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The Untimely Deaths of Daryl Handy

Under the Radar – The Cat Lady

I love horror games. I’ve been around since the first Alone in the Dark, and watched the rise of the Resident Evil franchise. Telltale Games’s excellent spin-off of The Walking Dead proved that even point and click adventure games can still do the job well. However, The Cat Lady used the same play style to bring the genre to near perfection.

The game starts on a dark note. Middle-aged and alone (save for her friendships with the local stray cats), the game’s protagonist, Susan, attempts suicide. Upon entering a surreal afterlife, she is offered a deal: she can have a second chance at life in exchange for killing five “parasites” back on earth. Agreeing to the terms, Susan becomes functionally immortal, although she still suffers the pain and experience of death each time it occurs during her mission.

While the plot may not sound that original at first blush, it’s the execution that sells it. The characterization in this game is bone deep. The characters, particularly the lead, feel very much like real people in a real world, and it’s a pleasure to watch them develop. The art direction is superb, using a paper cutout style and muted palette to achieve a dour look that makes the rare splashes of color pop. And while this is a point and click adventure game, the puzzles generally stay in the challenging category without delving too deeply into the moon logic for which they’re so notorious.

The Cat Lady really is less a game than an experience, and I don’t say that lightly. If you’re looking for something more subtle and emotionally resonant than the umpteenth zombie gorefest or Garry’s Mod jumpscare simulator, track this game down. You won’t regret it.

The Planning Stage

The new novella is currently locked in the mental outline phase while I try to figure a more few things out about this horror I’m unleashing. I don’t want to give too much away, but you might want to check out the Bridgewater Triangle some time if you’re looking for inspiration–interesting place, to say the least.

Meanwhile, I’m getting some new segments of Under the Radar prepped and ready to go on some more unusual subjects and organizing a guest post.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get going on my new book in earnest at some point next week.

Under the Radar – Frailty

Horror and religion have a long history of intersecting. Just about every Antichrist, religious apocalypse, and demonic possession movie can be perceived as embracing the Christian faith, albeit in a rather indirect and morbid way. Unfortunately, very few movies with this bent can break away from the three stereotypes above and do something original. Frailty is one of these rare exceptions.

The bulk of the film revolves around an extremely simple but effective premise. A single father (played by Bill Paxton) has a series of what he believes are angelic visions, gifting him with the power to identify “demons” and the responsibility to slay them. He’s upfront about what he’s seen with his children and attempts to include them in his mission. While he wins the youngest boy over to his cause fairly easily, the other is convinced his father is going mad and can do little but watch while the murderous plan rolls along and very human-looking victims are dragged to the basement dug in the family shed.

Given that two of the lead actors are children, the acting is astoundingly good across the board. Matt O’Leary–who plays the older son and serves as the protagonist for the majority of the film–portrays his character’s fear and confusion in such a sensitive, believable way, a viewer can’t help but get engrossed in his plight. And the sometimes over-the-top Paxton turns in a great performance, bringing real sympathy to a very ordinary man stuck in a situation that calls on him to do horrible things.

The only real weakness of the movie is its last few minutes, which altogether destroy the ambiguity that kept the narrative so unsettling. However, the ride getting there is so well-crafted, I can still easily recommend giving Frailty a watch.

Favors and Fomenting Ideas

To be honest with you all, things have been a little quiet on this end lately. My last novella, Wind Chill, took a lot out of me, and I’ve been trying to get back on the ball and back to work on a new project without much success. I found a setting and premise I like, but the theme–the guts–of the story kept eluding me. Fortunately, I think it just slapped me upside the head yesterday. Now, I just need to figure out how it’ll fit…

In other news, I currently have the pleasure of reading an advance review copy of my friend and beta-reader Ben Eads’s first book, Cracked Sky. Having beta-read the novella early on, I’m quite proud of where he’s taken it, and I’ll be sharing my review here in a week or two. I may also offer Ben a guest post should he be so inclined so you can all here a little more about it.

Under the Radar – Thinner

There is probably no horror writer more synonymous with his genre than Stephen King. Carrie, It, and The Stand are only a few of dozens of works that helped him dominate the scene for decades. Alas, obscurity can strike even the giants among us. And with Thinner, it’s terribly undeserved.

Thinner was the last novel King wrote undetected under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. In many ways, his attempt to hide his style’s usual trappings is a very good thing. There is almost none of the self-confessed “elephantiasis” that often infects his work. The narrative is lean, offering just enough space to fully develop the characters and their bizarre predicament without sacrificing the pacing.

Admittedly, the plot does come off rather absurd in summation. A portly attorney accidentally strikes and kills a gypsy woman with his car. Using his connections to avoid the charges, he escapes justice only for the widower to place a curse on him causing rapid emaciation.

A story this borderline corny would’ve been so simple to mishandle, but King’s talent twists it into something bordering on the sublime. The protagonist, though unlikable, is very well developed, and the story’s tension really amps up to match his increasing desperation. Instead of coming across as a cheesy B-flick (like its movie adaptation), the novel has the quality of a weird little fever dream that sticks with you upon waking.

So, give this one a shot even if you’re more into King’s epic-length books. At only a little over 300 pages, you don’t have much to lose.

December Sales and Streamlining

Autumn goes way too fast. No sooner do the jack-o’-lanterns get snuffed than we’re subjected to two months of Christmas permeating everything in sight (and don’t even get me started on Black Friday…).

So, in honor of my fellow horror geeks mourning their favorite time of year, I’m putting The Untimely Deaths of Daryl Handy on sale for $0.99 for the entire month of December, except for the 23rd through the 25th when I’ll be giving it away for free:

The Untimely Deaths of Daryl Handy

Under the Radar – The Call of Cthulhu

The essence of H.P. Lovecraft’s work is notoriously difficult to capture on film. The results range from the entertaining but rather absurd (Re-animator), to the downright awful (The Unnameable). To this day, there is really only one straight-up screen adaptation that sticks to the source material and manages to emulate its mood.

And it took the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society to make it.

The filmmakers slyly chose to model The Call of Cthulhu as a 1920’s era black and white silent film. Not only does this hide some of the limitations of the $50,000 budget, but it lends a certain dreamlike quality that complements the narrative. Being well-versed with Lovecraft’s haunts, many of the buildings mentioned in the actual story are included in the film, adding an extra sense of care to the production.

Hardcore fans of the story will be pleased to find few deviations from the original plot and a great stop-motion depiction of the titular Old One. The ending is one of the few alterations, but it conveys the bleak hopelessness of the story so well, I really can’t find anything to fault in it.

I can’t recommend this little indie gem to you enough.

Playing the Waiting Game

Query letters/synopses for Bestiary and Wind Chill are now awaiting their fate at the same publisher. I should get an answer back on whether they want sample chapters within three months. All that’s left is to decide which book I want to start next…

Under the Radar – The Dark Half

When people think George Romero, they think zombies. That’s certainly fair enough considering nearly all modern depictions of zombies are derivative of his Night trilogy (which remains superior to virtually all of these copycats). However, the unfortunate side effect of this reputation is that some of Romero’s work tends to go forgotten. And The Dark Half is no exception.

Adapted from a novel of the same name written by Stephen King, The Dark Half follows Thad Beaumont, a writer who moonlights as gritty thriller novelist George Stark to pay the bills. Eventually found out by a would-be blackmailer, Beaumont decides to come clean and have a symbolic burial for his pseudonym. But it isn’t long before the grave is found empty and people connected to the mock funeral start turning up dead, leaving Beaumont as the prime suspect.

Despite mixed reviews, this movie has a lot going for it. Timothy Hutton does a great job playing both the hero and villain, switching between the two convincingly for the entirety of the film. The story also remains refreshingly original (I honestly can’t think of another full-length doppelganger horror movie off the top of my head) and is quite well executed in terms of its pacing and tension.

So, if a unique horror concept mixed with thriller elements sounds interesting to you, give this one a try. I think you’ll have a good time.