Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 33

Dustbearer for free

Yup. For a couple more days, my fantasy short story collection DUSTBEARER is absolutely free. Two stories, good dark fun, no cost to you.

http://www.amazon.com/Dustbearer-and-Others-ebook/dp/B00DQC50I6

Do check it out.

Fireworks for the fourth.

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

Here’s some shots from last night’s front yard fireworks.

 

Happy Independence Day, everybody.Here’s some shots fro...

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

Here’s some shots from last night’s front yard fireworks.

 

DUSTBEARER preview pages

Quick head’s-up. I’ve put together a preview PDF of the new DUSTBEARER book (released all of two days ago). If you’re looking for something to read and want to take some dark fantasy out for a test-drive, just follow the link below. Read it in the browser window or download a tiny PDF file.

DUSTBEARER PREVIEW

And keep in mind, there’s previews/excerpts from all my kindle books (which you can read on any device from a tablet to a phone or desktop computer by way of the Kindle app) over on the bar on the right. Dig it.

DUSTBEARER introduction

 

That’s the cover for DUSTBEARER, by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein. Check the rest of her work out if you like. Good stuff.

DUSTBEARER is a collection of two horror-driven fantasy stories, shared world (just don’t ask me to name it yet.) I’ll be posting some larger excerpts here later on. No, you won’t be quizzed on interminable family relationships or court intrigues or global politics. The women wear plate mail when they go into battle. There are no prophecies. There is no one ring (that’s been done, folks).

The end, however, is written in dust.

Here’s the introduction I scratched out for the release of the kindle edition yesterday.

INTRODUCTION

People are sometimes weirded out by my writing fantasy fiction. Not sure why. Granted, I’m not reading a lot of it, though I did when I was a kid. In the mainstream it’s a completely underrepresented genre (LORD OF THE RINGS and GAME OF THRONES aside). Or we end up disguising our fantasies as horror. That happens a lot too. I suppose that since I don’t talk about the genre a lot online, I’m perceived as being against it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Think of these as payoff from all those afternoons reading DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS modules and rulebooks and playing ROLEMASTER or MORIA in college instead of doing my close readings of texts. And in all these fantasies, I’m imagining Ray Harryhausen animating armies of the damned and their titanic minions.

I’m no good at influence maps, but here’s some names that you might want to look into further if you dig what’s going on in these pages. Chandler, Waits, DeMatteis, Kirby, Morrison, Gibson, Wolfe, Zelazny, Anthony, Morhaime, Lord British, Harryhausen (so good he has to be namedropped twice), Matheson, Lovecraft (though that’s a complicated subject), Serling, all my third-grade literature reading selections, WIZARDRY, ROGUE, Games Workshop, BLACK TIGER, WARCRAFT, Clavell, Blake and Ann Maxwell for getting me to read anything in the first place.

The whole thing will cost you less than lunch at McDonald’s and will be considerably better for you. Give it a shot.

DUSTBEARER for your Kindle device at Amazon.

WORLD WAR Z – THE TENTH MAN

You all know that the miracle isn’t that great films are made, right? The miracle is that movies get finished at all in any semblance of completion much less take our brains and hearts anywhere worth going. Or at least let us be entertained for a couple of hours. And us armchair quarterbacks love to read the inside baseball stuff on how movies and television and comics are made. All the business stuff, the Kremlinology and second-guessing of giant media entities who don’t even know you’re there as much as a blue whale notices that it has an extraordinarily big sea louse attached to the skin beneath its left eye today.

But it makes us feel involved and potent in a world and media landscape that frequently leaves us feeling the opposite. We can participate in the successes and failures of a movie, much like the same sort of mentality that makes it cool to freak out when a local sports team wins a title and then go out and burn buses and wreck franchise coffee shops and generally show team pride. Go team!

So yeah, we do the same thing when it comes to movies. We like to back winners and piss on the losers. By the by, I’m being awful generous with the “we’s” here. I sometimes pay attention to that stuff, but it’s gotten to the point that I have to decide that I’m interested in a movie and that means I get to ignore all the coverage about it from storyboard inception to director assignment to star casting to special effects to kraft service to viral preview to actual preview to YouTube channel to oh god I’m so goddamn sick of this movie that I no longer want to see it again and I haven’t even yet seen it.

“But how do you decide which movies you want to watch, Matt?” you ask.

I have my ways.

That first week, though, oh yeah, the box office projections and the sweetest of moments, to see whether we’re down with the hero or quickly backing away from a loser until it becomes a cult hit some time down the road. Then it’ll be okay to like it again.

Thing is, we don’t get to pick cult hits. But that’s another thing, right?

Yes, I’ll get around to talking about WORLD WAR Z. But I want to bring up how troubled the production was, since that was the narrative driving discussion about the movie (and I’ll confess that I did read a couple stories about that, mostly how they didn’t start with a shooting script and shot 40 minutes of a Moscow sequence that never happened and Damon Lindeloff was brought on to fix things and etc etc etc, Brat Pitt should never produce and such howls of outrage.) Oh, and then there was the griping about how it wasn’t true to the original book. Yeah, I didn’t call it a novel. It’s a book of linked short stories. I suppose that makes it an epistolary novel maybe, but I didn’t see it that way. Not that WORLD WAR Z was a bad book. It was pretty good and kept me up a night finishing it off. However, it’s far from a sacred text that can’t be deviated from in the slightest.

But there’s a lot of fans out there who are aesthetic singularists, who think there’s only one way to read a text, one way to adapt it, one way to enjoy it. We’re all smarter than that here, right? Thought so. Even if the movie showed a zombie eating a copy of WORLD WAR Z and crapping out the remains while reciting Sartre, the original novel is still there, inviolate and for you to read at any time (or catch the audiobook, which I’ve heard is quite good). The original is still there no matter how crappy the adaptation. Of course, the reality is that the original is the stuff that happens in your head when you read the book and your brain goes to work on it. We’re all going to come out with a different reading, y’know. The book is just a set of instructions to relay a set of experiences to varying final renders based on the reader.

Now, the funny thing. Most people out there in the actual world don’t follow the inside baseball stuff. Most people don’t read every blog post or every manufactured outrage as to how this is a disaster of intensity unseen since say WATERWORLD or ISHTAR. Now, to be fair, I’ve made jokes to that effect on the Twitter, but I wasn’t trying to turn those into page hits. Does that excuse me, I guess not. However, since I’m only read by about twenty people on the planet, I suspect the effect of my 140-character funny was minimal at best. Nor did it wreck the take, which to my eyes was only okay, but given the prevalent narrative of disaster in the making, I guess people were pretty happy with it.

Now, as for the film itself. I liked WORLD WAR Z. I won’t say that it was perfect. There were some pretty glaring plot holes and gaps. And I’ve been on record as not being a fan of the fast zombie (for a variety of reasons, but the the one that’s the most irritating is that fast zombies become slow when the story calls for it and you need that dramatic standoff shot.) I don’t really like instant apocalypses, either. They tend to be boring. When suddenly everyone is faced with what amounts to an existential threat, moral lapses get conveniently excused and everyone suddenly tends towards stone-cold-killerdom in the twitch of an undead limb.

The slow-motion apocalypse is much more interesting, much meatier, and really doesn’t work in a movie format (though it can be done, DAWN OF THE DEAD having done a pretty good job of it in 1978). But it seems that for most writers/readers/viewers that the moment where things go from “what the hell is going on” to “shoot them all in the head” should be as brief as possible. And it goes like that in WORLD WAR Z, in the narrative of the film, though we’re shown breadcrumbs that were leading towards disaster. However we only see those in retrospect as Brad Pitt’s character goes from site to site, trying to find out what let the undead out in the first place.

Honestly, the film was most effective when the scale was small. It set up the big action sequences as large-scale spectacle and sometimes that paid off. But at some points it became too big, too abstract. I will say, however, that zombies at that scale hadn’t really been done effectively before. There were glimpses of it in the DAWN remake and even in LAND OF THE DEAD, but those felt much smaller, much tighter. Watching Glasgow as Philadelphia get overrun was impressive, with the aerial shots of masses of zombies hunting and prowling and the marines making immediate retreats via helicopter.

Visually impressive, but never really scary. But that’s popcorn spectacle. Fun to look at, oftentimes not delivering the bite it needed to.

However, WWZ did deliver on one of the things that I ask of any movie, zombie or otherwise. It gave me something new to see. It built up its own flavor of the undead. It showed them doing different things, finding new ways to get to their prey. Granted, it didn’t really base that in any new behavior/discovery/etc. Zombies massed like leafcutter ants in columns, trying to climb over hundred-foot walls, that’s new. Now, it didn’t say that they were all cooperating, in particular, only the vague notion delivered by the luckless immunologist, that nature was clearing the table, or that nature is more than a bitch, but a bloodthirsty serial killer. Honestly, that rang untrue for me, but they didn’t harp on the point for long (and they sorta showed that the guy who said this stuff was an idiot all along and maybe he could be discounted).

The zombies of WWZ weren’t the walking dead so much as they were a walking immune system gone amok, taking out all things not zombie. Well, almost all things. Which gets us to the zombie weakness subplot. Which I’m sure is one thing that a lot of people were upset by.

See, the thing is that zombies are this sort of relentless and dogged adversary, mindless, driven only by the desire to infect and always taking a straight line between themselves and whatever they were after. They don’t pick favorites. They’re not choosy at all. They see a warmie, and they’ll shuffle along or run in order to pick up a meal.

WWZ plays with this some, from which humanity can derive a weapon against them. It works well enough for me, in terms of the boundaries that they chose to work with. I can see how a lot of people would take it as a cop-out or whatever. Honestly, I suspect a lot of people like zombie movies because they’ve got a pretty good chance of seeing everyone get eaten at the end, of watching humanity take one on the chin. It’s more or less built into the DNA of the modern zombie flick, and can be done very effectively. Oftentimes it just rolls out as a cheap shock and doesn’t have much of an impact.

And really, the zombie denizens of WWZ aren’t bones-exposed and ripped-up THE WALKING DEAD style zombies, which is also probably a disappointment to a lot of viewers. Again, didn’t have a problem with it because of how the filmmakers were framing the phenomenon. Ultimately, they weren’t Romero zombies or 28 WEEKS LATER zombies or even RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD zombies. They were their own thing.

So, what worked? I thought a lot of the look and design worked pretty well, particularly the interior shots in the Newark grocery store and the high-rise project apartments. Lots of good use of color (and I am sick to death of blue-cast or green-cast or any-look-but-based-in-reality-cast). The whole film felt grounded in its wildly varying locales. I’d like to have seen more sort of cultural fallout from the whole phenomena (the touches of the soldiers coming up with new slang was nice, and from the book; more would be welcome.) And as I said before, the film’s most intense moments took place when there was just a small group to focus on. The family’s escape from the overrun apartments, the airstrip in Korea where the troops use flanking and tactics and still only barely come out of it alive, the tunnels in Jerusalem and the medical facility in Wales. All of these locations worked and what’s more, tightened the focus, worked more on tension and intensity than just brute force spectacle filmmaking.

That said, the film also used some pieces up maddeningly quickly. David Morse, who should have turned into a companion for Pitt’s character, is instead used and discarded in a matter of five minutes of screen time (but he was so good in that five minutes). There’s glimpses of Moscow (apparently an entire deleted sequence took place there, some 40 minutes), but also of giant corpse-middens of mostly immobilized zombies, of apartment buildings manned with flamethrower troops fighting off waves of zombies, and you say to yourself “Yeah, I could watch some of that.” But then again, I just said that the filmmakers did better when it was reined in some, so maybe you’d be wrong there.

One of the other things that probably betrayed expectations is that if WWZ is a horror movie, it’s not the kind of horror movie that zombie fans were after. There’s no rivers of blood or entrails, of grinning skulls or jawless walking corpses. There’s no zombie dress-up. And there’s not a lot of nihilism. Not a lot of moaning about how humanity is doomed. There’s some realpolitik horror, some of it hinted at, some of it explicit (with our hero’s family being kicked off the safety of a ship at sea since his perceived death renders them non-essential personnel status) and the use of a nuke somewhere to wipe out what one would hope are a hell of a lot of zombies. But that’s modern media level horror, right? Not as exciting or interesting as regular film horror. So yeah, lots of folks expecting bone-chomping action are going to be disappointed.

Sure, there’s some things that are borderline silly (and one wonders why they’re even there). The Israeli commando gets bitten. Pitt amputates her hand before the ten-second-count where the zombie virus/whatever takes over the human host. She doesn’t turn. Nevermind even the transformation taking place that quickly (yes, there’s a precedent from 28 DAYS LATER), but by my read that’s borderline magic stuff. Somehow North Korea can remove the teeth from however many million people live in its borders, but can’t just shoot zombies wherever they show up? Leaving on a satellite phone in a zone where you’re supposed to be absolutely silent? These are some gaffes, which I suppose are dire enough to make viewers roll their eyes as hard as I did during PROMETHEUS, but none of them killed the experience for me.

So far, I seem to be in the minority. But then I’ve seen a lot of zombie movies and don’t mind a sober sort of contemporary take on the little fellers. There’s only so many times you can do the same thing and expect brilliant results.

So yeah, I enjoyed it, but I suspect I’m in the minority here. I didn’t expect trenchant critique on how things work (everything fell apart as the choreographed requirements of the story called for) or an inside look at infectious disease (the disease was designed like no other disease in history—rabies infected humans don’t bite normal humans) or the biggest budget zombie movie ever (it wasn’t ever going to be a traditional zombie movie).

And hey, maybe that’s the secret. Don’t let expectation get molded ahead of time by the critic brigade or marketing or YouTube. If you’re going to watch the movie, watch it.

You say ‘slow’ and I say ‘go go go’.

Thinking a bit more about things, which is what I do when I’m not ready to write or avoid being ready to write.

One of my upcoming projects could be a thing called EATERS, which I posted some comics pages from ages ago, as in years. Several things have sidetracked this project, most namely the fact that it’s not likely to make a profit, even paying myself at minimum wage while typing it. Another thing is that it’s a take on zombies. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but zombies have become a little mainstream and even overdone. Which means they’re mostly done badly.

But I was thinking about the whole slow/fast zombie dichotomy and I’ve finally figured out why I just don’t like a population of fast zombies (and yes, it sure looks like WORLD WAR Z is going that route when it certainly wasn’t the case in the books). But that’s ’cause fast zombies make for more dramatic movie villains. They’re speedy, mean, relentless and impatient. They’re on you in an eyeblink and ripping your throat out or heart or whatever they can lay their teeth on. Very in your face, especially if you’re going with the whole 28 DAYS/WEEKS LATER high-speed aesthetic (particularly on the first one).

There’s no time to think! Do it now! Here they come!

There’s also no time to identify with them. And how could you, when they’re running you down like a cheetah bearing down on an antelope?

Besides, everyone thinks “Oh, slow zombies. You can always outrun those. They’re funny.”

Thing is. You can’t. They don’t give up. They walk through rivers and will pound on those plate glass doors until they finally give way. And that whole time, you can look at their faces and recognize them as former neighbors and loved ones and know that the fate that consumed them will consume you. There’s a lot more dread in the slow plodding zombie, more doom metal than speed metal, so to say.

Now, if you’ve got a video game, you’re gonna have fast or normal-speed zombies at worst. And that works for the way video games are laid out these days. Granted, it makes them all pretty samey. Yes, I know they’re dogmeat slow in RESIDENT EVIL, but RE is also its own thing, not really a first-person shooter like most action games end up going for these days. And I’ll stop the tangent here. I’m not a game designer. Just a writer.

Slow zombies are just witless enough to make you think that you’ve got a chance. Slow enough that you can see the reflection of everything that went wrong in their dead eyes. Slow enough that you might be able to think of them as a matter for another day.

And you’d be wrong.

So, yeah, fast zombies are out. Fast zombies are boring, though can make for good spectacle. But they end up being too alien, too easy to separate from the human, too hard to generate any sympathy for. And classic monsters always manage to eke out some sympathy somewhere. Makes ‘em richer, tastier.

Recent goings-on

Hey folks. Let’s get caught up on things.

Over to the right, you may notice a beautifully-updated sidebar with various offerings of mine that you can purchase for reading on your kindle device.

In vertical order:
Comics/film/horror commentary
Horror and science fiction stories
Fantasy novel
Comics/film/commentary
Science fiction and horror short stories
Weird western comics

In addition, I’m working on a new collection of fantasy stories with the title DUSTBEARER. (Early June.)

Anticipating the release of my science fiction novel BLUE HIGHWAY with a cover artist beloved by millions. (July, maybe.)

You can still read my science fiction/horror short story “The Teacher” (set in the STARCRAFT universe) over here: “The Teacher” at Blizzard Entertainment. I always try to write this sort of thing so that it appeals to people beyond just the game/franchise backstory. Sometimes tough to do with length limits.

Making progress on the third STRANGEWAYS book, this one called THE LAND WILL KNOW, featuring a whole host of artists bringing their magic to the weird western works.

Trying to figure which next big project to start on, as my day job is in a lull at the moment. Though the kids get out of school shortly, so that might all go up in smoke. Potentials include finally writing EATERS, working on the BLUE HIGHWAY sequel called THE LEVIATHAN BANKS, or KING OF ALL THE DEAD.

Some of these are more likely than others.

Still posting cultural debris and screenshots at Highway 62 Revisited on Tumblr.

Posting macro photography of cheap comics and that vanishing world over at Intrapanel. You can see a sample in the cover of HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED just below.

Not sure how much I’ll be posting here. Tumblr is a lot easier, but this over here is a lot more secure and/or permanent. Honestly, the final work is more interesting than me talking about the final work. But I have to put up something to keep folks reminded that I’m still alive, I suppose.

HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED available now.

It’s here.

 

Click to embiggen.

HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED available for your kindle devices now. Click to view at Amazon.

Culled from the last ten years (or more: there’s a surprise piece from 1993 in there, but I won’t tell you where) of blogging on comics and horror and music, HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED is a titanic (almost 1200 pages) tome of pop culture dissection and celebration, all from my unique (arguably warped) perspective. It also makes the perfect companion volume to THE COLLECTED FULL BLEED, the compilation of comics-related writing that I did between 2003-2008.

This volume features an introduction by friend Ken Lowery, he of LIKE A VIRUS and THE VARIANTS (oh and RINGWOOD RAGEFUCK if you’re old enough to remember such dalliances.) He pegs me pretty good in the introduction, though it’s not what you’d expect at all.

It’s available for the low price of three bucks. That’s less than you’ll pay for a new comic book and I guarantee it’ll take you at least fifty times as long to read. So if you’ve enjoyed anything that I’ve written in the last forever since I started blogging, might I humbly ask that you give it a try? And if you find yourself in a state of enjoyment due to its reading, please leave a review indicating such at the Amazon page in question. Thanks.

HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED

Okay, right. One of the things I’ve been working on. An older version went on my tumblr, but I made some changes here.

 

 

This is a gigantic collection of not only my writing on comics (both the reading and making) but horror film and fiction and thought, as well as all of my collected convention reports for the years 2004-2012 or so (haven’t been to any shows this year). Additionally, it collects all of my Conversation: Fear columns from the lamented DARK, BUT SHINING. Additionally additionally, there’s several short stories and some other assorted fiction.

I hope to have this out by the end of the month, if not significantly before. Kindle and related platforms. Printing this thing would break the bank. No, really, it tips more than 800 single-spaced pages.

I wrote a lot of stuff for free, it turns out.