Michael A. Arnzen's Blog: News from Gorelets.com, page 30

Enter the Tweetnest

I've added a new subpage to gorelets.com that will collect and archive all my posts to twitter.com, so you don't have to go to their website and try to hunt for them.

Enter the Tweetnest.

What I like about this is not only will it allow me to keep a record of all those brief snippets of weirdness that I've posted that are hard to find in twitter's archives, but it also lets readers like you search for things that you'd have a hard time finding on twitter itself, and it doesn't require signing up for twitter to do so at all (though I think you should).

You can find some fun things in the Gorelets Tweetnest, by searching for keywords of your interest or filtering archives by month.  Keyword searches are pretty cool. (Quick example: try a search for "amazon" and you'll get a list of all the books I've recommended on twitter over the past two years).  You can also see "pre-focused discussions" used by twitter #hashtags.  If you enter a "hashtag" (basically a keyword preceded by a # sign) in the search, you can filter the list to show only one conversation or thread.  You have to know what these are first, but if you spot a #hashtag mentioned in a tweet, try searching for it on my tweetnest rather than clicking on it (which will take you to twitter itself) — and you'll cut out a lot of noise.

Example:   search for "#whohorrors", and you can read all the twisted puns on songs by The Who I ran during last year's superbowl party.  Other fun #hashtag searches might be: #zombiehaiku,  #nanowrimo, #retrospective

So if you like the "Twitter Litter" department only available in the e-mail edition of the newsletter, you'll like the new web-based Tweetnest.

[With thanks to Andy Graulund for sharing the system!]

2010 Halloween Haiku Contest Winners

The 2010 Halloween Haiku Caption Contest was difficult to judge, and all the entries were fantastic. Thank you for captioning all those weird art pieces!  We'll do it again sometime.

It was difficult to pick one, but to me the clear winner is FJ Bergmann (fibitz.com), for penning a gross little number inspired by the art piece, "Fountain of Worm." Bergmann's haiku has dynamic action, impending doom, good reference to the image, and great language use, all telling a unique story in just 17 syllables!:

FOUNTAIN OF WORM

quivering with need

undulating, gorged with blood

the gut villi wait

– FJ Bergmann

FJ wins a free trade paperback of the book, HE IS LEGEND, edited by Christopher Conlon for Tor Books.  I'll deface my story in that book with my signature scrawl. Maybe draw some book-worms, even. And then to make up for that I'll toss in an extra Arnzen book of some kind as a bonus.

I wasn't planning on a 2nd place prize, but I really liked the unsettling suggestions evoked by Terrie Leigh Relf's entry for the drawing, "Angry Bird", too, so she's winning a free copy of Audiovile on CD:

ANGRY BIRD

so many ravens

gathering around my house

those eyes. . .those blue eyes

– TL Relf

We'll have more contests like this in the future, so be sure to subscribe to The Goreletter so you don't miss a chance.  In the mean time, check out everyone's twisted haiku!  And do feel free to post your own captions, share dark poems, and add comments whenever you like on the gallery or photostream!  I appreciate it, and I think all the visitors to gorelets.com really do, too. — Mike Arnzen

p.s. Don't forget to download the free goodies released on this site to celebrate Halloween this year:  a spooky digital wallpaper, and a new audio story set to music about, well, zombie mimes!

Halloween Episode of Horrors at Crimewav.com

There's a bonus treat wiggling around in the filthy bottom of your Halloween candy sack….some hot brass!

Crimewav.com — an excellent podcast of noir crime fiction — is featuring three of my music-enhanced horror stories in a special Halloween Episode of Horrors in a surprise Halloween release tonight.  It's a great way to get a free sampler from my cd,  Audiovile, and you can also hear the new track, "Attack of the Bleu Man Group," if you didn't check it out on gorelets.com earlier this week.  Check it out, and sample some of the other writers on the site, or subscribe to the podcast through iTunes.

Crimewav(e) is run by Seth Harwood, author of the great new urban action thriller, Young Junius, and podcaster extraordinaire.  Seth is famous for serializing his Jack Palms novel, Jack Wakes Up, through free podcasts, which later turned into a major book deal. So visit crimewav.com to see what he and his "Palm Daddies" are up to, review the great roundup of related podcasts he supports, and read his work!

And again, Happy Halloween.  Read something scary.

Behind the Halloween Fire

Behind The Halloween Fire

Happy Halloween! Here's a treat: "Behind the Halloween Fire": original widescreen desktop wallpaper art available at the Arnzen Flickr Gallery, or click on the image above and then save to your computer.

Don't forget: the Halloween Haiku Contest ends tonight (Oct 31st, 2010) at Midnight eastern.  Enter a haiku caption to one of the images in my "Scrawl" gallery for your chance to win a free copy of the new Richard Matheson tribute anthology, He Is Legend (which includes my story, "She Screech Like Me"), along with a surprise treat.  Be sure to read the haiku there for some fun and twisted inspiration.

Halloween Haiku Contest 2010

HE IS LEGEND (Tor, 2010)

[Note: open to all, but as always, you must be an e-mail subscriber to The Goreletter (free!) to win a prize.].

This one's easy. Post a haiku poem related to one of the artpieces on my gallery. Just enter it in the "comments" field, along with your byline (name) and e-mail address. This will automatically publish the poem. All adult language will be censored, so please don't use any — suggest and evoke, instead. Entries are due by Halloween (Oct 31st) at Midnight.

Arbitrary rule: I expect your haiku to be 3 lines long, in a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. No rhyme necessary. Can be humorous, horrific, or traditional in nature. You can enter up to three total. Anything more than that, and I'll report you to the FCC as a perpetrator of spamku.

If I like your haiku best, you'll get a signed copy of the Tor trade paperback edition of He Is Legend, a random horror gift from the Arnzen coffers, and your poem will appear in the next e-mail edition of The Goreletter.

Attack of the Bleu Man Group – Exclusive Halloween Audio Story

Attack of the Bleu Man Group

ATTACK OF THE BLEU MAN GROUP

by Michael A. Arnzen (3.33 mins)

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Happy Halloween! For a surprise treat this year, I am releasing a new humorous zombie story, exclusively in audio format, called "Attack of the Bleu Man Group." It's a wacky musical number, as much as a bizarro fiction reading, in the style of Audiovile. Without giving too much away, I'll just say two things about it: 1) yes, I meant to spell it "bleu," and, 2) "zombie mimes in black berets"! 

Just crank up your speakers and press the red play button above. Or go ahead and download the .mp3 (3.43 MB — right click that link to save it to your computer) for free right now and listen to it whenever you like. (Free for personal use only. All other rights reserved.)

Comments welcome here on the blog, and please do let others know about this strangeness however you can.

If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, then I hope you'll pick up a copy of my cd, Audiovile, which features 16 tracks just as strange as this one, featuring musically-enhanced stories from my book, 100 Jolts, and beyond. You can get it from iTunes or buy the cd itself via cdbaby.com or the publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press. But I'm offering up a special deal to readers of The Goreletter: get a signed CD copy for just $6, postage paid. Order from PayPal by using the button below, or e-mail me if you need to use check or cash.

Get Audiovile on CD -- just $6!

Happy Halloween!

p.s. You can find other audio streams here on gorelets.com, via the "audio" tag.

Reading in Morgantown 10.21

I'll be reading this coming Thursday, October 21, in Morgantown, West Virginia as featured guest at the Morgantown Poets society at the Monongalia Arts Center, 107 High St., 7pm. If they record it, I'll post a link here later on. Details on this and other future appearances can be found at booktour.com.

Goreletter 6.02 Mailed

The Goreletter Vol. 6, #2 was e-mailed to subscribers on 10/20/10 @ 1:44am est. It contains extra material not available here on the weblog version, including a haiku contest exclusive to subscribers.

If you subscribe and did not receive this issue, e-mail me for a replacement or review the archives at gorelets.com.

Subscribe today…it's free and you can always unsubscribe if it terrorizes you too much. Issues are mailed only a few times per year, so your inbox won't suffocate.

Happy Halloween,

– Michael A. Arnzen

Philosophies of Horror: Matt Cardin and Thomas Ligotti

The horror genre seems to attract two dominant personality types: those who love the emotional thrill of fear and shock for its own sake, and deep thinkers who enjoy musing over the alternative possibilities promised by the Unknown. On the latter score, some authors approach the ideas of life, death, and the great beyond with impressive sophistication and scholarly research that often supersedes their fictional imaginings. Stephen King's non-fiction titles (Danse Macabre, On Writing) are seminal works of criticism. Anne Rice's musings on the church are followed by many. Dean Koontz wrote the book on Writing Popular Fiction. China Mieville writes Marxist criticism. HP Lovecraft wrote a virtual bible for author's of the weird tale (no, not the Necronomicon; I'm talking about his essay, "The Supernatural in Horror Literature"). And, of course, Poe's criticism is oft-cited in courses that study theories of the short story. The history of scary authorship almost requires a philosophical contemplation of the abyss. Call it a "dark theology." It's worth gazing into.



Two notable books in this subgenre were published in the independent press this year that strongly remind us of the serious business of horror and spirituality: Dark Awakenings by Matt Cardin and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. The latter is a fantastically written philosophical treatise advocating pessimism about the human existence. With all the sophistication of doctoral thesis in Philosophy, Ligotti argues, essentially, an idea he's been employing in his scary fiction for many years: that man lies to himself about existence all the time, that other unseen and unknowable forces may be pulling our puppet strings, and that THOSE STRINGS might themselves be a construct of our imaginations, because our existence could be meaningless after all.

Reminiscent of Emil Cioran's wonderfully depressing book of aphorisms, The Trouble With Being Born, Ligotti's "Conspiracy" is a twisted celebration of pessimism — at times laugh-out-loud funny in its bold disregard for any hope for humanity and other times downright convincing in its unflinching suggestion that life is a "malignantly useless" enterprise, and that suffering is inherent to this existential condition. Ligotti's philosophy is three levels beyond atheism, and requires a strong-minded reader to really accept his position. Yet I loved Ligotti's book, because it so smartly builds an audacious case in support of the idea that human extinction might not be such a bad thing, and he does so in such an earnest and serious voice that the prose, simply, convinces. A downer on downers, a love letter to the suicidal, this book challenges our assumptions in a way that I wish more writers would try to do.

I won't say more, because the book deserves a more thorough review than I can give here. Look it up at Hippocampus Press and see if, well, if you can handle it.



If so, don't stop there. Pick up another book just as engaging, but whose net is more widely cast in its focus on belief and cosmic dread, called Dark Awakenings by Matt Cardin.

Cardin's project as a writer is vast — and he seems just as interested in what it is that makes us monkeys squeal as he is in what lies beyond in the cosmos. It is rare to come across a writer as earnestly focused on this sort of thing as Matt Cardin (who, incidentally is also a scholar OF Ligotti — and in many ways follows in his shadows).

Dark Awakenings offers generous heapings of fiction and "dark theology": there are seven high quality Weird Tales (in the proper sense of that phrase, as many of them are eldritch stories, directly or indirectly related to the Cthulhu Mythos) and three artful, multi-part works of literary criticism on the diverse religious and philosophical elements of supernatural tales (from the Bible to Romero films). My copy — which you can special-order from the quality publishers at Mythos Books — not only contained the 120,000 words of prose in a quality hardcover package, but also even came with an audio CD of dark music (much of driven by creepy synthesizers and voice samples of lines from various film and radio programs — ultimately sounding something like quotes from Aleister Crowley's dream journal) composed by Cardin's alter-ego, Daemonyx, called "Night of the Daemon." I enjoyed this multigenre approach. You get a hefty bundle of "awakenings" that really reward the experience with a sustained study of the limits and hopes of religion, the phenomenological experience of dread, the undercurrent of primordial fear in everyday life, and the figurative and literal meanings of the supernatural.

In other words, you get something with serious intellectual heft.

One might presume that a book should only come at you with one approach — i.e., that a reader can only hold a work of fiction, or one of non-fiction, in their hands at once. And it's true that many lesser writers might produce something schizoid if they attempted this dual approach to dread. But the exact opposite is true in Cardin's case: these two genres of writing inform each other in an interesting way, so that by the time you finish the stories and turn to the criticism, you are eager to learn more about the writer's worldview; and when you get to the end, you've learned so much more that you want to turn right back to the beginning and start reading the fiction all over again. And it does reward a second read: Cardin is deft at writing in both genres, because he writes with such a centered focus.

Cardin's writing is at once scholarly and imaginatively rich, but throughout this book you can't help but pick up the author's sense of conviction about the material and his respect for the gutsy legacy of the genre. It is not that he preaches about spirituality; instead, he reasons with his audience and appeals to their sense of wonder…and then leads us into a voluntary contemplation of the abyss. No, not a contemplation, that's too weak a word for Cardin's project. Instead, it is a full bore immersion into oblivion, where neither reason nor emotion can really save you, and you have to transcend or succumb to a larger, sublime reality. Good, ambitious, horror fiction has always done this, reveling in the irrational by pulling the rug out from underneath reason's footing to spill the reader into a vacuum of possibility.

Cardin, following in Lovecraft's tradition, is more interested in crafting and musing over the cosmic horrors that threaten to render us insignificant…when they aren't otherwise threatening to lash our heads off with a tentacled thwack. Rife with dream imagery, and one curious eye flittering about the liminal edge of the abyss, Cardin's storytelling is effective in its tricky balancing act of spiritual curiosity and primordial dread. Some of it will be a bit philosophically pensive for most reader's taste. This sort of writing may appeal mostly to fans who already share the author's worldview. It's somewhat telling that the opening story, "Teeth," is written in first person from the perspective a grad student in philosophy. Not all readers will be able to identify with that sort of protagonist, who seems a modern echo of Lovecraft's classic scholars-driven-to-insanity-by-indulging-their-relentless-intellectual-curiosity. But then again, who can't help but see one's self mirrored by the narrator of "Teeth," when he peers into a colleague's notebook and finds himself pulled into the "obscene infinitude" of a mandala filled with "trillions of teeth" that begin to chew away at his mind? That's >our< mind being consumed by the story as we read. And all the stories are engaging in this same manner.

While Cardin's fiction remains potent, the lengthy critical essays in this volume are really important contributions to horror scholarship, and are more grounded in literary history and criticism than Ligotti's book, which draws mostly from existential philosophers -- some long forgotten. Cardin's first essay surveys a history of the angel and demon in canonical fiction, opening the reader's eyes to the precedents for these figures in contemporary literature, and revealing their meanings beyond the dominant Christian iconography we find all too familiar. An essay on George Romero's nihilistic Living Dead film series explores the way the cannibalistic zombie icon raises issues related to the body and spirit (and fans of Kim Paffenroth's Stoker-award winning book, Gospel of the Living Dead, will feel amply rewarded by Cardin's essay). Cardin's collection culminates with a close reading of the appearance of monstrous chaos — and the problem of "anti-closure" — in the biblical book of Isaiah. All three essays echo one another's central theme, while illuminating the problems the horror genre has been posing to mankind and meaning alike for centuries, in the process.

Either of these two books would make great fodder in a course in the Philosophy of Horror and Belief. You don't need a professor to give you the syllabus; enroll yourself in these books, and see what lessons their teeth have to teach you.

Find out more about Dark Awakenings on the author's website:

http://www.mattcardin.com/darkawakenings.html

Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race:

http://www.hippocampuspress.com/mythos-and-other-authors/nonfiction/the-conspiracy-against-the-human-race-by-thomas-ligotti

Hospital Horrorshow

For your next movie night, rent:

Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)

Coma (Crichton, 1978)

Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)