C.M. Saunders's Blog, page 36
September 3, 2016
Rolling the Dice, Man
I don’t know how many people reading this would be familiar with the now-defunct British magazine Loaded. For men of a certain age, it was something of a lifestyle bible, and told you everything you needed to know about, well, life and style.
In a 1999 issue they named an obscure (to me, anyway) American writer by the name of Luke Rhinehart, ‘Novelist of the Century.’ He was awarded this accolade largely due to a book he wrote called The Dice Man, which carried the rather catchy tag (on some editions) ‘Few novels can change your life, this one will.’ Until that point, I’d thought Stephen King was ‘Novelist of the Century.’ Still do, actually. So this was news to me. Loaded were very rarely wrong about such important things, so I went out and found a copy of said book in HMV. Then I stuck it on my ever-expanding book shelf and promptly forgot about it. Fast forward a few years, and I’m a mature student with a lot of free time on my hands. Enter The Dice Man.
In a nutshell, the book tells the story of a psychiatrist called Luke Rhinehart (which makes it kind of a mock autobiography) who, feeling bored and unsatisfied with life, decides to stop making decisions. Instead, he rolls a dice, and lets fate decide which path he should take. As far as I remember, the rule of the ‘game’ is that you give yourself six options, one for each number on the dice. Five reasonably attractive things that you wouldn’t mind doing, and one thing you don’t want to do. On the surface, its a book about freedom, the search for adventure, and fucking the system. I’m sure many of the deeper psychological concepts and themes were lost on me at the time. You kind of grasp most of them, but not with much clarity. The result is that they linger in your subconscious for years after.
I was so taken with the book that one summer I bought a one-way ticket to Spain and decided to live by the dice for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t let the dice decide anything important. That would be stupid. I just let it dictate the little things like which places I should travel through and in what order (as it tuned out, it was Alicante, Benidorm, Murcia, Granada and Malaga, in that order), and when I got there which tapas bar I should I stop at, which hostel should I stay in, and whether or not I should hit on the cute American tourist with the flower in her hair. Nothing remotely negative happened, apart from the cute American tourist with the flower in her hair saying no. But even that wasn’t a total blow-out. The two of us got talking to a Spanish gypsy girl called Estrella (Star) and I took her home instead.
Playing the dice was a liberating experience, and I spent most of the time strolling through the sunshine wallowing in a carefree attitude sadly missing from my daily life. But at the same time, it was slightly unnerving. I wasn’t in control of my life anymore. Something else was, some higher force. Call it what you want; fate, destiny, the Cosmic Joker, God, whatever. After a while you begin to wonder what path you are on, and why. Is it really all random? Or is there some kind of plan involved? Interesting times, indeed.
Luke Rhinehart is the pseudonym of George Cockroft, who has written numerous books and essays, including several other ‘Dice’ books. The original, first published in 1971, has attained cult status, and been published in over 60 countries. In 2012 he pranked his own death, the mentalist, but in reality is still going strong at the age of 83. Throw a dice for him. You won’t regret it. Actually, you might. But that’s part of the fun.
August 26, 2016
Free Trip to Sker House!
It’s August Bank Holiday. So why not take a trip to Sker House, a lovely little seaside retreat in south Wales?
Look. Isn’t it beautiful, in a creepy kind of way?
You can just imagine some of the things that have gone on there over the years. The house has a very long and macabre history, and is also just a little bit haunted. But don’t worry, you should be okay. Sker House has garnered quite a bit of publicity recently, and a few notable visitors have spent time there. Some enjoyed their stay very much. Others, got a little bit disturbed by it all. Understandably so. It isn’t the kind of place which appeals to everybody.
The trip would normally cost you $4.99/£3.99. But from now until the end of the weekend it’s FREE to all. The offer will never be repeated because, call me old-fashioned, but I believe people should be paid for their hard work. Believe me, it was neither easy nor cheap to arrange this trip for you. I only hope you take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and please, bring your friends!
At least tell them where you are going so they know where to look if you don’t come back.
Sker House, the place where past and present collide, awaits.
August 20, 2016
Sker House – Collected Reviews
Reviews are the lifeblood of indie writers. Good, bad, or indifferent, we’ll take what we can get. We make no demands. Reviews posted on Amazon or Goodreads can make or break a book, but those featured on websites and blogs can be even more valuable because of the potential exposure they get.
I am truly thankful to those below and truly appreciate the time these wonderful people invested in Sker House. And I hope I scared their pants off. Just a little bit.
August 15, 2016
As the Crow Flies included in QuickFic Anthology 2
I’m thrilled to announce that my very weird flash fiction story, As the Crow Flies, has finally found a home having been included in QuicFic Anthology 2: Shorter Short Speculative Fiction out now on DigitalFictionPub. This time out, I’m honoured to be sharing antho space with Lisa Finch, Liam Hogan, Greg Chamberlain, Tanya Bryan, Suzie Lockhart, Amy Sisson, Pedro Iniguez, D.J. Cockburn, and many others.
“He remembered the stories his grandfather told him when he was a kid. The stories about how the devil himself, the original fallen angel, stalked these mountainous peaks under cover of darkness, preying on weary travellers. Granddad never elaborated much on what he meant by ‘preying.’ He never had to.”
– From As the Crow Flies
I wrote As the Crow Flies in 2011 or 2012. At about 750 words, it’s one of my shortest short stories. I submitted it to a few magazines and websites, nobody wanted it, so I dumped it in a folder on my desktop and moved on with my life. Fast forward a couple of years and I’m re-organising (okay, organising) my writing folders and I come across this again. I re-read it and remembered I had based it on a creepy old Welsh folk tale I read about in a history book. So yep, this story might be true. Equally, it might NOT be, but who the fuck knows, right?
August 6, 2016
Blink 182 – California (review)
They’re back! The Blink 182 love-in is one of the most hotly anticipated reunion stories of the decade. When founder member Tom DeLonge left to go chasing spaceships or whatever, a lot of people, me included, thought it was all over. As if growing up wasn’t enough to deal with. But then in walked Matt Skiba to breathe new life into what had become a stagnating franchise. By all accounts, recording the last album, Neighbourhoods (2011), their first in eight years, was a fraught exercise. And it showed. The music was derivative, disjointed and, for the most part, bang average. If this was the sound of a band maturing, it was painful to ear. Then came Skiba, who had been fronting emo punks Alkaline Trio to great effect since 1998. Released worldwide on 1st July 2016, a full 21 years after their indie label debut, California gave Blink 182 their first US number one album in fifteen years, and their first UK number one album EVER. They also deserve some extra kudos for kicking Drake off the top spot.
Predictably, after all this time the teen angst has morphed into mid-life angst, but angst is angst however you dress it up. Lyrically, Blink are just as witty as they ever were and now they can incorporate Gen Y frustration and general hopelessness into their music as well as the odd broken heart. Gone are the dick jokes and dog semen references (mostly), and in are the odes to misplaced youth and shattered dreams. This is never more evident than on opening track Cynical (clue’s in the title) which starts off in a pretty subdued manner before launching into a frantic sing-a-along reminiscent of the Take off Your Pants and Jacket days. Cynical bleeds effortlessly into lead single Bored to Death, which appears to be another depressing evaluation of adult life featuring the telling refrain, “It’s a long way back from seventeen, the whispers turn into a scream.”
She’s out of Her Mind, No Future and The Only thing that Matters are lightweight, up-tempo stand-outs while Los Angeles, Left Alone and San Diego wouldn’t sound out of place on either of the last two albums. Not that that’s a bad thing. Not entirely, anyway. The grown-up sensibilities fall completely by the wayside for Kings of the Weekend, Rabbit Hole, and in particular, Brohemian Rhapsody, a 30-second full-frontal assault built around the line, “There’s something about you I can’t quite put my finger in.” Snort.
In many ways this album is a homage to punk past. Most of the tracks will have you waxing lyrical about those heady days of the early noughties when Blink, Good Charlotte, and Fallout Boy ruled the world. But other aspects (No Future, for example, is a title lifted from God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols) reach even further back in time. Listen carefully and you might recognise elements borrowed from the Misfits, the Ramones, NOFX, Bad Religion, Pennywise, MXPX and more. It has the hooks, humour and choruses of every classic Blink album, but here they delivered with a fresh twist. Matt Skiba shows he isn’t just hear to make up the numbers. His vocals compliment those of Mark Hoppus perfectly, his guitar work is solid if unspectacular, and he even had a hand in writing almost half the songs. California contains an impressive 16 tracks (17 if you include the bonus Hey, I’m Sorry) but with a total running time of under 43 minutes, the band have clearly steered back toward the three-minute formula that made them so popular, and away from the bloated stadium rock epics they were in danger of resorting to. All in all, this is a great album. I’m going to finish by nicking a line from Home is Such a Lonely Place which sums it all up pretty well:
“Tomorrow’s frightening. But not today.”
Check out my other recent album reviews: Foo Fighters – Saint Cecilia EP and BabyMetal – Metal Resistance
July 30, 2016
The Forest – Film Review
At the foot of mount Fiji in Japan lies the deeply mysterious Aokigahara forest, widely known as a popular suicide destination. In 2010 alone, there were 54 confirmed cases. Nobody is quite sure what draws people from all over the country, and even further afield, there to end their days, but it has a long association with the Yurei of Japanese mythology, similar entities to what we would call ghosts. Yerei pray on the sad, lonely and vulnerable, using their own negative emotions against them. Sounds more like the script of a horror movie, right? Well, now it is, thanks to producer David S Goyer (the Blade franchise, Da Vinci’s Demons, and cult noughties TV show FreakyLinks) reading about the forest on wikipedia.
Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer plays an American woman who recieves a phonecall from the Japanese authorities saying that her identical twin sister has ventured into the Aokigahara forest and has not been seen since. Obviously, she gets on the next plane to the land of the rising Sun and rocks up to the very same hotel her sister was staying where she meets a western journalist who seems just a little too eager to help. Together with a guide, they head into the forest in search of the missing sister. All in all, it’s a good premise for a film. It’s atmospheric, well-produced, and for the most part well executed. It’s a pity the film lets itself down in other areas. The plot kinda drifts off and cannibalizes itself toward the end, and there are some mildly annoying oversights. For example, when Dormer’s character first meets the journalist (Taylor Kinney, aka Mason Lockwood of Vampire Diaries fame) she tells him how the sisters lost both their parents in a car accident caused by a drunk driver who was never caught. But… if the driver was never caught, how did anyone know they were drunk? They could just be a really shit driver. You would think with all the untold millions lavished on film production these days, somebody somewhere along the line would notice such a gaping plot hole. Evidently not. Sigh.
As you would expect, the film is laced with the kind of creepy, unsettling horror you would expect from something so Japan-centric, though it has minimal input from anyone actually Japanese apart from a few actors, which you would think was the minimum requirement. For the most part, it wasn’t even filmed in Japan. The Japanese government don’t allow filming in Aokigahara forest so apart from a few scenes shot in Tokyo, the bulk of the movie was filmed in a warehouse Serbia. I shit you not. The forest is suitably creepy, though, and there are some sleek touches.
On its release, The Forest was met with an avalanche of criticism and almost universal bad reviews. It has an overall rating of 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more rotten than that. Even the regrettable Rocky V managed 28%. Does that mean the film most Rocky fans refuse to acknowledge is three times better than The Forest? Not at all. It could be better but plot holes aside, for the most part I actually enjoyed it. It’s a crazy world.
The original version of this review appears in the latest Morpheus Tales supplement, available FREE
July 16, 2016
The Sker House Blog Tour
It’s finally over. Wow, that was energy sapping. Now I know how Thirty Seconds to Mars felt when they played 309 shows to break the record for the longest ever tour. Well, kinda. I probably got less groupies than they did. but I did meet a lot of cool, like-minded people, and gained some new readers along the way.
Here is a full itinerary of my stops, with links. Please take a few minutes to check out some of the sites. You might find something you like.
Fiona McVie runs an excellent cross-genre site dedicated specifically called Author Interviews. I gave her the lowdown on why I do what I do:
The ultra-cool Scary Reviews is dedicated to horror, post-apocalyptic fiction, dark fiction, thrillers and science fiction books and movies. I stopped by to talk about the REAL Maid of Sker:
Being horror’s #1 community on the web, Horror World should need no introduction. Here I discuss the truth behind Sker House, and why the book needed to be written:
The charming Em Lehrer does a wonderful job over at Keystroke Blog, a review and interview combo site. She’s also one of those uber-sassy young YouTubers who has her own channel called #BookTalk.
Gorefiend caters more toward the splatterpunk and extreme horror side of things. I did something special for them. When I wrote Sker House I incorporated lots of paranormal/supernatural phenomena into it, including Shadow People. They are most definitely real. We just don’t know what the fuck they are.
This is the definitive Sker House article, written for Americymru, the best Welsh ex-pat site you’ll ever see:
You may or may not know, one of the things I do is review books and films for Morpheus Tales, one of the UK’s biggest genre fiction mags. When editor Adam Bradley goes in for an interview, he goes in HARD. This is everything you wanted to know about me but couldn’t be bothered to ask:
There is a lot of historical fact in Sker House. Every country has episodes in their past that they are not proud of. Wales had the Wreckers, which I discussed over at The Horror Bookshelf.
I did an interview with the elegant, ultra-professional and self-confessed snark Lilyn G at Sci-fi & Scary
Got me a namecheck in a piece on haunted houses by Daniel Cheely:
And finally, I went rogue and talked about my unhealthy fascination with Japanese horror movies for those lovable, yet so Deviant Dolls
Welcome to Sker House, a place where past and present collide.
Finally, guess what? When one adventure finishes, another begins, and I just started the No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches blog tour. No rest for the wicked, as they say. So keep half an eye open for my updates and please ‘share’ and ‘like’ occasionally, if so inclined. It means the world to an impoverished indie writer.
Peace and love.
July 14, 2016
Christian Saunders
I did an interview over at Scary Reviews recently. Books, writing, horror and giant bananas!
Christian Saunders writes dark fiction and has had his stories published in Screams of Terror, Shallow Graves, Dark Valentine, Fantastic Horror, Unbroken Waters, Siren’s Call, and several anthologi…
Source: Christian Saunders
July 2, 2016
No Man’s Land – Horror in the Trenches
My new novella, No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches, is out now via Deviant Dolls Publications. July 1st marked the 100-year anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in France between the Allies and the German Empire, which is still one of the episodes in human history. In the first hours, eight British soldiers fell PER SECOND and by the time it was over some five months later, there were a million dead.
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 as he realizes the full extent of 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.
This book contains descriptions of graphic violence and is not suitable for minors. Cover art by Greg Chapman.
Proceeds will be donated to Help for Heroes
No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches is available now, priced £1.99/$2.99:
Check out more great books from the Deviant Dolls HERE
June 24, 2016
Trigger Warning #6
I am pleased to report that my short story, Little Dead Girl, is included in Trigger Warning #6
As you can probably gather, I wrote Little Dead Girl when I was in living in China. I tried to convey some of the isolation and disassociation you feel when immersed in a different culture, and the surreal sense of unreality that permeates everything you do. The artist who illustrated the story, John Skewes, captures the mood perfectly.
Little Dead Girl was yet another story based on one of my fucked up dreams, probably inspired by the evil Little Emperors I was teaching at the time. Believe me, some of them deserved to be kicked down a flight of stairs or three. To this day, I can still remember the dream vividly, and it still gives me chills.
You can read Little Dead Girl for free HERE
