C.M. Saunders's Blog, page 35

Something Bad in Deadman’s Tome

I am proud to announce that my latest short story Something Bad is now live on Deadman’s Tome, one of the creepiest and most gore-tastic ezines around.

Something Bad is about a guy who wakes up every morning to find strings of black goo all over his apartment. Puzzled, and probably a bit fucked off at having to clean up the mess all the time, one night he stays awake to find out what’s causing it.

Then, he discovers that there are some things you are better off not knowing.

Deadman’s Tome operates on a page view system, which means that the more views, likes, shares and comments the story gets, the more I get paid. I don’t think it counts if I like my own stuff. You don’t have to pay anything to read the story or enjoy the rest of the site. So how about throwing a starving writer a bone and checking it out?

Here’s the link:

Something Bad by C.M. Saunders

Thank you, wonderful friends and followers of mine!

FM17 – First Play

The wait is over. Nope, not the new season of the Walking Dead (shocking premier, by the way) I’m talking about the latest edition of the greatest manager sim in the world. Before we go any further, let’s address the big hulking elephant in the room. By their definition, a lot of these kinds of games get jaded and boring after a while. Sega games, the developers of Football Manager, put a great onus on keeping things as realistic as possible, and also take great delight in throwing the odd curve ball. The latest version of the game is probably the first computer game in the world to incorporate Brexit. Three possible scenarios are built into the gameplay involving varying levels of fuckery, and you have no option but to wait and accept your fate. You voted for it, you got it. The knowledge that the effects of Brexit loom large influence your decision-making right from the start. I was wary of being caught in a position somewhere down the line where half my squad would be unable to gain work permits, so immediately began focusing my efforts on scouting British, and in particular, Welsh players, as my chosen team was Cardiff City. I don’t know why because in all my years of playing this game I’ve never achieved anything with them, except the odd promotion. This is coming from a man who spent his university years making Carlisle United the undisputed kings of Europe. Finding good players within such a limited scope is a challenge. I kept having flashbacks to the time when City qualified for the Cup Winners Cup every year (courtesy of winning the Welsh Cup) then got royally spanked by the European elite because, on top of being a lower-division team, they were only permitted to play a handful of non-Welsh players.

A couple of new features are evident immediately: You are able to use a photo of yourself to generate your manager likeness (I look awful) and you are given a handy breakdown of your team’s strengths and weaknesses right off the bat. Other new additions include a medical department overhauled to include sports scientists, a revised contract system, and tweet displays helping you gauge how supporters feel about potential new signings and other developments. Innovative stuff. The gameplay, constantly improving, is smooth and hitch free. You might want to change to a darker skin, though. The light one can be hard on the eyes.

So, on to team-building. One of the most overlooked aspects of the game is the coaching and training set-up. I invariably have to fire at least one coach to make way for improvements, and the same goes for the scouts. My tip is to bring in specialist coaches for key areas (defence, attack, tactics) and draft in some scouts from different countries. They bring their knowledge with them.

The Cardiff squad circa 2016/17 is decidedly average. And with barely any room to manoeuvre in the wage budget and just £1.2m in the kitty, it’s going to be tough, especially with a glaring weakness between the sticks which needs to be addressed. £650k got me Adam Smith from Northampton Town. Admittedly not the biggest name, but an improvement on my existing goalkeeping options and plenty of potential and sell-on value. I also managed to draft in centre-back Yohan Tavares and defensive midfielder Diego Poyet on free transfers. That’s almost £6m worth of talent. Incidentally, a few other very good Championship-level players knocking around on frees at the start of the game are Jordan Spence (CB) Ivan Bandalovski (RB), Wiljan Pluim (CM), Roland Lamah (AM), Federico Macheda (ST) and Ivan Bolado (ST).

To raise some capital and make room in the squad I sold Bruno Manga to Sassuolo for £4m. That was a gamble, Manga was one of my better players, but he was on massive wages and in the last year of his contract so the transfer made financial sense. Besides, he wasn’t THAT good and Tavares is a more than adequate replacement. I also shipped-out squad players Kadeem Harris and Lee Peltier for a combined £600k, sent loanee Ben Amos back to Bolton, and loaned out a bunch of youngsters. With some money in the bank I was able to splash out on a marquee signing. Enter Raphael Holzhauser. What do you mean ‘who?’ He’s a 23-year old central midfielder available for about £1.7m from Austria Vienna. There are cheaper options around in his position and my squad was already reasonably strong in that area with Joe Ralls, Emyr Hughes, and Aron Gunnarsson, but Holzhauser’s passing and dead ball ability made him an attractive option.

I started with a 4-4-1-1 formation, and had an undefeated pre-season leading into the Championship fixtures. I scraped a win at Birmingham in the first game then knocked Newport County out of the EFL Cup, but scoring goals was proving a problem. I only managed two in the first five games, not enough for a board who demanded ‘attacking football.’ After that I switched to a 4-2-3-1 with two deep holding midfielders, and promptly lost 6-2 at Norwich. Thrashed Preston 4-1 in the next game, though, and at least the games were less turgid. Then, disaster struck. Rickie Lambert, my talismanic top scorer with eight goals in ten games, broke his foot. I have a lot of strikers on my books. Problem is, none of them are any good. Marouane Chamakh is decent, but he threw his toys out when I refused to play him every game so I banished him to the reserves where he ran out his contract which, luckily, expired in January. That left me with limited options, and results suffered accordingly. I did manage to pick up enough points to be in 6th place mid-way through the season, which was better than expected.

I spent a bit of time scouting Europe for the answer to my goalscoring problems, and the January transfer window gave me an opportunity to put my plans into action. In came Danish international striker Marcus Pedersen and Hungarian winger Lucacs Bole for a combined £600k. Pretty good business, even if I do say so myself. I also picked up Marius Lundemo on a free as a replacement for Lex Immers who I sold to PAOK for £1.1m. He just wasn’t cutting it and at 31 his value was only going to depreciate. Rickie Lambert was also back from injury so I was optimistic of pushing for a play-off place. However, it wasn’t to be, and my team capitulated in the last third of the season, winning only one game out of the last 12, finishing in 13th position with 60 points. My top scorer was Anthony Pilkington, a midfielder, with 12, and perhaps the only positive was Emyr Hughes winning Championship Goal of the Season. Apart from that, the biggest shock of the season was Sam Allardyce finding gainful employment again at Everton.

On that showing, I was a bit surprised to be offered a new contract, with the modest proviso of finishing in the top half of the table. The board also handed me an £8 million transfer kitty, which was nice of them. The main issue at Cardiff was the fact that there were too many average players on the books. My weekly wage bill was well in excess of £440k a week, so the first thing I had to do was trim the squad with the aim of sacrificing quantity for quality. Out went Joe Bennett, Tom Adeyami, Stuart O’Keefe, Raphael Holzauser, Deli Oshilaja, Idriss Saidi and nine youth/U23 players. My biggest signing was Welsh international left-back Paul Dummett from Newcastle for £2.7 million, and young centre-back Alfie Mawson, who was a steel at £1 million from Swansea, the signing given extra bite as I would be playing the Jacks in the Championship following their relegation from the Premier League (yay!). My only other cash signing was Romanian striker Denis Alibec (600k for a £3.5 million player), while midfielders Jota (valued at over £9 million) and Yasir Kasim (2.6m) came in on frees to fill out the squad.

I cruised through pre-season, then got decent results in my first few fixtures, replicating the achievements of the previous season. But then, the moment the transfer window closed, came the first murmurings of dissent. The team started complaining about ‘broken promises,’ specifically, that I hadn’t strengthened the team. But I had! Okay, it was missing Gareth Bale or Lionel Messi, but the squad I built had 13 full internationals, for fuck’s sake. AND Peter Whittingham and Sean Morrison. The grumblers didn’t seem to realize that if I’d signed more players, their own places in the team would come under threat. Some people just don’t think. With the dressing room in disarray, straight defeats to Hull, Wolves, Villa and Leeds followed, and before I knew it I was in the relegation zone. I’m still in a job, for now. But only because I’ve been afraid to play any more games for the past two days. I know I’m probably getting sacked in the morning. I won’t even keep my job long enough to experience the Brexit shenanigans. Sigh.

Nobody said being a football manager is easy.

Football Manager 17 is out November 4.

Thanks to Sega Games for the sneak preview.

Quantifying Creepiness

It’s Halloween! That means only one thing. Creepy shit. But what does that even mean? Here’s a piece I did for Deviant Dolls where I attempted to find out.

Creepy: Causing an unpleasant feeling of fear or unease (Adj.)

We all have a thing. Something that creeps us the fuck out. I know a girl who is terrified of dwarves. Even worse than that, there are people who walk among us, looking all normal and shit, with a profound fear of cheese. Yep, it’s true. The condition even has a name, Turophobia.

My thing is creepy crawlies. Not very original, I know. But my bug fear has a weird little twist. The more legs they have, the more repulsed I get. Dung beetles? Cool. Centipedes? Forget it. There’s also something intrinsically creepy about lobsters and crabs. It’s those pincer things. Therefore, despite being about half an inch long, earwigs put the fear of God into me. ‘Cos they have lots of legs AND pincers, see?

Yep, it’s irrational. On paper it looks damn stupid. But it’s something I can’t control. With humankind being a race of such disparate and complex individuals, anything is possible. What might might freak one person out might make another get his freak on. One man’s poison, etc. It’s one of the things that makes our lives so colourful. Imagine how boring this would be if we were all the same.

So is quantifying creepiness even possible?

Apparently so. There’s a wealth of material on the Internet to prove it (so it must be true, right?). Everything from academic papers to sketchy blog posts like this one. After digesting some of this information, a few points become evident. Some things are almost universally creepy. Clowns? Creepy. Spiders? Creepy. Serial killers? Creepy. Using those indicators, it would be fair to assume that serial killer clowns like John Wayne Gacy would push the creep factor through the roof. It wouldn’t be a complete surprise to discover he had a thing for spiders, too. He was just that kinda guy. Some people make it easy for the rest of us to judge them by ticking every. Fucking. Box. Or at least one box too many.

Usually, though, it isn’t so straightforward. Some boffins (smart, scientific types) have decided that people’s jobs should be taken into account. Apparently, the job with the highest ick factor of all is funeral director, while things like morticians also rank highly. Basically, anything involving death. Does that mean we find death itself creepy? Possibly. On the other hand, according to the statiticians, your friendly local weathermen is about as scary as a poptart. But guess what? That doesn’t mean a weatherman can’t be a serial killer. You just wouldn’t expect him to be, so you’d be even more horrified when sneaks up behind you and stabs you in the throat. Tellingly, a writer friend of mine disagreed with the first assumption because the funeral director in her town was ‘Hot, has abs, and rides a Harley.’ So it turns out, when someone is pleasing on the eye, we tend to overlook a lot. Who knew, right?

It’s obviously wrong to pre-judge anyone on what they do for a living. Just like it’s wrong to judge them on where they come from, the colour of their skin, or what music they are into. The only thing that really matters is what people are actually like. You know, their personality and shit. And here, a Reddit user by the name of Saigonsquare has helpfully attempted to produce a handy formula to help us decide how creepy the people around us really are.

Creepiness = (Awkwardness x Forwardness / Attractiveness) ^ Persistence.

See the role ‘attractiveness’ plays? It’s right up there, which means my friend with a thing for funeral directors isn’t such a freak after all. Apparently, if you are considered charming and/or good-looking, you can get away with murder. Just ask Ted Bundy.

Of course, this all breaks down when you enter the murky world of the Internet and you can’t actually see who you are talking to. Or, perhaps more accurately, who is talking to you. Sure, they might have a hot profile pic, but how do you know it’s not fake? I was happily chatting away to a hot chick online recently who’d sent me a random friend request a few days before. Things were going pretty well, until ‘she’ sent me a picture of his dick. Yup.

Every item in that formula is subjective. Take ‘persistence,’ for example. Everyone likes it when someone shows a romantic interest in them. It makes us feel wanted, valuable, even a bit special. We also like a bit of persistence. The keener the admirer is, the more they must like you. But too much persistence? Nope. Then you’re heading into potentially dangerous stalker territory. So where do we draw the line?

Same goes for ‘forwardness.’ Someone who displays just the right level of confidence is a real go-getter, right? Which can only be a good thing. They probably have a well-paying job, a nice car, prospects, ambition, all that good shit. Nobody wants to go out with a slacker. But there’s a fine line between ‘confident’ and ‘cocky.’ And after ‘cocky’ comes ‘pushy,’ which is an obvious turn-off.

This brings us to the ‘Awkwardness’ part of the equation. Some things just feel wrong. We don’t know why, they just do. It’s instinctive. It’s entirely possible that whatever causes us to lose our shit is linked to some primal condition buried deep within us. A legacy, perhaps, of the time when we crawled around on our bellies in swamps. But obviously, that doesn’t explain what the fuck clowns have to do with anything.

Check out some more deviance HERE.

Halloween Parties, New Releases & More

There’s a virtual Halloween party on Facebook tomorrow. And you’re invited. You’re welcome

The Halloween Sale!

Being your typical horror nut, I absolutely love Halloween. I love it so much, I’m going to give you a special gift. Not only that, but I’m giving it to you early. Five times, baby. From now until 1st November, all my indie titles are 0.99. I’m also open to offers for my body, my soul, and an Iron Maiden Number of the Beast limited edition 7″ red vinyl, but let’s start with the books.

The sale means you can pick up a novel, two novellas, and two short story collections for less than a fiver, including the Top Ten Amazon bestseller Sker House and my new release No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches. Details and links below. So in the immortal words of David Coverdale, If you want it, come an’ get it.

No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches

The Somme Offensive, 1916. Harry Doyle is a young, overawed British infantryman struggling to come to terms with the insanity of war. His main objective is staying alive, and getting back home to his family in one piece. But his hopes begin to diminish when he realises the full extent of the misery and destruction around him. And the German war machine isn’t the only thing he has to worry about. Something else is preying on his friends and comrades in the trenches, picking them off one by one. Something no amount of military training can prepare him for.

Proceeds from this book will be donated to the Help for Heroes foundation.

This book contains descriptions of graphic violence and is not suitable for minors.

UK LINK

US LINK

Sker House

Dale and Lucy are two students with a fascination in the supernatural. One weekend, they travel to Sker House, South Wales, a private residence with a macabre history which has recently been converted into a seaside inn. They plan to write an article for their university magazine about a supposed haunting, but when they arrive, they meet a landlord who seems to have a lot to hide. Soon, it becomes apparent that all is not well at Sker House. An air of oppression hangs over it, while misery, tragedy and ill-fortune are commonplace. Gradually, it becomes clear that the true depth of the mystery goes far beyond a mere historical haunting. This is a place where bad things happen, and evil lurks.

Little by little Dale and Lucy fall under Sker’s dark spell, and as they begin to unravel the mysteries of the past, they realize that nothing stays buried forever. Welcome to Sker House, a place where past and present collide.

UK LINK

US LINK

Out of Time

Joe Dawson is a struggling 41-year old writer battling a serious case of writer’s block. When he travels to Wales in a last-ditch attempt to reignite his career, he finds himself staying at a mysterious seaside hotel, where nothing is quite what it seems. As the secrets of his past finally catch up with him, Joe is thrust into a life or death situation where his every action could have terrible consequences.

UK LINK

US LINK

X: A Collection of Horror

This is what happens when you ‘wake up’ inside a dream, when the urban myth you heard turns out to be so much more, and when that hottie you pick up in a bar springs a terrible surprise. But what do you do when your wife gives birth to something not entirely human? When your past discretions come back to haunt you? Or when a serial killer moves in next door?

The first collection of horror and dark fiction from C.M. Saunders, including three previously unpublished stories, plus an introduction and extensive notes. Also features exclusive artwork by Greg Chapman.

Table of Contents: Introduction: That’s Entertainment, A Thin Disguise, A Hell of my Own Creation, Monkey Man, The Awful Truth, Mr. C, Fame / Infamy: A Deconstruction, Another False Dawn, The Night Everything Changed, The Devil & Jim Rosenthal, Club Culture, Afterword

UK LINK

US LINK

X2: Another Collection of Horror

The sequel to 2014’s successful X: A Collection of Horror features ten more slices of dark fiction from the blood-soaked pages of Fantastic Horror, Unspoken Water, Dark Valentine and several anthologies. Also includes two previously unpublished stories, extensive notes, and original artwork by Greg Chapman.

Meet the teacher who sees dead pupils, the ambulance crew who pick up a casualty who won’t die, and the childhood friends who spend the night in a haunted pub. Along the way you can meet a man who refuses to accept his wife’s death and goes to extreme lengths to keep the flame of love alive, the boy who just likes to watch you sleep, and maybe even pay a visit to an antique shop with a deadly secret. If you dare.

Table of Contents: Little Dead Girl, Curiosities, Intruder, The Night Visitor, Hero of the Day, Embracing Solitude, Treat Night, Handsome Jack, Tiny Little Vampires (Flash Version), Roadkill, Afterword

UK LINK

US LINK

Ditching the middle man and telling the story that matters

Really enjoyed doing this interview for Horror Made where I talk about my background, turning indie, Sker House and the Somme.

Horror Made

What do you do when a story about a place from your past haunts you over continents? What about when it’s icy grasp touches you through decades?

That’s one of the many questions that will be answered during today’s interview with  Christian Saunders, the author of the book Sker House and  No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches.


JA= Jeanette Andromeda (That’s me!) CS= Christian Saunders (That’s today’s guest!”

The Interview



JC- First off, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your upcoming books?

C. M. Saunders

CS-I am from Wales, though I live in London now. I spent a long time teaching English in China. Now my day job is writing and editing in the men’s sport and lifestyle sectors. I’m freelance, so basically I’ll write about anything, as long as I get paid. Over the years I’ve written about everything from chilli peppers to…

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An Unlikely Welsh Folk Hero

When people think of Welsh folk heroes, Twm Sion Cati and Owain Glyndwr invariably spring to mind, and rightly so. Not many people mention Will Cefn-Coch. In fact, I’d never heard of him myself until I recently read a book about Welsh murders. But his story is deserving of a much wider audience.

Until November 1868, plain old William Richards was an ordinary 28-year old bloke living a simple life in Cardiganshire. Times were hard in those days. There was a glaring gap between rich and poor, and lots of countryside folk took to poaching to feed their families. There simply wasn’t enough to eat, especially in winter. Although still considered a crime, most people considered sneaking onto privately-owned land to fish or hunt game a necessary evil. Except the rich landowners, obviously, who employed gamekeepers to combat the problem. These guys were not looked upon with much fondness by the locals, in much the same way I imagine Community Support Officers are these days.

One night, Will Richards (aka Will Cefn-Coch, that being the name of the village he was from) and two of his mates illegally ventured onto the estate of Trawscoed, the property of the Earl of Lisburne, to go hunting. Unbeknownst to them, gamekeepers were lying in wait. The gamekeepers, who were unarmed, tried to chase off the transgressors. The story goes that whilst running away, Will stopped and levelled his gun at them on three separate occasions. Each time, the gamekeepers begged for their lives, Will relented, ran off again, and the chase was back on. Eventually, a particularly determined gamekeeper caught up with one of the poachers and wrestled him to the ground. By this time Will had had enough, and shot the gamekeeper dead.

One of the poachers was caught by the other gamekeepers and prosecuted, while Will made his getaway and melted into the community. Some sources say he was held in quite high esteem by some of the locals, who sympathised with the fact that all he had been trying to do was get some food. There was a lot of resentment against the upper classes. The locals hid and fed him, while the authorities alerted every port and city in the country and put a £100 reward on his head. A tidy sum in those days, because now it wasn’t just poaching Will was guilty of, it was murder. He was on the run for months, going from house to house and farm to farm, always on the move. He had a few close shaves, but always managed to evade capture with the help of his friends and supporters.

Eventually however, the net began closing in. If he was apprehended, Will knew he faced death by hanging, so drastic measures were called for. Wary of using transport he walked (yes, walked) to Liverpool, where he put the most audacious part of his plan into action. The authorities were on the lookout for a man fitting his description, so he disguised himself as a woman, complete with heavy make-up. It is likely he drew inspiration for this from the Rebecca Riots thirty years previously, when farmers dressed in drag and attacked toll gates placed on Welsh roads in protest against unfair taxation. In any case, Will must have made a convincing femme fatale, because he succeeded in boarding a ship bound for America and somehow made it all the way to Ohio, where he met and married an Irish immigrant and lived a long and prosperous life.

Sker House and the Angry Reader

So I managed to upset a couple of people last month when I ran a free promo on my novel Sker House. How can giving something away piss people off? Because in the run-up to the free promo, Sker House experienced some weird inexplicable sales spike. It happens. Not nearly often as I would like, but it happens. And the book sold a few copies at full price, $4.99/£3.99.

Then, the free promo kicked in.

Quite rightly, a few people (okay, one person) contacted me through Facebook and voiced their displeasure because they’d paid for something that was then made free days later. It’s probably fair to assume that if this one person felt cheated, others probably did too. I would. So maybe I should explain a couple of things.

Why do writers run free promos? Why do we work tirelessly for six months or more, then pay for artists to design our covers and editors to make us sound good, only to give the result away for free?

Because we are dumb, that’s why.

Not really. The simple truth is, we do it for exposure. Amazon uses magic algorithms to determine your book’s ranking. The higher your ranking, the more love  Amazon will give your book, in the form of recommending it to potential readers and what-not. Of course, writers also want to attract new readers, in the hope that they’ll like our work and perhaps buy another of our books at some point. We hope this works by the same principal as a drug dealer giving away the first hit for free. It doesn’t work like that at all, but that’s what we hope.

And then there are the reviews. Indie writers like me can never get enough reviews. The good, the bad, and the indifferent. We love them all. Reviews sell books. Most of us would beg, steal, kill or maim for an honest review.

The Sker House free promo was probably the most successful promotion I’ve ever done. In four days it was downloaded a total of 1,012 times. It peaked at #14 in Amazon’s Top 100 free horror books, and #3 in it’s sub-category (occult). Judging by the habits certain other indie writers display, I’m pretty sure that practically qualifies it as an ‘Amazon bestseller.’ So in that respect, even though I gave away about four grand’s worth of free books, the promo was a resounding success. Yeah, I know the majority of people won’t read it. It’ll sit on their Kindle, phone, or computer unopened for all eternity with all the other free books they’ve collected. But if only 1% of the people who downloaded Sker House read it then left a review on Amazon, the exercise would be more than worth it.

Be special. Be the 1%!

Weirdly, immediately after the promotion ended, Sker House enjoyed another unprecedented spike and sold more copies in three days than it had at any time since it’s release. This is another benefit of running free promos. Your book stays ‘visible’ for a while before sinking without trace again. We’re not talking thousands of sales here, or even hundreds. The harsh truth is that for most indie writers, to sell double figures of one title in one day is considered an achievement. To do it two or three days running represents the height of success.

Anyway, back to Angry Reader, I explained the situation to her and I think I made amends. Now I feel bad for everyone else who might think I pulled a fast one on them and I want to make it right. So if you also bought Sker House at full price between August 1st and August 25th 2016, send me proof of purchase, and I’ll let you choose any of my other indie titles for free. How’s that? Are we good?

Good.

Spring – Film Review

How on earth have I not seen this movie before? The Internet says it’s been around since debuting at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2014. It did have a very limited theatrical release, then went direct to streaming, though, which is where a lot of things tend to get lost. More’s the pity, because it’s an exceptional piece of work. Part of the attraction is that it’s so many things, and yet at the same time none of them. At it’s core it’s a love story, but it’s also a sci-fi flick, a monster movie, a mystery, a comedy, and one of those meaningful coming-of-age dramas like The Beach. It’s a huge risk trying to do so much within the confines of a single movie. So much can go wrong. But the directing team of Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson (who also wrote it) have done a magnificent job of crossing boundaries and meshing those genres together into something that is captivating, original and truly unique.

A directionless young American, Evan Russell (Lou Taylor Pucci, who starred in the recent Evil Dead remake) loses his mother and his job within days of each other. He also gets in a spot of bother with da police and some local hoodlums, so decides to skip town and use his inheritance to fund a voyage of discovery to Italy. Once there, he meets two hilarious Englishmen in a hostel, and hooks up with a local hottie called Louise (Nadia Hilker). And that’s where the fun begins. Louise slowly reveals herself to be a 2000-year old murderous genetic freak, who gets herself pregnant every twenty years so her body can ingest the cells in her embryo and keep her young. Yup. She regales Evan with tales of 17th Century witch trials, erupting volcanoes, and surviving the Great Plague that swept Europe, all of which Evan takes remarkably well (“At least you have the same back-story as Harry Potter. That’s pretty cool”). Such is the power of love, I guess. Louise then reveals that she can only return to anything resembling a normal state if she falls in love. But does she really want to and risk giving up the life to which she has become accustomed?

The dialogue is sharp and witty, the plot compelling, and the Italian setting stunning. Spring is much more than a mere comedic sci-fi flick. The subtext throws up some interesting existential questions and addresses some pretty fundamental moral dilemmas. Overall, this is a supremely creative, entertaining and imaginative movie. Go watch it right now.

The original version of this review appears in the latest Morpheus Tales supplement. Available FREE.

Devil Dogs

My new novella, No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches, tells the story of a young British infantryman called Harry Price at the Somme in World War I who ends up fighting not just the Germans, but also an unseen enemy that makes his friends ‘disappear.’ Amongst the usual death and destruction to be found in a war zone, the book features a reanimated corpse, unkillable death squads, and what I refer to as ‘Devil Dogs.’ In the story, these are vicious German Shepherds, symbols of the German war machine, who had their brains transplanted and replaced with those taken from dead SS soldiers. So in effect, they are dogs with people brains. Angry people brains. They are then sent out to prowl no man’s land, the area between the allied and German trenches, looking for victims.

I wish I could lay claim to making this shit up. But rumour has it that this area of research was part of the infamous Nazi human experiments of the 1940’s during which all manner of cheerful things took place, from sewing sets of twins together to making people drink nothing but sea water so they could study the effects. Some of these experiments also included forced amputations and limb transplants. Yep, just like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Most of this stuff was inflicted on POW’s during World War II, but I moved it to the trenches of World War I to suit my purposes. During war time, or even outside war time, people do such incredibly fucked-up shit to each other you don’t have to make it up. Just read a bit of history.

I couldn’t find any online sources for the transplanting-people-brains-into-dogs thing, so maybe I did make that bit up. Who knows? However, there is some literature relating to Soviet experiments along similar lines concerning the pioneering ‘work’ of Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov in the 1950’s which supposedly led to the first heart transplant in 1967. One of his greatest achievements was bringing a dead dog’s head ‘back to life.’ There’s even footage on YouTube. Some sources suggest this was a continuation of research started by the Nazis a decade earlier, and it’s anyone’s guess what really went on at those sketchy Unit 731 camps.

Ultimately, nobody knows how far they want or if the experiments were successful. Probably not. I imagine it came down to size in the end (doesn’t it always?). I mean a man’s brain wouldn’t fit inside a dog’s head, would it? Unless these particular dogs were genetically engineered or something to make them bigger than the average canine. And the Nazis would never do that, would they? By the way, I took the term Devil Dogs from a nickname the US Marine Corps were given by the Germans. According to Marine Corps legend, they fought with such ferocity at the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918 that they were likened by the enemy to ‘Dogs from Hell.’

It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?