Matt Ruff's Blog, page 3

The Fear of God podcast: Talk to Me + bonus House of Usher content

This week I pay another visit to the always entertaining Fear of God podcast to talk about Talk to Me, the Phillipou brothers’ breakout horror film. You can listen to the episode here; for Patreon subscribers, there’s also a bonus segment about Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series, The Fall of the House of Usher.

And next Wednesday, March 13, starting at 6 PM, I will be live and in person at Queen Anne Book Company, reading from The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country.

Now in paperback

The paperback edition of The Destroyer of Worlds is being published today. You can pick it up at your local indie bookstore or use one of the online order links below (the book is still available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions as well).

If you’d like a signed or custom inscribed copy of this or any of my other novels, you can contact Secret Garden Bookshop (206-789-5006 / bookshop@secretgardenbooks.com), who ship worldwide.

This Saturday, February 24, at 2 PM, I will be appearing at the Darby Winery in Woodinville, WA. Details are here.

I will also be appearing at Queen Anne Book Company on March 13 at 6 PM.

And in May, I’ll be a guest at Crypticon Seattle; details on that are forthcoming.

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Lovecraft binge-watch: Hell House LLC, et. al.

This post is #8 of a series.

The list of found-footage films I’ve enjoyed enough to watch more than once is pretty short: There’s the largely forgotten granddaddy of the subgenre, 84 Charlie MoPic, as well as The Den, The Last Exorcism, Apollo 18, and some of the entries in the V/H/S franchise. And then there’s Hell House LLC and its sequels.

Written and directed by Stephen Cognetti, Hell House LLC concerns a 2009 haunted house attraction staged in the abandoned Abaddon Hotel in Rockland County, New York. On opening night, a mysterious disaster claims the lives of fifteen people. Five years later, a crew making a documentary about Hell House fall victim to the same dark forces that caused the original tragedy. The movie you end up watching is a meta-documentary that combines video from both 2009 and 2014.

This documentary framing helps Hell House avoid the pacing problems that bog down too many found-footage films. And while there are some jump scares, most of the tension comes from the very Lovecraftian sense of mounting dread as you watch these doomed people ignore danger sign after danger sign until it’s too late.

Cognetti followed up Hell House with two direct sequels that expand on the Abaddon Hotel’s mythology and change the scenario just enough that you don’t feel like you’re watching the same movie three times in a row.

Last year brought a spinoff sequel, Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, which shifts the setting to an isolated mansion in the same county as the Abaddon Hotel. The backstory here is that in 1989, Eleanor Carmichael and her daughter Catherine were brutally murdered in the manor, while her husband, Arthur, and her son, Patrick, went missing; police discovered a single set of footprints in the snow leading away from the house. The mystery of what happened remains unsolved.

Fast forward to 2021. An internet sleuth named Margo Bentley arranges to rent the Carmichael Manor for five days. She brings along her girlfriend, Rebecca, her brother, Chase, and some cameras to record the ghosts who are rumored to haunt the manor.

Like the original Hell House, Carmichael Manor is structured as a documentary, so we know from the outset that none of these three are getting out alive, but even without the upfront spoiler, it wouldn’t be hard to guess the ending. During her initial walkthrough of the property, Margo asks the rental agent what’s behind the locked pair of French doors in the upstairs hallway. “Old storage,” he replies, vaguely. “I don’t even have a key for it anymore.” After he leaves, Margo gets the doors open and finds that the stored items include a pair of life-sized clown mannequins:

This is the point where I’d be speed-dialing the rental office to find out whether it’s too late to get my deposit back, but Margo doesn’t want to leave, even after the clowns start moving around the house. And while Rebecca and Chase have a bit more sense, they wait too long to force the issue. Bad luck for them, but if you like scary movies about terrible decision-making, it’s a lot of fun to watch.

The entire Hell House LLC franchise is streaming on Shudder and AMC+, and the first three films are also available free, with ads, on Tubi.

Reading and signing at the Darby Winery in Woodinville next Saturday

The paperback edition of The Destroyer of Worlds will be published on Tuesday, and to help celebrate, I’ll be appearing at a special event at the Woodinville Tasting Room of the Darby Winery in Woodinville, WA next Saturday, February 24, starting at 2 PM. Tickets are $45, which includes a signed copy of the novel and your first glass of wine. You can RSVP using the link on this page.

I will also be reading and signing at Queen Anne Book Company on March 13 starting at 6 PM. (Admission to that event is free.)

In two weeks

The paperback edition of The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country drops in two weeks, on February 20.

As always, signed and inscribed copies of the novel will be available from Secret Garden Bookshop (206-789-5006 / bookshop@secretgardenbooks.com), who happily ship anywhere in the world.

If you’re in the Seattle area and you’d like to get a book signed in person, I currently have two upcoming events scheduled:

On Saturday, February 24, I’ll be reading and signing at the Darby Winery’s Woodinville Tasting Room, starting at 2 PM. The $45 admission fee gets you a copy of the novel and your first glass of wine. Details here.

On Wednesday, March 13, I’ll be reading and signing at the Queen Anne Book Company starting at 6 PM. (Admission to this event is free.)

The Destroyer of Worlds: in paperback February 20

The paperback edition of The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country will be in stores five weeks from today, on Tuesday, February 20.

Publisher’s Weekly called Destroyer “another virtuoso blend of horror, action, and humor,” and Kirkus Reviews said it’s “a ripping yarn with shocks and surprises at every turn.”

If you’d like to know more about the novel, check out the FAQ and the Destroyer of Worlds podcast (where we also talk about the original Lovecraft Country and the HBO series it inspired).

You can preorder the paperback here; or if you’d rather not wait, you can get The Destroyer of Worlds in hardcover, ebook, or audiobook right now.

2023: last word

Thirty-three years ago, I began writing what would become my second published novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric, a science-fiction satire of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged set in 2023.

At the time, 2023 seemed ridiculously far in the future—but not so far that I couldn’t reasonably expect to live to see it. Indeed, that was part of the fun, imagining Older Me comparing SG&E’s fictional future with the future that actually came to pass. And while one of the many things Younger Me failed to anticipate was the invention of blogging, if he had known about it, Younger Me would absolutely have said, “Yes—when the milestone year finally arrives, Older Me will reread the novel and write a comprehensive blog post about it!”

…and, well, I really did mean to do that, but as happens more and more frequently these days, time got away from me.

So before 2023 becomes history, let me at least mark the milestone by giving a shout-out to Younger Me way back there in 1990. You were right, man: It was an altogether different year.

A short list of things I enjoyed in 2023

A Murder at the End of the World — I’ve written before about how much I appreciate Brit Marling’s work, so I was excited to learn she had a new miniseries coming out, and it didn’t disappointment. Emma Corrin (young Princess Di from The Crown) plays Darby Hart, a hacker/amateur sleuth who gets invited to a tech billionaire’s retreat that quickly turns into an Agatha Christie murder mystery. As with Marling’s previous series, The OA, I’d advise you to avoid spoilers and just dive in; the opening is a masterclass in how to grab an audience’s attention, so you’ll know in the first five minutes whether it’s your kind of story. A Murder is currently streaming on Hulu.

The Fall of the House of Usher — The latest Netflix miniseries from Mike Flanagan (Oculus, The Haunting of Hill House) is a sort of Edgar Allen Poe’s greatest hits: Each of its eight episodes is inspired by a different Poe classic, which together tell the tale of the final reckoning of the wicked Usher clan. Great cast, great story.

The critical response to Starfield — Starfield is an open-world science-fiction roleplaying video game from Bethesda Game Studios. It debuted in September, three days before my birthday, and as a longtime fan of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, I of course had to check it out. Long story short, I ultimately found Starfield to be mediocre—but as often happens when something I expected to like doesn’t work for me, I then started thinking about why it didn’t work, which led me to YouTube and its many, many videos dissecting Starfield’s flaws. A lot of these are unhinged rants (which can be entertaining), but there are also some really thoughtful critiques that get into the weeds of game design and storytelling, like this one and this one.

No Man’s Sky — Another open-world sci-fi game that clearly inspired some of Starfield’s mechanics. I bought No Man’s Sky on sale back in 2020, but only got around to playing it a few weeks ago after I got tired of Starfield, and despite the similarities, I’m enjoying it a lot more. I’m still mulling over exactly why that is, but to borrow a point from one of the critique videos I linked to above, No Man’s Sky is a more focused game with a much clearer sense of what it wants to be.

Reacher — This Prime Video series, based on Lee Child’s novels, follows the adventures of an itinerant ex-military policeman who wanders America with nothing but the clothes on his back, dispensing justice to bad guys who are unlucky enough to cross paths with him. I decided to check the show out after one of my Twitter follows described Reacher as “an autistic savant in the body of a silverback gorilla.” I’m really digging it, and surprisingly, so is my wife, who ordinarily wouldn’t be into this sort of thing.

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor — And finally… I’ll have more to say about this in a future Lovecraft binge-watch post, but if you want to end the year with something good and creepy, this latest installment in the Hell House LLC series should do nicely.

Signed books for the holidays, 2023 edition

This is your annual reminder that signed copies of my novels make excellent holiday gifts.

You can get signed and custom inscribed copies of any of my novels from Secret Garden Bookshop in Seattle (206-789-5006 / bookshop@secretgardenbooks.com). Tell them what you want and they’ll order it, get me to sign it, and ship it anywhere in the world, usually within a few days.

The hunger killer

Happy Thanksgiving. Here at the Ruff-Gold house, we’ll be having the traditional lamb-and-pita holiday dinner. But a couple days ago, I decided to experiment with something different: an Argentine dish called matambre (“hunger killer”).

As my South American cousins are sure to remind me, the original matambre is a beef dish, but flank steak is $18 a pound at the local QFC right now, so I opted for a cheaper variant that uses pork loin. You butterfly the meat to a uniform thickness of about half an inch, then roll it up around a filling of hard-boiled eggs, sliced meat, olives, roasted red peppers, and chimichurri sauce. Roast for about two hours and serve.

It’s really good, and it looks cool. The only problem is that the name is accurate: one slice of this stuff is enough to fill you up, so while it’s a great party dish, with just two people you’ll have more leftovers than you know what to do with.

If you’d like to try it yourself, the recipe I used is here. N.B., I substituted salami for capicola in the filling and it worked just fine. Also, unless your knife skills are really good, you’re going to need a meat tenderizer to pound the pork to an even thickness—I used a heavy bottle of vinegar as a mallet, but you probably want to go with something that isn’t made of glass.