Brian Keene's Blog, page 169

Movie Updates

1. GHOUL: Debuts on Chiller Friday, April 13th, at 9pm (EST). Eventual DVD release. Directed by Gregory Wilson (The Girl Next Door). Starring Nolan Gould (Modern Family). Official Facebook page. Official Twitter. Official website.

2. DARK HOLLOW: Slated for 2013. Paul Campion (The Devil's Rock), Paul Finch (The Bill), Shane Rangi (The Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia), and WETA Workshop attached. Official Facebook page.

3. DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN: Scott Derrikson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and C. Robert Cargill attached.

4. CASTAWAYS: Jon Wagner (Anniversary at Shallow Creek) and Damian Maffei (Closed For the Season) attached. Official Facebook page. Official Twitter.

5. THE SIQQUSIM WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS: In development as Who Shot Santa? Paul Campion attached.

6. FAST ZOMBIES SUCK: Jeff Heimbuch (Leeds Point) attached.

7. THE TIES THAT BIND: Released in 2009 on DVD. Directed by Jeff Heimbuch. Starring Logan Tracey (Guiding Light) and Kevin Interdonato (The Sopranos).

THE LAST ZOMBIE: NEVERLAND #2 – In Stores Now

On sale this week in all good comic shops is issue #2 of The Last Zombie: Neverland. If your local store doesn't carry it, order one online here.

Welcome to Neverland, an enclave of children who have survived the zombie apocalypse, apparently without any adult supervision whatsoever. What dark secret do they hold? Meanwhile, Russo and Diaz grow closer, and Doctor Federman's suspicions about Ian deepen, despite the fact that he seems to have recuperated.

If you missed issue #1, buy it here.

MAELSTROM III Line Up – Pre-Order Fall 2012

Maelstrom Set I (2010)

A Gathering of Crows by Brian Keene

The Rising: Deliverance by Brian Keene (no reprint until 5 years after pub)

Six Days by Kelli Owen

Maelstrom Set II (2011)

A Conspiracy of One by Brian Keene (never to be reprinted)

Alone by Brian Keene

Once Upon A Time In Midnight by John Urbancik

Maelstrom Set III (forthcoming Fall of 2012)

Deluge by Brian Keene

Sundancing by Brian Keene (never to be reprinted)

Mo 3:16 and Other Preyers by Geoff Cooper

ONLY 12 COPIES LEFT!!!

A Plea to Old-Tyme Readers

If anyone has the 1999 (or possibly early 2000) issue of Jobs In Hell which featured a story by Geoff Cooper, please contact me or J.F. Gonzalez. We're not talking about Coop's regular Screams From the Abyss column, which also ran in Jobs In Hell regularly. This was a fictional piece, the title of which we can't remember, but involved a beach, an alien, maybe Mars, and was possibly meta-fictional. Thanks. You'll find out why we're asking later this year…

Some Thoughts on Gender, Genre, and Reading

As previously noted, I'm under some serious deadlines this month, and as a result, content has been sporadic around here. Yesterday, anticipating a lull in new announcements until The Cage and The Last Zombie: Neverland #2 go on sale, I posted this list of my 25 Favorite Writers of All Time. This led to a discussion on Twitter between myself, author Sarah Pinborough, and CONvergence's Charlotte Nickerson. Sarah and Charlotte found it curious that there were no women on my list. And after they called it to my attention, I found it curious, too. 

There are a lot of fine writers who were left off that list. Some readers questioned the absence of Bentley Little, Robert R. McCammon, Richard Matheson, and others. All of them are fine writers who have written some of my very favorite books (Little's The Store is the crown jewel in satiric social commentary horror, McCammon's Boy's Life is a coming-of-age watermark, and if there was an American Library collection focusing solely on horror, Matheson's I Am Legend would be the centerpiece. I enjoy reading all three (and many of the others who were mentioned) but they aren't among my absolute desert-island favorites. That's not a slight against them. That's the inherent problem with lists — no matter how expansive, somebody is always going to get left off.

But even so, I did find it curious that there wasn't one female writer on my list, so I spent much of yesterday pondering the significance of that, and what it meant. Here are my conclusions, offered as the kicking off point for a discussion amongst yourselves. As always, be polite and respectful of others.

1. That list is primarily compiled of genre novelists and comic book writers. More than half of them are people I grew up reading. As I've written elsewhere, it was a Steve Gerber-penned issue of The Defenders (along with a Jack Kirby- penned and illustrated issue of Captain America) that first gave me the writing bug at age six. J.M. DeMatteis, Stephen King, etc. were a huge part of my teenage years. Ditto Joe Lansdale, Skipp & Spector, etc. when I was a still too young to buy a beer but old enough to know that I needed to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

But when I consider that time-period — the mid-70's to the late-80's — it occurs to me that there simply weren't as many female writers working in either the genre or in comics as there are now. I didn't discover Shirley Jackson until high school. And for whatever reason (probably the fact that my reading choices were limited to the Spring Grove Public Library — which was located in an old farmhouse — and whatever was on sale at the newsstand) I didn't discover Chelsea Quinn Yarbro or Andre Norton until then, either. In truth, the first female writers I really remember being aware of for their gender are (in prose) Poppy Z. Brite and Yvonne Navarro and (in comics) Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson. And I had graduated high school and joined the Navy by that point.

Fact is, I simply wasn't exposed to a lot of female writers during my formative years, because work  by female writers wasn't as commercially available, and thus, that's a big reason why there weren't any on my list.  But that doesn't mean I don't enjoy books written by women, which brings me to thought number two.

2. I suspect that, to some extent, gender might influence which characters a reader identifies with, and which plot points move a reader. That's not to say I don't enjoy a story written from a female perspective or can't identify with a female protagonist. On the contrary. Some fine examples of this are Kelli Owen's Six Days, Stephen King's Lisey's Story, or Lucy Taylor's Dancing With Demons. And I certainly enjoy books written by women (Yvonne Navarro's After Age and Sarah's own Breeding Ground are among my Top 25 Favorite Books).

But reading is something one does primarily for enjoyment, and I think that enjoyment is increased when we identify strongly with a character or situation. Sometimes, our gender determines that. As I said on Twitter, a story about the special bond between a mother and a daughter is going to have much more of an emotional impact on a female reader than it will a male reader. The reverse is also true. I know I'm not the only male to sob uncontrollably after watching Big Fish or The Wrestler, and I also know that the female partners I watched them with were perplexed by my reaction. Unless you're a father or a son, it's hard to understand the depth of the visceral reaction many men have to Big Fish.

Men and women view some things differently. Read a sex scene written by a woman versus one written by a man. Most of the time, the female-written one will make use of all the human senses while the male-written one will predominantly focus only on the visual elements. It's the difference between Gone With the Wind and and The English Patient versus Braveheart and The Crow. All four are romances. Two appeal more to women. Two appeal more to men.

The issue of gender and characterization is an important one, too. In the college class I used to teach, I liked using The Sopranos' Tony Soprano and The Shield's Vic Mackey as examples of great characterization. Despite some of the heinous, repugnant things they've  done, we can't help rooting for them week after week. That's because the writers have created characters we can identify with on some emotional, primal level, no matter what our surface qualms about them. And I do identify with Tony — in enough ways that it would take me an entire Blog entry to go into with the depth required — but those reasons are certainly from a core, male perspective. I like the character of his wife, Carmella. I find her tragic and appealing and fascinating, but she's not what hooked me on the show. What drew me in week after week was seeing Tony deal with fictionalized, metaphoric versions of the very same things I was dealing with at the time (being torn between job and family, maintaining a reluctant alpha dog status and wondering where the next betrayal or challenge would come from, etc.)

So, yeah… after pondering things, that's my guess as to why there weren't any female authors on my list of all-time favorites. It does make me wonder what my list would have looked like if I was coming of age now, in an era when women have a much more prominent role in both comics and horror fiction. And that makes me simultaneously happy for how far we've progressed in our field — and pensive for how far we still have to go.

It would be great, for example, if we could get to a point where transgendered writers' books were discussed by fans online more than their sexuality is (and I understand that's only a portion of the genre's fan-base, but nevertheless it's an annoying one), or we didn't have to collectively groan each week about The Walking Dead's treatment of T-Dog (absolutely zero characterization other than very tired racial stereotypes that should have gone out of play after Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

But I digress. Those are conversations for another day. It's 12:30am and I've been up since 5:00am yesterday and chased around after my toddler all day and am tired and need to get to work. But I thought Sarah and Charlotte's question was something worth examining and discussing. So now it's your turn.

Discuss.

My Top 25 Favorite Writers of All Time

This is something I get asked all the time, so I decided to create a definitive list. Now, whenever someone asks, I can just give them this link.

My Top 25 Favorite Writers of All Time (in no particular order):

1. Hunter S. Thompson

2. Stephen King

3. Richard Laymon

4. Joe R. Lansdale

5. William Hope Hodgson

6. Steve Gerber

7. J.M. DeMatteis

8. F. Paul Wilson

9. Tom Piccirilli

10. Brian Hodge

11. Karl Edward Wagner

12. Robert E. Howard

13. Arthur C. Clarke

14. Warren Ellis

15. Alan Moore

16. Michael Marshall Smith

17. John Skipp & Craig Spector

18. Edward Lee

19. H.P. Lovecraft

20. Jack Ketchum

21. Larry McMurty

22. Jack Kirby

23. Carlton Mellick III

24. Manly Wade Wellman

25. Neil Gaiman

FAQ: My Top 25 Favorite Writers of All Time

This is something I get asked all the time, so I decided to create a definitive list. Now, whenever someone asks, I can just give them this link.

My Top 25 Favorite Writers of All Time (in no particular order):

1. Hunter S. Thompson

2. Stephen King

3. Richard Laymon

4. Joe R. Lansdale

5. William Hope Hodgson

6. Steve Gerber

7. J.M. DeMatteis

8. F. Paul Wilson

9. Tom Piccirilli

10. Brian Hodge

11. Karl Edward Wagner

12. Robert E. Howard

13. Arthur C. Clarke

14. Warren Ellis

15. Alan Moore

16. Michael Marshall Smith

17. John Skipp & Craig Spector

18. Edward Lee

19. H.P. Lovecraft

20. Jack Ketchum

21. Larry McMurty

22. Jack Kirby

23. Carlton Mellick III

24. Manly Wade Wellman

25. Neil Gaiman

March Madness Week #2

As previously noted, I'm on a writing vacation, and posts are sporadic this month. Here are some updates on various things.

Last Saturday, Mike Lombardo of Reel Splatter Productions came by to record a commentary track with me for Demonstration of the Dead, which will be included on the forthcoming Reel Splatter DVD. While he was here, we got the idea to record a mini-sequel to Demonstration of the Dead, which I think you'll all enjoy. Details on the DVD release coming soon.

J.F. Gonzalez and I found our trip to New York delayed until later this month, which is good, because it gives us more time to polish the pitch. I can't tell you anything else about the proposed project, other than it's not horror, and it recalls Jason Bourne and John MacClane, and we still get to destroy the world (which, as anyone who has read the Clickers series can tell you, is something we do well together).

Speaking of Clickers, there are less than 10 copies of Clickers vs. Zombies left. Click here to read the free preview, or click here to order one of those last ten. The book will ship in just a few more weeks.

This past week was spent working on The Lost Level and the Ghoul prequel. I can't say much about the prequel, but I can confirm it is based on the movie's continuity and not that of the novel. You'll see it very soon.

Pre-readers are hard at work on Deluge, which will be part of this year's Maelstrom set. Now that contracts have been signed, I imagine I'll have to go ahead to tell you what the other two Maelstrom books are very soon.

A reader asked via my message board for a status update on Apocrypha. It's still being put together, albeit slowly. Since much of the material hasn't seen print in almost 15 years or more, it's taking a while to track down and secure the rights to it all.

If, like me, you're a Karl Edward Wagner devotee, here's a fascinating article I stumbled across this week.

Here's something I posted last week – my abbreviated thoughts on the Amazon versus Barnes & Noble war, and the "All Kindle books should be free or 99 cents" lobbyists.

And now I go back to work.

OPEN CALL FOR GHOUL VIEWING PARTIES

GHOUL premieres Friday, April 13th at 9pm on Chiller. Click here to watch the trailer.

A number of people have expressed an interest in hosting viewing parties for the public that night. If you own a sports bar, restaurant, etc., hosting a viewing party is a great opportunity for you to see some extra business. If you are a private citizen hosting a party for the public in your home, then this is a great opportunity to meet other fans in your area.

What follows are instructions on how to host a public viewing party, and how I'll support you in return.

If you are one of those establishments, or if you are a private citizen willing to open your home to other fans, please post a comment here on the Blog, or on Facebook or Twitter or my message board. DO NOT post it via Google+ or send it via email, as I do not check Google+ and I'm approximately 27 days behind on email.

Include your name, the name and address of the venue, what time festivities will begin, and an email address or phone number where people can contact you. I will then compile all of the locations nationwide and post a directory so fans without Chiller can find the viewing party closest to them.

But wait… there's more! During the commercial breaks, I will also personally call each of the viewing parties and thank everybody in attendance for their support (so it would be awesome if you have speaker phone). If you are a private venue and don't want your phone number being made public, no problem. All comments on this Blog are moderated before they are approved. Simply include the phone number in your comment, along with a note advising me it's not public. I'll then copy it down and delete it before approving the comment.

Now for the legal stuff: these viewing parties are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or in any other way approved by Chiller, NBC, Universal, or their subsidiaries. Neither they, nor myself, nor Moderncine or its subsidiaries are responsible for anything that might happen during these events. So if a power outage causes customers to riot in your bar, or you invite a serial killer into your home, that's on you.

I also want to stress that if your party is a private party in your home for just you and your friends, it should not be listed here (unless you want me making your address public). The parties on this list will all be considered as open to the public.