Steen Langstrup's Blog, page 4

HorrorHound Film Fest Official Selection

[image error]HorrorHound Film Fest in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, has just announced their officiel selection of films for the 2019 event in March.

‘Finale’ is among the selected films.

HorrorHound will be the third international film festival to screen ‘Finale’ as both FrightFest, Glasgow, and Night Visions, Helsinki, has already selected it.

HorrorHound will be the US premiere of the movie.

‘Finale’ is based upon my novella ‘All The Things She Wished She Didn’t Understand’. Find the e-book on Amazon, iTunes, Smashwords, or most everywhere.

Visit Horrorhound here.

Read more about the book here.

FINALE selected for the Frightfest Filmfestival

[image error]The biggest genre film festival in the UK, Frightfest, has just announced ‘Finale’ as part of the festival’s official selection in Glasgow, screening on Saturday the 2nd March 2019.

This will be the UK premiere of the movie. The director of ‘Finale’, Søren Juul Petersen will be at the festival as well.

Have you read the book behind the movie?

It’s called ‘All The Things She Wished She Didn’t Understand’ by Steen Langstrup (me). English e-book out most everywhere.

Visit Frightfest here.

Read more about the book here.

The film trailer

I just wanted to show you the new trailer for the film based upon my novella ‘All The Things She Wished She Didn’t Understand’.

The movie is now streaming on Blockbuster

[image error]Oh, it’s here. The movie ‘Finale’ based upon my novella ‘All The Things She Wished She Didn’t Understand’ is now streaming on Blockbuster in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

At the same time the novella has been re-released in a re-edited English edition under the original book title ‘All The Things She Wished She Didn’t Understand’.

Go check it out!

Visit Blockbuster here

Get the book on Smashwords here.

Night Vision Finland

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Finally, I have some news about the movie.

‘Finale’ will premiere in Finland at the filmfestival Night Visions in Helsinki on November the 24th. So, If you’re in Helsinki at that time, take a chance and watch this weird and gory film.

‘Finale’ is directed by Søren Juul Petersen and based upon my novella  ‘All The Things She Wished She Didn’t Understand’.

The book will soon be re-released in English in a brand new and re-edited edition. I will return with more news about both book and movie soon.

Visit Night Vision here.

A tough decision

I have decided to unpublish my novella ‘Finale’ for the time being. It wasn’t an easy decision but it had to be done. But why would I want to do that?

Here’s the thing. When I returned from travelling with my family in Sri Lanka this sunday, I was greeted by two very bad reviews of the book. Of course, I have been a writer for more than twenty years and I’ve had my share of bad reviews like everyone else. It comes with the job. I’ve learned to ignore the haters and focus on the readers who enjoy my way of writing. Luckily, there are enough of them to feed me and my family, and that’s more than anyone could hope for. I have been blessed in that way.

However, this was different. Besides hating everything about my book they both agreed that the text was full of typos, misused words and other grammatical errors. To be honest, it shocked me.

English isn’t my native language. I am Danish. I don’t kid myself that my English is anything like perfect or brilliant. But I am a professional writer. Have been making a living writing all kinds of stories for the last 22 years. I have my pride. I am not perfect, I know that, but I do hate typos and errors in my books.

For that reason I have always hired professionals to edit and proofread my work, especially in English. I translated ‘Finale’ from Danish myself, like I’ve done with most of my previous books in English, knowing I needed someone to edit or even translate my imperfect English into real English, and I thought I had a good team doing that. At least I had paid them handsomely.

So, when I read those reviews my first thought was that I must by mistake have published an early unedited and unproofed edition of the text and was really kicking myself for doing that. But it turned out that I hadn’t. The published edition was the rigtht one. Edited and proofread.

Then what? Those angry reviewers did point out a few of the errors in the text and they did seem to have a point. Even though they also appeared to hate everything about me, my book and my writing, and it would be easy to clasify them as internet haters which are never in short surply these days. But I couldn’t. I had to know. And if they were right I had to do something about it.

Yesterday, I asked an English friend to read a few chapters of the book and tell me if it was as bad as claimed. She came back to me with an honest but hard truth: It was.

For that reason I have decided to unpublish ‘Finale’ for the time being while the text is being re-edited and re-proofed.

I am sorry this has happened. I am kicking myself, slamming doors. I screwed up this time. But crying doesn’t help anyone. I have to fix it. And I will.

German reviews + a good summer to you!

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Summer is here. Time to have fun and relax. Maybe even time to travel the world. The German edition of ‘Finale‘ has recieved sa few new reviews that made my day. So, I’ll share qoutes from two of them with you here, wishing all of you a nice summer.

Five stars by Kia on Lost in Books:

“Ein grandioser Thriller … Ich habe dieses Buch innerhalb von neunzig Minuten durchgelesen und hatte durchweg Kopfkino, was wahrscheinlich einer der Gründe war, das ich es im Showdown beinahe abgebrochen hätte, weil es mir zu heftig war. Obwohl mich die 195 Seiten erst abgeschreckt haben, ist es zu einem Monatshighlight geworden und bekommt eine komplette Leseempfehlung von mir, ABER, Achtung! Es ist wirklich nichts für schwache Nerven, da die Szenen teils sehr ausführlich sind.”

In English something like (by Google Translate): “A terrific thriller … I read this book in ninety minutes and I had a headscarf all over, which was probably one of the reasons I almost broke it off in the showdown because it was too intense for me It has become a monthly highlight and gets a complete reading recommendation from me, BUT, beware! It’s really not for the faint of heart, as the scenes are sometimes very detailed.”

Four stars by StMoonlight from Gedankenteiler.blog:

“Langstrup hat einen wirklich packenden Schreibstil. Schon nach wenigen Seiten war ich regelrecht gefangen. Bildliche Beschreibungen, die nichts für schwache Nerven sind, aber genauso wie ich es liebe. Das Ganze kombiniert mit Überraschungseffekten und einem unerwarteten Ende. Mir hat „Finale“ sehr gut gefallen.”

In English something like (by Google Translate): “Langstrup has a really captivating writing style, and after only a few pages, I was literally trapped – pictorial descriptions that are not for the faint of heart, but just as I love it – all combined with surprise effects and an unexpected ending. I really liked “Finale”.”

 

Why the title FINALE?

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Why did I give a book about the kidnapping and torturing of two young women working an evening shift at a gas station in the middle of nowhere the title ‘Finale‘?

The quick answer is that I didn’t.

Not to begin with. When first published in Danish the book was titled ‘Alt det hun ville ønske hun ikke forstod’ (In English: ‘All the things she’d wish she didn’t understand’) the last sentense in the book but also a hint on a subtheme of the book.

At the time, I also considered calling the book something like ‘The Gas Station’ or ‘The Torture Show’ but decided on the longer and stranger title, giving a short minimalistic novel a very long title.

But why then ‘Finale’? Where did that come from.

To explain that I have to tell you a few things about the story. It’s not a book about football, soccer or any other kind of sport. The finale is only in the background of the story and it’s never clearly stated if it is the Fifa World Cup or something else. It’s really not that important. What is important about it being the night of Denmark playing the grand finale is the impact something like that has on a small country like Denmark. We are only five million Danes. On the odd occation of Denmark reaching a finale in some of the major sports events, the streets will be deserted, everybody watching the game. It’s like two hours of a country wide ghost town. Not a bad setting for a horror story, I figured.

I never considered that finale to be important enough to the story to be part of the book title, and if I did it would have been something like ‘On the Night of the Finale’ or something like that.

But then I sold the movie rights and, well, they always change a few things adapting a book, and among those things were the title as, I guess, the director Søren Juul Petersen wanted less words in the title or something like that. He chose the title ‘Finale‘ instead — and I decided to use that title, presenting the book to the world outside Denmark as, Hell, the book was being filmed. Not something that happens too often to most writers.

You don’t get to decide everything in life, sometimes you just have to play along.

As I write this, the Fifa World Cup is being played in Russia. Denmark has moved on to the round of 16, however, I don’t believe we will win. Maybe, it’s finally time for England to win?

 

Fuelled by anger

I am not a fan of the torture porn horror subgenre. Which of course makes a bit odd that I would write a book like ‘Finale‘. I mean, honestly, I can’t stomach the sight of blood. I fainted once at the vet. The dog had a tiny scratch and down I went.

But I was gettig tired. I was feeling misunderstood. I had for years, and I had this anger boiling inside me. A rage against a litterary snobbish culture that had me caged not as a low cultural horror writer and would read everything I wrote, no matter the subject or genre (and I did all sorts of things) as some sort of gory pulp.

[image error]After all, my debut ‘Kat’ was a horror novel, and nobody did horror in Denmark at the time because it was considered too controversial or at least too low class. They really had no idea what the genre was all about, and I felt I was deliberately misunderstood. My books, even the bloodiest ones, wasn’t really, I felt, that revolting, not compared the majority of the genre out there.

At the time, around 2010, I had just finished my longest story, the ‘Plantagen’ trilogy. Normally, I prefer shorter books, both as a reader and as a writer. And I had spend years on the trilogy and longed to return to my favorite short style, Ira Levin’ish I hope. The last few years had also been particulary hard for me as libraries was being closed around the country and book sales dropped and I wasn’t making enough money to feed my family. It looked like the end of my writing career, I was ready to quit, I’ve had it. I was in my early 40s and I had no idea what else to do. Telling stories had been my whole life until then.

However, it you are a writer, write about it. Let those feelings fuel your art. If rock musicians can get their anger out through their art, so could I, I figured.

I had had the idea to ‘Finale’ for some years, thinking that this was a book I would never write. It was too much, too evil, too mean, too gory, too painful. No way. But ideas have their own life and all the pieces had come together. And I figured, well if this will be my last book, and I honestly thought it would be, then let it be an enormous fuck you to everybody. It would not only be short, it would be ultra short, and it would not only be mean, it would be the meanest, goriest and in your face book ever written in Danish, I told myself.

If you think my books are too gory, then watch this, motherfucker.

Looking back, I can’t help but feel a little embarrased. I was being a bit childish. Anger often does that to you, I think. However, I meant it. And I wrote the book in some sort of rage filled trance and I got it out of my system. At the time, it pained me that I felt I wasn’t really able to go all the way in. If you read the book, keeping your own imagination at bay, I do tend to skip out of the worst gore. Like when Agnes’s boyfriend is killed. She can’t really see what’s going on. The clown blocks her view. That said, having seen the reactions to the book over the years, I think, I got the gory message through as readers tend to think, they got all that detail, I couldn’t make myself write. Strange how that works.

I did stop writing after that. And for years it seemed that ‘Finale’ would be the last work I did on my own, just writing a book for the sake of telling that story. I did write other stuff, things I was hired to do, or books as a result of a cooperation with The Danish Open-air Museum (a collection of true ghost stories from the museum) or a book for the Danish eductation in the Icelandic schools.

‘Finale‘ was published in a very limited first edition under the Danish title ‘Alt det hun ville ønske hun ikke forstod’ (Actually, the last sentence of the book) as I didn’t think it would ever gain that big an audience. The year after, it was awarded ‘Best Danish Horror Book of the Year’, and a few years later, they began filming the book.

I would never have guessed.

 

Why didn’t I get a rat like Stephen King did?

The other day, I was searching Amazon for something to read. For some reason I ended up browsing through Stephen King’s books. I have to admit that I rarely read King anymore but I was thinking that maybe I should consider giving some of his newer books a chance? So there I was. Browsing Stephen King books. And there, among them, I spotted one of my own books. Or I thought I did. It wasn’t, really, it just had the same cover. The book was Stephen King’s novel ‘1922’, published by Scribner in 2017.

There was an old house on the cover, below some red text. It was the exact same cover picture as can be found on my audio book ‘Huset’ (‘The House’) containing three short stories from my collection ‘9 før døden’ (‘9 before death’). The audio book was published in 2009 by the small Danish publisher BogLyd, eight years before this edition of ‘1922’ was released. At least, my book was published first, I guess. However, Stephen King appears to have been given a rat on his cover which isn’t on mine which is kind of sad, as rats do play a major role in my short story.

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This is actually the second time the same thing has happened to me. As I mentioned before, the audio book ‘Huset’ contains three short stories, all part of my collection of short stories ‘9 før døden’, published by the largest Danish publishing house, Gyldendal, in 2001. On the first edition, it had a great greenish cover that I loved with a row of waterfilled graves illuminated by a full moon. I really loved that cover. So did my editor. It was only years later that I learned that the same cover had also been used on a Black Sabbath album in 2000.

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Out of my 25+ books, it’s a bit weird this happing twice to (more or less) the same book and not to any of my to my knowledge to any of my other books. But there you go … the world doesn’t always make sense.

Still, why didn’t I get that rat when Stephen King did?