he had nearly torn through his rescuers to get at the cool air. After a precarious ride up the rope, he had whirled and flapped his elbows, dancing and gibbering hoarsely like a madman. They told him later he had bit the men who tried to restrain him.
Once he had been strong enough to stand again, he straightaway resigned and put miles between himself and his would-be grave. He hadn’t even stayed to learn the fate of his comrades.
But now every night was like the time in the shaft anew. He couldn’t bear to sleep beneath a roof. He awoke sweaty and thrashing beneath bedclothes. Whenever he closed his eyes for any period, his breaths grew short and sharp, his heart hammered, and all he saw behind his eyelids was the lid of a stone coffin. He had to drink himself insensible or go to the point of collapse just to sleep.
Featuring stories from James Palmer, Josh Reynolds, Tommy Hancock, Morgan Minor, and Barry Reese, Strange Trails can be picked up right ‘chere for about nine bucks.
Not bad for all that.
