Hunter Shea's Blog, page 9
May 28, 2019
Black-Eyed Children and Bigfoot in the Wild, Wild West
With the re-release of Ghost Mine this week, I thought I’d give you Hellions a little primer on what to expect and some of the real history and lore behind the story. I literally put everything but the kitchen sink into Ghost Mine, so like a good Boy or Girl Scout, you need to be prepared.
When it originally came out as Hell Hole, I got a ton of letters asking me about the eerie black-eyed kids (not the Black Eyed Peas) that pop up in the book. There are numerous tales about these strange children in paranormal history. Here’s a great article by UFOlogist Ryan Sprague about the big, bad BEC’s – CAN WE COME IN?
Now, you know how much I love Bigfoot. In the era that Ghost Mine takes place, there were tales in the west about hairy Wild Men, but it was decades before they were given the terrible nickname, Bigfoot. Here’s a great article about the Wild Men of yesteryear I found in Cowboys & Indians Magazine called TALL TALES.
Aside from being cowboys, our heroes, Nat Blackburn and Teta Delacruz, are war veterans, having ridden with Teddy Roosevelt as part of his Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War in Cuba. Check out this nice and short video on the tough as nails Rough Riders.
Ghost Mine is set in the abandoned mining town of Hecla, Wyoming, which is an actual mining ghost town! Reading about it is what inspired me to write the book. A couple of years ago, some dude made a video of his trip to Hecla. I kept waiting for something to snatch this guy up and drag him into a mine. If he even was in Hecla. Either way, it amused me for a spell.
Of course, the book is also chocked full of stories of ghosts, Djinn and so much more. I invite you all to mosey on down to your bookstore or laptop to rustle up a copy of Ghost Mine and tell me what you think of my yarn. I’ll be tipping back a bottle of whiskey and waitin’ for you to come a calling.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE HARDCOVER, PAPERBACK, EBOOK OR AUDIOBOOK.
May 14, 2019
Digging Into Ghost Mine
After a minor delay, GHOST MINE is only two weeks away. Formerly known as Hell Hole, my little weird western has just about everything you can imagine within its pages. Cowboys, Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Riders, ghost towns, abandoned mines, a love story, mystery, Bigfoot, Black-Eyes kids, ghosts, demons and so much more.
I haven’t written anything like it before or since. What was the inspiration behind this bizarre tale? I opened up about reasons why I chose to head west over at DARK TALES . Check it out to get a little behind the scenes insight into how many books come to be.
Click here to read the Ghost Mine origin story!
May 7, 2019
One For All The Vampire Lovers
Those of you who know me know I’m not a vampire guy. I leave that for my comrade in Monster Men arms, Jack Campisi. But when I was asked to write an essay about an offbeat vampire movie, I was actually excited. My initial thought was to wax poetic about The Hunger, starring David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. Alas, someone had already taken it. (By the way, some other vampire movies I dig are Rabid, Near Dark and Let The Right One In)
Luckily, no one had snagged my actual vamp favorite, The Vampire Lovers, starring the lovely Ingrid Pitt. I recently took my daughter to see it in 35MM at the Alamo and she loved it, too. Chip off the old beast.
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Well, if you’re a lover of vampires in cinema, you’ll definitely want to check out STRANGE BLOOD.
STRANGE BLOOD contains my ‘insightful’ essay on The Vampire Lovers and 70 other off the beaten track vampire flicks. Here’s a little on the book:
This is an overview of the most offbeat and underrated vampire movies spanning nine decades and 23 countries.
Strange Blood encompasses well-known hits as well as obscurities that differ from your standard fang fare by turning genre conventions on their head. Here, vampires come in the form of cars, pets, aliens, mechanical objects, gorillas, or floating heads. And when they do look like a demonic monster or an aristocratic Count or Countess, they break the mold in terms of imagery, style, or setting. Leading horror writers, filmmakers, actors, distributors, academics, and programmers present their favorite vampire films through in-depth essays, providing background information, analysis, and trivia regarding the various films. Some of these stories are hilarious, some are terrifying, some are touching, and some are just plain weird. Not all of these movies line up with the critical consensus, yet they have one thing in common: they are unlike anything you’ve ever seen in the world of vampires. Just when you thought that the children of the night had become a tired trope, it turns out they have quite a diverse inventory after all.
That synopsis have your blood running? Then pick up Strange Blood today!
April 29, 2019
Disturbing the Peace of Mind – Guest Post by JG Faherty
Like my wife, I’m sure you Hellions need a break from me from time to time. Put your hands together and give a warm welcome for author JG Faherty and by all means, pick up a copy of his latest book, Houses of the Unholy.
I thought long and hard about what to write for my guest post. And I decided rather than talk about what scares me, or why I wrote a certain book, or why does everyone love zombies (or vampires, or clown-faced killers), I would write about what I hope for from the things I write. Most horror writers will say they want to scare their readers, or entertain them, or perhaps maybe even make them think about this social or political issue. And that’s all true to a degree.
But for me, there’s something else.
What I like to write are stories that make you uncomfortable.
There are a lot of ways to do that. You can hit readers over the head with buckets of gore and you can sneak up behind them and give them a jump scare. Keep them at the edge of their seat with non-stop action or be so subtle they don’t even know they’re scared until later that night while they’re lying in bed with the lights off and still thinking about that certain scene in the story.
A lot of horror writers tend to stay within a specific sub-genre. Zombies. Splatter. Extreme. Weird. Vampires. Werewolves. Kaiju. Ghosts. Torture Porn. Suspense. You name it, there’s someone specializing in it. And that’s great. All of us have different tastes, and that shapes what we like to read and what writers like to write.
I’m a little different. I guess you could call me a throwback. I’ve never stayed within the lines of a certain sub-genre, or even a genre at all, unless you consider the broad descriptor of dark fiction. I primarily write horror, but sometimes it drifts into the areas of weird fiction, thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction. I’ve written about supernatural creatures, haunted houses, serial killers, and zombies.
As a child, I discovered horror by reading Poe, Shelley, and Stoker. But I also devoured The Hardy Boys, Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury. I watched all the classic Universal monster movies but I also never missed the reruns of the sci-fi classics from the 1950s: Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, The Blob. As I got a little older, I learned many of the movies were made from books, so I read the books, too. In my teens, I discovered gore. Faces of Death, I Spit on Your Grave, Motel Hell, Evil Dead, and so many others. In college, I read every horror novel and short story anthology to hit the bookstores, from King and Koontz and Straub to Garton, Skipp, Spector, and McCammon. I went back and ‘discovered’ the authors I’d missed as a kid. Manly Wade Wellman, Karl Edward Wagner. And I also still read sci fi (Alan Dean Foster, James Bliss, Heinlein, etc.).
Over time, as a reader, I came to know what I liked and what I didn’t. When I got to my thirties, I no longer cared for splatter or torture porn. I preferred books that had complex plots, that ratcheted up the suspense chapter after chapter, that sent shivers up your spine because you didn’t know what was going to happen next.
And, when I started writing, I stayed true to that form.
It’s easy to go for the gross out, for the quick disembowelment, the body tossed in the wood chipper. Something like that might make you flinch, or gag. But for me, that kind of scene never stayed with you, and often it ended up more silly than scary.
I wanted to write things that make people keep the lights on at night, not laugh about how someone’s intestines got used to hang their mother.
So I’ve always stuck to the plan that I have no plan. If the story in my head calls for no blood, then there’s no blood. If it calls for buckets, then there are buckets. As long as it’s necessary for the plot. I veer away from the gratuitous, the unnecessary. When it comes to gore, a little can go a long way. I won’t skip on the zombie eating its victim’s organs, I just won’t spend 3 pages describing it. A few sentences ought to suffice, and then let the readers’ imaginations do the rest.
With all that in mind, when it came time to do my latest collection of short stories, Houses of the Unholy, I wanted it to run the gamut from violent to comic, from supernatural to all-too-real, and from straight horror to those places in between genres.
Most of my stories do tend to be ‘classic’ horror; there’s something supernatural, somewhere. It might be the major point of the story or a subplot, but it’s there. Beyond that, I like to think there’s something for everyone here, whatever you happen to enjoy.
I hope that, like the younger me, you’ll read broadly, and maybe discover something new. Something that sends a shiver up your spine and keeps you awake at night.
Something that disturbs your peace of mind.
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A life-long resident of New York’s haunted Hudson Valley, JG Faherty has been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award® (The Cure, Ghosts of Coronado Bay) and ITW Thriller Award (The Burning Time), and he is the author of 6 novels, 9 novellas, and more than 60 short stories. His latest collection, Houses of the Unholy, is available now, and it includes a new novella, December Soul. His next novel, Hellrider, comes out in August of 2019. He grew up enthralled with the horror movies and books of the 1950s, 60, 70s, and 80s, which explains a lot. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/jgfaherty, http://www.facebook.com/jgfaherty, http://www.jgfaherty.com, and http://jgfaherty-blog.blogspot.com/
April 23, 2019
Hanging With Author, Director and Actor Terry M. West
Terry M. West is living the dream. Or at least my dream. My horror dreams. He’s done just about everything within the horror genre and has a hell of a lot of war stories under his belt. I first came to know him a few years ago, thanks to the magic of social media. We formed an instant mutual appreciation society. I was thrilled to provide the forward to his book, GRUESOME: A GATHERING OF NIGHTMARES.
We had talked for some time about having him on Monster Men, but life and scheduling always got in the way. Despite some technical issues at the start, we finally made it happen! Terry talks about directing Caroline Munro, horror cons and an incredible secret about his start in writing. We did not see that coming. Check out our interview with an all around awesome guy below…
And when you’re done, check out his bestselling story, CAR NEX. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out how to steal Terry’s wicked cool office.
April 15, 2019
Why Do We Love Slashers?
If you’re a horror fan, odds are you love slasher flicks. Who is your all time favorite slasher villain? I’m partial to big ol lumbering Jason.
But have you ever stopped to ask yourself WHY you love watching some maniac chase and mutilate scores of people? Before you run out to make an appointment with a therapist to find out why you’re so twisted, check out my latest VIDEO VISIONS column over at Cemetery Dance Online. In what will be a year of exploring slasher movies, I start by pondering our bizarre fascination with slashers. The answer is simpler than you think. Although it may make you question some life choices. And if you have a particular slasher or movie topic you’d like me to explore in a future column, let me know. Great and demented minds do think alike.
April 10, 2019
On Dracula’s Castle and Pet Sematary
What’s shakin’ Hellions? Remember the old Marvel Two-In-One comics where The Thing was paired each month with a new superhero? Well, I may not have scrapped against the Yancy Street Gang, but I can present a horror two-in-one.
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First up on Monster Men, author J.H. Moncrieff takes us on a tour of Dracula’s Castle and the Haunted Forest of Romania. I am green with envy. Or is it pea soup?
Next, the Final Guys travel up to Maine to see if we can reunite with our beloved pets of the past. Does the new Pet Sematary rise above the original? Church still smells bad.
April 1, 2019
The Horror Movies of 1987
The Monster Men are kicking off a new series of episodes where we go back in time and look at the horror movies that came out in a specific year. We started it all off with 1987 (the last year I was a single man) and boy, what a year! It may be the best of all time. Give the episode a watch and tell me what you think. What was your favorite horror movie of 1987? Also, what years would you like us to explore next?
March 25, 2019
Bugging Out With TICKS
As a man who makes his stock-in-trade trade in creature features, I make it a point to watch as many monster flicks as possible. Somehow, I missed the 1993 horror/scifi romp, TICKS. That was the year my wife got seriously ill, so there are quite a few things that flew under my radar. Cut to years later and I always assumed I had watched it. Well, I hadn’t…until now.
I’ve had TICKS on my Amazon Prime watch list for a while now. If I had realized it was Ami Dolenz on the poster, I would have watched it sooner. The daughter of Monkee Mickey Dolenz, I crushed on her when she played a genie in the movie Miracle Beach.
If you’re looking for pure icky bug mayhem and some gooey gore, TICKS is for you. We start with a very young Seth Green being sent to one of those city kids goes to the woods camp. He meets a street thug who threatens to kill him if he doesn’t make a free throw. That gutter punk is none other than dancing Carlton, AKA Alfonso Ribeiro. It’s wig flipping to watch him play the tough kid who also sells dope on the side. They’re picked up in a van by couple Holly (played by Rosalind Allen, who I remember from the soap, Santa Barbara, but was also the marine biologist on Seinfeld) and Charles (Peter Scolari, from Newhart and Bosom Buddies – ever wonder how much he truly hates Tom Hanks?). Their sullen daughter is along for the trip and they’re joined by bad boy Ray, his main squeeze Dee Dee (Ami Dolenz) and a girl who never talks.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Clint Howard is a filthy redneck who has some insane contraption that pumps steroids into his marijuana plants? It looks like something the Little Rascals or Bugs Bunny would make, only less sturdy.
That weird goo is what drips on a tick and starts the whole shit storm. I always let out a little cheer when I see Clint in a movie. He’s this generation’s Dick Miller (RIP). The ticks pupate in these ooey-gooey egg sacks and when they pop out, they’re about the size of a man’s hand. Giant ticks skitter everywhere, latching onto faces and backs, crawling up pants and burrowing under rippling flesh.
This is all practical effects and it’s glorious. Be warned, a dog gets the tick treatment and he does not fare well. The third act is freaking bonkers, with hordes of ticks descending on the cabin, pot farmers looking to kill the wilderness kids and something growing inside Carlton. I don’t want to give too much away, but take my word and watch it if you haven’t already. Alas, there’s no nudity, but you do get Dolenz in a very teeny black bikini. There’s plenty of slime and blood and ticks exploding like pus filled popcorn when flame touches them.
I wonder how Seth Green feels about this movie. If you didn’t know better, you would swear he would never get another acting gig. He’s that bad. But hey, he was young and learning. Without this, we might not get Buffy or Robot Chicken!
It’s been a while since I posted a movie review, but I felt this was good penance to make up for missing TICKS for the past 26 years. It is now my job to preach the word. The only thing creepier than the ticks in the movie are the millions of ticks around my house carrying Lyme Disease. Thank you, Plum Island buttholes for creating that little gift.
Now, go watch TICKS. I have to attend to my chiggers.
Oh, and if you revel in the squeamish delight of TICKS, your skin will crawl with joy when you read THE DEVIL’S FINGERS. Swap out bugs for a killer fungus and let the games begin!
March 21, 2019
Fu** Your MFA
This isn’t me crapping on MFA (a Master of Fine Arts) degrees or everyone who has worked hard to get one. I know quite a few damn good people who have one they can add to their resume. This is about elitism and misguided entitlement. You can expand this from the microcosm of writing to all things great and small in our society.
For years, I’ve heard select MFA holders put down writers who they believe don’t possess such a degree, referring to them as hacks or worse. To them, only he or she who wears the MFA crown has the necessary skills to put words to paper. The rest of us are here to be dazzled by their command of the English language and storytelling prowess. I came across such a troll recently who lambasted my writing on Goodreads, basically saying I didn’t have the skills to be a good writer because it was apparent I never received the proper education to do the very thing I’ve been working at for over a decade. I read it and laughed, then looked up their name to find their writing credits. I wasn’t surprised to find zippo. (By the way, I’m a college graduate who never scored less than a 90 in English my entire life.)
Truth be told, the review didn’t make me angry. My skin is thicker than an elephant’s hide. If you’re going to do this for a living, you can’t let the bad or even the good reviews get to your head. What does make my blood boil is when I see a trend that deeply hurts earnest, honest writers.
An MFA degree doesn’t make you a writer, just as going to astronaut camp doesn’t qualify you for a stint on the ISS. In many cases, an MFA degree does put you in some serious debt, hoping to strike it rich in an industry that is pretty darn parsimonious when it comes to paychecks. As an author friend once said, better to learn a trade and be a fucking plumber.
I learned all I needed to know about becoming a writer from a chance meeting with the great Elmore Leonard. It was the late 90s and I was at a two day writers conference in New York City. I’d spent money I didn’t have to be there, hoping to learn from those who had scaled the mountain. I was in a classroom, sitting in the back because I had a hard time finding it and was almost late. A famous thriller author was giving a talk about the publishing process, but it was really an examination of the neurosis of a writer who never felt as if his stuff was good enough.
A small, older man sat next to me during the class. At one point, he leaned over and asked if I’d spent a lot of money to be there. I gave a quick answer, wishing he’d leave me be. He then said, “You see all these people? None of them will ever be writers. Don’t waste your money. You really want to be a writer?” Slightly annoyed, I said, “Of course.”
He said, “Then go home. Read a ton. Then write a ton. That’s all there is to it.”
I thanked him for the advice and shifted my attention back to the real author in the front of the room. When the class ended, the old man shuffled out and I headed for the next session. When lunch came, I grabbed a table by the podium, chatting with a world famous bestseller. Imagine my surprise when they brought that older man up to be the key speaker. It was Elmore Leonard!
I realized in that moment that I’d just gotten invaluable wisdom from a man who’d published more books than every writer at the conference combined. Who the hell was I not to listen to him? I vowed that day to never attend a writing conference. I was already a voracious reader, but I stepped up my writing game. Read a ton. Write a ton. I could do this.
And I did. As have so many others, all without the benefit of an MFA. You don’t need any high falutin’ qualifications to be a writer, other than a command of your native language, imagination, and limitless passion. I don’t care what degrees you have and don’t have, and neither do editors. Tell a damn good story they think will sell.
If you think your MFA makes you a better writer than someone who gets paid to write and publishes book after book, it’s time to dispel yourself of that delusion. That degree, especially if you’re not writing and publishing, is worth as much as the paper it was printed on. You are not entitled to a damn thing. You need to earn it. That means get off your high horse and get down in the mud and muck and write. Then go bust your hump finding someone to publish your work. Stop criticizing those who have accomplished the very thing that inspired you to get that degree. You are not the elite. You’re just a regular person who spent more on school.
Over the years, I’ve found that writers rarely criticize other writers because we all share the same story, the same grind. We not only know how the sausage is made – our hands are in it day after day. So next time you want to use your MFA to tear down another person, take a good, hard look at yourself and like most opinions, keep it to yourself. Writing is a great equalizer. You’d know it if you did it.
