David Dubrow's Blog, page 34

Odds and Ends: Harassment, Imajica, and Civilization

I’ve got a few things I want to talk about, but none of them are big or important enough to warrant individual posts, so here they are:

Harassment and Its Redefinition: Looking through blogs and other bits of social media, one could be forgiven if one was to think that “harassment” lurked around every corner of every speculative fiction convention under the sun, and that it’s finally time someone Did Something About It. This may be the case; I haven’t been to a convention in decades. What concerns me is the definition of harassment, which is extremely plastic. What happened here was apparently a case of harassment, instead of a guy just being an a-hole. If everything’s harassment, then nothing is. So you con-goers out there, be on the lookout for that harassment, because it’s everywhere and it won’t stop until it’s reported as harassment and the harassers are harassed out of conventions across the globe. Your emotional safety is at risk. Demand those safe spaces and you’ll get them.
Imajica and Its (anti-)Religiosity: After about two decades, I re-read Clive Barker’s Imajica . I remember liking it better in my twenties. Anyway, it’s still an extraordinary book, but now in my forties I’m struck by how anti-Christian the book is (not to mention anti-heterosexual male). In it, the protagonist Gentle is the bastard son of God (Hapexamendios), a dissolute, childish near-incompetent who does little other than forge paintings and sleep with any woman who would have him. In fact, he’s such a horndog that he messed up a great work of magic centuries ago because he had to have sex with an unconscious woman he was magically cloning for a rival so they could both screw her. His absentee father Hapexamendios, a terrible God who slew all the Goddesses and laid waste to beauty and truth across entire dimensions, has as His highest servants a cohort of appalling, humanoid monsters called Nullianacs, whose heads look like a pair of praying hands placed fingertip to fingertip with electricity arcing between the palms. Nullianacs live for destruction and the corruption of innocents; one of them raped and killed a child under Gentle’s protection, for example. It’s obvious that Nullianacs are intended to be Christian priests and Hapexamendios the God of the Bible. Were I a Christian myself I might be offended at the characterization, but as a Jew and a thinking man I just find that sort of thing tiresome . 
Civilization and Its Contents: One of my favorite computer games is Civilization 2: Test of Time, but I can’t play it any more because my version of Windows (8.1) won’t even allow me to install it from the CD, let alone play the thing. I’m still a fan of older computer games like XCOM 3: Apocalypse, Ultima 7, Baldur’s Gate 2, Fallout Tactics, and even the gold box AD&D games, mostly because I rarely had a machine that had the juice to play them when they first came out and always had to wait for years to play them. At any rate, my computer won’t let me play Civ 2, so I went more recent: Civilization V: Brave New World. After the moments of play I’ve been able to sneak in during evenings while my wife watches Quantico and weekends while my son’s taking his afternoon nap, I’ve decided that I’m going to have to stop writing altogether and just play Civ 5 for the rest of my days. So thanks for reading, and it was good knowing (some of) you. (Oh, you want to know what happens at the end of the Armageddon series ? Okay: everyone goes through a bunch of stuff, but they die anyway and Hell wins. Then God gets mad and hits the Reset Button at the center of the universe, so it’s all good. The end!*)

*Well no, not quite. But holy poop, is Civ 5 a lot of fun. And the learning curve…it’s steep. But doable. If only I had more time to play it.

Friday Links: Heir, Happy Campers, A Grave Situation, and More!

As we count the days to when another beloved musician passes or injects himself into politics, let’s take a long look back at the week and see what’s happened in the world of the weird, the bizarre, the horrific:

A must-see pressbook from one of the best films ever made, The Warriors, fell out of Zombos’ Closet . Come out to playy-ayyy!
Full Moon Reviews reviewed the 2014 movie Nurse: “NURSE 3D is obviously a horror film since our lead character is a serial killer with some emotional issues towards adulterous men. It’s not really scary, but I can instantly see why it would fall within the horror genre. However, NURSE 3D is also supposed to be a comedy. And… I didn’t really laugh much. Niecy Nash’s character had some chuckle-worthy moments, but nothing about NURSE 3D made me bust a gut or anything, even unintentionally.”
Nev Murray reviewed Toneye Eyenot’s The Scarlett Curse: Sacred Blade of Profanity at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “This Book One to me, was confusing. When the story begins you are dropped straight in the middle of it. No explanations and no build up, just bam and the action starts. Now, in some ways, I like this idea but I would have liked it a bit more if there had been some explaining later in the book about how Scarlett came to own the blade and what it’s true history was.”
Almost 100 schoolchildren have been demonically possessed in Peru , it seems: “In what has been described as a mass case of demonic possession, the pupils in Peru are experiencing seizures alongside their horrifying hallucinations. Experts have struggled to explain the strange goings-on, which also include widespread convulsions and fainting at the school, reportedly built on a Mafia graveyard. According to local reports, as many as 80 students at the Elsa Perea Flores School in northern Peru’s Tarapoto have been experiencing the supposedly contagious ‘condition’ since last month.”
Who doesn’t like Mexican vampire films? Taliesin meets the vampires doesn’t. Which means he does: “Oh, you just have to love Mexican Horror Cinema. Even when it begs, steals and borrows, and even when it isn’t the best example, there are more often than not moments that make a vehicle worthwhile.”
At his invaluable R’lyeh Tribune , Sean Eaton discussed the apocalyptic tale Till A’ the Seas: “With his tolerance for higher temperatures, Lovecraft might have been one of the last survivors in Robert H. Barlow’s apocalyptic piece, Till A’ the Seas (1935), which he co-wrote with his younger friend.  The two worked on the draft together till 3:00 a.m. one New Year’s night, according to S.T. Joshi.  Barlow was 16 at the time.”
The Movie Critic Next Door reviewed the movie Heir at The Slaughtered Bird : “Pretty much everyone and everything in Heir is creepy, though. Robert Nolan plays Gordon, who you can tell instantly is haunted by something dark in his past, and in himself. He’s taking his son, Paul (Mateo D’Avino), along for a nice road trip as he visits an old “college friend”, Denis (Bill Oberst Jr.), and if you believe for a second that they’re college buddies I have a lovely little bridge I’m looking to sell.”
The Horrors of It All brought us the story A Grave Situation from the May 1953 issue of The Thing #8.
From the House of Self-Indulgence came a review of Happy Campers: “Written and directed by the writer of Heathers, the film, as expected, is darkly humorous and refreshingly unsentimental. But like I was saying, it put me in a bit of a bind. And that is,  repeatedly forcing me to choose between two actresses I have the hots for. Granted, the characters in the film itself seem to have no trouble whatsoever making their decision (they either went with Swain or King), but I’m not Brad Renfro (Ghost World) or the Xander-esque Jordan Bridges (Dawson’s Creek).”
Here, I discussed leaving Facebook and pointed you to a review I wrote at The Slaughtered Bird of David A Riley’s His Own Mad Demons. As it turns out, I was right to quit the platform. At least one credible study shows a link between social media use and depression. As I said to my wife about quitting Facebook, “Everyone’s on Facebook and nobody’s happy.”

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu’s S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.

(Theme song for this week’s Friday Links: Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants.)

The Slaughtered Bird Book Review: His Own Mad Demons

At The Slaughtered Bird, I reviewed David A Riley’s His Own Mad Demons:

His Own Mad Demons is an anthology of short stories written by David A Riley, who’s been an active horror writer since he published a story in the eleventh volume of the legendary Pan Book of Horror Stories in 1970. The tales in Riley’s His Own Mad Demons are all set in the English moorland town of Edgebottom, where the supernatural lurks in every shadow.

Check out the review to find out why you need this short story collection in your library, then click here to pick it up from Amazon.

I Quit Facebook.

I quit Facebook. I did it about a week ago, but now I’m bothering to tell everyone.

My reasons for this are manifold, and any one of them is a good enough reason to leave the platform, but I’ll state them here for those interested. This has nothing to do with any individual or contretemps or drama I may or may not have been involved in. I’m not leaving in a huff or anything remotely like that. The only reason why you’re able to read this on Facebook right now is because I’ve shared it from my blog to my Facebook page. I’ll continue to do that, as you nice people who do use Facebook shouldn’t be deprived of my wit and wisdom. Ahem.

Informed readers know that the Facebook contractors who curate Facebook’s “Trending Topics” section have done so with an eye toward minimizing conservative news. Not because people on the right side of the ideological spectrum don’t do or say anything newsworthy, but because the leftists in charge of curating the Trending Topics loathe conservatives and seek to destroy them at every opportunity, like almost everyone in media. With that in mind, why should I spend my time, my bandwidth, my attention on a service administrated by people who hate me and anyone who shares my outlook? Why should I participate in their social experiments, post my family pictures for them to look at (and potentially use in prurient fashion; I put nothing past these vermin)?

Everyone likes to complain about politically-dominated organizations like Hollywood, social media companies, and news outlets, but few actually do anything about it. This is my way of doing something about it: I’m opting out. I’m under no illusions that this little gesture will elicit even the slightest change, but I’m hoping that some of you will think about these issues and join me. If you’re a conservative, Facebook doesn’t want you and actively wishes you ill. Is this a place where you should spend your time?

Yes, I know I’m sneaking a toe in the door by having my blog link my individual posts to Facebook, but as a writer I’ve been told that I need to have a social media presence. So I’m using Facebook in this minimal fashion without letting it use me.

The other reason why I left Facebook is because it promotes bitchiness, backbiting, and passive-aggressive snark, none of which are the least bit healthy for even the strongest psyche. It’s possible, even likely, that all social media is conducive to this kind of negativity, but Facebook’s the big dog, so they get the most attention. What people Like, what they don’t Like, what they talk about online, what they ignore: paying attention to that, to the facade of minutiae masquerading as day-to-day life, drains energy from positive pursuits. It’s also a massive time-sink, and you’d be amazed at how much time you find in the day to do good things when you’re not spectating other people’s facades.

I already miss the many cyber-friends I’ve met on Facebook. I very much enjoyed looking at your family photos, reading your posts, laughing at your memes, watching your cat videos, and mindlessly Liking (some of) your book links. And I know how tenuous, how ephemeral these electronic friendships are; for many of you, this will be the last time we communicate. That’s a shame, but to quote the great Northeastern philosopher DB, “It is what it is.”

Before long I’ll set up an account on some photo-sharing service and send the link to those friends and family members who would want to see pictures of my wife and son. I’m very proud of both, as you know, and incredibly lucky to have them. The rest of my updates, both personal and professional, will be posted here at http://davedauthor.com/blog.

You can, of course, always contact me via email. I use Gmail, and my handle is davedauthor.

I hope to hear from you.

Friday Links: Montana Gothic, The Happy Man, and The Psychophonic Nurse

You may have noticed that I’ve cut back on the blogging, as I’m trying to spend more time writing this third and final novel in my Armageddon series. Also, I’ve been looking for great stuff for you to read for the Friday Links! Take a look at what happened this week in the world of the strange, the bizarre, the horrific:

Dirck Van Sickle’s novel Montana Gothic was the subject of analysis at Ruined Head : “In the opening segment, Deke Morgan, a young medical school drop out, arrives in the backwater town of Citadel, Montana, to take over a run-down mortuary business. Unable to rise beyond a social pariah in the eyes of the local townspeople, Deke eventually discovers the grotesque history of his predecessor that seems to forever hold him in the role of outsider. Only the affections of Mary Lynn Crandall, daughter of a wealthy land-owning family to whom he offers piano lessons, provides Deke with an optimism that his fate could change.” The cover alone is worth a click!
Some awesome things have been creeping out of Zombos’ Closet of late. Check out Fantastic Monsters of the Films Vol. 1, Issue 1 , for example. When you’re done, take a gander at Issue 2 !
Ghost Hunting Theories listed the best movies out there for cryptid lovers. And you don’t even have to know what a cryptid is!
Regular readers know that Sean Eaton’s  The R’lyeh Tribune is one of my favorite websites, and this deconstruction of David H Keller’s The Psychophonic Nurse will show you why: “Aside from its interest as early science fiction, The Psychophonic Nurse can be consideredclinical data about the status of relationships between whites and African Americans, and between men and women, in early twentieth century America.  Fiction like this should still be examined and pondered, maybe in an anthology entitled Enduring Social Nightmares, Volume One. It shows how far we have come in our collective evolution since the 1920s—which is not very far at all.”
John Kenneth Muir discussed the 1994 film Stargate, a movie that tends to get lost in the wake of the television shows it later spawned: “I would like to comment again — as I have in the past – about at what an absolutely great leading man [Kurt] Russell is.  His O’Neil is distinctly different from his Snake Plissken, Jack Burton, or MacReady in The Thing .  There’s a kind of retro, non-showy grittiness in Russell’s performance here.  The film features a number of scenes during which he stands back in the corner of a frame and just silently smokes a cigarette, an act which is pretty unusual in mid-1990s cinema but which reminds one of Humphrey Bogart or some other leading man of yesteryear.”
Route 666 (the highway) was the subject of analysis at Deck the Holidays : “This particular highway is so large that it is found in 4 individual states-Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Those that know of the terrors of this haunted place also identify it appropriately as the one and only “Devil’s Highway”. While it is true that there are many urban legends, rumors, and tall tales that are associated with this particular stretch of road, there are also many facts that relate to this road-such as statistics on accidents and even deaths.”
At The Slaughtered Bird , Patrick Ricketts reviewed the film The Devil’s Woods: “If I had one complaint about the film it would be that takes a bit too long getting to the camp ground but at the same time the last twenty minutes of the film more than makes up for it. Once the action starts things become tense, suspenseful and frightening and the action doesn’t stop until the very end. There isn’t anything new here, it is your straightforward slasher film but that never matters because what it does do it does well which is create a high sense of fear and isolation.”
The village of Badi in India has seen 80 suicides this year. Some attributed this to demonic possession , but there’s a scientific explanation: “Rajendra Sisodiya, the village chief, said that his brother and mother were among those who took their own lives. His predecessor on the post of the village head was his cousin Jeevan, who also deliberately ended his life by hanging himself in front of his house.”
Too Much Horror Fiction reviewed the 1985 novel The Happy Man by Eric C Higgs: “Whatever you do don’t read the back-cover copy of the paperback edition of The Happy Man (Paperjacks/April 1986). It gives awayeverything. I went in knowing nothing about the novel save a couple intriguing reviews by folks I trust (which of course I avoided reading). I found myself quietly guided into a private universe of amoral appetites and infernal indulgences.”
Nev Murray is looking for a bit of help at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “What I am looking for is people who can either commit to a long term deal where they would continually pick up books from the submissions pile and read and review. Alternatively, if you cannot commit to something long term, if you are interested in picking something up to review once and a while and feel that Confessions is the place to host it, then give me a shout also.” Read the whole thing for the 411, as they say.
Here, I discussed the attacks made on Kukuruyo by SJWs out to ruin him because he has opinions that differ from theirs. These special snowflakes need their safe spaces, and they’ll make them by destroying all expression they disagree with. Whatever you do, don’t watch this video . It is not screamingly funny and spot-on. At all.

Illustration by Gustaf Bjorksten for Stormbringer’s Sorcerers of Pan Tang supplement.

SJWs and Content Creators: Ideological Purity Required

Yes, this again, because we’ve got a new example of Social Justice Warriors looking to ruin the career of someone who they don’t agree with. Noticing a pattern?

Artist Alejandro Ricondo, working under the name Kukuruyo, has the wrong opinions, and because of that, he must be destroyed:

Since i publicy became a gamergate supporter, the ammount of reports i’ve gotten on art sites have increased, many times in very underserved cases (i got a drawing pulled because the characters had sweat. Yes, sweat…) as well as the amount of people lying about me on blogs and such. And i don’t mean making critiques of me, i mean outright lies (one guy even wrote about how i voted for some candidate in the past US elections, which is interesting considering i’m a spaniard living in Spain).

Read his entire post and then come back. I’ll still be here.

Do you see it yet? It’s not just me. It’s not just David A Riley. I didn’t make all this up to attack ideological opponents and gain some kind of coveted victim status. Content creators who don’t skew left enough are under assault by Social Justice Warriors intent on ruining their careers. Rather than create things of beauty and lasting value, the SJW’s raison d’être is to destroy. They’re cultural Visigoths on a mission to eradicate all expression that they don’t approve of.

The comments section on a post describing Kukuruyo’s difficulties at File 770 is, as usual, quite illuminating. Look for yourself, but the prevailing opinion is that Kukuruyo deserves it, that he asked for it, that he’s a pedophile, that it’s not really happening. It’s typical SJW name-calling: according to Ginger Nuts of Horror’s site owner Jim Mcleod, I’m a Nazi; according to the HWA, David Riley’s a fascist; and according to File 770’s commenters, Kukuruyo is a pedophile.

This kind of thing is never going to end until we, as individuals, put a stop to it. Call out the SJW bullies personally, and when you can’t, make sure they know you’re onto them. Consider the lack of character and personal courage it takes to try to anonymously ruin someone’s career over political differences. Isn’t that disgusting? Aren’t you sickened by it?

If not, why not?

One thing I noticed with the David A Riley dust-up is that the science fiction guys barely touched it, if they even acknowledged it was happening. I don’t know if it was due to lack of awareness or if they decided that the horror genre wasn’t relevant to their unique struggles (heh), or what. What it proves is that everybody’s pretty concerned about his or her own rice bowl rather than the whole meal, which is Western culture. Yes, standing up and defending the once-reasonable position that people shouldn’t have their lives ruined for having contrary opinions exposes you to risk, especially because there’s no guarantee you’ll get support. Do it anyway. It’s only free expression at stake.

Friday Links: Crypt of the Vampire, The Bad Game, and a Haunted Clown Motel

Yes, we’re back to the Friday Links, where the latest and greatest in the world of the bizarre, the speculative, even the horrific gets some extra attention. This is a special edition of the Links, because I have some bits of news to relate at the bottom. So, let’s hit it:

Nev Murray reviewed Adam Millard’s novel The Bad Game at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “The plot? This is where my comparison with Richard Laymon comes in. This has that distinct 80’s feel to it. That easy to read style that Laymon was so good at in all his tales set in America. The fact that Mr Millard has so successfully transferred this style to a small seaside town in England, to me, is superbly fantastic. I don’t think I have read anyone else recently who has managed to do that. It’s sort of B movie style but on a big budget if that makes sense.”
A ghost has been captured on film in Honduras: “A ‘ghostly apparition’ has appeared in a darkly lit corridor of a supposedly haunted hospital in the same spot a doctor allegedly took his own life. In the video that was taken at the School Hospital Universitario in Honduras, stretchers are lined up in the hall, and a semi-transparent figure seems to pop its head out the doorway.”
Cool Ass Cinema reached deep into the archives of British science fiction to deconstruct the film Prisoners of the Lost Universe: “A Showtime cable premiere in the US but theatrical everywhere else, PRISONERS OF THE LOST UNIVERSE (1983) mixes SciFi with Fantasy–essentially the same template as director Marcel’s previous effort, HAWK THE SLAYER from 1980. The difference in the above-mentioned movies is that they had big budgets behind them. All PRISONERS has is a few bucks. Lively dialog, a child-like appeal and passionate performances by the main cast is like a million dollars in its favor.”
Fans of girls, devils, and the planet Mars will very much enjoy what fell out of Zombos’ Closet : a pressbook from the 1954 movie Devil Girl from Mars.
In time for its 20th anniversary, The Craft got itself analyzed at House of Self-Indulgence : “Even though there are four chicks on the poster, only one of them is giving off what I would consider a Goth vibe. I mean, what gives, The Craft, mid-90s gothploitation yarn about a trio of teen witches who befriend a new teen witch in order to complete “the circle,” or some nonsense like that? Why are you short-changing me, Goth-wise? If I’m gonna sit down and watch a movie about four teenage girls who practice witchcraft in their spare time, at least half of them better be Goths, or, at the very least, Goth-adjacent.”
At the unmissable, always-erudite R’lyeh Tribune , Sean Eaton returned to Robert E Howard’s Hyboria: “There does not seem to be any overarching theme to Shadows in Zamboula, other than perhaps the horror of miscegenation.  However, there is an appealing absence of good guys—only a collection of opportunists, Conan among them, with varying degrees of ruthlessness.  Shadows in Zamboula seems to have been written mainly for entertainment, without any pretensions to expounding a philosophy of life or some such—though Howard can surprise readers with occasional gravitas.”
The study of haunted houses got turned on its head at Ghost Hunting Theories : “Some places have hauntings that in baseline conditions can be perceived, i.e. anyone can have an encounter there at any given time. These conditions are likely caused by construction of the building, geology, layout of the rooms, and other factors like water table and seismic activity. If a building is placed with such ideal alchemy to leave a perceivable haunting, then Joe Schmo non-psychic can go there and have an encounter.”
The Horrors of It All brought us a story from the June 1952 issue of The Thing #3 titled Crypt of the Vampire. It has a kneeling vampire panel that is not to be missed!
Zombie Rob reviewed the 2007 movie WAZ, AKA The Killing Gene at The Slaughtered Bird : “Immediately WAZ presents itself as an American cop thriller, with all the recognisable ingredients therein: grizzled & cynical middle-aged lead detective, doe-eyed & idealistic rookie recently assigned to partner the grizzled & cynical middle-aged lead detective, a morally questionable gobshite of an ex-partner with whom the lead detective has an unspoken & torrid history, you’ve got your shouty black captain, loudly threatening people with “24 hours or their badges” sorta thing and a crime so horrifying, so atrocious, even the grizzled & cynical middle-aged lead detective can’t quite believe the new depths that this grizzled & cynical world has stooped to.”
Christopher Sebela lived in a haunted clown motel for 30 days and wrote about it: “Sebela doesn’t remember how he came across the travel website that first introduced him to the Clown Motel, but the minute he saw the twinkling lights of its roadside marquee, he knew he needed to visit. It wasn’t just the assortment of clowns lurking in each room that mesmerized and terrified him; the combined triple threat of the adjacent cemetery and nearby abandoned silver mine made the whole place seem like the setting of a horror movie—one he desperately wanted to survive.”
Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of the action horror novella Detroit 2020 at The Slaughtered Bird . I wrote about my dead cat a few weeks ago, so I feel obligated to mention that we got a new kitten recently. We named her Waffles. Barring something particularly noteworthy about the cat, it’s not likely that I’ll mention her here again, as I find gushing about pet cats somewhat unmanly and uncomfortable, particularly as the father of a small boy. Except on Facebook , where you can follow me and learn all about the cute li’l girl’s kitty idiosyncrasies and see pictures. Ahem. Also, I recently finished the outline to the third and last book of my Armageddon series and have begun writing the first draft, which is really quite a relief. The story of angels, demons, psychics, occultists, Nephilim, and ordinary people caught up in the apocalypse has a provisional ending. Yay me! And yay you, once you read it. You have read The Blessed Man and the Witch and The Nephilim and the False Prophet , haven’t you? I certainly hope so.

Illustration by Mark J. Ferrari for Call of Cthulhu’s S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Creatures of the Dreamlands.

The Slaughtered Bird Book Review: Detroit 2020

I reviewed Jeffrey Conolly and BL Daniels’ novella Detroit 2020 at The Slaughtered Bird: 

Calling itself “The best action movie you’ll ever read,” it’s an exciting gore-fest of a novella that takes the reader to the Golden Age of post-apocalyptic action movies, bringing you only the good stuff: over-the-top violence, manly men, womanly women, and a nonsensical plot that never stops.

Does it live up to its own hype? Click the link to find out!

A Personal Note from the Author

I understand that this space has involved matters political over fictional of late, and I am no happier to write about them than you are to read them. Yes, it’s drama, and drama can be interesting to witness, but it’s far less enjoyable to experience. I would very much rather discuss books and movies and television shows and religious themes in fiction and my experiences as the father of a small child and war stories of working with the country’s most dangerous people.

In the media-saturated world we live in, it’s frighteningly easy to glance at something wrong, shrug, and decide that someone else will deal with it. Easy to figure that it’s not worth the time and effort to involve yourself. It’s not your problem, after all…until it is. Social psychologists call this mode of thinking “bystander apathy“. This bystander apathy ranges from watching an unconscious man get run over in the street to watching Western culture become irretrievably upended by an exceedingly loud but vanishingly tiny minority. We’ve all got careers and families and hobbies and other interests; why put them at even the mildest risk? Why stick your neck out?

That’s not me. Why have a neck if you won’t stick it out?

When it comes to the situation with Ginger Nuts of Horror, that was easy. Site owner Jim Mcleod kicked me off the staff of Ginger Nuts of Horror and called me a Nazi because I dared to express my well-considered beliefs in my own space. Not because of anything I had said or done to him or anyone else, but because I had unacceptable opinions on issues that had nothing to do with horror. Opinions, by the way, that millions and millions and millions of other people share. The funniest part of the experience was when, after I had the temerity to tell my side of the story, Mcleod and his coterie of ill-educated SJW halfwit buddies did their junior high-school version of a “point and shriek” campaign, telling anyone who would listen that I was persona non grata. And why? Because I stood up for myself, unlike many of Mcleod’s self-created enemies.

The social media gurus always tell you, as a writer, to keep your politics to yourself. You’ll alienate readers with your horrible politics. What I’ve noticed, however, is that left-wing writers with a social media presence seem to have no problem talking politics. For example, Women in Horror Month is political: if you ask the Five Whys about Women in Horror Month, you’ll eventually drill down to the notion that the publishing industry, from publishers to readers to writers, is somehow institutionally sexist. Institutional sexism is politics. The Hugo Awards are political, and have been for some time. When Stephen King writes about gun control, that’s political. When SJWs demand that the World Fantasy Award bust be changed from Lovecraft to something less triggering, that’s political. So the problem isn’t talking about politics. You just have to have the proper, left-wing politics. If you obey the stricture on keeping your politics to yourself, what you’re really doing is voiding the field of ideas, letting one side of the political spectrum have all the say. That’s ludicrous.

I’ve already explained my reasons for getting involved in the David A Riley kerfuffle, so I won’t reiterate them here. Just consider this for a second: do you really think I like the idea of being tarred with the term fascist because I chose to write about Riley in terms that weren’t immediately condemnatory? That’s what the ill-educated SJW halfwits call me because they haven’t bothered to examine the issue and come to an informed conclusion. What’s absolutely amazing is that I was the only person on the planet aware of the Riley/HWA issue who bothered to talk to the man himself about it. Just about everyone else was either too busy virtue-signaling or immersed in the funk of bystander apathy to unearth a few facts. Why? Too scared?

I understand that it’s easy for me, a relative unknown, to risk a nascent writing career: I have less to lose. Fair enough. But aren’t you, the ones with (apparently) more to lose, tired of these stupid, endless non-troversies cluttering up your beloved genre? Aren’t you tired of SJW drama queens hijacking content over identity politics? The point-and-shriek campaigns, the bitchy backbiting? If you’re sick of it like I am and you don’t speak up, you’re contributing to the problem. This bullshit only goes on because the principals involved receive both active and passive support. Natural disasters are nobody’s fault: you clean up after a hurricane or tornado, succor the injured, and move on. Point-and-shriek campaigns are started by people, by individuals, and individuals, unlike snowstorms, can be stopped.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: the vast majority of readers don’t care about your politics. You can’t ruin your career by denouncing SJW bullshit. But you can ruin your conscience if you fail to speak out.

Even if I’m wrong, even if it’s true that some stupid whisper campaign promulgated by ill-educated halfwits can damage me in some way, my conscience is far more important than my career. As a moral man, as a husband and father, my ethics are paramount.

The Slaughtered Bird Movie Review: Volumes of Blood

At The Slaughtered Bird, I reviewed the indie horror film Volumes of Blood:

The overarching story focuses on a college study group in a public library trying to create a new urban legend as part of a class project. As in just about every anthology, some of the stories were better than others, owing to variances in acting, cinematography, and screenplay. Yes, it’s a low-budget film, but that’s not where it falls short: what failed the movie was the writing.

Were there volumes of blood in Volumes of Blood? Is it worth your time despite its failings? Click the link to find out!