C.R. Langille's Blog, page 14

Quick Tip Survival: Dandelions & Mallow

If you find yourself out in the wilds, or even just want to eat organic, healthy foods that Mother Nature provides, take a close look at the dandelion. The dandelion is abundant in many parts of the world and the entire plant can be eaten! The leaves can be added to salads (although I would recommend getting them early, otherwise they can be bitter); the roots can be chopped up, ground up, or even eaten raw (I’ve heard that the roots can be ground up and used as a coffee substitute); the flowers themselves can be used in tea, eaten, or even made into wine. Some of the health benefits of dandelions are that they are high in Vitamin A, C, and K. They are also heavy with antioxidants and can help draw toxins from the body. Next up is the mallow plant. It’s another common plant that gets a bad rap as a weed. It can eaten and used as an anti-inflammatory. This plant is rich with Vitamins A, C and high in calcium, magnesium and potassium. Careful though, this plant has been used as a laxative, so don’t go eating a bunch (unless that’s your goal). All parts of the plant can be eaten, and if you know what you are doing (look up directions) you can make a true marshmallow.  
I’ve personally used both of these plants in green smoothies and they work great! I’ve also utilized dandelion root to treat infections, and it seemed to do the trick. I chewed the roots up to release all the wonderful goodness, and then placed them on the affected area for a couple of hours. When I removed the bandage, the area didn’t look nearly as angry as before. Could have been a coincidence, or it could have been the dandelion root helping draw some of those toxins out. Either way, both dandelion and mallow can be found in a lot of different places throughout the year. One word of caution, be careful where you harvest these plants. Make sure it is in an area void of pollution and chemicals. If you are unsure whether or not the area is treated with chemicals, just pass on by.

Consequence Special Edition Release

Griffin Publishers revealed the cover art for the special edition release of my novel, Consequence. The artist is Adam Miconi who was amazing to work with. Included in the special edition will be a preview of my next novel, Canyon Shadows that explore more events surrounding the Dark Tyrant. Consequence will be available in June.

Quick Tip Horror: Building Dread with Knowledge and Questions

What is horror? Ask a group of people that question and you’ll get a plethora of answers. According to our good friends at Merriam-Webster, the official definition is: 
Horror—a very strong feeling of fear, dread, and shock. 
So the burning question on everyone’s mind is, how the hell do you create something that instills a very strong feeling of fear, dread, and shock? It’s a slippery slope of information rationing; give too much, and it’s no longer scary, withhold too much, and you’ll just frustrate readers with the endless questions with no answers. 
Let’s look at the following passage from Stephen King’s “Mile 81”:
Doug reached for the door handle, then thought better of it and stooped to peer through the opening. What he saw was dismaying. The bench seat was covered with mud; so were the dashboard and the steering wheel. Dark goo dripped from the old-fashioned knobs of the radio, and on the wheel were prints that didn’t look exactly as if hands had made them. The palm prints were awfully big, for one thing, but the finger marks were as narrow as pencils. (“Mile 81”—by Stephen King)
What worked with this piece? Let me break it down.
Doug reached for the door handle, then thought better of it and stooped to peer through the opening. (King builds tension here with the character hesitant to open the door. There’s something screaming in his protagonist’s reptile brain, and both as a character and a reader, we want to know what’s going on. We want to know what Doug saw in the car that made him hesitate. King has given us some info, but left things unanswered. It’s that fear of the unknown that has created the first hook.) What he saw was dismaying. (More information, but more questions. What did he see? I want to know. Why was it dismaying?) The bench seat was covered with mud; so were the dashboard and the steering wheel. Dark goo dripped from the old-fashioned knobs of the radio, and on the wheel were prints that didn’t look exactly as if hands had made them. (Holy crap! Why is the car in such a state, and even more concerning, what made the prints on the wheel? I need to know more!) The palm prints were awfully big, for one thing, but the finger marks were as narrow as pencils.(This is a great example of slowly building up that feeling of dread.) (“Mile 81”—by Stephen King)
The above passage from King’s short story strikes a good balance between the give and take relationships of creating horror. The scene could have been ruined easily if he answered too many of the questions, or if he didn’t give enough description at all. A person’s mind will fill in the blanks with details more horrifying than you could ever come up with, but you have to seed that person’s mind with the necessary foundation to foster the horror. This ideal is constantly destroyed in horror movies. Think about it. How many movies featuring a monster or a killer have you seen where they keep the killer in the shadows? That technique keeps the viewer on edge far more than when they show the creature/killer, bringing it/them into the light. Once they drag the critter from the shadows, the illusion of horror is destroyed with cheesy effects. A similar thing happens with writing. If you reveal your creature too soon, it loses some of its hold on the reader. There is a time and place for the reveal, but too soon isn’t that time or place. Now that you have this tip, go write a scene utilizing the balance between giving and withholding information. Post it in the comments, I'd love to see what kind of nightmares you dream up.

World Horror Con Retrospective

​World Horror Con 2016 came and went in a flash! I have to say this, it was great being around a bunch of folks who share my passion for horror and writing. I was able to meet and reconnect with a lot of great, talented people in the industry such as Jack Ketchum, Brian Keene, Joe McKinney, and Michael Arnzen. I even got to sit on a panel with most of them which was amazing. I was on a panel talking about Utah Horror and how it’s growing; I was also on a panel about short fiction vs novels; and I moderated a panel about graduate degrees and writing. If you missed it and have any questions about any of them, I’d be more than happy to take any questions.
If you’ve never been to a convention, I can’t recommend it enough. Nothing gets the creative fires going faster than three to four days of nothing but horror and writing. Not to mention the networking opportunities alone are worth their weight in gold. There are plenty of conferences and conventions out there, all you need to do is find one that interests you and go to it. Worst thing that could happen is you walk away the same as when you walked in (okay, sure there are plenty of “worst things” especially when dealing with the horror genre, but we’ll assume we’re living in a semi-safe environment…just don’t read that old musty tome out loud, and whatever you do, don’t play with that fun looking puzzle box). Best case, you walk away with some more friends and some education.
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Some highlights of the convention for me were the panels, the gross out competition (can’t mention what happened in this venue, you’re just going to have to attend one, that is if you have the stomach for it), and the crazy noises coming from the film festival. I was manning the Utah Horror Writers Association booth a lot of the time and the film festival was going on right behind us. It’s almost as fun trying to figure out what was happening based off the sounds coming from the films as it was watching them. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for next year and where the next World Horror Con is going to take place.

Black Mountain Side Movie Review

​I recently watched a movie called Black Mountain Side directed by Nick Szostakiwskyj. It was released in January of 2016 in the USA. The description of the movie is what pulled me in to begin with, stating that a group of archaeologists find a structure buried in the ground in Northern Canada that is over ten thousand years old. As they continue to unearth the structure, their communications equipment fail and they find themselves stranded and begin to lose their sanity—very Lovecraftian from the description.
 
The movie was actually pretty interesting from the Lovecraftian standpoint. They bring in an expert who helps them try to identify the culture that built the structure and offer other tidbits of information. As they continue, workers begin to disappear, seeming to walk off the dig site into the Canadian wilderness, which given the location and the time of year basically equates to death sentence. 
​I’ll get into some spoilers later in this, but overall, I really enjoyed the slow pacing and build-up of tension as the team starts to lose their shit. Some of them start seeing and hearing things, while others become violent. For me, the story goes off the rails and loses steam with the ending which wasn’t a complete bummer, but it wasn’t the satisfying end I was hoping for. The acting is a sub-par in some spots, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from this kind of movie. Another thing that was kind of a letdown was the fact that the movie never shows you any of the artifacts they talk about. While not a necessary thing for storytelling, it felt somewhat lazy and probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to manufacture artifacts to show what they were referencing.
 
Overall, it was entertaining and played on some great horror tropes such as isolation, not really explaining or showing things that didn’t need to be shown, and leaving a lot to interpretation. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s hard these days to nail a perfect movie. I’d recommend it to fans of Lovecraftian horror. It felt like a nod to The Thing. I’d give it three out of five cephalopod bacteria.
 
Keep reading for a spoiler review.
The archeological team finds some symbols and artifacts that point out some sort of deer god that was worshiped by the culture that created the structure. There are also markers around the area that were placed later in the timeline by another (different) indigenous group of peoples. I had the sense that the markers were there to keep people away from the site because it was obvious that people who went near started going nuts. The team surmised that it was some sort of bacteria because one of the first people to lose their shit becomes ill, and starts throwing up some black liquid. They end up having to sever the person’s arm because there’s something moving around underneath the skin. After some tests run by the doctor on site, he determined that the bacteria was causing the cells to reform into tiny cephalopod-like creatures (octopus-squid things). This felt very out of place because there is never another connection to squids or octopi ever again in the movie. It almost felt like was force-feeding some Cthulhu-esque mythos into the movie. Plus, the big baddie manifests as an upright deer that talks to the archeologists, urging them to kill one another for various reasons. So I failed to see how the cephalopod angle was relevant or necessary in the movie. On top of that, no one else ever progresses that far into the disease (in that no one ever shows signs of having things move under their skin). In that aspect the story felt a little jumbled. On a different note, I don’t think they were just going crazy, because they all had visions of the same creature. While it’s possible to have a shared hallucination, I don’t think that was the direction the movie was going. 
​I found the deer god interesting on one hand, because it was a departure from what you would expect a malevolent being to manifest as. I mean, how scary is a deer? On the other hand, I never got a sense of what the deer god wanted. Was its motive just to sow chaos? It had the archaeologists at each other’s throats with deception, manipulation and dark little nudges when it was necessary. It was also obvious that the creature was trapped to the structure, because otherwise it would have left a long time ago. However, at one point the deer god asks one of the people, “what makes you think I’m trapped here?” or something similar.
 
Near the end, there are two team members left. One of them is injured via gunshot wound to the guts. He stays behind while the uninjured team-mate makes a run for it hoping to make it to a nearby reservation (a long shot for sure, but they had run out of options). The guy who stays behind gets it in his head to blow up the structure in the hopes that it will destroy the creature. This idea kind of comes out of left field and didn’t make a ton of sense to me.
 
The other guy ends up stepping on a bear trap on his way to the reservation. End of movie. It didn’t answer any questions, which is okay, but it didn’t even put us on the path to make our own inference as to what happened after the structure was destroyed. There just wasn’t enough throughout the film to give me any idea of what that would do, or if the creature wanted him to destroy it, or not. So in that aspect, the movie failed in my mind. But the build-up to that point was fun, reminding me of The Thing as I mentioned before. Worth a watch from a Redbox or if it comes to Netflix if this type of movie is your thing.

Quick Tip Survival: Transpiration Bag

If you find yourself out in the wilds trying to survive and you just can't seem to find any water, worry not! You can use a transpiration bag with little effort on your part. Now I know you packed clear plastic bags in your in your survival/bug-out kit because I mentioned their use in an earlier blog post. Grab one of those divine chalices and find a plant (the larger the better, because they will have the most water. Do NOT use this method on poisonous plants...just don't...I think it will cause you to lose your mind, shit your pants, and possibly die, only to be reborn as some ungodly creature that scours the night preying on unsuspecting humans. But in all seriousness, don't use this on toxic or poisonous plants. If you're unsure, then move along until you are sure).

Once you've selected the plant that gets to endow it's life-giving liquid unto you, then wrap that bag around the greens, at least 3/4 of the way into the bag. Tie the top end off with some cord real tight so it won't fall. You'll also want to use a small rock to keep the corner low so the moisture will collect. Then you wait and let the sun do it's work. The plant inside will go through its magical process and within a few hours, SHAZAM! you've got water. The amount of water you collect will depend on a lot of factors like sun, cloud cover, type and size of plant, etc...but it should produce enough to keep you alive.

​To collect the water you can open up the corner with the rock and drain it into a container. You might want to filter it because sometimes there can be debris or "other" things in there (free protein if you aren't opposed to eating creepy crawlies). You can also place a tube in the bag and use it as a straw if that's your thing. Anyway, that's a quick tip for survival. Make sure you put some clear plastic bags in your survival gear and you can get some water.

Review of the Apparition by Michaelbrent Collings

​I picked up a copy of Apparition by Michaelbrent Collings at the last Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium a couple of months ago. For those of you who don’t know Michaelbrent, he’s billed as a Bestselling author and does quite well in the market. I’ve seen a lot of his work at the local conventions, as well as online, and finally decided to pick something up. The back cover blurb caught my eye and intrigued me:

Every year, thousands of children are killed... by their own parents.
Now, Shane Wills is about to discover why. About to discover an evil that has existed since the beginning of time.
An evil that invades loving parents and turns them into something else. An evil that feeds on the blood and despair of dying children.
An evil that most people will never know, because they cannot perceive the APPARITION.

To top that, his father was at the booth helping sell the books and he told me something along the lines of, that’s the only book of my son’s that I can’t read. It’s too disturbing. Whether true or not, it was a great marketing technique.

The story begins with the protagonist waking up in the middle of the night to his wife trying to kill their daughter with a knife. It quickly spirals into a tale of ghosts, unearthly entities, and constant thoughts of filicide that the protagonist can’t shake.

The story itself is a fast-paced, cinematic read that would make a great horror flick. In fact, many times while I was reading it, it felt as if I were watching movie. On that same note, sometimes I felt like the scares were there for no apparent reason other than to be creepy (#notreallyaproblemnowisit?). I loved the little snippets before each chapter and overall I found the content to be somewhat disturbing. Whether that was due to the fact that I have kids and the thought of killing my own children is horrible, I’m not sure.
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Overall the book is a fun read with some great twists and turns throughout the narrative. I loved the ending and the final confrontation. If you haven’t read Michaelbrent Collings, then this is a great book to start with. Fans of horror, both books and movie alike, should find this read entertaining.

The Dark Tyrant Series

If you follow my Facebook, then you already know the news: Dark Fantasy Press, the publisher that picked up my Dark Tyrant Series, of which Consequence was the first book, has gone out of business. That means they gave me back my rights to the series. For a short time, I didn't know what to do, but I reached out, and was able to strike a deal with Griffin Publishers, the publishing company behind the Utah Horror Writers anthologies, Old Scratch and Owl Hoots, and It Came From the Great Salt Lake.

Consequence will be re-released through Griffin in a few months. If you've already bought the book, don't worry, the only thing that will have changed is some minor typographical errors, and it will have some kick ass new cover art (to be revealed soon). Shortly after that, the second book, Canyon Shadows will be released. I'm already working on the third in the series, Alpha Protocol, and I hope to have it finished by the end of the year. I'd love to have it done sooner, but life gets in the way.

If you don't know about the Dark Tyrant Series let me tell you a bit about it. The series is dark urban fantasy/horror that takes place in Utah. Each book follows a different set of protagonists as they cross paths with the Dark Tyrant and his minions. The Dark Tyrant crashed into the Earth as it was first created, and was locked away deep underground in a prison by the combined forces of the Infernal Legion and the Celestial Armies. As the years passed, the Dark Tyrant regained his strength, slowly corrupting everything around it until it could find a proper host and free itself from its prison. The books themselves can stand alone and you can read the first three in any order. Some of the characters and locations will hop through each book, but it's not necessary to read them in any particular order. The fourth and final book will bring all the main characters together for a final showdown.

Consequence is about a man who is hunting elk in the Utah wilderness with his friends when the demonic apocalypse kicks off. A supernatural storm tears across landscape awakening all sorts of nightmares, as well as latent magical powers in the protagonist. He races to get home to his family, willing to sacrifice everything to make it there on time. The second book, Canyon Shadows is about a Sheriff in a small Utah town and an antiques collector who find more than they were looking for in some ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. The events in Canyon Shadows lead up to the supernatural storm featured in Consequence. Alpha Protocol, the third book, is about a specialized team of soldiers, called an Alpha Team who's sole purpose in life is to respond to supernatural, cataclysmic events. They are dispatched to Salt Lake City to investigate the damage which occurred in Consequence and neutralize the threat before an Omega Team is dispatched to clean up. The Omega Team believes in nothing more than a scorched earth policy to fix problems of that magnitude. The Alpha Team races against the clock and the awakened, nightmarish creatures to get the job done in time.

As I mentioned before, the series is a dark urban fantasy because there is magic of all kinds, monsters, and the main characters can hold their own; however, it's also horror because of the mood, tension and sense of dread throughout the books. I like to think of the series as a really dark Jim Butcher or Simon R. Green mixed with Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft and a smidgen of Dungeons and Dragons. Shake them all up and add my own special ingredient and you get the Dark Tyrant Series. I grew up reading a lot of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. As I got older I transitioned to horror and urban fantasy, so it's no surprise that my own books would have all those elements. Keep an eye on this blog and my Facebook page for more information. 

Review of The Witch and How to Make it Better

​The Witch has garnered a lot of hype lately with the Master of Horror, Stephen King, saying, “The Witch scared the hell out of me. And it’s a real movie, tense and thought-provoking as well as visceral.” Ever since I saw the trailer last year, I’ve been interested in seeing it. Then with King dropping that bomb on Twitter and other sites giving it rave reviews, it was set in stone, I was going to see it.
I saw it Friday, the day of release in an almost empty theater (I guess movies about witchcraft endorsed by the Church of Satan don’t do well in Utah, go figure). As I watched it, I came to three conclusions: first, it’s well shot; the cinematography is amazing and the visuals are stunning. Director, Robert Eggers did an excellent job in that department. It felt like the family was in a remote part of the wilderness, detached from society and trying to make it on their own. The border of the trees representing the forest, and the savage wilds was great, and I felt like it was a barrier not to be passed. I also thought the wardrobe choices, tools and structures were true to the time-period (at least for an uneducated person like me). On top of that, the acting was superb. Dialogue choices, use of old-school language, and situation were spot on. My hat is off to the two small children, Mercy and Jonas played by Ellie Grainer and Lucas Dawson respectively. They did an amazing job for being so young, and really had a hand in some of the creepier parts of the movie.
​Second, I saw that the real story and the real horror if you will, was not about the witch at all, more about the family and its descent into darkness. Eggers showcases the mindset of the people during this setting, and their reliance on religion over everything. The scariest part of this whole story was that this mindset and belief was real and that people acted in such a manner. There is a statement at the end of the film that a lot of what was depicted was lifted from actual accounts from journals, court documents and witness testimony. To watch a family fall apart under the stress of being banished, and the terrible experience of losing a small child is the true horror of the film. It starts early (in fact the beginning of the movie is the family being banished from the town) and doesn’t let up. Don’t get me wrong though, even though the madness starts early, it definitely puts the creep in creepy. It’s a slow burn throughout the film, building into a crescendo that loses steam at the end (more on that in a minute). ​Before I get into the third part of my observation, I want to leave you spoiler free, because the third part requires me to get into spoilers. Overall, the movie as it is, is good. It isn’t great, it isn’t amazing, and it definitely isn’t terrifying in the traditional sense. If you peel away what we think modern horror should be, and look beneath the skin, you can find the real horror in the family losing its shit and falling apart. Don’t go to this movie expecting tons of gore, jump scares, and crazy special effects, because you’ll be disappointed. However, if you are interested in a period piece with some disturbing story content, beautiful visuals and excellent acting, then by all means go for it. One final note before we get to the third portion, is the music. The music was a little heavy handed on the discordant string instruments. I felt like the director was trying to force unease on me in certain scenes by blasting the score. It didn’t feel right, and I don’t think it fit. More so, it became a distraction as the movie went on. 
​Now, on to the third part of my observations. There be spoilers here, so veer off if you don’t want to be spoiled.  ​Still here? Okay, I warned you. So this part deals with why the movie didn’t work in my opinion. As I mentioned before, the real horror of the story isn’t the witch, but in how the family deals with what the witch does. First off, we have the disappearance of Samuel, the infant. He disappears while the main character, the young Thomasin, played by Anya Taylor-Joy (excellent job by the way) is playing peek-a-boo with the child. This is depicted in the trailer, and is pretty creepy. What ruins this scene, is the following one where we see the witch walking through the woods with the baby. We then see her kill the child and bath in its blood. Creepy, sure, but it felt like it was there more as shock factor and maybe to show us why the witch would steal the kid. However, it would be even creepier if we never see this, if all we saw was the baby missing and never know for sure what happened. In fact, it would be best if the witch scenes were stripped from this movie altogether. Then we have a real thought-provoking piece—is there really a witch, or is the family just going insane under all the stress? In fact, think about it, the scene where the boy, Caleb, is out in the woods by himself and he gets drawn to the witch’s hut, only to be seduced by a voluptuous vixen (the witch) and in-turn possessed. It would work so much better if we just see a scene with him seeing something with horror on his face, then the next time we see him is the scene where’s he naked out in the rain outside of the farmhouse.  All of the scenes involving the witch were destroyed by actually seeing her. That’s a basic rule of horror; don’t show your monster, because it’s no longer scary at that point. How much cooler would it have been if the scene where Thomasin, Mercy and Jonas were locked in the barn, and instead of seeing the witch near the goat, all we have are the noises of something outside, then next scene is where the barn is destroyed and Thomasin is the only one left? Finally, the ending of all the witches dancing in the woods naked fell really flat and was unnecessary. Eggers could have ended the movie with Black Philip (the billy goat) whispering to Thomasin. We still would have been left with questions, such as did the goat really talk, or was Thomasin just insane at that point because she killed her mother with a knife? Leave us in the dark and let us figure it out for ourselves. 

World Horror is Creeping...

I know I just posted about this...but the new graphic they just built was too cool not to share. I also caught wind of a new guest that might be showing up. You're not going to want to miss this convention. Do what you gotta do to make it!

http://www.whc2016.org/home.html